Evgenii Zamiatin and the Literary Stylization of Rus'
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TITLE PAGE Title of dissertation: Evgenii Zamiatin and the literary stylization of Rus Name of candidate: Philip John Cavendish Degree: PhD thesis Institution: School of Slavonic and East European Studies University of London ProQuest Number: 10017280 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 10017280 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 ABSTRACT My doctoral thesis concerns the prose fiction of Evgenii Ivanovich Zamiatin (1884-1937), one of the most celebrated and flamboyant Russian writers of the early part of the twentieth century. It concerns an aspect of his fiction which has received little scholarly attention until now - namely the use of popular folk- religious and urban culture in his early provincial stories, ecclesiastical parodies, and the 1924 play, Blokha . The thesis consists of eight chapters. The introductory chapter discusses Zamiatin's interest in skaz and popular language, his knowledge of popular folk-ecclesiastical culture, and the development of his 'neo-realistic' writing style. The chapters which follow are devoted to individual works as examples of this stylistic phenomenon. These are followed by a concluding chapter and a bibhography, with footnotes given at the end of each individual chapter. My methodological approach is primarily expository and interpretative, relying on extra-textual sources where relevant. I analyse these stories and the play in terms of what the Formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum has defined as 'literary populism' - in other words, a stylistic phenomenon in nineteenth and twentieth century Russian literature which involved the artistic reworking of such popular materials as folk tales, magic tales, spiritual songs, hcroff^êallaàs, popular drama, apocrypha, Saints'Lives , popular legends and ritual celebrations. I seek to present Zamiatin as a writer with neo-populist leanings, as a traveller, ethnographer, collector of folklore, linguist and poeticiser of ordinary life in the provinces; in particular, I consider the early years of his career, his association with the neo-populist journal Zavety , his links with such writers as Aleksei Remizov and Mikhail Prishvin, and the stylistic affinity his fiction bears to the contemporary 'neo-primidvist' movement in the fine arts. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 4 1. Poludennitsa-Kuny 55 2. Kiiazhi 107 3. Afrika 148 4. Znamenie 202 5. Chudesa , or 'miracle stories': Introduction 257 O sviatom grekhe Zenitsy devy, Slovo pokhval noe 264 O torn, kak istselen byl inok Erazm 286 O chnde, proisshedshem v Pepel 'nuiu Sredu 307 6. Blokha 351 Conclusion 416 Bibliography 434 EVGENII ZAMIATIN AND THE LITERARY STYLIZATION OF RUS' ’Dragotsennye slova nevozmozhno vydumat', oni dolzhny byt estestvennym, organicheskim svoistvom pisatelia, tak zhe kak otlozheniia dragotsennykh metallov i obrazovaniia dragotsennykh kamnei v gomykh porodakh. Zamiatin iavilsia k nam s Urala, gde dragotsennye, blagorodnye metally i kamni skaplivaiutsia, sobiraiutsia tysiachami, millionami let, lezhat pod davleniem ochen' tiazhelykh i grubykh porod i zhdut. Zhizn idet. Dragotsennye kamni nachinaiut svetit'sia, stanoviatsia samotsvetnymi i zhdut vekami nastoiashchego tsenitelia i znatoka, kotoryi podymet ikh iz kamennoi tolshchi, vysvobodit i dast im prostor siiat' na ves' svet. Vot eto i est' Evgenii Ivanovich Zamiatin - gomyi inzhener nashego iazyka!"'i INTRODUCTION More than most writers of his generation, Zamiatin constantly reinvented himself as an artist, varying the devices which constituted his creative method to such a degree that no all- encompassing and definitive assessment of his corpus is really possible - in the words of Alex Shane: '....in Zamjatin’s work the elaboration of one technique was followed by a search for a new and different technique - a search that reflected his philosophy of never-ending revolution in all spheres of life.'^ There have been attempts to chart his development in terms of precisely defined periods, each with its own set of devices and artistic values, but even these categories fall foul of his tendency to switch style radically at the same stage of his career for different strategic purposes - one need only compare the different narrative procedures of, say, Lovets chelovekov an d Spodruchnitsa greshnykh , both written during the same month in 1918, to see this process starkly at w o r k .3 Even Zamiatin's own definition of his writing in terms of 'neo-reahsm', or 'synthetism', outlined in his lectures at the Petrograd House of Arts and in critical essays during the 1920s, applies rather more satisfactorily to his 'middle-period' (to borrow briefly Shane's definition) than to the rest of his work. For this reason, within the larger context of the modernist movement in Russian literature, it is not