Double-Exposure: Picturing the Self in Russian Émigré Culture Robyn Jensen Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement
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Double-Exposure: Picturing the Self in Russian Émigré Culture Robyn Jensen Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2019 Robyn Jensen All rights reserved ABSTRACT Double Exposure: Picturing the Self in Russian Émigré Culture Robyn Jensen Double exposure has often been used as a metaphor for the condition of emigration: of being between two places simultaneously, of layering the memory of one place onto another. To extend the metaphor of double exposure, this study turns to the medium of photography itself to explore how it functions within Russian émigré narratives of the self. I examine how Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Gary Shteyngart, and the visual artist Ilya Kabakov use photographs in their autobiographical works—from literary memoirs to art installations—as a device for representing the divided self in emigration. “Double exposure” works as a flexible concept in this dissertation: as a metaphor for exilic double consciousness; for the autobiographical tension between multiple selves; and as a model for the composite structure of these texts that join together word and image. Bringing together photography and autobiography in this study, I explore how the “objective” medium of photography offers these authors a version of the self as visual object to be used creatively within their own self-representations. Self-representation, after all, involves the transformation of one’s own subjectivity into an object of investigation. And the objectivity of the photograph cannot be divorced from the subjective experience of looking at and interpreting the sense data that the image supplies. The photograph’s uneasy relationship between objectivity and subjectivity makes it a rich source for autobiographical practices of self- creation and self-investigation. The photographs and their textual mediation work as visual metonyms that stand in for the larger project of self-representation; they picture the act of picturing the self. This dissertation charts the critical ambivalence to family photographs in these works, how they stage a back-and-forth between an affective or nostalgic attitude to images and a sharp awareness of the limits or dangers of such an attitude. The subjects of this dissertation reveal a divided attitude to the visual medium, both attracted and repelled by the promise of photographs. The divided attitude to photographs in these works, I argue, stems in part from a crisis in vision. From the semiotic appraisal of photographs to the disciplinary and propagandistic abuses of photography, to see the photograph as an uncomplicated restoration of the past is no longer possible by the second half of the twentieth century (if, indeed, it ever was). And yet, it is the very losses of the twentieth century that make urgent the need to collect and preserve the fragments that remain. These authors exhibit an ambivalence about how photographs preserve the past and what kind of information they provide us with, about how these images represent the self (and the family), and finally about how this form of representation compares with the written word. Each of my four chapters examines a different modality of this ambivalent approach to photographs as they intersect with narrating the self: Nabokov’s agonistic contest between photography and his visual memory; Brodsky’s resignation to the modern photographic condition that ruptures the continuity of memory and experience; Shteyngart’s divided reading of the self from a hyphenated Russian-American perspective; and Kabakov’s ironically sincere recuperation of an affective response after postmodernism. Considering photos as both indexical documents that provide evidence but also as indeterminate images that demand interpretation, I read the photographs as an integral component of self-construction in these works, rather than as transparent illustrations of the self. These photographs offer a productive site for representing the divided self in emigration, the experience of trauma, and the convergence of personal and social history. Table of Contents List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................................. ii List of Illustrations..................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... iv Introduction Double Exposure: Narrating the Self in Emigration .................................................................... 1 Chapter One Authorizing the Image: Photography in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory ......................................... 39 Chapter Two Missing Frames: The Limits of Photographic Memory in Brodsky’s “In a Room and a Half” ... 87 Chapter Three Navigating the Family Archive of Photos in Shteyngart’s Little Failure ................................. 146 Chapter Four Return to Sincerity: Mother and Son in Kabakov’s Installations and Paintings ........................ 204 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 276 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 285 i List of Abbreviations LF Little Failure (2014) by Gary Shteyngart LTO Less than One (1986) by Joseph Brodsky OGR On Grief and Reason (1995) by Joseph Brodsky SM Speak, Memory (1966) by Vladimir Nabokov W Watermark (1989) by Joseph Brodsky ii List of Illustrations Figure 1. Nabokov with Mesures editorial board ...................................................................... 60 Figure 2. Photograph of Joseph Brodsky’s father .................................................................... 122 Figure 3. Photograph of Joseph Brodsky's mother's grave ...................................................... 142 Figure 4. Double-exposed Brodsky, photograph by Bengt Jangfeldt ....................................... 284 iii Acknowledgements I am grateful to many people for their support in the writing of this dissertation. First and foremost, I am indebted to Liza Knapp, whom I have been lucky to have as a mentor since my years as an undergraduate. She has been a constant source of intellectual guidance and a singularly inspiring teacher. I am grateful to Valentina Izmirlieva, who has been unwavering in her support of my work, while always pushing me, from the beginning of graduate school. I would also like to thank Boris Gasparov for his generous and insightful feedback. Katherine Reischl and Marianne Hirsch offered incisive comments at the defense, helping me to glimpse what the next stage of this work might look like. I thank Tanya Chebotareva for inviting me to work as an archival assistant cataloguing the Lev Loseff Papers at the Bakhmeteff Archive at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia. This experience proved invaluable as I began work on my Brodsky chapter. I also wish to thank the staff at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection and the Beinecke Library for their help in my archival research. I am especially grateful to the Nabokov estate for permission to print excerpts from correspondence and manuscript drafts by Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright ©1965, 1966 by Vladimir Nabokov, used by permission of the Wylie Agency LLC. I have been fortunate enough to work on this project at two institutions, Columbia and UC Berkeley, where I have greatly benefitted from conversations with my students, peers, and fellow colleagues. At Columbia, I could not have asked for a better cohort than Holly Myers, Bradley Gorski, and Inna Kapilevich, from whom I’ve learned so much; their friendship has made all the difference. Life in Morningside Heights was made immeasurably richer by Molly Rose Avila, Mie Mortensen, Ben Lussier, Riley Ossorgin, Brendan and Becca Nieubuurt, and Jude Webre. At Berkeley, I am grateful to the members of the Nabokov Working Group, iv especially Eric Naiman and Anna Muza, for their thoughtful feedback on a version of my Nabokov chapter. Thomas Dyne and Dominick Lawton have been the ideal officemates, providing both relief from writing and motivation to carry on. Weekly writing sessions with Simona Schneider have been indispensable. Finally, I wish to thank my family, especially my parents, Barbara Miller and Peter Jensen, and my brother Luke. Their love and support have made everything possible. I’m glad that I listened to my parents when they suggested I read Chekhov and Tolstoy. Their love of the arts continually inspires me. Above all, I thank Edward Tyerman, my constant companion, whose laughter, music, and curiosity make it all worthwhile. v Introduction Double Exposure: Narrating the Self in Emigration In 1926, the Russian émigré poet Vladislav Khodasevich begins his poem about exile “Sorrento Photographs” (Sorrentinskie fotografii) with a double-exposed photograph.1 The scatterbrained photographer (fotograf-rotozei) forgets to advance the film, thus superimposing an image of two friends on a picnic alongside a goat in Capri onto an image of a friend atop a steamship departing from a bay. In the poem, this double exposure is experienced as a happy accident of the camera. The lyric narrator takes pleasure in the surprising juxtaposition of these two scenes: Хоть я и не люблю козляток (Ни итальянских