Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature

by Jane Gary Harris (Editor)

Overview

The fifteen essays in this volume explore the extraordinary range and diversity of the autobiographical mode in twentieth-century Russian literature from various critical perspectives. They will whet the appetite of readers interested in penetrating beyond the canonical texts of Russian literature. The introduction focuses on the central issues and key problems of current autobiographical theory and practice in both the West and in the Soviet Union, while each essay treats an aspect of auto-biographical praxis in the context of an individual author's work and often in dialogue with another of the included writers. Examined here are first the experimental writings of the early years of the twentieth century—Rozanov, Remizov, and Bely; second, the unique autobiographical statements of the mid-1920s through the early 1940s—Mandelstam, Pasternak, Olesha, and Zoshchenko; and finally, the diverse and vital contemporary writings of the 1960s through the 1980s as exemplified not only by creative writers but also by scholars, by Soviet citizens as well as by emigrs—Trifonov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Lydia Ginzburg, Nabokov, Jakobson, Sinyavsky, and Limonov.

Originally published in 1990.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691609362
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University , #1050
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Read an Excerpt

Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature

---

By Jane Gary Harris

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06818-3

---

CHAPTER 1

Rozanov and Autobiography: The Case of Vasily Vasilievich

Anna Lisa Crone

Rozanov's Use of the Autobiographical Mode

In a recent discussion of modern autobiography Paul de Man wrote: "Empirically as well as theoretically, autobiography lends itself poorly to generic definition; each specific instance seems to be an exception to the norm." Nevertheless, Elizabeth Bruss in Autobiographical Acts puts forth some general guidelines for autobiography as a genre. Although she stipulates that these may sometimes be violated, she suggests that they provide a basis for generic definition. The essential aspects of her "rules" for autobiography that have relevance for Rozanov's use of the autobiographical mode follow:

Rule 1: The autobiographer is the source of the text's subject matter and structuring. He claims individual responsibility for its creation and ordering, and his existence is assumed to be a verifiable fact.

Rule 2: Information and events reported in connection with the autobiographer are supposed to have happened or to be true. No matter how difficult it may be to verify the events or attitudes mentioned, the claim for their truth is made.

Rule 3: Even if what is reported can be or has been discredited, the autobiographer purports or believes it to be true.

These rules, as we shall see, clearly exclude Rozanov's writings and his protagonist Vasily Vasilievich from the genre of autobiography. Yet Rozanov's relationship to that genre and his use of the autobiographical mode is extremely interesting; its various facets will be explored here.

Where Rousseau had his J. J., Rozanov has his V.V., the fictional character Rozanov fashioned from his "self." He bears most of the author's autobiographical, or seemingly autobiographical, data in his most personal and intimate works — Solitaria (Uedinennoe, 1911) and Fallen Leaves: Basketful One and Basketful Two (Opavshie list'ja. Korob pervyj and Korob vtoroj, 1913 — 1915), as well as The Apocalypse of Our Time (Apokalipsis nashego vremeni, 1917–1919).

In these works the reader is introduced to V.V. through the several literary masks or voices that Rozanov adopts and that I have described elsewhere as the confessor, the homebody, the buffon, and the gossip. There are at least four other voices — the prophet of doom, the mentor, the mystic, and the objective critic — whose discourse is more restrained and elevated than that of the down-to-earth V.V., whose "plain Russian" voice emerges in the crossfire of opinions, ideas, prejudices, and feelings dispersed throughout these works. The polyphonic exchange between the simpler voices of V.V. and the more exalted, intellectual ones introduces a cacophony into the total self portrayed. What is more, the elevated voices contain very little autobiographical material. The presence of this higher self makes it difficult to sense any unity in the first-person narrator in much the same way that it is difficult to grasp a sense of Michel, the self embedded in Montaigne's discussion of myriad topics in his Essais.

Solitaria and Fallen Leaves: Basketful One and Basketful Two constitute Rozanov's trilogy. His Apocalypse is often grouped with them as a kind of continuation in form and as a part of the work of the "late Rozanov." The massive amount of autobiographical material in these works is presented most often by a voice that I call the confessor. Moreover, it is usually conveyed in such a way as to seem spurious or contrived. Although the tone of the work is autobiographical, the reader suspects that this confession is pure fiction.

