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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association
OBITUARY NOTICE
This essay was completed by Marina Kanevskaya a few weeks before her tragic death at the age of forty-seven. She was hit by a truck on a dark street of Missoula, Montana, where she lived and worked as professor of Russian at the State University. Marina's life was full of rapid turns, but a passion for Russian literature was the true engine that supplied her with joy and ardour despite all the odds of two emigrations, changes of career, job searches, etc. She emigrated from the USSR to Israel at the age of twenty-five; eight years later she moved to the United States. There she continued her lifelong studies of Russian literature at the University of Indiana, where she defended her dissertation on Dostoevskii's Pushkin speech in 1992. The focus on Dostoevskii remained in her monograph The Cruel Critic: N. K. Mikhailovsky's Criticism on Dostoevsky, published by Edwin Mellen Press in 2001. In this book she did not only restore the political and literary circumstances of Mikhailovskii's 'war' against Dostoevskii, but also argued that this famous opponent of Dostoevskii, in his vindications, actually foreshadowed Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and polyphony of Dostoevskii's novel. What Mikhailovskii was blaming Dostoevskii for, Bakhtin put into the foundation of his new aesthetics. The paradoxality of thought and the ability to discover something new in the texts well read and the road well walked distinguished Marina's approach to literature. No wonder that she could not limit herself to nineteenth-century works. Among the subjects of her numerous essays, published both in English and in Russian, are Nabokov and Evgenii Popov, Nikolai Erdman and Nikolai Antsiferov, the conceptualists and the 'new Russians'. Fazil' Iskander was one of Marina's latest interests. She was commissioned to write a biographical article on him for The Dictionary of Literary Biography (expected to be published in 2004), but got involved more than the biographical sketch required. That was her nature--she could not work otherwise. She met Iskander in Moscow, interviewed him, and wrote two articles incorporating her observations on his poetics that did not fit into the strict format of the Dictionary. It is one of these that is printed below. I believe Marina offers a completely new approach to this writer, who was traditionally treated as a social satirist, as for example in Natal'ia Ivanova's 1990 book on him, Smekh protiv strakha ('Laughter vs. Fear'). Marina rediscovers Iskander as a daring modernist investigating the limits of the language and manifestations of logos through focusing on gestures, the expressivity of animals, and children's pre-intellectual reasoning. One can hear Marina's vivid voice, her temper, and her irony in this work, belonging to the vast list of first-rate texts written by her during her unbearably short life.
MARK LIPOVETSKY
Marina Kanevskaya submitted this article for publication in MLR in November 2002, when I met her at AAASS in Pittsburgh. Sadly, she did not live to see it accepted and printed, for her death occurred less than a month after the conference. I should like to thank Mike and Masha Levin for their kind permission to publish the article, and Marina's colleague Stewart Just-man for his editorial assistance.--BIRGIT BEUMERS.
Realizing that the shortest path to the truth would be the one most perilous for him, Uncle Sandro decided not to give in, but to force his own path to the truth on the prince. (Fazil' Iskander) (1)
Non-Linear Discourse
Fazil' Iskander explores through Uncle Sandro the idea that the shortest path to the truth, besides being the most dangerous, may not be the most apt. Taking this metaphor a bit further, we might suggest that a short and straight path to the truth fragments in Iskander's own work, reflecting both his particular creativity and the expectations of his readers. Herein we find a pattern of serpentine byways, detours, and cul-de-sacs, with but a few straight stretches in the form of aphorisms or didactic maxims.
So, what is the truth that Iskander aspires to express? The most concise answer is found in the traditional values encapsulated in Lev Tolstoi's well-known formulas, the 'national idea' (mysl' narodnaia) and the 'family idea' (mysl' semeinaia). (2) In his essay 'An Attempt to Understand Human Nature' (Popytka poniat' cheloveka) Iskander admits that for him literature has always been divided into 'a literature of home and a literature of homelessness'. In the first category he includes, notably, Tolstoi, as well as his own work. 'The literature of home always abounds in greater detail because its universe is the home and one cannot help but touch and identify household objects which are dear to the writer's heart.' (3) This definition of stylistic features--the abundance of detail--which marks 'the literature of home' relates closely to the subject of this article and helps explain the function and significance of the non-linearity of discourse in Iskander's work.
