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Transcultural Studies:
Transcultural Studies
A Series in Interdisciplinary
Research
Vol. 8 (2012)
L I S S U E
SPECI A
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TRAN
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Literat
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Vol. 7-8 (2011-2012)

Cinema
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C
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Editors M . V l a div-Glov
nka
Sloboda
Padgett
Andrew
Charles Schlacks, Jr., Publisher, Idyllwild, California

VOL. 8 2012
TRANSCULTURAL STUDIES: A SERIES

IN INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
SPECIAL ISSUE ON
TRANSCULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON
LITERATURE, MUSIC, CINEMA AND
CULTUROLOGY
Editors:
SLOBODANKA M. VLADIV-GLOVER
ANDREW PADGETT
(Monash University, Australia)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Position Paper
Transculturalism and Transcultural Literature in the 21st Century 1

Arianna Dagnino
Section I: Literature and Transculture
Литературные Заимствования и Пародия в Бедных Людях 15

В. Е. Ветловская
Гипнотическая функция ритма в бесфабульных ранних рассказах

А. П. Чехова 35
Olga Shalygina
Medicine in Chekhov’s Works 55

Leonard A. Polakiewicz
Fathers Love to Torture: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Maria Komornicka’s
Fairytale “O Ojcu I Córce” and Zofia Nałkowska’s Short Story “Zielone
Wybrzeże” 75
Klara Naszkowska
Идейные основания культа женственности в русской культурной

традиции 89
Лян Кунь
Section II: Music and Transculture
Reading Adorno, from Schoenberg to DJ Shadow 101

Andrew Padgett
New Jerusalem: Musicology and the Marxist Aesthetic 117

Christian Griffiths
Section III: Cinema and Transculture
From Poetic to Cinematic Image: Theorising about Multimedia Translation 131

Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover
Cinematic Poetry: An Act of Translation 145

Smiljana Glisović
The Cinema of Milani: a (Hi)story of Iranian Women in Post-Revolutionary

Iran 149
Mohamad Anjomshoa
Section IV: Culturology and Transculture
Bilingualism in Ukraine: A Matter of Convenience or National Suicide? 157

Ludmilla A’Beckett
Struggle Between ‘Humanity’ and ‘Party Spirit’ in Maoist China: The Case of
Chen Dengke and Ding Ling 172
Robert Irving
Прометеевский Подтекст «Проблем Поэтики Достоевского» М.М.

Бахтина 187
Sergei Shaulov
Review Articles
Edward Dennis Goy, The Escaped Mystery: The Poetry of Momčilo

Nastasijević 197
Zdravka Gugleta
Article Summaries
Literary Borrowings and Parody in Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk 205

V.E. Vetlovskaia
The Hypnotic Function of Rhythm in Chekhov’s Early Stories Without A Plot

Olga Shalygina
The Sources of the Cult of the Feminine in the Russian Cultural Tradition
Lian Kun
The Promethean Subtext in M. M. Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

Sergei Shaulov
Transcultural Studies, 8 (2012), 1-14
ARIANNA DAGNINO
TRANSCULTURALISM AND TRANSCULTURAL

LITERATURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Introduction
There are important questions raised by the contemporary state of culture
and society; one in particular is that in a rapidly globalizing world, cultures as
well as societies and identities tend to be more fluid and “less irreducibly
different,” less internally homogeneous, less coherent or self-contained and
less territorially fixed than it was assumed.1 They may appear more like
loosely bound or confluent streams of meanings and practices than monolithic
blocks or mutually exclusive absolutes; especially at the present time, when
cosmopolitan dispositions and pluralistic sensibilities – fostered by migrant,
transnational or neonomadic experiences and modes of being – become ever
more relevant. That is why Arjun Appadurai has suggested that we are to look
at today’s cultural forms as irregular, boundary-less and without any clear
structure:
These cultural forms, which we should strive to represent as fully fractal,

are also overlapping in ways that have been discussed (…) in biology (in
the language of polythetic classifications). Thus we need to combine a
fractal metaphor for the shape of cultures (in the plural) with a polythetic
account of their overlaps and resemblances. Without this latter step, we
shall remain mired in comparative work that relies on the clear separation
of the entities to be compared.2
Edward Said also had come to a similar conclusion, stating that: “No one
can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations,
national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems to be no reason
except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and
distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about.”3
Growing numbers of scholars active in the humanities have thus started to
study the creative cultural productions of the 21st century global scenario under
a transcultural lens, “a perspective in which all cultures look decentered in
1. Frank Schulze-Engler, “Theoretical Perspectives: From Postcolonialism to Transcultural

World Literature,” in Lars Eckstein (ed.), English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion
(Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), pp. 20-32, 27.
2. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 46.
3. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 407.
2 Transcultural Studies
relation to all other cultures, including one's own.”4 In Germany, for example,
a group of literary critics (among them, Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff)
has initiated the field of “Transcultural English Studies”; while in the upper
regions of Northern Europe another group of scholars has given birth to the
“Nordic Network of Transcultural Literary Studies.”5 Though both these
groups mainly focus on the study of Anglophone literatures or so called “New
Literatures in English,” the same approach may be adopted for the study of any
work of literature whose nature can be defined as intrinsically “transcultural.”6
Drawing on Schulze-Engler and Pettersson,7 we can already define a
transcultural work of fiction as a work that transcends the borders of a single
culture in its choice of topic, vision and scope and contributes to feeding the
need for a wider global literary perspective.
In this article, I outline a brief historical trajectory of transculturalism, a
theoretical approach which is acquiring increasing resonance in cultural and
literary studies. In the process, I also explain the conceptual differences among
the several terms – transculturation, transculturality, transculture,
transculturalism – used alternatively or simultaneously by different thinkers (in
particular by Epstein 1995, 2004, 2009 and Welsch 1999, 2009)8 at different
times and in different contexts. Finally, I give account of how transculturalism
4. Ellen Berry and Mikhail N. Epstein, “In Place of a Conclusion: Transcultural Dialogue,” in
Ellen Berry and Mikhail N. Epstein (eds), Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American
Models of Creative Communication (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), pp. 302-322, 312.
5. Cf. https://www.uib.no/rg/nnlts. The Nordic Group draws mainly on the concept of
“transculturation” initially devised in 1940 by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz and later
expanded, among others, by Mary Louise Pratt (1992). See in this regard the article by Anne
Holden Rønning, “Literary Transculturations and Modernity: Some Reflections,” Transnational
literature, 4, no. 1 (2011). In the present study, I mainly refer to the conceptualizations of
“transculturality” and “transculture” respectively devised by Wolfgang Welsch and Mikhail
Epstein. On a more general level, since its inception in 2006 the Centre for Transcultural Writing
and Research (CTWR) at the University of Lancaster (U.K.) has created a transnational
environment for scholars interested in ‘writing across cultures’ and in ‘studying the work of
writers from a wide range of social and cultural contexts’.
6. In this light, as Anne Holden Rønning (2011) remarks, “the link between cultural
production and transculturation is a continuation of the debate in postcolonialism on (…) the
reception of literatures in languages other than English” (“Literary Transculturations,” p. 6.)
7. Frank Schulze-Engler, "Introduction," in Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff (eds),
Transcultural English Studies. Theories, Fictions, Realities (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi,
2009), pp. ix-xvi. Anders Pettersson, “Introduction. Concepts of Literature and Transcultural
Literary History,” in Anders Pettersson (ed.), Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective
(Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2006), pp. 1-35.
8. Mikhail N. Epstein, “Culture—Culturology—Transculture,” in Mikhail N. Epstein (ed.),
After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture
(Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 280-308. Mikhail N. Epstein, “The Unasked
Question: What Would Bakhtin Say?” Common Knowledge, 10, no. 1 (2004): 42-60. Mikhail N.
Epstein, “Transculture: A Broad Way between Globalism and Multiculturalism,” American
Journal of Economics and Sociology, 68, no. 1 (2009): 327-351. Wolfgang Welsch,
“Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash
(eds), Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World (London: Sage, 1999), pp. 194-213. Wolfgang
Welsch, “On the Acquisition and Possession of Commonalities,” Transcultural English Studies,
pp. 3-36.
may be interpreted and used as an analytical tool within a specific literary

context.
From Fernando Ortiz’s transculturation to Wolfgang Welsch’s

transculturality
The first scholar to acknowledge the importance of processes of
“transculturation” was the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in his book
Cuban Counterpoint, initially published in Spanish in 1940.9 At that time,
Ortiz was particularly interested in analyzing the ability of so-called
“peripheral” cultures to create cultural fusions (the processes of
transculturation) through the meeting and intermingling with newly acquired
elements instead of simply and passively assimilating the cultures (the
processes of acculturation) of more powerful, domineering nations. It was
through these fusions, according to Ortiz, that the cultural and racial
hybridization (méstizaje) of Cuba and, more generally, America acquired its
distinctive identity traits. As Schulze-Engler explains:
Ortiz’s “transculturation” concept (…) sought to explore processes of

cultural transformation and exchange within a framework of
fundamentally unequal and hierarchical relations between powerful
nations (such as the USA) and less powerful ones (such as Cuba).10
In Cuban Counterpoint, Ortiz critiqued the current notion of acculturation

(at the time adopted also by anthropologist Bronisław Kasper Malinowski),
which in his view, as Sneja Gunew remarks (2003), “did not capture the
uneven tensions and transmutations […] analyzed within Cuban culture” and
the changes that come to affect both cultures (major and minor) in the
process.11 Subsequently, Latin American scholar Walter Mignolo criticized
Ortiz for not acknowledging the colonial dimension fully and for speaking
from a nationalist stance.12
In her study of travel writing, entitled Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt
applies the concept of transculturation through a postcolonial lens, considering
it as a phenomenon of the “contact zones” – “social spaces where disparate
cultures meet (…) often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and
subordination.” Pratt analyzes how modes of representation from the
metropolis are absorbed and then creatively transformed and re-shaped by the
9. Fernando Ortíz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, [Contrapunteo Cubano Del
Tabaco y El Azúcar, 1940; first Engl. transl. 1947], Harriet De Onís (trans.) (Durham, NC and
London: Duke Unic. Press, 1995).
10. Schulze-Engler, "Introduction," pp. ix-xvi, x.
11. Sneja Gunew, “Transcultural Translations: Performative Pedagogies,” Workshop on
Transculturalism, Rockefeller Center, Bellagio, Italy, Aug. 2003, CD format. Available also
online at: http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sgunew/TT.HTM.
12. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and
Border Thinking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000).
peripheries.13 But as Anne Holden Rønning remarks, Pratt’s reasoning is

inscribed within a too restrictive and dichotomous paradigm of colonizer
versus colonized cultures:14
She sees transculturation as ‘a phenomenon of the “contact zones”’ which

are social spaces where ‘disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with
each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of dominance and
subordination.’ I agree with Pratt that in these ‘contact zones’ cultures
meet but not necessarily in relationships which are binary based, since the
very core of transculturation is the ability to move freely from one cultural
stance to another and back again.
Summing up the different uses and interpretations of the notion of

transculturation together with the debates regarding cultural hybridization,
creolization and métissage which are taking place – often through the
Caribbean intersection – in the Anglophone/North American,
Hispanic/Lusitanian and Francophone critical traditions, Gunew nonetheless
validates the concept of transculturation in proposing a vision of ‘cultures and
identities [as] heterogeneous rather than homogeneous’ through processes that
‘disrupt[s] national as well as disciplinary borders’.15
As already anticipated, in the present study I mainly refer to the
conceptualizations of ‘transculturality’ and ‘transculture’, devised by Welsch
and Epstein respectively, which overcome the binaries of dominant versus
subordinate, colonizer versus colonized cultures inherent in the original notion
and subsequent postcolonial interpretations of transculturation.16
Almost fifty years after Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint, and almost in the same
years in which Mignolo and Pratt were proposing their expanded postcolonial
version of transculturation, the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch devised
a concept of cultures – “transculturality” – “beyond the contraposition of
ownness and foreignness” in which the classical binaries of center versus
periphery, national culture versus local culture, powerful nations versus
weaker nations, are being erased in favor of a pluralistic model of cultural
permeation more adherent to “the inner complexity of modern cultures” and to
our fluid, liquid times.17 From Welsch’s standpoint, any separatist vision of
cultures as distinct, self-enclosed and self-sufficient units, which he traces
back to Johann Gottfried Herder’s view of folk-bound, uniform and
exclusionary single cultures, with its focus on “inner homogenization and
13. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New
York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 4 and 6.
14. Hanne Holden Rønning, "Literary Transculturations and Modernity: Some Reflections,"
Transnational literature, 4, no. 1 (2011), pp. 1-10, 3.
15. Gunew “Transcultural Translations,” pp. 3, 9.
16. See also the article by Rønning, “Literary Transculturations and Modernity: Some
Reflections.”
17. Welsch, “Transculturality,” pp. 196, 195.
outer separation” is now overcome, and any divisive (ethnic, geographic,

religious, national) barrier is now superseded in view of the contemporary
dynamics of cultural transformations and “pure cultural interchange
processes”:
The description of today's cultures as islands or spheres is factually

incorrect and normatively deceptive. Cultures de facto no longer have the
insinuated form of homogeneity and separateness. They have instead
assumed a new form, which is to be called transcultural insofar that it
passes through classical cultural boundaries. Cultural conditions today are
largely characterized by mixes and permeations.18
In a new world of decentered “multiple modernities,”19 Welsch’s

transculturality thus combines the concept of the “permeation” of cultures due
to their growing entanglement (a process which he calls “cultures' external
networking”) and the focus on the commonalities and the urge to connect that
all human beings (and cultures) share, despite their intrinsic differences: “It is
a matter of readjusting our inner compass: away from the concentration on the
polarity of the own and the foreign to an attentiveness for what might be
common and connective wherever we encounter things foreign.”20 In this
inclusive vision of culture/s, which stresses the power of confluences and
interactions rather than that of polarities, Welsch is also keen to point out that
any individual has (or should have among his/her own basic rights) the right to
freedom in cultural formation and to independence of any pre-determined
cultural milieu.
The focus on individual agency and the right to a personal cultural choice
and allegiance appear to be among the central tenets of a transcultural
approach keen to acknowledge the proliferation of plural identities,
citizenships, affiliations and nationalities that characterize the lives of
increasing numbers of people.21 Similarly, Schulze-Engler states that in the
emerging complexity of globally interlinked collectives and transnational
individuals, “The primary subjects and actors (…) are no longer cultures but
people, and the main interest no longer lies in the problem of how cultures
shape social groups and their perceptions, but in the question of what
individuals and groups do with culture in an increasingly globalized world.”22
Mikhail Epstein’s transculture

Initially through the peculiar perspective of the post-Soviet cultural
environment and later through a more global perspective, the Russian
culturologist Mikhail Epstein proposed his inclusionary notion of
18. Ibid., pp. 204, 197.

19. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus, 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 1-29.
20. Welsch, “Transculturality,” pp. 197, 201.
21. Linda Bosniak, “Multiple Nationality and the Postnational Transformation of
Citizenship,” Virginia Journal of International Law, 42 (2001-2002): 979-1004.
22. Schulze-Engler, “Theoretical Perspectives,” p. 28.
“transculture” as “the site of interaction among all existing and potential

cultures” and of a transcultural dimension which “lies not apart from, but
within all cultures, like a multidimensional space that appears gradually over
the course of historical time. It is a continuous space in which unrealized,
potential elements are no less meaningful than ‘real’ ones.”23
Transculture thus represents, as Epstein elaborated in a subsequent paper, “a
transcendence into no culture, a metacultural beyond (...) a newly emerging
dimension, (…) a process of interaction between cultures in which more and
more individuals find themselves feeling outside the ethnic, racial, sexual,
ideological, and other limitations imposed by the culture into which they were
born.”24 It is thanks to (and through) this emerging transcultural space that,
according to Epstein, the individual is now able to escape the restrictions
imposed by each single culture and access the right to be free from the
conditioning and the dependencies of any given, native or primary culture,
thus reaching a full transcultural condition. For this reason, Epstein refers also
to transculture as to “the process of self-distancing, self-estrangement, and
self-criticism of one's own cultural identities and assumptions”25 or as a way to
manifest “the freedom of every person to live on the border of one’s ‘inborn’
culture or beyond it.”26 He is thus suggesting that – in the same way as Welsch
did with his concept of transculturality – transculture tends to move the focus
of cultural identity from the collective to the individual consciousness, where
human beings are seen as individuals able to dynamically select from a myriad
of different cultural offerings what best suits them depending on the contexts
and the circumstances.
(…) transculture offers a universal symbolic palette on which an

individual can blend colors to produce an expressive self-portrait.27
This transcultural approach to the self as an open-ended process is shared

by Nick Couldry,28 who in his essay Inside Culture explicitly refers to
transcultural positions and theorizations (in particular the ones externalized by
Welsch 1999):29
What is missing from post-structuralist claims of the death of the subject

(…) is any sense of what it is like to be an active, reflexive self. Few
would now claim that the self is a simple ‘object’ rather than an open-
ended process; one of the key elements in that process is reflexivity,
23. Epstein, “Culture–Culturology,” p. 299.

24. Epstein, “The Unasked Question,” p. 49.
25. Berry and Epstein, “In Place of a Conclusion,” p. 307.
26. Epstein, “Transculture: A Broad Way,” p. 334.
27. Epstein, “The Unasked Question,” p. 50.
28. Nick Couldry, Inside Culture: Re-Imagining the Method of Cultural Studies (London:
Sage, 2000).
29. Cf. Welsch, “Transculturality,” pp. 95-98.
reflecting back on our past, on the conditions which have brought us to be

what we are.30
In order to reach this transcultural dimension or “special mode of existence”

(Epstein, 2004), one needs to undergo a process of physical/spatial/imaginary
deterritorialization, transnational movement, linguistic dis/appropriation,
cultural displacement – what I synthetically call “creative transpatriation” –
that is, physical, emotional detachment (where detachment means critical
distance, not the opposite of commitment) from one’s own primordial culture,
territory, roots (the ‘individual’ motherland) as well as intellectual
disalignment from one’s own national/ethnic ‘collective’ fatherland. It is
increasingly less common, as Welsch is keen to emphasise, that cultural
identity automatically coincides with national identity:
It belongs among the mustiest assumptions that an individual's cultural

formation must be determined by his nationality or national status. (…)
The insinuation that someone who possesses an Indian or a German
passport must also culturally unequivocally be an Indian or a German and
that, if this isn't the case, he's some guy without a fatherland, or a traitor to
his fatherland, is as foolish as it is dangerous. Wherever an individual is
cast by differing cultural interests, the linking of such transcultural
components with one another becomes a specific task in identity-forming.
Work on one's identity is becoming more and more work on the
integration of components of differing cultural origin. And only the ability
to transculturally cross over will guarantee us identity and competence in
the long run.31
As Epstein posits, “we acquire transculture (…) at the crossroads with other
cultures through the risky experience of our own cultural wanderings and
transgressions.”32 And even that sometimes is not enough: the
passage/transition to a transcultural condition is still a rare phenomenon and
very few people – even in the 21st century, when the conditions are most
suitable – are experiencing it, willing to experience it or ready to experience it,
as Epstein himself reminds us:
Too many people who leave the geographical location of their culture
nevertheless remain, for the rest of their lives, prisoners of its language
and traditions. Other migrants, having turned their back on their past,
become prisoners of a newly acquired culture. Only a small number of
people, when acceding to two or several cultures, succeed in integrating
them and thus are able to keep their freedom from any of them.33
30. Couldry, Inside Culture, p. 119.

31. Welsch, “Transculturality,” p. 199.
33. Ibid., p. 330.
This passage is happening more frequently, at least in these early stages of

transcultural development, among those creative people who are fortunate
enough to benefit from a socio-economically privileged background and/or a
good level of education. Among these progressive representatives of the
mobile, global middle-classes there are no doubt also imaginative writers,
whose transcultural orientations may and indeed do become more manifest due
to their self-reflexive attitudes, their ability to articulate the process of
transformation they undergo, their willingness to conceptualize it, put it into
words and share it with their fellow human beings through a plethora of
fictionalized characters and storylines.
It is clear that the transcultural path tends to be highly personalized,
inventive and original. There does not exist a common pattern, a common
recipe, a common way of being transcultural. A transcultural constitution, that
is, the ability to negotiate between different cultural identities, depends on the
specific individual capabilities, attitudes and experiential backgrounds.
Nonetheless, the transcultural path allows a process of transformation – a
metamorphosis – that even if played at an individual level can have a
collective resonance. This idea of what can alternatively be described as a
process of “self-culturation” (the self-service of cultures for the formation of
one’s own cultural identity) echoes Schulze-Engler’s understanding of
Welsch’s transculturality, with its open notion of cultural identity:
Theories of ‘intercultural’ communication (…) create the very problem

they set out to solve: they posit ‘cultures’ as separate entities and people as
‘belonging’ to these separate entities, thereby failing to acknowledge the
fact that in an increasingly interconnected world, cultures are increasingly
intertwined and people often constitute their cultural identities by drawing
on more than one culture.34
In describing this contemporary cultural movement “beyond the horizon of

postmodernism,”35 Epstein compares the transcultural dimension (he calls it
the ‘continuum’)36 to Jorge Luis Borges’ Aleph, the place where symbolically
all cultures and ‘noncultures’, that is, all their infinite possibilities, can be
active and alive simultaneously:
In Borges’s great story, “Aleph,” the brightest point of the universe is

described as a place where all times and spaces may be present together,
without hiding or overshadowing each other. In the typical terms of
physical reality, Aleph is a pure fantasy, but culture is, after all, a symbolic
reality that can be condensed indefinitely by the increasing scope of its
34. Schulze-Engler, “Introduction,” p. xii.

meanings. We may imagine transculture as the Aleph of the entire cultural

world.37
2.5 Transculturalism and rooted cosmopolitanism

The transcultural approach seems also to point out the “need to move
beyond traditional concepts of society that continue to rely on the nation state
as the only conceivable frame of reference.”38 “Holding too closely to older
notions of national identity may not prove the most effective way to preserve
the ability of Canadians [and others] to shape the decisions that affect their
daily lives,” writes Diana Brydon.39 Commenting on Brydon’s quote, Ezra
Yoo-Hyeok Lee notes that “[T]he paradigm that focuses too much on a
national level (…) does not enable us to deal with changes occurring in our life
at this age of globalization, when the global dynamically and dialectically
interrelates to the national.”40
Thus, right at the moment when national identity appears to be put to the
test under the pressure of globalization, growing migratory flows and
cosmopolitan tendencies, the various national and strictly defined cultural
imaginaries are offered – through a transcultural perspective – a new way to
open up in a process of cultural “dissemination,” creating the space for a new
transcultural imaginary. This is a process which fosters citizens’ agency not
only at a national level but also at a global (international or transnational) one.
Lamberto Tassinari, who was for twelve years chief editor of “Vice Versa,”41
one of the first experiments in transcultural publishing in Montreal, puts it this
way:
We can imagine and envision transculturalism as a new form of

humanism, based on the idea of relinquishing the strong traditional
identities and cultures which in many cases were products of imperialistic
empires, interspersed with dogmatic religious values.42
Espousing a transcultural approach, though, does not mean to adhere, even

when recognizing its manifest idealistic stances, to the “banal”
cosmopolitanism denounced by Ulrich Beck in his Cosmopolitan Vision - the

38. Schulze-Engler, “Theoretical Perspectives,” p. 27.
39. Brydon cited in Ezra Yoo-Hyeok Lee, “Globalization, Pedagogical Imagination, and
Transnational Literacy,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 13, no. 1 (March 2011):
2-12, 7.
40. Lee, ibid., p. 7.
41. Founded in 1983, Vice Versa: Magazine Transculturel published untranslated articles on
literature, arts, culture and political issues written in English, French and Italian. Its publication
was stopped in 1996 for lack of funding. For Alessandra Renzi it represents “a unique example of
the emergence of a counter-hegemonic movement questioning identity at its roots”; Alessandra
Renzi, "Identity and Transculture in Vice Versa," Collegium antropologicum, 28, no. 1 (2004):
109-113, 109.
42. Tassinari cited in Donald Cuccioletta, “Multiculturalism or Transculturalism: Towards a
Cosmopolitan Citizenship,” London Journal of Canadian Studies, 17 (2001/2002): 1-11, 8.
kind that unfolds “beneath the surface or behind the façade of persisting
national spaces.”43 Epstein is keen to draw a distinction between
transculturalism and globalism (or what he calls “its older brand,”
cosmopolitanism), implying that:
[It] is precisely this relevance of the primary (ethnic, national) cultures,

which the latter [cosmopolitanism] attempts to ignore or bypass. A
cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, claims to belong directly and
immediately to the human kind as a whole, disregarding ethnic, racial, and
other differences. A transcultural personality fully recognizes hu’s44 roots
in a certain cultural ground, though hu does not want to cling to them’. 45
On the same wavelength, Welsch posits that “[T]ranscultural identities

comprehend a cosmopolitan side, but also a side of local affiliation.
Transcultural people combine both.”46 There is another kind of
cosmopolitanism, a new vision of liberal humanism (better known as “rooted”
cosmopolitanism or “vernacular” cosmopolitanism),47 promoted by thinkers
such as Anthony Appiah,48 that seems more in sympathy with the transcultural
mode proposed by Epstein and Welsch, where there does not necessarily need
to be “a conflict between local partialities and a universal morality,”49 since in
Appiah’s view “there are some values that are, and should be, universal, just as
there are some values that are, and must be, local.”50 This means that without a
strong commitment to the local there cannot be a genuine sense of obligation
to the universal, and vice versa. In other words, cosmopolitanism and localism
(together with its institutionalized form - nationalism) do not need to be
opposed but can instead go together, seeking to balance universals with respect
for particulars through an ongoing dialogue between the two:
That makes nationalism and cosmopolitanism part of the same exercise.

(…) I defend a cosmopolitanism that recognizes that we have collective
human identity and also the crucial importance of many more local forms
43. Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006), p. 19.
44. Hu stands for he/she; hu’s stands for his/her.
47. Pnina Werbner, Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and
Vernacular Perspectives (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2008). See also Sneja Gunew, Post-
Multiculturalism; Immanent Cosmopolitanism: A Future Anterior, CSAA (Cultural Studies
Association of Australasia) Annual Conference 2011, Adelaide.
48. Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2006).
49. Ibid., p. xviii.
50. Ibid., p. xxi.
of identity, and that many forms of identity crosscut national identities,

which is where those of us who are mongrels come in. 51
Undoubtedly, we are all aware that where there is cultural harmony there
can also be, at the same time, cultural resistance or even cultural conflict, often
fuelled by a recrudescence of ethno-political or religious fundamentalism, or
what Shmuel Eisenstadt calls the “ideologization of violence, terror and
war.”52 As Peter Burke writes:
The tendency to assume that cultural exchange is always a reflection of

tolerance and open mindedness is one that historians should resist. It
should not be forgotten that cultural interaction in late medieval Spain, the
so-called convivencia, took place at a time of pogroms, forced
conversions, and inquisitors hunting down moriscos and marranos,
crypto-Muslims and crypto-Jews. In other words, cultural ‘harmony’, or at
any rate any appropriation, was apparently combined with social
disharmony.’53
In any case, it is always better to learn from and to promote a mode of

interaction with strangers since, sooner or later, as Appiah reminds us, we will
have to deal with them, wherever they are:
Depending on the circumstances, conversations across boundaries can be

delightful, or just vexing: what they mainly are, though, is inevitable.54
More so in an increasingly interconnected world, where all our destinies

seem to be inextricably intertwined, and “even the meanest self-interest
suggests we look out for the ones around us.”55 Moreover, as Zygmunt
Bauman alerts us:
As the polivocality and cultural variegation of the urban environment of

the globalization era sets in, likely to intensify rather than mitigate in the
course of time, the tensions arising from the vexing/confusing/irritating
unfamiliarity of the setting will probably go on prompting segregationist
urges.56
51. Anthony Appiah, Q&A chaired by Joanne Myers at the Books for Breakfast Program,
Carnegie Council/Voice for Ethics in International Affairs, 16 February 2005,
www.carnegiecouncil.org/resources/transcripts/5387.html/ (Accessed 20 June 2011).
52. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” p. 25.
53. Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), p. 81.
54. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, p. xxi.
55. Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home (London:
Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 35.
56. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2007), pp. 86-87.
Thus, one way to come to terms – by force or out of sheer curiosity – with
our internal or external foreignness, outside/within our societies and ourselves,
is precisely through a transcultural approach, where we are called upon to
make “the efforts to understand, to negotiate, to compromise that living amidst
and with difference requires,”57 as well as to look deeper into ourselves and
into each other. As Welsch points out:
Hatred directed towards foreigners is (as has been shown particularly from
the psychoanalytic side) basically projected hatred of oneself. One takes
exception vicariously to something in a stranger, which one carries within
oneself, but does not like to admit, preferring rather to repress it internally
and to battle with it externally. (…) It is precisely when we no longer
deny, but rather perceive, our inner transculturality, that we will become
capable of dealing with outer transculturality.58
2.6 The main tenets of transculturalism

We have seen that transculture, transculturality and transculturalism have
been used by different scholars mainly as synonyms, for concepts with similar
meanings, even if Sabrina Brancato59 prefers to distinguish between: 1)
“transculturality” (or what Epstein calls “transculture”) as a new theoretical
framework through which one can describe and analyze the cultural dynamics
and the creative expressions in contemporary mobile societies “based on a new
conceptualization of culture” and “out of the narrow national and regional
boundaries”; and 2) “transculturalism” as the new operative and ideological
mode of cultural interaction – una risposta (…) alla minaccia
dell’omogeneizzazione culturale da una parte e a quella degli essenzialismi
fondamentalisti dall’altra,”60 – suggesting that the two concepts/modes need to
work together.
Là dove transculturalità viene ad essere il modello analitico per la lettura

della realtà culturale odierna, transculturalismo (i due termini sono spesso
usati come sinonimi) potrebbe essere un termine più adatto a designare
l’ideologia che ne scaturisce, una volontà di interagire a partire dalle
intersezioni piuttosto che dalle differenze e dalle polarità, una
consapevolezza del transculturale che c’è in noi per meglio comprendere e
accogliere ciò che è fuori di noi, una visione che privilegia la flessibilità e
57. Ibid., p. 87.

59. Sabrina Brancato, “Transculturalità e trnasculturalismo: I nuovi orizzonti dell’identità
culturale,” Le Simplegadi, 2, no. 2 (August 2004): 39-46, http://all.uniud.it/simplegadi/wp-
content/uploads/Simplegadi-2-2-2004.pdf (18/08/2010).
60. [An answer (…) to the menace of cultural homogenization on one side and of
fundamentalist essentialisms on the other] (Brancato, “Transculturalità,” p. 45, my translation).
la fluidità, il movimento e lo scambio continuo, la rinegoziazione continua

dell’identità.61
In this light, transculturalism, understood in its broader and all-

encompassing way, might be deployed as a concept for creative culture-
making, an instrument for cultural identity formation, a mode of experiencing
one’s cultural identity and an analytical/critical tool able to capture the
interplay between culture, the different modes of modernity, and the works of
a globalized imagination and sense of citizenship.
If we thus wanted to summarize the central tenets of transculturalism, we

might say that transculturalism fosters and promotes:
- a non-essentialized, inclusive approach to culture;
- a refusal to think of cultures as pure and holistic essences: cultures are
not seen as fixed (stable), autonomous and insular (separate) entities
located exclusively or mainly in the context of ethnicities or nations but
as hybrid formations characterized by interconnectedness, permeation
and ongoing transforming dialogues between/among them;
- the idea of blurred, fluctuating and overlapping cultural borders within
and outside societies/nations – what Eugen Banauch calls “the
deconstruction of national cultures as stable and clear entities;”62
- the idea of culture and cultural individual formation as a dynamic
process;
- the focus on human agency, “with an affirmative position by the
individual” (Banauch 2007)63 and the right of personal cultural choices,
allegiances, plural affiliations and multiple, multi-layered identities;
- a cosmopolitan approach which does not deny the relevance of one’s
primary origins but does not accept the oppositional dynamics of fixed,
self-enclosed cultural, ethnic and national identities/allegiances;
- the relevance of translingualism (or polyglossia) for the transcultural
constitution.
Conclusion
The present article provides an account of how transcultural vision and
“creative transpatriation” may be interpreted, within a comparative literary
61. [There where transculturality comes to be the reading analytical model of the present
cultural reality, transculturalism (the two terms are often used as synonyms) could be a more
suitable term to describe the ensuing ideology, a will to interact starting from the intersections
rather than from the polarities and differences, a consciousness of the transcultural which is in us
to better comprehend and accept what is outside of us, a vision that privileges flexibility and
fluidity, movement and ongoing exchange, the constant re-negotiation of identity] (Ibid., p. 44,
my translation).
62. Eugen Banauch, “Inter- and Transcultural Writing” in “‘Home’ as a thought between
quotation marks. The Fluid Exile of Jewish Third Reich Refugee Writers in Canada 1940-2006,”
PhD thesis, Wien University, pp. 253-305, 257. Banauch published his thesis in 2009 with the
title Fluid Exile: Jewish Exile Writers in Canada 1940-2006, Winter, Heidelberg.
63. Ibid., p. 258.
studies discourse, as determining factors in the emergence of transcultural

literature within the global ecumene. As Brancato states in proposing her
vision of transculturality within a literary context:
La transculturalità deve essere intesa, in ambito letterario, come cornice

teorica che comprende diversi fenomeni di interazione culturale
(dall’intertestualità postcoloniale all’ibridazione e creolizzazione cross-
culturale fino alle modernità multiple del mondo globale) e permette di
estrarre le nuove letterature dagli stretti confini del nazionale e del
regionale e di rivedere il locale e il diasporico da un punto di vista
globale.64
As stated at the beginning of this article, my use of the concept of

transculturalism is confined within a literary/artistic/aesthetic critical
discourse, where creativity and identity are being expressed at a very personal
and individual level. It is not within the scope of the present article to
investigate the implications of these notions within a broader socio-
political/collective context.
Even if, in itself, this position may betray a Western individualist
standpoint, the accent on the individual and the respect for individuality should
not be conflated with the rugged, ‘American’-style liberal individualism. Here
we are rather talking about a ‘process of subjectivity’ that disengages itself
from the classical concept of individualism and asserts the undeniable
singularity and fluidity of any self-constituting being.65
In our best interests, we (as individuals as well as members of more
extended communities) cannot ignore other cultures, and the more we
comprehend them and – most importantly – interact with them, let ourselves
be transformed by them, the better. By dealing with them, we not only might
find it harder “to think of the world as divided between the West and the Rest;
between locals and moderns; between a bloodless ethic of profit and a bloody
ethic of identity,”66 but we might even find new paths and inspirations for our
creativity, knowledge and human development.
University of South Australia
64. [Within a literary context, transculturality must be conceived as a theoretical framework

that includes phenomena of cultural interactions (from postcolonial intertextuality to cross-
cultural hybridazation and creolization up to the multiple modernities of the global world) and
that allows us to pull out the new literatures from the narrow boundaries of the national and of the
regional as well as to revise the local and the diasporic from a global point of view] (Brancato,
“Transculturalità,” p. 46, my translation).
65. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge:
Polity, 2002), p. 7.
66. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, p. xxi.
В. Е. ВЕТЛОВСКАЯ
ЛИТЕРАТУРНЫЕ ЗАИМСТВОВАНИЯ И ПАРОДИЯ

В БЕДНЫХ ЛЮДЯХ1
В предлагаемой вниманию читателя статье речь идет о ранних шагах

Достоевского на литературной стезе. До того как писатель явился
публике с первым романом, он успел пройти некоторый путь: опыты
сочинений в драматическом роде, перевод романа Бальзака “Eugénie
Grandet”; одновременно с этой творческой работой его время постоянно
занимало чтение авторов разных стран и эпох. Основательная
начитанность Достоевского уже в ранней юности удивляла его
товарищей по Главному инженерному училищу. “Достоевский, – писал
Д.В. Григорович,– во всех отношениях был выше меня по развитости; его
начитанность изумляла меня. То, что сообщал он о сочинениях
писателей, имя которых я никогда не слыхал, было для меня
откровением.”2
Особую заинтересованность у Достоевского всегда вызывала русская
литература. Несмотря ни на какие западные влияния, писатель “за
редкими исключениями,” как считал А. Л. Бем, оставался верен русской
почве: “Понять Достоевского вне русской литературной традиции
невозможно, и это не только в чисто формально-логическом смысле, но и
в его литературно-идейной проблематике. Сам Достоевский прекрасно
осознавал эту связь.”3 И не просто “осознавал” (как некий объективный,
не зависящий от него факт), но и намеренно к такой связи стремился.
Чтение Достоевского если не с самого начала, то постепенно, чем
далее, тем более, становилось профессиональным, т. е. вдумчивым и
аналитичным. В письме брату от 24 марта 1845 г. (тогда, когда он
заканчивал работу над “Бедными людьми”) Достоевский сообщал: “Ты,
может быть, хочешь знать, чем я занимаюсь, когда не пишу, – читаю. Я
страшно читаю, и чтение странно действует на меня. Что-нибудь, давно
перечитанное, прочитаю вновь и как будто напрягусь новыми силами,
вникаю во всё, отчетливо понимаю, и сам извлекаю умение создавать.” И
далее: “Брат, в отношении литературы я не тот, что был назад два года.
1. В основу статьи положен доклад, прочитанный на XIV Международном Симпозиуме

Международного Общества Достоевского. Неаполь. 15 июня 2010 г.
2. Д. В. Григорович, Литературные воспоминания (Москва: ГИХЛ, 1961), с. 47.
3. А. Л. Бем, “Достоевский – гениальный читатель,” Вокруг Достоевского в 2 т. О
Достоевском. Сб. ст. под ред. А. Л. Бема. Прага 1929 / 1933 / 1936 (Москва: Русский путь,
2007), 1: 207.
Тогда было ребячество, вздор. Два года изучения много принесли и

много унесли” (28, 1: 108).4
Однако каким бы “вздором” “в отношении литературы” ни были
ранние годы, они, конечно, тоже служили профессиональной выучке.
Так, 16 августа 1839 г. Достоевский признавался брату: “…учиться, ‘что
значит человек и жизнь’, – в этом довольно успеваю я; учить характеры
могу из писателей, с которыми лучшая часть жизни моей протекает
свободно и радостно…” и т.д. (28, 1: 63). Но два года, которые выделяет
писатель, сыграли решающую роль: помимо усвоения приемов и навыков
художественного мастерства, именно в это время, как ясно, сложились
основные убеждения, сформировались идейные и эстетические
ориентиры. Одним словом, ребяческая наивность восприятия уступила
место зрелому размышлению.
С этих пор литературные (и не только литературные) предпочтения,
симпатии и антипатии обрели под собой твердую почву разумно
обоснованных воззрений.
Свое эстетическое credo (не вполне, но в существенной части)
Достоевский изложил в первом же романе. Он сделал это с опорой на
Белинского – первого критика России, произведения которого
внимательно читал. “Я мало думал об успехе, – вспоминал Достоевский
много лет спустя, – а этой ‘партии Отечественных записок’, как говорили
тогда, я боялся. Белинского я читал уже несколько лет с увлечением, но
он мне казался грозным и страшным и – ‘осмеет он моих Бедных людей!”
– думалось мне иногда. Но лишь иногда…’ (“Дневник писателя” за 1877
г., январь, гл. 2, IV “Русская сатира. ‘Новь’. ‘Последние песни’. Старые
воспоминания”; 25: 28). Опасения Достоевского (если они его и в самом
деле посещали) были, как известно, напрасны: Белинский встретил
произведение начинающего автора с восторгом. В частности, потому, что
почувствовал в нем отголоски своих идей.
“Еще Добролюбов отметил, – писал В. Я. Кирпотин, соглашаясь с
Добролюбовым, – что в гуманных воззрениях Бедных людей не было
ничего нового по сравнению с пропагандой Белинского и что по своему
художественному методу они вполне сливались с общим потоком
‘натуральной школы’ (это не совсем справедливо. – В.В.).
Индивидуальный стиль воплощения зависел от особенностей дарования
Достоевского, но Белинский потому так и взволновался и возликовал, что
нашел в рукописи представшего перед ним трепещущего юноши свое.”5
В таком случае понятны не только неумеренные восторги по поводу
Бедных людей, но и столь же неумеренные огорчения по поводу
“Двойника,” “Господина Прохарчина” и особенно “Хозяйки.”
Уже после личного знакомства с критиком Достоевский рассказывал
брату в письме от 8 октября 1845 г.: “Я бываю весьма часто у
4. Ф. М. Достоевский, Полное собрание сочинений в 30 т. (Ленинград: Наука, 1972–

1990). Здесь и далее ссылки на это издание даются в тексте; в скобках указаны том или том
и книга, затем – страницы. Курсив в цитатах везде принадлежит авторам.
5. В. Кирпотин, Достоевский и Белинский (Москва: Художественная литература, 1976),
с. 26.
Белинского. Он ко мне донельзя расположен и серьезно видит во мне

доказательство перед публикою и оправдание мнений своих” (28, 1:
113). Однако вряд ли такое “доказательство” и тоже вполне “серьезно”
видел в себе Достоевский. Иначе вслед за приведенными словами не
прозвучала бы в том же письме неподдельная тревога: “Вообще говоря,
будущность (и весьма недалекая) может быть хороша и может быть и
страх как дурна” (Там же). Именно последнее, как водится, в
значительной степени и оправдалось: Достоевский, едва
познакомившись, очень скоро разошелся с кругом Белинского. И это
доставило начинающему автору немало горьких минут. В апреле 1847 г.,
т. е. менее чем через два года после знакомства с Белинским и “нашими,”
Достоевский писал брату: “Вот уже третий год литературного моего
поприща я как в чаду. Не вижу жизни, некогда опомниться; наука уходит
за невременьем. Хочется установиться. Сделали они мне (писатели круга
Белинского. – В.В.) известность сомнительную. И я не знаю, до которых
пор пойдет этот ад. Тут бедность, срочная работа, – кабы покой!!” (28, 1:
141).
Говорить о влиянии Белинского на Достоевского довольно
затруднительно. Несмотря на разницу лет, несмотря на увлеченное
чтение сочинений критика (а кого в те годы, если судить по письмам, не
читал Достоевский с увлечением?!), автор Бедных людей даже в первом
романе выступил не учеником Белинского, а, скорее, его
единомышленником. И то – до известной степени, и то – в известных
границах. (Кстати, имя Белинского до личного с ним знакомства в
письмах Достоевского не упоминается).6
Позднее (письмо М. М. Достоевскому от 17 декабря 1846 г.)
Достоевский объяснял: “Мне всё кажется, что я завел процесс со всею
нашей литературою, журналами и критиками и тремя частями романа
моего в ‘Отечественных записках’ (имеется в виду “Неточка Незванова.”
– В. В.) и устанавливаю и на этот год мое первенство назло
недоброжелателям моим” (28, 1: 135). В действительности этот “процесс”
Достоевский “завел” уже в Бедных людях. Его связь с литературой,
выражавшаяся в осознанных притяжениях и отталкиваниях, не
ограничивалась изящной словесностью, но включала и критику. Начиная
литературную деятельность, Достоевский развернул баталию по всему
фронту, соперничая и с известными писателями, и с теми, кто критически
оценивал их труды.
Мнения ведущего критика России (“великого критика,” как называл
его Достоевский – 25: 30), его оценки вызывали у писателя не только
согласие, но и полемику. Полемика по преимуществу касалась
6. В. Я. Кирпотин, не склонный умалять влияние критика на писателя, тем не менее

счел нужным заметить: “Достоевский относился к Белинскому не так, как ученик
относится к учителю. Он не затверживал его уроков в их формально-логической
законченности, он непрестанно размышлял о них, впитывал их, растворял в своем
сознании, вдохновлялся ими, находил в них отправные пункты для своего
художественного творчества” (Ibid., с. 16). В действительности отношение Достоевского к
Белинскому было еще более сдержанным.
отношения к Пушкину и особенно к Гоголю (писателям первой

величины), которое Белинский не мог без оговорок признать своим, во
всяком случае – до знакомства с “Бедными людьми” (да, конечно, и
позднее).7 А согласие и сочувствие внушала упорная, последовательная
борьба критика с запоздалыми романтиками и их эпигонами, с “улицей”
(если воспользоваться словечком Достоевского) романтизма.8
Начинающий писатель выступил на стороне Белинского против
романтиков в защиту принципов нового реалистического искусства,
главным представителем которого, в глазах критика, был Гоголь,9 в
глазах же Достоевского – конечно, Пушкин и, ему хотелось надеяться,
очень скоро должен стать он сам. При условии везения и успеха первого
романа – возможно, не без поддержки “партии Отечественных записок” и
того же Белинского.
Прямые и косвенные переклички с Белинским в Бедных людях

возникают в сложном контексте полушутливой-полусерьезной
литературной игры, рассчитанной на понимание “своих” и их
одобрительную усмешку. Отвлеченные рассуждения критика
Достоевский переводит в план конкретных представлений, логические
понятия и переходы мысли – в систему образных соответствий, ирония
высказывания оборачивается эффектной уничижительной пародией.
Так, в статье “Русская литература в 1843 году” (Отечественные
записки, 1844, т. XXXII, № 1, отд. V “Критика,” с. 1–42; ц. р. 31 декабря
1843 г.; вып. в свет 2 января 1844 г.; без подписи) Белинский говорит о
неблагополучном состоянии современной литературы, о засилье
дилетантов среди пишущей братии, о невзыскательной публике, не
только читающей, но и почитающей их: “Литераторство у нас – дело
между другими важнейшими делами, отдых от служебных занятий, а
чаще всего оно имеет простое значение лишних полутора или двух тысяч
рублей в год, вдобавок к жалованью.” Публика полагает, что “занятие
литературою между прочим – дело очень почтенное, особенно, если оно
прибыльно…” И далее: “…литература наша только в немногих своих
исключениях выше этой публики; но, взятая вообще, совершенно по
7. Ср.: “В суждениях о Гоголе Достоевский был оригинален и парадоксален. Отдавая

дань уважения и увлечения Гоголем, он в отличие от своих литературных соратников
считал, что нужно идти не от Гоголя, а от Пушкина, что именно Пушкин должен стать
знаменем новой русской литературы” (В. Н. Захаров, “Дебют гения,” Ф. М. Достоевский.
Полное собрание сочинений. Канонические тексты. (Петрозаводск: изд., Петрозаводского
университета, 1995), 1: 611.
8. Об “улице,” которая всегда опошляет высокие идеи, Достоевский говорил в связи с
либерализмом, увлекшим русское общество накануне реформ 1860-х годов: “И чего тогда
не говорилось и не утверждалось, какие нередко мерзости выставлялись за честь и
доблесть. В сущности, это была грубая улица, и честная идея попала на улицу” (22: 101) и
др.
9. В статье “О русской повести и повестях г. Гоголя” (1835) Белинский писал: “…г.
Гоголь владеет талантом необыкновенным, сильным и высоким. По крайней мере в
настоящее время он является главою литературы, главою поэтов; он становится на место,
оставленное Пушкиным.” См.: В. Г. Белинский, Собрание сочинений в 9 т. (Москва:
Художественная литература, 1976), 1: 183.
плечу ей. Наши литераторы большею частию не артисты (т. е. не

художники, не писатели профессионалы. – В. В.), а дилетанты, которые
между делом и бездельем, почитывают и пописывают. Они убеждены,
что можно прежде всего делать что-нибудь <…> а потом, в свободное от
главных занятий время, почему и не написать чего-нибудь – ведь оно же
и выгодно, между прочим.”10
Ситуация, о которой говорит Белинский, легко угадывается в Бедных
Людях в рассказе Макара Алексеевича Девушкина о литературных
вечерах у Ратазяева. Среди гостей своего литературного “друга” бедный
герой чувствует себя, по собственному признанию, “болван болваном.”
Однако это не мешает ему задуматься о том, что сочинительство (такое, с
каким он знакомится у Ратазяева), в конце концов, и ему по плечу: “Ведь
что я теперь в свободное время делаю? Сплю, дурак дураком. А то бы
вместо спанья-то ненужного можно было бы и приятным заняться; этак
сесть бы да и пописать. И себе полезно и другим хорошо. Да что,
маточка, вы посмотрите только, сколько берут они, прости им Господь!
Вот хоть бы и Ратазяев, – как берет!” и т.д. (1: 51). Уже отсюда ясно,
кстати сказать, какую цену имеют восторги Макара Алексеевича по
поводу сочинений Ратазяева.
Подобные сочинения – тогдашний литературный ширпотреб. Об
авторах таких сочинений Белинский в той же статье писал, что их искать
и звать не надо, что если затеется какое-нибудь издание, они сами
прибегут. “Сто или двести из них принесут вам, на первый случай, по
сотне стихотворений, в которых нет ни поэзии, ни смысла; пятьдесят
принесут обещание – к такому-то числу представить по повести и, при
сей верной оказии, спросят вас, почем вы платите с листа; десять
принесут вам в самом деле по повести, исполненной канцелярского
юмора и чиновнической иронии или высокого трагического пафоса à la
Марлинский…”11
Что касается оплаты, то Ратазяеву, например, по словам Макара
Алексеевича, платят очень и даже очень неплохо: “Что ему лист
написать?12 Да он в иной день и по пяти писывал, а по триста рублей,
говорит, за лист берет. Там анекдотец какой-нибудь или из любопытного
что-нибудь – пятьсот, дай не дай, хоть тресни, да дай! а нет – так мы и по
тысяче другой раз в карман кладем! <…> Да что! Там у него стишков
тетрадочка есть, и стишок всё такой небольшой, – семь тысяч, маточка,
семь тысяч просит, подумайте. Да ведь это имение недвижимое, дом
капитальный!..” и т.д. (1: 51–52). Как бы ни преувеличивал Макар
Алексеевич, основываясь на хвастливых уверениях самого сочинителя,
доходы Ратазяева, они, судя по всему, вполне достаточны, ведь его
писания удовлетворяют непритязательному вкусу толпы.
10. В. Г. Белинский, Русская литература в 1843 году (Москва: Художественная

литература, 1976), 7: 32.
11. Ibid., с. 32–33.
12. “Лист” здесь означает страницу с оборотом.
Так, пафос à la Марлинский, увлекающий слишком многих, в избытке

демонстрируют ратазяевские “Итальянские страсти,” отрывок из которых
Макар Алексеевич выписывает для Вареньки: “…Владимир вздрогнул, и
страсти бешено заклокотали в нем, и кровь вскипела…
– Графиня, – вскричал он, – графиня! Знаете ли вы, как ужасна эта
страсть, как беспредельно это безумие? Нет, мои мечты меня не
обманывали! Я люблю, люблю восторженно, бешено, безумно! Вся кровь
твоего мужа не зальет бешеного, клокочущего восторга души моей!
Ничтожные препятствия не остановят всеразрывающего, адского огня,
бороздящего мою истомленную грудь. О Зинаида, Зинаида!..
– Владимир! – прошептала графиня вне себя, склоняясь к нему на
плечо…
– Зинаида! – закричал восторженный Смельский.
Из груди его испарился вздох. Пожар вспыхнул ярким пламенем на
алтаре любви и взбороздил грудь несчастных страдальцев.
– Владимир!.. – шептала в упоении графиня. Грудь ее вздымалась,
щеки ее багровели, очи горели…
Новый ужасный брак был совершен!............................……………
Через полчаса старый граф вошел в будуар жены своей.
– А что, душечка, не приказать ли для дорогого гостя самоварчик
поставить? – сказал он, потрепав жену по щеке” (1: 52).
Сочинения типа “Итальянских страстей,” понравившихся Макару

Алексеевичу, Белинский выделял в особый разряд; он говорил о “романе
восторженном, патетическом, живописующем растрепанные волосы,
всклокоченные чувства и кипящие страсти. Основателем этого рода
романа был <…> Марлинский, у которого есть тоже свои счастливые
подражатели.”13
Основным (но не единственным) источником “выписанного” Макаром
Алексеевичем отрывка из “Итальянских страстей” (и одновременно
объектом пародии Достоевского) является повесть А. А. Марлинского
“Фрегат ‘Надежда’.” Созданная с избыточными “претензиями на
глубокость и силу изображенных в ней страстей,” она, по свидетельству
Белинского, пользовалась “особенною знаменитостию и славою.”14
В данном случае имеется в виду эпизод, в котором Правин, герой
повести, оставив свой фрегат накануне бури, проводит ночь (если
13. В. Г. Белинский, “Кузьма Петрович Мирошев. Русская быль времен Екатерины II.
Сочинение М. Н. Загоскина,” 1842, В. Г. Белинский, Собрание сочинений в 9 т., 4: 362.
14. Ibid., 3: 27. На одно из сочинений, подражающих повести (“Сицкий (,) капитан
фрегата. Сочинение князя Н. Мышыцкого. Санкт-Петербург. 1840), Белинский написал
рецензию, начинающуюся словами: “Новое произведение литературной школы,
основанной Марлинским – не тем он будь помянут! Оно носит на себе все родовые
признаки своего происхождения: его герои всё офицеры, да еще морские; место действия –
фрегат…” и т.д. (Ibid., с. 448). Но фрегат, конечно, не обязателен. За сочинение повести à
la Марлинский, привнося в нее свои особенности, мог взяться кто угодно. Повесть была
настолько популярной – в частности, в чиновничьей среде, – что на ее авторство не мог не
покуситься Хлестаков (ср.: “Всё это, что было под именем Брамбеуса, Фрегат Надежды и
Московский Телеграф… всё это я написал” (“Ревизор,” д. 3, явл. VI).
следовать пересказу Белинского) “в объятиях любви и наслаждения”; при

этом буря, разразившаяся “громом и молниями,” заставляет его
произнести соответствующий обстановке гремучий монолог. Белинский
переписывает его, сопровождая своим комментарием: “ – Ты моя! Вера
моя! Что ж мне нужды до всего остального – пускай гибнут люди, пускай
весь свет разлетится вдребезги! Я подыму тебя над обломками, и
последний вздох мой разрешится поцелуем!.. <…> Знаешь ли ты, –
примолвил он тише, сверкая и вращая очами как опьянелый,– ты должна
любить меня, уважать меня, поклоняться мне более чем когда-нибудь
<…> Да, я могу сорить головами людей по своей прихоти и за каждый
твой поцелуй платить сотнею жизней…” и т.д.15
Весь этот надрывный треск и шумиху Белинский заключает словами:
“И это поэзия, а не реторика?.. И это вдохновение таланта?..”16 Фразу о
сверкании и вращении очей Белинский выделяет курсивом и восклицает:
“Какая возмущающая душу и оскорбляющая чувство картина!”17
Она, однако, нисколько не смущает Ратазяева. Сходную фразу,
позаимствовав ее из другого источника и слегка переиначив, он ввернул
в свою повесть “Ермак и Зюлейка” и прицепил ее к Ермаку. Ср.: “ –
Тогда казацкая сабля взовьется над ними (всеми людьми. – В. В.) и
свистнет! – вскричал Ермак, дико блуждая глазами” (1: 53) и тоже
намереваясь, по-видимому, “сорить головами.”
Все это время бешено клокочущей страсти (эту ночь “любви и
наслаждения”), ввергшей под конец Правина и княгиню Веру в грех, ее
муж был где-то рядом. Он появился в самый неподходящий момент. В
виде вестника грядущего суда и возмездия: “Страшный, как труба,
пронзающая могилы и рассевающая льстивые грезы грешников, раздался
над ними голос… Сердца их вздрогнули – перед ними стоял князь
Петр!”18
У Марлинского вслед за этим – три строки отточий, после которых
опозоренный муж в благородном негодовании произносит патетический
монолог, чрезвычайно красноречивый и эффектный.19
Белинский, не раз возвращавшийся к “Фрегату ‘Надежда’.” и именно к
сцене измены, считал, что реакция мужа в этой ситуации (как очень
многое в произведениях Марлинского) нелогична, притянута к делу кое-
как и без особого смысла: “…удивительно ли, если у него муж княгини
Веры, до 191 страницы только евший и пивший, как бессловесное
животное, на 191 странице вдруг делается и горд, и благороден, и умен, и
на полутора страницах говорит экспромтом ‘речь’, сочинение которой
сделало бы честь самому Правину?..”20 Белинский это писал в 1840 г. в
статье “Полное собрание сочинений А. Марлинского” (Отечественные
15. А. А. Бестужев-Марлинский, Повести и рассказы (Москва: Советская Россия,

1976), с. 364.
16. В. Г. Белинский, Собрание сочинений в 9 т., 3: 30.
17. Ibid.
18. Бестужев-Марлинский, Повести и рассказы, с. 365.
19. Ibid., с. 365–366.
20. Белинский, Собрание сочинений в 9 т., 3: 31.
записки, 1840, т. VIII, № 2, отд.V “Критика”). То же самое он писал и

шестью годами раньше в статье “Литературные мечтания (Элегия в
прозе)”: “Мне кажется, что роман не его (Марлинского. – В. В.) дело, ибо
у него нет никакого знания человеческого сердца, никакого
драматического такта. Для чего, например, заставил он князя, для
которого все радости земли и неба заключались в устрицах, для которого
вкусный стол всегда был дороже жены и ее чести, для чего заставил он
его проговорить патетический монолог осквернителю его брачного ложа,
монолог, который сделал бы честь и самому Правину?”21
У Марлинского обманутый муж застает любовников на месте
преступления. Между его появлением и изреченным им приговором, как
говорилось, три строки отточий. В сочинении Ратазяева (или, что то же, в
пародии Достоевского) муж появляется если и не в самый неподходящий
момент, то очень близко от этого момента, когда “растрепанные волосы”
и “всклокоченные чувства” еще никак не могли быть причесаны и
приведены в порядок, а “кипящие страсти” остыть. Вероятно, в
ознаменование этого обстоятельства всего одна строка отточий и
отделяет торжество разделенной, но предосудительной любви от
появления обманутого мужа. Однако в отличие от повести Марлинского
этот муж не произносит патетического монолога. Повинуясь
рекомендации критика, он ведет себя самым будничным образом – по-
видимому, в полном соответствии со своим прозаическим характером,
раз и навсегда расположенным при любом повороте в житейском
странствии что-нибудь поесть и выпить: “– А что, душечка, не приказать
ли для дорогого гостя самоварчик поставить? – сказал он, потрепав жену
по щеке.” И это выглядит гораздо более абсурдно (не только по форме
выражения, но и по существу), чем любая патетика. Ведь все-таки не
каждый день муж (каковы бы ни были его достоинства и недостатки)
впервые убеждается в неверности жены, чтобы остаться равнодушным к
такому событию и поспешить по этому случаю лишний раз поесть и
выпить. Здесь, как ясно, Достоевский скорее был склонен согласиться с
автором романтической повести, чем с его суровым критиком.
По мнению Белинского, высказанному уже в “Литературных
мечтаниях,” Марлинский производит наилучшее впечатление на
читающую публику исключительно на безлюдье: “…нельзя не сознаться,
что его талант чрезвычайно односторонен, что его претензии на пламень
чувства весьма подозрительны, что в его созданиях нет никакой глубины,
никакой философии, никакого драматизма; что, вследствие этого, все
герои его повестей сбиты на одну колодку и отличаются друг от друга
только именами; что он повторяет себя в каждом новом произведении;
что у него более фраз, чем мыслей, более риторических возгласов, чем
выражений чувства.”22
Позднее Белинский отказал героям Марлинского, и мужчинам, и
женщинам, вообще в каком бы то ни было отличии, даже по именам:
21. Ibid., 1: 109.

22. Ibid., с. 107.
“…сам их сочинитель не мог бы различить их (лица, выдуманные

автором. – В. В.) одно от другого даже по именам, а угадывал бы разве
только по платью” (имеется в виду – мужскому или женскому).23
Если так обстоит дело с родоначальником “школы,” то ничего другого
не приходится ожидать от его подражателей. Все их герои “без лиц” и на
одно лицо; будучи в общем ряду “безличных лиц и бесхарактерных
характеров,”24 они могут спокойно меняться именами. Вот почему,
пересказав кое-как и на свой лад кульминационный эпизод повести
“Фрегат ‘Надежда’,” имена своих героев Ратазяев заимствует у других
любителей Марлинского, ведь, в конце концов, не так уж и важно, в ком
именно “бешено заклокотали страсти” и чья “кровь вскипела.”
Владимир Смельский явился из романа Ф. Фан-Дим (псевдоним Е. В.
Кологривовой; 1809–1884) “Два призрака” (СПб., 1842. Ч. 1–4). При этом
имя и фамилия героя Ратазяева в источнике принадлежат хотя и
связанным узами дружбы, но разным персонажам, чьи характеры
сочинялись с особой заботой подчеркнуть их противоположность. Это
Владимир Марлин (фамилия, по-видимому, – знак почтения к кумиру; ср.:
Марлинский – Марлин) и Петр Смельский. Соединение Владимир
Смельский естественно упраздняет всякую претензию на различие и этих
двух призраков, вызванных Ратазяевым из чужого романа.
Мотив “несчастных страдальцев” на почве любовного томления
(“Пожар вспыхнул ярким пламенем на алтаре любви и взбороздил грудь
несчастных страдальцев” – 1: 52) ближайшим образом отсылает к тому
же роману, где о влюбленном Владимире Марлине сказано: “страдалец,”
о влюбленной героине – “страдалица.”25
Зинаида, имя героини Ратазяева, восходит к повести Зенеиды Р-вой (т.
е. Ржищевой; Зенеида Р-ва – псевдоним Е. А. Ган; 1814–1842) “Суд
света” (1840). К этой же повести восходит и восклицание Владимира
Смельского, вырвавшееся у него вследствие “всеразрывающего, адского
огня, бороздящего” его “истомленную грудь”: “О Зинаида, Зинаида!..”
Ср. в повести Е. А. Ган: “…я видел ее в объятиях отжившего, давно
расточившего жизнь супруга <…>, в бешеном припадке ревности и
негодования, я терзал грудь свою, со жгучими слезами припадал к
изголовью, чтоб хоть в нем удушить громкие рыдания, и не раз, лобызая
в забытьи увлажненную слезами подушку, роптал: ‘Зенаида!
Зенаида!..’.”26
Обеих писательниц, Е. В. Кологривову и Е. А. Ган, Белинский
справедливо называл в числе подражателей Марлинского.27
23. Ibid., 3: 27.

24. Ibid., с. 25.
25. См., например: Ф. Фан-Дим, Два призрака (Санкт-Петербург, 1842), часть 1, с. 235,
247.
26. Е. А. Ган, “Суд света,” Дача на Петергофской дороге. Проза русских писательниц
первой половины XIX века (Москва: изд. Современник, 1987), с. 173.
27. Белинский, Собрание сочинений в 9 т., 4: 517, 518 (рецензия на роман Е. В.
Кологривовой “Два призрака”); 5: 264, 269 (статья “Сочинения Зенеиды Р-вой”).
Творчество Е. В. Кологривовой вызывало у критика резкое (и, надо

сказать, заслуженное) неприятие. В рецензии на роман “Два призрака”
(Отечественные записки, 1842, т. XXI, № 4, отд. VI “Библиографическая
хроника,” с. 29–32) он писал: “В оправдание мудрой русской пословицы:
не родись ни умен, ни пригож, а родись счастлив, недавно появившееся
имя г-на Фан-Дима грозит сделаться знаменитым именем в современной
русской литературе, благодаря вкусу, образованности и
добросовестности некоторых наших журналов, которые до седьмого неба
превознесли водяную, детски несвязную и напыщенную повесть
‘Александрина’ – первый опыт г. Фан-Дима. ‘Два призрака’ были
превознесены ими только еще в виде извещений о появлении этого
романа: что же будет в критиках и рецензиях о нем?..”28
Белинский имеет в виду Н. А. Полевого, неумеренно расхвалившего в
“Русском вестнике” первую повесть Е. В. Кологривовой и назвавший еще
не опубликованный роман “прекрасным.” Перечисляя в “Литературных
известиях” вышедшие и готовящиеся к выходу романы, Н. А. Полевой
сообщал: “Наконец, писатель, скрывший свое имя под псевдонимом Фан-
Дима, на днях выдаст роман, в 4-х частях (и за тайну вам сказать,
прекрасный!). Порадуемся: будет что почитать, будет о чем
поговорить!”29 Однако позднее, по выходе романа в свет, Полевой был
заметно разочарован.30
Возражая Полевому, преждевременно и неосмотрительно
похвалившему роман, Белинский писал: “Эти ‘Два призрака’ не что иное,
как один призрак, и суть самое ‘призрачное’ явление современной
литературы – четырехтомный нуль, огромное вместилище слов без
значения и фраз без содержания, длинный, утомительный рассказ о
происшествиях и случаях, которых не бывает в действительности; вялое
и бесцветное изображение людей, характеров и общества, которых не
было, нет и не будет нигде, кроме холодного воображения бесталантных
сочинителей” и т.д.31
Отрицательное мнение о романе разделял Н. А. Некрасов:
“…чувствительность – его элемент; чувствительность приторная, вялая,
безжизненная, утомительная и скучная…”32 И далее: “‘Два призрака’ –
роман в двух, а не в четырех частях, потому что третья и четвертая часть
его – не что иное, как повторение первой и второй, с небольшим
прибавлением в конце.”33 “Характеров в ‘Двух призраках’ не имеется,
потому что роман, как мы уже сказали, чувствительный, а из
28. Ibid., 4: 515.

