Russian Montparnasse

Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris

Maria Rubins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137508010
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Europäische Literaturkritik

This book reassesses the role of Russian Montparnasse writers in the articulation of transnational modernism generated by exile. Examining their production from a comparative perspective, it demonstrates that their response to urban modernity transcended the Russian master narrative and resonated with broader aesthetic trends in interwar Europe.

Part I
Narrating the Self

The Existential Code of Interwar Literature

1

In the “Waste Land” of Postwar Europe: Facing the Modern Condition

In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift, we find a mock endorsement of the pervasive interwar critical discourse that militated for the “document” in literature at the expense of fiction. It comes in the guise of a book review, penned purportedly by a Parisian émigré critic by the suggestive name of Christophorus Mortus:

But in our difficult times with their new responsibilities, when the very air is imbued with a subtle moral angoisse (an awareness of which is the infallible mark of “genuineness” in a contemporary poet), abstract and melodious little pieces about dreamy visions are incapable of seducing anyone. And in truth it is with a kind of joyous relief that one passes from them to any kind of “human document,” to what one can read “between the words” in certain Soviet writers (granted even without talent), to an artless and sorrowful confession, to a private letter dictated by emotion and despair.¹

This parody ostensibly targeted the Soviet literary paradigm. But Soviet “fact literature,” which had been so vibrant during the 1920s, was fading away by the middle of the following decade, when Nabokov’s novel was in gestation. This passage was most likely directed in the first instance against the preferred stylistic model of Russian Montparnasse, with whose main publishing outlet—the journal Chisla—Nabokov was engaged in a heated polemic.² Christophorus Mortus himself is a composite fictional character drawn from several prototypes in Russian literary Paris, including the chief émigré critics Georgy Adamovich and Zinaida Gippius, who patronized the Chisla writers.³ The mock review in The Gift was not Nabokov’s only attack on the documentary element in contemporary prose. Another eloquent example can be found in Despair (1934), a novel that travesties the “existentialism of the Parisian ‘human document.’”⁴ At the end of his notes, the solipsistic protagonist Hermann is compelled to acknowledge his own narrative incompetence, manifest in his inability to transcend the diaristic medium: “Alas, my tale degenerates into a diary … A diary, I admit, is the lowest form of literature.”⁵ Such ironic meta-literary remarks pepper Nabokov’s narratives of the time, and comment implicitly on the dominant practice of Russian Montparnasse writers, who by and large adopted the human document as the genre best suited for their self-representation.

The bulk of Russian Montparnasse texts discussed in this book has been rediscovered and republished in recent years, and today’s readings often ignore the specific cultural context that informed their aesthetics. For a more historically balanced reception of these narratives, it is important to reinsert them, to use H. R. Jauss’s expression, into the proper “literary series”⁶—in this case, the literary field of interwar Europe. Russian Montparnasse human documents can most profitably be read against the rise of the existentialist code in Western literature, provoked by the philosophical, moral, and aesthetic crisis in the wake of the Great War. Shocked by a meaningless massacre of unprecedented proportions, European intellectuals pondered the causes and consequences of the decline of European civilization. Anticipating this postwar pessimism in his essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), Freud declared the apparent evolution of Western society to be a mere illusion. The psychological reaction of those contemplating with horror and disbelief the descent of Europe into barbarism is unjustified, wrote Freud: “In reality our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed.”⁷

As Paul Valéry stated in “The Crisis of the Mind” (1919), the war had demonstrated that civilizations are also mortal. Despite its past greatness, Europe had become what it is geographically—an appendix of the Asian continent, and the illusion of exceptional European culture had been irredeemably lost. The European mind is now characterized by disorder, and knowledge can save nothing; all positive notions, beliefs, and ideals have been discredited. Like a modern Hamlet, the postwar European intellectual is consumed by the contemplation of countless ghosts.⁸ Marcel Arland echoed this pessimistic assessment, writing about the collapse of positivist culture and about the metaphysical loneliness and despair experienced by the younger generation.⁹ The failure of postwar historiography, politics, and ideology to explain the military catastrophe and to justify the unprecedented bloodshed made arts and literature a privileged medium for reflection on the war, and especially on the individual experience of the calamity. Adequate expression could not have been achieved, however, without the major aesthetic and conceptual shift that informed interwar modernism. As Modris Eksteins observes: “Modernism, which in its prewar form was a culture of hope, a vision of synthesis, would turn to a culture of nightmare and denial.”¹⁰

A key figure in the articulation of the postwar transnational modernist lexicon, T.S. Eliot constructed a vision of Europe as a cultural wasteland. Contemporary man is deprived of nourishing soil, roots, and continuity, plunged into the moribund condition of an automaton, incapable of either physical or spiritual regeneration, meaningful communication or adequate self-expression; he perceives the cultural tradition as no more than “a heap of broken images.”¹¹ With the links to previous civilizations broken, he can make no sense of this inherited cultural rubbish, and in the absence of any unifying narrative, surviving myths and symbols remain for him utterly incomprehensible. Filled with obscure references and incorporating lines in a range of foreign languages, “The Waste Land” (1922) mimetically represents the modern condition—a barren and decaying world where people stumble periodically upon “fragments” and “ruins” of the past that they cannot decipher.

