Tolstoy, Khlebnikov, Platonov and the Fragile Absolute of Russian Modernity

Three Easy Pieces: Tolstoy, Khlebnikov, Platonov and the Fragile Absolute of Russian Modernity The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:37945016 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Three Easy Pieces: Tolstoy, Khlebnikov, Platonov and the Fragile Absolute of Russian Modernity A dissertation presented by Alexandre Gontchar to The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Slavic Languages and Literatures Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts January 2017 ©2017– Alexandre Gontchar All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: William M. Todd Alexandre Gontchar Three Easy Pieces: Tolstoy, Khlebnikov, Platonov and the Fragile Absolute of Russian Modernity Abstract This dissertation shows how three Russian authors estranged and challenged the notion of human freedom as self-determination—the idea that meaningful self-authorship is possible in view of the finitude that every human being embodies under different aspects of his existence, such as the individual and collective awareness of the inevitability of death, as well as the narrative inclusion of any existential project within multiple contexts of history, culture, and language, all of which are always given already. At first glance to be free is to transcend these multiple limits. But this transcendence can only be absolute if it sees infinity as a creative modification of meaning, whose foundational limits are eradicable. Freedom as absolute transcendence has to be fundamentally suspicious of all totalizing claims, especially those stressing their productive inclusion of unfinalizability as their ultimate source of legitimation. This fundamental suspicion is the aegis under which Leo Tolstoy, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Andrei Platonov approach the legacy of creative transcendence bequeathed by European modernity. The two theoretical accounts of human freedom this dissertation uses are G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1806/1807) and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). Chapter I explores Leo Tolstoy’s response to the cultural legacy of European modernity and its absolutization of the individual project on the example of his novella the Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), whose narrative structure provides a key to its philosophical argument, namely that the privatization of God via secular self-authorship is metaphysically unwarranted. Chapter II is a comparative reading of Velimir Khlebnikov’s Zangezi (1922) and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Khlebnikov polemically estranges Hegel’s account, positing the triumph of the poetic word as a historical standpoint of the human triumph over death, evident in the interplanetary brotherhood of artists for whom cultural, political, iii historical and economical boundaries become only a means to provisionally define multiple sites of future creation. Chapter III examines the philosophical significance of the formal and thematic peculiarity of Andrei Platonov’s prose in the Foundation Pit (Kotlovan) (1930). Platonov’s unique philosophical vision is in his understanding of Soviet dialectics as half philosophical theogony and half Christological ontology. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: Russian Modernity and the Hermeneutics of Liminal Suspicion 1 I. First: Life as Ekphrasis: LeoTolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich 19 I.0. Death and Dying in Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, 19 I.1. Some Phenomenological Common Places, 21 I.2. Heidegger and Death as Narrativity, 29 I.3. Ivan Ilyich and Some Literary Critics, 33 I.4. Ivan Ilyich and Some Philosophically-minded Critics, 40 I.5. Ivan Ilyich: A Phenomenological Close Reading, 47 I.6. Ivan Ilyich: In Search of Lost Self, 62 II. Second: Zangezi and the Odyssey of the Russian Poetic Spirit 70 II.0. Zangezi and the Phenomenology of Russian Poetry, 70 II.1. Hegel’s Phenomenology and Khlebnikov’s Zangezi: A Bird’s Eye View, 72 II.2. Khlebnikov’s Platonic Rebellion against Historicism, 76 II.3. The Verbal and the Visual: Overcoming the Finitude of Language, 80 II.4. Thus Spake Seingeschichte, 98 II.5. Back to the Future: Zangezi and the Prison House of Language, 104 II.6. The Story of One Encounter, 113 II.7.Station Tsvetaeva, 124 II.8. Tsvetaeva and the Beauty of Transcendental Suffering, 140 III. Third: Engineering Red Existence 144 III.0. Approaching History in the First Century after Max Sebald (A.M.S.), 144 III.1. Andrey Platonov, Dialectical Proposition, and the Phenomenology of Collective Ascension, 148 III.2. In the Captivity of a Metaphor, 153 III.3. A Slow-slow Reading, 166 III.4. Between Analogical Imagination and Speculative Theogony, 184 Conclusion: Between