The Vortex That Unites Us: Versions of Totality in Russian Literature 9781501769405

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Totalities of Russian Literature
1. Versions of Possession: Ghost, Demon, Idea, Discourse
2. The Epidemic: The Infectious Imagination of Leo Tolstoy
3. The Panorama: World Literature and Universal Language
4. The Orchestra: Dictation and Dictatorship
5. The Market: Humbert Humbert as Mad Man
Afterword
Notes
Index

Citation preview

THE VORTEX THAT UNITES US

A volume in the NIU Series in

Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Edited by Christine D. Worobec For a list of books in the series, visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu.

THE VORTEX THAT UNITES US

V E R S I O N S O F TOTA L I T Y I N R U S­S I A N L I T­E R­A­T U R E

J acob E mery

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2023 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2023 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Emery, Jacob, 1977– author. Title: The vortex that unites us : versions of totality in   Russian literature / Jacob Emery. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Northern Illinois   University Press, an imprint of Cornell University   Press, 2023. | Series: NIU series in Slavic, East   European, and Eurasian studies | Includes   bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022048218 (print) | LCCN 2022048219   (ebook) | ISBN 9781501769382 (hardcover) |   ISBN 9781501769399 (epub) | ISBN 9781501769405 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Russian literature—Themes, motives. |   Russian literature—History and criticism. | Whole and   parts (Philosophy) in literature. | Ideology in literature. Classification: LCC PG2986 E64 2023 (print) |   LCC PG2986 (ebook) | DDC 891.709—dc23/eng/  20221121 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022048218 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/20220  48219

C o n te n ts

Acknowl­edgments  vii

Introduction: The Totalities of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture

1

1. Versions of Possession: Ghost, Demon, Idea, Discourse

22

2. The Epidemic: The Infectious Imagination of Leo Tolstoy

59

3. The Pa­norama: World Lit­er­a­ture and Universal Language

84

4. The Orchestra: Dictation and Dictatorship 115 5. The Market: Humbert Humbert as Mad Man

141

Afterword

168

Notes  171 Index  207

A ck n o w l­e d gm e n ts

Chapter  1 includes parts of several previously published articles, which have been substantially reworked and mixed in with new material: “Repetition and Exchange in Legitimizing Empire: Konstantin Batiushkov’s Scandinavian Corpus” (Rus­sian Review, October 2007); “Between Fiction and Physiology: Brain Fever in The ­Brothers Karamazov and Its En­glish Afterlife,” written with Elizabeth F. Geballe (PMLA, October 2020); “Sigizmund Krzhizhanovksy’s Poetics of Passivity” (Rus­sian Review, January 2017), and “A Clone Playing Craps ­Will Never Abolish Chance: Randomness and Fatality in Vladimir Sorokin’s Clone Fictions” (Science Fiction Studies, July 2014). A partial version of chapter 2 was previously published as “Art Is Inoculation: The Infectious Imagination of Leo Tolstoy” (Rus­sian Review, October  2011). A partial version of chapter 4 was previously published as “Keeping Time: Reading and Writing in Conversation about Dante” (Slavic Review, Fall 2014). And a partial version of chapter  5 was previously published as “Humbert Humbert as Mad Man: Art and Advertising in Lolita” (Studies in the Novel, Winter 2019). I am grateful to ­those journals for permission to reuse this material and to their editors, staff, and peer reviewers for improvements made along the way. I would like to thank Amy Farranto and every­one at Northern Illinois/ Cornell University Press, including the anonymous reviewers, for helping shepherd this book to press; my mentors—­Julie Buckler, Tomislav Longinović, Stephanie Sandler, Marc Shell, William Mills Todd III, Justin Weir, and my late advisor Svetlana Boym—­for their patience and support; my colleagues at Indiana University, especially Elizabeth F. Geballe, Herbert Marks, Eyal Peretz, and Russell Valentino, who provided stimulating discussions and penetrating critiques throughout the writing of this book; Alex Berg, Ian Chesley, Rebecca Cravens, David Damrosch, Caryl Emerson, Ilya Kun, Natalia Kun, Robert Latham, Mark Lipovetsky, Ainsley Morse, Eric Naiman, Nariman Skakov, Alexander Spektor, Dennis Yi Tenen, and Julia Vaingurt, each of whom improved this book through some combination of comments, conversation, and intellectual generosity; Ilya Bendersky, David Gramling, Olga Hasty, Colleen McQuillen, Harsha Ram, and Tatiana Venediktova, who invited me to share early vii

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A c k n ow l­e d g m e n ts

versions of this work at the Tolstoy Museum, the ACLA meeting at New York University, Prince­ton University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Moscow State University Summer School in the Humanities; and the audiences at t­ hose talks for their attention and response. This work was partially funded by the Davis Center at Harvard University, Indiana University’s College Arts and Humanities Institute and Russian and East European Institute, and by Indiana University Research through the Grant-in-Aid Program, all of which provided material support at vari­ous stages. Thanks as ever to my students, my apologies to every­one I have forgotten in this all-­too-­brief list, and one final thank-­you to Amy and Otis, whom I never forget.

THE VORTEX THAT UNITES US

Introduction The Totalities of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture

One ­thing that distinguishes art from other forms of knowledge is that an artwork’s formal features mark it off as a complete object from the larger world that it represents or even, paradoxically, seeks to contain. The phi­los­o­pher Bruno Latour has decried the meta­phoric frameworks he calls “pa­noramas”—­capacious interpretive paradigms such as “modernity” or “globalization”—as false totalities that give up nuance and accuracy for scope and simplicity.1 What­ever the value of this attitude in the social sciences, it is simply not relevant to the totalities represented in and by aesthetic objects. The avant-­garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov’s 1920 poem “The One, the Only Book” depicts the ­whole world as a vast text, with rivers laid across the landmasses like threads “marking the place / Where the reader rests his gaze.”2 From this panoramic perspective, all the planet’s regions and its ­people—­“Race of Humanity, Reader of the Book”—­are united by their inclusion in the sacred volume of creation “whose cover bears the creator’s signature / The sky-­blue letters of my name.”3 The world appears h ­ ere as a version of Khlebnikov’s own oeuvre and its per­sis­tent efforts to discover the master rhythm of history, to identify a vantage point from which to take in all the earth, and to forge the universal language of concepts that Khlebnikov proposes in his manifestoes and grasps at in his poetic practice: “the new vortex that unites us, the new integrator of the ­human race.”4

1

2 I n t r o d u c t i o n

Innovative and idiosyncratic as Khlebnikov’s proj­ect is, it belongs to an extensive tradition of texts that swell from totalizing meta­phors of a literary cosmos. In the culminating image of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the narrator attains to the pinnacle of heaven, where he achieves a similar metafictional vision of “the scattered leaves of all the universe / bound with God’s love into a single book.”5 ­Here, too, the commonplace meta­phor of the total book represents the universe as a utopian totality gathered together in a meaningful pattern by a transcendent power; in the same stroke, Dante makes a grandiose claim that the poetic text before us is commensurate with all of creation. Of course, con­temporary audiences are unlikely to extend any more literal truth value to The Divine Comedy’s cosmology than they do to Khlebnikov’s assertion that he is the author of existence. In both cases, the poem’s panoramic ambitions are compelling primarily ­because they speak to a claim to gather the world, if only by means of allegory, into the self-­enclosed totality of the artwork. In this book, I offer a conceptual anthologizing of the Rus­sian canon through the theme of totality. I do not pretend to exhaust the theme of totality in Russian-­language lit­er­a­ture; the “One State” of Eugene Zamiatin’s dystopian novel We, to name just one prominent example, is absent from the following chapters. Nor do I desire to reduce totality’s many manifestations across the longue durée of Rus­sian culture to a single claim about Rus­sia’s essential character or historical destiny, although I discuss numerous claims of the sort as they crop up in the following pages. Still less do I argue that Rus­ sian totalities are somehow more total than universalizing ideologies originating elsewhere, such as Chris­tian­ity or positivism.6 Rather, I am interested precisely in Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture’s teeming and paradoxical diversity of totalities. This book treats in turn a poetics of possession (in authors who sketch out a historical trajectory ­running loosely from Rus­sian Imperial Romanticism to post-­Soviet postmodern fiction); the all-­encompassing emotional community implied by Leo Tolstoy’s epidemic meta­phor of artistic experience as an “infection”; the panoramic text of the world envisioned by Khlebnikov and other representatives of the early Soviet avant-­garde; the continuous cultural tradition that is guaranteed, in the writings of the dissident poet Osip Mandelstam, by the orchestral meta­phor of a common time enforced by the conductor’s baton; and the global market for cultural goods in the English-­language writing of Vladimir Nabokov, whose fictional worlds, capable of both giving plea­ sure and entrapping unwary victims, come uncannily to mimic the logic of totalitarian regimes. The stakes and orientation of art’s totalizing dimension shift radically across ­these texts and the distinct historical moments in which they originate. Despite ­these diverse guises and ideological thrusts, a recurrent set of intertex-

Introduction

3

tual references, cultural touchstones, and theoretical concepts link t­ hese texts and my readings. Aspirations to aesthetic totality become readily allied with other totalizing intellectual currents such as the totalitarian state, Enlightenment reason, globalization, or Christian universalism. Literary texts propagandize such discourses, of course, but it is more essential that totalizing ideologies find analogues in literary form. A humanity united in and transfigured by art is a central feature of utopian aesthetics since at least the French Revolution, whose demo­cratic ideals and transformative potential inspired Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Schiller’s book describes “the realm of aesthetic semblance” through a series of po­liti­cal meta­ phors, casting the artistic impulse as an “executive power” whose jurisdiction includes all of ­human experience, from unconscious physiological response (the “blind compulsion” of natu­ral impulse) to self-­aware rational intent (“the point where reason governs”).7 Despite Schiller’s egalitarian ideals, interpretations of the aesthetic as an irresistible force communicated through the artist and welding the audience into a single unit governed by a single visionary conception can carry fascistic implications. A per­sis­tent formation that constitutes an impor­tant through line in this book triangulates po­liti­cal organ­ization with artistic genius and aesthetic response. In this scheme, an inspiration that partakes at once of artistic vision and utopian politics descends on and possesses the artist, who manifests that impulse in an artwork; the public, falling u ­ nder the artwork’s spell, is moved to share in a common experience that implies a community of feeling. In the formation of this ambiguously poetic and po­liti­cal totality, we can discern two complementary movements that work together to bind discrete ele­ments (­whether words or persons) into a ­whole (­whether a text or a polity). On the one hand, totality requires some expansive mechanism that spreads through space and time, a princi­ple of transmission made manifest as imperial conquest, infectious spread, textual dissemination, or commercial networks of exchange. On the other hand, totality requires some unifying princi­ple that gives shape to artistic material and compels e­ very ele­ment that falls into its field of force to articulate the pattern that it perpetuates and universalizes: artistic genius, ghostly possession, literary tradition, or totalitarian authority. Harsha Ram has identified both movements in Khlebnikov’s work, which vacillates between the two “equally utopian impulses” of “outward expansion, from the erasure of national bound­aries to the final goal of planetary liberation,” and of “closure . . . ​ an impregnable island ruled by a ‘laboratory for the study of time.’ ”8 A similar opposition underlies Vladimir Papernyi’s hypothesis—­itself a totalizing narrative that encompasses Rus­sian cultural history in a self-­perpetuating cyclical logic—­that Rus­sian culture alternates between the expansive and egalitarian

4 I n t r o d u c t i o n

“Culture One” and the centralizing and hierarchical “Culture Two.”9 The emblem of the latter is Boris Iofan’s plan for the Palace of Soviets, a massive “perfect architectural construction,” capped by a three-­hundred-­foot-­tall statue of Lenin, that was to bring about the culmination of architecture itself, “so that in the ­future t­ here would be only endless reproductions of this model.” In Papernyi’s analy­sis, the Stalinist skyscrapers that ring the proposed site of this unbuilt structure are earthly echoes of an ideal image but at the same time harbingers of a return to Culture One, since the shift in emphasis “from the planning of this model to its multiplication” means “the decline of hierarchy and a return to horizontal expansion.”10 In the more abstract terms pop­u­lar­ized by Roman Jakobson, we might think of t­ hese two impulses as the “metonymic axis,” involving relationships of contiguity and causality, and the “meta­phoric axis” of similarity and identity.11 Like Papernyi, Jakobson sees cultural history as oscillating between ­these two poles: thus, the realist novel, essentially metonymic in its linked plot events and plethora of ancillary details, follows on a Romantic lit­er­at­ ure of allegory and is itself succeeded by the explic­itly meta­phorical Symbolist movement.12 He acknowledges that both pro­cesses are always at work, however, and suggests that lit­er­at­ ure is the result of their patterned interaction. An essay by Gérard Genette, which decomposes the g­ rand synthetic images that encapsulate Marcel Proust’s aesthetic proj­ect into the intricate systems of coincidence that motivate them, illustrates how the one princi­ple gives rise to the other. “It is meta­phor that recovers Lost Time,” Genette concludes, “but it is metonymy that reanimates it, sets it in motion, which delivers it to itself.”13 Following Genette, Paul de Man has suggested that any passage that is “ordered around a central, unifying meta­phor” can be analyzed into a set of transfers and juxtapositions.14 “The inference of identity and totality that is constitutive of meta­ phor is lacking in the purely relational metonymic contact,” de Man points out, and yet upon close inspection, “the assertion of the mastery of meta­phor over metonymy owes its persuasive power to the use of metonymic structures” through which a unified pattern comes to dominate the entire text.15 A literary totality thus emerges from a collocation of individual transfers, each one communicating an impulse that binds the myriad atoms of the text together into a coherent form. This originary impulse is readily i­magined as an essentially citational authority, akin to past usage or l­ egal pre­ce­dent, whose force determines the meaning of words and application of laws in the pre­sent moment. In authors’ aspiration to write a total text, they seem to echo another, prior utterance—­a “voice which traverses them without belonging to them,” in Avital Ronell’s phrase.16 ­Because this animating genius remains ex-

Introduction

5

ternal to the artwork it inspires, totality is close to the Gothic and elegiac modes in which the trace of a lost origin haunts the pre­sent. The inspiration visited on Romantic poets as they wander country churchyards and contemplate ruins reflects this understanding of cultural authority. So do Soviet materialist conceptions of capital as “dead l­abor, which, vampire-­like, lives only by sucking living ­labor”: this formula, from the pen of Karl Marx, manifests the Gothic scheme as a structure of economic and po­liti­cal alienation.17 Even texts that seem to oppose centralized authority conjure up some compensatory figure that promises to bind the text, and the totality of culture, into a w ­ hole. The dissident martyr Osip Mandelstam’s last essay, Conversation about Dante, likens culture to a flock of birds that has settled down on grain strewn in the shapes of letters, so that they collectively spell out a preexisting text that none of them individually intends or understands. In Mandelstam’s conception, a writer is like a “scribe who is obedient to the dictation” of a transcendent force that is interpretable as poetic inspiration but also as po­liti­cal tyranny.18 (The poet dis­appeared into Stalin’s camps not long a­ fter he wrote ­these words.) In a 2000 book subjected to a public desecration and l­egal persecution by allies of Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Sorokin evokes a similar scene: a multitude of torchbearers floating down a river, disposed so as to spell out a propaganda message in letters of fire for the audience gathered on the embankments.19 Casting ­human bodies as an artistic or quasi-­artistic medium, such images allude to an avant-­garde aspiration to work not in repre­sen­ta­tions but in the material of life itself. As the 1913 Futurist manifesto “Why We Paint Ourselves” proclaims, “We have joined art to life. . . . ​Life has invaded art, it is time for art to invade life.”20 By annulling the boundary between life and art, the w ­ hole world was in this view to become subject to the dynamic, creative pro­cess that radical artists called zhiznetvorchestvo, or “life creation.” In Boris Groys’s intentionally provocative account, the avant-­garde mind-­set was internalized by the Soviet leadership, which became “a kind of artist whose material was the entire world.”21 “Mankind w ­ ill educate itself plastically, it w ­ ill become accustomed to look at the world as submissive clay for sculpting the most perfect forms of life,” writes Leon Trotsky in his Lit­er­a­ture and Revolution.22 In a striking illustration of the tendency that Groys calls the “total art of Stalin [Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin],” Trotsksy proj­ects that “the entire economic, social, and everyday life of the nation” was to be “subordinated to a single planning authority commissioned to regulate, harmonize, and create a single w ­ hole out of even the most minute details”—­the fulfillment, on the grandest pos­si­ble canvas, of an aesthetic ideal, into whose vortex life and art alike ­were to be drawn.23

6 I n t r o d u c t i o n

From Point of Origin to Point of Sale The seminal literary instance of “life creation” is the opening sequence of Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 poem The Bronze Horse­man, which mythologizes Rus­ sia’s passage from provincial backwater to global modernity through Peter the ­Great’s foundation of a new capital on the shores of the Baltic. For Groys, the scene is the locus classicus of Rus­sian totalitarianism and codifies its “myth of the demiurge, the transformer of society and the universe.”24 In the poem’s iconic first lines, the tsar stands “on the shore of the desolate waves [pustynnykh voln]” where he intends to build the city that ­will bear his name.25 In the lack of distinction between land and w ­ ater, the gloomy chaos of moss and fog suggests the uncreated world at the opening of Genesis, “without form, and void [pustoi]”; it is the godlike tsar who is “full of sublime thoughts [dum velikikh poln],” pregnant with the city that he ­will make to “rise from the mire” on this spot.26 Created with a word of command resembling the divine performative “let t­ here be light,” Peter’s brilliant new capital is the product of a language that does not just represent but makes the world. The mythopoetic word of the tsar is at once aesthetic and political—­the creation of a luminously beautiful ­thing and the exercise of authoritarian power. In the main plot of Pushkin’s poem, a statue of the tsar seems to become animated and to persecute the lowly clerk who dares to defy his legacy; Petersburg and its inhabitants are haunted by the tsar’s implacable ghost, which compels them to live according to his tyrannical vision. Peter’s center of empire is paradoxically situated on that empire’s margins, on land recently seized from Rus­sia’s “haughty neighbor” Sweden. The native Finnish fisherman, “the sad stepchild of nature,” is silently effaced in ­favor of the Rus­sians, who are apparently nature’s true inheritors.27 When the boom of the ice breaking up in the river during the spring thaw joins with the boom of the cannon from the Petropavolvsk fortress to celebrate “the gift of a son to the ­house of the tsar / Or a victory over the ­enemy,” the princi­ple of filiation and the natu­ral world’s benediction of Rus­sia’s imperial designs are plain.28 The idea that the tsar has imposed his creative vision onto the blank slate of nature gives way to images suggesting that Peter is himself an instrument of nature or of some historical destiny that nature represents. On this inauspicious spot, “Nature . . . ​has fated us,” Peter muses, “to cut a win­dow onto Eu­ rope.”29 ­These lines, as well known as any in Pushkin’s oeuvre, clash with the divine performative “let ­there be light.” The architectural meta­phor implies that light is not created by fiat but is accessed by opening a win­dow onto the West and its Enlightenment culture, commensurate with the physical trade routes that are to integrate Rus­sia into the global economy. “­Every nation’s

Introduction

7

flag ­will visit” the “new waves” leading to this new city, the poem prophesies; the landlocked empire’s newly established port w ­ ill attract and or­ga­nize the universe around it, so that “ships / in a mass from ­every end of the earth / stream to our rich wharfs.”30 St. Petersburg is an emblem of centralized imperial power, achieved through the compulsive vision we have identified with meta­phoric totality, but at the same time it represents Rus­sia’s integration into, even subjection to, the expansive historical forces that spread modernity and revolution around the globe. ­These tropes, and the tension between them, are not original to Pushkin. He draws on commonplaces already established by Mikhail Lomonosov in his 1761 “Peter the G ­ reat: A Heroic Poem,” which repeatedly depicts the tsar on a foggy shore devising some visionary infrastructure proj­ect, and in a 1755 panegyric that praises Peter for opening the gates of Rus­sia onto the “ebb and flow of the expansive Ocean” to let in commerce, arts, and science.31 “The expansive Rus­ sian state, in this resembling the world as a ­whole, is practically surrounded by ­great seas,” writes Lomonosov, whose “waves groan beneath the weight of the Rus­sian fleet” as Rus­sian flags disperse on voyages of colonial exploration.32 Konstantin Batiushkov, in his 1814 “Walk to the Acad­emy of Arts,” painted a similar scene of a ­silent, swampy “desolation [pustynia]” in which Peter “spoke—­ and Petersburg ­rose out of the wild swamp,” a “won­der” of civilization destined to “overcome nature itself ” and gather to its bosom a cosmopolitan “mixture of all nations.”33 According to the semiotician Yuri Lotman, Petersburg has since its foundation served as a “culture generator,” in which “dif­fer­ent national, social and stylistic codes and texts confront each other” across centuries of Rus­sian history: autocracy and freedom, Rus­sia and the West, center and periphery, nature and culture, primordial ­water and hewn stone, a “utopian ideal city of the ­future” and yet “the terrible masquerade of the Antichrist.”34 Rus­sia’s win­dow onto Enlightenment humanism and secular rationality is at the same time a signal instance of Rus­sia’s brutal history of forced l­ abor, a fragile capital of the uncanny built by serfs and enslaved prisoners of war at terrific h ­ uman cost. Marshall Berman describes St. Petersburg as the inaugural scene of peripheral modernity—­a partial integration into the protean flux of capitalism, whose attendant inequalities and incitements have become our common condition across the planet.35 According to Nikolai Gogol’s own (very suspect) testimony, the plot of his 1842 satire Dead Souls, another seminal work from the formative period of modern Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture, originated with Pushkin, who donated it to him as a sort of sacred trust.36 This monstrously funny picaresque novel, about a con man buying up the titles to deceased serfs in order to mortgage them for their paper value and invest the funds in real estate, stages a very dif­fer­ent intersection of

8 I n t r o d u c t i o n

global commerce and national destiny. It was to be the opening salvo of a national epic whose three projected volumes, modeled a­ fter the three parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy, would deliver Rus­sia from the hell of serfdom through a purgatory of self-­reflection and into a paradisiacal destiny. The proj­ect can be seen as one episode in the history of art’s effort, over the course of the nineteenth ­century, to take religion’s place as the unifying force of Eu­ro­pean culture. In a central scene, the novel’s antihero, Chichikov, reads through the bills of sale for dead serfs and, carried away by a sort of inspiration, begins to paint verbal pictures resurrecting them. In his reverie, he imagines a runaway who has found work as a Volga barge hauler and breathlessly evokes the stevedores who “noisily pour peas and wheat into the deep vessels, pile up sacks of oats and groats”—­ the collective produce of Rus­sia, gathered with the melting of the spring ice and hauled away to global markets.37 “All as one,” Chichikov apostrophizes this phantasmal mass of workers, “you’ll buckle down to toil and sweat, pulling the rope to the strain of a single song endless as Rus.”38 The barge that gathers together Rus­sia’s wealth is a microcosm of the nation as a w ­ hole; the “single song endless as Rus,” to whose rhythm Rus­sia moves through slavery and corruption to its salvific destiny, is its artistic analogue and a meta­phor for Gogol’s own novel. For the nineteenth-­century ethnographic critic Alexander Veselovsky, the popu­lar chorus was a spontaneous collective expression, whose dissolution into distinct genres like the epic and lyric was a symptom of society’s fragmentation into distinct classes.39 In the triumphal final scene of Gogol’s novel, the fraudster’s carriage becomes assimilated to this collective song. Chichikov’s three speeding ­horses, which “have heard from on high the familiar song,” are compared to the Christian trinity and to the “divine miracle” that is Rus­sia’s destiny.40 The spiritual cargo of “souls” that the carriage conveys to the afterlife replaces the material cargo of peas and buckwheat that the barge carries to foreign markets; the millenarian hymn from on high replaces the work song of the laboring masses. Described as a “wind” by which Rus­sia is “all-­inspired by God,” this “song from on high” draws on commonplaces of the soul as an animating breath blown into m ­ atter. Its “inapprehensible mysterious force [tainaia sila]” expresses Rus­sia’s “unembraceable space,” in which a “boundless thought is destined to be born” that ­will paradoxically “embrace” the narrator himself: “reflecting itself with terrible force in my very depths; by an unnatural power [neestesvenoi vlast’iu] have my eyes been illumined.”41 This illumination is dif­fer­ent in kind from that offered by Enlightenment reason. By claiming to “reflect” the super­natural totality of this song in the depths of his own self, the narrator audaciously represents Dead Souls to its reader as a spiritual vessel transporting the nation to salvation.

Introduction

9

The introduction to the 1940 edition of Gogol’s collected works admires the author’s “tremendous ability to create works that reflect ‘all of Rus.’ ”42 Over the course of Gogol’s narrative, each financial transaction with another eccentric landowner in the picaresque series that makes up the book is a partial step ­toward this evocation of “all of Rus.” The deeds of sale accumulating in Chichikov’s ledgers, the barge laden with Rus­sia’s collective produce, the work song of its myriad haulers, the chorus that is a spiritual echo of the work song—­all ­these increasingly bold and spiritualized images, religious, po­liti­cal, economic, and aesthetic, require us to perceive Gogol’s novel as a more perfect member of the same series. A compulsive, utopian, total text emerges from a snowballing cascade of individual transfers. For Georg Lukács, the novel is the literary form that “seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality” immanent in the fragmentation of modern life, an effort he investigates particularly among the Rus­sians.43 “In order to create a real totality such as Gogol’s authentically epic intention demanded,” Lukács suggests, it would have been necessary to provide a positive counterweight to the satire; this was beyond the author’s powers.44 Overcome with fanatic piety, Gogol burned the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls and starved himself to death in penance for writing the first one. The tragic end to the author’s life highlights the stakes of his ambition. In a preface to the first and only published volume of Dead Souls, Gogol styles the work as a collective utterance of the nation. He asks the reader to bring to mind “his entire life and all the p­ eople with whom he had met, and all the events that had taken place before his eyes, and every­thing that he had seen for himself or heard from anyone e­ lse, . . . ​to describe all this just as it appears in his memory, and to send me e­ very page as he writes it” for inclusion in f­ uture installments of an infinitely capacious book.45 Gogol carries on this insane but not wholly facetious invitation for six pages. At first blush a gag in the vein of Laurence Sterne, his jocular proposal that his readership convert their lives into narratives and send them in to be gathered between the covers of a book can also be seen as literalizing the collective utterance set forth in the imagery of the barge hauler’s song, the millenarian hymn, or indeed the owner­ship deeds gathered in Chichikov’s portfolio.46 ­These universal texts produced by a collective author are the counterpart to a collective readership like the one i­magined by Vissarion Belinsky in his famous open letter admonishing Gogol’s turn to religious conservatism. “I do not represent a single person in this re­spect but a multitude of men, most of whom neither you nor I have ever set eyes on, and who, in their turn, have never set eyes on you,” warns Belinsky, echoing his long-­standing conviction that a Rus­sian public would discover itself as “something unified, a single living personality

10 I n t r o d u c t i o n

developing historically” through its encounter with its reflection in Rus­sian lit­er­ a­ture.47 Belinsky’s Hegelian notion of a ­people becoming a unity by internalizing its represented image persists in statements of the Bolshevik period. Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet commissar of education, announced in the article “On the P ­ eople’s Festivals” that if the “masses” w ­ ere to achieve consciousness, they must “become a spectacle for themselves.”48 The ideal was put into practice, at least in an embryonic form, by Alexander Medvedkin’s “cinema train,” a traveling film studio that shot footage of workers in the morning, edited it in the after­noon, and screened the completed film in the eve­ning in the mess hall.49 In this ideal cir­cuit of production and consumption, the workers who starred in the film ­were at the same time the market that consumed it.

A Braid of Totalities In The Bronze Horse­man and Dead Souls, major works by the two towering figures of the golden age of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture, totalizing figures spread across frontiers and guarantee the coherence of the globe; they reshape the f­ uture in the image of an inexorable destiny and ensure the continuity of history. Received wisdom, often an Orientalist received wisdom, has long foregrounded a totalizing ele­ment in Rus­sian culture more generally.50 Rus­sia’s po­liti­cal traditions are steeped in tyranny; its intellectual history is studded with visions of planetary socialism, universal language, and cosmic conquest. Even the canonical realists, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, instill their texts with grandiose suggestions of final judgment or emotional collective: Dostoevsky speaks passionately of “Rus­sia’s striving t­oward its ultimate goals of worldwide and international universality,” Tolstoy of art “uniting all the most varied men in one feeling” and making sensible an “eternal and infinite harmony.”51 Alongside Groys’s “total art,” we can readily find scholarly accounts of a “global ethic,” a “universal siblinghood,” or a culture that “saw itself as the inheritor of all the traditions of mankind” and “wanted to possess every­thing.”52 Again, my objective is not to argue for any one of ­these ideologies, and my readings are meant to be exemplary rather than exhaustive. Still, it may be useful at the outset to rehearse in brief several distinct but interweaving traditions of totality that are sustained across t­ hese centuries of lit­er­a­ture and to note their points of relevance to the authors whom I treat in detail in the chapters that follow. One of the most formidable of t­hese totalizing traditions descends from the previously discussed myth of St. Petersburg, founded by imperial fiat on a swampland recently wrested from the Swedish Empire and symbolizing the inauguration of the modern autocratic state. James Billington connects

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St. Petersburg’s geometric grids of streets and canals to a fantasy of comprehensive Enlightenment rationality and cites a 1694 poem on geometry by Peter the ­Great’s childhood tutor, Karion Istomin: “geometry has appeared, / land surveying encompasses every­thing. / Nothing on earth lies beyond mea­sure­ ment.”53 The menacing aspect of cartography’s alliance with state power is evident in a quip made by Vladimir Putin, a baldly imperialist ruler who has styled himself as Peter’s successor, as he presided over a 2016 awards ceremony at the Rus­sian Geo­g raph­i­cal Society: “Rus­sia’s borders never end!”54 Andrei Bely’s 1913 novel Petersburg, which contains an elaborate restaging of Pushkin’s Bronze Horse­man, describes St. Petersburg as an emanation of its found­er’s brain— an abstract idea spreading endlessly through real ­matter, so that “the entire ­spherical surface of the planet should be embraced, as in serpent coils, by blackish gray cubes of ­houses.”55 The idea of a blank globe populated by angular geometry is central to avant-­garde practices like the Suprematist painting of Kazimir Malevich, whose squares and triangles can be read as images of a utopian ­f uture world that has transcended organic forms. In the 1836 Apology of a Madman, Pushkin’s friend Petr Chaadaev describes Rus­sia in similar terms as a “blank sheet of paper” on which Peter I inscribes the name of “Eu­rope and the West,” thereby creating a Western civilization in an empty space with no history of its own.56 Chaadaev’s Philosophical Letters lays out in detail the mimetic rivalry between Rus­sia and the West. Since Rus­sia has been “isolated . . . ​from the universal development of humanity,” Chaadaev argues, it must cleave to the example of Eu­rope, whose civilization is “animated by the vivifying princi­ple of unity”; by emulating the historical development of the West, Rus­sia w ­ ill participate in its millenarian end, at which “all hearts and minds ­will constitute but one feeling and one thought, and all the walls which separate ­peoples and communions ­will fall to the ground.”57 Anticipating ele­ments of Vladimir Lenin’s theory that colonial expansion inaugurates a “world system” of exploitation and hence a genuinely global chapter in ­human history, Chaadaev perceives imperialism as an ultimately progressive force, insofar as it gathers peripheral nations into this one stream of events.58 The spread of Enlightenment rationalism is in Chaadaev’s view fundamentally mystical; its “divine origin” is indicated precisely by the “aspect of absolute universality which allows it to penetrate ­people’s souls, . . . ​to possess souls without their being aware of it, to dominate them, to subjugate them, even when they most resist it.”59 Chaadaev’s formulas resonate widely in Rus­sian intellectual history and in my own readings. His historical logic, in which submission to an original animating force unites far-­flung regions in a single narrative, is central to the ideological construction of a shared identity with the Scandinavian colonies, “fated

12 I n t r o d u c t i o n

by nature” to be the site of the Rus­sian imperial capital. His appreciation for Enlightenment universality coexists with a desire for some spiritual princi­ple in the world beyond the “mechanical force of its own nature”; the same tension is picked up in Dostoevsky’s opposition of neurological and spiritual explanations of h ­ uman consciousness.60 The first entry in Tolstoy’s diary, written in 1847, is consistent with Chaadaev’s conception of a natu­ral law from which individuals and nations fall away when they substitute “artificial reason” for “that portion of universal reason which was imparted to us in the beginning.”61 (Both authors prob­ably derive the idea from Rousseau.) Just as Chaadaev counsels his reader to recognize that “the law which we make for ourselves is derived from the general law of the world,” Tolstoy admonishes himself, “form your reason so that it corresponds with the ­whole, with the source of all ­things, and not with the part, with ­human society; then your reason w ­ ill flow into that same w ­ hole.”62 Chaadaev’s notion of an “initial impulse” that acts on “the ­whole universality of beings” is one tributary of Mandelstam’s hypothesis of an “impulse [tolchok]” that penetrates into the bodies of writers and readers in order to make Log­os sensible as aesthetic experience.63 In Mandelstam’s 1915 essay “Petr Chaadaev,” he links Dante to Chaadaev in their “profound, ineradicable demand for unity,” that “sacred bond and succession of events” that is the synthesizing princi­ple in ­human history as in poetic texts.64 The same ideas resurface in his last essay, the 1933 Conversation about Dante. Chaadaev valorizes the West as the home of unity, but his embrace of a reason higher than Enlightenment rationality endeared him also to Slavophile thinkers who repudiated the West as a false totality. In a 1923 essay titled “The Tower of Babel and the Confusion of Tongues,” the linguist Nikolai Trubetskoi rails against the Enlightenment’s atomizing analytic logic and insipid internationalism. In the leveling “universal ­human culture” ­imagined by Esperantists and communists, he argues, “logic, rational science, and material technology ­will always prevail over religion, ethics, and aesthetics, so that in this culture the intensive development of science and technology would inevitably be connected to a regression in the spiritual and moral sphere” and w ­ ill lead to a monotonous 65 and static world culture. Trubetskoi’s position is adapted from Dostoevsky’s anti-­Enlightenment retelling of the Babel legend, found in the oft-­anthologized section of The ­Brothers Karamazov called “The Legend of the G ­ rand Inquisitor.” Interpretations of this parable w ­ ere frequently colored by Dostoevsky’s programmatic statements on Rus­sia’s destiny to “unite humanity” and “speak the final word of the ­great, general harmony, of the ultimate brotherly assent of all ­peoples to the law of Christ’s gospels.”66 The tale became a touchstone in discussions of Rus­sia’s historical telos and its eschatological visions took on a special pertinence in the years just before and ­after the Rus­sian Revolution. Vasili Roza-

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nov’s influentially reads the “Legend of the ­Grand Inquisitor” as announcing Rus­sia’s messianic destiny to unite humanity ­under the mantle of Orthodox faith, whose capacious universalism Rozanov contrasts to Protestant and Catholic efforts to reconcile worldly power and heavenly justice by regularizing relations between church and state.67 True Chris­tian­ity, for Trubetskoi, is a dynamic “ferment that is introduced into cultures of the most dif­fer­ent kind” and does not preclude diverse national expressions within the framework of a common truth: the notable example is Rus­sia’s rejection of Western Enlightenment in ­favor of its germane brand of Christian mysticism.68 Best remembered as a structural linguist who, together with his collaborator Roman Jakobson, revolutionized phonology, Trubetskoi attempts to reconcile national difference with Christian universalism through a linguistic analogy. He compares a planet united in Christ to a grouping of languages that share common features through their mutual interaction rather than through any ge­ne­tic link—­the so-­called linguistic alliance (iazykovoi soiuz), to which linguists typically refer through Trubetskoi’s German calque Sprachbund. His concrete example is the alteration and omission of root vowels, which constitutes a common morphological princi­ple in adjacent but genet­ ically unrelated languages of the Semitic, Hamitic, northern Caucasian, and Indo-­European language families, including Rus­sian. Trubetskoi illustrates this princi­ple through the series “soberiu—­sobrat’—­sobirat’—­sobor,” Rus­sian words derived from a single combination of prefix and root meaning “bring together.”69 The last member in Trubetskoi’s series, sobor, is Rus­sian for “cathedral” and suggests the related sobornost’, a word that in Slavophile writings designates a conception of spiritual community, upheld by conservative thinkers as a model for Rus­sia’s po­liti­cal constitution. As in the Sprachbund, Trubetskoi suggests, the capacious ­house of God accommodates the vari­ous utterances of e­ very nation without flattening their distinctive traits. Trubetskoi’s series of words that are distinguished by their root vowel recalls sequences in Futurist verse like Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Grib / Grab’ / Grub / Grob,” which uses vowel alteration to draw together etymologically unrelated words meaning “Mushroom / Steal / Rude / Grave” into a text that generates a meaningful pattern from phonetic coincidence.70 Early essays by Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky w ­ ere devoted to the incantatory poetic experiments of Velimir Khlebnikov, the greatest master of such phonetic patterning, whose work arguably served as the crucible of Formalist literary theory and then Structuralist phonology. In the Structuralist account, ­every utterance is pronounced within a common grid of differential phonetic features—­providing, as Boris Gasparov has argued, a universal language of linguistic theory that compensates for the lack of a universal language in practice.71 Trubetskoi’s vision of the

14 I n t r o d u c t i o n

universal ethical framework of Chris­tian­ity can thus be identified with the universal framework of Structuralist linguistics that Trubetskoi helped to devise. The system espoused by Dostoevsky, Rozanov, and Trubetskoi exists on a continuum with the po­liti­cal ideology of Eurasianism, which takes nomadic ­peoples inhabiting the frictionless expanses of the steppes as a model of international coexistence that would be qualitatively dif­fer­ent from the homogenizing positivism of the West. Versions of the idea, often noxious ones, retain currency in Rus­sia’s ethnonationalist po­liti­cal discourse ­today. The Kremlin apologist Dmitri Trenin, writing in April 2022, not long ­after the Rus­sian invasion of Ukraine, opposes the culture of the West, which he takes to be imperial or national in character, to the “civilizational state” of Rus­sia, in which “multitudinous ethnicities, cultures, . . . ​creeds,” and other “ele­ments of diverse origin come together in organic unity and equality,” thanks to the “rigid core and flexible frame” provided by the supervening power of the absolutist state.72 Trubetskoi’s basic framework is ­here rendered ideological cover for territorial aggression. The Rus­sian avant-­garde, frequently primitivist in its orientation, readily accommodated Eurasianist attitudes. Benedikt Livshits’s memoir The One-­and-­ a-­Half-­Eyed Archer offers as Rus­sian Futurism’s central emblem a steppe warrior at the vanguard of a Scythian horde, “atavistic layers streaming with the blinding light of prehistory,” racing westward “with his face turned backward and with just half an eye squinting at the West.”73 A draft manifesto by Khlebnikov, “An Indo-­Russian Union,” asserts, “Our path leads from the unity of Asia to the unity of the stars, and from freedom for the continent to freedom for all of Planet Earth.”74 As this quote implies, Khlebnikov’s fascination with the nomadism of the past is compatible with visions of a liberated f­ uture humanity undertaking to shape itself and its social and physical environment by science fictional means. For the Futurists, everyday life (byt) was to be overcome by the transformative technologies of modernity, which make h ­ uman life available to the artist as the ultimate medium. A commitment to life creation was perhaps most expansively expressed by the Cosmist phi­los­o­pher Nikolai Fedorov, for whom humanity’s “common task” of overcoming death and resurrecting every­one who ever lived would necessitate a space program to track down the atoms of our ancestors that had chanced to escape Earth’s orbit. Terraformed planets would accommodate the multitudes of risen dead. “Governed by all the resurrected generations, ­these worlds w ­ ill be, in their ­wholeness, the creative work of all generations in their totality, as if of a single artist.”75 For Fedorov, the regathered ­family of humankind was to realize the Christian community of sobornost’ as a futuristic utopia of immortals, inhabiting the universe that they had rendered a perfect work of art.

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Fedorov’s transhumanist philosophy was widely influential in the avant-­ garde but also among major cultural figures including Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as well as scientists like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, innovator of rocketry, hero of Soviet science, and Cosmist visionary in his own right. Tsiolkovsky’s fantasies of an engineered Earth and extraterrestrial colonies w ­ ere readily assimilable to the march of ­human pro­gress and technological perfectibility cheered on by Soviet ideology.76 The comic writers Ilya Ilf and Evgenii Petrov memorably parodied ­these cosmic ambitions in their 1928 satire The Twelve Chairs, whose rakish antihero inveigles a Volga backwater to fund a chess tournament that ­will make the village into the center first of Eu­rope, then the world, and fi­nally “the Universe”: as “chess logic” becomes an “applied science,” the con man proj­ects, it w ­ ill facilitate communication with other worlds and culminate in an “interplanetary chess congress” about eight years hence.77 In a more sober vein, Anatoly Lunacharsky conceives the Soviet economy as an ideal form of poetic activity, whose “task” is to apply the “general laws of artistic taste . . . ​to a mechanized industry even more colossal than it is now, to the construction of life and the everyday world.”78 Leon Trotsky, in the final utopian pages of his Lit­er­a­ture and Revolution, proj­ects a life “saturated with consciousness and planfulness,” in which “Soviet society w ­ ill command nature in its entirety,” razing mountains and moving rivers and transforming even ­human biology, so that “social construction and psycho-­physical self-­education” ­will become the sphere in which “all the vital ele­ments of con­temporary art” are brought to their apex.79 Able thanks to ge­ne­tic engineering and biological manipulation to survive in the ocean deeps and other novel habitats, humanity ­will accede to its inevitable inheritance of the world as a w ­ hole. The biological meta­phor extends to vari­ous fantasies of a communist society as a collective body. Alexander Bogdanov, cofounder of the Bolsheviks, espoused mass blood transfusions as a “comradely exchange of life” through which society’s members would share vital resources and re­sis­tance to disease; Aleksei Gastev, a proletarian poet and Soviet theorist of ­labor management, proclaimed a new l­abor culture to be achieved by “inoculating” workers with the “bacillus” of scientifically or­ga­nized ­labor.80 Pronouncements of this kind are fodder for Boris Groys’s aforementioned argument that the avant-­garde enthusiasm for infusing art into life was of a piece with the massive construction proj­ects of Joseph Stalin and Peter the ­Great. Groys’s broad brush homogenizes the complex currents of modernist culture, but the prominent strain in the avant-­garde that “claimed universality and the ability to or­ga­nize the entire world” remains undeniable.81 Futurist artists thrilled to the idea of incorporating space and time into a visionary aesthetic plan. Their academic counter­parts, the Formalists, defined art as the subjection of everyday

16 I n t r o d u c t i o n

phenomena to artistic princi­ples of organ­ization, implicating literary theory in the same effort to render life “material for a structure of sounds or a structure of images.”82 In the essay “Government and Rhythm,” Osip Mandelstam compares his poetry to exercises in collective rhythmic gymnastics—an anticipation of a society harmonized on the physiological level by artistic structure or, perhaps, a rehearsal for totalitarian control.83 More cynically, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita makes available the justification that its pedophile narrator’s c­ areer results in a “work of art.”84 By analogizing Humbert Humbert’s power over his preteen captive with his narrative manipulations and ultimately the author’s own rhetorical power over the reader, Nabokov tests the theory that poetic language is not just abstract repre­sen­ta­tion but an exertion of authorial control over an embodied audience that reacts physically to the text.

The Medium of Totality Across this survey of aggrandizing discourses, the body remains the medium of totality, inspired by artistic vision and controlled by authoritarian w ­ ill. In an essay on the origin of language, the eighteenth-­century phi­los­o­pher Johann Gottfried Herder compares the physiology of our savage ancestors to a musical instrument that, when stimulated by the noise of thunder or the call of a beast, instinctively reproduces the sound.85 This primal “imitation of resounding, acting, stirring nature” becomes the raw material of poetry, gathering “the sounds of the w ­ hole world” into a grandiose “vocabulary of the soul which is si­mul­ta­ neously a my­thol­ogy and a wonderful epic of the actions and speakings of all beings!”86 Through a natu­ral reflex, the body’s sensory apparatus registers an experience of the world and proj­ects it back out into the world in an integrated and universalized form. Herder’s view of the body as an aesthetic medium that translates the potential totality of nature into the determinate totality of myth is typical of the German philosophical idealism of his day. However, Herder’s scheme also anticipates materialist theories of aesthetic response, in which the stimulation of sensory nerves elicits affective response. “What used to be called, meta­phor­ically, movements of the psyche materialized as cir­cuits of ner­vous energy and reflex automatism,” writes Ana Hedberg Olenina in her book Psychomotor Aesthetics.87 “New studies revealed vast areas of behaviour that lay beyond conscious control. Feeling, action, thought, and other familiar functions dissolved into neurological mechanisms, and further, into chemical and electrical signals between cells.” She cites an 1863 article by the physiologist Ivan Sechenov, which draws a direct line between the “external manifestations of brain activity that we denote through words such

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17

as spiritedness, passion, derision, sadness, joy, e­ tc.” and the “mechanical movements” performed by “the musician’s or the sculptor’s hand creating life.”88 The audience for this art is, by the same logic, a potential collective that might be moved by a common stimulus. In the 1921 book Collective Reflexology, Vladimir Bekhterov assimilated the neurological substratum of social life to Soviet ideologies of mass action. Writing of the “collective personality [kollektivnaia lichnost’]” that forms in crowds, Bekhterov suggests that psychological states are “reflected externally in the changes of the face, gesture, and posture. This movement spreads, reaching other persons and evoking in them the same movements.”89 Bekhterov provides the collective audience i­magined by Gogol and Belinsky with a physiological basis. This mechanistic view of art turns out to be curiously compatible with Romantic doctrines of art as an act of genius—­a transcendent inspiration that possesses the body of the artist and passes on, through the artwork, to the p­ eople. The basic model can be traced back at least to Plato’s Ion dialogue, which conceives poetry as a divine force that is communicated from the gods to the poet to the rhapsode to the audience, lessening in intensity but not in kind as it affects an ever-­greater number of ­people.90 Mandelstam alludes to Ion explic­itly in his essay Conversation about Dante, which calls for a new science of poetry, a “reflexology of speech,” inspired in part by Bekhterev’s theory.91 In another essay, “Word and Culture,” Mandelstam describes the synesthetic “ringing mold of form which anticipates the written poem” and the transcendental inheritance communicated by “the sound of the inner image, . . . ​the poet’s ear touching it. . . . ​ In sacred frenzy poets speak the language of all times, all cultures. Nothing is impossible.”92 The manifestoes of the Futurists likewise blur mystical and mechanistic explanations of the artistic impulse, citing religious glossolalia as a pre­ce­dent for their experiments with the nonsignifying poetic language that they called “zaum,” a neologism that Paul Schmitt has deftly rendered as “beyonsense.”93 According to Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, an originary impulse distinct from the literal meaning of the words is transmitted through the poetic medium, its sounds or even its written letters. “Our handwriting, distinctively altered by our mood, conveys that mood to the reader in­de­pen­ dently of the words,” so that “when a piece is copied over, by someone e­ lse or even by the author himself, that person must reexperience himself during the act of recopying, other­wise the piece loses all the rightful magic that was conferred upon it by handwriting at the moment of its creation, in the ‘wild storm of inspiration.’ ”94 Spanning the origin of the artwork in a poetic tradition and its endpoint in an audience, inspiration and dictation imply a larger aesthetic totality that exceeds any given artwork or artistic experience.

18 I n t r o d u c t i o n

Formalist theorists who worked on zaum cite scientific arguments that “the mimetic or repre­sen­ta­tional aspect of the word has to do with the movement of the organs of speech, as well as accompanying facial and bodily gestures”; since an audience listening to a poem w ­ ill unconsciously mime its pronunciation, even zaum poetry “can contain an ele­ment of mimesis.”95 The artistic inspiration that possesses the body of the artist thus corresponds to a symmetrical gesture in which the audience is bodily possessed by the artwork. Since this model takes emotional states to be essentially physiological, “the act of absorbed listening is also an act of empathy, in which the interlocutor is literally being moved.”96 As evidence for the physiological tendency in early Soviet reception studies, Olenina cites Sofia Vysheslavtseva’s call for “a typology of poetic styles based on how intensely they engage the reader’s body” and Sergei Eisenstein’s proposal to rec­ord spectators watching close-­ups of expressive ­faces and then to compare the two film reels in order to mea­sure the “contagiousness” of the stimulus.97 The Czech Structuralist Jan Mukařovský theorizes the phenomenon by proposing the body as the ground and medium of aesthetic experience.98 Recent work on “body genres” like melodrama, horror, and pornography, which oblige the consumer to physiologically experience the tears, terror, or tumescence represented in the work, lend suggestive force to t­ hese ideas.99 Whereas chapters 2–5 of this book treat individual authors or movements, chapter 1 treats the trope of possession across the w ­ hole of modern Rus­sian lit­ er­a­ture, from the early Romantic poetry of Konstantin Batiushkov to the con­ temporary fiction of Vladimir Sorokin. In Batiushkov’s Scandinavian elegies, the ghosts of Viking skalds dictate verses to their supposed successor, a Rus­sian soldier poet who sojourned in Finland as a member of the occupying Rus­sian Army. The structure of possession, in which the wellspring of Rus­sian poetry seems to be located in the Scandinavian past, is superimposed on the structure of empire, which constructs its capital, St. Petersburg, in the newly acquired territories at its northwestern periphery. In my reading of Dostoevsky’s novels, the demonic figures that visit Ivan Karamazov and Nikolai Stavrogin, which are interpretable e­ ither as unclean spirits or as hallucinatory symptoms of misfiring nerve cells, mark the conflict between the irreconcilable universalizing ideologies of Orthodox mysticism and Enlightenment reason. A dystopian allegory by the early Soviet writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, in which a global economy is achieved through a transmitter whose wireless signals innervate the muscles of the world proletariat—­obliging the workers to carry out a general economic plan despite themselves—­probes the limits of the materialist position. Krzhizhanovsky’s larger concern, however, is with the ambitions of art to exert itself on its audience, and his scenario of historical development through totalitarian

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technologies updates the Petersburg myth, in which an idea is imposed by fiat on the material of the world. Fi­nally, in the oeuvre of the postmodern writer Vladimir Sorokin, discourse itself appears in a series of materialized hypostases—­ cakes of excrement, blocks of ice, lard, or nails—­which penetrate into the body and subject it to a hallucinatory experience that partakes at once of the aesthetic and of the po­liti­cal. Sorokin depicts totalizing historical ideologies like Stalinism as mere effects of discourse, which can be mobilized and contained within aesthetic structures. The remaining chapters focus on specific authors and movements across the loosely defined modernist period: Tolstoy, the avant-­garde, Mandelstam, and Nabokov. In each case, verbal artworks are analogized with some coercive force that acts on the body. Tolstoy’s aesthetic theory, the major focus of chapter 2, holds that “art is infection” and that “the degree of infectiousness is the only mea­sure of the value of art.”100 Imagining humankind as an epidemiological community that shares a common set of circulating microbes, Tolstoy argues that the spread of infectious diseases restores interconnectedness to a humanity fractured by exploitation. “Illness is given to man as a beneficial indication of the fact that his ­whole life is bad and that it must be changed,” he writes in his diaries.101 A sick tailor might infect the man who buys a germ-­ridden suit, or an ailing chambermaid might pass on germs to ­those who sleep in the beds she makes. Meta­phors of contagion, which run through Tolstoy’s work in ­every genre, encourage us to reconcile his fictional repre­sen­ta­tions of emotional states with his theory of art’s unifying power. Since artworks are aesthetic vectors that transmit infectious feelings, they offer humanity the opportunity to merge into a single emotional community. Chapter 3 turns to the Rus­sian avant-­garde, whose manifestoes describe a universal language, capable of exerting a compulsive force upon its audience, as a necessary corollary of a planetary communism. From the Babel-­like heights of this poetic idiom, according to authors like Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, the w ­ hole world might be grasped as a single poetic intuition that is at the same time a radical po­liti­cal and economic integration. Valorizing lyric verse rather than narrative prose and a panoramic vision of the globe rather than a networked economic globalism, Futurist experiments with universal language represent a historical corrective to notions of world lit­er­a­ture generated within the horizon of global capitalism—an “off-­modern” version of world lit­er­at­ ure, to use Svetlana Boym’s phrase for the myriad potential paths suggested by modernist authors but never realized in practice.102 Insofar as the phonetic experiments of the Futurist poets w ­ ere instrumental in the development of the Structuralist linguistics of Roman Jakobson—­which served as the “common language” for transatlantic literary scholarship in the

20 I n t r o d u c t i o n

years ­after World War II—­then literary theory itself, much of which developed from or in opposition to Structuralism, can be seen to refract the grandiose ambitions of the Futurists.103 The poet Osip Mandelstam, the subject of chapter 4, professed a “nostalgia for world culture” shortly before he fell victim to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.104 Mandelstam’s enigmatic late essay Conversation about Dante exploits ambiguous figures of aesthetic inspiration and po­liti­cal tyranny, identifying poetry’s effect on its readership with totalitarian control over the citizenry. A demonstration of and meditation on reading, Mandelstam’s essay addresses perennial prob­lems of our relationship to the authority of writing and the preservation of literary culture through time, largely through a cluster of meta­ phors around the central image of a conductor’s baton. For Mandelstam, the baton is a central authority that imposes harmony on the orchestra’s cacophony of instruments. The vis­i­ble instrument of musical mea­sure, the movements of the baton symbolize the undulating line of script traced by the writing pen, which is realized as waves of sound when the poem is read out loud. Mandelstam’s philosophy of notation and per­for­mance parallels his effort to reconcile the po­liti­cal and poetical functions of written authority, largely through allusions to scenes in Dante’s Paradiso that compare the power of a dictating muse or a divine creator to the power of kings and tyrants. The meta­phorical image of a body caught up in an artistic structure and compelled to act out its commands is realized in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita through its much-­discussed intersection of the aesthetic and the ethical. As I describe in chapter 5, Nabokov translates totalitarianism into the atomized and individualistic sphere of postwar consumerism in the United States. It has gone strangely unremarked that Humbert is not just a madman, the criminal author of a memoir written as a psychiatric patient, but an adman, whose travels with his pubescent captive are bankrolled in part by his sinecure as a writer of advertising copy for perfumes. Advertising, which like art asks its audience to suspend disbelief in a fictional world, is a quasi-­aesthetic genre that has to do precisely with the rhe­toric of be­hav­ior and the ability of words and images to influence action; Lolita’s agonistic mimicry between art and advertising partakes of the techniques of the artist but also the function of the tyrant. In Humbert, who is artist and adman and tyrant rolled up into one, Nabokov accomplishes the transplantation of a Rus­sian problematic of totality into the open markets of the West and the tawdry contingent worlds promised by its consumer goods. Fifty years ­later, the containment of the world within the single shared horizon of the global market seems at last at hand—­even if writers lack as yet the ability to represent that entanglement as anything but conspiracy or to en-

Introduction

21

vision its destiny as anything save catastrophe. At the same time, the irredentist aggression of Putin’s Rus­sia and its recent invasion of Ukraine have reasserted a totalizing imperial vision that, militating against the liberal order, threatens to decimate Rus­sia’s intelligent­sia, vitiate its culture, and tarnish the claims to wider relevance of lit­er­a­ture in Rus­sian. T ­ hese two versions of totality, both of them timely and pressing, are obviously incompatible with one another; something like a Bakhtinian conflict of irreconcilable ideologies or German Romantic conceptions of dynamic becoming within the infinite chaos of the ungraspable universe might comprehend them in a single theoretical model, but only at the cost of their specificity. A totalizing gesture in a literary text, however, even when it echoes one or another historical ideology, has a purpose beyond adequacy to the world that encompasses the artwork or anything in it. My three-­year-­old son, who as yet knows nothing of my research but enjoys taking my thickest books off the shelves to judge their bigness, recently volunteered while engaged in this activity, “I have a book, and it is seven hundred four thousand four thousand and sixteen pages long. I actually wrote it. And it is called Every­thing in the World Is in This Book.” His claim is equivalent to the infinitely capacious volume conjectured by Dante, or by Khlebnikov, or by any number of ­others. If “genius is nothing but childhood recovered at ­will,” as Charles Baudelaire remarks, then this child’s fantasy of a universal text speaks to the fundamental impulse to create an all-­inclusive artwork that my own book, somewhat more modestly, tracks across two centuries of Rus­sian lit­er­ a­ture.105 The determinate content of t­ hese literary universes is highly variable and with the flux and churn of history can be made to coincide with one or another po­liti­cal ideology. We can analyze nonetheless a tradition of totality, manifested in the rhetorical techniques of contagion and compulsion, and the related aesthetic of bodily possession, through which artworks imagine themselves as drawing in their audience and encompassing the w ­ hole of space and time.

C h a p te r   1

Versions of Possession Ghost, Demon, Idea, Discourse

Avital Ronell’s book on the afterlife of Goethe in German letters describes a “primary gap between the text and the source,” across which the deceased author, “amplified by myth and biography,” continues uncannily to dictate writings to his inheritors “through more or less conscious channels of transmission and by means of a remote control system.”1 Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s 1927 novel The Letter Killers Club (which Ronell could not have known) also begins by evoking Goethe’s omnipresent and determining influence on German lit­er­a­ture.2 The discussion of literary influence in the first pages of the book foreshadows a literal technology of bodily control in the science fiction dystopia that makes up its longest and most central chapter. The first experiments with Krzhizhanovsky’s ­imagined “remote control system” involve writing to dictation; in its final form, the technology makes all the world into a vast text, controlled by a central authority and articulated in h ­ uman flesh. The pre­sent chapter treats the Gothic motif of possession in four touchstone moments in Rus­sian literary history: the elegies of Konstantin Batiushkov, written against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars and Rus­sia’s colonial expansion; the zenith of realism in the novels of Dostoevsky; Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s fantastic tales, which refract the tense coexistence of high modernism and communist revolution in the 1920s; and the transgressive metafiction of Vladimir Sorokin, penned in the Soviet Union’s chaotic after22



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math. All ­these authors resort to a meta­phoric formulation akin to Ronell’s: a transcendental force of inspiration possesses the artist, dictates the work, and passes through the artistic medium into a public. ­Because the pro­cess constitutes a body politic united by the compulsive force of the artwork, it implies dictatorship as well as dictation. Fi­nally, romantic notions of artistic genius participate in each text in an inexorable and all-­encompassing historical logic, eschatological or cyclical, which finds voice in the artwork as its animating force. The same dynamic underpins works treated in detail in ­f uture chapters, which also turn to super­natural possession as a figure for discourse. Anna Karenina, as she reads on the train, finds herself succumbing to an arcane force that drives her to Vronsky and to her fate as the heroine of a tragic romance; her counterpart, Konstantin Levin, experiences his attraction to Kitty not as love but as “some external power that has seized [him].”3 Ultimately this force can be read as the plot of the book, which conducts the characters to their fated end and frequently finds super­natural expression in something that is not quite ordinary language—­for example, in Anna’s ominous foreshadowing dreams of a peasant mumbling French, a dream that Vronsky unaccountably shares, or when the charlatan mystic Landau falls into a trance and ventriloquizes arcane powers that deny Anna her divorce. If Tolstoy’s monument of realism is haunted by Gothic tropes that convey the determining power of discourse, the theme of possession is more evident yet in Aleksei Kruchenykh’s suggestion that zaum is akin to the spiritual visitations of religious ecstasy, in Osip Mandelstam’s theory of dictation across cultural epochs, or in Nabokov’s Lolita, whose narrator utilizes incantatory language to possess his fictional victim as well as the ­actual reader. In the Rus­sian context, scholarly attention to the Gothic has gravitated to the St. Petersburg myth, to the imperial periphery, and to the unsettled legacy of the Stalinist repressions—­concrete situations in which historical traumas have created a world that cannot digest its origin, and have thus doomed the f­ uture to endless repetition of an uneasy past.4 However, the Gothic can also be expressive of the citational structure that is an ineluctable function of discourse in general, and which this chapter delineates in four loosely linked readings of other­wise divergent texts.

