Samizdat (2016-17)

Самиздат Samizdat

Russian Undergraduate Students’ Society Winter 2017

EDITOR IN CHIEF Anna St. Clair

EDITORS Alexander Fraze Artem Khomich Isabel Post

DESIGNER Yolanda Zhang

This Journal is Published Thanks to The Russian Undergraduate Students’ Society The Arts Undergraduate Soceity

ISSN 2369-8497 (Print) ISSN 2369-8500 (Online)

Letter from the Editor-in-chief

I am pleased to present the 2016-2017 edition of Samizdat.

This year we had a highly competitive pool of submissions.

Deciding which pieces to publish was a difficult process for myself and editors Isabel Post, Artem Khomich and Alex Fraze, due to the high quality of student work. The pieces published here represent some of the best academic work of undergraduate students at McGill (and one from Concordia). The papers published here address an array of diverse and relevant topics, such as the legacy of Stalin in Russia today, the use of women as literary devices in literature, and the architecture of fin-de-siècle St. Petersburg.

I would like to thank my co-editors Alex Fraze, Artem Khomich, and Isabel Post, for all their work as editors.

I would also like to thank graphic designer Yolanda Zhang for designing this beautiful journal. Finally, thank you to Julia Yingling for your leadership on the RUSS exec and all your assistance in the publishing process.

Sincerely, Anna St. Clair

Table of Contents ✳ Memorial, the State, and Stalin’s Legacy in Post-Soviet Russia Mathieux Paré

5

✳ Locus and Platea in The Color of Pomegranates

17

✳ The Construction of Psychological Experience of the Odessa Massacre

21

✳ “Power of Sound” Khlebnikov and Trans-Sense, Korolenko and Spell Art

25

✳ In Defense of The Idiot’s Buffoons

33

✳ Science and Technology in the Alternate Reality of Socialist Realism

38

✳ Literary Ladies: Women as Literary Devices in Two Russian Short Stories

46

Leigh Emerson

Xiying Xu

Alice Feldman & Adrien Mercat Max Katz

Amelia Lindsay-Kaufman

Lillian King

✳ Representation and Physical Form In The New Metaphysical City: Architecture, Identity, And Modernity in Fin De Siècle St. Petersburg 51 Chiara Andreotti

✳ The Lowly and the Pure: Creating a Beautiful Person

63

✳ Танцы русской души: Народный танец в Монреале

68

✳ Литературные устройства в рассказе: «Грамматика любви»

71

Zoë Goldstein

Daria Borovitsky

Abigail Luddy-Dunn

Memorial, the State, and Stalin’s Legacy in Post-Soviet Russia Mathieux ParÊ

W

hen Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev implemented Perestroika and Glasnost, he set the Soviet Union on a course that he did not expect. Soviet citizens, living in a time of greater openness and transparency, saw an opportunity to begin sharing information of past experiences that was never to be mentioned. Out of this climate came hopes of gaining access to classified documents from the Soviet Union’s sinister past, locating the bodies of those persecuted by the state, and ultimately, attempting to understand how a government can repress its own people.

Memorial is a non-governmental organization for human rights that emerged in the Soviet Union during Perestroika.

At the time, its role “was [to awaken] and [preserve] […] the societal memory of the severe political persecution” that dominated Soviet life until the state’s dissolution.1 At present, Memorial is not only responsible for recording and publicizing the Soviet Union’s totalitarian past, but is also responsible for monitoring human rights in a number of post-Soviet states.2 The organization’s role as whistle-blower has evidently interfered with the Russian government’s attempts to repurpose the Soviet past as a time of “political and economic stability, of international prestige, […] [and] of national purpose and cohesion,” as it is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Justice over its status as a “foreign agent.”3

Given Nikita Khrushchev’s limited reforms during the Thaw, Leonid Brezhnev’s quick re-Stalinization of the country, and Gorbachev’s determination 6

to maintain the Party’s control and reputation by limiting the scope of liberalization, it can be said that Soviet history, and Stalinism more specifically, is still as divisive as ever. In Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR, Kathleen Smith discusses the various ways in which Communist Party members dealt with “the re-emergence of the Stalin question” in the late 1980s.4 Those who pursued liberal positions were concerned with revealing new facts about past injustices in order to “fill in ‘blank pages’ of Soviet history.”5 Alternatively, those who maintained conservative stances tended to underplay Stalin’s role in the state’s violent history while “[couching] their debate in the language of patriotism in an effort to recruit social support.”6 These positions, which were part of a larger debate concerning the legacy of Stalinism, and how to confront it, delineated separate systems of thought nearly thirty years ago, and yet to this day remain.7 The purpose of this essay is to investigate the state’s relationship with Memorial in order to determine whether or not Russia has officially come to terms with its Stalinist past. I intend to argue that the state is using a politicized history of the Stalinist period to validate its actions in the present, and as a result, has attempted to claim ‘ownership’ of the country’s history by silencing populist movements (such as Memorial). The Russian government is refashioning the memory of Stalin to serve many political purposes, such as bolstering Russian identity and patriotism, and legitimizing the government’s consolidation of power at home

and beyond its borders. Memorial consistently draws attention to the violence and inhumanity that took place during Stalin’s rule, which interferes with the state’s efforts to repurpose the late dictator’s image. As such, the government has moved to repress the activists by labeling them ‘foreign agents,’ in hopes of “liquidating” the organization altogether.8 By analyzing English-language newspaper articles, written by ‘Western’ and state-funded Russian sources for predominantly English readers, and some Russian-language newspaper articles written for Russian audiences, I hope to acquire a fuller, and more nuanced, understanding of the ‘Stalin question’ in post-Soviet Russia. The English-language newspapers that I have opted to use include The Moscow Times (MT), and Russia Today (RT), while the Russian publications include Pravda, Izvestiia, and Gazeta.ru.9 While newspapers in Russia are no longer like those of the Soviet Union, where they simply disseminated propaganda, there are certain biases that must be noted.10 In a broadcasted interview with RT, President Vladimir Putin stated that the channel (and thus the articles it publishes) “is funded by the government, so it cannot help but reflect the Russian government’s official position.”11 Similarly, Gazprom-Media, which is affiliated with the government-owned gas company Gazprom, purchased a “controlling stake” of Izvestiia, which was once considered to be “one of Russia’s most objective” publications.12 With the state’s influence over Izvestiia, one can assume that it also takes a pro-government stance in its articles. Aside from these

two publications providing me with government-sanctioned material, the very fact that the state funds news agencies is very telling of the state of democracy in Russia at this time.

My understanding of post-Soviet Russia and Memorial comes from a significant body of scholarship that has been written on both topics exclusively. Nanci Adler’s Victims of Soviet Terror: the Story of the Memorial Movement traces the emergence of Memorial as an unofficial organization in 1988-89, to its becoming a political force in 1989-90.13 Her work illustrates the populist nature of the organization, and how, above all, it desired to work with the Communist Party, and not to subvert it. This is hugely important because the CPSU would eventually feel threatened by Memorial’s drive to uncover the past, which may have conflicted with how much of it the state wanted to confront. That same issue characterizes the tenuous relationship that the human rights organization has with the current government, which suggests that Stalin is still significant to the nation’s history and that he has yet to be condemned by the public and/or the state.

On the topic of the current Russian State, Angus Roxburgh’s The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia has helped explain the nature of Russian governance under Vladimir Putin. His work is an exhibition of Putin’s various policies in foreign and domestic affairs, and one interesting aspect of this book is Roxburgh’s discussion of the president’s “crackdown on the free media,” and his creation of the ‘vertical of pow7

er’.14 The ‘vertical of power’ is defined as the “gathering-in of all political power to the centre,” which Putin, in turn, distributed amongst his colleagues and close friends.15 Far from a democracy, Russia has become a state governed by an oligarchy, which silences the voices of those who hold disparate views and who have the ability to influence public opinion.

My essay serves as a bridge between these two histories of activism and politics, in hopes of placing Memorial, a group that unearths undesirable aspects of Russia’s Stalinist past, in this broader discussion of oligarchic governance.

Commonly known as Victory Day, May 9 is a national holiday meant to celebrate the heroism of Soviet men and women who sacrificed everything to defeat the Nazis. In 1945, this day saw many newspaper articles about the victory without mentioning the casualty figures (30 million dead), the destruction of 1 700 towns or 70 000 villages, or the need to remember the war dead. Instead, the articles focused on “unforgettable heroism” and the one true hero of the Soviet Union, Stalin.16 Interestingly, the war was initially widely discussed in the press until 1946, when normalcy finally returned.

Stalin, who was focused on competing with the United States at the onset of Cold War, focused his efforts on rebuilding the economy. As a result, Victory Day was demoted from national holiday to normal workday until 1965.17 With little praise given to veterans, some took it upon themselves to create their own cult of the Great Patriotic War, which involved “an organized system of symbols and rituals” that was eventually tak8

en over by the Central Committee after Brezhnev’s inheritance of power in 1964.

The idealized war memory was used to instill patriotic fervor in apathetic Soviet youths, for “the war had everything: violence, drama, martyrdom, success, and a chic global status.”18 Given its popularity, Victory Day was often used to serve political purposes, and this is especially the case even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.19 In “Victory Day in Moscow: Yes, We Can Do It Again,” the appropriation of Victory Day for political purposes is quite evident. That military units can be seen parading alongside Russia’s newest military weapons is an indication of Putin’s deviation from the “nonmilitaristic tradition” that ex-President Boris Yeltsin preferred.20 Whereas Yeltsin chose to have a peaceful celebration that commemorated the actions of individual soldiers, Putin used the Victory Day celebrations “to showcase the growing importance of Soviet victory in World War II – and that of Russian military force – in Russia’s current global agenda.”21 Indeed, Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in 2014 has cost Russia its seat in the G8, and has heightened tensions with NATO, and yet, the Russian president continues to draw connections between the Soviet Union’s victories against the Nazis and the country’s readiness to “do it again”.22 Mikhail Fishman, who penned the article, also writes that “over the last two years, Russian propaganda has widely applied the World War II narrative to military developments in Ukraine.”23 It is clear that the Putin government is repurposing the memory of World War II, not

only to bolster national pride (given the USSR’s victory), but to frame the current conflict in Ukraine as one of purpose. The military’s might was paraded across Red Square and, for the first time in recent memory, beyond the country’s borders for all to see. This was not a celebration or a commemoration, but a “formidable warning to those who would like to test [Russia’s] endurance” again.24 The memory of the Soviet Union’s defeat of the Nazis is one of pride, which could explain why it outweighs the wrongdoings of Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s. Instead of addressing the wrongs that Stalin had committed, and building an identity that was based on the neutrality and reconciliation of that history, the kremlin chose to forget certain aspects of it. In the words of historian Michael Kammen, “amnesia [is] a bonding agent far preferable to memory,” which helps to explain why the state has not, and most probably will not, address certain aspects of Stalinism that undermine their idealized heroic narrative.25 The state not only uses this heroic narrative to overshadow Stalin’s crimes, and bind its citizens to a shared historical narrative, but also, as previously noted, to suit its immediate political purposes. Fascism has become a useful “political tool” for the government to create an ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ mentality, and Russian historians are “increasingly promoting this Kremlin line.”26 The Great Patriotic War was a fight against fascism, and in recent years, the Russian government has labeled a number of its enemies as fascists.27 Ultimately, Soviet history serves a particular political purpose, which makes criticising that history in-

creasingly difficult. Perhaps this could explain why denouncing the ghost of Stalin is becoming increasingly difficult for Memorial.

Celebrating a national holiday that memorializes Soviet pride and glory also serves to normalize the use of other Soviet symbols, such as its past leaders.

Historians have spoken at length about Putin’s steps to consolidate Russian society through Soviet symbolism. For example, Vera Tolz suggests that Putin’s decision to use the Soviet music for the new national anthem, and to simply alter the Soviet lyrics, may have received criticism from liberals, but was welcomed by non-Russian minorities because “the Soviet period offers more examples than pre-revolutionary imperial history of a ‘usable past’.”28 An interesting addition to this idea of the normalization of Soviet symbols is the staging of the November 7, 1941, parade in 2016. The parade was initially used to celebrate the Revolution of 1917 before Soviet soldiers would depart for the front, though it has taken on a whole new meaning.

At this year’s parade, “performers sang patriotic [Soviet] songs from the time, while Moscow’s iconic Red Square truly turned red with dozens of red Soviet flags and banners waving in the wind.”29 What is interesting about this passage is that it comes from RT, which, as we have seen, is funded by the Russian government. This article allows us to discern, to a certain extent, the kind of language that is employed by the government to describe Soviet symbols more generally. In this particular instance, the words

‘iconic’ and ‘patriotic’ immediately stick out, and given the context, they are projecting a positive embrace of the country’s Soviet history. Apart from the article, the state’s use of its soldiers dressed in double breasted coats and ushanki, while clutching PPSH-41 submachine guns, parading around Red Square also evokes overtly-Soviet imagery.30 Such explicit representations of the Soviet military indicate a sense of pride in the nation’s exploits on the one hand, and the complete normalization of Soviet symbolism on the other. Rehabilitating past leaders, according to Agna Grigas, is one of the current administration’s means of “[pushing] forward its foreign policy agenda,” and I contend that hosting nationalistic (and interestingly, historical) parades is also helpful, for it produces a sense of nostalgia for the Soviet period. Perhaps it is both this normalization of Soviet symbols and nostalgia for the Soviet era that could help explain why there has been an increase in positive perceptions of Stalin in recent years.31 “Was Stalin’s Terror Justified? Poll Shows More Russians Think it Was” was published on March 31, 2015, and discusses a very unsettling poll that was conducted by the Levada Center in that same month.32 The pollsters asked 1 600 citizens from 48 different regions a series of questions regarding what they thought about the late Soviet leader. When asked how they felt about Stalin, a surprising 39 percent of respondents felt positive about him, with 25 percent perceiving him negatively, and 30 percent feeling indifferent towards him.33 How a man who was responsible for the deaths and de10

portations of millions of citizens received an overwhelming number of positive evaluations reflects the divisive nature of the ‘Stalin question’ in Russia, and the state’s successful refashioning of his image. According to Alexei Levinson, head of the Levada Center’s social and cultural studies department, the increase in positive perceptions of Stalin is a direct result of the government’s use of the country’s past to “[legitimize] and [justify] their actions” in the present.34 A Russian media source, Interfax, immediately reached out to Arseny Roginsky, the Memorial co-founder and current board member, to hear his opinion of the poll, which he called: “a very alarming sign.”35 Roginsky sees the warming-up to Stalin as a result of nostalgia, for he “is perceived as a symbol of a powerful and mighty nation,” and not as a leader whose policies were “anti-human.”36 This seems like a fair observation given the economic crisis that Russia continues to find itself in.37 However, I believe there is something even more fundamental to this issue of facing Stalinism in contemporary Russia.

According to Nanci Adler, the time to confront the perpetrators of Stalinist crimes was directly after the fall of the Soviet Union, and even at the time of her writing, in 1999, she believed that “the opportunity […] to pass definitive judgement” had been missed.38 She compares the return of repressed history to the return of gulag prisoners during the Soviet period. This is an accurate observation, for their return is a “painful confrontation for individuals, society, and the state,” which could explain why, after sixteen years, there is still no defin-

itive way of memorializing the dead.39 The government has overlooked certain aspects of Stalinism to emphasize Stalin’s leadership during the Great Patriotic War, which, as we have seen, has become one of the principal bulwarks of post-Soviet Russian identity. However, this is not to say that the state has not attempted to officially revaluate the Soviet past. In fact, I believe that the source of tension between Memorial and the state emerged from this idea of ownership and of interpretation of history. For Memorial, the state may never go far enough, and for the state, Memorial may go too far, which could lead to “destabilization, and national shame.”40 Much like the CPSU, the current government relies on history, not only to legitimize its authority, but also to provide its people with a sense of pride in order to go forward.41 Memorial’s commitment to representing history as “an unbroken whole of the past, the present, and the future” is at odds with the state’s creation of a “dominant narrative.”42 As previously mentioned, these two modes of thinking represent similar liberal and conservative approaches to dealing with Stalinism during Perestroika. The debate between liberals and conservatives in the Soviet period largely occurred within the walls of the Kremlin and amongst party officials, whereas the debate between Memorial and the current Russian government took place in a variety of locations, one of which was located 100 kilometers northeast of the city of Perm. Perm-36 (officially named ITC-36) was a Soviet labour camp and an important part of the state’s intricate Gulag system. It was

home to “prisoners serving sentences for ‘especially dangerous crimes against the state’ (ie anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda).”43 More importantly, it was a Gulag museum created by Memorial in 1995, and was a concrete example of the organization’s efforts “to collect oral histories and memoirs, and to create databases of statistical information garnered from independent sources.”44 According to historian Thomas Sherlock, the administration of the Memorial Complex of Political Repressions (the official name of the Perm-36 museum) was progressive, and this fact was not supported by the government. In fact, the museum’s progressive administration was replaced in 2012 by “local conservative forces […] who quickly recast the camp’s historical identity, now as a model penal institution and regional economic hub.”45 This may not seem surprising to some, and indeed, Sherlock admits that there are historians who believe that the Kremlin “uniformly burnishes and simplifies the Soviet past” to suit its heroic historical narrative.

However, it is not that simple, and it is likely that officials interfered because of the necessity to have “state-funded systematic organizations of remembrance” in the place of unofficial institutions.46 While the Memorial Complex of Political Repressions was being repurposed in 2015, the state was simultaneously renovating and creating a number of memorials and museums to commemorate the victims of Stalinism. Roy Medvedev, the Russian Prime Minister, signed the Concept of State Policy to Perpetuate the Memory of the Victims of Political Repressions (2015), which was “influenced 11

by the historical perspective of the Memorial society.”47 The concept supported the notion that officially coming to terms with Stalinism would contribute to Russia’ modernization, and as a result, would not only create “horizontal cooperation among diverse societal groups,” but would also foster a greater working relationship with the state.48 In an article published by Izvestiia, government officials claimed that they were not attempting to “eliminate” the museum, but were seeking to “develop” it.49 If there are instances where Memorial and the state cooperate on memorialization projects, what could explain the animosity between the two? The answer to this question, once again, lies in the fact that the state is using history and commemoration to promote patriotic values, which is a recurrent theme in this essay.

