UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) The poetics of personal behaviour : the interaction of life and art in Russian modernism (1890-1920) Ioffe, D. Publication date 2009 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Ioffe, D. (2009). The poetics of personal behaviour : the interaction of life and art in Russian modernism (1890-1920). General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:04 Oct 2021 The Poetics of Personal Behaviour. The Interaction of Life and Art in Russian Modernism (1890-1920) Dennis Ioffe Universiteit van Amsterdam Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis Promoter: Prof. dr. Willem G. Weststeijn 2009 The Poetics of Personal Behaviour. The Interaction of Life and Art in Russian Modernism (1890-1920) Dennis Ioffe Universiteit van Amsterdam Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis Promoter: Prof. dr. Willem G. Weststeijn 2009 1 The Poetics of Personal Behaviour. The Interaction of Life and Art in Russian Modernism (1890-1920) ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op woensdag 24 juni 2009, te 14:00 uur door Dennis Ioffe geboren te Simferopol’, Sovjet-Unie 2 Promotiecommissie Promotor: Prof. dr. W.G. Weststeijn Overige Leden: Prof. dr. M.G. Bal Prof. dr. E.A. Dobrenko Dr. W.J.J. Honselaar Dr. E.A. de Haard Prof. dr. J.J. van Baak Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen 3 Contents Acknowledgements..................................................................................................5 Introduction..............................................................................................................6 Chapter 1. Deciphering the memoir : the stratification of narrative techniques in European mnemocentric literary discourses. ……………………................................................................................................22 Chapter 2. Russian Modernism and life-creation : Observations on the theory of life text sign systems with regard to the Lebenskunst ................................................................................................................................60 Chapter 3. Life-creation strategies of the Russian Symbolists ..............................................................................................................................102 Chapter 4. Pragmatics of the Avant-Garde and Life-Creation ( Zhiznetvorchestvo ). Towards an Interpretation of Avant-Garde creative Behavior ..............................................................................................................................210 Concluding outline...............................................................................................263 Bibliography........................................................................................................264 Summary..............................................................................................................318 4 Acknowledgements A doctoral dissertation, as nearly any work of scholarly endeavor can hardly be regarded as a “singular” effort, since writing, as well as living (if not in a hermit’s cell) is never a solitary enterprise. The initial idea of this dissertation originated in the (now) remote year 1997 – during a MA seminar in Russian poetics conducted by Yuri Lotman’s doctoral student Prof. Vladimir Papernyi. Vladimir was the one who deviously “infected” me with the interest to analyze the “text-of-life” topic in general and “life-creation” strategies of Russian Modernism in particular. I wish to use this occasion to thank him for this. The paramount gratitude, which cannot be, I am afraid, adequately expressed in plain words, must go to my Supervisor and Promoter and, I should say, a Teacher, with the capital “T” – Willem Weststeijn, whose tireless care resulted in the accomplishment of the present work. It is to him I owe the greatest indebtedness and praise. It was his personal friendly support, his enduring encouragement and delicate protection, his exemplary scholarly rigor that, I hope, eventually made a scholar out of me. Lots of affectionate thanks I would like to extend to my loving family, particularly to my mother, without whose constant cornerstone support and self-forgetting devoted help I would have never made it till the end of my assignment. I also thank my father and grandfathers for excellent advice and inexhaustible good humor. I wish to thank all the extraordinary university colleagues I was fortunate to meet in the University of Amsterdam. My cordial thanks go to Mieke Bal for the opportunity to attend the best Theory Seminar existing in our field and for introducing me to Vera – the Parisian princess of the Golytzyns, to Maaike Bleeker for a chance to learn something about the “performing bodies”, to Philip Westbroek – my dear roommate and a great friend for stimulating talks about Hegel and Viacheslav Ivanov, and to all the other excellent colleagues in the Amsterdam Slavic Seminarium as well. I also thank Jesse Savage, Steven McCarthy and Michael Klebanov for their devoted help with improving my English style. Last, but obviously, not least, I gladly thank my wife Lilia, not only for generously tolerating my endless late-at-night studies of Russian culture, but also for providing an excellent musical environment for living and working. I dedicate my work to my late uncle Dr Grigorii Belchinskii, a promising theorist of biology whose tragic and untimely death has been never forgotten in the 15 years that passed; he was the first who introduced to me the principal idea of academic quests and “scholarship” and I wish to thank him for that, posthumously. 5 Introduction The central concern of my analysis is the cultural concept of “life art” (which may be traced back to the Latin expression ars vivendi )1 as embodied by the leading exponents of Russian Modernism. I was interested to understand the peculiar mechanisms behind the ways and actions of people committed to the radical formation of their personal lives as works of art. Many prominent figures of Russian Modernism were in fact styling their life according to the primordially stated principles of their aesthetical agendas and interests. The subsequent pages will show how they “programmed” their lives according to the proclaimed principles, shaping their biographies in accordance with the curriculum of their playful Modernist experimentation. Behavioral “stylization” and interpretation of life as a sort of artificial narrative constitute therefore the conceptual core of the studied phenomenon. I was determined to examine how “an artistic craft of life” 2 was realized in and corresponded to the widely-known cultural output of the discussed authors. I consider the idea of “art” not just as a traditional mimetical representation of any objective phenomena (as suggested by the philosophy of Aristotle). 3 Following in some way Tolstoy’s definition of art as “using indirect means” of communication “from one person to another”, 4 I rather subscribe to the “semiotic” approach to art. 5 Aided by the apt semiological term of “sign-vehicle” we can conclude that work of art as any other artificial sign, always stands for something else as a substitute of carefully contrived expression and aims at a certain resulting communication. What is actually being communicated depends largely on the intention of the creator (i.e. ideology of the creation). It comes as no surprise that such a commonly accepted resource as Encyclopaedia Britannica also provides a semiotically-oriented definition of art emphasizing the “communicated” and “sign-sharing” essence of the phenomenon, referring to art as: “the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others”. The aesthetic experiences that can be shared with the “other/s” constitute the adequate understanding of art as is assumed by this study. Understanding art as communication agrees with Russian Modernism perfectly since it echoes the major concern of its exponents about appealing to others through the means of any chosen, particular event of their “unusual” lives. In many cases such an event contained, as I will demonstrate, some hidden “utopian” components. 6 This utilization of art for conveying new utopian “messages” suggests that the communicative and semiotic apprehension of aesthetic function can be especially relevant in this case. 1 Additional terminological definitions