Language and Landscape: Batiushkov’s Ghosts The early Romantic poet Konstantin Batiushkov is best known for his ­free translations of Western and classical poetry and for his essays in defense of

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light verse, but another thread in his c­ areer leads to ancient Scandinavia. Contemporaries like Vladimir Dal’, Vasily Zhukovsky, Faddei Bulgarin, and Evgeny Baratynsky also wrote Ossianic poems and Scandinavian travelogues, but Batiushkov’s engagement with the theme represents a uniquely intricate and uniquely fraught instance of the so-­called Northern Vogue.5 His adaptations of poems by Évariste de Parny or Friedrich von Matthisson, re­imagined as the words of a long-­dead skald, give voice at once to a studied literary model and to a fantasy of spontaneous northern genius; he reconfigures his Western originals as a possessing force emanating from the ancient North. Batiushkov’s elegies are further complicated by the fact that the author served with the Rus­ sian troops occupying Finland in the 1809 war. The Viking ghosts possess and inspire the Rus­sian soldier-­poet in the instant that the Rus­sian occupies the land where the skald is buried; like the pagan pre­de­ces­sor he ventriloquizes, the lyric speaker is an agent of both poetic prowess and military might. A rich ideology of empire emanates from this marriage of literary succession and military conquest. Batiushkov draws on Romantic notions that the ­peoples of northern Eu­rope could achieve the cultural heights of the ancients only by tapping into their youthful vitality and developing their own cultural forms. He constructs for Russia—­a peripheral country whose claim to Eu­ro­ pean modernity rested in part on its digestion of the Swedish Empire—­a source of inspiration in a primeval northern poetry, something like the “barbarian lyre” that Alexander Blok evokes in his poem The Scythians.6 This myth of shared origin sharply distinguishes Rus­sian poetry on Scandinavian themes from verses dealing with the eastern and southern colonies and gestures ­toward a synthesis of two of the most fruitful directions in scholarship on the period. The first of t­ hese, outlined by authors like Dmitri Sharypkin, Iury Levin, and Otto Boele, demonstrates the necessity of considering an opposition between North and South, “inherent in Preromantic lit­er­a­ture in general and Gothic lit­er­a­ture in par­tic­u­lar,” alongside the more conventional dichotomy of East and West.7 The second direction, pioneered by Monika Greenleaf ’s Pushkin and Romantic Fashion and Harsha Ram’s The Imperial Sublime, demonstrates the dialectic between the elegy as a genre and the expansion of the Rus­sian imperial state, through which, as Ram puts it, “the romantic artist becomes an ambiguous third ele­ment in the other­wise binary conflict between the colonizer and the colonized.”8 Greenleaf claims that “the poet’s mourning implicitly lays claim to his poetic inheritance: he establishes himself as the next living link in the elegiac tradition.”9 Batiushkov’s self-­identification with skaldic poetry additionally suggests a my­thol­ogy of po­liti­cal legitimacy. Valeria Sobol’s recent book Haunted Empire, which stresses the “blurring of bound­aries between the colonizer and the col-



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onized” in the Baltic territories, describes the historical mythologies that trace the foundation of the Rus­sian state back to the Rurikid dynasty of Finland, thanks to which the conquest of Rus­sia’s northwestern frontier could be made to seem “a legitimate return of Riurik’s homeland to the Rus­sian Tsar.”10 Discussing M. N. Murav’ev’s historical romance Oskol’d in an 1814 essay, Batiushkov admires its “inspired skalds with golden harps,” whose “songs of ­battle and heroism” compel a troop of Varangian warriors to abandon their fishing nets and undertake the expedition to Constantinople that ­will culminate in the foundation of Kievan Rus.11 Associated si­mul­ta­neously with poetry and military conquest, the skald “reminds us of Lomonosov,” Batiushkov asserts, “the f­ ather of Rus­sian verse . . . ​who has earned the attention of l­ater generations not only through his poetic talents, his incredible l­abors and successes in the arts and sciences, but through his very life, filled, if I may use this expression, with poetry.”12 The Viking is transformed from an emblem of Rus­ sia’s distant past into the very personification of Rus­sia’s entrance into cultural modernity: the polymath genius Mikhail Lomonosov, who discovered the chemical law of mass conservation, founded a glass factory, systematized Rus­ sian versification, and himself wrote heroic poems on Rus­sia’s military campaigns in the Baltic. By linking Lomonosov to the Rurikid Vikings, Batiushkov imagines for modern Rus­sian verse deep historical roots in an in­ven­ted skaldic tradition. The Viking bard’s role as a rhetorical figure for the con­temporary issues of Rus­sian poetry motivates Batiushkov’s programmatic poem Dream, originally composed between 1802 and 1805 and published in its final form in 1817. In this paean to the lyric imagination, the skald appears as a figure for the Romantic poet himself, the dreamer of the poem’s title: В полночный час Он слышит Скальдов глас In the midnight hour He hears the voice of the skalds and is transported into a fabric of images drawn from Nordic my­thol­ogy.13 The same verses are inserted into Batiushkov’s 1809 Excerpt from the Letters of a Rus­ sian Officer about Finland, which frames them as the runic inscription on a Viking burial marker, brought to life through the creative fantasy of the Rus­sian warrior-­poet who is the Scandinavian bard’s successor.14 Among Batiushkov’s many Scandinavian texts, which pepper the de­cade of his greatest productivity, the Excerpt, composed while Batiushkov was stationed on the Gulf of Bothnia, is uniquely illuminating.15 Certainly it was the most influential, as it remained

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standard reading in the Rus­sian school curriculum ­until 1917.16 The Excerpt’s account of the birth of a northern poetic language provides a new perspective on the tension between Batiushkov’s roles as neoclassical imitator and Romantic innovator, whose elegies refer back to ancient literary forms but aspire to modern poetic sensibilities.17 Structurally the piece is perfectly symmetrical and consists of two series of four prose paragraphs on e­ ither side of the central quotation of more than sixty lines from Dream. Both four-­paragraph sequences share the same narrative progression, beginning with a description of nature repeating itself through tropes of echo and reflection and culminating in the cultivation of the landscape, which becomes a repository of h ­ uman culture, most strikingly in the grave markers, first a runic and then a Rus­sian one, which speak to and through the narrator with the voice of the dead. The text thus exemplifies the pro­cess according to which small transfers swell into a systematic vision of space and time encompassed by a single logic—­here, the logic of empire. The Excerpt begins by evoking a “new land, wild, but gorgeous even in its wildness,” which “everywhere displays a ravaged and infertile appearance, everywhere gloomy and dejected”; “wherever you might cast your glance—­ everywhere, everywhere you ­will meet with ­water or rocks.”18 Monotonous, empty, and self-­same, this landscape has nothing to imitate but itself. “Spring not infrequently takes on the appearance of gloomy autumn,” the “mirror of the ­waters [zerkalo vod]” reflects the cliffs along its banks, and “the forests echo the voice of the storm.”19 Although natu­ral phenomena are figured as having “voice,” the closest ­thing to intentional language comes with the quasi-­ mythological carrion birds that dwell in the cliff sides and call storms forth from the depths of the caves with their cries—­a multilayered echo, since the call of the birds, echoing back from the depths of the caverns, reemerges as the anthropomorphized storm whose “voice” is then “echoed” by the forest.20 The same caves, a bit ­later in the narrative, are inhabited by “the grim, invincible sons of aboriginal nature, or the outcasts of happier lands,” who utilize a similarly prereferential language that is emotive rather than instrumental. This protolanguage represents one more member in the series of nature’s self-­ reflections: “In bestial ecstasy they fill the forest with their cries, and the echo repeats their voices in the expansive wastes.”21 When the Excerpt’s narrator frames his own utterance as a reflection of natu­ral phenomena—­“I hasten to communicate to you the deep impressions left in my soul at the sight of this new land”—he inscribes himself into this cycle of repetitions between landscape and vocalization.22 The cir­cuit comes to include more complex forms of expression: the pitiless my­thol­ogy of the Scandinavians, the narrator tells us, is reminiscent of their cruel climate.23



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Batiushkov expands on the idea of geographic determinism in another essay, A Few Words on the Poet and Poetry: “Climate, the appearance of the sky, ­waters, earth—­all of this acts upon the soul of the poet, which is flung open to all impressions. In the songs of the northern skalds,” we perceive “all of nature, miserly with the gifts of life, but always sublime, gorgeous even in its terrors.”24 This last phrase directly parallels the Excerpt’s opening tableau of Finland, “gorgeous even in its wildness [prilestnaia i v dikosti svoei].” Batiushkov’s supposition that landscape determines art can be contextualized in an intellectual tradition that holds language to be ­shaped largely, even exclusively, by geo­graph­i­cal circumstance. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, posthumously published in 1781, separates the formation of northern and southern tongues into distinct chapters, writing that “in southern climates, where nature is prodigal, needs are born of the passions; in cold countries, where nature is miserly, the passions are born of the needs, and the languages, sad ­daughters of necessity, reflect their harsh origin”—­and yet in the course of time “eventually all men become alike.”25 How does a savage tongue, defined by its “reflection” of its scant surroundings, surpass itself in order to enter into this universal cultural discourse of Enlightenment humanism? Anx­i­eties about Rus­sian verse and the Rus­sian Empire’s ability to attain the level of its Eu­ro­pean counter­parts come to the forefront in Batiushkov’s 1816 philosophical dialogue An Eve­ning with Kantemir. In this text, the French po­liti­cal phi­los­o­pher Montesquieu attempts to convince Antioch Kantemir, a prominent Westernizer of Peter I’s court, “your climate, stern and inconstant, your land, for the most part infertile, covered in winter with deep snows . . . ​­will long delay the pro­gress of intellect and enlightenment. The power of the climate is the first of all powers.”26 Kantemir admits that Tasso, “born ­under the hot sun of Naples,” was uniquely equipped to describe southern phenomena like drought in “fresh and true colors” but emphasizes Rus­sian folk poetry’s own virtues of eloquence and pensiveness.27 Elsewhere, however, in plans for an unfinished Varangian epic, Batiushkov expresses the ambition to create a Slavic or Scandinavian version of the sorceress in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, a “northern Armida”—­ “cannot one build her palaces on the Biarmian ice, amongst the storms and winds?” Batiushkov asks. “Cannot one transform ice into roses and gardens—­ with a magic wand, or, better yet, with poetry?”28 For Kantemir, the figure that emblematizes this transformation of landscape through language is Lomonosov, a “­g reat genius . . . ​born among half-­savages along the ice of the White Sea,” who was to “repeat . . . ​in his marvelous verses” the “sublime and gorgeous” marvels of the northern lights and white nights, to which his northern soul is so receptive, and who “transformed [pereobrazoval] his language” in order to realize its potential for a northern poetry.29 In a parallel pro­cess, northern

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geography becomes civilized by the plow, “the foundation of society,” which leaves its “beneficial traces” as cultural inscriptions on the formerly wild earth.30 In the Excerpt too, poetic text becomes the dynamic ele­ment that civilizes the landscape, which becomes marked first with the signs of agriculture and then with traces of poetic activity—­the poetic epitaphs carved into Viking tombs, the ranks of Rus­sian gravestones. In Batiushkov’s account of the evolution of poetry from a primitive reflex of nature to an enculturating and transformative force, he seems to follow Johann Gottfried Herder’s influential 1772 Treatise on the Origin of Language. Herder’s essay begins with a stirring evocation of aboriginal humanity, which “already as an animal . . . ​has language” in spontaneous expressions of bodily feeling like the “bestial ecstasy” of Batiushkov’s primordial Scandinavians. He compares the vocal apparatus to the string of a musical instrument, which, stimulated by the natu­ral environment, performs “its natu­ral duty” and “calls to a similarly feeling Echo.”31 The accumulation of ­these imitative noises translates “the sounds of the w ­ hole world” into a “collection of ele­ments of poetry” or “vocabulary of the soul,” which makes it pos­si­ble for the “actions and speakings of all beings” to find coherent literary form.”32 For Herder, the poetry of savage and ancient p­ eoples remains compelling even to t­hose who do not understand the language in which it is recited, since “in all original language remains of t­ hese natu­ral sounds still resound,” and in such verses, “one hears the root of the word breathe like the first living Adam.”33 As the “­whole tree” is “contained in its germ”—­a striking image, derived from Aristotle, of ge­ne­tic development ­toward a telos—­ the echo of nature that takes root in the ­human soul is destined, through the mediation of poetry, to culminate in the conceptual totality of myth.34 In Herder’s enormously influential narrative of language’s evolution from an involuntary reflex to a mythic medium, nonsignifying properties of modern poetic language remain in communication with an Ursprache, which retains the primal compulsive force of Adamic language. Ele­ments of his theory recur in the nonreferential poetry of the Rus­sian Futurists, who also theorized poetic language through reference to a pre-­Babel idiom and who understood the poetic impulse to be a compulsive force of imitation. In Batiushkov’s account of the dialectic between landscape and language, the natu­r al world, which in the first paragraphs repeated only animal noises and prelinguistic yelps, becomes with the passage of time the mirror of poetry—­a transformative speech that humanizes the wilderness. “In the ­Middle Ages ­these wastes, ­these deserted places, ­these impassible forests repeated the voice of the skald. Even h ­ ere, poetry scattered its flowers,” enthuses the narrator of the Excerpt, by promising “a better world and a wonderful life to come. Dif­fer­ent tribes of ­people gathered into one, formed settlements on the banks of this gulf. ­Little



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by ­little even nature itself took on a dif­fer­ent appearance, not so stern and wild.” Significantly, poetry also inaugurates national identity and po­liti­cal unity, as in this transfigured land, “dif­fer­ent tribes of ­people gathered into one.”35 The landscape from which language emanates is itself transformed by elegiac inscriptions on the tombstones that mark the earth and demarcate the barbaric age of wild nature from the civilized age of agriculture. Runic verses of the sort are a standard motif in Batiushkov’s verse elegies on Scandinavian themes. On the Ruins of a ­Castle in Sweden also begins with an evocation of a landscape in which an “echo” repeats the voice of a native fisherman; the landscape is marked by Viking gravestones, so that in the final stanza, a passing traveler, who figures the reader of the ultimate Rus­sian text, “questions the stones / And reads . . . ​the secret runes.”36 Where the skald’s voice had been “repeated in the landscape,” the poeticized landscape is now “repeated” in the poet-­traveler, whose imagination resurrects the “­g iants of the midnight lands” that the stones memorialize.37 A similar device gives shape to the Excerpt. The anthropological narrative of the origin of language and its eventual transformation through poetry concludes with the entrance of the modern Rus­sian traveler, who ponders the indecipherable text inscribed into a profoundly historicized landscape. Perhaps on this cliff, shaded by pine trees, at the skirts of which the zephyr’s breeze rocks the gulf ’s deep ­waters—­perhaps on this cliff a ­temple was erected to Odin. H ­ ere the poet loves to dream about bygone times and immerse his thoughts in t­ hose ages of barbarity, magnanimity, and glory; h ­ ere he gazes with plea­sure upon the ocean waves, once streaming with the ships of Odin, Arthur, and Harald—­upon this gloomy horizon, on which the shades of warriors gone to rest once moved—­ upon the stones, the remains of hoary antiquity, on which secretive signs, traced by an unknown hand, remain discernable.38 The series of ghostly traces persisting in the geography, which we have seen to hark back to the origin of language in the primordial wilderness, resolves ­here into the literal trace of the past and of the history of language. The poet’s contemplation of the runes effects a transition from prose into elegiac verse. The poet, like a spiritual medium, channels the voice of a Viking skald—in fact a self-­quotation from Batiushkov’s own unpublished Dream, in turn a loose translation from the French of Évariste Parny—in order to bring figures of legend to life for the Excerpt’s reader. Здесь, погруженный в сладкую задумчивость,— Он слышит скальда глас,

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Прерывистый и томимый. Зрит: юноши безмолвны, Склоняся на щиты, стоят кругом костров, Зажженных в поле брани; И древний царь певцов Простер на арфу длани, Мoгилу указав, где вождь героев спит. «Чья тень, чья тень,—­гласит В священном исступленьи,— Там с девами плывет в туманных облаках? Се ты, младый Иснель, иноплеменных страх, Со славой падший на сраженье! Мир, мир тебе, герой! Твоей секирою стальной Прищельцы гордые побиты . . . Но ты днесь пал на грудах тел От тучи вражьих стрел!39 ­ ere, immersed in sweet pensiveness— H He hears the voice of the skald, piercing and languid. He sees s­ ilent youths, leaning on their shields, standing around the bonfires lit on the field of ­battle; and the ancient lord of bards stretches his hand out to his harp, indicating the tomb where the leader of heroes sleeps: “Whose shade, whose shade,” he cries in sacred ecstasy, “swims t­ here with his maidens in the dark clouds? It is you, young Isnel, the terror of alien tribes, who has fallen with glory in ­battle! Peace, peace be upon you, hero! You beat back the proud invaders with your steely axe, but now you have fallen upon the heaps of corpses in a cloud of ­enemy arrows.” Isnel’s tomb, indicated by the resurrected skald, is implicitly the stone examined by the wandering poet: the ancient bard who eulogizes Isnel and the Romantic poet who eulogizes the bard are inspired by an identical landscape and a shared history. The Excerpt thus establishes a series of embedded elegies: Batiushkov describes a Rus­sian elegist who imagines a skald who evokes a ghostly warrior. When the skald addresses the fallen hero’s ghost directly, the elegiac meta­phor of resurrection is literalized and accompanied by a transition from past to pre­ sent tense. The Valkyries, the skald intones, “touched their spears to your eyes,” and once again “the blood flows in your veins.”40 As Isnel joins the dead Vikings feasting in their pagan paradise,



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В восторге скальд поет О славе древних лет.41 An enraptured skald sings Of the glory of bygone ages. The enunciatory structure of the poem is by now so baroque that this last singer is interpretable as a celestial skald, a historical skald, the framing Rus­ sian soldier-­poet, or Batiushkov himself: the reader recognizes dif­fer­ent diegetic levels only in order to appreciate the degree to which they are identified with each other. Whereas the version of the poem in Dream places a closing quotation mark a­ fter Isnel’s arrival in Valhalla to signal the end of the skaldic text, in the Excerpt the opening quotation mark has no corresponding close, allowing us to interpret the entire poem as the skald’s quoted description of the heavenly feast.42 Even when “the skald’s voice falls ­silent,” the reverie does not end but rather trails off into an erotic reverie of Valhalla’s maidens, “young beauties, / Always half naked,” who entreat the resurrected warriors to drink a euphemistic “sweet mead.”43 Far from accomplishing the reaffirmation of the elegiac self, as the corresponding verses in Dream do, the modern poet’s voice seems to be absorbed into his skaldic counterpart, an erotically charged ­union that persists even ­after the poet has “fallen ­silent.” Paul de Man famously describes “the latent threat that inhabits prosopopeia, namely that by making the dead speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death.”44 The Excerpt responds to the excessive verse per­for­mance by retreating into prose and resuming the quasi-­anthropological language of the opening paragraphs. Indeed, it returns to its initial theme of the impressions made by nature on the h ­ uman soul—­the excess of imagination that we understand to have catalyzed the Rus­sian poet’s dissolution into the legendary past that is recorded in Finland’s stones. “In this manner, even in the snows, and u ­ nder a stern sky, the tribal imagination created for itself a new world and decorated it with gorgeous inventions. The northern ­peoples are endowed with an excess of imagination: nature itself, wild and infertile, the inconstancy of the ele­ments and their manner of life, active and solitary, gives it nourishment.”45 The text’s own embedded verses serve as an example of the cir­cuit between nature and the imagination. The narrator is absorbed into the elegy of the skald b­ ecause they are both inspired by a single landscape, increasingly inscribed with the voices of the dead and given voice by a series of historical poets whose utterances weld the primeval origin of language, the bardic poetry of pagan Scandinavia, and modern Rus­sian verse into a single ongoing tradition.

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On the Ruins, which also represents itself as a skaldic eulogy, describes the dead Vikings as the “scourge of the Gauls,” returning from a victorious raid on France. The identification of Rus­sian and skaldic voices compares the ninth-­century Norman conquest of France with the Rus­sian victory in the Napoleonic Wars, in which Batiushkov participated; he wrote the piece in Sweden during his return journey from Paris.46 In the Excerpt, however, Isnel’s death at the hands of the foreign invader seems to allegorize the Rus­sian conquest of Finland in 1809. One way to illuminate the soldier-­poet’s identification with the fallen e­ nemy is to treat it as an allegory of colonial anxiety, in which the conqueror is haunted by echoes of the unquiet dead. But this interpretation only partially accounts for the Excerpt’s intricate grounding in the dialectic between ­human language and natu­ral phenomena, according to which the invention of poetry caused the vari­ous savage tribes to “gather into one.” The second half of the Excerpt, which is divided at its exact structural midpoint by the verse interlude, closely mirrors the first, but in the second rehearsal, the sequence of forests, snows, lakes, sea, and cliffs is rendered pastoral, calm and melancholy—­pacified, perhaps, by poetry. The landscape is now so imbued with the possibility of its reproduction in art that its new inhabitants, the Rus­sian troops, are introduced as “a subject for the paint­er’s brush [predmet dlia kisti zhivopistsa].”47 Appearing in the third paragraph of the second half, the new masters of Finland correspond structurally to the aboriginal Scandinavians who appear in the third paragraph of the first half. T ­ hese narrative parallelisms lend historical events a sense of organic inevitability. Just as the Rus­ sian poet is possessed by and repeats the per­for­mance of the ancient skald, so too the Rus­sian army seems to reiterate the logic that brought the ancient Scandinavians from unthinking repetition of nature to civilization and nationhood. A particularly vivid example is the fire theme that recurs through the two halves of the prose narrative as well as the verse elegy that is its pivot. A forest fire appears as an act of nature in the initial description of the landscape. ­Later, the image of “­g reat fires, lit h ­ ere and t­ here, around which the soldiers crowd in the cold night hours,” introduces the Rus­sian troops in terms that recall the ghostly Viking warriors of the embedded skaldic poem.48 They too are introduced as they Стоят кругом костров, Зажженных в поле брани.49 Stand around the bonfires Lit on the field of b­ attle. The under­lying reference is apparently to sacrificial fires lit by the Vikings ­after successful military campaigns.50 Unconsciously repeating the same vic-



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tory ritual and taking the Vikings’ place in Batiushkov’s series of identified conflagrations—­the primeval, the heroic, the con­temporary—­the Rus­sian troops become another instance of the echoes emanating from the landscape and circulating among the h ­ umans who dwell in it. However, nature’s self-­ repetition is now recognizable as an ideological as well as a poetic logic. For it is precisely through the act of victory that the Rus­sian troops are most strikingly identified with the ­people they have conquered. Far from a displacement of a military rival or the colonization of a populated territory, the Rus­sian regiment’s appearance in the Finnish woods is presented as a member of a ge­ne­tic series of events originating in nature and proceeding from the Vikings to the Rus­sians, who seem not so much to have conquered the land as to have inherited it through their figurative continuity with its previous inhabitants. As the Rus­sian poet walks the Finnish earth, he is possessed by the spirit of his pre­de­ces­sor and speaks with the voice of the past; but the same dialectic of nature and poetry has, in its universalizing aspect, made that patch of earth a territory of the expansive Rus­sian state. The structure of poetic inspiration, in which the source of Rus­sian poetry lies in the Viking past, reflects the structure of empire, in which the new capital of the Rus­sian state, St. Petersburg, is built on conquered land. Batiushkov sees skaldic poetry as “a reward for ­those who have fallen gloriously in ­battle”: in the final paragraph, the Rus­sian occupiers too have marked the earth with their remains, which speak to the passing soldier-­poet, just as Isnel’s tomb had done, with the elegiac voice of landscape suffused with history: ­ very step in Finland is now notable for the events whose memory is both E sweet and sorrowful. ­Here we ­were victorious; but ­whole ranks of the brave ­were laid low, and t­here are their tombs! . . . ​This row of Rus­sian tombs in foreign lands, far from their native country, say to the passing soldier: victory awaits you too—­and death! ­Here at ­every step we meet ­either an abandoned battery, or an ancient c­ astle with sharp gothic towers, arousing memories of ancient knights; or an advance camp of the ­enemy, or a recently torched bridge, or an abandoned village. Traces of our victory or traces of long since bygone ages are everywhere—­the baleful traces of war and destruction.51 This closing landscape is diametrically opposed to the initial one, in which “wherever you might cast your glance—­everywhere, everywhere you ­will meet with ­water or rocks.” The “new land” of the first paragraph has become old. Now it is traces of ­human history, Scandinavian and Rus­sian alike, that are “everywhere.” In the first paragraph, nature communicated only with itself (the call of the birds in the depths of the caves, the cliffs reflected in the ­waters), but

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over the course of the Excerpt, we have witnessed the blossoming of an enculturing discourse, to the point that the dead Rus­sians, buried in Finnish earth and literally become a part of the Finnish land, speak to and through the Rus­sian officer just as the ghosts of the Viking age had spoken to and through the Rus­ sian poet. Insofar as Batiushkov himself was both soldier and poet—­the only of the major writers of his generation to participate in the Eu­ro­pean campaigns of his time—we can identify with him both of ­these speakers for the dead. The Russo-­Swedish War is evoked through its picturesque traces and figured through stirring depictions of Viking ­battles but is never represented. The fierce defense put up in 1809 by Finland’s ­actual inhabitants is eclipsed by the deeds of their warlike pre­de­ces­sors.52 Hailed as intrepid invaders and courageous defenders, respectively, the Rus­sian and Scandinavian armies appear to have missed each other by a thousand years. Only the indices of ­battle—­their tombs and the ruins of their fortifications—­bear witness to the conflict. Laid to rest in the same landscape, Vikings and Rus­sians are perforce incorporated into the single figure of the northern soldier-­poet, speaking the same language and possessing the same character. The grave that is the Finnish earth—­possessed by the soldiers who are buried t­ here and possessing the poet who wanders the tombs—­absorbs land and ­people alike into the structure of empire, for whose ongoing and limitless expansion Batiushkov’s text is an apology. The ambiguous fact that “the capital of the empire was created in its colony,” as Valeria Sobol puts it, drives the “tension between the forces of pro­gress and culture and the per­sis­tent threat of the irrational and natu­ral” that is the salient feature of the Petersburg myth.53 The narrator of Batiushkov’s 1814 “Walk to the Acad­emy of Arts” admires St. Petersburg’s “wondrous mixture of all nations,” in which he “picked out En­glishmen and Asians, Frenchmen and Kalmyks, Rus­sians and Finns” (tellingly, the series of parallelisms implies that Rus­sia is a Western colonial power on par with ­England and France, while Finns are grouped with Asians and Kalmyks) “and asked myself the following question: what was on this spot prior to the construction of Petersburg?”54 A reverie of the primordial landscape follows: a “swamp overgrown with moss,” a poor fisher’s boat, a “longhaired Finn,” gathered in a world so primordial that it seems even to lack language: “­Here all was quiet. Scarcely did a ­human voice disturb the silence of this wild desolation [pustynia].” It was Peter the ­Great who first surveyed the shores of the wild Neva, now so beautiful!—­From the fortress of Nyenschantz the Swedish cannons still resounded; the mouth of the Neva was still covered by the ­enemy . . . ​when the sublime thought [velikaia mysl’] was born in the mind of that sublime man [velikii chelovek]. ­Here ­will be a city, he pronounced, the won­der of the world. . . . ​­Here the



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arts, sciences, civil works and laws w ­ ill overcome [pobedit’] nature itself. He spoke—­and Petersburg ­rose out of the wild swamp.55 In this scene, the creative word, ambiguously poetic and authoritarian, draws nature and politics alike into an inexorable historical logic that leads from the primal mythopoetic speech act to the polyglot Babel of a world capital. Batiushkov’s evocation of Petersburg’s foundation is rooted in passages from Lomonosov, especially a panegyric to Peter the G ­ reat that imagines the ruler as “opening the wide gates” of “the expansive Rus­sian state” to maritime trade and a heroic poem that repeatedly depicts him standing at the shore of a misty northern river and imagining the g­ reat work he w ­ ill build ­there.56 It prefigures the opening of Pushkin’s better-­known Bronze Horse­man, which mythologizes Rus­sia’s passage from provincial backwardness to global modernity in the same terms and using largely the same wording. In all ­these texts, the Baltic frontier opens onto a progressive narrative of Enlightenment civilization but is at the same time the site of an irrational power that binds Rus­sia to a unique historical trajectory.

Babel and Bacteria: Dostoevsky’s Demons Critics have long discounted the medical plausibility of Ivan Karamazov’s hallucinated devil, preferring to treat delirious episodes in Dostoevsky’s novels as a psychological heuristic and wondering ­whether it is even “appropriate” to treat Ivan’s illness as part of a “mimetic depiction.”57 However, Dostoevsky uses medical terms knowingly. In a letter about his research for The ­Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky wrote to his editor, N. A. Liubimov, that he had consulted the opinion of doctors (and not only of one). They maintain that before a “ce­re­bral fever” [“belaia goriachka”] not only are such nightmares pos­si­ble, but also hallucinations. . . . ​­Here we find a physical (sick) trait when an individual at times begins to lose the distinction between the real and the illusory (which has happened to almost every­body at least once in his life), but also a moral trait which concurs with the hero’s character: denying the real­ity of the illusion, when the illusion has dis­appeared, he stands up for its real­ity.58 The letter makes clear Dostoevsky’s efforts to be cognizant of medical norms in his repre­sen­ta­tion of Ivan’s disease. Diagnosed ­after his ­father’s murder with “ner­vous fever” (nervnaia goriachka), Ivan attempts to dispel his hallucinated devil by wrapping his head in wet cloth in order to reduce the temperature

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and blood pressure within the ce­re­bral vessels.59 His ­brother Dmitri, the day ­after being sentenced for the murder, similarly “fell ill with a ner­vous fever” (nervnaia likhoradka) and sits in the hospital “with a towel, soaked in vinegar and w ­ ater, on his head.”60 Dostoevsky represents the disease diagnosed as “ner­ vous fever” as a recognized pathology with a consistent etiology and symptoms, treated in accordance with medical norms of the day. This disease also marks the site of a terminological ambiguity. In medical contexts in the novel, it is called nervnaia goriachka, a phenomenon described in con­temporary medical textbooks as excessive blood flow in the brain, often brought on by severe shock and corresponding to the En­glish “brain fever” or “ner­vous fever.” In the private letter quoted ­earlier, however, Dostoevsky calls Ivan’s condition belaia goriachka and places the term in quotation marks. As a medical term, this last refers to delirium tremens, although it was colloquially used in Dostoevsky’s day in reference to delirium more generally. The imprecision appears not to be a symptom of Dostoevsky’s troubled relationship with literary realism but an intentional undermining of medical terminology. In Ivan’s devil-­haunted delirium, Dostoevsky claims, he means to explore the prob­lem of distinguishing between the real and the unreal and to correlate it with the prob­lem of distinguishing between the physical and the moral, that is, between the m ­ ental organs (nerves, nervy) and the soul (dusha). Describing Ivan’s hallucination as an instance of the larger theological prob­ lem of belief in something for which ­there is no material evidence—­“standing up” for an illusion, as he puts it—­Dostoevsky suggests that Ivan’s illness reflects other major themes in the novel: the prob­lem of judgment and punishment, explored notably through Dmitri’s trial, and the recurrent motifs of faith healing and demonic apparition. The book’s narrator, who breaks in at critical junctures, stresses the contrast between medical and moral discourses at the onset of Ivan’s hallucination. “I am not a doctor [Ia ne doktor],” the narrator announces, “but yet I feel that the moment has come when I must inevitably give the reader some account of the nature of Ivan’s illness. Anticipating events I can say at least one t­ hing: he was at that moment on the very eve of an attack of brain fever [belaia goriachka].”61 A literal translation that highlights the narrator’s bumbling abundance of specifiers might render this last phrase as “he was now, this night, exactly right on the eve of a delirium [on byl teper’, v etot vecher, imenno kak raz nakanune beloi goriachki],” further emphasizing the narrator’s lack of medical qualifications through a parody of medical exactitude. The narrator continues in the same vein: “Though I know nothing of medicine, I venture to ­hazard the suggestion that he ­really had perhaps, by a terrible effort of ­will, succeeded in delaying the attack for a time, hoping, of course, to check it completely”; and he further underscores



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his lay status by adding that Ivan has already consulted a specialist, who “­after listening to and examining him came to the conclusion that he was actually suffering from some disorder of the brain [u nego vrode dazhe kak by rasstroistva v mozgu].”62 This comical paraphrase of a medical diagnosis is, again, more comical yet in an alternative translation that accentuates the colloquial tone: “he even had something kind of, like, wrong with his brain.” Echoing the real-­life medical experts Dostoevsky consulted, the diegetic doctor proclaims that in Ivan’s condition, hallucinations are quite pos­si­ble. The terminological distinction between the colloquial belaia goriachka and the technical nervnaia goriachka becomes freighted ­here, since fifty pages prior, Katerina has told Alyosha that Ivan “has a fever, a ner­vous fever [nervnaia goriachka]! The doctor told me so.”63 The narrator’s distracted paraphrase of nervnaia goriachka as “something kind of, like, wrong with his brain” is thus deliberately opposed to the accredited diagnosis confidently cited by Katerina. In fact, the garbled parody resonates with the disease’s major symptom, Ivan’s hallucinated devil, who complains that he suffers from a cold but has not sought medical treatment, since doctors “can diagnose beautifully, they have the ­whole of your disease at their finger-­tips, but t­hey’ve no idea how to cure you.”64 Debating theology with Ivan, the demon actually describes himself in medical terms as a “homeopathic dose [gomeopaticheskie-to doli]” of faith. At the center of Ivan’s condition is a tension between materialist and theological interpretations of the perceived world: Is the devil a medical symptom or a visiting spirit?65 Yuri Lotman has cast this tension in semiotic terms as that prevailing in Dostoevsky between the denotational and symbolic poles, which are “constantly at odds with each other” and “make up the complex texture of his work”: in his view, Dostoevsky was, like a doctor or detective, a professed “decoder of symptoms” of social ills, even as his characters symbolize more obscure forces that are not transparent to reason.66 With this context in mind, we might understand the narrator’s use of the colloquialism belaia goriachka as an interrogation of medicine’s claim to account for aberrant be­hav­ior. The moral dimension of this claim comes to a head in the courtroom scene where Dmitri stands trial for the murder of his f­ather. The visiting medical expert who previously diagnosed Ivan with nervnaia goriachka testifies to Dmitri’s “condition of aberration [affekt] for several days before his arrest and, if a crime had been committed by him, it must, even if he w ­ ere conscious of it, have been almost involuntary, as he had not the power to control the morbid impulse that possessed him.” ­Here, too, the narrator claims to be a translator from one discourse to another: “It must be noted that I report this in my own words, the doctor made use of very learned and professional language.”67The ­widow Kokhlakova also produces a garbled paraphrase of the doctor’s explanation:

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“A man may be sitting perfectly sane and suddenly have an aberration [affekt]. He may be conscious and know what he is d­ oing and yet be in a state of aberration. And t­ here’s no doubt that Dmitri Fydorovich was suffering from aberration. They found out about aberration as soon as the law courts w ­ ere reformed.”68 A few pages ­later, Dmitri himself rehearses a mechanistic interpretation of consciousness—­paraphrasing the materialist Rakitin’s explanation of axons and dendrites, which becomes in Dmitri’s retelling a confused mass of tails and dev­ils: Imagine: inside, in the nerves, in the head—­that is, ­these nerves are ­there in the brain . . . (devil take them) ­there are sort of ­little tails, the ­little tails of ­those nerves, and as soon as they begin quivering . . . ​that is, you see, I look at something with my eyes and then they begin quivering, t­hose ­little tails . . . ​and when they quiver, then an image appears . . . ​it ­doesn’t appear at once, but an instant, a second, passes . . . ​and then something like a moment appears; that is, not a moment—­devil take the moment!—­ but an image; that is, an object, or an action, devil take it! That’s why I see and then think, ­because of t­ hose tails, not at all b­ ecause I’ve got a soul, and that I am some sort of image and likeness. All that is nonsense! Rakitin explained it all to me yesterday, ­brother, and it simply bowled me over. It’s magnificent, Alyosha, this science! A new man’s arising—­ that I understand. . . . ​And yet I am sorry to lose God!69 The garbling of medical discourse, a device the narrator shares with the characters, turns on the question of w ­ hether ­mental phenomena—­whether Ivan’s devil or a nerve cell—­have tails. Critics have often noted the source of ­these ideas in the French physiologist Claude Bernard, whose work became known in Rus­sia via the revised system of Ivan Sechenov.70 Dmitri’s incoherent effort to grapple with neurology comically illustrates humankind’s position within a positivist model that reduces all m ­ ental phenomena to organic and material units. On a linguistic level, the competing pathological and spiritual interpretations of Ivan’s hallucination evoke a contrast between two Rus­sian idioms for a disordered consciousness. Is the world our brains represent to us a m ­ atter of excited nerves, whose disordered action remains the mechanical and metonymic operation of a networked brain, that is, a ner­vous fever [nervnaia gorichaka, from nervy, “nerves”], or are hallucinations the meta­phorical “image and likeness” of theological concepts, and ­mental illness hence a spiritual disease [dushevnaia bolezn’, from dusha, “psyche” or “soul”]? The systematic opposition of materialist and theological interpretations of the perceived world obliges the reader to choose between mutually exclusive diagnoses that stem from mutually exclusive discourses for mediating between the imagination and



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the empirical world. When a doctor is the diagnostic authority, the medical term is used: “He has a fever, ner­vous fever [nervnaia goriachka],” Katerina Ivanovna tells Alyosha. “The doctor told me so.”71 But Alyosha, the Karamazov ­family’s spiritual bulwark and mouthpiece of faith, cries out in the courtroom during Ivan’s testimony, “He is ill. ­Don’t believe him: he has brain fever [v beloi goriachke].”72 The latter term, also used in Dostoevsky’s private correspondence, seems to elevate personal faith above the empirical proofs elicited by secular institutions of ­legal judgment or medical diagnosis. Ivan and Alyosha, the intellectual and the saint, are both c­ hildren of a klikusha, or “shrieker,” whom Alyosha apparently resembles in his own hysterical symptoms.73 The narrator of The ­Brothers Karamazov suggests that klikushestvo—­a syndrome associated with involuntary cries, fits, and fainting—­stems from the marginal social position of peasant ­women.74 Dostoevsky seems to have derived this interpretation from discussions of the phenomenon in the Rus­sian press; in the second half of the nineteenth c­ entury, numerous accounts of klikushestvo as a ner­vous pathology ­were published “in connection with the appearance and development in Rus­sia and abroad of new conceptions of psychiatry.”75 Although folk belief dating back at least to the medieval period had ascribed klikushestvo to demonic possession or ensorcellment, the syndrome became in post-­Petrine Rus­sia the focus of “a pro­cess whereby church and state strug­gled over definitions of possession and over the role that magic played in the cosmic order.”76 Susceptible to ­either a religious or a medical interpretation, klikushestvo in the late nineteenth c­ entury thus constituted, in Christine Worobec’s words, “an arena within which two worlds—­one of popu­lar Orthodoxy and the other of secular rationalism—­collided and at times converged.”77 Introduced early in The ­Brothers Karamazov, klikushestvo has a privileged function to frame other illnesses, especially Ivan’s and Dmitri’s fevers and Smerdiakov’s epilepsy—­ailments whose objective real­ity is similarly in question and that serve them as potential alibis in the case of their f­ ather’s murder. ­Under any name, ­mental disorders in Dostoevsky involve the complex of features that Gary Sol Morson calls “vortex time”—­loss of self, dissolution of plot time, and the transgression of moral bound­aries.78 The paradigmatic boundary in The ­Brothers Karamazov is parricide: Smerdiakov’s illness is associated with the murder of the f­ather; Dmitri’s illness occurs in combination with his jealous competition with and assault of his ­father; Ivan’s disorder dates from his decision to leave town at Smerdiakov’s behest, thus allowing the murder to take place, and becomes full-­fledged ­after Smerdiakov insists, “You murdered him; you are the real murderer, I was only your instrument.”79 Raskolnikov and Rogozhin, the murderer-­heroes of other late Dostoevsky novels, also become physically ill. Endemic disease is thus identified with endemic

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guilt. Ivan makes this thesis explicit: “in ­every man, of course, a demon lies hidden—­the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of a tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on.”80 Mere intent suffices to call down t­ hese diseases: the child Iliusha falls ill a­ fter feeding a dog a pin, and the child dies, although the dog in the end does not. “It’s b­ ecause I killed Zhutchka, f­ ather, that I am ill now,” Iliusha laments on his deathbed.81 Sigmund Freud famously associates this endemic guilt with the desire for parricide, diagnosing Dostoevsky’s epilepsy—an affliction he gave also to Smerdiakov—as an expression of Oedipal guilt over his ­father’s murder at the hands of his serfs. In Freud’s reading, Dmitri, Ivan, and Smerdiakov all become physically ill ­after performing actions that implicate them in the murder of their ­father, while the youn­gest ­brother, Alyosha, chooses total subordination to a substitute ­father: the monastic elder and faith healer Zosima.82 According to Slobodanka Vladiv-­Glover, Dostoevsky’s fiction puts forward “an oedipalized model of consciousness in which guilt and abjection are innate, leading to the re-­absorption of the transgressor into the all-­inclusive totality of the ‘Church.’ ”83 In this reading, the sin-­and-­redemption scheme of Chris­tian­ity and the guilt-­and-­abjection scheme of psychoanalysis are mapped, in Dostoevsky, onto the affliction-­and-­cure model of disease. The disease is the physical manifestation of a character’s guilt in rebellion against higher moral authority; it is also a necessary component of the sinner’s pro­g ress t­ oward subordination to that authority. The prob­lem of authority in its relation to secular and theological universalisms, respectively, is framed by a heated discussion early in the book, which represents the first gathering of major characters in the novel. This conversation takes place at F ­ ather Zosima’s as the monk returns home from treating klikushi, and its pretext is Ivan Karamazov’s article on the relationship between the civil and ecclesiastical courts. In its essence, the disputed issue is the one interrogated by Karl Marx in his early essay “On the Jewish Question”: is pos­ si­ble for a universal religion and a universal state to coincide?84 Like the missionary religion of Chris­tian­ity, Marx argues, the bourgeois state grants a phantasm of equal access to a universal structure as compensation for the fact that relations of in­equality prevail in real economic life—­a mere fantasy of the higher stage of socialism, which ­will supersede church and state alike. Ivan’s essay, however, proposes that “the Christian Church . . . ​could pursue no other aims than t­ hose which have been ordained and revealed by God Himself, and among them that of drawing the w ­ hole world, and therefore the ancient Pagan State itself, into the Church.”85 Throughout Dostoevsky’s novel, this collapse of temporal and divine justice is identified with the third temptation of



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Christ, in which Satan offers the Son of God dominion over the earth and the opportunity to eliminate ­human suffering through his rule. The novel continues this debate in vari­ous guises, most prominently in the juxtaposition of state and religious moralities in Dmitri’s trial and in Ivan’s “Legend of the G ­ rand Inquisitor,” an interpolated narrative that makes the subtext explicit when the Inquisitor chastises Christ for surrendering to state power and allowing himself to be crucified, rather than himself seizing power in order to wield it on God’s behalf. Why didst Thou reject that last gift? Hadst Thou accepted that third last counsel of the mighty spirit, Thou wouldst have accomplished all that man seeks on earth—­that is, some one to worship, some one to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unan­im ­ ous and harmonious ant-­heap, for the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men. Mankind as a ­whole has always striven to organise a universal state. . . . ​The ­great conquerors, Timours and Genghis-­Khans, whirled like hurricanes over the face of the striving to subdue its p­ eople, and they too w ­ ere but an unconscious expression of the same craving for universal unity. Hadst Thou accepted the world and Caesar’s purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and given universal peace.86 Elder Zosima rebuts Ivan’s argument by pointing out that the state cannot aspire to the genuinely universal ethos of the church, whose “judgment is the only one that contains the truth, and therefore cannot practically and morally be united to any other judgment even as a temporary compromise,” since to enforce laws and punish infractions is to separate sinners from the community.87 Whereas in Protestant countries the church has dissolved into the state and in Roman Catholic countries the church has proclaimed itself a state, in Rus­sia the Orthodox Church does not exclude criminals even when the state has pronounced on them a sentence of exile, rather remaining to them a grieving and unconditionally welcoming ­mother to her prodigal sons. In relation to the uncorrupted church, all are guilty, but no one is thereby excluded. This relationship of the church to all humanity, which pertains even to heretics and atheists, exists over and above secular law and the claims of Enlightenment reason. Vasili Rozanov, in his reading of the “Legend of the ­Grand Inquisitor,” locates its stakes in the corrosive effects of modernity and division of l­abor. Set in motion by the Enlightenment, ­these forces have fractured humanity into individual citizens of separate states. “No common idea binds the nations together any longer,” Rozanov complains. “No common feeling guides them—­ every­one in ­every nation works only at his own par­tic­u­lar job.”88 To supply

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this unifying idea is the “most impor­tant task of man on this earth,” and Rus­ sia’s peculiar destiny is to “slowly but everlastingly create harmony,” ­until the other nations at length “submit to its spirit.”89 Rozanov draws upon polemical statements in which Dostoevsky advocates “a universal international uniting,” since “to become truly Rus­sian, to become fully Rus­sian,” means “becoming a b­ rother to all h ­ uman beings, a universal h ­ uman being.”90 From this messianic point of view, the true challenge to the Kingdom of God is not a religious heresy but scientific positivism, which also aims to bring about paradisiacal plenty in a joyful and transparent world. Enlightenment reason attempts to provide for humankind the common language and common purpose that, according to the biblical myth of the confusion of tongues, God has denied it. Technological pro­gress is exemplified, for the ­Grand Inquisitor, by the Tower of Babel: a work of ­human hands that proclaims ­human omnipotence and therefore the power to eliminate death and suffering. However, since science cannot provide spiritual unity for the ­human species, pro­gress through reason is doomed to end in Malthusian increase and a cannibalistic dystopia that grimly parodies the Eucharist.91 In the Inquisitor’s analy­sis, this wholly mechanical sequence of c­ auses and events must take place wherever science claims the prerogative of faith—­ for example, when a diabolical hallucination is taken not as an opportunity for the ­free exercise of conscience and belief but as the natu­ral and logical result of a vibrating nerve. A ­ fter completing the disastrous experiment of rationality, the Inquisitor prophesies, the remnant of humanity ­will come creeping back to the church to seek theocratic rule. The Inquisitor’s apocalyptic vision elaborates a parable in Crime and Punishment that explic­itly draws together demonic possession, disease, Enlightenment rationality, and historical totality. In the novel’s epilogue, Raskolnikov lies in the hospital during the theologically significant Lenten period. Recovering at Easter, he “remembered the dreams he had had while he was feverish and delirious. He dreamt that the w ­ hole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Eu­rope from the depths of Asia,” caused by “some new sorts of microbes.”92 Resembling demons more than germs, insofar as they are “endowed with reason and ­will,” ­these unclean agents infect humanity with the princi­ples of Enlightenment rationalism and enlightened self-­interest. “Never had p­ eople considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth,” Dostoevsky writes; “never had they thought their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible.” In their egoistic isolation, moral judgment breaks down: “they did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good.” As in the Inquisitor’s retelling of the Babel legend, an age of vio­lence and famine culminates in scenes of mass cannibalism. Soldiers in an apoca-



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lyptic planetary war “fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting and devouring each other.”93 Humanity’s pretension to universal reason brings about only the fragmentation of the species into mutually destructive atoms; far from liberating humanity from disease, Enlightenment thought is itself a “plague.” The survivors of this eschatological allegory are “a pure and chosen ­people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth,” apparently symbolizing Raskolnikov’s own redemptive promise of “full resurrection into a new life.”94 Dostoevsky’s narrowest quarrel with medicine is that it places crime within a materialistic discourse in which sin can be interpreted as a symptom rather than a moral act. As Susan Sontag observes, “if criminal be­hav­ior can be considered an illness, then criminals are not to be condemned or punished but to be understood (as a doctor understands), treated, cured.”95 Medical science reiterates the famous slogan of The ­Brother Karamazov that if ­there is no God, then “every­thing would be lawful [vse budet pozvoleno], even cannibalism.”96 If all pathological be­hav­iors are the consequence of impersonal material impulses, then no one is responsible for t­ hose actions and no one is susceptible to punishment. The murderer-­heroes of Dostoevsky’s late novels all traverse the temptation of guiltlessness by medical diagnosis. In Crime and Punishment, the jury at Raskolnikov’s trial identifies his fever with the “fash­ion­able theory of temporary insanity, so often applied in our days in criminal cases”—­but Raskolnikov only recounts the details of the murder and takes no advantage of this excuse.97 In The Idiot, Rogozhin’s ­lawyers “proved . . . ​that the crime committed was a consequence of the brain fever [vospalenie mozga] which had set in long before its perpetration”—­but Rogozhin too makes no attempt to adopt this defense.98 In The Demons, Stavrogin’s outrages when he first arrives are blamed on “brain fever [belaia goriachka]”; although he anticipates that no ­legal action w ­ ill be taken b­ ecause of the generally accredited notion of his derangement, Stavrogin states in his final confession (suppressed from the initial Rus­ sian publication), “I do not want to look at environment or illnesses for the ­causes of my irresponsibility when I commit crimes.”99 Ivan’s hallucination of the devil, a symptom ­either of a physiological or spiritual ailment, catalyzes his ac­cep­tance of responsibility for his ­father’s death and for Dmitri’s punishment. It is sourced in Dostoevsky’s own hallucinations of the mid-1840s: “an irritation of the entire ner­vous system,” he explained in a letter to his ­brother, “barely contained by leeches and two blood-­lettings,” whose “treatment . . . ​must be both physical and moral.”100 Dostoevsky’s ­family physician reports that he would reassure the paranoid young author that his symptoms w ­ ere the effects of a disordered ner­vous system: “the hallucinations come from the nerves [a galliutsinatsii—ot nervov],” and Dostoevsky

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would reply, “Of course, nerves [konechno, nervy].”101 Although critics are more commonly preoccupied with Dostoevsky’s epilepsy, his e­ arlier hallucinatory illness is the likely ground for his insistent probing of the physiological roots of hallucinations, especially t­hose marking religious crises. The tension inherent in Dostoevsky’s own psychobiography—­between mystic terror of a dark inhabiting force and the reassurance that it is “of course, nerves”—­gets played out time and again in The B ­ rothers Karamazov. When the monk at the monastery sees evil spirits, should he engage in continual prayer or take “a special medicine”?102 When Lise confesses to Alyosha her dreams of dev­ils, he ambiguously assures her, “it’s a passing crisis; it’s the result of your illness, perhaps.”103 According to Ivan’s hallucinated devil, “artistic visions” and “plot,” as well as religious faith, should be discounted as mere dreams born of “indigestion”—­a more prosaically materialist explanation even than disordered nerves.104 The ambiguous place of hallucinations between the religious discourse of guilt and the medical discourse of material etiology in The B ­ rothers Karamazov is prefigured in a chapter of The Demons suppressed from the novel’s initial publication, in which the charismatic antihero Stavrogin visits a Zosima-­like monk, Tikhon, in order to confess his rape of a ten-­year-­old girl who subsequently committed suicide. Finding the monk ill in bed, Stavrogin admits that he too feels unwell, that he is subject to “hallucinations of a sort, that he sometimes saw or felt some sort of evil being beside him, mocking and ‘rational,’ ‘in vari­ous guises and with vari­ous personalities, but always one and the same.’ ”105 For many pages, Stavrogin vacillates between spiritual and neurological etiologies for this phenomenon, which is ­either a demonic being or “the product of a deranged mind” for which he should “go to the doctor”: “It’s just me in dif­fer­ent guises, and nothing more.”106 His anguished cry that he would like to see his victim “in real­ity sometime, even if in a hallucination!” directly links the apparition and his guilt.107 The crux of the hallucinatory phenomenon is gradually revealed to be Stavrogin’s belief in it, a question that Tikhon refuses to resolve despite Stavrogin’s dogged efforts to elicit a straightforward diagnosis. “It’s more likely that it’s an illness,” Tikhon agrees, even though “demons undoubtedly exist.” When Stavrogin comes out with the non sequitur “Do you believe in God?” the demon’s ontological status is bluntly linked to the prob­lem of religious faith.108 The scenario gathers together the ele­ments that make up Ivan Karamazov’s crisis: the dispute with a monastic elder, the suffering of a child counterposed to a divine notion of justice, and an ambiguous illusion for whose real­ity the character must, as Dostoevsky puts it in his letter to Liubimov, “stand up” through a statement of faith in t­hings invisible. In the case of Stavrogin, as in the vari­ous demonic presences in The ­Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky implies that the hal-



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lucinations (and the crises of faith they mark) could perhaps be reduced to physiological origins. S. D. Ianovsky recalls that when Dostoevsky provided medical justifications for the strange be­hav­ior of his characters, he did it so convincingly that “one could not help believing only the diagnosis which he supplied.”109 Even Dmitri’s rant about nerves reflects a medical paradigm that reduces spiritual phenomena to local physiological pathologies, grounded in the research of Claude Bernard and perhaps influenced by a book by the German psychologist Gustav Carus—­Dostoevsky once contemplated translating it into Russian—­that argues that chronic fevers, by stimulating the connections between nerve fi bers, produce hallucinations including religious visions.110 Ivan’s conversation with his hallucinated devil, like Stavrogin’s hypothesis that his visitations are just him “in dif­fer­ent guises,” seems, however, to reflect another, more mystical claim from Carus that “the ­whole soul is always a unity,” within which hallucinations are a “shadow on the conscious mind” cast by some deeper spiritual disturbance (Seelenkrankheit) and introducing into the essential unity of the soul the possibility of dialogue between its parts.111 According to Mikhail Bakhtin’s analy­sis of Ivan’s hallucination, Dostoevsky dramatizes “even internal contradictions and internal stages in the development of a single person—­forcing a character to converse with his own double, with the devil, with his alter ego.”112 On the ideological level of the novel, this self-­ division makes available a parallel between morbid psy­chol­ogy and religious heresy. As Ivan’s “Legend of the G ­ rand Inquisitor” makes clear, any totalitarianism must divide humanity into a conscious and an unconscious part: even a Christian state therefore cannot accomplish unity but only carve out a technocratic class that rules over the remainder of humanity in the name, and even in the spirit, of a higher morality. Caught between the incompatibly universalistic claims of Enlightenment materialism and Christian mysticism, Dostoevsky sees any pro­cess that reduces spiritual conflict to a physiological cause as, in the final analy­sis, inspired by the devil.

Idea and Actuality: Krzhizhanovsky’s Black Wedge In a 1926 work by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, a science fiction technology called the “externalizer” commandeers h ­ uman bodies by transmitting wireless signals that innervate their muscles from afar. A ­ fter spiking an internationally marketed brand of fruit preserves with a bacterium that renders ­people susceptible to the machine’s impulses, a conspiracy of scientists turns the workers of the world into puppets and uses them to implement a central plan for a

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prosperous global economy. The hijacked bodies begin to produce a glandular secretion that counteracts the external control, but by that time their brains have been driven insane by their helpless isolation. The managerial elite is able to save itself from the billions of violent lunatics it has created only by immobilizing them and leaving them to rot in the fields and factories. The survivors take refuge in the wilderness, regressing into “half-­savage clans. . . . ​And the wheel of history, having described a full circle, again began turning its onerous spokes.”113 This is a po­liti­cal allegory topical to the Soviet experiment, of course, but it is also a reenactment of the eschatological parable in the epilogue of Crime and Punishment, in which a small remnant of humanity survives the plague of Enlightenment reason. Above all, it is an aesthetic allegory that takes up Schiller’s distinction between the artist who works with material media like stone or paint and “has no scruple in d­ oing it vio­lence” and the pedagogic or po­liti­cal artist, for whom humankind is at once “the material on which he works and the goal ­toward which he strives.”114 Krzhizhanovsky’s dystopian body politic is possessed and or­ga­nized by an essentially aesthetic impulse: the impulse to pattern ­every aspect of life that the avant-­garde celebrated ­under the name zhiznetvorchestvo or “life creation.”115 But he represents the drive for a harmonious, efficient, and perfectly intentional society as being itself contained with a transcendent “wheel of history” that cycles through chaotic barbarism and dystopian tyranny. If the story of the externalizers is merely one turn of this perpetually revolving wheel of history, so too is the Rus­sian Revolution, in whose wake Krzhizhanovsky wrote. The apparently transformative “revolution” thus appears less as a break with the past than a cumbersome circling back to it: a necessary episode in the fundamentally cyclical and conservative returns of history.116 Krzhizhanovsky ­here addresses a preoccupation in Rus­sian thought with a cyclical logic, “contrasted with the linear and progressive understanding of historical time” associated with Enlightenment rationality, that would enclose Rus­sian culture within a self-­sustaining historical structure.117 The tale of the externalizers is the middlemost and longest of the interlinked stories that make up Krzhizhanovksy’s 1926 novel The Letter Killers Club, a kind of high modernist Decameron in which authors who have foresworn the written word gather once a week to describe the stories they refuse to commit to paper. As always, Krzhizhanovsky’s concern is for “the idea or concept (mysl’, zamysel) trapped in the brain,” as Caryl Emerson writes. “His recurring plot: how to release an inner thought into the outer space of the world at the right time with enough nourishment so it ­will survive.”118 In the scenario of the externalizers described ­earlier, the idea exerts itself in the material world by totalizing paths that partake at once of cap­it­al­ist networks (the global market for jams) and so-



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cialist collectivity (an intentional economy of rationally or­ga­nized l­abor). Since all the tales embedded in this cycle of stories share the motif of an idea taking control of a body, they can all be seen as revolutions of the same narrative wheel, each one encoding in a dif­fer­ent genre the tension of inspiration against accomplishment, the spoken against the written word.119 The opening salvo is an ingenious revision of Hamlet in which a stage actor is possessed by his role. When the club’s leader, Zez, discovers that the playwright Rar has committed his scenario to paper, he throws the manuscript into the fire. (Like monks, t­ hese ex-­authors have taken new names, each one a “nonsense syllable.”) Rar’s subsequent suicide catalyzes our narrator’s transcription of the five stories he has heard, whose unwritten words subject our narrator to a “dictation” that is also an ideal writing. “I barely had time to fetch a pen; words w ­ ere suddenly gushing out of five mouths, jostling at the split in the nib. Thirsting and impatient, they guzzled the ink and whirled me from line to line.”120 Referring to his own lack of imagination, he admits, “I ­don’t have a way with words; it is they that have had their way with me, conscripting me as a weapon of revenge.”121 A passive vessel rather than an active creator, he is physically possessed by the demonic power of narrative that commands his incompetent pen. The compulsive force that acts upon the narrator consummates the ­earlier scenario of externalizers taking control of ­human bodies: in early experiments with this dystopian technology, possessed bodies are made to write other ­people’s words. The narrator’s act of transcription also reiterates a seminal act of literary memory recounted in the introductory chapter by the club’s leader. As a young and penniless author, Zez sold his library to buy a ticket to his ­mother’s funeral. ­ other died saturday. presence required. come. The tele­gram attacked m my books one morning; by eve­ning the shelves ­were bare and I could slip my library, now in the form of three or four banknotes, into my pocket. The death of the ­woman who gave you life, that is very serious. Always and for every­one: like a black wedge in your life.122 Upon his return, Zez misses his habit of reading Don Quixote in bed and, something like Pierre Menard in the story by Borges, attempts to reconstruct the novel from memory.123 “I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the book before me,” he recalls; “some words returned, o ­ thers did not; so I began filling in the gaps, inserting words of my own.”124 The situation is autobiographical: as a penniless young author, Krzhizhanovsky apparently sold his own books for the same reason.125 Zez’s efforts to recover his lost library leads to a lucrative ­career. His new works are published and bring him riches and acclaim.

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“Now I knew what to do: I took them down, one by one, my imaginary books and phantasms filling the black emptiness of the old bookshelves, and, dipping their invisible letters into ordinary ink, turned them into manuscripts, and the manuscripts into money.”126 ­There are resonances ­here of Batiushkov’s elegiac conceit, in which a vanished voice from the past of poetry dictates to the living lyricist. Zez’s writings originate at once in the formative books he tries now to reproduce and to the ­mother on whose absence he now, “inserting” his “own words” into a maternal void, begets an incestuous verbal child. Zez calls the loss of the m ­ other a “black wedge.” This black wedge from which writing issues is subsequently identified with the split in the nib of a fountain pen (rashchep pera) that channels ink to the paper. “Sometimes a box of pens ­will contain an unsplit pen,” says one character of his authorial impotence; “it is just like the o ­ thers, and no less sharp—­but it cannot write.”127 When Zez is afflicted l­ater in his c­ areer by writer’s block, he becomes convinced that the books that he has sold are taking revenge for their exploitation. Foreswearing publication, he gathers around him a group of storytellers whose unwritten stories he compares to flowers growing in the inaccessible gardens of St. Francis, which bloom for themselves alone; the ultimate reference is Immanuel Kant’s example of the flower as an autonomous aesthetic object, the “­free beauty.”128 Fictions have a life of their own, Zez insists, and resent being pinned to the page by the technology of writing and sold in the literary marketplace. Despite Krzhizhanovsky’s strenuous efforts, he published next to nothing in his lifetime. Zez’s austere rejection of money and fame can be read as compensatory fantasy from a penurious and unknown novelist. But Zez’s interpretation of the black wedge (klin) as the absence from which literary inspiration issues is complicated by the fact that Hamlet in his famous soliloquy contemplates suicide with a “bare bodkin”—in Rus­sian, klinok, diminutive of the same word.129 When Zez incinerates Rar’s playscript, which includes a per­for­mance of Hamlet’s monologue, the narrator experiences the event as a “black wedge driven into [his] life”: “I had to unwedge it. But how?”130 The narrator’s rhetorical question can be paraphrased as, How can the text whose destruction I have witness be written? How is this wound to come to life and speak? The black wedge is the wound inflicted by dead origins, the ­mother or the library or Rar. It is also the opening through which the fiction of past ages, Shakespeare or Cervantes, is reborn and the condition of a literary f­ uture. It is the gap of nonbeing, introduced by the censoring vio­lence that destroys Rar’s modernist manuscript, that conducts the pure potentiality of the club’s stories, Rar’s included, onto paper in the book’s final pages. Krzhizhanovsky’s imagery is philosophically rich. It recalls Greek and Latin sources describing Aristotle as a phi­los­o­pher who “dipped his pen in thought,”



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thought in this context being precisely that which is not fixed in material form. Giorgio Agamben has written on this meta­phor as “the image of a writing of potentiality” that “experiences itself, a writing tablet that suffers not the impression of a form but the imprint of its own passivity, its formlessness,” and ultimately “writes its own unwrittenness.”131 The passage is felicitous to Krzhizhanovsky’s novel but relates more broadly to an aesthetic derived from isolation and helplessness in the face of a cultural tradition and economic horizon beyond authorial control. Krzhizhanovsky’s meditation on an unwritten lit­er­a­ture reminds us that he himself represents a substantial gap in the genealogy of Rus­ sian modernism—­authors who ­were relegated to the periphery of literary culture during their own lifetimes and whose manuscripts w ­ ere in some cases recovered from KGB files.132 In a prospectus for a “History of Unwritten Lit­er­a­ ture,” which of course also remained unrealized, Krzhizhanovsky proposed an elaborate genealogy of ideas that never found expression or an audience. Many features of The Letter Killers Club are topically totalitarian and can be understood in the context of Soviet repression; the novel’s premise encodes a mutilated literary past, a curtailed literary pre­sent, and an uncertain literary ­future. But The Letter Killers Club is also an effort to imagine a vital fiction that would stem from its own suppression, undertaken by an artist trying to understand the investment of his own life into an unpublished body of lit­er­at­ ure. For Agamben, power persists insofar as it is not exerted, as potential energy exists only u ­ ntil it is discharged and as money pre­sents a universal substitute only u ­ ntil it is spent. To exercise power is not to achieve but to squander it—to know impotence and exhaustion. Even po­liti­cal force, in order to maintain itself, must hold back from killing the body it dominates.133 Death is in this re­spect the limit of objective power, just as it is the ultimate and most ineluctable subjective experience of powerlessness. A writing of death, notes Jacques Derrida, is necessarily citational: one can speak of death only in quotation marks, as a reference to alien experience.134 If narration has to do with sharing lived experience, death is the essential limit between stories—­the ­thing that cannot be narrated and across which e­ very tale is told. Death, in Hamlet’s soliloquy, is “the undiscovered country, from whose bourne / No traveler returns.”135 In Rar’s rewriting of the play, Richard Burbage, the original Hamlet, possesses the play’s protagonist, a Shakespearean actor; Burbage’s spirit interrupts the per­for­mance of the soliloquy at this point to proclaim that he is such a traveler and has in fact returned. The relation between the living actor and the text that speaks through him is conceived through an economic meta­phor. To cross the line of footlights that separates the stage from the audience is “like passing through customs,” and the actor must pay the duty of his own life to play his role.136

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“Power is established on death’s borders,” writes Jean Baudrillard; “it is the bar between life and death, the decree that suspends exchange between life and death, the tollgate and border control between life and death.”137 The Futurist manifesto “The Letter as Such” refers to typescript as a “gray prisoner’s uniform,” in which letters, like a convict gang, are “lined up in a row, humiliated, with cropped hair”; a word printed in such letters is “dead” and “stillborn.”138 Zez draws on a similar reservoir of images when he compares an author producing a literary commodity to a furrier inducing a miscarriage in order to obtain the hide of the fetal lamb or when he declaims writing as an instrument of tyranny, calling writers “professional word tamers; if the words walking down the lines w ­ ere living creatures, they would surely fear and hate the pen’s nib as tamed animals do the raised whip.”139 The refusal to realize ideas on paper, however, commits the club’s members to a more fundamental despotism. By fetishizing possibility, they deny achievement; in the same stroke, they deny the return to possibility that comes when realized works inspire new ones. Krzhizhanovsky sees the possession of the pre­sent by the spirit of another time and place as underwriting a continuous cultural tradition, but he is also keenly engaged with questions of the cultural commodity and industrial society. Despite Zez’s efforts to isolate the club from literary history and the literary marketplace, its tales are saturated with monetary meta­phors and restagings of canonical texts—­Cervantes and Shakespeare but also Pushkin, Tiutchev, Odoevsky, and the Christian soteriology of the Gospels. “Keep ­silent, screen yourself and hide / Your feelings and your dreams,” writes Fyodor Tiutchev in his 1830 lyric “Silentium,” espousing an authorial self-­denial so radical that it professes an idea and its realization to be wholly incompatible: “A thought expressed becomes a lie.”140 In The Letter Killers Club, Krzhizhanovsky attributes an apocryphal biblical text to this poem, a copy of the Gospels scored in its margin at ­every instance Christ refrains from speech—­“Jesus held his peace,” “He answered her not a word,” “Jesus stooped down, and with his fin­ger wrote on the ground,” and so on—­together constituting “The Gospel According to Silence.”141 On the flyleaf of the volume is the quasi-­authorial inscription S—­um. This is a “nonsense syllable,” as one characters calls it, but then all the characters are storytellers with “nonsense syllables” for names. This par­tic­u­lar syllable happens to be the name of Tiutchev’s poem, “a flattened Silentium.” What is more, the partial repression of the Latin word for “silence” reveals, in the very elision that spans the word’s initial and its suffix, the statement of a speaker’s being: sum, “I am.”142 According to the Gospel of John, “in the beginning was the Word,” but in Krzhizhanovsky’s apocryphal Gospel, that first engendering word is a nonsense or a silence, whose very occultation announces in meaningful language the existence of an author and his link to poetic and sacred tradi-



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tion, Tiutchev and the Gospels. For Krzhizhanovsky, the speaking self is born, like Zez’s writings, from a productive elision. In subtracting letters in order to produce a continuum between silentium and sum, Krzhizhanovsky adopts the methods of avant-­garde poets who probed for new meanings and unexpected resonances by breaking down and recombining the ele­ments of language. The Rus­sian Futurists called their poetic idiom “zaum,” itself a neologism that combines morphemes meaning “beyond [za]” and “mind, reason [um]”; it is often rendered into En­glish through the equivalents “beyonsense” or “transrational.” The Letter K ­ iller’s Club names zaum directly when a medieval monk deforms the words of sacred chants, “nonsensing the syllables for the sake of other abstruse [zaumnye] meanings.”143 The creative deformation of language—­breaking its words down into constituent parts and repatterning them for poetic effect—is not just represented in the monk’s actions but also performed by Krzhizhanovsky’s neologism “nonsensing [bessmyslia],” which is just one of the hundreds of in­ven­ted words in his oeuvre. The “nonsense syllables” by which the club’s members are called are another example of the creative recombination of the building blocks of language. Vladimir Markov notes the zaum device of “sequences that result from the speaker’s dropping one letter from a word to form the next word in the sequence,” a technique prob­ably influenced by articles on sectarian glossolalia.144 Passages in Krzhizhanovsky’s theoretical writings give form to the passage between the potential, the ­actual, and the transcendental through wordplay of the same sort. In Krzhizhanovsky’s essay “Philosopheme of the Theater,” he explains that the Rus­sian conditional particle бы (by), which can mean “if ” or “as if,” represents pure potentiality; adding a consonant to the end turns it into the word быт (byt)—­banal ordinary life. By tacking on a suffix, Krzhizhanovsky arrives at the third stage of бытие (bytie), the metaphysical concept of Being with a capital B. For Krzhizhanovsky, the by-­byt-­bytie sequence, like the ladder of letters leading from silentium to sum, illustrates the ceaseless dynamic through which material existence mediates the idea and the Ideal, potentiality on the one hand and transcendental concepts on the other. He takes t­hese punning resonances as proof that silence and potentiality are part of a cycle moving from idea through realization to ideality and back again—­another, more metaphysical version of the wheel of history in The Letter Killers Club, which also concerns the journey of an idea through its implementation and out the other side. A major subtext for The Letter Killers Club is Vladimir Odoevsky’s 1838 Rus­sian Nights, a collection of disparate tales, recounted over the course of nine nights, with framing discussions of a larger problematic: loosely put, the status of the individual work within the system of knowledge and power set in motion by the Enlightenment. In one story, the narrator discovers in an Italian bookshop a

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collection of monumental architectural plans by Giovanni Piranesi—­“colossal buildings, for each of which the construction would require millions of p­ eople, millions of ducats and centuries”—­that extend even to the excavation of mountains and the transformation of rivers into ornamental waterworks.145 One sinister volume is entirely devoted to vast dungeons of criminals undergoing excruciation. As the narrator buys the book, he is interrupted by a queer individual dressed in eighteenth-­century garb, who begs ten million ducats “in order to join Etna and Vesuvius with an arch.”146 This is Piranesi himself, who explains that the tortures of his imaginary dungeons are allegorical repre­sen­ta­ tions of his own torments as a genius who never found a patron willing to finance his proj­ects. “Eternal sleep had hardly closed my eyes when I was surrounded by specters in the shape of palaces, ­castles, h ­ ouses, halls, arches, columns,” Piranesi laments. His unrealized proj­ects maintain him in an agony of undeath ­until all his “colossal fantasies [zamysly] ­will exist on more than just paper.”147 Like Krzhizhanovsky’s storytellers, Piranesi has conceived fantastic proj­ects that, however implausibly, demand to pass from by into byt. “The spirits I engendered,” Piranesi says, “demanded my life,” and they w ­ ill not suffer him to leave the world u ­ ntil he has midwifed them into it.148 Their existence is the price of his nonexistence. Julia Vaingurt has spoken of Odoevsky’s story as prefiguring sublimely improbable proj­ects of the early Soviet period, such as Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International or Boris Iofan’s Palace of the Soviets.149 The parallels with Soviet fantasies are exact—­when Odoevsky’s narrator offers Piranesi a single ducat in alms, the architect says “[I ­will] add this money to the sum I am collecting for the purchase of Mont Blanc, in order to tear it down to its foundations; other­wise it ­will spoil the view from my plea­sure palace”; Trotsky’s Lit­er­a­ture and Revolution ends with a triumphal vision of “man, who ­will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build ­people’s palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc.”150 Both images are fantasies of art’s omnipotence, capitalizing on long-­standing images of spirit’s command over ­matter, the faith that moves mountains.151 For the Romantic writer as well as the communist revolutionary, the eternal soul is secularized as the demonic force of genius, which w ­ ill not rest u ­ ntil it has been realized as m ­ atter. In Krzhizhanovsky’s 1931 story “Bridge across the Styx,” a loathsome Acheronic frog comes to the land of the living in hopes of engaging a civil engineer to facilitate commerce between the ­human world and the undiscovered country. The land of the dead is “a nation like any other, but with somewhat inflated customs duties,” the frog explains: “upon crossing the border, one hundred p­ ercent of life is exacted from the living.”152 This ingenious creature has plenty of ideas



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to regulate trade between the two spheres. One is a vending machine with two slots; the customer slips a coin into one aperture, and a bullet shoots out of the other. The frog’s most cherished idea is for a Soviet engineer to build a modern suspension bridge over the Styx, across which humanity might cross efficiently into nonexistence, on an industrial scale. In “Bridge across the Styx,” Krzhizhanovsky inverts the grandiose avant-­ garde rhe­toric of zhiznetvorchestvo, or life creation, depicting instead smertetvorchestvo, or death creation—­something like Andrei Platonov’s Foundation Pit, in which the preliminary excavation for a vast all-­proletariat h ­ ouse becomes a mass grave for the peasants and workers. Just as in the allegory of the externalizers, the utopian totality of aestheticized life culminates in the cynical totality of mass suicide. In The Letter Killers Club, the grandiose failures of modernism to engineer the world in the image of art find a petty refraction in the idea’s strug­gle to find physical form in writing, so that it might, at the least, be sold. In fact, Krzhizhanovsky’s per­sis­tent theme of the alienated idea realizing itself through living recalls Marx’s concept of the commodity fetish, according to which produced objects—­the reified “dead ­labor” of the workers who made them—­seem to possess affective qualities that we comprehend through spiritual meta­phors of an uncanny vampire existence. Indeed, the art that moves us and the capital that dominates us can both be seen as an uncanny inheritance that exerts itself on our bodies. In this sense, Marx’s Gothic formulation of capital as “dead l­abour, that vampire-­like, only lives by sucking living ­labour” is the corollary of Paul de Man’s equally Gothic observation that to “mak[e] the dead speak” by investing ourselves in a literary text is to cede some portion of our life to the artwork.153 Krzhizhanovsky’s morbid images derive in part from the historical fact that many of the writers in Krzhizhanovsky’s milieu dis­appeared into Stalin’s camps as payment for the words that they had written. His writings remind us that the cost of a life in art is not just the monetary value of the book but the staggering fact that we spend our l­imited life spans largely absorbed in the alienated imaginations of the dead. Both kinds of value testify to the investment of ­human life into dead objects that continue to exert their influence, the capital that dominates us and the art that moves us.

