Plotless Literature Vasily Rozanov
The Russian Formalists were a group of avant-garde Russian literary theorists who emerged in the decade prior to World War I and the Russian Revolution. The term “formalism,” then and now, has been a contested one, both aesthetically and politically. The autonomous and claustrophic (closed) formalism championed by the New Critics was attacked, for both aesthetic and cultural reasons, by American avant-garde poetry from the 1950s—with Charles Olson’s projective verse, Robert Duncan’s open field composition, Denise Levertov’s organic form, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s political poetry. At the same time, many cultural studies critics from the 1970s on have seen literary form and “formalism” as separating art and society. However, concepts like Shklovsky’s ostranenie (defamiliarization), the “semantic shift,” “foregrounding” or “laying bare of the device,” and the motivation of art by byt (everyday life) bridge the gap between art and society and have widely influenced Left aesthetics and ideology critique. In publishing Shklovsky’s “Plotless Literature” (in Richard Sheldon’s exemplary translation) as the opening essay of Poetics Journal, we meant not only to revive interest in the Formalists’ work but also to show how attention to radical form is motivated by political and social concerns. In his essay on the forgotten dilettante Vasily Rozanov, Shklovsky reveals the constructive potential of nonnarrative form, in its refusal of generic expectations, as a new form of literaturnost (literariness).
I
Wilhelm Meister contains a section entitled “The Confession of a Beautiful Soul.” The heroine of this confession says that she used to view the beauty of a work of art in the same way that people view the beauty of the typeface in a book: “It’s nice to have a beautifully printed book, but who reads a book just because it’s beautifully printed?”
Both she and Goethe knew that people who speak in that fashion understand nothing about art. And yet that attitude is as prevalent among contemporary art critics as slant eyes in a Chinaman.
That view may have become ridiculous in music and provincial in the visual arts, but it is still rampant in literature.
But that contemporary theoretician who concludes from his examination of a work of literature that its so-called form is a sort of veil that must be pierced, jumps over the horse that he is trying to mount.
A work of literature is pure form; it is not a thing and not material, but a relation between materials. And like each and every relation, it is a relation of zero dimensionality. Consequently, the scope of the work, the arithmetic value of its numerator or denominator, is inconsequential: what matters is the relation between them. All works—whether humorous or tragic, universal or parochial—and all juxtapositions, whether of world to world or cat to rock, are equivalent.
That is precisely why art is benign, self-contained, and unassuming. The history of literature moves forward along a broken, staccato line. If we line up all the literary saints canonized in Russia between the seventeenth and the twentieth century, the line that results will not enable us to trace the history of how literary forms developed. What Pushkin wrote about Derzhavin is not acute and not true. Nekrasov clearly does not derive from the Pushkin tradition. Among the prose writers, Tolstoy just as clearly derives neither from Turgenev nor from Gogol, and Chekhov does not derive from Tolstoy. These gaps are not due to the chronological distances between the designated names.
No, the fact of the matter is that in the shift of literary schools, the line of succession goes not from father to son but from uncle to nephew. Let us begin by developing the formula. In each literary epoch, there exists not one but several literary schools. They exist in literature simultaneously, one of them constituting its canonized apex. The others exist in uncanonized form, subliminally, as, for example, in Pushkin’s time, the Derzhavin tradition existed in the poetry of Kuchelbecker and Griboedov simultaneously with the tradition of Russian vaudeville verse, and with a set of other traditions, such as, for example, the pure tradition of the adventure novel in Bulgarin’s work.
The Pushkin tradition did not continue after him—another example of the phenomenon whereby geniuses fail to produce exceptionally gifted children.
Meanwhile, though, new forms come into being on the lower stratum, where they coexist with the old art forms that are no longer sensed. Elements once charged with artistic power become subservient and inert. The recessive strain supersedes the dominant and the vaudeville writer Belopyatkin becomes Nekrasov (the work of Osip Brik); Tolstoy, the direct heir of the eighteenth century, creates a new novel (Boris Eikhenbaum); Blok canonizes the themes and tempos of the “gypsy ballad”; and Chekhov introduces the “Alarm Clock” into Russian literature. Dostoevsky elevates the devices of the dime novel to a literary norm. Every new literary school is a revolution, something like the appearance of a new class.