Myth and Reason 200 Bibliography 205 v Acknowledgements (or on the Good) Writing a dissertation is a careful balance of individual endeavor and collective help. The only adequate way to acknowledge the debt, admiration, and gratitude I owe to everyone who has made possible the very special world in which the “‘I’ of ‘mine’” continues to exist, would be to dispense altogether with the faceless, meaningless, empty pronoun “I” and mention these people every time the “I” talks about any aspect of the work “it” sees as largely brought about on the account of itself. But because the ‘in what way’ is as important as the “who,” “I” am very happy I can begin my ascent from abstract to concrete. From my academic father, Professor William Mills Todd III, Uil’iam Uil’iamovich, Bill, I learned good morals, government of my temper, and how to be generous in all things; from Professor George Grabowicz not to busy myself with trifling things and to become intimate with philosophy; from Professor Justin McCabe Weir, Justin, not to be led aside by anything and cheerfulness in all circumstances. They have always been light for my soul; theirs was the best gift parents can give: unconditional love and unconditional trust. If at times I wondered whether finishing my dissertation made sense at all, it was only because I kept forgetting that there is no dialectical ascent without descent. Their care and gentleness always reminded me that the Soul needs time to readjust to the darkness of the cave, no matter how bright the sun may have been outside. In my life, I have never been happier, learning everything I did learn during the eight years I spent as a graduate student at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Most importantly, I have learned what education truly is. Help, encouragement, advice, scholarship, mentoring, inspiration, support—no list will ever grasp the extent of my gratitude. My debt is infinite. vi To Professor Leonid Iosifovich Livak, under whose guidance I cut my teeth as a literary critic during a seminar on Nabokov in which I enrolled in the spring of 2003, while also attending a seminar on Dostoevsky with Professor Kenneth Lantz, I owe special thanks. He taught me ‘slow reading’ but also that anything could be taught in a way that the only time a student looks at the clock is only to confirm the premonition of the end, first announced by an impatient herald rushing inside the classroom to announce the arrival of another intellectual space itself. To Donna Orwin I owe a debt equally great, for it was during her two seminars, one on Dostoevsky and another on the Russian short story, in the fall 2007, that I discovered in a truly dialogical form that my interest in Russian literature was inseparable from a set of metaphysical inquiries known to humanity since the time of its earliest liturgical consciousness. To Professor Christopher John Barnes goes my gratitude for teaching me to withstand the intensity of biographical research. To Taras Volodymyrovych Koznarsky I owe my initiation into the culture of European modernism as well the excitement over the truly nomadic cultural recollection of my Ukrainian heritage. As my academic mentor he has always been to me what Razumikhin was to Raskolnikov. While a graduate student at Harvard I was also fortunate to learn from Professors Svetlana Boym, John Malmstad, Joanna Niżyńska, and Stephanie Sandler. Svetlana showed me how to do things with Plato’s Phaedrus which I have never seen done in academic prose. Knowing how to write playfully, to write for amusement’s sake (παιδιάς χάριν) I owe to her together with the plan of the grand nomadic symphony, the latter created spontaneously during the one and only time we talked about my dissertation. To Professor John Malmstad I learned the well-kept secret of all great scholarship, namely, that it is time-sacrifice first and foremost and has always been that. From Joanna I learned dialectical thinking and the inventory spanning the vii axiomatic base of the post-structural theoretical moves. To her I owe a true miracle of learning and understanding Plato through Deleuze and Guatarri and Hegel through Lacan. Before I spend a semester reading poetry with Stephanie I never encountered the true infinity that dwells in an act of reading, one best captured with the two lines from the estranged quote from Shiller’s “Friendship” (“Die Freundschaft,” 1782) with which Hegel’s Phenomenology ends: “aus dem Kelche dieses Geisterreiches / schäumt ihm seine Unedlichkeit” (from out of the chalice of the whole realm of the soul/Foams for him infinity). Because everything solid melts in the air, I must thank my virtual teachers. To Professor Hubert Dreyfus’s I owe my initiation into Martin Heidegger that changed my world forever. From Professor Jay Bernstein, I learned W.F.G.

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