All Future Plunges to the Past

James Joyce in Russian Literature

José Vergara

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501759918
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria rusa

All Future Plunges to the Past explores how Russian writers from the mid-1920s on have read and responded to Joyce's work. Through contextually rich close readings, José Vergara uncovers the many roles Joyce has occupied in Russia over the last century, demonstrating how the writers Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin draw from Joyce's texts, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, to address the volatile questions of lineages in their respective Soviet, émigré, and post-Soviet contexts. Interviews with contemporary Russian writers, critics, and readers of Joyce extend the conversation to the present day, showing how the debates regarding the Irish writer's place in the Russian pantheon are no less settled one hundred years after Ulysses.

The creative reworkings, or "translations, " of Joycean themes, ideas, characters, plots, and styles made by the five writers Vergara examines speak to shifting cultural norms, understandings of intertextuality, and the polarity between Russia and the West. Vergara illuminates how Russian writers have used Joyce's ideas as a critical lens to shape, prod, and constantly redefine their own place in literary history.

All Future Plunges to the Past offers one overarching approach to the general narrative of Joyce's reception in Russian literature. While each of the writers examined responded to Joyce in an individual manner, the sum of their methods reveals common concerns. This subject raises the issue of cultural values and, more importantly, how they changed throughout the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, Russian emigration, and the post-Soviet Russian environment.

CHAPTER 1

Yury Olesha

An Envy for World Culture

So begin the searches for a father, for a motherland, for a profession, for a talisman that can prove to be glory or power.

—Yury Olesha, “I Look into the Past”

Speaking at the 1936 General Meeting of the Moscow Union of Soviet Writers, Yury Olesha offered up James Joyce as the face of a negative, alien literary model that must be eradicated. According to Olesha, Joyce exemplified the reason for the urgent need to struggle against Formalism and Naturalism in Soviet letters. His speech was reproduced in the March 20 edition of Literary Gazette (Literaturnaia gazeta) and included the following remarks:

The artist should say to man: “Yes, yes, yes,” but Joyce says: “No, no, no.” “Everything is bad on Earth,” says Joyce. And thus, all his brilliance is of no use to me.… In order to understand what is Formalism and what is Naturalism, and why these phenomena are hostile to us, I give you an example from Joyce. This writer said: “Cheese is the corpse of milk.” Look, comrades, how terrible. The writer of the West saw the death of milk. He said that milk can be dead. Is it well said? It is well said. It is said correctly, but we don’t want such correctness. We want neither Naturalism nor formalist tricks, but artistic dialectical truth. And from the point of view of this truth, milk can never be a corpse; it flows from the mother’s breast into the child’s mouth, and therefore it is immortal.¹

On the surface of it, there is nothing particularly special about Olesha’s comments, which align with the trend in Soviet criticism from the early 1930s on to denounce Joyce’s perceived pessimism and nonprogressive vision of history. As any deviation from state-mandated Socialist Realism was by this time considered counterrevolutionary and artistically suspect, it was inevitable that Joyce would eventually face such condemnation. Olesha, who declared in his speech at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 that he had renounced his individualist “beggar theme” and committed his art to the youth of Russia and contemporary moral issues, thus proactively chose to contribute to this body of criticism.² By reproaching Joyce early and publicly, as Benedikt Sarnov maintains, he could align himself with the so-called correct critical point of view and potentially avoid greater troubles such as arrest or execution in the future.³ After all, the year 1937 and Stalin’s purges, which made aesthetic preferences a matter of life and death, loomed.

Examined more closely, Olesha’s speech reveals itself to be highly contrived and not without contradictions. In the process of covering his own modernist tracks by damning Joyce’s formalistic technique and purportedly pessimistic worldview, he alludes to Ulysses’s famous lyrical conclusion, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, when she recalls her future husband’s proposal: “and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”⁴ Olesha’s statements quoted above thus begin with an obvious lie: Joyce’s finale undoubtedly ends with a positive affirmation, indeed, one of the most well known in European literature. It stands as an instructive contrast to Olesha’s own cynical ending to his novel Envy (1927), which finds its protagonists resigned to their undesirable fates. Olesha here allegedly proclaims “No!” to Joyce by appropriating Molly’s soliloquy for his own purposes, and he argues that Soviet literature now requires something other than negation, namely, “artistic dialectical truth,” a convoluted formulation that bespeaks the jargon of the era.⁵ He then goes on to mix metaphors by juxtaposing the milk-corpse-cheese with his own image of a mother’s milk offered to a child, an apparently optimistic symbol of immortality. Such an unconvincing and odd juxtaposition raises a host of questions: Just how sincere was Olesha in his speech? Why does he lie about Joyce’s pessimism? Was he truly abasing himself, or did he expect his audience to see some other meaning through the subterfuge?