But that, of course, is only an analogy. The vanquished “line” is not annihilated; it does not cease to exist. It is merely toppled from the summit; it sinks into obscurity but can be restored, so it remains a perpetual pretender to the throne. Actually, however, all this is complicated by the fact that the new hegemony is usually not a pure recapitulation of a prior form: it is adulterated by traits from other, lesser schools and even by traits inherited from its predecessors on the throne, now reduced to a subservient role.
Now let us shift to Rozanov for some new digressions.
In this commentary on Rozanov, I have confined myself to his last three books: Solitaria and Fallen Leaves (Baskets One and Two).
Needless to say, these books, which are intimate to an insulting degree, reflect the soul of the author. But I will try to demonstrate that the soul of a work of literature is none other than its structure, its form. According to my formula, “A work of literature does not exceed the sum of its stylistic devices.” In the words of Rozanov (Fallen Leaves, Basket One, 170):
Everyone imagines that the soul is a being. But suppose it’s music?
And people look for its “properties” (the properties of an object). But suppose it has only structure? (At morning coffee)
A work of art has a soul tantamount to structure, to the geometric relation between solids. The selection of the material for a work of art is also a matter of formal signs. The quantities chosen are significant and palpable. Each epoch has its own Index, its list of themes forbidden because of their obsolescence. Tolstoy, for example, put into effect such an Index when he forbade such topics as the romantic Caucasus and moonlight.
The foregoing is a typical prohibition of “romantic themes.” In Chekhov we see something else. In his early piece, “What Is Most Frequently Encountered in Novels, Tales, etc.,” he enumerated some clichés:
A rich uncle, liberal or conservative, depending on the circumstances. His exhortations are not as useful to the hero as his death.
An aunt in Tambov.
A doctor with a concerned face offering hope during a crisis; he frequently has a bald spot and a cane with a knob.
Dachas in the suburbs and a mortgaged estate in the south.
As you see, here the prohibition is imposed on several typical “real-life” situations. This prohibition is imposed not because there are no longer any doctors who declare that the crisis has passed, but because that situation has already become a cliché. It is, however, possible to renew the cliché by emphasizing its conventionality. That approach—playing with banality—can work well, but only on rare occasions. Here’s an example (Heine):
Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne,
Die liebt’ ich einst alle in Liebeswonne.
[Further on, he plays with rhymes: Kleine—Feine—Reine—Eine = krov—lyubov, radost—mladost.]
But forbidden themes continue to exist outside the realm of canonized literature, just as the erotic anecdote exists now and has always existed, or as there exist in the psyche suppressed desires that occasionally emerge in dreams, sometimes to the surprise of the afflicted. The theme of ultimate “domesticity”—the domestic attitude toward things, marital double-bedded love—has not risen, or almost never risen, to the “high society” of literature, but it has existed, for example, in letters. Tolstoy writes his wife:
I kiss you in the nursery, behind the screens, in your gray housecoat. (10 November 1864)
Elsewhere:
So Seryozha is putting his face on the linoleum and crying “Aha”? That I’ll have to see. You surprised me so when you explained that you are sleeping on the floor; but Lyubov Aleksandra said that’s how she’s sleeping, too, and then I understood. I like it and I don’t like it when you imitate her. I would have wished that you might be just as innately good as she.
In three days’ time, I’ll be standing on that linoleum in the nursery and embracing you, my fleet, slender, dear wife. (10 December 1864)
But time passed; the Tolstoyan material and device faded and became clichés. Being a genius, Tolstoy had no heirs. So, in the absence of a declaration or a promulgation of a new list of forbidden themes, his work went into the stockpile. What happened then is what happens in married life, according to Rozanov; when a man and wife cease to feel that they are two disparate beings:
The cogs (disparity) wear down, rub smooth, cease to mesh. And the “shaft” grinds to a stop, “work” has stopped: because the machine, as a balance and harmony of “opposites,” has disappeared.