For interwar prose writers, the model text challenging the thematic, stylistic, and linguistic conventions of the past was James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Focusing on the futility of war and the duplicity of the epic codes of heroism, showing the modern Ulysses as an ordinary individual and endorsing the minutiae of the quotidian, Joyce paved the way for a new generation of writers who eschewed their fathers’ spirit of collectivism and noble truths, including the rhetoric of progress, patriotism, and self-sacrifice, preferring to focus on their personal perception of the horror of existence. For the younger Europeans, a book about the war could be successful only if it was written from an individual point of view and presented a personal response to gruesome reality. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) became an international bestseller because it spoke to the emotional need of the postwar man to represent his suffering and confusion in a private key. Millions of readers identified with its protagonist, Paul Bäumer, the “little man” and a victim of trench warfare, who has known nothing of life but despair, fear, and death. Such an experience could not be adequately rendered using conventional literary language: metaphors, abstractions (such as heroism, duty, sacrifice), and poetic clichés (like the proverbial “calm before the battle”) struck readers familiar with the reality of warfare as unsuitable and false. The war dramatized a “collision between events and language available … to describe them.”¹² Its incommunicable essence could best be rendered by silence or at least in simple, vivid, matter-of-fact words, drawing on clinical and even obscene vocabulary to convey the sight and stench of blood, mutilated flesh, and severed limbs. This was, as Fussell observes, a question of rhetoric more than linguistics. Narratives of trauma became a fertile ground for the articulation of a new concept of literature, free from fictionalization, embellishments, and grand heroic idioms. These tendencies precipitated the crisis of the novel and a general distrust of fiction in the 1920s.¹³

The demand for truthful accounts of “real life” gave rise to a proliferation of documentary writing of various kinds. One genre that exerted an important influence on literature and contributed to the restructuring of the genre system was reportage.¹⁴ It was born at the intersection of tradition (nineteenth-century Naturalism) and modernity—in particular, new forms of dissemination and consumption of information promoted by mass media. Documentary footage during World War I for the first time turned war into a spectacle, creating a new concept of history, as events were shown onscreen almost as they were unfolding. Inspired by documentary cinema, reportage was seen as inseparable from life itself, “ideologically pure” and resisting any form of manipulation associated with historical fiction.¹⁵ Focusing on the “raw” factual aspects of life, on the here and now, reportage suppressed not only generalizations but also psychological nuances. The genre of the human document, also partially rooted in Naturalism and inspired by modern sensibilities, was located at the other end of the documentary spectrum. But, as opposed to reportage, it focused on the subjective psychological dimension of a specific individual, on the “here and now” of human emotion, and on the most essential existential experience. It is this genre that became the leading medium for the literary production of the interwar generation, and had a defining influence on the writing of Russian Montparnasse.

2

Who Needs Art? The Human Document and Strategies of Self-Representation

There is no art and art is unnecessary … Only the document exists, only the fact of spiritual life. A private letter, a diary and a psychoanalytic transcript are the best forms for its expression.¹

The Interwar Human Document: Pre-History

As with any genre, to understand the specificity of the human document model articulated during the interwar period we must analyze it with reference to its direct antecedents. The human document did not appear on the European literary scene ex nihili. In France, it already had a long history tracing back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century.² The invention of the term “human document” (if not of the genre itself) was contested between Emile Zola and Edmond Goncourt. It was cited profusely by both of these prominent Naturalists, for example, in Goncourt’s Les Frères Zemganno and Le Faustin, and by Zola in Thérèse Raquin and in his collection of critical essays, Le Roman experimental. In 1879, five of these essays were published in Russian translation in the flagship Russian periodical Vestnik Evropy, appearing even before a French edition had been released. Zola’s ideas quickly penetrated Russia, where a similar phenomenon—the so-called “physiological sketch”³—had been thriving for decades. Discussing contemporary literature, Zola presents Claude Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865) as a template for the novel. He maintains that, following in the tracks of contemporary science, the writer must turn away from the abstract metaphysical man to the natural human being, who is under the unshakeable sway of physical and chemical laws and is shaped by his environment.⁴ The author polemicizes with “idealist” opponents and condemns the irrational and supernatural in art, which he would see completely impersonalized. To achieve this goal, artists’ private feelings must be brought into line with objective reality. In Zola’s opinion, the naturalist “novel of observation and analysis” requires no imagination; the author, he claims, does not invent but seizes upon random situations from ordinary life. The more trivial the situation, the more effectively can the writer demonstrate to the reader a slice of raw reality. Ultimately, the writer’s function is reduced to gathering facts, arranging them logically in a narrative and filling the gaps in between.⁵ Zola’s contemporaries criticized him for what they perceived as his undue focus on slums and abject poverty, and the use of argot in place of literary language. In a chapter entitled “Documents humains,” Zola responds to this misinterpretation, stating that Naturalism is a method rather than rhetoric, language, or subject matter. He defines human documents in literature as “simple sketches, without peripety and denouement, an analysis of one year in a life, a story of one passion, biography of one character, notes on life itself.”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Russian Montparnasse as a Transnational Community
• Part I Narrating the Self: The Existential Code of Interwar Literature
• Part II Reading and Writing the “Paris Text”
• Part III Challenges of the Jazz Age
• Part IV The Canon Re-Defined: Reading the Russian Classics in Paris
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index