Another coded layer exists within Olesha’s speech, one that may be read as a call to admire the depth and novelty of vision that Joyce brought to literature. Despite his diatribe, Olesha implicitly champions Joyce’s creative artistry by recognizing the milk-corpse metaphor as strong, if perhaps decadent in some sense. His comments thus represent a subtle form of doublespeak, a way to simultaneously acknowledge and criticize Joyce while remaining noncommittal. Maintaining an ambivalent stance arguably provided not only safety but also an indirect means to promote Joyce’s art to the extent that it was possible. Despite the speech’s many ambiguities, it raises the issues of Olesha’s complicated relationship with Joyce and how he responded to Ulysses through his own fiction.

In writing Envy, Olesha drew on his interpretation of Joyce’s text as well as reviews of the much-debated author, who at this point in the 1920s became a frequent subject of conversation among writers even in Soviet Russia. Joyce’s impact on Envy goes beyond sporadic allusions to Ulysses; Olesha, in fact, establishes a sustained literary response by which he investigates ideas central to his worldview and his situation within a cultural climate growing rapidly hostile toward experimentation and freethinking individualism. This first chapter explores the degree to which Olesha was familiar with Joyce based on his own statements and the general availability of Joyce’s work in Russia and then enumerates and analyzes the similarities between Envy and Ulysses at various important levels including character, plot, and theme. Individually some of these connections may appear coincidental. However, taking such details into account collectively, it becomes clear that the works resonate quite strongly with each other. More broadly, in rereading Envy through the lens of Ulysses, we better understand the former’s thematic complexities. The parallels—and reversals—that Olesha features throughout his text can best be understood as the response from one writer, who attempts to conceptualize the issues facing his generation in a radically unstable period, to the work of another writer who faced analogous concerns in different conditions. In particular, these correspondences and differences develop a conversation concerning one of Joyce’s primary themes: father-son conflict and Stephen Dedalus’s related project of choosing his own artistic lineage to overcome paternal legacies. Olesha, in turn, addresses this same problem and with his references to Ulysses suggests the difficulty, even the impossibility, for a Soviet writer like him to pursue Stephen’s path during this period of transition toward an ever more regimented way of life. Though Nikolai Kavalerov engages in a similar undertaking as Stephen Dedalus, the cultural-historical circumstances around him, exacerbated by his own considerable ambivalence, prevent his success. Examining Envy in light of Ulysses thus helps reveal another layer to the tragic dilemmas presented in Olesha’s fiction and his own trying position. It likewise establishes many of the main tropes of the Russian Joycean tradition.

Points of Contact

The more general Soviet interest in Joyce, of which Olesha became an early participant, can be traced back to at least 1923. In the second issue of his journal Contemporary West (Sovremennyi Zapad), Evgeny Zamiatin (1884–1937) wrote a column discussing Ulysses’s overall strengths, use of Shakespearean subtexts, and attention to sexuality.⁶ Neil Cornwell rightly suggests that this article “initiated an interest in Joyce among the modernist-inclined writers and intelligentsia in Russia.”⁷ Copies of Ulysses found their way to Russia during these key years. Cornwell, for example, cites Noël Riley Fitch’s account of Ivy Litvinov’s (née Low) visit to Sylvia Beach in Paris sometime in 1926–27 and her excitement at the thought of bringing Joyce to Russia.⁸ This cultural exchange is essential to a comparative study of the two authors. Although the conditions in Soviet Russia would soon change irrevocably, such connections remained possible at this time.