That love, having died a natural death, will never regenerate. That is why, before love ends (once and for all), infidelities flare as love’s final hope; nothing so alienates (creates that disparity between) lovers as infidelity. The last remaining cog, not quite rubbed smooth, increases in size and the corresponding cog meshes with it. (Fallen Leaves, Basket One, 136–37)
In literature, that type of infidelity is seen in the succession of literary schools.
It is common knowledge that the greatest works of literature (I’m speaking now only of prose) do not fit within the framework of a specific genre. It is difficult to say exactly what Dead Souls is, difficult to assign this work to a specific genre. Tolstoy’s War and Peace, as well as Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with their almost complete lack of a central plot (frame novella), can be called novels only because they violate the laws of the novel. Even a relatively pure genre such as “neo-classical tragedy” makes sense only in terms of a canon that is itself not always a model of clarity. But the canon of the novel genre, perhaps more than any other, lends itself to multiple parody and modification.
True to the canon of the eighteenth-century novel, I am permitting myself a digression.
Apropos of digressions. In Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, the description of the brawl is followed by an interpolated chapter (book 3, chapter 10). That chapter is called “A discourse between the poet and the player,” and the title continues with the following words—“of no other use in this history but to divert the reader.”
Digressions generally have three functions. Their first function is to permit the introduction of new material into the novel. Thus, the speeches of Don Quixote permitted Cervantes to introduce into his novels a wide variety of critical and philosophical material. The second function of digressions is much more significant, that is, to retard, or brake, the action. That device is widely used by Sterne. The essence of the device in Sterne is that one plot motif is elaborated by the introduction of a new theme (in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for example, that is how the story of the hero’s aunt and her coachman is introduced).
Playing with the reader’s impatience, Sterne keeps reminding him of the stranded hero, but does not return to the hero after the digression; the reminder serves only to whet the reader’s expectation.
In a novel with parallel plots, such as Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or Dostoevsky’s novels, an action from one plot interrupts another, where it functions as a digression.
The third function is to create a contrast. This is what Fielding says about it:
And here we shall of necessity be led to open a new vein of knowledge which, if it hath been discovered, hath not to our remembrance been wrought on by any ancient or modern writer. This vein is no other than that of contrast, which runs through all the works of the Creation and may probably have a large share in constituting in us the idea of all beauty, as well natural as artificial; for what demonstrates the beauty and excellence of anything but its reverse? Thus the beauty of day and that of summer is set off by the horrors of night and winter. And, I believe, if it was possible for a man to have seen only the two former, he would have a very imperfect idea of their beauty. (Tom Jones, book 5, chapter 1)
I believe that the previous quotation sufficiently clarifies the third function of digressions—to create contrasts.
When Heine was assembling his Reisebilder, he deliberately tampered with the order of the chapters in order to create such a sensation of contrast.
II
Back to Rozanov.
The three books being analyzed are a brand-new genre, an infidelity of extraordinary proportions. Into these books have gone entire newspaper articles, broken into interlocking segments, and these are interspersed with Rozanov’s biography, scenes from his life, snapshots, etc.
These books are not utterly formless, since we see in their structure a certain continuity of device.
These books strike me as a new genre, one most closely related to the parody novel, with a rudimentary central plot and no comic coloration.
Rozanov’s book was a heroic attempt to get away from literature, to “declare himself without words, without form,” and the book worked out beautifully because it created a new literature, a new form.
Rozanov introduced into literature new, “kitchen” themes. Family themes had been introduced before. Charlotta slicing bread in Werther was for that time a revolutionary phenomenon, as was the name Tatyana in Evgeny Onegin; but family humdrum—the quilt, the kitchen and its smell (with no satiric overtones)—had not existed in literature.
Sometimes Rozanov introduced these themes in unadulterated form, as in the following series of fragments:
This kitchen ledger of mine is worth every bit as much as Turgenev’s Letters to Madame Viardot. Though something else, it is the same axis of the world and, as a matter of fact, the same poetry.