Art and Ideology: Sorokin’s Discourse N. L. Liederman describes Krzhizhanovsky’s technique of “personification of the word,” in which stories, individual nouns, and even conjunctions and morphemes

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become “autotelic images” capable of acting in­de­pen­dently.154 This device is brought to grotesque culmination by Vladimir Sorokin, in the Soviet era a dissident author and ­after it a widely popu­lar novelist whose work interrogates the limits and legacies of totalitarianism. Mark Lipovetsky has written on Sorokin’s avowed desire to “fill Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture with corporeality,” manifested variously as the materialization of bodily meta­phors (a sailor “leaves his heart” with a girl in port—in a jar), the incarnation of discourse situations (a schoolboy’s internalization of pedagogic banalities becomes ­eager consumption of the teacher’s excrement), or the dismemberment of language into zaum, a pure material devoid of signification. In Lipovetsky’s insightful reading, Sorokin identifies the textual body with the Christian theology of incarnation: the word become flesh. In a symmetrical move, the totalitarian impulse exemplified by the atrocities of Stalinism transforms “the bodily into the spiritual or discursive” and culminates in the “dictatorship” of abstract ideas over ­human lives.155 In Sorokin’s early short story “The Swim,” ­later interpolated into his novel Blue Fat, ­human beings float in formation, holding torches and collectively spelling out a propaganda message in letters of fire for the crowds on the embankment: the main character is a comma. The scenario of a text spelled out by ­human bodies echoes and anticipates instances in which Rus­sian totalitarianism has literally made ­human bodies into a textual medium, for example the tribute of the airmen who in the 1930s flew in a formation to spell out the name “stalin” or the patients at a Kazan ­children’s hospital whose bodies, in 2022, ­were arranged to spell out the Latin letter Z in symbolic support for the invasion of Ukraine.156 Sorokin in interviews reminds us that his characters are “not ­people, it’s just letters on paper,” even as his fiction represents the tyrannical pro­cesses that make text out of ­human beings.157 He tests our reflex of emotional reaction to t­ hese “letters on paper” through scenes calculated to excite nausea and horror. Shocking tableaux of cannibalism and sexual deviance blur into interminable lists that render tedious even mass murder and defilement. Sorokin’s conception of the totalitarian as an impersonal discursive force exerted over the individual body is related to a narrative form in which interchangeable characters perform absurd functions within an inexorable plot structure. His novel The Norm (written 1979–83, published 1994) comprises hundreds of vignettes in which characters from e­ very walk of Soviet life eat “the norm,” something the reader gradually realizes to be an obligatory ration of excrement. Perhaps most egregious is Roman (written 1985–89, published 1994), in which an elaborate pastiche of nineteenth-­century country-­estate novels unexpectedly resolves, a­ fter the apparently culminative marriage scene, into the systematic slaughter of all 248 inhabitants of the village. “Roman went up



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to the bed and hit Aleksei Girin on the head with the axe. Alexei Girin ­didn’t move. Roman hit Marfa Girina on the head with the axe. Marfa Girina ­didn’t move. Roman went up to the stove and hit Semen Girin on the head with the axe. Semen Girin ­didn’t move. Roman went up to the couch and hit Ivan Girin on the head with the axe. Ivan Girin ­didn’t move.”158 The automatized language persists long a­ fter the massacre in an elaborate series of rituals in which Roman and his bride desecrate the corpses one by one and hang their innards on the iconostasis of the village church, ending only with the novel’s last words: “Roman stirred. Roman twitched. Roman groaned. Roman stirred. Roman jerked. Roman twitched. Roman stirred. Roman died.”159 ­Because Roman is at once the name of the character, the title of the book, and Rus­sian for “the novel,” the death of the main character is at the same time the end of the book we are reading and a punning literalization of the “death of the novel” popularly diagnosed by postmodern critics. The cata­logue of casualties can thus be read as the novel, or even the genre of the novel, performing an impersonal vio­lence on ­every figure in its zone of control. From a formal point of view, the pro­cess is not essentially dif­fer­ent from the endless consumption of excrement in The Norm or indeed from the pro­cesses of repetition that, in Excerpt from the Letters of a Rus­sian Officer about Finland, give rise to a solemn imperial ideology of historical destiny. In Roman, Sorokin bares the device, making a repetition of the most arbitrary and unmotivated kind—­the pun—­into the ground of an absurd and grotesque sequence. Patterns of sound precede language’s semantic function; arbitrary actions come through repetition to set the horizon of expectation and function as a narrative law. In Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy (2002–5), the mechanical automatization of discourse is justified by the gnostic premise that twenty-­three thousand rays of extraterrestrial light have been trapped in ­human flesh, to be “awakened” only when the host’s chest is smashed with a hammer made of ice from the Tunguska comet. As this pro­cess is repeated, each awakened heart speaks its “true name”—­a zaum sequence like “Bro” or “Fer.” This nonsignifying monosyllable is equivalent to the monastic names assumed by members of Krzhizhanovsky’s Letter Killers Club; it also recalls the primal verbal expressions of nature whose repetition, for Batiushkov, constitutes the source of language. Becoming indifferent to the “meat machines” that make up the mass of humanity, the newly awakened member joins the conspiracy to induct the remaining rays into the Brotherhood—­that is, to perpetuate the ritual march of awakenings that constitutes the text. In this fashion, the stock trope early in the book of an orphan entrusted to blind fate (“I ­didn’t understand where I was ­going or why. I was simply led. . . . ​Coincidence became the

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norm”) can be retrospectively identified as the inscrutable “language of the heart” that directs the Brotherhood’s actions and thus the novel’s plot (“as usual, we ­didn’t know what to do, but we believed in our hearts”).160 The determining power of fate cum discourse is rendered metafictional when four portraits of Rus­sian writers are described as portraits of “strange machines. They ­were created for writing books, that is, for covering thousands of pages of paper with combinations of letters” that teach readers “how to feel, love, worry, calculate, create, solve prob­lems, and build, in order to teach ­others ­later how to live according to this paper.”161 If “meat machines” (the narrator’s term for ­people), live and feel according to absurdities mechanically produced within the discourse of fiction, the Brotherhood lives by an equally absurd and equally fictional compulsion to hit ­people with ice hammers. This compulsion becomes a transcendent force insofar as its repetition constitutes Sorokin’s narrative, but in the same stroke, it calls into question fiction’s prerogative to instruct its readership in feeling and to direct its be­hav­ior. Sorokin’s art thus seems to respond to Fredric Jameson’s influential argument that postmodern culture has lost its ability to represent history coherently and is ­limited to “a practice of the randomly heterogenous and fragmentary and the aleatory” on the one hand and conspiracy theory on the other.162 For Jameson, history cannot be grasped as content but only as “the inexorable form of events, . . . ​a narrative category” that exerts itself as “ground and untranscendable horizon” of any local effort to impose a fixed meaning on “the impossible totality of the con­temporary world system.”163 Sorokin’s plots can be read as a sophisticated effort to give narrative form to the link between the grotesque, random, and unpredictable on the one hand and the inflexible, impersonal, and totalitarian on the other. First in Sorokin’s Soviet works, which deconstruct the clichés of Soviet culture by enacting them as literal narrative events, and then in a series of post-­ Soviet visions of tyrannical structures that merge the medieval past with a science fictional f­ uture, his books identify narrative caprice with totalitarian absurdity. His 2000 novel Blue Fat compares itself to a “fugue [fuga],” punning in Rus­sian on the word’s meaning in ­music and as a term of art in carpentry for the gap between boards connected by a hinge.164 Illustrating Sorokin’s post-­ Soviet shift to wider scales of history that implicate past and f­uture in the logic of his plots, the book begins as an epistolary novel set in a futuristic research laboratory, where clones of canonical Rus­sian authors—­Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, and ­others—­are bred for the layer of subcutaneous “blue fat” they produce while writing. A grotesque material manifestation of the immortality of art, this substance is impervious to entropy and is harvested in order to provide a source of perpetual power for a moon base. However, trog-



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lodyte worshipers of “Wet Rus­sian ­Mother Earth” raid the fa­cil­i­ty, seize the blue fat, and abscond with it to their under­g round home—an incestuous and Orphic descent of art into the depths of the earth, si­mul­ta­neously a womb and a grave. Packing the blue fat into a time machine, the sectarians send it into an alternative 1950s, where Stalin injects the stuff into his brain, bringing about an orgiastic u ­ nion of the totalitarian and artistic imaginations. Swelling to cosmic proportions, “the brain of Joseph Stalin gradually filled up the universe, swallowing stars and planets,” ­until ­after millions of years, it turns into a black hole and condenses to its original size, albeit “with a mass 345,000 times greater than that of the sun.”165 Now Stalin opens his eyes and delivers, on a silver salver, the letter that had inaugurated the novel in its first epistolary sequence. ­Here the narrative is revealed to be a time loop: Stalin, the universe-­swallowing dictator, is a mere messenger, whose role in the text is to tie together the past and f­ uture of a cyclical narrative that transcends him. This circular structure is interpretable ­either as art’s miraculous survival or its degrading travesty. Above all, the fat is a somatic manifestation of the word itself, similar to the excremental cakes of Soviet propaganda ingested in The Norm, the fish in Day of the Oprichnik that swims up to the brain and lays eggs, or the pyramidal “product” in The Blizzard that produces a hallucinatory experience of being boiled alive. In all t­ hese cases, and throughout Sorokin’s oeuvre, the penetration of the body by a materialized discourse precipitates mutual mimicry between the po­liti­cal and aesthetic imaginations. Represented flesh becomes the stage for an event that is ambiguously utopian or nightmarish, coercive or aesthetic, as some absurd and reified version of imagination penetrates the body, possesses it, and creates for it a new real­ity. Blue Fat’s structure in par­tic­u­lar lays bare the ambition of the totalitarian imagination to control a historical destiny or an aesthetic form that in fact exceeds its grasp: as the dictator injects the blue fat into his brain, he himself becomes a victim of historical or discursive contingencies. Alexander Etkind writes of Blue Fat as emblematic of the mode he calls “magic historicism,” a term he coins by analogy with “magic realism” to describe a con­temporary Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture that perpetually reworks the historical events of Stalinism.166 Like the elegy, magic historicism transposes loss into literary form, but it fails to bring about the restoration of a ­whole self who has survived the loss. Even the totalitarian aspirations of Stalin and Hitler are revealed as partial and distorted emanations of a truly total and impersonal logic that comprehends them. One explicit subtext for Blue Fat is Nietz­sche’s concept of eternal return, but the novel perhaps parallels more closely Mircea Eliade’s hypothesis of a “terror of history” that drives ­human thought to the comfort of cyclical time, in order to domesticate through ritual and repetition the terrible

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open-­ended uncertainty that is the f­ uture: for “­there is nothing that does not, in one way or another, find its explanation in the transcendent, in the divine economy.”167 Sorokin’s time loop imposes a mythic structure of return on a collection of competing ideologies that aspire to totality through linear development: the cap­i­tal­ist narrative of expansive growth, the religious narrative of salvation, the socialist narrative of dynamic pro­gress. Blue Fat moves perpetually through a global, even transplanetary capitalism, a nationalist cult of the Earth ­Mother, and a Stalinism that swallows up the universe. Krzhizhanovsky’s tale of the externalizers, in which humanity’s rise, hubris, and return to barbarism are endlessly repeated, already suggests a cyclical determinism, in which modernity in each iteration breaks on the rocks of an attempted utopia. For Sorokin, even more explic­itly than for Krzhizhanovsky, the artistic imagination stages the failure of the totalitarian imagination to impose totality on the larger shape of history. The wheel of history is itself conceived as an overdetermined narrative that repeats and repeats and repeats—­a sort of simulated prison within which ­actual totalitarian currents, or at least repre­sen­ ta­tions of them, can be confined. It is only a textual simulation, of course, and yet ­these artworks give sensible shape to the fact that even totalizing ideologies emerge from the ­human imagination and are delimited by their circumstances. Sorokin’s hermetic and overdetermined plot proves how puny any local totalitarianism must be, by comparison with the ongoing flow of history, whose totality is more im­mense, and more real, and whose arc remains unknown.

C h a p te r   2

The Epidemic The Infectious Imagination of Leo Tolstoy

What Is Art?, Tolstoy’s most explicit and summary account of his aesthetic philosophy, defines its subject through a meta­ phor of communicable illness: “Art is that ­human activity which consists in one person consciously transmitting to ­others, by certain exterior signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in o ­ thers being infected by t­ hose feelings and experiencing them.”1 Infectiousness (zarazitel’nost’) is a key trope throughout the text, even identified as art’s sine qua non: “Not only is infectiousness a certain sign of art, but the degree of the infectiousness is the only mea­sure of the value of art.”2 From Tolstoy’s somewhat curmudgeonly perspective, most so-­called artworks are mannered, false, and intellectualized; they appeal only to a jaded public alienated from genuine feeling. True art, which Tolstoy tends to associate with folk culture, communicates emotional states directly from artist to audience—­sometimes positive states like joy and faith, sometimes negative ones like lust and fear. Ultimately art holds forth the potential that this frictionless communication of feelings ­will become epidemic, “uniting all the most varied men in one feeling,” and bring about a total Christian u ­ nion of humankind.3 I would like to bracket for the time being the typical concerns about this theory as an aesthetic philosophy (Is it coherent? Can its moral and aesthetic aspects be reconciled? Does it require us to repudiate Tolstoy’s own masterpieces?) in order to make the s­ imple observation that this equation of the 59

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artistic and the infectious is only one instance of the greater and remarkably consistent disease theme that runs through Tolstoy’s fictions and diaries as well as his polemical writings. While we are accustomed to thinking of illness as an aberrant condition that must be “gotten over” in order to resume our everyday lives, Tolstoy himself, in an 1896 diary entry that is other­wise devoted to the aesthetic ideas expanded on in What Is Art?, voiced the opposing opinion that “illness is given to man as a beneficial indication of the fact that his ­whole life is bad and that it must be changed.”4 Richard Gustafson, in his discussion of this passage, concludes that “to Tolstoy, God’s greatest teaching device is illness.”5 Disease is a corrective rather than a debilitative phenomenon: inherently didactic, it “communicates” a valuable lesson merely through the fact of having been communicated. The salutary potential of illness is evident in What Is Art?’s utopian projection of a global ­human unity engineered by artistic infection, but it is just as forcefully pre­sent at the very root of Tolstoy’s literary proj­ect—­the obsessively kept diaries that Irina Paperno has demonstrated to be the laboratory of Tolstoy’s early fiction and that Tolstoy inaugurated while convalescing from gonorrhea in 1847.6 “It is now six days since I entered the clinic,” begins the first entry, “and that’s six days that I’ve been almost satisfied with myself. Les pe­ tites ­causes produisent les ­grands effets.” Rather than checking his pro­gress in life, Tolstoy confides, the “trivial circumstance” of gonorrhea is the “jolt [tolchok]” that has caused him to transcend himself: “to mount the step which I had long ago put my foot on, but had been quite unable to heave my body onto.”7 In Tolstoy’s own account, his beneficial brush with disease is the motive force that turns the young hedonist into the mature author; it provides the impulse for Tolstoy to undertake his lifelong regime of writing and self-­examination. ­These two treatments of sickness and writing, the 1847 diary entry and the 1897 What Is Art?, bookend the majority of Tolstoy’s fictions—­a corpus of literary works that are themselves highly involved with meta­phors of infection. Often t­ hese meta­phors can be traced through the entire rhetorical structure of the text and even read as mises en abyme that figure in miniature the dynamics and preoccupations of the larger work: as Rymvidas Šilbajoris puts it, Tolstoy’s power as a writer derives from “an artistic language in which each single semiotic sign reveals itself upon observation as a microcosm of the ­whole text.”8 Masterfully describing “paradigmatic actions” that “embody and reveal the ­whole” of the text, in which “similes and meta­phors are woven together into a network which is generated by a par­tic­ul­ ar emblematic ele­ment,” Richard Gustafson convincingly argues for an analogy between Tolstoy’s rhetorical structures and his moral ideas, insofar as “the relationship of part to w ­ hole in Tolstoy’s fiction resembles the relationship of part to ­whole in his metaphys-

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ics.”9 The simultaneous aesthetic and ideological unity of Tolstoy’s texts, which Gustafson terms “emblematic realism,” is brought about in this view through systems of repeated, interrelated figures, coherently motivated moral allegories that are also balanced rhetorical complexes. One well-­known example of Tolstoy’s symbolic practice, the subject of extended treatment in Boris Eikhenbaum’s classic study, is the unhappy steeplechase in Anna Karenina. The meta­phorical identification of the heroine with Vronksy’s steed in this scene enables the reader to recognize that the events of the race (Vronsky shoots the mare he has lamed as Anna realizes she is pregnant with his child) figure in miniature the entire Anna-­Vronsky plot.10 The scene therefore unfolds through multiple layers of meaning, not only for the alert reader but also for the characters, as it is by decoding Anna’s reaction to her lover’s fall that her husband at last realizes she has been unfaithful. The structure becomes a recursive one, whereby the husband’s interpretive activity affects the outcome of the plot, a plot that is itself already figured in the emblematic event that sparks his moment of insight. A more understated but similarly crucial scene is the one in Princess Betsy’s salon that I propose to read now as my paradigmatic example of the disease theme in Tolstoy’s fiction and whose full relevance emerges through its comparison, in a kind of figurative dialectic, with a counterpart scene in the Kitty-­Levin plot. In early plans, Tolstoy intended to open the novel with this society conversation, “in which the work’s central themes are all touched on,” in order to set the stage for their development throughout the plot.11 The topic ostensibly u ­ nder discussion, the conditions ­under which a marriage can be considered “happy,” remains the central concern of the first and most famous line of the published text: “All happy families are alike; ­every unhappy ­family is unhappy in its own way.”12 At the same time, the chatter in the salon is a slightly veiled treatment of Anna and Vronsky’s embryonic relationship, in the course of which Anna’s adultery becomes understood as inevitable. Its key motifs can be traced through the web of the novel’s rhe­toric not only back to its opening line but also, through the simile that begins the chapter, forward to the book’s denouement. As Anna enters Princess Betsy’s drawing room, “the conversation, interrupted by her entrance, again burnt up like the flame of a lamp that has been buffeted by the wind.”13 This image is one member in a long series of candle and lamp figures associated with Anna, culminating in the strikingly metafictional meta­phor of her death: “The candle by the light of which she had been reading the book filled with anx­i­eties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up again with a light greater than before, lit up for her all that had before been dark, flickered, began to grow dim, and went out for ever.”14 In this ultimate instance,

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the meta­phor of the candle suddenly flaring back up promises to illuminate the “book” we ourselves are reading, as within that book it appears to totally illuminate the title character’s life flashing before her eyes at its final moment. By anticipating the climactic figure of the illuminated pages of Anna’s life, the flaring up of the conversation in the drawing room is implicated in the novel’s metafictional currents: we are promised a minor epiphany, or at least some crucial chapter in Anna’s pro­gress ­toward the train tracks. Indeed, as talk resumes, it develops into a coded seduction, and when it is over, Vronsky’s eventual conquest is assured, both from the point of view of the lovers themselves and from that of their larger social circle. In response to a wordless glance “filled with love,” Vronsky concludes, “She loves me! She acknowledges it!”15 ­Later, as Anna and Vronsky sit together, the gathered ­women comment on the impropriety of their attention to each other, and when her husband announces his departure, Anna, “not looking at him,” says that she ­will remain at Princess Betsy’s to dine in Vronsky’s com­pany.16 Anna’s suicide, in the light of which she and the reader understand the narrative of her life, is the direct result of the understanding that she and Vronsky come to share, in the implicit languages of allegory and gesture, by the end of the soirée. ­After Anna’s entrance, the conversation turns to a “love match [brak po strasti]” that is at first dismissed ironically. “What antediluvian ideas you have! Who talks of love nowadays,” says the wife of an ambassador. She acknowledges the existence of “happy marriages, but only such as are founded on reason [brak po rassudku].” Vronsky responds by referring to the adulterous passion he has awoken in Anna, whose own marriage is a reasonable but loveless one: “Yes, but how often the happiness of marriages founded on reason crumbles to dust ­because the very passion that was disregarded makes itself felt l­ater.” Like the reader and the assembled com­pany, Anna recognizes Vronsky’s words as a reference to his romantic schemes and as an effort to persuade her to collaborate in them. The ambassador’s wife ­counters the argument with the simile of acquired immunity to a childhood illness: “But by ‘marriages founded on reason’ we mean marriages between ­those who have both passed through that madness. It’s like scarlet fever: one has to get over it.” To which Vronsky retorts, “Then someone should invent a way of inoculating love, like smallpox.”17 The irony of Vronsky’s witticism is that he has himself in­ven­ted such a method of inoculating love. He has enticed Kitty Shcherbatskaia into an amorous passion and then thrown her over in ­favor of Anna herself, to whom his words are now obliquely directed; indeed, Anna at this point changes the subject by saying that she has received a letter from Moscow, informing her that “Kitty Shcherbatskaia is very ill”—­the illness precipitated by Vronsky’s abandonment.18 Yet it is this same aborted love affair that allows Kitty, having

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“gotten over” her first love or figural scarlet fever, to fi­nally accept the “right” suitor, Levin, when he proposes (for the second time) l­ater in the book. Kitty’s subsequent involvement in ­family life counterpoints the continuing story of Anna herself, who has had no similarly prophylactic experience and whose illicit love affair with Vronsky is ultimately fatal—­a plot parallelism that carries through the w ­ hole book the dialectic between happy and unhappy families presented in its first line. Preventative exposure to a dangerous childhood disease and preventative exposure to a dangerous youthful passion are, then, meta­phor­ically identified, and that identification is meaningful to the text’s larger narrative and ideological structure despite the fact that it is ironically articulated in the de­cadent environment of a Petersburg salon. The importance of emotional inoculation is highlighted when we turn back five chapters to reread a scene in the Shcherbatsky ­house­hold that foreshadows the meta­phor and realizes it in advance. Kitty, afflicted since Vronsky’s departure with a mysterious illness, is about to go abroad to recuperate at a German spa. She has just been subjected to an apparently shameful examination at the hands of a quack doctor—­for Tolstoy, all such examinations are shameful, and all doctors are quacks—­when her ­sister Dolly comes to bid her farewell: one of Dolly’s ­children appears to have scarlet fever, so she w ­ ill not be able to leave her quarantined ­house again u ­ ntil the disease has run its course. Kitty describes to her ­sister her feelings of shame and humiliation: “Every­thing appears to me in the coarsest and most horrid aspect. . . . ​This is my illness. Perhaps it ­will pass.” It is only in the innocent com­pany of ­children, she says, that she feels well, and Dolly regrets that ­because her own c­ hildren are ill with an infectious disease, Kitty cannot come to visit them. However, Kitty insists, “But I w ­ ill come. I have had scarlet fever 19 and I w ­ ill persuade Mama to let me.” Dolly’s c­ hildren do indeed have scarlet fever, and Kitty and Dolly together nurse them back to health: the clever comparison made in the Petersburg drawing room, that first love and scarlet fever are parallel phenomena that must both be experienced firsthand in order to gain immunity, is h ­ ere realized in the events of Kitty’s life. The inoculation meta­phor is thereby integrated into the larger narrative through a series of plot points that also serve as anticipatory figures. Having survived scarlet fever, Kitty is able to enter into domestic life and care for sick c­ hildren, foreshadowing her role as a nurse at the German spa and also her eventual role as caretaker of her ­children and Levin’s tubercular ­brother in her own “happy” h ­ ouse­hold. At the same time, she is able to marry and to establish this f­ amily only ­because she has already “gotten over” Vronsky, her dangerous passion. The meta­phorical identification of the physiological and emotional infections, scarlet fever and irrational love, unites ­these two

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apparently separate threads in the novel, even as it connects to the book’s other major themes (the happiness and unhappiness of h ­ ouse­holds) and r­ unning figures (the image of the flame that metafictionally illuminates Anna’s life). Importantly, this complex meta­phor is generated not in any single scene but through the interaction of parallel plots. The Babylon of a Petersburg drawing room and the domestic hearth of the Shcherbatsky ­family are drawn together within a single rhetorical horizon. In fact, the “happy” ­house­hold of the Kitty-­ Levin narrative is made pos­si­ble only through this counterpoint, its risky communication or contamination with the “unhappy” narrative of Anna and Vronsky—­the adulterous agent that ruins marriages. Our reading of the disease theme thus elucidates not only the individual c­ areers of the characters but also the plot parallelism that structures the novel as a w ­ hole through what Eikhenbaum terms its “dialectical unity,” the contrapuntal technique following from the novel’s initial distinction between happy and unhappy families.20

Dialectical Unity Tolstoy’s use of rhetorical parallelism has theoretical import if only b­ ecause it debunks the prejudice that meta­phors are not dynamic ele­ments of plot, a notion that is implicitly pre­sent in Roman Jakobson’s famous but oversimplified association of lyric poetry with meta­phor and of narrative prose with metonymy and that finds an especially inflexible formulation when Mikhail Bakhtin writes that “no ­matter how one understands the interrelationship of meanings in a poetic symbol (a trope), the interrelationship is never of the dialogic sort; it is impossible to imagine a trope (say, a meta­phor) being unfolded through the two exchanges of a dialogue.”21 In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy not only unfolds a trope through dialogue but engineers its full significance through a kind of metadialogue between the two main strands of the novel’s plot. Indeed, the trope is itself the agent of communication: it is precisely as a communicated “infection” that the Anna-­Vronsky plot enables the Kitty-­Levin plot to take place. The pathological communication of an emotion—­even a dangerous infatuation and even when realized through the meta­phor of a dangerous disease—­can be prophylactic and beneficial in Kitty’s case, even as in Anna’s case it is fatal and even though both infections proceed from the same vector: Vronsky, who himself unwittingly formulates the key idea of “inoculating love, like smallpox.” We can take t­hese ideas of “dialectical unity” and communication between narratives one step further by observing that the complex of Tolstoyan tropes relating to disease operates not just within the text of Anna Karenina but through-

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out Tolstoy’s oeuvre. As such, disease imagery allows us to compare his activity within dif­fer­ent genres (his autobiographical, polemical, and fictional writings) and from his early to his late c­ areer. Thus, the meta­phor of youthful indiscretion as vaccination compactly recurs in Tolstoy’s last full-­length novel, the 1899 Resurrection: “When Nekhliudov, having enlisted in the guards, ran through and gambled away so much money with his aristocratic companions that Elena Ivanovna was obliged to borrow against her capital, she was barely distressed, thinking it was natu­ral and even desirable for this smallpox to be inoculated in one’s youth and in good com­pany.”22 The medical meta­phor is clear even if it is not developed as fully as in Anna Karenina, even though the vaccination does not immediately “take” (as sometimes happens even in medicine proper), and even though Elena Ivanovna, willfully blind to Nekhliudov’s moral peril, is, like the Petersburg socialites, essentially misguided in her attitude.23 If we expand the semantic field of “inoculation” in this novel to include grafting, which is expressed in Rus­sian through the same word (privit’), Resurrection provides a positive counterpoint in a peasant’s son who has become a wealthy philanthropist and whose liberal ideas represent (at least as ironically focalized through Nekhliudov) his “healthy” incorporation of, rather than contamination by, Western culture.24 As Tolstoy’s use of the word “healthy” in this context implies, his grafting imagery might be at least partially mapped onto his disease themes, and in fact, it is not always clear, especially in his polemical writings, which is the direct sense of the word privit’ as he uses it. Turning back to Tolstoy’s early fiction, we find that his 1859 novella ­Family Happiness unfolds through a narrative of prophylactic infection that, though more diffuse and not as fully literalized as in his mature works, is especially rich in opportunities for comparison with Anna Karenina. As is clear from its title, ­Family Happiness is similarly preoccupied with the happiness and unhappiness of households—­indeed, in both texts the “happy” f­amily estate is called Pokrovskoe—­and it too features a young bride, married to a much older man, who is tempted to adultery ­because she has not previously experienced a youthful passion. A few years into her marriage, the restless narrator experiences a prophylactic version of adultery when an Italian nobleman attempts to seduce her and succeeds in planting a single kiss on her cheek. As he draws near, she relates, “a fever ran through my veins, my sight grew dim, I was shivering. . . . ​ Suddenly I felt the kiss on my cheek and shivering all over and turning cold, I stood still and stared at him. . . . ​‘Je vous aime!’ he whispered in the voice that was so like my husband’s.”25 At this point, the tryst is interrupted, and having experienced through meta­phors of illness the entire pro­gress of an adulterous romance—­fever, chill, failing sight—­the narrator somewhat improbably resolves to salvage her marriage; the Italian nobleman’s statement of illegitimate

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love, which recalls to her the voice of her legitimate spouse, ultimately directs her back to her ­family responsibilities. Afterward, accusing her husband of exposing her to the danger of seduction by allowing her too much freedom, he responds pedantically, “All of us, and especially you ­women, must have personal experience of all the nonsense of life, in order to get back to life itself; the evidence of other p­ eople is no good. . . . ​Personal experience was necessary, and now you have had it.”26 As in Kitty Shcherbatskaia’s case, the experience is ultimately beneficial. Instead of leading the narrator to literalize the passion, the kiss actually prevents the apparently inevitable adultery and returns the narrator to the domestic fold, “life itself,” where she finds true “­family happiness,” or at any rate resignation. Yet for this one dangerous moment, fornication and infection are fully pre­sent in figural form: the kiss metonymically communicates the extremity of passion and meta­phor­ically communicates the disease through which that figural adultery is conceptualized. Given the consistency with which the trope of infection recurs throughout the span of Tolstoy’s ­career and the range of genres in which he wrote, I propose that disease pre­sents us with a crucial isotopy—to enlist A. J. Greimas’s term for a set of concepts that, by appearing in multiple and even contradictory combinations of relationships, generate a meaningful unity within a work or a body of work—­that affords us, without resorting to biographical or cultural determinism, a point of entry into Tolstoy’s writings as a coherent and meaningful corpus.27 The relationships between the terms may be manifested differently in dif­fer­ent instances, but even when the inoculation theme is implicated in directly contradictory outcomes, as in the two parallel plots of Anna Karenina or in our comparison of the positive and negative results of youthful temptation in ­Family Happiness and Resurrection, respectively, ­those instances remain expressions of a coherent rhetorical complex. In the many permutations of emotional and physiological contagion found in Tolstoy’s literary corpus—­prophylactic and pathological, effective and inconsequential, salutary and damaging—­his aesthetic philosophy and his literary practice participate in a single system of concepts and figures. Even if What Is Art? cannot be logically reconciled with itself and with Tolstoy’s other writings, it can be read as manifesting the same rhetorical paradigm.

Art Is Inoculation How do we then bring our observations on Tolstoy’s novels into dialogue with his explicit theory of aesthetics? Returning to the meta­phor of contagion in What Is Art?, Tolstoy states in italics and no uncertain terms that “the stronger

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the infection, the better the art is as art, not to speak of its contents, that is, in­de­pen­ dently of the value of ­those sensations it conveys.”28 Tolstoy specifies two axes according to which works of art can be judged. On the one hand, we have true art versus counterfeit art: art that is actually infectious and successfully communicates a clear, par­tic­u­lar, and sincere emotional state (for example, a peasant song in which “­there was expressed such a definite feeling of joy, liveliness, energy, that I did not myself notice how I became infected”) versus cultural forms that are mannered, obscure, imitative, and of at most intellectual interest (like the Beethoven sonata that “was only an unsuccessful attempt at art, containing no definite feeling and therefore infecting no one with anything”).29 On the other hand, we have good art versus bad art, a moral judgment that distinguishes between artworks that communicate desirable emotional states (“firmness in truth, devotion to the ­will of God, self-­renunciation, re­spect for ­people and love of them,” ­etc.) and that deplorable art that “directly corrupts ­people by infecting them with the very worst feelings, the most harmful to humanity, of superstition, patriotism, and, above all, sensuality.”30 In keeping with his authorial proj­ect’s origin in convalescence from gonorrhea, Tolstoy seems especially concerned with “all that horrible female nakedness,” and meta­phoric infection in his fiction frequently appears in juxtaposition with or as a figure for sexual desire.31 Tolstoy’s schema has, as a rule, been skeptically received by scholars, whose reaction can be ascribed in part to sheer defensiveness: Tolstoy, defining literary critics as t­ hose who are “devoid of the ability to be infected by art,” dismisses the very idea of an intellectual response to it.32 On a more pragmatic level, Tolstoy’s definition of art is difficult to accept ­because he denounces as frauds ­those authors, like Shakespeare, to whom we usually refer as the gold standards of artistic quality and in fact dismisses as counterfeit almost all of his own works (exempting only two works: “Prisoner of the Caucasus” and “God Sees the Truth but Waits”). Fi­nally, Tolstoy pre­sents his own tendentious moral prescriptions as the sole evaluative criterion within the category of true art, and ­those thinkers who, like Gary Jahn, have recuperated What Is Art? as propounding a generally valid philosophy of art have been able to do so only by self-­consciously “divorc[ing] the aesthetic from the moral component” and rejecting the latter as narrow and sanctimonious.33 However, art in Tolstoy’s theory has an avowedly moral telos in the u ­ nion of humankind, and in his own terms, the evaluative distinction between “good” and “bad” art can be made solely as a moral judgment. Reduced to its distinction between true and false art, stripped of its ethical-­evaluative function and of its narrative of art’s place and promise in the historical and religious evolution of society, Tolstoy’s theory lacks most of the ideas that are specific to it.

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It is in this reductive sense that other proponents of emotive aesthetics, like John Dewey, have praised Tolstoy for seeing that “works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man and man.”34 George Steiner in his essay on Tolstoy characterizes criticism itself as a pro­ cess of transmission analogous, if secondary to, aesthetic infection: “Through some primary instinct of communication,” he writes, “we seek to convey to ­others the quality and force of our experience” of a literary text.35 Dewey and Steiner prefer the term “communication” to Tolstoy’s own “infection,” and one of our most insidiously instinctive objections to What Is Art? may be Tolstoy’s provocative choice of infectiousness, with all the pejorative associations of illness intact, as the fundamental meta­phor of aesthetic experience. As Caryl Emerson notes, the “epidemiological resonances” of this term “are of course deliberate—­for in Tolstoy’s view, ­every impor­tant truth had to prove itself on the individual body.”36 From a more narrowly lexical perspective, we can observe, with Jahn, that “infection [zarazhenie]” stands in contrast with the more common aesthetic term “expression [vyrazhenie],” words that, in Rus­ sian, are distinguished only by the prefix.37 Tolstoy takes care in What Is Art? to distinguish between two distinct communicative functions coinciding with expression and infection, respectively, writing that “art is one of the two organs of humanity’s pro­g ress. Through words man shares in thought, through the images of art he shares in feeling with all men.”38 The artistic function proper—­even in verbal art—is understood as imagistic or figural and as distinct from the analytic or mimetic function of language to formulate and represent one’s thoughts. Infection and expression are contrasted not only in the aesthetic tract but also in the fiction, and u ­ nder the same names. The 1906 short story “What I Dreamed” employs the contrast to describe the onset of yet another adulterous passion: “He spoke of his work, of his ­people, of a new Swedish novel, and she herself could not say how and when that terrible infection [zarazhenie] of glances and smiles began, the meaning of which was impossible to express [vyrazit’] in words, but which possessed a meaning, as it seemed to her, surpassing any words. T ­ hese glances and smiles opened their souls to each other, and not only their souls, but certain tremendous and very impor­tant secrets common to all humanity. E ­ very word they spoke received from t­hese smiles the greatest and most blissful meaning.” Infection is, then, precisely that which exceeds or goes unspoken in signifying language, and as the communication of an emotional state through some vector—­eye contact, facial expression, m ­ usic, or any other form of ­human interaction—it is distinct from the communication of a fact, idea, or intention. Language itself, even lit­er­a­ture on apparently unrelated topics, is a potential vector of infection: the words the lovers speak are imparted

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with a meaning over and above the words themselves, and “the words of the books they read out loud received the same meaning.”39 Despite the ironic undertone to this passage, all the ele­ments (save possibly deliberateness) of artistic infection as described in What Is Art? are pre­sent. We have the contrast of expression and infection, an emotional contagion, and even a sarcastic but palpable sense of movement ­toward universal ­union in the communication of secrets “common to all humanity,” which seems to exist in satirical counterpoint to scenes of community through art throughout Tolstoy’s oeuvre. Perhaps ­because the social manneredness and grammatical conventionality of ordinary language obstruct emotional infection, the characters in Tolstoy’s fictions tend to share their most intense feelings through acts we can broadly define as figurative: a meta­phorical excess of infectious meaning over and beyond literal language (as ­here) or a synecdochic intuition of the part from the w ­ hole, as in Anna Karenina’s famous, if implausible, chalkboard scene, in which Kitty immediately grasps from only its initial letters the sentence “When you answered it cannot be, did you mean then or never?”40 A ­whole love conversation ensues in which, although ­every word is abbreviated to its initial, “every­thing is said.” Afterward, Levin refuses to let his b­ rother speak of his engagement in “words so ordinary, so insignificant,” but is delighted to speak with a doorman who is “infected by Levin’s exultation as men get infected by ­others’ yawning.”41 ­There are thus two coexisting aspects to the infectious function in verbal art: on the one hand, we find Tolstoy’s explic­itly valorized princi­ples of clarity, simplicity, and sincerity, a language that is so transparent that the emotional experience shines through directly, while on the other hand, Tolstoy, in his depictions of aesthetic infection, associates art with the figurative, with meaning produced over and above what is said directly. If we bring this tension back to our original generalizations about Tolstoy’s artistic language, it is consistent with Gustafson’s concept of emblematic realism—an intuitively grasped moral tale that is at the same time an intricate assemblage of rhe­toric. The emotional and ideological aspects are both to speak through a language that does not distract from them and to speak over and above that language. Infection powerfully figures ­these uneasily coexistent aspects of artistic activity, both ­because, as figure, it pushes us beyond the limits of expressive language and ­because it takes place, as Tolstoy would like to have it, on an irresistible, physiological plane. It can be compared to other irrational ­drivers of narrative: in Anna Karenina, the “external force” that drives Levin to Kitty, the “coarse mysterious power that . . . ​ruled his life and demanded fulfilment of its ­will” that prevents Alexei Karenin from achieving a rapprochement with Anna, or the “evil power,” which Levin resists and Anna does not, that draws

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the characters to suicide.42 As in the case of Dostoevsky’s diseases, such powers are susceptible both to mystical and to rational explanations, neither of which fully accounts for their activity. In an early conversation on spiritualism, Levin doggedly insists on materialist accounts of consciousness, while Vronsky entertains “other forces which we do not yet know” that might explain occult phenomena.43 When Stepan Oblonsky is confronted by his wife with evidence of adultery, he “involuntarily (‘reflex action of the brain,’ thought Oblonsky, who was fond of physiology)” smiles a stupid smile that alienates his wife, so that he requires his ­sister Anna’s intercession to patch up the breach.44 At the other end of the book, Oblonsky goes as Anna’s emissary to Petersburg to petition for a divorce, which is denied b­ ecause a French mystic, speaking “in his real or pretended sleep,” disapproves of it.45 In t­ hese instances, which bracket Anna’s ­career, a phenomenon that is not quite language shapes the plot as it communicates between the characters on a level beyond consciousness. This uncanny force can seem rapturous, as in the magical communication between Kitty and Levin during the proposal scene, or sinister, as in the unkempt French-­speaking peasant that Anna and Vronsky, in another magical meeting of minds, both see in their separate dreams. Tolstoy is as likely to employ disease rhe­toric to thunder against “unhealthy” lifestyles and moral “contagion” as he is to cast disease in a positive light (by, as we have seen, expanding the semantic field of “infectious joy” or “contagious laughter,” insisting on the corrective function of illness as a warning that we live wrongly, or depicting a quasi-­inoculatory experience of physiological or moral exposure that renders the subject immune to temptation thereafter). On several occasions, Tolstoy uses vaccination imagery to speak of the official church as an etiolated version of Christ’s teachings that renders its members incapable of being “infected” with true religious feeling, as in his open letter “To the Clergy”: “The Chris­tian­ity you preach is the inoculation of a false Chris­tian­ity, like the inoculation of smallpox or diphtheria, rendering the one inoculated with it forever incapable of receiving true Chris­tian­ity.”46 Tolstoy expresses derision even for the medical practice of vaccination. As part of a diatribe against the false hope promulgated by secular scientific discourse, What Is Art? itself remarks that “we are now able to inoculate preventative diphtheria”—­which he sees as perpetuating unjust social practices by palliating their most vis­i­ble symptoms, the diseases of the poor that ­ought properly to remind us of the wrongness of class division and of tolerance for suffering.47 Tolstoy’s ambivalence ­toward disease mirrors the ambivalence he expresses about art itself, which he portrays as both a g­ reat corrupter and the potential catalyst of a unified humanity; his audience o ­ ught to be at once completely open to the artistic infections that ­will erase the divisions among ­people and

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to be schooled in re­sis­tance to the sensual or jingoistic infections that create such exploitative divisions. Yet, as we have seen, he repeatedly returns to meta­ phors of inoculation with greater or lesser obviousness, and in his repre­sen­ta­ tions of artistic experience, he often seems to be attempting to vaccinate his readers against the kind of harmful infection that ruins his characters, presenting their experience of dangerous art in a form attenuated by irony and estrangement. A key example is Anna Karenina on the train, reading a novel by the light of the flickering candle that develops into the metafictional meta­phor of her own illuminated life. Over­eager to “live herself,” Anna desires to enter into her reading with the completeness of experience, to realize the figures of art, some of which, like the sickbed nurse, appertain to the happy plot of which she is not, as it turns out, the heroine. “When she read how the heroine of the novel nursed a sick man, she wanted to move about the sick-­room with noiseless footsteps; when she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she wished to make that speech; when she read how Lady Mary rode to hounds, teased the bride, and astonished every­one by her boldness—­she wanted to do it herself.” Something in the novel makes her feel ashamed, but she reasons away that sense of shame and succumbs to a series of sexual and epidemiological symptoms that anticipate the themes of What Is Art? “Overcome with unreasoning joy,” she has “delirious thoughts” of slippage from one individual to another: “Am I myself or another [ia sama ili drugaia]?”48 The dissolution of Anna’s identity—­the identification with literary characters or with other h ­ uman beings that, in What Is Art?, brings about the teleological unity—­here seems a terrifying and disorienting loss of self. An analy­sis by Yi-­Ping Ong argues that this scene has become so canonical ­because it evokes the phenomenology of novel reading itself: a suspension of self that resembles critical awareness but that tends not to enhance subjective experience through empathy or self-­consciousness but actually to efface the reader.49 Anna acts out this fate for us. She has “the power to give way” to t­ hese thoughts “or to resist” them, and to clear her head, she goes out for a walk on the platform where Vronsky is waiting for her—­setting in motion the train of events that brings about her downfall precisely at the moment when she seems to be separating herself from the heady experience of literary identification. This scene anticipates the periodic return of her delirium throughout the novel, lastly when the candle by which she had been reading on the train becomes the one that, in her interior monologue ­under the train, illuminates the book of her life for herself and for the reader; at the same time, we understand the metafictional point that Anna’s temptation to identify with the En­glish romance figures our own temptation to identify with Anna. All t­hese meta­phor­ically identified texts—­the one Anna reads, the book of Anna’s life, the novel Anna Karenina

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itself—­are meta­phor­ically continuous with one another, and as we insert ourselves into the chain by identifying ourselves with Anna, we too are given a choice between succumbing to the second­hand experience or schooling ourselves in re­sis­tance to it. Are we ourselves or are we another; are we ourselves or are we her? “Tolstoï’s own special contribution to the novelistic art,” according to David Herman, is the interior monologue, “a method by which writers can get into the heads of their characters.”50 In blurring the bound­aries between p­ eople in the name of h ­ uman communion, this invasive technique conjures up profane forms of merged identity—­especially the venereal communion that links the isolated bourgeois ­family to the open community of the brothel by way of adultery. Noting an entry in Tolstoy’s diary specifying that the seducer in The Kreutzer Sonata poaches other men’s wives instead of frequenting prostitutes for fear that “he might catch an infection,” Herman links the fear of social diseases to the aesthetic meta­phor of infection in What Is Art?51 The production of empathic identification in fiction is in this view shadowed by the vectors of epidemiological u ­ nion, both in its utopian variants and in the travesty of communal f­ amily that is universal adultery. In experiencing Anna’s life, charged as it is with figural infection, we may be preserved from its real­ ity in a double sense: preserved from the sin of adultery, which we have prophylactically experienced through her, and also, perhaps, inured against the danger of losing the self through identification with morally bad artworks, which we have also experienced through her. This complex of plot, rhe­toric, and ideology is closely paralleled by the scene in War and Peace in which Anatole Kuragin plots his seduction of Natasha Rostov at the opera while a young ­woman is abducted onstage “to the enthusiastic shouts of the audience.”52 Tolstoy’s transcription of the per­for­mance, which precisely anticipates the similarly estranging account of a Wagner opera that Tolstoy appends to What Is Art?, renders it bizarre: “One very fat girl in a white silk dress sat apart on a low bench, to the back of which a piece of green cardboard was glued. They all sang something. . . . ​A man with tight silk trousers over his stout legs, and holding a plume and a dagger, went up to her and began singing, waving his arms about.”53 All this seems absurd to the reader and initially to Natasha as well (“she saw only the painted cardboard and the queerly dressed men and ­women who moved, spoke, and sang so strangely in that brilliant light”), but ultimately she is corrupted by both Anatole and the drama, becoming “quite submissive to the world she found herself in. All that was ­going on before her now seemed quite natu­ral, but on the other hand all her previous thoughts of her betrothed, of Princess Mary, or of life in the country did not

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once recur to her mind.”54 The lesson remains unlearned, and the opera that might have prevented the seduction—­had Natasha, like the reader, recognized it as a farcical version of Anatole’s proposal that she break her engagement and run away with him—­instead becomes an accessory to it. Like Kitty in Anna Karenina, Natasha experiences the aftermath of her temptation as disease, succumbing to a long illness that is both a physical and a moral recuperation. An intriguing article by Douglas Robinson outlines “the psychosocial intertwining of disease and cure in Tolstoy’s aesthetic imagination” and powerfully links it to Tolstoy’s novelistic practice by way of the Tolstoyan technique of estrangement or defamiliarization (ostranenie) described in Viktor Shklovsky’s classic essay “Art as Device.”55 Retrospectively diagnosing Tolstoy with a ­mental disorder, depersonalization, that renders the world always already absurd and alienated, Robinson argues that Tolstoy’s perception of operas and other artistic media as false and forced derived from his pathological inability to recognize any ­human be­hav­ior as genuine. Noting that Tolstoy’s explicit statements do not allow for cathartic or inoculatory experiences of the kind we have identified in his fictional practice—­“garbage in, garbage out”— he suggests that Tolstoy’s defamiliarizing style “turns out to be a more complex kind of homeopathic or cathartic cure for the disease of depersonalization, estrangement as a cure for estrangement, alienation as a cure for alienation.”56 Scenes like the alienated description of the opera provide us with a corrective sensation of strangeness in the face of phenomena that we take for granted, that we are numb to, and thereby restore to us the possibility of real sensation. This account suggestively identifies a homeopathic or inoculatory current at work alongside the obvious disease theme in What Is Art?, but in tying the unsettling and unaccountable ele­ments of Tolstoy’s theory to a diagnosis of chronic depersonalization, Robinson essentially pathologizes genius and comes close to relegating Tolstoy’s aesthetics to the status of an individual neurosis. By grounding Tolstoy’s aesthetics in a biographical reading, Robinson sidesteps ­those aspects of it that exceed Tolstoy: his much-­imitated innovations in novelistic technique and the universal claims of his moral prescriptions.

Social Diseases To treat Tolstoy’s theory as primarily a function of the author’s psy­chol­ogy, however, is to ignore the point that much of What Is Art? is devoted to a plangent critique of social ills that cannot be dismissed as vagaries of Tolstoy’s admittedly idiosyncratic personality: class divisions, false consciousness, and all manner of

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everyday exploitations. In his narrative of a culturally unified Christian past corrupted by economic modernity and in his hope that artistic activity can restore that unity in symbol or in actuality, Tolstoy’s treatise can in fact be placed among works like Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education or Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, which similarly postulate a primal consciousness fractured by the transition to the modern age. In Tolstoy’s historical vision, we have since the Re­nais­sance, due to man’s division from man, most poignantly in class exploitation, forgotten art’s necessary role in the “the ­whole complex work of humanity,” which “consists on the one hand in destroying the physical and moral barriers that prevent the ­union of men, and on the other in establishing ­those princi­ples, common to all men, which can and must unite all men into one universal brotherhood.”57 Like Schiller’s account of an art that, by creating models of formal unity, rebukes and reeducates a society fragmented by specialization or Lukács’s account of the novel as a genre of “transcendental homelessness” for the holistic consciousness of the classical age, Tolstoy’s work both yearns for ­wholeness and looks to art, through an emotional contagion that w ­ ill unite the multitude in a single feeling, to create or to restore it. The trope of infection thus operates both as a symptom of humanity’s fractured, fallen state and as the means of reinstating its unity with itself and with the world. It can be fruitfully contrasted to other indictments of a fractured humanity that seeks community in reason rather than in feeling, for example, Raskolnikov’s dream of the plague of egoism in the epilogue of Crime and Punishment. The 1857 short story “Lucerne,” closely based on Tolstoy’s diaries, revolves around an aesthetic idyll that is also a utopian picture of humanity rendered harmonious by its participation in a community of art. As the vacationing narrator, Count Nekhliudov, approaches his Swiss ­hotel, he hears a ­music whose “revivifying effect” renders him immediately “happy and cheerful.” At first, this ­music seems to have a collective character. “I could clearly distinguish the full chords of a guitar which vibrated sweetly in the eve­ning air and several voices which by intercepting one another did not actually sing the melody but indicated it by chiming in at the chief passages,” Nekhliudov observes. “The voices sometimes seemed nearer and sometimes farther away; now you could hear a tenor, now a bass, and now a guttural falsetto with a warbling Tyrolese yodel.”58 Arriving at the scene, he discovers that the ­music is made by a single itinerant singer, whose ability to produce the effect of a choral multitude prefigures the social function of his song to gather persons and t­hings into a configuration or­ga­nized by ­those same princi­ples of harmonious diversity. On the steps at the win­dows, and on the balconies of the brilliantly lighted ­hotel, stood ladies resplendent in full-­skirted dresses, gentlemen

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with the whitest of collars, a porter and footmen in gold-­embroidered liveries; in the street, in the semicircle of the crowd, and farther along the boulevard among the lime trees, elegantly dressed waiters, cooks in the whitest of caps and blouses, girls with their arms around one another, and passers-by, had gathered and ­stopped. They all seemed to experience the same sensation that I did, and stood in silence around the singer, listening attentively. All ­were quiet, only at intervals in the singing, from far away across the ­water came the rhythmic sound of a hammer, and from the Freschenburg shore the staccato trills of the frogs intermingled with the fresh, monotonous whistle of the quails.59 ­ nder the influence of this performance—­“uniting all the most varied men U in one feeling,” as What Is Art? puts it four de­cades ­later—­artist and audience, leisure and servant classes are joined in a transcendental harmony. With the introduction of the hammer’s rhythm, this harmony incorporates l­ abor; with the contributions of the frogs and quails, the natu­ral world. The scene’s fantasy of a quasi-­political power that emanates from the artist and organizes the world around him represents Tolstoy’s narcissistic ambition as well as his utopian aspect. When the singer receives no payment or recognition from the ingrate crowd ­after his per­for­mance, the narrator brings him into the h ­ otel restaurant in order to shatter in practice the social hierarchies that had seemed suspended for the duration of the song. The gesture is humiliatingly inadequate: by attempting to distinguish himself from the other guests through a demonstration of his sensitivity and also through his exertions to oblige the ­hotel workers to serve the indigent artist despite their instincts of social hierarchy, Nekhliudov has ­violated the very princi­ple of harmonious unity to which the song gave voice. The role of the artist is not to stand above the world and to regulate it but to abandon himself, as the public of an artwork does, to that divine ­music that precedes and exceeds its per­ for­mance. “In your pride you thought you could separate yourself from the universal law,” contemplates Nekhliudov in the final lines, which complete the thought, “but you, too, with your mean and petty indignation at the waiters, have been playing your necessary part in the eternal and infinite harmony.”60 Although only cacophony seems to result from his effort to orchestrate class conflict on his own terms, even that disharmony is legible from the perspective of the ­whole as an ele­ment in a universal composition. In this denouement, the artist seems not to be a po­liti­cal leader who stands above the prob­lems he attempts to solve but the man who empties himself in order to receive the original creative voice of God or nature. This transcendental harmony appears in the artist and is transmitted to the bodies of his

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public precisely ­because he has relinquished his separation from the rest of humanity, or indeed from the frogs that croak along with him in the marsh. Paradoxically, this attitude of nonhierarchical ­union with the ­whole is at the same time an embrace of isolation. “Remove a person from society, and he ­will enter into himself,” writes Tolstoy in his first diary entry of 1847, which goes on to claim that the “chief benefit” of his fateful hospital stay is the perceptual clarity that comes with being removed from other ­human beings. In a move betraying the influence of Rousseau, Tolstoy identifies this separation as a recovery of the original voice of soul or reason, from which society has deviated and to which the self begins to conform the moment it has cast off its subordination to convention: “Let reason act, and it w ­ ill direct you to the right way, w ­ ill give you the rules you need to enter bravely into society,” enthuses Tolstoy. “Every­thing that is consistent with the first of h ­ uman faculties—­reason—­will soon become consistent with every­thing that exists; an individual ­human being’s reason is a part of existence, and a part cannot disrupt the order of the ­whole. . . . ​Therefore form your reason so that it corresponds with the ­whole, with the source of all ­things.” The execution is more difficult than the intention, of course: the entry concludes by acknowledging that “it is easier to write ten volumes of Philosophy, than to put anything into practice.”61 Ten years ­later, the narrator of “Lucerne” continues to strug­gle on the same ground. Although his first instinct is to elevate himself above ­others, in order to force them to accept the artist’s superiority, it is only by giving himself over to the world that he is able to flow into “the source of all ­things” that harmonizes the ­whole. The dialectic of part and w ­ hole that we have observed in Tolstoy’s figurative practice thus appears as a question of po­liti­cal agency and class division prior to Tolstoy’s awareness of his literary vocation. As Tolstoy matures as an author, he begins to see art as a solution to t­ hese conundrums, which are revealed as po­liti­cal or economic manifestations of the single prob­lem of making oneself w ­ hole through communion with the true source. “Like Rousseau,” writes Caryl Emerson, Tolstoy “is convinced that humanity’s task is not to move forward but to move back.”62 Art and its dominant meta­phor of infection play a key role in redressing the fragmented everyday life of the modern individual. Deliberate artistic infection transmutes repre­sen­ta­tions of suffering, poverty, and decadence—­symptoms of a sick, splintered society—­into desirable emotional states, as listed in What Is Art?: “awe before the dignity of ­every man, before the life of ­every animal, . . . ​shame before luxury, before vio­ lence, before vengeance, before the use for one’s plea­sure of articles that are indispensable to other men.”63 We all rationally recognize ­these ills, but in order to live in our accustomed way, we selfishly stupefy ourselves and distract

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ourselves from our own knowledge. Artistic infection makes us experience this knowledge in our emotional lives: “Art is the organ of ­human life that translates the rational consciousness of men into feeling.”64 We might prefer to keep this knowledge from affecting us, but art provides us, even against our ­will, with the correct emotional responses to a fallen social real­ity—to the oppression, destitution, moral failures, and fear of death that texture our lives. Tolstoy’s theory thus revolves on the age-­old crux of how we can, without resorting to schadenfreude as the explanation, derive aesthetic value from repre­sen­ta­tions of loss and vio­lence. In this re­spect, it can be contextualized with other aesthetic systems that undertake the same task, notably Aristotelian catharsis (also a medical meta­phor, drawn from the Greek word’s meaning of “purgation”), in which the exceptional emotions of pity and fear are “purged” by being invested into the artwork, and the “aesthetic economy” of Freud’s fort-­da game, in which we master loss by restaging it in symbols; t­ hese theories claim to explain the literary genres of tragedy and elegy, respectively. Emerson’s cogent account of Tolstoy’s aesthetic philosophy foregrounds the cathartic aspect, stressing that, instead of the extreme states of pity and fear emphasized in Aristotle, Tolstoyan catharsis focuses on everyday life and ordinary economic activity: eating the flesh of another living creature, drinking a glass of wine with dinner, looking on our fellows with lust.65 The suitability of disease meta­phors to address ­these small but omnipresent moral ills is tied to the broader cultural construction of disease in the nineteenth ­century and especially the revolutionary impact that germ theory had on con­ temporary thought. Instead of proceeding from environmental c­ auses as in early nineteenth-­century medicine, during Tolstoy’s lifetime, disease became conceptualized as communicated through infectious agents. In this new paradigm, books could be seen not just as agents of moral and aesthetic infection but as literal carriers of germs, and circulating libraries began to destroy or quarantine books that had been lent to h ­ ouse­holds afflicted with contagious illness. In ­England, autoclaves ­were developed to sterilize schoolbooks from year to year, and experiments w ­ ere conducted in which “books w ­ ere ‘inoculated’ with pus and ‘in a short time the books ­were full of germs of measles, scarlet fever, smallpox, and other diseases.’ Similar experiments w ­ ere made wherein consumptives ­were encouraged to spit upon the pages of books, the pages then being ground up, a ‘wash’ made and injected into guinea pigs.”66 Germs could be perceived as linking the members of e­ very social stratum in a single circulating w ­ hole of disease: in this view, the upper classes could not become f­ree of illness without first alleviating the unsanitary conditions of the lower classes. One En­g lish pamphleteer memorably evoked the “socialism of the microbe, . . . ​the chain of disease, which binds all the p­ eople of the community

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together.”67 The perfect circulation of goods and ser­vices on which liberal society is predicated facilitates the perfect circulation of microbes and creates a community of moral symmetry: the sweatshop seamstress who lives in unsanitary conditions infects the thread of the rich man’s suit with the diseases of the slums. To participate in the social economy is to participate in the exchange of diseases, which links all the members of society in an epidemiological unity. On the other side of the Rus­sian Revolution, Soviet imagery exploits similar meta­phors of an immunological collective. Aleksei Gastev, a radical theorist of scientific l­ abor management and a major figure in the “Proletarian Culture” movement of the early 1920s, averred that “by the art of collective ­labor we must understand the art of infection” that allows workers to share their “enthusiasm” for a task; in an essay on the formation of a new ­labor culture, he even proposed a “method for inoculating e­ very worker with a certain organizational-­labor bacillus.”68 Describing the early Soviet journalistic rhe­toric of immorality as a disease, to be combated through a “revolutionary, communist, Marxist ‘vaccine,’ ” Eric Naiman interprets a notorious 1926 gang rape, in the course of which the victim and her attackers alike became infected with venereal disease, as eliciting such a strong public reaction precisely b­ ecause it represented a horrendous realization of the “collective act” of building communism.69 Infection in Tolstoy’s time was thus already marked both as a socially unifying agent and as a morally weighted one that brought home to the mansion the evils of class exploitation. During a 1909 visit to Tolstoy’s estate, the immunologist Ilia Mechnikov stressed this point, citing in conversation a wealthy ­house­hold that was made chronically ill by the germs of its servants, who lacked proper hygienic facilities: enlightened self-­interest, Mechnikov argued, required the upper classes to eradicate disease among the poor as well as among their own kind.70 Tolstoy, typically dismissive of scientific cures for social ills, rejected Mechnikov’s example, but his diaries touch on similar points and suggest that the doctor’s views ­were in fact not radical enough for him. In 1900, he excoriates “all ­those clinics erected by the merchants and industrialists who have ruined and continue to ruin tens of thousands of lives,” not only for hy­ poc­risy—­since supposedly philanthropic institutions are funded by the same exploitative economic activities that create poverty and disease in the first place—­but ­because, in “claiming to learn to lessen suffering and prolong life, . . . ​they can save and reduce the sufferings of only a few select p­ eople.”71 In relieving the symptoms of patients, medicine actually chooses who is to be saved, thereby reinscribing the divisions that generate illness. In an 1896 diary meditation on art and illness, in which Tolstoy explores ideas formally expressed in What Is Art?, he follows up a claim that disease is a beneficial indi-

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cation of the wrongness of one’s life by making an analogy between the individual infection and the social one: “It is the same with the diseases of our society. ­Every sick part of society does not remind us that all of our social life is wrong and ­ought to be changed, but rather we think that for each such sick part ­there is or o ­ ught to be an institution freeing us from that part or even correcting it. . . . ​The sicker society is, the more institutions ­there are for the treatment of its symptoms and the less care is taken to change life as a ­whole.”72 Infection’s corrective value becomes apparent only when its potential to become total and epidemic—to penetrate e­ very aspect of social life—is realized. A sick society metastasizes its own internal separations, yet the sickness itself, by r­ unning through and communicating between all of t­ hese segregated parts, provides the means and model for overcoming ­those barriers. Created by class division and passed on through trade goods, disease is, like art, a “teaching device” that reminds the idle rich that they live wrongly in living on exploited l­abor; it makes sensible in their physical and emotional lives the rational knowledge they must suppress in order to persist in their de­cadence. As Lukács has observed, Tolstoy makes a point of stressing that his upper-­class characters manufacture nothing for themselves, so that the ­people whose l­abor they exploit are “visibly or invisibly pre­sent in . . . ​­every greater or lesser phenomenon of life”; he gives the example of Nekhliudov in Resurrection, who wears clothes “which not he but ­others had made and brushed,” brandishes weapons “which ­were also made and cleaned by ­others,” and rides a ­horse “which had again been bred, trained, and groomed by o ­ thers.”73 This same class hierarchy is for Tolstoy the root cause of both false and bad art, a direct consequence of “the exclusiveness of the life of the wealthy classes.”74 Such art could not even exist outside of an unhealthy society fractured by division of l­abor, including a specialized culture industry of professional artists, printers, costume makers, and the like. “­Free the slaves from capital,” Tolstoy thunders in What Is Art?, “and it ­will be impossible to produce this refined art.”75 Tolstoy therefore condemns medical advances—­artificial inoculation included—as a false consciousness proceeding from the invidious separation of ­human beings into social classes. Self-­congratulatory scientists aspire to cure the diseases of the poor, whereas in fact ­those diseases are vis­i­ble signs of poverty and class division that urge society to transform itself as completely as the young Tolstoy—­infected with gonorrhea by a prostitute, literally diseased by concupiscence and class exploitation—­hoped to transform himself as an individual by recovering his oneness with the w ­ hole. Arguing for a symmetry between false science and false art, Tolstoy claims that public health programs suppress needful reminders of social in­equality just as counterfeit art distracts us from our conscience. A true science would attend to the root cause of disease in social

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division, rather than preserve us from its consequences—­would entirely prevent, say, ­women from falling out of the mass of society or men from being exalted above it, instead of merely preventing ­these divisions from being communicated, in the form of venereal disease, between the prostitute and the man who rents her body. For the same reason, true art unflinchingly communicates the emotional life of the exploited classes to their de­cadent masters.76 Both communicative diseases and artistic infections, in being shared across class lines, make sensible in our bodies the knowledge that we must live better in a world where we are artificially separated from each other.

Infection and Imagination Disease is, then, a source of social cohesion and moral authority. A rich critical tradition considers it to be a source of narrative cohesion and artistic authority as well. Walter Benjamin complains in his essay “The Storyteller” that ­dying, once a public event and an organic part of social life, has been relegated by modern society to the back labyrinths of hospitals and nursing homes and that the art of storytelling has suffered thereby ­because “real life—­and this is the stuff that stories are made of—­first assumes transmissible form at the moment of death”: “that authority which even the poorest wretch in d­ ying possesses . . . ​is at the very source of the story.”77 As Tolstoy in his polemics argues against the medical establishment that suppresses disease without addressing its fundamental ­causes, in his fiction he stages a concerted effort to restore visibility to illness and death. His sickbed scenes are almost sensible in their vividness, from the “special, heavy, thick, reeking stench” in the field hospitals of the Sevastopol stories to the interminable agonies of the title character in The Death of Ivan Ilyich.78 The interior monologues of Tolstoy’s characters carry through to the moment of death itself, a moment that, as when the candle at Anna Karenina’s end perfectly illuminates the “book” of her life, comes to function as a mise en abyme of the larger narrative. Our identification with t­ hese second­hand deaths exposes social falsehoods: we are able to compare the vivid final moments of Praskukhin (in the early Sevastopol in May) or Avdeev (in the late Hadji-­Murad) with the drily false official accounts that they have fallen “in the ­battle for faith, throne, and fatherland” or “­were killed in ­battle, ‘defending the tsar, the fatherland, and the Orthodox faith.’ ”79 In the last example, the patriotic phrase—­What Is Art? repeatedly singles out patriotism as an especially harmful aesthetic infection—is represented in quotation marks in Tolstoy’s text and represents the inoculatory presence of jingoistic language within the work. As when Anna Karenina reads her novel or Natasha Rostova

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watches her opera, the juxtaposition of discourses is profoundly morally charged: having lived through the “true” experience of death with Tolstoy’s characters, we understand that its cause is not the e­ nemy’s bullet so much as the chauvinist discourse that justifies the murderous division of p­ eoples, which art ­ought properly to redress. Life, illness, and death have all begun to blur together ­here, which is unavoidable b­ ecause Tolstoy, who was fond of variations on the adage that life is a fatal disease, made a point of confusing them. In his 1879 Confession, whose title places it in the lineage of Rousseau and St. Augustine, Tolstoy describes life as a series of “minor symptoms” that gradually “flow together into undivided suffering” u ­ ntil the patient realizes that “what he had taken for an illness is the most impor­tant t­hing in the world—­that it is death.”80 This narrative of the part discovering its way to the ­whole exactly schematizes the plot of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which becomes the universally applicable master plot of ­human existence. The life that is illness that is death possesses total revelatory power ­because, as Tolstoy notes repeatedly in the text, “the truth is death [istina—­ smert’].” This formula on the face of it implies that the truth is inaccessible to the living and is a wisdom achieved only when it is no longer useful. “For ­dying, which is the greatest task we have to perform, practice cannot help us,” wrote Montaigne, another author of an obsessively examined life, whose essays w ­ ere one of three books Tolstoy took with him to his deathbed: “We are all apprentices when we come to it.”81 Yet Montaigne continues by vividly recounting a riding accident that left the author “much closer to death than to life”; the recollection of the incident, by showing him “the face and idea of death so true to nature, reconciles [him] to it somewhat.”82 If death, that ultimately singular and personal event, can be made repeatable—­and especially if it can be made transmissible, experienced through another person or through its artistic representation—­then it ­will retain its narrative authority but lose its sting. A communicated death is not always a fatal one. In Master and Man, the servant Nikita, d­ ying of hypothermia, moans, “I feel it, my death,” moving his master to sacrifice his own life by lying down on top of and warming the peasant.83 Through a heavi­ly textured system of meta­phorical identifications, puns, and syntactic figures, the scene builds to an explicit statement of ­union between the two individuals. “He was Nikita and Nikita was he, and . . . ​his life was not in himself but in Nikita. . . . ​‘Nikita is alive, so I too am alive,’ he said to himself triumphantly”—­the exact inversion of the syllogism “all men are mortal, Caius is a man, therefore Caius is mortal,” which torments Ivan Ilyich.84 The infection that brings about the “­union of one soul with another,” which What Is Art? proposes as the ultimate goal of aesthetic activity, is manifested as Christian allegory, the eternal life and communion of death shared

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by master and man alike. At the moment that Vasily Andreevich takes Nikita’s fate upon himself, he becomes immune to death. If Tolstoy has successfully communicated this conversion to the reader, then death, the telos of life and of disease, ­will be rendered innocuous for us as well. In the Confession, Tolstoy expresses the hope that he too might know death without experiencing it personally, as the Bud­dha had achieved enlightenment not by himself ­dying but by leaving his palace and encountering a corpse. Tolstoy even inserts himself into this chain of second­hand enlightenments by writing, “I, like Sakia-­Muni, could not go hunting when I knew that t­ here is age, suffering, death. My imagination was too power­ful.”85 Thanks to the power of his imagination—­a faculty so impor­tant to him that in his youth he singled it out as an area of self-­improvement and performed a regimen of exercises to strengthen it—­Tolstoy is capable of diagnosing himself by analogy with the ultimate disease, mortality.86 In a much e­ arlier document, recounting the experience that would grow into the short story “Lucerne,” Tolstoy refers to his imagination as the “spark” that ­will transmit his own emotional state to the reader, who, he hopes, w ­ ill then feel at least “a hundredth part” of his own feelings.87 Throughout Tolstoy’s c­ areer, the imagination is the means by which feelings are communicated from author to audience and by which our awareness of mortality and injustice, physical and social ills, is awakened in our emotional life. We have, obviously, begun to stray far afield from disease proper to show how infection is involved with the issues that loom largest in Tolstoy’s philosophy: death, right living, the imagination. But this is precisely the point: as I hope to have shown, infection in its broadest sense plays a nodal role in the metatextual structure of Tolstoy’s work, that is to say, in the aggregate of tropes that represents to us a hermeneutics specific to the text in question and the Tolstoyan corpus in general. Anna Karenina “is held together,” writes Eikhenbaum, “not by the linkage of the events themselves to each other, but by the linkage of themes and images and a unity of relation to them.”88 A similar observation applies to all of Tolstoy’s oeuvre insofar as his explicit aesthetic of emotional infection and his fictional repre­sen­ta­tions of communicated experience manifest a single complex of themes. Infection is the chief meta­phor for the artistic mechanism that produces ­human ­union in Tolstoy’s explicit theory, and meta­phorical identification is the motor that generates t­ hese moments of unity in the fiction, where infection or communication or ­union is accomplished through skillful rhetorical assemblages evident on ­every textual level, from the most subtle (the figures of inoculation ingrained in the contrapuntal plot parallelism of Anna Karenina) to the most obvious (statements like “he was Nikita and Nikita was

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he”). In the specific instances, the results vary tremendously, from the inoculatory and life-­giving to the pathological and fatal. Yet the thematic architecture grounding all ­these instances is legible throughout Tolstoy’s work and makes legible techniques and arguments that are central to Tolstoy’s aesthetic practice as well as his aesthetic theory.

