Slot: 28A-4 Dec.
28, 8:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
Panel: Classical Connections in Russian
Literature
Chair: Catherine O’Neil, United States Naval
Academy
Title: On Ripping, Whipping and the Importance
of Underpants in Vasilii Maikov’s Elisei Or Bacchus Infuriated
Author: Viktoria Ivleva, Vassar College
Textile and sartorial images and
allusions in Vasilii Maikov’s multi-patched poem Elisei or Bacchus
Infuriated (1771)
comprise a well-heeled list that includes references to travesty, stitching,
unstitching and various garments among which underpants and pants are probably
the author’s favorite. Charged
with contemporary socio-historical, moral as well as literary and meta-literary
significance, these images function as metaphors which emphasize the essence
and modus operandi of a burlesque poem, engage in literary and ideological
polemics of the day, parody manners and fashions of the Russian Gallant Age,
highlight the plot structure and elucidate the depiction of characters.
The purpose of a
burlesque poem is to have the fabric of previous tradition turned, to show the
lining of its rehashings and the seamy side of reality. In Maikov’s poem where the narrative
oscillates between the notions of scandalous inappropriateness and proper
decorum, the mention of underwear, ripping and whipping pantagruelizes heroic
descriptions and comments on artistic devices used in creating this parodic and
polemical work as well as authorial thematic choices and angle of view. Both the main character and the writer,
each in his own way, are engaged in ripping real or metaphorical garments and
whipping their opponents. Maikov’s
opponents include both literary and historical figures.
In
this paper I will demonstrate how Maikov engages in polemics with Catherine II
through images of textile activities, how he employs Russian sartorial proverbs
to explicate his characterization of the main character and of narration, and
what roles undressing and dressing play in the plot of the poem. I will show that sartorial images are
important not only as a part of realistic or mythical entourage of characters,
but also as an instrument that helps bare the artistic device of parody and
travesty and as a means of engaging in literary and ideological polemics.
Title: Navigating a Landscape of Dead Souls: Gogol and the Odyssean Road
Author: Michael Kelly, Brigham Young University
In Gogol’s reflections on Zhukovskii’s
translation of The Odyssey,
he utilizes his discussion of Homer’s epic primarily to set forth his own key
aesthetic and moral tenets. Gogol’s views on Homer connect him with a central
endeavor of Romanticism that M. H. Abrams describes as “mankind’s journey back
toward his spiritual home” (225). Schelling links this enterprise to Homer’s
epics. The Iliad “represents
the departure of humanity from its center” to a position of alienation, and The
Odyssey “represents the
return” (as quoted in Abrams 223–24).
In explaining
the burning of a draft of Volume II of Dead Souls, Gogol insists that he must clearly show
“the paths and the roads” to “the lofty and the beautiful” (8: 298). He was
searching artistically for a way to illustrate a transitional road out of the
banal landscape of dead souls and back to a moral home characterized by
wholeness and harmoniousness. He was seeking to create a unique Gogolian
version of an Odyssean road.
After outlining
salient features of the Odyssean road based on various Gogolian texts, I
propose to reexamine the image of the road in both Volumes I and II of Dead
Souls. Lotman emphasizes
the central importance of the road, but suggests that Volume II provides a
“non-Gogolian scheme of spatial relations” (293). I will argue that the image
of the road in Volume II, while undergoing metamorphosis to reflect Gogol’s
evolving design, retains its fundamental shape, function, and vitality. It
represents an attempt to embody Gogol’s conception of an Odyssean road, and
Gogol’s striving to depict the road provides a framework for reassessing certain
fundamental paradoxes of his art.
References
Abrams, M. H. Natural
Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton,
1971.
Gogol′, N. V. Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii, 14 vols.
Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1937–52.
Lotman, Iu. M. V shkole poeticheskogo
slova: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol′.
Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1988.
Title: Building Authority: Horace, Joseph Brodsky,
and the Poetic Task
Author: Rebecca Pyatkevich, Columbia University
Joseph Brodsky’s poem “Ia pamiatnik
vozdvig sebe inoi….” (1962), by signaling the poet’s participation in the
long-standing tradition of revisions and transpositions of Horace’s “Exegi
Monumentum” into Russian (see Alekseev for a conservative list of such poems),
was a poetic act that announced Brodsky’s understanding of his own goals as
poet, and performed the function of establishing his poetic authority for his
readers. Poetic authority is both
a poet’s relation to his poetic predecessors, and his position toward his
readers; poets present an authoritative poetic voice by underscoring their
self-inclusion in a poetic canon of varied depth and breadth, and by
manipulating the ways in which this positioning, and the content of their
verse, is perceived by their readers.
This paper will
use Horace’s “Exegi Monumentum” and Brodsky’s “Ia pamiatnik vozdvig sebe inoi” to illustrate how both
poems construct the authority they claim by turning to their predecessors and
their readers (in the case of the latter, in very different ways), and then
read Brodsky’s poem in the context of his times and his oeuvre. Written at the
beginning rather than the end of a career, Brodsky’s “Ia pamiatnik vozdvig
sebe” announces a poetics of cultural relevance, intense individuality, and an
understanding of the poetic text as a place of genuine discursive
exchange. Read in the context of
the rise of a new cultural generation, and the inheritance of the Acmeist poetics
of cultural preservation, Brodsky’s poem establishes an effective credo that is
deeply concerned with continuing the Acmeist ideal of cultural memory and
creating a new emphasis on poetry as place of communication.