What effort! frugality! fear of exceeding the “limit”! and—satisfaction when the “first of the month” arrives and the books balance. (Fallen Leaves, Basket One, 129)
Elsewhere:
I love tea. I love putting a tiny patch on my cigarette (where it’s torn). I love my wife, my garden (at the dacha). (Fallen Leaves, Basket One, 175)
Sometimes these themes are motivated by a sweet memory:
… I still save cigarette butts. Not always, mind you, but certainly if half the cigarette is left. Or even less. “Everything must be utilized” (the scraps of tobacco must be used over again).
Yet I make 12,000 rubles a year and certainly don’t need all that. Why then?
A habitual messiness of hands (childhood) … and even, believe it or not, the sweet memory of my childhood years.
Why do I love my childhood so? My tormented and sullied childhood. (Fallen Leaves, Basket Two, 265)
Among the original things in these books is a new image of the poet:
Goggle-eyed and slobbery—that’s me.
Unattractive?
Can’t be helped. (Fallen Leaves, Basket Two, 220)
My soul is compounded of dirt, tenderness, and sadness.
Or:
Some goldfish are “playing in the sun,” but they are housed in an aquarium full of slushy manure.
And they don’t suffocate there. Quite the contrary … Improbable. And yet—true. (Solitaria, 52)
Rozanov introduced new themes. Why? Not because he was a singular person, though he was a genius, i.e., singular, but because the laws governing the dialectical self-generation of new forms and the attraction of new materials had, after the death of the old forms, left a vacuum. The soul of the artist sought new themes.
Rozanov found a theme. A whole category of themes, the themes of everyday existence and the family.
Things stage periodic rebellions. In Leskov, it was the rebellion of the “great, mighty, truthful” and every other Russian language, exaggerated and mannered—the language of shopkeepers and poor relatives. Rozanov’s rebellion was more extensive. The things surrounding him demanded halos. Rozanov gave them halos and glorification:
It is certainly without precedent and its repetition is unthinkable in the universe—at the very moment when tears were flowing and my soul was bursting, I sensed unmistakably the presence of a listener and felt that those tears were flowing literarily, musically “even if I were to write them down” and for that reason alone I wrote down: (Solitaria: little girl at the railroad station, ventilator). (Fallen Leaves, Basket Two, 220)
Here are the two passages mentioned by Rozanov in the parentheses:
Fail to give something and you feel heartsick. Even if you fail to give a present. (A little girl at the railroad station, Kiev, whom I wanted to give a pencil, but hesitated, and she left with her grandmother.)
But the little girl returned and I gave her the pencil. She had never seen one and I could hardly explain what sort of “miracle” it was. How fine for her and me. (Solitaria, 60)
The ventilator in the corridor hums distractingly, but not offensively: I started weeping (almost): “If only for the purpose of listening to that ventilator, I want to go on living, but, above all, my friend must live.” Then came the thought: “Won’t she (my friend) hear that ventilator in the other world?” And a craving for immortality so gripped me by the hair that I almost sank to the floor. (Solitaria, 72)
The very concreteness of terror in Rozanov is a literary device.
To show how deliberately Rozanov uses “domesticity” as a literary device, I want to call attention to one typographic detail of his books. You surely remember the family snapshots inserted into both Baskets of his Fallen Leaves. Those snapshots make a strange, unusual impression. If you scrutinize them, the reason for that impression will become clear: the snapshots have been printed with no border and not in the way that illustrations in books are usually printed. The gray background of the snapshots goes right to the edge of the page. There is no caption and no outline whatsoever. All this, taken together, creates the impression of something that is not an illustration in a book, but a genuine photograph that has been glued or merely stuck into the book. The deliberate nature of this type of reproduction is proved by the fact that only certain family photographs are reproduced in that way; the illustrations of less importance are printed in the usual way, with margins retained.
True, the margins are retained on the photograph of the writer’s children, but the outline is curious:
Mama and Tanya (standing by her knees) in the garden on Pavlovskaya Street in St. Petersburg (the Petersburg Side of town). Next to them is the Nesvetevich boy, a neighbor. The Efimov house, No. 2.
