Russian anarchist text in the novel ‘The lime works’ by Thomas Bernhard: reception strategies

The paper examines the reception of Russian anarchist text by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), considered through the example of Memoirs of a Revolutionist by Peter Kropotkin (1899). Bernhard read this text while working on the novel The Limе Works (Das Kalkwerk, 1970). In the article, intertextual relationships between this novel and Kropotkin’s memoirs are traced, anarchist ideas in the early and late works by Bernhard are revealed, and biographical analogies (the writer’s grandfather, Johannes Freimbichler vs. Peter Kropotkin) are drawn. The study concludes: 1) anarchism was perceived by Bernhard as philosophy of nihilism, i. e. rebellion against the ‘fathers’, ‘lies’ of institutions, unproductive ‘administrative machinery’ (Kropotkin); 2) nihilistic views of Bernhard developed in the context of the German and Austrian ‘language criticism’; 3) Kropotkin’s idea of liberating people from the yoke of the state is appropriated by an egocentric hero who is not capable of cooperating with people; 4) Memoirs of a Revolutionist describe the experience of imprisoning Kropotkin in the Peter and Paul Fortress, while Bernhard artificially models the isolation of the protagonist Conrad from the world in a metaphorical prison of language / writing; 5) unlike the Bernhard’s hero, who sets himself an ‘absolute’ goal (the knowledge of the immanent essence of hearing), the autobiographical hero of Memoirs of a Revolutionist solves practical problems related to the transformation of social and political reality. Thus, Kropotkin’s anarcho-communism is deconstructed by Bernhard in a neo-romantic way, is deprived of political programmability, and is built into a modernist aesthetic program of the absolute language and absolute text. The metaphor ‘lime works’ is semantized as space of creation, ‘anarchic’ freedom and, at the same time, ascetic martyrdom, crime, (self)destruction.