C h a p te r   3

The Pa­norama World Lit­er­a­ture and Universal Language

In 1919, on the heels of the Rus­sian Revolution, the avant-­garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov proposed a “common written language shared by all the ­peoples of this third satellite of the sun, . . . ​the new vortex that unites us, the new integrator of the h ­ uman race.”1 Khlebnikov’s script, which he compares to painting and hieroglyphics, associates ­every speech sound with a pictorial gesture. For example, he represents the phoneme /v/, which “in all languages means the turning of one point around another,” as a circle with a dot in the center of it. Khlebnikov’s vocabulary of images is meant to reveal the common basis of all natu­ral languages and to evolve into “a suitable instrument of exchange between auditory and visual modes, . . . ​ soundless currency for the marketplace of conversation.” Khlebnikov’s mathematical training is evident when he translates into this idiom a sentence about the Huns filling up the emptiness of the steppes: “SHa + So (Hunnic and Gothic hordes), Ve Attila, CHa Po, So Do, but Bo + Zo Aetius, KHo of Rome, So Mo Ve + Ka So, Lo SHa of the steppes + CHa.”2 Proper names remain tenaciously embedded in a completely abstracted, almost algebraic language that replaces ordinary words like “emptiness” or “warlike enthusiasm” with graphic functions. “The overall model of a universal [mirovoi, etymologically ‘world’] language in the f­ uture is h ­ ere provided,” he proclaims. “It w ­ ill be ‘beyonsense’ [zaum3 nyi iazyk].” Khlebnikov ­here employs a neologism, dating back to Futurist 84

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manifestoes of 1913, composed of the prefix za-­, meaning “beyond,” and the root um, meaning “reason” or “mind.”4 Often rendered into En­glish through the calques “beyonsense” or “transrational,” zaum was to transcend the binary opposition between sanity and insanity, between umnyi (smart, rational) and neumnyi (not smart, stupid, foolish). It was to be a pure language of poetry, liberated from conventional meaning, exulting in phonetic, morphological, and syntactic ambiguity, verging in vari­ous manifestations on religious glossolalia, the sound play of infants, or the dream of universal language. Despite occasional grandiose statements on the part of its prac­ti­tion­ers, zaum was never implemented in the po­liti­cal or economic spheres. However, impor­ tant resonances between avant-­garde and revolutionary utopianism remain, and the early Soviet triangulation of a planetary economy, universal language, and all-­proletarian culture remains an instructive counterpoint to our current era of global capitalism and world lit­er­a­ture. In 2014, I gave a conference paper suggesting that zaum can be read as a socialist counternarrative to the cap­it­ al­ist imaginary of world lit­er­a­ture and that impor­tant dimensions of its proj­ect have been inherited by the discourse of literary theory.5 Other scholars have since published brilliant treatments of ­these themes, including Harsha Ram’s work on the spatial dimensions of the Rus­sian avant-­garde, Galin Tihanov’s research into early twentieth-­century eastern Eu­rope as the crucible of literary theory, and Aamir Mufti’s interrogation of world lit­er­a­ture’s roots in globalizing economic pro­cesses. This chapter regathers the strands of my conference paper, as elaborated and enriched by ­these thinkers. “By analytically decomposing the linguistic and artistic raw materials of the creative pro­cess,” Ram notes, “the Rus­sian avant-­garde strove to generate a planetary internationalism of aesthetic form commensurate with world revolution.”6 The internationalist aspirations of official Soviet literary policy are showcased in Maria Khotimsky’s study of Maxim Gorky’s World Lit­er­a­ture publishing ­house, which aimed, in Gorky’s own words, to introduce in Rus­sian translation the nations with which the Soviet Union “aspires to build new forms of social life.”7 A 1928 journal of foreign lit­er­a­ture featured an introduction by Anatoly Lunacharsky that addressed the Soviet Union’s interest in “participating in the life of the entire world.”8 Joseph Stalin’s dictum “proletarian in content and national in form—­such is the universal h ­ uman culture ­towards which socialism is marching” carries forward the shell of the same idea, decayed into a dogmatic distinction between form and content.9 Throughout the twentieth ­century, programs to construct a counterweight to the culture industry of the West made “the Soviet proj­ect for world lit­er­at­ure,” in Rossen Djagalov’s words, a uniquely concerted effort “to transform the workings of literary production, circulation, and consumption worldwide.”10

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As t­ hese examples suggest, the Soviet instance represents an instructive counterexample to methodologies of studying “world lit­er­a­ture” that emphasize the expanding scope of literary markets and the intensifying circulation of texts. David Damrosch’s lively 2003 prolegomenon What Is World Lit­er­a­ture? influentially answers the question posed by its title with the formula “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin.”11 Accounts in this vein identify world lit­er­a­ture with the ramifying trade networks and increasingly frictionless exchange of globalism; “the analogy to capital following the path of least re­sis­tance” is, as Galin Tihanov points out, “hard to avoid.”12 As Erich Auerbach points out in his 1952 essay “Philology and World Lit­er­a­ture,” cap­ i­tal­ist competition promises a f­ uture of linguistic mono­poly in which “only a ­limited number of literary languages ­will continue to exist, soon perhaps only one. If this w ­ ere to come to pass, the idea of world lit­er­at­ ure would si­mul­ta­ neously be realized and destroyed.”13 Aamir Mufti, in a provocative study of the echoes between world lit­er­a­ture and global domination asks what it means “to speak in En­glish, the quin­tes­sen­tial world-­encompassing language, of lit­ er­at­ ure as a world-­encompassing real­ity? Hidden inside world lit­er­a­ture is the dominance of globalized En­glish.”14 On this reading, a diverse world lit­er­a­ ture is haunted by colonial vio­lence, po­liti­cal hierarchy, and the loss of the world’s linguistic resources in f­ avor of a single transparent and monotonous idiom. But what if this universal literary language of a global economic order promised not total intelligibility but radical indeterminacy? What if it w ­ ere not primarily a narrative language associated with the “world novel” but a lyric one associated with the phonetic patterns of verse?15 What if it identified itself with international communism instead of spreading with global capitalism? And what if it ­were not a normative colonial language but a language that specifically rejected instrumental and imperative use in f­ avor of a wholly intransitive poetic function? In this chapter, I treat zaum as a supplement to world lit­er­a­ture in three interrelated dimensions: poetics, economics, and intellectual history. Encoding an effort to grasp the w ­ hole world as a panoramic intuition, zaum offers an alternative to methodologies that treat world lit­er­a­ ture as an essentially metonymic network of associations, points of transfer, and moments of influence spanning the planet. ­Those methodologies allegorize the expansive trade networks that constitute a world market for literary commodities; other conceptions of world lit­er­a­ture would be conditional on the possibility of noncapitalist globalisms—­notably, the imaginary of international communism that, like Futurism, found fertile ground in Rus­sia in the first de­cades of the twentieth c­ entury. Fi­nally, the utopian practices of the Rus­ sian avant-­garde exerted a formative influence on literary theory, a major

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tributary of which is the Formalist effort to explain and valorize Futurist innovations.16 World lit­er­a­ture has sometimes been construed as an alternative or adversary to theory in the acad­emy, but it is precisely ­under cover of theoretical abstraction that Futurist experiments in universal language have come to inform practices of reading across the globe. As “traveling theory,” to use Edward Said’s phrase, if not of “texts that travel,” zaum has become a phenomenon of world lit­er­a­ture in its own right, filtering to distant shores by paths of which many Western scholars remain unaware.17

Beyonsense The coinage “zaum” first reached print in a 1913 manifesto that Velimir Khlebnikov—­the most brilliant practitioner of beyonsense poetry and, ­according to Roman Jakobson, “the greatest world poet of the current ­century”—­coauthored with Aleksei Kruchenykh, zaum’s fiercest partisan and most devoted theorist.18 The “model” of zaum, and the first poem to assume the label, was Kruchenykh’s provocative “dyr bul shchyl”; however, Futurist manifestoes acknowledged as zaum avant la lettre vari­ous products of religious ecstasy and strong emotion. “Exclamation, interjection, murmurs, refrains, ­children’s babble, pet names, nicknames—­such transreason [zaum’] is plentiful among writers of all schools.”19 Vladimir Markov notes that for Kruchenykh, zaum was “a f­ree, but often emotionally expressive, combination of sound, devoid of full meaning,” whereas Khlebnikov tended to something more akin to the philosophical languages of the Enlightenment.20 In the manifestoes and verse of the Futurist poets, zaum proved a capacious and uncodified practice: a specifically poetic idiom that was to transcend in a new verbal dimension the constraints of reason; a transcendent language systematizing the abstract concepts inhering in discrete phonemes; the etymological recovery of the primal sediment of language; the defamiliarizing phonetic repre­sen­ta­tion of spoken language; the nihilistic deformation of conventional bourgeois speech; the recovery of language as a pure plastic material, a sound medium uncontaminated by conventional meanings; or the stage of nonrepre­sen­ta­tion through which poetry must pass in order to find its ­f uture forms, just as Kazimir Malevich’s iconic painting Black Square was supposedly the abstracted zero degree through which visual art must pass in order to claim a ­f uture.21 Although zaum can be compared to experiments in sound poetry carried out around the same time by Christian Morgenstern or the Dada poets, it was more developed as a practice; although it is prefigured by c­ hildren’s rhymes, magic charms, and religious glossolalia, zaum was heavi­ly theorized, highly

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programmatic, and embedded in a Promethean my­thol­ogy of the poet as creator of a new world. Gerald Janecek describes it as a technique to “produce indeterminacy” through “dislocations [sdvigi]” at ­every level of language.22 By recombining phonemes, morphemes, and words, zaum disrupted signification and introduced alternative meanings on the phonetic, morphological, and syntactic levels, respectively. For example, the etymologically unrelated root tvor (creation) could be substituted for dvor (court) in the word dvoriane (gentry), yielding the neologism tvoriane (which Khlebnikov glosses as “creators of life”: members of a creative court or perhaps “artocrats”).23 Dislocations on the phonetic level also liberate new potential meanings. For example, a comparison of the root morphemes ukh (ear) and um (mind, reason) can be made to encode the sensory and conceptual aspects of language, respectively, which are linked by the common vowel /u/ but distinguished by the dissimilar consonants /kh/ and /m/; Khlebnikov elaborates this core opposition into poetically suggestive parallelisms like glukh (deaf ) and glum (scorn).24 A 1914 poem by Vasily Kamensky, “Я” (ia, I), is constructed according to the same princi­ple of adding and subtracting letters from a common ending: Излучистая [izluchistaia, meandering, sinuous] Лучистая [luchistaia, rayed] Чистая [chistaia, clean] Истая [istaia, genuine] Стая [staia, mob, horde, flock, or pack] Тая [taia, melting but also hiding] Ая [aia, adjectival suffix] Я [ia, I]25 In this case, too, the sequence implies a meaningful narrative: the mob or flock melts away ­under the pure rays of the sun in order to reveal the poem’s source in the hidden genuine speaking self, which emerges triumphantly from the cocoon of language that had camouflaged the first-­person pronoun.26 As we saw in chapter 1, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky uses a similar technique of subtracting and adding letters to link the words Silentium and Sum (another revelation of the speaking self out of the word in which it had been swathed) and to construct the significant series by-­byt-­bytie. In his 1925 essay “Philosophy of Titles,” which discusses the by-­byt-­bytie series, Krzhizhanovsky suggests that since the titles of books operate as a shorthand for the complex ideas found inside the volume, they might someday evolve into a system of notation that would accomplish at last philosophy’s long-­standing dream of a universal language. He sees the pro­cess of contraction as already ­under way: as the number

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of printed books increases, titles contract in order to compete for attention on the shelves. The cultural commodity thus prefigures a bridge between real and intellectual worlds that Krzhizhanovsky identifies with Gottfried Leibniz’s globus intellectualis, or “world of the mind.”27 The phrase actually originates in Francis Bacon’s 1605 Advancement of Learning, which defines itself as a microcosm or “small globe of the intellectual world,” inspired in part by the pictographic writing system of Chinese, “characters real, which express neither letters nor words in gross, but ­things or notions.”28 Like Bacon, Leibniz points to Chinese writing as a forerunner for his proposed “alphabet of ­human thoughts,” or characteristica universalia: a repertory of symbols representing the fundamental ele­ments of ratiocination, to be combined according to a logical grammar.29 Leibniz “wanted to compress the bodies and meanings of words down to the capacity and precision of algebraic characters,” Krzhizhanovsky explains. In a formula uncannily recalling Goethe’s 1827 maxim that “the epoch of World-­literature is at hand, and every­one must strive to hasten its approach,” Krzhizhanovsky concludes that “ever closer, now, comes the moment when the orbits of the earthly globe and the globus intellectualis ­will inescapably collide.”30 Krzhizhanovsky’s conception of the title as a microcosm that contains the ­whole work and his comparison of the title of a work to the prefix of a word are prob­ably influenced by Khlebnikov’s Leibniz-­like ambition to break down language to elementary particles that would be susceptible to poetic recombination. In Khlebnikov’s notebooks and manifestoes, he generates cata­logues of the under­lying meanings of letters and prefixes and generates charts of the pos­si­ble variations following from a single prefix, apparently with the aim of devising “a new world language for the w ­ hole ­human ­family.”31 The beginning of a word “governs the ­whole word—­sets ­orders for the rest of it,” Khlebnikov writes, attempting to discover the under­lying laws of the globus intellectualis or Adamic language that would fuse word and world.32 He takes the fact that “even in Sans­ krit vritti means rotation [vrashchenie], and in Egyptian as in Rus­sian khata means hut,” as evidence that he has correctly identified the phoneme /v/ as inherently referring to rotation and /kh/ as “a protective line.”33 It is irrelevant that the Sans­krit and Rus­sian words are etymologically descended from a common root, while the similarity between the Coptic and Rus­sian words is a serendipity: ­actual, as opposed to false, etymology is no more material to Khlebnikov’s poetry than it is to the intensely multilingual puns of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which represents itself as a paronomastic regathering of the tongues scattered ­after the fall of the Tower of Babel.34 For Khlebnikov, multilingual puns do not represent dialectical variations fallen away from a single source but two partial impressions that testify to a single object, the totality of language and hence the coherent totality of the world and its history. His goal, he explains, is to

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find the “phi­los­o­pher’s stone that transforms all Slavic words one into the other, . . . ​the self-­sufficient word beyond everyday life [byt] and utility for life.” Like Krzhizhanovsky, Khlebnikov seeks the path from byt to bytie. Etymological “roots are only phantoms, ­behind which stand the strings of the alphabet,” Khlebnikov continues, and by plucking t­ hose strings, it w ­ ill become pos­si­ble “to find the unity of world languages in general, constructed from the ele­ments of the alphabet”—­“the path to a world zaum language.”35 Through Khlebnikov’s writings, he claims, one can trace a universal thread that binds all t­ hings in a form that is at once mathematical and poetic.36 Khlebnikov’s unfinished life’s work, The ­Tables of Destiny, comprised a fanatic effort to discover in historical events the “pure Laws of Time,” the mathematic laws of rhythm and recurrence that give poetic form to every­thing from the formation of the planets to the con­temporary “era marked by the interference of man in the life and structure of Planet Earth” (a concept we can retrospectively identify as the global Anthropocene).37 Johann Gottfried Herder had suggested that poetry in primitive languages manifests the Adamic root of language from which all other tongues have grown and that they all contain inside themselves as an echo of nature playing on the strings of the h ­ uman organism; Khlebnikov, more radical yet, proposes to grasp the strings of nature itself and become an artist of space of time. His poem “Suppose I make a timepiece of humanity [Esli ia obrashchu chelovechestvo v chasy . . .]” develops the analogy between language and historical events. Once he has mastered the mechanism of history, he proj­ects, war ­will “wither like an unused letter, drop / From our alphabet” and—in a pun on the Rus­sian word mir, which means both “earth” and “peace”—­“let Planet Earth be sovereignless at last!”38 In Khlebnikov’s manifestoes, he repeatedly links world government and world language, devising a “Society of Presidents of the Globe [Obshchestvo predstavitelei zemnogo shara].” ­After the revolution, the phrase often appeared as “predzemshar,” a neologism constructed, a­fter the fashion of Soviet bureaucratese, by ­running the first syllables of several words together. Membership in this society was fluid and in addition to Khlebnikov (who autocratically signed some “­orders of the Predzemshars” as Velimir the First, King of Time and Ambassador to the Globe) included Fillipo Marinetti and H.  G. Wells (who received courtesy appointments) along with vari­ous members of Rus­sian avant-­garde circles.39 The long poem “The Call of the Presidents of the Globe [Vozzvanie predsedatelei zemnogo shara],” written in the revolutionary year 1917 and published in the official state organ of Khlebnikov’s Kingdom of Time, boasted 317 signatories.40 Sovereign status was eventually to be extended to the entirety of the h ­ uman species as well as to the “wise community of animals and plants.”41 The pen name “Velimir,” which Khlebnikov came to ­favor over his birth name Viktor, is itself inter-

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pretable as a zaum coinage combining the root morpheme vel, connoting “­great,” “sovereign,” “wish,” or “­will,” with mir, meaning “world” or “peace”; it might be rendered in En­glish as something like “Sovereign Earth” or “WishPeace.” In vari­ous poems, neologisms play on the Veche, the citizen assembly of the medieval city-­state of Novgorod, which issued edicts and coined money in the name of “Velikii Novgorod” (translated as “Novgorod the ­Great” or “Sovereign Novgorod”). Derived from an Old Slavic root meaning “speak,” veche is cognate with “Soviet” (sovet, meaning “council”). For Khlebnikov, to access the origin of language is also to comprehend a genealogy of po­liti­cal forms. When he hails the ­future world as Predzemsharvelikaia (Presidents of the Globe the G ­ reat), his address is autocratic and collective, medieval and bureaucratic all at once. In “Suppose I make a timepiece . . .” Khlebnikov’s poetic brilliance and the collectivity of Presidents of the Globe are to liberate the world to become at once a poem and a polity—­“our sovereign song [pesn’ povilikoiu].”42 The paronomastic potential that underlies this enthusiastic vision of a ­future globe unified as sovereign state and poetic word uneasily straddles national languages. Khlebnikov’s zaum exploits the morphological resources and signifying field of Rus­ sian specifically, but at the same time, he aspires to relationships with sound sequences in all tongues. In this scheme, the very idea of a national idiom is exploded without however ceding the resources of any given natu­ral language. The contradictory claims of zaum reflect its ambiguous status between national and international lit­er­a­ture, which is manifest in the variable name of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh’s circle—­sometimes “Hylea” (alluding to Slavic antiquity) and sometimes “Cubo-­futurism” (alluding to the international avant-­ garde).43 On the one hand, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov claim that the five lines of “dyr bul shchyl” contain “more of the Rus­sian national spirit than all the poetry of Pushkin,” and they often substituted Slavic coinages, like budetlianin, for Western loan words like “futurist.”44 On the other hand, Alexei Kruchenykh concluded in his 1921 manifesto “Declaration of Transrational Language” not just that zaum is universal but that “transrational works can provide a universal poetic language, born organically, and not artificially like Esperanto.”45 In the introduction to a zaum drama written by Ilya Zdanevich and printed in Paris in 1923, the Dadaist Georges Ribemont-­Dessaignes compactly rehearses the same tension: zaum “retains a fatally Rus­sian appearance,” yet it is pos­si­ble to imagine “a French zaum, a German or an En­glish zaum, or even an international one.”46 Zaum quotations in other languages are habitually introduced with the note “(untranslatable)”—­and yet a text like “dyr bul shchyl” arguably requires no translation, since it has no conventional meaning to begin with.47 Kruchenykh contrasts the supposedly organic emergence of zaum as a global language of poetry to the artificial and technocratic language Esperanto,

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touted by many internationalists as the lingua franca of the world to come. Richard Stites notes of early Soviet utopias that “the global unity of science fiction was not a Rus­sianized world but a cosmopolitan one,” in which the rationalized economy of international socialism finds a linguistic corollary in some rationally devised global lingua franca, commonly Esperanto (which itself originated in the Rus­sian Empire).48 Stites emphasizes “the hoped for ac­cep­tance of the Rus­sians into an egalitarian world order, a world where Rus­sia is fi­nally greeted and assisted on equal terms in a new community of p­ eoples, a world where the language is usually Esperanto-­like and not Rus­sian.”49 As Mark Mazower has shown, the dozens of constructed languages (of which Esperanto is the most famous and long-­lived example) that emerged in the de­cade prior to the First World War are an impor­tant manifestation of the globalizing ideologies manifested in simultaneous movements for world government and ­free trade, international communism among them.50 The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who was trained as a linguist at the University of Turin before committing himself to the Communist Party, dismissed popu­lar enthusiasm for constructed languages as having “more to do with bourgeois cosmopolitanism than with proletarian internationalism” but acknowledged a longing for ­future forms of language that ­will “transcend national limits and in relation to which current national languages ­will have the same role as dialects now have.”51 When Gramsci expresses the hope that in the “strug­gle for the cultural unification of the ­human race,” national languages w ­ ill come to be dialects of a superlanguage that comprehends them all, he approaches the paradox that is central to Khlebnikov’s proj­ect: a global language that w ­ ill draw on the resources of e­ very national idiom.52 Launched in 1918, the World Lit­er­a­ture (Vsemirnaia literatura) publishing ­house was to print classics in translation for the benefit of the newly risen proletariat.53 In Gorky’s introduction to its first cata­logue, he wrote that even if the sentiments and ideas of the scattered vernaculars of the earth express a single ­human essence, “­there is no universal [vsemirnaia] lit­er­a­ture ­because— as yet—­there never was any universal language common to all mankind.”54 Gorky’s phrasing holds out the possibility that such a language, and such a lit­ er­at­ure, might develop u ­ nder communism. A few years l­ater, Kruchenykh claimed, “on April 27, at 3 p.m., I mastered all languages in a momentary flash. Such is a poet of modern times,” and he illustrated his claim with zaum poems supposedly written in Japa­nese, Spanish, and Hebrew.55 The poet’s imitations of t­ hese tongues are crude and, n ­ eedless to say, incomprehensible as ordinary language. Nonetheless, his fantasy of glossolalia speaks to the utopian desire to transcend national language that underlies Futurist displays of cheek, just as it underlies Gorky’s intimation that a “universal language com-

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mon to all mankind” is to develop ­under the aegis of international communism or Gramsci’s hope that Italian and Japa­nese w ­ ill at the consummation of history become dialects of a single superlanguage. The poets of zaum had at their disposal mystical as well as rationalist pre­ce­ dents, notably religious traditions of glossolalia and vari­ous efforts to recover the divine language spoken by Adam in the Garden of Eden. Kruchenykh in his 1913 article “New Paths of the Word” enthuses over religious sectarians who, speaking in tongues, perform utterances “not only in such a zaum language but also in many foreign languages they had not known of ­until then!”56 ­Here the Futurist claim of the self-­sufficient poetic word is fused with religious claims of universality: the miracle of Pentecost and a recovery of the h ­ uman community that was fractured together with the Tower of Babel. The Symbolist writer Andrei Bely’s theoretical tract Glossolalia, written in 1917 but not published ­until 1922, identifies bodily gestures with sounds and ascribes an essential meaning to each one. Explic­itly grounded in a mystical theory of Adamic language, this book aims to revive the primal, prelapsarian idiom that w ­ ill make of the speaking mouth a microcosm of the cosmos, as suggested by wordplay linking deep “roots” (korni iazyka, meaning e­ ither the etymological roots of a language or the anatomical roots of the speaker’s tongue) with the lofty “heavens” (небо, a visual pun on the words for sky [nebo] or the upper palate [nyoba], which are spelled the same although their pronunciation differs).57 In the etymological aspect of zaum poetry, it can be seen as an offshoot of Enlightenment efforts to reconstruct protolanguages, even to uncover the origin of language or to regain the Edenic Ursprache. Mystical traditions hold that in the language of Adam, words w ­ ere identical with t­ hings and ­every speech act was an incantation—­until, with the fall of the Tower of Babel and the scattering of tongues, the universal ­human language fell into a system of opaque dialects and national rivalries.58 In Northrop Frye’s analy­sis, charm poetry assumes “a world of interlocking names of mysterious powers and potencies which are above, but not wholly beyond reach of, the world of time and space”; such verses attempt to repossess the elemental power of Adamic language by patterning verbal material.59 Poems like Khlebnikov’s 1909 “Incantation by Laughter [Zakliatie smekhom],” a virtuosic exercise composed of neologisms based on the Slavic root meaning “laugh,” are expressly arcane and seem designed to illustrate Susan Sontag’s claim that “the earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical.”60 Undergirding the aspiration of philosophical or Adamic language to annul the discrepancy between words and t­ hings is the proposition that the world is in some sense textual and that it can therefore be transformed by poetic per­for­mance. In the poem “The One, the Only Book,” Khlebnikov claims to have himself authored

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the globe, which he depicts as a vast poetic text, traversed by g­ reat rivers laid out as bookmarks so that the reader or traveler can pause for reflection.61 Even prior to the elaboration of zaum as a technique, Khlebnikov exploits the internationalist potential of the Garden of Eden. His 1909 free-­verse masterpiece “Garden of Animals [Zverinets],” which comprises a list of animals with poetic epithets, is already a biblical allegory of an interconnected world. The caged species in the zoological garden, often identified explic­itly with one or another nation, can be read as representing the vari­ous ­peoples of the world, prevented by the iron barriers of linguistic difference and national territory from entering into the state of that other literary garden in which all species coexisted peacefully: the Garden of Eden (raiskii sad). Even its form (a litany, each line introduced by a relative clause) is biblical, resembling the psalm-­like ­free verses of Walt Whitman that Kornei Chukhovsky had recently translated into Rus­sian. Где орлы сидят подобны вечности, оконченной сегодняшним еще лишенным вечера днем. Где верблюд знает разгадку Буддизма и затаил ужимку Китая.62 Where ea­gles perch like eternity, crowned by a day without an eve­ning. Where the camel knows the essence of Buddhism, and suppresses a Chinese smile.63 The biblical source for belief in Adamic language is the second chapter of Genesis: “whatsoever Adam called each living creature, that was the name thereof.”64 Eden is thus the source of language as well as life. By dwelling on the animals one by one in a ritualistic cadence whose form evokes ancient Hebrew verse, Khlebnikov’s “Garden of Animals” reenacts Adam’s naming of the beasts and claims to inherit the creative power of Adam’s speech. The shamanistic power of true names possessed by Adam is an obvious fountainhead of zaum, but I want additionally to stress how “Garden of Animals” reenacts the primal scene of language in a microcosm of the globe. Kept peaceful by iron bars that “seem like a f­ather who stops a bloody fight to remind his sons they are b­ rothers,” the zoological garden is an enclosure in which all the nations of the earth are gathered in a configuration that is grasped by the poet and given form in verse parallelisms.65 Evoked through syntactic sequences that mutually echo each other, the dif­fer­ent nations even in their separate cages inhabit a single verbal form that suggests a single world in which they are all native. Although the animals remain ignorant of belonging to that larger world of potential peace—in which, as Isaiah has it, “the wolf also ­shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard s­ hall lie down with the kid and the calf and

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the young lion”—­their common existence is rendered harmonious by Khlebnikov’s innovation of a blank verse form that accommodates them all.66 Identified with Adam’s inauguration of speech as well as the Futurist culmination of language, Khlebnikov’s lines can be interpreted as both preceding and transcending the division of the world’s ­peoples. The language of Adam is a world language, and a writing that achieves it is perforce a world lit­er­a­ture. A line in one of Khlebnikov’s notebooks puts the ­matter bluntly: “Which is better—­a universal [vsemirnyi] language or universal slaughter?”67 The under­ lying pun, again, is that mir means both “peace” and “world.” To realize that pun would mean to bring about peace on earth in fact as well as in a play on words. Khlebnikov insists that humanity is not to remain forever siloed in its nation-­cages, fractured by language difference, trade competition, and world war. Loosely following the example of the religious phi­los­o­pher Nikolai Fedorov, who had proposed as a “common task” for all humankind the resurrection of our ancestors, all the way back to Adam, in order to gather together a universal ­family in a world beyond death, Khlebnikov proposes as a “common task” the recovery of Adam’s speech. In Markov’s words, Khlebnikov intends “to distill the language by scientific means to obtain t­hese original meanings and then to build on this foundation a universal language that would, by itself, lead to a cessation of wars b­ ecause ­people would understand each other and wars would not be necessary.”68 In the aftermath of the revolution, Khlebnikov gives the mystical imagery that underlies “Garden of Animals” a communist twist. He analogizes national languages with economic protectionism and proposes to smash ­these mercantilist monopolies through a revolution that is at once linguistic and socialist. As “differentiated auditory instruments for the exchange of rational wares,” Khlebnikov writes, sounds “have divided multilingual mankind into dif­fer­ent camps involved in tariff wars, into a series of verbal marketplaces beyond whose confines any given language loses currency.”69 In an apparent gesture to the utopian economic discourse of the early Soviet period, Khlebnikov envisions that his planetary language ­will be or­ga­nized along the lines of a worker’s syndicate.70 “Each individual word resembles a small worker’s collective, where the first sound of the word is like the chairman of the collective who directs the w ­ hole set of sounds in the word.”71 ­Here the poetic princi­ple of alliteration, the meaningful repetition of initial phonemes, is elevated to the ideal of a planetary zaum language analogized with planetary socialism. Khlebnikov’s dream of international cooperation cannot be aligned with Bolshevism in any straightforward way. He describes himself as “Marx squared” and claims to be the prophet of, in Harsha Ram’s words, a higher “internationalism of poetic and cognitive innovation designed to unify the ­human race

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in tandem with the goal of world revolution.”72 In a 1914 verse drama, Khlebnikov superimposes the similarly named “Karl [Marx] and Charles [Darwin] / . . . ​/ Two bearded old guys” and mocks materialist rationales for conflict between nations.73 Even in this text, however, Khlebnikov waxes nostalgic for “being without words” and asks us to imagine “that the world ­were one united nation.”74 Khlebnikov found in communist internationalism more fuel for his own utopian dream of global union—­a primitivist recovery of Adamic language and a futurist fantasy of “our sovereign song,” an earth on which space, time, and national difference would all be annulled.

The View from Above The 1913 operatic spectacle Victory over the Sun featured a prologue by Khlebnikov, a libretto by Kruchenykh, and a set by Kazimir Malevich. In this futurist fable, the ­human race rises up against the sun, which dominates the solar system from its central point and regulates the temporal cycles of day and night and the solar year. The sun’s defeat voids the laws of space and time; humanity must learn to live without the structuring limitations of the Kantian categories. The spectacle culminates in the crash and resurrection of the messianic Aviator, gravity-­defying and all-­seeing, who represents a transcendent point of view beyond space and time and speaks in zaum. Authors unaffiliated with the Futurists, including Alexander Blok and Vladislav Khodasevich, also wrote poems in which aviators figure as emblems of modernity, but winged flight looms uniquely large in the Futurist mythos. In a vociferous manifesto on the alliance of poetic and technological innovation, Khlebnikov describes a Futurist Earth as a “winged engine,” soon to be cleansed with “the soap of word-­creation” from utilitarian exploitation ­toward utilitarian ends.75 “In the shortest pos­si­ble time,” a poem’s language “must cover the greatest distance in images and thoughts,” Khlebnikov writes.76 The airplane is the technological correlate of zaum, representing the abolition of distance and the transcendence of biological limits through the ascent into a higher dimension. Malevich in 1919 calls for “a new Suprematist satellite”: “Follow me, comrade aviators!”77 Vasily Kamensky, himself an aviator, boasted that flight and poetry ­were the two prongs of his creativity and wrote onomatopoetic poems imitating the sounds of airplanes as well as concrete poetry representing in the arrangement of letters an airplane’s ascent.78 “Our era = an era of aviation,” he wrote; he read a lecture titled “Airplanes in Futurist Poetry” and appeared in public with an airplane painted on his forehead.79

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In Khlebnikov’s essay “Demonstration of Word-­Creation in Language,” he generates pages of words derived from the Slavic root for “to fly [letet’].”80 The name of a 1921 flying apparatus by Petr Miturich, “The Flyer [Letun],” is drawn from that list; Tim Harte calls it a “realization of Khlebnikov’s aeronautic neologisms.”81 Another proj­ect for a flying machine, designed by Khlebnikov’s friend Vladimir Tatlin, was called “Letatlin,” a name that synthesizes the portmanteau techniques of zaum and the fantasy of flight. The 1923 song “Air March [Aviamarsh]”—­“higher, higher, and higher,” goes the chorus, “We strive for the flight of our birds”—­testifies to the larger cult of the airplane in Soviet culture, with its myths of technological pro­gress and its idolization of test pi­lots and space explorers.82 For Vlad Strukov and Helena Goscilo, the song is emblematic of the avant-­garde’s “extraordinary faith in the spiritually liberating power of aeronautics” as well as Stalinism’s co-­optation of this “rhe­toric of transcendence” into militarized and totalitarian evocations of verticality.83 The theme of flight provides an impor­tant point of contrast and continuity between prerevolutionary futurist works and verses produced in the Soviet milieu. For instance, the apocalyptic image of an Icarus-­like airplane in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1913 lines крикнул аэроплан и упал туда, где у раненого солнца вытекал глаз the airplane screamed and fell ­toward the leaking eye of the wounded sun can be compared to late propaganda works like “The Flying Proletarian,” in which the new Soviet proletariat, h ­ oused in flying buildings, are “conquerors of the space of the seas, the oceans, and the continents.”84 Mayakovsky’s didactic poem “This Is Why the Peasant Needs Airplanes” more prosaically praises aerial photography for superseding surveying equipment.85 Fittingly, the Mayakovsky Station of the Moscow subway, built in the 1930s, was embellished with “a series of thirty-­five mosaics . . . ​all representing images of flight and aircraft, placed within the domes of a high ceiling.”86 The link between panoramic perspective and nonrepre­sen­ta­tional aesthetics is evident in the revolutionary abstractions of Kazimir Malevich, which can be seen as a visual counterpart to Khlebnikov’s efforts to develop a new poetic medium that rejects language’s referential function. Malevich’s theoretical writings emphasize how aerial perspective ­will reveal a world ever more radically transformed by artistic intention, which his paint­erly techniques intuit in advance. In the ­future, genet­ically engineered sheep w ­ ill grow vibrantly colored wool to save ­humans the trou­ble of ­dying it, Malevich enthuses; for aviators of the

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f­uture, looking down at the rationalized globe, grazing herds w ­ ill limn on the canvas of the earth blocks of geometric red and yellow, just like t­ hose that grace his Suprematist canvases.87 His first wholly abstract painting, Black Square, appeared in the set design for Victory over the Sun; shortly a­ fter, he unveiled his 1914 painting The Aviator.88 ­Later works synthesize airplanes and geometric forms. In the 1929 Head of a Peasant, blocks of color making up a portrait in the foreground echo similar rectangles in the background, representing an agricultural landscape from the point of view of airplanes flying in the upper corners of the canvas. The Constructivist journalist Sergei Tretiakov writes of aerial perspective as rendering the ­whole world a text. “The black stripes of the ploughing on the yellow-­green background of stubble and fields take the shape of letters,” he writes; “socialism ­will redraw the face of the Earth in a new way.”89 Several mentees of Malevich, including Ivan Kudraishev, Lazar Lissitzky, and Georgy Krutikov, produced blueprints for flying cities.90 Malevich’s paintings are not from this point of view abstractions but repre­sen­ta­tions of a ­future world, s­ haped by the collectivity of ­human intent. The artist’s access to a higher dimension—­ higher in the sense both of altitude and of the fourth dimension of time—­makes this ­future utopia apprehensible to us in the artwork.91 Julia Vaingurt, in her analy­sis of Vladimir Tatlin’s unbuilt skyscraper Monument to the Third International, points out that this structure, which harks back to the Tower of Babel, can be seen as “the embodiment of his friend Velimir Khlebnikov’s visionary teaching of the interrelationship between man’s endeavors and the movements of Earth, sun, and moon.”92 Composed of rotating glass shapes embedded in a lofty spiral of steel, the design is a technological achievement that simulates the cycles of nature but surpasses them in grandeur and transparency. Khlebnikov’s “supersaga” Zangezi, a verse drama arranged as a series of “planes” leading to the “heights” where the prophet Zangezi dwells, can be read as emulating the form of Tatlin’s monument in a vertical organ­ization of discourse.93 In his speculative writings, Khlebnikov writes of panoramic aerial perspective and its transformative effect on the aesthetics of everyday life. “­People now look at a city from the side; in the f­uture they w ­ ill look from directly overhead. The roof ­will become the main ­thing,” he writes in a 1915 essay. “With swarms of flyers and the face of the street above it, the city w ­ ill begin to be concerned about its roofs and not its walls.” Like Malevich, Khlebnikov suggests that the mundane aspects of everyday life ­will become material for f­ uture life creation. From the pedestrian point of view in the pre­sent day, sheep and rooftops are merely food, clothing, and shelter, but the bird’s-­eye perspective of the ­future reveals their aesthetic potential. “Dress up your roofs!” Khlebnikov exhorts. “Think of them as hairdos, add some pretty pins.”94

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The intuition that the world w ­ ill become apprehensible as an aesthetic object if it is viewed from a ­g reat distance is assimilable to spatial and historical perspective alike. Kruchenykh’s 1913 poem “The World Has Ended / The Heights (Universal Language) [Mir konchilsia / Vysoty (vselenskii iazyk)],” as its title suggests, is preoccupied at once with pa­norama and with futurity. The lyric has much in common with Kruchenykh’s libretto for Victory of the Sun, written the same year: both are split into two halves, the first of which represents the destruction of the world while more or less observing conventions of time, space, and language, while the second suggests a transrational ­f uture world beyond linguistic conventions and Kantian categories. I. Мир кончился. Умерли трубы . . . Птицы железные стали лететь Тонущих мокрые чубы Кости желтеющей плеть. Мир разокончился . . . ​Убраны ложки Тины глотайте бурду . . . Тише . . . ​и ниже поля дорожки Черт рспустил бороду. II. Высоты (вселенский язык) еую иао оа оаеиея оa eуиeи иe и ы и е и ы95 I. The world has ended. The trumpets have died . . . Steel birds have begun to fly Wet topknots of the drowned Whip of yellowing bone.

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The world has ended away . . . ​the spoons have been cleared Silts you swallow swill . . . Hush . . . ​and below the margin of the path The devil has let down his beard. II. The Heights (universal language) e u iu iao oa o a e i e ia oa euiei ie iyieiy The apocalyptic subtext of the Last Judgment and the aerial theme are immediately apparent. The last trump signals the end of the world; steel airplanes have replaced organic birds, commonplace figures for the lyric voice of the poet. Over the course of two stanzas written in more or less comprehensible Rus­sian, though with nonnormative word order and unmotivated declensions, the lyric gaze sinks downward, from the heavens filled with steel birds to the drowned bodies in the w ­ ater, first topknots (chuby, the lock of hair on the other­wise shaved head of a Cossack or steppe warrior), then the bones, the bottom silt, and fi­nally the dev­il’s beard spreading into the underworld. As the poem traces this trajectory, its zaum techniques (which my translation renders very provisionally) appear on an increasingly granular scale. Kruchenykh performs for us the gradual decomposition of language: first on the level of syntax, then of morphology, and fi­nally of phonetics. Over the course of the first stanza, the meter becomes irregular; the words begin to appear in a counterintuitive order, though with grammatically correct declensions. In the second stanza, distortions appear on the level of the morpheme. The opening neologism, razokonchilsia, repeats the poem’s first verb, konchilsia, “has ended,” but with a prefix that implies dispersal (to end, dissolving away). The second-­person-­ imperative form glotaite (swallow!) is substituted for the expected third-­person indicative—­possibly as an apostrophe to the silts—­and contradicts the indicative mood of the rest of the poem. In the last two lines, the imagery has become opaque and more evidently motivated by sound repetition (burdu—­borodu, swill—­beard) than by logical sequence. Now deformation occurs on the phonetic level: “rspustil” is clearly a version of raspustil, a word whose most obvi-

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ously relevant meaning is “let down,” as in “let down one’s hair,” but with the vowel removed from the prefix. It can also mean to “let go” or “set f­ree” and in this sense announces the liberation of vowels from the structuring articulation of consonants that is accomplished in the poem’s second half. Whereas the first neologism is generated morphologically, by attaching the nonnormative prefix raz-­to the poem’s first word, this second neologism is generated on the phonetic level, by eliminating the vowel from that same prefix to produce a jarring variant of a dictionary word. The elided vowel is a negative image of the second half of the poem, which seems to have lost all its consonants and retained only the vowels, the f­ ree flow of breath through the vocal apparatus. I do not propose to have exhausted the poem’s sound patterns and ambiguities, but this brief reading suffices to demonstrate its formal logic of creation, salvation, and apocalypse. The poem is also richly allusive. In its opening line reverberates the biblical resurrection of the dead: “Behold, I tell you a mystery: We s­ hall not all sleep, but we s­ hall all be changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet ­will sound, and the dead w ­ ill be raised incorruptible, and we ­shall be changed.”96 The “last trumpet” (posledniaia truba) with which the poem begins (“the trumpets have died”) augurs the resurrection of the layers of buried dead in the following lines, but the apocalypse is given a Futurist spin. The divine blast that ends the world, undoes death, and changes every­thing can only be a burst of zaum poetry—­a divine or magical language that transforms the world.97 The airplanes that herald the eschatological obliteration of space and time in Kruchenykh’s Death of the Sun in this text replace the flying angels or singing birds that figure the poet in conventional elegies. The vertical descent that structures “The Heights” is overlaid with a temporal regression from the end of the world to its origin; along the way, we meet the inhabitants of the past, the myriad dead awaiting resurrection. The tendrils of dev­il’s beard sinking into t­ hese archaic depths evokes the spreading roots of the cosmic tree that unites the world in numerous mythologies—­most obviously the tree of knowledge, the haunt of Satan, at the center of the Garden of Eden—­and of the etymological roots of language, which can also be traced back to Adam. Heights and depths, origin and end—­the first half of the poem is already a formal encapsulation of the totality of space and time. What remains on the other side of the transformation? The “universal language,” consisting only of vowels and corresponding structurally to the second act of Victory over the Sun, seems to overlay Genesis onto Revelation with a reference to the Tower of Babel, the Bible’s primal scene of the differentiation of national languages. “Behold, the ­people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing w ­ ill be restrained from them, which they have

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i­magined to do,” pronounces God in this narrative of punished hubris. “Let us go down, and t­ here confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”98 Victory over the Sun celebrates hubris in its portrayal of ­human beings seizing and displacing the sun, the celestial mea­sure of time and space, and ends with a messianic zaum-­speaking Aviator. In “The Heights / Universal Language,” the airplane in the first lines suggests another paean to ­human ambition. Having conquered the heavens through technology, a ­f uture humanity claims for itself the place of God and the universal language that, in the biblical myth, God dismembered in order to prevent h ­ uman cooperation on a planetary scale. Kruchenykh’s poem thus undoes God’s refusal of a common language and of a “common task [obshchee delo]”—­the task that Nikolai Fedorov sought in the resurrection of the dead and Velimir Khlebnikov sought in the recovery of a universal language.99 What seems at first glance to be a bizarre and marginal Futurist text can thus be read as a transposition and inversion of the most canonical text in the Western world, the Bible. Futuristic airplanes supersede the ancient tower, and the text culminates not with the dissolution but with the recovery of a universal language.100 The apparently inscrutable sequence of vowels that makes up the second half of the poem represents another deformation of a canonical text: the Old Church Slavonic version of the Nicene Creed, from which the consonants have been removed.101 Denis Crnkovic plausibly reads the minor discrepancies between the canonical sequence of vowels and Kruchenykh’s text as the rewriting of the Creed from belief in “one god [vo edinago boga]” to belief in “another god [v inago boga],” a change that corresponds to Kruchenykh’s call for “another sound [inoi zvuk]” and flirtations with Satanic imagery.102 Kruchenykh’s gleeful desecration of the sacred text seems to exemplify Mikhail Lifshits’s accusation that avant-­garde deformations of cultural tradition amount to “the joy of destruction, the love of cruelty, the thirst of unconscious life.”103 The opposition of consonants and vowels, and the climactic release of vowels from the articulatory framework of consonants, offers another entry point to the poem. A 1913 manifesto signed by the major figures of Futurism identifies vowels with the Kantian categories, consonants as specific sensual content. “We understand vowels as space and time (the character of direction), consonants— as color, sound, smell.”104 Another manifesto of the same year affiliates vowels with Adamic language. “The artist has seen the world in a new way and, like Adam, proceeds to give ­things his own names,” he proclaims, rebaptizing the lily (liliia) with the new name “euy [еуы],” in order to “reestablish” its consonantless “purity.” The consonants and the vowels in a line of verse, he asserts, exist in­de­ pen­dently of one another: “Consonants render everyday real­ity [byt], nationality, weight; vowels, the opposite: a universal language.”105 A version of the Lord’s

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Prayer follows, with the consonants removed to produce a vocalic poem similar to the one that concludes “The Heights.” The artist’s deformation of sacred language is, for Kruchenykh, a blasphemous recovery of the Adamic capacity to give true names. By liberating the flow of breath, the poet expunges the divine sentence passed on humanity for the crime of aspiring to godhood. We are liberated from the twin prisons of language and gravity, “nationality” and “heaviness.” As in many languages, the Rus­sian word for breath (dukh) is etymologically related to the word for soul (dusha). The interruption of breath, whenever a consonant is articulated, allegorizes for Kruchenykh humanity’s pitiful, fractured, earthbound state. Like the iron bars of Khlebnikov’s menagerie, consonants for Kruchenykh represent for the barriers without which the zoological garden might become again an Eden, each of its members mingling in a global linguistic harmony that supersedes the protective bound­aries of the nation. In their zaum poems, Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh explode language in order to build of its blasted parts a home for humanity. The first Futurist manifesto, the infamous “Slap in the Face of Public Taste” of 1912, already sneers at established writers of the previous generation from the panoramic perspective of a transformed f­ uture. “From the heights of skyscrapers we gaze at their insignificance,” declaim the Futurists, in an early image of their aspiration to the higher dimension that would make the world and its history vis­i­ble as a ­whole spatial and temporal object.106

Formalist Theory and Nomadic Phonetics In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova notes that peripheral lit­er­a­ tures gain access to the centers of literary power by translating, rewriting, and other­wise co-­opting canonical texts. She gives the example of James Joyce’s efforts to deform and universalize through etymological play the colonial language of English—­not least through his rewriting of the Babel legend in Finnegans Wake.107 Her model plausibly explains the irreverent and performative zaum experiment, dreamed up by petit-­bourgeois bohemians of provincial background who wrote from the margin of Eu­rope in a language that was largely unknown to readers in global centers of finance. However, the Futurists themselves stress not transit across borders but their abolition, not points of access to a network but a panoramic intuition of the w ­ hole from a higher dimension. A meta­phoric intuition rather than a metonymic cooptation, their proj­ect may bear comparison with theoretical texts better than literary ones. I have in mind, for instance, revisions of the Tower of Babel narrative by Jacques Derrida or Walter Benjamin, who follows Kabbalistic sources in speaking of

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the world’s languages as shards of a single pot, each one testifying to a common Edenic language and a common ­human world.108 The scope of zaum’s influence on theoretical discourse goes often unappreciated in the West.109 Khlebnikov fantasized of dissolving language “into its fundamental elementary truths, whereafter it would be pos­si­ble to build for the sounds something similar to Mendeleev’s law,” and predicted that “if it ­will be confirmed that the laws for the s­ imple ele­ments of the alphabet are identical for the ­whole ­family of languages, then it ­will become pos­si­ble to build the world language for the ­whole ­family of nations—­the language in whose verbal mirrors the ­whole itinerary from New York to Moscow would be reflected.”110 The structuralist linguistic theory of Roman Jakobson, argues Boris Gasparov, translates Khlebnikov’s vision of an absolute poetic language into a linguistic concept by “offering descriptions of existing languages in such terms as if they ­were emanations of the ideal ‘cosmic’ language: totally or­ga­ nized, united, and redeemed from the curse of linearity” through the alignment of dif­fer­ent distinctive features in a single phoneme.111 For Gasparov, a verse sequence like “Ia videl / vydel / vesen / v osen’ [I saw the making of springs into the fall],” produced through minor phonetic permutations, suggests “a phonologist’s dream”—­a “fully accomplished language” that would “systematically exploit phonological correlations throughout all its vocabulary.”112 He sees traces of the utopian goal to regather “the meaning scattered among dif­fer­ent languages and dif­fer­ ent epochs” as surviving in Jakobson’s mature theory.113 ­Because literary studies a­ fter World War II turned to Jakobson’s system for its own “common language,” on which or in opposition to which much of what we now call literary theory developed, the universal language of the Futurist poets can be seen as the foundation of the discipline as we know it.114 The alignment between Futurist poetics and Structuralist linguistics is perhaps clearest in their approach to translation, through which a text enters into a supranational existence beyond any given language.115 “A verse pre­sents (unconsciously) several series of vowels and consonants,” writes Kruchenykh in his 1913 “Declaration of the World as Such,” and “­these series cannot be altered. It is better to replace a word with one close in sound than with one close in meaning (bast-­cast-­ghast). If similar vowels and consonants w ­ ere replaced by graphic lines, they would form patterns that could not be altered (example: III-­I-­I-­III). For this reason it is impossible to translate from one language into another; one can only transliterate a poem into Latin letters and provide a word-­for-­word translation.”116 In the Futurist mind-­set, literariness (literaturnost’) resides in the patterning of the verbal material. A message communicating the same information in a dif­fer­ent language must utterly change the sounds, stresses, and other differential features of the text; the signifying function of

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language is parallel to and distinct from the poetic one.117 Indeed, poems do not from this point of view stand in need of translation. While the series of repetitions that unfolds in a given text may use the set of phonemes current in a given national language, the poetic text has its own rules and is essentially autonomous. A poet in French might attempt to create a pattern of sound with semantic resonances that mimic t­ hose of a poem in Japa­nese, but this is not to create an equivalent but to create another poem. Poetry’s literary dimension is supranational. If the pattern of differentiated and repeated ele­ments that make up the poem is wholly abstract, it is even immaterial ­whether the text is manifested in sound, graphic marks, or any other medium; it ­matters only that its features can be distinguished from, aligned with, and related to each other. In a 2020 talk, Eugene Ostashevsky illustrated the continuity between Futurist manifestoes and mature Structuralist theory by juxtaposing the preceding Kruchenykh quote with the following lines from Roman Jakobson’s 1959 essay “Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In poetry, verbal equations become a constructive princi­ple of the text. Syntactic and morphological categories, roots, and affixes, phonemes and their components (distinctive features)—in short, any constituents of the verbal code—­are confronted, juxtaposed, brought into contiguous relation according to the princi­ple of similarity and contrast and carry their own autonomous signification. Phonemic similarity is sensed as semantic relationship. The pun, or to use a more erudite and perhaps more precise term—­paronomasia, reigns over poetic art, and w ­ hether its rule is absolute or l­imited, poetry by definition is untranslatable. Only creative transposition is pos­si­ble: e­ither intralingual transposition—­from one poetic shape into another, or interlingual transposition—­from one language into another, or fi­nally intersemiotic transposition—­from one system of signs into another (from verbal art into ­music, dance, cinema, or painting).118 The proj­ect of a universal literary theory is in Jakobson’s argument predicated on the impossibility of poetic translation. Ele­ments of Herder’s notion that the vocalic patterning of ele­ments repeated from the environment is the foundation of verbal art resurface ­here in a twentieth-­century jargon: since a work of lit­er­a­ture is based in contrastive and recombinatory linguistic values, each poetic text is an autonomous system of “verbal equations.” Constituted by sound parallelisms rather than signification, a poem is in its defining aspect not a message that can be communicated across national languages but a unique expression of a universal language. Galin Tihanov’s The Birth and Death of Literary Theory describes efforts in early twentieth-­century eastern Eu­rope to “flee the constraints of thinking

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about lit­er­at­ ure through the prism of a national culture and a single national language”—to “establish what constitutes lit­er­at­ ure beyond the singularity of the language in which it happens to be written.”119 This new discourse broke with approaches that value lit­er­a­ture’s capacity to express its author or to effect social change, thereby inaugurating a “regime of relevance, in which lit­ er­at­ ure is valued for its autonomy and uniqueness as a discourse that is unlike other discourses.”120 ­Later in the c­ entury, Formalist ideas would fruitfully intersect with the Kantian attitude that distinguishes artworks from other products of h ­ uman l­ abor insofar as their formal features exceed their expressive or instrumental function, giving rise to the theories of artistic autonomy espoused by Theodor Adorno or Clement Greenberg. Insofar as zaum aimed to provide, in Kruchenykh’s words, “a ­free language, beyonsense and universal,” which would f­ree the word from the “shackles” of its “subordination to meaning,” Futurist poetic technique radically affirms the autonomy of art and provides proof of concept for the Formalist aesthetic stance.121 The groups ­were close socially. The Formalist theorist Osip Brik lived in a menage à trois with his wife, Liliya Brik, and the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Roman Jakobson, u ­ nder the pseudonym Alyagrov, contributed zaum poetry to a 1915 volume compiled by Kruchenykh, and his earliest critical essays ­were devoted to Futurism.122 Viktor Shklovsky’s first major theoretical statement, “Resurrection of the Word,” was a justification of Khlebnikov’s poetic techniques; he presented it in 1913 at the Stray Dog, a café that hosted Futurist readings. In Shklovksy’s essay “Art as Device,” an expanded and more mature version of the same argument, he hails Khlebnikov’s “creation of a new, specialized poetic language” and introduces his most famous theoretical concept, itself a neologism that exploits morphology to generate a new term: ostranenie, variously translated as “defamiliarization,” “enstrangement,” or “making it strange.”123 It is easy to imagine this word appearing for the first time in a verse by Khlebnikov or Kruchenykh; but it is doubtful that Shklovsky could have coined it without their poetic example. Like the other Formalists, Shklovsky was interested in literariness as a phenomenon of verbal patterning, but he lacked fa­cil­i­ty in foreign languages and was drawn increasingly to prose narrative. “Art as Device” became the first chapter of his Theory of Prose, a book based in part on lectures given in 1919 to the editors and translators of Maxim Gorky’s World Lit­er­a­ture publishing ­house.124 In this groundbreaking volume, Shklovsky discovered literariness on levels of organ­ization that are not language specific. His analyses of novels like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote focus on devices that survive translation ­because they appear in the patterning of themes and events. Shklovsky’s forays into comparative lit­er­a­ture reveal

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“striking coincidences in the treatment of identical themes, in the similar arrangement of individual motifs, the temporal sequence of the incidents; in a word, in the plot structure,” admires Viktor Erlich. “­These amazing convergences seem to point in the direction of certain esthetic conventions, of immanent laws of narrative art, which obviously transcend national bound­aries and cannot be reduced to so­cio­log­i­cal or ethnographical considerations.”125 Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Lit­er­a­ture” acknowledges Shklov­ sky’s pioneering effort to uncover something like evolutionary pressure within literary environments.126 Tihanov suggests that the “liberal Anglo-­Saxon discourse” of world lit­er­a­ture, with its assumption of a “circulation that supports the ­free consumption and unrestricted comparison of literary artifacts,” is broadly obliged to Shklovsky for demonstrating that “the literary core of lit­er­at­ ure travels well”—­“in other words, that literariness is in the end portable” beyond its original language or indeed any par­tic­u­lar context of production or reception.127 Yet Shklovsky is not especially interested in moments of transfer and exchange. He is drawn to the recurrence of the same techniques and forms in diverse historical moments and even to the proj­ect of filling out lit­er­a­ture’s evolutionary tree, so that it includes e­ very v­ iable literary form. It is in this sense that Shklovsky speaks of Tristram Shandy as “the most typical novel in world lit­er­at­ure” and therefore an appropriate model through which to “illustrate the general laws governing plot structure.”128 He sees Sterne’s riotous novel as drawing within a single horizon e­ very pos­si­ble plot device, much as the universal language of zaum poetry validates ­every pos­si­ble combination of phonemes. Since zaum takes place on dif­fer­ent levels of language (reordering syntactic, morphological, and phonetic ele­ments), Shklovsky’s approach to the patterns that make up plot remains of a piece with Jakobson’s emphasis on phonetic paronomasia and its models in Futurist verse—­albeit focused on the narrative rather than the phonetic level of organ­ization. Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the sign was an impor­tant forerunner of Nikolai Trubetskoi and Roman Jakobson’s account of distinctive linguistic features. According to Boris Gasparov, Saussure’s ideas influenced Trubetskoi’s po­ liti­cal ideology as well as his linguistics, since Trubetskoi saw the Eurasian mentality as uniquely capable of perceiving “the immanent structural qualities of the sonic particles of language, for which the sounds of speech serve only as the surface expression.”129 In the essay “The Tower of Babel and the Confusion of Tongues,” whose major meta­phor is inspired by the G ­ rand Inquisitor’s interpretation of the Babel legend in Dostoevsky’s ­Brothers Karamazov, Trubetskoi yokes an expansive Eurasian nationalism to the universality of the Christian Church. Chris­tian­ity, he suggests, resembles a Sprachbund (iazykovoi soiuz)—­his

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term for a grouping of genet­ically unrelated languages that, like ­those of the Eurasian steppes, have come to share common features through proximity and interaction.130 The hegemony of any one world language would be a “brotherhood of nations bought at the price of a spiritual flattening of all ­peoples—­a repulsive deception,” Trubetskoi writes; however, “all the languages of the world represent an uninterrupted network of links that transition mutually from one to another.”131 As in Gramsci’s fantasy of a supranational idiom of world communism, linguistic difference in Trubetskoi’s view is to be superseded by a larger totality that does not negate but rather sublates them. He aligns the neutrality of Structuralist linguistics, which ecumenically describes all languages without judgment, with the Christian faith that is true for all—­ and also with the frictionless habitat of the Eurasian nomads, whose endless gradations of p­ eoples symbolize for Trubetskoi the computational modularity of the new phonetics. “By virtue of the graduated transitions from one of its segments to the next, the ­whole system of languages of the globe, in all its rich variety, represents nonetheless a single whole—­graspable, granted, only in the mind [umopostigaemoe].”132 Just as the system of languages comprehends e­ very dialect, Trubtskoi takes unique cultures to exist within the ethical totality of Chris­tian­ity. An impor­tant poetic pre­ce­dent for this idea is Khlebnikov’s free-­ verse vision of a zoo as a Garden of Eden, in “Garden of Animals,” which holds that “­there are so many animals on Earth ­because each can see God in its own way.”133 For Khlebnikov, ­every species of animal and ­every nation of ­people possesses a unique orientation onto a common truth, all of them accommodated by the structure of the zoo or poem. A 1914 letter listing Vladimir Mayakovsky among its signatories claimed that “Futurism is a social big-­city-­born movement which by itself abolishes all national differences. Poetry of the ­Future ­will be cosmopolitan.”134 However, Futurism also evinced a Eurasianist strain that aimed to produce an “all-­Slavic language” rather than a universal one—­a nationalist and primitivist attitude championed not least by Khlebnikov, whose “Sovereign Planet Earth” often seems coextensive with the “United Stans of Asia, that ­great u ­ nion of ­labor 135 communities.” In his writings on architecture, Khlebnikov’s utopian urbanism effectively futurizes nomadism. He describes a built environment of transportable modular units, each one “a container of molded glass, a mobile dwelling module supplied with a door, with attachment couplings, mounted on wheels.”136 Khlebnikov’s “framework-­buildings” have close analogues in modernist thinkers who worked more directly in architecture and urban planning, such as Mikhail Okhitovich’s “de-­urbanist” vision of collapsible dwelling units transported from place to place along a network of superhighways.137 Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome and advocate of thinking on “the scale

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of the total world pattern,” also proposed modular flying “high standard living equipment” of glass and aluminum, ­free to ­settle at ­will “on mountain top, in remote valley, or island.”138 Like Fuller, Khlebnikov advocated engineered construction materials, echoing in an architectural medium his search for intentional verbal materials with which to assem­ble the poetry of the ­future, in which “not only ­humans but all living ­things on Planet Earth” ­were to find a home.139 By the same token, Khlebnikov’s reinvented nomadism of “movable glass cubicles” that can be plugged at w ­ ill into frameworks (­shaped like arches, tree trunks, spirals, and so on) can be read as an allegory of his poetic methods, in which sound ele­ments are rearranged within linear verse forms. His hy­po­thet­ i­cal buildings are to be a writing “in the terrifying alphabet of iron consonants and vowels of glass,” a poetic rhythm of opacity and transparency.140 Meant to be viewed from above, his utopian dwellings can themselves rise into the air; their perfectly mobile residents are at home in the ­whole world, a view of which they command and into which they can be inserted at any point. In an insightful evaluation, Yuri Tynianov observes that Khlebnikov “shifted poetry’s center of gravity” due to his “recognition of the verse line as a framework. If unrelated but similar-­sounding words are placed in a series, a framework, they become relatives.”141 In Khlebnikov’s “Garden of Animals,” an innovative free-­verse parallelism becomes the template for a harmonized world: a series of verses accommodates e­ very nation, just as a series of cells in the zoo accommodates ­every species of animal. In the same fashion, Khlebnikov imagines the everyday life of the ­f uture as an architectural realization of his zaum poetry, in which contingent sequences of discrete phonemes, morphemes, or words acquire contrastive value when they are plugged into an utterance.

From World Lit­er­a­ture to Global Village On the one hand, Khlebnikov appeals to the global imaginary of a f­ uture socialism; on the other hand, the Eurasianist fantasy of vast and frictionless steppes has something in common with the networked planetary economy of global capitalism and its international market for literary commodities. In the 1848 Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels describe world lit­er­at­ ure as a part of a pro­cess that w ­ ill, in the ultimate calculus, bring about a united humanity and a rational global economy. “National one-­sidedness and narrow-­mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local lit­er­a­tures ­there arises a world lit­er­a­ture,” they write.142 Quoted by itself, as it often and misleadingly is, this sentence seems to imply a benign narrative of pro­g ress.143 Its larger context, however, concerns the

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homogenizing colonial vio­lence that “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production.”144 Through the commodifying pro­cess that supplies alienated artifacts of the world’s cultures to a global audience in a palatable form, capitalism “creates a world ­after its own image.”145 The oft-­cited “level playing field” of world culture, in which the literary traditions and artifacts of the ­whole world have become available in translation and circulate as competing commodities in the global marketplace, is for Marx and Engels only a form of “that single, unconscionable freedom—­Free Trade.”146 As Aamir Mufti remarks, the cele­bration of “a ‘borderless world’ ” often ignores that world’s underpinning in the “institutional frameworks of the con­temporary cap­i­tal­ist system and world market”; insofar as we prize speedy transmission, unhampered progression, and intensifying circulation, we recode “an opaque and unequal pro­cess of appropriation as a transparent one of supposedly f­ree and equal interchange and communication.”147 World lit­er­at­ ure cannot but reiterate the pro­cess by which literary raw materials are obtained (often from agricultural and extraction regions), refined by translation and exegesis, and sold to their final consumers as a sort of luxury good.148 For Marx, the deracination of cultural products and their total alienation in the commodity form is necessary if culture is to become the truly common inheritance of a ­future humanity; for Vladimir Lenin, colonial monopolies augur “the transition from capitalism to a higher system,” namely, humanity’s collective owner­ship of the means of production.149 In the wake of the Soviet experiment, however, capitalism stands alone as the imaginary within which a world lit­er­a­ture is conceivable.150 The plaint that we are deprived since 1989 of the sense of an alternative to global capitalism, voiced most forcefully by Fredric Jameson, has been challenged by Slavic scholars who assert the specificity of the postcommunist world.151 Jameson’s dismissal of alternate modernities has been accused, as in Susan Stanford Friedman’s 2015 Planetary Modernisms, of “reductionist economism” and “vulgar Marxism,” tantamount to colonialism.152 Friedman’s aim to construct multiple qualitatively distinct planetary modernisms is sympathetic; however, her conclusions are susceptible to the charge that they are themselves ideologically motivated—­one more example of the “pious hopes for cultural variety in a ­future world colonized by a universal market order,” as Jameson puts it.153 Yet this is not to say that capitalism is the only mode of production capable of spanning the globe, that its hegemony is permanent, or that other forms of world culture might not appear in its wake. In fact, it is plausible to expect ­every form of economic globalization to yield its own notion of world lit­er­a­ ture. If received thinking around world lit­er­a­ture internalizes the basic logics of global capitalism in its valorization of exchange and its assumption of neu-

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tral networks of communication, then something like the Chinese ­Belt and Road initiative—­insofar as it might evolve into a qualitatively distinct global system of production, trade, and consumption, alongside or in the wake of liberalism—­would imply a new global culture. Early Soviet mythologies of a global economic and cultural order pre­sent an especially robust imaginary of a world united by economic forces that may have been mustered by capitalism but that resist identification with it. Harsha Ram reminds us that “alternative models of world lit­er­a­ture might well be expected to arise when the socio-­economic under­pinnings of the world market” enter a state of crisis, as in the case of Communist revolution, and that “the dominant narrative of globalizing capital all too often brackets the rival path to modernity offered by state socialism in many parts of the world.”154 How can we compare the global imaginary of capitalism with the hy­po­thet­ic­ al world lit­er­a­ture intuited by the early Soviet avant-­garde? Roman Jakobson proposes that culture is performed at the intersection of similarity and association: lyric verse, structured through sound repetitions, or Romanticism, emphasizing symbolic imagery, are predominantly meta­ phorical, while the novel, with its emphasis on plot continuity, or Realism, with its technique of characterization through the telling detail, tend to the metonymic.155 World lit­er­a­ture, which offers orientation onto the condition of global capitalism by identifying with its under­lying logics of expansion and exchange, is frankly metonymic. Treating literary relations as a network of transfers, it emphasizes influence and echo, adaptation and mutation; its readings of individual texts are richly informed by historical and biographical considerations.156 World lit­er­at­ure can thus be seen as part of an intellectual zeitgeist articulated in its most radical form by the sociologist of science Bruno Latour, who imagines the scholar’s task as tracing “a trail of associations between heterogeneous ele­ments” instead of erecting interpretive paradigms.157 Latour’s emphasis on chains of association is testament to the dominance of the metonymic in con­temporary culture, propagated by networked media and rewarding fluid navigation of bookmarks and hyperlinks. While recognizing “paths that lead from the local to the global,” he finds it impracticable to reproduce the Borgesian map of the world in its entirety and expressly mistrusts meta­phorical frameworks, whose explanatory power comes at the cost of reduced detail and accuracy.158 Tellingly, literary theory is for Jakobson essentially allied to meta­phor. “Similarity in meaning connects the symbols of a metalanguage with the symbols of the language referred to,” explains Jakobson, and since metonymic relations are less susceptible to symbolic interpretation, “nothing comparable to the rich lit­er­a­ture on meta­phor can be cited for the theory of metonymy.”159

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In Cartographies of the Absolute, Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle observe that Latour’s apparently metonymic method itself is built on a system of visual meta­phors; it is, furthermore, so granular as to prevent us ever addressing fundamental questions like, “What does our world look like?”160 Toscano and Kinkle see early Soviet artists in new media as pioneering techniques to represent the world system that had become evident in the first ­great epoch of economic globalization, the First World War, and the effort to implement international socialism. They cite Dziga Vertov, who wrote of film as “establishing a visual bond between the workers of the w ­ hole world” that would make graspable as an aesthetic intuition their economic interdependence, and Sergei Eisenstein, who pursued an aesthetics that would “create in the literary or poetic work a stylistic structure whose internal tensions are a meta­phor for the internal tensions and structural tendencies of a social ‘body.’ ”161 For Toscano and Kinkle, the utopian ambitions of t­ hese artists bespeak the same ambition for unity and transparency manifested in commercials exploiting satellite photography of our planet.162 To this list we might add the panoramic ambitions of Futurism. Of course, it is madness (bezumie), if not ­simple stupidity (neumie), to believe in a universal language (zaum’).163 Evolutionary linguists suggest that, on the contrary, dialects diverge more rapidly as the community of speakers increases.164 Khlebnikov’s dramatic “supersaga” Zangezi makes zaum’s quixotic quality into a rueful joke. In the climactic scene, a chorus of gods performs a poem based on morphological play with the Rus­sian root um (reason, mind); an epilogue mentions the title character’s suicide, only to have him walk on to deliver the closing line: “Zangezi lives! It was just a stupid joke [neumnaia shutka].”165 This final play on um suggests the possibility that the entire text and the very proj­ect of a universal poetic language are a foolish prank. Contrariwise, the joke might be that while zaum seems dead, it remains always immanent in the material of language, awaiting its resurrection at the final, apocalyptic curtain call, like a commedia dell’arte clown. The c­ areer of Ilya Zdanevich, one of the most accomplished, dedicated, and emblematic prac­ti­tion­ers of zaum, distills the course of the avant-­garde milieux in which he lived and serves as an appropriate coda for this chapter. Polyglot child of a Georgian ­mother and a Polish teacher of French, Zdanevich grew up in Tbilisi, a vibrant city that Harsha Ram has described as a model environment for peripheral modernism.166 Moving to the capital for university, Zdanevich became in his late teens and early twenties the author of a cycle of zaum dramas, published ­under the portmanteau name Iliazd. ­After the revolution, he returned to Georgia, where he participated with Kruchenykh in the fecund avant-­garde group they called 41°, a­ fter their geographic latitude. ­After the consolidation of Soviet power, Zdanevich emigrated to Paris,

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where he collaborated with Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró among ­others, continuing all the while to produce zaum lit­er­at­ ure and experimenting particularly with typography. In 1949, he compiled a zaum anthology featuring Eu­ro­pean as well as transliterated Rus­sian poetry, titled Poésie de mots inconnues and illustrated by luminaries including Hans Arp, Fernand Léger, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, and Marc Chagall—­a kind of regathering of the avant-­garde in multiple media, nations of origin, and periods of development.167 Zdanevich’s novel Rapture, published in Paris for an émigré audience in 1926, is a bandit tale that borrows many techniques from popu­lar fiction but is at the same time an allegory of the aims and failures of the international avant-­garde. Set in an inbred mountain village “with an unbelievably long and difficult name, so difficult that even its inhabitants could not pronounce it,” the novel consciously develops the fine line between the transrational and the idiotic, the zaumnyi and the neumnyi: “The village . . . ​was famed for the fact that it was populated exclusively by ­people with goiters and ­people who ­were cretins.”168 Among ­these two inbred families, each with their own deformity, both of them sharing a lofty isolation, it is the cretins who practice something like poetry, “crawling out most eve­nings” onto the slope overlooking the pa­ norama of the lowlands and “breaking out into beyonsense [zaumnyie] songs entirely constructed on resemblances to the village’s name.”169 The subtext of the scene is the “steep craggy rock” that in Khlebnikov’s supersaga is “Zangezi’s favorite place. He comes ­here ­every morning to recite his poems.”170 Zdanevich’s joke is that the zaumnyi has collapsed back into the neumnyi. Poets are ­idiots; the futurist techno-­utopia of universal poetry has degenerated into an impoverished and isolated pastoral; the dawn of poetry has given way to a sunset gobbledygook; a world of humanity united has become a pair of inbred tribes. As in Kruchenykh’s “The World Is Ended / The Heights,” zaum remains a ­matter of a higher world and a transcendental language—­but it is practiced only by dead-­enders who, wedded to the futile proj­ect of naming their own isolated village, can talk to no one outside it. And yet we can infer the name of this village that poets attempt to recover through phonetic permutation, like safecrackers trying dif­fer­ent combinations at h ­ azard. It is Babel, the home of universal language, the city whose name means confusion. An elegy for the creative origin of language and an incantatory effort to recover it, the panoramic song of the cretins mourns the failure of lyric verse but does not abandon it. Although it has no specific addressee, the stupid and sublime song of the heights calls out from the mountain peaks of the 1920s—­across the time of the world as well as its spatial geography— in an attempt to discover, if only by chance, the total poetic form that ­will be

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vis­i­ble from the end of history or from the divine point of perspective that lies beyond the world. This form would accommodate e­ very pos­si­ble poetic utterance. It would be the globus intellectualis of Enlightenment philosophy, the mythical index of Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, the exhaustive grid of Structuralist phonetics. We might think of this song broadly as the sustained effort of poetic intuition at unique times and places to name the place where poets live, which is the place we all live, which is the world.

