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Exploring the Impetus of the Silver Age: the Evolution of Discourses of Carnality and Eroticism in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Literature and in Émigré Writing

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Exploring the Impetus of the Silver Age: the Evolution of Discourses of Carnality and Eroticism in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Literature and in Émigré Writing CHAPTER FOUR EXPLORING THE IMPETUS OF THE SILVER AGE: THE EVOLUTION OF DISCOURSES OF CARNALITY AND EROTICISM IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND IN ÉMIGRÉ WRITING In the previous chapter I have discussed Russian erotic prose of the turn of the century in its multiple connections to what I have called, following Aleksandr Etkind, the anti-utopian counter-tradition of Russian literature. I have singled out such authors as Leonid Andreyev, Mikhail Kuzmin and Fyodor Sologub, whose groundbreaking works laid the foundation for the literary experiments of both their contemporaries and subsequent genera- tions of literati. They undoubtedly influenced both Soviet literature (which is largely beyond the scope of this monograph)1 and émigré literature. My focus in this chapter will be on such pre-revolutionary and émi- gré authors as Aleksandr Kuprin, Ivan Bunin, and Georgii Ivanov, as they, together with Vladimir Nabokov, who I will treat in the next chapter, appear to have made the most signifijicant contributions to developing the erotic and carnal discourses that emerged in the Silver Age as part of the general search for new discourses of sexuality for a modern Russian soci- ety. A common denominator for all these writers is that they engaged in a productive dialogue with Vasilii Rozanov’s revolutionary philosophy of sexualities: far from concurring with him on everything, they nonetheless were certainly inspired by and/or echoed his insights and intuitions. My skipping over the Soviet era is intentional, as I am interested in Russian traditions in the hands of Russian intellectuals. Given that it was the authors who left the country between 1917–1925 who largely created Russian literature in exile, one can safely suppose that they were more 1 I realize that I have thus sidelined a lot of fascinating literary phenomena, in which the eroticized, sexual body fijigures prominently, such as the oeuvres of Babel, Bulgakov, Platonov and Zamyatin but, as I pointed out above, early Soviet literature existed in a diffferent ideological framework and was marked by imposed censorship, and Silver Age sensitivities were in many intricate ways transformed into and/or merged with the Soviet ideology (including issues of censorship and repression) in the Soviet Russia of the 1920s and 30s. With émigré and “dissident” authors—from Ivanov and Nabokov to Mamleyev and Brodsky—this task appears much more straightforward: they did not have to adjust their creative philosophies in any way to the stifling conditions of the communist regime. 174 chapter four heavily influenced by the Silver Age, rather than by parallel developments in early Soviet literature. In fact, any of older generation exile literati to be discussed here (e.g., Aleksandr Kuprin and Ivan Bunin) actually wrote some of their best work in Russia during the Silver Age and are represen- tative of this period as much as Vyacheslav Ivanov, Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Bely or Osip Mandelshtam. Writers of a younger generation like Vladi- mir Nabokov (1899–1977) and Georgii Ivanov (1894–1958) produced their best work in emigration, but they had absorbed the intellectual achieve- ments of their numerous predecessors who were active during the three astounding decades in Russian history (1890–1920). I will argue in the next chapter that Nabokov’s Lolita (if treated as a Russian, not an American, novel; both approaches are plausible) is a crowning achievement of Russian strategies for representing carnality and eroticism in post-Silver Age writing, but its success would not have been possible without Nabokov’s precursors, whose work he knew quite well, regardless of whether he praised or berated (or both) the given authors in his numerous interviews and critical essays. The specifijic works dis- cussed in this and previous chapters that, as I will claim, may have directly impacted certain poetic and thematic aspects of Lolita as a novel about sex and eroticism include Fyodor Sologub’s The Petty Demon, Vladislav Khodasevich’s “About Pornography,” G. Ivanov’s The Decay of the Atom, Kuprin’s Sulamith, and Bunin’s short stories. Finally, the authors of later generations—Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996), Yuri Mamleyev (b. 1931), Viktor Yerofeyev (1947), Vladimir Sorokin (1955) and others who lived considerable periods of their lives in the Soviet Union—have arguably been avid readers of and active respondents to the Silver Age legacies: such a literary benchmark as Mamleyev’s best novel cccccc / Vagrants (1968, fijirst published in 1988), for instance, appears in many ways to have “leapfrogged” the Soviet tradition and inherited directly from Sologub, Bely, Kuprin and many other Silver Age authors and thinkers (in addition to Gogol, Leskov and Dostoevsky, of course). All these authors, while grappling with representations of the body and sexu- alities in their works, have contributed to the anti-utopian sub-tradition of Russian literature—to this day a most topical tendency in literature and the arts as after a brief spell of liberal democracy in the 1990s, Russia continues to be an authoritarian state, in which, for example, the uto- pian heritage of the pochvennichevo (a nationalistic philosophy of the “soil” generated by Fyodor and Mikhail Dostoevsky, Nikolai Danilevsky, Apollon Grigoriev and many others) is very much alive and thriving. As noted in the previous chapters, philosophical and literary discourses of .
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