29. Русский вестник, № 2 (1842), отд. IV, с. 49.
30. При всех реверансах в сторону автора и одобрении некоторых частностей Полевой
посоветовал Е. В. Кологривовой признать “ “Два призрака” шуткою, неудачною попыткою
прокатиться по избитой колее романа, вроде тех, которые ежедневно являются и гибнут
десятками, сотнями” (Русский вестник, № 4. (1842), отд. III, с. 25).
32. Н. А. Некрасов, “Два призрака.” Роман в четырех частях. Соч. Фан-Дима. СПб.,
1842, Н. А. Некрасов, Полное собрание сочинений и писем в 15 т. (Ленинград: Наука,
1989), 11, 1: 55.
33. Ibid., с. 57.
чувствительности необходимо вытекает высокопарность, которая при

художественном настроении душ действующих лиц отнимает малейшую
возможность создать современного человека.” Некоторое исключение,
однако (в отличие от Белинского, у которого нет исключений), Некрасов
делает для Смельского: “Только Смельский, остряк, веселый малый,
материалист, обрисован довольно верно с подлинником, так что невольно
жалеешь, для чего автор не набросал нам побольше таких типов вместо
мечтательных призраков, которых в его романе не два, а почти столько
же, сколько лиц.”34
Отношение Белинского к Е. А. Ган, “автору многих превосходных
повестей,”35 в целом было весьма благожелательным. Ее творчеству
критик посвятил большую статью – рецензию “Сочинения Зенеиды Р-
вой. Санкт-Петербург. 1843. Четыре части,” написанную уже после
смерти рано умершего автора. В этой статье Белинский утверждал, что
“ни одна из русских писательниц не обладала такою силою мысли, таким
тактом действительности, таким замечательным талантом, как Зенеида Р-
ва” и что вообще “существенное достоинство повестей Зенеиды Р-вой” –
в “их мысли.”36 Об этом достоинстве и даже с б'ольшим энтузиазмом, чем
Белинский, писал Некрасов: “В ее произведениях заметно уже
присутствие господствующего убеждения, могучей мысли <…>. Зенеида
Р-ва всюду верна своей любимой, задушевной идее и вместе с тем верна
действительности, источнику своей идеи.” И далее: “Зенеида Р-ва в
значительной степени обладала характеризующую таланты высшего рода
способностию постигать действительность или, короче, одарена была
тактом действительности…”37
“Такт действительности” побуждал Е. А. Ган положить в основу своих
повествований изображение женских характеров и возвышенных
женских чувств в тех ракурсах и поворотах, которые напоминали
русскому читателю о проблематике романов Жорж Санд. “Мысль,”
“идея,” как, впрочем, и “весь пафос <…> поэзии” Зенеиды Р-вой,
вызвавшие горячую симпатию и Некрасова, и Белинского, заключаются,
по словам последнего, “в глубокой скорби об общественном унижении
женщины и в энергическом протесте против этого унижения. Повесть
‘Суд света’ написана преимущественно под влиянием этой идеи, которая,
однако ж, органически связывается с идеею о высокой способности
женщины к безграничной любви.”38
Несмотря на весьма положительную оценку творчества Е. А. Ган,
Белинский видит и досадные недостатки. Иногда он замечает у автора
“провинциальный идеализм à la Марлинский,” иногда – “слог <…>
34. Ibid., с. 58.

36. Ibid., 5: 252.
37. Н. А. Некрасов, Взгляд на главнейшие явления русской литературы в 1843 году,
Н.А. Некрасов, Полное собрание сочинений и писем в 15 т., 11, 1: 152.
38. Белинский, Собрание сочинений в 9 т., 5: 261. Эта повесть была одобрена многими,
в том числе и Некрасовым. См.: Некрасов, Полное собрание сочинений и писем в 15 т., 11,
1: 154–155.
Марлинского,” иногда – “самую смешную марлинщину.”39 В

произведениях Е. А. Ган, к огорчению критика, попадаются даже
“эпиграфы из гг. Кукольника и Бенедиктова.” Все это Белинский относит
на счет отсутствия у автора столичной искушенности и присутствия,
напротив, убогого провинциализма: “В провинции – известное дело –
идеалом нувелистов добродушно считают Марлинского, идеалом
лириков – г. Бенедиктова, идеалом драматургов – г. Кукольника, а
идеалом юмористов – Барона Брамбеуса… Мы знаем из достоверного
источника, что лучшими повестями на русском языке Зенеида Р-ва
считала ‘Аммалат-Бека’ Марлинского и ‘Блаженство безумия’ г.
Полевого. Нельзя не сознаться с горестью, что на ее повестях заметен
отпечаток влияния повестей Марлинского и г. Полевого.”40
Трудно сказать, как отнесся Достоевский к “могучей мысли” и
“пафосу” произведений Зенеиды Р-вой, имя которой он нигде не
упоминает (вряд ли с таким же воодушевлением, что и Белинский или
Некрасов), но надуманные положения, высокопарные тирады и
напыщенный слог à la Марлинский и Полевой его, конечно, смешили.
Это видно по “Итальянским страстям.”
Само название сочинения Ратазяева “Итальянские страсти” не
случайно. Оно имеет свою литературную предысторию, связанную с
именами Некрасова и Н. А. Полевого.
В резко отрицательной рецензии на первую пьесу К. Д. Ефимовича
(1816–1847) “Эспаньолетто, или Отец и художник,” подписанную
псевдонимом И. Ралянч, в рецензии, опубликованной в “Литературной
газете” за 1844 г. (31 августа, № 34) без подписи, Некрасов, полагая, что
автором пьесы был Н. А. Полевой, дважды упомянул слова об
“итальянских страстях” – сначала в подзаголовке, “Эспаньолетто, или
Отец и художник. ‘Попытка на севере на изображение итальянских
страстей’ в пяти действиях” и далее, в заключении: “Автор подает
большие надежды по части ‘изображения на севере итальянских
страстей’.“41 Некрасов обыгрывает возможную двусмысленность: с
одной стороны, попытка на севере изображения… и т.д., а с другой –
попытка изображения итальянских страстей, прописавшихся почему-то
на севере.
В предыдущем номере “Литературной газеты” (24 августа,1844, № 33),
в фельетоне “Петербургская хроника,” опубликованном тоже без
подписи, Некрасов писал: “На днях была также представлена на
Александрынском театре новая оригинальная драма под названием
‘Эспаньолетто’. О ней мы также скоро поговорим. Но чья это драма? –
спросите вы. Наверное не знаем, а вот что было писано, около пяти лет
назад, г-ном Полевым в ‘Письме к Ф. В. Булгарину’, напечатанном в
‘Сыне отечества’ (см. № IV, 1839 г.): “Так, в одном из новых
приготовляемых мною для сцены опытов моих, под названием “Ода
39. Белинский, Собрание сочинений в 9 т., 5: 264, 265, 267.

40. Ibid., с. 269.
41. Некрасов, Полное собрание сочинений и писем в 15 т., 11, 1: 331, 334.
премудрой царевне Фелице,” мне хотелось бы показать поэтическую

сторону прозаической жизни Державина; в другом, “Елене Глинской,”
испытать быт русской старины в идеале художника (?); в третьем,
“Стрешневе,” – простое изображение русского быта и опыт на сцене
языка наших предков; в “Эспаньолетто” попытаться на севере на
изображение итальянских страстей…”
О каком “Эспаньолетто” здесь идет дело, – не о том ли, что дано на
днях на сцене? или эта драма сама по себе, а та угрожает еще нам
впереди? Во всяком случае, теперь или после, очень приятно будет
увидеть попытку г-на Полевого на изображение на севере итальянских
страстей…”42
У Достоевского такую “попытку” осуществляет Ратазяев, изображая
“итальянские страсти” не только на севере (в будуаре русской графини),
но, “для усиления смеха” (14, 9), прямо в Сибири. Так выглядит дело в
его повести “Ермак и Зюлейка.”
Заметим, кстати, что неприятие “итальянских страстей” где бы то ни
было (хотя бы и в самой Италии, а не то что в Сибири) у Некрасова и
Достоевского в середине 1840-х гг. было тем более решительным, что оба
писателя в свое время отдали этим “страстям” известную дань.
Достоевский по дороге в Петербург для определения в дальнейшем в
Главное инженерное училище (май 1837 г.), по собственному признанию,
“беспрерывно в уме сочинял роман из венецианской жизни” (22, 27); а
Некрасов даже опубликовал такого рода сочинения (в 1840 г. повесть
“Певица,” в 1842 г. повесть “В Сардинии.” Правда, в последней описаны
“испанские страсти,” но они ничуть не хуже “итальянских”).
“Ермак и Зюлейка” – пародия на псевдоисторические повествования,
которые не имеют никакого отношения ни к исторической, ни вообще к
какой бы то ни было действительности. О таких повествованиях можно
сказать то, что Белинский говорил о драмах Н. В. Кукольника: “В них
русские имена, русские костюмы, русская речь, но русского духа слыхом
не слыхать, видом не видать.”43 И еще (в связи с трагедиями А. С.
Хомякова): “Одежда и слова русские, а чувства, побуждения и образ
мыслей немецкий или французский… Мы не станем говорить о
вульгарно народных, безвкусных, бездарных и неэстетических изделиях:
подобные чудища везде нередки и везде составляют необходимый сор и
дрязг на заднем дворе литературы. Но что такое “Ермак” и “Дмитрий
Самозванец” г. Хомякова, как не псевдоисторические трагедии в духе и
роде трагедий Корнеля, Расина, Вольтера, Кребильона и Дюсиса? А их
действующие лица что такое, как не немцы и французы в маскараде, с
накладными бородами и в длиннополых кафтанах? Ермак – немецкий
бурш; казаки, его товарищи – немецкие школьники; а возлюбленная
Ермака – пародия на Амалию в “Разбойниках” Шиллера.”44
42. Ibid., 12, 1: 130–131. Процитированные слова Полевого см.: Сын отечества (1839),
т. 8, отд. IV, “Критика и библиография,” с. 113.
44. Ibid., с. 480; ср.: Ibid., 7: 26, 194 и др.
Пародируемые Достоевским сочинения посвящены как раз Ермаку,

покорителю Сибири (†1584?). На эту тему, начиная с исторической песни
о Ермаке из сборника Кирши Данилова45 и драматической поэмы И. И.
Дмитриева (1760–1837) “Ермак” (1794),46 написано несколько
произведений разных авторов в разных жанрах: дума К. Ф. Рылеева
(1795–1826) “Смерть Ермака” (1821); безымянное произведение “Ермак,
завоеватель Сибири. Историческая повесть,” вышедшее вторым изданием
в Москве в 1827 г.; стихотворение А. Н. Муравьева (1806–1974) “Ермак”
(1827); трагедия А. С. Хомякова “Ермак,” замеченная публикой
(написана в 1825–1826 гг., премьера 1829 г., отдельное издание – М.,
1832); затем: “Ермак, или Покорение Сибири. Исторический роман XVI
столетия.” Сочинение Павла Свиньина. Ч. 1–4. СПб., 1834; еще одно
безымянное сочинение – “Ермак, покоритель Сибири,” исторический
роман в 2-х частях, выдержавший с конца 1830-х гг. шесть изданий (1839,
1841, 1843, 1845, 1846, 1848 гг.); наконец, драма Н. А. Полевого (1796–
1846) “Ермак Тимофеевич, или Волга и Сибирь” (премьера 15 февраля
1845 г., отдельное издание: СПб., 1845; ц. р. 28 февраля 1845 г.).
Почти все эти сочинения (и не только они) самым прихотливым
образом отразились в повести Ратазяева, где романтические
преувеличения и домыслы их авторов доведены до полного абсурда.
Справедливости ради следует сказать (если иметь в виду б'ольшую часть
перечисленных повествований), что двигаться Ратазяеву в этом
направлении было недалеко.
Зюлейка, у Ратазяева возлюбленная Ермака, перекочевала “в родные
снега Сибири, в юрту отца своего” (1, 53) из восточной поэмы Байрона
“Абидосская невеста” (1813), переведенной на русский язык И. И.
Козловым (1826),47 а вместе с ней, этой поэмой, и – из бедных вариаций
45. См. о ней: Ibid., 4: 263–266.

46. Она заслужила, при всех оговорках, положительный отзыв Белинского. Критик
писал: “Формы од Дмитриева оригинальны, как, например, в “Ермаке,” где поэт решился
вывести двух сибирских шаманов, из которых старый рассказывает молодому, при шуме
волн Иртыша, о гибели своей отчизны. Стихи этой пьесы для нашего времени и грубы, и
шероховаты, и не поэтичны; но для своего времени они были превосходны, и от них веяло
духом новизны” и т. д. Ibid., 6: 95.
47. Кстати, Зюлейка из поэмы Байрона упомянута в четвертой части романа “Два
призрака” Е. В. Кологривовой. Героиня этого романа (Агата) говорит о себе: “Я ожидала и
боялась тех ощущений, которые привели в трепет и тайный восторг Байронову Зюлейку,
когда она узнает, что Селим – не брат ее, и что их любовь – настоящая любовь, со всем
увлечением страсти” (Ф. Фан-Дим, Два призрака [Санкт-Петербург, 1842], часть 4. с.14).
Вообще имя Зюлейка (Зулейха) идет из восточного предания об Иосифе Прекрасном и
влюбленной в него жене Пентефрия (Потифара), которая, хотя и была отвергнута
Иосифом, продолжала любить его до самой его смерти. На Востоке она сделалась
образцом безграничной, нежной и преданной любви. К этому популярному преданию
восходит и Зюлейка “Западно-Восточного дивана” Гете (1819), и Зюлейка “Абидосской
невесты” (1813). В примечаниях к своей поэме Байрон пишет: “Турки неосновательно
думают, будто предания о Каине, о ковчеге и все повествования Ветхого Завета им столько
же известны, сколько и евреям. Они даже тщеславятся знанием самых мелочных
обстоятельств из жизни патриархов с большею подробностию, нежели означены оныя в
Св. Писании <…>. Зюлейкою, по-персидски, называется жена Пентефрия, и любовь ее к
Иосифу дала предмет к сочинению одной из прекраснейших восточных поэм” (см. в кн.:
на ее тему Варвары Лизогуб (“Зюлейка, повесть в стихах.” Сочинение

Варвары Лизо<гу>б. М., 1845; ц. р. мая 25 дня, 1845 года). Именно в этой
повести, построенной на перепевах не только Байрона, но и Пушкина
(“Бахчисарайский фонтан,” 1824), Ратазяев нашел и повторил мотив,
напоминающий о “вращающихся” очах Правина.
Здесь о Гирее, услышавшем от своей жены, Зюлейки, признание в том,
что она любит гяура, сказано:
Глаза его дико, безумно блуждали…48
Напомню этот мотив в Бедных Людях: “ – Тогда казацкая сабля

взовьется над ними и свистнет! – вскричал Ермак, дико блуждая глазами”
(1, 53).
Надо заметить, что ни в одном из повествований о Ермаке и
покорении им Сибири дочь сибирского царя Кучума (реальное лицо; до
1540 г. – ок. 1600 г.), в которую у Ратазяева (и в пародии Достоевского)
влюблен Ермак (…влюблен в Зюлейку, дочь сибирского царя Кучума, им
в полон взятую” – 1, 52), вообще не фигурирует. Зато фигурирует дочь
одного из сибирских князей, нежные отношения которой с Ермаком у
Ратазяева сильно преувеличены. Ср.: “Продолжая таким образом идти
вперед, поражал он (Ермак. – В. В.) всюду неприятеля и наконец
подступил к селению татарского князя Иелигая, которой, добровольно
покорившись под власть его, поднес ему не только знатные дары, но
представил ему дочь свою, которая почиталась у татар красавицею,
желая выдать ее за него замуж; однакож Ермак не принял сего
предложения и запретил строжайше, чтоб никто из козаков не смел
нанесть ей оскорбление.”49
В четвертой части “исторического романа” Павла Свиньина тоже
упоминается сибирская княжна (Тебенский князь привозит к Ермаку
свою дочь) от которой Ермак тоже отказывается. Однако здесь он
запрещает казакам даже на нее взглянуть.50
Поскольку у Кучума не было дочери (в повествованиях о Ермаке – во
всяком случае), Ермак не мог взять ее в плен, как это происходит у
Ратазяева (1: 52). В действительности покоритель Сибири взял в плен не
дочь, а племянника царя Кучума. В исторической справке,
предпосланной думе “Смерть Ермака,” К. Ф. Рылеев, например, пишет:
“В течение следующего года (1582. – В. В.) казаки разбили татар во
многих сражениях, взяли Искер (столицу Сибирского царства на
Стихотворения И. И. Козлова. Изд. исправленное и значительно дополненное Арс. И.

Введенским [Санкт-Петербург, 1892], с. 135–136).
48. Лизо<гу>б В., Зюлейка, повесть в стихах. Указанное издание, с. 14.
49. Ермак, завоеватель Сибири. Историческая повесть. Издание 2-е (Москва: 1827), с.
167–168.
50. Ермак, или Покорение Сибири. Исторический роман XVI столетия. Сочинение
Павла Свиньина (Санкт-Петербург: 1834), части 1–4, с. 120–122.
Иртыше. – В. В.), пленили Кучумова племянника, царевича Маметкула, и

около трех лет господствовали в Сибири.”51
Слова Макара Алексеевича о том, что “событие,” описанное
Ратазяевым, взято “прямо из времен Ивана Грозного, как вы видите” (1:
52), похоже, повторяют замечание Ратазяева и взяты “прямо из” драмы Н.
А. Полевого “Ермак Тимофеевич, или Волга и Сибирь” (1845), где после
длинного перечня действующих лиц автор поясняет: “Событие
происходит в конце XVI века, в царствование царя Иоанна Васильевича
Грозного.”
Изображение “бешено клокочущих” страстей в “Ермаке и Зюлейке”
восходит частью к А. А. Бестужеву-Марлинскому, частью – к В. Г.
Бенедиктову (1807–1873), один из стихов которого, как правильно
отметил В. И. Мельник, Ратазяев привносит в свой текст почти без
изменений. Так, в Бедных Людях: “ – Любо мне шаркать железом о
камень!” (1: 53) и в стихотворении В. Г. Бенедиктова “Возвратись!”
(1838):
В поход мы рядились, все прихоти – в пламень,

А сабли – на отпуск, коней – на зерно; –
О, весело шаркать железом о камень
И думать: вот скоро взыграет оно!52
“Шаманский камень,” о который Ермак “в диком остервенении” точит

свой “булатный нож” (1: 53), представляет собой контаминацию мотивов.
“Шаманский” мотив впервые прозвучал в стихотворении И. И.
Дмитриева “Ермак,”53 а “камень” занял заметное, иногда – центральное
место в драме А. С. Хомякова, посвященной тому же историческому
персонажу. См., например, ремарку автора к “действию третиему”:
“Ночь. Сцена представляет открытую ставку Ермака; перед нею
площадка, среди которой большой камень.”54 Этот “камень” настойчиво
упоминается и до и после указанной ремарки.55 В некотором роде он
даже может сойти за “шаманский”; во всяком случае, вблизи него в
ответственный момент появляется сибирский шаман и кладет на него
венец Сибирского царя, предлагая Ермаку этот венец вместе с
царством.56
51. К. Ф. Рылеев, Думы. (Москва: 1975), с. 57.

52. В. Г. Бенедиктов, Стихотворения (Ленинград: 1983), с. 101 (“Библиотека поэта,”
большая серия). См.: В. И. Мельник, Пародия на В. Г. Бенедиктова в Бедных Людях Ф. М.
Достоевского, Русская литература, 4 (1994): 178–179.
53. И. И. Дмитриев, Полное собрание стихотворений. Изд. 2-е (Ленинград: 1967), с. 78
и сл. (“Библиотека поэта,” б. с.).
54. А. С. Хомяков, Стихотворения и драмы. Изд. 2-е (Ленинград: 1969), с. 198
(“Библиотека поэта,” б. с.).
55. См.: Ibid., с. 157, 162, 163, 164, 220 и др.
56. Ibid., с. 220, 221.
Что же касается “булатного ножа,” то Ратазяев соорудил его, по-

видимому, из “булатного копия” покорителя Сибири, отыскав это
“копие” в стихотворении И. И. Дмитриева.57
Разумеется, ни от какой любви Ермак в действительности не погибал,
но некоторые подробности его гибели Ратазяев тоже заимствует у других
авторов.
Так, в Бедных Людях сказано: “Слепой старец Кучум, пользуясь
темнотою ночи, прокрался, в отсутствие Ермака, в его шатер и зарезал
дочь свою, желая нанесть смертельный удар Ермаку, лишившего его
скипетра и короны” (1: 53).
Приведенные слова – пародийное переложение мотивов разных
сочинений. “Слепой старец” со “скипетром и короной” напоминает о
романе Павла Свиньина, ср.: “…державный слепец (Кучум. – В. В.),
пылавший мщением, переправился вброд через реку <…>. Осторожно,
без малейшего шума, татары подползли к козацкому лагерю: в нем все
было тихо и безмолвно, как в могиле”58; а “пользуясь темнотою ночи,
прокрался <…> в его шатер” – о думе Рылеева. В ней говорится: “В одну
темную ночь (5 августа 1584 г.), при сильном дожде, он (Кучум. – В. В.)
учинил неожиданное нападение: казаки защищались мужественно, но не
могли стоять долго; они должны были уступить силе и незапности
удара.” И далее:
…С вождем покой в объятьях сна

Дружина храбрая вкушала;
С Кучумом буря лишь одна
На их погибель не дремала!
Страшась вступить с героем в бой,

Кучум к шатрам, как тать презренный,
Прокрался тайною тропой,
Татар толпою окруженный… и т.д.59
Наконец, еще один образчик ратазяевского творчества – “отрывочек, в

шуточно-описательном роде, собственно для смехотворства написанный:
‘Знаете ли вы Ивана Прокофьевича Желтопуза? Ну, вот тот самый, что
укусил за ногу Прокофия Ивановича. Иван Прокофьевич человек крутого
характера, но зато редких добродетелей; напротив того, Прокофий
Иванович чрезвычайно любит редьку с медом’” и т. д. (1, 53). Этот
отрывок, как известно, пародийно обыгрывает мотивы “Повести о том,
как поссорился Иван Иванович с Иваном Никифоровичем.” Ср. у Гоголя:
“Вы знаете Агафью Федосеевну? та самая, что откусила ухо у заседателя.
Прекрасный человек Иван Иванович! Какой у него дом в Миргороде!” и
57. И. И. Дмитриев, Полное собрание стихотворений (указанное издание), с. 82.

58. Ермак, или Покорение Сибири. Исторический роман XVI столетия. Сочинение
Павла Свиньина (Санкт-Петербург, 1834), часть 4, с. 135–136.
59. К. Ф. Рылеев, Думы (указанное издание), с. 57, 59.
т. д.60 Впервые повесть была опубликована в альманахе “Новоселье”

(1834); несколько откорректированная, она вошла в сборник “Миргород”
(1835) и была воспроизведена еще раз в составе этого сборника во втором
томе “Сочинений” Гоголя (1842).
За этим “для смехотворства написанным” отрывком стоит
многолетняя ожесточенная полемика Белинского в защиту Гоголя против
всех его недоброжелателей – Ф. В. Булгарина (1789–1859), О. И.
Сенковского (1800–1858), С. П. Шевырева (1806–1864) и др.,
старавшихся свести художественные достоинства писателя к чисто
внешнему комизму.
Шевырев, записной теоретик литературы и критик, начиная рецензию
на сборник “Миргород,” писал: “Кто из русских читателей не знает
теперь о знаменитой ссоре Ивана Ивановича с Иваном Никифоровичем?
Что ваши гвельфы и гибеллины, Мономаховичи и Ольговичи перед
этими миргородскими помещиками?” Затем, заняв целую страницу
восклицаниями по поводу отдельных эпизодов повести, он продолжает:
“Да кто не помнит всего этого? Кто не надрывался от смеху, читая все
это?”61 Сам Шевырев, судя по всему, “надрывался.” Так же, как Ратазяев
и его посетители, выслушавшие рассказ о Желтопузе: “Да ведь это умора,
Варенька, просто умора! Мы со смеху катались, когда он (Ратазяев. – В.
В.) читал нам это. Этакой он, прости его Господи! Впрочем, маточка, оно
хоть и немного затейливо и уж слишком игриво, но зато невинно, без
малейшего вольнодумства и либеральных мыслей” (1, 53).
Именно в этом духе, как если бы речь шла о писателе размера
Ратазяева, “без малейшего вольнодумства и либеральных мыслей,”
вообще без “мыслей,” Шевырев толкует Гоголя. Для Шевырева Гоголь –
автор “хохотливых вечеров,” нашедший где-то, в каком-то “углу
Малороссии” “клад простодушного, искреннего <…> неистощимого
смеха.” Это тот литератор, который “хочет щекотать наше воображение и
играть на одних веселых струнах человека,”62 ввиду “особенного
расположения” души “схватывать одну смешную сторону жизни.”63 Она
заключается в “безвредной бессмыслице” – подлинной “стихии
комического,” области “истинно смешного.”64 “Автор Вечеров Диканьки,
– пишет Шевырев, – имеет от природы чудный дар схватывать эту
бессмыслицу в жизни человеческой и обращать ее в неизъяснимую
поэзию смеха.”65 Этот дар и в дополнение к нему – “обилие фантазии
свежей, живой, своенравной, прихотливой, носящей на себе оттенок
60. Н. В. Гоголь, Полное собрание сочинений (Москва: Ленинград: 1937), 2: 223.

61. С. П. Шевырев, “Миргород. Повести, служащие продолжением Вечеров на хуторе
близ Диканьки” Н. Гоголя, Московский наблюдатель, журнал энциклопедический (Москва:
1835), часть 1, отд. V “Критика и библиография,” с. 396, 396–397.
62. Ibid., с. 397.
63. Ibid., с. 400.
64. Ibid., с. 401.
65. Ibid., с. 402.
какого-то юмора” той же малороссийской породы,66 составляют, по

Шевыреву, особенность Гоголя.
Столь поверхностное объяснение творчества гениального писателя
было совершенно неприемлемым для Белинского. В статье “О русской
повести и повестях г. Гоголя” (1835), вышедшей в свет вскоре после
рецензии Шевырева, Белинский, возражая ему, писал: “В самом деле,
заставить нас принять живейшее участие в ссоре Ивана Ивановича с
Иваном Никифоровичем, насмешить нас до слез глупостями,
ничтожностию и юродством этих живых пасквилей на человечество – это
удивительно; но заставить нас потом пожалеть об этих идиотах, пожалеть
от всей души, заставить нас расстаться с ними с каким-то глубоко
грустным чувством, заставить нас воскликнуть вместе с собою: ‘Скучно
на этом свете, господа!’ – вот, вот оно, то божественное искусство,
которое называется творчеством…”67 В произведениях Гоголя Белинский
видит “простоту вымысла, народность, совершенную истину жизни,
оригинальность и комическое одушевление, всегда побеждаемое
глубоким чувством грусти и уныния.”68
Возвращаясь к полемике с Шевыревым в статье “О критике и
литературных мнениях ‘Московского наблюдателя’” (1836), Белинский
снова пишет о том, что особенность творчества Гоголя никак нельзя
свести к одной “стихии комизма.” И далее, рассуждая о комизме вообще,
делит его на два рода. Один – поверхностный, не затрагивающий
глубины и сущности явлений (Барон Брамбеус). Другой – идет “от
умения видеть вещи в настоящем виде” (Гоголь). Вот почему повести
Гоголя “смешны, когда вы их читаете, и печальны, когда вы их прочтете.
Он (автор. – В. В.) представляет вещи не карикатурно, а истинно: в его
‘Вечерах на хуторе’, в повестях ‘Невский проспект’, ‘Портрет’, ‘Тарас
Бульба’ смешное перемешано с серьезным, грустным, прекрасным и
высоким. Комизм отнюдь не есть господствующая и перевешивающая
стихия его таланта. Его талант состоит в удивительной верности
изображения жизни в ее неуловимо разнообразных проявлениях. Этого-
то и не хотел понять г. Шевырев.”69
Мнениям, высказанным в полемике с Шевыревым, Белинский
оставался верен и позднее.
С этими мнениями, судя по сочинению Ратазяева “в шуточно-
описательном роде, собственно для смехотворства написанному,” был
безусловно согласен Достоевский.
Несогласие и с Белинским, и с Гоголем высказано в Бедных Людях не
в связи с природой смешного, а в связи с природой серьезного в
творчестве мастера новой реалистической школы. Под вопросом
оказалась та “верность изображения жизни,” которую нашел у Гоголя
критик, но с которой всем своим романом спорил Достоевский. Я имею в
66. Ibid., с. 403.

68. Ibid., с. 162.
69. Ibid., с. 270, 271.
виду полемическую разработку темы “Шинели” в Бедных Людях.

Полемика с Гоголем шла в глубину анализа жизненных явлений и
соответствующих форм их отражения средствами искусства.
Далеко не все заимствования и даже не все пародийные переклички
здесь названы. Но из сказанного, думается, ясно, каким огромным и
разнородным литературным материалом владел Достоевский, только-
только вступавший на литературное поприще, и с какой удивительной
легкостью, с каким блеском распорядился этим материалом в первом же
своем романе. Не удивительно поэтому, что позднее, уже после личного
знакомства, он выслушивал наставления “великого критика,”
пытавшегося руководить его художественной работой, без особого
пиетета, но “благосклонно и равнодушно.”70
Institute of Literature "Pushkin House"—Russian Academy of Sciences and

Arts (RANI), St Petersburg
70. Об этом рассказывает П. В. Анненков: “Белинский хотел сделать для молодого

автора то, что он делал уже для многих других, как, например, для Кольцова и Некрасова,
т. е. высвободить его талант от резонерских наклонностей и сообщить ему сильные, так
сказать, нервы и мускулы, которые помогли бы овладевать предметами прямо, сразу, не
надрываясь в попытках, но тут критик встретил уже решительный отпор…. Белинский,
видимо, не мог освоиться с тогдашней, еще расплывчатой манерой рассказчика…. Но
Белинский ошибся: он встретил не новичка, а совсем уже сформировавшегося автора,
обладающего поэтому и закоренелыми привычками работы, несмотря на то, что он
являлся, по-видимому, с первым своим произведением. Достоевский выслушивал
наставления критика благосклонно и равнодушно” (П. В. Анненков, Замечательное
десятилетие, П. В. Анненков, Литературные воспоминания (Москва: Правда, 1989), с. 259).
OLGA SHALYGINA
ГИПНОТИЧЕСКАЯ ФУНКЦИЯ РИТМА В

БЕСФАБУЛЬНЫХ РАННИХ РАССКАЗАХ
А. П. ЧЕХОВА
Введение
При всем разнообразии художественных индивидуальностей, стилей,
методов и направлений в литературе начала ХХ века могут быть
выделены общие черты, характерные для художественного мышления
эпохи.
Парадигмальный культурный сдвиг в освоении природы времени
обусловил внимание к нему писателей начала ХХ века и напряженные
поиски возможности выразить это новое времеощущение в прозе.
Рассмотрение проблемы соотношения композиционной организации
“поэтической прозы” и содержания - преодоления времени и смерти в
художественном творчестве - представляется нам чрезвычайно
интересным.
Особенности нового художественного видения эпохи, как нам
представляется, проявляются в поэтике “ритма образов и чувств,”
характерной для прозы серебряного века. Понимание ритма как формы
бытия художественного целого (А.Белый, Вяч. Иванов, П.Флоренский) в
начале века манифестировало новое мировидение эпохи.
Смысл ритмической организации “поэтической прозы” серебряного
века рассматривается нами в связи с особенностями пространственно-
временной организации текста.
“Поэтическое мгновение” представляет собой специфический способ
пространственно-временной организации поэзии – “вертикальное время,”
в отличие от времени линейного развертывания в прозе.
“Проза Чехова в самих построениях своих, отчетливых с формальной
точки зрения, выражает прежде всего поэтическое содержание,”1 - считал
Н. М. Фортунатов. Проблема суггестивного ритмического воздействия
поздней прозы Чехова мало изучена и требует поиска новых методов
исследования. В настоящей статье рассматривается именно это тема:
функция ритма в “безгеройных” и “бесфабульных” рассказах Чехова.
Чеховский пейзаж и причинность действия

Чеховский пейзаж зачастую представляет собой не “статический
мотив” (или открытую живописную тему), а “динамический мотив,” так
1. Н. М. Фортунатов, “Ритм художественной прозы,” в Б. Ф. Егоров (ред.), Ритм,

пространство и время в литературе и искусстве (Ленинградское отд-ние: Наука, 1974), с.
180.
как природные “причины” иногда даже более динамизируют

повествование, чем любые другие человеческие “причины.” Именно это
качество (перенос центра тяжести с причины в мире человеческом на
причины общего потока жизни2) позволяет так ярко проявиться в
строении чеховского повествования тону, настроению, подтексту,
“поэтичности.” В так называемых бесфабульных рассказах (“Налим,”
“Мыслитель,” “Егерь”), “минимальной” фабулой является событие
движения солнца по небосклону. А композиционный центр рассказа
зачастую определяется положением солнца в зените.3 В этом смысле
показателен известный рассказ “Хамелеон.” Полдень, жарко — это и есть
основная причина и пружина повествования. Есть главное событие —
время остановило свой бег — и есть то, что это событие определяет в
состоянии людей. Отсутствие литературно необходимой завязки в этой
сценке мнимо. Она перенесена в “правильную” для любой поэзии сферу:
небо, солнце, “божий мир,” — и обозначена автором. Только
литературная нововременная традиция приучила читателей видеть в
обозначении положения солнца пейзаж и так называемый “статический
мотив.” В любой архаике — это самый что ни на есть динамический
мотив и основа сюжета.
По объектам привлечения внимания читателя рассказ четко делится на
две части. Первая организована оппозицией “пустоты” пространства (в
область внимания попадают единичные детали: “решето, доверху
наполненное конфискованным крыжовником,” “торчащий палец,
имеющий вид знамения победы”) и ярко выраженной агрессией, объекты
которой меняются, но сила постоянна, передается она через нагнетание
повелительных интонаций и угроз. Вторая часть рассказа набирает свой
темп от сомнения городового, хотя происшествие уже исчерпало себя и
решение вроде бы принято. В то время, как Елдырин стоит за спиной
Очумелова и как будто исполняет роль статиста — подает и снимает
шинель, проявляется его познавательная активность. Поиск ответа на
вопрос “чья собака?” из сомнений, останавливающих Елдырина,
превращается в мотив, организующий развитие сюжета. Этапы решения
познавательной задачи структурируют ритм второй части рассказа.
Параллельно ритмизующую функцию выполняет комический повтор.
“Известный пример с так называемым смехом “от повтора,” — считает
Л. В. Карасев, — не противоречит принципу неожиданности: повторный
жест комедийного персонажа смешит лишь тогда, когда мы внезапно
2. В философском отношении сквозь этот художественный принцип просвечивает

платонизм. О близости художественного мироощущения Чехова этой философской
традиции писал, напр., В. И. Гусев: “Поздний чеховский рационализм — это не рассудок, а
разум в платоновском смысле слова: это полнота и внутреннее, духовное спокойствие,
уравновешенность скрыто динамической, напряженной формы” (В. И. Гусев, “Чехов и
стилевые поиски современной советской прозы,” в Л.Д. Опульской, З.С. Паперного, С.Е.
Шаталова (ред.), В творческой лаборатории Чехова [Москва: Наука, 1974], с. 363.)
3. Ср.: А. П. Чудаков указывал на безгеройный фабульный ряд в чеховской прозе:
“Фабула героем не исчерпывается — в нее входит жизнь природы (биосферы), в ней может
изображаться ход истории — независимо от героя произведения. Фабула может быть
вообще безгеройной.” (А. П. Чудаков, Поэтика Чехова [Москва: Наука, 1971], c. 228.)
обнаруживаем, что он повторный, а вовсе не в момент первого с ним

знакомства; повтор снижает, оглупляет его и от этого делает смешным.”4
Трехкратная перемена объектов агрессии распыляет силы зла, оно
становится нестрашным, смешным.
Познавательная активность и течение внутреннего времени

Смешным зло делает эстетическая дистанция — пересказ события,
случая. Это читатель смеется над Очумеловым. Толпа в рассказе смеется
над проигравшим в “поединке” Хрюкиным. Таким образом, ритм второй
части рассказа задается двумя противонаправленными потоками
эмоционального напряжения: во-первых, организуется этапами
познавательной активности, распространившейся через ритм следования
тексту и на читателя; во-вторых, комическим повтором, ритмическими
возвратами спазмов смеха. Объединяются эти два потока в точке
остановки времени. Сила познавательной активности столь велика и
заразительна, что полностью поглощает внимание читателя, парализует
течение внутреннего времени, когда ничто не важно, пока не узнаешь
ответ на вопрос, разгадку. Напряжение, вызываемое интересом, столь
велико, что даже несколько приостанавливается, задерживается
“механизм запуска смеха.” Смех прорывается тогда, когда напряжение
спадает. В этот миг даже Очумелов расслабился, обрадовался, вступил в
игру с бывшим “соперником”: “Шустрая такая... Цап этого за палец! Ха-
ха-ха... Ну, чего дрожишь? Ррр... Рр... Сердится, шельма... Цуцык
этакий...” (3, 555). Ритмические возвраты спазмов смеха вновь
останавливают время, внутреннее время читателя. “Время
останавливается и бежит вспять — чтобы еще и еще раз вернуться к
точке, где нам открылась несостоятельность зла, — пишет Л. В. Карасев,
анализируя механизм смеха. <…> Смех рождает приятные ощущения, и
оттого мы с неохотой расстаемся с ним, держа его на “привязи”
повторяющихся “взрывов” и продлевая тем самым чувство удовольствия,
насколько это возможно.”6 Чехов в рассказе “Хамелеон” использует два
комплекса мотивов (состязание и преображение облика героя),
способных вызвать напряжение и передать его читателю.7 Оба они,
вовлекая читателя в отграниченный от бытового времени хронотоп игры,
фиксируют остановку внутреннего времени, связанную с прохождением
цикла игры, результатом которой становится миг обладания знанием, миг
победы над злом, миг, возвращающийся благодаря возвратному
4. Л. В. Карасев, “Парадокс о смехе,” в В. И. Мудрагей (ред.), Квинтэссенция:

философский альманах (Москва: Политиздат, 1990), с. 356.
5. А. П. Чехов, Полное собрание сочинений и писем в 30-ти тт. Н. Ф. Бельчиков, Д. Д.
Благой, Г. А. Бялый, А. С. Мясников, Л. Д. Опульская, А. И. Ревякин, М. Б. Храпченко
(ред.), (Москва: Наука, 1974-1983). Все цитаты даются по этому изданию, в тексте, в
скобках, с указанием на том и страницу.
6. Карасев, “Парадокс о смехе,” c. 352.
7. О комплексах мотивов, вызывающих напряжение, см.: Й. Хейзинга, “Homo Ludens.
Опыт исследования игрового элемента в культуре,” в Р. А. Гальцева (ред.), Самосознание
европейской культуры 20 века: Мыслители и писатели Запада о месте культуры в
современном обществе (Москва: Политиздат, 1991), c. 69-92.
механизму смеха. Именно наличие этого “сакрального” мига и проявляет

в комических произведениях Чехова “бытийное время автора,” в
противоположность бытовому времени его героев.
Фабула рассказа “Налим” предельно проста: налим, которого хотели
поймать герои рассказа, уплыл. Можно было бы назвать такую фабулу в
отношении литературной традиции нулевой, но для героев рассказа и
читателей в центре оказывается именно “действие,” здесь и сейчас
сжимающее время и обнажающее его прерывистую структуру. Начало
рассказа обозначает время — летнее утро и пространство тишины:
“Летнее утро. В воздухе тишина; только поскрипывает на берегу
кузнечик да где-то робко мурлыкает орличка. На небе неподвижно стоят
перистые облака, похожие на рассыпанный снег… Около строящейся
купальни, под зелеными ветвями ивняка <…> (4, 45). Взгляд
повествователя как бы движется вверх — вниз, пересекая сначала
пространство тишины тихим звуком от земли до неба, а потом опускаясь
с белоснежных облаков к реке.8 Следующий отрезок текста вводит
первых героев, дается избыточная для читателя информация о
персонажах с большим количеством деталей и уточнений. На
синтаксическом уровне обилие обособлений прерывает и рассеивает
внимание читателей, создает эстетическую аналогию шума до того, как
тишину нарушат голоса героев: “Около строящейся купальни, под
зелеными ветвями ивняка, барахтается в воде плотник Герасим, высокий,
тощий мужик с рыжей курчавой головой и с лицом, поросшими
волосами. Он пыхтит, отдувается и, сильно мигая глазами, старается
достать что-то из-под корней ивняка. Лицо его покрыто потом. На сажень
от Герасима, по горло в воде, стоит плотник Любим, молодой горбатый
мужик с треугольным лицом и с узкими, китайскими глазками.” (Там
же).
Ритм чередования “напряжения / разряжения” и магический миг

остановившегося времени
Эмоциональное напряжение начинает набирать темп от
экспрессивного выражения: “уж больше часа.” Последующий диалог
8. По отношению к таким отрезкам текста возможен кинематографический анализ

композиции, разработанный P. Эйзенштейном. Гармоничность и поэтичность чеховского
повествования во многом определяются чувством “правильного” построения композиции
(от смены “точек зрения” внутри одной фразы до архитектоники драмы). Ср.: “Но вопрос
пульсации между четным и нечетным началами еще глубже и шире. И разве не так же
единица всякого намерения вообще переходит в процессе осуществления в двучлен
“отрицания отрицания”! Что пластически рисуется переходом процесса из двухточечной
схемы в трехточечную! Именно не в “логическую пару”: исходная точка и точка цели; а
динамическую триаду: точка намерения, точка его отрицания и снятие ее новым
отрицанием на путях к точке осуществления? <…> Совершенно так же невозможен на
сцене уход через дверь, если не было сделано хотя бы предварительное минимальное
движение от нее. … Это такой же органический базисный закон свершения явлений, как и
ряд других ….” (P. Эйзенштейн, “Чет и нечет,” в Л. Б. Алаев, М. Л. Гаспаров, А. Б.
Куделин, Е. М. Мелетинский (ред.), Восток и Запад. Исследования. Переводы. Публикации
[Москва: Наука, 1988], c. 256-257).
закрепляет повтор чередования нетерпения и спокойствия: нетерпение

Любима (“дрожа как в лихорадке”), спокойствие Герасима: “не уйдет...
Куда ему уйтить?”; нетерпеливый совет: “за зебры” — снимает
напряжение попытка достижения цели; нарастающее нетерпение
выражено повышено экспрессивной речью Любима (“хватай” — дразнит
его Герасим), снимает напряжение смена деятеля. В начале рассказа эта
оппозиция обусловлена различными темпераментами героев. Следуя
ритму диалога персонажей, эмоции их нарастающего желания достать
налима, читатель оказывается втянутым в ритм чередования
“напряжения / разряжения.” Нетерпение героев передается меняющемуся
стилю повествователя.9 Видимая, ощущаемая рукой близость цели
подводит Любима к высшей точке напряжения: дыхание и речь
становятся прерывистыми, торопливыми (многоточия разрывают
предложения). Далее следует сценочное, анекдотическое “бултых в воду”
и смена деятеля: “Утонешь еще, чёрт, отвечать за тебя придется!.. —
Хрипит Герасим. — Вылазь, ну тя к лешему! Я сам вытащу!” (4, 46).
Пятикратная смена “напряжения — выхода из него” переходит в
ритмически возобновляющееся действие — “все ещё барахтаются.” И
уже не важно, кому принадлежат следующие реплики героев.
В предложениях, соединенныех противительной интонацией10:
“Начинается ругань... А солнце печет и печет” (4, 47),— ругань
однообразна так же, как медленное ежедневное движение солнца. Яркое,
неожиданное сравнение обращает внимание на положение солнца в
зените: “Тени становятся короче и уходят в самих себя, как рога
улитки...” Это миг остановки движения солнца, магический миг
остановившегося времени, установившейся вертикали: человек на земле
— солнце прямо над ним. Чехов как бы переключает тональности, на
первый план выходит оппозиция: “тишина — звук.” Абсолютный покой
находит выражение в дурманящем, захватывающем собой пространство
и человеческое существо запахе: “Высокая трава, пригретая солнцем,
начинает испускать из себя густой, приторно-медовый запах.” Хриплый
бас и озябший, визгливый тенор сливаются в один звук. Реплики уже не
распределены, лишены значимого для внимания смысла. Они
неугомонно нарушают тишину летнего дня. Появляется новый звук:
“Слышится хлопанье бича... По отлогому берегу к водопою лениво
плетется стадо, гонимое пастухом Ефимом. Пастух, дряхлый старик с
одним глазом и покривившимся ртом, идет, понуря голову, и глядит себе
под ноги. Первыми подходят к воде овцы, за ними лошади, за лошадьми
коровы.” (4, 47). Неторопливые интонации в описании ленивого
движения стада и пастуха, введение книжного оборота речи — “гонимое
пастухом Ефимом,” наделенного не то индивидуальными, не то
9. Ср. ставший в последующий период творчества Чехова знаменитый способ

повествования “в духе героя.”
10. О противительной интонации у Чехова см.: А. В. Чичерин, “Роль противительной
интонации в прозе Чехова,” в А. В. Чичерин (ред.), Идеи и стиль. О природе поэтического
слова (Москва: Советский писатель, 1965-1968), c. 262-268.
мифологическими чертами: “с одним глазом и покривившимся ртом,” —

создают иллюзию вечного движения. Ветхозаветный11 покой Ефима
нарушает звук — голос Любима: “Потолкай его из-под низу! — слышит
он голос Любима. — Просунь палец! Да ты глухой, чё-ёрт, что ли?
Тьфу!” (Там же). Перебранка героев заинтересовывает персонажа и снова
входит в область внимания читателя. Последовательность действий
Ефима иллюстрирует, как нарастает его нетерпение: от минуты, когда он
щурит глаз, до “сбросить порты не хватает терпения.” Захлебывается
Любим, кашляет, стадо залезло в господский сад — события, которые
могли бы привлечь внимание в другое время, и читателями, и героями,
увлеченными, полностью захваченными рыбалкой, не признаются
важными, лишь мешают, отвлекают и выбрасываются из области
внимания, как ненужный рак на берег. Разве могут они быть сравнимы по
важности своей с налимом, которого ловят руками! Степень
гипнотического воздействия чеховского текста здесь довольно велика, но
не исчерпана.
Снова речь повествователя останавливается на детализации в
описании нового героя. Появление барина и его гнев могли бы отвлечь
героев от их занятия. Но гнев барина из-за недостроенной купальни
признается и читателями, и героями несообразным. Сжатому
нетерпением времени противопоставляется “целое лето.” Андрей
Андреевич заражается общим нетерпением, забывая все свои
“несообразные” претензии и признавая “уважительность” причины
такого поведения работников. Сила воздействия общего настроения
проявляется мгновенно: “— Налим? — спрашивает барин и глаза его
подергиваются лаком. — Так тащите его скорей!” (4, 48). Следующая
порция перебранки между действующими лицами рассчитана не столько
на читателя, который давно уже в курсе дел, сколько на барина. Время,
кажется, тянется от их долгой и лишней болтовни. Психологическое
временя героя сжимается: “Проходит пять минут, десять...” Время
тянется в ожидании, когда прибежит, дожует что-то, разденется кучер
Василий, нить нетерпения натянута до предела, и когда снова начинается
все та же перебранка: “я его сейчас,” “уж больно ловко засел,” — барин
больше терпеть не может и сам лезет в воду. Напряжение давно достигло
кульминации — все уже полностью охвачены им.
Разрыв в течении художественного времени и “настоящее” как

вечность
Интереса к реальному действию — подрубить корягу — у читателя не
возникает, не на нем сосредоточено внимание. Ведь идея подрубить
корягу топором приходит плотнику Любиму — первому действующему
лицу рассказа. Отчего бы ей не появиться еще утром? В этом месте
рассказа происходит сильнейший разрыв в непрерывном течении
11. О том, что иногда у Чехова интонации напоминают ветхозаветные см.: А. П.

Чудаков, Мир Чехова: возникновение и утверждение, (Москва: Советский писатель, 1986)
с. 229.
художественного времени. Одно мгновение, вобравшее в себя отрезок

времени от утра до полудня, исчерпало себя в кульминации напряжения,
другого, равного в интенсивности, пока нет. Промежуток заполнен
суетными заботами барина: “Пальцев-то себе не отрубите!,” “Ефим,
пошел вон отсюда!” Второе, интенсивное, мгновение — это время
всеобщей эмоции удовольствия. Стяжение времени в полноценный миг
достигается удовлетворением величиной добычи: “Андрей Андреевич, к
великому своему удовольствию, чувствует, как его пальцы лезут налиму
под жабры. — Тащу, братцы! Не толпитесь… стойте… тащу!” (4, 49).
Величина налима поражает и читателя, и героев рассказа: “На
поверхности показывается большая налимья голова и за нею черное
аршинное тело. Налим тяжело ворочает хвостом и старается вырваться.”
Но самое большое удовлетворение приносят слова барина: “Шалишь...
Дудки, брат. Попался? Ага!.” — цель достигнута. Восхищение полное:
“По всем лицам разливается медовая улыбка. Минута проходит в
молчаливом созерцании.” Обратим внимание на то, что психологическое
время трансформировано — это вряд ли минута, интенсивность эмоции
растягивает время удовольствия. Однако автор не останавливается на
трехкратном повторе, он закрепляет ее еще двумя повторами, усиливая
воздействие всепроницающей эмоции радости:
— Знатный налим! — лепечет Ефим, почесывая под ключицами. —
Чай, фунтов десять будет...
—Н-да... — соглашается барин. — Печенка-то так и отдувается. Так и
прет из нутра. А… ах!
Вот теперь гипнотическое ритмическое воздействие, оказываемое на
читателя, достигает своей кульминации. Концовка рассказа сценочная,
комичная: “Налим вдруг неожиданно делает резкое движение хвостом
вверх и рыболовы слышат сильный плеск… Все растопыривают руки, но
уже поздно; налим — поминай как звали.” (Там же). Художественное
время рассказа оказывается спрессованным в неотменимое в своей
значимости мгновение, или собственно настоящее, имеющее
прерывистую структуру. Размышляя о природе времени, М. Гюйо
указывал на то, что “идея действия ни в коем случае не может быть
рассматриваема как производная идеи времени; она предшествует ей.
Действие обнимает собой время без остатка.”12 В простой
юмористической сценке Чехова обретает бытие собственно “настоящее”
в своем древнейшем виде как единое действие коллектива-рода. И здесь
не названная, не ограниченная никаким образом-символом сквозь
настоящее легко движется вечность.
Оценочная функця “тишины”: “зерно” философии времени Чехова

Теоретик музыкальной композиции Б. Асафьев рассматривал
противопоставление “звучащих” образов “тишине,” безмолвию в
природе, в людском кругу или в душе отдельного человека как систему
12. М. Гюйо, Происхождение идеи времени. Психологический этюд (Смоленск, 1891),

c. 32-33.
(звучание — минус звучание), имеющую оценочную функцию.13 В

чеховском художественном мире система “звучание — минус звучание”
определяет не только ритм повествования, она организует ритм
подтекста и, соответственно, семантику сюжета, а также определяет
такое качество художественной системы, как поэтичность. В рассказе
“Мыслитель” Чехов через оппозицию “тишина — звук”14 сумел показать
остановившееся время. Начинается рассказ с обозначения вертикали:
“Знойный полдень.” Пустота объединяет через многоточие смыслы двух
следующих предложений: “В воздухе ни звука, ни движений... Вся
природа похожа на очень большую, забытую богом и людьми, усадьбу”
(4, 71). Время человеческой жизни от полудня до вечера заполнено
исчислимым количеством звуков и движений, нарушающих тишину:
“— Да-с! — издает вдруг Яшкин, и так неожиданно, что собака,
дремлющая недалеко от стола, вздрагивает и, поджав хвост, бежит в
сторону.” (4, 71);
“Слышится помойный плеск и визг облитой собаки.” (4, 72);
“— Да-с! — говорит вдруг Яшкин. Пимфов вздрагивает и с испугом
глядит на Яшкина. Он ждет от него новых ересей.” (4, 73);
“Начинается громкое хлебанье и чавканье. Словно из земли вырастают
три собаки и кошка. Они стоят перед столом и умильно поглядывают на
жующие рты. За щами следует молочная каша, которую Феона ставит с
такой злобой, что со стола сыплются ложки и корки. Перед кашей
приятели выпивают. — Все на этом свете лишнее! — замечает вдруг
Яшкин. Пимфов роняет на колени ложку, испуганно глядит на Яшкина,
хочет протестовать, но язык ослабел от хмеля и запутался в густой
каше… Вместо обычного “то есть, как же это-с?” получается одно только
мычание.” (Там же).
Ритм нарушения тишины создает иллюзию ритмического движения
художественного времени рассказа. Иллюзию, так как звук,
производимый этой жизнью, пуст, обезличен, обессмыслен. Это
движение пустоты. Звуки, производимые людьми, принадлежат ей,
обозначая ее собственное бытие и движение: “Наступает тишина, изредка
только прерываемая звяканьем рюмок, да пьяным покрякиванием...
Солнце начинает уже клониться к западу, и тень липы все растет и
растет. Приходит Феона и, фыркая, резко махая руками, расстилает около
стола коврик. Приятели молча выпивают по последней, располагаются на
ковре и, повернувшись друг к другу спинами, начинают засыпать…” (4,
13. См.: Б. Асафьев, “У истоков жизни. Памяти Пушкина,” Орфей, vol. 1 (1922), c. 30-
31.
14. Ср. значение этой оппозиции в народной культуре: “Оппозиция “звук (шум) —
тишина” и ее коррелят в мире “человеческих” звуков — “голос” — ”молчание” являются
одной из главных категорий культуры. На семантическом уровне им соответствует
кардинальное для всей культуры противопоставление земного мира людей, звучащего и
говорящего, и потусторонненго мира мертвых, погруженного в тишину и безмолвие.” (С.
М. Толстая, “Звуковой код традиционной народной культуры,” в С.М. Толстая (ред.), Мир
звучащий и молчащий: Семиотика звука и речи в традиционной культуре славян [Москва:
Индрик, 1999], c. 10).
73—74). Движение тишины и солнца в этом рассказе объединены только

многоточием. Нет той противительной интонации, которая соединяла
звуки жизни и движение солнца в рассказе “Налим.” Концовка рассказа
полностью утверждает власть пустоты — всё погружается в сон. В этом
рассказе Чехов начинает незаметно раздражать читателя: коврик,
который стелет Феона около стола “мыслителям,” переполняет чашу
терпения читателя, только что подчинившегося иллюзии кругового
ритмического движения повествования. Возникает противоречие, но не в
зоне открытой работы слова и даже не подтекста, а в сфере
психофизического раздражения, ответной реакции живого на власть
пустоты, сна, смерти. Это слегка заметное, формируемое автором
противостояние негативно-оценочной и в то же время положительно-
победной эмоции усмешки, насмешки, улыбки читателя величию, власти
пустоты, обезличенного пространства существования человека, на наш
взгляд, можно рассматривать как “зерно” философии времени Чехова.
Пространственные оппозиции и непространственные

распространения: разработка “настоящего — длящегося мига”
Художественное время рассказа “Егерь” организуется
пространственной оппозицией: движение вдоль дороги — остановка, зов
домой, в деревню. Ритмизует его четырехкратный повтор описания
движения Егора по дороге и безнадежно бессмысленный повтор зова его
жены: “хоть бы разочек зашли,” “хоть бы разочек зашли,” “хоть бы денек
со мной, несчастной, пожили,” “А когда же в деревню придете?”; “Он
словно чувствует этот взгляд, останавливается.” Начало рассказа сразу
же определяет вертикаль — солнце в зените: “Знойный и душный
полдень.” Предложения первого абзаца намечают основные
семиотические оппозиции: небо — земля, жизнь — смерть; внутри их
движения движется и ритм рассказа:
1) “Знойный и душный полдень. На небе ни облачка...” — мгновение
отсутствия видимого движения вечно подвижного неба.
2) “Выжженная солнцем трава глядит уныло, безнадежно: хоть и будет
дождь, но уж не зеленеть ей...” — видимость убитой жизни, земли.
3) “Лес стоит молча, неподвижно, словно всматривается куда-то
своими верхушками или ждет чего-то” (4, 79) — внутреннее
напряженное движение при невозможности внешнего движения —
взгляд.
Ритмически возобновляющееся внешнее, физическое движение героя
рассказа Егора Власыча внутри оппозиции “дорога — деревня”
усиливается также движением внутри не только топографической, но и
социальной оппозиции. Пелагея также бессмысленно и безнадежно, как
свой зов “хоть бы разочек зашли,” произносит социально-оградительные
нормы: “Вы хозяин,” “Не степенное ваше дело,” “грех,” “да ведь
венчаны,” “сказывают, вы Акулине новую избу поставили.” Егор
несколько раз пытается объяснить свое внутреннее стремление на волю,
игнорируя при этом все социальные нормы и роли: “я бы избу сжег, или
руки бы на себя наложил,” “прощай соха,” “нешто мы пара?,” “не волей
венчаны.” На вопрос об Акулине Егор молчит и резко прерывает

разговор, исчезает. Движение Егора и в топографическом, и социальном
пространстве может быть охарактеризовано как линейное, прерывистое,
вырывающееся из циклического природного ритма деревенской жизни.
Пелагея не движется ни в топографическом, ни в социальном
пространстве: “Она, бледная, неподвижная как статуя, стоит и ловит
взглядом каждый его шаг” (4, 83). Реплики ее имеют характер
бесконечного, неизмененного, возобновляющегося, ритмического
кругового движения. Невозможность внешнего, активного действия
восполняется интенсивным внутренним движением — эмоция радости от
встречи, любви поглощает доступное ее взгляду пространство,
преобразуя его во внутреннее время, столь интенсивно переживаемое,
что оно приобретает характер неограниченного, непространственного
распространения. В рамках художественного времени рассказа “Егерь”
Чехов продолжает разрабатывать категорию “настоящего — длящегося
мига.” Здесь это время встречи, заполненное интенсивной эмоцией, оно
расширяется, захватывая время жизни Егора и Пелагеи, раздвигает свои
рамки до символического времени вечной драмы оглянувшейся на дом и
окаменевшей жены и безвозвратно уходящего все дальше и дальше мужа;
и вновь стягивается вокруг солярной фабулы: встреча была недолгой —
полдень: “Опять молчание. С сжатой полосы несется тихая песня,
которая обрывается в самом начале. Жарко петь…” (4, 82). В отношении
философии времени мы видим противоположный эффекту “Мыслителя”
эффект преодоления, уничтожения пространства временем. В “Егере”
пространство поглощается, уничтожается временем жизни, эмоцией
радости, безнадежности, любви вечной — внепространственной и
вневременной. Созерцание мгновения, заполненного чистой эмоцией
героини, создает возможность проникновения этого чувства во
внутреннее время читателя.
А. Дерман считал, что только к 1887 году относится перелом в
отношении Чехова к фабуле, которая в ранних рассказах была, по его
мнению, ярко выраженной и в, основном, мелодраматической.
Переломными в отношении Чехова к фабуле он называет такие рассказы,
как “Холодная кровь” и “Мститель.” В “Мастерстве Чехова“ он
писал: ”<…> здесь, в “Холодной крови,” Чехов с непостижимым
искусством создает картину “неподвижного движения”! Старик
Малахин, сопровождающий в столицу гурт быков, все время
передвигается, самая задача его — двигать, толкать. Но рассказ сделан
так, что происходящее движение словно охвачено оцепенением, оно как
бы замирает всякую минуту, мы видим, как трудно его раскачать.”15
Однако, как мы можем наблюдать это на примере так называемых ранних
бесфабульных (“мнимосценочных”) рассказов, Чехов овладевал этим
умением постепенно. Ощущение перелома стало явным, когда “умение”
Чехова вступило в активную фазу противостояния современной ему
литературной традиции. Еще в раннем творчестве Чехов осваивает
15. А. Дерман, Мастерство Чехова (Москва: Советский писатель, 1959), c. 49.

различные способы “манипулирования” временем в художественном

тексте: он то плывет по его течению, то останавливает его, устанавливая
вертикаль выхода из времени в вечность (“Налим”), то показывает время,
поглощенное пространством (“Мыслитель”), то пространство,
поглощенное временем (“Егерь”). В сатирических произведениях
обращается к категории “сакрального мига” — проявлению бытийного
знания в бытовом (“Хамелеон”), в философско-лирических (“Тоска”)
этим “сакральным мигом” становится миг эстетического сопереживания
читателя — миг торжества чистого времени, проницаемого
консубстанциального мира, где нет метафизического одиночества
человека. Высшие творческие достижения Чехова в период становления
художественной системы связаны с осуществлением в них
гипнотической функции ритма.
Суггестивная функция ритма в зрелой фабульной прозе Чехова

Предельная ритмизация, поэтичность “Гусева” и “Дамы с собачкой,”
“Чайки” и “Вишневого сада,” образно-смысловая и сюжетно-
композиционная симметричность, ослабление семантических связей
слов, вызывающее глубокие ассоциативные процессы, — все это вместе
определяет проявление суггестивной функции ритма в позднем
творчестве Чехова. Рассмотрим ее на примере рассказа “Гусев,” где и на
тематическом, и на ритмическом уровне мы встречаемся с
развертыванием всех основных мотивов “морского комплекса.” “Общий
знаменатель степи и моря — безбрежность (в экстенсивном плане) и
особенно (в интенсивном плане) — колыхательно-колебательные
движения, фиксируемые и визуально, и акустически, индуцирующие
соответствующий ритм в субъекте восприятия и как бы вызывающие
мысли и даже чувство беспредельного, отсылающие к началу, к
творению, к переживанию его смысла,”16 — писал В. Н. Топоров.
Один из первых признаков проявления “морского комплекса” — это
сама фиксация колыхательно-колебательных движений. В первой главе
— “Кажется, начинает покачивать. Койка под Гусевым медленно
поднимается и опускается, точно вздыхает — и этак раз, другой,
третий...” (7, 327). Во второй главе этот мотив достигает своей
кульминации: им определяется ритмико-синтаксическое членение речи
персонажа. “От качки, духоты и своей болезни он изнемог, тяжело
дышит и шевелит высохшими губами: “Мне всё казалось странным, как
это вы, тяжело больные, вместо того, чтобы находиться в покое,
очутились на пароходе, где и духота, и жар, и качка, всё, одним словом,
угрожает вам смертью, теперь же для меня все ясно…”“ (7, 329). Ритм
дыхания тяжелобольного Павла Ивановича задает тот же ритм качки.
Следование этому ритму речи индуцирует тот же ритм в дыхании
16. В. Н. Топоров, Миф. Ритуал. Символ. Образ: Исследования в области

мифопоэтического: Избранное (Москва: Прогресс-Культура, 1995), c. 580.
читателя.17 “Сильно качает, нельзя ни встать, ни чаю напиться, ни

лекарства принять”; “Он изнемог от качки и закрыл глаза; голова у него
то откидывается назад, то опускается на грудь” (7, 330). Мотив сильной
качки смыкается с мотивом тишины и смерти: “И наступает тишина...
Картежники играют часа два, с азартом и руганью, но качка утомляет и
их; они бросают карты и ложатся”(7, 331). Здесь Чехов пользуется своим
старым, излюбленным приемом (как в “Налиме” или “Мыслителе”) —
человеческие звуки: ругань рыболовов, звяканье рюмок да пьяное
покрякиванье, становясь ритмически монотонными, выходят за пределы
осознанного человеческого существования и становятся
принадлежностью тишины, жизни, поглощенной пространством. В
третьей главе качки уже нет, и Павел Иванович повеселел. Стоят на
рейде. “Гусев не слушает и смотрит в окошечко. На прозрачной, нежно
бирюзовой воде, вся залитая ослепительным, горячим солнцем, качается
лодка” (7, 334). Эта остановка в пути, солнце в зените — один из
признаков стяжения художественного времени к центру — вертикали, —
проявляющийся уже в ранних рассказах Чехова с выраженной
гипнотической функцией ритма. В четвертой главе “Качки нет, тихо, но
зато душно и жарко, как в бане; не только говорить, но даже слушать
трудно” (7, 334). Тихо умирает Павел Иванович. “Оба солдата смотрят на
белую пену, отсвечивающую фосфором, молчат и думают. Первый
нарушает молчание Гусев. — А ничего нету страшного,— говорит он” (7,
337). В пятой главе: “Пройдя сажень восемь — девять, он начинает идти
тише и тише, мерно покачивается, точно раздумывает, и, увлекаемый
течением, уж несется в сторону быстрее, чем вниз” (7, 338).
Таким образом, фиксация колебательно-дыхательных движений может
быть представлена в композиции рассказа трехчастной структурой:
первая, вторая главы — “качка”; третья глава — “остановка на рейде”;
четвертая, пятая главы — “качки нет,” что соответствует
первоначальному трехчастному композиционному членению рассказа.18
Включая рассказ в сборник “Палата № 6,” Чехов изменил разбивку по
главам. Первую и третью поделил — каждую на две главы, так что
вместо трех стало пять глав. Пятичастное членение дает расподобление
первоначальной структуры: первая глава — “начинает покачивать”;
вторая глава — “сильная качка” (две смерти); третья глава — на рейде
легкое покачивание лодки — “всем легче”; четвертая глава — “качки
нет,” смерть Петра Ивановича, мысленное переживание смерти Гусевым,
17. Согласно Л. С. Выготскому, речевой ритм произведения устанавливает

соответствующий ритм и характер дыхания; каждой смене дыхания и ритму отвечает
определенный строй эмоций; этот эмоциональный фон поэтического переживания
тождествен или, во всяком случае, сходен с тем, который переживает в момент творчества
автор. См. также о роли дыхания в организации чеховской прозы: Л. В. Карасев, “Чехов в
футляре,” в Л. В. Карасев, Вещество литературы (Москва: Языки славянской культуры,
2001), c. 313-336.
18. См.: Гришунин А. Л., Громов М. П., Краснощекова Е. А., Лазерсон Б. И., Медриш
Д. Н., Орнатская Т. И., Соколова М. А., “Чудаков А. П. Примечания,” в А. М. Горького
(ред.), Чехов А. П., Полное собрание сочинений и писем: В 30 т. Сочинения: В 18 т
(Москва: Наука, 1977), с. 683.
здесь появляется образ борьбы волн друг с другом: “Неизвестно для чего,
шумят высокие волны. На какую волну ни посмотришь, всякая старается
подняться выше всех, и давит, и гонит другую; на нее с шумом,
отсвечивая своей белой гривой, налетает третья, такая же свирепая и
безобразная”(7, 337). Пятая глава — тело Гусева “мерно покачивается в
воде.” Борьба волн, хаос океана сливается с тишиной и покоем ясного
неба. Оппозиция четвертой главы: “Наверху глубокое небо, ясные
звезды, покой и тишина — точь-в-точь как дома в деревне, внизу же —
темнота и беспорядок”(7, 337), — снимается картиной нежного слияния
цветов океана и неба. Этой же волновой структуре подчинено и
изображение смерти в рассказе. За умершими вниз, в лазарет, приходят
сверху, чтобы бросить вниз в море. Оппозиция дополнительно
семантизируется: верх — “царство небесное”; низ — дно морское, в
мифологической традиции — образ смерти и ужаса, несостоявшегося
рождения, и вместе с тем, образ хранилища всех жизней: прошлых и
будущих.
Таким образом, схему композиционного членения можно представить
волновой структурой:
“Колебательно-колыхательные, вибрирующие движения морских вод

или степных трав, собственно, и образуют те коротко-частотные волны,
которые открывают простор взгляду и слуху вплоть до иллюзий,”19—
писал В. Н. Топоров. Колебательно-колыхательный ритм, составляющий
19. Топоров, Миф. Ритуал. Символ. Образ, с. 601.