References
Alekseev, M. P. “Stikhotvorenie Pushkina
‘Ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig’,” Pushkin i mirovaia literatura. Leningrad: 1987.
pp. 5-265.
Moranjak-Bamburać, Nirman. “Iosif Brodskii i akmeizm,” Russian Literature, Vol. 40.1 (Summer 1996): 57-75.
Oliensis, Ellen. Horace and the Rhetoric of
Authority. Cambridge, 1998.
Razumovskaia, Aida. “Statuia v khudozhestvennom mire I.
Brodskogo,” Iosif Brodskii i
mir: metafizika, antichnost′,
sovremennost′. Sankt-Peterburg: 2000.
pp. 228-242.
Title: The Wandering Portico: Classical
Structures in Transnational Russian Fictions—Brodsky, Tarkovsky, Makine,
Ulitskaia
Author: Sharon Lubkemann Allen, State University
of New York-Brockport
Brodsky claims, as does Nabokov, that the
“writer’s biography is in his twists of language” (Brodsky 1986: 3). This is
especially so for the translated or translingual Russian emigré or exile,
extending abroad an already eccentric cultural sensibility. As Boym points out,
Brodsky’s biography and aesthetics are doubly embedded in twists of language,
insofar as even in Petersburg “civilization” involved “not merely a canon but a
way of translation and transmission of memory” (Boym 1996: 523). Brodsky
defines civilization in terms of the second of “two key architectural
metaphors” drawn from Petersburg—the “room and a half” and the “Greek
portico.” In his essay on
Mandelstam, in internal exile, Brodsky writes, “Civilization is the sum total
of different cultures animated by a common spiritual numerator, and its main
vehicle—speaking both literally and metaphorically, is translation. The
wandering of a Greek portico into the latitude of the tundra is a translation”
(1986: 139). For Mandelstam “this Greek portico is not merely a classical
foundation, but a wandering structure,” (Boym 1996: 523), which also winds its
way Westward with Brodsky’s poetry and essays, or his remembered “room and a
half.” Geographically, historically, culturally, and linguistically
displaced—from an antiquity translated through European modernity to Petersburg
and subsequently from the Petersburg text into a Russian interior and along and
beyond its margins—classical structures become, in a certain sense, reified and
reduced; but they also become an infinite prism, or a liberating “prisonhouse
of language” (526).
This essay
examines the continued reconstruction of Russian cultural consciousness in
classical terms within transnational film and fiction. Comparatively surveying
the transformation of classical (and, by the twentieth century, already classic
Russian) figures and formal structures in works by Brodsky, Tarkovsky, Makine
and Ulitskaia, it argues against a reading in terms of a “nostalgic modernism”
(Boym 1996: 526). Rather, in discrete genres, historical moments and cultural
contexts, Brodsky, Tarkovsky, Makine and Ulitskaia each “deterritorialize” and
“reterritorialize” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986) in order to redefine a Russian
“nostos”—a longing for home realized, through a displacement paradoxically
consistent with the Petersburg text, against an ever distended cultural horizon
and opened aesthetic threshold. Cross-examining intertextual resonances in
terms of Bakhtin’s “chronotope” and “dialogism,” Lotman’s “semiosphere,” and
Shklovsky’s, Todorov’s, Deleuze and Guattari’s, Even-Zohar’s, Said’s and
Bhabha’s theorizations of estrangement, this investigation seeks to elucidate
the characterization of Russian cultural consciousness through the continual
re-translation of classical elements in lyric, tragic or elegiac, epic, and
comic descriptions of everyday Russian existence, from perspectives of
“outsideness” (Bakhtin 1981: pp. 187-208; 1984: pp. 60-69; 1978: pp. xii-xiii,
136-143) that are not only internal and intertextual, but also transnational.
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. M. Holquist. Trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
---. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. C. Emerson. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
---. Speech Genres and Other Late
Essays. Ed. C. Emerson
and M. Holquist. Trans. V. W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978.
Boym, Svetlana. “Estrangement as a
Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky.” Poetics Today. 17.4 (Winter 1996): 511-530.
Brodsky, Joseph. Less Than One:
Selected Essays. New
York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1986.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. Kafka:
Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana
Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Even-Zohar, I. “Polysystem Theory.” Poetics
Today. 1.1-2 (1979):
287-310; 11.1 (1990): 9-26.
Lotman, Iurii. The Universe of the
Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture.
Trans. A. Shukman. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 1990.
---. Semiosfera. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2004.
---. «Символика
Петербурга и проблемы семиотики города».
Semiotika goroda i gorodskoi kul′tury:
Peterburg. Trudy po znakovym systemam.
Vol. XVIII. Tartu: Tartu
State University Press, 1984.
Makine, A. Le Testament français. Paris: Mercure de France, 1995.
---. Le Crime
d’Olga Arbélina. Paris: Mercure de France, 1998.
---. Requiem pour
l’Est. Paris: Mercure de France, 2000.
---. “Un poème pétrifié.” Ed. Aliette Armel. Magazine littéraire:
Ecrivains de Saint-Pétersbourg. May 2003. 21-63.
---. La Femme qui
attendait. Paris: Seuil, 2004.
Shklovsky, V. O teorii prozy. Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel′, 1983.
Tarkovsky, Andrei. Nostalghia. 1983.
---. Offret. 1986.
---. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on
the Cinema. Trans. K.
Hunter-Blair, New York: Knopf, 1983.
Ulitskaia, Liudmila. Veselye pokhorony. Moscow: Vagrius, 1998.
---. Medeia i ee deti. Moscow: Vagrius, 1996.