However, this patriotism is not to “serve the goals of the state” by inculcating militaristic values, but to develop ‘practical patriotism’, which combines patriotic feelings (ie ‘Russianness’, a shared Soviet past) with civic actions (commemoration of the dead).50 The state’s expectations to create a sense of solidarity among society, and improve state-society relations, could be considered insidious given the silencing of NGOs that influence public opinion. It could also help to elucidate the reasons some historians believe that Russia is currently undergoing yet another form of re-Stalinization.51 Memorial’s pursuit of “truth about the historical past” is what frustrates the state, which is attempting to reconcile with Stalinism, but not to the human rights society’s standards.52 This partly explains why Me12

morial, and other NGOs, such as the Levada Center, has been persecuted by the state.

The steps taken to sideline NGOs that receive foreign funding is nothing new, as the Putin government had been attempting to do so since the conclusion of the Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” in 2005.53 In January 2006, Putin signed legislation drafted by the Duma, which “required all Russian NGOs to disclose their finances and sources of funding, and ensure that their activities complied with Russian ‘national interests’ or risk closure.”54 This legislation was long in the making, for Russia had proof of foreign spies working in Moscow, and discovered that the intelligence organization in question, Britain’s MI-6, was funding the Moscow Helsinki Group.55 After having made this connection - however dubious it may have been - the state was able to monitor and censor NGOs. The term ‘foreign agent’ is now applied to “non-profit organizations that engage in political activity and receive funding from abroad.”56 Despite the fact that ‘political activity’ is as equally ambiguous a term as ‘anti-Soviet activity’, it is telling of the intentions of the state.

Given the steps taken by the government to reclaim ownership of the past through ‘official’ monuments and institutions, Memorial can be seen as an organization that seeks to, in the words of the co-chairman of the Great Fatherland Party, “pour dirt on our history and divide our society.”57 While the co-chairman, Nikolai Starikov, is not a member of Putin’s cabinet, nor a member of Putin’s

political party (United Russia), he does provide us with a conservative opinion on the issue of Stalinism in Russia at present. He even goes as far as to criticize Memorial for victimizing the victimizers (so to speak), because it presents figures like Lavrentyi Beria as innocent.58 Evidently, this conservative politician misses the point of Memorial, which does not overlook the complexities of being “cogs in the system.”59 And while he, and other conservatives, may think that Memorial has arrived at a point of irrelevance, they will be horrified to learn that the organization’s website crashed (from high traffic), in November 2016, after it released the names of 40 000 NKVD officers, who interrogated and arrested Soviet citizens between 1935 and 1939 specifically.60 Despite the government’s efforts to reconcile with the past, there seems to be a general understanding, judging by the upsurge in visits to Memorial’s website, that the government will always withhold the kind of information that could provide citizens with closure.

To conclude, the complicated relationship that Memorial and the state share is a result of both parties’ inabilities to agree on the use of history. The Putin government relies on history to bolster Russian identity and legitimize its political aims, which is done through nationalistic and mythologized narratives of the Great Patriotic War. Conversely, Memorial views history as important in and of itself, and as something that should not be manipulated to suit political aspirations. Memorial’s disparate views of history undermine the state’s grand narrative, and the latter has moved to censure

the former by discrediting it as a ‘foreign agent’. Stalin can never truly be rehabilitated, nor can he ever be condemned, but Memorial must continue to hold him accountable.

Notes:

1 Who and What is Memorial? Memorial. accessed December 13, 2016, http://www.memo. ru/eng/about/whowe.htm.

2 According to its website, these states are Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Georgia.

3 Thomas Sherlock, Historical Narratives in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia: Destroying the Settled Past, Creating an Uncertain Future (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 149-150.

The ‘foreign agent’ label is ascribed to organizations that receive funding from foreign countries and attempt to shift public opinion. For more, see “Russia Censures Memorial Rights Group as “Foreign Agent,” BBC, November 9, 2015, accessed December 13, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/ world-europe-34767014.

4 Kathleen Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1996), 41.

5 Ibid., 45.

6 Ibid., 49.

7 That is to say that Memorial supports the idea of ‘filling in’ the blank pages of Soviet (now Russian) history, while the Putin government leans more toward the conservative approach, avoiding Stalin’s wrongdoings so as to not undermine its own efforts to create a usable past that engenders national pride.

8 Данила Розанов и Сергей Подосенов, “Минюст хочет ликвидировать ‘Мемориал’,” Газета.ru, November 10, 2014, accessed December 13, 2016, https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2014/10/10_a_6257457.shtml 9 Russia Today is a TV broadcasting station that also publishes written work.

10 For a discussion of Soviet Newspapers as conduits of state propaganda, see Jeffrey Brooks, Thank you, Comrade Stalin!: Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

11 Margarita Simonyan, “interview with Vladimir Putin,” for Russia Today (Moscow: Russia, June 12, 2013).

12 Claire Bigg, “Russia: State-Owned Gazprom Buys Independent Daily ‘Izvestiya’,” Global

13

Security, accessed December 13, 2016, www. golablsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/russia/2005/ russia-050603-rferl01.htm. Global Security is an American think-tank.

13 Nanci Adler, Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement (Westport: Praeger, 1993).

14 Angus Roxburgh, The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 63.

15 Ibid., 64.

16 Nina Tumarkin, “The Great Patriotic War as Myth and Memory,” European Review 11, no.

4 (2003): 596. For a more complete discussion of the Great Patriotic War Myth from its inception to its supposed conclusion, see Nina Tumarkin, The Living & the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

17 Ibid., 597.

18 Ibid., 600.

19 Kathleen E. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics & Memory During the Yeltsin Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 85-86.

20 Ibid., 86.

21 Mikhail Fishman, “Victory Day in Moscow: ‘Yes, We Can Do It Again’,” The Moscow Times, May 11, 2016, accessed December 13, 2016, https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/victory-dayin-moscow-yes-we-can-do-it-again-52851.

22 Ibid. “We can do it again” was a popular slogan at the parade. It could be found on stickers and posters, stuck on car windshields, buses, etc.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid. For more on Russia’s celebrations of Victory Day (2016) abroad, see “Moscow Takes Victory Day Parade to Crimea,” The Moscow Times, May 9, 2016, accessed December 14, 2016, https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/russiatakes-victory-day-parade-to-crimea-52807; and “Russia Parades New Weapons in Syria on Victory Day,” The Moscow Times, May 9, 2016, accessed December 14, 2016, https://themoscowtimes.com/ articles/russia-parades-new-weapons-in-syria-onvictory-day-52806.

25 Michael Kammen, Life in the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 204, found in Smith Mythmaking in the New Russia, 172.

26 Agna Grigas, Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire (Yale: Yale University Press, 2016), 50.

27 Ibid.

28 Vera Tolz, “The Search for a National Identity in the Russia of Yeltsin and Putin,” in Re-

14

structuring Post-Communist Russia, eds. Yitzhak Brudny, Jonathan Frankel, and Stefani Hoffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 171.

29 “Thousands of Soldiers March in Moscow for WW2 Parade’s 75th Anniversary (Photos, Video),” Russia Today, November 7, 2016, accessed December 14, 2016, https://www.rt.com/ news/365664-moscow-parade-red-square/.

30 Alexey Kudenko, Servicemen Wearing the Red Army Uniform of the Great Patriotic War, November 7, 2016. Photo. Sputnik, Moscow.

31 Gingras, Beyond Crimea, 50-51.

32 The Levada Center is an independent, non-governmental polling and sociological research organization, which has also recently been labeled a ‘foreign agent’ by the Putin government.

For the Russian government-approved take on the story, see “Foreign Agent: Leading Russian Independent Pollster Levada Center Loses Court Bid,” Russia Today, November 18, 2016, accessed December 14, 2016, https://www.rt.com/politics/367397-court-confirms-leading-russian-independent/.

33 Jennifer Monaghan, “Was Stalin’s Terror Justified? Poll Shows More Russians Think it Was,” The Moscow Times, March 31, 2015, accessed December 15, 2016, https://themoscowtimes.com/ articles/was-stalins-terror-justified-poll-showsmore-russians-think-it-was-45301. I am aware of the unreliability of polls, but there is an impressive increase in popular support for Stalin since 2012.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Sherlock, Historical Narratives, 166. For a discussion of economic hardship in the Russian energy sector see especially “2012 and Beyond”, in Allen Lynch, Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 125.

38 Nanci Adler, “In Search of Identity: the Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Recreation of Russia,” in The Politics of Memory and Democratization, eds. Alexandra Barahona De Brito, Carmen Gonzalez Eqnriquez, and Paloma Aguilar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 31.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Sherlock, Historical Narratives, 165-167.

42 Thomas Sherlock, “Russian Politics and the Soviet Past: Reassessing Stalin and Stalinism under Vladimir Putin,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 49, no.1 (March, 2016): 47.

43 Дмитрий Рункевич, и Елена Малай, “Пермские правозащитники просят спасти музей политических репрессий,” Известия, June 20, 2014, accessed December 15, 2016, izvestia.ru/news/572693.

44 “Memorial Complex of Political Repressions,” Russian Museums, accessed December 15, 2016, http://www.russianmuseums.info/ M3029#web; Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims, 152.

45 Sherlock, “Russian Politics and the Soviet Past:” 47.

46 Ibid., 55.

47 Ibid., 54. The concept was developed at the order of Putin.

48 Ibid.

49 Рункевич, и Малай, “Пермские правозащитники просят спасти музей политических репрессий,” 50 Sherlock, “Russian Politics and the Soviet Past:” 54.

51 For discussions of Putin’s totalitarian approach to politics in contemporary Russia, see Dina Khapaeva, “Triumphant Memories of the Perpetrators: Putin’s Politics of Re-Stalinization,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 49, no.

1 (March, 2016): 61-73; Taras Kuzio, “Nationalism and Authoritarianism in Russia: Introduction to

the Special Issue,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 49, no. 1 (March, 2016): 1-11.

52 “The Charter of the International Volunteer Public Organization ‘Memorial Historical, Educational, Human Rights, and Charitable Society’,” Memorial, December 8, 1998, accessed December 16, 2016, http://www.memo.ru/eng/ about/charter.htm.

53 Roxburgh, The Strongman, 148.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., 149-150.

56 “Суд признал ‹Мемориал› иностранным агентом,» Правда, May 23, 2014, accessed December 16, 2016, www.pravda.ru/ news/politics/23-05-2014/1209259-memorial-0/ 57 “Данные о сотрудниках НКВД: Какая ложь скрыта за обнародованием фактов?,” Правда, Novem er 24, 2016, accessed December 16, 2016, http://www.pravda.ru/news/expert/2411-2016/1318790-starikov-0/ 58 Ibid.

59 Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims, 154.

60 Александр Чеков, «Сайт «Мемориала» рухнул после публикаций базы данных сотрудников НКВД,» Известия, November 25, 2016, accessed December 16, 2016, http://izvestia. ru/news/647459#ixzz4T16M5NHk.

Work Cited Adler, Nanci. Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement. Westport: Praeger, 1993.

Adler, Nanci. “In Search of Identity: the Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Recreation of Russia.” In The Politics of Memory and Democratization, edited by Alexandra Barahona De Brito, Carmen Gonzalez Eqnriquez, and Paloma Aguilar, n/a. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Brooks, Jeffrey. Thank you, Comrade Stalin!: Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Fishman, Mikhail. “Victory Day in Moscow: ‘Yes, We Can Do It Again’.” The Moscow Times, May 11, 2016.

Accessed December 13, 2016, https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/victory-day-in-moscow-yes-wecan-do-it-again-52851.

“Foreign Agent: Leading Russian Independent Pollster Levada Center Loses Court Bid.” Russia Today, November 18, 2016. Accessed December 14, 2016. https://www.rt.com/politics/367397-court-confirms-leading-russian-independent/.

Grigas, Agna. Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire. Yale: Yale University Press, 2016.

Kammen, Michael. Life in the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Khapaeva, Dina. “Triumphant Memories of the Perpetrators: Putin’s Politics of Re-Stalinization.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 49, no. 1 (March, 2016): 61-73.

Kudenko, Alexey. Servicemen Wearing the Red Army Uniform of the Great Patriotic War. November 7, 2016. Photo. Sputnik, Moscow.

Kuzio, Taras. “Nationalism and Authoritarianism in Russia: Introduction to the Special Issue.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 49, no. 1 (March, 2016): 1-11.

Lynch, Allen. Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

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“Memorial Complex of Political Repressions.” Russian Museums. Accessed December 15, 2016. http:// www.russianmuseums.info/M3029#web.

Monaghan, Jennifer. “Was Stalin’s Terror Justified? Poll Shows More Russians Think it Was.” The Moscow Times, March 31, 2015. Accessed December 15, 2016. https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/was-stalins-terror-justified-poll-shows-more-russians-think-it-was-45301.

“Moscow Takes Victory Day Parade to Crimea.” The Moscow Times, May 9, 2016. Accessed December 14, 2016. https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/russia-takes-victory-day-parade-to-crimea-52807.

Roxburgh, Angus. The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012.

“Russia Censures Memorial Rights Group as “Foreign Agent.” BBC, November 9, 2015. Accessed December 13, 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34767014.

“Russia Parades New Weapons in Syria on Victory Day.” The Moscow Times, May 9, 2016. Accessed December 14, 2016. https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/russia-parades-new-weapons-in-syria-onvictory-day-52806.

Sherlock, Thomas. Historical Narratives in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia: Destroying the Settled Past, Creating an Uncertain Future. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.

Sherlock, Thomas. “Russian Politics and the Soviet Past: Reassessing Stalin and Stalinism under Vladimir Putin.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 49 (2016): 45-59.

Smith, Kathleen E. Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics & Memory during the Yeltsin Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Smith, Kathleen E. Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1996.

Simonyan, Margarita. “Interview with Vladimir Putin.” Russia Today. Moscow: Russia, June 12, 2013.

“The Charter of the International Volunteer Public Organization ‘‘Memorial’ Historical, Educational, Human Rights, and Charitable Society’.” Memorial, December 8, 1998. Accessed December 16, 2016. http://www.memo.ru/eng/about/charter.htm.

“Thousands of Soldiers March in Moscow for WW2 Parade’s 75th Anniversary (Photos, Video).” Russia Today, November 7, 2016. Accessed December 14, 2016. https://www.rt.com/news/365664-moscowparade-red-square/.

Tolz, Vera. “The Search for a National Identity in the Russia of Yeltsin and Putin.” In Restructuring Post-Communist Russia, edited by Yitzhak Brudny, Jonathan Frankel, and Stefani Hoffman, 160-180.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Tumarkin, Nina. The Living & the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Tumarkin, Nina. “The Great Patriotic War as Myth and Memory,” European Review 11, no. 4 (2003): 595611. “Данные о сотрудниках НКВД: Какая ложь скрыта за обнародованием фактов?” Правда, November 24, 2016. Accessed December 16, 2016. http://www.pravda.ru/news/expert/24-11-2016/1318790starikov-0/. Розанов, Данила, и Сергей Подосенов. “Минюст хочет ликвидировать ‘Мемориал’.” Газета.ru, November 10, 2014. Accessed December 13, 2016. https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2014/10/10_a_6257457. shtml. Рункевич, Дмитрий, и Елена Малай. “Пермские правозащитники просят спасти музей политических репрессий.” Известия, June 20, 2014. Accessed December 15, 2016. izvestia.ru/ news/572693. “Суд признал ‘Мемориал’ иностранным агентом.” Правда, May 23, 2014. Accessed December 16, 2016. www.pravda.ru/news/politics/23-05-2014/1209259-memorial-0/. Чеков, Александр. “Сайт «Мемориала» рухнул после публикаций базы данных сотрудников НКВД.» Известия, November 25, 2016. Accessed December 16, 2016. http://izvestia.ru/ news/647459#ixzz4T16M5NHk.

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Locus and Platea in The Color of Pomegranates Leigh Emerson

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he presence of the medieval theatre technique locus and platea is seen throughout Parajonov’s The Color of Pomegranates. The use of the locus and platea allows the audience to perceive defined versus undefined spaces with the use of the setting, sometimes creating a split-screen effect. It also creates a contrast between the performance world and our own. The locus is a fixed point within a setting. This is most commonly representative of a physical place or location, but could also represent an idea or characteristic. The locus could also mark a clear boundary between the performance and the audience. The platea, on the other hand, is an open space which is fluid in nature and non-representational.

This space is often used to depict travelling. The boundary between the performance and audience is often blurred in

Fig. Still from [35:32] The Color of Promergranates

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the platea, unlike the locus. A character’s movement from locus to platea, or vice versa, is very important to medieval theatre. What it shows could be as simple as moving from one domain to another, or it could show a character developing and moving from one concept or idea to another.1 In The Color of Pomegranates, Parajonov employs, through both still shots and montage, the medieval theatre technique of locus and platea in two ways: to depict a defined space or idea next to an undefined space, and movement between the locus and platea.

In the film, there are many instances of locus and platea used as defined and undefined spaces in both still shots and montage. Still shots are set up like a stage, and therefore correlates more closely with medieval theatre. One example at 35:32 in the film illustrates this feature. Here, the locus is the building in the background, and the platea is

the ground. In this scene, the locus and platea are being used in their most basic form. The building is representing a specific stationary location, and the ground is an open area used for travel, exemplified by the people and cattle walking in circles. Another example of locus and platea used as spaces is at 11:07, where the balcony above is the locus, and the area below is the platea. Here, the locus is represented by an idea rather than a specific location. The people on the balcony are clean and remain in that state. In the platea, the people are the unclean, but it is not a constant idea like the locus because they are being washed.