основу “морского комплекса,” соотносится как с началом творения и его

смыслом, так и с пренатальной матрицей подсознания. В рассказе
“Гусев” возможно вычленение этих кодов. Космогонический миф
представлен как в структуре сюжетно-композиционного членения, так и
в образно-символическом плане. Основным признаком текстов,
соотнесенных с мифами о творении, как отмечал В. Н. Топоров, является
гипертрофизм числового принципа при забвении его старой семантики.
Черед вечеров, сон и “другой” мир
Повествователь чеховского рассказа ведет счет вечеров: первая глава
— “вечер”; вторая, третья глава — “вечер”; четвертая глава — “проходит
два дня”; пятая глава — два дня спит Гусев, на третий в полдень
приходят сверху два матроса и зашивают его в парусину. Счет дней (6+1)
является известной параллелью семидневному циклу творения. Гусев
выступает в роли медиатора, он сам в болезни находится между жизнью
и смертью, между иллюзией и реальностью, сном и явью, океаном и
небом. Образы рыбы-горы20 и ветра, прикованного к стенам на краю
света, в первой главе задают повествованию космогонический код. Ветер
в ряду семиотических общекультурных соответствий связан с дыханием,
духом, душой, является цепью связи структурных элементов мира и
причиной болезней. 21 В начале рассказа “чужое слово”: “солдат в Сучане
сказывал: ихнее судно, когда они шли, на рыбину наехало и днище себе
проломило” (7, 327),— и метафора “ветер с цепи сорвался”
мотивируются легкостью перехода от народного мифопоэтического
сознания Гусева к символическому разворачиванию архетипических
образов. Он думает о рыбе-горе со спиной твердой, как у осетра; о
толстых каменных стенах на краю света, к которым прикованы злые
ветры; затем он начинает думать о родной стороне. Видение образов
родной стороны: пруда, занесенного снегом, дыма из заводской трубы
фарфорового завода, родных (брата Алексея, его сынишки Ваньки и
девчонки Акульки — “лица не видать — закуталась”), только повод для
разворачивания символического значения предметных деталей: сани уже
не едут, а кружатся в черном дыму, без глаз показывается большая бычья
голова. Случайная чеховская деталь — вторжение чужого бреда в
видение Гусева — переводит его сон из плана личных воспоминаний в
план образов-символов смерти: езды на санях, черного дыма, бычьей
головы без глаз.22 Таким образом, архетипические образы-символы
первой главы репрезентируют мифологическое трехчленное членение
20. Известна демиургическая функция рыбы. “Возможно, мотив рыбы как опоры земли
в океане связан прежде всего с индийскими представлениями о мировой горе посреди
океана, повлиявшими, в частности, на центральноазиатские традиции.” См.: В. Н. Топоров,
“Рыбы,” в С.А. Токарев (ред.), Мифы народов мира. Энциклопедия в 2-х тт. (Москва: Сов.
Энциклопедия т.2., 1992), c. 392.
21. См.: В. Н. Топоров, “О структуре некоторых архаических текстов,” в Т.М.
Николаевa (ред.), Из работ московского семиотического круга (Москва: Языки русской
культуры, 1997), с. 121.
22. Доминик Хаас, “Гусев — светлый рассказ о мрачной истории,” в А. М. Горького
(ред.), Чеховский сборник (Москва: Издательство Литературного института, 1999), c. 85-89.
вселенной по вертикали: рыба как зооморфный классификатор нижней

космической зоны, бык, символизирующий срединную космическую
зону, ветер как властитель верхней космической зоны.
На функцию Гусева как медиатора между мирами указывает
осязаемость его контактов с “другим” миром. Сначала контакт между
мирами укладывается в рамки психологической реальности: сон
переживается как явь, встреча во сне дает физическое ощущение радости
наяву: “Радость захватывает у него дыхание, бегает мурашками по телу,
дрожит в пальцах. — Привел господь повидаться! — бредит он” (7, 328);
затем в просьбе о помощи к ребенку из сна: “Шестой годочек пошел, а
все еще разума нет! — бредит Гусев. — Заместо того, чтобы ноги
задирать, поди-кась дядьке служивому напиться принеси. Гостинца
дам” (7, 331). В четвертой главе трижды “проигрывается” смерть Гусева
— первый раз во сне, когда он не захотел держать понесшихся лошадей,
второй в разговорах с солдатом о близкой смерти, и третий — выход на
палубу (верх — смерть в композиционной структуре этого рассказа).
Мир иллюзии обрел для него реальность более плотную и осязаемую,
обоняемую, чем жизнь: “Запахло навозом и сеном. Понурив головы,
стоят у борта быки. Раз, два, три… восемь штук! А вот и маленькая
лошадка. Гусев протягивает руку, чтобы приласкать её, но она мотнула
головой, оскалила зубы и хочет укусить его за рукав. — Прроклятая…—
сердится Гусев” (7, 336—337). Поэтому переход его из сна в смерть
никак не обозначается: “Спит он два дня, а на третий в полдень приходят
сверху два матроса и выносят его из лазарета” (7, 338). Наличие даже в
редуцированном виде мотивов космогонического мифа в первой главе
позволяет рассматривать слияние цветов и нежность океана и неба в
финале как брак, предшествующий рождению. Кольцевая композиция,
реализующая кодовое значение космогонического мифа, расширяет тему
рассказа о смерти на море до мистерии творения-рождения мира. Таким
образом, фабулу в этом рассказе определяет не столько событие смерти
отдельного человека, сколько бесконечность событийного ряда на
мистериальном космопоэтическом уровне повествования.
По описанию С. Грофа, ритм легкого покачивания вызывает чувства
космического единства и блаженства.23 Так ритмическое разворачивание
симметричных композиционных структур: “начинает покачивать” в
начале рассказа — лодка покачивается на волнах в композиционном
центре повествования — тело идет ко дну, слегка покачиваясь, в
финале, — также актуализирует семантику образа “океана — лона,” и
соответственно, чувства покоя и радости жизни до рождения. По мнению
В. Н. Топорова, идее рождения независимо от того, реализуется ли она в
биологическом или духовном плане, соответствует единый
символический смысл: “Субъект рождения (тот, кто рождается), будь то
ребенок или “новый,” духовно родившийся (хотя бы только на краткое
время, когда восстанавливается связь с бессмертием, с полнотой жизни)
23. С. Гроф, Холотропное сознание (Москва: Трансперсональный Институт, 1996),

с. 50.
переживает пограничное состояние тесноты, томления, мук, страданий,

разрешающееся выходом в “новое” пространство, что воспринимается,
как освобождение, как “новое рождение,” как приобщение к вечности и
бессмертию.” 24
Пространство текста и “точка зрения” “новой” души

Но кто совершает путь со дна моря к небесам, чья “точка зрения”
организует пространство текста в финале рассказа “Гусев”? Душа ли
умершего героя, взгляд ли автора, пронизывающий глубину вод и
воспаряющий к небесам, “новая” ли душа читателя? Если это “новая”
душа, то пространство-время текста, ритм его осуществления и есть
пространство рождения этой души. Вплетаясь в сложную систему
пересечения волн жизни и смерти, хаоса и покоя, убаюканная сном,
плотностью художественной иллюзии, гармонией симметрии, она
постигает опыт смерти-жизни. А. П. Чудаков отмечал, что пейзажные
завершения рассказа, подобные концовке “Гусева,” были далеко не
частыми приемами в прозе конца XIX века: “Это — революция
сюжетосложения рассказа, решительно изменившая его главные
композиционные составляющие: эти составляющие нового типа
принадлежат к фундаментальным в ароморфном рассказе.”25 Вероятно,
что в данном случае можно говорить не только о формальной новизне
“пейзажного” финала рассказа, но и о смещении эстетической доминанты
в суггестивную сферу, образуемую сложнейшими пересечениями ритма и
смысла, уравновешенными и гармонично завершенными. В ХХ веке
суггестивная проза станет одной из линий развития литературы, однако
утрата внутренней меры станет также и причиной ее кризиса.
В поздних фабульных рассказах (таких как “Душечка,” “Ионыч” и др.)
ритмическая организация отступает на задний план, она уже не может
быть так просто, как в бесфабульных рассказах, высчитана в количествах
повторов основных семиотических оппозиций. Почти невозможно
угадать где, в каком месте рассказа, на каком повторе или паузе, с какой
периодичностью возникают пики “напряженности,” как они
“разряжаются”: внутри иллюзорной сферы искусства или проецируются
на общее психоэмоциональное состояние человека. Например, в одном из
самых известных рассказов Чехова “Ионыч” постепенно-поступательное
движение времени осознается как власть пошлости и обыденной жизни,
убивающей молодость, совесть, “высокие” порывы души. Но каким
образом формируется эта эмоция, противоречащая обычному,
ежедневному опыту человека? Почему проникает в сознание и
закрепляется в нем? “Событие и бессобытийность в “Ионыче,” — считает
Е. А. Стеценко, — это не только ритмические единицы движения
сюжета, но и признаки главного противоречия деятельной
24. Топоров, Миф. Ритуал. Символ. Образ, c. 595.

25. См.: А. П. Чудаков, “Ароморфоз русского рассказа (к проблеме малых жанров),” в
В.А. Келдыш, В.В. Полонский (ред.), Поэтика русской литературы начала ХХ века.
Динамика жанра: общие вопросы. Проза (Москва: ИМЛИ, 2009), с. 365-396.
целеустремленной жизни и обывательского прозябания. Поэтому

перелом в событийном ряду и переход от динамического действия к
статике сопровождается аналогично направленной внутренней
эволюцией героя. <…> Самоисчерпанность рассказа проявляется и в
угасании темпа развития действия. Рассказ возвращается к исходной
позиции: доминирует изначальная точка зрения о скуке и однообразии
жизни, автор вновь описывает тех же Туркиных с их неизменными
занятиями. Все внутренние движения повествования, развитие сюжета,
характера погрузились в его глубины, исчезли, подавленные
безысходностью провинциального бытия.”26 Однако наперекор этому
фабульному ходу развития событий у читателя за время прочтения
рассказа (в соответствии с гипотезой Н. К. Гея о значении “формы
протяженности материального субстрата художественного
произведения”27) оформляется ярко выраженная негативная
эмоциональная реакция на власть времени, поступательного его хода.
Эта негативная эмоция, формируемая Чеховым, противостоит
изображенному им ритму обыденной жизни, монотонному ритму
провинциального города. И так же, как в рассказе “Мыслитель,” коврик,
который стелет Феона обожравшимся приятелям, переполняет чашу
терпения читателя и направляет его духовные силы на противостояние
злу обезличенности пространства, так и вид ожиревшего и обнаглевшего
Ионыча вызывает внутренний протест читателя против силы
обезличивающего хода времени. “Старцев еще больше пополнел, ожирел,
тяжело дышит и уже ходит, откинув назад голову. Когда он, пухлый,
красный, едет на тройке с бубенчиками и Пантелеймон, тоже пухлый и
красный, с мясистым затылком, сидит на козлах, протянув вперед
прямые, точно деревянные руки, и кричит встречным “Прррава держи!,”
то картина бывает внушительная, и кажется, что едет не человек, а
языческий бог” (10, 40). Двойной знак — проезд тройки Старцева,
напоминающей колесницу языческого бога, и шествие его через
анфиладу комнат, на глубинном мифологическом уровне воскрешает
семантику путешествия бога времени. Это впечатление усиливается так
называемыми “лишними” и совсем не поэтическими подробностями:
разбегающимися неодетыми напуганными детьми и женщинами,
мясистым затылком громко орущего возницы. Все вместе они усиливают
уже сложившуюся в ходе сюжетного развития резко негативную эмоцию
читателя на власть поступательного хода времени.
В работе Л. Нирё “О значении и композиции произведения” была
высказана, на наш взгляд, справедливая мысль о том, что было бы
ошибкой отождествлять значение с композицией, так как “значение
определяет взаимоотношение знаков, знаковых элементов между собой
26. Е. А. Стеценко, “Ритмическая композиция художественного произведения,” в Н.

Гей, П. Палиевский, В. Щербина (ред.), Контекст 1988. Литературно; теоретические;
исследования (Москва: Наука, 1989), c. 204.
27. Н. К. Гей, “Время и пространство в структуре произведения,” в Н. К. Гей, А.С.
Мастеков (ред.), Контекст 1974. Литературно; теоретические; исследования (Москва:
Наука, 1975), с. 221.
постольку, поскольку предпосылкой этого определения располагают

сами составляющие компоненты знака, то есть даны все условия, чтобы
из взаимодействия составляющих родилось новое значение. Значение
прежде всего приводит в движение семантические реляции сводимых
воедино элементов, но так как они заведомо связаны и с носителем знака,
само собой разумеется, что значение в свою очередь определяет и
упорядоченность носителя знака.”28 Если следовать принципу
дополнительности А. П. Чудакова, в соответствии с которым “лишние”
детали и подробности работают на создание “поэтической”
целесообразности, то такие случаи введения антипоэтических “лишних”
деталей в повествовательную ткань рассказа “Ионыч” не могут быть
объяснены ни эффектом “неотобранности,” ни “случайностностью.” Их
можно рассматривать только как более сложные знаки, значение которых
проявляется не на одном из уровней (языковом в виде семантических
узлов или фабульно-композиционном), а объединяет контекстуальные
языковые и композиционные напластования значений. Этот синтез и
определил значение прозы Чехова для формирования в русской
литературе “поэтической прозы.”
Сегодня уже привычная, а на момент утверждения в художественной
практике Чехова “свободно-присоединительная композиция”29 без
характерного для новеллы трехчастного развития (завязка, кульминация,
развязка) поражала современников своей новизной. И сегодня она
вызывает споры о жанре рассказов, построенных по такому принципу, их
называют то мини-драмами, то мини-романами. По мнению Л. Нирё,
композиция в случаях трансформации устоявшихся литературных
жанров может принимать непосредственное участие в создании значения,
так как “приводит к новому соединению составляющих произведения как
знака и выполняет тем самым задачу разрушения — созидания
конвенции.”30 Характерное для стиля Чехова изложение фабульных
событий в виде драматизированного эпизода (или цепи эпизодов), когда
промежуточные события излагаются кратко,31 в композиции рассказа
“Ионыч” дополнительно семантизируется, приобретает значение
“концепта.” “Его главный прием, здесь примененный, можно назвать, —
писал А. Дерман, — расстановкой вех на жизненном пути доктора
Старцева, между которыми автор оставляет пространство, заполняемое
уже читателем в процессе сотворчества.”32 Ритм смены эпизодов в
28. Л. Нирё, “О значении и композиции произведения,” в А. М. Горького, Ю. Я.

Барабаш (ред.), Семиотика и художественное творчество (Москва: Академия наук
СССР, 1977), c. 149.
29. См.: А.П. Чудаков, Мир Чехова: возникновение и утверждение (Москва: Сов.
писатель, 1986), с. 248.
30. Л. Нирё, “О значении и композиции произведения,” c. 150.
31. Ср.: “Чеховская манера бежит безэпизодного изложения — в противоположность,
например, тургеневской, которой свойственно открыто обобщенное изложение событий,
когда целые периоды жизни персонажа представлены не в виде сцен-эпизодов, но в
авторском рассуждении (Vorgeschichte почти всех героев тургеневских романов)” (A. П.
Чудаков, Поэтика Чехова, c. 202).
32. A. Дерман, Мастерство Чехова (Москва: Сов. писатель, 1959), c. 78.
“Ионыче” потому принимает непосредственное участие в создании

значения, что воспроизводит круговой ритм течения человеческой жизни,
власть времени и вместе с тем оформляет противостояние этому ритму и
его власти.
Institute of World Literature THME. A. M. Gorky, Moscow

LEONARD A. POLAKIEWICZ
MEDICINE IN CHEKHOV’S WORKS
“In Goethe the poet lived “I have no doubt that the study of
amicably side by side with medicine has had an important
the scientist.” influence on my literary work”
Anton Chekhov Anton Chekhov

Letter to G.I. Rossolimo, Letter to Suvorin,
October 11, 1899 May, 15, 1889
It can be safely asserted that Anton Chekhov introduced medicine as a topic

into Russian literature. By medicine is meant the wide variety of illnesses and
diseases, as well as people of the medical profession and those who appear to
be on the periphery of medicine. The objective of the present analysis is to
examine several of Chekhov’s representative “medical works,” analyze his
method of presenting illnesses and disease, and show how the latter became
integral artistic components of the works themselves. It will be shown that in
his stories, Chekhov the artist “lived amicably side by side” with the physician.
The average reader of Russian literature is undoubtedly familiar with a
number of Chekhov’s works which contain incidents relating to medicine, but
this same reader would be amazed at just how often Chekhov drew on
medicine for a topic, or how frequently his writings allude to medical matters.
What seemed to many of Chekhov’s contemporaries to be merely a fortuitous
collection of facts and incidents when they read his works, was soon
recognized by the more perceptive readers to be the realization of one of the
main principles of Chekhov’s aesthetic approach, namely, the representation of
the various manifestations of Russian life.1 At this, he was immensely
successful.
It appears that hardly a class or profession failed to receive the attention of
his pen. That physicians frequent his pages incessantly should be of little
surprise to anyone, for he himself belonged to that profession. Similarly,
illnesses of all sorts that one encounters in his works are explainable in part by
the fact that he was a doctor, and in part by the fact that he himself suffered
from tuberculosis. Those suffering from this disease understandably received
the author’s repeated attention. They represent characters in his stories, from
one of his earliest (Marusia in “Late-Blooming Flowers,” 1 8 8 2 , w r i t t e n
t w o y e a r s p r i o r t o h i s f i r s t p u l m o n a r y h e m o r r h a g e ) to his very
last (Sasha in “The Betrothed,” 1903, published a year prior to his succumbing
to tuberculosis).
1. Boris Eichenbaum, “Chekhov at Large,” in Robert Louis Jackson (ed.) Chekhov: A

Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 23.
There is yet another reason for the presence of matters relating to medicine
in Chekhov’s works, which may perhaps be regarded as most important. In his
attempt to show Russia in depth and breadth, Chekhov realized that people of
all walks of life must be shown in their daily existence. To accomplish this, he
considered it necessary to introduce into literature “trifles” of life which had
formerly appeared to lie outside the realm of literature. The result was that
Chekhov introduced into belles-lettres scientifically and artistically motivated
medical incidents, made them a subject matter of art, and thus enriched and
expanded the possibilities of art. Such a broadening of horizons in art was truly
innovative. To be sure, this subject matter had occasionally been treated
elsewhere in literature, but it often received a scientifically incorrect
presentation or had little if any artistic significance in a given work. In
Chekhov’s aesthetics, it was sine qua non that medical incidents be
scientifically and artistically motivated. Concerning scientific motivation and
accuracy in presenting medical incidents, Chekhov maintained: “I am a
physician and for this reason, if I am not to be ashamed, I must provide
motivation for incidents related to medicine in my stories.”2 On another
occasion, in a letter of October 11, 1899 to G. I. Rossolimo, he added: “My
acquaintance with natural sciences and with scientific method, has always kept
me on my guard, and where it was possible, I have always tried to be
consonant with scientific facts, and where it was impossible, I have preferred
not to write at all.”3 As to the question of artistic motivation in presenting
subjects relating to medicine, Chekhov had a clear answer. In a letter of
February 28, 1895 to E. M. Shavrova he explained: “Personally I abide by the
following rule: I present ailing people only if they are interesting as characters
and if they are picturesque (kartinny).”
Chekhov’s works prove clearly that he adhered closely to these principles.
From his earliest stories it becomes evident that medical incidents did not
appear to the author an end in itself. He made use of them only in so far as
they furthered the artistic quality of a given work, when they helped him to
paint a more complete picture of man and his ideas, or helped Russian life
come to light in its entirety. Often the depiction of physically ill people served
to make ever sharper and more vivid the outlines of their spiritual sickness.
It is obvious that there is no limit to recording numerous illnesses. At times
2. Letter of October 9, 1888 to A. N. Pleshcheev, A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii

i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, N. F. Bel’chikov et al. (eds) (Moskva: Nauka, 1973-1984), Pis’ma,
Vol. 3, p. 20. All references to Chekhov’s works are from this edition and will be noted in the
text by volume and page number. References to Chekhov’s letters are also to this edition and will
be cited in the text by date. All translations from Russian are my own unless otherwise stated.
3. Actually, this quotation is from a brief autobiographical sketch which was requested by his
old University of Moscow classmate and friend, Dr Rossolimo, for a class album; Chekhov
had included it together with the letter of October 11, 1899. It must be noted that Chekhov
qualified this remark by the following statement in this same letter: “I may observe… that the
conditions of artistic creation do not always admit of complete harmony with the facts of
science. It is impossible to represent upon the stage death from poisoning exactly as it takes
place in reality. But harmony with the facts of science must be felt even under those conditions,
i.e., it must be clear to the reader or spectator, that this is only due to the conditions of art, and that
he has to do with a writer who understands.”
it may even be an easy way out for the author, but often it only reveals a lack
of true artistic gift. The real objection, however, is that such recording, no
matter how faithful, is not only boring, but is also open to dispute as to
whether it is art and literature. There is no room for such doubt in Chekhov’s
works. He is neither didactic nor boring despite his descriptions of individual
illnesses and numerous clinical observations. Henri-Bernard Duclos, who was
himself a physician and a writer, was rightfully impressed by the great skill
with which Chekhov ”...using only several strokes, several words, without
even resorting to scientific terminology, makes possible for the reader-
physician to recognize the symptoms of an illness and make a diagnosis. Had
the author himself not been a doctor, he would have taken a directly opposite
approach: he would have identified the illness without going into details or, he
would have taken some sort of pathology manual and copied out of it various
symptoms, without any understanding of them as Zola often did.”4 Chekhov
indeed usually avoids diagnosing the illness and frequently eschews medical
terms by drawing expressions from ordinary, everyday speech. It is striking
how objectively and precisely he describes characteristic “medical details”
without any manifest indication of his attitude.
Chekhov was quite aware that medical incidents are not yet literature. His
“medical works” evince clearly an aesthetic approach which regards medical
matters as only rough material to be fashioned into art. In order for it to be
literature, as William Gerhardi notes, it needs not only taste, tact and humor,
but also discrimination, proportion and restraint.5 It hardly needs mentioning
that these qualities are ever present in Chekhov’s works. He declared that his
medical training and experience had played a decisive role in his creative
work: “I have no doubt that the study of medicine has had an important
influence on my literary work; it has considerably enlarged the sphere of my
observation, has enriched me with knowledge, the true value of which for me
as a writer can only be understood by one who is himself a doctor. It has also
had a guiding influence and it is probably due to my close association with
medicine that I have succeeded avoiding mistakes” (Letter of October 11, 1899
to G. I. Rossolimo). Although Chekhov’s medical expertise had indeed a great
influence on his art, one should avoid exaggerations of the type Duclos makes
when he argues that without his medical experience Chekhov certainly would
not have approached the essence of human suffering with such understanding
nor would he have been able to comprehend the human heart as he did. The
question of the relationship of and Chekhov’s dual devotion to medicine and
literature should be approached with caution. As quoted in the epigraph, the
author had noted that: “In Goethe, the scientist got along wonderfully with the
poet.” With these words he had expressed not only his view of the perfect
artist, but at the same time had succinctly characterized his own art.
As a strong advocate of truth in the broadest sense, Chekhov also demanded
4. Henri-Bernard Duclos, Antone Tchekhov: le médicin et l’écrivain (Paris: Bernard Grasset,

1927), pp. 61-62, 64.
5. William Gerhardi, Anton Chehov: A Critical Study (New York: Duffield and Company,
1923), pp. 132-133.
that medical matters be truthfully depicted in art. In the words of Leonid

Grossman, Chekhov, the exacting artist, was “positively obsessed by a mania
for the concise.” To him, “scientific precision in poetic creation was an
indispensable element.”6 Thus, we are not surprised that in speaking of the
purely artistic shortcomings of other writers, Chekhov often draws attention to
flaws in medical allusions in their works. Even Tolstoy, whom he considered
to be his favorite author (Letter of February 22, 1892 to V. A. Tikhonov) and
from whom he had learned much, did not escape criticism in this respect.
Chekhov greatly admired Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata from an artistic point of
view and felt that in terms of what was being written at the time, “it [was]
difficult to find its equal both for the importance of the idea and the beauty of
expression;” but he was nevertheless quite dissatisfied by its medical side and
claimed that it “betrayed an ignorant man who, in the course of his long life,
has not taken the trouble to read two or three pamphlets written by specialists
[on] the subject” (Letter of February 15, 1890 to A. N. Pleshcheev).7 Clearly,
Chekhov’s appreciation is in part determined by his medical training, but his
criticism in this case is just, because Tolstoy’s pronouncements on medical
matters violated not only artistic truth as Chekhov understood it, but truth in
the broadest sense of the word. On another occasion when speaking of War
and Peace, he also appears to be impressed by its artistic quality, but again
does not fail to notice an unusual defect: “If I had been with Prince Andrei, I
would have cured him. It is strange to read that the wound of the prince, a rich
man who was attended day and night by a physician and who had the benefit of
being nursed by Natasha and Sonia, should have given forth a putrid odour”
(Letter of October 25, 1891 to A. S. Suvorin).8 In this case, one is inclined to
agree with Leonid Grossman’s remark concerning this statement: “[It seems
that] the physician awakes in the delighted reader [Chekhov], and with his
skepticism spoils all aesthetic pleasure.”9 Perhaps this is the inevitable result
when Chekhov’s demand for truthful depiction of medical matters in literature
is strictly applied. His remarks concerning Tolstoy’s works illustrate that in the
wake of the aesthetic response of the literary critic there was always the
scientific response of the medical expert.
Herbert Thoms argues that Chekhov saw the world through a physician’s
eyes and therefore the spirit of the physician pervades his entire art.10 Such a
6. Leonid Grossman, “The Naturalism of Chekhov,” in Chekhov: A Collection of Critical

Essays, pp. 32-33.
7. Chekhov was particularly annoyed by Tolstoy’s statements concerning syphilis, asylums
for children, women’s aversion to sex, etc. Concluding his letter, Chekhov softens his criticism
with these words: “it is only with regret that the novel did not escape the lot of all human
enterprises, none of which is perfect or free from blemish.” After his return from the
trip to Sakhalin, Chekhov in a letter of December 17, 1890 to A.S. Suvorin, seems to
reject the work completely: “Before my journey Kreutzer Sonata seemed to me to be an event, but
now it seems to me absurd and ridiculous.” Pis’ma Vol. 4, p. 147.
8. Chekhov also notes that throughout the novel he found Tolstoy’s consistent abhorrence of
medicine.
9. Grossman, “The Naturalism of Chekhov,” p. 33.
10. Herbert Thoms, “Anton Chekhov: Physician and Literary Artist,” The Journal of the
American Medical Association, 79, no. 19 (Nov. 4, 1922), p. 1631.
view is only partially correct. It is true that medicine was important to

Chekhov both as a method of obtaining knowledge of man and society, as well
as a scientific support for his artistic observation and analysis of material. It
played a significant role in his creative work by laying guidelines for his
artistic method (such as the selection of only the essential details to make an
ensemble lifelike), and by introducing him to unusually rich material for
literary processing. It certainly helped shape and clarify his Weltanschauung.
But Herbert Thoms and B. Barker Beeson (who maintains that “[O]nly an
actual practitioner of medicine such as Tchekhov was, could describe [medical
incidents] so vividly.”11) seem to err in the same manner as does Duclos. The
latter, as G. I. Gurevich aptly notes, ascribes to Chekhov’s medical profession
the most important features which distinguish his creative methods.12 The
dangers inherent in such an approach to Chekhov’s work is that it tends to
maximize the role of the physician and minimize the role of the artist.
Obviously knowledge alone, which one accumulates from medical training and
practice, does not assure success of any kind in the field of belles-lettres. The
fact is one must possess other indispensable qualities which Chekhov indeed
had. His medical knowledge fortunately blended perfectly with his artistic
talent. Chekhov’s experience in medical school, private practice, hospital and
the penal colony on Sakhalin, brought home to him the horrors of life, the
cruelty of nature and the helplessness of man, all of which he recorded in his
mind.
Rather than presenting a resume of Chekhov’s works which touch upon
medicine (which is neither possible nor desirable in this study), an attempt will
be made to focus on three representative works, namely, “At the Pharmacy” (V
apteke), “Gusev” (Gusev), and “The Bishop” (Arkhierei) and analyze them in
terms of Chekhov’s method of presenting illness and disease. The choice of
these three works was not an arbitrary one. They represent three different
periods of Chekhov’s creative evolution: a Chekhonte work, the first one,
belongs to Chekhov’s early creative period and illustrates how even the
“unknown Chekhov” was capable of producing genuine art; the second story
belongs to his middle creative period; and the third story is his penultimate
work, a masterpiece written by him during his mature creative period, two
years prior to his death. Moreover, the choice of these three works was based
on the belief that they would not only facilitate a close, in depth analysis of
Chekhov’s depiction of illnesses, but that it would also obviate an analysis of
the “overworked” “medical stories” such as “A Nervous Breakdown,” “A
Boring Story,” or “The Black Monk.”
The year 1885 marked the appearance of “At the Pharmacy,” a short piece
which Chekhov had originally subtitled “A scene” (Scenka). In terms of
Chekhov’s artistic development it is a transitional story and lacks the polish of
his later works, but certain of its features, such as the handling of details,
11. B. Barker Beeson, “Anton Tchekhov: A Resume of His Works and of His Career,” Annals
of Medical History, 3 (1931), p. 607.
12. G. I. Gurevich, “Frantsuzskaia kniga o Chekhove,” Chekhovskii sbornik (Moskva, 1929),
p. 248.
particularly those related to the hero’s illness, clearly anticipate the appearance
of such gems as “Typhus” (1887)13 and “An Attack of Nerves” (1888). The
organic use of medical elements in this story is also a marked improvement
over their more conventional and apparent use in some of his earlier works. He
had used the theme of “the chemist’s tax” twice earlier that year believing that
it was “fashionable,” interesting and lucrative;14 however, a comparison of the
three pieces indicates how much he could improve upon a theme in a short
amount of time.
“At the Pharmacy” is a vignette on the state of mind of a sick individual in
which Chekhov demonstrates his medical knowledge and observation. He
draws for the reader a physiologically accurate picture of the inception of a
serious illness. The real significance of the story, however, lies not here, but in
the manner in which it is used to reveal a specific social inadequacy and human
weakness, notably the inferior apothecary service, with its inflated prices, and
man’s inhumanity to man.
Basically, this “scene” from life consists of the following details: Svoikin, an
ill individual, arrives at the pharmacy and asks to have a prescription filled.
When payment is asked for, he realizes he is six kopecks short. Though
gravely ill, he is denied the medicine until he can make full payment. He has
no choice but to return home for the money. Upon his arrival, however, he is
completely incapacitated by the illness, lies down to rest and loses all
consciousness. Although the illness is not identified specifically, the symptoms
which Svoikin experiences are characteristic of typhus.
In this episode which takes up only four pages, Chekhov has skillfully
characterized both the state of the pharmaceutical service in Russia and the
individual’s frequent helplessness before it. From the opening lines we see
carefully selected details used precisely in the right places to characterize the
pharmacy and its owner. The pharmacy is compared to a mistress (soderzanka)
and a railroad man (zeleznodoroznik). Both nouns suggest something
expensive or costly. The detail of the staircase leading to the pharmacy being
covered with a luxurious carpet supports this notion. These impressions are
followed by the narrator’s remark that Svoikin had perceived a smell in the
pharmacy “which is common to all pharmacies of the world” (4: 54). Science
and medicine change with the years, we are told, but this everlasting odour
which has been experienced by the sense of smell of our grandfathers, will also
be experienced by our grandsons. The odour is not identified as being good or
bad, but the negative description of the pharmacist which follows, offers a
hint:
13. For my analysis of “Typhus,” see “Čexov’s TIF: An Analysis,” Russian Language
Journal, 33 (Fall 1979): 92-111.
14. “The Chemist’s Tax, or Help, robbers!!! (A funny treatise on a sad theme)” [Aptekarskaia
taksa, ili spasite, grabiat (Shutlivyi traktat na plachevnuiu temu)], appeared in the February 14,
1885, No. 7 issue of Budil’nik, and was signed “My Brother’s Brother,” “The Chemist’s Tax”
(Aptekarskaia taksa) appeared in the April 13, 1885 issue of Oskolki. In a letter of March 22,
1885 to N.A. Leikin, Chekhov noted: “The theme of ‘chemist’s tax’ is fashionable… I believe
one can make use of it.” Pis’ma, Vol. 1, p. 144.
Behind the yellow, glossy counter, arranged with labeled jars, stood
the tall owner, with his head tossed back in a dignified manner
(solidno), a stern face and well groomed whiskers — quite obviously, the
pharmacist. From the small bald patch on his head to the long pink
fingernails, everything on this person looked painstakingly laundered,
pressed and as if licked clean (vylizano).... His frowning eyes glanced
haughtily down at the newspaper lying atop the counter. He was reading
(4: 54).
The above passage suggests that by inserting the comment about the odour,
between the negative comparison of the pharmacy and the negative description
of its owner, Chekhov called for an association in the reader’s mind between
all three elements. In these three opening paragraphs, Chekhov has subtly
sketched Svoikin’s impressions of the pharmacy, its distinct odour and its
owner. It is also an early indication of mastery of construction which is so
characteristic of Chekhov’s work.
A further characterization of the establishment and its owner is given as
perceived by Svoikin, whose condition is worsening progressively. Having
been told by the pharmacist that it will take an hour to fill the prescription
(although he was the only customer there and he could have expected quick
service as is suggested by the rapid alliteration of the labials p and b and their
interplay with the liquids r and 1 in Publiki, blagodaria pozdnemu chasu, v
apteke ne bylo [4: 54; emphasis added]), Svoikin explains that he cannot
possibly wait that long and asks whether it can be done sooner, to which the
pharmacist does not even deign to reply. Svoikin sinks (opustilsia) onto the
couch and decides to wait. At this point we are given an artistic description of
the mental symptoms attending the onset of the disease in Svoikin. Chekhov
feels no need to identify the disease and merely allows Svoikin to state: “…the
doctor has said that it is still difficult to decide the nature of my illness” (4:
55). Instead, Chekhov picks only important details which will fit organically
into the artistic fiber of the story. We are told that Svoikin experienced a
burning sensation in his throat and drawing pains in his arms and legs. In
addition, his head felt heavy and in it hovered misty images the shape of
clouds and bundled up human beings. It appeared to him that he was seeing
everything through a veil and that the monotonous pounding of the pestle
against the mortar and the slow ticking of the clock were taking place not
around him but within his very head.
Chekhov expertly motivates that which Svoikin perceives in his semi-
delirious state. On the one hand, we are told that the cashier is smoking. This
explains in part Svoikin’s seeing everything through a veil. On the other hand,
twice earlier we were told that in a semi-dark adjacent room, there puttered
about two dark figures. One of these was busy with the marble mortar while
the other was mixing something in a blue phial. Clearly, the two helpers in
their white smocks, working in semi-darkness, explain respectively the
hovering misty images which resemble clouds and bundled human shapes.
Their seemingly visual presence is constantly reinforced by the aural
perception of the pounding of the mortar. The same pounding, together with
the rhythmic striking of the clock, serve to explain Svoikin’s illusory sensation
of experiencing all of this within his head. The pounding of the mortar (stuk o
mramornuiu stupku) with its onomatopoeic quality, which serves as a refrain
in the story, also motivates the worsening of Svoikin’s condition, for at one
point we are told it begins to nauseate him. At a later time, this detail is used to
indicate how far his condition has deteriorated: “the pounding of the marble
mortar was becoming all the time louder and clearer” (4: 55).
In order to pull himself together, Svoikin tries to strike up a conversation
with the pharmacist, but the latter simply ignores him. As a result he tries to
occupy his mind by other means. He looks at the various gallipots standing on
the shelves; reading their labels, he comes to realize that each name sounds
more pretentious and more antediluvian than the next. And his conclusion is
this: ”...how much worthless stuff there must be here. How much routine there
is in these gallipots standing here only because of tradition, and yet, how
respectable (solidno) and impressive all of it is” (4: 56). There is a clear note
of derision in the last words. First we recall that the term “respectable” was
used to refer to the pharmacist; now it is used to refer to the jars. The
implication is that both the owner and his jars have much in common.15 There
is much that is worthless and outdated about them and both give a false
impression as to their real importance. The latter point is confirmed by the
thoughts that pass through Svoikin’s mind as he begins to examine closely the
pharmacist's “superciliously, learned physiognomy”:
Strange people, honest to God! – he thought. – For whose sake do their faces
affect a learned colour? They skin their fellow man charging three times as
much as he should pay; all they do is sell salves for growing hair but when
one looks at their faces one could imagine that they actually are priests of
science. They write in Latin and speak German... In a healthy state
one doesn’t notice these dry, callous physiognomies, but when one
becomes ill, as I am now, then one is horrified realizing that such a sacred
matter has fallen into the hands of this insensitive, pressed (utiuznaia) figure
(4: 56).
The exaggerated notions of the learning and social importance of

pharmaceutical experts are under attack here. We find a derisive remark even
earlier when told that the counter, behind which the pharmacist stood,
separated the “Latin kitchen” from the “crowd.” Furthermore, the pharmacist’s
ridiculous aloofness toward Svoikin, his refusing to talk with him, is
repeatedly noted. Obviously, if this division must exist, the narrator prefers to
be part of the crowd which includes Svoikin. It is with the latter that the
narrator’s sympathies lie and as the first element (svoi-) of the name suggests,
the aim is to elicit the reader's sympathy also, for indeed, he is one of us.16
15. The word motionlessly (nepodvizhno) is used by the narrator several times when referring to
the pharmacist. It serves as another link between him and his motionless jars.
16. We must not assume, however, that the narrator views Svoikin without some criticism, for
the suffix (-kin) suggests a pejorative connotation. This notion is also developed in the story.
Although Svoikin is sick, he is nevertheless a weak individual who perceives the true character of
The above quoted passage serves not only to ridicule the pharmacist but
also to reveal Chekhov’s keen observation about man which he will repeat
again in later works, namely, that in normal circumstances, man fails to notice
things, which when ill, he notices as a result of heightened awareness. But
Chekhov of the mature period would have been more subtle in expressing this
idea just as he would have been more subtle in handling subjective elements
present in this story, for as he noted later in a letter to Suvorin, he preferred
toallow the reader to figure things out.17 The passage is also a clear example of
Chekhov’s technique of blending incidents related to medicine with the theme
contained in the work. There is no interest in the illness of Svoikin as such;
rather, it is used naturally as an occasion for the hero to express critical
remarks about the unhappy state of pharmaceutical services in Russia.
Chekhov’s renowned irony appears several times in the story. In the very
opening lines we are told that it was urgent enough for Svoikin to get the
medicine and so as not to waste time he set off directly from the doctor’s
office to the pharmacy. It turns out, however, that he had not only wasted
precious time but more importantly, perhaps his very life is wasted. Later in
the story, Svoikin makes the following remark to the pharmacist: “And I am
fortunate that I have become ill in the capital and not in a village where there
are no doctors and Pharmacies” (4: 55). The outcome of his experience at the
pharmacy however, is contrary to what Svoikin had expected. Not in vain do
we find the cashier mentioned no less than four times in the story, for money is
the only concern of the pharmacist.18 Already in the first reference to him we
are told that he is sitting and counting money. The function of this reference is
to make the reader more receptive to the financial difficulties which Svoikin
will experience later. Indeed, when the time comes to pay for the medicine,
Svoikin lacks the sufficient amount, a mere six kopecks. He is brusquely
denied any credit and is forced to go home to get the balance.
With a single telling detail, Chekhov informs us of how seriously ill
Svoikin was by this time. We are told that on his way home “he had to sit
down and rest about five times” (4: 57). Having arrived home he finds some
coins, but before returning to the pharmacy, he decides to sit down on his bed
to rest. It was then that “[S]ome inexplicable force pulled his head to the
pillow. He lay down seemingly only for a minute… Misty images the shape of
clouds and bundled figures began to cloud his consciousness... He remembered
the pharmacist but fails to put the rude and callous pharmacist in his place. Instead, he allows
himself to be treated worse than a child and at one point approaches the pharmacist with a “pleading
grimace” begging him to enable him to leave.
17. In a letter of April 1, 1890 to A.S. Suvorin, Chekhov wrote: “When I write, I count entirely
upon the reader to add for himself the subjective elements that are lacking in the story.” Pis’ma, Vol.
4, p. 54.
18. In “The Chemist’s Tax, or Help, robbers!!! (A funny treatise on a sad theme),” Chekhov had
this to say about the greed of pharmacists: “By nightfall, the cash box is filled with gold and
silver one per cent of which is taken for medicine and the rest from greed… When we ask what
they do with such a mass of money, they say that they have to pay high wages to all their help, each
of whom has received a higher education and therefore demands higher pay. But we know from
most reliable sources that not a single small business firm pays its help as little as do the
pharmacies” (16: 223).
for a long while that he had to go to the pharmacy, was forcing himself to get
up, but his illness took its toll. The copper coins dropped out of his hand and
he began to dream that he had already gone to the pharmacy and was again
talking with the pharmacist (4: 57). In this closing paragraph, Chekhov
succinctly summarizes the hallucinatory experiences of someone who is
gravely ill and in a state of delirium. The reader sees hew the mind is deceived
by an unhealthy physical state, and admires Chekhov’s keen psychological
perception and artistic talent in rendering this process. The misty images which
Svoikin began seeing at the pharmacy, at the outset of the story, appear to him
again: the circle is made complete, for the reader leaves Svoikin (at least in the
latter’s mind) in the same place as he had met him at the beginning of the
story. The tight structure, impressive descriptive technique and skillful
blending of medical detail with the rest of the material, which are manifest in
“At the Pharmacy,” render it one of the best of Chekhov’s early stories.
In the story “Gusev” (1890), the atmosphere of illness and dying dominates
the narrative. In the words of Rufus W. Mathewson Jr., “[W]e need not
speculate about the presence of death in ‘Gusev’; three lives are extinguished
in the course of the story. The process of dying is the action of the story; the
experience and meaning of death are the subject-matter.”19 The story concerns
two individuals, Pavel Ivanych and Gusev, returning to Russia after serving in
the Far East. More precisely, they are among the sick sailors and soldiers
returning from serving in the penal colony on the Island of Sakhalin which
Chekhov visited and later described in his The Island of Sakhalin (Ostrov
Sakhalin).20 In the portrayal of Pavel Ivanych and Gusev, we find Chekhov’s
favorite device of employing contrasting, diametrically opposed personalities.
The former is a protester (one of the numerous Chekhovian protesters), while
the latter is a meek, submissive individual, a Platon Karataev type (smirennik).
We learn that Pavel Ivanych “suffered from seasickness.” Next we are
given his physical description: “he slept sitting up, as he felt suffocated lying
down. He had a gray face, a long sharp nose, and eyes which seemed
enormous because he was terribly emaciated; and his temples were sunken” (7:
328-329). These are all visible and alarming signs of the ravaging effects of
tuberculosis. Pavel Ivanych is “worn out by coughing” as a result of his illness
and the suffocating heat contributes to his breathing laboriously. He protests
against the authorities for, among other things, putting gravely ill soldiers and
sailors “in the last stages of consumption” on a ship heading for Russia,
knowing full well they will never get there alive (7: 329). He says of himself:
“‘I am protest personified’” (7: 333). The problem is that he does not express
his protest nobly; it is not a dignified protest which would meet Chekhov’s
approval. Although Gusev is meek, he also has a primitive, violent side to him;
he explains beating up some Chinese men: “Well, I was bored, and I beat them
up” (7: 330).
19. Rufus W. Mathewson, Jr., “Intimations of Mortality in Four Čexov Stories,” American
Contributions to the Sixth International Congress of Slavists, Prague, 1968, August 7-13, Vol. II:
Literary Contributions, William E. Harkins (ed.) (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1968), p. 268.
20. Chapters 1-19 were serialized in Russkaia mysl’, 1893-1894. It appeared in book form in
1895.
Like a refrain we read about Pavel Ivanych’s condition: “Several times he

tried to lie down, but he never succeeded. His breathing was labored” (7: 331).
The narrator adds: “It was suffocating in the heat, one had no strength to
breathe, one was thirsty, and the water was hot, disgusting” (7: 331). In the
meantime, when someone on board dies, the event is conveyed almost as if it
were happening off-stage: “Overhead someone gave a loud shout, and several
sailors ran past, and there was s sound as though some heavy object was being
dragged across the deck or something had burst open” (7: 331). A death scene
which follows is described soberly, unsentimentally, with striking realism and
through effective use of the device of “ostranenie” (“making it strange”):
“Suddenly something strange happened to one of the soldiers who was playing
cards …. He called hearts diamonds then he got muddled over the score, and
then let the cards fall from his hands. He smiled a frightened, stupid smile, and
gazed at the other card-players. ‘I won’t be a moment, fellows,’ he said, and
lay down on the floor. They were all astonished. They shouted at him, but he
did not answer” (7:331). It takes the simple-minded Gusev to enlighten them:
“‘There’s not a drop of breath left in him – he’s dead!’” (7: 332).
Pavel Ivanych’s deteriorating condition is made clear by the fact that he
“was lying down, no longer sitting up. His eyes were closed, and his nose
seemed to have grown sharper” (7: 334). When asked whether he feels ill, he
denies it, saying “‘[N]o, on the contrary… I’m better… As you see, I can lie
down … It’s a bit easier’.” He adds: “‘When I compare myself with you, I’m
sorry for you poor fellows… My lungs are healthy, what I’ve got is a stomach
cough. … I take a critical attitude toward my illness and the medicines I take.
While you… you are in the dark’” (7: 334) This is consistent denial of a grave
illness before dying. Meanwhile, Gusev’s condition also deteriorates: “[He]
murmured something in his fever, and kept on drinking water. It was hard for
him to talk and hard for him to listen, and he was afraid of being talked at” (7:
335).
Once again sounds in the background signal another death has taken place –
Pavel Ivanych’s. His death in effect takes place off stage: “There was the
sound of someone coming into the sick bay, voices were heard, but five
minutes passed, and then there was only silence. ‘May he enter the kingdom of
Heaven and receive eternal peace,’ the soldier … was saying” (7: 335). The
suddenness of Pavel Ivanych’s death, seemingly unexpected yet inevitable, is
conveyed with great effect.
When Gusev learns that someone has died, we read: “‘Oh, well’ murmured
Gusev, yawning. ‘May he enter the Kingdom of Heaven’” (7: 335). This
represents a very calm, stoic acceptance of someone else’s death. Finally, at
this point Gusev learns it was Pavel Ivanych who had died. He agrees that the
former will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. When the soldier observes that he,
Gusev, is also not long for this world and that he will not reach Russia alive,
Gusev is surprised and asks who told him that. The soldier says it is obvious:
“You know at once when a man is close to death. You don’t eat, you don’t
drink, you are so thin you’re frightening. It’s consumption all right” (7: 336).
The soldier suggests that Gusev receive the last rights, but the latter instead
agonizes that he has not written home and that he’ll die and his family will
never hear about it. He obviously believes in life hereafter but is not ready to
admit that he is near death. We learn that “such conversations made [him]
uneasy.” The soldier describes how Pavel Ivanych will be placed in a sack and
thrown into the water and Gusev comments matter-of-factly: “‘Yes, that’s the
regulation’.” However, he also agrees that it is better to be buried in the earth
at home in which case his mother can come to his grave to weep over him.
When asked whether he is afraid of dying, Gusev responds in the affirmative,
but his thoughts immediately shift to a concern for the welfare of his family,
noting specifically that his drunkard brother “beats his wife for no reason at
all” (7: 337).
The unsentimental, report-style, detailed description of Gusev’s final
consumptive moments follows: “There was a weight on his chest, a throbbing
in his head, his mouth was so dry it was difficult for him to move his tongue.
He dozed off, talked wildly in his sleep, and toward morning, worn out with
nightmares, coughing, and the suffocating heat, he fell into a heavy sleep. …
He slept for two days, and on the third day at noon two sailors came down and
carried him out of the sick bay” (7: 338). As Jerome Katsell observes, in the
portrayal of Gusev’s death, “the line dividing sleep and death becomes
ambiguous and blurred.”21 After they sewed him up in a sail-cloth he looked
like a “carrot or a horse-radish: broad at the head and narrow at the feet.”
Following the priest’s prayers Gusev’s body is tossed into the water – a stark,
unsentimental, almost shockingly realistic portrayal of the process of dying,
death and burial. The closing description of the beauty of nature, resulting in a
form of hyperoche 22 – in this case an excess of seeing, focuses on the sky
with its complete spectrum of colors “for which there are scarcely any names
in the tongue of man.” This serves as a stark contrast with, even a protest
against, the gloom of anguish and death.
If the sea and the ship in exerting their destructive force do not distinguish
between “saints and sinners,” neither does death. Both the protester and the
meek, submissive individual suffer the same fate – both die of the same
disease and are buried in the same sea. Ironically, Pavel Ivanych who thinks he
is superior to Gusev, dies first.
Despite “At the Pharmacy” and “Gusev” being impressive artistic
accomplishments, there is a marked artistic difference between them and “The
Bishop,” one of the pearls of Chekhov’s creations in prose. In “The Bishop,”23
21. Jerome Katsell, “Mortality: Theme and Structure of Chekhov’s Later Prose,” Paul
Debreczeny and Thomas Eeekman (eds) Chekhov’s Art of Writing: A Collection of Critical
Essays (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publications, 1977), p. 59.
22
Hyperoche – a term coined by literary critic and historian Dmitrii Chizhevskii to identify
hyperbole which uses elevated, biblical language to refer to something beyond man’s
imagination or ability to describe in human terms; for example, heaven is so beautiful and
will be so wonderful if one gets there that it is impossible for one to imagine how beautiful
it is or to describe it in words. In his analysis of Gogol’s use of heperbole in Dead Souls,
Chizhevskii identified the author’s use of hyperoche in an inverted manner when describing
something trivial, petty or mundane.
23. It is surprising that Thomas Winner, Chekhov and His Prose (New York, Chicago, San
Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), fails to even mention “The Bishop,” one of
Chekhov’s most important works.
against the solemn background of Holy Week, the most important week in the
liturgical year, Chekhov recounts the last days in the life of the protagonist,
Bishop Peter, including his illness, the accompanying crisis, the “awakening,”
and death.
Guiding the course of the story is the fatal illness which controls Bishop
Peter’s thoughts and actions. “The Bishop” ranks as one of Chekhov’s best
works portraying illness. The first chapter describes the onset of the malady;
chapters 2 and 3, its duration; and chapter 4, the crisis followed by death. Hints
throughout suggest that the bishop will die. Besides the symptoms of his
disease which are scattered here and there, each chapter contains references
and allusions to death.
The bishop, a prince of the church, suffers from typhoid fever (briushnoi
tif),24 although at the outset he, the congregation and the reader are in the dark
regarding the reason for his feeling unwell.25 As one of the last creative efforts
of a writer approaching death, the story can be regarded as eminently
autobiographical.
The narrative begins at midnight mass on the eve of Palm Sunday. We learn
that the bishop “had been ill for three days.” Next we learn that “the air was
hot and close,” the service seemed endless and the bishop was tired: “His
breathing was labored, dry, and rapid, his shoulders ached with weariness, his
legs were trembling” (10: 186). These are the first detailed symptoms of his
illness which become a major refrain throughout the text. With each successive
mention of these, additional symptoms emerge.
As the bishop officiates at the vespers the congregation appears to him as an
indistinguishable blur with “all faces alike,” “heaving like the sea.” That the
congregation seems shrouded in mist may be another symptom of his illness,
but it also suggests his isolation from the flock. Even as his own mother
approaches him, he is unsure of her identity. We sense a powerful emotional
note when the bishop begins to weep, and the congregation weeps with him.
His tears may be brought on by these imaginings of his mother, or by his
fatigue, and because his illness makes him prone to crying, but the narrator
creates ambiguity by stating that “for some reason tears began to flow down
his cheeks” (10:186). The infectiousness of his crying is conveyed in an
alliterative passage:
И почему-то слезы потекли у него по лицу...Слезы заблестели у него

на лице, на бороде. Вот вблизи еще кто-то заплакал, потом дальше
кто-то другой, потом еще и еще, и мало-помалу церковь наполнилась
24. Robert Payne, in his translation of “The Bishop,” in Forty Stories by Anton Chekhov
(New York: Vintage Classics, Random House, 1991), p. 321, translates the bishop’s illness as
“typhus.” Although the two diseases share some symptoms, they are nevertheless not identical
and are transmitted differently—typhoid fever is caused by a bacillus and acquired through
drinking infected milk, water, etc., while typhus is caused by a rickettsia and transmitted by the
bite of fleas, lice, etc.
25. For one of the best analyses of the story, see Nils Ȧke Nilsson’s Studies in Čexov’s
Narrative Technique ‘The Steppe’ and ‘The Bishop’ (Stockholm, Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell,
1968).
таким плачем. (10:186)
[For some reason tears began to flow down his cheeks… The tears
glistened on his cheeks and on his beard. Soon someone near him began to
weep, and then someone further away, and then still others wept, and
gradually the whole church was full of the soft sound of weeping.]
Chekhov’s description of crying is made vivid especially through the

repeated use of the consonant l’/l. The image of his mother leads him to recall
his youth and to come to the awareness that he is much older, not that “he is
soon going to die” as Nilsson claims.26 However, the tears are a presage of
death or mourning.
When the weeping stops, the narrator notes that “everything was as before”
(words which are echoed at the end of the story following the bishop’s death).
On his return to the monastery, the moon is shining. The bishop identifies with
it and other objects in nature even if these evoke sterility and deadness.
Descriptions of nature which appear ominous – the “moon peeping” into the
bishop’s window27 and a “cricket chirping” – intensify this mood; in
Chekhov’s creative writing, the ubiquitous moon image is often associated
with death.28 To the bishop “everything seemed kindly, youthful, akin … and
one longed to think that so it would be always” (10:187). Despite this desire
for continuity of existence, his identification with such forms of nature
strengthens the motif of his estrangement from his personal identity.
The news that his mother was in town quickens memories of his “sweet
precious childhood … which seemed brighter, fuller, and more festive than it
had really been” (10: 188) – a childhood when “joy was quivering in the air,”
when he had “naïve faith,” when he had been called Pavlushka, and had been
“infinitely happy.” His reverie is disrupted by the snoring of Father Sysoi – a
sound which to him suggests “loneliness, forlornness, a strange wandering”
(10: 189). At home he experiences the following new symptoms: “His legs and
arms were stiff, the back of his neck ached. He felt hot and uncomfortable”
(10: 188).
In chapter 2 he has lunch with his mother and niece Katia. Surprisingly, the
26. Nilsson (ibid., p. 64) makes this erroneous claim not on the basis of the final published
text of the story, but on the basis of a report by N.S. Shchukin regarding what Chekhov
purportedly told him of the original plan about the bishop’s crying at this point. Moreover,
Shchukin reports Chekhov as saying “что он может скоро умереть, что может умереть
сейчас,” i.e., “that he could die soon, that he could die right now” (Primechania, 10:453), not
“that he is going to die” (emphasis added). Also, Nilsson’s claim that the bishop at this juncture
in the text “understands that he is now an old man [and that] his life is over and done with” is
puzzling in view of textual evidence which suggests he is somewhat over forty.
27. Payne (Forty Stories, p. 308) mistakenly translates the passage “Луна глядела в окно,
пол был освещен, и на нем лежали тени” (10: 189), as “The moon glittered through the
window… and the shadows lay over him ,” (p. 308), instead of “over it,” i.e., the floor, not the
bishop.
28. One of the most striking and direct associations of the moon with death is found in the
closing lines of “Ward No. 6”: “[Dr. Ragin] lay on the table, open-eyed and bathed in moonlight
at night” (8:126).
mother treats him as a bishop rather than as her son; he envies others with
whom she is on closer terms. It leads to one of his many mood swings or
‘absences’. Disappointed by his mother’s reserve, the son once again “cannot
recognize her,” the woman who was so tender and sympathetic when he was ill
as a child. Cut off from warmth and simple human intercourse, the bishop feels
estranged from reality and is increasingly aware of his illness. He suffers from
the headache of the day before, his legs ache horribly and he experiences a
new symptom affecting his sense of taste: “the fish he was eating seemed stale
and insipid, all the time he was very thirsty” (10: 192). He complains to Father
Sysoi of having a fever and thinks he “should do something about it.” The life
that, eight years before, seemed to him to have “no end in sight” has now
“retreated far away into the mist as though it were a dream” (10:193).
In chapter 3 we learn that rather than recite his prayers “with scrupulous
attention” as he had done the day before, he now says them “hurriedly.”
Another symptom of his illness, irascibility, has intensified his sensitivity
toward the clergy’s lack of spirituality and the ignorance, triviality and
pettiness of his suppliants. People being in awe before his rank annoys him.
No one speaks to him “genuinely, simply, as to a human being.” Church is
now the only place where he feels peace yet here, once again, “tears trickle
down his cheeks.” He is satisfied with his success, and significantly,
acknowledges having faith, and contemplates life hereafter. Yet some things
remain unclear to him; he understands that he is going to die but senses that
something important is still missing and that he is not yet ready to die.
Chapter 4 opens with a lyric description of nature. Mention of “awakening
trees smiling a welcome” foreshadows the bishop’s “awakening” and
identification with nature before dying. After celebrating mass and officiating
at “Washing of the Feet,” he returns home, lies down and has the shutters
closed. His pain and suffering which have become more acute are emphasized
through the repeated anaphoric “What,” and an exclamation point terminating
the last sentence: “What weariness he suffered, what pain there was in his legs
and back, a heavy chilling pain, what noises in his ears! For a long time he had
not slept … and there was something nonsensical which tickled his brain as
soon as he closed his eyes, preventing him from sleeping” (10: 196). A visit
from his niece leads to spontaneous communication. His mistaken impression
of hearing the opening and shutting of doors, identified by Katia as the noise in
his stomach, provokes his laughter and offers a moment of relief, yet it also
indicates the progress of his illness. Jerome Katsell notes correctly that Katia is
associated with “those forces in nature which bespeak renewal and seemingly
boundless energy.”29 However, with natural childish spontaneity, she also
introduces the topic of mortality by blurting out that Nikolashka, the bishop’s
nephew who is studying medicine, “cuts up dead people.” His mother also
visits him, observes that he is ill, and adds that, when Easter comes, he shall
rest – words prophetic of his death the day before Easter. Similarly, the
announcement that the horses are ready, that it is time for the Passion of the
Lord, foreshadows the bishop’s own approaching suffering and agony.
29. Katsell, “Mortality,” p. 65.

Once again he finds relief in church, where he discovers a sense of

continuity and thus a meaning to life. The foreshadowing of this discovery is
present in the opening of the story: “It seemed that all those faces – men and
women, old and young – were exactly the same… and it looked as though
there was no end to the congregation and there would never be an end to it”
(10:186). Now he sees the congregation as unchanged since the days of his
childhood and senses identity in the church. Meanwhile, his condition becomes
markedly worse: “His head was aching horribly, and he was overwhelmed by
the fear of a sudden collapse. His legs had grown quite numb, all the feeling
gradually going out of them, and he could not imagine how he was able to
stand or what he was standing on, and why he did not fall down…” (10: 198).
At home, his loneliness reaches its greatest intensity as he yearns for
someone with whom he could talk openly. By now, the illness’s devastating
effect upon the bishop with its major symptoms has been revealed: extreme
fatigue, excruciating pain in legs and back, heavy chilling pain, ringing in the
ears, continuous headache, rumbling in the belly, difficulty speaking, and
sleeplessness. The next day, Good Friday, final relief and release come in the
form of a hemorrhage from the bowels and the last stage of his illness. The
doctor arrives, examines him and informs him he has typhoid fever – the first
time the illness is identified by name. As the bishop continues to hemorrhage,
we learn that “he grew paler, thinner, was visibly wasting away. His face was
covered with wrinkles and his eyes were enormous: it was as though he had
grown old and shriveled” (10:200). The bishop imagines himself thinner,
weaker, and more insignificant than anyone and concludes: “How good!” This
thought in the form of stream-of-consciousness speech signifies his acceptance
of death and the discovery of true peace. His mother arrives and seeing his
condition, becomes shocked and frightened: “She fell on her knees by the bed
and began to kiss his face, his shoulders, and his hands” (10: 200). Realizing
that the bishop is seriously ill, she asks repeatedly what is wrong, begins to
comfort him, and finally addresses him as her son, Pavlusha. To her he is no
longer a venerable bishop but her son of old.
Nilsson maintains that “with the arrival of his mother … the immediate
contact lost during the years of service to the Church, is renewed.”30 Actually,
the real, genuine, warm contact, that which he had wanted from his mother, to
be treated like a son, to be close, does not happen until he is dying, loses
consciousness and can no longer speak or make out her words. He no longer
hears her – a striking conclusion to missed opportunities for mother-son
closeness. Rather, having identified himself with nature, he imagines that he is
a simple, ordinary man, free as a bird. On Holy Saturday morning the lay
brother tells the Bishop’s mother to go into her son’s bedroom and informs
her in a terse, unsentimental, report style: “the bishop has departed this
life” (преосвященный приказал долго жить; 10: 200).31 Easter Sunday,
30. Nilsson, Studies in Čexov’s Narrative Technique, p. 72.

31. The original text reads: “подошел келейник и попросил ее сходить в спальню:
преосвященный приказал долго жить.” The statement that the bishop had died may be
attributed to the lay brother, but it can also be attributed to the narrator, in the mode of “erlebte
the day after his death, is celebrated by everyone with no particular notice
of his passing. In the face of the enormity of Christ's resurrection, the death
of the bishop becomes insignificant to his congregation. This implies that
he was not known to anyone as a person, only as a servant of the church. In
this service, he had accomplished his function. There was nothing more to
think about him. From the bishop's point of view, this is like Christ's last
words on the Cross, just before He is ‘liberated’: "Father, it is
accomplished."(John, 19:30) It is the moment of freedom for the bishop.
This is not an unhappy ending: it is what comes after a life lived according
to the tenets of one's belief, a life of sacrifice. Thus the bishop’s deathbed
vision of being at last a free man is realised in both the secular and biblical
sense: of “dust to dust” and “let the dead bury the dead.”
Тhe story is the tragedy of a member of the intelligentsia whose pursuit of a
highly successful clerical career cuts him off from genuine human intercourse.
Not until he faces death does the bishop realize that something important is
missing from his life, namely the love of others, which is more valuable than
the respect others had for his high rank. His existential crisis which includes a
feeling of loneliness and isolation is evidenced by his thoughts: “If only there
were one person to whom I could talk, unburden my soul” (“Хоть бы один
человек, с которым можно было бы поговорить, отвести душу!”; 10: 189).
The bishop has two identities: a private one associated with Pavlushka, the
name of his youth, and a public one associated with his present name, Bishop
Peter. He has been unable, however, to defend this private identity against the
forces of his career. Now that he is dying, he senses a release from the
responsibility and duty which had hindered him from living as a simple human
being. His mother’s presence during the last week of his life (a nine-year
separation for which he must share the blame) has made him painfully aware
of the lack of genuine love and closeness in his life. Even his mother until just
before his death addresses him with the formal “you” (вы) instead of the
familiar “thou” (ты).
Now that he is dying, he wishes to return to the simple existence of his
youth (clearly a Tolstoyan idea). His transformation is both physical and
spiritual. He imagines that he has become thinner, shorter, and more
insignificant than anyone. Then, during his final, more spiritual, thoughts, he
imagines himself a simple, ordinary man, free as a bird to go anywhere he
likes. His awakening before death enables him to die peacefully, thinking:
“How good!” (Как хорошо!).32 The bishop dies enlightened and satisfied.
Jerome Katsell is correct when he states: “[The bishop] finds in death not so
Rede” or “free indirect discourse.” Constance Garnett translates this passage as follows: “the lay
brother... asked her to go into the bedroom: the bishop had just breathed his last.” Robert Payne
translates it as: “the lay brother ... bade her go into the bedroom. The Bishop was dead.”
32. In the closing of “Ward No. 6” we read: “Knowing that his end was near, Ragin
remembered that Gromov, Michael Averianovich and millions of others believed in immortality.
Now, what if there really were such a thing? But he didn’t want any immortality, he only thought
about it for a moment” (8:126).
much the meaning of life, but the necessity of death to make life, eternal life
possible.”33
We learn that the bishop died and was forgotten, yet this conclusion is not
despairing, for the story suggests that a simple, genuine existence guided by
love and respect is far more important than rank and fame. Throughout the
text, an analogy is drawn between Bishop Peter and Christ. This likeness
rightfully stops with the quiet death of the bishop. The point is, the bishop is
not Christ and need not be remembered. He is only a link in a continuous chain
of clergy and the church created by Christ. Before he dies, the bishop
perceives this continuity and is happy that he is part of it. We also recall his
thoughts about the congregation he sees in church and their continuity: “It
occurred to him that they were perhaps the same people who had been around
him in the days of his childhood and youth, and they would always be there
year after year until such time as God provided” (10: 198). Although he will
die, he knows that some things remain eternal; that mankind will continue and
that the existence of eternity is evident in nature. His faith assures him of the
Resurrection promised by the One whose own Resurrection is celebrated the
day after the bishop dies. Throughout the text the image of moonlight
(associated with death) alternates with the image of sunlight (associated with
life). The bishop dies during the night, most likely illuminated again by
moonlight. The next day, Easter Sunday, celebrates Christ’s resurrection and
the promise of new everlasting life, of immortality for all mankind. Instead of
the bright moon, there is bright sunshine, symbolizing the victory of life over
death. As Nilsson notes, the feeling of freedom that comes to the bishop before
he dies seems to be also a form of resurrection.34 The pealing of church bells
which the bishop so enjoyed on Easter morning is testimony to the
perseverance of his spirit. Once again, Jerome Katsell makes a keen
observation: “The necessity of life renewal through death process … brings to
mind the idea of resurrection, of endless renewal and return, the possibility of
immortality.” Katsell adds: “Chekhov is concerned with demythifying death
and he sees acceptance of mortality as integral to life. For Chekhov this is the
starting point of spiritual freedom. Thus death is not necessarily a point of
culmination, but part of a natural process which is necessary for inner
growth.”35
And yet, the fact that the bishop is forgotten leads Nilsson to offer the
following interpretation: “This is [Chekhov’s], an unsentimental agnostic’s
calm and simple view of death. It was needed for the purpose of precluding
any direct religious interpretation of the bishop’s death and also as a
counterbalance to the nostalgic atmosphere brought to its peak in the death
scene.”36 Nilsson’s final observation regarding the story’s main point is right
on the mark: “Individual man is mortal, but life is eternal as mankind is
eternal; every individual is a mortal link in an immortal chain, a member of an
33. Katsell, “Mortality,” p. 63.