Here Rozanov indicates the address with all the exactitude of a policeman and he stresses the documentary nature of the illustration, which is also a deliberate stylistic device.
My words about Rozanov’s “domesticity” should in no sense be understood to mean that he has made a confession and bared his soul. No, he adopted the confessional tone as a device. […]
IV
Now I will try to sketch briefly the plot pattern of Solitaria and the two Baskets of Fallen Leaves.
Several themes are presented, the most important being: 1) the friend (his wife), 2) cosmic sex, 3) newspaper accounts of the opposition and the revolution, 4) literature, with full-fledged articles on Gogol, 5) biography, 6) positivism, 7) the Jews, 8) a sizable interpolated swatch of letters, and various others.
Such a profusion of themes is not unique. We are familiar with novels that have quadruple and quintuple plots; the very device of violating the plot by means of interpolated themes that interlock was used by Sterne, who also worked with no fewer themes.
Of the three books, Solitaria is the one that can be considered an independent entity.
The interpolation of new themes is handled in the following way. We are presented with a fragment of some complete situation, but no explanation is given for its appearance and we do not understand what we see; then comes the elaboration—along the lines of first the riddle, then the solution. Extremely characteristic is the theme of the “friend” (about Rozanov’s wife). First comes simply a reference (22), then (35) various allusions lead us into the heart of the matter. We are given an individual in bits and pieces that seem to refer to someone we already know, but only much later do the fragments jell (67–71), at which point we have a coherent biography of Rozanov’s wife, which can be integrated by extracting all the remarks about her and grouping them under the rubric of “the wife.” The unfortunate diagnosis by Bekhterev also appears for the first time as a simple reference to Doctor Karpinsky’s name:
“Why didn’t I call in Karpinsky?”
“Why didn’t I call in Karpinsky?”
“Why didn’t I call in Karpinsky?” (Fallen Leaves, Basket One, 177)
And only afterward do we get an explanation, with the story of the incorrect diagnosis which failed to take into account the “reflex of the pupils” (180). The same with “Byzov.” At first only his name is given (Basket One, 140), then he is elaborated into an image. In this way, Rozanov makes sure that a new theme does not appear to us out of the blue, as in a collection of aphorisms; instead, he prepares a thread and the character or situation is wound in and out of the entire plot.
These interlocking themes, set against each other, are the threads that, alternately appearing and disappearing, create the plot fabric of the work. Cervantes elaborates the second part of Don Quixote by using the names of people mentioned in the first part—for instance, the Moor Ricote, Sancho Panza’s neighbor.
Several of the themes contain a curious conglomeration of fragments; for example, out of the random comments on literature, one can piece together an elaborate essay on Gogol. In addition to numerous fragments, there is a full-fledged article (Basket One, 118–20); similarly, at the end of the second Basket, some contradictory allusions have been distilled by Rozanov into an entire article. It starts out in the tone of a newspaper and then shifts abruptly to the cosmic tone of the fragment about the breasts of the world, which ends the book.
Generally, Rozanov’s fragments succeed one another according to the following principle: contradiction of themes and contradiction of planes; i.e., the “real” plane gives way to the cosmic plane; for example, the wife theme gives way to the Apis theme.
So we see that Rozanov’s three books have a certain structural unity, that they are novels with the connective motivating material excised. For example, one fairly common device in novels is the interpolation of poems, as we see in Cervantes, in The Arabian Nights, in Ann Radcliffe, and, to some extent, in Maksim Gorky. These poems are a distinct material that exists in some sort of relation to the prose of the work. Various motivations are used for their interpolation—either they are presented as epigraphs or they are presented as the product of the characters, whether major or minor. The latter constitutes plot motivation, while the former involves laying bare the device. But in both cases, the device is essentially the same. We know, for example, that Pushkin’s “Prophet” or “Once There Lived a Poor Knight” could just as easily have been presented as epigraphs for the individual chapters of Dostoevsky’s Idiot, instead of being read by the characters within the work itself. In Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, the epigraphs are taken from the speeches of the main character. In Vladimir Solovyov’s “Three Conversations,” the point is made that the epigraph on Pan-Mongolianism has been written by the author (this information is presented via the lady’s question and the gentlemen’s answer).
