Fanailova’s two female holy fools: before the liturgical moment

The article examines poems by E. Fanailova that depict the modern holy fool, drawing on French sources (Simone Weil) and Russian sources (Xenia of Petersburg). At the core of both poems is a literal inversion that mirrors the plot of the Book of Job: the discovery of the underside of speech through double negation in the case of Weil, or through the total allegory of God as the creator of text-texture-sewing in the case of Xenia. In both poems, the primary device is polyphony, with various characters’ voices, simultaneously incapable of negation. Holy foolishness is thus understood as the embedding of Job’s story in a liturgical context: Fanailova employs the technique of peeping and eavesdropping to create a reverse perspective on the liturgical institution of polyphony. The fool challenges conventional notions of appropriateness, including literary decorum. The critique of literary appropriateness, aligning in some respects with postmodern cultural criticism, introduces persistent stylizing strategies consistent with the narrative: from Mikhail Kuzmin’s legacy in the poem about Xenia to the theater of the absurd in the poem about Simone. This adopts a strategy of style separated from the female protagonist by one or two generations, enabling a positive stereoscopic model of culture. This model incorporates the principles of liturgical sequences, litany, or akathist into the poem. Thus, the poem about Xenia discerns the structural and compositional principles of the troparion and the synaxarion. Fanailova, using postmodernist polyphony, establishes a positive concept of the occurrence of sainthood in history.