Paradoxically, Rozanov managed in these works to fulfill some of the important functions of modern autobiography, without actually practicing the genre. This is part of the reason why his late works are considered so significant and why they enjoyed such popularity in their day. (The other reason why these works are still studied is more strictly literary, and its tangential connection with autobiography will be considered in the second part of this essay.) In a sense, it might even be said that Rozanov was attempting not an autobiography of himself but an autobiography of literature.

Let us first address ourselves to the character V.V., who seems to possess many qualities of an autobiographer. His obsessive love for everything small, private, homey, and everyday (bytovoj) immediately strikes the reader. There is ample reason to believe that this characteristic was far less central to the empirical personality of Rozanov than it is to this character, although many readers have failed to differentiate between the two. The author chooses to present a character or persona to whom the average reader of New Times (Novoe vremja) — where Rozanov published several times a week — would be able to relate and in whom that reader would take an active interest. Thus, Rozanov lowers the level of his persona in order to raise the level of self-consciousness in the average Russian city dweller or, in general, any reader. He provides the average reader with an alternative to the unfamiliar models of behavior, modes of expression, and lifestyles encountered in "landowners' literature," a term applicable to many of the Russian classics. By emphasizing his own sense of alienation from the aristocracy, what he calls the social class difference (so-slovnaja raznitsa), V. V. expresses his sense of alienation from the authors and characters of many literary works of the nineteenth century as well as from the authors of scholarly and journalistic articles. This professed alienation from high literature — dubious indeed if one applies it to Rozanov the writer — is part and parcel of V.V.'s intimate relationship with the reader. V.V. mirrors the average reader, speaks his language, and thereby leads him to self-reflection, pushing him toward an evaluation of his own individuality. In other words, the reader very often sees himself in V.V., and to the extent that this is true Rozanov performs a service similar to that which Montaigne performed for his fellow aristocrats in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.

Of course, many readers preferred tales of the aristocracy, stories of heroes with lives, problems, language, and culture far removed from their own. Many had no desire to break with the heroic or aristocratic models of Russia's literary past. In his Essais Montaigne warns the reader who is not open to risk and change to put his book down before starting:

This is an honest book, reader. It warns you at the outset that in it I have set no goal but a domestic and a private one. I have no thought of serving you. ... If I had written a book to seek the world's favor, I should have bedecked myself better, and should present myself in a studied posture. I want to be seen here ... without pose or artifice. ... So reader, I am myself the matter of my book. You would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous a subject.

Rozanov follows suit in Solitaria:

Why do I write? For whom? Simply, I need to. Ah, dear reader, I have long since been writing "without a reader," simply because I like to. Just as I publish without thought for a reader. ... I simply like to. And I won't cry or get angry if a writer, who has bought the book by mistake, throws it in the trash basket. ... So there, reader, I don't stand on ceremony with you — and you don't have to stand on ceremony with me, either:

"Go to hell!"

"Go to hell yourself!"

Among the reading public of Rozanov's day were many who could not stomach Dostoevsky's fiction or Dostoevsky as he presented himself in The Diary of a Writer (Dnevnik pisatelja). "Dostoevshchina" is still a term for highly scandalous, even criminal life. These facts did not stop Rozanov from creating his V.V. in a Dostoevskian mold, as a Dostoevskian creature come alive and living in St. Petersburg. Few characters sound more like Dostoevsky's underground man than Rozanov's confessor:

It's amazing how I could always accommodate myself to lying. Lies never tormented me. And for a strange reason: "Just what business is it of yours [addressed to the reader or anyone else] to know exactly what I think?" "Just what obliges me to tell you my real thoughts?" My deepest subjectivity ... made it so that I was always living as if behind a curtain ... that could not be removed or torn. ... If at the same time, in the majority of cases (even always, it seems to me), I wrote sincerely and honestly, this was not out of love of truth which I not only lacked but "could not even imagine having" — but out of carelessness. To lie you have to "think something up," and "make ends fit together," "to construct something." It's much harder than just telling things as they are. And so I simply put things "as they are" down on paper, which is the essence of my veracity. ... At times it seems to me that I am the most honest and sincere of all writers. (Solitaria, 54)

