Notes Introduction 1. B. Poplavsky, Stat’i. Dnevniki. Pis’ma (Moscow: Knizhnitsa, 2009), p. 126. 2. I address here in the first instance the problem of relatively limited aware- ness beyond the Russian-speaking world of russophone literary production of the Parisian diaspora. At the same time, there were spectacular cases of success in the West of those émigrés who did participate in the intellectual life of their host country by publishing in French (L. Livak, Russian Emigrés in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Interwar France: A Bibliographical Essay (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2010)). 3. Bunin was the first Russian writer to receive this distinction (there have been five Russian laureates to date). Perhaps to an even greater extent than today, the decision of the Nobel committee was dictated by political considerations—Bunin’s chief opponent was the Soviet candidate, Maxim Gorky. Despite the obvious prestige and an increase in book sales and trans- lation contracts, as well as a boost in self-esteem for Russian émigré writers, Bunin’s Nobel Prize provided few long-term benefits for the literary diaspora (I. Belobrovtseva, “Nobelevskaia premiia v vospriiatii I.A. Bunina i ego bliz- kikh,” Russkaia literatura 4 (2007): 158–69; T. Marchenko, “En ma qualité d’ancien lauréat... Ivan Bunin posle Nobelevskoi premii,” Vestnik istorii, literatury, iskusstva, 3 (2006), 80–91). 4. This formula was used by Varshavsky in his 1930s articles and in a later book, in which he paid tribute to his generation and documented its activities: V. Varshavsky, Nezamechennoe pokolenie (New York: izd-vo Chekhova, 1956). 5. E. Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Collier Books, 1987), p. 100. 6. Attributed to Gippius, this expression was possibly first used by Berberova in her “Liricheskaia poema,” published in Sovremennye zapiski, 30 (1927). 7. Z. Gippius and I. Bunakov, Chto delat’ russkoi emigratsii? (Paris: Rodnik, 1930). 8. A. Krainy [Z. Gippius] “Polet v Evropu,” in Kritika russkogo zarubezh’ia, eds. O. Korostelev and N. Melnikov, vol. 1 (Moscow, 2002), p. 60. 9. G. Slobin, Russians Abroad: Literary and Cultural Politics of Diaspora (1919–1939) (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), p. 14. 10. Yu. Lotman, “Simvolika Peterburga i problemy semiotiki goroda,” in Izbrannye stat’i v trekh tomakh, vol. 2 (Tallinn: Alexandra, 1992), pp. 17–18. 11. The flexibility of this cultural construct allows Catherine Ciepiela to include in the Russian Montparnasse circle diverse figures seemingly remote from the younger Parisian avant-gardists, such as Zinaida Gippius, Nadezhda Teffi, Avgusta Damanskaya and even Vera Bulich, who lived in Helsinki (C. Ciepiela, “The Women of Russian Montparnasse,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, eds. A. Barker and J. Gheith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 117–33). 12. The tenets of transnational theory relevant for the study of literature were articulated in the following works, inter alia: J. Ramazani, A Transnational 236 Notes 237 Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); A. Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); S. Clingman, The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. (New York: Routledge, 1994); N. Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); M. Thomsen, Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (London: Continuum, 2008). 13. J. Ramazani, “A Transnational Poetics,” American Literary History, 18(2) (2006), 333. 14. R. Trousdale, Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination: Novels of Exile and Alternative Worlds (New York: Palgrave, 2010), p. 195. 15. I trace a similar evolution towards open transnationalism in Vasily Yanovsky’s works of the American period (see M. Rubins, “Transnational Identities in Diaspora Writing: The Narratives of Vasily Yanovsky,” Slavic Review, 73(1) (2014), 62–84). 16. G. Struve, Russkaia literatura v izgnanii (New York: izd-vo Chekhova, 1956), p. 9. 17. Z. Shakhovskaya, “Literaturnye pokoleniia,” in Odna ili dve russkikh litera- tury? (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1981), pp. 52–62. 18. The main research question pursued in Slobin’s recent monograph (Slobin, 2013) is how Russian émigré literature contributed to articulating national identity. Defining her book as a study of Russian nationalism, she focuses on linguistic and cultural continuity as guiding principles of the diaspora. With the exception of Nabokov, who figures to some extent as a foil for more conservative members of the diaspora (Remizov, Khodasevich, Bunin, as well as Tsvetaeva), Slobin chooses examples that highlight the smooth transi- tion between the pre-revolutionary Russian tradition (Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and the Silver Age) to exile writing. The focus and material con- sidered in her book illuminate precisely the context that prompted Russian Montparnasse to articulate an alternative identity. 