Likewise, the kinship used as a device to connect characters is sometimes far-fetched and poorly grounded, as in the case of Werther’s father in The Sorrows of Young Werther or Mignon’s parents in Wilhelm Meister, where kinship merely serves to motivate structural elements of the work and to create compositional juxtapositions. Sometimes the motivation is strained (a dream); sometimes it’s not serious. Motivation by dream is typical of Remizov; in Hoffman’s Kater Murr, shifts in plot and the confusion of the cat’s story of a cat with the man’s story are motivated by the fact that the cat was writing on his master’s papers.
Solitaria and the Baskets can therefore be characterized as novels devoid of motivation.
Thus in the thematic sphere, these novels are distinguished by the canonization of new themes; in the structural sphere, by the laying bare of the device. […]
VI
An image/trope comes into being when something is given an uncommon designation, i.e., when something is called by an unusual name. The purpose of this device is to shift the thing into a new semantic set, a set containing conceptions of a different order—for example, stars = eyes, girl = gray duck; in addition, the image is usually elaborated by describing the thing that has been substituted.
One can compare the image with the syncretic epithet, i.e., the epithet that defines auditory sensations in terms of visual and vice versa. For example, “crimson chime” or “brilliant sounds.” This device is often encountered in the Romantics.
Here the auditory representations are mixed with the visual and it seems to me that what we have here is not confusion, but the device of shifting something into a new set—in short, removing it from its former category. It is interesting to examine Rozanov’s images from that point of view.
This is how Rozanov realizes that phenomenon, citing the words of Shperk:
“Children differ from us in that they perceive everything with a power of realism completely inaccessible to adults. For us, a ‘chair’ is a detail of ‘furniture.’ But a child does not know the category ‘furniture’ and a ‘chair’ to him is enormous and alive in a way that it cannot be for us. For that reason, children enjoy the world much more than we.” (Solitaria, 64)
That is the kind of work produced by a writer who destroys the category, wrenching the chair from its place with the furniture. Here is an absolutely staggering example:
Sex is a mountain of lights: a high, high mountain from which lights radiate. Its rays cover the entire earth, imbuing it all with a new, utterly noble meaning.
Believe that mountain. There it stands on its four wooden legs (iron and hard metal are not allowed here, just as “wounding” nails are not allowed).
I have seen. I bear witness. And I will stand behind what I have seen. (Fallen Leaves, Basket One, 159)
Here is how that image is constructed. First comes the “elevated,” glorifying section—the thing is called a “mountain of lights” and is perceived as a world center, as something Biblical. It is shifted into the set of cosmic concepts.
Then comes a paraphrase and we recognize the thing. The words about iron make the thing still more concrete and, at the same time, transform a technical detail into a “symbolic” detail. The last section of the fragment is remarkable in that, although the thing has been “recognized,” the tone does not change, but continues to be sustained at the height of prophecy. The recognized thing remains in the elevated set. That is one of the most elaborate applications of the device image/paraphrase.
In addition to its elevating function, paraphrase/estrangement can also have a reductive function, which is typical of the parodic style in all its varieties, including the Imagists. Here is one of Rozanov’s similes, where abstinence is equated with constipation:
With inexpressible tears, my intent is to convey it all simply and crudely, diminishing something that is venerated, though in the sense of pressure, the comparison is accurate.
Your mouth is overflowing with saliva, but you must not spit. You might hit some monks.
A man eats for days, weeks, months on end, but he must not “excuse himself,” he must keep it all inside himself….
He drinks, keeps drinking—but once again he must not “excuse himself …”
That is virginity.
I’m suffocating. I’m bursting at the seams.
“Forbidden.” That is monasticism. (Fallen Leaves, Basket One, 100)
Or:
Flexible matter envelopes the inflexible thing, however larger the latter may seem. Matter is always “larger” …
A boa constrictor the width of an arm, or at most the size of a leg at the knee, swallows a kid goat.
