This article discusses the reconstitution of self-identity after the crisis of the First World War and the Revolution in ego-documents, which marks a fracture in the perception of the interlocutor. As the correspondence of Zinaida Gippius and Vladimir Zlobin demonstrates, the construction of one's identity becomes inseparable from the reconstruction of one's interlocutors' identity. An early stage of this recently fully published correspondence suggests how a complex relationship between interlocutors concerned with each other was forged. Gippius constructs her own and her interlocutor's autonomy through the use of certain speech markers. She engages Zlobin in a game where feeling, will, and the decision to change life turn out to be variables in a larger life-building project. This game is compounded by a time of deep political change, when some of Zlobin's hopes and aspirations needed adjustment. Gippius sees herself as a mentor to her interlocutor, but she also forms a special erotic tension that turns the correspondence into a novel with its dramatic and paradoxical character. The article explores the various speech means by which Gippius constructs the complex self-identity instilled in her interlocutor. The paradoxes of the correspondence are explained with the help of models of social masks: the mask implies public speech behavior, but also the topography of inner life, the construction of identity based on the topics of inner experiences. Therefore, the actions of the interlocutors are not a correction of someone else's public behavior, but a work with someone else's topics through their own, with the particularities of inner experiences and inner self-determination in a challenging era. Within the epistolary novel, a new cartography of inner life is developed, which is incorporated into the autobiographical myths of the correspondents.

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“Lyric poetry... under suspicion”: vicissitudes of “self-expression” in the 1950's

Lapushin Radislav

Статья научная

The essay traces the origins of the “poetic renaissance” of the Thaw, namely, the 1953-1954 discussion on lyric poetry and poetry’s reappearance in literary periodicals during that time. Initiated by Ol’ga Berggol’ts’s article “Conversation on Lyric Poetry,” the discussion revolved around such concepts as “self-expression,” lyrical persona, and poetry’s right to express the whole spectrum of human emotions. The essay sheds light on the role that the discussion played during this period and its contributions to the development of “Soviet interiority” at large.

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“Poem-paintings” by V. Kamensky: performative gesture and its material embodiment

Shvets A.V.

Статья научная

The paper focuses on the poem-paintings (“stikhokartiny”) by V. Kamensky, verbo-visual texts published in his experimental book “Tango with Cows” (1915). Given that the poems were seen as located halfway between literature and painting, the author tries to account for the hybrid character of the poems by placing them in a wider communicative and aesthetic context. One of the contexts to be taken into consideration is the visual arts background, namely, artistic exhibitions that became a site of meeting for most Futurist poets. Besides providing futurists with publishing and financial resources, visual arts unions and groups exerted conceptual influence on the artists suggesting a new aesthetic orientation. That orientation could be described as stressing the pragmatic dimension of the text over its semantics, choosing an act produced by the words over their literary meaning. Elaborating on that artistic choice, the paper addresses scandal as a PR strategy and asserts that this strategy was promoted by the means of gesture as a device. A few examples and testimonies from Futurist practices are examined as the body of evidence. Then the paper transitions to arguing that gesture as a device for generating an overall pragmatic effect of shock, scandal etc. could be recreated virtually, by material properties of the book. A few examples of Futurist productions are called for to prove the point. Then the paper provides a thorough analysis of one of ferroconcrete poems.

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“That, when translated incorrectly, was saying something like this”: Victorian context and intertext in the works of Juan Benet

Bazhenova-sorokina A.D.

Статья научная

The article analyzes Juan Benet’s essays on Victorian literature, short stories “De lejos”, “Una linea incompleta” and “Viator” and his non-fiction book “Londres victoriano” in which the Spanish writer addresses 19th century Anglo-Saxon writers from Charles Dickens to Joseph Conrad. Benet is mostly known as an author who brought the discourse of European and American modernism to Spanish literature and as the creator of the Spanish new novel, who consciously renounced Spanish realism of both 19th and 20th century. However, his standing as a postmodernist writer is often debated, as the neomythologism and complex narrative structure of his novels are more often associated with American and European modernist landmarks. Proustian, Joycean and Faulknerian heritage of Benet is widely studied, while his connection to Victorian literature stays largely overlooked. Meanwhile, in his essays as well as in his short fiction, the author addresses his favourite 19th century writers, and in short stories he establishes intertextual dialogue with many of them, producing some of his greater postmodernist works. It demonstrates that pastiche, parody and allusions to Victorian discourse in his work are examples of Benet’s postmodernist prose, only comparable epistemologically to his novel “En el estado”. Therein, intertextuality serves a goal that is undoubtedly postmodernist - that of showing the textual, fictional nature of narrated events, establishing an ironic dialogue with the reader and revealing the nature of the narrator as an entity that creates an illusion of reality rather than describing it, and deconstructing the author’s own narrative practices.

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