Here we see the ambiguous V.V. in action: is he a sincerely honest man or a lazy liar? In Rozanov, as in the Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz pod-pol'ja) that so influenced him, there is a Bakhtinian backward glance (ogljadka) to the Confessions of Rousseau. Rozanov, who has said that he is perpetually "behind a curtain," undertakes to reveal himself by confessing while at the same time explicitly denying that he is confessing at all or that his trilogy contains any self-revelatory intentions.

Despite his disclaimers, it is quite possible that Rozanov turned to the more "private" communication with the reader found in Solitaria and Fallen Leaves for reasons not unlike those that led Rousseau to take up autobiographical confession at the end of his life. Like Rousseau, Rozanov was one of the most lonely and criticized of writers. His isolation became most acute around 1913, when he was expelled from the Religious-Philosophical Society for his highly idosyncratic position on the Beilis Case. Like Rousseau, Rozanov invited an avalanche of criticism with his extreme iconoclasm and his ideological changeability. Sinyavsky believes that Rozanov courted such criticism on purpose so as to be always ostracized from the various literary camps. Something similar can certainly be said of Rousseau. Yet another parallel lies in Rozanov's insistence on being so different from other men of letters that even those who respected his undeniable talent were forced to disapprove of him much of the time. Rozanov used his new form as a means of direct self-expression, as Rousseau had done in his Confessions — to explain himself both to contemporaries interested enough to listen and to posterity. Thus Rozanov in his trilogy and in The Apocalypse struck a more personal and intimate note with the reader than he ever had before (except in personal letters and necrologies). But the "personal" element in his work is only partially self-descriptive. The work expresses its personal effect not by rendering the author's own life and thoughts but by evoking an intense personal experience in the reader. With an effect similar to that of Dostoevsky's fiction, Rozanov leaves us somewhere between fiction and autobiography; it is certainly not autobiography as defined by Bruss's rules.

In the trilogy and The Apocalypse Rozanov wished to reveal to the literate Russian world of his day a complex, fluctuating, constantly changing and disintegrating, as well as reforming self-in-process. And he wanted to pass off this character, more complex even than Dostoevsky's underground man, as his own self, as the author of many notorious and brilliant articles and books published under the names Rozanov, Varvarin, and other pseudonyms. With these objectives in mind, it is no wonder that he made recourse to spiritual and confessional autobiography and to apology. Indeed, there are many pages in Rozanov's late works that would fit perfectly into a genuine autobiography. For example, Rozanov's appeal to the Jews to forgive him for all he wrote against them (The Apocalypse) contains elements of both confession and apology; his "First Love" could be found in a confessional work; while the numerous tales recounting religious experience and faith have caused his works to be compared to Pascal's Pensées and Awakum's Autobiography (Zhitie protapopa Awakuma). In Rozanov such passages always break off suddenly or abruptly, however, being interrupted just as the reader is about to settle into them.

The frankness of such passages, as is so often the case with autobiography, is suspect. The honesty and sincerity of Rousseau, Augustine, Montaigne, and Cellini — of almost all autobiographers — have been impugned. Yet in Rozanov there is another problem: the reader must question whether Rozanov had any intention of being or even of appearing to be honest or sincere. Any attentive reader senses that Rozanov lies with as little effort and compunction as he tells truths and that there is no way of distinguishing truth from falsehood, fact from fiction, in his works. It may be that V. V. lies as unabashedly as that most endearing of literary liars, General Ivolgin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot (Idiot). This embroils the reader in yet another paradox: there may be nothing more honest for the inveterate liar to do in a self-revelatory work than to display amply his own brand of lying. Such a view assumes that the specific nature and content of a man's lies contain important information about him. Of course, there remains the residual possibility that Rozanov, like Ivolgin, may sometimes tell the truth inadvertently or that he may do so out of laziness, for the sake of variety, or by deliberate design. In the latter cases, even though he tells the truth, the reader's confidence in the author's veracity has been so shaken that he will not receive the message as true.