34. Nilsson, Studies in Čexov’s Narrative Technique, p. 72.
35. Katsell, “Mortality,” pp. 60, 66.
36. Ibid., p.74.
unbroken tradition.” Thus, the last part of the story placed in this context
shows “that the seemingly pessimistic note at the end is not so pessimistic at
all.”37
The fact that an individual can soon be forgotten after dying is not unusual
in life and not an unusual occurrence in Chekhov’s creative opus. The bishop’s
mother, who returns to her provincial town, is the only one who still
remembers her son. Eventually, she internalizes her grief because when she
speaks of him, some of her friends do not believe she had a son who was a
bishop. His old grieving mother will no doubt soon follow her son to the grave.
The remembrance of the bishop is left to the young. We recall that his niece
Katia who witnesses the tragedy will quite likely remember her uncle the
bishop for a long time.
Chekhov’s method of portraying illness and the role it plays in his works
varies in accordance with the thematic needs of the given work. In all three
stories the personal experience of the illness is relegated to the background so
that social criticism or personal philosophical crisis may occupy the
foreground. In “At the Pharmacy” and “Gusev” social criticism figures
prominently, while in “The Bishop” the hero’s philosophical crisis occupies
the foreground. Although “At the Pharmacy” offers a physiologically accurate
picture of the inception of typhus and “Gusev” depicts the last stages of
consumption, the real significance of these two stories lies not here, but in the
manner in which they reveal specific social inadequacies and abuses. The three
stories share the common feature of an underlying structure which follows the
course of a fatal disease, and Bishop Peter’s typhoid affects his thoughts and
actions as surely as typhus controls Svoikin’s and tuberculosis Gusev’s. These
stories also illustrate a development in Chekhov’s portrayal of illness. The
story “At the Pharmacy,” colored by a social note, constitutes the shortest and
simplest treatment of typhus. The effects of the disease are shown from its
onset to the point where the hero falls into a coma. The reader never learns the
hero’s fate. Stylistically, “Gusev” shows a marked advancement over the style
of “At the Pharmacy” and offers an almost graphic and strikingly detailed
picture of the last moments of the hero’s life. “The Bishop” is the most
sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing portrayal of illness as a result of its
perfect blend of the details trough which illness is depicted and the details of
Bishop Peter’s philosophical crisis. Here too, the disease is portrayed from its
onset to its crisis, but in this case, as is true of “Gusev,” it claims the hero’s
life.
It is not surprising that Chekhov devoted a significant number of pages to
the “trifles” and events incidental to illness in man: the first signs of its
appearance, how man endures and fights it or at times succumbs to it. By
weaving this subject matter artistically into the literary fiber of his works,
Chekhov had undoubtedly expanded the picture in literature of man’s daily
life. Such a depiction of life served also to further the universal quality of his
work, for in the face of illness and death, all men are equal. The pain and
discomfort one suffers during an illness knows no national or ideological
37. Ibid.
boundaries. Anyone who has experienced an illness described by Chekhov will

recognize it and identify with the hero-patient no matter who he is. The works
analyzed here and many others which deal with “medical matters,” testify
clearly that in both Goethe and Chekhov, the scientist harmonized perfectly
with the poet.
University of Minnesota
KLARA NASZKOWSKA
FATHERS LOVE TO TORTURE: A PSYCHOANALYTIC

READING OF MARIA KOMORNICKA’S FAIRYTALE
“O OJCU I CÓRCE” AND ZOFIA NAŁKOWSKA’S
SHORT STORY “ZIELONE WYBRZEŻE”1
The present paper sets out to scrutinize the nature of "bad love" – love
inseparably connected with suffering and death – in Maria Komornicka’s
fairytale “O ojcu i córce” (“On the Father and his Daughter”, 1900) and Zofia
Nałkowska’s short story “Zielone wybrzeże” (“Green Shore”, 1909), in order
to retrace its correspondence with the psychoanalytic theories. In the two texts
under study, the feelings of (sexual) pleasure, satisfaction and affection,
continually intertwine with the painful experiences of overwhelming
unhappiness, alienation, and loss. Thus love is impossible, (self)destructive,
obsessive, abusive and tyrannical. The love-death association in the works of
both Komornicka and Nałkowska corresponds with the ideas on destruction
formulated by the forgotten Russian psychoanalyst, Sabina Spielrein, and the
later theory of the death instinct proposed by Sigmund Freud. The
unacknowledged theories of Spielrein will be the basis of the present analysis.
The intention of this essay is to analyze the two Polish literary texts, which
have been marginalized by publishers, critics and readers, yet they deserve
recognition from English-speaking readers and the critical community.
Although the scandal-prone Maria Komornicka recently became a subject of
intense, mostly feminist, critique, her “On the Father and his Daughter”
remained outside the mainstream. Similarly, “Green Shore” belongs to Zofia
Nałkowska’s – largely forgotten – Modernist period of writing. Nevertheless,
dubbed by her contemporaries "the first lady of Polish literature,” the second
author considered in this paper, Nałkowska, remains today a prominent
novelist valued for her Interwar and Post-war texts, especially "Medallions.”
She is one of the mainstays of Polish women's writing.
Additionally, this paper offers a comparative interrogation of “On the
Father and his Daughter” and “Green Shore.” Despite the fact that these two
texts exhibit evident similarities, they have not yet been analyzed in a
comparative manner.
Similarly, the texts, which call for a much-needed new reading from the
point of view of pre-Freudian and Freudian psychoanalysis, have not been
investigated in this perspective to date. This will be done through an analysis
of the theme of Eros and Thanatos, which appears pervasively in the works of
1. This essay is an extract from my unpublished Ph.D. thesis “The Living Mirror: The
Representation of Doubling Identities in the British and Polish Women’s Literature (1846-
1938),” defended at the University of Edinburgh.
both Komornicka and Nałkowska, and a reading in the light of the theories of
Luce Irigaray.
Before embarking on an analysis of the texts, it is essential to briefly dwell

on the history and theory of Sabina Spielrein who introduced the subject of
Eros and Thanatos, and the association between love and death to
psychoanalysis.2 In Greek mythology, Eros (Gr. “desire”) was the god of love;
Thanatos (Gr. “death”) was a daemon personification of death. Spielrein
formulated the concept based on her private experiences, and on her work with
hysterics and schizophrenics.3 As early as 1909, she wrote in her diary:
This demonic force, whose very essence is destruction (evil) and at the
same time is the creative force, since out of the destruction (of two
individuals) a new one arises. That is in fact the sexual drive which is by
nature a destructive drive, an exterminating drive for the individual, and
for that last reason, in my opinion, must overcome such great resistance in
everyone.4
In 1911, shortly after becoming a member of the prestigious Vienna

Psychoanalytic Society, she presented fragments of her work on love and
destruction during one of the famous Wednesday meetings. The speech
triggered a heated debate, but was severely criticized by other members of the
circle. It did not fit with their contemporary understanding of Eros and
2. Various factors contributed to the fact that the name of Spielrein had generally disappeared
from the history of psychoanalysis and the Russian thought for over thirty years. She was
murdered by the Nazis in 1942 in her native Rostov-on-Don, Russia and buried in a mass grave.
The first part of her documents—works, fragments of diaries, and correspondence with Jung and
Freud—was accidentally discovered in the basement of the former Institute of Psychology in
Geneva in 1977. The recovered documents were edited and published by a Jungian professor
Aldo Carotenuto in his A Secret Symmetry. Further discoveries and publications followed. See
Aldo Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud, John Shepley
(trans.) (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982); Coline Covington and Barbara Wharton (eds.)
Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis (Hove and New York: Brunner-
Routledge, 2003); and John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: the Story of Jung, Freud and
Sabina Spielrein (London: Vintage 1994).
3. Although Spielrein belonged to the Viennese Circle and was a Freudian psychoanalyst, she
was largely bound up with Carl Gustav Jung, who was her therapist and with whom she had a
romantic relationship for many years. For more information on the relationship with Jung, see
Spielrein’s diaries and correspondence: “Letters from Sabina Spielrein to C. G. Jung,” K.
Winston (trans.), in Carotenuto, Secret Symmetry, pp. 45-90; “Letters from Sabina Spielrein to
Sigmund Freud,” K. Winston (trans.) in Carotenuto, Secret Symmetry, pp. 91-112; “Letters from
Sigmund Freud to Sabina Spielrein,” A. Pomerans (trans.) in Carotenuto, Secret Symmetry, pp.
113-129; “The Diary of Sabina Spielrein (1909-1912),” K. Winston (trans.) in Carotenuto, Secret
Symmetry, pp. 3-44; “The letters of C.G. Jung to Sabina Spielrein,” B. Wharton (trans.) in
Covington and Wharton, Sabina Spielrein, pp. 33-62; “Unedited extracts from a diary,” P.
Bennett, trans., in Covington and Wharton, Sabina Spielrein, pp. 16-32; and Zvi Lothane,
“Tender Love and Transference: Unpublished letters of C.G. Jung and Sabina Spielrein (with an
addendum/discussion),” in Covington and Wharton, Sabina Spielrein, pp. 191-226.
4. Quoted in Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible. The History of Psychoanalysis in
Russia, N. and M. Rubis (trans.) (Colorado: Westview Press, A Division of HarperCollins
Publishers, 1997), pp. 149-50.
Thanatos. Her controversial “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being”

(1912) was the first text to address the issue of the death drive. The starting
point of the text is the question: why the reproductive instinct is triggered by
negative, as well as positive emotions? Spielrein offers her examination in
three areas: biological speculations, individual psychological observations and
the mythological-scientific field (the Bible, Wagner’s operas). According to
her, the reproductive instinct consists of two conflicting fundamental forces,
inseparably connected with each other: the instinct of “coming into being” and
the destructive drive. Destruction is a feature of the sex drive, as sexual
intercourse leads to the dissolution of a separate self. Spielrein describes the
destructive component of the reproductive instinct and the process of merging
with the object in the following way:
The instinct for preservation of the species, a reproductive drive, expresses

itself psychologically in the tendency to dissolve and assimilate
(transformation of the I to the We).
“Where love reigns, the ego, the ominous despot, dies.” When one is in
love, the blending of the ego in the beloved is the strongest affirmation of
self, a new ego existence in the person of the beloved. If love fails, the
image becomes one of destruction or death.
Death is horrible; yet death in the service of the sexual instinct, which
includes a destructive component, is a salutary blessing since it leads to a
coming into being.5
Freud ignored and depreciated Spielrein’s observations on the subject of

destruction. In his letters to Jung, he referred to the Russian psychoanalyst in a
condescending manner.6 However, Freud became intensely interested in the
death drive in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and later addressed
the issue in Civilization and Its Discontents, Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego and The Ego and the Id. He inserted a symbolic and rather
patronizing remark about Spielrein’s pioneering discoveries in the footnote of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “considerable portion of these speculations
have been anticipated by Sabina Spielrein (1912) in an instructive and
5. Sabina Spielrein, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being,” the article is signed
M.S (trans.) Journal of Analytical Psychology, 39 (1994): 172, 174 and 183.
For a discussion of Spielrein’s theory of the sex drive, see Elisha Davar, “The Perils of
Conviction: Addiction, terror and Leadership,” Psychodynamic Practice, 10, no. 4 (2004): 439-
458; Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method; Rosemary Marshall Balsam, “Women of the Wednesday
Society: The Presentations of Drs. Hilferding, Spielrein, and Hug-Hellmuth,” American Imago,
60, no. 3 (2003): 303-342; and Victor Ovcharenko, “Love, Psychoanalysis and Destruction,” C. J.
Wharton (trans.), Journal of Analytical Psychology, 44 (1999): 355-372.
6. Spielrein’s work had also greatly inspired Jung, who openly admired the originality and
brilliance of her text. However, in his correspondence with Freud, he concomitantly pointed out
triviality, lack of erudition and the personal undertone of “Destruction.” Jung added a comment
on Spielrein's contribution on the issue of the death instinct to the revised edition of his Symbols
of Transformation in 1952. See: Carl Gustav Jung, Symbols of Transformation: an Analysis of the
Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia, R.F.C. Hull (trans.) (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967),
pp. 140-141.
interesting paper which, however, is unfortunately not entirely clear to me.”7

Freud thus approached the problem of the death drive in an entirely different
way from Spielrein:
It seems […], than an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore

an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to
abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a
kind of organic elasticity, or to put it another way, the expression of inertia
inherent in organic life.8
For Freud, the death instinct is an inclination towards death, destruction,

aggression, entropy, and the primal, non-organic state. It expresses the urge for
self-destruction, and annihilation of the sexual energy as contrasted with the
life instinct – an attraction towards self-preservation.
In the two works of Polish fiction, “On the Father and his daughter” by
Komornicka and “Green Shore” by Nałkowska, the theme of Eros and
Thanatos, libido and mortido9 is manifested in the ambiguous behaviour of the
two father-figures. Both, the father of Alla, and the father of Bertha and
Carolina associate love with pain, suffering and death.
In our interpretation of the two father-figures, we find that they are
portrayed as agents of forces in the unconscious which is the locus of the death
drive. The two father-figures exercise authoritative influence over language
and education of the daughters; they attempt to monopolize and subdue the
sexuality of the daughters and to symbolically annihilate the outside world in
which the daughters move. They have the power to supervise, restrain and
prevent. It is important to note that they resemble the Superego, the Lacanian
Symbolic Father, the embodiment of the Name-of-the-Father, and the Jewish
God from the Old Testament.10 This is seen in their relation with language,
knowledge and education, and in their legislative and prohibitive function.
7. Sigmund Freud. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, J. Strachey (trans.) (New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1961), p. 55.
8. Ibid., p. 36.
9. The term morbido was introduced by Paul Federn; see the collection of his writings Ego
Psychology and the Psychoses, E. Weiss (trans.) (New York: Basic Books, 1952).
10. In Totem and Taboo Freud points out that parricide is the principal crime of humanity. He
(re)constructs the myth of the “primal father” and the horde. The “father” is the most powerful
male within the group. Moreover, he is a tyrannical figure situated beyond the law, with the
absolute power and the sexual monopoly over the horde. Although, the other male members of
the group are forbidden incestuous relationships, the father has unlimited access to all women.
Finally, the sons decide to collectively overthrow the father, in order to gain access to the women.
They murder the father, but have contradictory feelings. First, they feel guilty and second, they
are immediately faced with the same situation, as they become rivals with regard to the place of
the dead father. Totem and Taboo demonstrates the origin of the two fundamental laws, repressed
by the Oedipus complex: the protection of the totem animal and the prohibition of incest: “They
hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their
sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too. […] A sense of guilt made its appearance.
[…] The dead father became stronger than the living one had been. [The brothers] revoked their
deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute of their father; and they renounced its
Initially, the two father-figures of “On the Father and his Daughter” and
“Green Shore” eliminate the mothers by pushing them to the peripheral, pre-
Symbolic, pre-linguistic spheres located between life and death, fantasy and
reality; the undefined, enigmatically dubbed green shore, or a place not named
at all. In the fairytale, the father murders his wife and succeeds in erasing her
“name” (“mother”) from his daughter’s memory. He persuades the latter, not
only of the absence, but also even of the nonexistence of the mother. Alla does
not even know the word “mother”: “Mother? what is a mother?”11 – she asks.
By concealing the word “mother,” the father excludes his wife from the
linguistic and the Symbolic order.
The function of the father’s behavior is to substitute for the mother. In
“Bodily Encounter with the Mother,” Luce Irigaray argues that in
phallogocentric culture women are brutally forced to abandon their mothers,
and to form relationships with fathers:
The relationship with the mother is a mad desire because it is the <dark
continent> par excellence. It remains in the shadows of our culture; it is its
night and its hell. […] Desire for her [the mother], her desire, that is what
is forbidden by the law of the father, of all fathers.
fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free.” Sigmund Freud, Totem
and Taboo, J. Strachey (ed. & trans.) (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1950), p. 143.
In “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” “On a Question
Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” and “Introduction to the Names-of-the-
Father Seminar” Jacques Lacan takes up Freud’s concept of the dead Father and creates a
paternal metaphor, a signifier, the-Name-of-the-Father. It refers not to the Real, or the Imaginary
father, but to the Symbolic father. The homophony of le nom du père (the name of the father) and
le non du père (the no of the father) indicates the legislative and prohibitive function of the
Symbolic father: “It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the
symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of
the law.” Jacques Lacan, Écrits: a Selection, A. Sheridan (trans.) (London and New York:
Routledge Classics, 2004), p. 74. The-Name-of-the-Father interrupts the dyadic mother-child
relationship, introduces the law (the prohibition of the incestuous relationship with the mother),
and sexual difference. The paternal metaphor replaces the forbidden desire for the mother with
the law of the father. Finally, the Symbolic father positions the child within the Symbolic realm,
subject to the law and language. “The Oedipus myth is based on the premise that it is the father,
as the agent of prohibition, who denies us access to enjoyment (i.e., incest, the sexual relationship
with the mother). The underlying implication is that parricide would remove this obstacle and
thus allow us fully to enjoy the forbidden object. The myth of the primal father is almost the
exact opposite of this: the result of the parricide is not the removal of an obstacle, enjoyment is
not brought finally within our reach. Quite the contrary—the dead father turns out to be stronger
than the living one. After the parricide, the former reigns as the Name-of-the-Father, the agent of
the symbolic law that irrevocably precludes access to the forbidden fruit of enjoyment.” Slavoj
Žižek, Looking Awry. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1991), p. 23.
11. Maria Komornicka, “O ojcu i córce,” in Utwory poetyckie prozą i wierszem, (Kraków:
Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1996), pp. 86-98, p. 92. All translation from the Polish are my own
unless otherwise stated.
The social order, our culture, psychoanalysis itself, want it this way: the
mother must remain forbidden, excluded. The father forbids the bodily
encounter [corps-à-corps] with the mother.12
In “On the Father and his Daughter,” as “a superior creature and a creator of
all things,”13 the father constitutes himself as a life-giver. In this capacity, he
attempts to restore, and reconstitute the primal wholeness bonding a mother
and a daughter, with him taking the place of the former. The realm of the
father is Imaginary – silent, pre-linguistic and dreamy. His solitary, quiet, dark
castle resembles a motherly womb. He (re)creates this realm, through
separation from the outside world; he imprisons his daughter within it, silences
her and lulls her into an unconscious sleep. He “decided to be everything in
her life. [...] Jealous about her since the day she was born, he did not allow
anyone to approach her, did not step away from her for a minute – only at
nights, after locking her inside her sleeping chamber, he sneaked away for
lonely wandering.”14 Krystyna Kralkowska-Gątkowska, suggests that the
source of his behavior lies in a complex, which compels him to try to have the
power to create and give life: “Jealousy of mysterious feminine abilities
pushes the father towards secondary and unnatural creation marked by
Satan.”15 And according to Luce Irigaray’s theory, a father attempts to replace
the umbilical cord with the phallus:
[B]y denying the mother her generative power and by wanting to be the
sole creator, the Father, according to our culture, superimposes upon the
archaic world of the flesh a universe of language and symbols which
cannot take root in it except as in the form of that which makes a hole in
the bellies of women and in the site of their identity.16
Similarly, in “Green Shore” the mother is absent. She escapes the father’s
jurisdiction, leaves her daughters behind and shows no interest in their
subsequent lives. After her flight, the father efficiently disposes of objects
associated with her (he spares only the portrait reflected in an immense broken
mirror and the murderous great piano). The sisters are forbidden to even
mention the mother.
In the two texts under investigation, “On the Father and his Daughter” and
“Green Shore,” subsequently to eliminating the mothers, the fathers transform
their houses into prisons. The order of the father is founded on isolation,
constant control, prohibitions and restrictions.
12. Luce Irigaray, “Bodily Encounter with the Mother,” in M. Whitford (ed.), Irigaray
Reader, D. Macey (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), pp. 35-36 and 39.
13. Komornicka, “O ojcu i córce”, p. 88.
14. Ibid., p. 88.
15. Krystyna Kralkowska-Gątkowska, Cień twarzy. Szkice o twórczości Marii Komornickiej,
(Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2002), pp. 101-102 and 103.
16. Irigaray, “Bodily Encounter,” p. 41.
The father of Komornicka’s fairytale insulates his daughter from the outside
world. He triply imprisons the protagonist: in the castle, in her sleeping
chamber and – with the use of magic – in her sleep. He does not allow anyone
to enter the castle. Additionally, he creates an illusion of omnipresence. Alla
feels constantly watched, controlled and supervised. The father becomes her
only companion: he “decided to be everything for her, to reign exclusively
over her feelings and thoughts. […] [H]e did not allow anyone to approach
her, never stepped away from her.”17 And indeed, the thought of him does
constantly accompany the protagonist. He is not present in the flesh, but
through objects and emotions:
[Alla] felt his presence everywhere – in the silent empty rooms, in the hum
of the forest and the uproar of the creek, in the sky with its dark, billowy
rushing clouds. Everything that wasn't him was his creation and play. She
was sure that the world existed because her father wanted it to exist – and
if he ordered it – it would disappear.18
Although the father of “Green Shore” does not imprison his daughters, like
Alla’s father, there exists an unspoken law prohibiting the sisters from going
outside without his permission (occasionally, he allows them to enter the
garden). He attempts to insulate his daughters from the external world and its
influences. The sisters and the father inhabit an old, solitary house located on a
mountain peak, far from the village (and green shore). The father does not
allow any visitors in the house. Carolina recalls this situation of extreme
separation as follows: “Not once a direct gust from the world infiltrated our
home. […] We never had any guests. We spent our entire childhood and youth
only with our father and the blind grandmother, amidst the old, grim, tacit
servants.”19
As well as being separated from the outside, Bertha and Carolina are
constantly visually and/or aurally controlled. The latter fears that “[the
father’s] constant watching might bring [her] to madness.”20 In order to
continually observe and restrain his daughters, the father schedules a daily
routine consisting of meals, discussions and walks, which leave no free time.
“During the day [the father] tries to be with [them] as much as possible, in the
evening he accompanies [Carolina to her room] and makes sure that [she] will
not return downstairs to Bertha, or that [Bertha] will not come to [Carolina] for
the night.”21 When he cannot watch the sisters, he sends his informants: the
grandmother and the foster mother Margaret. He reacts with silent violence,
and intrusive behavior, upon discovering secret information.
17. Komornicka, “O ojcu i córce,” p. 88.

18. Ibid., p. 89.
19. Zofia Nałkowska, “Zielone wybrzeże,” in Opowiadania. Koteczka czyli białe tulipany.
Lustra. Tajemnice krwi (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1984), pp. 41-69, p. 43. All translation from the
Polish are my own unless otherwise stated.
20. Ibid., p. 45.
21. Ibid., p. 44.
Bertha’s hysteria and agoraphobia result from the incarceration enforced by

the father. The neuroses are allowed to develop, in order to prevent Bertha
from becoming autonomous and self-reliant, and to preclude her escape. After
Carolina’s flight, Bertha becomes fully dependent on her father. By forcing her
to go outside and by arranging regular garden walks, the father supports her
agoraphobia. Carolina describes the situation as follows: “[W]hen the father
[…] offered a walk […] Bertha became even paler and sealed her lips. […] I
offered Bertha my hand and she clung to it with great force. Only then I
realized that she covered her eyes with her second hand, and that her whole
body was shivering feverishly.”22 As her illnesses develop, Bertha’s world
gradually shrinks to the ground floor of the house. She used to be able to enter
the garden without reservations, but after Carolina’s return “[she] walks by
herself only around the house, however, she is afraid to climb the stairs or to
enter the garden. [...] Carolina [cannot] let go of her hand even for a second,
[because] she will start crying out of fear or she will faint.”23
In the two works analyzed, the pivotal arenas of the fathers’ influence are
knowledge and education. The father of Alla aims at separating his daughter
from all kinds of information. The protagonist becomes an analphabetic, who
does not know how to read, write or pray (speak?): “He did not teach her how
to read – because books explain life; or how to write – because writing
conceals betrayal; or how to pray – because a praying soul flies to the sky; and
because of his haughtiness he desired to be for Alla the greatest creature and
the creator of all things.”24 The father of “Green Shore” monopolizes
information by fully controlling the type of wisdom his daughters receive. He
allows the sisters access only to philosophical books and foreign scientific
magazines preselected by him. He also chooses topics for discussions from the
philosophical repertoire of the three famous literary misogynists: Friedrich
Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and August Strindberg.
In Nałkowska’s short story, the father excludes his daughters from the
linguistic sphere. He gradually silences them by creating situations, which
preclude private verbal or written communication. They are never by
themselves and he “does not let [them] speak with each other.”25 When he
cannot supervise the sisters, they are guarded by the blind grandmother with
perfect hearing, able to pick up distant whispers and to immediately interrupt
any conversation. When the sisters are not being watched by the father, the
grandmother or Margaret, and when they are not separated from each other,
they are forced into daily silent promenades. These obligatory walks in the
garden fuel Bertha’s agoraphobia. She becomes paralyzed by fear, unable to
speak, unable to look (she covers her eyes). The fact that these promenades are
mute and dumb is emphasized by the simultaneous intellectual activity
undertaken by the father who is reading a book.
22. Ibid., p. 49.

23. Nałkowska, “Zielone wybrzeże,” p. 50.
The restrictions described above are implemented in order to prevent Alla,

Bertha and Carolina from entering the Symbolic order: language, the social
and the public spheres. Most importantly, the fathers postpone the sexual
adolescence of the daughter-figures.
The father of “Green Shore” fears female sexuality. He deflects the advice
of the doctor without hesitation: Bertha cannot leave, or become a wife.
Carolina describes the visit as follows: “The doctor […] made it clear, that
without the change of environment, the patient would not regain her health. He
made a playful remark that she ought to get married. The father reacted with
passionate rage. The doctor left – and didn’t come back.”26 The notion of
“passionate rage” and the fact that the doctor mysteriously disappears after the
visit suggest that the jealous father murdered the medic, just as he reacted with
passionate rage and murdered the servant involved in the escape of the mother.
The constant intrusive observation, invigilation and silencing deprive
Bertha and Carolina of privacy and intimacy. The sisters are forbidden to lock
their bedroom door: “I heard you lock the door with a key [...] and I came to
check what is going on. We don't do that in my house. Please, do not create
any conspiracies or secrets...”27 – says the father to his younger daughter. The
father simply eliminates sexual education: “We didn't really know, what was
love, marriage and life”28 – says Carolina.
In the second text, “On the Father and his Daughter,” the triple
imprisonment – in the castle, bedroom and sleep – are designed to guarantee
Alla’s a-sexual status. Indeed, the protagonist embodies a statuesque, numb
and sexually inactive Sleeping Beauty:
Not awakened by the sight of people, knowledge or play, [Alla’s] soul was
dreaming a tormenting dream in the body of great beauty. [...] Alla slept
with a heavy sleep, she did not have any visions and did not feel anything
at all. She was beautiful and dead in her sleep, like a marble statue on a
grave.29
The father of “On the Father and his Daughter” does not eliminate his
daughter’s sexuality. He locks Alla in her bedroom – a symbol of the
unconscious – and intervenes in her most intimate sphere of dreams. By using
suggestive, magical tricks, he arouses and subdues his daughter’s desire, but he
does not approach her in the flesh: “[H]e guessed her thoughts and made her
fall asleep by looking into her eyes; his gaze awakened unbearable torments in
26
. Ibid., p. 43.
27. Ibid., p. 51.
28. Ibid., p. 43.
29. Komornicka, “O ojcu i córce,” pp. 89-90.
The fact that Alla is “beautiful and dead” brings to focus Elisabeth Bronfen’s theory. In her
inspiring book Over Her Dead Body, the scholar establishes a strong link between femininity and
death, beauty and immobility, and describes such identification as dominant in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century European literature. See: Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death,
Femininity and the Aesthetic, (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2006).
her body. But he never caressed her.”30 Most importantly, he monopolizes her
sexual desire and becomes her only love-object. According to Irigaray, “the
father seduces his daughter but […] he refuses to recognize and live out his
desire, he lays down a law that prohibits him from doing so.” He “wraps his
desire, his penis” in “the cloak of the law.”31
Whilst he embodies the Superego, the omnipotent father of Komornicka’s
fairytale cannot become sexually engaged with his daughter. Only as blinded,
defective, crippled, and sexually castrated can he approach her in the bedroom
in the final scene. This is most evident in the fact that he discovers Alla’s
whereabouts after fasting (abstaining from food and drink), self-flagellation,
self-mutilation with pain from thorns, and after allowing the crows to peck his
eyes out. Importantly, the sightlessness of the father enables him to “see” his
daughter. In Greek mythology and in the Bible blindness serves as punishment
for the lustful. Oedipus, the mythical Greek king of Thebes, does not know his
origins. He unwittingly kills his father, marries his mother and has four
children in that incestuous union. At the moment of recognition he punishes
himself by gouging out his eyes. Similarly, in the Bible, God decides to
destroy the lustful city of Sodom and punish its citizens with blindness. In her
“Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” Sabina Spielrein interrogates
the theme of Adam and Eve, and the connection between punishment and
sexuality, suffering and sexual pleasure: “What is punishment in reality? It is
an injury to the individual; because the reproductive drive requires destruction
of the individual, it is entirely natural that images of punishment so readily
incorporate a sexual coloring.”32 By inflicting severe physical pain onto his
own body in order to retrieve his daughter, Alla’s father equates torture with
affection, and establishes a connection between love, unhappiness and
suffering.
In Komornicka’s fairytale, loss of sight represents symbolic castration. The
father is subject to a transformation resembling that of Oedipus. However,
while the mythical king of Thebes blinds himself in reaction to the discovery
of the terrible facts, Alla’s father allows it, in order to find out the truth. His
sightlessness is not a punishment for incest; on the contrary, it improves the
situation of the father. He becomes capable of engaging in an incestuous
relationship with Alla. The father reappears in the form of a deadly ghost,
eliminates the groom and approaches the protagonist in her marital bedroom.
Despite the attempts of both father-figures to control and subdue the

daughter’s sexuality, Alla and Carolina discover their sexuality in connection
with their mothers. In “On the Father and his Daughter,” Alla wakes up from
the deathly dream, follows her returning mother outside the father’s realm,
leaves the dreamy Imaginary of daughterhood, marries an accidental stranger
and enters the Symbolic order. The fact that Alla discovers her sexuality after
leaving the castle is indicated in her transformation from a numb, dormant,
30. Ibid., p. 88, my emphasis.

31. Irigaray, “Speculum,” p. 38, original emphasis.
32. Spielrein, “Destruction,” p. 179.
inactive “sleeping beauty” into a sexually awakened woman. Her burning red
lips, face and chest, the glowing eyes, the heavy breathing, the blinking of her
eyes, the loose hair suggest an aroused sexuality, or even the jouissance of
sexual abandon. However, the protagonist does not liberate herself from the
destructive emotional attachment to the father. Although she physically
escapes the castle, she remains spellbound. The father is still in control of her
newly aroused sexuality.
Furthermore, as the result of the intervention of her mother, Alla’s attitude
towards her father changes from hatred to love. She begins to perceive the
father as her only love-object. Her appearance and demeanor change upon
thinking about the father: “To cover her fear and sorrow [associated with the
father], the bride [drinks] wine and let[s] her lover kiss her.”33 When the
father’s messengers arrive, she begins a wild, eroticized dance. In the field of
sexuality, she rejects the groom (he suddenly disappears), wants to rejoin her
father and instinctively hails him. Alla recreates the father in her imagination.
Her sexual desire revives the dead father. The phantom, which visits her in the
bedroom, is not blinded and powerless. She does not accept her father’s
symbolic castration. The father reincarnated is an omnipotent, terrifying and
sexually threatening father-figure. This shift escapes the protagonist’s notice,
because this is how she desires him to be and this is how she revives him.
In “Green Shore,” the absent, but well-remembered mother fuels the desire
for the mysterious green shore, an undefined idyll and a sexual fantasy.
Finally, Carolina decides to escape the realm of the father. Subsequently, she
forms sexual relationships with her husband and various lovers. However,
similarly to Alla, she does not detach herself from the emotional and
intellectual dependency on the father. In the quotation below, she speaks about
her only love-object: the father. She associates her “first lover” (not
“husband”) with paternal features: wisdom, consciousness and a powerful,
controlling gaze. She claims that she was happy only with her first sexual
partner: “My first lover – I miss your eyes, your calm, wise, conscious eyes!
Once again – this merciful reigning gaze – on my eyes, unconscious of
love....”34
Alla and Carolina appropriate from their fathers the paradigm of love
associated with death, sexual desire mixed with fear, and pleasure stimulated
by physical pain, and, furthermore, they transfer this model onto their future
relationships. Alla’s wedding feast resembles a violent sexual orgy, a
bakkheia, or an erotic battlefield comprising exploding grenades, skyrockets
and thunders:
The feast bubbled with life. Wine inebriated heads, the band fuelled
madness. Everyone forgot about their worries, they were captured by the
gust of blissful freedom in the fiery worlds of rapture. In the air saturated
with incenses and the scent of thousand flowers – there exploded grenades
33. Ibid., p. 95-96, my emphasis.

of joy, there flew skyrockets of jokes, there rolled the thunders of

passionate gazes.35
The protagonist identifies sexual experience with fear. When she searches for
her absent husband, her fright arouses her desire: “Maybe – she thought – he
waits for me to lie down somewhere in the dark – to suddenly grab me into his
arms? She undressed hastily and lay on the bed panting.”36 Afterwards, she
combines sexual desire with terror: “screaming with terror, she pushed her
head against the pillow.”37 The activity of men (the groom and the father) is
contrasted with Alla’s passivity, reflecting her relationship with the father,
which is of a masochistic nature. This is most evident in the final scene, when
she lies in bed paralyzed by fear, and the father finds her, approaches her and
murders her.
Similarly, Carolina of “Green Shore” connects love with hatred, fear, pain
and death. Her feelings about the father are a mélange of contradictory
thoughts and emotions. It is pleasurable to imagine his death, but she also
dreads this prospect. Her attitude towards love is reflected in the childhood
scene with a spider and a fly, embodying the theme of Eros and Thanatos.
Carolina calmly observes the insects, because she has mistaken the cruelty of
the spider and his deathly intentions towards the fly, for a sexual love act. Her
older sister, Bertha, recognizes the situation and punishes the predator by
brutally crushing it. She comments: “It was not love, but death.”38
Outside family home, Carolina continues to fuse love with suffering and
pain. She duplicates the paradigm of the love-hate relationship with her father
in her marriage and love affairs. Firstly, she chooses a domineering father-
figure for a husband. Later, there is also no equality in her future relationships:
she is alternatively superior or abject in relation to her lovers. Secondly, her
sexually-based relationships oscillate between love and hatred, pleasure and
pain. She summarizes her experiences on the green shore with the following
words: “unbearable pleasure – and unbearable torment.”39
I would like to conclude this essay with a suggestion that the foundation for
the tyrannical behaviour of the two father-figures under study is ambiguous.
The father of Komornicka’s fairytale incarcerates, and tortures his wife and
daughter because he longs for their love, and fears loneliness. He abuses his
wife because he loves her: he “slaughtered her because of loving hatred.”40
Subsequently, he tortures the protagonist with imprisonment and constant
control. And last, he inflicts severe physical pain onto his own body in order to
discover her whereabouts. Izabela Filipiak makes a similar discovery: “This

36. Ibid., p. 98.
37. Ibid., p. 98.
38. Nałkowska, “Zielone wybrzeże,” p. 58. Some spiders are sexual cannibals. Similarly to
mantises, they eat their sexual partners during or directly after intercourse.
39. Ibid., p. 61.
40. Komornicka, “O ojcu i córce”, p. 87.
father has one longing – a desire to be loved. For what? For nothing, always,
unconditionally.”41
The father of “Green Shore” has the same longing. He also attempts to
restrain his daughters inside the house, control their decisions, knowledge,
thoughts and dreams, and he constantly observes them. He raises them to be
mentally, emotionally and physically dependent on him, because otherwise
they might leave him. He fears betrayal and abandonment because his wife has
deserted him (with the help of another man), and entered a relationship with a
third man. In psychoanalytical terms, by incarcerating the sisters, the father
attempts to reverse the escape of the mother. Most importantly, he becomes a
fearsome, controlling tyrant as a result of his wife’s disappearance. His
transformation is suggested by Carolina in the following remark: “[s]ince then
[the mother’s flight] we began to fear him....”42 There is no trace of his
oppressive behaviour prior to the escape of the mother.
This reading of the two texts by the neglected Polish women writers shows
a remarkable correspondence between Spielrein’s psychoanalytic theory of
Eros and Thanatos, and the symbolism of the plot and character development
in these literary works. While there is no historical connection between, on the
one hand, Komornicka and Nałkowska and, on the other hand, Spielrein’s
psychoanalytic theory (the two Polish texts had been penned before Spielrein
and Freud formulated their theories on destruction and the death instinct), the
two writers demonstrate a deep appreciation of the modern psychoanalytic
tradition, through whose model of subjectivity they structure their fictional
world of “bad love.”
It was the intention in this paper to contribute to the process of restoration

and reinterpretation of two works, “On the Father and his Daughter” by Maria
Komornicka and “Green Shore” by Zofia Nałkowska, so that they may be
afforded their appropriate position within the English-speaking readership and
receive further critical examination.
University of Edinburgh
41. Izabela Filipiak, Obszary odmienności. Rzecz o Marii Komornickiej (Gdańsk: słowo/obraz
terytoria, 2006), p. 334.
ЛЯН КУНЬ
ИДЕЙНЫЕ ОСНОВАНИЯ КУЛЬТА

ЖЕНСТВЕННОСТИ В РУССКОЙ КУЛЬТУРНОЙ
ТРАДИЦИИ1
В русской литературе женственные образы создаются в соответствии с

двумя основными идейными руслами. Первое, абсолютно
метафизическое, содержит в себе религиозно-философские размышления
писателей и поэтов; второе делает акцент на более приземленном
общественном статусе женщины. Глубинная причина существования
данного феномена в том, что русская культурная традиция относится к
женственности с позиции дуальности. C одной стороны женственность
обожается как совершенный божественный образ, с другой стороны
женщина в обществе занимает “восточную” бесправную позицию. К
постановке и решению проблемы женского положения русская
культурная традиции (включая философскую мысль) и европейская
мысль подходят абсолютно по-разному. В рамках культуры западной
цивилизации проблема женщины и даже проблема полов обычно
анализируется с точки зрения социологии, пытаясь искать путь реального
решения, заботясь о равном месте женщин в праве и в обществе. Так
появился феминизм в качестве общественно-политического движения,
исследования о женщине и поле. Русская культурная традиция может
вполне вмещать эти два резко противоположные полюса. Однако, в ней
прослеживается больший уклон в метафизический слой, не уделяется
надлежащего внимание к реальному положению женщины и даже если
эта тема и затрагивается, то внимание к ней скользит по поверхностности.
Большей частию путь состоит в том, чтобы женщина, повергнутая в
бездну страдания, посредством Евангелия исповедовала веру в Бога,
достигая удовольствия и освобождения души. Итак, страдание даже
становится одним из знаков святости. Идея культа женственности, после
долгой истории развития, успела проникнуть в глубину народного
коллективного бессознательного, и получить определенное значение в
создании женственных образов в литературе. Идея женстевнности
обладает глубоким идейным основанием: он коренится в русской
национальной языческой традиции, а также впитывает элементы
западно-христианской культурной традиции. Наконец, идея
женственности утвердилась в Софиологии - учение, которое имеет
естественные связи с платонизмом.
1. This research is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities,
and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China 10XNK012.
Языческая традиция и культ Великой Богини Матери

В глубине русского самосознания Мать сыра-земля наделяется
чертами женщины и матери, Русь обнаруживает себя в женских чертах.
Истоки этой идеи исходят из языческой традиции. Еще в давные времена
до всеобщего крещения Руси в 998 году, славяне исповедовали язычество,
верили во вездесущие божества, обожествляли различные природные
явлении и им поклонялись. Крещение Руси вовсе не означало то, что
христианство полностью заместило язычество, идеи которого успели
укорениться довольно прочно. Ее христолизация испытала долгий
процесс по сотни лет борьбы и интеграции христианской и языческой
традиции. В своей обрядности, в почитание святых и святынь, русское
православие носит отпечаток языческих традиций.
В основе языческих идей лежит широкий спектр культов

женственности и материнства. Практически все женственные образы в
славянской мифологии можно свести к единому, нечеткому образу
великой богини матери, матери-земли или Матери сырой земли.
Знаменитый исследователь славянской и русской мифологии, Б.А.
Рыбаков, в работе Язычество древних славян рассматривает культ
женственности как основание для стадии язычества. 2 Концепция
Матери-земли становится благодатной почвой на которой постепенно
вырастает понятие Родины и на которой вырастает культ Великой
богини-матери в русской культурной традиции.
Русская религиозная философия также содержит элементы пантеизма,
в частности, в философской системе Владимира Соловьева. Учение
всеединства - центр его философской идеи - возведет Абсолют в
единство, в которое вмещается все. Это учение Соловьева, которое
находит свои истоки в греческом учении о “Едином” прежде Платона и
Аристотеля, через Ираклитоса и Шеллинга, совершенно сочетает в себе
восточную христианскую традицию и западную философию, выражает
восточные христианские культурные традиции философским языком,
подчеркивает соединение человека с миром природы под принципом
божественной любви. Соловьев рассматривает всеединство
божественной сущности, в которой Бог является Богом философским, а
не религиозным. Весь мир, вся действительность, все сущее, не только
обладает внешним организмом, но так же внутренней интуицией. София
- “принцип мировоззрения и совокупность творческих энергий в
Единстве,” воплощающий космический порядок, воплощающее
всеединство. Большинство школы всеединства исследуют и настаивают
на Софиологии, именно здесь начинается поиск проблем космизма.
С.Н. Булгаков, будучи православным отцом, однако положительно
рассматривает тот исторический факт, что христианство в России
слилось с и впитывало язычество. Его научная система близка пантеизму.
Он полагает, что с точки зрения диалектики, пантеизм является
неустранимым элементом в космологии Софии. Он особенно
2. Б. А. Рыбаков, Язычество Древних Славян (Москва: Наука, 1981), с. 33-69.
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подчеркивает религиозную истину которая содержится в языческом

почитании божественного материнства. Булгаков, не смущаясь, говорит о
соблазнительной близости “между Изидой, плачущей над Озирисом, и
Богоматерью, склоненной над Телом Спасителя.” 3 Он считает, что в
почитании женской ипостаси в Божестве, язычеству приоткрывались
священные и трепетные тайны, не раскрывшиеся в полноте, быть может,
еще доселе в религии христианства.4 Он отталкивается от пантеизма,
выводя свое учение о Матери-сырой земле: “Акт творения мира
осуществляется созданием в Начале неба и земли, образованием в Софии
двух центров.” “Земля же есть ничто, в которое излилась уже софийность,
поэтому она есть потенциальная София. Ничто получило актуальное
бытие и стало Хаосом, реальным άπειρον, о котором говорят мифологии
греков, вавилонян и других народов. Это тот “родимый Хаос...”
“Сотворение земли лежит вне шести дней миротворения, есть его
онтологический prius.” Отделение света от тьмы, тверди от воды,
проявление разных светил, животных и растениях, все это “сотворено
творческим словом Божиим, но уже не из ничего, а из земли, как
постепенное раскрытие ее софийного содержания, ее идейной
насыщенности. Эта 'земля' есть поэтому как бы космическая София, ее
лик в мироздании, женское его начало, которое имеет силу, по
творческому слову да будет, производить из себя твари, рождать от него.
Она есть та Великая Матерь, которую издревле чтили благочестиво
языки: Деметра, Изида, Кибела, Иштар. И эта земля есть в потенции
своей Богоземля; эта матерь таит в себе уже при сотворении своем
грядущую Богоматерь, 'утробу божественного воплощения'. ”5
В своей работе Философия свободы (1911), Бердяев понимает Софию
более широко, используя ее для объяснения русского национального
характера в целом, сводя ее к русскому культу Матери-земли. Он пишет:
“Вечная женственность есть девственность Марии, и она соединяется с
вечной мужественностью, с мужественностью Логоса. И вся земля, вся
матерь-земля женственна, но женственность ее двойственна, как и всякая
женственная природа, Земля Ева и Мария. Только в мистическом браке
раскрывается тайна соединения Логоса с женственной душой мира, с
землей.” 6 Он считает: “Вселенский дух Христов, мужественный
вселенский логос пленен женственной национальной стихией, русской
землей в ее языческой первородности. Так образовалась религия
растворения в матери-земле, в коллективной национальной стихии, в
животной теплоте. Русская религиозность - женственная религиозность,
религиозность коллективной биологической теплоты, переживаемой как
теплота мистическая. ...Такая религиозность отказывается от
мужественного, активного духовного пути. Это столько религия Христа,
сколько религия Богородицы, религия матери-земли, женского божества,
3. С. Н. Булгаков, Свет Невечерний (Москва: Республика, 1994), с. 286.

4. См. Н. О. Лосский, История Русской Философии (Москва: АСТ, 2000), с. 251.
5. Булгаков, Свет Невечерний (Москва: Республика, 1994), с. 209-210.
6. Н. А. Бердяев, Философия Своболы (Москва: ОЛМА-Press, 2000), с. 304.
91
освещающего плотской быт.……Мать-земля для русского народа есть

Россия. Россия превращается в Богородицу. Россия - страна
богоносная.”7
Следует отметить, что между открытым дискурсом русской

религиозной философии и консервативным официальным православием
монашеского аскетизма существует важное различие. Даже между
русскими религиозными философами есть разногласие по восприятию
Софии. В середине тридцатых годов, будучи в русской эмиграции в
Париже, Бердяев со своими идеаями вызвал бурную “дискуссию о
Софии” в кругу богословов. Православная церковь жестоко критиковала
то, что София мыслится как символ Вечной Женственности и что
софиология Булгакова имеет пантеистическую направленность. На самом
деле, эти элементы являются обобщением православной традиции,
вмещающей пантеистическое наследие русской религиозно-философской
школы, и воплощают смирение как особенность восточного
христианства, которое обращает внимание на выражение целостного
духовного опыта. Именно эти новаторские элементы софиологии
прозивели глубокое влияние на русскую литературу.
Культ Богоматери в западной христианской традиции и его

секуляризационное влияние
Что касается лейтмотива культа женственности, влияние христианской
культуры особенно проявляется с двух сторон - внутренним верованием
и литературным выражением. Во-первых, наряду с процессом
локализации христианства, идея женскиого начала в языческом наследии
встречается с образом Богоматери в христианской традиции; эти две
тенденции смешиваются, взаимопроникаются, и наконец
сосредоточиваются в культе Богородицы, который становится одной из
главных особенностей православия. Во-вторых, после реформ Петра
Великого в Россию проникает западная секуляризационная христианская
культурная традиция. Культ Девы Марии непосредственно
обуславливает в рыцарской литературе средневековья святую любовь к
прекрасной даме, что является психологическим поворотом от
посюстороннего к потустороннему. Русские поэты обнаружили, что
модель средневекового рыцарского идеала любви вполне подходит для
выражения их святых чувств к Вечной Женственности, связывает земной
мир с Царством Небесным. Эта модель пересекает время и пространство,
удачно прививая западную культурную традицию к русской почве.
Идея женского начала в христианской культуре развертывается до
предела в православии. Женский лик выражается церквой христианства -
“Невестой Христа,” Покровительницей и Утешителем страдающих за
веру. Высоко оценивается христианскими авторами идеал женской
святости. Дева Мария занимает непревзойденное место. Принимая такую
духовную традицию, в России чествуют святые иконы Богоматери.
7. Н. А. Бердяев, Судьба России, Кризис Искусства (Москва: АСТ, 2004), с. 21.
92
Выражаясь словами Булгакова: “Дева Мария есть райский цвет,

расцветший на древе всего человечества.” 8 Любовь Богородицы
абсолютна: любой преступник может надеяться на ее помощь. В
православии Божья Матерь есть Заступница перед нападающим и
суровым Богом Отцом, посредник между Богом и человеком. Почитание
Богоматери кладет свою печать на всей христианской антропологии и
космологии. Будучи человеческой стороней “Слова” которое “стало
плотию” (Инкарнация) и воплощением Святого Духа, Богородица
объединяет в себе двойственность Бога и человека. Именно такое
целостное понимание указывает на различие православия от
католичества и протестантизма. Католичество не признает связь
Богородицы с человечеством, человек и Бог полностью разделены.
Забвение о Богоматери в протестанской религиозности делает
протестантизм носителем отцовства. Отсутствие женских божеств и
секуляризация женского начала в западной культуре не могут не иметь
связи. В русской культуре материнское значение Богородицы особенно
выделяется. Женское и материнское начала, идея Матери-Руси обладают
особым значением для формирования русского народного самосознания.
Россия становится воплощением Богородицы в русской
религиозно-национальной имагинации.
Многие религиозные философы уделяют большое внимание особой
мистической связи между русской Матерью сырой-землей, Россией и
Богородицей. Все идеи Богини-матери слились с христианским образом
Божьей Матери. Согласно Соловьеву, если Иисус или Логос являются
воплощением Вечного Мужского Начала, то София является
воплощением Вечной Женственности, женственным полюсом творения
мира. Относительно Логоса она является телом Христа. Но тело Христа
во всеобщем представлении есть Церковь. Таким образом София
является Церквой. Как женская личность, она воплощается в образ
Марии, становится посредником между миром и Богом. Обращение к
Святому Духу, придание Святому Духу образа Богородицы, придание
Матери (Тварной) задачу спасения мира - центральное содержание
нового религиозного сознания П.А. Флоренского, С. Булгакова, Д.С.
Мережковского, Н.А.Бердяева и Н.О.Лосского. Отец Павел Флоренский
считает, что “[С]офия есть великий корень целокупной твари,” есть
тварное бытие, четвертой ипостаси вне Отца, Сына и Святого Духа.
Сергей Булгаков считает, что София является третьей ипостасью Творца,
личности Святого Духа. Он надеется отдать исследованию Софии в
России абстрактный богословский способ выражения. Таким образом,
его школа называется школа Софии. Он заявляет: “Два аспекта
человеческого существа - мужчина и женщина, суть образ Логоса и Св.
Духа.” Святой дух - женская и материнская стихия, материнские
элементы. “Божья Матерь является матерью человечества и проявлением
Св. Духа в человеческой ипостаси.”9
8. C. Н. Булгаков, Православие (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1991), с. 255.

9. См. Лосский, История Русской Философии, с. 264-265.
93
Мережковский недвусмысленно постулирует идею о том, что

“[Б]огоматерь спасет Россию.” Он считает, что не красота, а любовь,
вечное материнство, Вечная Женственность спасет мир. “Если, по Слову
Достоевского, 'красота спасет мир', то и это значит: мир спасет Мать.”10
“Отец не спас мира, Сын не спас его, Матерь спасет его; Матерь есть
Святой Дух.” 11 Высшее единство, божественное общество связано с
тремя ипостасями Троицы. На арамейском языке слово “дух” (“Rucha”) -
женского рода. Одна из аграф, т. е. из сказаний о богоматери,
сохранившихся в устной традиции, гласит: “Моя мать - Святой Дух.”
Именно так Он истолковывает природу Св. Троицы: отца, сына,
матери-духа. Третий завет будет царством духа-матери. Н.О. Лосский
принимает софиологию русских религиозных мыслителей. Он полагает,
во главе всего мира, вслед за Христом, как его ближайший сподвижник
стоит тварное бытие, мировой дух, св. София, Дева Мария - земное
воплощение св. Софии, которая, таким образом, служила делу
воплощения Иисуса Христа.12
Главное значение софиологии состоит в разрешении вопроса о
взаимосвязи Бога и мира. В Христианстве, и в библейских традициях, и в
традициях церкви, вопрос о связи Бога и мира, Бога и человека всегда
размыт, разрыв между “Небом” и “Землей” непреодолим.
Противопоставляя себя рационалистическому распаду, носившемуся
западным богословием, русский дух, лежавший в основе православия,
жаждет органичности и целостности. Русские мыслители развивают
гениальные творческие силы, отождествляют Богоматерь с одним из
проявлений Софии для преодоления распада, достижения единства Бога
и мира. Софиология добавляет женский элемент вне оттенка отцовства у
Бога, распространяет широкое, глубокое материнское дыхание.
Мистические концепции пантеизма и панентеизма (теизм и пантеизм)
соединятся Софию с Богородицей-Святым Духом и просторной,
глубокой русской Матерью-землей. Такая органичность и целостность по
всей вероятности именно есть та причина, что в России обращается
особое внимание на софиологию, которая рождается и постепенно
забывается на Западе.
Секуляризационная христианская мысль на Западе произвела глубокое
влияние на русскую культуру. Одним из важных вкладов духа рыцаря в
общество является культ любви; это не простое чувство любви между
мужчиной и женщиной, а неземное, чистое духовное чувство,
религиозная любовь к типичной женской добродетели. Этот вид любви
заслуживает поклонников между благородными. У Данте, первый стих
восемнадцатилетнего юноши - любовный сонет – в котором герой
описывает свою любовь к увлеченной девушке Беатриче. Данная любовь
естественно несет на себе отпечаток рыцарской любви, самый высокий
пример возвышения мирской, земной любви до любви священной -
10. Д. С. Мережковский, Иисус Неизвестный (Москва: Республика, 1996), с. 293.

11. Мережковский, “Тайна трех,” Иисус Неизвестный, с. 364.
12. Лосский, История Русской Философии, с. 315.
94
предмет устремлений, мечтаний Соловьева и, затем, символистов.

Несмотря на то, что в России никогда не было системы рыцарства,
однако с 1698 года после реформ Петра Великого, вслед за принятием
западных веяний, такой идеал чистой рыцарской любви и западные
изящные правила этикета проникали путем литературы и культуры из
аристократического сословия во все общество. Несмотря на то, что
русские мыслители вообще не хотят признать влияние рыцарства,
считали, “что православию является совершенно несвойственным
внесение в почитание Богоматери таких оттенков, которые выразились в
рыцарском культе 'прекрасной дамы' на западе. Трезвенность
православия противится внесению в почитание Богоматери хотя бы
легкого оттенка эротизма.”13 Однако, в литературных произведениях, в
православном культе Богородицы произошел секуляризационный сдвиг,
который обычно выражается в модели абсолютной священной и
идеальной любви верного и храброго рыцаря к прекрасной даме. В
западной литературе эта модель любви почти сходит на нет за Данте и
Беатриче. Удивительно, с интервалом в несколько веков эта прерванная
традиция возрождается в России, достигая преемственности вне времени
и пространства: нужно посмотреть на “Три Свидания” Соловьева, “Стихи
о прекрасной даме” Блока, “Мастер и Маргарита” Михаила Булгакова,
“Доктор Живаго” Пастернака - все эти примеры не оставляют места для
сомнения в этом влиянии, только героизм в рыцарстве замещается
русским смирением и самопожертвованием.
Платонизм и прототип Софии

Будучи одной из духовных оснований разных форм символизма в
истории европейской культуры, учение Платонизма об Идеях и об Эросе
в космологии и антропологии имеет два вектора влияния на русское
религиозно-философское понимание Софии: “творение мира” и “любовь”
являются исходными точками размышлений. Через русский
литературный Символизм, миф о Софии становится особенным
культурным ландшафтом в Серебряном веке.
За то, что Соловьев воспринимает и впитывает одинаковое духовное
веяние у Платона, известный русский философ Лопакин и князь
Трубецкой восхищаются им как “русским Платоном.” У Соловьев
философская система предстает как онтологический символизм, в ней
часто можно услышать отзвук платонизма. Соловьев принимает и
развивает учение Платона о двух мирах, считает, что реальный,
посюсторонний мир сосуществует с “Миром Идей” - потусторонним
миром; однако, последний становится возвышенным, совершенным,
вечным. Земная действительность является лишь “бледной тенью”
потустороннего мира, его искаженным подобием. “София… - священное
олицетворение совокупного бытия людей и всей твари, олицетворение
культуры и природы в субстанциональном-божественном. Это, если
13. Булгаков, Православие, с. 259.
95
выразиться современным языком, как бы и проект и идеальная

реализация мира в Боге.”14
Мысль П.А. Флоренского развивается совершенно по иному руслу: он
разрабатывает собственные оригинальные концепции всеединства и
Софии, основанные целиком на представлениях платонизма и
христианского платонизма; он доказывает, что платонизм собственно и
есть ортодоксальное православное учение. 15 Подобно тому,
центральным понятием метафизики C.Н. Трубецкого является
Абсолютное Сознание, его основание - христианский платонизм с его
“идеальными-первообразами” и “ миром в Боге.” Трубецкой считает,
что София является божественным планом и замыслом о мире, Идеей
Мира, миром вечного первообраза тварных. Вместе с тем, он
анализировал существенное различие Софии как Мира Идей и Мира
Идей Платона. Он в полной мере относит Софию к области
трансцендентного, таким образом снимая проблему тварного и
нетварного. Не смотря на то, что и то и другое одинаково трансцендентно,
в платонизме Мир Идей есть абсолютное бытие, однако мир в статусе
тени Мира Идей – совсем другое бытие, эти два мира изолированны друг
от друга. В христианстве, напротив, учение о Софии утверждает, что
между этими двумя мирами существует решающая и разрешаемая связь.
Трубецкой пишет: “Мир божественных идей от века завершен и закончен:
в нем нет места для какой-либо неполноты или несовершенства…Это –
вечная божественная действительность, тот субстанциальный мир
вечного покоя…В эзотерической сфере божественного сознания и бытия
действительность и замысел совпадают: здесь Премудрость
осуществлена во всей полноте.”16
Учение об Эросе Платона также имеет основное отношение к мифу о
Софии. Понимание антропологии Софии проявляется в связи с половой
любовью человечества и поклонением Софии. В русской религиозной
философии XIX века, в развитии философии любви существуют два
направления: первое восходит к Вл. Соловьеву, далее к Л. Карсавину, Б.П.
Вышеславцеву и З. Гиппиус. Оно возрождало и переосмысливало
античную и основанную на ней гуманистическую, в основе своей
неоплатоническую концепцию любви, любви-Эроса. К другому
направлению относятся П. Флоренский, С. Булгаков, И. Ильин. Они
имеют тенденцию к ортодоксальному богословию. Это тяготение к
средневековому христианскому пониманию любви как сaritas (каритас) -
сострадание, милосердие и жалость - и связанным с этим пониманием
комплексом идей христианской этики, относящийся к семье, к браку.
Противостояние двух направлений вызывало острую полемику. Русская
литература XX века, в особенности литература русского Символизма,
14. Е. Б Рашковский, «Владимир Соловьев: Учение о природе философского знания»,

Вопросы Философии, 6 (1982), с. 87.
15. См. C. C. Хоружий, О Старом И Новом, (Санкт-Петербург: Алетейя, 2000), с.
157-158.
16. Е. Н. Трубецкой, Смысл Жизни (Москва: Республика, 1994), с. 103.
96
обладающая романтическим качеством мечтать о духовном небе во

мрачной и посредственной жизни, стремится к идее потустороннего мира,
в первую очередь соответствует первому направлению.
В интерпретации русской религиозной философии любовь и
Премудрость взаимосвязаны, сосуществуют друг с другом. София есть
Вечная Женственность, в древнегреческом языке означает “мудрость”
（Σοφíα）; философия - это “любовь к мудрости.” Платон полагал, что
самая высокая любовь есть ничто иное как философия. Любовь не
соединение с кровно-телесной супругой, даже не соединение с
однородным сердцем на всю жизнь, а душа которая невообразимо
сливается с Вечной Премудростью в области далеко выше страстей
человечества. Соловьев считает, что истинная любовь, которая может
привести к любви к Софии, есть платоническая любовь. Цель истории
лежит в достижении результатов мистерии брака, среди которых вечная
природа (женская сущность), богочеловек (мужская сущность) и вечная
мудрость (объединяющая мужское божество и природное начало
женственности). Универсальная религия должна быть религией души;
специальная функция души - любовь, которая объединяет со всей
духовной сутью сквозь свободную имманентную связь. Смысл любви
состоит в достижении органической связи между личностью и миром, в
преодолении взаимного отчуждения и одиночества. Земная женщина -
лишь путь реализации нашей любви к Софии.17 Каждый человек призван
любить Софию (быть в этом смысле философом). Эта любовь может
реализоваться через платоническую любовь мужчины к женщине. Чистая
платоническая любовь позволяет любить конкретную женщину как образ
Софии. Мужчина должен любить свою возлюбленную в Софии и Софию
в возлюбленной. Таким образом, София реализуется и воплощается в
индивидуальной жизни человека. Соловьев также замечает, что
поскольку София одна, но может быть представлена различными
женщинами, кажется, ничего не мешает нам сменять партнеров
“философской” любви.18
Другая теория Платона об Эросе основывается на учении об
андрогинах. Тема “андрогина” занимает важное место в современном
религиоведении. Во многих культурных традициях, соединение полов
понимается как восстановление изначальной цельности человека, что
является путем к возвращению в потерянный рай. Платон в “Пире”
рассказывает легенду об андрогинах, сочетавших в себе признаки
мужского и женского пола. Разорванные по приказу Зевса на две
половинки, так объясняется корень стремления воссоединиться в любви
мужского и женского начала. Эту тему можно найти в гностицизме,
герметизме, немецком мистицизме и романтизме. Она широко
обсуждалась в русской религиозной философии. Соловьев в “Смысле
любви” подчеркивает, что сутью любви между мужчиной и женщиной
17. См. Вл. Соловьев, Сочинения: В 2 т. (Москва: Мысль,1990), Т. 2, с. 537.

