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Nieubuurt Dissertation DEPOSIT View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Columbia University Academic Commons FLESH MADE WORD: Inscription and the Embodied Self in Osip Mandel’shtam and Vladimir Nabokov Brendan Nieubuurt Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Brendan J. Nieubuurt All rights reserved —ABSTRACT— Flesh Made Word: Inscription and the Embodied Self in Mandel’shtam and Nabokov Brendan Nieubuurt “Flesh Made Word” examines two seemingly incongruous Russian modernist writers to illuminate one remarkable species of aesthetic response to the violent pressures of Marxist ideology, especially as those pressures are manifest as sociolinguistic phenomena and practice. The unexpected pairing of Osip Mandel’shtam and Vladimir Nabokov is motivated by their shared debt to Henri Bergson’s materialist theories of embodied selfhood and subjectivity, language, and the metaphysics of art. Poetry, both writers insist, as it operates according to a non-linear logic of ever-open and expanding associations of sound and image, offers the only authentic grammar for a multifarious self that knows not the constructions of time, causality, and finality. This mode of self-expression, at once intimate and cryptic, clashes with the Marxist state’s effort to make the subject uniform and transparent—to “sentence” him to his prescribed collective identity in the bondage of speech, prose, and narrative, whose didactic agenda and linear momentum are encrypted with Marxism’s world-historical teleology. Mandel’shtam’s and Nabokov’s own texts, the study argues, operate primarily by poetic principles, and their literary practice in turn creatively anticipates theories of Bergson’s postmodernist heirs (Foucault, Barthes, Derrida), particularly as they draw bold political implications from Bergson’s theories to analyze the relationship of language, writing, and power. Barthes, for instance, claims that the “poetic” text—composed of a personal image-system, not a “structure of signifieds”—places the artist “outside the pact that binds the writer to society.” In exploring this conflict between manners of expression, the study offers innovative, cohesive readings of the writers’ most enigmatic and elusive works of poetic prose— Mandel’shtam’s The Egyptian Stamp and Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. More specifically, it examines the ways the conflict is manifest on the bodies of the narrator- protagonists. These figures are effectively twice composed: once by the mortifying narration of the State, again as they are the subjects of their own revitalizing self-writing. The texts that the protagonists produce of themselves are figured as their very flesh transubstantiated, and as nothing other than the poetic works that we are reading. These metaphysical dimensions of the fiction make forceful statements about the power of the artistic act, and especially its potential to reclaim and restore the self in a gesture of political defiance. By establishing a distinct set of images, themes, and techniques shared by the authors, along with a conceptual framework in which to discuss them, this dissertation responds to a scholarly need, until now not substantively articulated, to place Mandel’shtam’s and Nabokov’s creative projects into dialogue. As much as it invites a parallel gaze, however, the study equally contributes daring new chapters to each author’s existing body of scholarship and opens fields of inquiry that demand continued critical attention. —TABLE OF CONTENTS— ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................................... i INTRODUCTION A Common Thread ......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER I: BODY-LANGUAGE Henri Bergson and his Heirs on the Power of Self-Writing ......................................................... 25 CHAPTER II: TRUANCY AND TRUTH IN MANDEL’SHTAM a. Mandel’shtam and Literary Savagery ...................................................................................... 79 b. Coat, Text, Body: Parnok’s Obolochka in The Egyptian Stamp ............................................ 115 CHAPTER III: NABOKOV’S INVITATION TO ART a. Nabokov and the Text(ure) of the Self ................................................................................... 155 b. Cincinnatus the Scapegoat and Writing the Remedy: Invitation and Pharmakos ................. 195 CONCLUSION The Death of the Author? ........................................................................................................... 242 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................ 253 i —ACKNOWLEDGMENTS— I shudder to calculate how many hours I spent in isolation researching and composing this study, but none of what was produced would have been possible without the guidance and support I received from many faculty and colleagues, friends and family. I want first to express my immense gratitude to my advisor, Valentina Izmirlieva. It was she who proposed the comparative nature of the project, when I had envisioned a more one- dimensional study. I am so happy that I accepted her challenge, and so grateful that she had faith in my ability to meet it—even if I, as so many of us dissertators do, questioned it myself. Professor Izmirlieva’s intimate familiarity with my subjects, and her incomparable sensitivity as a reader, further compelled me to be ever more meticulous in my analysis, and to be daring in my arguments while remaining faithful to my materials. Her careful attention to my writing helped tremendously in the process of finding my voice on the page. Irina Reyfman drew my attention to so many valuable details in the works and their contexts, jewels that I would never have seen on my own; her mastery of Russian helped me to bring out more of the richness and nuance of Mandel’shtam’s and Nabokov’s sometimes intimidating language. I am very grateful for Cathy Popkin’s most targeted challenges to my ideas, since they forced me to sharpen my argumentation. I know that the dissertation is better for it. Akhil Sharma provided me with a very different manner of advice that helped me to stay right-sized in this daunting undertaking, and to constantly appreciate the adventure and delight in my difficult work. My fellow graduate students in Columbia University’s Department of Slavic Languages proved no less instrumental to this project. Serving variously as sounding boards for my thinking, thoughtful readers of messy manuscripts, commiserators in my frustrations and stress, ii my peers kept me motivated, while inspiring me, in word and in deed, to continually challenge myself. Special thanks in this regard is due to Holly Myers and Bradley Gorski as encouraging friends and stellar models of scholarly labor. I owe my greatest debt of gratitude to figures outside my academic activity proper: my family. My parents, Ed and Kathy, tragically, are not alive to witness my accomplishment, but my memories of their happiness at my sometimes strange aspirations, and their undying belief in my potential, provided me with comfort and confidence. I trust that I have made them proud. My children, Frances and Felix (and at the time of writing this, the imminent arrival of yet one more), were often the only people who could take me out of my work and remind me that I am not my dissertation. My joy in their existence, and in their promise, enabled me to see that this document was possible and, more important still, only a small part of a much more vast and beautiful project. Last—last because anything but least—I give thanks to my incomparable partner in life, my wife Rebecca, who sacrificed so much of her time and energy so that I might devote more of mine to these pages. Her inexhaustible love, saintly understanding, and unflagging support, drove me when I, left to myself, would otherwise have gladly thrown in the towel. If, as the following study contends, one’s self is inscribed in one’s writing, you, Becca, are as present in these pages as the one under whose name they appear. iii B. Nieubuurt Introduction —INTRODUCTION— A Common Thread And now I have finished a work, which neither the anger of Jupiter nor fire nor the sword nor biting time will be able to destroy. When that day, which has dominion over nothing except this body, so desires, let it finish the uncertain extent of my time: still through the better part of me I will be carried everlasting above the high stars, and my name will be un-erasable, and wherever Roman power extends over conquered lands, I will be read in the mouths of the people, and through every age in fame, if there is any truth in the prophecies of poets, I will live. —Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.871-879 Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book. Michel de Montaigne, Address to the Reader in Essays Why a comparative study of the works of Osip Mandel’shtam and Vladimir Nabokov? Why especially these two particular writers on whom, individually, scholarship seems already to have reached the saturation point? And how? After all, how many meaningful connections can be drawn between these two artists, the one an Acmeist poet, a Jew of humble social rank, murdered by the Stalinist state, and whose creative work was subsequently suppressed for decades afterward, the other
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