C h a p te r   4

The Orchestra Dictation and Dictatorship

The 1933 essay Conversation about Dante is the poet and dissident martyr Osip Mandelstam’s most elaborate statement of aesthetic philosophy and the most extended document of his reading practice. In the afterword to the first Soviet edition, published in 1967, a de­cade ­after Stalin’s death, L. E. Pinsky already described the work as laying out its author’s “most involved conception of the poetic”; Jane Gary Harris’s introduction to the 1979 En­glish translation calls it “the poet’s supreme effort to explicate the creative pro­cess.”1 More recent years have seen detailed and persuasive interpretations of the piece as, in Elena Glazova’s words, “a key text of utmost importance” in the development of Mandelstam’s images and ideas, which extend through a large and often enigmatic body of poetic and essayistic works spanning the pre-­and postrevolutionary periods.2 Glazova’s own reading of the essay as an allegorical journey of the poetic impulse into its material goes a long way ­toward rendering this dense text legible both as a linchpin in the system of motifs spanning Mandelstam’s late poetic works and as a coherent, if highly meta­phorical, expression of a theoretical stance. However, I would like ­here to approach Conversation about Dante not chiefly as a theoretical statement or a poetic text in its own right or a reservoir of motifs to be traced through Mandelstam’s larger proj­ect, though it is all t­hese ­things, but as a demonstration of and meditation on reading—­a document of a textual encounter by one of the ­g reat modern readers of poetry. “Are ­there 115

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many ­people who can read poetry? And yet almost every­body writes it,” Mandelstam complains in a 1923 essay. “To read poetry is a most sublime and difficult art, and the vocation of reader is no less respectable than the vocation of poet.”3 ­These lines enjoin us to redirect our attention from genesis to reception; nonetheless, my intent is not entirely to bracket Mandelstam’s personae as theoretician and poet. His philosophy of reading is part and parcel of a philosophy of writing, manifested in Conversation about Dante through a highly poetic cluster of meta­phors around the central image of a conductor’s baton and addressing perennial concerns of how the preserved and authoritative word preserves culture over time. According to the memoirs of Mandelstam’s wife, it was in the thirties that he equated his poetic movement, Acmeism, with “nostalgia for world culture [toska po mirovoi kul’ture].”4 She cites verses of the period in which wordplay on nostalgia (toska) and Tuscany (Toskana) links Mandelstam’s exile in the provincial city of Voronezh to his longing for humanity’s “universal [vsechelovecheskoe]” home in world lit­er­a­ture—­the work of Dante, a poet who wrote his classic Divine Comedy in exile from Florence half a millennium before.5 Nancy Pollak has argued that Mandelstam “defines the poet as a reader” by conceiving of verbal art as a product of and intervention into the textual time of poetic tradition, most vividly in his famous image of the poet’s pen as a plough that sinks into the layers of the past and turns up the fertile material of prior ages.6 In his conception of cultural history, of aesthetic education, and of the authority that governs and gives form to poetic language, Mandelstam addresses us not only as a poet and theoretician of making poetry but as a reader and theoretician of the technology of writing, which sustains verse over the centuries from one per­for­mance to the next.

Transcription and Synesthesia “The finished poem,” Mandelstam writes, “is no more than a calligraphic product.”7 In his verses and his essayistic writings, this “calligraphic product” appears in grandiose and all-­encompassing meta­phorical guises: as the ladder of evolution, spanning the ­whole chain of being from primordial soup to world-­creating man; as a Gothic cathedral u ­ nder whose monstrous arches a universal readership is gathered; or simply the universe as such, revealed to be a kind of divine poetic writing in the medium of stars and stones. Velimir Khlebnikov had dreamed of a universal ­future alphabet that would provide “a suitable instrument of exchange between auditory and visual modes.”8 For Mandelstam too, the miracle of a pen’s trace on paper is that it reconciles sight and sound—­two

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incommensurable phenomena that are somehow harmonized when the vis­i­ble script is performed in spoken language. In a synesthetic image that nimbly suggests the passage between the optical and auditory, Mandelstam avers that it is not deafness to the ­music of Dante’s words but “blindness” to their visual aspect that has prevented readers from fully appreciating his talent. “Insufficient re­ spect for the poetic material which can be grasped only through per­for­mance, only through the flight of the conductor’s baton [dirizherskaia palochka]—­this was the reason for the universal blindness to Dante, to the greatest master and man­ag­er of his material, to the greatest conductor of Eu­ro­pean art.”9 The central meta­phor of the conductor’s baton, to which generations of readers, like an unskilled orchestra, have failed to pay attention, appears as the climax of an ideal reading pro­cess in the sixth of the essay’s eleven sections. When you read Dante with all your powers and with complete conviction, when you transplant yourself completely to the field of action of the poetic material, when you join in and coordinate your own intonations with the echoes of the orchestral and thematic groups constantly arising on the pocked and undulating semantic surface, . . . ​then the purely vocal, intonational, and rhythmical work is replaced by a more power­ful coordinating force—by the conductor’s function—­and the hegemony of the conductor’s baton comes into its own, cutting across orchestrated space and projecting from the voice like some more complex mathematical mea­sure [izmerenie, also “dimension”] out of a three-­dimensional state.10 In the first instance, this dense passage powerfully recalls Mandelstam’s crucial but somewhat cryptic initial distinction between (1) the “mute” yet somehow “audible and sensible to us instruments of poetic discourse,” which I understand as the abstract structuring ele­ments that mea­sure and pattern verse language and are encoded through conventionalized notation, and (2) “the discourse itself, that is the intonational and phonological” per­for­mance of the reader in response to t­ hese instruments, which I take to be the vocal utterance.11 Neither of ­these functions, in and of themselves, suffices to constitute the poetic text. The formal pattern of rhythm, assonance, and rhyme is manifested in the verses we read or hear as an alienated sequence of articulations in sensory phenomena. Conversely, our spoken or subvocalized recitation is an individuated and historically situated flow of sound that becomes susceptible to paraphrase and deviation immediately upon entering the sphere of ordinary language. We might align Mandelstam’s basic distinction between linguistic law and verbal per­for­mance with Ferdinand de Saussure’s dichotomy of speech (parole) and language (langue), the first referring to an utterance, the second to

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the social fact of language as a system of shared conventions—­“a repository of sound patterns, and writing is their tangible form.”12 The young Mikhail Bakhtin’s unfinished 1919 treatise Philosophy of the Act similarly distinguishes between the abstract linguistic description of a word and its unique intonation as it is used. The latter aspect of the word “follows from the very fact of its being pronounced” and implies a subjective and evaluative orientation onto the word from a specific space and time, since it ­will be spoken in tenderness or hostility, to a friend or to a stranger, with rising or falling pitch, and so on.13 Bakhtin proposes to use the intersection of the abstract and concrete in the moment of communication to bridge the objective and subjective aspects of language and ultimately the gulf between cognition and lived experience. His book was to culminate with an account of “the architectonic of Dante’s world,” which partakes at once of the aesthetic and the religious and approaches “the ultimate bounds of being.”14 Bakhtin prob­ably borrows his diction and some of his ideas from Georg Lukács, whose 1916 Theory of the Novel singles out Dante’s work as an “architectural” phenomenon that overcomes the fragmentation of organic life in order to envision “the symbolic unity of h ­ uman destiny in general.”15 Like t­ hese forerunners, Mandelstam holds an architectural conception of Dante’s work, which like a Gothic cathedral works to gather humanity and reconcile it with the world. Poetry becomes real in lived experience, Mandelstam argues, only at the moment the sonic flow of rhythm and intonation are made to coincide with the visual or kinetic “undulations” of the written text’s surface, which encode the artwork in a stable form for a host of potential readers. For Elena Glazova, the decaying wave’s journey from light into sound is emblematic of Log­os entering ­matter and constitutes “the basic landscape of Mandelstam’s universe.”16 Alongside any allegorical sense, however, Mandelstam has in mind the literal fact of synesthetic transcription in the arts: the printed page manifested as oral speech, the visual gesture of the conductor’s baton regulating orchestral ­music, or, in the obedience of dancers to the rhythm of the waltz, “periodic undulating movements, the very same close listening to the wave that permeates all our theory of sound and light, all our scientific study of ­matter, all our poetry and all our ­music.”17 (The coexistence of allegorical and literal meanings in the essay is consistent with Mandelstam’s appropriation of medieval exegetic techniques from Dante himself.)18 Mandelstam credits Dante with anticipating neurological accounts of aesthetic response through his “reflexology of speech” (refleksologiia rechi), according to whose princi­ples the Italian poet “signals with a light his sudden desire to express himself ” and through which he “comes closest to approaching the wave theory of sound and light, determining their relationship.”19 On the most concrete level, the

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imagery of the conductor’s baton as an “undulating semantic surface” represents the movement of the writer’s pen, which generates an undulating line of script that then enters the reader’s eye as light waves and exits the mouth as sound waves. The “hegemony of the conductor’s baton” is brought into being by synthesizing the categories of the senses, particularly sight and sound, and the artistic media that are associated with them. Mandelstam throughout his essay engages the Enlightenment theorist Gotthold Lessing’s seminal distinction between the visual/spatial arts of sculpture and painting and the auditory/temporal arts of m ­ usic and verse.20 The conductor’s baton partakes of both, existing in space as a vis­ib­ le phenomenon even as it exerts itself in time as the mea­sure of a common orchestral rhythm. More profound and perplexing is how Mandelstam’s baton both originates in and produces time: it “proj­ects” into space from the temporal flow of language but in the same stroke generates a “more complex” mea­sure or dimension out of the three dimensions of space. The one-­dimensional line traced by the baton becomes a two-­dimensional image, then a three-­dimensional object, and fi­nally, in a meta­phoric approximation of Einstein’s theory of relativity, the fourth dimension of time. The “hegemony of the baton” is thus invested in lit­er­a­ture’s production of temporality and the overcoming of time by means of a journey through spatial media. We might surmise that the idea of time’s recoverability through writing might have seemed especially attractive to t­ hose who, like Mandelstam, feared for the historical legacy of world culture and sought to ensure its survival by imagining it as safely located in a dimension accessible only to the stylus of the poet, which, like a plow, turns up layers of time in order to bring the remotest levels of culture to the surface that is the pre­sent day. The mea­sure or dimension of time (the ambiguous word izmerenie means both) is active for Mandelstam in the poetic rhythms that mea­sure the intervals of verse language, of course, but also in the preservation of a “pan-­chronic and paradigmatic view of history” that Dimitri Segal has emphasized as the central feature of Mandelstam’s late poetics.21 In Segal’s reading, Mandelstam’s verse seeks to preserve the culture of the past by placing it in relation to the personality of the poet-­creator and the urgent events of his day, most obviously the Rus­sian Revolution and its aftermath. This organ­ization of space and time around the poet serves as “a means of restoring cultural continuity, a bridge between divergent and contradictory parts of the text, the self-­identity of the lyric ‘I’ of Mandelstam’s poetry.” Through what Segal calls “ambivalent anti­theses,” Mandelstam’s verse makes ­whole the broken self of the lyricist, whose pieces have been scattered throughout the cosmos like the limbs of Osiris; in the same stroke, the poem dramatizes the resurrective miracle of unification that knits together the fractured epochs of history.22 Writing on

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Mandelstam’s essays of the 1920s, Thomas Siefrid perceives a related identification of the poetic word and the creative self, showing how the linguistic theory of Alexander Potebnia informs the poet’s treatment of the word as “a living being, a self,” whose “absolute in­de­pen­dence and right to self-­definition” provide “a safe haven from the entropic forces perennially undermining Rus­sian culture.”23 This personification of the word, in a variation on the elegy’s function to overcome loss by constructing a coherent lyric persona, works t­oward “an alter-­ego or alter-­self which is also the embodiment of the w ­ hole of (Rus­ sian) verbal culture” and the “surrogate martyr of its vari­ous travails.”24 The essentially mythic narrative that the Soviet revolution had ­violated a sacred cultural totality, whose scattered relics ­were re­united and made incarnate in Mandelstam’s life and work, would become central to the poet’s status in the Soviet literary under­g round as martyred savior of world culture, an interpretation readily ­adopted by Western critics. The En­glish translation of Mandelstam’s critical prose is advertised on the cover by Bruce Chatwin’s exhortation, “He is our c­ entury’s literary martyr. Another age would have made him a saint.”25 Mandelstam becomes the personification and symbol of the larger work of memory performed by the Rus­sian intelligent­sia, scattered in the post-­Soviet diaspora or withdrawing from state surveillance into whispered conversations and clandestinely distributed typescripts. He resembles the émigré intellectual in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1930 novel The Defense, whose “sole function in life was to carry, rev­er­ent­ly and with concentration, that which had been entrusted to him, something which it was necessary at all costs to preserve in all its detail and in all its purity,” and occasionally revealed “for a moment—­from the ­whole of that enormous something that he carried mysteriously within him—­some tender, priceless l­ittle trifle, a line from Pushkin or the peasant name of a wild flower.”26 The self-­appointed carrier of culture through the long night of Soviet barbarism, Mandelstam even before the revolution was wont to meta­phorize his poetry as a fragile vessel lost in the vastness of world history—­a message in a ­bottle floating in the ocean of time or an ancient clay jar buried in archeological layers—­which paradoxically contains a totality as vast as the medium in which it is tossed or embedded. The theme of the baton, however, refocuses our attention from the vagaries of cultural transmission and the semantic function of language onto the technical materials through which poetry is recorded and passed on. If a finished poem is indeed “no more than a calligraphic product” that reaches its reader in a ­future far from the aegis of the poet or, in the stock trope of his 1913 essay “On the Addressee,” a “message in a b­ ottle” that finds its audience in a distant place and time, we can read the synesthetic rhe­toric that negotiates sight and sound, graphic image and dynamic per­for­mance, as reassurance that the poet’s

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words ­will be restored to history at last.27 In “the hegemony of the baton,” which restores the fossilized text to the lived time of per­for­mance, Mandelstam attempts to define meta­phor­ically a poetic notation adequate to perpetuate the text beyond the zone of the poet’s personal influence. Yet the same image of the baton seems to ally poetic authority with other forces, overtly po­liti­cal ones, that emanate from the totalitarian authority that threatens culture—­that centralized, awesome, irrational power that compels an orchestra of readers, as they turn the pages, to play their parts in a common text. In the central passage analyzed e­ arlier, the baton figures the coordination of the marks on the paper and the intonational per­for­mance that is the culmination of a successful reading. However, the baton first appears some twenty pages ­earlier as a prerequisite of writing, the poet’s chief instrument in his encounter with m ­ atter (materiia) and his interaction with time. Dante never enters into single combat with his material without having first prepared an organ to seize it, without having armed himself with some instrument for mea­sur­ing concrete time as it drips or melts. In poetry, where every­thing is mea­sure and every­thing derives from mea­ sure, revolving about it and for its sake, instruments of mea­sure are instruments of a special kind, performing an especially active function. ­Here the trembling hand of the compass not only indulges the magnetic storm, but makes it itself.28 As befits a poet with a keen ear for the pulse of language, Mandelstam h ­ ere typifies poetry as deriving from the mea­sure of time—­rhythmic patterns of breath, intervals of rhyme and vocalic stress, and so on. The baton, which mea­ sures the auditory-­temporal per­for­mance of the orchestra through visual-­ spatial gestures, becomes the exemplary figure of the poetic instrument and can be assimilated into a ­whole series of the text’s ­running meta­phors. The scepter with which the poet articulates and rules over time, the baton is also the fructifying phallus or “organ” with which the poet “enters into combat with his material,” the “trembling compass needle” that both responds to and calls forth the magnetic storm, and, as Seamus Heaney has noted, it is a visual image of the tongue, itself mute, whose movements deep into the orchestra pit of the mouth articulate the undifferentiated flow of breath into mea­sured, meaningful language.29 Most insistently in this series of related figures, the baton is the pen or quill that is the instrument of writing, in itself and in its vari­ous associations with sexuality, religion, and law. “Now I ­will begin to describe one of the innumerable conductorial flights of Dante’s baton,” Mandelstam announces. “Let us begin with the writing. The pen draws calligraphic letters. . . . ​The quill pen is a small bit of bird’s flesh. Dante, who never forgets the origins of ­things,

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remembers this, of course. His technique of writing with broad strokes and curves is transmuted into the figured flight of a flock of birds.”30 The swooping movements of the baton in the air represent the loops performed across the paper by the quill pen (pero), a metonym for the bird from which the plume was plucked and whose flight is reenacted by the writing hand. Stéphane Mallarmé employs a similar figurative series in his well-­known 1897 poem “A Throw of the Dice ­Will Never Abolish Chance,” in which a “solitary distraught feather [ plume solitaire épardue]” dramatizes the act of writing by descending, like the author’s quill, from the upper left of the page, across the “whiteness” of the paper, to alight at last in the lower right corner as an illuminative flash of “lightning [foudre]”: an angelic or Luciferian word, a falling star or bolt of electricity, descended from the heights of the idea into the abyss of the material world.31 In the poem’s preface, Mallarmé stresses that his unconventional spacing and typography w ­ ill result, “for whoever wishes to read it aloud, in a musical score,” as the dif­fer­ent fonts and typefaces “dictate” emphasis and the disposition of the lines stipulates “the rising and falling of the intonation.”32 Mallarmé’s ambition to develop new techniques for modulating reception proceed from a long-­standing fascination with the possibilities of mass print media. In his 1895 essay “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument,” the poet enjoins readers to execute the text as we would “­music on the keyboard, actively, mea­sured by the score,” without however asking for “servile obedience: for each of us has that lightning-­like [éclair] initiative that links the scattered notes together.”33 In order to be realized as continuity in the reader’s per­for­mance, poetic notation trusts to our initiative, our spark of inspiration, or even, as we read in another Mallarmé essay of the same year—an essay that employs the same meta­phor of poetic inspiration as a thunderbolt spanning the heavens and the earth—­the reader’s and writer’s common “obligation” to a divinity whose “rhythm” is performed on the “verbal keyboard.”34 Whereas criticism on Mandelstam often stresses the function of the lyric subject to suffuse and ground his texts, t­hese Mallarméan parallels point to sites of poetic activity situated beyond the horizon of the author. “In an artist so fascinated by the desire for mastery,” remarks Maurice Blanchot, “nothing is more impressive” than Mallarmé’s embrace of randomness, doubt, and inspiration.35 Since Mandelstam knew Mallarmé’s work intimately and even translated him, t­ hese pages are prob­ably intertexts for Conversation about Dante, also a piece in which an assiduously cultivated my­thol­ogy of the autonomous, intentional, and personified word runs up against speculation on the contingencies of source and audience.36 Critics have seen the 1930s, the de­cade in which Mandelstam returned to poetry a­ fter a long hiatus and u ­ nder conditions of stringent censorship, as a period in which the poet takes up with fresh ur-

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gency the prob­lem of the addressee. Pollak cites the poignant concluding apostrophe of a verse written in the poet’s Voronezh exile, represented as a cry from a coffin: “A reader! An advisor! A doctor! [Chitatelia! Sovetchika! Vracha!].”37 Mandelstam’s fantasy of a control over a f­ uture readership, given voice in musical meta­phors, acquires inevitable Stalinist overtones by the 1930s. Nonetheless, it belongs to a line of thought that predates the revolution. His 1913 essay “On the Addressee” already compares the poet to a violinist playing on the psyche of his audience—­but ­because ­there is no “supplier of living violins,” his ideal instrument is unknown, and his poem, like a message in a ­bottle, finds its addressee only by chance.38 Numerous images from the same essay—­ reading as musical per­for­mance, the poet’s “contract” with the mob, the meta­ phor of the author as a bird producing a divinely inspired text—­recur twenty years ­later in Conversation about Dante, now focused on technical issues of reading and writing.

Transcription and Writing In “A Throw of the Dice,” the divine electrical impulse descends with the writing feather or poet’s pen to come to rest on the bottom of the page, mirroring the text’s or die’s movement from the heights of the idea to that random “final point that sanctifies it”: the reader.39 In Conversation about Dante, we encounter an analogous poetic journey from the mystery of inspiration on the one hand to the mystery of ­f uture audience on the other, made pos­si­ble by the meta­phoric baton that mediates between the incommensurables of sight and sound. The poetic and figuratively electric impulse (poryv) descending into ­matter is an ongoing meta­phor in Mandelstam’s essay: in Elena Glazova’s words, the journey that is poetry begins as the movement of Log­os “into the depth of m ­ atter.”40 The image is a transposition from the structure of the Divine Comedy itself, which begins with the author’s descent into the abyss and climaxes in a scene of divine writing. As Mandelstam paraphrases this late scene from the Paradiso, the angelic hosts flock together to spell out celestial maxims “­under the hand of a scribe who is obedient to the dictation”; they are like birds, “magnetized by green grass,” who assume the shapes of letters when they alight to peck at the bait scattered to them by a divine authorial hand.41 ­Because Dante’s obedient angels are the spirits of just rulers ( Joshua, Charlemagne, William of Orange) who in coordinated flight spell out the phrase “Diligite justitiam qui judicatis terram,” meaning “Love justice, you who judge the earth,” the subtext is explic­ itly po­liti­cal.42 Mark Musa, in the notes to his En­glish translation, points out a

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crucial intertext in Dante’s po­liti­cal tract De Monarchia and explains how the poem’s seven-­stanza description of the maxim’s final letter M, limned in gold on a silver backdrop, functions as a heraldic image of monarchy—­for Dante, a divinely sanctioned form of government.43 The scribal pen or baton that figures the possibility of poetry’s transition between vis­i­ble and audible manifestations is thus implicated, not just in the transfer of a poetic impulse across sight and sound media (the mechanism by which poetic texts, which are mea­ sures of the time of spoken language, are preserved beyond the immediate moment of per­for­mance into the longue durée of cultural history) but in a hierarchical structure, according to which the obedient body of the angel, scribe, or bird enacts the desire of a higher power. Mandelstam’s evocation of the scene might conceivably be read as a remonstration of Stalinist brutality, obliquely ventriloquizing the divine exhortation to justice for the benefit of Soviet powers. Yet it might also be read as a sanction of tyranny as a po­liti­cal structure—as off-­key as Charles Baudelaire, who fought at the barricades in 1848, admiring “a military regiment, marching like a single animal, a proud image of joy and obedience.”44 The darker interpretation gains in plausibility if we bear in mind Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture’s most famous baton meta­phor, whose intertextual relevance to Conversation about Dante John McKay calls “alarming” and “too plain to be denied.”45 Nikolai Gogol’s notorious right-­wing tract Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends recounts a purported conversation with Pushkin in which the poet expressed the need for an “all-­powerful sovereign,” since “a state without an absolute monarch is an orchestra without a conductor: all the musicians could be excellent, but if ­there is no one to control them with his baton, the concert ­will not take place.” Thanks to this autocrat, “the first violin ­will not dare to break loose at the expense of the o ­ thers; he ­will be concerned with the ­whole composition, he the animator of the ­whole, the supreme head of this supreme harmony!”46 In fact, Gogol’s meta­phor of a harmoniously modulated piece of ­music collectively performed by the Rus­sian ­people has more in common with the epic song at the climax of Dead Souls than anything from Pushkin. Gogol justifies the tsar’s po­liti­cal authority through a prob­ably specious appeal to Pushkin’s poetic authority. Like Gogol, Mandelstam revolts against the notion of “an orchestra without a conductor,” a fantasy he identifies with “the same order of vulgar pan-­ European ‘ideals’ as the international language Esperanto, symbolizing the linguistic teamwork of all mankind.” Mandelstam opposes his notion of the totality of world culture to the avant-­garde fantasy of a universal and fully demo­cratized poetic idiom, which he rejects in f­avor of a cultural tradition rooted in place, language, history, and hierarchy.47 The essential conservatism

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of Mandelstam’s identification of po­liti­cal power with the tools of art—­the conductor’s baton or the writer’s pen—is made plain in another passage of Conversation about Dante that refers to oral speech as a “mob” that “longs for law.”48 The model for Mandelstam’s po­liti­cal constitution seems to be Dante’s paradisiacal writing, which is performed flawlessly by the marshaled bodies taking dictation from “that Mind, from which spring thy power / And motion,” in order to illustrate how “justice ­here on earth / Comes from the heaven.”49 In this scheme, the sovereign force that binds culture to a coherent form compels obedience in the name of a supreme power, of which the earthly autocrat is an image. Interestingly, Mandelstam’s description of the scene of divine writing ­here reverses the image, which occurs just one page before it, of a writer’s quill mimicking avian flight, inasmuch as now we have birds or angels reproducing the motions of a scribal pen. Two pos­si­ble sources of the gesture of writing—­a pen tracing the path of a flying creature, a flying creature tracing the path of a writing pen—­come by rhetorical sleight of hand to seem the same t­ hing. Jacques Derrida has described this fantasy of the “immediate sign”—in which, as in the language of Adam, ­there is no distinction between signifier and signified and ­every word is realized in the addressee’s understanding exactly as it is meant—as a shared gestural language, a “movement of the magic wand” that disallows any qualitative difference, as for instance that between visual writing and oral speech, between the signifying gesture and its replication in “the desiring body of the person who traces” it.50 It is a perfect writing with a perfect reader. Yet even as a fantasy, t­ here is something unsettling in the image of the “writer’s hand” governing the “obedient” body of the angel, bird, copyist, or reader through an irresistible force of “magnetism.” This last word is shaded by its old meaning of hypnosis, since Mandelstam e­ arlier in the section states that the “precondition” of the Divine Comedy is a “session of hypnosis” (further glossed as “writing to dictation”) and since Mandelstam’s account of the determining electrical impulse deliberately recalls Mesmer’s theory that electrical fluids, or “animal magnetism,” caused trance states in which the subject would unquestioningly obey commands.51 Late in the essay, Mandelstam emphasizes the meta­phor of attractive compulsion through magnetic force by citing the French word conducteur, which like the En­glish “conductor” refers both to an orchestra leader and to the transmission of an electrical charge.52 Friedrich Schiller, whose Letters on Aesthetic Education lay out a dynamic between formative impulse and artistic material that resonates in part with Mandelstam’s conception, is careful to specify that the artist, like an ideal government, must re­spect the essential freedom of ­human beings; to use real ­people as material in order to articulate an artistic vision is to violate the princi­ple of f­ree

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self-­realization that is the very source of the aesthetic urge.53 The opening sentence of Mandelstam’s significant 1923 essay “Humanism and the Pre­sent” echoes Schiller explic­itly. “­There are epochs which maintain that man is to be used like bricks or mortar, that man should be used for building t­ hings, not vice-­ versa,” writes Mandelstam.54 He contrasts ­these cruel and barbaric epochs to the “social architecture” of humanism, which he hopes ­will serve as the guiding princi­ple of the communist reor­ga­ni­za­tion of life on a vast and global scale. The apparent shift in Conversation about Dante ­toward a willingness to treat h ­ uman beings as the raw material in which an author realizes his work is especially marked against the backdrop of the 1930s, when the tendency that Boris Groys has called the “total art of Stalinism” assimilated the aesthetic impulse to pattern material ­after an ideal image with the po­liti­cal impulse of social control.55 At the other end of the Soviet period, Vladimir Sorokin’s 1978 short story “The Swim” utilizes the same Dantean subtext, linking it to Stalinist spectacles in which formations of airplanes spelled out the dictator’s name in the sky: in an infernal inversion of t­hese totalitarian angels, Sorokin represents a host of swimmers floating in formation down a Stygian river of death, carry­ing torches that spell out a po­liti­cal slogan.56 The story was l­ater inserted into Sorokin’s 2000 novel Blue Fat, whose three-­part structure of catabasis makes the Dantean subtext more explicit yet. Mandelstam’s fantasy of divine writing concludes by stressing both its impossibility and its relationship to juridical authority, in terms that seem to concede his scheme’s despotic implications. “Writing and speech are incommensurate,” he avers. Whereas series of discrete written words, like the mea­sured patterns of poetry, “correspond to intervals,” oral speech is formless and lawless, “always the same anxious flock of birds, . . . ​a mob, changing laws like gloves, and forgetting in the eve­ning the ukazes published for the common good in the morning.”57 In an image recalling the “intelligent, leaderless herd” of g­ rand pianos in Mandelstam’s The Egyptian Stamp (1928), whose feverish throng draws the novella’s narrator into the “contagious labyrinth” of song, Mandelstam writes that the inconstant “mob” of ordinary speech longs for the poetic mea­sure of time and the stabilizing force of law, which w ­ ill articulate its unorchestrated flow of sound into the per­for­mance of verse.58 The perpetual paraphrase of spoken language is in itself alien to the authoritative burden of written cultural tradition; it feels form and history only as “a magnetized impulse, a longing for the stern of a ship, a longing for a forage of words, a longing for an unpromulgated law.”59 If we understand the magnetized longing for the stern of a ship as a reference to the magnetic mountain in the voyages of Sinbad, which attracts passing ships and reduces them to wreckage by drawing out their nails, the “incommensura-

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bility” of the chaotic flight of speech and the fixative power of writing result precisely from the mutual desire that motivates Derrida’s immediate sign. The electrical impulse that directs the phallic nail (alternately compass needle or pen or baton) is also the attractive annihilative force, the desire for realization and readership, which threatens to unmake the ship, to end the journey, to destroy the writer. At the same time, the inconstant flight of speech, perpetually rewording itself, yearns for the authoritative power of form, writing, and canonical law, to which, however, it can relate only through the forcible compulsion to imitate it. Once more we recognize the fragile intersection of the instruments of poetic form and the ephemeral linguistic per­for­mance, in which we initially observed the “hegemony of the conductor’s baton” to “come into its own.” Mandelstam’s theory of dictation recalls Futurist musings on the “rightful magic” of a handwritten poetic text, which is reexperienced “during the act of recopying.”60 Imagining the soul as split into a rational government and a passionate mob, Velimir Khlebnikov suggests that magical “incantations and beyonsense language are appeals over the head of the government straight to the population of feelings, a direct cry to the predawn of the soul or a supreme example of the rule of the masses in the life of language and intellect.”61 In Mandelstam’s development of the same imagery, however, the intersection of inspiration and per­for­mance is made to articulate a gendered po­liti­cal hierarchy, and the hegemony of the conductor’s baton carries the force of compulsion.62 In a 1923 essay that is an evident precursor text to Conversation about Dante, Mandelstam already typifies poetry as a “­battle” between speech and writing, “the positive and negative poles of the poetic language,” which sustain between them the electrical charge of culture. Where we spoke e­ arlier of an ideal gestural sign spontaneously reproduced in the desiring body, as the oscillations of the dancer reproduce the wave pattern of the m ­ usic or the sound waves of a verbal per­for­mance reproduce the undulations of written script, ­here we see its double in the gesture of l­egal vio­lence that compels the subjected body to obedience. Mandelstam’s scheme reiterates Roman Jakobson’s definition of poetry as “or­ga­nized vio­lence committed upon ordinary speech,” which suggests kinship between artistic patterning and totalitarian control.63 Conversation about Dante renders the image unsettlingly literal by its gendered terms (the all-­too-­familiar opposition of chaotic feminine ­matter longing for the rule of masculine form) and by the Stalinist context of censorship and state vio­lence that devastated Mandelstam himself. The identification of po­liti­cal power and the technology of writing is a familiar trope. Derrida typifies it as the necessary counterpart of the fantasy of

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the immediate sign and as associated with a moral hierarchy in which “an enslaving vio­lence is assigned to total literacy.”64 We are accustomed in this scheme to associate Mandelstam with the freedom of living speech against the authoritative power of writing. He explic­itly distances himself from a writing contaminated by politics in his 1930 “Fourth Prose”: “I have no manuscripts, no notebooks, no archive. I have no handwriting, for I never write. I alone in Rus­sia work with my voice, while all around me consummate swine are writing.”65 A bodily poetry of memory and voice is crystallized in the memoirs of his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, as a counterforce against the mechanical writing practiced by Soviet organs of propaganda and censorship. Bemoaning the destruction of the poet’s sound archive, she specifically opposes the identification of conducting and writing: “I remember O.M. reading and his voice,” she recalls, “but it is inimitable and sounds only in my own ears. If you could hear it, it would become clear what he meant by ‘conscious fulfillment’ or ‘conducting’ [dirizhirovan’e]. Phonetic transcription and notation can give only the crudest outline of the pauses, the rising and falling of the voice.”66 In this account, it is the loving body, rather than a technology of reproduction, that preserves the poetic corpus. “­Until the age of 56 I remembered every­thing by heart—­prose and verse alike,” Nadezhda Mandelstam boasts; “at night I ran sleepless about the enormous factory floor and, servicing the machines, muttered verses to myself. I had to have every­thing by heart—­for my papers could be confiscated, or my protectors in a moment of panic could take it all and throw it in the fire.”67 The stark contrast between the organic body that shelters spoken verse and the machinery of totalitarian authority to which poetry becomes exposed through writing is a crucial component in the myth of Mandelstam as Soviet martyr. He composes verses in his head for fear of leaving written evidence to his persecutors, comes close to tears when Akhmatova recites Dante from memory in “the voice he loved so much,” or, in Isaiah Berlin’s account, directly intercedes in totalitarian writing by seizing a stack of signed execution forms from a drunken Cheka officer and ripping them to shreds.68 ­These anecdotes are woven together into a compelling and internationally influential image of Mandelstam as an uncompromising partisan of freedom, life, and the spoken word against authoritarianism, death, and writing. Arthur A. Cohen situates “the Mandelstamian genius” in “the formulaic premise of oral poetry” and paints a mythic picture of Mandelstam “continuously moving his lips” as he composes an unwritten corpus that is at once “an oral cycle of poems, an eschatological epic,” and an elegiac “defense of man.”69 In this hyperbolized image, Mandelstam is cast as the heir to oral practices that sustain poetry organically in recitation, especially the epic utterances of the Homeric rhapsodes.

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Transcription and Per­for­mance Lydia Ginzburg’s memoir account of a public reading of Conversation about Dante helps link this imagery to Mandelstam’s performative practice. Andrew Kahn notes in his analy­sis of Ginzburg’s impressions “the absence of a­ ctual quotation, . . . ​as though she somehow feared detaching the words from the per­for­mance.”70 For Ginzburg, what stands out in Mandelstam’s verse is precisely the “fusion of musicality and language that creates in the listener and reader a movement that seems analogous to the poet’s own creative pro­cess,” thereby synchronizing the subjectivities of reader and writer through what Ginzburg calls an “ordering of our consciousness.”71 The poet’s own immediate audience thus seems to have acknowledged the gesture of creation and reproduced it in personal experience as a gesture of appreciation. Far from being a spontaneous expression in stark opposition to writing and to law, however, this synchronization of writer and reader is affected through careful attention to the per­for­mance pro­cess. Mandelstam “took pains to instruct the actor Yakhontov how it ­ought to be,” observes Henry Gifford of the poet’s mistrust of his readers. “He wants the reader to perform the complicated score Dante has put before him, and to control the per­for­mance exquisitely.”72 Mandelstam treats the “calligraphic product” that is written poetry as a notation that directs the reader in detail how to enact the text as sound. On this point, t­ here is a suggestively practical core to Mandelstam’s philosophy of synesthetic transcription, one that is related to Dante’s own synesthetic images. “Dante, when he feels the need, calls eyelids ‘the lips of the eye,’ ” notes Mandelstam; “suffering crosses the sense organs, producing hybrids, and bringing about the labial eye.”73 The synthesis of the organs of speech and vision points to a mode of textual per­for­mance in which reading and speaking, watching and listening, intersect. “If you attentively watch the mouth of an accomplished poetry reader,” writes Mandelstam, “it w ­ ill seem as if he w ­ ere giving a lesson to deaf-­mutes, that is, he works with the aim of being understood even without sounds.”74 The lines of a poem literally determine the movements of the reader’s body, just as Dante’s angels perform a divinely inspired text as a “kinetic ballet.”75 “The mouth works, the smile nudges the line of verse, cleverly and gaily the lips redden, the tongue trustingly presses itself against the palate. The inner form of the verse is inseparable from the countless changes of expression flitting across the face of the narrator who speaks and feels emotion.”76 According to the princi­ples Mandelstam describes as “reflexology of speech,” the visual transcription of the poet’s words orchestrates a set of poetic articulations to be performed in real time within the reader’s body: the vocal organs but also facial expressions and, more obscurely, emotional life.

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With the term “reflexology,” Mandelstam alludes to the psychophysiological theories of Vladimir Bekhterev, whose influential books Objective Psy­chol­ ogy (1907) and Collective Reflexology (1921) describe imitative reflexes as the physiological basis of education, empathy, and the “cementing force of a collective.”77 In Mandelstam’s notes ­toward the essay Journey to Armenia, like Conversation about Dante written in 1937, he writes that “the physiology of reading still remains to be studied”—­but in fact scholars influenced by Bekhterev ­were already at work on the prob­lem.78 Ana Olenina describes how the Formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum and other affiliates of the Institute of the Living Word “evaluated the length of rhymical units with chronometers, mea­sured tones with pitch forks, and marked fluctuating intonations” in order to produce visual schemata of readings by poets including Mandelstam.79 Certainly the loops and swirls of written letters in some narrow sense determine the curls and convolutions of the reader’s lips and tongue, but Mandelstam appears to believe that the poetic text’s manifestation in the reader’s physiology has wider application. Already in 1923, Mandelstam had spoken of Boris Pasternak’s verse as “breathing exercises” that determine the configuration of the reader’s vocal organs.80 In rough drafts of Conversation about Dante, the line about “the tongue trustingly pressing itself against the palate” occurs in reference to Pushkin, so it seems to be a general statement about the authority of poetic texts rather than a comment specific to Dante, a master of the technique who compels his reader to act out stammering, chewing motions, and so on.81 Among modern Eu­ro­pean poets, Mandelstam sees Arthur Rimbaud as “the closest to Dante’s method,” averring that “long before Arthur Rimbaud’s alphabet of colors, Dante linked color with the pleophany of articulate speech.”82 The synesthetic sonnet to which Mandelstam alludes, Rimbaud’s famous “Vowels” (1883), evinces a concentrated effort to make the reader’s vocal organs and facial expressions coincide with the poem’s content. Thus, the line “I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lévres belles” forces the reader to produce both the i sound that is its subject and, in the same instant, the smile that it describes.83 We might align this approach to transcription and per­for­mance with a reader-­response model in which the reader is not the ground of meaning’s production, as per Roland Barthes, but is rather determined by the text. Wolfgang Iser goes so far as to claim that the text, by constituting a set of instructions that must be fulfilled, constructs the reader, a claim that Elena Glazova cites as consonant with Mandelstam’s conception of the text as an impulse that sets in motion the reader’s per­for­mance of it.84 Theoretical debates around zaum already articulated radical and physiologically grounded conceptions of a text’s power over its reader. Mandelstam certainly knew Viktor Shklovsky’s groundbreaking 1916 essay “Poetry and

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Transrational Language,” which stresses how the audience of a poetic per­for­ mance translates the verse text into a bodily alphabet of per­for­mance and feeling. Shklovsky cites research to the effect that in listening to a sequence of spoken language, “we soundlessly reproduce with our speech organs the movements required to pronounce the given sound,” thereby activating “the link that sound and movement, sympathetically reproduced by the audience as a kind of mute spasm of the speech organs, share with emotions.”85 He finds significant the observation that prac­ti­tion­ers of religious glossolalia, when about to speak in tongues, begin with compulsive but noiseless movements of the vocal organs; this linguistic phenomenon, which takes place on the borderline between divine possession and poetic ecstasy, must therefore originate as bodily experience and only subsequently find expression in the medium of audible speech. Shklovsky’s ideas migrate into the manifestoes of Aleksei Kruchenykh, who writes in 1923 that “the task of zaum language” is to provide aty­pi­cal sound sequences, “thereby refreshing the ear and throat, the organs of hearing and speech that perceive and reproduce sound.”86 Shklovsky concludes that “a large part of the plea­sure poetry gives us stems from its articulatory aspect”—­“from a special dance of the organs of speech.”87 In another essay, he defines poetry as a “ballet for the organs of speech.”88 Andrei Bely’s Glossolalia: A Poem about Sound, which like Conversation about Dante exists somewhere on the fringe between poetic and critical discourse, characterizes the tongue as a eurythmic dancer gesturally mimicking language.89 Written in 1917 and published in 1922, Bely’s treatise on synesthesia and mystical language takes inspiration from Futurist experiment and Formalist scholarship. During the writing of Conversation about Dante, Mandelstam kept avid com­pany with Bely; although the final draft never mentions Bely by name, Jane Gary Harris suggests that he serves as Mandelstam’s unnamed interlocutor throughout the essay.90 The word “glossolalia” occurs once in the essay—in reference to Dante “combining the incombinable” functions of space and time—­and Bely’s imagery prob­ably informs Mandelstam’s meta­phorics of textual per­for­mance as “kinetic ballet.”91 Amply illustrated with frames depicting a tongue, a dancer, and a written letter all mutually imitating a primal movement, Glossolalia lends the convergence of all ­these phenomena cosmic force through a visual pun on the Rus­sian word небо, which with dif­fer­ent pronunciations can mean e­ ither the sky (nebo) or the roof of the mouth (nyobo). The tongue, an “armless dancer” hidden deep in the enclosure of the mouth, becomes a microcosm of the f­ ree and spontaneously moving body in the space between earth and sky. “The gestures of the arms reflect all the gestures of the armless dancer, dancing in a murky dungeon: beneath the arches of the palate [or sky]; the movement of the arms reflects an armless mimicry.”92 This

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recursive structure of gestural imitation—­the dancer reflecting the tongue that mimics the dancer—­strongly anticipates Mandelstam’s dynamic of an authority that is perpetually displaced in the gestural contact between the light wave and the sound wave. Given the cosmological context of Dante’s poem and its culmination in a bodily writing on the heavenly firmament, Conversation about Dante may itself be playing with the visual pun on небо when Mandelstam writes, in his description of the written text’s determining influence on the vocal organs, that “the tongue trustingly presses itself to the palate.” The pun is obvious in a 1931 poetic fragment: ты, могила, Не смей учить горбатого—­молчи! Я говорю за всех с такою силой, Что небо стало небом, чтобы губы Потрескались, как розовая глина.93 you, grave, ­ on’t dare straighten out the hunchback. D I speak for all with such strength, That my palate becomes the sky, That my lips crack like pink clay. In this fragment, the undulating body appears as a curved tongue or a hunchback, its wave form preserved against the force of death through a resurrective opening of the lips or tomb. The visual pun “небо” already emphasizes the problematic of synesthetic transcription: fully appreciated only in the contrast of orthography and pronunciation, it showcases Mandelstam as a poet of script as well as speaking, even or especially in a text that stages the poetic utterance as a cosmic and everlasting act of giving voice to the dead. As the vocal apparatus becomes vis­ib­ le and the poetic word becomes audible—­freeing the “armless dancer” from its dungeon, as Bely’s universal language of imitative gestures would have it—­the tongue and palate add a kinetic, physiological dimension to the play of sight and sound. The mouth, an embodiment of the heavens and the earth, is rendered a microcosm of the universe of meaning it keeps from extinction. The poem’s opening lines are closely paraphrased in the 1937 “Verses on the Unknown Soldier,” suggesting that Mandelstam’s thoughts on transcriptive authority, particularly as encoded in the image of a bodily wave that preserves a poetic impulse, constitutes a rich theme throughout his late verse.94 The tongue spanning the heavens and the subterranean abyss of death also recalls the rela-

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tionship between ­human and divine writing that takes shape in the 1923 “Slate Ode.” This poem takes its name from the last work of the eighteenth-­century poet Gavriil Derzhavin, a fragment on ephemerality that begins, “The river of time in its flow / Carries away all the works of man,” and is built on the acrostic “ruina chti,” an exhortation to “read [or honor] the ruin.”95 ­These brief verses ­were written in a highly ephemeral medium: in chalk, on a slate. Discovered intact and published a­ fter its author’s death, the preserved lines represent for Mandelstam the miracle of the text’s survival of the author and the inevitability of its encounter with a ­future readership; his poetic excursus on the theme relates Derzhavin’s stick (palochka) of chalk to the Milky Way, a white streak of celestial writing communicating between stone and sky. Another resonant text, the 1920 “When Psyche-­Life descends to the shades,” encodes the aporia of resurrection through an Orphic catabasis that anticipates the Dantean themes of Mandelstam’s 1933 essay. In its final image of hesitation at the Styx, the soul Дохнет на зеркало и медлит передать Лепешку медную с туманной переплавы.96 Breathes on the mirror, reluctant to exchange The copper lozenge from its misty crossing. In ­these lines, a synesthetic hesitation between the living word and visual image figures the moment of performative intersection that is the poetic act but also an oxymoronic agony in which the word and image exclude each other. As the soul exhales, its articulated breath or poetic utterance is made manifest as image on the looking glass; if the trace of mist ­there is the proof of life, however, it is also proof of the breath having accomplished the fatal “misty crossing” from the depths of the body to the alienated surface of the mirror, where it actually effaces the poet’s image by clouding over the glass. Similarly, to spit out the word in the form of a coin stamped with writing is to make a meta­phorical exchange between a momentary speech act and a fixed iconographic object, but in the same stroke, it is to make the economic exchange that is Charon’s price of passage into death. That is to say, we already discern in this text the aporetic and synesthetic displacement between atemporal visual art and dynamic verbal art that in Conversation about Dante is oriented onto issues of notation and authority. The theory of transcription that the essay elucidates leads, then, to ways of thinking of Mandelstam again primarily as a poet, but as a poet with suggestive and strongly held ideas about technologies of reading and writing in relation to aesthetic—­and synesthetic—­articulations of space and time.

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Transcription and Authority Anna Akhmatova called Mandelstam “at home in ­music.”97 The Egyptian Stamp describes how musical notation “caresses the eye no less than m ­ usic itself soothes the ear” and paints for us “mirage cities of musical notation” in which the signatures of ­g reat composers are legible as a visual Gestalt: the hanging gardens of Mozart, the laundry lines of Schumann, or the “undersized shrubbery of the Beethoven sonatas.”98 Already a rich vein of poetic imagery, musical notation in all its synesthetic potential becomes increasingly entwined in Mandelstam’s late writings with figures of authority and the vexed questions of Mandelstam’s attitude t­ oward po­liti­cal powers. His exegesis of Dante’s scene of divine writing, in which the spirits of just rulers spell out a po­liti­cal maxim, as the mob of speech longing for the authority of scriptural law, ineluctably implicates poetic authority in issues of ­legal force and po­liti­cal constitution. How can we relate Mandelstam’s scene of angelic dictation to his documented awareness of writing’s use or misuse as a tool of po­liti­cal control? And how can we approach poetry with the “conviction” and “trustfulness” he recommends, when the “hegemony of the baton” that culminates the reading pro­ cess is identified not just with dictation but with dictatorship? Mikhail Gasparov, arguing against Nadezhda Mandelstam’s interpretation of “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” as an ethical counterweight to the “Stalin Ode,” has provocatively championed the need for a more complex understanding of Mandelstam’s relationship to po­liti­cal authority, suggesting that “all the key verses of his last years deal with the ac­cep­tance of Soviet real­ity.”99 In his reading of the “Stalin Ode,” Gasparov understands Mandelstam to orient himself ­toward the relationship between authoritative dictator and worshiping multitude: in figuratively “merging with Stalin,” the poet accomplishes a “merging with the ­people.”100 Gasparov’s interpretation suggestively recalls writing’s government over the “mob” of spoken language in Conversation about Dante, in which it is a mutual compulsion to imitate that unifies script and speech and makes them into versions of each other. On this reading, Mandelstam’s emphasis on the technical instruments that implement authorial or authoritarian intent may speak to a desire to reconcile aesthetics with an essentially totalitarian conception of law. Projected from the person or the personified word onto the hierarchical structures of reading and writing that communicate cultural texts to f­uture generations, structures of po­liti­cal authority appear as guarantors of preservation, no ­matter how brutal and repressive dictators may be in the given historical instance—­even when they censor the poet, arrest him, and send him to die, like Mandelstam himself, of cold and hunger in a transit camp.

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Mandelstam anticipates our wariness on this point but complains that “therein lies the prob­lem: in authority, or to be more exact, in authoritativeness, we can see only insurance against error and we are not at all equipped to understand that grandiose ­music of trustfulness.”101 Tellingly, the “one time” that Nadezhda Mandelstam admits to interfering in her husband’s poetic affairs was her refusal to write this section to dictation, since she interpreted Mandelstam’s claim that Dante’s poem is “directed t­ owards authority; its sound is fullest; it is most concert-­like at the point where it is caressed by dogma” as a concession to Soviet power. We might take her rebellion as an example of the mistrust Mandelstam describes and also as an instance of the authority he claims over his most immediate audience. “Mandelstam grew angry that I had become too smart for my own good and had begun to meddle. I told him to get a new wife,” she recalls: “or hire a stenographer, like normal p­ eople: ­she’ll write anything you like and not bat an eye.”102 The poet seems eventually to have reclaimed his scribe’s obedience, but the anecdote points to his essay’s own creation through a dynamic of gendered power relations centered around the paradox of dictation. In Friedrich Kittler’s analy­sis of the gendering of textual media, he speaks of the “omnipresent meta­phor” that “equated ­women with the white sheet of nature or virginity onto which a very male stylus could then inscribe the glory of its authorship.”103 Mandelstam’s own wife and scribe appears to have been so attached to this commonplace that she refused to accept her husband’s conclusion that “Dante fawns upon authority,” which she can see only as a craven surrender of cultural tradition into the hands of Stalin. So invested is she in her husband’s place in a fixed hierarchy that when Mandelstam represents the poet as an obedient stenographer—­something like Nadezhda Mandelstam herself—­she balks and ­will not write it down.104 Mandelstam’s rhe­toric on authority and trustfulness, especially in combination with the image of marshaled bodies performing an authoritative text, follows from his 1920 essay “Government and Rhythm,” which concerns the Swiss pedagogue Émile Jacques-­Dalcroze’s system of aesthetic education through eurhythmic dancing—­courses of rhythmic gymnastics, meant to translate musical concepts into kinetic movements of the body, to be performed collectively by groups of ­children from the age of three on up.105 Mandelstam hails eurythmic dancing as “one of ­those brilliant finds like the discovery of gunpowder or steam power” and predicts that, like t­ hose technologies, it w ­ ill exert itself as a world-­historical force.106 The essay lauds “rhythm as an instrument of social education,” collective rather than focusing on the development of the bourgeois individual, and expresses “an unerring instinct . . . ​that rhythmic education must be controlled by the government.”107 It was presumably inspired by Mandelstam’s 1918 stint in Anatoly Lunacharsky’s Ministry of Education,

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where he or­ga­nized an “Institute of Rhythmics.”108 Mandelstam’s praise for rhythmic education is reminiscent of statements by Soviet utopians who sought to assimilate everyday life to the mechanical rhythms of factory work. Beginning in 1921, the theater critic Ipollit Sokolov in articles like “Industrial-­Plastic Gymnastics” and “The Taylorized Gesture” advocated for “­labor gymnastics” as a technique to train industrial efficiency.109 Leon Trotsky writes approvingly of the enthusiasm for “educating man himself rhythmically.”110 Vladimir Papernyi suggests that inspiration and technocracy coincide in early Soviet culture, since they have in common “an absolute trust in the result of any pro­cess or activity,” ­whether “the dissolution of the soul into the collective stream” or a “universal orga­nizational science” that encompasses ­every minute phenomenon of life.111 Like Conversation about Dante, “Government and Rhythm” diagnoses re­sis­tance to rhythmic dancing’s “fusion of non-­ differentiated ele­ments”—­“the spirit and the body”—as an unwillingness to believe in generosity and justice. “Our body, our l­ abor and our science are not yet ready to accept rhythm unreservedly,” Mandelstam counsels; “we must still prepare for its ac­cep­tance.”112 In an image that seems to prefigure the scene of divine writing interpreted in Conversation about Dante, Mandelstam hopes for “a miracle . . . ​that transforms the abstract system into the p­ eople’s flesh.” A divine government, identified as both a po­liti­cal and a poetic force, is to shape the trusting and collective body of the p­ eople. Like Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s externalizer, this utopian essay’s poignant figuration of rhythm as “a social force that has just awakened from prolonged lethargy and that has not yet realized all its possibilities” can be read retrospectively as a figure for Stalinist authority realizing its plans through the bodies of Soviet workers.113 While Mandelstam’s appeal to trustfulness in Conversation about Dante may be difficult to accept in the immediate context of Stalinism, it is, then, not wholly alien to the figure of authoritative writing elsewhere in his oeuvre. If we can find moments, as in “Fourth Prose,” in which Mandelstam treats writing as the trace and ground of a debased po­liti­cal authority, we can also find moments in which writing is the carrier of a divine law beyond justification. I. M. Semenko, in her analy­sis of the ge­ne­tics of “The Slate Ode,” shows that the first preserved draft’s relatively transparent image of a “patriarch” with a stone tablet—­Derzhavin with his chalked slate or Moses with the Commandments—­morphs over the revision pro­cess into the metonymically related image of a writing stick (svintsovaia palochka), while “the inscription [zapis’] made by ­human hands upon the tablet . . . ​becomes the meta­phorical geological inscription of fault lines and cataclysms.”114 The earth becomes a perfect text—­analogous to Dante’s climactic vision of “the scattered leaves of all the universe” bound by God’s love “in one eternal book,” Mallarmé’s dictum that “every­thing on earth exists in order

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to end up in a book,” or Khlebnikov’s “One, the Only Book, / Whose pages are enormous oceans”—of which the poetic or ­legal text is a fragment or miniature model.115 And what we mistrustfully take for a destructive, fracturing force, Derzhavin’s river of time that carries e­ very ­human work into the maw of oblivion, may in the final calculus that exceeds our comprehension be the operation of patriarchal, authoritative writing, which miraculously preserves a fragile poetic inheritance against the entropic forces of chaos, change, and loss. In this conception, written verse remains the medium of an originary authority, but the pro­cess resembles less the scheme in Plato’s Phaedrus, in which transcribed speech is an ineffectual, orphaned imitation of the spoken word, and more the heavenly impulse of Plato’s Ion, which passes from the divine muse through the possessed poet to the rapt reader: the locus classicus for Mallarmé’s electrical flash of inspiration, Mesmer’s hypothesis of the hypnotic influence of magnetic fluids, and of course Mandelstam’s own account of the poetic impulse between writers and readers as a “magnetic” attraction. In this dialogue, Socrates compares poetic inspiration to a chain of iron rings suspended from a single lodestone, the connection between them gradually lessening in intensity but not in quality. “The Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from t­hese inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration,” so that all of them “receive the power of the original magnet from one another.”116 Now an electrical as well as an orchestral conductor, Dante appears in this scheme as a link in the chain, a connective medium magnetized by and rendered subject to the power of his muse. Mandelstam insists that he “writes to dictation, he is a copyist, he is a translator”: When written down and ready, this is still not the end of the pro­cess, for the written object must be taken somewhere, must be shown to someone to be checked and praised. It is not enough to say “copying,” for what we are involved with ­here is calligraphy in response to dictation by the most terrifying and impatient dictators. The dictator-­overseer is far more impor­tant than the so-­ called poet. . . . ​Now I must ­labor a ­little longer, and then I must show my notebook, bathed in the tears of a bearded schoolboy, to my most severe Beatrice, who radiates not only beauty but literacy.117 Literacy remains implicated in prob­lems of sacral, poetic, and po­liti­cal authority, but some ­things along the way have been turned around—­have come to resemble, in fact, the scene of dictation in Krzhizhanovsky’s Letter Killers Club, in which lit­er­at­ ure usurps the place of the tyrant in order to oversee its own passage from potentiality into being, or the Gothic scheme of Konstantin

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Batiushkov, in which runic memorials mediate the poetic impulse passing from the dead skald to the Rus­sian poet who ventriloquizes his verses. The tracing of letters that had seemed the bodying forth of l­egal writ is h ­ ere subject to a “dictator-­overseer” identified no longer with writing but, as the oral source of the text, with speech and, as the schoolmaster or censor who approves the work, with reading.118 In a parallel meta­phoric scheme, the authoritative pen or phallus that fertilizes and gives meaningful shape to feminine material is rendered subservient to the female muse and “takes dictation from the verbal material itself,” as V. B. Mikushevich puts it.119 Fi­nally, where we might have expected a bearded god or mustachioed tyrant disseminating the tablets of law, we instead find a bearded poet submitting copybooks to his young muse, a metonymy of the f­ uture generations to which poets bequeath their work.120 Mandelstam himself, of course, is the implicit next link in the chain that leads from Dante and the cultural past to the reader and the cultural f­ uture. In this textual cir­cuit, which both emerges from and evokes a readership in the universe beyond the poet’s own horizon, the source of attractive authority in which Mandelstam implores us to hear that “grandiose m ­ usic of trustfulness” is a power to dictate and to censor writing. But it is at the same time a beloved and benevolent force: the text’s origin in divine inspiration and its telos in an ideal reader. The dynamic harks back to the 1913 essay “On the Addressee,” which avers that Pushkin’s meta­phor of the poet as “God’s bird”— an autonomous voice that sings in­de­pen­dently of any audience and is not beholden to temporal powers—is plausible only if we understand the bird as “bound by a natu­ral contract with God, an honor even the greatest poetic genius does not dare to dream of,” b­ ecause “the one who o ­ rders the bird to sing, listens to its song.”121 It is to this divine command, which assures the poet of an ultimate ideal audience, that Mandelstam depicts the poet of the Divine Comedy submitting, like a host of angels flocking to the magnetic power of scripture or a dancing body yielding to the m ­ usic. As a fantasy of a censor to whose dictation the poet joyfully produces his “calligraphic products,” this attraction between writing and speech, authority and action, instrument and material, is the displacement of a very real historical vio­lence. Gasparov has read a 1937 lyric as echoing the rhe­toric of the metrically related “Stalin Ode,” which the dictator composed ­under compulsion in the same month: in both, the poet is first equated with the dictator and then enters into a rapturous global harmony thanks to that self-­annihilating identification.122 Through a triangulation of the poet, the tyrant, and the multitude, the genesis and realization of the poetic text appear within a cycle of displacement and self-­loss. The poet writes to the dictation of his muse or dictator and for the approval for his audience or censor; both of t­ hese powers lie

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outside his control, but they bookend and make pos­si­ble poetic creation. Other dynamics of perpetual displacement—­above all the wave-­like alternation between light and sound, space and time, which is regulated by the conductor’s baton—­allegorize this productive difference between authoritative dictation and censorious reading, which is that same “coordination of the impulse and the text,” the “law of transmutable and convertible poetic material,” that Conversation about Dante enjoins scholars to investigate.123 The theme of reconciliation with temporal powers is consistent with a “Slate Ode”–­like faith in a more distant and inscrutable destiny, but Mandelstam’s per­sis­tent dissolution of authoritative origin into a structure of difference and reciprocal desire also suggests that he is seeking, in the dynamic of writing and per­for­mance, a mechanism that ­will cherish and sustain the poetic impulse more effectively than any single individual’s gesture of imitation or control. The baton, whose wave motions orchestrate visual movement and audible ­music by marking a common time, is not in this sense an extraneous and essentially oppressive function but the condition of a transcription through which poetry can, its vital spark oscillating between visual and audible media over a series of per­for­mances, be written and read in perpetuity. To be sure, this is a variation on the fantasy of the immediate sign, in which the rhe­toric of desire fills and obscures the signifying gap between text and per­for­mance. Yet even as a fantasy of sensual poetic plenitude, writes Derrida, “the gesture of passion rather than that of need . . . ​guards us against an already alienating speech, a speech already carry­ing in itself death and absence.”124 In mediating between sight and sound, the baton occupies the site of hierarchical differentiation, but as the dream of an integral rather than an imposed authority. “Far from being an external, administrative accessory which could be done away with or a distinctive symphonic police which could be done away with in an ideal state,” stresses Mandelstam, the “invulnerable baton,” the dynamic instrument that regulates and partakes of both space and time, “qualitatively contains in itself all the ele­ments in the orchestra.”125 In the essay’s rhetorical structure, the baton indeed contains or is at least figuratively implicated in the w ­ hole series of ele­ments Mandelstam identifies with successful reading: magnetic impulse, sight, sound, writing, per­for­mance, orchestration, authority, oscillation. Moreover, as in poetry “every­thing is mea­sure and every­thing derives from mea­sure,” an instrument to mea­sure time and make it vis­i­ble is a condition not just of the successful manifestation of articulated rhythmic intervals in a given poetic per­for­mance but of the techniques of transcription that make pos­ si­ble their repeated performance—­that is to say, of a cultural tradition. Chief among them is of course writing, which the flight of the baton insistently figures. Mandelstam allegorizes the historical origin of writing by rehearsing

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the orchestra’s evolution from an audible to a visual mea­sure of time—­his essay’s most explicit image of writing as coextensive with history and therefore an appropriate end for this chapter. Although Dante somehow anticipated the baton in his poetry, Mandelstam tells us, it was not ­until 1732 that a ­music director began to beat out time with his hand rather than stamping his foot; in 1753, time was rapped out with a stick; and fi­nally, in 1810, an orchestra was “conducted with a baton made of rolled-up paper, ‘without the least noise.’ ”126 In this account, the audible and temporal art of ­music spontaneously gives rise to a princi­ple of synesthetic authority, itself mute, which governs it by articulating it into discrete sections. For Mandelstam, this invention parallels other technologies that render the continuous flow of time apprehensible as a series of segments corresponding to poetic mea­sure, as for example the imprecise needle of the sundial was replaced by the mechanical clock that ticks off distinct seconds or as the pen’s spacing of letters on paper counteracted the tendency of “colloquial language” to “melt down the hostile chunks” of distinct written words.127 Mandelstam in ­these images approaches the insight of the aes­the­ti­cian Nelson Goodman that intermedial transcription (as, e.g., a musical score is realized in sound per­for­ mance or written text in oral recital) is pos­si­ble only the condition of being composed of discrete ele­ments.128 The baton’s relationship to writing is underscored by being made of “rolled-up paper,” reminiscent of the “rolled-up manuscripts . . . ​heavy and smeared with time, like the trumpet of the archangel,” in the epigraph to The Egyptian Stamp.129 Whereas this epigraph expresses an aversion to the scroll, which is both writing on paper and a divine, apocalyptic musical instrument, Conversation about Dante looks to the same synesthetic figure as the spontaneous development of cultural tradition, as the guarantor of the successful per­for­mance of cultural texts, and as the mechanism that preserves them against forgetfulness, distortion, and decay. Alongside the essay’s invigorating theory of poetic per­for­mance, it reminds us that ­every such theory is, at the same time, a theory of the notation that sustains the text from one per­for­mance to the next—­that integral authority u ­ nder whose compulsion the ­whole of ­human history is bound together in a commonwealth of culture.