18. См. Е. Ю. Скобцова, Мать Мария. Воспоминания, Статьи, Очерки (Paris:
YMCA-Press, 1992), Т. 1, с. 181.
97
является восстановление человеческой ценности. Платоническая любовь

мужчины и женщины являлась единственным способом восстановления
этой ценности. Но различие между ними состоит в том, что андрогин у
Платона существует лишь в области формы, что ставит Идею над
практикой, в то врема как Соловьев превращает платонический дискурс о
любовь в идею утопии и российской традиции, перекладывающей идею
на действительность жизни. Он противостоит как любви духовной, так и
любви телесной, высказывая точку зрения о том, что через сексуальность
следует восстановить цельность человеческой натуры, достичь
соединения с Мировой Душой и Вечной Женственностью. Сергей
Булгаков обнаруживает в божественной Софии - небесном первообразе
сотворенного человечества - сосуществование мужского начала и
женского начала. “Софийный дух человека двупол...Он сочетает мужское,
солнечное начало мысли, Логос - с женским началом восприимчивости и
творческой завершенности, облеченным в красоту.” 19 Понимание
Бердяев о Софии связано с идеей религиозного творчества - творения
новой твари, в которой будет восстановлено тождество субъекта и
объекта. Понятие андрогина представляет собой эту идею новой твари.
Он считает, что задача женщины состоит в выражении “Вечной
Женственности,” и вместе с ним, во вдохновении мужской творческой
природы. Идеал личности для Мережковского - это некое двуполое
существо, мужчина-женщина. Разделение на два пола является распадом
личности, ее раздвоением. Полное разделение постольку невозможно,
поскольку “в каждом мужчине есть тайный дух женщины, в каждой
женщине есть тайный дух мужчины” (идея Вейнингера). Духовный
андрогин не является ни мужчиной ни женщиной. Он обожествляет пол,
потому что “[П]ол есть единственно живое, кровно-телесное 'касание к
мирам иным', единственный выход из своего тела в чужое, из я в ты, из
тайны Одного в тайну Двух.”20
Российский Серебряный век наполнен настроениями конца века (fin de
siècle) – мир в преддверии и предчувствии катастрофы. Современный
религиозный философ Сергей Хоружий замечает, что “Серебряный век –
Русская Александрия, и Соловьев с Софией – пророк ее.” 21 Таким
образом софиология выступает главной мистической темой во многих
понятиях русской интеллигенции того времени. София есть
платонический “Мир Идей,” архетип мира, Идея и форма Всего. Светская
женщина как бы тень Мира Идей, или конкретное чувственное -
“objective correlative” (T.S. Eliot) - того прототипа и Идеи. Каждая
женщина является воплощением Софии, Вечной Женственности. Весь
мировой и исторический процесс есть процесс ее реализации и
воплощения в великом многообразии форм и степеней. Осуществить
19. С. Н. Булгаков, Утешитель (Таллинн: Типография В. Бейлинсон. YMCA-Press,

1936), с. 241.
20. Д. С. Мережковский, Атлатида-Европа: Тайна Запада (Москва: Русская книга,
1992), с. 174.
21. См. Хоружий, О Старом И Новом, с. 157.
98
слияние с Вечной Женственностью путем мистического испытания и

созерцательного любования, особенно испытания любви – являются
прекраснейшими идеями русских мыслителей и поэтов нового времени.
Литература - поистине лучший путь выражения этой идей.
В литературе женский образ есть преломление глубокой культурной
традиции. Западноевропейским истоком является католическая вера,
русским - православная вера, смешивая в себе языческую традицию.
Католическое и протестантское почитание индивидуализма и
либерализма обуславливает разделение европейской мысли на два
полюса, между рациональным богословием и секуляризацией. На этом
основании, в западной литературе женственные образы после
средневековья возвращаются к образу целостного человека, вступают в
мирскую жизнь, обычно не покрыты светом святости. В православии
вера в Христа и культ Богородицы есть неразделимым целым: “Любовь и
почитание Богоматери есть душа православного благочестия.” 22 Эта
любовь и почитание выражаются в богочеловечестве. Богочеловечество,
т. е. тварный бог, воплощающий в жизнь Св. Духа, значит связь человека
и Бога. В этой основной русской идеи скрыто стремление к Софии. Как
следствие, обожательство женских образов в русской литературе
содержит в себе двойное значение: с одной стороны, возвышает жизнь
человека до священного, связывает с Царством Неба, воплощает
священность православного идеала; с другой стороны, спускает Царство
Неба на землю, вводит Небо в мир людей, вызывает искренние,
глубокие чувства к Великой Матери-Земле (священной русской
Богини-Матери), выражает концепцию мистического Всеединства.
Начиная с XIX века, в России богиня поэзии никогда не забывает
восхищаться женщиной. Русский религиозный философ и поэт Соловьев,
ушедший на заре XX века, открыл особенный символический прототип -
Вечную Женственность и Мировую Душу. Канонизация земной любви у
него позволяет женственному образу включить в свой состав
священность, мистический оттенок и философское раздумье. В русском
символизме и последующей русской литературе XX века так же
выражается глубокое согласие с Вечной Женственностью. Многие
женственные образы являются метаморфозами или переписыванием
именно этого прототипа.
Renmin State University, Beijing
22. Булгаков, Православие, с. 253.
99
100 Transcultural
Studies
100
ANDREW PADGETT
READING ADORNO: FROM SCHOENBERG TO DJ

SHADOW
In the five decades since it was introduced to academia, cultural studies has
seen major advances in the understanding of the sociology of popular
culture—popular music in particular—and of the value of popular cultural
forms in the lives of the youth and subcultures who consume it. But while
cultural studies demands that we take popular culture seriously and pay due
diligence to the traditional prejudices against so-called ‘low’ culture, much
less has been done to test how popular music measures up to the exacting
standards aesthetes such as Theodor Adorno who theorise about the work of
art and its effects on the recipients. The reason for this is that we are often
reluctant to ‘subject’ popular culture to any kind of stringent aesthetic critique
for fear of accusations of cultural elitism, and of wanting to subject popular
culture to standards derived from ‘high’ culture—standards that are not those
of popular culture. This accusation is based on the assumption that the criteria
we use to evaluate cultural texts have always been derived from ‘high’ culture,
and that it is inevitable that popular culture will always fall short of those
standards. This assumption overlooks the possibility of establishing a ‘middle
ground’ of cultural critique in which we judge the value of texts according to
standards that can be universally applied to any cultural text that seeks a
prominent place in the public’s imagination. That we should expect both
Picasso and Lady Gaga to take that responsibility seriously has nothing to do
with the kind of culture they produce. This search for a middle ground for
cultural critique is at the heart of Adorno’s aesthetic theory. It has often gone
undiagnosed, however, due to Adorno’s reputation as the archetypal ‘grumpy
old man’—or even worse, a ‘grumpy old Marxist’—a curmudgeon left over
from a past age of cultural critique, and the kind of figure that contemporary
academia must avoid.
To dismiss Adorno based on this stereotype, however, is to ignore his
formidable musicological training and the relatively minor place of his critique
of mass culture in his work. This misperception is not helped by the two most
common ways that new readers come to Adorno. The first of these is the
approach taken by undergraduate courses in cultural studies, which are in the
habit of reading the single chapter, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception," in isolation from the rest of Dialectic of Enlightenment,
thereby elevating one aspect of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique above all
others. The other common approach to Adorno is through publications of his
collected essays, in which his writings on mass culture usually feature
prominently. No doubt, Routledge's publication of Adorno's collected essays
on the culture industry1 in the ‘Routledge Classics’ series makes perfect

economic sense, but it gives the naive reader the impression that Adorno was
somehow obsessed with attacking anything that fell short of Beethoven. This is
an unhelpful stereotype, because it overlooks the fact that Adorno develops his
critique of the culture industry in response to his extensive work in musicology
and aesthetics. The best reflection of Adorno’s attitude to popular culture is his
mature essay, "On Popular Music,"2 in which, while acknowledging the
traditional belief in the inferiority of popular culture, he recognizes the
necessity of critiquing the grounds of that belief. This is the Adorno examined
here - the musicologist, practicing composer, and aesthete, who provides us
with a working model for critiquing popular music upon musicological, not
ideological grounds.
This paper makes use of Adorno in what may seem to be a decidedly un-
Adornian manner. It uses Adorno’s aesthetic theory to argue that it is possible
to see popular music as deserving of the same sincere respect that Adorno
often reserved for his teacher, Alban Berg, and Berg’s teacher, Arnold
Schoenberg. This paper argues that we can see in the music of the popular hip-
hop artist, DJ Shadow, a resistance to the ‘rules’ of mass culture that is
reminiscent of Schoenberg’s resistance to the rules that constrained
composers’ freedom in the early twentieth century. Insofar as Adorno holds
Schoenberg‘s difficult atonal music in the highest regard, it is possible to argue
that popular music such as DJ Shadow’s is deserving of the same high regard,
for musicological, not ideological reasons.
Locating Adorno’s critical aesthetics

There are two entry points into reading Adorno: his aesthetic theory, and his
sociological critique of totalitarianism. The two are interlinked, insofar as he
develops the aesthetic theory against the background of a critique of the
evolution of Enlightenment reason into an “instrumental reason” that is the
ideological backbone of authoritarian society. For Adorno, it is the particular
responsibility of art to renounce and resist such social stasis, and he develops
his aesthetic theory in order to understand the artistic principles that make this
possible. Aesthetic Theory ([1970] 2002) therefore has two aims. The first is to
identify the space occupied by art in an "administered society" that does not
tolerate opposition; the second task is to establish the manner in which this
“autonomous” art is able to confront administered society from a position of,
and with the voice of alterity.
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is founded on the premise that it is possible to
judge some cultural texts as being more or less valuable than others, and to do
so on non-ideological grounds. The mark of value in a cultural text, for
Adorno, is that it takes seriously the responsibility to resist social stasis. The
1. See Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, J.M.
Bernstein (ed.) (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
2. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music (with the assistance of George Simpson),” Essays
on Music, Richard Leppert (ed.), Susan H. Gillespie (trans.) (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
2002).
102
responsible cultural text is characterised by its offering its audience a

transformative aesthetic experience, not a comfortable aesthetic experience.
Adorno’s aesthetic theory identifies the principles of aesthetic composition
that make this transformative experience possible—how it is possible that our
perspective on our lives can change through the simple activity of viewing an
inanimate object hanging on a wall or listening to carefully organised sound. It
is inasmuch as a cultural text possesses such an affective aesthetic effect that
Adorno regards it as being ‘successful’, a term he prefers to ‘great’, which he
regards as a marketing term deployed to sell tickets and to reabsorb difficult
art back into the comfortable and familiar world of mass consumerism that it
opposes. The proliferation of the ‘blockbuster’ exhibition today, staged with
the primary aim of ensuring the financial viability of its host gallery, testifies
to the keenness of Adorno’s insight in this regard.3
This criterion of ‘affectivity’ is a very productive criterion for critiquing
cultural texts, for it neither automatically qualifies all 'high' culture as
successful, nor does it automatically disqualify all 'low' culture as being
unsuccessful. Adorno is just as ardent in his critique of supposedly 'high'
cultural texts that only feign at developing a ‘difficult’, affective aesthetics as
he is of industrially-produced mass culture that does not even bother trying to
be difficult. Jazz, Dalí and Stravinsky are his favourite targets in this respect,
with Adorno reserving some of his most biting remarks for Dalí, whom he
brands as little more than “an exalted society painter, the Laszlo or Van
Dongen of a generation that liked to think of itself as being sophisticated on
the basis of a vague sense of crisis that had in any case been stabilized for
decades.”4 Equally so, Adorno is critical of jazz for gesturing towards
developing difficult and unfamiliar compositional forms,5 but stopping short
with forms that as soon as the listener's ear had grown accustomed to hearing
them , became just as comfortable and familiar as the most commonplace of
dancehall music. The fate of jazz as unsuccessful culture was thereby sealed,
as Adorno recognized in a 1933 essay, “Farewell to Jazz”:
Jazz itself has long been in the process of dissolution, in retreat into
military marches and all sorts of folklore. Moreover, it has become
stabilized as a pedagogical means of “rhythmic education,” and with this
has visibly renounced the aesthetic claims that it admittedly never ever
made on the consciousness of the producers and consumers of dance, but
3. See, for example, Dr Gerard Vaughan’s comments upon leaving his post as Director of the
National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne, Australia. In an interview with The Age newspaper,
Vaughan admitted that the terms in which he evaluated the success of his own blockbuster
exhibitions were primarily financial. The gallery is currently facing financial difficult largely
because the 2011 iteration of the gallery’s ‘Winter Masterpieces’ blockbusters attracted the
lowest attendance numbers of only 172,000, down from a high of 333,000, when Dalí came to
town in 2009. See Peter Munro, “For Art’s Sake, the Gallery Confronts its New Challenges,” The
Age (Melbourne), 5 February, 2012.
4. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedermann (eds), Robert
Hullot-Kentor (trans.) (London and New York: Continuum, [1970] 2002), p. 229.
5. Above all, its use of syncopated rhythms.
103
did make in the ideology of the clever art composers who at one time
thought they could be fertilized by it.6
The same fate is reserved for Igor Stravinsky, who, after youthful
experiments in atonalism in the style of Schoenberg, settled for his role as the
“grand old man” of new music post-war, an honour that “inexorably results in
the loss of that modern quality which it was intended to preserve.”7
Affectivity in art
What jazz, Dalí and Stravinsky have in common is that they all fall short of
producing successful cultural texts. They each pursued a transformative
aesthetic experience, but only as far as the bounds of mainstream taste would
allow. All three stop short of inciting the ‘scandal’ that accompanies anything
that is radically new and disagreeable to the ear or eye. In settling for the
safety net of social acceptance, all three fall short of creating art that “detaches
itself from the empirical world [to] bring forth another world, one opposed to
the empirical world.”8 In contrast, successful culture gains its critical voice not
by what it says, but “by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes
condemn it.”9 Adorno is careful to point out that that does not mean that
successful cultural texts maintain absolute autonomy from the society they
reject, for such a work would be rendered unintelligible within that society.
Instead, successful culture maintains a “precarious” autonomy, drawing its
content from mainstream society, while maintaining a separation from society.
In so doing, successful art is in a constant state of flux, as it comes close to
society, in order to draw from it, while always retreating back to its position of
alterity, from which it gives to the things of everyday life a new and unfamiliar
perspective. This ‘movement’ is inherent in successful art, and is the key to its
ability to give its audience a transformative aesthetic experience. As Adorno
writes:
[Art] is defined by its relation to what it is not. The specifically artistic in

art must be derived concretely from its other… Art acquires its specificity
by separating itself from what it developed out of; its law of movement is
its law of form. It exists only in relation to its other; it is the process that
transpires with its other.10
The effect of this movement is twofold. In the first instance, it establishes

the work as other to a society in stasis; second, it draws its viewer, reader, or
listener away from him- or herself, as a member of that society. In this way, an
affective aesthetics exercises its capacity for the transformation of its subject:
one is in a ‘different place’ after experiencing successful culture than
6. Theodor W. Adorno, “Farewell to Jazz,” Essays on Music, p. 496.

7. Theodor W. Adorno, “Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait,” Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on
Modern Music, Rodney Livingstone (trans.) (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 145.
8. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 1.
9. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 225-226.
10. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 3.
104
beforethis experience. Or, to use the familiar discourses of psychoanalysis and

post-structuralism, successful art ‘decenters’ the subject.11
Defamiliarisation and Affectivity

This movement inherent to successful culture describes the aesthetic effect
of ‘defamiliarization’. First theorized by Viktor Shklovsky in his seminal
essay, “Art as Technique” (1917), defamiliarization (отстранение) is the
aesthetic experience in which a work of art is able to make difficult and
unfamiliar the cultural forms and social discourses to which we have grown
accustomed through habit and repetition.12 This effect is evident, Shklovsky
writes, in Leo Tolstoy’s short stories, in which Tolstoy uses the technique to
“prick the conscience” of his readers, forcing them to recognise the
contingency and transience of the configuration of everyday life that habit
teaches us to accept as normal and natural.13 The aesthetics of
defamiliarisation preserves the content of everyday life, but calls into question
the inevitability of its configuration by presenting an alternative configuration
of what everyday life could be. It is therefore the background aesthetics of the
work that successfully maintains its precarious autonomy from a society from
which it takes its content, while reworking that content.
For Adorno, no cultural movement has had a greater decentering effect,

either on its own medium or on its audience than the invention of atonal music
by Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples in the Second Viennese School.
Adorno’s evident bias in this regard—he studied composition under Alban
Berg, himself a student of Schoenberg’s—is not unjustified, and is carried by
the weight of Adorno’s musicological insights into the novelty of the
compositional techniques employed by this School. Adorno gives the reader a
critical glimpse into how the composers of this School developed a method
that freed music from the constraints that classicism placed on composers.
Atonalism: The Defamiliarization of Music

The strangeness of Schoenberg's music makes an immediate impact on its
listener, no matter how familiar one may be with his music. It always appears
as if Schoenberg had deliberately set out to offend good taste. Certain elements
of his music are familiar, of course. He composes with the same familiar
instruments as the classical music we have been exposed to throughout our
lives. Likewise, Schoenberg has not somehow invented any new notes, which
might appear different to those Mozart had at his disposal. The ‘offending’,
provocative aspect of Schoenberg’s music lies in how he combines those
resources together, with obvious disregard for the long-accepted rules for how
11. For the range of fields that draw on this notion of the decentred subject, see the excellent
volume, Who Comes after the Subject? Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (eds)
(New York and London: Routledge, 1991).
12. Отстранение (Ostranenie) also carries connotations of ‘strangeness’ (странный /stranii)
and ‘estrangement’ (отстранять/otstranyat’).
13. Viktor Shklovksy, “Art as Technique,”‖in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (eds), Literary
Theory: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), p. 16.
105
‘classical’ music is meant to sound. This is the core principle of atonal music:
to offer a transformative aesthetic experience that radically undermines the
cultural apparatus that guided the development of music through the classical
period. The label ‘atonal’ is to be taken in a rhetorical sense, as a rejection of
the systems of tonality that underpinned and constrained the work of classical
composers. Adorno writes that, as a ‘slogan’, ‘atonal’ “registers with some
precision the shock-waves” caused by Schoenberg’s music. Above all, it
represents a rejection of the way tonality marginalizes dissonance in music.
Harmonic dissonance pervades Schoenberg's music, which jars the ear and
violates the concept of accepted musicality and harmony. Schoenberg himself
describes the experience of listening to his music as a “sense-interrupting”
experience,14 a sentiment echoed by Adorno, who writes that it is the “shock of
[its] strangeness and enigmatic form” that makes new art “so hard to
understand,” at least by a naïve “public.”15 To the naïve ear, Schoenberg
appears to have inverted the hierarchy of consonance and dissonance. Even
before we have the language to express it, we know that the nice-sounding
music is meant to take priority over the ugly-sounding music, or, at worst,
composers are allowed to employ dissonance, but only in the service of
heightening the drama of consonance. Composers are given license to indulge
in dissonance in the third movement, but only to heighten the drama of the
harmonic resolution achieved in the fourth movement.Schoenberg inverts this
accepted (‘natural’) hierarchy. He does not make any false promises of
offering a dramatic happy resolution, because his music has nothing—no tonic
center—into which to resolve back. His music is simply an exploration of what
can be created when music can be composed without regard to any received
rules, and without conforming to what traditional (‘classical’) arbiters of good
taste expect. Schoenberg recognizes that it will be the job of future generations
to judge the success of his atonal music in offering his listeners a challenging,
totally transgressive and unexpected aesthetic experience.16
Schoenberg developed his new approach to composition by enacting

something akin to a phenomenological reduction in music. His development of
atonalism progressively stripped music back to its basic elements—the notes
or "pitch values"17—free of the "traditional prejudices"18 that constrained
14. Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea: Selected Writings, Leonard Stein (ed.), Leo Black
(trans.) (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), p. 216.
15. Theodor W. Adorno, “Why is the New Art So Hard to Understand?” Essays on Music, p.
127. This is a strange apologia, presented to an audience of Adorno’s peers on behalf of a naïve
listening public. It is disconcerting because it is one of the few places where the stereotype of
Adorno as a cultural elitist seems justified.
16. See Schoenberg, Style and Idea, p. 216.
17. “Pitch values” is a term for ‘notes’ that links tones to their objective frequency, thereby
stripping them of their subjective interpretation in terms of their pitch, duration, loudness, and
timbre.
18. This is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's term to signify the cognitive frames that structure our
perception of phenomena. A phenomenological reduction is a methodology for paring back these
prejudices to expose the phenomenon as it first appears to our sense certainty, before it becomes
106
classical composers’ freedom. Chief amongst these prejudices was the practice
of composing in a clearly defined key signature, such that classical music was
composed around a key’s tonic center. As a result, composers were expected to
observe a strict hierarchy of notes, privileging those seven notes that fell
within the heptatonic scale structured around that tonic center. The other five
notes were marginalised, preventing classical composers from employing
dissonance as a central motif in their compositions. It was as a result of this
prejudice that listening to classical music is a predictable and comfortable
experience, because the listener can be confident that any dissonance he
encounter will only be a temporary difficulty because the music always
reaches a comfortable resolution when it resolves back into its tonic center.
Schoenberg, however, considered neither ease of consumption nor
subscribing to 'rules' admirable qualities in art. He set out to create music that
was free from any constraints, even if it meant composing music that was
difficult and offensive to popular taste. However, in his own reflections on
how he came to invent atonalism and the twelve-tone technique of
composition, he is careful to reject any “accusations,” as he sees it, that his
music was a “revolution” in music.19 Instead, he argues that it was the
“necessary” evolution of the Romantic movement in music across the
nineteenth century. In order to understand Schoenberg, we must therefore take
a brief survey of what came before him.
Mahler’s Influence on Schoenberg20

With respect to the influence they had on Schoenberg, the most significant
composers of the nineteenth century were late-Romantics such as Brahms,
Beethoven and Mahler. As a whole, late-Romanticism brought music into line
with the ethos of free individual expression that characterised Romantic
philosophy. In order to achieve this, the Romantic composers dramatically
expanded the musical vocabulary, freeing their compositions from the
relatively conservative and conformist expectations of classical moderation
(das Mass). It was Mahler, above all, whom Schoenberg regarded as “one of
the greatest men and artists,”21 who took the most significant steps away from
classical “pitch-centricity”22 when he adopted ‘progressive tonality’ as a
legitimate compositional technique in his Second Symphony (1895).
Progressive tonality is the principle in which the movements of a Symphony
are composed in different keys. In Mahler’s case, the final movement of his
Second Symphony was composed in a different key (E-flat major) than the
an object of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty uses it throughout the introduction to Phenomenology

of Perception, Colin Smith (trans.) (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
19. Schoenberg, Style and Idea, p. 86.
20. See, for instance, Dika Newlin’s study of the relationship between the two in “Arnold
Schoenberg‘s Debt to Mahler,” Chord and Discord, 2, no. 5 (1945): 21-27.
22. This termed was coined by Arthur Berger in the context of an analysis of Stravinsky’s
atonal music. See Arthur Burger, “Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky,” Perspectives of
New Music, 2, no. 1 (1963): 11-42.
107
first movement (C minor).23 Mahler’s Second did not yet break from tonality,
since it still specifies each movement’s key signature at the outset to each
movement, but it undermined the hegemony of the tonic centre as the single
organizing principle of the work as a whole. The effect on music was
immediate. By the end of the century, significant doubts were emerging as to
whether “a tonic appearing at the beginning, at the end, or at any other point
really had a constructive meaning.”24 For Schoenberg himself, these doubts
coalesced some 10 years later in his realisation that "the traditional articulative
procedures” that determined how music was to be composed in the classical
period were “no longer adequate"25 to the task of guiding the development of
modern music in the twentieth century. It was in this sense that Schoenberg
regards his “method of composing with twelve tones” as having “grown out of
a necessity.”26
Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique formalised this break from
classicism.27 It is based on the principle that there is no hierarchy of tones: all
twelve semitones of the chromatic scale possess equal value,28 and composers
should be free to make use of all twelve, without regard to the traditional rules
that privilege harmonic consonance over dissonance. As Adorno has written,
Schoenberg “endowed even the chromatic accidentals of the key with the
character of powerful fundamental steps. In the end, every sound became
autonomous, all tones enjoyed equal rights, and the right of the tonic triad was
overthrown.” Schoenberg’s music, he writes, “rend the mantle of tonality, and
with it much that was interwoven with it.”29
For Schoenberg, the aim of this new technique was to “emancipate [of]
dissonance.”30 Dissonance was the final hurdle in the achievement of the
ultimate goal: “to start from the beginning and to construct music from what
were thought to be its primal elements.”31 To achieve this required nothing less
than giving to the listener a transformative aesthetic experience, one that could
retrain the listener to hear music in dissonance. And while he admits that his
own music was never received in this way, at least by contemporary audiences,
Schoenberg argues that Romanticism has precisely this impact on audiences:
The ear had gradually become acquainted with a great number of

dissonances, and so had lost the fear of their “sense-interrupting” effect.
One no longer expected preparations of Wagner’s dissonances or
23. Gustav Mahler, Symphonie No. 2 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1910).

25. George Perle, Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of
Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991), p. 1.
27. See Perle, Serial Composition and Atonality for an exhaustive but accessible discussion of
Schoenberg’s technique.
28. The chromatic scale consists of the twelve semitones that constitute an octave.
29. Theodor W. Adorno, “Toward an Understanding of Schoenberg,” Essays on Music, p.
636.
31. Theodor Adorno, “Berg’s Discoveries in Compositional Technique,” Quasi una Fantasia,
p. 179.
108
resolutions of Strauss’s discords; one was not disturbed by Debussy’s non-

functional harmonies, or by the harsh counterpoint of later composers.32
Schoenberg thus concludes that the 100-year genesis of Romantic music, of

which his own compositions are a necessary evolution, has indeed had a
transformative, decentering influence on its audience and has succeeded in
prizing this audience away from its comfortable and familiar listening habits.
In doing so, modern music meets Adorno's criterion for successful culture.
Adorno was, of course, writing with the benefit of an historical perspective
that allowed him to identify how Schoenberg extended the work of the late-
Romantics they both admired so ardently. Adorno even identifies the specific
moment in Mahler’s development that necessitated Schoenberg’s atonalism:
the finale of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, which Adorno calls the “caesura in
Mahler’s development,” marking a split between all that came before and
“everything that comes after it,” which “finally melts the crust of form” and
“breaks out of the pre-established musical space.”33
From Successful Art to the Culture Industry

It is in these most dramatic terms that Adorno frames the impact that
successful culture can have on a society in a state of stasis. It is against the
background of this society-transforming drama that he turns to develop his
critique of the culture industry. It is at this point that this paper’s analysis
diverges from Adorno’s. Adorno used his musicological analyses as a
springboard for developing a critique of the culture industry, whereas this
paper uses that same analysis as a springboard for taking a more serious
phenomenological account of a particular example of contemporary popular
music—the instrumental hip-hop of DJ Shadow—to make the argument that it
is possible for popular music to exhibit Schoenbergian qualities. The measure
of Schoenberg, in this sense, is not to be found in superficial qualities such as
the ease or difficulty of the listening experience, but in substantial, aesthetic
qualities, such as the effort a text makes to distance itself from the cultural
apparatus that shapes its production. In DJ Shadow, we see an example of
popular music adopting the same, defamiliarizing and decentering stance
towards the standardized and formulaic aesthetic forms of the culture industry
that characterized Schoenberg’s relationship to the cultural apparatus of
classicism. This is not, of course, Adorno’s view of the culture industry.
For Adorno, the chief fault of the culture industry is that it renders culture
docile, impotent, and incapable of surprising us. Through the mechanism of
the ‘star system,’ the culture industry participates in a society that "neutralizes"
art's alterity, thus firmly stamping every product with “sameness” that
“nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, or does not meet with
approval at first sight.”34 In this, the position of the ‘star’ at the centre of the

33. Theodor W. Adorno, “Mahler Today,” Essays on Music, p. 609.
34. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. John Cumming
(trans.) (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 128.
109
text is critical. The personality of the ‘star’ functions to determine how a text is
consumed, ensuring that popular culture can never ‘stray’ too far from its
standardized form, since any deviation from the norm is always part of that
star’s appeal. Max Horkheimer and Adorno observed this in the way the name
‘Orson Welles’ was deployed by the culture industry to transform his
creativity into a ‘selling point’. Welles’s name came to signify ‘creativity’ in
popular culture, so that no matter how new or different his productions were,
he could never shock his audience, because in being shocking he was only ever
living up to what everyone already expected of him. The effect, as Horkheimer
and Adorno write, is that Welles’s creativity is neutralised by the culture
industry, since “whenever [he] offends against the tricks of the trade, he is
forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated
mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the
system.”35
We can see in the music of DJ Shadow, however, an example of creativity
in popular music escaping the star system, precisely because its author is
entirely absent from his music. This is a result of the ‘cut’n’paste’
compositional technique he employs to create his music. This analysis of DJ
Shadow’s music will conduct a close, phenomenological reading of two of his
songs from his first two albums, to show how DJ Shadow’s innovations in
technique led to the construction of popular music that challenges and rejects
the authority of standardization.
DJ Shadow
DJ Shadow, according to his marketing profile, is an instrumental hip-hop
artist. This perhaps helps inform what music we should expect to get from
him--songs founded on heavy drum and bass rhythms, but topped off with lush
melodies and instrumental soundscapes rather than with rapped lyrics.
However, this categorisation does not accurately reflect the music that we
encounter when we take time to listen to DJ Shadow, especially his first two
albums, Endtroducing.... (1996) and Private Press (2002). To be sure, the
heavy rhythms and lush soundscapes are there, but his music only uses the
genre as a stepping-off point for going beyond the standardized aesthetic forms
of that genre. Music critics rarely comment on whether his music adheres to
the formal standards of the genre. Instead, critics celebrate his music for
employing a standard compositional technique in hip-hop music--'sampling'--
but using it in a radically new way that has helped to re-define what hip-hop
musicians are able to do with the resources at their disposal. As the influential
popular music magazine, Melody Maker--long the arbiter of popular music
taste in London--wrote in their review of the album,
Endtroducing.... flips hip hop inside out all over again like a reversible
glove, and again, and again, and each time it's sudden and new. I am, I
35. Ibid., p. 129.
110
confess, totally confounded by it. I hear a lot of good records, but very few
impossible ones....You need this record. You are incomplete without it.36
The Schonbergian Quality of DJ Shadow’s Music

While the popular music press are in the habit of turning to ridiculous
hyperbole when they come across something new and different in a world of
banal sameness, it is nevertheless significant that DJ Shadow’s music has been
framed in these terms, because it points to the Schoenbergian qualities
underlying his music. This is evident both in the technique and the radically
widened musical vocabulary DJ Shadow employs to create his music.
In the first instance, like Schoenberg, DJ Shadow employs a compositional
technique pared back to its basic elements, stripped free of any unnecessary
extra layers of composition. In the case of hi-hop music, the core element is
the sample—a short section of an instrument or a drum and bass motif, taken
from another’s music, and then mixed into the new song. In hip-hop, samples
are often used to provide the song’s foundation rhythm section, and the lyrics
and synthesizers are added as layers on top of this sample. DJ Shadow,
however, strips lyrics and synthesizers from this standard hip-hop formula and
composes with samples alone. As the readings of his music presented below
will show, stripping hip-hop back to its most basic element in this way allows
DJ Shadow to reconstruct new music without regard to the standard formulae
for how hip-hop is ‘meant’ to sound. The samples he employs, their tempo and
pitch altered to fit his new songs, not only form the rhythm section of the new
song but every other instrument or vocal section that one comes across in
Endtroducing…. and Private Press. Indeed, Endtroducing…. is renowned for
being the first album to ever be produced from samples alone. This is an
impressive feat considering the album is over an hour long, and several songs
run for between six and nine minutes—well beyond the radio-friendly pop
standard of three and a half minutes.
It is a feat made possible by the radically expanded range of musical
resources that DJ Shadow has availed himself of, as the owner of one of the
largest private record collections in the world—some 60,000 records.37
Moreover, his encyclopedic knowledge of his record collection gives DJ
Shadow access to a range of sounds and instruments that are usually beyond
the scope of standardized hip-hop music. His use of a mandolin as the central
motif in the song “You Can’t Go Home Again,” from Private Press, which is
examined below, illustrates his willingness to use his vastly expanded musical
vocabulary and pared down technique to produce music that places him in a
unique position in relation to the ‘star system’ at the heart of the culture
industry.
As the readings of DJ Shadow’s music presented below show, this music
has the effect of killing off DJ Shadow as its ostensible 'author', and removing
36. "DJ Shadow, 'Gloaming Instinct'," Melody Maker. Available at:

www.djshadow.com/about/press-archive/gloaming-instinct, accessed on October 3, 2012.
37. Sleevage, “DJ Shadow: Entroducing,” 26 June, 2007. Available at: sleevage.com/dj-
shadow-endtroducing/, viewed on: 18 September, 2012.
111
him from a star system that seeks to determine our interpretation of his
music.38 Instead, this music has many authors--as many authors as it has
samples--but no central 'star' at its center. DJ Shadow never sings in his music,
nor does he play any instruments. His music instead is marked by his absence,
and by preventing us trying to interpret the lyrics presented in this or that song
back to what we know about his personal life. Instead, DJ Shadow is the
bricoleur: part musical archeologist and part technician, but usually shrouded
in darkness at the back of the stage in his live shows, or hidden behind the
pseudonym ‘DJ Shadow’.
Reading DJ Shadow’s Music

The two songs given close phenomenological readings here illustrate the
Schoenbergian qualities of DJ Shadow’s music most vividly. The first,
“Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain,” from Endtroducing….39 illustrates DJ
Shadow’s Schoenbergian technique, of a stripped back sampling being used
without extraneous layers of live vocals or synthesizers layered on top, except
insofar as they are themselves samples. The second song, “You Can’t Go
Home Again,” from Private Press,40 illustrates the Schoenbergian attitude of
DJ Shadow’s music, as it explores the utility of standard popular music forms,
before ultimately rejecting them and moving on to construct an entirely new
music based on its primal elements. Because DJ Shadow’s music is
constructed in this way and achieves the defamiliarizing effect that it does, it
therefore qualifies as successful culture, in Adorno’s terms, even though it is a
brand of music that Adorno would reject as one more commercial ‘deviation’
from the norm.
"Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain"

It is evident from the outset that Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain does not
conform to any kind of standardized popular music form.41 It has not been
performed by any readily identifiable musicians, and DJ Shadow’s voice is
never heard on the track. From the outset, it is clear that this is a track without
an authorial figure at its center. Instead, the few vocals that appear in the song
are anonymous samples and what they say is so abstract that it is difficult to
pin down where they may have come from or what they ‘mean’. Unlike the
hip-hop formula, in which the vocals lie at the song’s core, here, they are
38. See Michel Foucault’s discussion of how great writing has the effect of killing off its
author in “What is an Author?” Josué V. Harari (trans.) in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology.
Vol. 2, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, James D. Faubion (ed.) (London: Allen Lane,
1998), pp. 206-207.
39. DJ Shadow, “Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain,” Endtroducing…. Mowax CDP 1152555,
1996, compact disc.
40. DJ Shadow, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” Private Press. MCA CDP 3632880, 2002,
compact disc.
41. The awkward phrasing here, which attributes agency to the song itself rather than its
composer, is on account of the requirements of a phenomenological reading. Because DJ Shadow
does not appear in his own music, a strict phenomenological reading requires us to restrict this
discussion to what presents itself in the music, and avoid the temptation to link what appears in
the music back to DJ Shadow’s creativity or anything we might know about his personality.
112
treated as but one more sample out of the approximately 20 used to construct
the song.42 These samples, which are broadly broken down into that relating to
drums, vocals, keyboards, strings, and guitars, slip in and out of the song and
are given no particular prominence. Instead, the central motif, if the song can
be said to have one, is the act of composition itself. The song is concerned
with exploring how music is composed, and it cycles through its samples,
exploring how they can be layered upon one another in different
configurations, both exploiting, and ultimately rejecting the utility of the ‘pop’
formula in its first two configurations. The song, it seems, has been composed
through a process of trial-and-error, not according to a distinct pre-determined
formula. The song is not ‘ready to go’ from the outset, as we would expect
from a song composed according to a standardized formula.
The first configuration unfolds as samples of a guitar riff (2:36), a haunting
vocal, chimes, a keyboard and strings are layered on top of one another,
culminating in what could be mistaken for the foundations of a ‘pop’ song by
the three minute mark. However, just as it sound like the song should be
coming to its radio-friendly conclusion after a neat four minutes, the drums
drop out of the song, leaving only the guitar, haunting vocals and chimes
behind. The first attempt at producing a song out of these samples, it seems,
has failed.
The second attempt at constructing a song takes up in the space left by the
first attempt, with a pared back hi-hat, playing the song’s basic rhythm, which
by now has graduated into a 32nd-note rhythm (3:55). The hi-hat pans from one
ear to the next, creating an uncanny sense of space in the middle of the mix
that has the effect of decentering the drums from the center of the listening
experience. The pared back hi-hat is again joined by a bass drum (4:34), and
soon after (4:48) by a snare drum, which completes the rebuilding of the drums
in preparation for the second attempt at building a song.
The song’s second phase unfolds in a similar fashion to the first, but with
the samples combined in a different configuration. As with the first phase, the
bass guitar (5:26), keyboards and chimes (5:53), the haunting vocals (6:13)
and strings (6:45) progressively rejoin the drums, establishing a much more
sedate and docile tone for this second phase of the song. The additional layer
of the strings in particular gives the song a sense of resolution, as though it
only had to strip itself free of the pop guitar riff, and having done so, one can’t
help but wonder why the song needs to go for another two and a half minutes.
But it has not yet fully accomplished its goal of stripping itself back to its
basic elements. The guitar re-enters (7:25), although, following the lead of the
rest of the song, it is now buried under reverb and sounds like a hollowed-out
shell compared to its first appearance in the song. But even at its most docile,
it is obvious that the guitar—the mainstay of popular music—does not have a
42. This is an estimate based on a close listening to DJ Shadow’s music on headphones,

which the complexity of these songs demand. Fans’ online attempts to catalogue the source of the
samples used in DJ Shadow’s music have met with limited success. Other samples used in this
song include flute, bass guitar, panning guitar effect, thunder, acoustic guitar, birds chirping,
chimes, and strings.
113
place in this reconstructed hip-hop aesthetics that the song is building. Its
second appearance takes place in the margins of the song, and has receded out
of the song completely after only 30 seconds. It is followed soon after by the
bass (8:10), and drums (8:23), leaving only the strings and keyboards behind to
play out the final minute of the song, as the two survivors out of the 20-odd
samples that were used throughout the song. These, the song is saying, are the
foundations for a new music—one that shows no regard for the standardized
formulae and instruments of pop music. The drums appear one last time, to
escort the strings out of the song (9:01-9:15), but by now it is clear that the
strings are shaping the song, not the drums. After nine minutes, the ‘reduction’
and deconstruction of the pop mantel is complete.
"You Can’t Go Home Again"

“Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain” is a template for how DJ Shadow composed
his early albums, and returns in Private Press, in particular in the track, “You
Can’t Go Home Again.”
“You Can’t Go Home Again” has the same goal as “Napalm Brain/Scatter
Brain”— stripping back the apparatus of popular music—but is more overt in
pursuing that goal than the earlier song. Whereas “Napalm Brain/Scatter
Brain” set out to create a standard popular song, only to discover the need to
move beyond that generic framework, “You Can’t Go Home Again” starts
with the non-standardized statement of a mandolin, to show why standardized
popular music formulae are insufficient for supporting anything new or
different.
The song progresses through three stages, which broadly echoe the three
periods of Schoenberg’s musical evolution: the first, an exploration of the
accepted paradigm; the second, a rejection of that paradigm; the third -
building a new musical paradigm. For Schoenberg, this meant dismantling the
apparatus of tonality and freeing music from its pitch-centricity. For DJ
Shadow, this means dismantling the apparatus of standardization and removing
generic compositional formulae from the center of popular music.
When listening to “You Can’t Go Home Again,” one is immediately struck

by the mandolin motif that marks both its opening, and its refusal to conform
to well-known popular music formulae. The mandolin is an uncommon
presence in popular music generally,43 and entirely rare in hip-hop. The hip-
hop listener expects to be greeted by heavy bass and drums or vocals, not by a
very fragile ‘ethnic’ sounding mandolin, associated with Italiante folk music
and the tarantella traditional dance. The mandolin’s fragility is reinforced by
the crackles and pops of the record from which it has been sampled. As the
song develops, it becomes clear that its aim is to find an appropriate sonic
43. Notable exceptions to this are the opening of Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Cóndor Pasa”
(1970), from which this sample is taken, and REM’s “Losing My Religion” (1991). Contributors
to the website www.mandolincafe.com maintain a list of rock songs that include mandolin.
Available at: www.mandolincafe.com/forum/showthread.php?18398-listing-of-rock-songs-w-
mando. Accessed on: September 30, 2012.
114
background to support this mandolin, which recurs four times across the
song’s seven minutes.
Immediately following the mandolin, a brief vocal interlude sets the tone
for the rest of the song—“And here’s a story about being free” (0:37). It is
only then that we are confronted by the familiar sounds of popular music, with
drums and bass pushing the song forward at a brisk tempo,44 with an emphatic
beat that is highlighted by claves (1:02), and juxtaposed to the sedate
mandolin, which re-enters, already sounding out of place, at 1:11. However, it
is immediately evident that the entire middle of the sound is missing. There is
a lot at the lower end of the mix, and the mandolin fills the top end of the mix,
but nothing in between the two. The song tries to fill the gap with a well-worn
popular music cliché. Keyboards are progressively layered into the middle of
the sound, the first playing a simple eight-note motif (1:48) followed by
another, very high in the mix, providing an accompaniment to the mandolin
(2:05), but only serving to exaggerate the hole in the middle of the sound. That
hole slowly starts to fill when an indistinguishable growl is inserted into the
middle of the sound (2:17), filling it out with noise, and a third keyboard, this
one even higher than the previous, eventually overwhelming the mandolin,
which recedes into the background and out of the song (2:26).
As if it has already grown tired of the keyboard formula, having found it
lacking the ability to provide basic support to the mandolin, the song turns to a
second popular music cliché, the rock guitar. Suddenly hyperactive drums
signal its entry (2:47), with the guitar playing a simple riff to mark the
departure of the keyboards. The guitar quickly assumes the center of the song
(3:05) with a riff that one would expect to come across in the soundtrack of a
Hollywood high school musical film. Due to its busyness, the song sounds as
if it was being distracted, seemingly forgetting the mandolin altogether (3:22),
sounding like it is quickly descending into farce. But it is not. The song is in
fact exposing itself as a parody of formulaic music: it is showing that the
utility of formulaic music is limited to easy listening and “effortless
consumption,”45 but that it has run out of energy after only four minutes.
As if signaling the arrival of the second half of the song, the sound is
stripped back to its basic drum beat, accompanied only by keyboards panning
from ear to ear (4:12), which are laying the foundations for a new attempt at
composing the song. As in “Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain,” the panning creates
an uncanny sense of space in the middle of the song, juxtaposing the drums,
which have never strayed from the middle of the mix. And it is upon this new
basis, stripped of any formulae that might dictate how they are to be combined,
that the samples are progressively reintroduced. This time, they sound
different. The instruments no longer seek to dominate the middle of the mix.
Instead, each is added couched in reverb, hollowed out, creating a sound that is
now capable of accommodating the fragile mandolin. It is significant that this
44. This song is composed at approximately 140 BPM.

45. This term “effortless consumption” is coined by Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover in an article
on popular culture. See “History as Pastiche in the Postmodern Detective: Eco’s The Name of the
Rose,” The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 13, no. 1 (2008): 57-78.
115
new sound tends to develop at the song’s periphery, with keyboards often
entering at different points in the mix, sometimes at the extreme ‘left’, other
times at the ‘lower right’, before moving cautiously to the ‘center’ of the mix.
Listening to DJ Shadow on headphones that effectively block out any ambient
sound, immersing the listener in the effect of the music’s panning, from one
ear to the other.
The effect is a song that is progressively emerging out of its parts, rather
than being produced according to a pre-conceived plan. And so, even when the
rock guitar modestly re-enters (5:20), playing the same formulaic riff as the
one which appeared earlier in the song, it now sounds like it fits the somber
mood of the song. Deciding that this is a sound that is able to support the
mandolin, the song breaks back to the drums and panning keyboard one last
time (5:54), for four bars, before the full complement of instruments returns,
this time topped off with the mandolin (5:59), which carries the song through
to its conclusion. The song finishes where it began, with the rest of the sound
gradually fading into the background, leaving only a basic drum beat to play
out the final seconds.
DJ Shadow: Decentering Standardisation

This is by no means a comprehensive analysis. This paper has addressed
only a very small part of DJ Shadow’s body of work. Nevertheless, we can see
a Schoenbergian quality in DJ Shadow’s music, insofar as it maintains a
critical relationship to the popular musical tradition of hip-hop which it
inherits.
For this reason, there is a case to be made that DJ Shadow’s music qualifies,
at least in principle, as ‘successful’ culture, according to Adorno’s criteria. It
adopts a position of alterity to the expectations of mainstream popular music
taste, and functions to defamiliarize our popular music listening experience,
using the familiar instruments and forms of popular music, but employing
them in ways that challenge our accepted conceptions of how those
instruments are meant to be used. Of course, Adorno himself would respond to
this suggestion by pointing out that the reality is that the name of DJ Shadow
is used as a marketing device, in the same was as Orson Welles is. Insofar as
DJ Shadow makes music that is different to the norm, that ‘difference’
becomes its selling point, and a tool that ends up serving the system it puts into
question. And, of course, Adorno would be right in this regard. We cannot
escape the fact that when we go searching for this music on iTunes, it is the
name of ‘DJ Shadow’ that we use to find it. Under these conditions, it is
questionable whether any popular music is able to ‘prick the conscience’ of its
listener, as Schoenberg certainly does. But at the very least it highlights the
need to recognize that popular culture is deserving of the same serious
aesthetic consideration to which we have always subjected the canon of High
culture, to which Schoenberg belongs, and that popular music is not a priori
disqualified from being considered ‘successful’ simply on the basis that it is a
product of the culture industry.
Monash University
116
CHRISTIAN GRIFFITHS
NEW JERUSALEM: MUSICOLOGY AND THE MARXIST

AESTHETICS
The song that is popularly known as Jerusalem was written in 1916 by

British composer Sir Hubert Parry (1848–1918), from a lyric by William Blake
that first appeared in 1804. Although the song has maintained an immense
popular appeal since the time of its creation,1 Western musicology has not
treated it as a work of particular aesthetic interest. The highly tonal form of the
song, as well as its tendency towards congregational performance, has
rendered it somewhat passé among the atonalism that dominates discussions of
early-twentieth-century music. Moreover, the appropriation of the song by the
Church of England in the 1920s has often led to it being mistakenly identified
as a “hymn,”2 a designation that arguably serves its marginalisation in
musicology by placing it within the conservative category of “sacred music.”
However, Jerusalem has also been connected with a variety of political causes
in its history, and the origins of the song reveal its close relationship to Marxist
thought in Great Britain in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The
undercurrents of the song’s performance history, as well as its enduring
populism, have invested Jerusalem with a revolutionary spirit that is still felt
today.3 More than this, however, these contexts demonstrate that the song
embodies a directly Marxist aesthetics in music, in accordance with a model
initially pursued by British composer, Cornelius Cardew (1936–1984).4 When
examined in light of this aesthetics, Jerusalem is revealed to have considerable
impact on the grand narratives of Western musicology, for it demonstrates the
extent to which those narratives are founded on elitist principles, and
furthermore furnishes a model according to which the “emancipation” of
music can only occur in a space beyond historical narratives.
In “Music and Postmodernism,” Jean-Francois Lyotard argues that the
grand narratives of Western history create their impression of progress
through the recurring trope of “emancipation,” whereby each “event” in
history is integrated into a continuous narrative of mankind freeing itself from
various repressive structures.5 “Postmodernity” is the condition that arises
when the meaning of “emancipation” can no longer be sustained within the
1. Jessica Duchen, “Hubert Parry - Royal appointment for a radical voice,” The Independent,
Friday 20 May 2011.
2. See n. 28, below.
3. Michael Ferber, “Blake's 'Jerusalem' as a Hymn,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 34, no. 4
(2000), p. 89.
4. Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1999), p. 138.
5. Jean-François Lyotard, “Music and Postmodernity,” New Formations (2009), p. 37.
narrative sequence, and thereby the “collapse” of the narrative gives way to a
mode of experience that is unmediated by such unifying structures.6 Lyotard
claims that “emancipation” becomes a feature of the historical narrative
through the influence of Christianity, and in more recent times through
Marxism,7 a reading that regards Marxism’s promise of emancipation as an
analogical recurrence of that offered by Christianity.8
In this paper, I would like to explore the possibility that these emancipatory
paradigms of the grand narratives are not merely linked by analogy, but rather
that their continuity is typological. In this context, “emancipation” is not
regarded merely as an incidental element of the narrative, but is instead
recognized as the principle that generates the narrative’s form, and is moreover
able to survive its “postmodern” collapse.
In this context, “typology” refers to a model of “promise and fulfillment,”
where the “promise” of emancipation can only be “fulfilled” in a space that
transcends the narrative of history. This definition of “typology” derives from
the traditional scholarship of the Bible, where it is applied to the doctrinal ideal
that the gospel of Jesus Christ simultaneously fulfills and transcends the law of
the Torah.9 Northrop Frye argues that such readings arise because the Bible is
structured on the mutually reflexive “types” of the Old and New Testament.
The emancipatory “types” of the Bible are therefore read as a cycle of
signification that places their fulfillment outside the temporal order, thereby
transcending the narrative of history.10 Frye also argues that the development
of revolutionary thought between the Reformation and the rise of Marxism
was itself an “intensifying of the original revolutionary impulse in Biblical
religion.”11 If Christianity and Marxism can therefore be connected in a
typological order where Marxism is revealed as both the fulfillment and the
transcendence of Christianity, it can be shown that the narrative’s promise of
“emancipation” is fulfilled outside of history. Lyotard’s contention that the
grand narrative fails because the principle of “emancipation” can no longer be
sustained within it is challenged by a Marxist aesthetics that proposes that the
grand narrative is an “elitist” structure that suppresses emancipation, and that
the narrative’s collapse provides the stimulus for its resurgence.
*****
6. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi
(trans.) (Minneapolis, MA: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 37 - 39.
7. Lyotard, “Music and Postmodernity,” p. 37.
8. See Northrop Frye, The Great Code. The Bible and Literature (London, Melbourne and
Henley: Routledge, 1982), p. 86.
9. Ibid., p. 84.
10. Ibid., pp. 78-84.
11. Ibid., p. 86.
The principles of Marxism have long been interpreted as promising

liberation from theological doctrine;12 however, the realization that the
writings of the Bible also contain the same promise has only been upheld by its
most radical readers. One such reader was the visionary poet of the late-
eighteenth century, William Blake, whose immersion in biblical literature is
regarded as the primary influence on his creative output.13 Many of Blake’s
political orientations appear contradictory: on one hand he was a staunch
revolutionary who regarded with reverence both the American and French
Revolutions of his own lifetime;14 yet he was highly skeptical about the
enlightenment philosophies of empiricism that underwrote them, regarding
them as dissipating the human potential for imaginative vision.15 Likewise, his
engagement with the literature of the Bible stands in firm contrast to the
contempt with which he regarded the repressive structures of the “Church.”16
In 1804, Blake authored a grand prophetic work titled Milton, which features a
prose preface that explicitly decries the tendency of Christian thought to
subvert its own liberating function through its orientation to the writings of
pre-Christian classicism, which he argues are uniformly inferior to the
literature of the Bible.17 The preface concludes with a poetic text of four
stanzas, beginning with the lines “And did those feet in ancient time/Walk
upon England’s mountains green” (see appendix), which is perhaps the most
famous text that Blake ever wrote, even if many who encounter it do not
associate it with his authorship.
This poetic text is worthy of critical attention, since the manner in which it
reflects the apparent contradictions of Blake’s own politics epitomizes the
typological relation between Christianity and Marxism. For example, the term
“dark Satanic Mills” (l. 8) has been interpreted as referring to the great
cathedrals of the English reform churches,18 as well as the academic
institutions that arose through the Enlightenment’s emphasis on empiricism.19
In contrast with this radical stance, the poetic text relies heavily on biblical
imagery: the unnamed figure in the opening stanzas is the “lamb of God,”
while the ideal city of God proposed in the closing lines of the text is given the
name “Jerusalem,” an image that typologically links the Old and New
Testament. Blake’s text therefore reveals a reading of the Bible that sees it
extending a promise of liberation that, while very much alive, can no longer be
fulfilled by the historical institutions it has founded.
12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Samuel Moore (trans.)
(London: Penguin, 1985), p. 103.
13. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947), p. 44.
14. David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press,
1969), pp. 50, 130.
15. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 14.
16. Ibid., p. 343.
17. William Blake, “Milton,” in W. H. Stevenson (ed.) The Poems of William Blake (London:
Longman Group, 1971), p. 487.
18. Mark Chapman, “William Blake, Hubert Parry, And the Singing of 'Jerusalem',” The
Hymn - A Journal of Congregational Song, 62, nos. 2-3 (2011), p. 44.
19. Nancy M. Goslee, “'In England's Green & Pleasant Land': The Building of Vision in
Blake's Stanzas from “Milton,”“ Studies in Romanticism, 13, no. 2 (1974), p. 118.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, distinctly Marxist elements had
emerged in the Church of England, and in this context Blake’s poetic text was
recognized as having the potential to support radical reform movements. In
1884, a maverick clergyman named Stewart Headlam, who vigilantly pursued
the cause of Christian Socialism, purchased a liberal newsletter called The
Church Reformer and adapted it to become the mouthpiece of his ideology.
One change he made in the format of the newsletter was to replace the
Reformer’s existing motto with the fourth stanza of Blake’s text, placing it in
bold type under the masthead of each edition, an act that would seem to align
Blake’s reading of the Bible with the ideals of Socialism.20 Although the
Reformer ceased publication in 1895, it appears that the use of Blake’s text had
come to exemplify a certain English radicalism that maintained strong links
with Christian thought.
The continuity of this association in Blake’s lyric is confirmed by its re-
emergence in the context of a First World War movement named “Fight for
Right,” which counted among its numbers many high-ranking members of
England’s cultural institutions. Although it was not strictly an anti-war
movement, “Fight for Right” promoted resistance against propaganda and
argued for a focus on “justice” over “victory” as the ideal outcome of war.21
One member of Fight for Right was Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, who also
recognized in Blake’s lyric the potential to promote and attract others to the
cause. With this end in mind, he approached his long-time friend composer
Hubert Parry, and asked if he would compose a musical setting for the lyric so
it could be sung at public rallies. Parry was not a member of Fight for Right
and was reportedly skeptical about its political orientations; however, he
assented to his friend’s request by providing the musical setting, now
commonly titled Jerusalem, which was first performed at a Fight for Right
rally in London on March 28, 1916.22
By all accounts, the new song-setting was highly effective and Jerusalem
quickly spread throughout England, both by word-of-mouth and in the form of
a published score.23 Although, in its first year, the song was generally
recognized as belonging to the Fight for Right cause, it also became popular
outside this context, and, when Fight for Right disintegrated in 1917, the song
was taken up by other political movements. The most notable of these was the
Women’s Suffrage movement of Great Britain, which had begun the informal
practice of closing their meetings with full congregational performances of the
song.24 In 1918, when the British Parliament passed an act giving women over
the age of thirty the right to vote, Millicent Fawcett, the President of the
National Union, invited Parry to conduct an orchestral setting of the song at a
celebration rally. Parry had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the song’s
association with Fight for Right, and, being an unreserved supporter of the
20. Chapman, “William Blake, Hubert Parry, And the Singing of 'Jerusalem',” p. 44.
21. Ibid., p. 45.
22. Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry. His Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992),
pp. 483-484.
23. Ferber, “Blake's 'Jerusalem' as a Hymn,” p. 85.
Women’s Suffrage movement, he was more than eager to endorse the song’s
association with this new cause. He agreed to Fawcett’s request and, despite
his own worsening health, performed the song with orchestra and choir at the
rally in March 1918.25
Parry died later that year, and Jerusalem soon after began to take on a life
of its own, being embraced by a wide variety of political causes.26
Notwithstanding its continuing vitality as a political song, it began to appear in
English liturgical books as early as 1923, and has since come to be commonly
regarded as a “hymn”.27 However, despite the widespread acceptance of this
term, including its use in scholarly commentaries,28 the designation remains
highly problematic. For one thing, English hymnody employs specific metrical
formulae to which Jerusalem does not conform;29 Parry himself was a frequent
writer of hymn melodies and would have undoubtedly been clear on the
distinction.30 His setting of Blake’s lyric, while it is certainly suitable for
congregational singing, is more metrically developed and melodically complex
than traditional hymnody allows.31 More important than this formal issue,
however, is the charge that Blake’s lyric does not “glorify God” in the explicit
manner required of hymn texts.32 Although it employs biblical imagery, it is
properly regarded as a secular lyric, and it can therefore still be excluded from
Christian liturgy on precisely these grounds.33
While the general acceptance of Jerusalem as a “hymn” has no doubt tended
to conceal its origins as a political song, attempting to describe it solely in
political terms is also somewhat problematic. Even if it is accepted that
William Blake’s politics veer close enough to Marxist principles to be
considered essentially “leftist,” there is nothing in the lyric’s biblically-
oriented content to directly support this; it certainly depicts a struggle, but it is
never made clear in concrete terms who is struggling against whom. Indeed,
the forward-looking nature of the lyric virtually seems to require that its
political meaning is always open to heterogeneous interpretation. So, while the
identification of the lyric by left-leaning church organizations in the late-
nineteenth century seems to be in sympathy with Blake’s ideals, its adoption
by more conservative organizations in the early-twentieth century does not
seem to conflict with the lyric’s “meaning” in any serious way. If it is possible
to argue that Jerusalem exemplifies a Marxist aesthetics, then the claim cannot
25. Ibid.
26. Ferber, “Blake's 'Jerusalem' as a Hymn,” p. 82.
27. Ibid., p. 88.
28. Chapman, Duchen, Ferber, Goslee and Smith are among those that describe the song
unequivocally as a “hymn.” See also Lorna Gibson, “The Women's Institute and Jerusalem's
Suffrage Past,” Women's History Review, 15, no. 2 (2006): 323-335.
29. Nicholas Temperley, “Hymn: IV. Protestant. 3. The Modern English Hymn,” Grove
Music Online. Oxford Music Online. (2001).
30. Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry. His Life and Music, p. 534.
31. For example, see Ferber, “Blake's 'Jerusalem' as a Hymn,” p. 87.
32. D. E. Richardson, “Singing of Jerusalem in a Strange Land,” The Sewanee Review, 102,
no. 3 (1994), p. lxxx.
be made on the basis of its lyric alone. In order to seek out this connection, it is
necessary to approach it via the function of its musical aesthetics.
*****
According to Lyotard, the principle of “emancipation” is manifested in

musicology’s grand narrative as the “emancipation of sound.”34 This has
traditionally been interpreted as referring to developments of harmonic form,
but Lyotard argues that this tendency reflects a hierarchy in musicology where
music is divided into a system of sound-variables, of which pitch-value is the
most privileged.35 At the head of “Music and Postmodernity,” Lyotard quotes
the modernist composer Pierre Schaffer:
When there are no more rules at all, the time of atonalism has come. Of
what precedes it, absolutely nothing remains. Yet, the sound remains…
And the sound leaves immense remains.36
This encompasses Lyotard’s argument in miniature form: “atonalism”

posits an impasse where the project of “emancipation,” as it has been
fashioned in the narrative, cannot continue, for the “sound” that “remains” will
no longer sustain innovations to harmonic form. The impasse makes explicit
the determining influence that the pitch-dominated hierarchy wields in the
construction of the grand narrative of Western music; when the hierarchy is
recognized, it frees composers from its influence, and the condition that results
is that of “postmodernity.”37 However, Lyotard’s identification of this
hierarchy overlooks the determining influence of a far more pervasive
structure within the grand narrative of musicology, and one that invests the
narrative with an elitism that the Marxist aesthetics is poised to address; this is
the hierarchy that privileges the “composer” in musical experience.
In 1936, composer Edgard Varese (1883–1965) characterized the musical
avant-garde of his time by claiming: “We cannot, even if we would, live much
longer by tradition.”38 This statement is problematic, since it posits that there is
an element in music that can survive a separation from “tradition.” Varese’s
music is frequently atonal and chaotic, yet it retains links with a number of
traditional elements, such as the use of orchestral instruments, finite
ensembles, and standardized notation.39 John Cage (1912–1992), who was an
important beneficiary of Varese’s influence, argued that the most “traditional”

35. Ibid., p. 40.
36. Ibid., p. 37.
37. Ibid., p. 40.
38. Edgard Varese, “The Liberation of Sound,” in Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs (eds),
Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), p. 195.
39. Arnold Whittall, Music Since the First World War (London: J. M. Dent and Sons,
1977), p. 198.
element in Varese’s music was the determinacy of his compositions.40

“Determinacy” refers to the understanding that the score represents the
indisputable will of the composer, and therefore the only role of the performer
is to interpret it competently. In order to pursue a further break with
“tradition,” Cage developed “indeterminate” forms of music that sought to
remove the composer’s influence from the musical act as much as possible.41
This strategy was, however, only partially successful, for no matter how much
these “indeterminate” compositions were able to effect a separation from their
composer’s will, it is only through its authoritative attachment to the name of
“John Cage” that they were able to leave their touch on the “surface of
history”.42
It has been conversely argued that the principle of “tradition” is not merely
an element of music, but that it is the very essence of music, and that therefore
an absolute elimination of “tradition” will leave no trace of music
whatsoever.43 If, as Lyotard claims, the recurring principle of the grand
narrative is the “emancipation of sound,” then the impasse of “atonalism” does
not actually result in the collapse of the narrative. Lyotard cites such
“postmodern” composers as Cage and Pierre Boulez as figures who have
pursued the emancipation of sound outside of the pitch-dominated hierarchy.44
However, if the act of emancipation should extend to freeing the musical work
from any connection to a composer, then the names of the composers, as well
as the works they created, would vanish from the narrative altogether. In the
context of the ideal of Cage’s indeterminacy, it becomes clear that the
paradigm of the composer is the last “tradition” of musicology; it is the
indispensable element of the narrative, and its failure is the factor that forces
the narrative’s collapse.
If the grand narrative of music is therefore constructed on the privilege of
the composer, then the ideal of the “emancipation of sound” exists as nothing
more than an analogy for that privilege, where it is not a true form of
emancipation, but merely a symbol for it. The “collapse” of the narrative does
not occur because the principle of emancipation has failed, but rather because
the analogy of that principle, which has hitherto dominated the narrative, no
longer sustains it. However, when this point of impasse is reached, the
resulting collapse can enact a genuine “emancipation” from the narrative’s
determining structure. Emancipation remains, but rather than being an ideal
that is produced within the grand narrative, it instead comes to signify the
drive that gives the grand narrative its initial legitimacy. Since this drive
would implicitly exist “before” the beginning of the historical narrative, it
would also be able to survive the “collapse” and remain present beyond it. It
thereby becomes possible to imagine the collapse of the grand narrative as the
40. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1968),
p. 84.
41. Ibid., p. 7.
42. A term used by Lyotard, “Music and Postmodernity,” p. 37.
43. Fred Goldbeck, “Twentieth Century Composers and Tradition,” in Rollo H Meyers (ed.)
Twentieth Century Music (New York: The Orion Press, 1968), p. 27.
typological establishment of a “new law” that fulfills its promise of

emancipation in a synchronic space outside the historical sequence.
To understand how this might be understood in Marxist terms, it will be
necessary to first account for the influence of Marxism within musicology.
Through the post-War period, a schism was imposed on the traditions of art-
music: in Western Europe and America, the tendency of composers was
towards the “emancipation of sound,” which was facilitated through
manipulations of “traditional” musical structures.45 However, in the Soviet
Union and its satellite states, the prevailing socio-cultural orthodoxy alleged
that the avant-garde approaches of the West were a symptom of imperialist
decadence, and decreed that Socialist music must embrace populist forms,
such as tonal harmony and conventional orchestral genres.46 This aesthetics is
known as “socialist realism,” and it was adopted as official Soviet policy with
the cultural manifestoes of 1948.47 However, since the end of the Cold War,
socialist realism has become a discredited aesthetics in the grand narrative of
Western music, where it is understood to have produced “bad music” by
espousing “revolutionary aims in the socio-political sphere while adopting a
conservative canon of aesthetic values”.48
Lyotard’s own analysis of the Western tradition suggests that the
“progressive” canon of aesthetic values, against which socialist realism is
being judged, is itself highly contingent, as it is centered on the privileging of
pitch-values.49 Since the music of the West is traditionally oriented to the
pitch-dominated hierarchy, its innovations are fully determined by that
structure, and may therefore be regarded as being just as “conservative.” The
manner in which socialist realism in music fails to meet the emancipatory
expectations of Marxism can be made quite clear: just like the “decadent”
music of the West, its aesthetics is ordered on an “elitist” hierarchy that
privileges the composer over both the performer and the audience in musical
experience. In both East and West, the only function of the performer is to
possess the technical competence to interpret correctly the composer’s will
(however “indeterminately” it may be expressed), and the only role given to
the audience is to consume passively what the composer has offered. This
hierarchy is still in supreme place today within art-music, but there have been
intermittent attempts to deconstruct it, particularly by Marxist composers in
Western countries.
One such figure was British composer Cornelius Cardew, who was
primarily active in the 1960s and 1970s. Having studied under the
“progressive” composer Karlheinz Stockhausen,50 Cardew came to believe that
the structures of Western music were inherently elitist in their tendency to
privilege the “composer” over the other participants in the musical
45. Richard Taruskin, “Nationalism, 15. The last of the Herderians and the Cold War,” Grove
Music Online. Oxford Music Online.
46. Christopher Norris, “Socialist Realism,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online.
47. Taruskin, “Nationalism, 15. The last of the Herderians and the Cold War.”
48. Norris, “Socialist Realism.”
50. John Tilbury, “Cornelius Cardew,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online.
experience.51 Initially, Cardew sought to subvert this elitism by writing music

that gave considerable scope to performers, and furthermore by facilitating
ensembles that blurred the distinction between the performers and the
audience.52 In conventional terms, the music that was created in these
processes was highly “progressive,” and Cardew eventually came to regard
this as undermining his ideological aims, since the music seemed to appeal
solely to the same elitist audiences against which he was reacting.53 In the final
phase of his career, Cardew turned to what would conventionally be regarded
as a “conservative” aesthetics, composing works that employed tonality and
metrical song-forms. This was not a surrender to Socialist Realism, however,
but rather an orientation to a music that was to be experienced specifically in
the context of political action. To this end, he composed and arranged songs
that carried revolutionary orthodoxies in their lyrics, but which were simple
and rousing so they could be sung en masse by political congregations.54
Cardew pursed this program for several years without major success, and his
premature death in 1981 leaves unanswered the question of whether it would
have achieved its ultimate aims had it continued.55 Yet, even if Cardew failed
to personally meet the objectives of his musical ideologies, the Marxist
aesthetics he proposed may still be regarded as viable.
*****
The entry of music into history illustrates that the establishment of

musicology’s grand narrative is predicated on re-appropriating the ideal of
“emancipation” and reconstructing it in the elitist paradigm of the composer’s
“emancipation of sound.” Western music properly enters into the historical
narrative with the Ars Nova at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when
an orientation to polyphony began to supplant the hitherto anonymous
traditions of plainchant.56 The new polyphony placed considerable emphasis
on creative design, and thereby provided the rationale for centralizing the
“composer” in the discourse as the “emancipator” of sound.57 A Marxist
aesthetics that retains its links to the “revolutionary impulse of biblical
religion”58 might suggest that the music of the Church was not in need of
“emancipation” by specialists, but rather that its music precisely embodied the
gospel’s promise of liberation through the collective worship-experience it
offered, and that the transfer of music into the hands of an elite was a violation
51. Cornelius Cardew, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, and Other Articles (London: Latimer
New Dimensions, 1974), p. 53.
52. Nyman, Experimental Music, p. 138.
53. Cardew, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, p. 101.
54. Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After. Directions since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1995), p. 188.
55. Tilbury, “Cornelius Cardew.”
56. J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western
Music, 8 ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2010), p. 117.
57. Ibid., p. 113.
58. Frye, The Great Code. The Bible and Literature, p. 86.
of that promise. In describing the function of the Marxist aesthetics in music,

the synchronic models of sacred music are somewhat useful, since they
subordinate the privilege of the “composer” to the worship-function of music.
In this model, the creation of music is denied the connection to a “composer”
that allows it to be “inscribed” into a historical narrative; it thereby exists
outside of the grand narrative, but is still present in concrete experience.
Following this general principle, the Marxist aesthetics situates
“emancipation” as a basic element of musical experience, both in the sense
that musical works are released from a narrative that circumscribes their
meaning, and in the sense that the common reception and performance of
music is made an essential element of political action.
Jerusalem is the rare instance of a musical work in the Western tradition
whose social function demonstrates both of these forms of emancipation. Even
the briefest account of the song’s evolution reveals that its creation and
reception was facilitated by many people (including Headlam and Bridges),
who recognized in the lyric a certain unifying power, but also the many
unnamed and unrecognized faithful whose enthusiastic embrace of the song
has invested it with revolutionary spirit. Thus, while the strict “authorial”
origins of Jerusalem may be widely known, it is clear that these are not
essential paradigms of its reception; when it is sung, it is rarely for the purpose
of glorifying the “composer,” but rather to glorify the cause of the
congregation that sings it. In this sense, the song provides a musical experience
that is unmediated by the elitist hierarchy of the composer that provides the
basic framework of the Western canon. Although the work is tenuously
retained in the canon, its marginalisation cannot properly reflect the deep
influence the song has had in concrete experience.
Likewise, performance of the song actively dissolves the other element of
the musicological hierarchy: that which divides the performer and the
audience. The printed score of Jerusalem, which first appeared in 1918, seems
to assist in this emancipation via the instruction that it is to be sung by “all
available voices.”59 This instruction is hardly necessary. Although the score
may have helped facilitate the song’s popularity in its first years, its full
history reflects that it has more frequently been communicated by word-of-
mouth, particularly in the context of non-commercial institutions such as
political movements, churches and schools.60 Furthermore, the appeal of the
song is struck in a musical balance between the ornate complexity of German
classicism and the simplicity of English hymnody: the melody requires
moderate range and is set out in regular syllabic progression; it is therefore not
so demanding that it will exclude the unskilled. At the same time, the melody
is complex and engaging enough as to reveal its secrets gradually, eliciting a
joy in singing it many times over. The history of the song demonstrates that
the inclusive nature of its aesthetics has provided sufficient inducement for “all
available” voices to join in its performance, without relying specifically on the
instruction of the composer to do so.
59. See Ferber, “Blake's 'Jerusalem' as a Hymn,” p. 92.