Ulysses’s early appearance in translation provides evidence of such permeability.⁹ The first known Russian publication of Joyce is V. Zhitomirsky’s 1925 rendition of several fragments from Ulysses in the Moscow almanac Novelties of the West (Novinki Zapada).¹⁰ These fragments, all with gaps even within episodes, are drawn from the morning episode of “Telemachus,” “Aeolus,” “Cyclops,” “Ithaca,” and “Penelope.” Additionally, a foreword by E. L. Lann provides an overview of the entire novel and a brief critical introduction to Joyce’s life, art, and reputation.¹¹ Having moved from Kharkov to Moscow in 1922, Olesha would have had access to this volume, and while this is not the place to evaluate the quality of Zhitomirsky’s translation, it should be noted that he at times alters lines. Nonetheless, he conveys numerous styles found in Ulysses, for example, the deceptively dry scientific catechism of “Ithaca” and Molly’s more colloquial soliloquy, including its famous conclusion. These partial translations, along with the foreword, provide an impression of a novel constantly in motion and without a grounded point of view. Olesha would have found in Ulysses a satisfying model for displaying varied perspectives. This is not to say that Envy should be regarded as formally groundbreaking as Ulysses, whether considered solely in the Russian context or not; Envy may instead be viewed as a microcosm of such bold modernist experimentation filtered through a different cultural-literary context.¹²

This experimentation was central to Soviet debates regarding Joyce. Even before his 1936 speech with its negative comments, Olesha made several more statements regarding his Irish contemporary, often in reply to others’ opinions or as part of a wider debate concerning Western literature. One of Joyce’s most outspoken proponents in the 1930s, the well-known playwright Vsevolod Vishnevsky, answered a series of three negative articles by critic Prince Dmitry Svyatopolk Mirsky (1890–1939) with his own “Know the West!” (“Znat' Zapad!”) in 1933.¹³ Defending Joyce, Vishnevsky emphatically repeats the need to understand Western literature and hails him as one of its greatest representatives. For support he includes statements by major artists and critics, including the following one from Olesha: “I consider the current of Joyce and Dos Passos innovative. True, I haven’t read Ulysses, but V. Stenich, who is now translating this book, gave me a keen impression of it.”¹⁴ The question of what exactly Olesha meant by his “not having read” Joyce remains unclear, as is often the case with him. Although it is generally believed that Olesha was not fluent in English, the Russian Joyce scholar Ekaterina Genieva, on the contrary, attributes a very thorough knowledge of the Irish writer to Olesha, even suggesting he may have translated Ulysses. Without offering any evidence whatsoever, she makes the following cryptic statement: “I think that a lot in the stories about Joyce belong to the realm of myth. But proving that is difficult, because far from all archives are open and no one can say with certainty whether or not Yury Olesha translated Ulysses.”¹⁵ So, did Olesha mean that he had not read Joyce in English, or was he protecting himself against possible accusations of overestimating decadent Western literature? In spite of his evasive answer, he had surely followed the controversy surrounding the book for the previous ten years and read translations, published or not, available to him. While the culture of 1920s Soviet Russia contributed to Olesha’s awareness and subsequent adaptation of Joycean motifs, his interest in European literature ran much deeper. His memoirs attest to the fact that he kept up with literary trends and knew the history of European literature rather well. Olesha even believed that “a writer’s work is to some degree like a settling of accounts with the impressions that the writer receives in the course of his entire life … [b]ut also with the impressions received from literature.”¹⁶ In turn, Olesha’s incorporation of elements derived from Ulysses into Envy evinces such a heavily intertextual practice.

By all accounts, Ulysses pervaded the air of the time. A memoir of Olesha by Lev Nikulin recounts a conversation with the author, Mirsky, the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894–1958), and the publisher Valentin Stenich (1897–1938) in which Joyce’s and U.S. novelist John Dos Passos’s (1896–1970) names appear. Olesha challenges Zoshchenko’s claim that Stenich is translating Dos Passos, suggesting that he makes it all up as he goes along, and states: “Dos Passos, Joyce, Dos Passos, Joyce! Everybody says, ‘Joyce,’ but no one has read him!”¹⁷ At Mirsky’s suggestion that Joyce is nevertheless a great writer, Olesha balks with his typical irony: “He wrote a chapter without punctuation marks? I heard! In Odessa, brokers have long been writing telegrams without commas and periods.”¹⁸ Such statements on Joyce by Olesha appear relatively frequently in memoirs from this period. Discussing literary technique in 1934, Olesha gives Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910) high praise and even states that in some respects he reminds him of “what they now call Joyceism [dzhoisizm].”¹⁹ Two years later, he remarked in an article published in Literary Critic (Literaturnyi kritik), “They consider Joyce a great writer. I only know excerpts. Yes, all that’s remarkable, what Joyce writes.”²⁰ He then goes on to call Joyce “formally interesting” and acknowledges his “sharp eyes” and “subtle psychological analysis.”²¹ Nevertheless, Olesha claims that he wants “to know that life is beautiful” and raises the same issue as in his Union of Soviet Writers speech: “I don’t want to read a wr...