Parajonov also shows defined and undefined spaces with locus and platea through montage. A notable example of this would be at 41:14, during the grave digging scene. The locus is the grave and the surrounding area is the platea. The locus is both a constant location as well as a steadfast idea. The locus represents the idea of death, and that it is unchanging and permanent. On the other hand, the platea represents life, and how it is constantly changing and unsure compared to death. Furthermore, the locus and platea characteristics are shown through the sheep and the poet. The sheep in the platea are wandering and lost in life, but the digging of the grave remains constant, no matter the turmoil around it. A second example at 1:07:40 also uses the idea of death. The locus is the ground with the poet, and everything surrounding that area from above is the platea. By having the locus at the bottom, Parajonov inverts the typical structure of locus and platea, where the locus was up high

and platea on the bottom. This inverted locus is again both a constant place and the idea of death with the dying poet.

No matter what is occurring in the ever changing platea, he remains in his location. The motion of life in the platea is also representative of preparing for death given their actions.

There is also a focus of movement between the locus and platea in the film.

For example, if one looks back at the scene at 11:07, the water, through the motion of being poured, is moving between the locus, the balcony, and the platea, the ground below. The water starts off clean, and because of the movement between spaces becomes something different, unclean, in the platea. 28:43 marks another still shot scene that presents movement between the locus and platea. Much like the traditional medieval stage setup of locus and platea, the balconies above act as a locus, and the ground below as platea.

The movement here is shown when three people move from the ground to the balconies with the use of stairs while the llama and man look on. Stairs were also a traditional tool on the medieval stage for moving to and from spaces.

Parajonov also shows this movement in scenes with montage. At 4:41, the rooftops act as a locus, and the ground as a platea. The poet as a boy moves from the ground to the rooftops with the use of a ladder, which was also a common tool for this type of movement on a medieval stage. The platea is littered with closed books, and the locus with open books.

The boy is also seen carrying a closed book up the ladder and opening it when 19

he reaches the rooftops. Mimicking the opening of the books, the movement is representative of the boy opening his mind, and perhaps an ascent to higher learning. Another example of movement shown through montage also comes when the poet is still a boy. At 9:57, the boy is moving from window to window looking into the bathhouses. The bathhouses are the locus and the surface is the platea, which once again inverts the typical locations of locus and platea on a medieval stage. Here, the boy does not physically move between spaces. Instead his inner consciousness is what is doing the moving, the windows being point of transportation. His mind travels from the platea to the locus below through the windows, and as a result, he undergoes a change and becomes sexually awakened.

This is showing a character develop and travel from one state of being to another through the lens of locus and platea.

Parajonov fills The Color of Pomegranates with locus and platea. He keeps

the use of the technique true to its medieval theatre roots, and he also adapts it for cinema use by inverting the staging or through montage. He showcases the important movement of a character from the platea to the locus and uses the spaces to reflect locations, ideas, and sometimes both at the same time. Because of the use of this medieval technique, it is easier to differentiate between defined and undefined spaces and ideas. It also sheds light on what the spaces could mean and why the effect was used in the film. With such an emphasis on locus and platea, the painting characteristics of the film are able to shine through more clearly due to their shared connection of medieval techniques.

Notes: 1 For more on locus and platea in medieval and early modern theatre, see Dillon, Janette.

2006. The Cambridge introduction to early English theatre. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Works Cited The Color of Pomegranates. Dir. Sergeĭ Paradzhanov. By Suren Shakhbazian and Tigran Mansuryan. Perf. Sofʹia Chiaureli, M. Aleksanian, and V. Galstian. Armenfilm, 1972.

DVD. Dillon, Janette. 2006. The Cambridge introduction to early English theatre. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

The Construction of Psychological Experience of the Odessa Massacre Xiying Xu

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ergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin (1925), “portraying an episode in the first Russian Revolution of 1905”, is one of the most impressive films that applies Eisenstein’s montage theories (Dickstein 90). The famous sequence “Odessa Steps” demonstrates the brutal, shocking massacre on the Odessa steps where unarmed citizens were forced to flee soldiers who were shooting at them. In the sequence, the concept of “conflict” in “the montage of attractions” is the essential aesthetic component that fulfills the ideological goals of “dramatizing the oppressive violence of Russia’s old regime; the basic, universal longing for human dignity” (90).

In his essay, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” Eisenstein defines the basic element of montage as the shot, the “single piece of celluloid” (36). Conflict is the most important feature in montage. The conflict can be “within the frame” such as the “conflict between an object and its dimension” (39). It can also happen in the individual frames as they are reconstructed and assembled to make “the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other” (37).

Contrast is the glue that sticks the elements in one fragment or different shots.

However, it is not just a tool to capture the attention of the audience but it transfers messages from directors to influence them in “the desired direction through a series of calculated pressures on its psyche” (39). This informs the definition of “the montage of attractions”: “the montage of attraction is closer to the simple contrasting compare that often produce a definitely emotional effect” (“The Mon-

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tage of Film Attractions” 43). If we use contrast as a parameter to classify “the montage of attractions,” apart from the conflicts within one frame, there are “conflicts between two successive fragments, between the object filmed and its space, and between the event and the time of its unfolding” (Aumont 31). In the “Odessa Steps” sequence, the conflicts in the “the montage of attractions” provide the audience with different views to see and experience the traumatic event and convey the message of the necessity of social revolution to fight against autocracy.

Regarding the composition of the sequence, the “juxtaposition of distinctive elements generate new meanings absent from the individual component” in single shots as “montage of attractions” fulfills “the goal of engaging and moving the audience” (Nichols 161). In the sequence, the scene where the mother holds her wounded son to confront an array of soldiers is one example of the contrast within the individual fragment.

The movements of the soldiers and the mother and the vertically distributed dead bodies on the horizontal steps are vividly impressive contrasts. In the later reverse shot, the mother in dark clothes, moving slowly at a lower position, faces the soldiers in white uniforms who raise the long rifles mechanically and quickly. She is standing in the middle of the shadows of the soldiers which are projected onto the ground. This contrast in light constructs an oppressive, dreadful atmosphere as one is threatened by numerous omnipresent, indistinguishable phantasms. Instead of using a long shot

to record the confrontation or close-ups to express the emotion of the characters, Eisenstein uses the contrasts in movement, space, color and light to illustrate oppression and terror under the cruel dictatorship of the ruling class.

Besides contrasts embedded in the single shots, “the montage of attractions” can be formed by editing different shots to generate psychological reactions in the viewers. In the beginning of the massacre scene, there are repeated close-ups of a woman’s swinging black hair and her face along with the abrupt sound of a drum. In the next scene, a lady holding a white flower-patterned umbrella rushes towards the fixed camera. The surface of the umbrella occupies the frame rapidly and the frame freezes on the tip of the umbrella as if it would protrude out of the screen to stab our eyes. The contrast of the two shots lie in the color (black and white), the texture (soft hair and iron tip) and the movement type (horizontal shake and vertical straight line), which symbolizes the correction between ironic, cold weapons and soft, fragile human bodies. The unseen but conscious imagery connection of the weapons approaching and threatening the human bodies leads to strong sensational and emotional reverberations for the viewers as they are suffering pain and panic during the massacre. When the soldiers turn up, the successive shots of the arranged linear movements of the soldiers and the chaotic, disoriented mass escape become a “conflict of graphic direction” that expresses the inhumanity of the army and the vulnerability of the mass (“The Cinematographic Principle” 39).

The “conflict between an event and its duration” is another common technique to create “the montage of attractions” in the sequence (“The Cinematographic Principle” 39). The closeups on the movements of the feet fleeing or trapping civilians and the following long shot of the whole chaotic scene of the Odessa Steps aggregate to increase the duration of the event to fortify its tragic effects. Another example is the scene when the mother finds her son has been left wounded on the stairs and trampled by the panicked mass. The frequent crosscutting between the child’s body and the painful expression of his mother interrupts the continuity of the movements of stepping up. As the shots are “distributed evenly in the sequence,” they recreate the rhythm of the sequence and “prolong the duration of the agonized perception” (Goodwin 68). Shots of the child’s body are presented as being damaged progressively by a series of separate cuts along with his mother’s shocking face. There are medium shots of his bloody face and his body after the boy is shot, cries out and falls to the ground.

This is followed by an extreme close-up of his leg to show people bypassing him without hurting him. An extreme closeup shows his hand being trampled by one foot. Finally a medium shot of his body when he is turned over shows his belly has been stepped on by a pair of women’s shoes. A similar effect is achieved in a later scene when the younger mother is shot and falls onto the ground. The images of her hands and face are juxtaposed with the shots of the slaughter conducted by Cossacks and the ordered pace of the sol23

diers. In this way, the extended suffering moment combined with the crazy killing scene demonstrates the hopelessness and misery of the individual and the collective in the massacre.

The scene of a baby carriage falling down the steps is the apex of the application of “montage of attraction” with the technique of accelerated montage.

The shots of the falling baby carriage are interspersed with human faces (the school teacher, the young male in glasses and the executioner) and other elements such as images of a dead women’s body and the soldiers with their guns. The increased speed of cutting creates a stifling tension that swells the audience into the massacre to experience the moment of a baby’s life hanging by a thread. Even though the school teacher and the young man are not looking at the baby carriage, the crosscutting makes the scenario seem as if they are watching the horrible scene and crying for help anxiously. This produces a subjective fabricated perception of the psychological reactions of characters towards the baby carriage, which is in conflict with what is revealed in the later scene when close-ups of a soldier

wielding his shining knife enter our eyes.

We realize what makes the school teacher so terrified is her own death. In front of the guns, unarmed humans become weak but the well-being of weaker individuals such as the disabled, women or children are more easily discarded and sacrificed.

Tyranny destroys equality and morality in society, making the soldiers and victims become indifferent and cruel.

As Dziga Vertov explains in his essay, “Kino-eye,” “we have to come to show the world as it is, and to explain to the worker the bourgeois structure of the world” (73). In the sequence “Odessa Steps”, Eisenstein presents the misery and suffering of Russian civilians under the bloody suppression of tyranny, which results in the sympathy for the victims and animosity towards the autocracy. This provides the possibility for social revolution.

The successful function of the technique of “conflict” in the “montage of attractions” contributes to the aesthetic frameworks to transfer ideological message, making Battleship Potemkin “a virtual textbook in how film editing could excite sympathy, fear, and revolutionary anger” (Dickstein 90).

Works Cited Aumont, J. Montage Eisenstein. London: BFI Pub, 1987.Print.

Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram.” Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Trans. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949. Print.

---.“The Montage of Film Attractions.” S.M. Eisenstein: Selected Works. Ed. Richard Taylor.

London: BFI Pub, 1988.Print.

---. Battleship Potemkin. Image Entertainment, 1976. Film.

Goodwin, James. Eisenstein, Cinema, and History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Print.

Morris, Dickstein. “Battleship Potemkin and Beyond: Film and Revolutionary Politics.” Dissent 58.3 (2011): 90-95. Project MUSE. Web. 3 Mar. 2016.

Nichols, Bill. “Battleship Potemkin (1926)” Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. Ed. Geiger, Jeffrey, and R L. Rutsky. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. Print.

Vertov, Dziga. “Kino-Eye.” Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Trans. Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Print.

“Power of Sound” Khlebnikov and trans-sense, Korolenko and spell art Alice Feldman & Adrien Mercat

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hroughout the Russian Avant-Garde, the Russian Symbolists and Futurists shared a focus on the formal features of language in their work and a common project of uncovering the basic building blocks of language. In so doing, many of them placed a special emphasis on the magical power of sound; sound was seen as a powerful defamiliarizing device which can profoundly impact and move an audience when used in a certain way. Writers Belyi and Khlebnikov comment on both the incantational power of sound as well as the repeated use of individual phonemes in their work. In “The Magic of Words”, Belyi writes that “[t]he process of naming spatial and temporal phenomenon with a word is a process of invocation,’ (“Magic of Words”, 93); in this sense, sound is magical, capable of enchanting and producing a spell, and “[e]very word is a charm” (ibid, 94). This presentation picks up on this magical quality of sound, and will explore how Belyi, Khlebnikov, and Psoy Korolenko all grant primacy to the power of sound; we also seek to highlight and uncover what particular effects the power of sound used as a defamiliarizing device has on us, the audience.

We will explore the various manifestations of sound as a defamiliarizing device as it is used by Russian Avant-Gardist Khlebnikov and compare his usage of sound to that of contemporary Russian performance artist Psoy Korolenko in their respective projects, theories, and models. In Korolenko’s work, we see the explosion of sound as a defamiliarizing device in his use of cut-Up and multi-lingualism in his songs, while in

Khlebnikov’s work, sound is exploited and used in the exposition of individual phonemes to posit the existence of a Universal Primal Language. Later, we compare Korolenko and Khlebnikov on their approaches to the function of sound in language. And finally, we compare the two on the basis of the Shamanic effect of sound and how it reshapes the role of the poet or artist.

In his seminal text “Art as Technique”, Viktor Shklovksy, celebrated father of Russian Formalism, writes that “[t]he technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged,” (Shklovsky, 72). “Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object;” Shklovksy writes, “the object [as such] is not important” (ibid). What is at stake here is that that it is not the object itself that is important, but the unique properties that constitute it as an (art) object.

We see many examples of defamiliarization as a device in literature to present events and social phenomena in a new way (as in Tolstoy’s description of an opera seen by Natasha in War and Peace).

We also see the use of defamiliarization in non-representational or non-figurative art towards the same end. But the question left unanswered is what does it look like when sound is used as a defamiliarizing device? As a tool to shock us out of our average everyday-ness?

I. Belyi’s ‘Magic of Words’ and Petersburg Experiments: Attempts at Bridging the Gap

between Sound and the Physical World Russian Avant-Gardists see sound as a bridge to link the imagined wor(l)d/s with the physical one/s. Perhaps Russian Symbolist writer Andrey Belyi is among the first to write an exposition of this idea.

In “The Magic of Words”, Belyi expounds upon the proposition that sound acts as a bridge between the Imagined world (world of words) and the ‘real’ physical world (the world that obtains in physical reality). “Every word is a sound,” he writes, and “[i]f words did not exist then neither would the world itself ” (“Magic of Words”, 93). In this text, Belyi embarks upon a literary exercise that he later uses in his novel Petersburg, where according to him “in sound there is recreated a new world” (“Magic of Words”,94); we see this materialized in the novel Petersburg in the instance of the character Shishnarfne (or Shishnarfiev) which begins as the nonsensical word “enfranshish” in Dudkin’s mind, then appears as a distorted singing voice, and finally incarnates as a real person (Petersburg, 374). Similarly, Belyi uses Pépp Péppovich Pépp, the onomatopoeic sound of a bouncing, then exploding ball from one of Nikolai Apollonovich’s fantasies to also link imagined sounds with physical reality. The “pepp - pepp” sound first exists as an imaginary sound within the character’s mind, then as a swelling object on the verge of explosion, and finally, it recalls an actual sound, the ticking of the sardine can bomb (Petersburg, 321). There is also the sound of the ominous “oooo” incessantly droning throughout Russia, which establishes suspense by foreshadowing the

impending apocalyptic revolution (Petersburg, 150). As we can see, for Belyi (and for the later Avant-Gardists) there is a real and tangible connection between sound (individual phonemes) and physical (objective) reality. In this context, sound can manifest things that exist and persist in physical reality.

We later see Belyi reflect on the real and tangible connection between sound and how it is manifested in physical reality in Golossalalia: A Poem About Sound (1914), Sound Made Dancer. This piece recalls the expressiveness of the tongue, and traces with scientific accuracy the tongue’s movements with the emotional connection between its gestures and the sound produced. Belyi’s drawings in Glossalia build on his comparison of the tongue as an armless dancer. That’s why a dancer, with arms, is used to show his concept of a sound-gesture.

II. Physiological Effects of Sound In Petersburg, Belyi reflects on the power of sound to bring about physical feelings of disgust, shock, or joy. He writes in the narrative voice of the character Appollon Appolonovitch, about the Russian vowel “ы”, which he says is savage (“obtuse, cynical, slimey”) and makes the character of feel physically sick to his stomach, and he wishes instances of the vowel could be replaced with the more civilized “и” (Petersburg, 118). But the fact that sounds have the capacity to produce and evoke a real physiological effect on us is a well documented scientific fact.

Loud droning noises are notorious for having the ability to evoke nausea in people who are nearby; an example of this 27

is found in the well documented experiment of the Republic XF-84H (“Thunderscreech”)1, an aircraft notorious for inducing severe nausea and headaches among ground crews. In one report, an engineer suffered a seizure after close range exposure to the shock waves emanating from the aircraft2. Another example of this phenomenon in science is with that of the autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR); ASMR is recognized in scientific communities as a euphoric experience triggered by acoustic or visual stimuli. This experience is “characterized by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine, precipitating relaxation” (Barrat, 2).

The capacity of sound to trigger a physiological response is not only regarded as a scientific phenomenon, but as a cultural phenomenon as well; we see evidence of it elsewhere, in literature and in music. Wagner’s famous ‘Tristan chord’, the first chord of Tristan and Isold, remains one of the most famous single chord in the history of music. It contains within itself two distinct dissonances, which creating within the listener a particular feeling “a double desire, agonizing in its intensity, for resolution” (Magee, 1). The chord to which it then moves resolves one of these dissonances but not the other, thus providing resolutionbut-not-resolution. I personally feel this chord as a sensation of anxiety in the pit in my stomach.