60. Ibid., p. 82.
Yet, it might still be argued that the embracing of the song indiscriminately
by right- and left-wing groups must disqualify its status as “Marxist.”
Although the lyric reflects William Blake’s own revolutionary fervour, it is
nonetheless highly ambiguous politically, and therefore seems to be infinitely
adaptable to whatever cause may wish to utilise its unifying aesthetics.
However, it might also be argued that the performance of Jerusalem does more
than simply foster unity among the adherents of a single cause; rather, its
recurrence in diverse political contexts lays bare the commonality of the
causes with which it has been aligned. The lyric directs its revolutionary focus
away from the partisan binaries of the present, towards the utopian future
where all such conflicts have been resolved. In this sense, the political
ambiguity of Blake’s lyric may in fact be its most revolutionary aspect, for it is
not merely a political vagueness that is being expressed: its visionary lyric is
specifically oriented to a typological space where such distinctions are
eliminated. The appropriation of the song by both socialist and conservative
causes is, therefore, not symptomatic of a basic disunity within the work, but
rather points to the common goal of “emancipation” shared by those causes.
The Marxist aesthetics of the song is not, therefore, solely an abstract quality
of its artistic structure, but is also manifested in its merging of the artistic with
the political. In each case, the promise and its fulfilment are placed outside the
grand narrative of history, and are proclaimed in a much larger unifying
structure: a city of God that is not the domain of an elite, but the inheritance of
all.
Monash University
APPENDIX
1 And did those feet in ancient time.

Walk upon England's mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen!
5 And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
9 Bring me my Bow of burning gold;

Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
13 I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green & pleasant Land
William Blake, preface to Milton (1804)

SLOBODANKA M. VLADIV-GLOVER
FROM POETIC TO CINEMATIC IMAGE: THEORISING

ABOUT MULTIMEDIA TRANSLATION
Introduction
This conversation by the joint investigators – one an academic and critical
theorist, the other a creative artist and film maker – refers to a practice-based
research project, involving a creative act and consideration of that act through
engagement with the theory of representation. The creative act consisted of the
making of three short films, Elegija, Tracks, and Kao, based on three
contemporary Serbian poems. The films were made by Smiljana Glisović as
part of her PhD research in cinema directing at RMIT University. The
theoretical considerations were made by Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, a
specialist in Slavic Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at Monash
University.
The theoretical aim was to answer the question: what is involved in the act
of ‘translation’ – both from language to language and from medium to
medium, from text to image? What happens to the ‘visuality’ or ‘spatiality’ of
the ‘original’ text – the text in the ‘original’ language (Serbian) and the
‘original’ medium (verbal art)? How are ‘mental’ images which have to be
imagined by the reader who reads or hears the original literary text transposed
into cinematic images which are spatial spaces and moving? Is there a
correlation between the structure of the verbal text and that of the cinematic
text? What is the “choreography” of these performative transformations, in the
sense that both language and cinema are ‘performances’ of meaning?
The aim of the investigation was to elaborate a pilot model of creativity in
the context of the theory of representation and the gaze. The theoretical
component of the project was informed by the practical component: the two
‘translations’ – one from language to language, one from medium (verbal) to
medium (cinematic).
The investigation interrogated the artistic process of transposition of the
poetic text into a cinematic text by theorizing the formal challenges that the
transposition or adaptation brought up for the artistic director. The artistic or
creative process was mapped in a dialogue between the director and the
academic, in which the director was asked to outline her artistic intention. Her
intention was contextualized in a theoretical interpretation of her cinematic
work which led the academic interlocutor to some inferences about the relation
of text and image.1 The insights gained into the creative process of
‘translation’ from poem to screen narrative are grounded in theoretically
1. Compare Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” Image Music Text, essays selected and
translated by Stephen Heath. (London: Flamingo, Fontana, 1977), pp. 32-52.
inflected practice.
The guiding questions of the theoretical analysis of the artistic process
involve the concepts of space, time and object. These are key concepts of
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language but also of film theory. The
investigation posed the question: how are the ‘spaces’ and the ‘objects’ of
representation transformed during the process of transposition of one text
(verbal) into another (visual)? Does this have any correlation with the process
of verbal translation (Serbian into English)? Do the two forms of translation
take place in similar virtual spaces? Does this correlate with the “two texts” of
the unconscious proposed by Freud in his theory of consciousness, which blur
the divide between the conscious and the unconscious through the intervention
or mediation of the space of memory?
Using a poem as a template for a film script is also contrasted with the
traditional modes of notation for shooting scripts (the narrative mode) to better
understand the process of literary adaptation.
The present article is in the form of a dialogue between the artistic director,
Smiljana Glisović , and the academic critical theorist, Slobodanka Vladiv-
Glover. It is through this conversation that some significant theoretical insights
about the process of creativity have been gained. A companion piece, setting
out the principles of Glisović’s artistic quest as a cinematic director, appears as
a sequel to the present conversation in the present volume of Transcultural
Studies: A Series in Interdisciplinary Research.
Cinematic Poetry or a New Model of Creativity: The Concept of Space

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: I am interested in two things, primarily.
One: the relationship between the formal properties of cinema and the
formal properties of poetry. I am interested in what the properties of poetry can
teach me about the properties of cinema, and therefore extend the cinematic
language.
Two: what can cinema offer to the act of inter-lingual translation, which a
translation from page to page cannot achieve?
I have a couple of guiding principles. One is that cinema is poetry. Formal
qualities guide the composition, which are not narrative driven or necessarily
linear. The formal qualities in cinema relate to the formal qualities in poetry
and music, that is: rhythm, colour, texture, movement, cadence, pace.
Thesis: Both poetry and cinema allow multiple subjectivities, including the
space for audience subjectivity.
THEORIST: The space for audience subjectivity can also be called the space
of an idealised total syncretic meaning of the text according to the Structuralist
model of narrative or the space of “the synthesising consciousness” of the
recipient according to Eisenstein’s theory of montage cinema. The Structuralist
model of the narrative text2 (in any medium) offers a clear schema of the three
2. See Appendix 1 for the Structural model of the narrative text, based on Wolf Schmid, Der
Textaufbau in den Erzahlungen Dostojevskijs. Beiheft zu Poetika. Heft 10. (Munchen: Wilhelm
levels of meaning which construct a complex (synthetic) aesthetic ‘message’.

If the text has this three-dimensional structure, it is interpretable on the
Implied or Abstract Author’s level. If a text is two-dimensional, there is no
‘space’ for the audience in the text. There is no third level of meaning on
which the text can be interpreted. Texts which are interpretable have been
called dialogic, those which lack the interpretive (third) level are monologic.3
The monologic texts have no space for reader/audience subjectivity. Ideally,
the question of the creation of subjective space in a cinematic text should start
with an analysis of the structure of the poetic text in conjunction with the
structure of the cinematic text.
Not all cinema is poetry. Only good, creative cinema is poetry. Only
creative cinema eschews a linear narrative structure (monologic structure), and
relies on formal qualities of poetry and music, namely “rhythm, colour,
texture, movement, cadence, pace.” In other words, the creative use of
cinematic space conforms to the principles of what Eisenstein has called
montage.4
Eisenstein describes the very process of construction of meaning by the film
spectator, which transcends the dimension of the “narrative medium”: “This
new principle of the third phase of cinematic development that we are studying
echoes precisely the principles that applied to the first two phases. In all three
phases, the means of generalisation – i.e. those which extend beyond the
immediate limits of the phase itself – prove to be creatively achieved through
elements of another dimension, of a medium different from that of the basic
narrative medium.” Thus Eisenstein’s cinema of montage is a theory of that
space of transformation, which corresponds to the Abstract or Implied levels of
reception in the structure of the artistic (narrative) text, on which meaning is
formed: “In montage cinema, it was the generalised image of an object or a
process which was not present in the film itself but which formed itself in the
synthesising consciousness of the person perceiving it.” 5
Artistic Director: My main interest lies in the ‘untranslatable’, the

multitudinous allusions that sit outside of the chosen word or single image. I
am interested in creating a film where all of the indeterminate spaces exist.
Fink, 1973) and Slobodanka Vladiv, Narrative Principles in Dostoevskij’s Besy: A Structural
Analysis. (Bern: Peter Lang, 1979), pp. 23-32.
3. On dialogic and monologic texts, compare M. M. Bakhtin’s typology of discourse in
Chapter Five of Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Caryl Emerson (ed. and
trans.) (London and Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984) (First published in Russian in
Moscow, 1963). First version published in 1929 as Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo. For an
analysis of a monologic text, compare Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, “History as Pastiche in the
Postmodern Detective: Eco’s The Name of the Rose,” The European Legacy: Toward New
Paradigms, 13, no. 1 (2008): 57-78.
4. Compare S M Eisenstein, Selected Works, Volume II. Towards a Theory of Montage,
Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (eds), Michael Glenny (trans.) (London: BFI Publishing,
1991), pp. 251-252.
5. Ibid., pg. 252.
THEORIST: Theoretically, according to philosophy of language

(Wittgenstein), everything that can be thought can be expressed – hence
everything that can be thought can be translated. Only what cannot be said (in
one language) can also not be said in another language: “What we cannot
speak about we must pass over in silence.”6
However, there are no univocal concepts in language, any language, verbal
or cinematic; all words and images ‘allude’ to something. Reference is a
problem even in ordinary language; all is construct and interpretation even in
the simplest communication.
This means, as far as a cinematic transposition of a verbal text is concerned,
that the cinematic director (artistic director) undertakes a double translation:
she constructs an interpretation of the verbal text (nowhere stated), and then
re-constructs that understanding of the verbal text in the cinematic text. She
performs a double coding, of which one coding remains ‘invisible’. It remains
an ‘inner text’, comparable to the “inner speech” of Vygotsky’s model of early
childhood development and concept formation.7
Thus what the artistic director is undertaking in the cinematic text through
manipulation of spaces and sound effects is replicate the allusive and elliptical
structure of meaning, which emerges in the verbal, poetic text as the
concatenation of metaphor or the “weave” of associations evoked by the verbal
images. The cinematic text thus becomes a meta-text which ‘frames’ both
texts: the cinematic text as sensory ‘content’ and the Implied Reader’s ‘text’
(‘level of meanin’) of the original poetic text. The ‘framing’ meta-text
corresponds to what Barthes designated as “the third meaning”8 in analysing
the stills of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: My thesis is that it is these (indeterminate) spaces that

allow the audience to participate in making meaning. A ‘poetic’ sensibility is
the key to the creation of these spaces.
THEORIST: Cinema is a spatial art. Everything is a ‘picture’ in space. This is

one meaning of “space.”
However, there is a second meaning of space: the space as “gap,” as
“nothing.” Manipulation of pictures (spaces filled with the cinematic images)
can mean the creation of ‘gaps’: inconsistencies, ruptures in the sequence of
images, in the “narrative.” These ‘gaps’ are required by any text through which
meaning is to be constructed by the viewer or reader. These are structural gaps
which Roman Ingarden in his phenomenology of the work of art has called
“Unbestimmtheitsstellen” (points of indeterminacy – SVG).9
6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness

(trans.) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989). (First German edition published in Annalen
der Naturphilosophie, 1921; first English edition, with translation, published 1922), §7.
7. Compare L. S. Vygotskii, Psikhologiia [Психология] (Moskva: Aprel Press/EKSMO-
Press. 2000). Compare also L. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, Eugenia Hanfmann and
Gertrude Vakar (eds and trans.) (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1962), p. 19.
8. Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” Image Music Text, pp.52-68.
9. Compare Roman Ingarden, Das literarische Kunstwerk, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: 1960), p. 267.
The space as “gap” is analogous to the space of ‘absence’. The images

‘taking place’ in the temporal sequence of the film create a succession of
presences; the “gaps” in the moving sequence – however visualised - create the
“other” space in which meaning can be ‘inserted’ by the viewer/reader. In this
“other” (or second) space, the viewer/reader constitutes his/her own
“presence,” becoming, as it were, a metonymy of the narrative or of the first
“space” of the moving image. In other words, the viewer’s imagination or
“synthesising consciousness” (Eisenstein) interpolates itself into the ‘place’ of
the “pictures in space,” as a kind of spatio-temporal doubling of space.
However, this “taking place” does not happen in any kind of ‘real’ space,
whether we speak about the ‘gaps’ in space or as the space of the moving
image. The plane onto which both the ‘gaps’ in space and the space of the
moving image are displaced is the third space which is invisible because it is
the space of the unconscious. It is this third space in which Eisenstein situated
the creative process of montage. This third space is the space of the
phenomenological reduction. We could say that Roland Barthes pointed to this
third space when he wrote about the phenomenon of “the third meaning” or
“obtuse meaning” in his analysis of the stills of Eisenstein’s Ivan the
Terrible.10
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: A ‘poetic’ sensibility is the key to the creation of these

spaces.
THEORIST: Which of the three definitions of space require a “poetic

sensibility”?
The first, the second (the “other” space, the “gap”) or the
phenomenologically reduced space (the third space, or space of the
unconscious)?
‘Poesis’ means ‘creation’ (Gr) and sensibility means “belonging to the
senses, to sensory perception.” There can be no perception outside the senses,
so the perception through artistic forms is sensory. What has been discovered
in modern art and literature is that synaesthesia is a function of sensuous
perception, that is, we ‘see’ music, we ‘hear’ colour, we ‘taste’ the texture of
an image or a sound; we may even hallucinate a sense of smell through a
powerful image (Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume).
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: It is also the ‘untranslatable’ that holds the deepest

sentiment of a work; it is the emotional centre of the work. This is another very
close link to music.
How does a concrete image on screen, that always necessarily has a spatial
and temporal dimension, simultaneously escape, or occupy multiple spatial
and temporal fields?
THEORIST: Theoretically it would make more sense to speak about the

ambivalence or polyvalence of word and image, not the ‘untranslatable’ in it.
10. Barthes, “The Third Meaning.”

Everything is translatable, even the ‘untranslatable’ because it can be

conceptualised as the ‘untranslatable’.
Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier in her excellent study De la litérature au
cinéma: genèse d’une écriture, referring to the seminal 1964 study by
Christian Metz “Film Language: A Semiotic of Cinema” (French title “Langue
ou langage”] explains that the “concatenation of shots confirms the content of
the shot, to the degree that the content of that shot, ‘through the illusion of
reality’ created by the succession of shots (‘plans’) ‘is already directed at
signification’ (that is, carries a meaning); that is why it is impossible to study
the syntagmatic arrangement of the shots without referring to the problem of
representation and its relation to meaning.”11
The “syntagmatic arrangement of shots” – which leads to the structural
principle of the film, of its principle of montage - is the reason why the
problem of the cinematic image has to be placed in a broader theoretical
context than that of ‘realistic’ or mimetic space in which a concrete real object
(the image) appears. This much emerges also from the artistic director’s own
project (below) of wanting to compare the structure of the poem with the
structure of the cinematic image. The tools for this comparison must be drawn
from cinema semiotics as well as general semiotics and linguistics (such as C
S Peirce, or Jakobson’s 1921 paper “On Realism in the Cinema”).
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: My investigation is into how the cinematic image can

achieve multiplicity. How does it deal with metaphor and abstraction, when it
is made up of concrete visual objects?
THEORIST: Through our theoretization of space (three types of spaces are

dealt with, which are constructed by the cinematic image in itself and by the
spectator), we have already rejected the positivistic notion of cinema as a
“concrete art.” To speak of the cinematic image as a “concrete” image is to go
against all that the European Modernists knew and bequeathed to us about the
nature of representation. See, for instance, Magritte’s film script “The Lesson
of Objects.”12 Cinema is also in the nature of representation. The visual
component of cinema is not ‘concrete’ despite appearing to be so. For its
recognition as an image, it requires memory, based on culturally acquired
concepts: chair, table, sunset, sea, ship, love, anger, hysteria. Without prior
knowledge of these concepts which are transposed into images, the cinema
would be working with an unknown language. So the image is already
grounded in a language of concepts.
Despite an ongoing debate on the subject, concepts themselves are not
conceptualised visually. For the problematization of the ‘visuality’ of concepts
– language – we must refer to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language.
11. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier in her excellent study De la litérature au cinéma:

genèse d’une écriture [From literature to cinema: the genesis of a discourse] (Paris, 1970), pp.
31-32.
12. Compare René Magritte Magritte or The Lesson of Objects (film script) in Harry
Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, Richard Miller (trans.) (New York: H. N. Abrams,
1977).
On the fundamental question of how we understand propositions (even if we

have never met them before) he says: (Tractatus §4.021) “A proposition is a
picture of reality: for if I understand a proposition, I know the situation that it
represents. And I understand the proposition without having had its sense
explained to me.”13 However, the word “picture” here means “model” or a
‘structure of meaning’ which needs no further explanation. It is not a visual
picture in the literal sense of the word. The German original, “Bild,” also
contains this second, figurative, sense. Similarly, when Wittgenstein says:
“The world is all that is the case.” (Tractatus, §1) and “The world is the
totality of facts, not things.” (Tractatus, §1.1), he is opposing “facts” to
concrete “objects,” and arrives, via a circuitous route, at the tautological
structure of meaning: “The world divides into facts.” (Tractatus, §1.2) and
“What is the case – a fact – is the existence of states of affairs.” (Tractatus,
§2). Meaning is thus a structure of logic or thought which makes “the world”
for Wittgenstein’s phenomenological subject of language a concatenation of
“facts” of thought: “The facts in logical space are the world.” (Tractatus,
§1.13).
Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier also asserts that “the impression of

reality in cinema demands to be strictly delimited: if one can’t negate at the
level of the image, it is a fallacious extrapolation to attribute this to the
concatenation of images...” Thus, we conclude: the concreteness of the
cinematic image is wrongly attributed to mimesis (copying ‘reality’, a ‘real’
object) when it is concrete only in the sense of “showing” – being a signifier of
something – without having to construct a ‘sign’ for that something (like a
word, a sound etc.). Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier goes on to quote Metz:
”The image is always first an image, it reproduces in its perceptive

literariness (‘literal’ ‘meaning’) the scene which is signified, of which it
(the image) is the signifier: that is why it (the image) is self-sufficient in
the showing without having to ‘fabricate’ a ‘sign’.”14
This resonates with Wittgenstein’s thesis that propositions (in language)

show their sense, which makes us infer that the cinematic image behaves
similarly to a proposition in language. It “shows” its (unstated, ‘absent’) sense
via the mediating force of the spectator’s imagination or synthesising
consciousness.
Further still, it means that image and word are both grounded in the logic of
propositional language – that is, an abstract conceptual stratum of perception
(the level of Vygotsky’s “inner speech” and structural remembering), in which
the visual (image) is coeval with the concept (meaning). That is why when we
read, we ‘imagine’ scenes created in our mind through the concatenation of
words. ‘Meaning’ is the middle term or the bridge which we must cross after
13. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 1.

14. Ropars-Wuilleumier, De la litérature au cinéma, p. 32 (with reference to Christian Metz,
“A propos de l’impression de réalite au cinema”).
perceiving an ‘object’: we must ‘translate’ the perception into a concept. Do

the poetic image and the cinematic image have the same structure with respect
to meaning? ‘Image’ is a picture – it can be in the mind or it can be on screen.
The mind is also a screen, surface of reception of impressions.15 Does a kind of
translation take place, not from language to language, not from medium to
medium, but from ‘screen’ (of the mind) to screen (of the cinema)? The screen
of the cinema has to be ‘transformed’ into the screen of memory – in other
words, the cinematic image has to go across the bridge of signification, walk
the plank, as it were, in order to become ‘significant’, to start signifying.
What of feelings? Language is grounded in the body, it has concrete bodily
symptoms. Affects are bundled in hysteria as the symptom of the body.
Hysteria has many forms: sexuality, ecstasy, depression etc. Images which
must of necessity be ‘translations’ of concepts (unconscious translations – by
the viewer/reader), can thus be cinematic or verbal. A process of translation is
always implicit in the image, whether the verbal or the cinematic image.
The Performance of Structure or the ‘Translation’ of the poet’s poetics

into the cinematic poetics
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: I will now explain a little about another part of my
process which I think is relevant to all of the above. I shoot in an
improvisational or documentary style.
My approach to collecting footage is a crucial part in the process.
THEORIST: Like Dziga Vertov and his kinoks group in the 1920-1930s.
Nevertheless, selection is at work, if not at the stage of collection, then in post-
production.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: I chose a location, which I feel is in some way in tune

with the sensibility of the poem. On the shoot, I try and listen to the
environment, its colours, its movement, it breadth and depth. I am attracted to
the natural environment and to things I cannot control. I am attracted to the
sense of possibility, the fertility it engenders in the image (this kind of
aliveness is never present on fully orchestrated shoots). The orchestration for
me starts in the editing room. This is where the composition starts (of course
there’s a degree of ‘editing’ that happens while gathering footage too, but it is
a much less conscious or deliberate act). Rhythm begins to play a crucial role.
The relationship between the ‘rhythm’ of figures in the frame, the tempo of
their movement, the rhythm of the editing, the rhythm of the diegetic and non-
diegetic sounds.
The relationship between all of these elements is where you begin to nurture
the ‘dark spaces’ that open up for each audience member’s subjectivity and
meaning making. This is the stage where the ‘dark spaces’ are nurtured. These
15. On the relationship of the various parts of the psychic apparatus which are active in
perception, compare Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad” (1925), in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, James Strachey (ed. And trans.), assisted
by Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 227-234.
spaces open up for the audience to inhabit, it is here that we make room for
their own subjectivity and meaning making.
THEORIST: How does the artistic director’s cinematic method of “collecting

footage” (which the Theorist takes as being analogous to “collecting facts”) for
her documentary style appear in its finished form: the poem transposed into
cinematic images?
There is no ‘literal’ fact which can be ‘reproduced’ or ‘mirrored’ in the
cinematic image. What the creative director is doing is creating a ‘space’ that
creates ambivalence as an unstable but nascent space of meaning, through the
random but evocative settings of her “documentary-style footage.” This is the
“second space of the ‘gap’ into which the artistic director will ‘insert’ herself
to create a “third space.” This is that space of the unconscious of the cinematic
text, which the artistic director refers to as “the dark spaces.” It can also be
designated as a repressed content that acts on each spectator as a trigger for his
or her return of the repressed. This “third space” is the structural laboratory of
thought and meaning. In it is condensed the Artistic Director’s intuition about
the meaning of the allusions and ambiguities of the poem; this intuition comes
to expression as a reproduction or re-invention of innuendo, allusion and
ambiguity as the structuring principle of the film. The artistic director is thus
‘performing’ the structure of the original verbal text, emulating its poetics,
making the poet’s poetics into the poetics of her images. What is undergoing
translation or transposition is the ‘technique’ of the poet’s art, the poem’s
devices which translate into structures, which are in turn modelled (‘pictured’)
as structures by the cinematic image.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: I usually do not endeavour to make a visual replica of

the literal images on the page. Or perhaps if I do capture some of the literal
images I think about how I can splinter them, about how they can get at the
underside of the poem, rather than their surface meaning.
THEORIST: The Artistic Director says as much here: she wants to get “at the
underside” of the poem, which is the poem’s structuring principle, or poetics.
This structuring principle is always concealed in or by the diegetic devices.
Hence we can think of it as repressed or constituted in that “dark space,” in
which the film director and the spectator ‘meet’ invisibly.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: Looking back on Elegija and Tracks, I feel that there is
too much going on, but it does achieve some things as well. I feel that the
words are over-used, that they act as crutches. Although, I also think that there
are moments when the words dance well with the other elements, and open up
interesting spaces. For example, in Elegija, the rhythm of the lavender image,
the words we hear and the text we see on screen are composed in such a way
as to evoke a past, present and future simultaneously, or even interchangeably.
THEORIST: Here the Artistic Director manages to construct a ‘true’ cinematic

image which has its ‘own’ temporality: it is neither past, nor prese, nor future;
it is ‘presence’ – a pure presence, which has no temporality measurable in

seconds or linear time. This is theorised by Ropars-Wuilleumier with reference
to the film Muriel – which, like Citizen Cane, “uses a montage (structure)
which brings a new temporal value to cinema: that which allies the simple past
of the event with the imperfect tense of habit (habitual action), places the
present in doubt. None of the incidents in this montage [in Muriel]could be
repeated since the narrative (le récit) presents them as unique actions marked
by difference – scraps of conversations, meetings, glances; what is added by
the brevity of the montage is an elliptical dimension, a fragmentation, a
hesitation, opening up uncertainty at the heart of the film, disorder and
anxiety.”16
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: This protracts and truncates time in a way significant

to the poem.
THEORIST: The Artistic Director is here adding ‘value’ to the poem through
her interpretation of the poem on screen. What this means is that her screen is
acting as an interpretant (C S Peirce’s term) of the interpretatum (the poem,
the word), without the intervention of herself as ‘auteur’. She is allowing
structure (montage of the image) to interpret structure (of the poem).
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: I think the relationship between the living and the dead
is interesting. The (dead) birds, absent from the (dead) trees, rendered alive by
the subjective (hand-held) camera.
THEORIST: Here the Artistic Director is plumbing the poem for themes – the
theme of death – and re-inscribing the same in the image through juxtaposition
of objects and absences of objects. She is introducing the dialectic of
absence/presence on the thematic level of the cinematic récit but this
absence/presence signifies beyond the juxtaposed images. While signifying as
theme (of death, absence), the absence/presence set also represents or models
(performs) itself as ‘absence’ – visually. Thus it ‘performs’ itself – self-
reflexively – as the structure of signification in which the signified is always
absent. At every step of the creative cinematic process, form and content form
an asymmetrical couplet (couple), or an asymmetrical dialogic relationship, in
which form is more voluble (speaks more) than content.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: The relationship between the cows and the horses is
interesting, in particular the quality and direction of their movement in and out
of the frame. We catch only a part of the cow leaving lazily, as the words
speak to us of galloping. Then a herd of cows moves away, again, from us, but
their long trajectory is visible in this long-shot; followed by the close-up of the
horses, that move in on us, gazing inquisitively into the lens. The direction of
movement and energy, and the interplay between the subjects of the images in
relation to the subjects and dynamics in the words, enact opposite relations. To
16. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, De la litérature au cinéma, p. 24.

work with simultaneous opposites or absences is to extend indeterminate, dark

space. It is what I am afforded, formally, in the use of video, sound and text,
and their interplay.
THEORIST: Here the Artistic Director is playing (again – as above with form
and content) with the ‘figure eight’ of the Moebius knot (M C Escher, Jacques
Lacan), abutting, significantly, in the quasi-human yet non-human ‘gaze’
represented by the horses. This shot of the gaze (the unseeing seeing) could be
the most significant montage of the entire film sequence, by its length and its
inexplicable and surprising connection with the theme of the poem. The gaze
is a metaphor for the construct of representation or representation as construct
of thought, pre-verbal and pre-visual. While representation borrows its forms
from the ‘real’ world - animate Nature – the horse is already double-coded as a
quasi-object, an artefact of human society able to perform work in place of the
human subject – hence domesticated Nature (like Rousseau’s ‘dangerous
supplement’17).
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: The colours here are also significant; the red of the
horses is connected to the tree bark, which is a particularly strong Australian
image. The landscape is obviously more in tune with the English language
than Serbian.
THEORIST: Here Culture makes a big entrance onto the stage of the
performance of meaning. The Australian audience knows that the verbal text is
a Serbian poem and hence belongs to Serbian culture. Or at least it knows that
it is something ‘foreign’. But it is placed in an Australian ‘cultural’ setting
since gum trees are part of an Australian cultural mythology – White as well as
Indigenous. It will be interesting to see how a Serbian audience reacts to the
Australian cinematic setting. But the language of the poem – even when in
English – is discordant, especially since the voice of the narrator is “an
accented voice” – the discord between WORD and IMAGE setting is at its
most striking at this point. It almost has a shock value. It perplexes the
audience (me). Culture thus adds an ideological dimension to the image. This
is what Eisenstein did with his montages: according to Marie-Claire Ropars-
Wuilleumier, Eisenstein shot sequence that did not construct an ideological
content but an “ideological discourse” introduced by Eisenstein was “entirely
based on the invention of a new cinematic writing” (“écriture
cinematographique”).18 The Artistic Director has thus started to invent her own
“cinematic writing” which consists of a melange of cultural settings and
cultural contexts. In fact, the artistic director’s new cinematic writing is an
embodiment of ‘transculture’.
17. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, introduction and translated by G. C. Spivak

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 141-165. Compare also G. C. Spivak’s
“Introduction to Derrida,” ibid., pp. vii-xc.
18. Ropars-Wuilleumier, De la litérature au cinéma, p. 25.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: Obviously this is an element present because I am

bound by my environment (so not a choice? –Theorist: this is also the creative
Director’s choice – she could have filmed in a studio, against a tromp l’oeil). I
haven’t come to a clear understanding of these implications. On an instinctual
level, my inclusion of my own voice in Elegjia was a choice made because my
own accented voice (without its perfect diction) is used as mediator.
THEORIST: The voice is like the ‘gaze’ – it mediates in that it is like a

‘middle term’. But as such, it is a shadow copy of another middle term in the
dialectic of meaning – desire. Hence what the voice is here mediating is the
(hidden) desire of the récit (or of the Artistic Director). It is what is referred to
as ‘the unconscious of the text” (Frederic Jameson). Although Jameson’s
unconscious of the text is always a political construct, not a personal
unconscious, it could be that here we are dealing with the ‘cultural
unconscious’ of an individual director whose cultural upbringing was a hybrid
– perhaps a ‘typical’ diasporic experience of culture, or who unconsciously
projected a model of hybridity into the poetics of her cinematic creation, in her
quest for the ‘translatability’ of cultural forms and mediums (verbal, visual,
‘one’s own’ native, ‘foreign’ etc.).
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: It was always my intention not to privilege the literary

text, and therefore not to privilege the Serbian. I didn’t achieve this in Elegija
because the Serbian voice is so dominant, while the English subtitles only
occasionally skirt the edges. Subtitles also imply that this is somehow a
‘secondary’ text, and the audio is the ‘original’ (this is by virtue of the
convention and how it is used).
THEORIST: In Elegija we witness Part One of the creative director’s quest

for translatability. Here she starts with the verbal text which is close to her
cultural memory (of childhood, home, parents, family etc.). It is a text to which
she ‘owes’ her emotional identity. That is why it appears to dominate.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: The appearance and positioning of the subtitles place

them in their usual role as ‘translators’. I tried to rectify this in the film Tracks.
THEORIST: In this film (Tracks), the creative director ‘alienates’ the Serbian
voice.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: The quality of the Serbian voice is unclear and distant,
it does not act as the ‘true’ ‘authentic’ voice. The English voice is introduced
with its own agency. The English language text is placed at the top of the
screen and in relation to the two voices, in an attempt to (literally) elevate the
text to something more than just ‘translator’.
THEORIST: The English text has now acquired cultural ascendancy – how is
this reflected in the visual imagery?
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: The Serbian and the English voices are in some ways
‘close’, while also dislocated. The Serbian voice is unclear but played over
‘familiar’ family photographs.
THEORIST: Here the creative Director is introducing a ‘palimpsest’

technique – she is over-coding layers of early (Serbian) cultural ‘memory’
with new layers (English). It is as if she were plotting the development of a
new cultural archetype in the diasporic identity she is playing with on the
ideological level of the film or the process of evolution of her new cinematic
writing, which might eventually be called ‘the diasporic poetics of Australian
cinema’.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: The English voice is accented and fragmented; the

written word completes the man’s thoughts, in silence. This poses questions
about identity, about whether these words have ever been uttered/written/sent?
Or is this a privileged interiority, which is nonetheless unfamiliar,
uncomfortable and distant?
THEORIST: The Artistic Director advances her quest for translatability to a

limit point: she is not modelling the meaning of the poem but the meaning of
meaning: can her ‘intended’ meaning ever leave the interiority of the artist’s
‘workshop’/interiority? This is really her personal quest for form and her
encounter with the recalcitrance of the process of writing in Derrida’s sense of
écriture. She is groping for her own ‘new’ cinematic language while
experimenting with the translatability of a poem into cinematic image. She has
come up against the problem of every creative artist: the problem of
expression.
How will she go about solving that problem in the next experiment? There
is definitely a need for a third film.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: The sound is never diegetic.
THEORIST: The image is not diegetic either – it only ‘appears’ that way.
This is a fallacy which the ‘kinoks’ dispelled in their Constructivist films
(Dziga Vertov).
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: We never occupy, aurally, the physical world, but a

kind of approximation of it.
THEORIST: Language – any language – is always an approximation, a

hypothesis, it constructs a possible world, not one that already exists. The
artistic director is encoding this in her cinematic poetics – through various
means.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: The voices also do not occupy their physical worlds.
There are offerings of a more subjective world, outside of the train. For
example, the slow-motion fairy-floss moment. This movement from an
interiority to exteriority, I think, allows an experience for the audience which

is palpable in my reading of the poem.
To record a clear voice is to privilege the poem and the words, it is to
highlight the text, to draw a boundary around the ‘source text’. It is to dissipate
any space for the viewer. To re-record a crystal clear voice would be an anti-
thesis to all of my intentions.
THEORIST: What remains to be done to complete this investigation of how

creativity works in adaptations of literary works into cinema is feedback from
the Serbian audience, in Serbia. This could be a group of Year 12 students and
a group of university students who are studying Serbian literature but are not
all necessarily Serbs – some are ethnic Albanians (University of Novi Pazar).
These are generationally audiences who are very close to what could be called
“the younger generation” of today (2010-2012).
I would like to show the films and ask questions of an audience in Australia
of comparable age – such as students at RMIT.
Another possible audience would be the young Serbs in Australia. This
would be really an interesting group who resemble the creative director’s own
diasporic profile.
Monash University
SMILJANA GLIŠOVIĆ
CINEMATIC POETRY: AN ACT OF TRANSLATION
This paper contains a short analysis of the process of transposing the following
three Serbian poems from word to film:
Elegija I by Radmila Lazić

Film: Elegy in Violetown. Available at: vimeo.com/49379286
Svajcarski Voz by Dragoslav Dedović

Film: Tracks. Available at: vimeo.com/50591364
Kao: Pesma u Noci by Milan Orlić

Film: Kao.1 Available at: youtu.be/woC2rfc8XRo
I started this series of works with a proposition that translation, rather than
being a reductive act, might be a process of enrichment and discovery.
Translation might not only move in one direction from source to target
language, where it arrives as a poorer version of the ‘original’, but might be a
movement in multiple directions, where the source and target are no longer
stable countries with simple hierarchies.
I was interested in the landscapes that we cross when we travel from one
language to another and from one mode of representation to a different one.
What happens outside of the image or word we depart from and inside the
other we settle in? What is the experience of this journey, what do we find or
lose along the way?
I thought of the act of translation as one not dissimilar to a cubist work of
art: a process of unpacking, of splintering in order to see as many sides as
possible of the one thing. This cubist-like gesture would surely reveal sides
and depths that would otherwise have been left unobserved.
To begin this exploration, I chose to work with poetry as my ‘source’ text
and the moving image and sound as my ‘target’ text. Thus I did not actually
approach them as the source and target texts or languages, but rather worked
towards a third text that might act as a dialogue between the two modes or
languages.
It is a popular refrain that poetry is very difficult if not impossible to
translate well. So much is lost in the act. I think perhaps this is because form
and meaning are so inextricably bound together in artistic representation as to
1 The three titles translate as: Elegy I, The Swiss Train, As If: Poem in the Night. [All
translation from Serbian are mine unless otherwise indicated.]
make it difficult to replicate this totality when one is working with a

completely different set of formal dimensions.
In my ‘act’ of ‘translation’, I wanted to trace the ‘impossibilities’ and
‘failures’ of my act. I hypothesized that the difficulties in translation might be
the ‘key’ to the creative work, and to accessing an even deeper understanding
of the poetic work.
Anne Carson in Economy of the Unlost speculates along similar lines, when
she appropriates Henri Bergson’s work on the notion of ‘nothingness’, on
“making use of the void to think the full,” into her work on language and
poetry.2 For Carson, “negation requires this collusion of the present and the
absent on the screen of the imagination.”3
The absence of the appropriate word helps to illuminate a sensibility
particular to both source and target cultures. Henri Bergson in Creative
Evolution says: “there is more not less in the idea of an object conceived as
‘not existing’ than in the idea of this, same object conceived as ‘existing’.”4
Pasolini, too, and his “cinema of poetry,” was suggesting to me that this
problem of form might just conceivably be answered by a transposition into a
completely other mode that was equally bound, or buoyed, by its formal
properties.
Although completely different modes, the text/poem and moving image
share formal aspects such as rhythm, colour, texture, movement, cadence,
pace. A focus on these properties moves towards a visceral rather than
cognitive experience of a work. A move away from narrative, and towards
form, is a move towards the more slippery area of emotion and the senses. This
kind of work asks the audience to be more present and actively engaged in it,
to participate in the meaning making.5
The particular aspect of Pasolini’s conception that became relevant to my
process was that the author (filmmaker) is able to speak from within the
character (subject of the film), which is “not of a linguistic nature, but of a
stylistic one.”6 So it is style, or form, that is ‘the poetic’ in the moving image.
And so form, or structure, was the guiding principle in my transpositions. It
was the structure of the poem that formed the structure for the transposition
into the film. This approach ultimately lead me to occupy the ‘character’s’
voice, or the poets voice in the poem, in order to access the emotional centre,
rather than the narrative, of the poem.
Pasolini articulates this speaking from within the ‘character’ while drawing
a distinction between literature and cinema, which is that cinema “can be
defined as an interior monologue without its conceptual and philosophic
2 Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost, (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), p. 104.
3 Ibid.,p. 102.
4 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, Arthur Mitchell (trans.) (London: Macmillan and Co.,
1922), p. 302.
5 See Bruce R Elder, “The foreignness of the intimate, or the violence and charity of
perception,” in Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour (eds) Subtitles (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press,
2004), pp.439-481.
6 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry,” in Bill Nichols (ed.) Movies and Methods
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), 1: 551.
element,” which as such is abstract. Cinema “can be a parable, but never a

directly conceptual expression.”7 Every image on the screen is located in
space, it has physical coordinates. I wanted to explore this dynamic and find
ways in which poetic principles could actually serve to create more abstract
spaces on screen. What can the properties of poetry teach me about the
properties of cinema, and therefore extend my cinematic language?
I looked to Deleuze for help with this idea of abstraction. For him,
metaphor is achieved on screen when a harmony is established between two
images.8 Metaphor, translated from the Greek, means to ‘transfer’ or ‘carry
over’, a ‘crossing’, a movement from one object to another. It is a crossing
perhaps similar to transposition, where there is an indeterminate space that is
crossed. I was interested in exploring whether a movement similar to metaphor
on screen could achieve an abstract space. Abstract space is non-physical,
figurative, conceptual - all the things the moving image is apparently not so
good at.
This leads to the question: how are the ‘spaces’ and the ‘objects’ of
representation transformed during the process of transposition of one text
(verbal) into another (visual)? Concepts become objects, or a relationship
between objects. For example, in Elegija, the line “soon, winter” is evoked
with a close-up of purple lavender stalks. The line is only anticipating winter.
There is something of a liminal sensibility here. I think this is evoked through
the use of the shallow depth of the field, the color tones, the rhythm of the
swaying stalks. It is a combination of these elements, of their relationships, of
the way the shallow depth of the field allows the lavender to sit ‘on-top’, a
little separate from its context, which opens up room for something more than
the concrete object to be read literally in a determined and literal space and
time.
Concepts can also become a relationship between the picture and sound, or
a relationship between the duration of one image and the duration of another.
To use an example from Elegija again: the film begins in silence, with a
tracking shot of tree branches. The soundtrack comes in after a couple of
seconds. The ‘voice’ speaks, again, of the passing of seasons, “like hooves on
the carriageway.” Which is to say, that the seasons pass in a steady rhythm,
relentlessly. In this moment we are both here in the present, but also running
away with the seasons. The rhythm of the image is steady, forward moving,
unchanging; while the piano comes in with strong purpose. The delayed sound
gives rise to this feeling of a break in the two ‘experiences’ of passing time.
Absence is a strong thematic thread in all three poems. In literature, words
can describe an absence that has the ache of loss. The challenge for me was
how to evoke a sense of absence even when choosing to represent the absent
object in the image. An image on screen is always ‘present’; it cannot exist in
the same realm of ‘past’ and ‘non-presence’ as in literature. How do you
achieve this on screen? This question has answers for narrative films: for
7 Ibid., p. 547.
8 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (trans.)
(London: Continuum, 1989), p. 160.
example, a character speaks about a past time, or there is the use of flashback.
But these tools do not create a visceral feeling for an audience. They are also
not helpful for a work that is not narrative or story driven.
I tried to achieve this sense in all three films by dislocating the voice from
the body. I only observe this in hindsight. This was not a conscious choice.
There is no body or image of a person to whom the voice can belong in either
Elegija or Tracks. In Kao, there are brief shots of parts of a body, a foot, a
thigh, but it is ambivalent whether the voice belongs to these body parts.
In Tracks, I wanted to do away with any spatial or temporal anchor which
would allow us to say ‘we are here, in the present’ or ‘we are there, in the
past’. The poem itself occupies various ‘spaces’, traverses them easily, just as
the voice itself is fluid. I tried to create various ‘planes’ from where the
different elements emerge. For example, the Serbian voice always emerges
from black, a moving image is followed by a static one. The voices are distant,
difficult to catch or identify with. The quality of the Serbian voice is distorted;
the English voice is fragmented, it falls into silence while his thoughts are
completed by text on screen. All of these ‘dislocations’ and ‘uncertainties’
speak to the themes in the poem about unstable identity and belonging.
There is obviously more work to be done, many of my questions have not

been answered, nor my propositions proven. But what the three exercises did
reveal is, that it is in the inter-play between formal elements, it is in their
relation and in the space that opens up between them, that we might find more
than we can in a ‘straight’ lingual translation.
Quite apart from a desire to make a ‘good’ moving image and sound work,
the process of translation and transposition was one that allowed me to deepen
my understanding of the poem. It was a methodology in mining the poem for
meaning.
Focusing on poetic principles to guide me in my approach, released me
from habitual ways of working and thinking. I could begin to develop a new
sense of space and time that was elastic and changeable. This is true of the
poems thematically, but also gives rise to the kind of non-determinate, fluid
space that opens up for the audience’s experience and interpretation.
The exchange between the texts was so effective because the formal
properties of cinema are so in tune with the ones of poetry, that they
understood each other, even while seemingly speaking a ‘different language’,
or producing a very different kind of sensual experience.
RMIT University
MOHAMADHOSEIN ANJOMSHOA
THE CINEMA OF TAHMINEH MILANI: A (HI)STORY

OF IRANIAN WOMEN IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY
IRAN1
Introduction
Over the past 60 years, Iranian cinema has on the whole ignored women’s
issues in Iran and has thus not been an art medium lobbying for the solution of
women's difficulties in Iranian society. Few cinematographers considered the
undeveloped history and culture of women in Iran. Few tried to delve into the
original roots of women's pain and the depths of their needs. If it represented
women, it made them look like victims and condemned the men for theplight
of women.
Tahmineh Milani is a female film maker who has changed all this. Milani
knows that men and women complete and perfect each other, and it is their
relevance and interconnectedness which makes up the human identity of a
society. The male-female relations, such as wife-husband, sister-brother, as
well as the ethnic, political, social, economic and other relations, are analysed
in Milani’s films with the objectivity of an external, ‘scientific’ observer, who
does not condemn the 'men' but who sees both men and women in the overall
context of social power relations which are historical in nature but subject to
the pressures of historical change. Milani’s films demonstrate to all those who
will see and hear that the historical evolution and development of society
cannot be done without the community of men and women.
Women in the Post-Revolution Iran

This gradual inclusion of women as a theme of cinematic discourse
occurred in three stages that in part overlap with each other:
1. Early 1360s/1978-82: Transition period or absence of women as a

cinematic theme. Since cinema was introduced for purposes of westernizing
Iranian culture before the Revolution, it was condemned by the traditionalists.
Because directors could not decide what was allowed and what was prohibited
due to the new laws, women were omitted from cinematic representation.
Women without the Hijab were automatically excluded from Iranian and
foreign films after the Revolution.
1. The Cinema of Tahmineh Milani: A (Hi)Story of Iranian Women in Post-Revolutionary

Iran [‫ تاریخ و داستان زنان ایرانی در ایران پس از انقالب‬:‫] سینمای تهمینه میالنی‬. Title and all texts are
translated by M.H. Anjomshoa unless stated otherwise.
2. Middle 1360s/1983-86: Consistency period. Women found some

space in cinematic representation during this period. It was a presence which
took representation of women beyond simple and flat clichéd types, and
contained religious, ideological, political and aesthetic considerations in which
there were new directions for film making, comprised of a new type of acting,
and a new relation (a new gaze) in the interaction on screen between actors and
actresses. However, in this period, showing women in close-up shots was
prohibited.
Cinematic themes and the presence of women in film were devoid of sexual
allusions. An example is Milani’s character Fereshte in The Hidden Half 2
whose clothes hide all the character’s feminine physical attributes; she is made
to wear ungainly, male clothes and resemble any male revolutionary colleague.
Love, physical romantic actions and even romantic statements, even among
close friends and family members, were absent. For example, in the café scene
in Milani’s The Hidden Half, the female protagonist Fereshte asks her
revolutionary female leader questions about love and its place in human's life.
The revolutionary female leader answers: “I will ask our people in the
organization and I will bring the answer to you…”) 3 The answer which is
eventually given is that love has no place in the revolution.
3. 1366-73/1987-94: Pains of Advancement. Women started to play a

more prominent role in Iranian cinema. They moved from the background to
the main roles. The strict directives for the system of the permissible gaze and
the looks passed between actors and actresses were reduced in severity. This
led to the exchange of more direct looks between the two sexes. Female film
directors began to rise to prominence more than over the previous 10 years.
The ones with the greatest success, at home but even more so aborad, were
Rakhshan Bani-Etemaad, Pouran Derakhshandeh and Tahmine Milani.
The Social Significance of the Hijab (Veiling)

The widespread presence of women in post-revolutionary cinema owes its
occurrence to a complex system of decency in the dress code observed by
cinema directors in the execution of their cinematic themes.
Since the nascent Islamic Republic believed that cinema was a tool of
moral corruption in the Pahlavi era (before the revolution), frameworks for
decency, dignity and Islamic dress (Hijab), look and gestures for women were
officially prescribed in front and behind the camera. These rules or guidelines
were established in 1361/1982.
Hamid Nafisi writes that in most non-western countries, such as Iran,
individual identity and self-consciousness are manifested through family and
2. ‫[ نیمه پنهان‬The Hidden Half], 1380/2001. Film. Directed by Tahmine Milani. Iran: Honar-e
Hashtom.
3. “I will ask our people in the organization and I will bring the answer to you…” [ ‫" از مسئولین‬
"‫ ]سازمان میپرسم و جواب رو در جلسه بعدی میارم‬17':24". Hidden Half at 17:24" of the film.
social relations. This leads to a split between an individual’s inner and outward
reality or identity.4
What Nafisi might be pointing to here is the split between “essence” and
“existence.” An individual is ‘looked at’ by society and this is his/her “eye-
dentity,” constructed by social gaze. However, an individual also perceives
him or herself as an “I” and hence as an “I”-dentity or ego-identity. The split in
the Iranian man or woman can thus be summed in the following formula:
“I/[eye]dentity.”5
Psychologically speaking, the inner part of everybody is consistent, while
the outer part is fluid, indeterminate and ever-changing. This dichotomy needs
its own boundary. It might be indeterminate but it is essential. This boundary
is symbolized by the Hijab or veil that makes immune and inviolable the inner
being or the quintessence of a female individual, protecting it from unwanted
outer effects.
Traditionally, the function of the Hijab for every Muslim woman was to
put the veil between her and the male persons with whom she was not related
(but with whom marriage would be allowed). In cinema, the woman had to
hide the surface organs and angles that might be considered a tool of seduction
between actors and actresses.
Women in the Hijab are free to unveil their body (even in the Hijab, their
face is not covered), or the clothes which they wear under their Hijab, to
people with whom they have a close relationship (but with whom marriage is
prohibited). In its original meaning, the Hijab designates a girl who has
reached the age of 9, who must hide her body and hair from all men excluding
those with whom marriage would be prohibited. Form the age of 9, the girl
may only reveal her hands (from wrist to the fingers), her feet and her face.
The seductive power of the veil is not acknowledged in Iranian culture, but
concealment is part of the negativity of the gaze, which functions in a
voyeuristic manner, apprehending the partial object, theorized in Jacques
Lacan’s psychoanalysis.
The Gaze and Looking

Islamic serenity and therefore the way of looking is based on the spaces
created between the inner and the outer self, the distinction between kinsmen
and outsiders, and the division between two sexes. Thus the joy (but not yet
jouissance) of looking is constituted in the space in between these
dichotomies. In Western culture, the gaze functions in the context of
jouissance: it is split between a drive called scopophilia (the love of looking or
peeping) and the libidinal drive, which is the sex drive. The “Western” gaze is
thus largely a negative pleasure grounded in transgression. The Iranian gaze is
4. Hamid Nafisi, “‫[ ”تصویری پنهان از حضوری مقتدر‬The Hidden image of a powerful Presence],
in Issa, Rose and Sheila Whitaker (eds) ‫ سینمای جدید ایران‬:‫[ زندگی و هنر‬Life and Art: New Iranian
Cinema] (Tehran: Ketab-sara, 2000), p. 137. [ ‫ هویت فردی‬،‫در بسیاری از کشورهای غیر غربی از جمله ایران‬
‫ که این امر سبب فاصله میان واقعیت و هویت رزونی و برونی‬.‫و خود آگاهی در روابط خانوادگی و اجتماعی ت جلی می یابند‬
‫]شخص می شود‬
5. Mohamadhosein Anjomshoa, “Re-mapping the Self: Space, Place, I/[eye]dentity in Samuel
Beckett's The Unnamable,” (M.A. thesis, Azad Univ. Publication, 2012), p. 69.
“naïve” in the sense that sexuality is banned from it by concealment before it

has had the chance to be engendered in unconscious “transgression.” The
cultural distancing of men and women in Iranian culture which is reflected in
Iranian cinema, can thus be evaluated positively from the point of view of
“pure” pleasure and “negative” pleasure. We could say that the Western gaze
is grounded in the pathology of the drive (its negativity, which couples the sex
drive with the death drive), while in Iranian culture, the gaze belongs to
scopophilia, which requires a space or a distancing between the subject and
object of the gaze. Thus remoteness and space are motivating forces in the
scopophiliac gaze. The Hijab and Islamic serenity provide this space and
constitute the “pure” pleasure of the Iranian cinematic gaze, which is analytic
without being transgressive.
However, if we probe further into the essence of the analytic gaze of Iranian
cinema, we come to another discovery. In Milani’s cinema, both the male and
female protagonists experience guilt. This guilt could be said to resemble
masochism. The analysis through guilt therefore becomes a “schizoanalysis” –
analysis based on a split between what is and what should be – which is
theorized by Gilles Deleuze in his book Masochism.6 This masochistic gaze
bears a close relation to the Islamic serenity laws for looking at the other sex.
Feminism in Post-Revolutionary Iran

In the post-revolutionary era, Iranian feminism and the emancipation
movement, formerly castigated in patriarchal ideological discourse, saw a
slight boost of confidence. 7 This was due to the exchange of information
which became possible amongst Iranian postmodern authors and artists that led
to the beginning of New Wave Iranian cinema, such as Kaiser 1348/1969 by
Masood Kimiyaii8 and The Cow by Dariush Mehrjooee.9 In fact the adaptation
of the screenplay of Cow from the avant-garde writer, Gholamhosein Saaedi,
led to a new bond between cinema and literature. New Wave films created a
new soul for Iranian cinema and constitute the complicated culture of film in
the last era of 1960s/1340s and the revolution of 1978-9/1357-8.
In the present day, the political and social situation which is the offspring of
revolutionary conditions, offers a representation of the Iranian woman, which
is mostly exterior and not in-depth. The contemporary cinematic image of the
Iranian woman does not offer real insight into the real position of women in
Iranian culture.
Post-revolutionary cinema, despite its propaganda couched in new mottos
and definitions, expels women from cinematic representation. Women are thus
not seen as playing a part in the progress of the Revolution or significant
national events, such as the 'Sacred Defense' - a term that the current regime
6. Gilles Deleuze and Leopold von-Sacher Masoch, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, and
Venus in Furs (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
7. Hamid Mazra-e, ‫ نقد و بررسی سینمای تهمینه میالنی‬:‫[ فرشته های سوخته‬Burried Fereshtes: Criticism
and Analisys of Cinema of Tahmineh Milani] (Teheran: Varjavand Publication, 2001), p. 14.
8. ‫[ قیصر‬Kaiser], 1348/1969. Film. Directed by Masood Kimiraii. Iran.
9. ‫[ گاو‬The Cow], 1348/1969. Film. Directed by Dariush Mehrjooee. Iran: Iranian Ministry of
Culture.
gives to the war between Iran and Iraq which took place two years after the
Revolution.
Post-revolutionary Iranian cinematographers making up the different
periods of Iranina cinema represent women's affairs and character as trivial.
However, there is a new breed of cinematographers who are women or who
make women’s affairs their concern. They include Pouran Derakhshandeh,
Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Tahmineh Milani. These cinematographers view
women’s issues more realistically. Of these three, Milani is perhaps the most
significant contemporary Iranian film maker who deals with the identity of the
Iranian woman.
Milani's Cinema: Two Women and The Hidden Half

Tahmineh Milani examines concealment as a way of life of the Iranian man
and woman in her award-winning film The Hidden Half (2001) and her earlier
and later films: Children of Divorce (1989),10 The Legend of Sigh (1991),11
What Else Is New? (1992), 12 Two Women (1999), 13 The Fifth Reaction
(2003),14 The Unwanted Woman (2005),15 Settling Scores (2007),16 Superstar
(2008), and One of Our Two (2011).17
While not treated as an outcast, Milani is nevertheless under pressure from
the regime and has even been arrested briefly after the release of The Hidden
Half. Moreover, her films are difficult to get in Iran. Scholarship and even film
reviews about Milani’s work are almost non-existent. The influences of
European and Russian directors or the cinema avant-gardes on Milani remain a
big enigma, which is nowhere discussed.
Her most prominent theme is the representation of Iranian women and their
contemporary position and role in Iranian society. The form of Milani’s
cinema is reminiscent of Italian Neorealism (“The Night of the Shooting Stars”
by the Taviani Brothers, Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Rossellini’s Rome,
Open City). Her methodology consists of constructing and de-constructing the
Iranian national myths through the lens of an Iranian modernity which is still
in the making. Because this modernity is still in process, unfinished, one can
study it through historical analogies. One such analogy is early 20th century
Russian society which was going through or acquiring its own form of
modernity. The Russian avant-garde cinema, particularly Eisenstein’s
‘historical’ film themes, provide a model of how national myths are
constructed by the cinematic medium. It is a task for a future investigation to
establish how much this model of myth making resonates with the construction
of identity and gender in Milani’s Iranian cinema, particularly in her trilogy of
Two Women, The Hidden Half and The Fifth Reaction. Thus the investigation
10. ‫[ بچه های طالق‬Childeren of Divorce].

11. ‫[ افسانه آه‬The Legend of Sigh].
12. ‫[ دیگه چه خبر؟‬What Else Is New?].
13. ‫[ دو زن‬Two Women].
14. ‫[ واکنش پنجم‬The Fifth Reaction].
15. ‫[ زن زیادی‬Unwanted Woman].
16. ‫[ تسویه حساب‬Setting Scores].
17. ‫[ یکی از ما دونفر‬One of Two Us].
of Milani’s cinema has the potential to modulate into a study of its

transcultural contexts.
“Transculture” is a concept introduced by the Russian cultural critic,
Mikhial Epstein, to counterbalance the concept of “national” or even “global”
culture. It is a concept which forms the basis of a theory of culture as a
dialogue between cultures. Iranian cinema needs to enter such a dialogue, both
in theoretical studies of its essential themes and structures and in the broader
context of historical ideologies (Marxism, Feminism, psychoanalysis),
deconstruction and myth construction.
In Two Women and The Hidden Half, Milani shows in critical perspective
the existential crisis of different generations of Iranian women, starting with
the socio-political context of the 1970s, when women studying at university
were turning to the utopian ideals of the socialist revolutions as a means of
emancipation. There are veiled allusions to Russian and Latin
Americanrevolutionary ideology as political models being embraced by the
younger generation of women of the 1970s. Milani shows the destiny of one
such woman who has survived the “purges” of the university students to
become a dutiful wife and mother in the present (1990s). However, the past
haunts Fereshte, who is still true to the concealed and repressed ideals of
emancipation of her youth. Thefilm explores how through Fereshte’s
confession to her husband, written up as a manuscript, Milani shows, in
flashbacks, the furtive lives of the young women of the 1970s, in a broad
context of Iranian society spread across city and country and different social
classes. Milani’s film offers a realistic representation of concealment as a way
of life of the Iranian women across generations and classes, from concealment
of the body to concealment of ideas. Milani’s film also examine the role of the
main male protagonist – the art critic and art magazine editor Roozbeh, who is
the love of Fereshte’s student days - who gives Fereshte an entry to culture and
aesthetics, and an escape route from ideology and fixed identity.
Unfortunately, this escape route would lead the heroine out of Iran, to England
and a new society. This is prevented by the conspiracy of Roozbeh’s wife, who
is connected with the powerful ruling elite of the country and who virtually
controls her husband through her family connections. The plight of the Iranian
woman in the present of the film – the 1990s – is thus a double bind: escape
into self-imposed exile outside Iran is unacceptable, while cultural life at home
is controlled by the economically powerful political elite.
In her earlier film, Two Women, Milani views both genders, particularly
women, as they are entrapped within the old and cumbersome tradition of
Iranian society, which does not give women the opportunities to find their
human identity. The films of the trilogy vacillate between pessimism and
cynicism in portraying the heroine, Fereshte, who is deprived of the freedom to
exercise her will and to define her destiny and future.
While Milani believes that veiling inflames the sincere and profound feeling
of indignation in her female characters, she maintains all the traditional
costume designs in her films due to the current religious regulations in her
country. Nonetheless, she does not cease to explore ever new features and
aspects of the lives of contemporary Iranian women.
Milani presents a portrait of Iranian women, who are forced into
marriageand live fenced in, in secure places called “home” but which function
as the security system of prisons. In Two Women, Milani manages to reveal
unsolved internal and structural problems of female livesby employing a
system of antithetical signs.
Two Women and The Hidden Half represent a type of 'Cinema Verité' for
the Iranian female director who focuses on the social and cultural gap between
contemporary Iranian women and men. These two films are part of a trilogy
which is held together by the chronicle of the life of the central character,
Fereshte.
Two Women and The Hidden Half deal with the daily life of women in the
pre- and post-revolutionary era. Both films represent the generic components
of the lives of women, consisting of previously untold events and daily tasks,
which include how a woman dresses, behaves in public and in private and how
she displays love for others. All her actions characterise Fereshte as a
bondswoman in a patriarchal society. However, despite the prevailing power
relations, in which the female heroine is enmeshed, she is able, according
toThe Hidden Half, to exercise her moral freedom. She discovers that the way
to do this is through writing a diary about her past and by showing this diary to
her husband. Nevertheless, it is because of her husband’s understanding and
leniency that she is able to exercise her moral choice without being punished.
Her less fortunate sister, whom her husband as the investigating judge has to
examine for adultery, may be facing the death sentence.
In Two Women, unlike in every romantic story, marriage is not the
beginning, but the end of freedom. For Fereshte, it is the onset of slavery.
Marriage thus becomes a code or cipher for that form of veiling or
concealment, which obstructs emancipation and the development of free
thought for women. Although a pleasant side of marriage is shown in the life
of Fereshte's old friend, Roya and her husband, Milani invites her audience to
see both sides. Two Women and The Hidden Half are not matriarchal films, but
they try to critique the patriarchal society of Iran.Their aim is to analyze social
relations, not to insult the men who are represented. In these films, Milani
points to the different pressures of class on Iranian women of the post-
revolutionary era. For instance, in Two Women, the husband's house, the
spaces of the alleys and streets as well as the university campuses are depicted
in such a way as to represent the position of women in all classes of society
and to show the loneliness in the crises and traumas experienced by women of
all types. Nonetheless, the film maker emphasizes the positive aspect and
impact of the university on shaping her characters' development and identity.
Milani’s cinema is only the beginning of a proper analysis of the
contemporary situation of the Iranian woman. New filmmakers are emerging
and will continue to push the ideological boundaries which at present thwart
the existing cinematic talent in Iranian society.
Islamic Azad University, Boroujerd Branch, Iran

LUDMILLA A’BECKETT
BILINGUALISM IN UKRAINE: A MATTER OF

CONVENIENCE OR NATIONAL SUICIDE?
1. Introduction1
Two decades after proclaiming independence, Ukraine continues its search
for directions and contents of nation-building processes. Wilson2 describes a
major challenge for the Ukrainian nation-building: "Even more so than the
Scots and the English, the Slovaks and Czechs, the Ukrainians and Russians
have long been friends and rivals, and on extremely intimate terms." Attitudes
of national leaders toward the use of Russian in the country often indicate
whether close relations with the neighboring Russia have been anticipated or
avoided. The changes in the profile of Ukrainian Presidents reflect a swing
toward and against Russia: from Leonid Kravchuk, the former Soviet
ideologist though nationally conscious, to Leonid Kuchma, the Soviet
apparatchik blessed by Russian authorities,3 then from Viktor Yushchenko, a
westernized Ukrainian patriot, to Victor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian
pragmatist with a criminal background.4 Voters’ choice often reflects voter
expectations in the realm of national policy rather than their appreciation of
candidates' virtues.
According to the Ukrainian Constitution of 1996, Ukrainian is a single state
language while Russian continues to be the language of ethnic minorities and
of communication in Ukrainian east and south. Some scholars incorrectly
comment that "the Ukrainian parliament passed a bill granting Russian official
status."5 Kuchma's promises of legalizing the status of Russian assisted him in
gaining votes from south and east in the 1994 and 1999 Elections. However,
after winning his presidency, he dissociated himself from this linguistic
venture and pursued his personal Ukrainian studies instead. Despite his initial
"shaky grasp of Ukrainian,"6 Kuchma improved his commands and delivered
1. I am indebted to Dr John Besemeres for his interest in this research and all his critical
comments and suggestions.
2. Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, 2nd edition. (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 2002), p. XIII.
3. Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine. (London: Weidenfield
and Nicolson, 1997), pp. 217-18
4. John Besemeres, “Ukraine: A Sharp Turn Eastwards?” ANU Centre for European Studies
Briefing Paper Series, no. 1, (2010):1-25.
5. A. P. Dietrich, “Language Policy and Status of Russian in the Soviet Union and the
Successor States outside the Russian Federation.” Australian Slavonic and East European
Studies, 19, nos. 1-2 (2005): 10. It is worthwhile noting that the sources quoted by Dietrich were
impossible to verify as they were not accessible.
6. Reid, Borderland, p. 220.
his speeches mostly in Ukrainian.7 He facilitated the introduction of Ukrainian

as a compulsory subject in tertiary institutions though Kuchma was initially
perceived as a promoter of socio-economic integration with Russia.8 His
"revolutionary" successor, Victor Yushchenko, was conventionally portrayed
in the Russian mass media as an anti-Russian war-monger9 who, in public,
argued for Ukrainian language as a sole means of communication in Ukraine
but at the same time welcomed the exiled high-profiled Russian media
presenters, Savik Shuster and Yevgeny Kiselyov, who run their talk shows in
Russian on two Ukrainian TV channels. Reportedly, Yushchenko's daughters
studied in an elite school where English but not Ukrainian was the subject
medium.10 President Yanukovych, "much more pro-Russian than any of his
post-1990 predecessors,"11 seemed to support the legitimization of de-facto
bilingualism in Ukraine.12 However, similarly to Kuchma, he terminated the
linguistic pursuit of his party, Regions, the very moment he was elected.13
The issue of the state language becomes extremely politicized and involves
many considerations, e.g. ideals of nationhood, cultural practices, linguistic
standardization, attitudes toward a possible re-unification with Russia and
others. The common fear has been that the acceptance of Russian in the
capacity of the second state language would lead to the end of Ukrainian
independence. This fear is shared by many former-Soviet Republics: "If
Russian were to somehow become official again, other Soviet habits would
start to creep back.”14 The fact that "everywhere in contemporary Ukraine,
Ukrainian national culture exists alongside Russian culture and is surrounded
by Russian culture, including Russian culture produced by both Russians and
7. Laada Bilaniuk, Contested Tongues: Language Politics and Cultural Corrections in

Ukraine. (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 147-8.
8. Besemeres, “Ukraine: A Sharp Turn Eastwards?” p. 7.
9. See Ludmilla A’Beckett, “Political Myths on the Ukrainian Orange Revolution in Russian
Public Discourse.” Monash University Linguistics Papers, 6, no. 1 (2008):3-18; Ludmilla
A’Beckett, “The Stance of Russian Mass Media on the Ukrainian Orange Revolution.”
Transcultural Studies: A Series in Interdisciplinary Research. 2-3 (2006-2007): 217-244.
10. E. Suprycheva, “Dochki Yushchenko Zubriat ne Ukrainskiy, a Angliyskiy.”
[“Yushchenko's Daughters learn English but not Ukrainian”], Komsomol'skaia Pravda, October
13, 2005. Available at: www.kp.ru/daily/23595/45569/, accessed on August 11, 2011 (in
Russian).
11. John Besemeres, “Can Poland and Russia Get Along at Last?” Quadrant, September,
(2010): 56.
13. Viktor Yanukovych, “Ukraine will not Have Second State Language,” Kyivpost, March
11, 2010. Available at: www.kyivpost.com/news/nation/detail/61283/#ixzz1SdF9GdLo, accessed
on September 11, 2011.
14. P. Kolstoe, Russian in the Former Soviet Republics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ.
Press, 1995), pp. 147-48.
Ukrainians,"15 has been considered a sign of national weakness by Ukrainian

and Russian politicians.16
The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the social consequences of de-
facto bilingualism and the role of legislation in changing the sociolinguistic
balance in Ukraine. The paper also seeks to discuss factors which impede the
desirable institutionalization of Ukrainian and preserve conditions for wide-
spread use of Russian.
2. Public Debates on Language Ideology

The public discourse in Ukraine exposes conflicting beliefs regarding
nationhood, functions of language and the overall impact of language choice
on the wellbeing of the nation. The beliefs have been asserted by ideologists
but they are commonly shared among ordinary citizens, i.e. native speakers of
Russian and Ukrainian, who support one or the other linguistic option for
Ukraine and express their views through public forums and media blogs.
Two basic linguistic options for Ukraine have emerged: 1) Ukraine is a
monolingual state where Ukrainian covers all social functions and is used by
the entire population; 2) Ukraine is a bilingual state where Russian
complements Ukrainian and can be accepted in all public institutions. The
second option prompts sentiments regarding the inseparability of Russia and
Ukraine and, hence, the redundancy of Ukrainian. The first option may entail
coercive measures. Given that Russian and Ukrainian are closely related
languages, Russophone and Ukrainophone citizens usually understand each
other properly in day-to-day communication. Nevertheless, Russian speakers
outside Ukraine have serious difficulties with comprehending Ukrainian.
Russophone Ukrainians attempting to express themselves in Ukrainian often
end up with a vulgar Ukrainian tarnished by interferences from Russian.
Russian speakers in Ukraine consider the existing monolingual legislation to
be discriminatory because of their personal insecurities. On the other hand,
speakers of Ukrainian believe that only the language of the titular nation
should be used state-wide. Both language communities view themselves as
victims despite the fact that each of them exercises certain advantages, e.g. the
broad access to Russophone cultural products, on the one hand, or the social
prestige of promoters of the indigenous culture, on the other. The two
language communities receive constant consolations and promises to rectify an
"unjust situation" from politicians supporting their perceptions. Retaining
15. Ivan Dziuba, “Chy usvidomliuiemo natsional'nu kul'turu iak tsil'nist'?” [“Do we perceive
the integrity of the national culture?”] Nauka i kul'tura, no. 22 (1988): 315. In Ukrainian. See
also Maxym Srikha, “Cultural Policy in Ukraine (1991-2005),” Australian Slavonic and Eastern
European Studies, 20, nos. 1-2 (2006): 102.
16. Ludmilla A' Beckett, “Debates about Ukrainian Language and National Identity:
Heteroglossia and Political Mythology,” in Kirill Nourzhanov (ed.) Two Decades without the
Soviet Union: Transformations in Eurasian Space. Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Conference
of AACaPS, 3 - 4 February 2011 (Canberra: Australasian Association for Communist and Post-
communist Studies and the Australian National Univ.). Available at:
cais.anu.edu.au/AACaPS_Conference_2011/, accessed on September 11, 2011.
political power in Ukraine often means a careful navigation between wants and
needs of east and west.
The Ukrainian ruling Party of Regions and the Communist Party promote
pro-Russian views in Ukrainian political discourse. These parties appeal to
Russophone and Russophile voters of South and East Ukraine.17 During their
political campaigns, they argue in favor of two official languages and closer
ties with Russia. Some of them, e.g. Mykola Levchenko,18 have suggested that
Russian should be the only state language. Professor Dmytro Tabachnyk, an
historian and present Minister of Ukrainian Education and Sciences, used to
advocate conventional pro-Russian views19 when Regions and Communists
were in opposition. However, their pursuit in legalization of Russian was
halted the moment they got presidential and parliamentary power in their
hands. The political decisions of these parties do not always meet the
expectations of their Russophone and Russophile voters.
The opposition to the expressed views of Regions and Communists comes
from so-called nationally conscious Ukrainians. They are a broad category of
conspicuous patriots and are often called "nationalists.”20 Nationally conscious
Ukrainians are typically affiliated with the Orange coalition, which governed
prior to the victory of President Yanukovych in 2010. The Orange coalition
voices are split among the opposition parties Our Ukraine, People's Self-
Defense and the Block of Yulia Tymoshenko. Ex-President Yushchenko
opposed de-facto bilingualism.21 However, some of his initiatives in cultural
policy were criticized by the international community,22 let alone Ukrainian
citizens.
Nationally conscious Ukrainians as well as some Russian political
analysts23 consider Ukrainian "pronounced patterns of ethnic, religious and
regional diversity"24 to be a threat to social stability. Both parties hold "[a]
view of society in which differences are seen as dangerous and centrifugal, and
17. See Strikha, “Cultural Policy in Ukraine (1991-2005).”

