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Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz Jeremy Guy Hicks Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics ofSkaz PhD Thesis The University of London (School of Slavonic and East European Studies) December 1999 ProQuest Number: U122782 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest U122782 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Contents Abstract Chapter I Introduction and Literature Review Chapter II Definitions of Skaz 25 Chapter III A History of Skaz 68 Chapter IV The Evolution of Zoshchenko’s Art: Early Work 110 Chapter V Zoshchenko’s Skaz and Journalism 129 Chapter VI Zoshchenko’s Skaz Narration 180 Conclusion 208 Notes 211 Bibliography 246 Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics ofSkaz Abstract The reputation of Soviet writer Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894-1958) was built and still stands upon his short stories of the 1920s. Their force derives from their most distinctive characteristic: they are told in the colloquial language of the people. This is called the skaz narrative manner and critics have associated the term with Zoshchenko from the beginning of his career. Nevertheless, as I argue in Chapter I, inadequate understanding of skaz has hampered study of his work. My thesis grounds its an^ysis of Mikhail Zoshchenko's 1920s short stories in an examination of theoretical treatments of the skaz technique (Chapter II) and a survey of its previous uses in Russian literature (Chapter III). Investigation of the definitions of skaz leads me to develop Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of the term. Bakhtin divided the technique into parody and stylisation according to the author’s intention in recreating another person’s style and point of view. This approach is flexible enough to account for writers’ divergent uses of the technique, and for readers’ contradictory interpretations of them. Zoshchenko’s use of skaz combines parody and stylisation. I illustrate this in Chapter IV by showing how Zoshchenko evolved this way of writing and in Chapter V, by relating it to 1920s Soviet journalism. Zoshchenko’s reproduction of the feuilleton and letter of complaint forms is sympathetic stylisation aimed at cultural démocratisation as well as parody. The same holds true of his language. Moreover, as I show in Chapter VI, the writer has a similarly ambivalent relation to his narrator’s mentality: the concrete experiences that serve as the stories’ material contradict the optimistic interpretations the narrator makes on the basis of those experiences. Zoshchenko himself is demonstrably unsure whether to trust the narrator’s experience or his interpretation. The competing claims of interpretation and experience coexist precariously through Zoshchenko’s exploitation of the inherent duality of skaz. His later works tend to resolve this conflict and forfeit any such balance. Chapter I Introduction and Literature Review To many readers of his short stories, Mikhail Zoshchenko is a wonderfully simple, funny writer. 2Ioshchenko, it would seem, is an artist without the slightest need of a doctoral thesis about him. But humour itself is a funny thing. Or rather, with Zoshchenko it is frequently no laughing matter, since his stories often leave us feeling sad rather than happy. We may start to wonder why they do this. In attempting to respond, we are likely to pose further questions: how far does Zoshchenko himself share the views and sympathise with the fate of the characters and narrators of his stories? Maybe we are being invited to cry rather than laugh; or to laugh with rather than at the characters. These questions may be summed up as ‘what is Zoshchenko’s own relation to his stories’ characters and narrators?’ This is the most important question to ask of Zoshchenko’s short stories, but the hardest to answer. As a consequence, Zoshchenko’s readers have tended to supply different responses from his critics, and the critics themselves have occupied a broad span of positions. The difficulty of defining Zoshchenko’s relation to his narrator, supplying a general account of his many stories, and of furthering our understanding of the place of Zoshchenko’s short stories within his work as a whole, has also led many critics to unify and simplify Zoshchenko’s artistic achievement. Too often, in the search for a coherent set of deeper concerns underpinning the work, critics have been willing to dismiss their comic nature as a superficial level of the Zoshchenko short story. In a similar way, there has been a tendency to see Zoshchenko’s use of a character- narrator as an incidental aspect of Zoshchenko’s form, as an ironic mask to be torn away to reveal the author’s true face. Nevertheless, we must strive not to