Exile: the Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters

University of Kentucky UKnowledge Slavic Languages and Societies European Languages and Literatures 12-8-1994 Exile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters David Patterson Oklahoma State University Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Patterson, David, "Exile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters" (1994). Slavic Languages and Societies. 1. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_slavic_languages_and_societies/1 EXILE EXILE The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters DAVID PATTERSON THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Publication of this book has been assisted by a grant from Oklahoma State University. Copyright © 1995 The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Patterson, David, 1948- Exile : the sense of alienation in modern Russian letters / David Patterson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8131-1888-3 (alk. paper) : 1. Exiles' writings, Russian—History and criticism. 2. Alienation (Social psychology) in literature. 3. Russian literature—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PG3515.P38 1994 891.709'920694—dc20 94-16230 For Luis Contents Prefatory Remarks ix Part One: The Word in Collision 1 The Loss of the Word in the Superfluous Man 2 2 The Collision of Discourse: Dostoevsky's Winter Notes 19 Part Two: The Breach between Life and Word 3 Monological Death and Dialogical Life: The Case of Ivan Il'ich 38 4 The Theological Aspects of Exile: Tolstoy's Resurrection 57 Part Three: The Rupture of Religious Discourse 5 Pavel Florensky's Antitheology 76 6 Shestov's Return from Athens to Jerusalem 94 Part Four: The Exile Within 7 From Politics to Metaphysics: Solzhenitsyn's From under the Rubble 116 8 Fragments of a Broken Silence: Andrei Sinyavsky's A Voice from the Chorus 134 Part Five: The Word in Exile 9 Exile in the Diaspora: The Poetry of Joseph Brodsky 154 10 Exile in the Promised Land: The Poetry of Mikhail Gendelev 174 Concluding Remarks 189 Works Cited 192 Index 200 Prefatory Remarks One of the distinguishing features of Russian thought over the last century and a half is the motif of exile. Indeed, the use of exile as a form of punishment in Russia can be traced back to the Middle Ages, when "un- desirables" were sent to the monasteries on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea; soon after the Revolution of 1917, these monasteries were turned into the first systematic labor camps. From a political standpoint this motif in Russian letters is addressed in terms of geographic exile, both within and beyond the borders of the motherland; in the social realm it manifests itself as an estrangement of one class from another or an alienation of certain individuals from their own class. But, as is often the case, these external manifestations of exile have their internal implications, and the pursuit of these implications has been a major pre- occupation of modern Russian letters. In addition to the authors to be examined here, many others immediately come to mind: the novel- ists Evgeny Zamyatin, Boris Pasternak, and Andrei Platonov; the poets Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam, and Marina Tsvetaeva; the phi- losophers Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Semyon Frank. These authors, as well as many others, demonstrate that for the Russian, exile is not only a social problem or a form of punishment for political crimes. Beyond these categories, it is an expression of that Russian condition that most of all announces the homelessness of the modern human condition in its existential and metaphysical aspects. It is the condition of the castaway that Walker Percy, for example, describes in The Message in the Bottle when he says, "In his heart of hearts there is not a moment of his life when the castaway does not know that life on the island, being 'at home' on the island, is something of a cha- rade. At that very moment when he should feel most at home on the island, when needs are satisfied, knowledge arrived at, family raised, business attended to, at that very moment when by every criterion of island at-homeness he should feel most at home, he feels most home- less" (143). One does not have to look far in Russian letters to find an illustra- tion of what Percy is talking about. Think of Leo Tolstoy's comment on his life when he describes a time of profound personal despair in his Confession: "This was happening to me when, from all indications, I x Prefatory Remarks should have been considered a completely happy man; this was when I was not yet fifty years old. I had a good, loving, and beloved wife, fine children, and a large estate that was growing and expanding without any effort on my part. More than ever before I was respected by friends and acquaintances, praised by strangers, and I could claim a certain renown.... And in such a state of affairs I came to a point where I could not live" (29). What the Russian here says of himself might well be said by much of modern humanity. The problem does not lie in being without a house; rather, it is being without a center that might make life meaningful. When Tolstoy declares, "I could not live," it is a way of saying, "I did not belong," that a sense of belonging was no longer possible for the man. Edmond Jabes articulates the condition very well in From the Desert to the Book, when he writes, "I feel that I exist only outside of any belonging. That non-belonging is my very substance. Maybe I have nothing else to say but that painful contradiction: like everyone else, I aspire to a place, a dwelling-place, while being at the same time unable to accept what offers itself" (29). What is given is never what is needful; the truth is something sought, not something found. The result of the continual miscarriage of this aspiration for a place to dwell, Jabes goes on to show, is that "we all suffer from an absence of identity which we desperately try to fill. It is in this despair that identity really resides" (67). This absence of identity is born of a breach between word and meaning, between the name and the man, between the truth sought in the text and the fact encountered in the world. From out of this rupture Russian letters unfold to ask the question, Who am I? "It is thanks to this rupture," says Jabes, "that the questioning acquires its true freedom and its deep meaning. Truth is always at the end of the questioning, on the other shore, behind the last horizon" (59). And the place where truth resides is precisely that place that we call home. The question of who I am, therefore, is tied to the question of where I am. Indeed, the first question put to the first man, the question that de- cides who he is thereafter, is, Where are you? (Genesis 3:9). And his eva- sive reply of "I hid myself" (Genesis 3:10) is the prelude to his exile from Eden to an alien and alienating place, where he must find some means of dwelling and thus recover himself through some process of redemp- tion. To take on an identity, then, is to take up a residence, to establish a home where one may dwell rather than take to a fortress where we merely survive; it is to have a place and a presence from which one human being may step before the face of another and declare, "Here I am." Since dwelling is tied to such a capacity for response, the linkage to a Prefatory Remarks xi dwelling place is determined by a linkage between word and meaning, between self and other. Thus the structure of language and the other whom it seeks are tied to the structure of human life. As Jacques Lacan puts it in The Language of the Self, "The form alone in which Language is expressed defines subjectivity" (61). And it defines the dwelling place— or the absence of it—for the living subject. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate through a study of se- lected Russian texts that the fundamental problem of meaning in human life is a problem of homelessness; that the effort to emerge from exile is an effort to return meaning to the word and thus the self to the other; and that the exile of the word is an exile of human being. The aim, therefore, is not only to make a point about Russian letters but to draw on these Russian texts in an effort to arrive at a deeper understanding of a much larger, more pervasive problem. Indeed, a glance at the many non-Russian works that appear in the bibliography will confirm this point: in addition to more than a hundred Russian and Russian-related sources cited in this study, I have incorporated nearly eighty sources from outside of Russian studies.

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