18. A. Zikora, “Sekretar Donets'koi Mis'krady Levchenko—pro Movu, Shevchenka i Sifilis”
[“The secretary of Donetsk City Council Levchenko about Language, Shevchenko and
Syphilis”], The Informational Agency Unian. March 2, 2007. Available at:
www.unian.net/ukr/news/news-186258.html, accessed on August 10, 2011, (in Ukrainian).
19. See Dmytro Tabachnyk, Utinyi Sup Po-Ukrainski: Besedy s Ukrainskim Politikuumom:
Dialogi s Glukhimi [Duck Soup, Ukrainian Style: Conversation with the Ukrainian Political
Mind: Dialogue with the Deaf] (Kharkov: Pholio, 2008) (in Russian).
20. Ibid.
21. Viktor Yushchenko, “Ukrainskiy iazyk vazhnee khleba i sala” [“The Ukrainian Language
is More Important than the Bread and Salo (lard)”], Informational agency Regnum, January 14,
2009. Available at: www.regnum.ru/news/1234993.html, accessed on August 11, 2011 (in
Russian). See also Viktor Yushchenko, “Ukrainskiy iazyk—zalog nezavisimosti Ukrainy” [“The
Ukrainian Language is a Token of Ukrainian Independence”], Delo, February 21, 2007.
Available at: delo.ua/ukraine/jucshenko-ukrainskij-jazyk---z-21454/, accessed on August 10,
2011 (in Russian).
22. See John Besemeres, “Can Poland and Russia Get Along at Last?” and also Aneta
Pavlenko, “Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Countries: Language Revival, Language Removal,
and Sociolinguistic Theory,” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 11,
nos. 3-4 (2008): 275-314.
23. See in A'Beckett, “Debates about Ukrainian Language and National Identity.”
24. Wilson, “The Ukrainians,” p. XI.
in which the "best" society is suggested to be one without intergroup

differences.”25 Ukrainian patriots attempt to consolidate Ukraine through their
promotion of monolingualism. At the same time, many Russian politicians still
perceive Ukraine to be a culture representing no substantial differences from
hegemonic Russia. Hence, in their perception, the intergroup differences in
Ukraine can be stifled through amalgamation with Russian culture, i.e. the
cultural fraternity of Eastern Slavs. Both sides put forward sophisticated
arguments buttressing their views. However, it seems that the experience of
other multilingual countries across the globe have been widely ignored in these
debates. The analysis of the bilingual conditions allows for a re-examination of
the "oppressors" and the "oppressed.” The effect and compliance with the
existing legislation needs to be considered more carefully.
3. Diglossia and Complaints of "Russophone Minorities"

Many scholars and international humanitarian organizations suggest that the
affirmative legislation in favor of the language of the titular nation has
achieved a revival of Ukrainian in all spheres of social life.26 However,
Zubrycka argues that the command of Ukrainian among Ukrainian citizens is
often insufficient:
[T]he level of mother tongue proficiency varies from the absence of any
proficiency, to passive proficiency (understanding but not speaking) to
bilingualism and diglossia. The last phenomenon is particularly evident in
the eastern and southern cities of Ukraine. At the same time the majority
of the population has competency in Russian to a greater or lesser extent.
Russian continues to be the lingua franca for a vast region of modern
Ukraine.27
According to State Statistics Committee of Ukraine,28 67.5 % of the

population declared Ukrainian as their native language and 29.6 % declared
Russian. At the same time, Russian and Ukrainian politicians tend to rig
figures on the linguistic composition of the Ukrainian population in favor of
the cause they advocate. The lack of official status for Russian does not bring
25. Jan Blommaert and Jef Vershchueren, “The Role of Language in European Nationalist
Ideologies,” Pragmatics, 2, no. 3 (1992): 362.
26. See Pavlenko, “Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Countries”; Laada Bilaniuk and Svitlana
Melnyk, “Tense and Shifting Balance: Bilingualism and Education in Ukraine,” International
Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 11, nos. 3-4 (2008): 340-372. According to
First Annual Report of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights “State of
observance and protection of human rights and freedoms in Ukraine” for the period from April
14, 1998 till December 31, 1999, “the amount of Russian-teaching schools has been decreased
since 1991 and now it is much lower than the proportion of Russophones.” Accessed at:
www.ombudsman.kiev.ua/de1_zm.htm, accessed on June 20, 2011.
27. Marina Zubrytska, “Between Scylla and Charybdis: Prospects and Challenges for
Ukrainian Culture in the Current Global Context,” Australian Slavonic and East European
Studies, 20, nos. 1-2 (2006): 10.
28. State Statistics Committee of Ukraine (2001) Census. Available at:
2001.ukrcensus.gov.ua/, accessed on September 1, 2011.
down the market of Russophone products. The Law on National Minorities

adopted in 1992 guarantees minorities the right to use and obtain an education
in their native language.29 Reports of Moscow-based sociologists suggest that
"even 10 years after gaining independence the majority of books published in
Ukraine are still in Russian.”30 Nevertheless, a legislation granting Russian the
status of official language looks like a highly desirable outcome for 52 per cent
of the Ukrainian population.31
What could the official status of the second state language change in
Ukraine? Why do Russophone Ukrainians feel unhappy? Their fundamental,
natural right to use their mother tongue has not been violated. One is free to
speak any tongue in Ukraine except for abusive language. The answers to
these basic questions can assist in revealing real and imaginative reasons for
ethnic tensions in Ukraine.
Since customer service has improved under conditions of the free market
economy, there is no risk of being neglected or poorly treated if one chooses to
address a shop-assistant in Russian rather than Ukrainian or vice versa. The
likelihood of an arrogant attitude towards Russophone or Ukrainophone
customers is equal to the chance of being poorly treated because of one’s
choice of clothes and hairstyle. Nevertheless, there is a list of grievances which
Russian speakers present to the state protectors of Ukrainian. Here is an appeal
of the Ukrainian citizen-native speaker of Russian to a Ukrainian patriot
placed on the public forum for Russian speakers in Ukraine:
Where do you see my hostility toward you, a Ukrainian? Because I want

to fill forms in my mother tongue which is used by almost everyone in
Odessa? Because I want my children to get an education in their mother
tongue? Because I want my city to preserve its unique culture and specific
verbal communication32? Because I want to watch TV, theatre
productions, and films and read newspapers, books, magazines in
Russian? Because I want to preserve the multicultural atmosphere of my
region? Does it bother you? How?33
29. See Dietrich, “Language Policy,” p. 10. See also Yulia Tymoshenko, Postanova vid 30
veresnia 2009 N 1033. Pro vnesennia zmin do polozhennia pro zagal'noostiniy navchal'nyi
zaklad. [Decree No 1033 issued 30 September 2009. On changes in the status of public
educational institutions]. Accessed at [http://zakon.rada.gov.ua/cgi-
bin/laws/main.cgi?nreg=1033-2009-%EF&passid=4/
UMfPEGznhhHXI.ZiM3RZS.HI4H6s80ms...], 20 July 2011. In Ukrainian.
30. Dietrich, “Language Policy,” p. 10.
31. See Interfax Ukraine, “Bol'shinsvo ukraintsev govoriat na russkom iazyke” [“The
majority of Ukrainian speak Russian”], Podrobnosti.ua, December 4, 2006. Available at:
podrobnosti.ua/society/2006/12/04/373924.html, accessed on June 20, 2011 (in Russian). See
also “Ukrainstsy vladeyut russkim iazykom luchshe, chem ukrainskim” [“Ukrainians speak
Russian better than Ukrainian”], IA Regnum, 4.12.2006. Available at:
www.regnum.ru/news/749712.html#ixzz1SdDdXeMG, accessed on June 20, 2011 (in Russian).
The English account of the phenomenon can be found in Dietrich “Language Policy,” p. 10.
32. Odessa is famous as a city of humour and puns delivered in Russian.
33. My own translation of a discussion from the public forum Donetskiy svobodnyi forum
[Free public forum of Donetsk]. Available at: forum.dkr.com.ua/, accessed on September 9, 2011
(in Russian and Ukrainian).
Some objective problems as well as their overstatements emerge.
4. Public Service
Since Ukraine inherited the Soviet bureaucratic habits, filling various forms
and applications in Ukrainian can be indeed an extremely painful exercise.
Only public officials have a linguistic and procedural "omnipotence," and are
eager to find faults in the written Ukrainian so as to impose a monetary
penalty, i.e., elicit a bribe, for misspelling and other mistakes.34 Some power-
driven officials often create unnecessary trouble if they think that Ukrainian
was not used appropriately for workplace documentation, legal procedures and
public arrangements. Article 6, 7 and others of the Law of Ukraine on the
Development and Use of Languages in Ukraine35 contains conflicting
provisions. It requires the use of Ukrainian everywhere but allows the use of
minorities languages in areas populated by national minorities. The regions
have not been specified.
It is plausible to suggest that the unique atmosphere of Odessa, as a capital
of humor based on the use of Russian word-play and comic stereotypes, could
change due to bureaucratic pressure even though the city was able to cope with
social affliction in the past with the inherent humorous resilience. At the same
time, the linguistic requirements for official documentation can be relieved by
a "prudent and democratic" authority. Therefore, the minimum requirement for
proficiency in the state language as well as the area of the state language
application may vary.
An incident at the recent scandalous trial of Yulia Tymoshenko, the former
Prime Minister, shows that the de facto existing bilingualism provides the
ground for abusing and humiliating both Russian and Ukrainian speakers.
When Mykola Azarov, Ukraine’s current Prime Minister, refused to accede to
Tymoshenko's demand that as a court witness he speak Ukrainian rather than
Russian, she asked for an interpreter. This incident resulted in the taking of
Tymoshenko into custody on the grounds of "contempt of court.”36 However,
it is the exalted position of Azarov as well as efforts to victimize Tymoshenko
which exempted him from the requirements applied to public officers in
Ukraine. The Ukrainian legal requirements unambiguously stipulates: "Legal
procedure in Ukraine shall be followed in the state language" (Article 12 of the
Law of Ukraine on the Development and Use of Languages in Ukraine) and
"Public officers and civil servants in executive government agencies and local
34. See about extortionist activities in Ukraine: Matthew Clayfield, “In Ukraine, It’s a Case of
Here Comes the Bribery,” Crickey, May 22, 2012. Available at:
www.crikey.com.au/2012/05/22/in-ukraine-its-a-case-of-here-comes-the-bribe, accessed on May
25, 2012.
35. The Ukrainian language legislation translated into English can be accessed at US English
Foundation (Ukraine. Language research. Legislation). Available at:
www.usefoundation.org/view/618#top, accessed on September 13, 2011.
36. “Yulia Tymoshenko’s Arrest Seems Motivated by a Desire for Revenge,” Economist,
August 13, 2011. Available at: www.economist.com/node/21525974, accessed on August 20,
2011.
bodies of self-governance, employees of public companies, institutions and

organizations are obliged to be proficient in the state language" (Article 9).
Ironically, according to Article 9.2 ,"[T]he Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine
specifies the extent of proficiency in the state language and the stretch of time
for mastering it," though Prime Minister Azarov, who has chaired the Cabinet
since 2010, is not either fluent or proficient in Ukrainian.
Terms like "official or state language" (e.g. Ukrainian in Ukraine or French,
German, Italian and Romansh in Switzerland etc), or "the language of ethnic
communication" (e.g. Russian in the Soviet Union and Russian in Kazakhstan
where the only state language is Kazakh), may obfuscate the linguistic reality
in different countries. Formulations of Ukrainian laws often lead to an
ambiguous interpretation, depending on our assumptions.
5. Mass Media and Entertainment

Russian broadcasting in Ukraine is a fairly complicated issue. In the first
years of Ukrainian independence Russian TV channels were disconnected
since Ukraine could not afford payment for their services. Nevertheless,
regional cable TV stations in East and South continued their broadcast in
Russian. Nowadays, the state channels broadcast in Ukrainian though they
incorporate many Russian programs, invite Russian actors and artists, run
interviews with Russian speakers etc. Russian famous TV presenters conduct
their shows in Russian while their guests and audience are free to use either of
the languages. It is hard to believe that "on April 14, 2004 the Ukrainian
National Council for Television and Radio adopted an unexpected resolution
that obliges all national and 'interregional' broadcasters to broadcast only in
Ukrainian as of April 19, 2004."37 Reportedly, on 1st November 2008, four
Russian channels were switched off in Ukraine because of their anti-Ukrainian
propaganda.38 Russian sites suggested that Yushchenko posed an angry
questions: "Why is the channel which does not respect our language, our
history not excluded from our informational space?"39 Whether his angry
outburst was aimed at channels broadcasting in Russian or Russian channels
misleading the public about events in Ukraine is a matter of interpretation.
Some Russophone Ukrainians and Russians were infuriated by the claim. The
decisions to discontinue Russian channels may have their reasons; however,
with the advent of new technologies it is ultimately impossible to seal the
stream of information from Russia to Ukraine. Therefore, complaints about
limited access to Russian TV channels, films, theatrical productions, books
and press have some dismal precedents which have been discounted in the
broadcasting practices afterwards.
In December 2007, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine announced that
starting in 2008, all foreign-language (Russian included) movies shown in the
37. US English Foundation Research, Ukraine. Language research. Legislation.

38. Mikhail Leontyev “Otkuda Vzialas' Takaia Kretinskaia Ideia?” [“Where does this
imbecile idea come from?”] Informational Agency Russkaia liniya, November 6, 2008. Available
at: rusk.ru/newsdata.php?idar=179491, accessed on August 10, 2011 (in Russian).
39. From ru.tsn.ua/ukrayina/yushchenko-trebuet-zakryt-telekanaly-prenebregayushchie-
ukrainskim-yazykom.html, accessed on September 1, 2011.
country will have to be translated into Ukrainian via dubbing, subtitles, or

synchronous translation. The decision was criticized within and outside
Ukraine.40 The law on subtitles was cancelled by Yanukovych at the beginning
of his Presidency,41 reversing many decisions of his predecessor. The
discussed contradictions include the cost of subtitling, a negative impact on
profits of cinematographic industry and the redundancy of translation for a
population who understands Russian anyway. However, to Yushchenko's
credit it can be accepted that the law has facilitated the Ukrainian-language
environment in Ukraine even though it caused objections and resistance.
6. Education
Public education remains the major area where linguistic issues may sow
dissent among the divided populace of Ukraine. Within this domain two
conspicuous problematic tendencies can be identified: 1. admission to tertiary
institutions; 2. teaching in tertiary institutions. The admission policy for
universities changed many times, reflecting initiatives of Ukrainian Ministers
of Education, and continues to accommodate changes. Whether prospective
tertiary students have been enrolled according to results from entrance exams,
certified school tests or a combination of both, they are required to
demonstrate a so-called proficiency in Ukrainian. Those who opt to pay for
their education are often exempted from the pre-requisite. Foreign students are
not tested for command of Ukrainian but go through extensive preparatory
training in Russian (my knowledge may reflect the situation in Ukrainian east
only). Despite the Ukrainian proficiency pre-requisite, Russian continues to be
the language of instruction at tertiary level in south and east of Ukraine.
Numerous official initiatives, such as calling Russian a foreign language for
Ukrainians,42 do not change the situation drastically.43 Russophone children
can be disadvantaged by the tertiary admission policy. The Russian language
proficiency in which students receive instructions deteriorates due to the lack
of oversight. According to my east Ukrainian colleagues and discussion blogs
for Russophone Ukrainians, Russian standards declined among newly admitted
university students. During Yushchenko's presidency, reports from east
Ukrainian educational institutions to the Ministry of Education had to
accommodate information on "the progress in acquisition of Ukrainian" which
was often exaggerated. The role of the bureaucratic machine and
administrative actions in shaping public attitudes toward language practices
40. See Pavlenko “Multilingualism in Post-Soviet countries,” p. 275.

41. Interfax Ukraine, “Otmenen Obiazatel'nyi Dubliazh Fil'mov na Ukrainskiy Yazyk” [“The
obligatory dubbing of films into Ukrainian has been cancelled”], Zerkalo nedeli, October 29,
2010. Available at: news.zn.ua/articles/67916, accessed on September 1, 2011 (in Russian).
42. Dietrich, “Language Policy,” p. 9.
43. From my personal experience, at a meeting of the Scientific Council at a University of
eastern Ukraine in the mid-90s, a lecturer from the Department of Ukrainian language demanded
that those who teach in Russian should to go to Belorussia. Belorussia and Kirgizstan are the only
two former Soviet Republics which gave Russian the status of the second state language.
and usage can be often misrepresented in official reports and ideologically

motivated claims.44
Many regional authorities of south and east Ukraine issued decrees giving
Russian the status of regional language.45 The term "regional language" may
cause a further confusion to the representation of the linguistic reality in
Ukraine. Even if the regional documents issued in the regional language can be
locally accepted, they have to be translated into the state language when are
presented in other regions. The discussion on the legitimacy of the regional
initiative continues.
Reasons other than an open sabotage of the Ukrainian legislation can be
blamed for reluctance of Russophone Ukrainians to switch to the state
language. Writing textbooks in Ukrainian is not an easy matter. Ukrainian
scientific terminology has been unsettled. There are many variant forms whose
appropriateness has been contested by different research schools. Hull and
Koscharsky observe: "When compared with its two large neighbors, Russian
and Polish, the Ukrainian language presents a picture of striking internal
variations."46 The linguistic support for those who would like to switch to
Ukrainian is poorer than for the Singaporeans struggling with their
Mandarin.47 Unlike in Singapore, telephone and Internet classes in Ukraine, to
my knowledge, have not been offered though it would be more problematic to
provide such services for the entire Ukrainian east and south.
For post-graduates, the public defense of their thesis translated into
Ukrainian often becomes a linguistic battle around the appropriateness of a
term. Such battles do not go any further than personal ambitions of the
candidate, supervisor and opponents. Except for the degree certificate, the
recognition of important findings in sciences usually comes from the
communication in Russian with colleagues from the former-Soviet Union and
in English world-wide. Misappropriation of Ukrainian terms has a limited
significance. Standardization of terminology is a painful and on-going process
in which linguists and specialists are often not connected. For example, a
former colleague of mine, who is professor of mathematics, claimed that the
defense of her Candidate and Doctor of Sciences thesis yielded many linguistic
puzzlements such as the translation of the Russian term погрешность which
renders either the English "margin of error" or "error" (in the semi-fixed
expression "absolute and relative error"). Some of her opponents demanded
that this term be translated into Ukrainian as помилка which overlaps with the
core semantics of "error" in Ukrainian. However, a thorough consideration led
44. See Pavlenko “Multilingualism in Post-Soviet countries,” p. 332 and Aneta Pavlenko,
“Linguistic Russification in the Russian Empire,” Russian Linguistics, 3, no. 5 (2011): 306.
45. D. Korotkov, “Prava Russkogo Yazyka Snova Hotiat Rasshirit'“ [“Some People Want to
Enlarge the Scope of Russian Language Rights Again”], Segodnia, August 30, 2011. Available
at: www.segodnya.ua/news/14283188.html, accessed on August 31, 2011 (in Russian).
46. Geoffrey Hull and Halyna Koscharsky, “Contours and Consequences of the Lexical
Divide in Ukrainian,” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies, 20, nos. 1-2 (2006): 139.
47. W. Bokhorst-Heng, “Singapore's Speak Mandarin Campaign: Language Ideological
Debates in the Imagining of the Nation,” in Jan Blommaert (ed.) Language Ideological Debates
(Berlin: Mouton Greuter, 1999), pp. 235-267.
to the acceptance of a relatively novel term похибка which competed with the
term погрiшнiсть modeled according to the Russian rules of word-formation .
Since primary, secondary and high schools changed their curriculums and
the subject medium (medium of instruction), Russophone parents often regret
that their children do not learn familiar topics in literature and language
classes. Unlike Yushchenko, many Ukrainian parents are unable to pay for
their children’s education in a private school with a different subject medium.
7. Standardization of Ukrainian and "Surzhyk"

Reid suggests that the gap between Russian and Ukrainian is as wide as
Estonian and Finnish, Dutch and German.48 But in the bilingual environment
the languages are mutually understandable. Russian speakers find it difficult
to be immersed into a Ukrainian environment. Nevertheless, it has been argued
that
[t]he three East Slavonic languages are very close to one another, with
very high rates of mutual intelligibility...The separation of Russian,
Ukrainian, and Belorussian as distinct languages is relatively
recent...Many Ukrainians in fact speak a mixture of Ukrainian and
Russian, finding it difficult to keep the two languages apart..."49
The mixture of the two languages where either Russian or Ukrainian can be
dominant is commonly known as "surzhyk.”50 The interference of two
neighboring languages frequently occurs in different regions world-wide.51 For
instance, in Spanish Galicia Spanish interferences with Galician undermine the
confidence of those who would like to use Galician in their communication.
To extend the similarity with Galician, Ukrainian used to absorb words and
grammatical models from Russian and Polish while Galician incorporates
Spanish and Portuguese inputs.
Speakers of surzhyk have always been mocked and shunned. If previously
Ukrainian speakers switching to Russian were a source of ridicule, now it is
the other way around. In politics and workplaces, Ukrainian with Russian
interferences can be a serious disadvantage. For instance, during the recent
Presidential campaign, some Ukrainians from Ukrainian west accused the
former Prime Minister Tymoshenko of speaking surzhyk52 instead of pure
48. Reid, Borderland, p. 85.

49. Bernard Comrie, The Languages of the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1981), pp. 145-146.
50. Laada Bilaniuk, “A Typology of Surzhyk: Mixed Ukrainian-Russian Language,”
International Journal of Bilingualism, 8, no. 4 (2004): 409- 425.
51. Compare Spanish interferences in Galician: V. Loureiro-Rodriguez, “Conflicting Values
at a Conflicting Age: Linguistic Ideologies in Galician Adolescents,” in M. Nino-Murcia and J.
Rothman (eds) Bilingualism and Identity: Spanish at the Crossroads with Other Languages
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008), pp. 63-87.
52. The accusations appeared at: Face Book. Personal Page of Yulia Timoshenko. Available
at: www.facebook.com/#!/Tymoshenko.UA, accessed on September 20, 2011, and Lurkmore at
lurkmore.to/%D0%A1%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B6%D0%B8%D0%BA, accessed on May 20,
2012 (in Russian).
Ukrainian.53 After careful examination of some speeches by Tymoshenko

placed in the public domains of the Internet,54 I had to concede that her
pronunciation indeed carries traces of Russian influence. Bilaniuk argues that
"having an accent--that is, speaking one language with phonology that is
typical of another--is often labeled as surzhyk because of stereotypes."55
Nevertheless, Tymoshenko's choice of lexicon seems to be appropriate and
refined comparing to other politicians. Besemeres defends Tymoshenko's
language skills: "Tymoshenko comes from Russophone and Russophile
Dnepropetrovsk (the home of Brezhnev's push), but she too earnestly enhanced
her Ukrainian and uses it widely."56 The incident shows that speech in standard
Ukrainian can be a risky endeavor for many Russophone Ukrainians. The
divergence of Ukrainian lexical forms and grammatical variants57 bears
consequences: 1) Ukrainian linguists are eager to purify Ukrainian from
Russian-like forms even if they have a history of use in the literary and
standard Ukrainian58; 2) the general public are not aware of some lately
endorsed language changes, though politicians have more time, money and
opportunities to enhance their Ukrainian; 3) the vague concept of standard
Ukrainian creates a situation of power abuse. Article 2.4 of the Law of
Ukraine on the Development and Use of Languages in Ukraine defines
standard Ukrainian as "the language variants of exemplary use.”
For comparison, the current Ukrainian Prime Minister Azarov, "a Soviet
style financial manager,"59 reads Ukrainian texts according to Russian rules
and therefore his "Ukrainian" speeches are anything but "standard Ukrainian.”
Azarov, as a high authority figure, is free to choose the language for his public
statements. His choice of "broken" Ukrainian for TV and radio presentations is
likely to be a snub for nationally conscious Ukrainians. Azarov's "innovative"
linguistic practices are in breach of Article 2.4 which states "[w]hen using state
language any departure from its standard form is inadmissible.”
The abundance of lexical variants confuses potential language users. From
my personal experience, in many English-speaking countries the foreign
speakers can feel comfortable with deciphering the basic meaning, speaking
with a strong accent and making spelling mistakes. However, a similar
proficiency level in Ukrainian would be embarrassing for Russophone
Ukrainians. A Russian native speaker can master basic Ukrainian faster than
English, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian but to keep Russian and Ukrainian
53. Ironically, Tymoshenko's rival Victor Yanukovych “has little rapport with the over 20
million who prefer to speak Ukrainian.” See Besemeres, “Ukraine: A Sharp Turn Eastwards?” p.
8.
54. See for instance, a fragment from Savik Shuster's program The Freedom of Speech
recorded on May 21, 2011. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8i_mxLDyJc, accessed
on May 20, 2012 (in Russian and Ukrainian).
55. Bilaniuk ,”Typology of Surzhyk,” p. 423.
57. See Hull and Koscharsky, “Contours and Consequences of the Lexical Divide in
Ukrainian.”
58. See Bilaniuk, “A Typology of Surzhyk,” pp. 418-419.
59. See Besemeres, “Ukraine: A Sharpe Turn Eastwards?” p. 14.
apart requires an effort. Similarly, Loureiro-Rodriguez argues that bilinguals in

Galicia often "stop speaking Galician due to a sense of incorrectness or
inappropriateness." 60 In Catalan, native speakers of Spanish can acquire
fluency but not proficiency in Catalan and thus they also experience the
linguistic insecurity when it comes to expression of their inner self in
Catalan.61 The Russians outside Ukraine are unable to work out the meaning of
Ukrainian phrases in public forums and customers' manuals without
translation. At the same time, Ukrainian participants in public forums
sometimes correct spelling mistakes in Russian sentences of their opponents.
Passive bilingualism is deeply rooted in Ukraine. In public forums and
media interviews, it is common to pose questions in one of the two languages
but receive an answer in the opposite medium. Bilaniuk and Melnyk call this
practice "non-accommodating bilingualism":
In this mode of interaction, each speaker uses their preferred language

(Ukrainian or Russian) regardless of the language others are speaking.62
This practice provides a convenient niche for linguistic insecurities of

Russophone Ukrainians.
8. Conclusions
The struggle for the legalization of Russian in Ukraine is a symbolic war for
the long-term acceptance of the existing sociolinguistic situation in this
country. A large part of the Ukrainian populace seems to be in breach of the
provisions stipulated by the Law on the Development and Use of Languages in
Ukraine. This fact can be explained by Pavlenko's observation on "the illusion
of politics,” "that change comes from the pen of legislators."63
The choice of the language of communication in Ukraine has been
stigmatized. Some Russophone Ukrainians and Russians present Ukrainian as
"the language of peasants and dogs," while their opponents view Russian as
"the language of occupants.” "The language of peasants and dogs" differs from
Soviet clichés portraying Ukrainian as "the language of nightingales" and one
of the most melodic languages in the world.64
Popular beliefs about weak and strong nations permeate these ideological
debates on language. The stereotype of a weak nation tolerating social
heterogeneity feeds the fear that Ukraine can be forever tied to Russia. The
stereotype of a strong nation purporting to undertake the reduction of ethnic
60. V. Loureiro-Rodriguez, “Conflicting Values at a Conflicting Age,” p. 83.

61. E. Boix-Fuster and C. Sanz, “Language and Identity in Catalonia,” in M. Nino-Murcia
and J. Rothman (eds) Bilingualism and Identity, pp. 87-109.
62. Laada Bilaniuk and Svitlana Melnyk, “A Tense and Shifting Balance: Bilingualism and
Education in Ukraine,” International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, 11, nos.
3-4 (2008): 358.
63. Pavlenko, “Linguistic Russification of the Russian Empire,” p. 344.
64. From the public discussion of the article “My spasli ukrainskiy iazyk” [“We rescued
Ukrainian”] by V. Yushchenko. Available at:
4road.net/news/Yuschenko_My_spasli_ukrainskij_yazyk//, accessed on September 20, 2011.
diversity and thus rid itself of Russian imperial habits, conforms to the idea of
ultimate Ukrainian national liberation.
Nationally conscious Ukrainian ideologists stress the importance of national
consolidation and thus target a cultural unity which homogenizes all
constituents of the national cluster. However, such efforts can be viewed, in
extremis, as a violation of minorities’ rights. At the same time, pro-Kremlin
ideologists try to use the diversity among the Ukrainians for obtaining a
protectorate over Russophone Ukrainians who are perceived as no different to
Russians .65
Playing with the hopes of Ukrainian east, west and south is a political
strategy which enables Ukrainian politicians to generate some political capital
at a time when economics and international affairs do not offer much
optimism. There is the constant threat of disturbing the fine balance between
discomfort and the linguistic insecurities of Russophone Ukrainians, and the
conviction of national patriots that Ukrainian borders should be authenticated
by the language of the titular nation. Even though they advocate homogeneity,
politicians do not miss any opportunity to exploit Ukrainian internal divisions.
They stir the cultural prejudices among easterners and westerners by various
means. For instance, Yushchenko awarded the title of hero of Ukraine to the
nationalist fighter Stepan Bandera, who was previously stigmatized by Soviet
authorities.66 The gesture infuriated the Ukrainian east since no serious public
discussion was offered on the matter. On the contrary, on Victory Day 2011,
Yanukovych tacitly approved a crusade of easterners and Soviet veterans
armed with the Soviet red flag to the city of L'viv which traditionally opposes
any Russian influence. The change of Presidents is thus perceived by the
people as a possibility of compensating formerly disadvantaged regions.
Stirring hostility among regions distracts the population from the other
mistakes of the government and their hidden agenda, e.g. shadowy
privatization of state property, further ascent of the tycoons who are members
of the Ukrainian Parliament and growing corruption.
At the beginning of Yushchenko's term, his Presidency was perceived to be
an era of national prosperity, democracy and liberation from Russian
imperialist habits. After the end of his term and his campaign for national
consolidation, Ukraine became further divided. Yushchenko's "policy of chaos
and occasional abrasive nationalism"67 attenuated his perceived inefficiency.
His policy was also perceived as a punishment for easterners and southerners
who defied his authority. Unsurprisingly, Yanukovych's presidential campaign
profited from Yushchenko's controversial legacy. Policy-makers of different
orientation derived their political capital from the existing legislation on
languages for decades. The inflated legal status of Ukrainian supplies endless
political opportunities of penalizing and pardoning unavoidable infringements
of the law as well as providing chances for new politicians to represent hopes
for changes.
65. Besemeres, “Ukraine: A Sharpe Turn Eastwards?” p. 8.

66. Besemeres, “Can Poland and Russia Get Along at Last?” p. 55.
67. Ibid., p. 43.
While this article was in preparation, an event occurred that corroborates

my basic assumption. On 22nd May 2012, a brawl between members of the
ruling party of Regions and oppositionists erupted in the Ukrainian Parliament
during the discussion of the bill allowing the official use of Russian in
Russian-speaking regions.68 Opposition member Mykola Petruk suffered a
blow to the head. This event thus corroborates my two conclusions. On the one
hand, any discussion on changing language policy stirs irrational behavior and
shallow suppositions. On the other hand, this irrational component has been
used by politicians to distract people from other urgent needs. In this case, the
ruling Party tried to assure voters that it is willing to fulfill its promises before
the new parliamentary elections. Simultaneously, the same ruling Party tries to
destabilize the situation in the country before the elections so as to confuse
voters and to benefit from the emerging chaos.69
Monash University
68. “When Politicians Snap: Brawl Erupts in Ukraine Parliament over Language Bill,” Sydney
Morning Herald, May 25, 2012. Available at: www.smh.com.au/world/when-politicians-snap-
brawl-erupts-in-ukraine-parliament-over-language-bill-20120525-1z91f.html#ixzz1w2DfY3xU,
accessed on May 27, 2012.
69. See Mustafa Nayem, “Partiya Regionov Poshla Va-bank” [“The Party of Regions goes va-
bank”], May 25, 2012, Ukrainian Truth-blogs. Available at:
blogs.pravda.com.ua/authors/nayem/4fbf2e9d47d4d/, accessed on May 25, 2012 (in Russian).
ROBERT IRVING
STRUGGLE BETWEEN ‘HUMANITY’ AND ‘PARTY

SPIRIT’ IN MAOIST CHINA—THE CASE OF CHEN
DENGKE AND DING LING
From humble beginnings, Chen Dengke developed into a writer of some

prominence in China. As an illiterate peasant soldier he was taught to read and
write by Party cadres during the 1940s and in 1950 was chosen to study at the
Central Literary Study Institute, where he came under the tutelage of the Stalin
prize-winning writer and literary doyen Ding Ling. The 1950s mark a period of
literary education for Chen Dengke, which saw a marked development in his
writing as he experimented with different narrative techniques and subject
matter. The official responses to his experimentation illustrate the operation of
the Chinese paradigm of the socialist realist aesthetics during this period.1 The
1950s can also be regarded as a period of political education for Chen. An
examination of the way in which his naïveté was shattered by the 1957 Anti-
Rightist Campaign holds wider relevance for the dilemma faced by writers, both
in terms of intellectual output and human relationships, as their sense of
humanity (renxing 人性) came into conflict with Party spirit (dangxing 党性).
The latter mandated for Party members, just as did partiinost for their Soviet
counterparts, blind obedience to the Party above all. We shall see that despite
being compelled to criticize his teacher Ding Ling, Chen Dengke maintained the
close relationship in the post-Mao period, giving credence to Thomas Gold’s
thesis that political movements gave rise to ritualistic behavior and surface
acquiescence to the comradeship ethics while friendships endured.2
To examining these factors, and Chen’s own attitude to what he wrote and
how he was influenced by the political climate, it is necessary to examine his
own contemporary and later writings on this period. Chen’s narration, as a
reconstruction of his life and a reflection on it, represents on the one hand a
perception determined by the “truth of the present.”3 Such autobiographical
1. The evolving Chinese socialist realist aesthetics, initially based on the definitions of socialist
realism put forward at the first Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934 in Moscow, was determined by
successive pronouncements from above, such as Zhou Yang’s Report at the First National Congress
of Literary and Art Workers (1949) at which Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on
Literature and Art” were officially established as the foundation of national literary policy after the
founding of the PRC. The socialist realist aesthetics was also cross-fertilized from below through the
experience and cultural background of writers. Subsequent policy statements built on, clarified or
emphasized various aspects of the content of the ‘Talks’ and invariably coincided with
developments on the political front.
2. Thomas B. Gold, “After Comradeship: Personal Relations in China since the Cultural
Revolution,” The China Quarterly, 104 (December 1985): 657–675.
3. In the sense that biography is a shaping of the past as seen from the author’s present
position, Laura Marcus writes of autobiographical ‘truth’ as being the “truth of the present—that
writings, which Party members were required to produce from time to time,4
have been described by Igal Halfin in the Soviet context as “testimony to the
author’s Communist world outlook.”5 They cannot therefore be regarded as
unfettered personal reflections: the Chinese writers, like their Soviet
counterparts, were subject to similar constraints. Halfin writes that under Stalin
authors were required “to present a cogent claim to have reached the light of
communism, and then successfully to uphold this claim in the face of possible
counter-narratives. . . Details could be pruned, embellished or ignored in order to
fit the author into the Communist literary conventions and write him into the
Soviet order.”6 In the same way, in examining Chen’s life writings, one must
always be mindful of the dynamic ideological paradigm to which he was
required to conform in narrating his own “progress.”7
The Institute Period

Whilst a communist guerrilla fighting in the 1946–1949 Civil War, Chen
published his first novel only four years after learning to read: it was a war
novel, Sister Du (1947). After the publication of his second novel, Living Hell,
also a war novel, late in 1950, he was assigned to study at the Central Literary
Study Institute at the recommendation of the famous writer Zhao Shuli.
Following the establishment of the Communist government in 1949, it was
official Party policy to foster writers of a worker-peasant background who came
from the former revolutionary base areas. The Party’s stated aim in doing so was
to improve the educational level and writing skills of such writers in order to
form them into the future dominant force in the Chinese literary world. This
policy also imposed a certain uniformity on literary production. To this end, the
Institute was set up under the auspices of the Chinese Writers’ Association at the
suggestion of Zhou Enlai and others. Literary commissar Zhou Yang and others
were involved in its concrete planning, with Ding Ling installed as director.8
is the author/person writing in the present—rather than that of the past.” Laura Marcus,
Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press,
1994), p. 261.
4. Ezra F. Vogel, “From Friendship to Comradeship: The Change in Personal relations in
Communist China,” The China Quarterly, 21 (January–March 1965):49.
5. Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass.
and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), p. 43.
6. Ibid., p. 19. Halfin writes in the context of autobiographies written both by applicants for
Party membership and by Party members demonstrating their worthiness.
7. The life writings of Chen under discussion include articles written in the 1950s describing his
early literary progress, an article written in 1957 in defense of writers’ freedom and a subsequent
self-criticism. These will be examined against three retrospective articles written between 1979 and
1981. Reference will also be made to a 1981 interview by the author with Chen and to a number of
creative works that Chen wrote during this period.
8. Gu Hua 古华, “Yidai geming zuojia de beiju—yi Kang Zhuo xiansheng’ 一代革命作家
的悲剧 —— 忆康濯先生 [“The Tragedy of a Generation of Revolutionary Writers:
Remembering Mr Kang Zhuo”], Zhengming 《争鸣》6 (1991), p. 70. Gu Hua, author of the
well-received novel Furong zhen 《芙蓉镇》, provides valuable background to this period in
this fascinating article on the late veteran writer Kang Zhuo, another former student of the
Institute who later became an executive editor of Wenyi bao. The full article is carried in three
successive issues of Zhengming: 5 (1991): 68–73; 6 (1991): 69–73; 7 (1991): 48–53.
173
Chen had produced his first novel very much as an uninformed writer, in the
storytelling tradition of his childhood. He had considered it to be mere reportage.
By contrast, the writing of Living Hell proved a difficult process. Having lost the
literary guidance provided by cultural cadres after he was sent to the front as a
field reporter in 1948, Chen considered that the completion and publication of
Living Hell would not have been possible without the personal help and
encouragement of Zhao Shuli. The opportunity for Chen to study at the Institute
was therefore crucial to the continued development of his career.
At the Institute Chen came under the influence of Ding Ling, who was to
shape his writing throughout the 1950s. Writing in 1986, Chen described Ding
Ling as the “teacher who introduced me to literature” and Zhao Shuli as the one
who “led me onto the literary road.”9 According to Chen, Ding Ling taught few
classes herself, because she was primarily engaged in “leadership work,” but she
was helpful to students by pinpointing and discussing their shortcomings and
helping them to clarify their problems. She often read Chen’s drafts, discussed
his problems and providing him with valuable encouragement.10 In the West,
academic supervisors encourage and guide their students, while ultimately
allowing the student a considerable degree of independence. Although the
relationship is not one of absolute equality, it is not strictly hierarchical. By
contrast, the relationship between Chen and Ding Ling was shaped by two kinds
of hierarchy. As Thomas Gold points out, relations between individuals in
Maoist China were not only subject to the requirements of the Leninist state;
they were also influenced by millennia of continuous Chinese history.11 These
two elements can be identified in the relationship between Chen and Ding Ling.
In view of the position of power (leadership) and respect (teacher) she held,
Ding Ling is likely to have exerted a decisive effect on his writing, as she sought
to ensure that it conformed to the socialist-realist paradigm. Indeed, writing in
1986 Chen recalled how, after he arrived at the Institute, he had been invited to
Ding Ling’s home where she made clear to him his duty as a writer with implicit
subservience to Party discipline:
You were transferred to the Institute so that the Party could better foster you.
You might develop into a writer, or you might not. But no matter what, first
and foremost you are a Party member, and only then a writer.12
The stance taken by Ding Ling is in keeping with the way she is characterized
by Tani Barlow as a woman “who understood political power in 1949,” who
“knew that the Party’s political base was the peasantry,” and who “had been
heavily involved in the Communist Party’s efforts to control all literary
expression for many years.”13
9. Chen Dengke 陈登科, “Yi Ding Ling” 忆丁玲 [“In memory of Ding Ling”], Xin
Guancha 《新观察》8 (1986): 28.
10. Taped interview with Chen Dengke by the author, Hefei, January, 1981.
11. Gold, “After Comradeship,” pp. 673–674.
12. Chen, “Yi Ding Ling,” p. 29.
13. Tani E. Barlow, “Introduction” to I Myself am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling,
Tani E. Barlow and Gary J. Bjorge (eds) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 43.
174
After a period of study at the Institute, and with the failure of his third war
novel, Sons and Daughters of the Huai River,14 Chen was able to recognize that
his basic problem lay in his limited training as a writer, because when he first
began writing he “relied on a kind of enthusiasm and didn’t recognize that there
was any skill involved in writing.” 15 He diagnosed the failure of his
characterization—the creation of disjointed characters that lacked psychological
dimension and development—and acceded to critics who had advised that at this
stage of his career he limit his writing endeavors to short stories, a mode in
which he could be in greater control.16 Chen left the Institute in the spring of
1953 and was sent to the Foziling Dam construction site in the Dabie Mountains
of southern Anhui, where he spent a year as the political instructor of a work
team.17
Chen’s First Exploration—Psychological Description

Out of the frustration he had experienced with Sons and Daughters, Chen
responded to the criticism that the characters of his previous novels lacked a
psychological dimension by taking a new direction in his writing. This
exploration first found expression in his 1954 short story “Leaving Home,” in
which he incorporates a psychological dimension into the narrative.18 He also
displays a more sophisticated narrative technique in his use of temporal
manipulation through flashbacks to the recent and more distant past in the
principal character’s thoughts.
In 1980, Chen chose to look back to what was in his mind when he wrote this
story: “In a few thousand words, and in a new style, I intended to probe into and
see how I could describe the inner world of a peasant.” 19 In terms of
psychological description, “Leaving Home” represents a clear development in
Chen’s writing. However there are certain incongruities in the end result.
The Party Steps In

Writing in 1979, Chen recalled that after the publication of “Leaving Home,”
while he was still at the Foziling Dam site, he received a good deal of praise for
the development it represented in his characterization and refinement of
language. But in the spring of 1954 when he arrived in Beijing to attend a
seminar held by the Writers’ Association to discuss his war novel Sons and
14. Chen, Huaihe bianshang de ernü 《淮河边上的儿女》[Sons and Daughters of the Huai
River] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1953, revised edn. 1954 and 1957), reprint edn. (Nanjing:
Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1979). The novel was also serialised in Renmin wenxue 4–8 (1953).
15. Chen, “Women yao xuexi’ 我們要學習 [“We need to study”], Wenyi bao, 14 (1953): 31.
16. Ibid., pp. 31–32.
17. According to Chen, the leadership had decided that he needed experience of living in a
new environment and so transferred him to Foziling. He arrived in the summer of 1953 and left in
the summer of 1954. See Chen Dengke, “Chuangzuo zhaji’ 創作札記 [“Writing notes”], Anhui
wenxue, 13 (1959): 50.
18. Chen Dengke, “Li xiang” 離鄉 [“Leaving home”], Wenyi yuebao, 2 (1954): 1-4.
19. Chen, “Tansuo” 探索 [“Exploration”], Xiwang 《希望》1 (1980): 10.
175
Daughters,20 and went to see Ding Ling, he found her very critical of “Leaving
Home” and the change in direction it marked in his writing. This is how she
expressed her dissatisfaction:
I have read your “Leaving Home” and am concerned for you. . . . I think this
sort of exploration is dangerous. You seem to have discarded everything of
your own to copy others. And what you have copied is exactly what others
have discarded.21
Ding Ling also wrote a letter to Chen at this time, echoing her criticism of
“Leaving Home,” but also expressing support for Sons and Daughters, which
she described as “a strong work of substance.”22 In the letter Ding Ling warned
writers not to incorporate naturalistic and humanist elements in their writing. She
wrote that writers who are lacking in life experience tend to superimpose
unrealistic psychological descriptions on their characters. 23 Ding Ling was
critical of Chen’s adoption of a narrative technique, which he described in 1986
as a form of “stream of consciousness.”24 This technique clearly runs counter to
the authoritative narrative voice and coherent plot structure required of socialist
realism to fulfill its didactic function. As Hilary Chung points out, the “shifting
and unreliable narrative perspectives of modernism” are inappropriate to
perform this task.25
Writing in May 1954, not long after the story’s publication and after Ding
Ling’s criticism, Chen admitted that in an effort to give his character added
depth he had imbued the old peasant in the story with his own feelings, which
were no longer those of an illiterate peasant.26 However one views Chen’s
stereotyping of what constitutes the peasant psyche, his comments represent an
interesting description of the shift in his thinking, and his ability to articulate this
realization.
In 1986 Chen wrote that the education he received from Ding Ling did not
end when he left the Institute: “She showed even more concern and care for me
after I left the Institute. After I left the Institute I took what she taught me even
more seriously.”27 While Chen often baulked at criticism from others, he held
20. That the Writers’ Association should have held such a seminar clearly shows on the one
hand his growing position in the literary world and on the other the continued implementation of
Party policy to foster (and control) writers of peasant background.
21. Chen cites Ding Ling’s criticism in “Tansuo,” p. 10.
22. Ding Ling 丁玲, “Gei Chen Dengke de xin” 給陳登科的信 [“Letter to Chen Dengke”],
Wenyi bao, 3 (1954):7. This letter was actually published in the official Party literary journal Wenyi
bao, signifying that it represented more than a personal message. It obviously served an instructive
purpose by conveying what the Party expected of writers.
23. Ibid., p. 7.
25. Hilary Chung, “Introduction: Socialist Realism,” in Hilary Chung et al. (eds) In the Party
Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China
(Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi, 1996), p. xv.
26. Chen, “Tan jidian tihui” 談幾點體會 [“Several Things I have Come to Understand”],
Anhui wenyi, 4 (1954): 5-6.
176
Ding Ling in high esteem and valued her opinion. He deemed that he understood
her well and knew that if one agreed with her, or listened quietly to what she
said, she would talk happily for an hour or two. 28 The closeness of their
relationship was further evidenced when Ding Ling invited Chen to stay in her
home to write. He stayed for two weeks and finished a new short story entitled
“Dark Girl.”29 This story centers on the female leader of a work team at the
Foziling Dam construction site. While not overcoming the shortcomings of
conceptualization evident in his earlier war stories, in this story, which is more
akin to his earlier style, Chen developed new skills of characterization and
further refined his language. This time Ding Ling’s response was a favorable one
in which she approved of his bold exploration, but one evolving “step by step,
along his own course.”30 In this response, Ding Ling was continuing to define
the course along which Chen was permitted to explore. These pronouncements
on Chen’s short stories by Ding Ling, who Barlow describes as having been, for
a brief time in the 1950s, “one of the country’s most visible cultural leaders,”31
provide evidence of the evolving socialist realist aesthetics as handed down from
above by the cultural leadership.
The Hundred Flowers and Chen’s Second Exploration

In China the first half of the 1950s represents a period of relative intellectual
repression.32 Meisner writes that this period of repression, which continued until
mid–1956, “served both to silence intellectual dissent and to create deep
resentments against the Party among intellectuals.”33 In May 1956 a new period
of liberalization was ushered in with Mao’s revival of the slogan “Let a Hundred
Flowers Blossom and a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend.”34 According to
28. Ibid., p. 31. Chen recalls that on a visit to her home, having been soundly criticized by Ding
for writing “Leaving Home,” her husband Chen Ming (陈明) had poured coffee to cut the tension.
Chen writes: “while drinking the coffee I took the initiative and said to her: ‘I will write another
piece’. Because if I admitted I was wrong she would talk even more.”
29. Chen, “Hei Guniang” 黑姑娘 [“Dark Girl”], Renmin wenxue, 6 (1954): 1-22.
30. Chen, “Tansuo,” p. 10.
31. Barlow, I Myself am a Woman, p. 43. Barlow notes that until her purge in 1957 Ding Ling
was a member of the Standing Committee of the All China Federation of Literary and Art
Circles, Vice Chairman of the All-China Union of Literary Workers and had control of the
Literary Bureau of the Propaganda Department.
32. In 1951 the Central Propaganda Department, led by Zhou Yang, launched a large-scale
attack on the film The Story of Wu Xun 《吳訓傳》. In 1954 the respected scholar Yu Pingbo
was criticized for his study of Dream of the Red Chamber. At the end of 1954 a nationwide
criticism campaign against Hu Feng was launched following his submission of a report to the
Central Committee calling for greater creative freedom. According to Meisner, the March 1955
Sufan 肃反 “Campaign to Wipe out Hidden Counterrevolutionaries” came down particularly hard
on intellectuals and, together with the imprisonment of Hu Feng as a counterrevolutionary in July
1955, intensified intellectual subjugation. Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the
People’s Republic (New York: The Free Press, 1999), pp. 134, 170.
33. Ibid., p. 135.
34. The revival of the slogan was officially announced by Lu Dingyi, head of the Central
Committee Propaganda Department. Meisner points out that Lu Dingyi’s speech was insufficient to
remove the fears that had resulted from six years of repression. Coupled with the open hostility of
Party officials, it is not surprising that intellectuals were wary of expressing views. Nevertheless,
according to Meisner, by the summer of 1956, a significant number of writers, encouraged by
177
Goldman, this period of liberalization, which was to continue until mid–1957,

was the most far-reaching political relaxation in any communist country up to
that time.35 Chen took full advantage of this more liberal atmosphere to begin a
further exploration. A number of his friends had said that he would not be able to
write on the theme of “romantic love.” Other writers were just beginning to write
on this theme. Of course, they still had to be careful that they reflected the
“moral atmosphere” of the society of New China
Writing in 1979 Chen reflected that he decided to take a risk, and wrote two
stories that represented the tragic and seamy side of love.36 In these two short
stories, entitled “Love” and “First Love,” he breaks through the ideological
restraints fettering writers and shocks readers by revealing some of the ills in
what the Party demanded be portrayed as a supposedly ideal socialist society.
The portrayal of such states of affairs, which would hardly seem shocking to a
Western reader, and which lacked in realism of motivation and logic of
characters’ actions, was strongly attacked by Chinese critics.37
Acceptance of Criticism with Reservation

In an essay on romantic love as a literary theme, published in the
authoritative Wenhui bao of 7 March 1957, the prominent writer Wang
Ruowang describes the parameters within which writers should be permitted to
write on this theme, and treats Chen Dengke’s two short stories as negative
examples, which he criticizes on both ideological and artistic grounds.38 In
response, in May 1957, at the height of the Hundred Flowers liberalization,
Chen wrote a self-criticism, “Acceptance of Criticism with Reservation,” which
was published in the provincial Anhui Daily. He explained that by narrating the
stories at times as an observer, he had intended to let the reader provide her own
criticism of sexual exploitation and violence.39 The critics did not approve of
this approach, regarding it as “voyeuristic.” Wang Ruowang, for example,
described Chen’s portrayal of the male protagonist as “appreciative,” thereby
forums sponsored by the Writers’ Association and literary journal, began to express views more
openly. Despite the suppression of the campaign at the beginning of 1957, it was revived in a more
radical form in February 1957 by Mao’s famous speech “On Contradictions,” culminating in a
torrent of social and political criticism in May and early June prior to the termination of the
movement. Meisner, ibid., pp. 179, 186 and 188.
35. Merle Goldman, China’s Intellectuals—Advise and Dissent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1981), p. 9.
36. Chen, “Tansuo,” p. 10.
37. See for example: Zhou Peitong 周培桐, Yang Tiancun 杨田村and Zhang Baocui 张葆萃,
“Ping Chen Dengke de liangpian xiaoshuo” 评陈登科的两篇小说 [“Critique of Chen Dengke’s
two short stories”], Guangming ribao, 23 February 1957.
38. Wang Ruowang 王若望, “Tan lian’aide ticai jian ping Chen Dengke de ‘Ai’” 談恋爱的
題材兼評陳登科的’爱’ [“On romantic love as a theme. Critique of Chen Dengke’s ‘Love’.”],
Wenhui bao 文匯報 7 March 1957. Viewed from a post-Maoist perspective, Wang Ruowang is
considered a liberal intellectual who, in response to the Hundred Flowers call, published some ten
essays criticizing Party dogmatism and excessive literary control, for which he was expelled from
the Party.
39. Chen, “You baoliude jieshou piping” 有保留地接受批評 [“Acceptance of criticism with
reservation”], Anhui ribao, 5 May 1957.
178
likely to evoke sympathy rather than disgust from the reader.40 While defending
his right to write on this topic, Chen conceded that by adopting the role of an
observer and letting the reader provide her own criticism he had lacked Party
spirit. In his enthusiasm to respond to the call to “Let a hundred flowers blossom
and a hundred schools of thought contend,” as a writer he had not made his
“proletarian” standpoint crystal clear to the reader.41 As with his earlier short
story “Leaving Home,” Chen had failed to incorporate an authoritative narrative
voice. His public affirmation of acceptance of the Party line represents a
dissolution of the political naïveté with which he had approached these stories, in
having assumed that the “Hundred Flowers” call had removed all ideological
restrictions on writers. Wang Ruowang took pains to cite Chen’s stories as proof
of the harmful effects of talking about “creative freedom” divorced from an
ideological context.42
In 1986 Chen wrote that after the publication of these stories, Ding Ling had
criticized him not for ideological reasons, but for following the fashion and for
writing on a theme about which he had no experience, rebuking him: “Only an
idiot would do such a stupid thing.” 43 Perhaps she was also criticizing him for
his political naïveté! At the time Chen had assured her that he would not write
any more such stories and took pains in 1986 to point out that he had been
genuine in his response and had not written another story like “Love” since.44
Implications of the Anti-Rightist Campaign for Chen Dengke and Ding

Ling
With the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957-58 signaling the end of the
Hundred Flowers campaign, in fear of being labeled a rightist, Chen had to make
public statements to show his obedience to the Party. The full text of his self-
criticism was published in the Party literary journal Wenyi bao under the title
“Returning to the Embrace of the Party.”45 In the self-criticism he not only
turned his back on his own works, but also made a clean break with his former
teacher, Ding Ling.46
40. Ruowang, “Tan lian’ai de ticai.”

41. Chen, “You baoliude.”
42. Ruowang, “Tan lian’ai de ticai.”
44. Ibid., p. 31.
45. Chen, “Huidao Dang de huaibaoli lai” 回到党的怀抱里来 [“Returning to the embrace of
the Party”], Wenyi bao, 27 (1957).
46. To a certain extent the movement to criticize Ding Ling had its roots in the personal
enmity that had existed between Ding Ling and Zhou Yang since the 1930s. During the struggle
that occurred within the League of Left Wing Writers in Shanghai during the 1930s between
factions led by Lu Xun and Zhou Yang, Ding Ling had supported the Lu Xun faction. After
having been imprisoned for three years by the Guomindang, in 1936 Ding Ling was sent by the
Party to the North Shaanxi Revolutionary Base Area where she met Mao, whom she told about
the factional struggle in Shanghai, also reporting several uncomplimentary things about Zhou
Yang.
Following her outspoken 1942 essay on the inequality of women at Yan’an, she was criticized
by both Mao and Zhou Yang at the subsequent Party ‘Rectification’. After 1949, in her capacity
as Head of the Literature and Art Section of the Central Committee Propaganda Department,
Ding Ling had Zhou Yang, as Deputy Minister of Propaganda, as her direct superior. She
179
Just what was the nature of the relationship between Chen Dengke and Ding
Ling, and what were the factors that led him to criticize her are issues interesting
not only in themselves, but also because they help one understand more broadly
the political and social pressures faced by intellectuals at that time. Much of the
information available about contact between Chen and Ding Ling after he left
the Institute appears in his post-Hundred-Flowers self-criticism. Following Ding
Ling’s political rehabilitation in 1978 and prior to her death in 1986, Chen was
quite reserved in his public comments about her. However in March 1986, in an
article in her remembrance, he reminisces about their time together and makes
some telling comments about his conduct in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the
late 1950s.47
According to Chen’s post-Hundred-Flowers self-criticism, his links with
Ding Ling continued even after he left the Institute. Indeed, in 1953, when he
was due to leave the Institute and return to work in Anhui, Ding Ling wrote him
a personal letter urging him to stay on. Although he did not accept her advice, he
was nevertheless flattered to think that she should have written to him
personally. At the time Chen had felt that this letter showed her concern for a
young writer like him, increasing his respect for her and the gratitude he felt
towards her.48 Speaking to me in 1981, Chen explained that it was typical of
Ding Ling to point out his shortcomings to him when others were praising him,
so that he would not get an inflated opinion of himself. It was also typical of her
to praise him when others were full of criticism, so that he would not become
discouraged.49
In his post-Hundred-Flowers self-criticism Chen writes that when Ding Ling
went to Huangshan to recuperate in the summer of 1954, it was he who made the
resented him as a source of disunity within the literary world, but comments of dissatisfaction to
this effect caused Mao to regard her as a political troublemaker. In 1955, Ding Ling (then chief
editor of Wenyi bao) and Chen Qixia 陈企霞 (the deputy editor), were compiling material
critical about Zhou Yang to submit to the members of the Central Committee. Unfortunately for
Ding Ling, Zhou Yang got wind of this and reported the matter to Lu Dingyi (Central Propaganda
Minister). Having just criticized the “Gao Gang 高岗 – Rao Shushi 饶漱石 Anti-Party
Alliance,” the Central Committee was very sensitive to factionalism amongst senior cadres, and
Ding Ling and Chen Qixia were labeled by Mao as the “Ding-Chen Anti-Party Clique.” The
Minister of Public Security, Luo Ruiqing 罗瑞卿, personally signed their arrest warrants and
they were imprisoned. Many writers associated with Ding Ling were forced to write self-
criticisms, but not wanting the situation to widen, Zhou Yang (no doubt satisfied with the result)
tried to protect those writers like Chen from the old ‘Liberated Areas’ who were Party members.
With Mao’s call in 1956 to “Let A Hundred Flowers Blossom, and A Hundred Schools of
Thought Contend,” in reality a scam to trick intellectuals to reveal their true feelings about the
Party, thereby exposing Mao’s opponents, many writers called for a re-examination of the
Ding-Chen case. They claimed that at most Ding and Chen had created a small faction within
literary and art circles and were certainly not guilty of forming an anti-Party clique.
Having achieved his aim, Mao ended this short period of liberalization with the Anti-Rightist
Campaign in mid-1957. Many of those who had been given the false confidence to speak out
were subsequently labeled rightists. From being merely “antiparty elements,” Ding Ling and
Chen Qixia became the first “rightists” as this campaign developed into a nationwide movement.
Gu Hua, “Yidai geming zuojia de beiju,” Zhengming, 6 (1991): 70–71.
47. Chen, “Yi Ding Ling.”
48. Chen, “Huidao.”
49. Interview with Chen Dengke by the author, tape recording, Hefei, January, 1981.
180
arrangements and spent forty days there with her. When she wanted to buy a
house in Wuxi, Chen went to Jiangsu himself to make arrangements. Whenever
he went to Beijing he would always go to see her and stay at her home. Chen
and Ding Ling clearly had a close relationship. Chen states that Ding Ling
regarded him as one of her favorite students, and writes of her attitude to him:
“Sometimes Ding Ling said that I wasn’t clever, that I relied on a burst of energy
to write; sometimes she praised me, and said that I treated people honestly and
genuinely.”50 He also writes that Ding Ling considered her favorite students to
be something of an elite group, citing this as an example of how she had tried to
“establish individual prestige, build up personal capital, accumulate anti-Party
power and create a split in the literary world.” This developed in him what he
called a “bourgeois individualism.”51 However, in 1986 he refuted these claims
writing that such favoritism was not in Ding Ling’s nature and that the few
students like him, who had no literary training, received special help from her
and were invited to her home because of their educational needs rather than out
of any favoritism.52
Ding Ling obviously had great trust in Chen in view of attacks he claimed
that she made in his presence on ranking members of the Propaganda Ministry
and Writers’ Association. He writes in his post-Hundred-Flowers self-criticism
that when he told her of the ‘help’ that the Party Organization of the Writers’
Association and Literature Section of the Propaganda Ministry had given him
with the ‘ideological’ problem of his love stories, she replied: “They have only
thought of helping you now. In future it will be: they will help whenever Chen
Dengke’s work has an ideological problem.”53 Chen writes that when the stories
were published he had thought that this was another example of her concern for
him. However, by the time of his self-criticism, he claims to have realized:
“Obviously, she regarded me as ‘hers’, having no connection with the Party, at
the same time she was inciting me to become distant from the Party.”54
What Chen writes about is clearly a close teacher-student relationship, a
relationship of trust that had existed over a period of years. But then he suddenly
questions Ding Ling’s motives in befriending him and criticizes her. Although in
his self-criticism he expressed sympathy for Ding Ling as a friend, and largely
listed his own “shortcomings,” he nevertheless directly criticized her for trying
to manipulate young writers and for trying to encourage them to become
individualistic: “Vulgarity, tender heartedness, hypocrisy, warmth, it was all
there; not only did this cause me to be misled by her, further encouraging the

51. Ibid.
52. Chen, “Yi Ding Ling,” p. 30. Chen refers to universities in the base areas such as the Lu
Xun Institute of the Arts 鲁迅艺术学院 and the North China United Univ. 华北连大.
54. Ibid. The self-criticism published in Wenyi bao is not dated. It would have been made either
towards the end or shortly after the Twenty-seventh Enlarged Conference to Carry out Struggle
against the So-called Ding-Chen (Qixia) Anti-Party Clique, held from June 6 to September 17,
1957. In 1957 Wenyi bao was initially published twice a month until April and then weekly until the
end of the year. This would place the publication date of the self-criticism in issue 27 of Wenyi bao
in either September or October, 1957.
181
development of individualism in me, it also caused me to sink increasingly

further into her stinking mire.”55
How does one account for this attack on someone who had been good to
Chen over a period of years both as a teacher and friend? Indeed Chen Dengke
had been forced to make a self-criticism of his “relations with Ding Ling which
deviated from Party principles” as early as 1955, when the power struggle
between Zhou Yang and Ding Ling began, and Zhou Yang criticized Ding Ling
and Chen Qixia as anti-Party elements at the Writers’ Association Party
Organization Sixteenth Enlarged Meeting.56
One needs to consider the pressures that someone like Chen, a Party member
and Vice Chairman of the Anhui Federation of Literary and Art Circles faced.
He had been educated by the Party and lived in a society in which access to the
written and spoken word was through Party controlled organs of publication and
propaganda. Through the suppression of contrary points of view, many people
were conditioned to accept the Party line without question. Passive acceptance
was not enough. As part of various political movements, Party members were
required to make public affirmation of this acceptance by self-criticism of their
own ‘mistakes’ and criticism of those deemed by the Party organization to be
anti-Party elements.
Ezra Vogel wrote in his 1965 article on the change in personal relationships
in Communist China: “At the time of movements, lines between the loyal and
the deviants are drawn more sharply, and the loyal must prove their loyalty by
criticizing their deviant friends.”57 As a Party member and a writer, Chen was
part of two groups over which the regime exercised strict control. Party
members, Vogel asserts, were subject to heightened control through study
meetings, self-criticism and criticism. The regime demanded of them a higher
degree of loyalty and discipline than of ordinary citizens because of their power
and responsibility. Intense control was also applied to intellectuals because of
their perceived unreliability and potential for influencing the public.58
If thought reform movements should fail to produce this sort of blind
obedience, then there were other consequences of a more unpleasant nature.
Party members who did not do what the Party required of them were likely to be
criticized at struggle meetings, isolated from the Party organization on which
they relied for their social position as well as their livelihood; they could also
face exile as an anti-Party element—in other words an end to life as they knew it
for themselves and their family. This would appear to be what Chen had in mind
when, in 1981, he reflected on the situation he had faced in 1957: “As a Party
member, when criticized one had to make one’s position known. If I had not
written a self-criticism, I would not have lasted long.”59 These were by no
means idle words. Igal Halfin writes in the same vein in the Soviet context: “as
long as individuals lived in the communist system, they could ignore the
55. Ibid.
56. Interview with Chen by the author, tape recording, Hefei, January, 1981.
57. Vogel, “From Friendship to Comradeship,” p. 47.
58. Ibid., p. 56.
59. Interview with Chen by the author, tape recording, Hefei, January, 1981.
182
communist discourse that engaged their private sphere only on pain of becoming
outcasts.”60
Gu Hua writes of the pressure under which Party members found themselves
when faced with the contradiction between their sense of humanity (renxing) and
their Party spirit (dangxing), between loyalty and betrayal:
If you submitted to the principles of Party spirit, then you inevitably

betrayed what your conscience told you; if you were loyal to the Party
leaders, then you inevitably betrayed your colleagues, teachers, friends and
even family. The alternative: you would be criticized, struck down to the
dust, if you tried to raise your head again your family would be broken up
and ruined or killed. Because the Party was higher than everything: higher
than the people, the nation, and the state. Only Chairman Mao Zedong was
above the Party, he led the Party and represented it.61
This was the sort of situation in which Chen Dengke found himself.
Did Chen criticize Ding Ling willingly because he considered her to be an
anti-Party element, or unwillingly because of political and social pressure? Of
course it is impossible to make pronouncements on the intentions of any
individual. Nevertheless, based on public statements made by Chen at the time
and in the post-Mao era, and in the light of Ding Ling’s reported reaction to
Chen’s criticism at the time and following her political rehabilitation in 1978, it
is possible to point to likely scenarios.
From what is known about their personal relationship over a period of years,
it is unlikely that Chen would have criticized Ding Ling willingly. But whether
or not he considered her to be an anti-Party element is more difficult to say.
Having witnessed the propaganda campaign and criticism meetings against Ding
Ling over a period of months, and facing a dangerous situation himself, Chen
may well have begun to believe that there was some truth to the charges against
her. However, it is more likely that his criticism was merely a sign of his
acceptance of the authority of the Party. He did not personally attack her. This
appears to be borne out by the content of his self-criticism and the events leading
up to it, and also by the relationship that existed between Chen and Ding Ling
following her rehabilitation.
Chen and other former students from the Institute tried to support Ding Ling
for as long as they were able.62 Chen writes in his post-Hundred-Flowers self-
criticism that the students “secretly publicized and discussed the Ding Ling
60. Halfin, Terror in My Soul, p. 19.