forget their most distinctive and attractive feature: their humour. The failure to value the stories’ humour is linked to the failure to value their narrative form because the humour is overwhelmingly produced by Zoshchenko’s use of and relation to a character- narrator. That is to say it is generated by his use of a skaz narrator. Critics treating the question of Zoshchenko’s relation to his narrator have tended to see the writer as similar or as precisely opposite to his narrator. However, no one has explored with any rigour the idea that Zoshchenko has a mixed relation of sympathy and antipathy for his narrator. To describe the author-narrator relation in this way would enable us to account for contradictions running throughout Zoshchenko’s short stories. It would also go some way towards explaining their profound tragi-comic power. This humour, and the narrative form that generates it, is inextricable from Zoshchenko’s world-view, and constitutes the pinnacle of his artistic achievement. Yet Zoshchenko did not invent the skaz narrative form that he employed. In order to understand Zoshchenko’s use of the skaz narrative form, we must first investigate its nature, definitions of it and its history in general. This thesis is an attempt to further knowledge with regard to both skaz and Zoshchenko. I consider that my development of Bakhtin’s definition of skaz as a double-voiced form, and my relating of it to debates about irony, parody and authorial intention, represent an advance in our understanding of the skaz form. This sharpened definition of skaz enables me better to describe the combination of sincerity and parody in Zoshchenko’s skaz in particular, and in his short stories of the 1920s in general. These mixed motives are made especially clear when related to the context of 1920s journalism, where Zoshchenko found sources for the language and mentality of his characters and the forms of his stories. By reproducing letters that, I contend, served as his sources, and examining Zoshchenko’s reworking of them into stories, I believe I have made an original contribution to our appreciation of Zoshchenko’s art. First, we must investigate how the critics’ approach to or avoidance of the question of skaz has influenced their views of Zoshchenko’s relation to his narrator. Needless to say, in doing this I shall be attentive to the critics’ genuine achievements in furthering our appreciation of Zoshchenko and his art. Anatolii Starkov is a good example of a critic who argues that Zoshchenko’s own position is opposite to that of his narrator. Starkov’s interpretation is grounded in a definition of skaz as the satirical use of irony, and an understanding of irony as antiphrasis. In particular, Starkov characterises Zoshchenko as using siuzhetnaia ironiia (the irony of plot) to comment on his characters.^ Similarly, Starkov argues that the narrator’s inadequate or distorted understanding of a significant question discredits him:^ Bojituiafl, aKTyaJiBHaji ftnfl Tex jict TeMa (ôopBÔa co B3HT0MHHHecTB0M, 6iopoKpaTM3MOM H nepe)KimcaMH b ôtrry, coaaaime coBeTCKOH aBMaujra h ttpynie) BBOflirrca b paccxaa b napoHUTo McxaxKeHHOM, noanac xypiesHOM ocMLicjieHHH repofl. B peayjitTaTe tmcKpezmrHpycTca He TeMa a repoH. Ero HcxaxceHHoe BocnpnaTHe hoboh aeHCTBMTeHBHocTH Kax 6bi HaKJiaALiBaeTca na odbiMHoe, HopMajibHoe BocnpHflTHe ee HHTaTejieM, m repoM caM ce6a >Ke h paaoÔJiaMaeT^ The critic here employs two approaches that crop up frequently in discussions of skaz and Zoshchenko’s narrator. The first is the idea of a reader with a normal understanding of events who, he contends, corrects the narrator’s abnormal views. The effect is to discredit the narrator’s understanding of the issue and not the issue itself. This notion is almost invariably accompanied by a view of an implicit norm language, from which all skaz is a deviation, and therefore parodie. The second is the very idea of a choice between trusting the narrator or the issue. Starkov immediately concentrates on the untrustworthy way in which the narrator evaluates, and takes this as meaning that the narrator, rather than the issue, is being satirised. In fact we are far freer than Starkov thinks. Zoshchenko’s skaz leaves it to us to choose whether to place our trust in the issue, what might also be called the generalisation, or to trust the narrator. Starkov bases his conclusion upon a notion of how an author makes his own point of view known when employing a character-narrator, i.e. when employing skaz. Indeed, at certain points, the critic argues that Zoshchenko has an ambivalent attitude to his narrator, but his resolution of the questions of skaz and irony lead him to banish all such ambiguity in his readings of the stories and in his conclusions.
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