III. Case Study: Sound Defamiliarization and Language in ‘Bura28

tino byl tupoi’ The previous section explored the fact that sound has the documented possibility to compel physiological responses from a body, this section explores the idea that laughter can also be a response to sound. In this section we go back to sound used as a defamiliarizing device, and explore an example of defamiliarized sound provoking the physiological effect of laughter in Psoy Korolenko’s song, “Buratino byl tupoi”. Using “Buratino” as a case study, we will examine the Dadaist technique used to create these works (Cut-Up), and uncover Korolenko’s take on why this song (with its use of cut-up and multilingualism) will cast a spell on the audience and make them laugh. We will then see how Psoy Korolenko’s theory of sound relates to language and how it contrasts with Khlebnikov’s understanding of the function of defamiliarized sound.

“Buratino byl tupoi” achieves the defamiliarization of sound through two different techniques: the Dadaist-inspired cut-up technique and the use of foreign words, which open new avenues for exploring the protean nature of sound and meaning-making. In “Buratino byl tupoi”, Psoy Korolenko seeks to create a contemporary nursery rhyme, based on the musical codes of techno music, thus creating “acoustic” techno. In order to reproduce the repetitive patterns of that genre, Korolenko used the cut-up technique, a aleatory literary technique that can be traced back to the Dadaist movement of the 1920’s. It consists in literally “cutting-up” text so it can be rearranged

to create a new text. It was popularized in the 1960’s by postmodernist writer William S. Burroughs and in visual arts by painter Brian Gysin (Stringer). It is even present in T.S. Eliot’s poetry in the form of incorporated newspaper clippings in his poem The Waste Land (1922). Korolenko innovatively uses the new combinations of sound that can arise out of cut-up text rather than just creating a new narrative. In this way, he imitates the approach to sound in modern DJ music.

For Psoy, cut-up allows the audience to abstract themselves from the natural meanings attached to sound and focus on a non-verbal message.

This non-verbal message is linked to the experience of “foreignness” produced by the fact that Psoy combines through the cut-up technique a text in a foreign language with a text in Russian, the language of the expected audience. The odd and unpredictable chains of foreign words and sounds created by the cut-up highlight the “protean” nature of sound.

This term used by Psoy Korolenko comes from Greek mythology and refers to a deity associated to the sea and its elusive changing nature. It underscores the fact that sound is fundamentally versatile, mutable and flexible. In this way, the Italian adverb ecco (here) to a foreign ear can provoke associations to Italian writer Umberto Eco, wood and ecology (Pinocchio as a wooden puppet). These associations were only possible through the incorporation of foreign text in a text partly understandable to the audience.

Our minds according to Psoy Korolenko are set on aggressively or subconsciously translating sounds foreign to us, thereby

creating new, unpredictable meanings.

The process of defamiliarizing sound through cut-up and foreign words is particularly salient in the word “тупой” (tupoi or dull), which appears in the title of the song. In our interview with Psoy Korolenko, he indicated that years after the piece’s composition he was informed of the possible dual meaning of tupoi. In Italian, the homophone tu puoi also means “you can”. This unpredictable double meaning of the word is typical of Korolenko’s search for new meanings in sound.

IV. Psoy Korolenko and Velemir Khlebnikov’s Contrasting Theories on the Relationship between Language and Sound From an analysis of Korolenko’s song, appear the tenets of Psoy Korolenko’s theory of sound and their relationship to language which we can contrast with Khlebnikov’s views. As we have seen with the unpredicted double meaning of tupoi, Korolenko uses “linguistic” sound or sounds as part of a language defamiliarized through the process of cut-up to create unique sub-conscious associations in the listener. Psoy seeks to reveal to his audience the polysemy of defamiliarized sound. Foreign words, which lack the baggage of conventional definition inherent to one’s own native speech, are perfect tools to fulfill that role. They are semi-consciously associated to other words, as we saw before in the case of pairing ecological with ecco.

Khlebnikov similarly believed that sound should be liberated from its original, superficial meanings in the word as signi29

fier. Sound should be allowed to “move freely in search of its own sense” (Khlebnikov xi). This space of unconstrained meaning becomes transsense or zaum in the conception of language developed by Khlebnikov and Khruchënykh, in their seminal work The Word as Such.

This transcendence departs from Korolenko’s vision when one examines Khlebnikov’s new project for rebuilding the relationship between language and sound. Khlebnikov saw his role as a that of a wordwright consciously using zaum’ to re-attach meaning to the overused, everyday sounds of language by revealing the mythological chains (узы) between sounds and the real world (Collected Works III 8). The arbitrary character of Korolenko’s approach to language is rejected by Khlebnikov, who seeks to find a logic to the ineffable power that language can have on an interlocutor. The poem “Incantation by laughter/Заклятие смехом” is one of Khlebnikov’s attempt to restructure language through the creation of neologisms. Most words in the poem are based on the root smekh. This experiment in coradication or скорнение (skornenie) seeks to redefine our relationship to the word laughter and provoke its referent (Collected Works S.P. 237).

Khlebnikov expanded his experimentation in the creation of mythological links between sound and language to the creation of a universal language.

Unlike Psoy Korolenko’s play with multilingualism and different perceptions of the audience according to their native tongues, Khlebnikov’s research into the

different avenues of meaning-making was propelled by a nationalistic impulse.

He said himself that his first approach to the problem of language was to find “the magic touchstone of all Slavic words, the magic that transforms one into another, and so freely to fuse all Slavic words together” (Collected Works III 8). Khlebnikov embarked in a poetic and aesthetic project bent on seizing the supranational power of language to remodel reality within human consciousness. His examination of the syllable “so” leads him to find links between the words “owl” (sova) and “sun” (solntse).

V. Case Study: Shamanism and the Role of the Artist in “Slovo o èl” (1920) and Psoy Korolenko’s Rendition “Pesnya o lya” (2004) Sound defamiliarization and its relationship to language takes on a new significance in the way it can change the role or function of the avant-garde poet or artist as such. Khlebnikov’s poem “Slovo o l’” (1920) and its rendition by Psoy Korolenko entitled “Pesnya o lya”(2012) both use the tropes of shamanism to empower their work to modify their relationship with the listener or reader. Before examining how Khlebnikov creates a new role for the poet, we can emphasize continuity between this poem and Khlebnikov’s theory of language as described above.

The poem, which was composed in Baku in parallel with Khlebnikov’s speculative-mathematical works on the Laws of Time, resembles a scientific demonstration of the poet’s theory concerning the primordial links between sounds, let-

ters and meanings. The poem focuses, as it is clear from the title on the phoneme and letter l, its plasticity and polysemy.

In the poem, Khlebnikov focuses on the semantic contrast between the two versions of the letter l in Russian writing and phonetics, the hard l and the soft l.

In Khlebnikov’s conception the hard l is associated with the idea of resistance.

One of the stanzas underscores how the word lyzhi or ‘skis’ in Russian, features a hard l to express its surface of resistance between the “hunter’s steps” and the snow. This is also the case for the words

ласты, лодка, лопасть, латы (lasty-fins, lodka-boat, lopast’-blade, laty--armor), which are etymologically completely unrelated but are connected by that “chain” of single profound meaning. By the same token, the soft l is taken to represent idea of relief and flight. This idea is reinforced by the use of conventional poetic figures: alliteration of the soft l in some stanzas and the repetition of identical or very similar words as seen below. One can also notice the chiasm, or ring structure, in the first two lines.

Когда мы легки, мы летим. (When we are light, we fly) Когда с людьми мы, люди, легки, (When we are with people, people, are light) Любим. Любимые — людимы. (We love. The loved ones-- the gregarious ones.) Хлебников, Слово о Эль Through Korolenko’s rendition of “Slovo o èl’”, one can approach the shamanistic powers and role that the poet acquires when he defamiliarizes sound.

Psoy Korolenko reappropriated Khlebnikov’s poem retaining the text without any modifications. His rendition “Pesnya o lya” added the component of music, with a pianist improvising on the note A (or lia in Russian). In addition, Psoy Korolenko performs this poem using the technique of throat singing. This singing technique is associated to the shamanistic practices of Central Asian peoples. As he describes in the interview, the unusual delivery of the poem very often induces not only wonder, but also shock in the audience. Some audience members burst out laughing, others are stunned. This powerful effect shifts the

links between the performer and the audience. Psoy Korolenko has acquired the magical powers of the shaman. On a more abstract level, the throat singing seems to hearken back to the contradictory archeo-modern roots of the Futurian movement and Khlebnikov’s quest for shamanic powers.

Khlebnikov like Korolenko sought to create for himself a shamanic identity out of the sheer power of his new sounds and words. In his thinking, if words were properly formed and conjoined, they could influence the human psyche as the hard and soft phoneme l structures our thinking about resistance and relief. Ronald Vroon distinguishes three different functions of the Shaman in Khlebnikov’s works: the shaman can induce laughter (“Incantation by Laughter”), en31

chant (“We chant and enchant”) and to address deities and demigods (“Neward, we praise thee”) (Collected Works III 8).

The defamiliarization of sound is the basis for much of the historical and current experiments of the Avant-Garde. The Russian Avant-Garde’s explorations in the power of the spoken and sung word to provoke reactions in its listener have led them in the person of Khlebnikov and to a certain extent for Korolenko, to reevaluate and recreate language, sounds and themselves as art-

ists. Khlebnikov sought to create a new super-language, whereas Psoy Korolenko explores subconscious meaning making by mixing different languages and sounds together. Even if they erase our preconceived links between sounds and words, both Khlebnikov and Korolenko unwillingly create new ones, a new language of the avant-garde.

Notes: 1 Back to the Drawing Board, Page 1 2 Sound recording of the aircraft :https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=YItexQxJS9U

Works Cited “Back to the Drawing Board: The Republic XF-84H ‘Thunderscreech’” Military History Monthly. N.p., 12 Nov. 2012. Web. 01 Nov. 2016.

Barratt, Emma L., and Nick J. Davis. “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR): A Flow-like Mental State.” Ed. Markus Dahlem. PeerJ 3 (2015): e851. PMC. Web. 2 Nov. 2016.

Belyi, Andrei. “The Magic of Words” (1909), 93-111 in Selected Essays of Andrey Bely, ed. And trans. Steven Cassedy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985. PG3453 B84 A23 1985 Bely, Andrey. Petersburg. Trans. John Elsworth. London: Pushkin, 2009. Print.

Khlebnikov, Velimir, Charlotte Douglas, and R Vroon. Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov.

Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987. Print.

Khlebnikov, Velimir, Paul Schmidt, and Charlotte Douglas. The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985. Print.

Magee, Bryan. Wagner and Philosophy. London: Penguin, 2001. Print.

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique,” (64-81) in From Symbolism to Socialist Realism: A Reader, ed. Irene Masing-Delic. Boston: Academic Studies P, 2012. Ebook.

Stringer, Jenny. “Burroughs, William S..” The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English. : Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference. 2005. Date Accessed 2 Nov. 2016 Хлебников, Велимир. «.Слово о Эль.» Русская виртуальная библиотека. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Nov. 2016.

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In Defense of The Idiot’s Buffoons Max Katz

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n ‘Prince Myshkin as a Comic Character’, Natalia Ashimbaeva glides over the characters of Ferdyshchenko and Lebedev, dismissing them as, “vulgar worthless characters and buffoons.”1 Todd S. Garth takes this critique of the buffoon a step further, belittling the archetype with the claim that, “Dostoevsky’s buffoon[s are]...all abject performance and no authentic feeling”2, thus suggesting that they exist solely for the purpose of comic relief. It is not without validity that they derive these claims: as Richard Cox explains, “writers [tend to] make use of the ridiculous purely and simply for its own sake.”3 This is hardly the case for Dostoevsky. Rather, Dostoevsky’s buffoons play an important role in one of the author’s main literary goals: to holistically depict the human condition.

Far from possessing “no authentic feeling”, Dostoevsky’s psychologically complex buffoons act outlandishly as a defense mechanism, seeking to mask their shame and insecurity. Melvin Seiden suggests that the Dostoevskian buffoon “feels himself to be unworthy of his own best standards; and so he is constantly abasing himself, fouling the temple of his own suffering, inviting scorn and abuse.”4 Yet shame and insecurity are far from qualities unique to the Dostoevskian buffoon, for as Dostoevsky argues in his 1873 Diary of a Writer article ‘Something about Lying’, “every one of us carries within an almost inborn shame of himself.”5 The buffoon’s degrading response to shame is within us all as well,

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as the prosecutor Ippolit Kirillovich tells that, “a sense of the lowness of degradation is as necessary for [our human nature]...as the sense of the loftiest nobility” (BK 699). Thus, by identifying Ferdyshchenko and Lebedev as Dostoevskian buffoons, expounding the archetype through the quintessential “Old Buffoon” Fyodor Pavlovich, we can redeem their status as “worthless” or merely-secondary characters and assert their vital importance within Dostoevsky’s humanist narrative technique.

It is through Fyodor Pavlovich, a self-proclaimed “natural-born buffoon” (41), that we are offered the clearest explanation of the psychological complexity and “all too human...spirit of [Dostoevskian] buffoonery.”6 While Fyodor plays the buffoon several times throughout the novel, there is no instance as illuminating of the Dostoevskian buffoon condition as the “Inappropriate Gathering” at the Elder Zosima’s cell. Fyodor mocks Miusov’s bows “like an ape, mimicking [him] perfectly” (39) and goes on to mock Zosima’s holiness, facetiously referring to him as “sacred elder!” (40).

Over the course of the gathering, Fyodor tells a series of anecdotes riddled with humor. Some draw off of wordplay, like the tale of calling a man’s wife “ticklish”, or touchy, and subsequently being asked, “did you tickle her?” (41). Others are completely fabricated, as the story claiming “that the godless Diderot came to Metropolitan Platon” and was baptised “at once” (41-2).

Though his actions are humorous, we come to understand that Fyodor does not

just play the buffoon simply for humor’s sake; rather, he does so out of shame. Zosima first identifies this: he tells Fyodor, “don’t be so ashamed of yourself, for that is the cause of everything” (43). Upon this revelation that “pierce[s him] right through”, Fyodor instantly agrees. He tells Zosima, “that’s why I’m a buffoon, I’m a buffoon out of shame, great elder, out of shame. I act up just because I’m insecure.

If only I were sure, when I came in, that everyone would take me at once for the most pleasant and intelligent of men,— Lord! what a good man I’d be!” (43-4).

With this exclamation, through the voice of Fyodor (notably his namesake), Dostoevsky reveals to us the source of his characters’ buffoonery. When a bystander at the trial some 700 pages later takes away “that we’re all the same as Fyodor Pavlovich” (723), the pieces are drawn together for us. Shame and insecurity, and its consequential buffoonery, are essential qualities of all of us. As Deborah A. Martinsen concludes, “shame [is] the post-lapsarian heritage we share with Fedor Pavlovich, with all of Dostoevsky’s characters, with all human beings.”7 Lebedev proves to be a comic buffoon much in the same vein as Fyodor Pavlovich; ashamed of his low status, he uses buffoonery as a defense and as a means of elevating himself. When we are first introduced to Lebedev on the train, prior to knowing his name, we are given a few descriptions: he is “poorly dressed” and “some sort of...copying clerk” (I 7).

Comically speaking in the third person, he then seeks to assert himself as what the narrator calls a “Mr. Know-it-all” (8). He tells Myshkin, “Lebedev knows

everything! I know everything, meaning every corner, and back alley, and in the end not a step is taken without Lebedev” (12). The narrator has already, however, exposed to us the true conditions of “Mr. Know-it-alls”. “For the most part,” we are told, “these know-it-alls go about with holes at the elbows and earn a salary of seventeen roubles a month” (8). He adds that “the phrase “they know all” implies...a rather limited sphere” (8).

Dostoevsky’s description of Lebedev as a low-rank (“copying clerk”) “Mr. Know-it-all”, helps guide our perception of him throughout the rest of the novel; Lebedev compulsively lies to defend the shame and insecurity of his social stratum. At one point Lebedev outlandishly claims that, in a time of famine, there was a man who “had personally killed and eaten...sixty monks and several lay babies” (376). Earlier he claims to be able to interpret the Apocalypse and declares that he’s “a professor of the Antichrist” (201). It is here where Lebedev reveals his self-consciousness. He exclaims, “Who will honor Lebedev? They all sharpen their wit on him, and accompany him by all but kicks.” “But here, in this interpreting [of the Apocalypse],” he adds, “I’m the equal of a courtier” (201).

With this comment Lebedev definitively reveals the motive behind his lying: to raise himself in the eyes of the others who mock him and, thus, hide his shame.

Ferdyshchenko, featured in the novel even less than Lebedev, proves himself to fit the mold of the Dostoevskian buffoon, acting absurdly and self-abasing to mask his shame and insecurity. In the

words of Nastasya Filippovna, Ferdyshchenko “produce[s] a terrible amount of superfluous babble and can never finish” (144). We are similarly told that ““blunders” of bad tone and a ““peculiar sort of boasting”...occurred quite frequently in Ferdyshchenko and were completely in character” (147). Critique of his buffoonery does not only come from his interlocutors; in a most self-deprecating, yet humorous, manner, Ferdyshchenko asks, “I mean is it really possible to receive somebody like me? I do understand that.

I mean, is it possible to sit [with] me, such a Ferdyshchenko...?” (138).

Ashamed of his character and fearful of attacks, Ferdyshchenko attacks himself as a preventive measure; in doing so, he is able to identify and expound the source of his buffoonery aloud. He tells Nastasya that he is “not witty,...that’s why [he] babble[s] superfluously!”, adding that, “if [he] were as witty as [others], [he]’d be sitting quietly” (145). Though Ferdyshchenko only confesses to being insecure about his lack of wit, this is certainly an understatement; his claim acts as a revelation of his buffoonery. It is for the purpose of hiding his shortcomings, lack of wit and intelligence amongst others, that Ferdyshchenko has “adopted for himself the role of the buffoon” (137).