This relativizing of truth and falsehood, the ambiguity that makes it impossible to distinguish between the two in apparently autobiographical statements, led Doestoevsky to point out repeatedly in The Idiot that the truth is often much less believable than lies and inventions.

In order to read Rozanov's trilogy without extreme frustration, the reader must relegate questions of truth and falsehood to a marginal or even irrelevant status. This serves two purposes. First, it places a shadow over the entire genre of autobiography and memoir. By accusing the autobiographer of lying, Rozanov seems to be unmasking the genre's past practitioners as liars. For example, one negative reference to Rousseau's most awful confession — that he left several of his illegitimate children on the stairs of a state-run orphange — is consonant with the desire to satirize earlier autobiography and Rousseau in particular. The material about Tolstoy as a man is likewise censorious. Rozanov also echoes the question Heine raised in connection with Rousseau as to whether the truth can be known or told, even when the human subject intends to tell the truth and sincerely believes that he is doing so. The underground man, the clearest model for Rozanov's confessor, directly cites Heine's view. All this skepticism and relativism in modern autobiography goes back to Montaigne's What do I know? ("Que sçay-je?"). Indeed, in the very variation of voices in his late works Rozanov presents a self unsure and ignorant of its own contents, its nature, its limits, and its future. Often voices speak out in him the presence of which he is unaware:

Once I was standing in Vvedensky Church with my three-year-old Tanya. ... There was no service, but the church was never locked. ... I liked to come there with Tanya who was thin and especially graceful. ... We feared she might have meningitis like our first child and that she might not "make it." And there we stood; it was silent — silent. ... Marvelous ... when suddenly it was as if a voice whispered: "You don't belong here. Why have you come? To whom? No one expected you. And don't go on thinking that you've done something "right," and "comme il faut," coming here together as' 'father and daughter." ... When I heard this voice, perhaps my very own voice, but formulating this thought for the first time [italics mine], without preparation or warning, as something "sudden," "unexpected," "from somewhere." (Fallen Leaves, 2: 260)

This passage gives the impression that Rozanov is intoning voices de profundis, from a deeper level of self, discovering himself in the process of writing. Apparently at least eight personae, each with its own characteristic tone, style, and world view, battle for dominance in the pages of Rozanov's last four works. Some betray an awareness of the others; some are oblivious to the several contending selves. This dynamic form conveys V.V. in the process of grasping for a sense of self, for a suitable vehicle for self-expression, yet the essential self ever eludes the comprehension of a single voice that attempts to define or impose order on it.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature by Jane Gary Harris. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• Acknowledgments, pg. xi
• INTRODUCTION. Diversity of Discourse: Autobiographical Statements in Theory and Praxis, pg. 1
• CHAPTER 1. Rozanov and Autobiography: The Case of Vasily Vasilievich, pg. 36
• CHAPTER 2. Alexey Remizov’s Later Autobiographical Prose, pg. 52
• CHAPTER 3. Andrey Bely’s Memories of Fiction, pg. 66
• CHAPTER 4. Autobiography and History: Osip Mandelstam’s Noise of Time, pg. 99
• CHAPTER 5. Boris Pasternak’s Safe Conduct, pg. 114
• CHAPTER 6. The Imagination of Failure: Fiction and Autobiography in the Work of Yury Olesha, pg. 123
• CHAPTER 9 Yury Trifonov’s The House on the Embankment. Fiction or Autobiography?, pg. 172
• CHAPTER 10. The Rhetoric of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, pg. 193
• CHAPTER 11. Lydia Ginzburg and the Fluidity of Genre, pg. 207
• CHAPTER 12. Roman Jakobson: The Autobiography of a Scholar, pg. 217
• CHAPTER 13. In Search of the Right Milieu: Eduard Limonov’s Kharkov Cycle, pg. 227
• CHAPTER 14. Literary Selves: The Tertz-Sinyavsky Dialogue, pg. 238
• Select Bibliography, pg. 261
• Index, pg. 279
• Studies of the Harriman Institute, pg. 288