C h a p te r   5

The Market Humbert Humbert as Mad Man

Discussion of ethics vis-­à-­vis aesthetics in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita tends to revolve around the place of pornographic techniques within high lit­er­a­ture or, what is the flip side of the same question, the right of aesthetic texts to operate in­de­pen­dently, not just of prudery but of any ethical constraints.1 I want h ­ ere, however, to think of the aesthetic and the ethical—of art’s intersection with be­hav­ior—in relation first and foremost to advertising. A quasi-­artistic repre­sen­ta­tion whose main purpose is to inspire its audience to purchase and consume a par­tic­u­lar commodity, advertising copy has to do precisely with the ethics of persuasion as realized in be­hav­ior. And it has gone curiously unremarked that Lolita’s insidious narrator Humbert, who calls himself “an artist and madman,” is in fact a hack and an adman, who receives pay throughout the novel for his “pseudoliterary” work composing and editing perfume advertisements.2 Humbert’s other pseudoliterary work is the exculpatory memoir he has written while awaiting trial, which he calls “Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male.”3 On the denotative level, the book details Humbert’s construction of a phony world in which to trap his orphaned stepdaughter, Dolores Haze. The role of the material commodity in the construction of this trap is apparent when Humbert at the midpoint of the novel, enumerates the comics and candy and clothes he has bought for his pubescent obsession in order to distract her from her ­mother’s death, concluding, “You see, she had absolutely 141

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nowhere e­ lse to go.”4 On another level of address, however, Humbert aims to exercise control over his readership—­judge, jury, forensic psychiatrist, and ultimately Lolita’s mass-­market public. As W ­ ill Norman succinctly puts it, Lolita is “a second attempt at seduction, not of Dolores, but of the reader.”5 Our knowledge of the novel’s events is entirely filtered through Humbert’s private system of sentimental meta­phors, which are calibrated to render our “mild, dog-­eyed” narrator sympathetic, his life pitiable, his crime forgivable, so that the meta­ phorical jury that is Lolita’s reader ­will let him off the hook despite the plain evidence of fraud, domestic abuse, and child rape presented to us in pastel emotional colors.6 Couched though Nabokov’s novel is in the language of l’art pour l’art, it dramatizes fiction’s aspect as amoral and self-­interested deceit. Nietz­sche calls art a “ruthlessly interested adjustment of t­ hings, a fundamental falsification”; Georges Bataille, in the same spirit, pronounces that “lit­er­a­ture . . . ​is guilty and should admit itself so,” in order to catalyze the higher morality that comes from knowledge of evil.7 Lolita, which addresses its reader as a ­legal or medical authority, leaves us ­little choice but to pass judgment, however fictionalized Humbert’s account or fundamentally fictional his crimes might be. Critical evaluation h ­ ere has po­liti­cal overtones. In exercising rhetorical power to ensnare victims in an artificial world, Lolita is continuous with Russian-­language books like the 1932 Laughter in the Dark or the 1936 Invitation to a Beheading, which refract aspects of the Bolshevik and Nazi regimes. In t­ hese novels, the tyrant appears as a shabby author-­figure who, like Humbert, is unaware of being the instrument of another, realer and cleverer author, even when their cruel and narcissistic manipulation of other characters mimics the true artist’s aspiration to a “final dictatorship over words”—as Nabokov’s 1938 Künstlerroman The Gift puts it.8 In Invitation to a Beheading, whose totalitarian dimension is frankest, Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death for the crime of “gnostical turpitude”—­for being more opaque, more individual, in a word more real than the gimcrack mashup of two-­dimensional characters and shoddy sets in which he dwells while he awaits execution of the sentence. Invitation to a Beheading illustrates the princi­ple through Cincinnatus’s prison, which comprises not just the space within the walls of his cell but the entire novel. All the characters turn out to be buffoonish automatons conspiring to keep Cincinnatus in an ersatz world meant to glorify the headsman, M’sieur Pierre, the director of the ­whole spectacle.9 As in Lolita, po­liti­cal and sexual dominion over the captive are two sides of the same coin. “To me you are as transparent as—­excuse the sophisticated simile—­a blushing bride is transparent to the gaze of an experienced bride-

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groom,” enthuses M’sieur Pierre, growing overheated, panting, and exposing to Cincinnatus a phallic axe. “Go,” he implores; “I am too excited, I too am not in complete control of myself.”10 A parody of a wedding party takes place on the eve of the execution, which itself is interpretable as a meta­phorical rape. If Lolita’s parallels with Invitation to a Beheading help us to perceive the totalitarian resonances of its plot, Laughter in the Dark brings commodity culture to the forefront. In this book Albinus, an art critic, becomes obsessed with Margot, a teenage girl and creature of cinematic mass culture. The novel’s plot is reminiscent of the melodramatic thrillers that Margot loves to watch: a­ fter Albinus is blinded in an auto accident, the girl conspires with her lover, a commercial artist named Axel Rex, to defraud him. Rex delights in constructing a false world around the blind man, teasing him by touching his lips with a stalk of grass to make him swat away the imaginary fly and so forth. Albinus, for his part, remains unaware of his position in the ménage à trois u ­ ntil the very end. Lolita’s configuration of Dolores, Humbert, and Quilty—­young girl, cultured critic, and commercial artist—­exactly parallels the love triangle in Laughter in the Dark. Like Humbert, Albinus is outdone in his efforts to possess and control the girl by Rex, whose very name, Latin for “king,” suggests autocracy and whose notion of art is a false real­ity in which a dupe is snared. The Rus­sian text of Laughter in the Dark is markedly dif­fer­ent from Nabokov’s En­glish version of 1938, most obviously in changes to the names of the main characters. Nabokov also cut the original beginning in order to motivate the acquaintance of Albinus (in Rus­sian, Kretchmar) with Rex (in Rus­sian, Horn) through Albinus’s idea of producing a film rather than Kretchmar’s participation in a copyright suit over an advertiser’s use of a trademarked guinea pig to sell cosmetics.11 The aesthetic and the commercial remain, however, horrendously linked.12 For Nabokov as for the Marxist critic Theodor Adorno, also writing in Germany ­under the increasing shadow of the Nazi regime and also revising his work from American exile, false consciousness and totalitarian power are manifested in the shallow and commercialized aesthetic of kitsch, whose shallow and commercialized repre­sen­ta­tions uncannily take the place of real experience and real judgment. In an analy­sis of a snow globe, written in Los Angeles in the wake of World War II, Adorno suggests that even the kitschiest artifact taps into true art’s utopian longing for another world, merely by virtue of being framed in glass apart from the one we live in.13 In Lolita, Nabokov depicts the uncanny synthesis of the coercive and the creative in postwar advertising culture—­raising to another level of subtlety the tyrant’s aim to create a world without an exit, a world comprehended completely by his power.

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“A Cheerfully Sinister Relationship to Everyday Existence” Yuri Leving notes that Nabokov weaves advertising messages into his earliest writings in order to emphasize the “textualization of urban space.”14 Luke Parker has detailed how Nabokov’s 1928 King, Queen, Knave internalizes the visual culture of Weimar consumerism and thematizes Nabokov’s participation in the literary marketplace.15 The neon sign blinking “Can—­it—­be—­ pos­si­ble?” that presides over Ganin’s dreams of recovering his adolescent love in Nabokov’s first novel, Mary; the glowing Renault advertisement that interrupts Sineusov’s recollections of his dead wife in Nabokov’s last Rus­sian publication, “Solus Rex”; or, interpolated into the En­glish version of The Eye, the choco­late advertisement in the tram where Smurov reads the purloined memoirs he hopes w ­ ill immortalize him—­all t­ hese examples implicate advertising in the themes of memory and hope, the repossession of lost love and the immortality of art, which figure so prominently in Lolita.16 Notwithstanding Nabokov’s caveat that “Humbert and Hermann are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at dif­fer­ent periods of his life resemble each other,” Lolita closely resembles Nabokov’s 1934 Despair in its distinctive formation of a mendacious advertiser-­cum-­author, the effort to portray a crime as an artistic act, and a plot structure that culminates in the narrator’s murder of his double.17 Despair’s opening pastiche includes a hackneyed description of an aristocratic ­mother, “a languid lady in lilac silks . . . ​ munching choco­late,” whom the narrator shortly admits to illustrate one of his “essential traits”: “my light-­hearted, inspired lying.”18 The lie is unoriginal, however, and in fact plagiarizes a choco­late wrapper showing “a lady in lilac, with a fan.”19 Since Hermann hawks that choco­late for a living, his vaunted artistic imagination turns out to be a slavish reflection of his work life. His ham-­fisted attempt to import an advertising cliché into his autobiography analogizes his failed effort to make an artistic masterpiece out of a criminal plot, in other words, to confuse life and art, real­ity and repre­sen­ta­tion.20 A scene in The Gift, ­later mirrored in Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory, also inserts an advertisement into the origin story of the artist. Whereas in Despair the advertisement is the inspiration for the image of the ­mother, in The Gift it is the ­mother who brings the protagonist “a Faber pencil a yard long and of corresponding thickness: a display g­ iant that had hung horizontally in the win­dow as an advertisement”—­the eponymous “gift” of literary genius, which repurposes commercial material for its own motives.21 The first pages of the same novel rail against “the altruism of advertisements, . . . ​all this nasty imitation of good, which has a strange way of drawing in good ­people,” something

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like the contagion transmitted through morally bad art in Tolstoyan aesthetics.22 In the predatory mirror world of advertisements, the narrator avers, “a world of handsome demons develops side by side with us, in a cheerfully sinister relationship to our everyday existence; but in the handsome demon ­there is always some secret flaw.”23 He promises someday to come back “to a discussion of this nemesis, which finds a soft spot for its blow exactly where the ­whole sense and power of the creature it strikes seems to lie.”24 Of all Nabokov’s novels, Lolita might best realize this intention, but advertising in its association with the demonic and with sinister mirrors crops up in vari­ous pre­de­ces­sor texts. In Nabokov’s Faustian 1926 story “A Nursery Tale,” the devil communicates to the protagonist in advertising code that his choice of a lady for his harem has been approved: “As she went by, now closely escorted by our ridicu­lous rival, Erwin remarked si­mul­ta­neously the crimson artificial r­ ose in the lapel of her jacket and the advertisement on a billboard: a blond-­mustachioed Turk and, in large letters, the word ‘yes!,’ ­under which it said in smaller characters: ‘i smoke only the r­ ose of the orient.’ ”25 The dystopian Bend Sinister, Nabokov’s second novel in En­glish, plays on the theme of mirror inversion in order to equate the herd mentality of the bourgeois consumer and the quasi-­communist ideology of “Ekwilism,” whose left-­handed invert leader models himself a­ fter the cartoon “Everyman” in a “blatantly bourgeois paper”—­“poster pictures showed him smoking the brand that millions smoke, and millions could not be wrong.”26 Lolita’s Quilty also first appears to the reader in a cigarette advertisement. Advertising’s exploitation of our better instincts is perhaps best exemplified by Pnin, that naïf adrift in the complications of the 1950s United States: “You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement,” he wails, upon being offered a magazine.27 To judge by the cartoon Pnin reads, that magazine is the New Yorker, in which four other sections of Pnin ­were published between November 1953 and November 1955, alongside advertisements for underwear, lounge chairs, whiskey, perfume, and Eu­ro­pean vacations. Nabokov plays ­here on the prob­lem of distinguishing fictional from commercial per­for­mances in the publication context of his own work, which found a home among the New Yorker’s ads for goods that confer cultural capital not least b­ ecause it exerted the same attractions on the same bourgeois public.28 If a credulous and well-­meaning audience, like Pnin, is prone to confuse the artistic and utilitarian functions of a given text, artists and advertisers might both, albeit from dif­fer­ent motivations, desire to amplify that confusion. The confusion of art and rhe­toric is a central conceit of Lolita, whose engagement with postwar consumer culture is suffused from start to finish with a sinister advertising theme. Early on, Humbert and the prostitute Monique

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pause before a win­dow display; the girl’s wish for stockings (bas) is distorted by her dialect into bot, the dev­il’s clubfoot, implying a demonic lower depth to her prosaic desire.29 “I doubt not that you and I would make a pretty ad for the Traveling Agency,” Humbert admonishes his wife, Charlotte, when refusing a trip to ­England, but “no colored ads in your magazines ­will change the situation.”30 Charlotte’s ­daughter, Dolores Haze, Humbert’s Lolita, appears at the swimming pool “glad as an ad”; their road trip is studded with “adman visions of celestial sundaes”; she accumulates teen magazines, which Humbert summarizes as “ads and fads”; his last encounter with her is “a beer ad” in which a one-­handed friend hospitably opens the cans.31 Before Humbert murders his rival Quilty, he passes through a town whose ­every billboard and neon sign is lovingly detailed. “Sherry-­red letters of light marked a Camera Shop. A large thermometer with the name of a laxative quietly dwelt on the front of a drugstore. Rubinov’s Jewelry Com­pany had a display of artificial diamonds reflected in a red mirror.”32 Rachel Bowlby, in a perceptive essay on the advertising theme in Lolita, notes how “the language of consumption, which on the surface is spurned as obviously inferior to the traditions of g­ reat lit­er­a­ture, seems to take over the poetic force of the novel as though against the grain of the narrator’s own intentions.”33 In constructing this opposition between Humbert and consumerism, however, Bowlby omits the complicating ­factor that the narrative of Lolita is not just a “madman’s fancy” but literally “adman visions.”34 Humbert’s ­uncle by marriage was a “traveler in perfumes” who made a fortune in the United States, and upon his death in 1939, Humbert is invited to accept “the soft job fate offered” him: “It consisted mainly of thinking up and editing perfume ads. I welcomed its desultory character and pseudoliterary aspects, attending to it when I had nothing better to do.”35 This sinecure is the pretext for Humbert’s immigration to the United States; his self-­presentation as a gentleman-­scholar, seeking the “solace of research in palatial libraries,” is materially sustained by mass-­produced perfume and advertising copy.36 The adman/madman pun at which Nabokov hints further relates artistic judgment to moral culpability. Humbert’s explic­itly “pseudoliterary” profession as perfume advertiser correlates with his apparently literary occupation as narrator of Lolita: a confession or excuse, edited by a sympathetic psychiatrist, functioning as it ­were to cover up the stink of his misdeeds by patheticizing their repre­sen­ta­tion. The adman’s greatest triumph would be to have his readers buy the story that he is not in fact a predator but a madman who cannot be held legally responsible for his actions. Scent is also bound up from the beginning with Humbert’s sexuality. It is Annabel’s stolen “toilet powder, . . . ​a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume, . . . ​

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mingled with her own biscuit odor,” that brings twelve-­year-­old Humbert to the verge of orgasm; a chance sound interrupts the tryst, and his ­later pedophilia is, he claims, an effort to bring closure to the interrupted climax.37 Working as an adman in New York, Humbert prefers the playground in Central Park to the repulsive “glitter of deodorized c­ areer girls that a gay dog in one of the offices kept unloading” on him—an implied cluster of pungent alternatives to adult heterosexuality in which the hunting dog theme appears together with that of scents and deodorants.38 At the time of his move to Ramsdale, Humbert claims to have “cut down to a minimum” his “active participation in [his] u ­ ncle’s posthumous perfumes.”39 His phrasing carries a whiff of the Rus­sian dukhi—­meaning “perfume” but also, with a shift in stress, the etymologically related “ghost” or “spirit.” The pun linking spirit and commodity suggests advertising’s effort to palm off a material good as a spiritual one, a topic Nabokov takes up in detail in his lectures; it is also consistent with Nabokovian play on the pneumatic meta­phor of “inspiration [vdokhnovenie]” elsewhere, as when Kinbote’s halitosis in Pale Fire signals the falsity of his art. Shortly ­after marrying Charlotte Haze, Humbert lies alone in bed, “pressing to [his] face Lolita’s fragrant ghost”; the suggestion of spiritual longing is significantly undercut by the possibility that Humbert is availing himself, as a few pages ­later, of a filched pair of underwear, “with a faintly acrid odor in the seam.”40 The tension between natu­r al and commercial fragrances that characterizes the initial encounter with Annabel haunts the narrative and recurs in Humbert’s first physical approach to Dolores. “Although I do love that intoxicating brown fragrance of hers, I r­ eally think she should wash her hair once in a while.”41 Dolores is perfumeless at this first encounter, but by the time she dis­appears with Quilty, Humbert tells us, her bed “smelled of chestnuts and roses, and peppermint, and the very delicate, very special French perfume I latterly allowed her to use.”42 Something like Hermann’s choco­late, ­these scents are a commodity marketed to the masses by association with Eu­ro­pean luxury. Perfume, mingled with the smell of an unwashed child, seems to encode the “twofold nature” of the nymphet, which for Humbert combines the allure of a demonic seductress with the pathos of an innocent. “This mixture,” Humbert rhapsodizes, “of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-­ nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures, from adolescent maidservants in the Old Country (smelling of crushed daisies and sweat); and from very young harlots disguised as ­children in provincial brothels,” gets “mixed up with the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through the musk and the mud.”43 The “vulgar” and the “stainless” coincide with delicately paired metonyms of sexuality: crushed daisies and sweat, musk and mud. Together, ­these substances generate

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a neat Structuralist grid: a perfume-­like scent (flowers, musk) paired with a suggestion of the filth it covers (sweat, mud); an emanation of the body (sweat, musk) and a reference to the place of coitus (crushed daisies, mud). In Humbert’s pursuit of his obsession, he claims he has “but followed nature”: “I am nature’s faithful hound.”44 Yet the “gay dog” in his office, who like Humbert has no use for “deodorized ­career girls,” suggests that dogs and the scents they follow are in fact figures of perversion. Far from “following nature,” the hunting dog that is Humbert is inveigled through the maze of the plot by authorial artifice: the cunning bait planted for him by Quilty, ultimately by Nabokov. Late in the novel, suspecting Dolores of betrayal, Humbert fully inhabits his ­uncle’s profession of “traveler in perfumes”: “I ripped her shirt off. I unzipped the rest of her. I tore off her sandals. Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity, but the scent I travelled upon was so slight as to be practically undistinguishable from a madman’s fancy.”45 Humbert’s effort to track down the author of his trou­bles in the body of “Lolita” is legible by this point as an allegory of interpretation that figures the reader’s efforts to decipher the textual body of Lolita. Humbert’s crux is to “distinguish” between his own paranoid imagination and Quilty’s ingenious conspiracy, which he is determined to unravel; but the reader or rereader is perhaps more concerned with the prob­lem of how to approach Humbert’s glib account, which like his stepdaughter claims to be faithful, but, like Quilty, misleads by planting false trails. Fi­nally, ­because Quilty and Humbert are both writers who are active in the advertising industry, the “madman’s fancy” that guides Humbert’s imagination can be read, once again, as an echo of the “adman visions” that, enticing the girl from one roadside attraction to the next, motivate the itinerary of their journey and the shape of the plot.46

“A Kind of Satellite Shadow World” In a lecture titled “Philistines and Philistinism,” Nabokov makes explicit advertising’s confoundment of the base and the spiritual, which we have found to be so richly encoded in Lolita’s olfactory dimension. Commercials can be instructively compared to art as sensual objects that represent for their audience a “a kind of satellite shadow world,” he notes.47 Some advertisements are even “very artistic,” thanks to the skill and consistency with which they create a false world and charge it with seductive appeal—­but “that is not the point,” which relates rather to their material telos. “The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due . . . ​to suggesting that the acme of ­human happiness is pur­chas­able and that its purchase somehow ennobles the pur-

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chaser.” Nabokov’s framework is implicitly Kantian or Symbolist. Whereas art’s purposiveness belongs to itself or to a higher world, the “celestial cereals” or enthroned “Idol” of a new car are inevitably in the ser­vice of utilitarian ends. Advertisements mean to ensnare their audience so fully in a false real­ity that the purchaser w ­ ill take the material product for a transcendental value. Although the adman facilitates a tendency to confuse mimicry of spirit for the real t­ hing—to use Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s terms, to confuse byt for its near twin bytie—­his work is according to Nabokov “pretty harmless in itself ­because every­body knows that it is made up by the seller with the understanding that the buyer w ­ ill join in the make-­believe.”48 As with fiction, our compact with the demonic world of advertising depends on a suspension of disbelief: the reader who “buys into” a literary work resembles the consumer who falls for a glossy advertisement. Prob­lems arise, however, as soon as one leaves the “pretty harmless” world of make-­believe for the fairly fraught world of ethical or consumer choice. Wayne Booth’s accusation that Lolita exploits the unskillful reader’s “inability to dissociate himself from a vicious center of consciousness presented to him with all the seductive self-­justification of selfish rhe­toric” applies, in Nabokov’s scheme, to commercial rhe­toric as much as to Humbert’s narrative, which we might also think of as a “satellite shadow world.”49 The failure of some readers to maintain ironic distance from the novel results from its leveraging of temptation on multiple rhetorical levels: Lolita is art impersonating advertising impersonating art. Humbert’s techniques of persuasion open Nabokov’s aesthetics onto the larger prob­lem of high art’s place within commercial society: what Sianne Ngai calls the “hypertrophy of the ‘aesthetic function.’ ”50 Exposed to an estimated five thousand advertisements e­ very day, how is the average American to distinguish objects of high art from the myriad other texts conspiring to appeal to our senses and absorb our attention?51 For Nabokov, advertising’s “poshlust”—­his pointed transliteration of the Rus­sian poshlost’, meaning “pretentious, philistine banality”—­represents “not only an aesthetic judgment but also a moral indictment.”52 In this view, the ethical dimension of the book may come into play not so much in its luridly ­imagined crimes (the book is, ­after all, fiction) as in a hermeneutic of consumerism, which lends a transcendental aura to base ­things in order to influence real be­hav­ior. Nabokov carries forward into the consumer age Tolstoy’s critique of the narrative desire that ­causes Anna Karenina to lose herself, first meta­phor­ically and then morally, in the novel that she reads on the train. More than other cultural genres, advertising encourages unquestioning identification with its images, in hopes of enticing the real audience to imitate the representation—to forget which side of the mirror they are on. And identifying

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with a fictional character is, for Nabokov, “the worst t­ hing a reader can do.”53 Advertising can therefore be thought of as the opposite of metafiction, which is a literary mode that compels the reader to remain conscious of the artificiality, contingency, and conventionality of ­every device. Critical awareness of such techniques is not just a m ­ atter of good reading but an ethical imperative, insofar as the exhortations of advertisers are realized in be­hav­ior as consumer choice. The popularity of advertisements that rely on frame-­breaking devices and other metafictional techniques testifies to our need to reconcile the commodity to critical awareness—­but also testifies to commodity culture’s ingenuity in absorbing and co-­opting ­every critical practice. We cannot rely on ethical or sentimental instinct to guide us h ­ ere. It is precisely our goodness, our tenderness, our temptation to identify with the suffering feelings of the forlorn lover or v­ iolated child, that is exploited by the cozening language of the salesman—or, since on this level Humbert is selling not a material object but identification itself, the pornographer. In functioning through affective identification, advertising resembles the “body genres” described by Linda Williams (pornography, melodrama, and horror), in which “the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen.”54 Frances Ferguson similarly stresses how pornography employs techniques to intensify the “analogy between the bodies of readers and viewers and of fictitious or a­ ctual persons,” whose bodily experience is triggered so as to “make personal memories look like recognitions of hy­po­thet­i­cal or fictitious experiences.”55 Operating on the level of repre­sen­ta­tion rather than linguistic material, Williams and Ferguson arrive at something reminiscent of Osip Mandelstam’s “reflexology of speech” or Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of zaum, according to which the verbal artwork triggers involuntary spasms of the vocal apparatus and hence an orchestrated sequence of emotional and sensual states. Roman Jakobson argues that “sound symbolism is an undeniably objective relation founded on a phenomenal connection between dif­fer­ent sensory modes,” citing as evidence the association in many languages of grave and acute vowels with dark and light tones, respectively.56 His claim translates into an academic idiom the richly synesthetic imagery of Futurist manifestoes and Mandelstam’s essays. Jakobson’s collaborator Jan Mukařovský provides a theoretical basis for sound symbolism by pointing out that the body is, in a strict sense, the medium for and ground of aesthetic experience.57 Pulse, breath, and repetitive ­labor condition our experience of rhythm; the basic orienting princi­ ples of symmetry and dissymmetry on horizontal and vertical axes condition our experience of visual art; and phonetic value is conditioned by the point of articulation and the relative laxness or tension of the vocal organs as we

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pronounce sounds. Distinguishing between “pure and applied” manifestations of the poetic function, Jakobson argues that its instrumental use is “a secondary, unquestionably derived phenomenon” and that “self-­evidently, the existence of versified, musical, and pictorial commercials does not separate the questions of verse or of m ­ usic and pictorial form from the study of poetry, 58 ­music, and fine arts.” Jakobson ­here fails to reckon with Formalist theories of literary evolution, according to which lit­er­a­ture develops by incorporating other verbal genres—­and especially extraliterary ones like, for example, advertising language—­and charging them with new orientations.59 Consider the memorable lines that constitute Humbert’s first address to the reader: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-­lee-­ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”60 ­These lines plainly vaunt the poetic function as Jakobson defines it: similarities patterned through their repetition across the ­whole of a linear utterance. Humbert w ­ ill not let us ignore the alliterative repetition of /l/ and the systematic alternation of low lax and high tense vowels in the first sentence, the grammatical parallelism and the significant /s/ alliteration in the second, or the gradation of the tongue from front to back of the mouth as we pronounce the name of the book. Lit­er­a­ture’s in­de­pen­dence from signifying language is further emphasized by the decomposition of “Lolita” into nonsignifying syllables. Does the “coercive, determining” role that Jakobson ascribes to the poetic function appear h ­ ere in a “pure” form, as in the intransitive poetry of zaum, which the series “Lo. Lee. Ta” superficially resembles? The question is weightier than initially appears. The first-­time reader does not yet know it, but Dolores Haze loathes the name “Lolita,” which Humbert applies to her without her consent. In taking plea­sure in the sensual experience of pronouncing this name and the verbal patterns Humbert or Nabokov weaves around it, we are rendered all unawares complicit in the (fictive) violation; we are, perhaps, ourselves seduced. In our first exposure to Humbert, he performs on the innocent and unwary instrument of our body for his own purposes. To the canny rereader, Humbert’s stratagem foreshadows his success in securing an orgasm from proximity to Dolores Haze, whom he meantime distracts by “garbling . . . ​the words of a foolish song” into a sequence of nonsense verses, “repeating this automatic stuff and holding her ­under its special spell,” even as “her voice stole and corrected the tune [he] had been mutilating.”61 The song that passes between them is a kitschy murder ballad about a ­woman named Carmen, evoking the subtext of Bizet’s opera—­but it is perhaps more essential that the name “Carmen” is a Latin word meaning “charm, song, incantation.” Humbert, like a Futurist poet, gains a magical power over his audience by submitting it to poetically patterned language. Capitalizing on the

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naïve Jakobsonian assumption that it is “self-­evident” when the “primary intent of the text is poeticalness,” Nabokov superimposes the poetic function’s coercive power, which is practiced on real bodies, onto a repre­sen­ta­tion of power wielded over a fictional body.62 In Nabokov’s afterword to Lolita, he declines to “bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual” but describes pornography as connoting “mediocrity, commercialism, and certain strict rules of narration” that require a series of sexual commonplaces escalating to a climax. His own book, he stresses, uses “certain techniques at the beginning” that create pornographic expectations, but they are over time exchanged for the less sexually explicit currency of pathos. In Ferguson’s account of pornography, however, the degree of explicitness m ­ atters less than the way pornography places erotic acts in an evident series whose vari­ous members can be compared to each other and hierarchized—­for her, one of many instances of a larger shift ­toward utilitarian approaches to value that is also evinced in workplaces, schools, economic markets, and other institutional contexts. Humbert’s narrative per­for­mance of recovering his lost love through a series of nymphets, which motivates the book’s pathos and exemplifies the Jakobsonian ideal of a literary text as a patterned series of comparable phenomena, exploits from start to finish the same “copulation of clichés” as commercial pornography or advertising.63 In fact, the novel’s nostalgic reveries are directly analogized with advertising commonplaces—­shading rapidly into pornographic ones. Humbert tells us that Charlotte “desired me to resuscitate all my loves,” and “to keep her happy, I had to pre­sent her with an illustrated cata­logue of them, all nicely differentiated, according to the rules of t­ hose American ads where schoolchildren are pictured in a subtle ratio of races.”64 ­Here Humbert’s confessional per­for­mance operates as a coy metafictional encoding of “Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male” itself, also an erotic memoir that aims to “resuscitate” Humbert’s loves, from Annabel on. That Humbert compares his fictional conquests to an “illustrated cata­logue . . . ​of schoolchildren” allows us to perceive in them the endless sequence of nymphets with which he regales the reader in descriptive shorthand: the girl with “porcelain-­white neck and wonderful platinum hair,” the one with “a white ribbon in her black hair,” and the “red-­haired schoolgirl,” to name a few.65 For Charlotte’s benefit, Humbert translates this cata­logue of fantasies into an equivalent sequence of a more adult variety: “the languorous blond, the fiery brunette, the sensual copperhead—as if on parade in a bordello.”66 Like poetic language in Structuralist theory, pornography and advertising are for Humbert a ­matter of similarities projected into a metonymic series. His persuasiveness to the reader, as to Char-

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lotte, lies in his mastery of t­ hese codes and his ability to exploit slippages between them for his own ends.

“That Quiet Poetical After­noon of Fastidious Shopping” Increasingly often, Humbert appears himself as the victim of a poetic or commercial logic that exceeds his understanding. Buying pre­sents for Dolores ­after Charlotte’s death, he succumbs in the department store to a diabolical mirror world that lures him on to his first rendezvous with his double and nemesis, Quilty, at a ­hotel where he hopes to drug and molest his orphaned stepdaughter. ­ here is a touch of the mythological and the enchanted in t­ hose large T stores where according to ads a c­ areer girl can get a complete desk-­to-­ date wardrobe, and where l­ittle ­sister can dream of the day when her wool jersey ­will make the boys in the back row of the classroom drool. Lifesize plastic figures of snub-­nosed ­children with dun-­colored, greenish, brown-­dotted, faunish f­ aces floated around me. I realized I was the only shopper in that rather eerie place where I moved about fishlike, in a glaucous aquar­ium. . . . ​Somehow, in connection with that quiet poetical after­noon of fastidious shopping, I recalled the h ­ otel or inn with 67 the seductive name of The Enchanted Hunters. The diction of this passage, with its “snub-­nosed mannequins” presiding over the “eerie” department store, harks back to the “eerie vulgarity” and “snub-­ nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures” through which Humbert had attempted to explain the twofold nature of the nymphet. In this mirror world of ­water, Humbert endows the commercial images of ­children with literary qualities—­“mythological,” “enchanted,” “poetical”—­and ends up himself seduced into making a reservation at The Enchanted Hunters, where Quilty is to interact with Dolores without his knowledge. The relationship of mirror inversion between advertising and art is reinforced when Quilty’s play The Enchanted Hunter, whose title is initially given to Humbert in an inverted form, The Hunted Enchanters, becomes the school play at Beardsley Acad­emy and the playwright’s means of reestablishing contact with the girl.68 In Humbert’s first road trip, the itinerary is determined by the happenstance of ads in tour guides and travel brochures, which provide Dolores with enticing, if temporary, goals; in its second iteration, Dolores colludes with Quilty to take control of that

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itinerary and eventually to escape Humbert’s control.69 The commercial display that leads Humbert to his first meeting with Quilty at The Enchanted Hunters thus foreshadows the larger function of advertising to draw Humbert and the plot forward t­ oward their final encounter. The mirror relationship between high and commercial art relies on a classic opposition, apparent not least in Jakobson’s distinction between “pure” and “applied” manifestations of the poetic function, in which high art disinterestedly manifests an autonomous world of or­ga­nized beauty without practical application (“purposiveness without purpose,” in Kant’s legendary phrase), while the “satellite world” of advertising is a prostituted genre of repre­sen­ta­tion that remains in close orbit around the material sphere. If a shrewd novel employs advertising techniques in order to manipulate its readership, however, or if an advertiser character narrates a work of high lit­er­a­ture, we may not know which side of the mirror we are on or even be sure that the classic opposition stands. Many theorists believe that, since the rise of postwar consumer society, a qualitative distinction between artworks and art commodities no longer obtains.70 For Rachel Bowlby, “Lolita demonstrates—­more enchantingly perhaps than any other novel—­that advertising has its own poetry, that far from being incompatible, advertising language and literary language share an assumption that objects of all kinds acquire their desirability through the words . . . ​in which they are represented.”71 On this reading, Nabokov discovers an aesthetic role for advertising language and subsumes it into the artistic plan of his novel. To remember that the narrator is himself an adman with a taste for purple prose, however, is to play on the tension between art and advertising rather than their common ground. The more perfect the parody, the more tense their relationship, u ­ ntil it approaches the theory of mimicry that Nabokov elaborates in his autobiography, Speak, Memory. In a scene exactly paralleling the allegory of writerly vocation in The Gift, Nabokov’s ­mother gives to her son, who is ill with fever, a “­g iant polygonal Faber pencil, four feet long and correspondingly thick,” which she “presumed [he] had coveted”: “as I coveted all ­things that ­were not quite pur­chas­able.” This repurposed advertisement and symbol of literary greatness is distinguished by its nonutilitarian perfection. “For an awful moment, I wondered ­whether the point was made of real graphite,” Nabokov writes. “It was. And some years l­ater I satisfied myself, by drilling a hole in the side, that the lead went right through the ­whole length—­a perfect case of art for art’s sake . . . ​since the pencil was far too big for use and, indeed, was not meant to be used.”72 The “art for art’s sake” quality of this advertisement is paradoxically demonstrated by its perfect correspondence to its functional counterpart, albeit in an abstract and exaggerated version that exceeds instrumental use.

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A crucial passage of Speak, Memory, describing the young writer’s burgeoning interest in butterflies, builds on this idea of the repre­sen­ta­tion whose exactitude surpasses utility. “The mysteries of mimicry,” Nabokov writes, “showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-­wrought t­ hings,” for example, in a butterfly’s “imitation of oozing poison by bubblelike macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-­refraction).” Darwin’s agonistic theory of evolution, Nabokov concludes, is helpless to explain “a protective device . . . ​ carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art.”73 The fine distinction between appreciation and predation plays a central role in Nabokov’s own work. For example, in Invitation to a Beheading, Cincinnatus C. is obliged to perform his role, without betraying his essential self, for the “predatory eye in the peephole” giving onto his cell—an image that applies both to the surveillance apparatus of the tyrant and the voy­eur­is­tic attention of the reader.74 A sequence from Lolita, in which Humbert reflects on his efforts to evade suspicion, uses the same imagery: “I felt I was d­ oing my best in the way of mimicry. As I lay on my narrow studio bed ­after a session of adoration and despair in Lolita’s cold bedroom, I used to review the concluded day by checking my own image as it prowled rather than passed before the mind’s red eye. I watched dark-­and-­handsome, not un-­Celtic, possibly high-­church, possibly very high-­church, Dr. Humbert see his ­daughter off to school. I watched him greet with his slow smile and pleasantly arched thick black ad-­eyebrows good Mrs. Holigan.”75 Humbert’s per­for­mance for potential witnesses, which he compares to that of a commercial model, resembles his narrative per­for­mance, which also attempts to deflect blame by evoking sentimental and sensational clichés. And yet the novel’s ability to trigger prurient interest and emotional identification—to spellbind Humbert’s prey and to mask his nature—­might also be viewed as a kind of camouflage. Nabokov’s virtuosic simulation of toxic language confounds mass audiences and would-be critics (predators, in this new, inverted scheme) while delighting more discerning readers through the verve with which it carries off advertising technique—­much as the macules on the butterfly’s wing put off carnivorous birds but thrill admiring entomologists. It remains doubtful ­whether mimicry of rhe­toric is distinct from the real ­thing in the same way that a trompe l’oeil image of a poison is distinct from the ingestion of one. The mainspring of Lolita remains Humbert’s pretensions to exercise power over an audience through a persuasive rhe­toric that masks itself as an aesthetic per­for­mance: indeed, the artistry is proven by the effectiveness of the rhe­toric. Lolita’s use of advertising strategies to insinuate itself into the reader’s ethical world can be read as an effort to claim for the novel,

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­ nder more or less false pretenses, the privileges of attention and influence u that advertising enjoys, in its “world where the game of the senses is played by bourgeois rules.”76 It is in this sense that the word “mimicry” has passed into literary theory. In Homi Bhabha’s elaboration of the term, “mimicry” connotes the paradox of camouflage: the veined green pattern in one part of a leaf might actually be an insect that claims the protection of its context against predators, so even though it looks like “leaf,” it properly signifies “insect.” The similarity in color and texture is meta­phor, the juxtaposition of two dif­fer­ent substances metonymy. Bhabha calls mimicry “metonymy of difference” and describes it as an artifact of transnational modernity, coloniality, and exile. Nabokov’s preternatural fa­cil­i­ty with En­glish, for example, helps him survive in the United States, but it is actually a trace of his Anglophone education among the Rus­sian aristocracy. By situating resemblance within power relations, Bhabha concludes, mimicry constitutes “an erratic, eccentric strategy of authority” that is based in a quality or a positionality that the mimic shares with the master.77 The effect is to split discourse in two, one variant taking “real­ity into consideration while the other disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats, rearticulates real­ity as mimicry.”78 The complex impersonation of mass culture involved in Nabokov’s refashioning of himself as a novelist in En­glish splits along analogous lines: the calculated exploitation of commercial culture on the one hand, the dream of aesthetic autonomy on the other. Even if Nabokov’s mimicry of persuasive rhe­toric betrays a desire for the reach and the power of mass culture, Lolita’s very success can be read as proof that the mass audience does not appreciate its fine shades of parody and does not touch its essence. In its own system of meta­phoric values, Lolita renders commercial rhe­toric a facetious ornament of an autonomous fictional discourse, thereby sapping the original of authority. However, Nabokov parlayed the scandal of Lolita’s publication into another kind of autonomy—­financial in­de­pen­dence, commercial clout, the privilege to publish increasingly self-­indulgent marvels with large print runs, and the opportunity to bring into broad circulation his entire Russian-­language corpus, which ­until that point had been unmarketable in translation, unpublishable in the Soviet Union, and whose émigré readership was withering away.

“Too Much of a Glad ­Thing” In addition to the reader, Humbert perpetually addresses interested language to young Dolores Haze. “It would take hours of blandishments, threats, and promises to make her lend me for a few seconds her brown limbs,” Humbert

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gripes, before pivoting to a complaint that this “disgustingly conventional l­ittle girl” is at the same time too easily enticed. She believed, with a kind of celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that appeared in Movie Love or Screen Land—­Starasil Starves Pimples, or “you better watch out if y­ ou’re wearing your shirttails outside your jeans, gals, b­ ecause Jill says you s­ houldn’t.” If a roadside sign said: visit our gift shop—we had to visit it, had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus candy. The words “novelties and souvenirs” simply entranced her by their trochaic lilt. . . . ​She it was to whom ads w ­ ere dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of ­every foul poster.79 In this passage, Lolita appears as the ideally naïve audience, appealed to on the one hand by Humbert, whose pretensions to aristocratic taste devolve into the “system of monetary bribes which was to work such havoc with my nerves and her morals somewhat l­ater,” and on the other by Quilty, a nimble native of consumer culture who is a humbug idol and, in Mark Conroy’s words, a “whorish talent” in his own right.80 In Humbert and Quilty, we perceive a rivalry between parallel versions of philistinism associated with two forms of cultural capital, one perpetuated through scholarship and cosmopolitan veneer, the other disseminated through magazines and bohemian chic. In both cases, Dolores, that unformed, preadolescent creature without inherent taste, “the subject and object of e­ very foul poster,” ends up herself a monetized commodity: the prostitute who performs sexual ­favors for money in Humbert’s Old World scheme, the pornographic actress who is to “tangle in the nude while an old ­woman took movie pictures” in Quilty’s somewhat savvier mass-­ media economy.81 Subject and object of ads, Dolores is at once the market whose taste advertising shapes and appeals to and the alluring commodity whose repre­sen­ta­ tion induces an audience—­ultimately, Lolita’s readership—to invest attention.82 Quilty and Humbert also appear on both sides of the mirror of advertising. Long before they meet face to face, the two men are juxtaposed in a pair of “foul posters” looming over Dolores’s “chaste bed,” where Humbert lies down to read her m ­ other’s confession of love for him. A full-­page ad ripped out of a slick magazine was affixed to the wall above the bed, between a crooner’s mug and the lashes of a movie actress. It represented a dark-­haired young husband with a kind of drained look in his Irish eyes. He was modeling a robe by So-­and-­So and holding a bridgelike tray by So-­and-­So, with breakfast for two. The legend, by Rev. Thomas Morell, called him a “conquering hero.” The thoroughly conquered lady

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(not shown) was presumably propping herself up to receive her half of the tray. How her bedfellow was to get ­under the bridge without some messy mishap was not clear. Lo had drawn a jocose arrow to the haggard lover’s face and had put, in block letters: H.H. And indeed, despite a difference of a few years, the resemblance was striking. U ­ nder this was another picture, also a colored ad. A distinguished playwright was solemnly smoking Dromes. He always smoked Dromes. The resemblance was slight.83 Humbert narcissistically compares himself to the male models of both advertisements, but the “striking resemblance” of the one labeled “H.H.” may be due more to the distinctive purple robe he wears than to any physiognomic trait, and the other actually introduces the image of his rival Quilty—­that same “crooner or actor chap on whom Lo has a crush” and whom Humbert is “said to resemble”—­“the writer fellow in the Dromes ad.”84 Their symmetry is underscored when Quilty in their final encounter, still with a Drome cigarette, wears a set of “regal robes” identical to Humbert’s. Alongside the uncanny doubling of Humbert and his rival, both ads implicate the commercial exploitation of high culture—­Broadway shows, hackneyed images of aristocratic leisure, and of course Lolita itself. The one labeled H.H. has a metafictional tinge and ominously foreshadows plot events: the conquered lady, the messy mishap. Its image of a dark hunk with “Irish eyes” recurs when Humbert, d­ oing his “best in the way of mimicry” in the passage quoted e­ arlier, imagines himself from the point of view of the neighbors as “dark-­and-­handsome, not un-­Celtic,” with “pleasantly arched thick black ad-­eyebrows.”85 Nabokov highlights the same commercial clichés in “Philistines and Philistinism”: while ­little boys in ads are freckled, he observes, “handsome young men . . . ​are generally dark haired and always have thick dark eyebrows. Their evolution is from Scotch to Celtic.”86 Humbert’s eagerness to identify himself with advertising models suggests that he is prone, despite his glibly expressed scorn for commercial commonplaces, to lapsing out of the healthy disbelief that renders advertisements “pretty harmless.” And his failure to grasp his likeness with Quilty signals his blindness to the more profound resemblance evident in their shared sexual taste and their common effort to use cultural capital to entice and control the teen market that is Dolores.87 The internal images of advertisements serve as miniature models of the larger narrative written by an adman. A scene that appears to act out the notorious Coppertone sunscreen advertisement in which a girl has her bikini bottom stripped off by a puppy may directly engage the larger cultural system of advertisements. The possibility of influence is uncertain: the chronology is only barely pos­si­ble, and Nabo-

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kov twenty years before had written a similar scene in Laughter in the Dark (the young Margo, mistaken by onlookers for Albinus’s ­daughter, plays with a dog and a ball).88 But Nabokov’s instinct for the drift of 1950s advertising culture is the more remarkable if this scene, which dramatizes the mass audience’s relation to the staged object of desire, evolved in­de­pen­dently. Searching for Dolores in a mountain resort, Humbert finds her in a bikini, and comments bitterly that she is “playing with a damned dog, not me.”89 Although he identifies the breed as “a terrier of sorts,” a ratting dog that hangs onto its prey and a meta­phor for Humbert himself, other characters see “a cocker spaniel pup” like the one in the Coppertone ad: a hunting dog with a keen scent and a metonymy for its owner, Quilty.90 (Humbert does not recall the foreshadowing scene in which, arriving at The Enchanted Hunter, he saw Dolores “caress a pale-­faced, blue-­freckled, black-­eared cocker spaniel” while he and Quilty looked on.)91 “­There was an ecstasy, a madness about her frolics that was too much of a glad ­thing,” Humbert writes; “even the dog seemed puzzled by the extravagance of her reactions.” Humbert looks past Dolores at a swimming pool that parodies the Mediterranean, where he first dallied with Annabel Leigh—­“my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea w ­ ater in Nice”—­and notices alongside it a voyeur, visibly erect in his swim trunks. In this figure Humbert recognizes at last his nemesis Quilty, united with Dolores through the specular relationship of performer and audience. The girl’s “show of gambol and glee” culminates when “she fell on her back, with her obscene young legs madly pedaling in the air”: “I could sense the musk of her excitement. . . . ​I saw (petrified with a kind of sacred disgust) the man close his eyes and bare his small, horribly small and even, teeth.”92 ­Earlier paired as advertising images presiding over Dolores’s virginal bed, Quilty and Humbert are now united as a single audience stirred by the girl’s sexual per­for­mance. The scene is narrated by Humbert, the memoirist, but staged by and for Quilty, the playwright. Both men are identified with the dog that frolics with Dolores within the per­for­mance’s frame. Quilty, the “damned dog” who takes Humbert’s place, has an animal’s “horribly small and even” teeth, and his upturned penis is “his reversed beasthood,” while the pup’s bewilderment mirrors that of “Humbert the Hound,” who underscores his identification with the abandoned beast by meditating, “Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?”93 Humbert, Quilty, and Lolita—­ perfume, cigarettes, and sunscreen—­are triangulated ­here in a highly artificial spectacle that gathers together the major themes of the book. We perceive the per­sis­tent confusion of the ­human and animal, whose subtextual touchstone is H. G. Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau, and see the per­for­mance cast its audience as meta­phorical beasts. The poolside restaging of Annabel on the

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beach, complete with a perfumed “musk of excitement,” makes advertising’s obsession with youth into a parody of memory. But I want primarily to stress the meta­phoric displacement involved in Humbert’s recognition. The book’s readers have h ­ ere opportunity not only to recognize both men as figural dogs but also to recognize themselves as drawn into that system of identification as audience of the same tableau. On this level, the reader of Lolita appears neither as critic of Humbert’s words nor judge of his actions but as a public addressed, like him, by the manipulations of a staged world. Doubtless few of the readers who made the book a succès de scandale reach this conclusion; Lolita is all the more insidious, as Booth complains, for the precision of its mimicry.94 This is to miss the point, however, which Eric Naiman has stressed, that Nabokov shifts the moment of judgment from sexual to hermeneutic perversion.95 The book asks us to adjudicate a pro­cess of reading rather than a represented action. Failing to command the system of meta­phorical identifications that comprises the relationship between ad and audience, Humbert the predator becomes instead the dumb abandoned animal tempted by and at the mercy of its whims. “Imagine me, I should not exist ­unless you imagine me,” Humbert implores, in perhaps his most naked effort to parlay pathos into the attention that sustains his existence.96 The reader too is offered a set of pos­si­ ble identifications, above all with Humbert and Dolores, the novel’s most prominent dupes. Like them, the reader might fall into the enmeshment of meta­phor or might discover, as the characters cannot, the “secret flaw” in the demonic shadow world of blandishments: that their prison has no real­ity beyond what we lend it. Dolores “does not have any thoughts or feelings,” Russell Valentino reminds us, “not ­until we give them to her, not ­until we allow him to give them to her for us.”97 Our emotional reflex can serve to remind us, as with the transgressive tableaux of Vladimir Sorokin, that we are dealing with letters on paper rather than p­ eople. Instead of falling into the enmeshment of meta­phor that ensnares the characters, we have the option of becoming better readers than they are. Nabokov’s mechanism resembles the inoculatory poetics we found in Tolstoy, though targeted on our susceptibility to false art rather than our proneness to bad emotions. ­Here again Lolita involves ethical choice, but the moment of choice depends not on Humbert’s per­for­mance of moral “recantation,” as Booth would have it, but on the reader’s metafictional awareness of the book as a work of fiction, with no a­ ctual crime to be recanted. From this perspective, the temptations of Nabokov’s demon isle do not instruct us in ethics by cultivating empathy, as critics who recuperate Lolita to the tradition of the nineteenth-­century novel have argued.98 Read with the advertising theme in mind, the ethical dimension of Lolita more closely resembles Bertolt Brecht’s call for art of “a non-­aristotelian (not dependent on empathy)

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type,” in which “the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Ac­cep­tance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane.”99 This was Brecht’s answer to the prob­lem of a Marxist art that would not itself be propaganda telling the workers what to believe but would rather excite in the workers critical detachment from the reflexive emotional identifications that are the bedrock of ideology. Nabokov would no doubt be nauseated by this comparison to a Marxist who sought to make of art a vehicle of po­liti­cal understanding, and Brechtian estrangement has been as notoriously unpop­ul­ar with mass audiences as naïve readings of Lolita have been popu­lar. Yet both authors restage, in order ultimately to ridicule, mechanisms by which cultural objects, which are ubiquitous but carry ulterior motives, trick consumers into accepting their fictional terms as real and inevitable. The everlasting debate over Lolita, w ­ hether Humbert is a feeling creature who leads us to sympathy with him and/or with his victim or ­whether he is a manipulative monster whose pastiche of excuses exposes the horror of sexual objectification and/or the amoral freedom of art, resolves at this level into a false dichotomy. We are exposed in Nabokov’s mimicry of advertising to an allegory of reading, whose practical aspect relates less to any represented crime than to our own navigation of a world of interested rhe­toric that, as the Coppertone advertisement demonstrates, has no compunctions about utilizing child sexuality or anything e­ lse.

“Blurred and Inflamed, and Morbidly Alluring” According to the aesthetic of high modernism, art must relinquish the attention and lucre enjoyed by mass culture in order to constitute a genuine negation of and alternative to the commodity. Like so many artists and critics, Nabokov is wont to express this attitude in the stock terms of a sexual taboo, denigrating advertisements as a form of consumerist pornography, accusing art of prostituting itself by pandering to an audience, primly denouncing the “conventional and corny” results of the “sexual kick in lit­er­a­ture” and claiming “never to use schoolboy words of four letters” (although Eric Naiman has exhaustively shown him to delight in thinly disguised plays on ­those same words).100 According to a set of easily sexualized tropes dating back to Romanticism, art is the innocent victim, with consumerism lying always in wait to pervert it to its materialist ends. In setting up t­ hese transferences between aesthetic and sexual taboos, Lolita activates a reflex according to which disinterested art represents itself as an indignant innocent before crass commercialism, even when it mimics the

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techniques of commercial language and even when that mimicry functions in the literary marketplace to sway real readers to ­really buy the book. Humbert’s perfumed words may be grossly interested, but the novel he narrates is to be a work of high art despite Humbert’s exploitative rhe­toric. Nabokov’s limp protests against Olympia Press, the pornographic publisher that first brought out Lolita, seem to parody Humbert’s own efforts to pre­sent himself as a hapless victim.101 Elsewhere, Nabokov’s mercantile side is evident. In his pursuit of financial in­de­pen­dence and a literary legacy, Nabokov nimbly exploited consumer society’s evolution from prewar win­dow displays to slick magazine ads. “The only t­ hing that is of some help to the commercial success of a book,” he wrote in a 1963 letter regarding endorsements on the jacket of Eugene Onegin, “is a sustained advertising campaign, lots of ads everywhere.”102 He boasts of having paraphrased Pushkin in a letter to Lolita’s publisher regarding rights to the novel: “I write for plea­sure, but publish for money.”103 Jonathan Paine observes that “­every narrative is, in some part, a self-­reflexive commentary” on its economic context and the “authorial strategies used to modify the value of an artistic production.”104 The commodification of lit­er­a­ture is acidly encoded in Lolita itself—­a difficult marvel of invention and erudition that mocks, even as it appeals to, American bourgeoisie thrilled, like Charlotte Haze, to find their own clichés ennobled by a real and rarefied Eu­ro­pean. Nabokov’s sense for the pulse of consumer culture is uncanny. Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty, in their matching purple robes, resemble each other but also that genius of middlebrow smut Hugh Hefner, whose Playboy debuted in December 1953 just as Nabokov was finishing Lolita. The cover of the first issue featured a jackrabbit in a smoking jacket (December 1953); subsequent color images demonstrate that the robe is in fact purple (December 1954). Early Playboy epitomizes the midcentury blend of commodified culture and softcore pornography, with amply illustrated articles on nudity in foreign films and the role of sex in advertising. Psychoanalysis is heavi­ly implicated in this instrumentalization of the aesthetic and the erotic. “The use of mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion has become the basis of a multimillion-­dollar industry,” writes Vance Packard in his 1957 exposé of the industry, even if—­evoking the same ambiguity as Nabokov’s lecture on philistinism—­“many of the creations of ad men are tasteful, honest works of artistry.”105 Sigmund Freud’s own nephew Edward Bernays pioneered the modern public-­relations campaign in his advertisements for Lucky Strike cigarettes. Nabokov’s success in the marketplace owed not least to his adroit exploitation of slippages between the aesthetic and the commercial. “The absorption of popu­lar culture into elitist discourse” comes with “the emergence of the advertising industry,” explain Yuri Leving and Frederick White, “which em-

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ployed mass-­circulation magazines as the main vehicle of national brand advertising. Nabokov’s se­lection of t­ hese periodicals was . . . ​a premeditated decision to amalgamate his literary works with specific brand identities.”106 Following Lolita’s publication, Nabokov’s combination of high-­culture credentials and sexual notoriety allowed him to place a number of works in Playboy, which paid better than other outlets for literary fiction. His c­ areer thrived thanks to the very relationship of mimicry between the commercial and the artistic that his art performed. Who is using whom in this scheme of mutual enrichment? And in what way does our reading of Lolita, in which the advertising theme refocuses the ethical questions of the novel from rape to rhe­toric, shed light on this burgeoning cultural formation, which Nabokov diagnoses and from which he profits? Having recognized the temptation to identify ourselves with the narrator-­predator, can we avoid another unsettling identification with Dolores Haze, who seems to represent the naïve American consumer slated for ravishment ­under the mocked-up banner of art? The predator-­prey dynamic at the heart of Nabokov’s aesthetics sets up a strug­gle between art and advertising, pure and applied poetics, high and low cultural forms, and the very dif­fer­ent forms of social capital that they represent. That strug­gle unfolds through mutual exploitation and mutual mimicry. In books like Invitation to a Beheading or Lolita, the world of the novel is gradually revealed to be a shabby make-­believe one, despite the efforts of an artist-­tyrant or an artist-­advertiser to mislead his prisoner, who is a meta­phorical reader and interpreter of the text. In both cases, art is analogized with some form of coercive power, w ­ hether po­liti­cal tyranny or commercial persuasion.107 Nabokov’s publicly cultivated art-­for-­art’s-­sake attitude can be readily contextualized within high-­modernist valorization of art’s autonomy at the cost of its relevance. As Duncan White points out, Nabokov’s formulation of a “link between American mass culture and totalitarianism” resembles that of Clement Greenburg or Theodor Adorno, who perceived the “autonomy of form” that defines au­then­tic artworks as condemning them to “powerlessness and superfluity in the empirical world.”108 This powerlessness is the condition of art’s negation of the culture industry and po­liti­cal tyranny; aesthetic potential is liable itself to become a totalitarian force when it exerts itself in the material of life. Unlike Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading, however, Dolores lacks the ability to recognize the contingency of the artist-­tyrant’s world, to distinguish persons from characters and real from simulated force. ­Behind the novel’s represented crime of rape lurks an ethics of repre­sen­ta­tion, which is abused whenever a false world is offered without allowing for any exit. The “hermetic” and “autonomous” artwork is an uncanny version of the advertiser’s aim to create a fictional world in which contingent meta­phorical identifications are

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taken for truths—at tremendous cost; our predatory narrator enjoys no more real freedom than his captive does. According to Humbert’s own figurative system, that enchanted isle outside of time where he dwells alone with his paramour, variously identified with the island of Prospero or the Garden of Eden, instead becomes the beast island of Doctor Moreau or confinement in a circle of hell. In the absence of any reference points beyond the “bourgeois rules” that work to the advantage of the advertiser, the naïve reader, like Humbert or Dolores, ends up like that ape in the Jardin des Plantes—­Nabokov’s ostensible inspiration for the novel—­who, being taught to draw, was able to reproduce only the bars of his own cage in a series of black charcoaled lines.109 Rhetorical and sexual crimes are complexly identified in Lolita itself. In a scene that Eric Naiman calls “a central meta­phor for the relation between author and reader,” Humbert obtains his first physical contact with the girl, whom he discovers in the bathroom attempting to remove an irritating mote from her eye:110 “Held her roughly by the shoulders, then tenderly by the ­temples, and turned her about. ‘It’s right ­there,’ she said, ‘I can feel it.’ ‘Swiss peasant would use the tip of her tongue.’ ‘Lick it out?’ ‘Yeth. Shly try?’ ‘Sure,’ she said. G ­ ently I pressed my quivering sting along her rolling salty eyeball. ‘Goody-­goody,’ she said nictating. ‘It is gone.’ ”111 He then repeats the per­for­ mance with the other eye. Humbert’s excuse is that he is removing an obstacle, which Dolores “feels” but cannot see, from the organ of vision it obstructs. In fact, he is d­ oing the exact opposite: introducing the blind spot of his own sensations. As Humbert notes in the subsequent paragraph, tellingly confusing whose eye is whose, “My own desire for her blinds me.”112 What for Dolores seems a literal, temporary, and salutary blinding—­a tongue descending on her eyeball and retreating from her cleared vision—is for Humbert a meta­phorical and permanent blinding that emanates from desire and shapes the narrative world. He accomplishes the one in order to accomplish the other, since the girl’s consent—­“ ‘Sure,’ she said”—is obtained only thanks to her inability to perceive the meta­phorical import of the literal proposition. The “sting” penetrating the “salty” aperture is already a solipsistic sex act, complete with loss of hymen (“Goody-­goody. . . . ​It is gone”), carried out without the girl’s conscious knowledge. The terms of this deflowering encounter between able instrument of deceptive language and blinded organ of perception are picked up in another double entendre twenty pages on: She had been crying ­after a routine row with her ­mother and, as had happened on former occasions, had not wished me to see her swollen eyes: she had one of t­ hose tender complexions that a­ fter a good cry get

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all blurred and inflamed, and morbidly alluring. I regretted keenly her ­mistake about my private aesthetics, for I simply love that tinge of Botticellian pink, that raw ­rose about the lips, ­those wet, matted eyelashes; and, naturally, her bashful whim deprived me of many opportunities of specious consolation.113 Once again, this is less an eye than a vagina: swollen rosy lips matted with moist hair and, in the reference to “Botticellian pink,” a vivid image of the Italian paint­er’s foam-­flecked clam opening to reveal the goddess of love. What Humbert pre­sents as Dolores’s “aesthetic” error, in hiding her tears from him, is actually his own ethical lapse. “Dolores” is a name that means “sorrow,” but Humbert calls her by the sensualized diminutive “Lolita.” In the scene just quoted, Humbert ­mistakes the organ of perception, red and wet with grief, for the organ of sexuality, swollen and dripping with desire. In so ­doing, he falls from the literal into a meta­phorical system. The passage in which Humbert imagines himself with “thick black ad-­eyebrows” as he “prowled rather than passed before the mind’s red eye,” explic­itly identifies that ambiguous organ as the target of predatory advertising.114 At the heart of this ­running meta­phor are questions of perception and feeling. With which organ is the reader to internalize Humbert’s language? By pressing his phallic “sting” into Dolores’s vaginal eye, Humbert has, u ­ nder the pretense of clearing her vision or sympathizing with her hurt, in fact raped her with his tongue—­his organ of deceit and his instrument of power. The reader’s place in this scheme is uncomfortable. Every­thing we know is made apparent to us through Humbert’s words, which penetrate our eyes and possess our vocal organs as we read. Can we perceive anything in his language beyond its violation of us, in an experience we are forced now to see as figural rape? By accepting Humbert’s meta­phorical system, we are not just identifying with the predator but in the same stroke being marked as prey. Nabokov stresses that the philistine, “in his love for the useful, for the material goods of life, . . . ​becomes an easy victim of the advertisement business”; the chilling corollary of this logic is that the philistine, who cannot conceive of disinterested and imaginary worlds, deserves the meta­phorical rape perpetrated by Humbert’s tongue, b­ ecause he does not realize what has happened.115 Such a reader has indeed been “safely solipsized,” as Humbert says of Dolores when he gains an orgasm from her body without her being aware of what he has done.116 This is the juncture, according to Leland de la Durantaye, at which Dolores “ceases, in Humbert’s description, to be an ethical subject and becomes an aesthetic object.”117 A reader who does understand Humbert’s

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meta­phor, on the other hand, is by that same token granted a “pretty harmless” sojourn in an imaginary world—­blameless plea­sure in the make-­believe of art and perhaps also in the fantastic wonderland of consumer society, if only, like the c­ hildren in the goblin market, we retain the good sense not to buy anything or if we learn from ­bitter experience to buy nothing in the ­f uture. Sin’s displacement from sexual relations to rhetorical ones is underscored by the biblical subtext of this encounter between wide-­eyed innocence and the serpent’s “sting,” as Humbert calls his subtle tongue or penis. Humbert first sees Lolita in an Edenic garden and experiences his first clandestine orgasm with her ­after giving her an apple (she is, on the davenport, reading an illustrated magazine, “apple-­sweet, . . . ​devouring her immemorial fruit”).118 The primal scene of ethics, the fall from timeless innocence into dynamic sin, thus appears as a primal scene of rhe­toric—an entry into the infernal circle of confession and excuse that Humbert’s language creates around himself and in which he attempts to imprison his reader. Paul de Man’s paradigmatic reading of Rousseau’s Confessions describes how the cognitive function of language to communicate knowledge and its rhetorical function to inspire feeling interact to create a whirligig of guilt and excuse. “Excuses generate the very guilt they exonerate,” he writes, while at the same time, “­there can never be enough guilt around to match the text-­machine’s infinite power to excuse.”119 Lolita exploits this textual pro­cess but leaves the reader a sort of a loophole: whereas Rousseau’s autobiographical pathos speaks in the name of his real experience, Humbert’s distracts us from his fictionality. Indeed, literary characters are only an effect of discourse, and Humbert is only an assemblage of rhetorical conventions gathered around an interdicted desire. The taboo shape of that desire distracts us from its positional value, which centers on culture’s exertion of power over a captive audience. Reading for positional as well as symbolic value, Humbert’s advertising rhe­toric betrays an effort to entice readers into a world that is fictional, insofar as it is made of language, but also real, insofar as it involves the purchase of the commodity that is the book. The rhe­toric of causative power, of persuasion or of excitation, can therefore never be fully exorcised from the satellite shadow world of repre­sen­ta­ tion, which Nabokov describes with the sly caveat “pretty harmless.” The book’s status as commodity means that it can never fully let go the point of contact with the world that is both its point of vulnerability and its point of leverage. In the afterword to Lolita, Nabokov compares his authorial persona to that of the in­ven­ted psychologist John Ray, to whom the book’s foreword is attributed: “The autobiographic device may induce mimic and model to blend.”120 This apparently metafictional observation leaves open the alternative but not contradictory reading that every­thing in the book is in fact a metonymic projection of its

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author, complete with his shameful desire for wide fame and material fortune.121 On this reading, Lolita’s vari­ous broken taboos are so many masks, concealing but also marking this one truly interdicted spot—­the author’s self-­interest and the interestedness of his language, which seeks to convert rhetorical force and command of a literary universe into real privilege and real power in the real world.

Afterword

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky speculates that a universal language of philosophy might emerge from economic pressures—­from the need to efficiently advertise a book’s contents in a competitive marketplace. In a language of catchy titles, ­every word would speak a volume. He might have been amused to observe how commodified fragments of literary texts circulate in our more fully achieved epoch of world lit­er­a­ture. The words of a Revlon eyeshadow advertisement, “He felt now that he was not simply close to her. . . . ​He did not know where he ended and she began,” are credited to “Leo Tolstoy, author.” A campaign for the tony Breguet Classique watch features a portrait of Alexander Pushkin and a quotation from the poet: “A dandy on the boulevards . . . ​strolling at leisure ­until his Breguet, ever vigilant, reminds him it is midday.”1 The notoriously purple J. Peterman cata­logue of the 1990s advertised “Flaubert’s Vest, . . . ​la chose juste”: “Gustave Flaubert is in Egypt. He photo­graphs antiquities, keeps journals, makes passionate love to kohl-­eyed dancing girls four times a night. . . . ​Who can deny this is the vest he wears as he stands at the mouth of the Nile and calls out, ‘I’ve got it! I’ll call her Emma Bovary.’ ”2 Advertising copy’s distillation of the literary text to an allusive fragment, at once a material object and an intellectual phenomenon, has played out, but more trivially than Krzhizhanovsky had foreseen. In the aggregate, such advertisements do something to illuminate culture’s place in the global consumer economy. As individual texts, however, they refer 16 8

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the reader elsewhere, to Tolstoy or to a consumer product, and it is only with some effort that we can perceive in them an embryonic desire to create or to comprehend a world. One way of signaling this Promethean ambition is through an internal image of totality, like the “­g iant mock-up of the universe” that the narrator contemplates from an upstairs gallery in Nabokov’s 1939 short story “The Visit to the Museum.”3 The scene attests to Nabokov’s own creative ambition to grasp something bigger than his text, or at least to convince his reader that he has done so, but it pre­sents a rueful paradox. It reminds us that a bigger universe, the real one, encloses our e­ very effort to make a model of it. Manifested in bodily experience, the aesthetic text reverberates from one generation to the next as influence and echo, conveying a knowledge that is dif­fer­ent in kind from denotative discourse. But the particulars of t­ hese texts, which offer an intuition of totality rather than totality itself, are suspect and even arbitrary. A movingly grandiose proj­ect such as Velimir Khlebnikov’s quixotic ­Tables of Destiny compels us with an evocation of history’s under­lying poetic form, but his construct fails to map onto history as it occurs. The first version of this afterword, written in 2021, emphasized the forces of economic globalization and the role of artworks to suggest through structural allegory the ungraspable totality of the world system. That totality remains ungraspable, but its identification with a constantly intensifying global capitalism, always complex, is complicated further by Rus­sia’s assault on Ukraine in 2022 and the geopo­liti­cal cleavages it has set in motion. Audiences in the West now look to Vladimir Sorokin for diagnostic insight into the “pyramid of power” that structures the Rus­sian state or the “phantom pains” of lost empire that Sorokin sees as a “dark stain on the Rus­sian mind,” prompting irrational, destructive actions.4 Current events reprise some of the dark, sardonic themes of Sorokin’s fiction and other major threads in this book: the Rus­sian state’s horrific disregard for ­people’s lives; the associated textualization of its subjects, groups of whom pose in myriad memes arranged into the letter Z; and a flare-up of jingoism, a condition that Leo Tolstoy describes as a terrible communicable disease and proposes to counteract with art. It would have been foolish to ­hazard prophesies or general statements about Russian-­language lit­er­a­ture as a w ­ hole in my initial manuscript, and any surmises of the kind seem more precarious yet as I approach the limit of my final draft, at a moment when history remains so obviously ongoing. As a work of scholarship rather than literary art, this book has, however, no par­tic­u­lar need to construct closure. As I have argued in t­ hese pages, ­there are many versions of totality. And a distinctive virtue of the aesthetic is that its potential totalities continue to speak to us even when accomplished history has given them the lie.