That is the basis of many strange phenomena. The appetite of boa constrictors, as well as nanny goats.
Certainly, it is somewhat painful, a tight squeeze, but it works….
It seems impossible to get on one’s hand the kid glove as it lies so narrow and “innocent” in the bin at the store. But it goes on and grips firmly.
The world has a metaphysical proclivity for the “firm grip.”
God holds the world in a “firm grip” …
And though everything seems to strive for freedom and the “abyss,” there is also an appetite diametrically opposed—the urge to enter the “narrow way,” the constricting way. (Fallen Leaves, Basket Two, 414)
On the next page:
Firm, particularly that which is firm, seeks the narrow way. The “abyss” is for old women…. [This fragment is not localized.]
In the last fragment, we discern erotic symbolism, given first of all via the “image,” via the location of the sexual organs in the category of gripping and entering things; then at the end, the image is doubled, i.e., the concept is used to translate the French Revolution from the “freedom” set into the “abyss” set. The latter thereby consists of the concepts “abyss,” “senility,” “French Revolution.” The other set—“kid glove” (equivalent to the female sexual organ)—is given via the word “innocent,” which seemingly refers to “glove.”
Then come the boa constrictor and the goat, the metaphysical “firm grip.” This leads to the concept of the “narrow way,” placed in opposition to freedom.
In Rozanov’s work, the glove is the usual image for the sexual object, for example:
Venal love seems “extremely convenient”: “whoever has five rubles goes and takes.” Of course, but:
The flowers have withered,
And the fires have died down …
What does he actually take? A piece of dead rubber. A kid glove spattered with spit and thrown on the floor…. (Fallen Leaves, Basket Two, 391)
These are the steps that a writer constructs in order to create a perceptible image …
This study has to be finished. I am thinking of ending it here. One possibility is to tie the ending with a bow, but I am certain that the old canon of the neat resumé for an article or lecture is dead. Thoughts summarized in artificial sets turn into a single road, into the ruts of the writer’s thought. All the varied associations, all the innumerable paths which run from every thought in all directions are smoothed out. But I have only the greatest respect for my contemporaries and I know that they must either “produce an ending” or else write below that the author has died and for that reason there will be no ending. By all means, then, let’s have an ending here, with some help from Rozanov (Basket One, 94):
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Twisted railroad ties. Planks. Sand. Rock. Ruts.
“What have we here—street repairs?”
“No, this is The Works of Rozanov. And the streetcar hurtles confidently along on its iron rails.” (Street repairs, Nevsky Prospekt)
I apply this to myself.
—Translated by Richard Sheldon
PUBLICATION: Excerpted from Introduction (1981), 1:1–24.
KEYWORDS: Russian poetics; modernism; nonnarrative; formalism.
LINKS: Abigail Child, “The Exhibit and the Circulation” (PJ 7); Ron Day, “Form and the Dialogic” (PJ 10); Carla Harryman, “Toy Boats” (Guide; PJ 5); Lyn Hejinian, “Strangeness” (PJ 8); Yulia Latinina, “Folklore and ‘Novoyaz’” (PJ 9); Mikhail Dziubenko, “‘New Poetry’ and Perspectives for Philology” (PJ 8); Bob Perelman, “Plotless Prose” (PJ 1); Barrett Watten, “The XYZ of Reading: Negativity (And)” (PJ 6).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922 (1923; trans. Richard Sheldon; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970); Knight’s Move (1923; trans. Sheldon; Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 2005); Zoo; or, Letters Not about Love (1923; trans. Sheldon; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971); Theory of Prose (1925; trans. Benjamin Sher; Elmwood Park, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1990); Third Factory (1926; trans. Sheldon; Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1977); Mayakovsky and His Circle (1941; trans. Lily Feiler; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972); Leo Tolstoy (1963; trans. Olga Shartse; Moscow: Progress, 1978); Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot (1981; trans. Shushan Vagyan; Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 2007).