61. Gu Hua, “Yidai geming zuojia de beiju,” p. 71.
62. From June 6 until September 17, 1957, the Party Organization of the Writers’ Association
held the Twenty-seventh Enlarged Conference to Carry out Struggle against the So-called
Ding-Chen (Qixia) Anti-Party Clique. According to the Taiwan scholar Xuan Mo, Chen Dengke
and other former students from the Institute sympathized with Ding Ling and when the Party
Organization called on them to write “dialectical material” about Ding Ling, they spoke in her
defense instead. Xuan, Zhonggong wenhua da geming玄默, Zhong gong wenhua da geming yu dalu
zhishi fenzi 《中共文化大革命與大陸知識份子》[The Chinese Communist Cultural Revolution
and Mainland Chinese Intellectuals] (Taibei: Zhong gong yanjiu zazhishe, 1973), p. 431.
183
question” and “sent news to Ding Ling about discussion of her problem by the
Party Organization of the Writers’ Association.63
However, Chen Dengke was not able to maintain this support for long. The
last struggle meeting to criticize Ding Ling and Chen Qixia was led by Lu
Dingyi, Head of the Propaganda Ministry. Chen Dengke and Ding Ling’s other
supporters realized that the situation was extremely grave and that Ding Ling
had already lost the political struggle.64 Chen had no choice but to show that he
had accepted the Party line. Making a self-criticism would not make the situation
worse for her, but was the only way out for them.
Chen’s public statement that he considered Ding Ling to be an anti-Party
element can be taken as a sign of his obedience to the Party rather than as
representing his own convictions. It contains the mandatory rhetoric about how
he was shaken by the exposure of the “Ding-Chen anti-Party clique plot.”
However, when he writes “I always hoped that she was not an anti-Party
element,”65 he implies that he did not judge her as such. Rather, his statement
indicates his acceptance of the Party’s authority. It is also in accord with Vogel’s
assessment that most people seeking to “minimize the rupture in personal
relationships” when forced to testify, “might supply testimony which, though
critical of the accused, subtly presents the friend’s good side or suggests
mitigating circumstances.”66
Another factor lending further support to the view that Chen’s post-Hundred-
Flowers self-criticism was purely politically motivated is the way in which he
slated his own love stories: “These works are pernicious, vulgar and low grade,
showing that I have wavered in relation to the Party’s guidelines on literature
and art and committed serious errors.”67 Yet, earlier that same year, he had
justified these stories to his critics and strongly defended the right of writers to
portray the truth.68
Following the overthrow of the Gang of Four and prior to Ding Ling’s death
in 1986 Chen and Ding Ling were on excellent terms and in 1981 Chen was
quick to point out that Ding Ling was the most decisive influence on his
writing.69 This is also borne out by Ding Ling’s attitude to Chen. During a visit
to Melbourne in 1985 she spoke of him to me in warm terms, in a way that gave
no sign that she bore him any grudge.70
In August 1979 Chen visited Ding Ling for the first time since the Anti-
Rightist Campaign. The visit was prompted by the response of readers to the
publication of Ding Ling’s novel In Bitter Days, in the inaugural issue of

64. Xuan, Zhonggong wenhua da geming , p. 432.
66. Vogel, “From Friendship to Comradeship,” p. 47.
67. Chen, “Huidao.” In another article written shortly after, entitled “Ting Dang de hua, dao
laodong he douzheng zhong duanlian ziji” 听党的话，到劳动和斗争中锻炼自己 [“Obey the
Party, temper oneself amidst labor and struggle”], Anhui ribao, January 1, 1958, Chen further
criticized these works along with “Li xiang.”
68. Chen, “You baoliu de jieshou piping.”
69. Chen Dengke, interviewed by the author, January 1981, Hefei, Anhui, tape recording.
70. I was fortunate enough to be present at a private dinner given by the writer Hugh Anderson
to welcome Ding Ling to Melbourne.
184
Qingming (July 1979), the Anhui provincial literary journal which Chen edited.
Chen naturally felt a certain degree of apprehension about meeting her. However
this apprehension proved unwarranted because Ding Ling’s first words to him
dispelled any uneasiness.71 Had Ding Ling thought that Chen had criticized her
maliciously, betrayed her personally, would she have been so willing to meet
him and to talk so freely? Why would she have agreed that her novel, the result
of years of suffering in exile in a remote part of Heilongjiang province, be
serialized in the very journal he edited? These actions give strong credence to the
argument that she did not blame him for the stand he had taken those many years
before and understood very well the situation in which he was placed. Concrete
evidence of their reconciliation can also be seen by Chen’s willingness to
publish Ding Ling’s novel during the early stages of relative political relaxation
in 1979. This represented a golden opportunity for her and called for a deal of
courage on his part.72
The definitive evidence of the survival of their relationship is contained in
Chen’s 1986 article in remembrance of Ding Ling:
Afterwards,73 Ding Ling treated me the same as always. When in jest we
would speak of the 1957 experience which made one not know whether to laugh
or cry, she would say, “Back then when I heard your denunciation and self-
criticism, I went home and had a good laugh with Chen Ming [her husband]. [I
said] Chen Dengke is an honest person and wouldn’t harm anyone.”74
This attests to the correctness of Vogel’s assertion that “supplying
information about a friend does not necessarily lead to a break in friendship,
since both recognize the pressures to cooperate.”75 It also gives credence to
Thomas Gold’s refutation of Vogel’s thesis that the regime was able to alter
personal relationships from friendship to comradeship and to Gold’s suggestion,
with the benefit of knowledge possessed in 1985, that it “merely caused
ritualized behavior and little more than surface acquiescence to the comradeship
ethic while friendship continued to thrive.”76 Chen also used the opportunity of
writing, following Ding Ling’s death, to publicly express remorse for his
conduct in 1957:
To protect myself, I did what was necessary to slip through the net; in order to
speak the same language as my superiors and keep in pace with the leadership,
71. Chen Dengke and Xiao Ma, “Xinnian—fang Ding Ling” 信念——访丁玲 [“Trust—visit
with Ding Ling”], Qingming, 2 (August 1979): 148.
72. This however was not to mark a re-assertion of the liberal position she held in 1942 in
Yan’an, which has subsequently been vindicated by reformist elements within the Party who
suggested that Mao’s Yan’an ‘Talks’ were not the definitive pronouncement on Chinese literature.
Barlow writes: “She [Ding Ling] earned the nickname ‘Old Shameful,’ one of a number of ‘Old
Shamefuls’ who have refused to make Party control of literary representation responsible for their
years of suffering. In fact, she seemed increasingly authoritarian and illiberal.” (Barlow,
“Introduction,” p. 44)
73. After their first meeting following her 1978 political rehabilitation when she returned
from exile in a remote part of Heilongjiang province in the Northeast.
74. ‘Afterwards’ refers to their first meeting following her 1978 political rehabilitation when
she returned from exile in Heilongjiang. Chen, “Yi Ding Ling,” p. 31.
75. Vogel, “From Friendship to Comradeship,” p. 47
76. Gold, “After Comradeship,” p. 658.
185
not only was I willing to bury my head in the sand like an ostrich, with my tail
up for people to hit, I also said things against my conscience about Ding Ling. I
even fabricated some unbelievable charges against her through my writing, for
which I soundly condemn myself. This is something I will regret for the rest of
my life and it is something shameful for which it will be difficult to atone as
long as I live.77
Thus both writer and teacher were enmeshed in a tragic situation endured by a
generation of Chinese intellectuals, a situation that was only the forerunner of
the even greater tragedy of the Cultural Revolution.
Monash University
186
СЕРГЕЙ С. ШАУЛОВ
ПРОМЕТЕЕВСКИЙ ПОДТЕКСТ ПРОБЛЕМ

ПОЭТИКИ ДОСТОЕВСКОГО М.М. БАХТИНА
В самом начале “Проблем поэтики Достоевского” есть

примечательный мифолого-метафорический пассаж, в котором М.М.
Бахтин задает своеобразный сквозной мотив дальнейших рассуждений.
Говоря об особенностях (“беспомощности”) критической мысли и
восприятия “всегда спорящих с героями Достоевского” читателей,
ученый заявляет следующее: “Достоевский, подобно гетевскому
Прометею, создает не безгласных рабов (как Зевс), а с в о б о д н ы х
людей, способных стать р я д о м со своим творцом, не соглашаться и с
ним и восставать на него.”1
Это рассуждение вполне можно было бы списать на привычную для
нашей науки образность научной речи, автоматически переводимую
любым профессиональным читателем в плоскость менее
индивидуальных литературоведческих понятий. Однако подобному
автоматизму восприятия здесь мешают две, как нам представляются,
намеренно оставленных, “занозы.”
Первая из них – уточнение, которое Бахтин не забывает сделать,
сравнивая Достоевского не вообще с Прометеем, а конкретно с
“гетевским.” Для того чтобы дать читателю яркое и емкое представление
о степени свободы героев Достоевского, такое указание не нужно.
Вполне достаточно было бы и просто сравнения с Прометеем. Для
литературоведческого смысла фразы отсылка к конкретной (при этом, не
самой известной) вариации мифа явно избыточна. Тут следует отметить,
что мы не относим себя к бахтинской традиции в литературоведении, не
разделяем мысли о безграничности свободы героя в художественном
мире Достоевского: Бахтин интересует нас, скорее, в качестве объекта,
нежели в качестве инструмента исследования.
Второй способ деавтоматизации чтения, на первый взгляд, – чисто
формальный: Бахтин не забывает указать мифологического противника
своего Достоевского-Прометея (“как Зевс”). Для мысли о
принципиальном новаторстве Достоевского “в области художественной
формы” подобное указание не только избыточно, но, с некоторой точки
зрения, даже вредно, поскольку вносит в концепцию, которая только
1. М.М. Бахтин, Проблемы поэтики Достоевского (Москва: Советская Россия, 1979), с.

6. В дальнейшем ссылки на это издание даются в тексте с указанием страницы. Разрядки и
курсивы в приводимых цитатах всегда соответствуют данному изданию.
начинает строиться, “сюжет”2 противостояния Достоевского

(бахтинского “протагониста”) и некоей управляющей силы. В самих
“Проблемах поэтики…” эта противоборствующая Достоевскому сила не
называется, оставляя тем самым читателю возможность задать вопрос.
Он формулируется просто: зачем нужны уточнения? Заметим попутно,
что непременным условием такого вопроса представляется уважение к
тексту Бахтина, ощущение, что в нем нет или почти нет случайных слов
и фраз.
С попытки ответить на этот вопрос и начинаются собственно
размышления. Прежде всего обратим внимание на разрядки в бахтинском
тексте. Цитированный отрывок – практически первый случай
применения такого способа выделения текста. Интересно, что именно
здесь выделяется. В отличие от последующих случаев, когда Бахтин
использует разрядку либо для указания на главные формулировки, либо
для повышения смыслового “веса” отдельных терминов
(“м о н о л о г и ч е с к о г о романа” значит “и м е н н о монологического”).
Здесь выделены слова, не обладающие терминологическим смыслом
(“герои,” “свободные,” “рядом”). В пространстве бахтинской мысли они
имеют широкие контекстуальные связи.
“Герои” ассоциируются, во-первых, с упоминающимся рядом
Прометеем, приобретая, таким образом, явные “античные” коннотации и
дополняя намек на противостояние “титана” Достоевского и некоего
“Зевса”; а во-вторых, с ярко выраженным, если не сказать, “героическим”
персонализмом философии Бахтина.
“Свободные” люди Достоевского – главная тема Бахтина; невиданная
до автора “Братьев Карамазовых” свобода художественного письма,
парадоксальным образом реализуемая через самоограничение
творческого своеволия художника – главный тезис его рассуждений.
Наконец, подчеркивание способности этих людей встать “рядом” со
своим творцом – вполне в духе бахтинского мировидения, с его
повышенным вниманием к событию, встрече, движению. Собственно,
возможность для читателя (а также потребность, а иногда и провокация)
встать “рядом” и является, на наш взгляд, “диалогизмом”
художественного текста. При этом, подобную возможность следует все-
таки отличать от обычного семиотического взаимодействия человека и
текста. “Диалогизм” литературного произведения в бахтинском смысле,
может быть, и не уникален, и присутствует не только в тексте
Достоевского, но, во всяком случае, – это явление редкое.
Таким образом, слова, которые Бахтин отмечает разрядкой шрифта,
прочно связывают мифологический образ с дальнейшим развитием
концепции, “новаторство в области художественной формы” оказывается
прометеическим деянием. Именно поэтому так важен для Бахтина
оказывается именно “гетевский” Прометей.
2. Здесь и далее в кавычки берутся термины, применяемые в привычном значении, но,

если можно так выразиться, в непривычном пространстве; “сюжетность”
литературоведения мы стараемся отграничить от собственно литературной сюжетности.
Явно несущественно для Бахтина то, что Гете все-таки не дал

полноценной трактовки античного сюжета. Неоконченность,
фрагментарность этой поэтической драмы, а также перипетии ее
эдиционной истории в бахтинском мире, скорее – достоинство. В этом
аспекте “Прометей” Гете соотносится с дальнейшими рассуждениями о
жанровой традиции, к которой принадлежит, по мнению Бахтина,
Достоевский.
Важнее то, что в контексте книги о Достоевского именно такой
Прометей и органичен, и необходим. Во-первых, гетевский титан не
только традиционно творец и законодатель, но и субъект эстетической
деятельности, художник, скульптор. Примечательно, что людей он
творит именно как художественные произведения. При этом Прометей у
Гете эстетически замкнут на себя, на воспроизводство собственного
образа; так, у Гете, видимо, трансформируется идея “по образу и
подобию.” Показательный монолог Прометея: “Мои созданья! / Все то,
что грудь мою волнует, / (приближается к изваянию девушки)
/ В ее груди должно созвучно биться!”3
Ради утверждения собственной свободы гетевский Прометей
отказывается даже от предложения оживить свои творения: “Но стать
рабом, господство Громовержца / Признать я должен? / Нет! / Пусть
будут скованы они, / В безжизненности этой / Они свободны все ж: /
Свободными их вижу!”4
Сложная гетевская диалектика перехода от неживого свободно
сотворенного к живому творению, подчиняющемуся Судьбе, как нам
кажется, должна была обрести связь с бахтинской мыслью – хотя бы как
развернутая иллюстрация формулируемого в “Проблемах поэтики…”
нового типа творчества.
Во-вторых, “Прометей” Гете оказывается контекстуально схож с
целым рядом специфически достоевских идей и мотивов. Так, например,
свобода для гетевского Прометея оказывается увязана с
“безжизненностью”; отказ от жизни мыслится как высшее проявление
свободы (думается, нет нужды приводить список таких “прометеев” в
текстах Достоевского). При этом такую свободу выбирают не сами люди
(еще попросту не наделенные способностью выбора), а “высшее” по
сравнению с ними существо, “бог,” узурпировавший власть Бога, но
отрицающий при этом и свою божественность, и божественность
вообще.5
Прометеические коннотации образов Ивана Карамазова и Великого
Инквизитора давно замечены. Собственно, они декларированы самим
Иваном в известной его фразе: “Люди сами, значит, виноваты: им дан
3. “Прометей” цитируется по следующему изданию: И.-В. Гете, Собрание сочинений: В

10 тт. Т. 5. Драмы в стихах. Эпические поэмы (Москва: Художественная литература,
1977), с. 74.
4. Ibid., с. 78.
5. Ibid., с. 88.
был рай, они захотели свободы и похитили огонь с небеси...” [15; 222],6
хотя именно эта, гетевская вариация мятежного титана в контекст
“Братьев Карамазовых” не вводилась, заслонялась обычно другим, более
известным гетевским же образным инвариантом; Иван, как известно,
“русский Фауст.”
Впрочем, в данный момент для нас не столь важна роль поэмы Гете в
генезисе образа Ивана Карамазова, сколько два специфических аспекта в
обозначенном бахтинском пассаже.
Первый: контекстуальное сближение творческой манеры Достоевского
с прометеичесским мифом Гете ведет к той самой ошибке, в которой
Бахтин справедливо упрекал современных ему достоевсковедов –
отождествлению идеологий автора и его героев. Второе наблюдение,
представляющееся для нас более важным, состоит в том, что
литературоведеческая концепция переводится здесь в плоскость иной
умственной активности. Рассуждения о “новой литературной форме” –
это один способ мысли и тип высказывания; размышления об этической
природе творчества и отношения автора к герою (а следовательно, и к
читателю, поскольку у последнего нет иного способа непосредственно-
чувственного принятия текста, кроме определения своей позиции в мире
литературного героя) – нечто другое. Первое – только оболочка; второе
же явно находится вне парадигмы современного литературоведения.
Дело тут не только в том, что Бахтин, по одному из утвердившихся о
нем мнений, “философ под маской филолога.” В конце концов, подобные
образные сопоставления не обусловлены, как нам кажется, и нуждами
философствования.
Под этим углом зрения вопрос, поставленный нами изначально –
зачем Бахтину нужен этот прометевский образ и что он значит? –
становится острее. Во-первых, этот контекст противоречит одной из
главных декларируемых литературоведческих целей книги ученого –
выйти, наконец, из-под власти философствования героев Достоевского и
прорваться к нему самому. Выясняется, что Прометей как автор “Братьев
Карамазовых” все-таки слишком близок к своим “бунтующим” героям
(показательная цитата Прометея-творца: “Как видишь, я творю людей
<...>Чтоб им страдать, и плакать, И ликовать, и наслаждаться, И
презирать тебя, Как я!”).7
Во-вторых, непонятен и его скрытый, философский смысл (Бахтин же,
как известно, “потаенный” философ). Что может означать этот
прометеевский сюжет? Наличие у Бахтина концепции Достоевского как
“философа свободного духа”? Вряд ли это адекватно пусть редким, но
все-таки имеющимся указаниям на собственно философские взгляды
ученого; очевидно, что его персонализм – какого-то другого вида. Может
быть, в бахтинском достоевсковедении скрыт некий антихристианский
6. Из литературоведческих сближений Ивана Карамазова и Прометея см., например:

Вяч. И. Иванов, “Идея неприятия мира,” в Вяч. И. Иванов, Собрание сочинений: В 4 тт. Т.
3. Статьи (Брюссель, 1979), с. 79-90.
7. Гете, Собрание сочинений, с. 88.
смысл? “Проблемы поэтики…” порой упрекают в этом, но, как нам

кажется, с этих позиций серьезная критика Бахтина невозможна, хотя бы
вследствие его явного нежелания формулировать свои ответы на
подобные вопросы.
Отметим попутно, что стремление к “дешифровке” скрытых смыслов в
тексте Бахтина, навязчивое желание “проникнуть” в “глубины,” прочесть
подтекст etc., программируется самим бахтинским “нарративом.” Не
последнюю роль в этом программировании должны играть и подобного
рода “провоцирующие” цитаты. То, что они не поддаются четкой
интерпретации, и доказывает их техническое, “завлекательное”
предназначение; их функция – удержание внимания и формирование
образной парадигмы восприятия дальнейшей концепции.
Иными словами, сравнение Достоевского с Прометеем дает образную,
до-рациональную основу для дальнейших размышлений, можно сказать,
фундирует их. Бахтин выстраивает мир, в котором дальше будет
мыслить. Мир этот центрирован вокруг оси, на одном полюсе которой
полуабстрактный эстетический тиран (Толстой-Зевс), на другом, творец-
освободитель (Достоевский-Прометей), в одиночку взрывающий
застывший существующее пространство.
Примечательно, что сам Бахтин в рефлексивно-критической части
своей книги, в “обзоре наиболее существенных попыток определения
основной особенности творчества Достоевского,” по сути, вписывает в
эту систему и себя: рядом с ним (особенно в первом варианте
“Проблем…”) не оказывается никого, его концепция одинока, отдельные
приближения к ней (Л. Гроссман, Вяч. Иванов, Б.Энгельгардт) не
достигают цели из-за фатальных изначальных ошибок (характерный
пассаж: .”..основная ошибка была сделала Энгельгардтом в начале пути
при определении “идеологического романа” Достоевского).8
Подобно тому, как “только Достоевский может быть признан
создателем подлинной полифонии” , так и критический разбор
литературы о Достоевском подталкивает читателя к мысли о том, что
только представляемая читателю концепция полифонии подлинна.
Между прочим, происходит здесь и несколько странная подмена
содержания рассуждения: Бахтин так строит свой обзор, что вопрос о
самом существования полифонии в романах Достоевского снимается, а
речь идет, по сути, только о том, кому удалось ближе подобраться к
вожделенной концепции и лучше ее сформулировать.
Этот критический обзор может показаться отчасти даже пародийным.
Неслучайно, сам Бахтин начинает вторую главу со странной фразы: “Мы
выставили тезис и дали несколько монологический – в свете нашего
тезиса–обзор…”9 Интересно, что обзор представляется
“монологическим” именно в свете выставленного тезиса о
принципиальном “диалогизме” текстов Достоевского, не позволяющем
закрыть мысль об их сущности. После подробного описания
8. Бахтин, Проблемы поэтики Достоевского, с. 42.

9. Ibid., с. 56
ограниченности всех (практически всех) существующих к моменту

создания “Проблем поэтики…” трактовок творчества Достоевского,
следует указание и на относительность собственной мысли. Это придает
предыдущей подмене предмета спора и всему “критическому” разбору
игровой (чтобы не сказать “карнавальный”) характер.
Объект пародии может быть “прочитан” двояко: с одной стороны, это
– стилистика или стилистический идеал, не столько существующий,
сколько декларируемый, “официальной” гуманитарной мысли
монологического времени, в котором Бахтин работал; с другой стороны,
этот объект – традиция европейской монологической мысли в целом, от
античных перипатетиков до немецких философских факультетов. Иными
словами, объект пародии может быть найден и в личном,
биографическом времени Бахтина, и в большом времени, на фоне
которого происходило его умозрительное самоопределение.
Бахтинский “нарратив” в коммуникативном аспекте выстроен
чрезвычайно продуманно. Те читатели, которые сочтут парадоксально
неуместной монологически завершенную речь о диалогически
незавершимом явлении, находят в начале второй главы намек на
внутренний диалогизм бахтинской мысли, на возможность автокритики
предложенной концепции. Парадоксальным образом указание на скрыто-
пародийную природу первой главы верифицирует высказанный в ней
тезис, придает ему необходимую для дальнейшего содержательного
раскрытия значимость.
Дальнейшее развитие основного тезиса “Проблем поэтики…,” на наш
взгляд, состоит в постепенной детализации и конкретизации бытия героя
в полярно организованном мире прометеической интерпретации
Достоевского.
Проблема, однако, в том, что в отличие от мифологического
пространства прометеевского сюжета, мир художественной литературы
не существует сам для себя. Он разомкнут для читателя, для чужого,
воспринимающего, сочувствующего, осуждающего etc. сознания,
естественной задачей которого будет понимание, то есть неизбежная
монологизация полифонического текста в восприятии.
Но именно такой монологизации противостоит мысль Бахтина:
“…дело идет не об обычной диалогической форме развертывания
материала в рамках его монологического понимания на твердом фоне
единого предметного мира.”10 Из этой фразы не вполне понятно, какая
альтернатива предлагается монологическому пониманию; вообще говоря,
для сознания, еще сохранившего как структурно необходимые
понятийные антитезы “истинное” и “ложное,” “прекрасное” и
“безобразное,” любое понимание будет монологическим, просто потому,
что будет предполагать определенное расположение нового текста в уже
существующей системе психологических, нравственных, эстетических и
иных координат.
10. Ibid., с. 26
Длинное, семантически насыщенное рассуждение Бахтина, которое

следует за только что цитированным отрывком, можно долго и подробно
критически разбирать. Но для нас наиболее важна его весьма интересная
противоречивость.
Так, сначала Бахтин пишет, что текст Достоевского “не дает
созерцающему опоры для объективации всего события по обычному
монологическому типу (сюжетно, лирически или познавательно),
делает, следовательно, и созерцающего участником.”11
Сразу вслед за этим следует пассаж: “Роман не только не дает никакой
устойчивой опоры вне диалогического разрыва для третьего,
монологически объемлющего сознания, – наоборот, все в нем строится
так, чтобы сделать диалогическое противостояние безысходным. С
точки зрения безучастного ‘третьего’ не строится ни один элемент
произведения. В самом романе этот безучастный ‘третий’ никак не
представлен. Для него нет ни композиционного, ни смыслового
места.”12
Для начала – несколько наивных вопросов. Если “третий” – это
“созерцающий участник” (то есть читатель, поставленный в ситуацию
невозможности монологического понимания текста; это соотносится со
словами о “точке зрения безучастного “третьего”), то каким образом он
может быть “представлен” (и в итоге не ““представлен”) в самом романе?
Зачем ему композиционное или смысловое место? Наконец, для кого
“безысходно” диалогическое противостояние романа? Для героя, для
читателя, для автора? Почему третий – “безучастен”; монологическое
восприятие Достоевского ведь вовсе не подразумевает “безучастности”
(совершенно в данном случае и невозможной, кстати)?
Гипотетический “третий” и его попытки “монологического” прочтения
Достоевского приобретает здесь странный, парадоксальный образ. Как
нам кажется, логическим путем добраться до монологического смысла
подобных риторико-интеллектуальных лабиринтов крайне сложно.
Положение, однако, облегчается тем, что текст Бахтина, по всей
видимости, изначально, строится как реплика к Достоевскому.
Богоборческие претензии Ивана Карамазова выливаются в
прометеический миф о природе творчества Достоевского. Приведенный
только что отрывок также находит свой источник в последнем романе
“великого пятикнижия,” в главке “Третье, и последнее свидание со
Смердяковым,” в эпизоде, который в контексте этих заметок вполне
может быть трактован как диалог художника-творца со своим
“созданием.”
Иван, этот наиболее творческий герой из всех Карамазовых, уже
понимая неудачу своих эстетических и этических построений, в отчаянии
говорит лакею: ““Знаешь что: я боюсь, что ты сон, что ты призрак предо
мной сидишь?” Ответ Смердякова в высшей степени интересен. Сначала
он подтверждает догадку Ивана: “Никакого тут призрака нет-с, кроме нас
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., с. 26-27
обоих-с…” В косноязычии лакея проглядывает истинный облик

ситуации: Смердяков утверждает небытийность их разговора,
выбрасывает и себя, и Ивана за пределы подлинного бытия. Но лакей
продолжает: “…да еще некоторого третьего. Без сумления, тут он теперь,
третий этот, находится, между нами двумя. <…> Третий этот – бог-с,
самое это провидение-с, тут оно и теперь подле нас-с, только вы не
ищите его, не найдете” [15; 60; курсив мой – С.Ш].
Последняя фраза Смердякова поразительно напоминает бахтинские
построения. Собственно, это один и тот же парадокс отсутствующего
присутствия, разумеется, у Бахтина гораздо более семантически
сложный. Проблема, однако, глубже. Так же, как и в случае с гетевским
Прометеем здесь мы имеем дело с обращением к инварианту идеи через
образ или ситуацию-посредник.
Глубинный корень этого парадокса таков: ““…если двое из вас
согласятся на земле просить о всяком деле, то чего бы не попросили,
будет им от Отца Моего Небесного, ибо где двое или трое собраны во
имя Мое, там Я посреди них” [Мф: 18; 19-20].
У этого евангельского стиха – большая литературная биография,13 но
достоевско-бахтинская вариация занимает в ней, судя по всему,
совершенно особое место. Прежде всего, это сравнительно редкий случай
полной перверсии евангельского смысла. У Достоевского эта цитата –
приговор Ивану, знак его полного отпадения от Бога. Думается, что
бахтинское описание романного мира в определенном смысле
продолжает традицию такой перверсии.
Первое, что роднит две вариации, – ощущение полной безысходности
ситуации. В “Братьях Карамазовых” она обусловлена не только
философски и мистически, но и сюжетно: Ивану нужен свидетель
смердяковского признания (и собственного раскаяния), но свидетеля нет,
есть только черт и Смердяков, его же создания (прометеический сюжет!),
мучающие собственного создателя.
В художественном мире, описанном у Бахтина, ситуация еще хуже.
Третьего, “наблюдателя” не только нет, для него даже не предусмотрена
“точка зрения” (кстати, если бы речь у Бахтина шла только о читателе, то
фраза о точке зрения потеряла бы всякий смысл). “Безучастность”
“третьего” объясняется в этом случае именно тем, что он дал удалить
себя из мира, это обвинение близко тем филиппикам, что бросает
гетевский Прометей Зевсу (“Мне чтить тебя? За что? // Когда ты скорбь
утешил // Обремененного? // Когда ты слезы вытер // Скорбью
томимого?”), фактически удаляя бога из мира (отметим попутно
идеологическую близость этих обвинений “бунту” Ивана Карамазова).
Пафос Бахтина сближается с гетевским (специфика несомненной
13. В частности, нам приходилось писать о ее функционировании в романе “Братья

Карамазовы” в составе сложного евангельско-романтического контекста: Шаулов С.с.
Культурный фон диалога в романе Ф.М. Достоевского, “Братья Карамазовы,” в
Достоевский и современность. Материалы XVIII Международных Достоевских чтений
(Новгород, 2002), с. 221-227.
генетической связи бахтинского текста с гетевским “Прометеем” при

этом для нас вторична) в оценке такого удаления как “величайшей силы”
творческой личности.
Думается, такие цитаты не могут быть невольными, тем более что
контекстуальные источники входят в орбиту “Проблем поэтики…”
именно через посредничество Достоевского. Оба раза концепция Бахтина
противоречит Достоевскому, и вряд ли автор “Проблем поэтики…” мог
этого не заметить. Так возникает все тот же вопрос: зачем это нужно
Бахтину?
Ответ, как нам кажется, нужно искать в специфических
представлениях автора “Проблем поэтики…” о том, что можно назвать
“психологией творчества” Достоевского. Во втором издании своей книги
Бахтин несколько расширил обзор критической литературы о
Достоевском и, говоря о книге В. Шкловского “За иi против,” особо
отметил такой вывод ученого: “Федор Михайлович любил набрасывать
планы вещей; еще больше любил развивать, обдумывать и усложнять
планы и не любил заканчивать рукописи... <…> Конец романа означал
для Достоевского обвал новой Вавилонской башни.” От себя Бахтин
добавляет к фразе Шкловского: “Это очень верное наблюдение.”14
Оно, однако, верно только в том случае, если Достоевского как
строителя романного мира отождествить с архитекторами Вавилонской
башни. Иными словами, перед читателями Бахтина встает выбор,
прекрасно осознаваемый и самим автором “Проблем поэтики…”: “Мир
Достоевского глубоко плюралистичен . Если уже искать для него
образ, к которому как бы тяготеет весь этот мир, образ в духе
мировоззрения самого Достоевского, то таким является церковь как
общение неслиянных душ, где сойдутся и грешники, и праведники;
или, может быть, образ дантовского мира, где многопланность
переносится в вечность, где есть нераскаянные и раскаявшиеся,
осужденные и спасенные.”15
Оспорено в этой цитате может быть все: от утверждения “глубокой”
плюралистичности мира Достоевского (здесь представляется полезным,
хотя и не вполне корректным мысленный эксперимент: Бахтин сообщает
эту новость самому Федору Михайловичу; люди, знакомые с мемуарами
о характере романиста, легко домыслят его реакцию) до странной
трактовки церкви, в которой якобы сойдутся все, “и грешники, и
праведники,” до идеи тождественности такой церкви и дантовского мира.
Смысл становится понятен, если учесть, что к этому описанию мира
Достоевского Бахтин приходит через последовательное отрицание
категории становления (“становящегося духа”) у Достоевского. Сама по
себе эта идея не выдерживает реального столкновения с текстами, но
Бахтину она нужна, по всей видимости, для другого. Она довершает
описание создаваемого в “Проблемах поэтики…” мифа (здесь – в
лосевском понимании термина) о творческом процессе Достоевского,
14. Бахтин, Проблемы поэтики Достоевского, с. 51.

15. Ibid., с. 45.
довершает одной, может быть, важнейшей чертой: этот мифологический

сюжет завершен и описывается уже после финальной черты. Мышление
Бахтина о Достоевском апокалиптично; в каком-то смысле трактат
“Проблемы поэтики...” сам по себе – мениппея.
Собственно, восприятие Достоевского как пророка исполнившегося
русского апокалипсиса не уникально, однако Бахтин использовал эту
идею как основу для изощренного интеллектуального сюжета, в рамках
которого сохраняется и умозрительный (“научный”) элемент, и даже
элемент лирико-биографический. С определенной точки зрения,
“Проблемы поэтики…” не только трактат о Достоевском, но и зримое
проявление жизни и эффективности художественной традиции автора
“великого пятикнижия.”
State University of Bashkiria

ZDRAVKA GUGLETA
EDWARD DENNIS GOY, THE ESCAPED MYSTERY:

THE POETRY OF MOMČILO NASTASIJEVIĆ
Momčilo Nastasijević (1894-1938) is arguably one of the most important

Modernist poets in the Serbian language who published only one book of
poetry during his lifetime: Pet lirskih krugova [Five Lyrical Cycles] (1937).
Nastasijević's small poetic output came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s
thanks to new editions of his writings and critical texts about his poetry and
poetics. Among the latter were the essays of the late Edward Dennis Goy who
was to become, in Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover’s words, “the best English
translator” and one of the “most prominent Western commentators” of
Nastasijević’s poetry.1
Edward Dennis Goy (1926-2000) was a Cambridge Slavic scholar whose
lifelong “love affair with Nastasijević’s poetry lasted from 1966 to the end of
his life.”2 Goy’s book, The Escaped Mystery: The Poetry of Momčilo
Nastasijević, (Bloomington: Slavica, 2010) is a labour of love beyond the
grave accomplished with the editorial help of his wife, Jasna Levinger-Goy.
The book consists of two parts, the main Part I, “Critical Essays,” a
compilation of one dictionary entry and six articles on Nastasijević’s poetry
which Goy wrote from the 1960s to 2000. The shorter Part II, “Poems in
Translation,” is something of an appendix featuring Goy’s translations of
Nastasijević’s poems, both those previously published, (Silentia and Words in
Stone),3 as well as those found posthumously as an “[u]nedited first draft, in
longhand” (Moments and Echoes).4
The structure of Part I generally follows the chronological order of the
essays’ original publication dates, rather than the order of Nastasijević's cycles.
A brief introduction to his life and literary corpus in Chapter One, “Momčilo
Nastasijević (23 September 1894 – 13 February 1938),”5 is followed by essays
1. Cited in the book’s jacket notes. Vladiv-Glover is a notable commentator and translator of
Nastasijević's lyrical dramas in her own right. See, for example: Slobodanka M. Vladiv,“The
‘Lyrical Drama’ of Momčilo Nastasijević: Problems of Poetics and Translation,” New Zealand
Slavonic Journal, Serbo-Croatian Colloquium Papers (1988): 51-66; Momčilo Nastasijević, “At
‘The Eternal Tap’: Drama in Three Acts with a Prologue and Epilogue,” in Lyrical Drama, Slavic
Modernism: Anton Chekhov, Milutin Bojić, Momčilo Nastasijević, special issue of Southeasten
Europe / L’Europe Sud-Est, 18, 1992 (2002): 99-134.
2. From the book’s jacket notes.
3. Both Silentia (Gluhote) and Words in Stone (Reči u kamenu) were first published in the
Scottish Slavonic Review, 8 (Spring 1987): 42-55.
4. As indicated in the footnotes by Jasna Levinger-Goy: The Escaped Mystery, pp. 137, 146.
5. This chapter originally appeared as an entry in Vasa D. Mihailovich (ed.), Dictionary of
Literary Biography, vol. 147, South Slavic Writers Before World War II (Detroit: Gale Research,
1995), pp. 151-156.
qua chapters which present Goy's analyses of the cycles of five Poetic Cycles.
Chapter Two analyses Silentia and Words in Stone, the fourth and fifth cycles
of Five Lyrical Cycles, while Chapters Three, Four and Five examine Jutarnje
(Morning Poems), Večernje (Evening Poems) and Bdenja (Vigils), the first,
second and third cycle respectively.6 Part I concludes with Chapters Six and
Seven, which examine the connections of the first cycle, Morning Poems, with
the whole of Nastasijević’s book and the evolution of the very first poem of
the cycle, “Frula” (“Flute”).
Goy’s methodology can be characterised as a close textual reading informed
by Nastasijević’s theoretical essays on art, language and music, based on
which Goy extrapolates Nastasijević’s poetics: “Nastasijević’s ideas on poetry
are perfectly suited to the poems he himself wrote” (p. 15). Formalism
(although not explicitly stated) is the theoretical subtext of Goy’s argument,
especially with regard to the relation between sound and sense, form or style
and meaning, though this is also what he discovers in Nastasijević’s
poetological statements. Despite his admission that Nastasijević’s poetry
cannot be paraphrased and that his “approximate appreciation is fraught with
difficulties” (p. 29), Goy succeeds in elucidating this poetry’s rich gnomic
idiom by closely attending to its imagery and syntax. In Chapter One, after
striving to paraphrase each cycle’s meaning, Goy concludes: “It is better to
consider the poems as a musical variation on a theme. Reading the poems
leads one to realize how much Nastasijević achieved his aim of making tone
more than the word. Pet lirskih krugova comes close to a symphony in words”
(p. 8).
Chapter Two, “The Poems Gluhote and Reči u kamenu,”7 concerns the last
two cycles of Five Lyrical Cycles, namely Silentia and Words in Stone, which
proffer “the culmination of [Nastasijević’s] poetic expression” (p. 11). Guiding
Goy's analyses of poems is his discussion of Nastasijević’s theoretical views
on art and language, above all his notion of surreality (nadstvarnost), “native
melody” (maternja melodija) and tone. Goy takes great pains to emphasise that
Nastasijević’s notion of surreality has nothing to do with the Surrealists’ view
of the transcendental. He quotes Nastasijević: “They [true artists] do not go
into the transcendental, but rather lay it bare within the reality” (p. 13). Poetry,
Nastasijević held, intimates this through tone and melody. As Goy points out,
this does not involve the use of conventional prosody. What matters is not
phonetics or accent as an ornatus understood as something separate from
sense; rather, it is tone intimately interlaced with native melody or, one could
say, the materiality qua specificity of one’s language, which is intrinsically
related to meaning. This led Nastasijević to conceptualise the maternja
melodija (native or maternal melody) as the inherent music of one’s language,
one that is found in the intonation of folk poetry. The modern poet, according
6. Here the chronological order of essays follows the sequence of Nastasijević’s cycles. The
fourth chapter is not strictly inserted in a chronological order as it was published in 1981 and
placed after the third chapter was published in 1982.
7. First published in Annali dell’Instituto Universario Orientale, Sezione slava (Naples) 9
(1966): 161-197.
to Nastasijević, needs to go back to this original source of folk poetry in order

to revitalise and extend it by drawing on folk idioms and syntax. Nastasijević
was the principal initiator of the second wave of the “folklorisation” of
literature, in this case, the avant-garde folklorisation.8 Opposing “the
straitjacket” (p. 15) of the Romantic pastiche (the first wave), which merely
imitated the folk idiom and syntax, the authors of the inter-war period, above
all Momčilo Nastsijević and Rastko Petrović, saw the need to return to the
Serbian golden tradition in order to discover the new. This idea would then be
picked up by the post-WWII poets such as Vasko Popa and Miodrag Pavlović
(the third wave) who greatly admired Nastasijević.9
The next part of the second chapter is then dedicated to the analysis of the
two cycles, Silentia and Words in Stone, respectively, which for Goy “seem to
present the synthesis of [Nastasijević’s] poetry in a single development.”10 The
fourth cycle, Silentia, is the most hermetic one of Five Lyrical Cycles, and the
central innermost concentric circle, if we have in mind the seven-cycle
structure of Nastasijević’s poetry in Popa’s edition.11 It contains ten short
untitled poems which all thematise the stony and opaque silence of a doomed
heart, its unrest and need to express the inexpressible – “the escaped mystery”
[“odbegla tajna”]. As the cycle unfolds, it is discovered that this very painful
muteness and darkness is the condition of beauty and the blessedness, the light
of expression: “Pain, / And black. // Yet I wish, for so is it, / If wound there be,
/ It be deeply alive. // Out of this hell, / Somewhere for a ray of heaven. // Out
of sin / That some be holy. // And that to this silence, / This obscurity, / There
be no end. // For that blessing / For ever, for ever accursed.” (Poem X)
Compared to Silentia’s highly elliptic turn of phrase, the Words in Stone
cycle is somewhat more accessible, being a movement projected outwards
towards expression. It comprises fourteen untitled poems that are like “words
in stone,” or “messages” that flow from the stony silence (Silentia), revealing
the truth about being. Goy compares the structure of Words in Stone with “a
musical development of a theme. We have a repetition of the same thing, but
developed, changed until, finally, a synthesis is reached” (p. 42). Goy
painstakingly examines this evolution and transformation of the principal
theme citing and analysing each poem, in particular paying attention to
Nastasijević’s poetics of the opposites (the continuation of the stylistic device
8. About the three waves of the folklorisation, see Miodrag Maticki “Tri foklorizacije u
srpkom pesništvu” in Pesnik Rastko Petrović, zbornik radova (Beograd: Institut za književnost i
umetnost, 1999).
9. Indeed, Vasko Popa talks in his preface to Golden Apple (an anthology of minor folklore
literature) about the importance of returning to folk tradition, “[t]he only bright, genuine tradition
of our folk poetry [which] is an endless invention and endless discovering.” Vasko Popa,
Pesnički zbornici. Dela Vaska Pope u dve knjige (Beograd: Draganić, 2008), p. 13.
10. Ibid., p. 42.
11. Momčilo Nastasijević, Sedam lirskih krugova (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1962). Goy, in fact,
cites this edition in his Bibliography of Momčilo Nastasijević. Popa’s edition joined
Nastasijević’s unpublished cycles, Moments and Echoes, respectively, to his Five Lyrical Cycles,
revealing a rounded concentric structure, which is in many ways akin to Popa’s own Sporedno
nebo (Secondary Sky) (1968). Popa admired Nastasijević’s poetry and it is not hard to see that he
learned a lot from his predecessor.
of Silentia, and manifest in the whole book) and meaning that affirms the
paradox inherent in existence: the intertwinement of death and desire or life.
This “message” emerges, as Goy points out, through the poems’ “suggestion.
They make their impact with imagery and sensation, avoiding any definite,
translatable statement” (p. 42). It is through concrete images, such as the
image of an old man’s hand on a young maid’s breast (Poem XII) that the
poems hint at meaning, and their association with and extension through other
images; for example, the way the above image is denied as an individual’s vain
desire for life, and seen in the last two poems within the larger context of the
perpetual oscillation between decay and life: “…To odour fragrance / To
fragrance odour. // And if, oh plant, they sense / The breath of putrefaction, ‘tis
from you, / On stalk and leaf” (Poem XIII); “…Upon the boundaries of
pestilence / She shall be immaculate / When she stands. // Of corruption the
drop / Has chastely separated / And fallen…” (Poem XIV).
Chapter Three, “The Cycle Jutarnje from Pet lirskih krugova,12 deals with
Morning Poems, the first cycle of Nastasijević’s book. Goy investigates its
nine titled poems, quoting each in full and giving the parallel English
translation, with both versions showing the accented structure. Goy analyses
the musicality of these poems, but not inspecting them merely in terms of their
phonetics. Rather, in sync with Nastasijević’s symbolist-like belief of the
symbiosis between music and poetry, Goy employs descriptive musical terms
(here, and in other chapters) such as “fortissimo,” “scherzo,” and “musical
phrase” to characterise Nastasijević’s poems, but also, in a more Formalist
manner, he looks at the rhythmical patterns, the alliteration, the foregrounding
(of archaic words), as well as the imagery of folk poetry, and the close relation
these formal elements have in the creation of meaning. The very first poem,
“Flute,” sets the theme of the whole cycle and indeed of the book as a whole:
“Flute, why does my joyous breath / Mournfully echo in the valley? // Is it that
dead shepherds / Through you called on their love? // Or is the sadness rooted
in me: / Am I wounded by an arrow from heaven? / Or has the dark earth stung
me; / So my song be adorned / with a tear, with a drop of blood? // Or when
my breath flows forth / Do you mourn the escaped mystery?” The emblematic
image of the lyrical subject removed from nature and expression creates a
mournful ambience and “begins a chain of paradoxes and dilemmas” (p. 47).
This starts with the conventional poem “Jasike” (“The Aspens”) and the highly
evocative folk poetry “Izvoru” (“To the Spring”), both depicting the
separateness of the inanimate and of nature from the self for which these
remain inaccessible. The principal theme is then developed with the ambiguity
(due to some highly accented verse ) such as is evident in, for instance,
“Rumena kap” (“The Rosy Drop”) and “San u podne” (“A Midday Dream”),
in which the sensuality of nature is explored. The female figure and the
animate are linked to the inanimate. The theme concludes with the macabre
message of the last poem “Dafina” (“The Oleaster”), with its imagery of
12. Originally published in Southeastern Europe/L’Europe du Sud-Est 9, nos. 1-2 (1982): 53-
69.
vampiric frustration of desire, anticipating the meditation on death, the inward-

oriented search of the succeeding cycles.
Chapter Four, “The Cycle Večernje from the Pet lirskih krugova,”13 treats
the nine Evening Poems pursuing the develop of theme and poetic style
evinced in the Morning Poems. The accentual rhythm is still present in the
poems (which are cited, again, in the original and in Goy’s translation), but the
poems now appeal mainly, as Goy aptly shows, to the sense of touch and
seeing, and introduce “stock romantic images [which] are explored in a new
way, as what [Goy has] termed ‘wavers,’ or variations upon themes” (p. 80).
One such transformation of a romantic image that Goy considers is the way the
motif of running water, the source of life, in the poem “Česmi kraj puta” (“To
a Wayside Spring”), is eroticised and transmuted into the motif of a woman
who becomes the source of life in the next poem, “Poznoj” (“To Her Too
Late”) which, however, turns on itself and converts the joyful tone of “To a
Wayside Spring” into the mournful sound of penitence: “…Let me, for a single
drop of you / Suffer thirst for you eternal, / For the pain, the sin, the
fornication.” All nine poems, Goy concludes, oscillate or “waver” “between
the inanimate and general and the personal and, finally, the intimate of “Sestri
[u pokoju]” (“To my Sister [Lying Dead]”)” (p. 80).
Chapter Five explores Nastasijević’s third cycle Vigils (Bdenja) which Goy
rightly interprets as “a variation of two preceding cycles” (p. 81). As in the
third chapter, Goy shows the accented structure of both original poems and
their parallel translations. The unified structure of the rhythm and rhyme
conveys the theme, Nastasijević’s eternal paradox of being. The thirteen
entitled poems move towards the abstract and metaphorical as the lyrical
subject meditates, in a more elliptical style, on his loneliness and nihilism in
the face of the Other: “…Loving what is it I kill, / What awaken?” (“The
Track” [“Trag”]); “…And the deeper we are not, / The deeper opens up
salvation.” (“To the One” [“Jedinoj”]). It is worth mentioning here that in his
reading of individual cycles of Nastasijević’s poetry, Goy often points out
connections with earlier poems and cycles, indicating how they differ or
“waiver” from the earlier motifs. In addition, Goy is often able to shed light on
some of Nastasijević’s lines by comparing them to the poems of, among
others, the Romantic poet Branko Radičević or the Parnassian poet Jovan
Dučić, or indeed, recalling lines and ideas of authors such as Dylan Thomas,
T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence.
Chapter Six “Flute, why does my joyous breath…?”14 is something of a
recapitulation. It looks once again at the first cycle Morning Poems by tracing
the development of one theme – the eternal problem of the division between
experience and expression, the self and the other – from its introduction in
“Flute” and its development and variations in the first cycle, as well as, albeit
briefly, in the rest of Nastasijević's Five Lyrical Cycles. Goy summarises his
argument: “All five cycles present a struggle, a battering against the cage-
wires. With the gradual veering of the style towards the final difficulty of
13. Published in Serbian Studies, 1, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 31-51.

14. First published in Serbian Studies, 14, no. 1 (2000): 3-13.
Gluhote and Reči u kamenu […] the question has been rinsed to a point of
finality. […] [I]t is not so much the solution, but the struggle for it that means
to live: “Al hoću, jer biva, rana li, duboko da je živa” (Gluhote, X)” (p. 112).15
It is in the last two cycles, with their language “stripped down to bare
essentials” (p. 112), with their highly dense idiom, that Nastasijević’s paradox
is seen anew, enabling the reader to glimpse the ever-elusive mystery. It would
be interesting to see how Goy would have seen the theme’s development in the
two cycles which Nastasijević left unpublished. Goy’s draft translations of
these two cycles, given in Part II, prove he was starting to work on them
intensely, but the work has unfortunately remained unfinished.
In the final addendum-like Chapter Seven, entitled “The Evolution of a
Poem,”16 Goy compares no less than fourteen of Nastasijević’s versions of
“Flute.” Goy’s aim is to “examine the development of the theme and form of
the poem offering insight into the interdependence of the one and the other as
the final poem struggles up from the poet’s unconscious” (p. 113). Goy
explores the theme’s coming into being, its surfacing through images, starting
with the image of the violin and the verbose and bathetic style of the early
versions, then illuminating its slow congealment into more tangible and
evocative images, its finding expression in the condensed idiom and rhythm of
the much shorter final version. Nastasijević’s creative method of rewriting his
poems a number of times making them more obscure through elimination,
inversion, etc., cannot be viewed as a deliberate act to deceive the reader, to
make his poetry “difficult.” Rather, these versions attest to the creative process
of the phenomenological reduction (Husserl). The various versions are like
concentric circles, with the final version being the innermost circle with its
hermetic idiom. Nastasijević was delving deep into the materiality of words
(the vertical direction) by the only way available, the linear or horizontal way
of writing. His method could also be characterised as palimpsest, where his
deletions aimed at revealing the underlying “unreadable” text, the “surreal,” as
he understood it. The versions display the progressive reduction or distillation
of language to its sheer materiality, the tone and meaning being coalesced
together, so that words lose their automatic dictionary meaning and instead
become approximations, rich evocations, which name in their magic
incantation the inexpressible.
Reading Goy’s translation of Nastasijević’s poetry, one is struck by his

wholehearted and meticulous approach. He even consulted Momčilo
Nastasijević’s composer brother, Svetomir Nastasijević, for advice regarding
the translation and exegeses of certain poems. Mistakes which has slipped
through in poems such as “Zora” (“Dawn”) and “Biljkama” (“To the Plants”)17
15. The translation is not given but is available in Part II. It has already been quoted in
Chapter III: “Yet I wish, for so is it, / If wound there be, / It be deeply alive.”
16. First published in Iz književnosti: Zbornik radova u čast Predraga Palavestre (Beograde:
Institut za književnost i umetnost, 1997), pp. 233-243.
17. In “Dawn,” “žal” means sadness, not “strand,” because of its feminine gender: ta žal. In
“To the Plants” the first line “Bliži se” is not an imperative “Draw near.” To the native speaker of
Serbian it is quite clear that it refers to the approach of autumn. One says “bliži se jesen”
are negligible, since they do not affect Goy’s overall interpretation of the
cycles. En passant, the English-speaking reader who has no knowledge of
Serbian would benefit were the seventh essay-chapter to include an English
translation, along with the Serbian original, of Nastasijević’s early versions of
“Flute,” to better appreciate the subtleties of Nastasijević’s expression and
Goy’s argument. It would also be useful for the sake of an immediate
comparison to have next to Goy’s unedited translations of Moments
(Magnovenja) and Echoes (Odjeci), presented in Part II, the original poems
that are unavailable in the first part of the book. This said, and despite its tardy
appearance after the author’s death, Goy’s unique book offers seminal essays
on and translations of Nastasijević’s poetry, which can serve as impulse to
further research into this neglected Serbian Modernist. Goy’s book is sure to
find its way onto the shelves of Slavic Studies students and scholars alike and
is an obligatory addition to any serious Slavic library collection.
Monash University
(“autumn is near”) or “bliži se zima” (“winter is near”). “Autumn” is also feminine in Serbian,
and thus there is no syntactical riddle as to what the line “Zlatna odora na njoj” (“There’s golden
raiment upon her”) signifies, although it has to be admitted that there is much ambivalence.
SUMMARIES OF ARTICLE IN RUSSIAN
В. Е. ВЕТЛОВСКАЯ
V.E. VETLOVSKAIA
ЛИТЕРАТУРНЫЕ ЗАИМСТВОВАНИЯ И ПАРОДИЯ В БЕДНЫХ

ЛЮДЯХ
LITERARY BORROWINGS AND PARODY IN DOSTOEVSKY’S POOR

FOLK
This paper illuminates the organic connection with Russian literature and
criticism Dostoevsky demonstrated in his first published novel, through the use
of literary borrowings and parody. While being welcomed by V. Belinsky and
the progressive circle of Russian critics, Dostoevsky’s debut in Russian
literature was guided not by the social ideology of the critic but by his own
artistic assimilation and transformation of the stylistic devices of his literary
predecessors, notably Gogol. In Poor Folk, Dostoevsky parodied not Gogol’s
use of the comic to represent Russian life, but the very essence of
representation of that life. Through his polemic with Gogol in Poor Folk,
Dostoevsky showed his own mastery of Russian realism, which went beyond
Belinsky’s understanding of the Natural School. That is why even the young
Dostoevsky could listen to “the great critic’s” sermonising on literature with
indifference and good humour.
OLGA SHALYGINA
ГИПНОТИЧЕСКАЯ ФУНКЦИЯ РИТМА В БЕСФАБУЛЬНЫХ РАННИХ

РАССКАЗАХ А. П. ЧЕХОВА
THE HYPNOTIC FUNCTION OF RHYTHM IN CHEKHOV’S EARLY

STORIES WITHOUT A PLOT
The problem of the formal aspects of rhythm and its effect on the content of
Chekhov’s prose of the late period has not been adequately studied and
requires a new investigative methodology. The present article attempts to do
just that: analyse the function of rhythm in Chekhov’s short stories ‘without a
hero’ and ‘without’ a plot, using rhythm as a theoretical tool to show how the
meaning (content) of the stories is shaped by their formal elements. Chekhov’s
radical restructuring of the short story genre – from a ternary structure to an

open or circular one – allows for an active reader to become a co-author of
the meaning or content of the stories.
This paper deals with a series of formal elements and their relation to
content: the natural setting (paysage) and the causality of ‘plot event’; the
narrative device of tension/release in the construction of the magic moment of
transfixed (stopped) time; the cognitive work of ‘inner time’; the disjunction in
the flow of narrated time and the “present” as eternity; the evaluative function
of silence as the core of Chekhov’s conception of temporality; the “present”
versus “the enduring moment” as a function of the opposition of spatiality
versus non-spatial extensivity; the creation of “other worlds” through
alternation of evenings/days and dreams; and finally, the spatiality of the text
and the “point of view” of a “new” soul.
The alternating rhythm of ‘plot’ episodes is thus seen as an agency in the
construction of meaning of the short stories, establishing a circularity of
human life, the tyranny of time over that life and at the same time a resistance
to the tyranny of time through the inner time of narrative.
Лян Кунь
Lian Kun
ИДЕЙНЫЕ ОСНОВАНИЯ КУЛЬТА ЖЕНСТВЕННОСТИ В РУССКОЙ

КУЛЬТУРНОЙ ТРАДИЦИИ
THE SOURCES OF THE CULT OF THE FEMININE IN THE RUSSIAN

CULTURAL TRADITION
In Russian Modernism, the figure of woman represents a cultural archetype,

connected with both the Western and Orthodox Christian traditions, both of
which have their deep roots in the pagan, in classical mythology and in
Platonism. However, while a secularization of the symbol of the feminine takes
place after the Middle Ages in the Western tradition, in the Russian Orthodox
tradition, the female figure grows into a symbol of the wholeness of man. The
Russian modernist philosophers of the fin-de-siècle, notably Vladimir
Solovyov, assimilated this female archetype who was endowed with Orthodox
religious connotations and connected to the world beyond the earthly one.
Solovyov privileged this archetype as the Eternal Feminine and the World
Soul. This new Modernist symbol has its roots in the veneration of the Mother
of God and the Mother Earth, who are the expressions of the mystical Oneness
of the Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
Sergei Shaulov
ПРОМЕТЕЕВСКИЙ ПОДТЕКСТ ПРОБЛЕМ ПОЭТИКИ

ДОСТОЕВСКОГО М.М. БАХТИНА
THE PROMETHEAN SUBTEXT IN M. M. BAKHTIN'S PROBLEMS OF

DOSTOEVSKY'S POETICS
Focusing on Bakhtin’s statement about the “third” party in the dialogic

relationship, the paper claims that Bakhtin’s model of dialogicity as a relation
between a fictional character, the author and the reader is derived as a
response to the scene between Ivan Karamazov and Smerdiakov in “The Third
and Last Meeting with Smerdiakov” (15:60). Here Dostoevsky sets up the
model of “absent presence” – the “third” in Bakhtin’s model. The given
episode with Ivan and Smerdiakov is interpreted as a dialogue between the
creator and his literary creation. This paper contests some of Bakhtin’s theses
about the plurality and incompletion of Dostoevsky’s world vision in order to
make the claim that Bakhtin’s interpretation of Dostoevsky is Bakhtin’s
construction of a myth (in Losev’s sense of the term) about Dostoevsky’s
creative process which makes Bakhtin’s “Problem of Dostoevsky’s Poetics”
into a kind of mennipea, but one which reflects the productivity of Dostoevsky
as a creator of genre.

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155mm W x 230mm H cover 11 mm spine 4mm bleed prepress by nick@artful.com.

au 1300 278 385

Vol. 7-8 (2011-2012)

Charles Schlacks, Jr., Publisher, Idyllwild, California

TRANSCULTURAL STUDIES: A SERIES

Transculturalism and Transcultural Literature in the 21st Century 1

Section I: Literature and Transculture

Литературные Заимствования и Пародия в Бедных Людях 15

Гипнотическая функция ритма в бесфабульных ранних рассказах

Medicine in Chekhov’s Works 55

Идейные основания культа женственности в русской культурной

Section II: Music and Transculture

Reading Adorno, from Schoenberg to DJ Shadow 101

New Jerusalem: Musicology and the Marxist Aesthetic 117

Section III: Cinema and Transculture

From Poetic to Cinematic Image: Theorising about Multimedia Translation 131

Cinematic Poetry: An Act of Translation 145

The Cinema of Milani: a (Hi)story of Iranian Women in Post-Revolutionary

Section IV: Culturology and Transculture

Bilingualism in Ukraine: A Matter of Convenience or National Suicide? 157

Прометеевский Подтекст «Проблем Поэтики Достоевского» М.М.

Edward Dennis Goy, The Escaped Mystery: The Poetry of Momčilo

Literary Borrowings and Parody in Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk 205

The Hypnotic Function of Rhythm in Chekhov’s Early Stories Without A Plot

The Promethean Subtext in M. M. Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

TRANSCULTURALISM AND TRANSCULTURAL

These cultural forms, which we should strive to represent as fully fractal,

1. Frank Schulze-Engler, “Theoretical Perspectives: From Postcolonialism to Transcultural

may be interpreted and used as an analytical tool within a specific literary

From Fernando Ortiz’s transculturation to Wolfgang Welsch’s

Ortiz’s “transculturation” concept (…) sought to explore processes of

In Cuban Counterpoint, Ortiz critiqued the current notion of acculturation

peripheries.13 But as Anne Holden Rønning remarks, Pratt’s reasoning is

She sees transculturation as ‘a phenomenon of the “contact zones”’ which

Summing up the different uses and interpretations of the notion of

outer separation” is now overcome, and any divisive (ethnic, geographic,

The description of today's cultures as islands or spheres is factually

In a new world of decentered “multiple modernities,”19 Welsch’s

Mikhail Epstein’s transculture

18. Ibid., pp. 204, 197.

“transculture” as “the site of interaction among all existing and potential

(…) transculture offers a universal symbolic palette on which an

This transcultural approach to the self as an open-ended process is shared

What is missing from post-structuralist claims of the death of the subject

23. Epstein, “Culture–Culturology,” p. 299.

reflecting back on our past, on the conditions which have brought us to be

In order to reach this transcultural dimension or “special mode of existence”

It belongs among the mustiest assumptions that an individual's cultural

30. Couldry, Inside Culture, p. 119.

This passage is happening more frequently, at least in these early stages of

Theories of ‘intercultural’ communication (…) create the very problem

In describing this contemporary cultural movement “beyond the horizon of

In Borges’s great story, “Aleph,” the brightest point of the universe is

34. Schulze-Engler, “Introduction,” p. xii.

meanings. We may imagine transculture as the Aleph of the entire cultural

2.5 Transculturalism and rooted cosmopolitanism

We can imagine and envision transculturalism as a new form of

Espousing a transcultural approach, though, does not mean to adhere, even

37. Epstein, “Culture–Culturology,” p. 299.

[It] is precisely this relevance of the primary (ethnic, national) cultures,

On the same wavelength, Welsch posits that “[T]ranscultural identities

That makes nationalism and cosmopolitanism part of the same exercise.