Understanding Lebedev and Ferdyshchenko to be Fyodor-like, shame-induced Dostoevskian buffoons, we can successfully negate any claims of their insignificance and reveal their integrality in Dostoevsky’s attempt to depict the human condition truly and realistically. Cox goes as far as to claim that Dos36

toevsky exhibits a “preoccupation with the ridiculous in human experience”8. A testament to his incredible authorial tact, it is the result of this “preoccupation” that we consistently find Dostoevsky’s characters to be so humanlike and relatable. After all, which of us has never felt ashamed or insecure? Which of us has never lied? And which of us has never played the buffoon? Echoing the voice of a bystander at Dmitri’s trial, in his Notebooks Dostoevsky wrote, “We are all, to the last man, Fyodor Pavloviches”9. As exhibited, with confidence we can make a claim that rings equally true: we are all Lebedevs and we are all Ferdyshchenkos.

Notes: 1 Ashimbaeva, Natalia. “Prince Myshkin as a Comic Character.” Milne, Lesley (ed.) Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture. London: Anthem Press, 2004. Print. 55 2 Garth, Todd S. Pariah in the Desert: The Heroic and the Monstrous in Horacio Quiroga. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2016. Print. 20 3 Cox, Richard. “Dostoevsky and the Ridiculous.” Dostoevsky Studies, Volume 1, 1980. Internet resource.

4 Seiden, Melvin. “Nabokov and Dostoevsky.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 13, no.

4, 1972. 434 5 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, and K A. Lantz.

A Writer’s Diary Vol 1. 1873-1876. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1993.

Print. 271-2 6 Seiden 434 7 Martinsen, Deborah A. Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. Print. 10 8 Cox, “Dostoevsky and the Ridiculous” 9 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Wasiolek, Edward (tr.) The Notebooks for the Brothers Karamazov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Internet resource.

Works Cited Ashimbaeva, Natalia. “Prince Myshkin as a Comic Character.” Milne, Lesley (ed.) Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture. London: Anthem Press, 2004. Print.

Cox, Richard. “Dostoevsky and the Ridiculous.” Dostoevsky Studies, Volume 1, 1980. Internet resource.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Lantz, K.A. (tr.). A Writer’s Diary Vol 1. 1873-1876. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Print.

——Wasiolek, Edward (tr.) The Notebooks for the Brothers Karamazov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Internet resource.

—— Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa (tr.). The Brothers Karamazov. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1992. Print.

——Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa (tr.). The Idiot. New York: Vintage Classics, 2003. Print.

Garth, Todd S. Pariah in the Desert: The Heroic and the Monstrous in Horacio Quiroga. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press 2016. Print.

Martinsen, Deborah A. Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. Print.

Seiden, Melvin. “Nabokov and Dostoevsky.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 13, no. 4, 1972.

Science and Technology in the Alternate Reality of Socialist Realism Amelia Lindsay-Kaufman

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he idea of creating an alternative reality is built into the definition of Socialist Realism. The dual and sometimes contradictory requirements of Socialist Realism - that it depict reality, and that it show reality in its revolutionary development1 - result almost inevitably in the warping of reality in the universe depicted by the Socialist Realist works. In an artistic regime where almost all art produced in a society portrays this same warped universe, the reality that is depicted will take on its own legitimacy alongside actual reality and the distinction between the two realities will blend.

The idea of altering reality goes back to the art of the Avant-Garde, which aimed to distil reality and break down existence into more basic ideas,2 but in Socialist Realism the new reality that was generated was much more pervasive than the simplified reality of the Avant-Garde.

Technology played an important role in this process, symbolizing mankind’s progression into the socialist, utopian future. Technology acted in Socialist Realist philosophy as both a replacement for bourgeois art forms and as a means of enabling mastery over nature. Socialist Realist art took place in a complete and total alternate reality, and the idea of technology as a means of conquering nature and replacing art contributed to the building of this reality.

The new reality within Socialist Realism was created through altered depictions of the past, through symbolism and codification in art, and through the placement of seeds of the future in depictions of the present. Soviet historical fiction (which is not quite Socialist Real-

ism, but occurs within the same artistic regime) depicts the past with overtones of ideology pertaining to the Soviet present, and also changed historical events to better fit Soviet values. Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible officially took place in the 16th century, but the story of Ivan IV in the film is an allegory for the story of Stalin.3 The boyars in the beginning of the film represent the internal enemies of the Soviet Union, and many of the characters represent political figures surrounding Stalin (for instance Kurbsky, Ivan’s ally who then betrays him, represents Trotsky). The film’s depiction of the relationship between Ivan and the Russian people is meant to reaffirm Stalin’s statues as a leader of the people. Eisenstein’s other film Alexander Nevsky is also a historical film officially depicting the past but really portraying Soviet ideology with Nevsky as the classic Socialist Realist positive hero and the Teutonic knights as the Nazi-esque, religious Soviet enemies.4 These depictions of the past with Soviet values inserted in changed the people’s understanding of the past, therefore creating a new, more socialist past as part of the new Socialist Realist reality. The inaccurate depiction of the Battle on Ice in Alexander Nevsky, in which the Germans drown in the lake (when in real life there is no evidence for this having happened)5 also supplanted the real version of events in popular consciousness and therefore created a new past that concretely diverged from the actual past. The new present was created through altered depictions of reality in art taking place in the present. The gradual usurpation of Lenin by Stalin in 39

poster art showed a shift in the Socialist Realist reality from Lenin’s ideological dominance in the Soviet Union to Stalin’s.6 This truth in the alternate reality precipitated a political shift in the real universe as Stalin amassed more power, because blending between the two realities made it seem as if the shift had already happened. The alternate present was also influenced by temporal schizophrenia - the placement of objects and concepts associated with the near future in environments from the present, or the simultaneous presentation of “what is” and “what ought to be”.7 Plausible but unlikely or uncommon technology placed in paintings, such as the electrical towers and trains in Serafima Riangina’s painting “Higher and Higher”, served to create an alternate present that was slightly further along in its revolutionary development towards the Ideal Future than the actual reality.8 The future in this alternate reality was depicted as being utopian and perfect. The utopian future depicted in Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What is to be Done? served as a template for later Soviet portrayals of the future,9 such as the utopian socialist society on Mars in Bogdanov’s novel Red Star. Altogether an entire alternate timeline was created within the universe of Socialist Realism, differing significantly from the real universe in its more total inclusion of Soviet ideology and more direct progression to the utopian socialist future.

Science fit into this alternate reality in such a way that it did not reflect natural laws, as science does in actual reality, but so that it confirmed principles already advocated by socialist ideology.

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The most well-known example of reshaping science to fit ideology was when Stalin advocated neo-Lamarckism over Mendelian inheritance and natural selection. In the 1920s genetic research in the Soviet Union was flourishing and many notable accomplishments in the field of genetics were made by Soviet scientists.

One particularly successful plant geneticist, N.I. Vavilov, developed an extensive long-term plant breeding program to increase yield in crops and improve their resistance to drought and insects. However food shortages under Stalin caused the government to frantically search for new techniques of increasing yield without waiting long enough properly test the methods. Trofim Lysenko, a plant breeder from Ukraine, quickly rose to the top of the Soviet agricultural hierarchy by proposing several techniques that would supposedly dramatically improve crop yields. He advocated a process called vernalization, which involved subjecting seeds to cold conditions in order to make them and their descendants flower faster, and also believed that crops could transmute into other species if they were subjected to the right conditions. Stalin, who associated genetics with Nazism and disliked Mendel because he was a priest, was sympathetic to Lysenko’s ideas and implemented his agricultural methods.

Farmers, knowing that Stalin supported Lysenko, reported higher yields than they actually had in order to make their yields seem consistent with Lysenko’s theory, so Lysenko collected inaccurate data showing that his methods worked. Genetics, which was in opposition to Lysenko’s work, was banned in the Soviet Union

and many geneticists were arrested, including Vavilov, whose methods were criticized because they did not produce results fast enough.10 In this time period Stalin rejected Darwinian genetics, which have been shown to be correct in reality, and advocated instead another system of inheritance similar to Lamarck’s theory that traits acquired during an organism’s lifetime could be passed on to later generations, not because it was right but because it better fit his ideology. Later in the Soviet Union during the space race, symbols and ideology were also considered more important than actual science.

Before the launch of Sputnik two copies of the satellite were made - one to be put into orbit and one for ground tests and simulations. The copy that was sent to space was polished beforehand to prevent overheating and so that it would reflect more light and be more visible from Earth (visibility was important because the satellite’s primary purpose was to intimidate and impress people), but the head of the program, Sergei Korolev, was reportedly outraged when he found out that the ground copy had not also been polished. The ground copy had no functions which required it to be polished, but it was the copy that would be seen by more people since it would be put in a museum after the launch. Korolev also stressed the importance of the spherical shape of the satellite, claiming that it must “look properly” because it was a symbol of humankind’s entry into space.

Korolev overall valued space artifacts for their symbolic function over their scientific function. He also altered the public conception (and thus the alternate reali-

ty) of space-related events; he refused to let reporters attend Yuri Gagarin’s launch into space, but later staged a photoshoot of himself “communicating” with the astronaut.11 In the Soviet Union scientific research was less about a search for truth and more about creating a narrative within the alternate reality in which science confirmed existing principles.

Technology in the high Stalinist period was seen above all as a means of exerting dominance over the natural world.

This can be seen in a popular idiom which appeared on several posters from the time period: “Мы не можем ждать милостей от природы, взять их - наша задача” (“we cannot expect kindness from nature, we must take it ourselves”).

This idea can also be traced back to the Avant-Garde period; Kazimir Malevich’s movement of Suprematism was centered on the idea of using geometric shapes to exert dominance over nature. The electrical wires and trains that appeared frequently in poster art reflected the excitement that people felt about making rural areas accessible and more livable with the use of technology. Posters celebrating exploration of the Arctic and celebrating flight also show technology conquering nature. The poster “Glory to the Stalinist Falcons - Conquerors of the element of Air!” by Deni & Dolgorukov from 1937 specifically uses the word “conquer” in the context of the natural world.12 Kirillov’s 1918 poem “The Iron Messiah” describes technology destroying the imperfect past world and creating a new world free from the burdens of nature: “Wherever he walks he leaves a trail, Of ringing iron rail; He brings joy and light to us, A 41

desert he strews with blossoms.”13 Technology was also seen as a replacement for bourgeois art forms. In Bogdanov’s novel Red Star, most of the art in the Martian city is functional or has been altogether replaced with machines. One character explains, “Powerful machines and their precise movements are aesthetically pleasing to us in and of themselves.”14 In the Martian society art and technology are essentially synonymous. Interestingly the only conflict in the Martian society is their lack of resources and their harsh natural environment. This serves to emphasize the role of nature as an enemy in the Socialist Realist reality. The literary group Smithy (Кузница) wrote poetry, and later prose, full of mechanical language and praise for technology.15 Gladkov was a member of this group, and the emphasis on the beauty of machines can be seen in his novel Cement. The Palace of the Soviets, though it was never built because the ground could not support it, was planned to be the tallest skyscraper in the world. Its size itself would have served as a symbol of technology conquering nature, in the sense of architecture being used to achieve heights that would naturally be inaccessible to humans. The technological infeasibility of the building is a perfect example of the conflict between “what is” and “what ought to be” in real life. The impossibility of the Palace of Soviets did not prevent its existence from bleeding through from the Socialist Realist reality into the physical reality; the concept of the Palace was so pervasive that post-WWII architects designed skyscrapers to fit the aesthetic of a skyline that included the palace as if 42

it were actually there.16 Technology was not only to be used to improve nature for mankind’s benefit, but also to improve mankind for the benefit of the country. The theme of the mechanization of humans appears in several works, for instance the 1918 poem “We Grow out of Iron” by Gastev describes humans being improved by mechanization: “I look at them and grow straight, Fresh iron blood pours into my veins. I have grown taller. I too am growing shoulders of steel and arms immeasurably strong. I am one with the building’s iron.17” In Bogdanov’s Red Star men and women in the Martian society have started to look alike due to performing similar tasks with the same technology, which follows the same neo-Lamarckian system of adaption that was advocated under Stalin and also follows the same idea of humanity improving itself physically. Susan Buck-Morss writes about how the Soviet fascination with machines was more symbolic than practical, as the machine cult developed before the actual machines did: “Machine culture under Western Capitalism was adaptive to an already existing level of industrialization. In the late nineteenth century Frederick Winslow Taylor devised his “scientific management” of labor ... treating human beings as machines in order to get the most efficient production out of them”. However, in the Soviet Union Taylor’s methods were implemented in a system that lacked the infrastructure to support them: “In this still pre-industrial context, human bodies practicing the rhythm of machines were like shamans practicing magic, mimicking a desired

state in order to bring it into existence.”18 Several Socialist Realist works focus on the transformation from human to machine. In Olesha’s novel Envy the character Volodya is striving to become like a human machine, “What I envy is the machine. There’s something! Why am I worse than the machine? We invented it, we created it, but it turned out to be much fiercer than we are.”19 Stalin also famously described Socialist Realist writers as “Engineers of the human soul”. Not only does this phrase embody the idea of improving humans, the word “engineers” also implies that human souls must be mechanical. In the alternate reality erected by Socialist Realism humans can almost literally become machines, and natural processes are replaced whenever possible with mechanical ones.

The version of reality that was depicted in most Socialist Realist works was generally consistent with itself, and was so pervasive in Soviet society that it took on a semi-real existence on its own. This reality was characterized not only by its ideological content and heavy symbolism, but also by its depictions of science and technology. The “natural” laws of science were altered to conform to the revolutionary ideology of Socialist Realism, and technology played an aesthetic role (rather than a purely practical one) of replacing nature, humans and art.

Technology also appears in Socialist Realist works in order to represent the near future. Technological objects in many works, especially paintings, become localized temporal portals where the utopian future is showing through into the present in order to demonstrate that the

present is progressing in the right direction. Altogether technology in the alternate reality of Socialist Realism plays a much more symbolic role, acting as a representation for dominance over nature and for the evolution of society.

Notes: 1 A.A Zhdanov, “Soviet Literature – The Richest in Ideas, The Most Advanced Literature,” 15-27 in Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress.

London: Martin Lawrence, [1934] Course pack page 7 2 Beraha, Laura. “High Stalinist Culture Lecture.” McGill. 28 Jan. 2016.

Lecture.

3 Ivan Grozny. Ivan the Terrible.

Part 1. Ivan the Terrible. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. By Sergei Eisenstein, Ė Tisse, and Sergey Prokofiev. S.n., 1944.

4 Alexander Nevsky. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Mosfilm, 1937.

5 Ostrowski, Don. “Alexander Nevskii’s “Battle on the Ice”: The Creation of a Legend.” Academia.edu. Harvard University, 2006. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

6 Beraha, Laura. “High Stalinist Culture Lecture.” McGill. 10 Mar. 2016.

Lecture.

7 Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1981. Print.

8 Riangina, Serafima. Higher and Higher. 1934. Painting. N.p.

9

“Russian Thought Lecture 10: 43

Utopias in Russian Culture: Of Palaces and Panopticons.” Sarah J Young. N.p., 12 Mar. 2013. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

10 Gaglioti, Frank. “World Socialist Web Site.” The Fate of Soviet Genetics -. N.p., 4 Oct. 1996. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

11 Dick, Steven J. “Creating Memories: Myth, Identity, and Culture in the Russian Space Age.” Remembering the Space Age. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of External Relations, History Division, 2008. 219-20. Print.

12 Dolgorukov, and Deni. Glory to the Stalinist Falcons - Conquerors of the Element of Air. 1937. Poster. N.p.

13 Vladimir Kirillov, “The Iron Messiah”, 4 in Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore 1917-1953 ed.

James von Geldern and Richard Stites.

Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995. Course pack page 107 14 Alexander Bogdanov, “The Museum of Art”, chapter 4, 74-80 in his The

Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, ed Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites.

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984 Course pack page 51 15 “ENCYLOPEDIA OF SOVIET WRITERS.” Smithy (Kuznitsa). Sovlit, n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

16 “Palace of the Soviets.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

17 Gastev, “We Grow Out of Iron”, 3 in Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore 1917-1953 ed. James von Geldern and Richard Stites. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995 Course pack page 105 18 Buck-Morss, Susan. “Common Sense.” Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. 105.

Print.

19 Olesha, Yuri Karlovich, and Andrew R. MacAndrew. “13.” Envy: And Other Works. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1967. 63-64. Print.

Works Cited A.A Zhdanov, “Soviet Literature – The Richest in Ideas, The Most Advanced Literature,” 15-27 in Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress.

London: Martin Lawrence, [1934] Beraha, Laura. “High Stalinist Culture Lecture.” McGill. 28 Jan. 2016. Lecture.

Ivan Grozny. Ivan the Terrible. Part 1. Ivan the Terrible. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. By Sergei Eisenstein, Ė Tisse, and Sergey Prokofiev. S.n., 1944.

Alexander Nevsky. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Mosfilm, 1937.

Ostrowski, Don. “Alexander Nevskii’s “Battle on the Ice”: The Creation of a Legend.” Academia. edu. Harvard University, 2006. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

44

Beraha, Laura. “High Stalinist Culture Lecture.” McGill. 10 Mar. 2016. Lecture.

Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1981. Print.

Riangina, Serafima. Higher and Higher. 1934. Painting. N.p.

“Russian Thought Lecture 10: Utopias in Russian Culture: Of Palaces and Panopticons.” Sarah J Young. N.p., 12 Mar. 2013. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

Gaglioti, Frank. “World Socialist Web Site.” The Fate of Soviet Genetics -. N.p., 4 Oct. 1996.

Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

Dick, Steven J. “Creating Memories: Myth, Identity, and Culture in the Russian Space Age.” Remembering the Space Age. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of External Relations, History Division, 2008. 219-20. Print.

Dolgorukov, and Deni. Glory to the Stalinist Falcons - Conquerors of the Element of Air. 1937.

Poster. N.p.

Vladimir Kirillov, “The Iron Messiah”, 4 in Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore 1917-1953 ed. James von Geldern and Richard Stites. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995.

Alexander Bogdanov, “The Museum of Art”, chapter 4, 74-80 in his The Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, ed Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984 “Encyclopedia of Soviet Writers.” Smithy (Kuznitsa). Sovlit, n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

“Palace of the Soviets.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

Gastev, “We Grow Out of Iron”, 3 in Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore 1917-1953 ed. James von Geldern and Richard Stites. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995 Buck-Morss, Susan. “Common Sense.” Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. 105. Print.

Olesha, Yuri Karlovich, and Andrew R. MacAndrew. “13.” Envy: And Other Works. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1967. 63-64. Print.

45

Literary Ladies: Women as Literary Devices in Two Russian Short Stories Lillian King

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I

n “Guy De Maupassant” and “Anna’s Body: Or the End of the Russian Avant Garde”, Isaac Babel and Viktor Erofeyev respectively place entire literary traditions on women’s bodies, making no room between their function for male artists and their physical existence but instead melding the two through hyper literary descriptions of the women’s sexuality and femininity. Looking at just the titles from both works it is clear that the woman and events in the stories are viewed through a specific literary perspective. Isaac Babel’s “Guy De Maupassant” deals directly with translation and Maupassant’s stories, applying them to the narrator and Raisa. The narrator translates the plots and the life of the author into his own life, and his descriptions of Raisa’s body highlight his desire to recreate a literary world in reality. Viktor Erofeyev’s short story “Anna’s Body”, written decades after Babel’s death, similarly discusses literature and art through descriptive imagery of a woman’s body.

But, set at the end of the Russian Avant Garde movement, his story deals more directly with the Avant Garde’s use of women’s bodies to depict ideology as well as the grander history of women in literature, using a narrator more familiar with the internal experiences of this literary woman. Looking at the differences and similarities of their skaz narrator’s descriptions and the actions of the women themselves, both short stories highlight how the reliance on femininity and women’s physicalities by male authors cause a sense of emptiness for both the women and the artists trying to make them represent more than they can.

Babel’s narrator looks at Raisa and her body strictly as a symbol for his own lust, projecting his reality and wishes onto her body. Erofeyev’s narrator stands closer to Anna’s perspective, looking out from her body at the world she navigates, drawing in the literary traditions and projections that have affected her life. In “Guy De Maupassant” the narrator relies on highly expressive details; he does not just translate texts but he translates the world around him into literary imagery. He describes nature in a saturated tone: “The sun, with its melting fingers, touched the books’ morroco leather bindings–the magnificent crypt of the human heart” (Babel 82). The narrator, having rejected the clerk positions, makes it clear that he wants to create his own path, one that uses both Raisa and Maupassant as catalysts for his own epiphanies. He separates himself from the crowd by “his own condescending or disdainful rejection of responses to art and life that for various reasons are judged inferior” (Rougle 172). His rejection of society feeds his belief that he must create the world around him for himself. He projects his desires in his descriptions of female bodies, explaining “the maid with the pointed breasts [who] moved ceremoniously around the room” and when he introduces Raisa, she enters the room “bearing her large breasts before her” (680-1). His idea of women as sexual objects creates two realities for him, the dream and the actual, and when they meet they do not support one another. This is clear after he dreams of his washerwoman, who in his dream he did “God only knows what” with. Afterwards 47

he “could not resist going down to her for boiling water” forcing him to come “face-to-face with a wilted woman, a shawl tied across her chest, with disheveled ash-gray curls and sodden hands” (Babel 682). The woman is not actually “wilted” but his image of her is. She does not arise to his sexual fantasy of her, and is therefore a disappointment to him, a “sodden” body whose sexual potential has faded. As Charles Rougle explains, “The narrator, of course, is easily recognizable as the starving young artisan, and Raisa is the maternal surrogate who quite literally nourishes him” (176). Babel’s use of the skaz narration style to connect the artist to the narrator builds the world in the short story as this world laden with sexual and literary imagery.

Viktor Erofeyev’s similarly employs a skaz narrator, but this narrator aligns with the women’s perspective and reality instead of the artist’s. As opposed to the Babel story, Anna places literary and artistic imagery onto herself, and this pressure consumes her. Her sexuality is inherent within her body. When she presents herself to the woman at the pool, “Anna stood, like a clash of two worlds, like a fatal contest between Picasso and Botticelli, generously displaying her Slavid breasts to the woman doctor, and that woman of another faith, dumbstruck by such beauty, involuntarily issued the required pass” (Erofeyev 381). Anna’s body, like Raisa’s, is consistently explained in terms that highlight how little control she has over her form. When she is fat, which she is in the evening of the story, her body is explained in its excesses, with her “thick chapped lips” and “long-neglected 48

untrimmed nails” (Erofeyev 379-80). The narrator in Babel’s story also focuses on the excesses of Raisa’s body, and how “it swayed like the body of a snake rising to music toward the ceiling” (Babel 683).

The narrator describes Raisa’s breasts the same way he does the breasts of the women in Maupassant’s stories, asking “Who can forget the tale of the hungry young carpenter sucking milk from the overflowing breast of the fat wet-nurse” (Babel 682). He applies the same exaggerated sexuality from his understanding of Maupassant’s story to his own life.

The professions of the women’s lovers affect the men’s treatment and outlook on the women in both stories. In Babel’s story, the narrator works as a translator. He fixes Raisa’s attempts of translating the Maupassant stories, adding Maupassant’s “free-flowing prose with its powerful breath of passion” (Babel 681). He explains his method of translating: “The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible.

One’s fingertip must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned one, not twice” (Babel 681).

This physical description is similar to the way he looks at life, consistently trying to grasp a secret or underlying meaning of something that may not actually exist; he believes he can “grasp the key” of life.

His translation job leads to his romance with Raisa, with heavy parallels between the Maupassant story and her seduction.

The narrator’s description of Celeste mirror his descriptions of Raisa, describing Celeste as she “swept her skirts, which hung over her powerful, red-stockinged calves” focusing on the same physical

traits as Raisa’s “stockinged legs, with their strong, delicate calves” (Babel 684, 681). Raisa’s actions seem predestined through the narration, they seamlessly connect to the narrator’s work and descriptions. She lacks any autonomy, no real motive on her part is ever conveyed in the story. Instead the narrator’s literary symbols govern her.

The lack of the woman’s autonomy is more blatant in Erofeyev’s story. Due to its use of avant garde literary tactics there is no sense of realism in the story, her body is at the whim of the artist. Much like Babel’s story, Anna is likened to an animal, for “Like a great fish, like a whale tossed up onto the shore of a stupefied ocean, Anna lay in her bed in the middle of the night” (Erofeyev 329). But her body is not just governed by animalistic whims, but industrial ones as well, when “her stomach announced, like a distant locomotive, and, instead of steam, it sent the shot of a belch into her nose” (329).

Though the narrator dives more into Anna’s experiences, her experiences are controlled by the numerous literary and artistic traditions her body has survived.

This story is like Babel’s, but instead of the artist telling it, the muse does. Anna is Raisa, they both are forced to fulfill the wishes of the artist. Anna’s lover, an avant garde artist, clearly uses her according to his own whims, and she realizes this. All of Anna’s relationships depend on what literary tradition or narrative Anna must represent; “Sometimes Anna felt that she was Anna Karenina, sometimes–Anna Akhmatova, sometimes just an Anna on the neck. Depending on this, her relationships would change” (Erofeyev 380).

Anna’s lives a lonely life, spending her time drinking and sleeping. Her actions depend on the artist and whether or not he wants to use her; “He’d been skiing off cliffs–she’d been sleeping. He’d been splashing around, convivial and frail, in the pool–and she’d been sleeping” (Erofeyev 381). And when he comes to visit her, he awakens her by “rousing her fat body” (381). When he shows up at her apartment, she does not wake him up but “stretched her trembling hand toward him, [... then pulling] the hand back” (381). She does not touch him until the end, instead she says “You sleep, and I’ll come to you in your dream and eat you up” (382). Then, “Anna snuggled into euphemisms” and continues her solitary and dependent existence. Her lover is her enemy, he represents the cause of her body’s shifts. She, representing the literary object of the female body, is tired of his avant garde style, and wants to push him into the next tradition (Socialist Realism). She pleads with him “you’d do better to write about us, about how you came back to me, about the love you and I have” (Erofeyev 382). She no longer wants to be a version of herself for her love, explaining’ “I’m a fool… I was a fool–Forgive me! But now you’re mine again” (382). This is the time when the Raisas and every version of Anna fights back, “and that’s how on this night the history of the Russian avant garde came to an end” (382). The end of the story places the man as the representative for the decline of an entire artistic tradition and shows how no matter what tradition preceded this one or follows it, the woman will continue to be the subject 49

of dissection and overly symbolic depiction. The tone and narration of Erofeyev’s story creates a mixture of avant garde and realist language, mixing literary genres that have used the body of this Anna to show how dependent most artistic movements are on femininity and the sexual power of a woman’s body.

While not ending in an explicit death, Babel’s story ends with the narrator fearing his life mirroring Maupassant’s too similarly as he learns about how Maupassant’s life declined. Raisa’s fate does not matter to him, he used her for what he wanted and now he only fo-

cuses on himself. Similar to Erofeyev’s story, Babel’s narrator’s dependence on literature consumes him. The women of both stories survive, but that is almost irrelevant. They will reappear in a hundred stories as different men want them to represent different things. The fate of the women do not matter but instead the women’s effects on the men do. Both stories use their skaz narrators to immerse the readers into this male artist-female subject dynamic to show how the relationship negatively affects both sides, but only focuses on the man’s future (or in Erofeyev’s story, the lack thereof).

Works Cited Babel, Isaac. “Guy De Maupassant.” Trans. Peter Constantine. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel. Ed. Nathalie Babel. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2002. 679-86. Print.

Erofeyev, Viktor. “Anna’s Body.” Trans. Leonard J. Stanton. Glasnost: An Anthology of Russian Literature under Gorbachev. Ed. Helena Goscilo and Byron Lindsey. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990. 379-82. Print.

Rougle, Charles. “Art and the Artist in Babel’s “Guy De Maupassant”” The Russian Review 48.2 (1989): 171-80. JSTOR. Web. 07 Dec. 2016.

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Representation and Physical Form In The New Metaphysical City: Architecture, Identity, And Modernity In Fin De Siècle St. Petersburg Chiara Andreotti

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A

t the frontier between art and engineering, architecture occupies a very special place in cultural history: it embodies the aesthetic and cultural ideals of a place and time while also, unlike other forms of art, serving a variety of utilitarian as well as social, political, or religious functions.

This social and cultural synthesis makes architecture an inexhaustible source for intellectual and historical inquiry. Architecture speaks with an aesthetic, spatial, and sensual language that is both universal and immediate yet idiosyncratically unique to a particular culture and time. It both produces and perpetuates meaning through its own physical reality, its projected aesthetic, and the uses and experiences of those who interact with it. The static and sometimes monumental quality of architecture has been exploited for centuries by elites and figures of authority as a way to project and maintain power, and to build common identities that will unite the population under a grand historical narrative. In the late modern period, however, as history appeared to be more and more fragmented and society evolved at a faster and more volatile pace, the traditional permanence and monumentality of architecture may have come to seem problematic or at least less representative of the times. In this paper, I argue that this tension between the static quality of buildings and the transitory nature of modernity is evident in St. Petersburg during the last decades of the Russian Empire.

The Fin de Siècle in St. Petersburg (roughly from the 1880s and 1890s although I will also consider the first two

52

decades before the Russian Revolution of 1917) was a time of transition. St. Petersburg’s political and cultural identity had always been fluid and contested as it stood at the frontier between Europe and Russia. Furthermore, the last few decades of the Russian Empire, before the February revolution of 1907, which took place in St. Petersburg, marked a time of instability, transition, and the movement and ephemerality typical of late modernity.

The Fin de Siècle architecture of St. Petersburg reflects this sense of fluctuation and transience, as well as the psychological mindset of late modernity. One might even say that in the latter half of the nineteenth century the architecture of St. Petersburg experienced a crisis of identity as it faced the inconsistency, ambivalence, and paradoxes of late modernity and struggled to recreate a cohesive physical materialization of the ideals and historical consciousness of its time, as had been its traditional role for centuries earlier. Among these paradoxes was the contrast between the desire to represent St. Petersburg as an imperial city with a continuing claim to legitimacy and popular identity, as seen for example in the tsar Nicholas II’s efforts to create a “Russian architectural style” in church architecture, and the intangible confusion and chaotic reality of the modern metropolis reflected in the eclectic style of architecture that was deeply shaped by the changing social and economic circumstances of the times. After having briefly situated my research in the current literature, I will begin by defining what I mean

by Fin de Siècle St. Petersburg being a “transitory space and time” by providing

a short overview of the social context of St. Petersburg in the late imperial period and the Russian quest for identity. Second, I will look at the architectural style of Russian revival and in particular, the construction of churches in the latter half of the nineteenth century as an example of a last (failed) attempt by the imperial elites to impose an anachronistic Russian identity through the use of architecture. I will then attempt to show, by looking at eclecticism and how it fits in the social reality of the Fin de Siècle, that the search for a lost imperial identity of which Russian revival architecture is an example, was being overtaken and infiltrated by an urban modern reality whose profane and individual concerns were served by a democratized but desacralized form of architecture. Finally, I look at the representation of St. Petersburg in the literature, in its restricted sense, of the time and how the image of the city for writers such as Dostoevsky reflected a shift away from the physically anchored, monolithic imperial city ideal to the sensual complexity and multiplicity of the modern city as a space of psychological experience, metaphysical reality, and alienation.

Current literature on the architectural history of St. Petersburg is relatively expansive but incomplete. The immense majority of existing research is centered around the Petrine architecture or the Soviet architecture. The nineteenth century is often glossed over or dismissed as a period lacking any major architectural achievement. In general, the architectural style of the late nineteenth century in Russia or St. Petersburg is discussed under the blanket category of Eclecticism, a

mostly pejorative term used to describe a perceived lack of cohesion, originality, and unity. In the English literature that was available to me, studies of this style in the broader historical and social narrative of the Fin de Siècle were quite limited (especially with regard to primary sources), with only a couple of works that really addressed either the social and economic circumstances of St. Petersburg in the Fin de Siècle or the architectural style of that period. William C. Brumfield attempts to fill these lacunas in his authoritative The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture. Outside the field of architectural history, Mark Steinberg in Petersburg Fin de Siècle, offers a a valuable and insightful cultural, political, and social history of the city. An interesting discussion about eclecticism in late imperial St. Petersburg can also be found in Julie Buckler’s almost encyclopedic work on the topography of (roughly) nineteenth century St. Petersburg.

Aside from these sources, the literature about late imperial architecture in Russia tends to be episodic, often consisting of short chapters and articles in books and sometimes covering much larger periods of architectural history. In this paper, I would like to address more fully and specifically the period’s architectural imagination, by focusing on how particular experiments related to the historical narrative of modernity and what I have called the city’s architectural as well as historical crisis of identity. More specifically, I seek to reconcile the architectural and mythological text of the city and articulate the disparities and perceived failures of the style of eclecticism as a re53

action to and embodiment of the transitory and fragmented reality of the Fin de Siècle. While I do not attempt to provide an analysis of eclecticism as an architectural style, I do examine eclecticism’s perceived lack of cohesion, suggesting it might be seen as a consequence of the adaptation of architects to a new bourgeois capitalist world. I also seek to address some of the misleading implication of the too broadly used category of eclecticism and how signifiant distinctions exist within this style. At the same time, I am interested in the literary conception of the city as immaterial, insidious, and impressionistic—evidence of a modern mindset of pessimism with an emphasis on the ephemeral and the fleeting that was typical of European (particularly French) culture at the time. The sense of an insidious creeping darkness brought about by (European) modernity and the new found fascination for invisible forces seemed to dislodge the conception of the city as a physical space and its architecture as a materialization of grand and sacred ideals of national identity and ethos.

Architecture, I argue, was pushed into a crisis of identity in which its traditional use as a tool to create, impose or maintain a unifying monolithic discourse, to act as a consecrated and shared historical symbol through its physicality and monumentality, was radically undermined by a rising concern for individual pathos, the profane, and a sometimes brutal utilitarian materialism.

Fin de Siècle St. Petersburg is the very definition of a transitory space and time. In Europe, the Fin de Siècle was a period of transition, of simultaneous 54

decay and creation, a time lost between two eras. It was characterized by a shared sense of degeneration, pessimism, and cynicism. While the beginning of the nineteenth century was marked by the bustling, optimism, and excitement of new-found modernity, the turn of the century seemed to reflect a period of deeper and more inquisitive and destructive introspection and self-examination, a time disillusion and raised awareness about the ambivalence and creeping darkness of modernity. The Russian Fin de Siècle and in particular St.-Petersburg’s followed in many aspects Europe’s yet, its experience of modernity we will see was even darker and more dramatic.

In Russia, the latter half of the nineteenth century was a pre-revolutionary period where the legitimacy and reality of the gilded age of empire were increasingly questioned and challenged. Steinberg describes Imperial Russia’s final decade as “an era of possibility and crisis, marked by an often desperate search for the meaning of the present and a sense of the future.”1 To some, the imperial system of Russia seemed inconsistent with the present, anachronistic and inadequate.