Non-linear discourse allows Iskander not merely 'to extend the path to the truth', but to convert that path into a way of experiencing the world--from the 'original wisdom' (4) of an empirical observation to the truth of a philosophical generalization. In Iskander's work, non-linear discourse operates both on the level of composition and on the level of subject matter and style. A compositional feature of Iskander's work is his rejection of a linear plotline in favour of a branching narrative. The dynamics of this technique will be discussed in greater detail below. Iskander's utterance confronts the challenge of expressing verbally that which is a priori inexpressible: a gesture, a look, a particular posture, the barking of a dog, the bleating of a goat, the shape of a tree branch, an ocean wave. These two structural features, (1) the redundant 'branching' (modularity) of the story which tries to embrace what cannot be contained in the plot, and (2) the redundant verbosity of the non-verbalizable, create a paradoxical effect. The first feature exposes the futile effort of rhetorically organized discourse to capture the dialogic complexity of even the simplest moment of everyday life, while the second reveals the futile effort of a rationalizing word to capture a non-verbal phenomenon. This close structural kinship is very important, and will be examined here through the interaction of its elements.
The existential tragedy that permeates Iskander's writings is the rapid erosion of traditional values. The elders in his idyllic Abkhazia still remember the traditional society in which they lived and the customs and traditions they held dear. Yet the tenets of that life become outdated and disappear right before their eyes. In the preface to Sandro of Chegem Iskander writes: 'In my childhood I caught fleeting glimpses of the patriarchal village life of Abkhazia and fell in love with it for ever. Have I perhaps idealized a vanishing life? Perhaps. A man cannot help ennobling what he loves.' (5) The writer makes no claim that Abkhazian traditions and customs are superior to any others. Yet he is convinced that attachment to tradition ennobles human beings and makes them stronger, while a loss of this attachment makes them weak, vulnerable, and, therefore, cynical. Iskander's 'highland' Abkhazia is different from the new world of the 'valley' in that it preserves the memory of its roots. (6)
In this, Iskander the artist maintains a very distinctive position. Although a romantic, he employs irony and indirection to establish his truth. This is, of course, a basic artistic technique of postmodernism, which can be seen most clearly in such contemporary Russian authors as Liudmila Petrushevskaia and Evgenii Popov. In Iskander's case this trope becomes an element in the structure of an essentially modernistic text. (7)
With his 'new word' (as Dostoevskii would say), (8) Iskander reached educated urban Russian-speakers in a very short time. Indeed, after the publication of his collection 'Forbidden Fruit' (Zapretnyi plod (Moscow, 1966)) he became one of the most popular modern writers in Russia. Critics like Marietta Chudakova and Natal'ia Ivanova argue that his 'new word' arose from the author's firm ethical position. Indeed, Iskander's work is marked with bold, yet somehow joyful, didacticism. By the mid-1960s many readers become weary of the self-irony introduced by the Thaw. They were, however, even more repelled by the aggressive moralizing characteristic of post-war socialist realism. After all, as Katerina Clark shows, post-war socialist realism shifted in focus from depicting epic heroes and their exploits to moralizing over 'lesser affairs' and 'the contest between the good and the excellent'. (9) It should be noted that the somewhat affected pedantry of Iskander's mini-sermons parodies precisely this moralizing of latter-day socialist realism. Thus, irony is not absent from Iskander's writing; instead, it ceases to be the purpose of the utterance.
The ironic and paradoxical didacticism of Iskander should be examined in the context of the 1960s' overall increased interest in the literary text as a technique. (10) An analysis of the motives behind this renewed attention to poetics in Russia, however, is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that the works of the formalists were rediscovered, Mikhail Bakhtin's and Iurii Lotman's books were brought out, and those with interest in European post-structuralist theory were allowed to satisfy their curiosity. Both writers and readers were again fascinated by literature as an art form. The notorious question for grammar-school compositions, 'What did the author intend to say?', gained the pathos of intellectual communication between the writer as a mentor and the reader...
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