19. This view was perpetuated, as late as 1990 (see M. Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 115). 20. L. Livak, How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Emigre Literature and French Modernism (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). 21. I. Kaspe, Iskusstvo otsutstvovat’: Nezamechennoe pokolenie russkoi literatury (Moscow: NLO, 2005). 22. A. Morard, De l’émigre au déraciné. La ‘jeune génération’ des écrivains russes entre identité et esthétique (Paris, 1920–1940) (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 2010). Among other books that have addressed the younger generation of Russian Paris in the context of their host culture, see: J.-P. Jaccard, A. Morard, and G. Tassis (eds.) Russkie pisateli v Parizhe: vzgliad na frantsuzskuiu literaturu (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2007); O. Demidova, Metamorfozy v izgnanii: literaturnyi byt russkogo zarubezh’ia (Saint Petersburg: Giperion, 2003); Yu. Matveeva, Samosoznanie pokoleniia v tvorchestve pisatelei-mladoemigrantov (Ekaterinburg: izd-vo Ural’skogo universisteta, 2008); S. Semenova, Russkaia proza i poeziia 1920–1930-kh godov (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2001); Livak (2010b). 23. M. Kundera, “Die Weltliteratur,” The New Yorker, 8 January, 2007, available at: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/01/08/die-weltliteratur. 238 Notes 1 In the “Waste Land” of Postwar Europe: Facing the Modern Condition 1. V. Nabokov, The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell and Dmitri Nabokov, in col- laboration with Vladimir Nabokov (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 156. 2. See S. Davydov, Teksty-matreshki Vladimira Nabokova (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1982); N. Melnikov “Do poslednei kapli chernil… Vladimir Nabokov i Chisla,” Literaturnoe obozrenie, 2 (1996), 73–82. 3. See A. Dolinin, “Tri zametki o romane Vladimira Nabokova ‘Dar,’” in V.V. Nabokov. Pro et contra, vol. 2 (Saint-Petersburg: RKhGI, 2001), pp. 697–721. 4. M. Malikova, V. Nabokov: Avto-bio-grafi ia (Saint-Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2002), pp. 106–11. 5. V. Nabokov, Despair (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 173. 6. H. R. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. T. Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 32. 7. See http://www.panarchy.org/freud/war.1915.html (accessed: Oct. 9, 2014). 8. P. Valéry, “The Crisis of the Mind,” in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962). 9. M. Arland, “Sur un nouveau mal du siècle,” in Essais et nouveaux essais cri- tiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), pp. 11–37. 10. M. Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1990), p. 237. 11. T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” in The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 61–80, quote from p. 61. 12. P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Sterling, 2009), p. 212. 13. The postwar crisis of the novel primarily affected the conventional realist novel, which was associated with imagination, positivism, extensive descrip- tions, robust plot, and the objective representation of reality mediated through a neutral third-person narrator. Meanwhile, modernist novelists like Proust, Joyce, and Gide were at the peak of their popularity, precisely because they had found new forms and content for a genre in need of a radical facelift. Surrealists likewise embarked on the ambitious project of creating a Surrealist novel, transcending the boundaries between fiction and document, life and art, the waking state and dreaming, subjectivity and objectivity, the visible world and mystical surreality, spontaneous “automatic” writing and premeditated design. In 1924, they published a manifesto entitled “Le Cadavre”, in which they derided Anatole France, who epitomized in their eyes the traditional novelist—irrelevant in the contemporary world. 14. The importance of this genre was probed by the French journal Vita, which conducted in the March/April 1924 issue a survey questionnaire entitled “Reportage and Literature.” 15. See M. Collomb, Littérature Art Deco (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1987), pp. 200–1. 2 Who Needs Art? 1. B. Poplavsky, Stat’i. Dnevniki. Pis’ma (Moscow: Knizhnitsa, 2009), pp. 45, 47. 2. For the purposes of this study, I begin my brief survey of the evolution of the human document from the invention of the term, leaving aside speculation Notes 239 about the possible links of this genre to confession, diaries, or epistolary