N ote s

Introduction

1. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 189. As Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle observe, “pa­norama” is also a meta­phor, suggesting that Latour’s fantasy of liberating thought from its poetic dimension is itself utopian. Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester, UK: Zero, 2015), 48. 2. Velimir Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Rus­sian Futurian, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 41; Khlebnikov, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, 6 vols. (Moscow: Dmitrii Sechin, 2014), 2:114. As a rule, I cite Rus­sian editions of aesthetic texts in parallel with published En­glish translations; translations are mine u ­ nless other­wise noted. 3. Khlebnikov, King of Time, 42; Khlebnikov, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:115. 4. Khlebnikov, King of Time, 146–47; Khlebnikov, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:153. 5. Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Lawrence Grant White (New York: Pantheon, 1948), 188. 6. According to Martin Jay, Rus­sian Marxism was in fact less totalizing than in its Western Hegelian variants, and he speaks of the “privileged place” enjoyed by totality in Western culture more generally. Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 21. 7. Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (New York: Continuum, 1993), 177. 8. Harsha Ram, “World Lit­er­a­ture as World Revolution: Velimir Khlebnikov’s Zangezi and the Utopian Geopoetics of the Rus­sian Avant-­Garde,” in Comintern Aesthetics, ed. Amelia Glaser and Steven S. Lee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 50. 9. Vladimir Papernyi, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two, trans. John Hill and Roann Barris in collaboration with the author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xxiv. 10. Papernyi, Architecture, 116. 11. Roman Jakobson, Language in Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1987), 110–14. 12. Jakobson, Language in Lit­er­a­ture, 111. 13. Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), 63. 14. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietz­sche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 68. 171

17 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 4– 7

15. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 14–15. 16. Avital Ronell, Dictations: On Haunted Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), xvi. 17. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Po­liti­cal Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Random House, 1906), 257. 18. Osip Mandelstam, Conversation about Dante, in Collected Critical Prose and Letters, trans. Jane Gary Harris (London: Harvill, 1991), 438; Osip Mandel’shtam, Sobraniie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, 4 vols. (Moscow: Art-­Biznes-­Tsentr, 1994), 3:255. 19. Vladimir Sorokin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3 (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2002), 122–23. 20. John E. Bowlt, Rus­sian Art of the Avant-­Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934 (New York: Viking, 1976), 81; Mikhail Larionov and Il’ia Zdanevich, “Pochemu my raskrashivaemsia: Manifest futuristov,” Artgid, December  11, 2020, https://­artguide​ .­com​/­posts​/­2124. 21. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-­Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (London: Verso, 2011), 3. 22. Leon Trotsky, Lit­er­a­ture and Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 249. 23. Trotsky, Lit­er­a­ture and Revolution, 249. 24. Groys, Total Art, 113. 25. Aleksandr Pushkin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965), 459. 26. Pushkin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 459–60. Pustynnyi, the word translated ­here as “desolate,” is cognate with pustoi, or “empty,” the equivalent word in the Rus­sian Bible. The Church Slavonic Elizabeth Bible used in the Slavic liturgy, however, uses the etymologically unrelated formula “nevidima i neustroena.” Genesis 1:1. Bibliia [The Bible], Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed July 13, 2022, https://­www​.­ccel​.­org​ /­contrib​/­ru​/­Sbible​/­1co​.­pdf. 27. That a spot secured by military conquest is “fated by nature” to become the Rus­ sian capital is a crucial ideology that naturalizes Rus­sia’s imperial domination of the Baltic. See Otto Boele’s analy­sis of how “the idea that Rus­sia had ‘emerged out of nothing’ ” relates national ste­reo­types of Swedes and Finns “to the genesis of Petrine Rus­ sia.” Boele, The North in Rus­sian Romantic Lit­er­a­ture (Amsterdam: Brill, 1996), 215. 28. Pushkin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 461. 29. Pushkin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 459. 30. Pushkin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 460. 31. M.  V. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8 (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1959), 696–734, 591. 32. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 597. 33. Konstantin Batiushkov, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989), 76–77. 34. Yuri Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 194–95. 35. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin, 1988), 175. 36. N. V. Gogol, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, 4 vols. (Moscow: Bibliosfera, 1999), 4:268.

NOTES TO PA GES 8– 10

173

37. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. Robert Maguire (London: Penguin, 2004), 155; Gogol, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:161. 38. Gogol, Dead Souls, 155–56; Gogol, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:161. 39. Aleksandr Veselovskii, Izbrannoe: Istoricheskaia poetika (Moscow: Rosspen, 2006), 259. 40. Gogol, Dead Souls, 282–83; Gogol, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:288. 41. Gogol, Dead Souls, 251; Gogol, Sobranie sochinenii, 3.257. 42. Vasilii Gippius, “N.  V. Gogol,” introduction to Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, by Nikolai Gogol, ed. Nikolai Meshcheriakov and Nikolai Bel’chikov, vol. 1 (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1940), 39. 43. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 60. 44. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 107. 45. Gogol, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:8. 46. I have expanded on this reading elsewhere in an essay on archival afterlives. Jacob Emery, “The Customs House of Hades: Why Dickens and Gogol Traffic with the Underworld,” Yearbook of Comparative Lit­er­a­ture 60 (2014): 92–101. 47. V. G. Belinsky, “Letter to N. V. Gogol,” in Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov: Essential Writings by the Found­ers of Rus­sian Literary and Social Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 83; Vissarion Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1953), 427. I am indebted for the latter quote to a forthcoming essay by Vadim Shkolnikov, who comments that Belinsky “perceived that the advancement of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture was contingent on the emergence of a community of p­ eople who would find their ‘own spirit,’ their ‘own life,’ in the works of Rus­sian writers, and he envisioned this public as a kind of single, collective self.” Shkolnikov, “Sociality—or Death: Belinskii’s Phenomenological Realism and the Emergence of the Rus­sian Intelligent­sia,” forthcoming in Rus­sian Review 81 (October 2022): 12. 48. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “O narodnykh prazdnestvakh,” first published in Vestnik teatra, March  4, 1920, Nasledie  A.  V. Lunacharskogo, accessed July  20, 2022, http://­ lunacharsky​.­newgod​.­su​/­lib​/­religia​-­i​-­prosvesenie​/­o​-­narodnyh​-­prazdnestvah​/­. 49. See Alexander Medvedkin’s memoir of the proj­ect, “The Kino-­Train: 294 Days on Wheels,” in The Alexander Medvedkin Reader, ed. and trans. Nikita Lary and Jay Leyda (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 27–95. 50. See, e.g., Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957). 51. Fyodor Dostoevsky, “On Rus­sian Distinctiveness and Universality,” The Portable Nineteenth ­Century Rus­sian Reader, ed. George Gibian (NY: Penguin, 1993), 433; Fedor Dostoevskii, “Pushkin,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 26 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972), 147; Leo Tolstoy, “Lucerne,” in Short Stories, trans. Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude (New York: Random House, 1964), 331; L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 91 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1928–58), 30:65, 5:26. 52. I refer ­here to Leonard G. Friesen, Transcendent Love: Dostoevsky and the Search for a Global Ethic (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2016); my own Alternative Kinships: Economy and F­ amily in Rus­sian Modernism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2017); and Papernyi, Architecture, 21.

17 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 11– 15

53. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe (New York: Vintage, 1970), 184. Istomin’s poem is collected in Virshi: Sillabicheskaia poeziia XVII–­XVIII vekov, ed. P. N. Berkov (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1935), 150. 54. Pavel Aptekar and Andrei Sinitsyn, “Rus­sia Without Borders: What Was Putin Joking About?” The Moscow Times, Nov. 29, 2016, https://­www​.­themoscowtimes​.­com​ /­2016​/­11​/­29​/­russia​-­without​-­borders​-­what​-­was​-­putin​-­joking​-­about​-­a56330. 55. Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert  A. Maguire and John  E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 11. 56. Peter Yakovlevich Chaadaev, Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman, trans. Mary-­Barbara Zeldin (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), 167. 57. Chaadaev, Philosophical Letters, 36, 42, 45. 58. V. I. Lenin, Selected Works (Moscow: Pro­g ress, 1968), 172. 59. Chaadaev, Philosophical Letters, 49. 60. Chaadaev, Philosophical Letters, 111. 61. Chaadaev, Philosophical Letters, 70. 62. L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 46:3. 63. Chaadaev, Philosophical Letters, 105. 64. Osip Mandelstam, “Petr Chaadaev,” in Collected Critical Prose and Letters, 84; Mandel’shtam, Sobraniie sochinenii, 1:196. 65. N. S. Trubetskoi, Nasledie Chingiskhana (Moscow: Agraf, 1999), 370. 66. Dostoevsky, “On Rus­sian Distinctiveness and Universality,” 435; Dostoevskii, “Pushkin,” 148. 67. Vasilii Rozanov, Dostoevsky and the Legend of the G ­ rand Inquisitor, trans. Spencer E. Roberts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 201; V. V. Rozanov, Legenda o Velikom inkvizitore F. M. Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Respublika, 1996), 108–9. 68. Trubetskoi, Nasledie Chingiskhana, 379. 69. Trubetskoi, Nasledie Chingiskhana, 375. In translation: “I ­will gather—to gather (perfective)—to gather (imperfective)—­cathedral.” 70. Vladimir Maiakovskii, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, vol. 1 (Leningrad: Biblioteka poeta, 1963), 247–48. 71. Boris Gasparov, “Futurism and Phonology: Futurist Roots of Jakobson’s Approach to Language,” Cahiers de l’ILSL, no. 9 (1997): 114–15. 72. Dmitrii Trenin, “Kto my, gde my, za chto my—­i pochemu,” Rossiia v global’noi politike, April 4, 2022, https://­globalaffairs​.­ru​/­articles​/­kto​-­my​-­gde​-­my​/­. 73. Benedikt Livshits, Polutoraglazyi strelets: Stikhotvoreniia, perevody, vospominaniia (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989), 373. 74. Quoted in Ram, “World Lit­er­a­ture as World Revolution,” 49; Khlebnikov, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:1.272. 75. Nikolai Fedorov, What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task, trans. Elizabeth Koutaissoff and Marilyn Minto (Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age de l’Homme, 1990), 134. 76. See, e.g., Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, “Budushchee Zemli i chelovechestva,” in Russkii kosmizm: Antologiia, ed. Boris Grois (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2015), 242–47, 258–59. 77. Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev (Moscow: Tekst, 2004), 346. 78. Anatolii Lunacharskii, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 7 (Moscow: Khudozhestevnnaia literatura, 1967), 330.

NOTES TO PA GES 15– 20

175

79. Trotsky, Lit­er­a­ture and Revolution, 253, 252, 256. 80. Aleksandr Bogdanov, Krasnaia zvezda; Inzhener Menni (Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 1979), 125; Aleksei Gastev, Kak nado rabotat’: Prakticheskoe vvedenie v nauku organizatsii truda (Moscow: Ekonomika, 1966), 99. 81. Groys, Total Art, 18. 82. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1991), 159. 83. Osip Mandelstam, “Government and Rhythm,” in Collected Critical Prose and Letters, 108; Mandel’shtam, Sobraniie sochinenii, 1:208–9. 84. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1997), 5. 85. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language, Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 66. 86. Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language, 100, 103. 87. Ana Hedberg Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Lit­er­a­ture and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), xii. 88. Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics, xx. 89. Quoted in Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics, 203. 90. Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Random House, 1937), 1.289. 91. Mandelstam, Conversation about Dante, 434; Mandel’shtam, Sobraniie sochinenii, 3:252. 92. Osip Mandelstam, “Word and Culture,” in Collected Critical Prose and Letters, 116; Mandel’shtam, Sobraniie sochinenii, 1:216. 93. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova,” in Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, ed. Vladimir Markov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1967), 67. Vladimir Markov sources Kruchenykh’s knowledge of sectarian glossolalia in an article by D.  G. Konovalov. Markov, Rus­sian Futurism: A History (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1969), 202. 94. Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, “The Letter as Such,” in Rus­sian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, ed. Anna Lawton, trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Ea­ gle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 64; Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, “Slovo, kak takovoe,” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 60–61. 95. Boris Kiterman, quoted in Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics, 27. Olenina identifies Kiterman’s work as a source for a seminal article on zaum by Viktor Shklovsky. 96. Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics, 38. 97. Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics, 101, 229. 98. Jan Mukařovský, Aesthetic Function, Nom and Value as Social Facts, trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1979), 29. 99. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 4. 100. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30:149. 101. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 53:82. 102. Svetlana Boym, Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), 8. 103. Aamir Mufti, Forget En­glish! Orientalisms and World Lit­er­a­tures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 207. 104. Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia (New York: Chekhov, 1970), 264–65.

17 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 21– 24

105. Charles Baudelaire, “Le Pientre de la vie moderne,” WikiSource, accessed July 24, 2022, https://­fr​.­m​.­wikisource​.­org​/­wiki​/­Le​_­Peintre​_­de​_­la​_­vie​_­moderne​/­III. 1. Versions of Possession

This chapter includes parts of several previously published articles, which have been substantially reworked and mixed in with new material: “Repetition and Exchange in Legitimizing Empire: Konstantin Batiushkov’s Scandinavian Corpus” (Rus­sian Review, October 2007); “Between Fiction and Physiology: Brain Fever in The ­Brothers Karamazov and Its En­glish Afterlife,” written with Elizabeth F. Geballe (PMLA, October 2020); “Sigizmund Krzhizhanovksy’s Poetics of Passivity” (Rus­sian Review, January 2017); and “A Clone Playing Craps ­Will Never Abolish Chance: Randomness and Fatality in Vladimir Sorokin’s Clone Fictions” (Science Fiction Studies, July 2014). 1. Avital Ronell, Dictations: On Haunted Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), xvi. 2. In the first chapter, Shakespeare appears as the “overgrown tree” whose shade prevents modern En­glish lit­er­a­ture from taking root and Goethe as a “monstrous cancer” crowding out his successors. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, The Letter Killers Club, trans. Joanne Turnbull (New York: New York Review of Book Classics, 2012), 11–12; Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, 5 vols. (St. Petersburg: Symposium, 2001), 2:15 (hereafter cited as SS). 3. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, rev. George Gibian (New York: Norton, 1995), 36; L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 18 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1928–58), 41. 4. See especially Muireann Maguire, Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Lit­er­a­ture (Oxford, UK: Peter Lang, 2012); Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Valeria Sobol, Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Rus­sian Imperial Uncanny (Ithaca, NY: Cornell/Northern Illinois University Press, 2020); and Katherine Bowers, Writing Fear: Rus­sian Realism and the Gothic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022). 5. For an overview of nineteenth-­century travelers’ accounts of Scandinavian voyages, see Aleksandr Kan, Sverige med ryska resenärers ögon 1817–1913 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1986). For an overview of Ossianic and generically Scandinavian ele­ments in Batiushkov, see especially Iu. Levin, Ossian v russkoi lit­er­a­ture (Leningrad: Nauka, 1980), 81–82. 6. Aleksandr Blok, Skify, Biblioteka Maksima Moshkova, accessed July  18, 2022, http://­az​.­lib​.­ru​/­b​/­blok​_­a​_­a​/­text​_­0030​.­shtml. 7. Derek Offord, “Karamzin’s Gothic Tale: The Island of Bornholm,” in The Gothic Fantastic in Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Neil Cornwell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 43. See also Dmitri Sharypkin, Skandinavskaia literatura v Rossii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1980); and Sharypkin, “Shvedskaia tema v russkoi lit­er­a­ture Petrovskoi pory,” in Russkaia kul’tura XVIII veka i zapadno-­evropeiskie literatury, ed. M. P. Alekseev (Leningrad: Nauka, 1980), 5–62. 8. Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Rus­sian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 11. Ram parenthetically notes the existence of “other Rus­sian sublimes” that are not “exclusively imperial or oriental” and singles out Baratynsky’s “Eda,” set in Finland, as one example (26).

NOTES TO PA GES 24– 27

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9. Monika Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 90. 10. Sobol, Haunted Empire, 56, 12. Sobol also explores the “perceived unity of origin of the colonizers and colonized” in the Ukrainian context (104). 11. For an overview of Ossianic and generically Scandinavian ele­ments in Oskol’d (Oskol’d, povest, pocherpnutaia iz otryvkov drevnikh gotfskikh skal’dov, ca. 1800), see especially Levin, Ossian v russkoi lit­er­a­ture, 81–82. 12. Konstantin Batiushkov, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, 2 vols. (Moskva: Khud. Lit., 1989), 1:68. 13. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:202. 14. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:95. 15. Alongside the Excerpt and Dream, we should mention the 1814 long poem “On the Ruins of a ­Castle in Sweden,” loosely based on Friedrich von Matthisson’s 1786 Elegie, in den Ruinen eines alten Bergschlosses geschrieben; on Karelia and Finland as the Rus­sian counterpart to the Alps of German models, see Valentin Kiparsky, Norden i den ryska skönlitteraturen (Helsinki: Finlandia, 1947), 27. Other ­free translations include a version of “The Lay of Harald the Bold” (1816), based on a French text ascribed to the twelfth-­century Norwegian king, and two excerpts from Parny’s Isnel et Asléga, both from around 1811: “The Dream of the Warriors” and “The Skald.” Batiushkov wrote several letters and ironic poems on Scandinavian themes during his sojourns in Sweden and Finland and his notebooks contain remarks on Scandinavian my­thol­ogy and cosmology, plans for translating a range of texts on Nordic subjects, and sketches ­toward an original “northern epic” about an ambiguously Scandinavian or ancient Rus’ian hero, perhaps “Rurik’s b­ rother,” set in a landscape based on “the places [he] saw in Finland.” Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 2:22, 2:31, 2:56–58, 2:287–94, 2:392–94. On Batiushkov’s Scandinavian travels and related documents, see Viacheslav Koshelev, Konstantin Batiushkov: Stranstviia i strasti (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1987), 180–86. 16. See Kiparsky, Norden, 25–31; Sharypkin, Skandinavskaia literatura, 126–34; Nikolai Fridman, Proza Batiushkova (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 21. 17. Nikolai Fridman provides an excellent overview of Batiushkov’s complicated aesthetic allegiances, from his idealization of the classical past to his association with Karamzin and ideas of poetry’s role in bringing about a transcendent literary modernity. Fridman, Poeziia Batiushkova (Moscow, 1971), 253–89. 18. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:93. 19. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:93–94. 20. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:94. Compare Valeria Sobol’s analy­sis of Finland in Odoevsky’s Salamander as “a realm of nature and the ele­ments uncorrupted by speech” (Haunted Empire, 77). 21. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:94–95. 22. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:93. 23. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:94. 24. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:44. 25. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses together with the Replies to Critics and the Essay on the Origin of Languages, trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 273. 26. Batiushkov, Sochineniia 1:54. This idea is elaborated at length in books 14–17 of Montesquieu’s 1748 The Spirit of Law.

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TO PAGES 27– 34

27. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:45. 28. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 2:56. 29. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:57. 30. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:59. 31. Johann Gottfried von Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 66. 32. Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” 100, 103. 33. Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” 68, 73, 113. 34. Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” 85. 35. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:95. 36. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:166, 1:168. 37. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:167. Batiushkov’s framing of this poem as an echo or reevocation of the Viking texts with which the land is inscribed obscures the fact that the text is in fact a loose translation or imitation of an elegy by Friedrich von Matthisson, from which the Rus­sian text deviates largely in its introduction of the initial image of the echo and the closing image of the legible Scandinavian stones. That is, the status of Batiushkov’s poem as an imitation of a Western model is complicated precisely through its framing tropes of language’s repeatability through echo and writing. Compare Matthisson, Gedichte, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Gedruckt für den litterarischen Verein, 1912), 114–17. 38. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:95. 39. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:95–96. 40. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:96. 41. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:96. 42. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:202. Dream had reached its final form four years previously and was ultimately published with the Excerpt in a single volume, the obsessively edited Essays in Verse and Prose. 43. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:202. 44. Paul de Man, Rhe­toric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 78. 45. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:97. 46. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:168. 47. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:98. 48. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:94, 1:98. The parallelism extends even to the structure of the sentence: in both cases, the fire’s cause is followed by a colon, then a description of the flames and the thick black smoke that rises from them, and at last a dash and the summation that “all this” is sublime in its effect. 49. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:95–96. 50. V.  A. Koshalev, in the notes to On the Ruins of a C ­ astle in Sweden, glosses the equivalent image of “oaks aflame” as referring to “the ritual immolation of oak trees among the ancient Scandinavians.” See Batiushkov, Sochineniia 1:451. The motif of the bonfire ­after the b­ attle also appears in Batiushkov’s poem The Dream of the Warriors (Sochineniia, 1:229). 51. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:98–99. 52. Other authors, for instance Baratynsky, do mention the guerilla re­sis­tance. See Sobol, Haunted Empire, 56.

NOTES TO PA GES 34– 39

179

53. Sobol, Haunted Empire, 70. Elena Clark too has written on Baratynsky’s use of Finland as a blank, unstable space in which to enact poetic freedom. See Clark, “­There like Vast ­Waters Have Come Together Sea and Sky: ‘Finland’ and Finland in the Poetry of E. A. Baratynsky,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 59, no. 1 (2014): 47–69. 54. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:76–77. 55. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 1:77. 56. M.  V. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8 (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1959), 591, 597, 696–34. 57. Bernard Paris, Dostoevsky’s Greatest Characters: A New Approach to “Notes from the Under­ground,” “Crime and Punishment,” and “The ­Brothers Karamazov” (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 180. See also, e.g., Joseph Collins, The Doctor Looks at Lit­er­a­ ture (New York: George  H. Doran, 1923), 85; and Yuri Zagvazdin, “Meningitis, a Whirl­pool of Death: Literary Reflections and Rus­sian Cultural Beliefs,” in Lit­er­a­ture, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders, ed. Stanley Fin­ger, François Boller, and Anne Stiles (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2013), 45. 58. Quoted in Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael A. Minihan (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1967), 594. 59. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The ­Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Random House, 1950), 729; Fedor Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30–­i tomakh, 30 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1972–90), 14:38 (hereafter cited as PSS). 60. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 923; Dostoevskii, PSS, 14:183–84. 61. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 771; Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:70. 62. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 772; Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:70. 63. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 729; Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:38. 64. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 779; Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:76. 65. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 784; Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:79. 66. Yuri Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Anne Shukman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 105. 67. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 818; Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:104. 68. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 702; Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:18. 69. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 716 (translation modified); Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:28. 70. See Robert Belknap, “The Rhe­toric of an Ideological Novel,” in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The B ­ rothers Karamazov,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 73; Robert Belknap, The Genesis of “The ­Brothers Karamazov” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990); Michael Katz, “Dostoevsky and Natu­r al Science,” Dostoevsky Studies 9 (1988): 63–76; Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Melissa Frazier, “The Science of Sensation: Dostoevsky, Wilkie Collins and the Detective Novel,” Dostoevsky Studies 19 (2015): 7–28. 71. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 729; Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:38. Emphasis added. 72. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 835; Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:117. 73. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 164; Dostoevskii, PSS, 14:21–22. 74. Liza Knapp, “­Mothers and Sons in The ­Brothers Karamazov: Our Ladies of Skotoprigonevsk,” in A New Word on “The B ­ rothers Karamazov,” ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 37.

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TO PAGES 39– 44

75. O. B. Khristoforova, Oderzhimost’ v russkoi derevne (Moscow: Neolit, 2016), 119. 76. Christine D. Worobec, Possessed: ­Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Rus­sia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 10. 77. Worobec, Possessed, 11. Dostoevsky also employs klikushestvo as part of a constructed ideology of au­then­tic Rus­sianness; Worobec describes in a brief reading how Alyosha’s association with it encodes sympathies with peasant mysticism (136–40). 78. Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 167. 79. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 758; Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:59. 80. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 287; Dostoevskii, PSS, 14:220. 81. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 603; Dostoevskii, PSS, 14:482. 82. Sigmund Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” in Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. René Wellek (New York: Prentice Hall, 1962), 103. 83. Slobodanka Vladiv-­Glover, “What Does Ivan Karamazov ‘Know’? A Reading through Foucault’s Analytic of the ‘Clinical’ Gaze,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 1995, 32. 84. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-­Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 26–27. 85. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 62; Dostoevskii, PSS, 4:57–58. 86. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 267; Dostoevskii, PSS, 14:235. 87. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 62; Dostoevskii, PSS, 4:58. 88. Vasilii Rozanov, Dostoevsky and the Legend of the G ­ rand Inquisitor, trans. Spencer E. Roberts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 188; V. V. Rozanov, Legenda o Velikom inkvizitore F. M. Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Respublika, 1996), 102. 89. Rozanov, Dostoevsky, 201; Rozanov, Legenda, 108–9. 90. Fyodor Dostoevsky, “On Rus­sian Distinctiveness and Universality,” in The Portable Nineteenth ­Century Rus­sian Reader, ed. George Gibian (NY: Penguin, 1993), 434; Dostoevskii, PSS, 26:147. 91. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 267; Dostoevskii, PSS, 14:235. 92. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 528; Dostoevskii, PSS, 6:419. 93. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 529; Dostoevskii, PSS, 6:420–21. 94. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 531; Dostoevskii, PSS, 6:420. 95. Susan Sontag, Illness as Meta­phor and AIDS and Its Meta­phors (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 56. 96. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 68; Dostoevskii, PSS, 14:65. 97. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 480; Dostoevskii, PSS, 6:411. 98. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Constance Garnett (London: Heinemann, 1913), 602; Dostoevskii, PSS, 8:507. 99. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Demons, trans. Robert  A. Maguire (London: Penguin, 2008), 57, 765; Dostoevskii, PSS, 10:43, 11:14. 100. Dostoevskii, letter to Mikhail Dostoevskii, April 26, 1846, PSS, 28:1.121. 101. S. D. Ianovskii, “Vospominaniia o Dostoevskom,” in F. M. Dostoevskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, ed. K. Tiun’kin and M. Tiunkina (Moscow: Khudozhenstvennaia literatura, 1990), 232. 102. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 403; Dostoevskii, PSS, 14:303. 103. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 708; Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:22.

NOTES TO PA GES 44– 47

181

104. Dostoevsky, ­Brothers Karamazov, 777; Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:74. 105. Dostoevsky, Demons, 756; Dostoevskii, PSS, 11:9. 106. Dostoevsky, Demons, 757; Dostoevskii, PSS, 11.10. 107. Dostoevsky, Demons, 776; Dostoevskii, PSS, 11.22. 108. Dostoevsky, Demons, 757; Dostoevskii, PSS, 11:10. 109. Quoted in James L. Rice, Dostoevsky and the Healing Art (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985), 19. 110. Carl Gustav Carus, Psyche: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele (Pforzheim: Flammer und Hoffmann, 1846), 436, 440; see Joseph Frank, A Writer in His Time (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2009), 225. 111. Carus, Psyche, 434. 112. Mikhail Bakhtin, Prob­lems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 28. 113. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 80; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:97. 114. Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, Essays (New York: Continuum, 1993), 94. 115. Krzhizhanovsky, who was affiliated with Alexander Tairov’s Chamber Theater and deeply involved in Moscow’s theatrical circles, may have known the experiments of the Theater Research Workshop, whose 1925 manifesto asserts that “the spectacle is an innervating stimulus [razdrazhaiushchii stimul] and the spectators are an or­ga­nized mass that is being innervated.” Quoted in Ana Hedberg Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Lit­er­a­ture and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 289. 116. The double meaning of “revolution” is exploited in many other literary works reflecting on the events of 1917—­most sustainedly, as the driving meta­phor of a mammoth cycle of historical novels by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, known u ­ nder the collective rubric The Red Wheel [Krasnoe koleso]. 117. Kåre Johan Mjør and Sanna Turoma, “Back to the F ­ uture, Forward to the Past? Explorations in Rus­sian Science Fiction and Fantasy,” afterword to The Post-­ Soviet Politics of Utopia: Language, Fiction and Fantasy in Modern Rus­sia, ed. Mikhial Suslov and Per-­Arne Bodin (London: Tauris, 2019), 318. See also Eliot Borenstein, Plots against Rus­sia: Conspiracy and Fantasy ­after Socialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 13, 23. 118. Caryl Emerson, introduction to Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, vii. 119. Evgeniia Isaakovna Vorob’eva, Zhanrovoe svoebrazie tvorchestva S. D. Krzhizhanovskogo (PhD diss., Moscow: Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Gumanitarnyi Universitet, 2002), http://­www​.­dissercat​.­com​/­content​/­zhanrovoe​-­svoeobrazie​-­tvorchestva​-­s​-­d​ -­krzhizhanovskogo. 120. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 111; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:132. Compare the last lines of his story “Comrade Bruk”: “But this—as some authors are fond of concluding—is a subject for another story and (I add from myself ) for a differently split pen.” Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:495. 121. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 111; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:132. 122. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 6; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:9. 123. “My general recollection of the Quixote,” writes Pierre Menard, “might well be the equivalent of the vague foreshadowing of a yet unwritten book.” Jorge Luis

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TO PAGES 47– 52

Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” The Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), 92. 124. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 7; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:10. 125. On Krzhizhanovsky’s probable sale of his library to finance his trip to his ­mother’s funeral, see Vadim Perelmuter, commentary to Krzhizhanovskii, Sobranie Sochinenii, 2:615. 126. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 8; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:11. 127. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 48; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:55. 128. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000), 81. 129. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 25; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:30. 130. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 34; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2.39. 131. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 214, 216, 218. 132. Cristina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics: Lit­er­a­ture, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 30. 133. Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael S­ ullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 71–72. 134. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 76. 135. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 29; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:33–34; the lines are quoted from William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1.75–80. 136. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 18; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:21. 137. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993), 130. 138. Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, “The Letter as Such,” in Rus­sian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, ed. Anna Lawton, trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Ea­gle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 63; in Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, ed. Vladimir Markov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1967), 60. 139. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 9; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:12. 140. Fedor Tiutchev, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Pravda, 1980), 63. 141. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 51; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:59–60. 142. Compare Krzhizhanovsky’s “Postmark: Moscow (13 Letters to the Provinces),” in which Moscow’s chaotic print advertisements seem to omit the centers of words: “The maddened alphabet . . . ​rubbed the ends and beginnings of words against my ears.” Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 1:516. Mikhail Iampol’skii discusses t­ hese reduced words in terms of a Letter Killers Club–­like contrast between spoken and written language and internal and external spaces. Iampol’skii, Bezpamiatstvo kak istok (Chitaia Kharma) (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998), 67–69. 143. Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club, 50; Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:58. 144. Vladimir Markov, Rus­sian Futurism: A History (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1969), 202. 145. V. F. Odoevskii, Russkie nochi (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), 30. 146. Odoevskii, Russkie nochi, 31. 147. Odoevskii, Russkie nochi, 32–33. 148. Odoevskii, Russkie nochi, 32–33.

NOTES TO PA GES 52– 59

183

149. Julia Vaingurt, Wonderlands of the Avant-­Garde: Technology and the Arts in Rus­sia of the 1920s (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 132. 150. Odoevskii, Russkie nochi, 33; Leon Trotsky, Lit­er­a­ture and Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 254. 151. As Trotsky writes, “Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing ‘on faith,’ is actually able to cut down mountains and move them . . . ​ according to a general industrial and artistic plan” (Lit­er­a­ture and Revolution, 251). 152. Krzhizhanovskii, SS, 2:506. 153. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Po­liti­cal Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Random House, 1906), 257; de Man, Rhe­toric of Romanticism, 78. 154. N. L. Liederman, “The Intellectual Worlds of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky,” trans. Caryl Emerson, Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 514. 155. Mark Lipovetskii, “Sorokin-­trop: Karnalizatsiia,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 120 (2013): 226, 231–32. 156. See Vladimir Papernyi, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two, trans. John Hill and Roann Barris, in collaboration with the author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 186; Aleksei Kovalev, “Bukva Z,” Meduza, March 15, 2022, https://­ meduza​.­io​/­feature​/­2022​/­03​/­15​/­bukva​-­z​-­ofitsialnyy​-­i​-­zloveschiy​-­simvol​-­rossiyskogo​ -­vtorzheniya​-­v​-­ukrainu​-­my​-­popytalis​-­vyyasnit​-­kto​-­eto​-­pridumal​-­i​-­vot​-­chto​-­iz​-­etogo​ -­poluchilos. 157. Lipovetskii, “Sorokin-­trop,” 225. 158. Vladimir Sorokin, Sobranie sochinenii, 3 vols. (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2002), 2:686. 159. Sorokin, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:708–9. 160. Vladimir Sorokin, Ice Trilogy, trans. Jamey Gambrell (New York: New York Review Books), 31, 122; Sorokin, Ledianaia trilogiia (Moscow: AST, 2018), 43, 146–47. 161. Sorokin, Ice Trilogy, 175; Sorokin, Ledianaia trilogiia, 207. 162. Fredric Jameson, The Po­liti­cal Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 38. 163. Jameson, Po­liti­cal Unconscious, 102, 38. 164. Sorokin, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:292. 165. Sorokin, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:290. 166. Etkind, Warped Mourning, 104. 167. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1959), 149, 100. 2. The Epidemic

Much of this chapter was previously published in an ­earlier version as “Art Is Inoculation: The Infectious Imagination of Leo Tolstoy” (Rus­sian Review, October 2011). 1. L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 91 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1928–58), 30:65 (hereafter cited as PSS). Translations are mine ­unless other­wise noted; I have used the Maude translations of the major novels, in some cases making minor revisions, and cited the En­glish texts alongside the standard Rus­sian Jubilee edition. 2. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:149.

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TO PAGES 59– 67

3. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:195. 4. Tolstoy, PSS, 53:82. February 27, 1896. 5. Richard Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1986), 152–53. 6. Irina Paperno, “Tolstoy’s Diaries: The Inaccessible Self,” in Self and Story in Rus­ sian History, ed. Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 255. 7. Tolstoy, PSS, 46:3. March 17, 1847. 8. Rimvydas Šilbajoris, Tolstoy’s Aesthetics and His Art (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1990), 109. 9. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, 206. See also Boris Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoi: Shestidesiatye gody (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1974), 185–87. 10. Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoi, 188–90. 11. David Herman, “Stricken by Infection: Art and Adultery in Anna Karenina and Kreutzer Sonata,” Slavic Review 56, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 15. 12. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, rev. George Gibian (New York: Norton, 1995), 1; Tolstoy, PSS, 18:3. 13. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 125; Tolstoy, PSS, 18:145. 14. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 695; Tolstoy, PSS, 19:349. 15. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 127; Tolstoy, PSS, 18:147–48. 16. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 128, Tolstoy, PSS, 18:148–49. 17. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 125; Tolstoy, PSS, 18:145. 18. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 126; Tolstoy, PSS, 18:146. 19. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 114; Tolstoy, PSS, 18:133. 20. Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoi, 128. Eikhenbaum uses the term broadly in reference to Tolstoy’s engagement with western Eu­ro­pean lit­er­at­ ure and to the incubatory pro­ cess through which he developed the structuring plot parallelism. 21. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 327–28. 22. Tolstoy, PSS, 32:427. 23. Reading against the grain of Tolstoy’s disapproval, one might argue that Nekhliudov’s eventual moral resurrection, when he comes to recognize and attempt atonement for his early sins, faintly parallels the moral and physical recovery we saw in Kitty. 24. Tolstoy, PSS, 32:427. 25. Leo Tolstoy, ­Family Happiness, in ­Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude and Nigel J. Cooper (New York: Perennial, 2002), 69; Tolstoy, PSS, 5:132. The same French phrase torments Pierre in War and Peace and is instrumental in his decision to separate from his wife. The expression “je vous aime,” through which Pierre “most strongly expressed his insincere love,” seems inherently false to Tolstoy, and Pierre also finds objectionable that Helene utters the word “lover” in French “as casually as any other word.” Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942), 343–44; Tolstoy, PSS, 10:29–30. 26. Tolstoy, ­Family Happiness, 79; Tolstoy, PSS, 5:141. 27. A. J. Greimas, Structural Semantics, trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 108. 28. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:149.

NOTES TO PA GES 67– 77

185

29. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:149, 30:144. 30. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:145, 30:173. 31. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:165. 32. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:173. 33. Gary Jahn, “The Aesthetic Theory of Tolstoy’s What Is Art?,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 60. 34. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 2005), 109. 35. George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (New York: Knopf, 1959), 4. 36. Caryl Emerson, “Tolstoy’s Aesthetics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 238. 37. Jahn, “Aesthetic Theory,” 64. 38. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:167. 39. Tolstoy, PSS, 36:80 (emphasis added). 40. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 362; Tolstoy, PSS, 18:418. 41. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 363; Tolstoy, PSS, 18:420, 18:422. 42. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 36, 387 (translation modified), 714; Tolstoy, PSS 18:41, 18:446, 19:370. 43. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 48; Tolstoy, PSS, 18:56. 44. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 2; Tolstoy, PSS, 18:4. 45. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 669; Tolstoy, PSS, 19:317. 46. Tolstoy, PSS, 34:308. 47. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:189. 48. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 92; Tolstoy, PSS, 18:106–7. 49. Yi-­Ping Ong, “Anna Karenina Reads on the Train: Readerly Subjectivity and the Poetics of the Novel,” PMLA 133, no. 5 (October 2018): 1086, 1088. 50. Herman, “Stricken by Infection,” 18. 51. Herman, “Stricken by Infection,” 36. 52. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 622; Tolstoy, PSS, 10:326. 53. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 620; Tolstoy, PSS, 10:324. 54. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 625; Tolstoy, PSS, 10:328. 55. Douglas Robinson, “Tolstoy’s Infection Theory and the Aesthetics of De-­and Repersonalization,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 19 (2007): 35; Victor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), 7. 56. Robinson, “Tolstoy’s Infection Theory,” 49. 57. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:154. 58. Leo Tolstoy, “Lucerne,” in Short Stories, trans. Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude (New York: Random House, 1964), 311; Tolstoy, PSS, 5:7–8. 59. Tolstoy, “Lucerne,” 312; Tolstoy, PSS, 5:8–9. 60. Tolstoy, “Lucerne,” 331; Tolstoy, PSS 5:26. 61. Tolstoy, PSS, 46:3–4. 62. Emerson, “Tolstoy’s Aesthetics,” 246. 63. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:194–95. 64. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:195. 65. Emerson, “Tolstoy’s Aesthetics,” 240. 66. Pamela Gilbert, Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian W ­ omen’s Popu­lar Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 55. In a slightly ­later and Rus­sian

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TO PAGES 78– 82

context, this germ paranoia prob­ably informs the meta­phors of infectious “communication” in Osip Mandelstam’s Egyptian Stamp, in which the public telephone in a pharmacy is made of “scarlet fever wood,” and Noise of Time, in which books are grafted or inoculated with alien blood (privivka chuzhoi krovi). Osip Mandel’shtam, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: ABTs, 1993), 478, 355. 67. Gilbert, Disease, 39. 68. Aleksei Gastev, Kak nado rabotat’: Prakticheskoe vvedenie v nauku organizatsiiu truda (Moscow: Ekonomika, 1966), 193, 99. 69. Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press), 262, 272. 70. As related second­hand by A. B. Gol’denveizer, Vblizi Tolstogo (Moskva: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1959), 348. See also the account of Tolstoy and Mechnikov’s acquaintance in Stephen Lovell, “Finitude at the Fin de Siècle: Il’ia Mechnikov and Lev Tolstoy on Death and Life,” Rus­sian Review 63, no. 2 (April 2004): 311. 71. Tolstoy, PSS, 54:18. March 24, 1900. 72. Tolstoy, PSS, 53:82. February 27, 1896. 73. Georg Lukács, Studies in Eu­ro­pean Realism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 146. 74. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:89. 75. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:82. 76. Tolstoy, PSS, 30:187–88. 77. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 94. 78. Tolstoy, PSS, 4:37. 79. Tolstoy, PSS, 4:59, 35:39. 80. Tolstoy, PSS, 23:11. 81. Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, 348; Michel de Montaigne, “Of Practice,” The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 267. 82. Montaigne, “Of Practice,” 269. 83. Tolstoy, PSS, 29:41. 84. Tolstoy, PSS, 29:44, 26:92. 85. Tolstoy, PSS, 23:25. 86. Tolstoy, PSS, 46:271. Notebooks, March–­May 1847. 87. Tolstoy, PSS, 60:199. June-­July 1857. Again, Tolstoy recalls Montaigne, who described himself as “one of t­hose who are very much influenced by the imagination”: “A continual cougher irritates my lungs and throat. . . . ​I catch the disease that I study and lodge it in me. I do not find it strange that imagination brings fever and death to ­those who give it a ­free hand and encourage it” (“Of the Power of the Imagination,” Complete Essays, 68). 88. Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoi, 127. Tolstoy makes the same case in a January 27,1878 letter to S.  A. Rachinsky: “I am proud . . . ​of [Anna Karenina’s] architecture—­the arches are so put together that one cannot see where the keystone is. . . . ​The structural link rests not on the plot or the relationships (friendship) of its characters, but on an internal linkage” (PSS, 62:377).

NOTES TO PA GES 84– 86

187

3. The Pa­norama

1. Velimir Khlebnikov, “To the Artists of the World,” The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Rus­sian Futurian, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 146–47; Khlebnikov, “Khudozhniki mira!” Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, 6 vols. (Moscow: Dmitrii Sechin, 2014), 6:1.153 (hereafter cited as SS). 2. Khlebnikov, “To the Artists of the World,” 150; Khlebnikov, “Khudozhniki mira!” 6:1.157. 3. Khlebnikov, “To the Artists of the World,” 151; Khlebnikov, “Khudozhniki mira!” 6:1.158. 4. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Deklaratsiia slova, kak takovogo,” 63, in Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, ed. Vladimir Markov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1967); Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, “Slovo kak takovoe,” Manifesty i programmy, 57. 5. Jacob Emery, “The Imaginary Languages of Communism,” paper presented at the American Comparative Lit­er­a­ture Association Conference, New York, NY, March 2014. 6. Harsha Ram, “World Lit­er­a­ture as World Revolution: Velimir Khlebnikov’s Zangezi and the Utopian Geopoetics of the Rus­sian Avant-­Garde,” in Comintern Aesthetics, ed. Amelia Glaser and Steven S. Lee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 31. 7. Quoted in Maria Khotimsky, “World Lit­er­a­ture, Soviet Style,” Ab Imperio 3 (2013): 120. 8. Quoted in Khotimsky, “World Lit­er­a­ture,” 120. On Lunacharsky’s marriage of con­ve­nience with the Futurists, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organ­ization of Education and the Arts ­under Lunacharsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 126–27. 9. Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National Question: Selected Writings and Speeches (New York: International, 1942), 196. Originally printed as “O politicheskikh zadachakh universiteta narodov Vostoka,” Pravda 102–3 (May 12–13, 1925). 10. Rossen Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Lit­er­a­ture and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds (Montreal: McGill-­Queens University Press, 2020), 22. 11. David Damrosch, What Is World Lit­er­a­ture? (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2003), 4. 12. Galin Tihanov, “The Location of World Lit­er­a­ture,” Canadian Review of Comparative Lit­er­a­ture 44, no. 3 (September 2017): 472. 13. Erich Auerbach, Time, History, and Lit­er­a­ture, trans. Jane O. Newman (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2014), 254. Auerbach anticipates con­temporary works detailing the effects of a global lingua franca on established lit­er­a­tures in other tongues, whose readers may increasingly assimilate to the categories and assumptions of verbal art in En­glish. See Minae Mizimuro, The Fall of Language in the Age of En­glish, trans. Mari Yoshihari and Juliet Winters Carpenter (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 14. Aamir Mufti, Forget En­glish! Orientalisms and World Lit­er­a­tures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 13. Compare Édouard Glissant’s discussion of the “vocation for the universal” involved in colonial languages, especially French. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 29. 15. With the phrase “world novel,” I have in mind Joseph Slaughter’s account of this impor­tant con­temporary genre in ­Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

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TO PAGES 87– 89

16. Galin Tihanov, The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Rus­sia and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 3. 17. I refer to the title of Edward Said’s essay “Traveling Theory,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226–47. 18. Roman Jakobson, “Iz vospominanii,” in Mir Velimira Khlebnikova, ed. V. V. Ivanov, Z. Papernyi, and A. E. Parnis (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), 86. 19. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Declaration of Transrational Language,” in Rus­sian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, ed. and trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Ea­gle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 183; Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Deklaratsiia zaumnogo iazyka,” in Manifesty i programmy, 179. 20. Vladimir Markov, Rus­sian Futurism: A History (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1969), 303. 21. On Malevich’s own forays into zaum poetry, see Gerald Janecek, Zaum (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1996), 201–3. 22. Janecek, Zaum, 4–5. 23. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1.171. 24. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1.53. 25. Vasilii Kamenskii, “Ia,” 1914, WikiSource, https://­r u​.­wikisource​.­org​/­wiki​ /­%D0%AF​_­(%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA% D0%B8%D0%B9). 26. This reading of Kamensky’s poem also appears in an essay I wrote in collaboration with Alex Spektor. Emery and Spektor, “Restoring the Balance,” introduction to Countries That D ­ on’t Exist: Selected Nonfiction, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), xxxi. 27. Krzhizhanovsky, Countries That ­Don’t Exist, 113–14. 28. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (London: Dent, 1973), 221, 137. 29. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters: A Se­lection, ed. and trans. Leroy E. Loemker, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 342. 30. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur (1827),” in World Lit­er­a­ture in Theory, ed. David Damrosch (Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 19–20; Krzhizhanovsky, Countries That D ­ on’t Exist, 114. In another impor­ tant essay, “Philosopheme of the Theater,” Krzhizhanovsky pre­sents the reader with a mathematical equation cross-­multiplying the earthly globe with the globus intellectualis and Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, concluding with a piece of philosophically charged Rus­sian wordplay: “Through three worlds—­from бытие [Being] through быт [Everyday Life] to the world of the pure subjunctivity of the all-­proposing but nothing-­ supposing бы [As-­if]—­runs the pro­cess of the phenomenalization of essences: Globus Intellectualis—­the earthly globe—­the windowless round Globe at the shore of the Thames” (Countries That D ­ on’t Exist, 54–55). See Alisa Ballard, “Быт encounters бы: Krzhizhanovsky’s Theater of Fiction,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 56, no. 4 (2012): 558–62. 31. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1.168. 32. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1.174. 33. Khlebnikov, “To the Artists of the World,” 148, 146; Khlebnikov, “Khudozhniki mira!” 6:1.157, 6:1.154. 34. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin, 1976), 4–5.

NOTES TO PA GES 90– 93

189

35. Khlebnikov, SS, 1:8. As Raymond Cooke observes, “One of the fundamental ele­ments in Khlebnikov’s vision of the lost idyll of primitive times is the presence of a universal language . . . ​Such a universal communication lies at the heart of Khlebnikov’s visions of a futuristic utopia too.” Raymond Cooke, Velimir Khlebnikov: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 161. 36. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:2.68. 37. Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works, 3 vols., trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 1:427; Khlebnikov, SS, 6:2.21. 38. Khlebnikov, King of Time, 55–56; Khlebnikov, SS, 2:363. 39. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1.250–51, 6:1.284–85. 40. Khlebnikov, SS, 3:170–71. 41. Khlebnikov, “A Cliff out of the ­Future,” King of Time, 162; Khlebnikov, “Utes iz budushchego,” SS, 5:226. 42. Khlebnikov, King of Time, 56; Khlebnikov, SS, 2:364. Khlebnikov’s unorthodox spelling perhaps draws into the net of associations the vining plant dodder, povilika. 43. On ­these names, see Markov, Rus­sian Futurism, 33–35, 117–18. 44. Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Slovo kak takovoe,” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 55. 45. Kruchenykh, “Declaration of Transrational Language,” 183; Kruchenykh, “Deklaratsiia zaumnogo iazyka,” 180. 46. Georges Ribemont-­Dessaignes, preface to lidantIU fAram, by Iliazd [Il’ia Zdanevich], in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 181. 47. For a recent example of the “untranslatable” note, see, e.g., Jason Strudler, “Kruchenykh at the Zero-­Point of Rus­sian Modernism,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 64, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 87. 48. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Rus­sian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 180. Esperanto was first formulated in Ludwig Zamenhof, Mezhdunarodnyi iazyk: Predislovie i polnyi uchebnik (Warsaw: Khetler, 1887). Zamenhof had some years prior authored the first grammar of Yiddish. 49. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 180. 50. Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012), 112–15. 51. Antonio Gramsci, Se­lections from Cultural Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 43. See also the section titled “Gramsci and Esperanto” in Peter Ives, Language and Hegemony in Gramsci (London: Pluto, 2004), 55–60. 52. Antonio Gramsci, Se­lections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International, 1971), 445. 53. The Union of Youth, an avant-­garde organ­ization allied with the Cubo-­Futurist group, was also involved in translation work and published translations from Chinese poetry. Markov, Rus­sian Futurism, 56. 54. Quoted in Khotimsky, “World Lit­er­at­ ure,” 137. 55. Quoted in Markov, Rus­sian Futurism, 203. 56. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova,” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 67. 57. I have previously discussed this pun. Jacob Emery, Alternative Kinships: Economy and ­Family in Rus­sian Modernism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), 28–30.

19 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 93– 97

58. For many early modern thinkers, Adam’s naming of the world was “the source of our own language, which therefore could be believed to contain recoverable ele­ ments,” writes Hans Aarslef. “His naming was our Ursprache.” Aarslef, “The Rise and Decline of Adam and His Ursprache in Seventeenth-­Century Thought,” in Die Sprache Adams, ed. Allison P. Coudert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999), 277–78. 59. Northrop Frye, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Lit­er­a­ture, Myth, and Society (Richmond Hill, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside), 137. 60. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1990), 3. 61. Khlebnikov, SS, 2:114. 62. Khlebnikov, “Zverinets,” SS, 5:41. 63. Khlebnikov, “Garden of Animals,” King of Time, 17. Compare the litany of animals in “Song of Myself ”: “Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou. / Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey . . . ​where the beaver pats the mud with his paddle-­tail.” Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1982), 59. 64. Genesis 2:19 (KJV). 65. Khlebnikov, “Garden of Animals,” 77; Khlebnikov, “Zverinets,” 5:41. 66. Isaiah 11:6 (KJV). 67. Khlebnikov, Collected Writings, 401; Khlebnikov, SS, 6:2.95. 68. Markov, Rus­sian Futurism, 81. 69. Khlebnikov, “To the Artists of the World,” 146; Khlebnikov, “Khudozhniki mira!” 6:1.153. 70. Khlebnikov, “To the Artists of the World,” 147; Khlebnikov, “Khudozhniki mira!” 6:1.154. 71. Khlebnikov, “To the Artists of the World,” 149; Khlebnikov, “Khudozhniki mira!” 6:1.156. 72. Ram, “World Lit­er­a­ture as World Revolution,” 66. 73. Khlebnikov, SS, 4:271, 4:275. “So then, the reason for a war: / Some are fat and ­others not / So gloomy Karl [or Charles] teaches us.” 74. Khlebnikov, SS, 4:260. 75. Khlebnikov, “The Trumpet of the Martians,” King of Time, 127, 129; Khlebnikov, “Truba marsian,” SS, 6:1.249, 6:1.251. Afterward humanity w ­ ill be ­free to inaugurate, in Anna Lawton’s words, “a ­future linguistic Golden Age of interplanetary communication.” Lawton, introduction to Rus­sian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 18. 76. Khlebnikov, “On Poetry,” King of Time, 153; Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1.275. 77. Quoted in Asif A. Siddiqi, “Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popu­lar Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Rus­sia,” in Rus­sian Science Fiction Lit­ er­a­ture and Cinema: A Critical Reader, ed. Anindita Banerjee (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018), 107. 78. Tim Harte, Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Rus­sian Avant-­ Garde Culture, 1910–1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 62–63, 93–94. 79. Harte, Fast Forward, 33, 55. 80. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:28–30. 81. Harte, Fast Forward, 154. Aleksandr Blok also uses the word letun to start his 1912 poem “The Aviator [Aviator].”

NOTES TO PA GES 97– 99

191

82. “Air March,” Wikipedia, accessed July  13, 2022, https://­en​.­wikipedia​.­org​/­wiki​ /­Air​_­March. The fascination with flight extends to the larger avant-­garde (Marinetti extolled flight, for instance); in Rus­sia, avant-­garde poets unaffiliated with zaum who expressed enthusiasm for flight include Konstantin Olimpov, the ego-­futurist, who published a collection titled Airplane Poesas (Aeroplannye poesy) in 1912 (Markov, Rus­sian Futurism, 69), and Konstantin Bolshakov, a member of the Mezzanine of Poetry, who compares the flight of history to an airplane over the earth in his 1913 Le Futur (Harte, Fast Forward, 44–45). For an excellent overview of the role played in the Rus­sian avant-­ garde by speedy transport and above all the airplane, see Harte, Fast Forward, 33–66. 83. Vlad Strukov and Helena Goscilo, “Introduction: The Aerial Ways of Aspiration and Inspiration, or the Rus­sian Chronot(r)ope of transcendence,” Rus­sian Aviation, Space Flight, and Visual Culture, ed. Vlad Strukov and Helena Goscilo (London: Routledge, 2017), 18. 84. Vladimir Maiakovskii, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, vol. 1 (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1963), 78. I have quoted the translation of “The Flying Proletariat” from Vladimir Papernyi, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two, trans. John Hill and Roann Barris in collaboration with the author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 34; for the Rus­sian, see Vladimir Maiakovskii, “Letaiushchii proletarii,” Biblioteka Maksima Moshkova, accessed July 13, 2022, http://­az​.­lib​.­ru​/­m​/­majakowskij​_­w​_­w​/­text​_­0490​.­shtml. 85. Vladimir Maiakovskii, “Vot dlia chego muzhiku samolet,” Biblioteka Maksima Moshkova, accessed July 13, 2022, http://­az​.­lib​.­ru​/­m​/­majakowskij​_­w​_­w​/­text​_­0430​.­shtml. 86. Aleksandra Idzior, “Flying City or Housing Freed from Gravity: Ideas of Space Travel and Internationalism in G. T. Krutkov’s City of the ­Future,” in Rus­sian Aviation, ed. Strukov and Goscilo, 129. 87. Kazimir Malevich, Malevich on Suprematism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1999), 56. 88. On Malevich’s designs for Victory over the Sun, see Christina Lodder, “Kazimir Malevich and the Designs for Victory over the Sun,” in Victory over the Sun: The World’s First Futurist Opera, ed. Rosamund Bartlett and Sarah Dadswell (Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2012), 178–93. 89. Sergei Tret’iakov, “Skvoz’ neprotertye ochki,” Ruthenia, accessed July 13, 2022, https://­r uthenia​.­r u​/­sovlit​/­j​/­3411​.­html. See the reading by Jacob Edmond in “Scripted Spaces: The Geopoetics of the Newspaper from Tret’iakov to Prigov,” Slavic Review 75, no. 2 (2016): 314. 90. Siddiqi, “Imagining the Cosmos,” 108; Papernyi, Architecture, 32–33; Idzior, “Flying City,” 117–134. 91. For a fuller version of this reading, see Jacob Emery, “Art of the Industrial Trace,” New Left Review 71 (September–­October 2011): 121. 92. Julia Vaingurt, Wonderlands of the Avant-­Garde: Technology and the Arts in Rus­ sia of the 1920s (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 103. 93. Ram, “World Lit­er­a­ture as World Revolution,” 57. 94. Khlebnikov, “Ourselves and Our Builldings,” King of Time, 134; Khlebnikov, “My i doma,” SS, 6:1.229–30. 95. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Mir konchilsia. Umerli truby,” 1913, WikiSource, https://­ru​ .­wikisource​.­org​/­wiki​/­%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%80​_­%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%

19 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 101– 104

D1%87%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%81%D1%8F​.­​_­%D0%A3%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%80 %D0%BB%D0%B8​_­%D1%82%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B1%D1%8B​_­(%D0%9A%D1 %80%D1%83%D1%87%D1%91%D0%BD%D1%8B%D1%85). 96. 1 Corinthians 15:51–52 (KJV). For the canonical Rus­sian translation, see Bibliia, Vostochnyi perevod, accessed July 13, 2022, https://­bibleonline​.­ru​/­bible​/­cars​/­1co​-­15​/­; for the canonical Old Slavonic translation, see Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed July 13, 2022, https://­www​.­ccel​.­org​/­contrib​/­ru​/­Sbible​/­1co​.­pdf. 97. Khlebnikov also frequently places phonetic zaum in the mouths of gods; w ­ hole scenes of his play Zangezi consist of divine figures from dif­fer­ent religious traditions communing in transrational language. See, e.g., Plane 2 of his supersaga Zangezi. Khlebnikov, King of Time, 193–95; Khlebnikov, SS, 5:308–10. 98. Genesis 11:6–7 (KJV). 99. Khlebnikov, “To the Artists of the World,” 146; Khlebnikov, “Khudozhniki mira!” 6:153. 100. Of which one word remains, as Jacques Derrida reminds us: the name of the city, Babel, which means confusion. Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Theories of Translation from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 224. 101. Denis Crnkovic, “Symbol of Undetermined Faith. A Note on Aleksej Kručënyx’s Vowel Poem ‘Heights,’ ” Studi Slavistici 7 (2010): 130. 102. Crnkovic, “Symbol of Undetermined Faith,” 133. 103. Mikhail Lifshits, “Pochemu ia ne modernist?,” in Krizis bezobraziia, by M. Lifshits and L. Reingardt (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968), 187. 104. David Burliuk, Elena Guro, Nikolai Burliuk, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Ekaterina Nizen, Viktor Khlebnikov, Benedikt Livshits, Aleksei Kruchenykh, “[Iz al’manakha Sadok sudei],” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 52. 105. Kruchenykh, “Declaration of the Word as Such”; Kruchenykh, “Deklaratsiia slova, kak takovogo,” 63. 106. David Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Victor Khlebnikov, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in Lawton, Rus­sian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 51; David Burliuk, Aleksandr Kruchenykh, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Viktor Khlebnikov, “Poshchechina obshemu vkusu,” in Markov, Manifesty i programmy, 50. 107. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 315–16. 108. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock et al., vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 260. 109. “Linguistic barriers, as well as the cultural isolation of the Soviet Union, have prevented most Western literary scholars from taking cognizance of the achievements of the Rus­sian Formalist School, indeed of its very existence,” wrote Victor Erlich in the 1955 study that is largely responsible for introducing ­those thinkers to the West. Erlich, Rus­sian Formalism: History, Doctrine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 272. 110. En­glish translation quoted in Boris Gasparov, “Futurism and Phonology: Futurist Roots of Jakobson’s Approach to Language,” Cahiers de l’ILSL, no. 9 (1997): 111; Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1.168. 111. Gasparov, “Futurism and Phonology,” 121. For example, the sound /t/ is si­mul­ ta­neously unvoiced, obstruent, and dental, /d/ is voiced, obstruent, and dental, /s/ is

NOTES TO PA GES 104– 107

193

unvoiced, continuous, and dental, and /p/ is unvoiced, obstruent, and labio-­dental: multiple dimensions of articulation are si­mul­ta­neously pre­sent in ­every phoneme. 112. Gasparov, “Futurism and Phonology,” 105, 110. 113. Gasparov, “Futurism and Phonology,” 121. 114. Mufti, Forget En­glish!, 207. 115. Eugene Ostashevsky, “Not Just Zaum: Translating the Untranslatables,” lecture at Harvard University, March 7, 2020. 116. Alexei Kruchenykh, “Declaration of the Word as Such,” in Lawton, Rus­sian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 67; Kruchenykh, “Deklaratsiia slova,” 63. 117. The avant-­garde translator Ivan Aksenov put a strategy of the kind into practice in his renderings of En­glish baroque poetry, which he attempted to “translate in total rhythmic agreement with the original . . . ​with the greatest pos­si­ble closeness to the original’s word order and phonetic texture.” For example, he replaced En­glish words with Rus­sian ones having the same number of syllables, despite the incon­ve­ nience of En­glish having an abundance and Rus­sian having a paucity of one-­syllable words. Lars Kleberg, Vid Avantgardets korsvägar: Om Ivan Aksionov och den ryska modernismen (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 2015), 66. 118. Roman Jakobson, Language in Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 434. 119. Tihanov, Birth and Death of Literary Theory, 2–3. 120. Tihanov, Birth and Death of Literary Theory, 4. Tihanov describes the ­factors that led to Rus­sia developing this notion of literary language as a “specific and autonomous discourse”: the region’s multilingual intelligent­sia; its import of alien literary forms; and the role of po­liti­cal exile in the formation of its cosmopolitan intellectuals. 121. Kruchenykh, “Novye puti slova,” 65–66. See also Erlich, Rus­sian Formalism, 45. 122. Jakobson’s early writings—­memoirs of the Futurist period, correspondence with Futurist figures, essays on Futurism, and his own Futurist writings—­are collected in En­glish in Roman Jakobson, My Futurist Years, ed. Bengt Jangfelt, trans. Stephen Rudy (New York: Marsilio, 1992). 123. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1991), 13. Elsewhere, Shklovsky expressed doubts about zaum’s f­ uture as a poetic medium, asking, “­Will genuine works of art ever be written in transrational language, ­will this ever be a specific kind of lit­er­a­ture acknowledged by all? Who knows.” Viktor Shklovskii, “Poeziia i zaumnyi iazyk,” 1916, Velimir Khlebnikov, accessed July 13, 2022, https://­www​.­ka2​.­ru​/­nauka​/­shklovsky​.­html#r10. 124. Tihanov, Birth and Death of Literary Theory, 178–79. 125. Erlich, Rus­sian Formalism, 102. 126. Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 144. Moretti builds on the observations of another Formalist, Boris Tomashevsky, in order to account for the stability of plot structure as a feature of genres across national contexts (133). 127. Tihanov, Birth and Death of Literary Theory, 175, 185. 128. Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 170, 147. 129. Boris Gasparov, “Teoreticheskaia lingvistika kak miroponimanie,” Voprosy iazykoznaniia, no.  3 (2017): 11. On Trubetskoi and Jakobson’s confluence with Eurasianism, see also Harsha Ram, “The Poetics and Ideology of Olzhas Suleimenov’s AZ i IA,” Slavic Review 60, no. 2 (2001): 301.

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TO PAGES 108– 110

130. Nikolai Trubetskoi, Nasledie Chingiskhana (Moscow: Agraf, 1999), 374–75. 131. Trubetskoi, Nasledie Chingiskhana, 372–73. 132. Trubetskoi, Nasledie Chingiskhana, 378. 133. Khlebnikov, SS, 5:45. 134. Quoted in Markov, Rus­sian Futurism, 152. 135. Markov, Rus­sian Futurism, 13; Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1.139. 136. Khlebnikov, “Ourselves and Our Buildings,” 136–37; Khlebnikov, “My i doma,” 6:1.232. 137. Papernyi, Architecture, 37. 138. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities (Toronto: Collier-­Macmillan, 1963), 79, 93. 139. Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1.143. 140. Khlebnikov, “Ourselves and Our Buildings,” 133; Khlebnikov, “My i doma,” 6:1.229. 141. Yuri Tynianov, Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Lit­er­a­ture, Theory and Film, ed. and trans. Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 193. 142. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-­Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 477. 143. Zhang Longxi, “The Changing Concept of World Lit­er­at­ ure,” in World Lit­er­a­ ture in Theory, ed. David Damrosch (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 516. 144. Marx and Engels, “Manifesto,” 476. 145. Marx and Engels, “Manifesto,” 477. 146. Marx and Engels, “Manifesto,” 475; see also Mazower, Governing the World, 38–48. 147. Mufti, Forget En­glish!, 5, 238. 148. According to Pascale Casanova, the idea of world lit­er­a­ture is fundamentally an idea of an eco­nom­ically interconnected world: the term’s locus classicus in Goethe’s 1827 exhortation that “the epoch of World-­literature is at hand, and every­ one must strive to hasten its approach” reflects Goethe’s belief in a “universal market of exchange” for cultural concepts (World Republic of Letters, 14). And it was Franco Moretti’s concern for “the relationship between markets and forms” that resulted in his seminal “Conjectures on World Lit­er­at­ ure” (Distant Reading, 50). 149. Vladimir Lenin, Selected Works (Moscow: Pro­g ress, 1968), 232. In the broadest terms, the aim to recover as a totality the sum of the productive ­human efforts that capitalism has alienated is consistent with Khlebnikov’s assertion that “all the industry of the of the con­temporary globe” is a “theft” perpetrated by cap­i­tal­ists on innovators, to be redeemed by the f­ uture “government of time” (Khlebnikov, SS, 6:1.250). 150. As argued most forcefully by Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xvii–­xvii. 151. For an encapsulation of this dispute, see Elana Gomel, “Figures at the End of Utopia: Viktor Pelevin and Literary Postmodernism in Soviet Rus­sia,” in Banerjee, Rus­sian Science Fiction, 290–92. 152. Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 148. 153. Fredric Jameson, Singular Modernity (London: Verso, 2002), 13; the same passage is quoted in Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 147.

NOTES TO PA GES 111– 116

195

154. Ram, “World Lit­er­a­ture as World Revolution,” 34; Harsha Ram, “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local,” PMLA 131, no. 5 (2016): 1373. 155. Jakobson, Language in Lit­er­a­ture, 113–14. 156. For an illuminating alternate approach to metonymy and meta­phor in world lit­er­a­ture and their triangulation with theory, see Jacob Edmond, “The Elephant in the Room: Literary Theory in World Lit­er­a­ture,” Orbis Litterarum 73 (2018): 312–13. 157. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5. 158. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 117, 189. 159. Jakobson, Language in Lit­er­a­ture, 114. 160. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester, UK: Zero, 2015), 48, 52. 161. Quoted in Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies, 89, 242. On Vertov and “geopoetics,” see also Edmond, “Scripted Spaces,” 307. 162. Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies, 6. 163. Emily Apter’s spirited attack on world lit­er­at­ ure in the name of theory exalts a decentering emphasis on “non-­translation, mistranslation, incomparability, and untranslatability.” Apter, Against World Lit­er­a­ture: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), 3–4. She does not address zaum specifically but does devote several pages to the unsayable and the nonsensical as the limits of a language game marking the border beyond which intelligibility gives way to the mystical or the mad (10–11). 164. Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 170. 165. Khlebnikov, Zangezi, King of Time, 235; Khlebnikov, Zangezi, SS, 5:353. 166. Ram, “Scale of Global Modernisms,” 1382. 167. Iliazd, ed., Poésie de mots inconnus (Paris: Le Degré 41, 1949). See Markov, Rus­ sian Futurism, 356. 168. Il’ia Zdanevich, Filosofiia futurista: Romany i zaumnye dramy (Moscow: Gileiia, 2008), 30. 169. Zdanevich, Filosofiia futurista, 30–31. 170. Khlebnikov, Zangezi, 191–92; Khlebnikov, Zangezi, 5:317. 4. The Orchestra

A partial version of this chapter was previously published as “Keeping Time: Reading and Writing in Conversation about Dante” (Slavic Review, Fall 2014). 1. L. N. Pinskii, “Posleslovie,” in Razgovor o Dante, by Osip Mandelstam (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1967), 59; Jane Gary Harris, “Introduction: The Impulse and the Text,” in The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, by Osip Mandelstam (London: Collins Harvill, 1991), 48 (hereafter cited as CCPL). 2. Elena Glazova, Podskazano Dantom: O poetike i poezii Mandel’shtama (Kiev: Dukh i litera, 2011), 33. 3. Mandelstam, “An Army of Poets,” CCPL, 197, 193; Osip Mandel’shtam, “Armiia poetov,” Sobraniie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, 4 vol. (Moscow: Art-­Biznes-­Tsentr, 1994), 2:342, 2:338 (hereafter cited as SS). All En­glish quotations of Mandelstam’s prose are

19 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 116– 121

from Harris’s translation, which I have on occasion made slightly more literal; for extended passages, I have appended the original Rus­sian in a block quote or note. 4. Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia (New York: Chekhov, 1970), 264–65. 5. O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:111. 6. Nancy Pollak, Mandelstam the Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 5. 7. Mandelstam, CCPL, 442; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:259. 8. Velimir Khlebnikov, “To the Artists of the World,” The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Rus­sian Futurian, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 150; Khlebnikov, “Khudozhniki mira!” Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, six vols. (Moscow: Dmitri Sechin, 2014), 6:1.153. 9. Mandelstam, CCPL, 440; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:258. 10. Mandelstam, CCPL, 425; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:243–44. 11. Mandelstam, CCPL, 297; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:216. 12. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), 13–14. 13. Mikhail Bakhtin, ­Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 32. 14. Bakhtin, ­Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 54. 15. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-­Philosophical Essay on the Forms of ­Great Epic Lit­er­a­ture, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1978), 68–69. 16. Elena Glazov-­Corrigan, Mandel’shtam’s Poetics: A Challenge to Postmodernism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 68. 17. Mandelstam, CCPL, 421; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:340. On Conversation about Dante’s dance motifs as a way of meta­phor­ically grasping material’s interaction with form as movement, see also Anja Burghardt, “Manifestation der Poetik: Osip Mandel’štams ‘Razgovor o Dante’ als literarisches Kunstwerk und poetologischer Essay,” Zeitschrift für Slawistik 56:1 (2011): 21. 18. Julia Vaingurt, “Mastery and Method in Poetry: Osip Mandel’shtam’s ‘Conversation about Dante,’ ” Slavic Review 73, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 457. 19. Mandelstam, CCPL, 434; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:252. 20. Pinskii, “Posleslovie,” 68–69. See Mandelstam’s disdain for “sculptural” interpretations of Dante: Mandelstam, CCPL, 400; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:219. 21. Dimitrii Segal, Osip Mandel’shtam: Istoriia i poetika, 2 vols. (Oakland, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1998), 2:771. 22. Segal, Osip Mandel’shtam, 1:7. 23. Thomas Siefrid, The Word Made Self: Rus­sian Writings on Language, 1860–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 74, 75. 24. Siefrid, Word Made Self, 73. 25. Mandelstam, CCPL, front cover. 26. Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense, trans. Michael Scammel with the author (New York: Capricorn, 1970), 230–31; Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: Pravda, 1990), 135. 27. Mandelstam, CCPL, 67; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 1:183. 28. Mandelstam, CCPL, 403; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:221–22.