The fin de Siècle appears like an escalation of paradoxes. While imperial Russia struggled to maintain credibility, especially in the urban centers, the growth of poverty, misery, and inequality, and the influence of European revolutionary or reformist discourses marked the rise of modernity, especially in St. Petersburg.

Here, at the frontier between Europe and Russia, in what might be described as the cultural and political battleground between Russia and the West, the same

fluctuating search for a cohesive national self that had characterized Russia’s own quest for a cultural and political identity between Europe and Asia was played out with new intensity.2 St. Petersburg’s historical ties to Europe were made manifest in the famous metaphor devised by count Algarotti on his first visit to the city a decade and a half after the death of Peter the Great, when he referred to St. Petersburg as a “great window lately opened in the north, through which Russia looks into Europe.”3 Indeed, as Steinberg notes, St. Petersburg had been founded by Peter the Great after the European model, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the city “famously stood for ‘Western Civilization’ in Russia.” At the same time, paradoxically, it was the “empire’s political capital and its most populous and developed metropolis—it quite literally represented Russia.”4 This dual or fractured identity takes on a particular salience and symbolic significance in the architecture of St. Petersburg.

In the face of increased instability in the late nineteenth century, the Tsars and the imperial elite attempted to maintain and consolidate their legitimacy by constructing a distinct Russian imperial identity that was not a mere replication of Europe’s, like Peter the Great was accused to have done. Architecture was used to perpetuate a new Russian historical narrative of national distinctiveness.

Richard Wortman notes how this attempt reflected a long tradition of using the “declaratory role of architecture in the representation of the Russian monarchy.”5 Central to this tradition was the use of “magnificence,” monumentality, and

the preciousness of architectural constructions to emphasize the power, grandeur, and sophistication of the monarchy.

In a way that might recall the different styles of the French kings, specific architectural and stylistic elements served to represent particular characteristics of each reign and of a ruler’s persona, in order to “set each ruler apart as a distinctive ruling presence embodying specific transcendent attributes of power.”6 Beginning in 1881, this approach was pursued especially through the architecture of churches. The use of this most sacred and spiritual building type served to enshrine the new national historical narrative in the everyday life of the Russian subjects and to lend it a divine and sacrosanct aura. Tsar Nicholas II conceived this new “Russian style” as a symbolic rejection of the domination of Western culture over Russia. He did so by establishing the origin of Russian greatness in the pre-Petrine period, considered to have been a moment of real Russian creativity, free from Western (or Byzantine) domination. By thus dismissing the narrative which placed Russia’s origins in Rome or the Byzantine empire, Nicholas sought to redefine the “derivative character of Russian religious doctrine to identify Russia with the source of Christianity itself.”7 How this intention was expressed in architectural form in St. Petersburg can best be seen in the monumental Cathedral of the Resurrection (or Christ on the Blood) designed by Parland and built between 1883 and 1907 (fig. 1), which came to epitomize the so-called “Russian Style.”

Here, the onion cupolas, the vibrant and exuberant surplus of architectural deco55

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rative elements such as kokoshniks (the rows of pointed semi-circular arches under the cupolas), were all borrowed from Pre-Petrine seventeenth century architecture. Similarly, Wortman notes how the “organic motifs ... springing mushroom like from their surface, defy the order and restraint of neo-classicism,” commonly associated with Western architecture. In this way, the church acted as a “flagrant repudiation” of both Western culture as well as the imitation of Western culture by Russian architects and previous rulers. It is also significant that some of the most exuberant examples of “Russian style” churches are found in St. Petersburg, suggesting the need to counteract the weight of the Western architectural tradition of the Petrine city.

Wortman notes that “expressing the autocrat’s growing dissatisfaction with the western imperial capital, these churches administered an open rebuke to the city itself, constituting an effort to Moscovitize St. Petersburg.”8 Architecture in this sense served an explicit edifying or moralizing function for the population of the city, at the same time as it helped to construct a Russian national identity and reinforce the power of the monarchy.

tural museum,” where disparate elements wrongly assumed to belong to a single pre-petrine style, were pieced together into a single building.9 The Russian style was also criticized as an autocratic imposition by an official culture foreign to that of the people and based on a “created’ historical narrative that was not even grounded in reality. Some denounced it as the transparent “attempt of an imperial regime to find a grounding in the ruled population by claiming their history.”10 Hence the Tsar’s efforts to manufacture an architectural style in support of a Russian imperial identity and historical narrative were undermined by a general lack of authenticity or conviction in the representation of St. Petersburg’s popular culture. As Wortman notes, “After the revolution of 1905, the recreation of the past withdrew behind monastery walls to sustain illusions of omnipotence and mass support that allowed Nicholas II to believe he still represented and spoke for a Russian nation.”11 Despite their physical presence, the Tsar’s projects thus failed to achieve their intended goal in popular consciousness, appearing rather as holdouts of a declining regime out of touch with reality.

As the legitimacy of the tsar eroded in the decades preceding the Russian revolution, it is not surprising that the Russian style of the churches came under increasing criticism. Revolutionary voices from within and without the field of architecture denounced its historical inaccuracies, its inauthenticity, and its superficiality. Contemporary critic Kurbatov, for instance, deplored how churches had become “a kind of architec-

The “Russian style” in architecture, also known as “Russian Revival” or, more dismissively, as the “Pseudo-Russian Style,” belongs to the more general nineteenth century phenomenon of Eclecticism. Broadly speaking, the latter describes the characteristic mixing of styles according to aesthetic or symbolic considerations that was common throughout Europe at the time. By comparison with this general stylistic des-

ignation, however, the “Russian style,” I contend, presents distinctive characteristics that make its association to Eclecticism misleading. This is especially apparent if one considers the social and political elements of eclecticism within the context of the Fin de Siècle modern city. As Julie Buckler explains, in the latter half of the twentieth century, a separation was introduced in architectural projects between “functional public buildings” and “magnificent monuments like St. Isaac’s [Cathedral].”12 Aesthetically speaking, architecture up until now had been almost exclusively devoted to “magnificent monuments,” but increasingly, “functional public buildings” such as schools, hospitals, apartments, commercial arcades, or railway stations were also subject to “architectural fancy,” and were thus integrated as components of the various architectural styles.13 Buckler further notes that the negative perception of eclecticism was due for the most part to its association with profane and utilitarian buildings, which had now to be considered as occurrences of architectural stylization.14 Eclecticism thus seems to have had a significantly social and historical component. The “Russian style” of sacred and official buildings would thus seem to conflict with this social definition of eclecticism. Rather what I believe was truly representative of the architectural style of eclecticism was a new approach to architecture that was the result of its confrontation with the particular social and political conditions of the Fin de Siècle metropolis. Such an approach is much better represented in other, non-official structures built in St.

Petersburg In contrast with the “Russian Style,” what should properly be called—in my view—St. Petersburg’s architecture of eclecticism was deeply intertwined with the social and demographic conditions of the city in the late imperial period. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, as mentioned above, St. Petersburg underwent major social and economic changes. One of the most visible was a dramatic growth in the urban population due to urban migration; this lead to enormous poverty and misery, and slums spread rapidly across the city. To respond to the high demands for housing, St. Petersburg experienced a significant construction boom beginning in the 1860s, which was registered in a massive increase in the number and size of apartment buildings.15 Brumfield describes the “disorientating effects” of this change in the urban landscape. In particular, he describes how “the rows of apartment blocks dating from the 1860s to the beginning of the century gave an impression of stylistic chaos.”16 Echoing the definition of Eclecticism above, he writes: “Every major architectural style was imitated or paraphrased on the facades of commercial and housing structures in Petersburg during the late nineteenth century: neo-Renaissance, neo- Baroque, neoGreek, Louis XVI, Russian Revival, and Moorish, [although] mixed or unrecognizable styles, however, may in fact have predominated.”17 The Palace of Grand Prince Vladimir Aleksandrovich (Fig. 2) is an example of an eclectic building that used the relatively cheap and convenient materials of brick and stucco to recreate 57

the appearance of a early Renaissance Florentine palace (although the interior rooms ranged from “Louis XVI to Gothic to Moorish”18). The result is an odd impression of flatness and plastic-like artificiality, which is reflected in the harsh words of cultural critics such as Vladimir Stasov who humorously explained in a newspaper that eclecticism “is the architecture of clever people who get smart in class and then with great indifference turn out goods by the yard and by the pound ... If it suits you, here are five yards of Greek ‘classicism’; if not here are three quarters of ‘Italian Renaissance...’”19 The language used by Stasov makes clear the connection between eclecticism and consumerism. At the root of this critique was the anxiety felt by many architects that modernization was undermining the sacredness of architecture itself, the genius of the architect, by reducing art to a mere object of consumption. This awareness of the consequences that a market-oriented society was having on the role of architecture can be seen in the words of the architect Kuroedov, for instance, complaining that the architect was fast becoming a “hireling, obligated for his renumeration to fulfill someone else’s will without thinking.”20 Buckler notes that the Great Reforms of the 1860s, which set the foundations of a fully capitalist economy, “provided tremendous impetus to the architectural trend toward eclecticism. This period saw the advent of architecture as a profession; ... the increase of privately funded multi-residence housing and other non monumental structures meant to be both functional and aesthetically pleasing.”21 These elements undeniably 58

constitute a departure from Nicholas II’s Russian Style in church architecture. In the face of the rising tide of “profane,” democratic, public, and functional forms of architecture that were redefining the image of the city, the monumental “sacred” architecture of official imperial doctrine might well have seemed lost and obsolete, unable to resist the rapid shift to a modern world of greater democratization, bourgeois consumption, material values, and individualistic utilitarianism.

The pessimism and anxieties that the architecture of eclecticism seemed to constitute or provoke are consistent with the general mood of the “troubled times” of fin de Siècle St. Petersburg described by Steinberg. Stylistic indecision, chaotic mixtures of historical sources both reflected the cultural, political, and economic contradictions of Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. The frantic exploration of different styles, the combination of incompatible architectural elements reflected the often unconscious search for new forms of modern identity more in line with the Zeitgeist of the times. While the imperial national identity, as we have discussed above, appeared more and more inadequate and anachronistic, the feeling of a void to be filled drove the search for new forms of culture and selfhood. Hence the hesitations, failures, and lack of cohesion and authenticity that were the bane of Russian eclecticism, which as Steinberg notes, made it “more pessimistic than in the west.”22 Steinberg also notes that a questioning of progress as an illusion and an obsession with disease and degeneration were recurring leitmotifs in the

consciousness of Peterburgers. This pessimism was reflected in a “vocabulary of sickness and crisis used to define public life.” He adds, “only partly was the sickness that was diagnosed a sign of the dying of an old regime. Much more, especially as contemporaries saw it, this was a crisis born of what was new.”23 Indeed, critiques of Eclecticism like Kuroeov and Stasov seemed to be quite conscious that the failures and mistakes of the style and the shift in the status of architecture were linked together but also ultimately tied to the social and economic event of capitalist modernization. The sense of crisis and powerlessness to control the future that were reflected in eclecticism and its criticism were noted by Robert Gedike, rector of the Academy of Arts in Petersburg, in 1889: The reasons for the obvious decline of taste in the civil architecture of our time lie, one must assume, in the numerous changes that have touched our lives in recent times but are not yet established and therefore prevent our artists from choosing one general and stable direction in all branches of the arts. Every style in architecture expresses the tastes and social currents of a particular time.

In our time no close tie exists between accepted concepts about art and their artistic expression in architectural compositions: devices once in use have grown old, and the new have not yet had time to work themselves out in clearly defined forms. At present we are experiencing a struggle in architecture between old and new points of view.24 Gedike here touched exactly on the

relationship between eclecticism and its historical context. The failure of eclecticism to create a cohesive, authentic, and culturally rich and stimulating forms of expression was characteristic of a time of transition, according to Gedike, where the old imperial Russia was dying although still maintaining an illusion of reality, and the new was foreign, ungraspable, as well as morally questionable.

While architecture struggled ineffectually to give form to these conditions, literature thrived on them. It was here, in the sphere of Russian Literature, in fact, that a new conception of the city of St. Petersburg emerged that seemed to completely negate the traditional image of the city shaped by rational principles, which architecture had upheld until then. Under the pen of novelists, Petersburg became a sort of phantasmagoric space of sensual multiplicity, transience, darkness, and intangibility that prompted individual wanderings and experimentation. A characteristic theme was the city’s ephemeral nature.25 Burton Pike, in his book, The Image of the City in Modern Literature, coins the term the “City as Flux.” Following Pike, we could say that St. Petersburg became in the literary imagination “an unstable refraction of an individual consciousness rather than as an object fixed in space.”26 The city as a “diaphanous idea” constituted of invisible, unpredictable, and fluctuating movements and energies is also a common theme in much European Fin de Siècle culture, where it reflects the sense of instability, fleetingness, chaos, and fragmentation of modernity. In Dostoevsky, the ethereal atmosphere and sensuous59

ness of St. Petersburg received some of its most memorable descriptions. In Crime and Punishment, St. Petersburg is described not through its famous monuments but through the most direct sensory registers of sound, temperature, light, and smell: “The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all those who are unable to get out of town in summer—all worked painfully upon the young man’s [Raskol’nikov] already overwrought nerves.”27 This is how Petersburg is first introduced in the novel and it seems already to possess some sort of invisible spirit and agency that can interact with the protagonist Raskol’nikov’s psychological state. Furthermore, as Dostoevsky stated in his newspaper feuilletons for the Petersburg Chronicle, in Petersburg “everything is chaos, everything a mixture.”28 Steinberg explains: “It is all ‘life and movement,’ but ambiguous movement— destruction and creation, chaos and forward progress: even up to the present Petersburg is in dust and rubble, it is still being created, becoming.”29 Dostoevsky associated the movement and chaos of the city with its modernity, its lack of cohesion to its situation in a time of self-realization and construction. He emphasized that Petersburg was in the ongoing process of identity creation. For Dostoevsky, however, the city was at once beautiful (in its modernity and fluidity), alienating and self-destructive.30 Ian LilFig. 1. Cathedral of the Resurrection (Christ on the Blood), St. Petersburg. Alfred Parland, architect. (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

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ly observes how in Russian literature St. Petersburg is intimately bound up with suicide and self-destruction. Gogol in Nevsky prospect or Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment both make self-destruction an inherent element of the modern Petersburg. Dostoevsky’s Raskol’nikov— although he never actually commits suicide unlike Gogol’s Piskarev’s who after his gruesome death “is mourned by not a single Petersburger”31— entertains suicidal thoughts during a long aimless walk along a canal of Petersburg in the “stifling ... stinking, dusty town air,” where he is first overcome by a “sort of savage energy,” while moments later, succumbing to insurmountable weakness.32 During his walk, as he stands on a bridge absorbed in the contemplation of the last ray of sunset over the city’s panorama, he witnesses the suicide of a young woman.

Dostoevsky describes Petersburg as a

Fig. 2. Palace of Grand Prince Vladimir Aleksandrovich, St. Petersburg. 1867–1872.

Aleksandr Rezanov, architect.

(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

dark, violent and alienating place. The city is sometimes represented as an insidious, treacherous and ensnaring entity with the power to either infuse or suck out all the energies of Raskol’nikov. Once again, Petersburg epitomizes the ambivalences of modernity as it plays with the psychology of its inhabitants. Thus while architecture struggled to define itself on the immateriality of a city caught in an uncertain present, between death and rebirth, this very phenomenon of the “city in flux,” whose physical monumentality seemed to disappear in the fleetingness and flailing reality of modernity, was the subject of great fascination in Russian literature.

I attempted in this paper to describe how architecture and the spaces of St. Petersburg are essential to our understanding of the historical and political conditions of the city at the end of the nineteenth century. Petersburg’s architecture, alongside its representation in the literary imagination of the times, gives historians a valuable framework through which to understand and decipher the

complex narrative of modernity in the final years of imperial Russia.

Indeed, by studying St. Petersburg’s cityscape as a symbolic space through which political, cultural, and historical change were articulated through a confrontation between the perennial quest for a Russian identity outside of Europe and the creeping darkness and ambivalence of urban “modernity,” we see how architecture was caught in a confrontation between old and new, in the transitory space and time of Fin de Siècle St. Petersburg. Its struggle to refigure a national identity as a physical materialization of grand and sacred historical narratives and ideologies in the face of an increasingly immaterial, individualized, and desacralized world is reflected first by the failed attempt of an imperial Russian elite to use architecture in the traditional way to consolidate a common historical narrative, then by eclecticism’s loss of architecture’s sacred status as monumental art, in favor of the profane and materialist world of “functional public buildings,” and finally by the description and conceptualization of the city in literature by writers such as Dostoevsky, where it emerges as a dark, invisible, and insidious environment that operates on a visceral and sensual register more than through the representation of physical form.

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Notes: 1 Marc D. Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 1.

2 Ibid.

3 Julie A. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 32.

4 Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle, 2.

5 Richard Wortman, ‘The “Russian Style” in Church Architecture as Imperial Symbol after 1881’, in Architectures of Russian Identity, 1500 to the Present, ed. James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 101.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., 105.

8 Ibid., 107.

9 Kurbatov (1905), in Ibid., 114.

10 Wortman, “Church Architecture,” 113.

11 Ibid., 116.

12 Buckler, Mapping Saint Petersburg, 50.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 William Craft Brumfield, The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (Berkeley: University California Press, 1991), 3.

16 Ibid., 5.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 50.

20 V. Kuroedov, “Berlinskaia arkhitektura.

Putevye zametki,” Zodchii , 1876, no. 7:79. in Brumfield, Origins of Modernism, 9.

21 Buckler, Mapping Saint Petersburg, 30.

22 Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siecle, 1.

23 Ibid.

24 Gedike in Brumfield, Origins of Modernism, 41.

25 Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 135.

26 Ibid., 71.

27 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, ed. Paul Negri, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Dover Publications, 2003), 2.