always easy to categorize his art as a whole. My purpose is not to attempt another unifying approach to Zamiatin's disparate body of work, or to suggest that the traditional approaches are misguided; rather, I wish to highlight an aspect of his art which has been relatively neglected hitherto - namely, the so-called 'stylizations of Rus ', as illustrated by the provincial fiction, the three parodies of ecclesiastical literature, and the adaptation for stage of Leskov's celebrated satire, Skaz o tul'skomkosom Lev she i o stal'noi blokhe (1881), all of which may be said to constitute Zamiatin's response to the cultural construct known as Rus" In my view, he was essentially a Janus faced writer, one whose entire oeuvre, very broadly speaking, oscillated between two artistic poles of influence, one represented by Andrei Belyi, a self-consciously cosmopolitan writer, and the other by Aleksei Remizov, a writer deeply immersed in the 'native' sources of Russian literature and culture. Primarily through Remizov, and the literary tradition to which he belonged, Zamiatin developed an artistic interest in what the Formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum described as 'the fusion {skreshchenie) of "high" literature with lubok ';5 in other words, the incorporation into 'serious' prose of such materials as folk songs, heroic ballads, spiritual songs, proverbs, popular drama. Saints'Lives and church chronicles, a stylistic phenomenon which Eikhenbaum himself chose to designate as 'literary popuhsm '.^ From Remizov, also, and Leskov as his predecessor, Zamiatin developed an interest in popular language and the artistic potential ofskaz , both of the implicit and the explicit typeJ In many of his stylizations he assumes the guise of a narrator whose language, social position and imaginative outlook is ostensibly different from his own, this fictitious mask being maintained even during pubhc performances of his w o r k . 8 Moreover, in his fiction as a whole we witness a number of experiments in the art of pastiche and parody, experiments which depend for their effectiveness on stylistic disguise: mock hagiographies, epistles, private letters, after-dinner speeches, and so on, each of which employs a very different register, tone and style of narration. In his obituary of Zamiatin, written after his untimely death in Paris in 1937, Remizov recognised their close spiritual kinship and defined it in terms of their 'common love of Russian "old singing"'.9 It is precisely this aspect of his work which I wish to examine here. In place of the conventional reading of Zamiatin as mathematician, designer and ship-building engineer, author of the dystopian novel M y , elaborator of the theory of entropy and energy, iconoclastic heretic and victim of political persecution, satirist of English middle-class mores and manners, and 'epigone' of Andrei Belyi^o - a reading which, for obvious reasons, has dominated critical discussion of his work until now - I would like to present Zamiatin the neo-populist, the traveller and ethnographer, the collector of folklore, the poeticiser of ordinary life in the provinces, and 'geologist' mining for 'precious metals' in the rich seams of the Russian language.Such a study concerns itself with the deeply Russian side of Zamiatin's artistic temperament, the negation and abandonment of which Maksim Gor 'kii remarked upon and evidently lamented when he spoke of Zamiatin's attempt to become a 'European' writer later in his c a r e e r . This is the aspect of his personality which is less well- known to readers and scholars alike. The stories which best illustrate Eikhenbaum's notion of 'literary populism', because they employ obscure materials and details from the imaginative world of the narod , adhere to a purely Russian, folk-based, artistic tradition, one whose aesthetic impact is difficult to appreciate fully, not only for the Western reader, but perhaps also for the cosmopolitan, urban-based, Russian intelligent . For this reason, my interest lies in identifying the sources used in these stories, clues to which are given in Zamiatin's lectures and critical writings, and in the prose works themselves, and in exploring exactly how these narratives work as poetic artefacts. Where relevant, 1 shall analyse the nature of the relationship between the implied narrator and actual author in order to examine the complex configurations of Zamiatin's skaz disguise. It is my view that while he certainly sought to communicate the resonances and richness of the Russian folk-religious mind, he did so with an ambiguous, not to say ironic attitude. He was a subtle ventriloquist, one who 'threw' his voice with a knowing sophistication, almost a playfulness, which was rooted in formalistic ideas about the nature of fiction and the writer's art. In my judgement, it is this aspect of his lubok -style experiments which most thoroughly deserves to be called 'modem'.