NOTES TO PA GES 121– 126

197

29. On sexual puns and the poet’s fructifying “aspiration to become a seed,” see Glazova, Podskazano Dantom, 131, 125; and Seamus Heaney, “The Government of the Tongue,” Partisan Review 55, no. 2 (March 1988): 295. 30. Mandelstam, CCPL, 437; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:254–55. 31. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le ­hasard,” Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 468–69. 32. Mallarmé, “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le h ­ asard,” Oeuvres completes, 454. 33. Mallarmé, “Le Livre, instrument spirituel,” Oeuvres completes, 380. 34. Mallarmé, “La Musique et les lettres,” Oeuvres completes, 647, 648. 35. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Lit­er­a­ture, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 117–18. 36. Mandelstam, SS, 1:162. 37. Pollak, Mandelstam the Reader, 14. 38. Mandelstam, CCPL, 67; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 1:183. 39. Mallarmé, “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le ­hasard,” 477. 40. Glazova, Mandel’shtam’s Poetics, 72. 41. Mandelstam, CCPL, 438; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:255. 42. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Lawrence Grant White (New York: Pantheon, 1948), 160. 43. Mark Musa, notes to Paradise, by Dante Alighieri (New York: Penguin, 1986), 215. See also the discussion in Vaingurt, “Mastery and Method in Poetry,” 469. 44. Quoted in Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin, 1988), 137. 45. John McKay, Inscription and Modernity: From Words­worth to Mandelstam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 198. 46. Nikolai Gogol, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, trans. Jesse Zeldin (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969), 53–54. 47. Mandelstam, CCPL, 426; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:244. 48. Mandelstam, CCPL, 438; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:255. 49. Dante, Divine Comedy, 161. 50. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 234. 51. Mandelstam, CCPL, 436; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:254. 52. Mandelstam, CCPL, 426; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:244. 53. Friedrich Schiller, Letters on Aesthetic Education, in Essays (New York: Continuum, 1993), 93. 54. Mandelstam, CCPL, 181; SS, 2:286. 55. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-­Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1992), 3. 56. Vladimir Sorokin, Utro snaipera (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2002), 7–16. 57. Mandelstam, CCPL, 438; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:255. 58. Osip Mandelstam, The Egyptian Stamp, in The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1965), 187; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 2:493. 59. Mandelstam, CCPL, 438; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:255.

19 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 127– 131

60. Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Bukva kak takovaia,” in Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, ed. Vladimir Markov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1967), 60–61; Victor Khlebnikov and Alexey Kruchenykh, “The Letter as Such,” in Manifesto: A ­Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 236–37. 61. Velimir Khlebnikov, The King of Time, 152; Khlebnikov, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:1.274. 62. Mandelstam, CCPL, 167; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 2:299. 63. Quoted in Victor Erlich, Rus­sian Formalism: History, Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), 219. 64. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 132. 65. Mandelstam, CCPL, 317; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:171. 66. N. Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia, 295. 67. N. Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia, 295, 362–63. 68. N. Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia, 247; Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind (Washington, DC: Brooking Institute Press, 2004), 44. 69. Arthur A. Cohen, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam: An Essay in Antiphon (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1974), 66–69. 70. Andrew Kahn, “Lydia Ginzburg’s ‘Lives of the Poets’: Mandelstam in Profile,” in Lydia Ginzburg’s Alternative Literary Identities: A Collection of Articles and New Translations, ed. Emily Van Buskirk and Andrei Zorin (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 180–81. 71. Kahn, “Lydia Ginzburg’s ‘Lives of the Poets,’ ” 184. 72. Henry Gifford, “Mandelstam’s Conversation about Dante,” in Lit­er­a­ture, Culture, and Society in the Modern Age: In Honor of Joseph Frank, ed. Edward J. Brown, Lazar Fleishman, Gregory Freidin, and Richard D. Schupbach, Stanford Slavic Studies 4:1–2 (Stanford, CA: Department of Slavic Languages and Lit­er­a­tures, Stanford University, 1992), 76. 73. Mandelstam, CCPL, 408; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:227. 74. Mandelstam, CCPL, 421; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:234–40. 75. Mandelstam, CCPL, 434; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:252. 76. Mandelstam, CCPL, 399; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:218. 77. Ana Hedberg Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Lit­er­a­ture and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 203. 78. Mandelstam, CCPL, 393; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:389. 79. Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics, 59. 80. Mandelstam, CCPL, 169; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 2:301. The piece further anticipates the imagery of Conversation about Dante by comparing Pasternak’s work to “the sacred ecstasy of space and bird’s flight.” 81. Mandelstam, CCPL, 443; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:400. 82. Mandelstam, CCPL, 416, 437; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:254, 3:235. 83. Arthur Rimbaud, “Vowels,” in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 140. 84. Glazov-­Corrigan, Mandel’shtam’s Poetics, 133. 85. Viktor Shklovskii, “Poeziia i zaumnyi iazyk,” 1916, Velimir Khlebnikov, accessed July 13, 2022, https://­www​.­ka2​.­ru​/­nauka​/­shklovsky​.­html#r10. 86. Aleksei Kruchenykh, K istorii russkogo futurizma: Vospominaniia i dokumenty (Moscow: Gileiia, 2006), 303.

NOTES TO PA GES 131– 136

199

87. Shklovskii, “Poeziia i zaumnyi iazyk.” I have taken the En­glish translation of this quote from Boris Eikhenbaum, “Theory of the Formal Method,” trans. I. R. Titunik, in Readings in Rus­sian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorksa (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978), 10. 88. Viktor Shklovskii, Literatura i kinematograf (Berlin: Russkoe universal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1923). 9. 89. Andrei Bely, Glossolaliia, with parallel translation by Thomas R. Breyer (Dornach, Switzerland: Pforte, 1990), 53. 90. Mandelstam, CCPL, 439; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:256. Early drafts do explic­ itly ascribe to Bely the idea that the ­human gait, or regulated periodic movement of the body, is the most developed form of conscious movement. Jane Harris, notes to Mandelstam, CCPL, 678. 91. Mandelstam had already referred to Bely’s writing as “dancing prose” in a (negative) 1923 review. Mandelstam, CCPL, 213–14; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 2:322. On the poet’s friendship with Bely, see N. Mandelstam, Vospominaniia, 162. 92. Bely, Glossolaliia, 51. 93. O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:57. 94. O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:123. 95. G.  R. Derzhavin, “Reka vremen v svoem stremlen’i,” Sochineniia (Moscow: Pravda, 1985), 304. 96. O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 1:265. 97. Anna Akhmatova, Listki iz dnevnika. Proza. Pis’ma (Moscow: AST, 2017), 98. 98. Mandelstam, Egyptian Stamp, 166–67; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 2:480–81. 99. M. L. Gasparov, O. Mandel’shtam: Grazhdanskaia lirika 1937 goda (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1996), 18. 100. M. L. Gasparov, “Metricheskoe sosedstvo ‘Ody’ Stalinu,” in Stoletie Mandel’shtama: Materialy simpoziuma, ed. Robin Aizlewood and Diana Myers (Tenafly, NJ: Hermitage, 1994), 105. 101. Mandelstam, CCPL, 424; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:242. 102. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga (Paris: YMCA Press, 1972), 222. 103. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­ Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 186. 104. “Above stands the ruler, then the poet, and then, fi­nally, the scribe,” writes Julia Vaingurt of this inflexible hierarchy (“Mastery and Method in Poetry,” 460). 105. Jacques-­Dalcroze’s eurhythmic dancing predates and is distinct from the Anthroposophist eurhythmy that inspired Andrei Bely, although Mandelstam may have blurred the distinction. 106. Mandelstam, CCPL, 110; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 1:210. 107. Mandelstam, CCPL, 108; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 1:208–9. 108. Clarence Brown, quoted in Harris, notes to CCPL, 610. 109. Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics, 164. 110. Leon Trotsky, Lit­er­a­ture and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket, 2009), 253. 111. Vladimir Papernyi, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two, trans. John Hill and Roann Barris in collaboration with the author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 191. 112. Mandelstam, CCPL, 110–11; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 1:211.

20 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 136– 142

113. Mandelstam, CCPL, 111; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 1:211. 114. I. M. Semenko, Poetika pozdnego Mandel’shtama (Moscow: Mandel’shtamskoe obshchestvo, 1997), 10. 115. Dante, Divine Comedy, 188; Mallarmé, “Le Livre, instrument spirituel,” 378; Khlebnikov, King of Time, 41; Khlebnikov, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:114. 116. Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Random House, 1937), 1.289, 1.291. 117. Mandelstam, CCPL, 436–37; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:254. 118. Nancy Pollak identifies this authoritative figure of the reader with “Talmudic injunctions against scribal error,” according to which “the alteration of a stroke transforms the meaning of the text, rendering it, in rabbinic terms, unholy—in Mandelstam’s, false.” Pollak, Mandelstam the Reader, 8. For an overview of Talmudic approaches to Mandelstam’s poetics, see Vaingurt, “Mastery and Method in Poetry,” 461. 119. V. B. Mikushevich, “Estetika Mandel’shtama v ‘Razgovore o Dante,’ ” in Smert’ i bessmertie poeta (Moscow: RGGU, 2001), 150. 120. The source for the image of the bearded Dante rebuked by Beatrice is Purgatorio 31, in which Beatrice chastises Dante for his faithlessness; Mandelstam’s use of it serves additionally as a sly literalization of the essay’s early trope that “in Dante’s conception the teacher is younger than the student,” derived from a scene in the Inferno in which Dante’s own teacher, Brunetto Latini, wins a race. Mandelstam, CCPL, 400; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:220. 121. Mandelstam, CCPL, 68; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 1:184. 122. Gasparov, “Metricheskoe sosedstvo ‘Ody’ Stalinu,” 103. 123. Mandelstam, CCPL, 442; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:259. 124. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 234–35. 125. Mandelstam, CCPL, 426; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:244–45. 126. Mandelstam, CCPL, 426; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 3:244. 127. Mandelstam, CCPL, 165; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 2:298. 128. Nelson Goodman, The Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 159–64, 177–92. 129. Mandelstam, Egyptian Stamp, 151; O. Mandel’shtam, SS, 2:465. 5. The Market

A partial version of this chapter was previously published as “Humbert Humbert as Mad Man: Art and Advertising in Lolita” (Studies in the Novel, Winter 2019). 1. Major statements of the kind have been made by Brian Boyd, Leland de la Durantaye, Aleksandr Dolinin, Eric Naiman, Richard Rorty, Leona Toker, Michael Wood, and many o ­ thers. 2. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1997), 32. 3. Nabokov, Lolita, 3. 4. Nabokov, Lolita, 142: “In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments—­swooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the

NOTES TO PA GES 142– 144

201

­ otel we had separate rooms, but in the ­middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, h and we made it up very ­gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere ­else to go.” 5. ­Will Norman, Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time (New York: Routledge, 2012), 116. 6. Nabokov, Lolita, 88. 7. Quoted in Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 179; Georges Bataille, Lit­er­a­ture and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973), x. 8. Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell and Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage, 1991, 364; Vladimir Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, 4 vols. (Moscow: Pravda, 1990), 3:328. For Nabokov’s Rus­sian novels, I cite the En­glish in parallel with the Rus­sian Sobranie sochinenii. 9. The book seems written to illustrate Hannah Arendt’s observation that totalitarianism, in its abhorrence of the unpredictable, replaces talented individuals capable of in­de­pen­dent insight with fools lacking intelligence and creativity. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando, FL: Harvest, 1968), 339. 10. Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (New York: Vintage, 1989), 162–63; Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:93–94. 11. Albinus is in Rus­sian Kretchmar; the En­glish Rex, suggesting kingship, is in Rus­sian Horn, suggesting cuckoldry. An anonymous reader of this book in manuscript suggests plausibly that the name Axel Rex encodes a jibe at Nabokov’s erstwhile friend Edmund Wilson, whose best-­known book is a collection of essays on Symbolism titled Axel’s ­Castle. 12. Tatyana Gershenzon points out that Nabokov’s alterations in the opening pages refocus attention from the corrupting power of commercialism to the seductive force of Albinus’s own half-­baked creative impulses. Gershenzon, “Self-­Translation and the Transformation of Nabokov’s Aesthetics from Kamera Obskura to Laughter in the Dark,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 63, no. 2 (2019): 207–8. 13. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 225. 14. Iurii Leving, Vokzal—­garazh—­angar: Vladimir Nabokov i poetika russkogo urbanizma (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Ivana Limbakha, 2004), 51. 15. Luke Parker, “The Shop Win­dow Quality of ­Things: 1920s Weimar Surface Culture in Nabokov’s Korol’, dama, valet,” Slavic Review 77, no. 2 (2018): 392. 16. Vladimir Nabokov, Mary (New York: Vintage, 1989), 26; Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:53; Nabokov, “Solus Rex,” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage, 1997), 526; Nabokov, The Eye (New York: Vintage, 1990), 83. 17. Vladimir Nabokov, Despair (New York: Vintage, 1989), xiii. 18. Nabokov, Despair; Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:333. 19. Nabokov, Despair, 5; Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:334. 20. The choco­late logo that betrays Hermann’s lack of originality is also a sort of punning signature for the real artist, whose Rus­sian pen name, Sirin, is a near homophone of the word for lilac, siren’. And the fan is one of a long series of Nabokovian images of debased or artificial breath parodying “inspiration,” like Kinbote’s bad breath in Pale Fire and the perfumes that Humbert advertises in Lolita. I am grateful to Eric Naiman for pointing out ­these resonances of the logo in correspondence.

20 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 144– 149

21. Vladimir Nabokov, Gift, 23; Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:22. 22. Nabokov, Gift, 5; Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:7. 23. Nabokov, Gift, 13; Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:14. 24. Nabokov, Gift, 13–14; Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:14. 25. Nabokov, “A Nursery Tale,” in Stories, 166; Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:313–14. The description of the w ­ oman herself and her smoking, “blue-­chinned companion,” whom the author calls “our rival,” are consistent with Nabokov’s authorial cameos of himself and his wife, Vera. 26. Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (New York: Time, 1964), 68, 69. 27. Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (New York: Vintage, 1989), 60. 28. On the irony of Nabokov’s supposedly disinterested writings appearing in this commercial com­pany, see Duncan White, Nabokov and His Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 52. 29. Nabokov, Lolita, 23. 30. Nabokov, Lolita, 90–91. 31. Nabokov, Lolita, 161, 155, 254, 273. 32. Nabokov, Lolita, 282. The drugstore display may nod to Madame Bovary’s sublimely philistine apothecary Homais, whose win­dow advertises laxative choco­lates and to whose confusion in converting between Celsius and Fahrenheit Nabokov devotes several pages in his Lectures on Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Harvest, 1980), 148–49. 33. Rachel Bowlby, “Lolita and the Poetry of Advertising,” in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”: A Casebook, ed. Ellen Pifer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 172. 34. Nabokov, Lolita, 215, 155. 35. Nabokov, Lolita, 10, 32. 36. Nabokov, Lolita, 32. 37. Nabokov, Lolita, 15. 38. Nabokov, Lolita, 32. 39. Nabokov, Lolita, 35. 40. Nabokov, Lolita, 47, 67. 41. Nabokov, Lolita, 43. 42. Nabokov, Lolita, 241. 43. Nabokov, Lolita, 44. 44. Nabokov, Lolita, 135. 45. Nabokov, Lolita, 215. The cluster of images recurs shortly thereafter: Humbert has lost Lolita, and, imagining “wrenching open the zipper of her nylon shroud had she been dead,” he discovers her “playing with a damned dog”—­Quilty’s (236). 46. Nabokov, Lolita, 215, 155. 47. Nabokov, Lectures on Lit­er­a­ture, 313. In his autobiography, Nabokov uses a related metaphor—­“outrunning gravity”—to imagine the escape velocity of the artwork, which achieves an orbit apart from the real world. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Vintage, 1989), 301. 48. Nabokov, Lectures on Lit­er­a­ture, 313. 49. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhe­toric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 390–91. 50. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, In­ter­est­ing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 242.

NOTES TO PA GES 149– 157

203

51. Louise Story, “Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad,” New York Times, January 15, 2007, www​.­nytimes​.­com. 52. Nabokov, Lectures on Lit­er­a­ture, 313. 53. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 4. 54. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 4. 55. Frances Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), x. 56. Roman Jakobson, Language in Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1987), 87. 57. Jan Mukařovský, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts, trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1979), 29. 58. Jakobson, Language in Lit­er­a­ture, 72. “The adaptation of poetic means for some heterogenous purpose does not conceal their primary essence, just as ele­ments of emotive language, when utilized in poetry, still maintain their emotive tinge.” Applied manifestations of the poetic function include mnemonic devices, advertising jingles, or, in Jakobson’s memorable example of the Senate filibusterer reciting Hiawatha ­because it is long, a nonsignifying address on the floor of Congress. 59. Yuri Tynianov, “On Literary Evololution,” Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Lit­er­a­ture, Theory and Film, ed. and trans. Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 278. 60. Nabokov, Lolita, 9. 61. Nabokov, Lolita, 59. 62. Jakobson, Language in Lit­er­a­ture, 72. 63. Nabokov, Lolita, 314, 313. 64. Nabokov, Lolita, 80. 65. Nabokov, Lolita, 198, 126, 21. 66. Nabokov, Lolita, 80. 67. Nabokov, Lolita, 108. 68. Nabokov, Lolita, 196. 69. Nabokov, Lolita, 151–58, 207. The private detective Humbert contacts “through an advertisement in one of Lo’s magazines” in order to find her discloses only more false leads (253). 70. I paraphrase h ­ ere from Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art ­under Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 20. As the title of the book suggests, Brown acknowledges the truism but complicates it considerably. 71. Bowlby, “Lolita and the Poetry of Advertising,” 177. 72. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 39. 73. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 124–25. 74. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 122; Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:69. 75. Nabokov, Lolita, 188. 76. Nabokov, Lectures on Lit­er­a­ture, 313. 77. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2012), 129. 78. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 130. 79. Nabokov, Lolita, 148.

20 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 157– 160

80. Mark Conroy, Muse in the Machine: American Fiction and Mass Publicity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 109. 81. Nabokov, Lolita, 276. 82. On the basis of discrepancies in the dates in the last part of the novel, Christina Tekiner has suggested that the last nine chapters, which describe Humbert’s visit to the grown-up Dolly Schiller and his murder of Quilty, are exculpatory fabrications. This persuasive reading, fleshed out further by Alexander Dolinin and Leona Toker, notes that “Humbert tells us that he worked on Lolita for fifty-­six days, but ­there are not that many days between the date of his arrest . . . ​and the date of his death.” Tekiner, “Time in Lolita,” Modern Fiction Studies 25, no. 3 (1979): 463–64. On this reading, the last accurate date is September 22, fifty-­six days before Humbert’s death and the day on which Humbert receives a letter from an attorney inquiring into his relationship with Lolita. In the first chapters, Humbert had confounded carnal lust and spiritual qualities; ­toward the end, his false real­ity conflates issues of judgment, repayment, and comeuppance. Even grown up, married, and pregnant, Dolly Schiller’s role is to supply Humbert’s wants, now exculpatory rather than carnal, in exchange for money: “I think it’s oh so utterly ­grand of you to give us all that dough. It ­settles every­thing,” she says at their last meeting. Nabokov, Lolita, 279. 83. Nabokov, Lolita, 69. 84. Nabokov, Lolita, 43, 121. 85. Nabokov, Lolita, 188. 86. Nabokov, Lectures on Lit­er­a­ture, 313. 87. The inability to correctly identify his own image, and a tendency to confuse it with that of his double, is something e­ lse Humbert has in common with Hermann, the narrator of Despair. 88. The chronology is tight but barely conceivable. Nabokov in his research for Lolita “documented e­ very aspect of post-­war American life that was relevant to his story,” as Barbara Wyllie notes. Wyllie, “ ‘My Age of Innocence Girl’: Humbert, Chaplin, Lita and Lo,” Nabokov Online Journal 9 (2015): 6. While the ad was not nationally available prior to Nabokov completing his draft of Lolita in December 1953, he might have seen it before completing the longhand copy in spring 1954 and could easily have done so before the book’s publication in 1955. 89. Nabokov, Lolita, 236. 90. Nabokov, Lolita, 246. 91. Nabokov, Lolita, 117. 92. Nabokov, Lolita, 237. 93. Nabokov, Lolita, 60, 238. 94. Booth, Rhe­toric of Fiction, 391. 95. Eric Naiman, Nabokov, Perversely (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 44, 74. 96. Nabokov, Lolita, 129. 97. Russell Valentino, The W ­ oman in the Win­dow: Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Rus­sian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), 101. 98. For example, Leona Toker: “The implicit ethical function of this facet of art lies precisely in the refinement of the careful reader’s sensibilities; the sensibilities that can ­later be directed to ­human relationships.” Toker, “Nabokov and Bergson on Duration

NOTES TO PA GES 161– 167

205

and Reflexivity,” in Nabokov’s World, vol. 1, The Shape of Nabokov’s World, ed. Jane Grayson, Arnold McMillin, and Priscilla Myer (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002), 136. 99. Brecht Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre: 1933–1947, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 91. 100. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage, 1994), 133, 3; Naiman, Nabokov, 17–45. 101. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1991), 266. 102. Quoted in White, Nabokov and His Books, 158. 103. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 273. Karl Marx makes much the same point when he comments that “Milton produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as an activation of his own nature. . . . ​He l­ater sold his product for £5.” Marx, Capital: A Critique of Po­liti­cal Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1044. 104. Jonathan Paine, Selling the Story: Transaction and Narrative Value in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 10–11. 105. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay, 1957), 3, 9. Marshall McLuhan in his less sanguine 1951 analy­sis complains that the instrumentalized desire in the pages of illustrated magazines makes of the public a “kept ­woman whose role is expected to be submission and luxurious passivity.” Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 21. 106. Yuri Leving and Frederick White, Marketing Lit­er­a­ture and Posthumous Legacies: The Symbolic Capital of Leonid Andreev and Vladimir Nabokov (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013), 108. 107. Nabokov in his lectures imagines a writer accosted by “the monster of grim commonsense” who “whines that the book is not for the general public, that the book ­will never never—­And right then, just before it blurts out the word s, e, double-­l, false commonsense must be shot dead”: a violent censorship of commercial language by authorial fantasy. Nabokov, Lectures on Lit­er­a­ture, 380. 108. White, Nabokov and His Books, 37; Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 104. See also Norman, Nabokov, 94–98. 109. Nabokov, Lolita, 311. 110. Naiman, Nabokov, 20. 111. Nabokov, Lolita, 43. 112. Nabokov, Lolita, 44. 113. Nabokov, Lolita, 64–65. 114. Nabokov, Lolita, 188. 115. Nabokov, Lolita, 311. 116. Nabokov, Lolita, 60. 117. Leland de la Durantaye, Style and M ­ atter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 71. 118. Nabokov, Lolita, 59. 119. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietz­sche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 299. 120. Nabokov, Lolita, 313. 121. Nabokov, Lolita, 313.

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TO PAGES 168– 169

Afterword

1. The com­pany’s website has a ­table of writers, or­ga­nized by time period, who “put the name of Breguet in their works.” Breguet, “Breguet in Lit­er­a­ture 1824–1863,” accessed July 19, 2022, https://­www​.­breguet​.­com​/­en​/­timeline​/­1824​-­1863​/­writers. 2. J. Peterman cata­logue, Winter 1994, 62. 3. Vladimir Nabokov, “The Visit to the Museum,” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage, 1997), 283; Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 4 (Moscow: Pravda, 1990), 357. 4. ­These quotes from Sorokin appear in a recent review of his novels in En­glish translation. Ben Hooyman, “Rus­sia’s Finest Metaphysician: On Vladimir Sorokin ‘Their Four Hearts’ and ‘Telluria,’ ” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 21, 2022, https://­lareviewof books​ .­org​/­article​/­russias​-­f inest​-­metaphysician​-­on​-­vladimir​-­sorokin​-­their​-­four​-­hearts​-­and​ -­telluria​/­.

Index

adman/madman trope, 20, 141, 145–46, 148–49, 154, 158 Adorno, Theodor, 143 adultery, 61–62, 64, 65–66, 68–70, 72 advertising, 20, 141, 143–53, 161–67, 168. See also commercialism/commercial culture Agamben, Giorgio, 48–49 “Air March” (1923 song), 97 Akhmatova, Anna, 134 Aksenov, Ivan, 193n117 alienation, 4–5, 53, 59, 69–70, 73, 109–10, 139 allegories: of the global village, 113; in literary totalities, 2, 4, 18–19; of Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 118–19, 138–40; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 148, 161; in Tolstoy’s meta­ phors of contagion, 60–62, 81–82; in tropes of possession, 32, 45–46, 51–52, 53; in zaum poetry and beyonsense, 86–87, 94, 103, 109 architecture, 3–4, 6–7, 52–53, 108–9, 117–18 artistry/artistic genius, 3–4, 17, 22–23, 144–45, 155–56, 162 audience: aesthetic infection of, 58–59, 70–71, 72–73, 82; global, 109–10; in literary totalities, 2–3, 5, 15–18, 20; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 122–23, 129, 130–31, 135, 138–39; for Nabokov’s persuasive language, 141, 145, 148–50, 151–52, 155–61, 166–67; in tropes of possession, 18–20, 48–49 Auerbach, Erich: “Philology and World Lit­er­a­ture,” 86 authoritarianism, 6, 16, 34–35, 134 authority: in literary totalities, 3–5, 20; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 116, 120–21, 123–28, 130, 131–40; mimicry as strategy of, 155–56; moral, in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 80–81; in tropes of possession, 22, 38–39, 40–41

automatization, 54–56 autonomy, artistic, 104–6, 122–23, 138, 154, 156, 163–64 avant-­garde, Rus­sian: and beyonsense, 87–96; fascination with flight of, 96–103, 191n82; and literary totalities, 1, 5, 10–11, 14–16, 19–20; nomadism in, 103–9; resonances of, in zaum, 84–85; and tropes of possession, 46, 50–51, 53; utopian practices of, 84–85, 86–87; and world lit­er­a­ture and the global village, 109–14. See also language, universal; world lit­er­a­ture; zaum language and poetry Babel, Tower of, 12–13, 35, 41–43, 89–90, 93–94, 98, 101–4, 107–8, 113–14 Bacon, Francis: Advancement of Learning, 88–89 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 45, 64, 117–18 Batiushkov, Konstantin, 18, 23–35, 137–38; An Eve­ning with Kantemir, 27–28; Dream, 25–26, 31; Excerpt from the Letters of a Rus­sian Officer about Finland, 25–26, 28–34; A Few Words on the Poet and Poetry, 27; On the Ruins of a ­Castle in Sweden, 29, 178n37; “Walk to the Acad­emy of Arts,” 7, 33–34 Baudrillard, Jean, 50 be­hav­ior, 16–17, 20, 37–38, 43–45, 141, 149–50 Bekhterev, Vladimir, 16–17, 130 Belinsky, Vissarion, 9–10 Bely, Andrei, 10–11, 93, 131–32 Benjamin, Walter: “The Storyteller,” 80–81 Berman, Marshall, 7 Bernard, Claude, 38 Bernays, Edward, 162 beyonsense, 17, 51, 84–85, 87–96, 113–14, 127. See also zaum language and poetry Bhabha, Homi, 155–56 Billington, James, 10–11 bird meta­phors, 5, 122–25, 138 207

20 8 I n d e x

Blanchot, Maurice, 122–23 bodies: in literary totalities, 5, 11–12, 15–21; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 124–25, 127–28, 129–33, 135–36, 137–38; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 20, 147–48, 150–52, 165–66; possession of, 22–23, 28, 45–47, 48–49, 53–55, 57; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 60–61, 68, 75–76, 79–80; in universal language, 93 Bogdanov, Alexander, 15 Booth, Wayne, 149 Bowlby, Rachel, 146, 154 brain fever, 35–39, 43–44 Brecht, Bertolt, 160–61 Brik, Osip, 106 calligraphy/calligraphic product, 116–17, 120–22, 129, 137–39 candle meta­phor, in Anna Karenina, 61–62, 70–72, 80–81 capital, 4–5, 53, 145, 156–57, 158, 163 capitalism, 46–47, 57–58, 84–87, 109–11, 112–13, 169. See also globalism/global market economy cartography, 10–11 Casanova, Pascale: The World Republic of Letters, 103–4 censorship, 127–28, 134, 137–39 Chaadaev, Petr, 11–12; Apology of a Madman, 11; Philosophical Letters, 11 charm poetry, 93–94 Chris­tian­ity: Rus­sian Orthodox, 12–13, 18–19, 38–41; as Sprachbund, 107–8; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 70, 73–74, 81–82; in totalizing traditions, 12–14; in tropes of possession, 40–41, 45, 50–51, 53–54 civilizing: in literary totalities, 7, 11–12, 14; in tropes of possession, 27–29, 32, 34–35 class, socioeconomic, 8, 73–75, 76–80 Cohen, Arthur A., 128 collectivities: in literary totalities, 7–10, 15–17; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 124, 130, 135–36; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 77–78; in universal language and world lit­er­a­ture, 90–91, 95, 97–98; as a version of possession, 46–47 colonialism, 7, 11–12, 14–15, 24–25, 32–33, 34–35, 86–87, 109–10. See also imperialism commercialism/commercial culture, 111–12, 143–46, 148–49, 150–51, 152–54, 156, 158–59, 161–67. See also advertising

commodification/commodities: commodity culture, 143, 149–50; Nabokov’s persuasive language in, 141–42, 146–48, 157–58, 161–63, 166–67; in tropes of possession, 50–51, 53; of world lit­er­a­ture, 86–87, 88–89, 109–10, 168 communism, international, 15, 19–20, 22–23, 77–78, 86–87, 92–93, 95–96, 107–8 compulsion: in literary totalities, 2, 3–4, 6–7; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 120–21, 124–25, 126–27, 130–31, 134, 138–39, 140; in postwar consumerism, 20, 149–50; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 69–70; in tropes of possession, 22–23, 24–25, 28–29, 47–48, 56; universal language in, 19–20, 109–10 conductor’s baton meta­phor, 115–17, 118–19, 120–22, 123–24, 127, 134, 138–40 conquest, 3–4, 24–25, 41, 101–2, 153–54, 157–58 Conroy, Mark, 157 consciousness: false, advertising in, 143–44; in literary totalities, 11–12, 15; materialist and theological interpretations of, 38–39, 69–70; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 69–70, 71–72, 73–74, 76–77, 79–80; transcription and per­for­mance in ordering of, 129; in tropes of possession, 37–39, 40 consumerism/consumer culture, 18, 20, 144–46, 148–50, 152–54, 156–57, 160–66, 168–69. See also advertising contagion, 18, 19, 64–83, 144–45. See also infection and disease continuity, historical and cultural, 10, 32–33, 97–98, 105, 119–20, 122 correctives: disease as, 59–60, 70, 73, 78–79; universal language as, 19–20 cosmology, 2, 132–33, 177n15 cosmopolitanism, 7, 91–92, 108–9, 156–57 creation/life creation (zhiznetvorchestvo): in literary totalities, 1–2, 5, 6–7, 14–15, 17; in tropes of possession, 5, 46, 53; in universal language and world lit­er­a­ture, 75–76, 87–88, 94, 96–97, 98, 101 creativity: in literary totalities, 5, 6–7, 14; in postwar advertising culture, 143; of the Rus­sian avant-­garde, 85; and transcription, 119–20, 129; in tropes of possession, 34–35, 51 crime/criminal be­hav­ior, 37–38, 42–44, 141–43, 144, 160–61, 163–65 Crnkovic, Denis, 102–3

I n d e x Damrosch, David: What Is World Lit­er­a­ture?, 86 dance motifs, 118–19, 127, 130–32, 135–36, 138 Dante, 2, 123–24. See also Mandelstam, Osip: Conversation about Dante defamiliarization, 73, 87, 106 de Man, Paul, 4, 31, 166 depersonalization disorder, 73 Derrida, Jacques, 49, 125, 127–28, 139 Derzhavin, Gavriil, 132–33, 136–37 despotism. See tyranny/tyrannical structures destiny, Rus­sian, 2, 6–8, 10–13, 20–21, 41–43, 54–55, 57 determinism, 27, 58, 66 dimensionality, 116–17, 119, 142–43 disease. See infection and disease displacement, 32–33, 131–33, 138–39, 159–60, 166 diversity, 2–3, 13, 14, 74–76, 107 divisions, social. See fragmentation of humanity and society Djagalov, Rossen, 85 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 10, 18, 35–45; The ­Brothers Karamazov, 12–13, 35–42, 43–45; Crime and Punishment, 42–43; The Demons, 43, 44; The Idiot, 43 Durantaye, Leland de la, 165–66 dystopia/dystopian lit­er­a­ture, 18–19, 22, 41–42, 45–53, 58, 145 East/West divides and dichotomies, 7, 11–14, 24, 34–35, 64–65, 85 ecstasy, 23, 26, 28, 87, 130–31, 158–59 education: aesthetic, 73–74, 125–26; social, rhythm in, 135–36 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 130 Eisenstein, Sergei, 18, 111–12 elegiac mode/elegies, 4–5, 23–35, 101, 113–14 Eliade, Mircea, 57–58 Emerson, Caryl, 46–47, 68, 76–77 emotion: and infection, 59, 63–75, 76–77, 78–80, 82–83; in literary totalities, 3–4, 10, 18, 19; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 127, 129, 130–31; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 150, 155, 160–61, 163–66; in tropes of possession, 26, 41–42, 50–51, 54–55, 56; zaum as product of, 87 empiricism, 38–39, 163 Engels, Friedrich: Communist Manifesto, 109–10

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Enlightenment/Enlightenment reason, 6–7, 10–11, 18–19, 35, 41–43, 45, 46, 82 ephemerality, 127 equality/in­e­qual­ity, 7, 14, 40–41, 79–80, 91–92, 109–10 Erlich, Viktor, 106–7 Esperanto, 91–92 estrangement, 70–71, 72–73 ethics: Christian, 13–14, 107–8; in literary totalities, 10, 13–14, 20; and Nabokov’s persuasive language, 20, 141, 149–50, 155–56, 160–61, 162–66; in transcription and authority, 134. See also morality/ immorality Etkind, Alexander, 57–58 etymology, 13–14, 87–88, 89–90, 93–94, 101, 103–4 Eurasianism, 14, 107–10 existence/nonexistence, 50–52, 81, 94–95, 104–5, 144–48 experience, aesthetic and personal: bodily, 16, 18, 150–52, 168–69; as inoculation, 62–64, 65–66, 70–71; in literary totalities, 2–4, 11–12, 16, 17–19; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 118–20, 127, 129, 130–31; and marketing, 143–44, 150–52, 165–66; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 59, 62–64, 65–66, 68, 70–73, 74–75, 76–77, 80–81, 82–83; in tropes of possession, 23, 48–49, 57 exploitation: class-­based, in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 19, 70–71, 73–74, 77–80; Nabokov’s persuasive language in, 145, 149, 150, 152–53, 156, 158, 161–63, 166; in tropes of possession, 48 exposure, 63–64, 65–66, 70, 149, 161 expression, 8, 28, 66–67, 68–70, 105–6, 107–8, 129, 130–31 “externalizer,” 45–47, 53, 56 faith, religious, 37, 44–45, 80–81, 107–8 false totalities, 1, 12 fantasies: cata­logue of, in Lolita, 152–53; in literary totalities, 10–11, 14–15, 21; of Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 122–23, 124–25, 126–28, 138–39; tropes of possession in, 23–24, 25–26, 40–41, 48, 52–53; universal language in, 92–93, 95–96, 104, 109–10 Fedorov, Nikolai, 14–15, 95 Ferguson, Frances, 150, 152 flight meta­phors, 96–103, 116–17, 121–22, 126–27, 139–40, 191n82

21 0 I n d e x

form, poetic, 90, 126–27, 169 Formalism/Formalists, 13–14, 15–16, 18, 86–87, 102–9, 130, 131–32, 150–51 41°, 112–13 fragmentation of humanity and society, 8, 9, 41–43, 45, 70–71, 73–81, 94–95, 117–18 France, Norman conquest of, 32 Freud, Sigmund, 40, 76–77 Friedman, Susan Stanford: Planetary Modernisms, 110 Frye, Northrop, 93–94 Fuller, Buckminster, 108–9 ­f utures: in literary totalities, 3–4, 7, 9, 10–11, 14; Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors in, 120–21, 122–23, 132–33, 134, 138–39; in tropes of possession, 48–49, 56–58; and universal language, 84–85, 86, 87, 90–92, 99–100, 101–2, 103, 108–9; world lit­er­a­ture and the global village in, 109–14 Futurism/Futurists, Rus­sian: literary totalities in, 5, 13–16, 17–18, 19–20; on Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 127; tropes of possession in, 28–29, 50–51; universal language and world lit­er­a­ture in, 84–85, 86–87, 91, 92–93, 94–106, 107, 108–9, 111–12 Garden of Eden, 93–94, 103–4, 107–8, 166 Gasparov, Boris, 104, 134, 138–39 Gastev, Aleksei, 15 gender, 127, 135 Genette, Gérard, 4 germ theory, 77–78 gestures, visual and bodily, 18, 20–21, 93, 118–19, 121–22, 124–25, 131–32, 139 ghosts, 6, 18, 23–35, 146–47 Ginzburg, Lydia, 129 Glazova, Elena, 114, 130 globalism/global market economy, 6–10, 18–19, 20–21, 45–47, 86, 109–11, 168–69. See also capitalism; trade/trade networks globus intellectualis (world of the mind), 88–90 glossolalia, 17, 51, 84–85, 87–88, 92–93, 130–33 Gogol, Nikolai: Dead Souls, 7–10, 124; Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, 124 Gorky, Maxim: World Lit­er­a­ture Publishing House, 85, 92–93, 106–7 Goscilo, Helena, 97 Gothic tropes and themes, 4–5, 22–23, 24, 53 government, world, 90–92

Gramsci, Antonio, 91–93 Greenleaf, Monika, 24–25 Greimas, A. J., 66 Groys, Boris, 5, 15–16, 125–26 guilt, 39–40, 41, 43–45, 142, 166 Gustafson, Richard, 59–61 hallucinations, 18–19, 35–37, 38–39, 41–42, 43–45, 57 happiness, 61, 62–63, 65–66, 148–49 harmony/disharmony: in literary totalities, 10, 12–13, 15–16, 20; Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors in, 20, 116–17, 124, 138–39; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 74–76; in tropes of possession, 41–42; in universal language, 94–95, 103, 109 Harris, Jane Gary, 114, 131–32 Harte, Tim, 97 Heaney, Seamus, 121–22 Hedberg Olenina, Ana: Psychomotor Aesthetics, 16–17, 130 hegemony, 107–8, 110–11, 117, 118–19, 120–21, 127, 134 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 14, 28–29, 90 Herman, David, 72 hierarchies, 3–4, 75–76, 79, 86, 124–25, 127–28, 134–35, 139 history: and Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 124, 139–40; in totalizing traditions, 11–12; in tropes of possession, 22–23, 33–34, 35, 45–46, 51, 56–58 humanism, 7, 125–26 Ianovsky, S. D., 44–45 identification, affective: of consumers with advertising, 149–50, 155, 159–61, 162–64; and Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 124–25, 127–28, 138–39; of poetry and creativity, 119–20; of readers with characters, 70–72, 80–83, 149–50, 159–61; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of infection, 63–64, 70–72, 80–83; in tropes of possession, 32 identity: merged, in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 71–72; in metonymy and meta­phor, 4; national, in Batiushkov’s Scandinavian elegies, 28–29; of self, in Mandelstam’s poetry, 119–20; in totalizing traditions, 11–12 ideology: of Ekwilism, 145; in literary totalities, 2–3, 10, 11–12, 14, 15, 16–17, 18–19, 20–21; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of

I n d e x contagion, 60–61, 63, 69; in tropes of possession, 24, 32–33, 53–58; in universal language and world lit­er­a­ture, 91–92, 107–8, 110 Ilf, Ilya: The Twelve Chairs, 15 imagination: of Humbert Humbert, 148; of Tolstoy, meta­phors of contagion in, 73, 80–83; tropes of possession in, 29–30, 31, 38–39, 47, 53, 56–57, 58 immunity, 61–64, 77–79, 81–82 imperialism, 3–4, 6–7, 10–12, 14, 20–21, 24–26, 33–34, 54–55. See also colonialism impulse: artistic, in literary totalities, 2–5, 11–12, 17; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 122–28, 130, 132–33, 137–39; in tropes of possession, 37–38, 43, 45–46, 53–54 indeterminacy, 86–88 industrialization, 50–51, 52–53, 78–79, 135–36 infection and disease: art as, 2, 19, 59–61, 76–77, 79–80; art as inoculation for, 66–73; corrective value of, 59–60, 78–79; in dialectical unity, 61, 64–66; and imagination, 73, 80–83; physiological and emotional, 61–64; social, 37–38, 72, 73–80; in tropes of possession, 35–49 inoculation, 15, 61–73, 77–78, 79–81, 82–83. See also vaccination inspiration: as bodily possession, 22–24, 33–34, 47–48; landscape and history in, 31; in literary totalities, 3, 4–5, 16, 17–18; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 122–28, 135–36, 137–38; of universal language, 88–89, 107–8 internationalism, 12–13, 85, 91–92, 94, 95–96 intonation, 117–19, 121–22, 130 intuition, 19–20, 69, 86–87, 97–99, 103–4, 110–12, 168–69 inversion, 81–82, 102–3, 125–26, 145, 153–54 Iofan, Boris, 3–4 Iser, Wolfgang, 130 isolation, 11, 42–43, 48–49, 50–51, 75–76, 113 Istomin, Karion, 10–11 Jacques-­Dalcroze, Émile, 135–36 Jakobson, Roman, 4, 19–20, 104, 105, 107–8, 111–12, 127, 150–51 Jameson, Fredric, 56, 110 Janecek, Gerald, 87–88 Joyce, James: Finnegan’s Wake, 103–4 judgment: and Nabokov’s persuasive language, 142, 143, 146, 149–50, 160; in

211

Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 66–67; in tropes of possession, 36, 38–39, 41, 42–43 justice, 40–41, 44–45, 123–25 Kahn, Andrew, 129 Kamensky, Vasily: “Airplanes in Futurist Poetry,” 96; “Я,” 87–88 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 1–2, 3–4, 13–14, 17, 84–85, 87–88, 89–92, 93–96, 104; “An Indo-­Russian Union,” 14; “Demonstrations of Word-­Creation in Language,” 97; “Garden of Animals,” 94–95, 107–8; “Incantation by Laughter,” 93–94; “Kingdom of Time,” 90–91; “Sovereign Planet Earth,” 108–9; “Suppose I make a timepiece,” 91; The ­Tables of Destiny, 90–91; “The One, the Only Book,” 1, 93–94; Zangezi, 98, 112 Khotimsky, Maria, 85 Kinkle, Jeff: Cartographies of the Absolute, 111–12 Kittler, Friedrich, 135 klikushestvo, 39, 40–41 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 17, 87, 91–93, 106, 130–31; “Declaration of the World as Such,” 104–5; “Declaration of Transrational Language,” 91–92; “New Paths of the Word,” 93; “The World Has Ended/ The Heights,” 99–100 Krzhizhanovsky, Sigizmund, 18–19, 45–54, 168; “Bridge across the Styx,” 52–53; Hamlet revision (The Letter Killers Club), 47–48, 49–50; The Letter Killers Club, 22, 45–53, 58; “Philosopheme of the Theater,” 51, 188n30; “Philosophy of Titles,” 88–90 ­labor: capital as, 4–5, 53; in literary totalities, 4–5, 7, 15; and rhythmic education, 135–36; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 74–75, 77–78, 79–80; in tropes of possession, 41–42, 46–47, 53 landscape, 23–35, 97–98 language: constructed, compared to natu­ral, 91–92; of consumption, 146; in literary totalities, 12–14, 17, 19–20; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 117–18, 119–20, 125, 126–27, 131–32; protolanguages, 26, 93–94; in tropes of possession, 23–35, 53–56; as vector, in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 68–69. See also persuasion/persuasive language

21 2 I n d e x

language, universal: Adamic roots in, 28–29, 89–90, 93–96, 102–3; in avant-­garde linguistics, 85–86, 91–92, 94, 95, 103, 104–5, 107–8, 112, 113–14; beyonsense, 17, 51, 84–85, 87–96, 113–14, 127; in compulsion, 19–20, 109–10; economic pressures in, 168; and the global village, 109–10, 111–14; in panoramic viewpoint, 96–103; phonetics and formalism in, 103–9. See also universality/universalisms; zaum language and poetry Latour, Bruno, 1, 111–12 Leibniz, Gottfried: globus intellectualis, 88–90 Lenin, Vladimir, 110 Lessing, Gotthold, 119 Leving, Yuri, 144, 162–63 Liederman, N. L., 53–54 Lifshits, Mikhail, 102–3 linguistics: in literary totalities, 12–14, 19–20; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 117–18, 124–25, 127, 130–31; of possession, 38–39; and universal language, 85–86, 91–92, 94, 95, 103, 104–5, 107–8, 112, 113–14 Lipovetsky, Mark, 53–54 literariness, 104–5, 106–7 Living Word, Institute of, 130 Livshits, Benedikt: The One-­and-­a-­Half-­Eyed Archer, 14 Lomonosov, Mikail, 7, 24–25, 27–28 Lotman, Yuri, 37–38 love, 23, 62–64, 65–67, 68–69, 143, 144, 152–53, 165–66 Lukács, Georg, 9, 73–74, 79, 117–18 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 15, 85; “On the ­People’s Festivals,” 9–10 magazines, mass market, 162–63 “magic historicism,” 57–58 magnetism, 121–22, 123–24, 125–27, 137–38 Malevich, Kazimir, 10–11, 96, 97–98 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 122–23, 136–37 Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 127–28, 134–35 Mandelstam, Osip: and Acmeism, 116; on authority and transcription, 116, 123–28, 130, 131–40; censorship of, 127–28, 134, 137–39; fantasy of divine writing, 123–27; in impulse and universality, 11–12; Institute of Rhythmics, 135–36; meta­phor of common time, 2; on per­for­mance and transcription, 129–33; on poetry as medium of totality, 20; on synesthetic transcription, 116–23, 129; on writing and transcription, 123–28

Mandelstam, Osip: Conversation about Dante: authority and transcription in, 116, 123–28, 130, 131–40; conductor’s baton meta­phor in, 115–17, 118–19, 120–22, 123–24, 138–40; literary totalities in, 5, 11–12, 17, 20; per­for­mance and transcription in, 129–33; as statement of aesthetic philosophy and reading practice, 115–16; synesthetic transcription in, 116–23 Mandelstam, Osip, works of: The Egyptian Stamp, 134, 140; “Fourth Prose,” 127–28, 136–37; “Government and Rhythm,” 15–16, 135–36; “Humanism and the Pre­sent,” 125–26; Journey to Armenia, 130; “On the Addressee,” 120–21, 122–23, 138; “Petr Chaadaev,” 11–12; “Slate Ode,” 132–33; “Stalin Ode,” 134–35, 138–39; “Verses on the Unknown Soldier,” 132–33; “When Psyche-­Life descends to the shades,” 133; “Word and Culture,” 17 marketplace, literary, 48, 50–51, 84, 86–87, 95, 109–10, 144, 161–67 Markov, Vladimir, 87 Marx, Karl, 40–41, 109–10 materialism: in literary totalities, 4–5, 16; in meta­phors of contagion, 69–70; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 141–42, 146–47, 148–49, 154, 163, 166–67; in tropes of possession, 18–19, 37–39, 43–44, 45–53, 56–57; in zaum poetry, 95–96 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 13–14, 106, 108–9; “This is Why Peasants Need Airplanes,” 97 Mazower, Mark, 91–92 mea­sure: of art, in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 59; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 20, 117, 119–20, 121–22, 126–27, 139–40 “meat machines,” 56 mechanization, 16–18, 37–38, 54–56, 127–28, 135–36, 140 Mechnikov, Ilia, 78–79 media, artistic: advertising as, 150–51; of literary totality, 5, 14, 16–21; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 116–17, 130–33, 137–38; in tropes of possession, 22–23, 28–30, 53–54; universal language as, 87, 97–98, 104–5 medicine/medical norms, 35–45, 64–65, 70, 77, 78–81. See also infection and disease; inoculation Medvedkin, Alexander, 9–10

I n d e x memory, 33–34, 47–48, 120, 127–28, 144–45, 150, 154–55, 159–60 metafiction: in literary totalities, 2; and Nabokov’s language of persuasion, 149–50, 152–53, 158, 160, 166–67; and Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 61–62, 63–64, 70–72; tropes of possession in, 22–23, 56 metaphysics, 51, 60–61 metonymics/metonymy: in literary totalities, 4; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phor, 121–22, 136–38; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 147–48, 152–53, 155–56, 158–59, 166–67; in nomadism, 103–4; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 64, 65–66; in tropes of possession, 38–39; in world lit­er­a­ture, 86–87, 111–12 Mikushevich, V. B., 137–38 mimicry: of art and ideology, 57; in literary totalities, 2; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 124–25, 131–32; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 20, 142, 148–49, 150, 154–56, 158, 160–63, 166–67; in universal language, 104–5 mirroring: in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 123, 133; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 144–46, 149–50, 153–54, 157–58, 159–60; in tropes of possession, 26, 28, 32; in universal language, 104. See also reflection modernism: and the ethics of repre­sen­ta­ tion, 161–62, 163; in totalizing traditions, 15–16; tropes of possession in, 22–23, 41–42, 46–47, 48–49, 53, 56; universal language and world lit­er­a­ture in, 19–20, 110–11 modernity: in literary totalities, 6–7, 14; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 73–74; in tropes of possession, 24–25, 35, 41–42, 58; in universal language and world lit­er­a­ture, 96, 110–11, 112–13 modularity, phonetic, 107–9 monarchy, absolute, 123–24 monologues, 48, 71–72, 80–81 Montaigne, Michel de, 81, 186n87 morality/immorality: of Nabokov’s persuasive language, 142, 144–45, 146, 149–50, 157, 160–61; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 67, 77–79, 80–81; in tropes of possession, 39–41, 45. See also ethics Moretti, Franco, 106–7 mortality/immortality, 14, 56–57, 81–82, 144

213

Mufti, Aamir, 85–86, 109–10 Mukařovský, Jan, 18, 150–51 Murav’ev, M. N.: Oskol’d, 24–25 Musa, Mark, 123–24 music/musicality, 16, 20, 28, 56–57, 74–75, 150–51. See also orchestral meta­phors (Mandelstam) mysticism: in beyonsense, 93–94, 95; in literary totalities, 11, 13, 17, 18–19; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 69–70; in tropes of possession, 38–40, 41–45 mythologies: in literary totalities, 6, 10–11, 16, 18–19; of Mandelstam, 120, 122–23, 128; in Nabokov’s narrative and mimicry, 153–54; in tropes of possession, 22, 24–26, 28–29, 34–35, 41–42, 57–58; in universal language and world lit­er­a­ture, 87–88, 96–97, 101–2, 110–11 Nabokov, Vladimir: centrality of advertising in oeuvre of, 144–48; on coercion and advertising culture, 19, 143–44, 151–52, 163; and the ethics of repre­sen­ta­tion, 161–67; on fictional worlds in advertising, 148–53; in the literary marketplace, 161–67; mass audience for, 156–71; mimicry in narratives of, 153–56; totalitarianism in works of, 2, 20, 142–43, 163–64 Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita: centrality of advertising in, 144–48; ethics and aesthetics in, 20, 141, 162–63, 165–66; ethics of repre­sen­ta­tion in, 161–67; fiction as amoral deceit in, 142; identification with fictional worlds in, 148–53; mass audience for, 156–61; narrative and mimicry in, 20, 153–56; rape in, 163–66 Nabokov, Vladimir, works of: “A Nursery Tale,” 145; Bend Sinister, 145; The Defense, 120; Despair, 144; The Eye, 144; The Gift, 142, 144–45, 154; Invitation to a Beheading, 142–43, 155; King, Queen, Knave, 144; Laughter in the Dark, 142, 143; Lolita, 15–16, 20; Mary, 144; Pale Fire, 147; “Philistines and Philistinism,” 148–49, 158; Pnin, 145; Speak, Memory, 154–55; “The Visit to the Museum,” 168–69 Naiman, Eric, 77–78, 160, 163–64 nature/natural environment, 6–7, 16, 28–29, 31, 32–33, 34–35, 55–56, 148 neologisms: in literary totalities, 17; in universal language, 84–85, 87–88, 90–91, 93–94, 97, 100–101, 106; zaum as, 51

21 4 I n d e x

ner­vous fever (nervnaia goriachka), 35–39 Ngai, Sianne, 149 Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 142 nomads/nomadic ­peoples, 14, 103–9 Norman, ­Will, 141–42 nostalgia, 20, 95–96, 116, 152–53 notation: and beyonsense, 88–89; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 117, 120–21, 122, 127–28, 129, 133–34, 140; musical as medium of totality, 20 obedience, 5, 118–19, 122–25, 127, 135 Odoevsky, Vladimir: Rus­sian Nights, 51–52 Olenina, Ana, 130 Ong, Yi-­Ping, 71–72 orchestral meta­phors (Mandelstam): authority in, 116, 120–21, 123–28, 130, 131–40; per­for­mance in, 20, 116–18, 120–23, 126–27, 129–33, 139–41; synesthetic transcription in, 116–23, 129, 130–34, 139–40; writing and transcription in, 123–28 Ostashevsky, Eugene, 105 Packard, Vance, 162 Paine, Jonathan, 161–62 Papernyi, Vladimir, 3–4, 135–36 parallels/parallelisms: in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 20, 122–23, 137–38, 140; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 143, 151, 154, 156–57; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 63–66, 72–73, 82–83; in tropes of possession, 27–28, 32, 34–35, 45, 52–53, 57–58; in universal language and world lit­er­a­ture, 87–88, 94–95, 104–5, 109 Parker, Luke, 144 parody: in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 142–43, 154, 156, 159–60, 161–62, 201n20; in totalizing traditions, 15; in tropes of possession, 36–37, 41–42 Pasternak, Boris, 130 patriotism, 66–67, 80–81 patterning, 13–14, 93–94, 104–5, 106–7, 127, 151–52 peace, global, 90–91, 94–96 penetration, 11–12, 18–19, 57, 164–66 perception: in literary totalities, 9, 11; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 163–66; Nabokov’s persuasive language in, 152–53; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 73, 75–76; in tropes of possession, 27, 37, 38–39

per­for­mance: in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 20, 116–18, 120–23, 126–27, 129–33, 139–41; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 152–53, 155, 159–60, 163–64; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 72–73, 74–75; in tropes of possession, 31–32, 48, 49; of zaum poetry, 93–94 personification, 24–25, 53–54, 120, 122–23 persuasion/persuasive language: in art and advertising, 141, 144–48, 155–56; ethics of repre­sen­ta­tion in, 161–67; in identification with fictional worlds, 148–53; and the mass audience, 156–61; metonymic structures in, 4, 152–53; mimicry and narrative in, 153–56 Peter the G ­ reat, tsar, 34–35 Petrov, Evgenii: The Twelve Chairs, 15 phenomenology of novel reading, 70–72 phonetics/phonetic patterning: in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 127–28; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 150–53; in totalizing traditions, 13–14; in transcription and per­for­mance, 130–31; in universal language, 84–85, 86–90, 91, 94–95, 100–101, 102–9, 113–14; zaum technique of, in tropes of possession, 51, 54–56 Pinsky, L. E., 114 Piranesi, Giovanni, 51–52 Plato: Ion dialogue, 17 Platonov, Andrei: Foundation Pit, 53 Playboy Magazine, 162–63 Pollak, Nancy, 115, 122–23 pornography, 141, 150–51, 152–53, 161–63 positivism, 14, 38, 41–42 possession, tropes of: in Batiushkov’s Scandinavian elegies, 18, 23–35; and Dostoeveky’s demons, 35–45; and ideology, 24, 32–33, 53–58; in Krzhizhanovsky’s The Letter Killers Club, 45–53; in literary totalities, 18–19, 22–23; poetics of, 2; theology in, 36, 37, 38–41, 42–43, 53–54 Potebnia, Alexander, 119–20 poverty, 76–77, 78–80 power: in literary totalities, 2–3, 4, 6–7, 10–11, 12–13, 14, 15–16; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 20, 117, 120–21, 123–28, 130–31, 134–35, 137–39; of Nabokov’s persuasive language, 15–16, 142, 143, 144–45, 151–52, 155–56, 163, 165–67; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 69–70, 71–72, 81–82; in Tolstoy’s theory of art, 19, 60–61;

I n d e x transcendent, as inspiration, 2, 5, 17, 22–23; in tropes of possession, 22–23, 27–28, 34–35, 37–38, 41–42, 47, 49–50, 51–52, 56–57; of universal language, 93–95, 103–4; writing as, 123–28 predation, 144–45, 146, 155–56, 158–59, 160, 162–66 psy­chol­ogy, 16–17, 35–45, 73–74, 130, 162, 166–67 puns: in beyonsense, 89–90, 93, 95; in Futurist poetics, 105; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 131–32; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 146–47, 201n20; in tropes of possession, 51, 54–55, 56–57, 81–82 Pushkin, Alexander: The Bronze Horse­man, 6–7 Putin, Vladimir, 10–11 Ram, Harsha, 3–4, 24, 85, 110–11 rationalism/rationality, 10–11, 38–43, 46, 91–92, 93, 97–98, 109–10 reading: Mandelstam’s philosophy of, 20, 115–23, 127–28, 129–33, 134, 137–39; and persuasive language, 149–50, 160–61, 165–67; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of contagion, 61–62, 70–72; in tropes of possession, 47–48; universal language experiments in practices of, 86–87 realism, 4, 10, 22–23, 36, 57–58, 60–61, 69, 111 reception, 18, 27–28, 106–7, 115–16, 122 reflection, 8–10, 16–17, 25–27, 28–29, 33–34, 44–45, 131–32. See also mirroring reflexology of speech, 16–17, 118–19, 129–30, 150 repetition: in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 150–52; in tropes of possession, 26, 32–33, 54–56, 57–58; in universal language, 95, 100–101, 104–5, 107, 111 repre­sen­ta­tion, ethics of, 163–66 repression, Soviet, 23, 49 response, aesthetic, 2–4, 16, 66–67, 76–77, 117, 118–19, 130 resurrections: in literary totalities, 7–8, 14; transcription in, 119–20, 132, 133; in tropes of possession, 29–31, 42–43; of universal language, 95, 96, 101–2 rhythm: in literary totalities, 7–8, 15–16; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 117, 118–20, 121–22, 135–36, 139–40; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 150–51; in universal language and world lit­er­a­ture, 90, 109, 193n117

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Rimbaud, Arthur: Vowels, 130 rituals, 32–33, 55–56, 57–58 Robinson, Douglas, 73 Ronell, Avital, 4, 22 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 27, 75–77 Rozanov, Vasili, 12–13, 41–42 Rus­sian Revolution, 46, 77–78, 119–20 Russo-­Swedish Wars, 34 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 107–8, 117–18 Schiller, Friedrich: Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 2–3, 73–74, 125–26 Schmitt, Paul, 17 science fiction, 14–15, 22, 45–47, 53, 56, 91–92. See also Krzhizhanovsky, Sigizmund Sechenov, Ivan, 16–17 Segal, Dimitri, 119–20 Semenko, I. M., 136–37 semiotics, 37–38, 60–61 sentimentality, 92–93, 141–42, 150, 155 sexuality, 54–55, 66–67, 70–71, 142–43, 146–48, 152, 156–57, 158–66 Shklovsky, Viktor, 13–14, 106–7, 130–31 Siefrid, Thomas, 119–20 Šilbajoris, Rymvidas, 60–61 skaldic tradition, 23–35 Sobol, Valeria: Haunted Empire, 24–25 socialism, 40–41, 77–78, 85–86, 91–92, 95–96, 97–98, 109–12 “Society of Presidents of the Globe,” 90–91 Sokolov, Ipollit, 135–36 Sontag, Susan, 43, 93–94 Sorokin, Vladimir, 5, 18–19, 53–58, 169; The Blizzard, 57; Blue Fat, 54, 56–58; Day of the Oprichnik, 57; Ice Trilogy, 55–56; The Norm, 54–55, 57; Roman, 54–55; “The Swim,” 53–54, 125–26 sound: in literary totalities, 15–16, 17, 20; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phor, 116–24, 126–28, 129, 130–32, 135, 138–39; in Nabokov’s persuasive language, 150–52; in tropes of possession, 28, 54–55. See also zaum language and poetry Soviet Union: in allegories of possession, 45–46; world lit­er­a­ture and universal language in, 85–86 space and time: in literary totalities, 3–4, 15–16; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phor, 116–18, 119–20, 121–22, 131–32, 133, 138–39; in tropes of possession, 25–26, 50–51; in universal language, 96, 99–100, 101–3, 113–14

21 6 I n d e x

speech: in Formalist theories, 18; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 117–19, 122, 124–25, 126–28, 129–33, 134, 137–39; oral, as a mob, 124–25, 126–27, 134; reflexology of, 17, 129–30, 150; in tropes of possession, 50–51; and universal language, 84, 87, 93–95, 101–2, 107–8 spirituality: commodification of, 147, 148–49; in literary totalities, 8–9, 11–13; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of infection, 69–70; in tropes of possession, 23, 38–39, 41–42, 43–45, 53–54; and universal language, 97, 107–8 Stalinism: in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 122–23, 124, 125–26, 127, 135–37; theme of flight in, 97; in tropes of possession, 23, 53–54, 56–58; universal ­human culture in, 85 Steiner, George, 68 Sterne, Laurence: Tristram Shandy, 107 Stites, Richard, 91–92 St. Petersburg, 6–7, 10–12, 18–19, 23, 33–35 Structuralism, 13–14, 18, 19–20, 104–5, 107–8, 113–14, 147–48 Strukov, Vlad, 97 supranationalism, 104–5, 107–8 Symbolists, 4, 93, 148–49 symbols, linguistic, 88–89, 107–8, 111–12 symmetry, 18, 25–26, 31, 53–54, 77–78, 79–80, 150–51, 157–58 synesthesia, 17, 116–23, 129, 130–34, 139–40, 150–51 taboos, sexual, 161–62, 166–67 Tatlin, Vladimir, 98 technocracy, 45, 135–36 technology: of flight, in panoramic lit­er­a­ture, 96–103; in literary totalities, 12–13, 14–15, 18–19; in tropes of possession, 18–19, 22, 41–42, 45–48, 53, 56; of writing, 116, 127–28, 133, 135–36, 139–40 the grotesque, 53–55, 56–57 Tihanov, Galin, 85–86, 105–7 Tiutchev, Fyodor: “Silentium,” 50–51 Tolstoy, Leo: on art as infection, 2, 59–60, 66–73, 76–77, 79–80; on art in unity, 10; depersonalization disorder of, 73; on dialectical unity, 64–66; on illness and inoculation, 60–64; on infection and imagination, 80–83; on social ills, 70, 72, 73–80

Tolstoy, Leo, works of: Anna Karenina, 23, 61–64, 69–72, 80–81, 82–83; Confession, 81, 82; The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 81–82; ­Family Happiness, 65–66; The Kreutzer Sonata, 72; “Lucerne,” 74–76; Master and Man, 81–82; Resurrection, 65, 79; Sevastopol stories, 80–81; “To the Clergy,” 70; War and Peace, 72–73; “What I Dreamed,” 68–69; What is Art?, 59–61, 66–68, 70–71, 72, 73–74, 76–77, 78–79 Toscano, Alberto: Cartographies of the Absolute, 111–12 totalitarianism: and literary totalities, 2–4, 6–7; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 15–16, 20, 120–21, 125–26, 127, 128, 134; and Nabokov’s persuasive language, 20, 142–44, 163; and panoramic perspectives, 97; in tropes of possession, 18–19, 45, 49, 53–55, 56–58 trade/trade networks, 6–10, 34–35, 52–53, 86–87, 91–92, 109–11. See also globalism/ global market economy transcendence, 51, 57–58, 74–76, 87, 96–97, 113, 148–50 transcription: and authority, 134–40; and per­for­mance, 129–33; synesthetic, 116–23, 129, 131–32; in tropes of possession, 47–48; and writing, 123–28 translation, 85, 92–93, 105, 106–7, 109–10, 193n117 transposition, 102–3, 105 transrationality. See beyonsense Trenin, Dmitri, 14 Tretiakov, Sergei, 97–98 Trotsky, Leon, 135–36; Lit­er­a­ture and Revolution, 5, 15, 52–53 Trubetskoi, Nikolai, 12–14, 107–8 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 15 Tynianov, Yuri, 109 tyranny/tyrannical structures: in literary totalities, 5, 6–7, 10–11; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 20, 123–28, 137–39; and Nabokov’s persuasive language, 20, 142, 143, 155, 163–64; in tropes of possession, 46, 50, 54–55, 56–58 Ukraine, Rus­sian invasion of, 169 universality/universalisms, 2–3, 10, 11–13, 15–16, 40–41, 45. See also language, universal Ursprache, 28–29, 93–94 utopianism: and commercial aesthetics, 143–44; in literary totalities, 2–4, 9, 10–11,

I n d e x 14–15; in Mandelstam’s orchestral meta­phors, 135–36; in Tolstoy’s meta­phors of infection, 60, 72, 74–75; in tropes of possession, 53, 57, 58; world lit­er­a­ture and universal language in, 84–85, 86–87, 91–93, 95–96, 97–98, 104, 108–9, 111–12 vaccination, 64–65, 70–71, 77–78. See also inoculation Vaingurt, Julia, 52–53, 98 Vertov, Dziga, 111–12 Veselovsky, Alexander, 8 Victory over the Sun, 96, 97–98, 101–2 Vladiv-­Glover, Slobodanka, 40 voice, 25–27, 31–32, 33–34, 129, 130–33, 150–51, 165–66 von Matthisson, Friedrich, 178n37 Vysheslavtseva, Sofia, 18 White, Duncan, 163 White, Frederick, 162–63 Williams, Linda, 150 world lit­er­a­ture: beyonsense in quest for, 87–96; and the global village, 109–14;

217

nomadism in, 103–9; panoramic perspective in, 96–103; in Rus­sian Futurism, 84–85, 86–87, 91, 92–93, 94–96, 103–6, 107, 108–9, 111–12; Soviet avant-­garde experiments with, 19–20, 84–85 World Lit­er­a­ture publishing ­house, 85, 92–93, 106–7 zaum language and poetry: and affective identification, 150; as alternative world lit­er­a­ture, 85, 86–87; in Formalism, 17–18, 103–9; and the global village, 112–14; as medium of totality, 17–18; nonsense syllables in, 51, 55–56; panoramic view in, 96–103; in Soviet narratives of world lit­er­a­ture, 85; transcription and per­for­mance of, 130–31; tropes of possession in, 23, 51, 53–54, 55–56; as universal language, 84–85, 87–96; zoological garden in, 94–95, 102–3. See also beyonsense; language, universal Zdanevich, Ilya, 112–14