28 Dostoevskii, “Peterburgskaia letopis’,” 1 June 1847 in Steinberg, Fin de Siecle Saint Petersburg, 25.

29 Steinberg, Fin de Siecle Saint Petersburg, 25.

30 Ibid.

31 Ian K. Lilly, ‘Imperial Petersburg, Suicide and Russian Literature’, The Slavonic and East European Review 72, no. 3 (1994), 407.

32 Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 291, 267.

Works Cited Brumfield, William Craft. The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture. Berkeley: University California Press, 1991.

Buckler, Julie A. Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich. Crime and Punishment. Edited by Paul Negri. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: Dover Publications, 2003.

Kuroedov, Vladimir. ‘Berlinskaia Arkhitektura. Putevye Zametki’. Zodchii 7, no. 79 (1876).

Lilly, Ian K. ‘Imperial Petersburg, Suicide and Russian Literature’. The Slavonic and East European Review 72, no. 3 (1994): 401–23.

Pike, Burton. The Image of the City in Modern Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Steinberg, Marc D. Petersburg Fin de Siècle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

Wortman, Richard. ‘The “Russian Style” in Church Architecture as Imperial Symbol after 1881’. In Architectures of Russian Identity, 1500 to the Present, edited by James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland, 101–16. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003.

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The Lowly and the Pure: Creating a Beautiful Person ZoĂŤ Goldstein

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I

n the cold months of 1867, Dostoevsky was undergoing the brutal challenge of formulating a truly new character—a kind of hero that no author, according to him, had been formerly able to create1. In a letter to S. A. Ivanovna he wrote, “The main idea of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful person.

There is nothing more difficult in the whole world”2. Steeped in fierce Christian faith, Dostoevsky firmly stated that there is “only one positively beautiful person in the world – Christ”3. Undeterred by his own declaration, Dostoevsky was determined to produce this literary soul and, consequently, bring about an “infinite miracle”4. The result of his initial pursuit was, of course, Prince Myshkin of The Idiot. Having used Myshkin “to test the impact of a contemporary Christ who is dedicated to living a life of genuine compassion”5, Dostoevsky’s project was, in certain ways, a failure. This failure lies in Myshkin’s inability to truly engage with the grime—so to speak—of the world in which he is placed; to be, after all, human. In Bakhtin’s words, “Myshkin is not able to enter into life completely […] it is as if he lacks the necessary flesh of life”6.

Here enters Dostoevsky’s second attempt: the lovely Alyosha Karamazov. It is no coincidence that our second positively beautiful person would arrive as the youngest of a family united in their passionate, bodily intensity. Carrying the “turbulent Karamzov blood”7, Alyosha’ innocence and purity contains a fundamental human element—one that is essential for the thriving of a beautiful and human person. There are many lenses through which to analyze the dis64

parity between Myshkin and Alyosha, but our current focus will be on the way their essential difference affects their relationship to two particular women, respectively. The two fallen women of The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov are Nastasya Filippovna and Grushenka. Within the social framework of the novel, the baseness of these two Femme Fatales is what makes them particularly important sites of intended redemption for their Christlike counterparts. In the following discussion, we will explore the ways in which Alyosha’s ‘redemptive’ response to Grushenka actually deconstructs the archetype of the fallen woman through equalizing the two characters.

We will compare this to the ways Myshkin’s understanding of Nastasya Filippovna keeps the two characters unequal by treating her as a suffering human only.

Although both Grushenka and Nastasya Filippovna are complex and largely unresolved characters, they undeniably embody aspects of the Femme Fatale/ fallen woman stereotype so commonly seen in literature and theology. The Femme Fatale as the “sinister embodiment of sexuality… [representing] the threat of both sex and death”8 is seen in both characters’ fraught (and quite similar) histories. Orphaned at the age of seven9, Nastasya Filippovna underwent her fall as the kept woman of her neighbor Totsky—“he’d stay for two months, a year, dishonor [her] and debauch [her]”10. As an adult, Nastasya Filippovna is described as a “madwoman”11 with beauty that can overturn the world12. Her sexual power is damaging in its intensity, and her role as a temptress places her as

“a focal point of conflict”13 throughout the novel.

As The Brothers Karamazov’s Femme Fatale, Grushenka was also taken advantage of as a young girl. At seventeen, “she had been deceived by someone, allegedly some officer, and then abandoned forthwith”14. Like Nastasya Filippovna, her resultant emergence as a “red-cheeked, full-bodied Russian beauty”15 appears to be connected to her initial fall into sexual baseness. Grushenka’s overarching position in the novel as the feminine object bitterly fought over by Fyodor Pavlovich and Dmitri is consistent with her façade as a hazardous temptress. Both women’s purported baseness—Grushenka as a “slut”16 and Nastasya as “shameless”17—are what make them especially important cases for Alyosha and Myshkin to respond to. Where most of society condemns, fears, and is deeply uncomfortable with these women, the ways in which our Christlike characters respond may say far more about their restorative role than about the women themselves.

Lets now turn to Myshkin’s relationship to Natasya Filippovna specifically.

Abused by Totsky and branded by her society, Nastasya Filippovna exists predominantly as a suffering person. Myshkin’s Christlike beauty and compassion allows him to see beyond the parameters of a society that “wouldn’t let her meet [their] daughters” for fear of the “dishonor in it for them”18. Instead, he sees only the pain in her—that “she has suffered terribly”19. Driven by his single-minded perception of her, Myshkin declares: “I am nothing, but you have suffered and

have emerged pure from such a hell”20, as if her suffering is what produced her purity. Myshkin is only concerned with saving Nastasya Filippovna, with giving her the “good care” 21 she appears to so badly need. With Myshkin no other reason is needed. Out of this single drive, Myshkin promises Nastasya Filippovna that he will follow her whatever happens and never leave her22. When her and Aglaya stand demandingly before him, Myshkin sees nothing else besides “the desperate, insane face”23 of the miserable Nastasya Filippovna. “His heart was forever pierced” by this suffering and, unable to make any other decision, he cries to Aglaya: “It’s not possible! She’s… so unhappy!”24. Myshkin has no other drive in him besides to relieve the most suffering possible. This is precisely what makes Myshkin fundamentally nonhuman— he wants nothing for himself, and is in touch with no human desire. This lack is what makes it impossible for him to see the human in Nastasya Filippovna. With a true one-track mind, Myshkin can see only gradients of suffering here. He consequently dismisses Nastasya Filippovna as a real woman, as someone capable of genuine self-determination, and sees her only as someone in need of salvation.

Alyosha takes a far different approach with Grushenka. From his first meeting with this ‘dangerous woman’, Alyosha, as expected, withholds all judgment of her and remains neutral. When the unusual sweetness between Katerina Ivanovna and Grushenka deteriorates into a bitter verbal brawl, Alyosha is distressed but takes no sides. He holds Grushenka back from “beating” Katerina Ivanovna and 65

pleads for her to “Go, go quickly”25. Alyosha does not join in the common judgment of Grushenka, he is only distraught at the sight of human pain—“His heart ached within him”26. Grushenka is exceedingly transparent in her intentions to seduce Alyosha, but when she learns that the elder Zosima died, she immediately retracts her hooks and “cross[es] herself piously”27. She seems to be horrified at her behavior, and asks of herself, “Lord, but what am I doing now, sitting on his lap!”28. At this Alyosha says to Rakitin, “Did you see how she spared me? I came here looking for a wicked soul—I was drawn to that, because I was low and wicked myself, but I found a true sister, I found a treasure—a loving soul… She spared me just now… I’m speaking of you, Agrafena Alexandrovna. You restored my soul just now.”29 There is much that is interesting in this passage. First, Alyosha admits that he is a “low and wicked” human with bodily desires, something that he also witnesses in Grushenka with her desire to “eat him up”30. Despite all of Grushenka’s behavior, Alyosha witnesses her single moment of piety and elevation— something that he could not muster in that moment—and sees her as a “true sister” and a “loving soul”. He sees both himself and Grushenka as equals fighting with their corporeal and ‘lowly’ selves in the effort to attain a higher level of restoration. Upon witnessing Grushenka do this; Alyosha says that she restored his soul. Despite all outward evidence to the contrary, Alyosha does not see himself as any better than Grushenka. This is where 66

his genuine, equal compassion lies. Note that in his small speech to her he calls her by her true name with her patronymic, an honor usually reserved for Katerina Ivanovna. His understanding of her is what dismantles the divisions placed between the fallen woman and the pure, holy character.

To conclude, Dostoevsky’s pursuit of creating a positively beautiful character came in two parts—Myshkin as the unsuccessful but honorable first try, and Alyosha as the effective second. In this discussion we have established that the fundamental difference between the two ‘pure’ characters lies in the way they view and treat the two fallen women of their respective novels. Where Myshkin fails is that he does not see any of himself in Nastasya Filippovna. As a nonhuman, angelic character, he sees nothing human in her besides suffering to be assuaged.

Through Alyosha’s utter humanness and equal relationship with Grushenka, he is able to be a truly redemptive character by having her restore him.

Notes: 1 Serman, Ilya, and Edward Waysband, “Russian Literature in 1868: In Search of a “Positively Beautiful Person””. Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. 3.1 (2005): John Hopkins University Press. Web. Page 62.

2 Ibid. Page 17.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Barnhart, Joe E. Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Talent. Lanhaum: University Press of America, 2005. Print. Page 84 6 Ibid. Page 85.

7 Barnhart. Page 86.

8 Burton, Michael, “The Femme Fatale and

Fair Maiden in Dostoevsky”. Honors College Thesis. Paper 34. 2006. Web. Page 296.

9 Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Trans.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. N.p.: Vintage Classics. Print. Page 41.

10 Ibid. Page 171.

11 Ibid. Page 172.

12 Ibid. Page 80.

13 Burton. Page 8.

14 Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. N.p.: Everyman’s Library. Print.

Page 344.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid. Page 152.

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

The Idiot. Page 123 The Idiot. Page 31.

Ibid. Page 36.

Ibid. Page 164.

Ibid. Page 168.

Ibid. Page 571.

Ibid.

Ibid.

The Brothers Karamazov. Page 152.

Ibid. Page 153.

Ibid. Page 351.

Ibid.

Ibid.

The Brothers Karamazov. Page 354.

Works Cited Barnhart, Joe E. Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Talent. Lanhaum: University Press of America, 2005.

Print.

Burton, Michael, “The Femme Fatale and Fair Maiden in Dostoevsky”. Honors College Thesis.

Paper 34. 2006. Web. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

N.p.: Everyman’s Library. Print.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. N.p.: Vintage Classics. Print.

Serman, Ilya, and Edward Waysband, “Russian Literature in 1868: In Search of a “Positively Beautiful Person””. Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. 3.1 (2005): 57-80. John Hopkins University Press. Web.

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Танцы русской души: Народный танец в Монреале Daria Borovitsky

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оссия очень большая страна со своей историей, искусством и культурой. Жители многих стран слышали или видели знаменитый русский балет, но мало кто знает, что есть ещё русские народные танцы. Для меня было большой честью взять интервью у Наталии Шатиловой, директора театра русского народного танца “Русские yзоры” в Монреале. Она хочет чтобы как можно больше людей узнали и полюбили русский народный танец.

Наталья Шатилова окончила школу имени Вагановой, самую престижную балетную школу в России. Она приехала в Монреаль в 1996 году из Санкт-Петербурга. По словам Натальи, после перестройки жизнь в России стала очень тяжелой. Когда ей пришлось покинуть Россию в поисках достойного заработка, новым домом для нее стал Монреаль, столь напоминающий ей ее родной город. Устроившись на работу в местную школу, Наталья начала преподавать детям русский язык. Во время Рождественских праздников она организовала концерт для своей церкви с участием учеников из ее класса. Родители были так впечатлены ее работой, что попросили ее и дальше учить их детей танцам. Через два года Наталья организовала театр русского народного танца “Русские yзоры” . К тому моменту Наталья уже

Fig. 1. Наталья Шатилова, директора театра русского народного танца “Русские yзоры” в Монреале.

преподавала в четырех балетных школах в Монреале. “Русские Узоры”, которые начинались как танцевальный класс при церкви Святого Николая, выросли до настоящего театра, и Наталья всегда будет благодарна своей церкви за помощь и поддержку, без которых ничего бы не случилось. Театр рос и развивался, нашёл новый дом и сейчас предлагает классы для всех энтузиастов. Эти энтузиасты, как и танцы, которые исполняет коллектив, собраны со всех концов России. Существует множество разных стилей русского народного танца, зачастую совершенно не похожих друг на друга. На севере приняты медленные и «задумчивые» танцы, например танец «Берёзка,» в котором девушки в длинных и «богатыx» платьях медленно и изящно двигаются на сцене. А на юге распространены более быстрые, веселые танцы, например казачья пляска.

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В русских народных танцаx, юноши и девушки танцуют поразному. Движения юношей энергичные, смелые, а движения девушек чаще всего мягкие нежные и изящные. Театр «Русские узоры» представляет танцы со всей России. Госпожа Шатилова и её театр пытаются представлять новые танцы на каждом концерте. Наталья особенно гордится тем, что танцоры выступают не за деньги, а из-за любви к танцу. Группа выступает в красивыx костюмax, многие из которых Шатилова шила сама. Театр организует собственные концерты, а также его

приглашают на разные фестивали танца в Виннипеге, Монреале, даже в Мексикe и Бразилии. Особой честью было выступление перед спортсменами, улетавшими на Олимпиаду в Сочи в 2014 году. Когда я спросила Наталию, скучает ли она по России, она ответила что скучает, хотя и бывает там каждый год. Наталья полюбила Канаду и Монреаль. И по-русски она уже говорит с небольшим акцентом. Наталья Шатилова одна из многих успешных иммигрантов в Канаде. Её жизнь учит, что достичь успеха можно благодаря труду и настойчивости.

Fig. 2. Фото в сайте “Русские узоры” (Ансамбль Танца в Монреале), 2014.

“16 Русских народных танцев.” Blog post. Fishki. Ed. нет данных. N.p., 6 June 2015. Web. 26 Mar. 2017. “Фото.” Русские узоры. Société du Patrimoine d’expression du Québec. [www.ouzory.com/].

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Литературные устройства в рассказе «Грамматика любви» Abigail Luddy-Dunn

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ассказ “Грамматика любви”1 написан Иваном Бунином в 1915ом году; это консервативное литературное произведение, в котором действительность изображается очень подробно. Зрение, слух, обоняние, вкус и осязание изображаются лексикой автором, и его описаниями в важных сценах. В этих сценах описание всех пяти чувств оказывают позитивное воздействие на читателя. Один из самых важных тому примеров находится в начале рассказе, когда Ивлев и с малым ехали в деревню. Бунин пишет: “Ехать сначала было приятно: тёплый, тусклый день, хорошо накатанная дорога, в полях множество цветов и жаворонков, с хлебов, с невысоких сизых ржей, простиравшихся насколько глаз хватит, дул сладкий ветерок, нёс по их косякам цветочную пыль, местами дымил ею, и вдали от неё было даже туманно” (29). В этим предложении Бунин взывает к зрению, пользуясь описательном языком. Кроме того, описание запаха деревни сладкий ветерок создает настроение ностальгии. Ещё одно важное предложение с отличным изображением следует за разговором между Ивлевом и малым. Бунин пишет “Пара чёрных куличков с плачем метнулась из них в дождливое небо...А на плотине, среди крапивы, мелкими бледно-розовыми цветочками цвёл большой старый куст, то милое деревцо, которое зовут ‘Божьим деревом’, и вдруг Ивлев вспомнил места, вспомнил что не раз ездил тут в молодости верхом…” (33). Это сцена вызывает эмоциональную

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реакцию у читателя. Изображаются размах и красота земли, и дождливое небо. Ивлев, и читател испытывают чувство опустошенности, и грусти. Кроме того, куст, называющийся ‘Божьим деревом,’ выражает влияние культуры на это место -- куст носит фольклорное название, и показывает, как Ивлев с малым живут в прошлом. Второй пример - тот момент в рассказе, когда Ивлев пил чай с графиней. Бунин пишет о графине; она “была в широком розовом капоте, с открытой напудренной грудью; она курила, глубоко затягиваясь, часто поправляла волосы, до плечей обнажая свои тугие и круглые руки, затягиваясь и смеясь…”

(30). Это описание зрительное -упоминаются цвет её одежды и густой дым сигарет, круглые руки. Такая подробная сцена создает впечатление действительности -- читатели как будто входят в сцену. Дым намекает на мечты. В конце сцены “босая девка с необыкновенной осторожностью подала на старом серебряном подносе стакан крепкого сивого чая из прудовки и корзиночку с печеньем, засиженным мухами.” (31). Образ серебряного подноса очень заметно противопоставляться корзиночке с мухами, что опять подчёркивает тему распада. Кроме того, изображение поместья сына Хвощинского тоже очень интересно. Дом запущен и опустошён. Бунин пишет, что в усадьбе всё казалось по-прежнему, так же как тогда, когда Лушка жила

и умерла -- “чуть ли не во время незапамятные.” (34) Это описание явно выражает атмосферу прошедших лет. Бунин пишет “Не было кругом ни сада, ни построек, -- только два кирпичных столба на месте ворот да допухи по канавам” (34). Между столбов нет ворот, что показывает, что поместье очень старое и находиться в состоянии запущенности. В заключение в “Грамматике любви” подробное изображение места

отражает смысл рассказа -- чувства запущенности, опустошенности. В рассказе действие происходит медленно, создаётся впечатление, что время застыло. Все вместе оказывают сладкое и тоже грустное воздействие на читателя.

Notes: Бунин, И. А. “Грамматика Любви.” Рассказы. London: Bradda Books, 1962: 29-40. Print.

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ISSN: 2369-8497 (Print) ISSN: 2369-8500 (Online)