Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism 9781501756726

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Alternative Kinships

Alternative Kinships E C O N O M Y A N D FA M I LY I N RUSSIAN MODERNISM

Jacob Emer y

NIU Press/DeKalb, IL

© 2017 by Northern Illinois University Press Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb Illinois 60115 Printed in the United States of America First printing in paperback, 2017 ISBN 978-0-87580-780-5 All rights reserved Cover design by Yuni Dorr Composed by BookComp, Inc. 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

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978-0-87580-751-5 (cloth) 978-1-60909-210-8 (e-book) Part of chapter 1 was originally published as “Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg,” in PMLA 123, no. 1 (January 2008). Reprinted with the permission of the Modern Language Association of America. Part of chapter 4 was originally published as “The Land of Milk and Money: Communal Kitchens and Collactaneous Kinship in the Soviet 1920s,” in (M)otherhood as Allegory, edited Lisa Bernstein and Pamela Goco (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholar’s Press, 2009). Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Emery, Jacob, 1977– author. Title: Alternative kinships : economy and family in Russian modernism / Jacob Emery. Description: DeKalb, IL : Northern Illinois University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016015947 (print) | LCCN 2017010718 (ebook) | ISBN 9780875807515 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781609092108 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Families in literature. | Kinship in literature. | Modernism (Literature)—Russia—History—20th century. | Modernism (Literature)— Soviet Union. | Bely, Andrey, 1880–1934. Peterburg. Classification: LCC PG3020.5.F34 E64 2017 (print) | LCC PG3020.5.F34 (ebook) | DDC 891.709/355—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015947

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

Chapter One: A Universe Akin

13

Chapter Two: A World of Mirrors

45

Chapter Three: Haunted Households

73

Chapter Four: The Land of Milk and Money 111 Afterword: Stock Exchanges Notes

145

Bibliography Index

187

175

139

INTRODUCTION

FA M I L I A R F I C T I O N S

My interest in kinship grew out of an interest in literary form, especially how narratives represent themselves to the reader. One time-honored device of this kind is the mirror, which inherently stresses issues of representation and mimesis. In Nabokov’s 1925 short story “Guide to Berlin,” the narrator looks into a pub mirror and sees in it the same thing that the barkeeper’s child sees from an adjoining room: “the blue-gray cigar smoke . . . and his father behind the bar, filling a mug for me from the tap.”1 The narrator imagines he has “glimpsed somebody’s future recollection,” since the boy will treasure this scene in his memory in years to come. “Here lies the sense of literary creation,” the narrator declaims, “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times.”2 A scene like one this provides a metaphorical image of the larger text and functions, in Lucien Dällenbach’s words, “to give the work a strong structure, to underpin its meaning, to provide a kind of internal dialogue and a means whereby the work can interpret itself.”3 All the story’s major themes are staged in the mirror’s compact frame: aesthetic play with perspective, literary art as a bequest to the future, and how an imaginative Russian émigré makes “a boring, foreign city, and expensive to live in,” into a world of fascination and a lasting monument to himself.4 Often a metaphor for realism’s claims to faithfully reflect reality—“a novel is a mirror you take for a walk down the road,” writes Stendhal—the mirror can also figure art’s function to delude and to delight.5 The climax of Nabokov’s story belongs to a wide class of mirror scenes that is central to this book, scenes in which distinct characters are identified with one another through the mediation of a reflective surface.6 Often, as here, such scenes are accompanied by a more or less explicit statement about how art differs from ordinary experience, making clear that the mirror’s capacity to produce an unexpected image is a metaphor for art’s capacity to depart from reality. Indeed, the trick of perspective by which the mirror identifies the two people looking into it dramatizes the “same but different” mechanism of metaphor itself.7 The Russian symbolist Andrei Bely called the paradoxical “A = B” identity of metaphor the

2

Introduction

essential building block of imaginative worlds; the same claim has been made by Western critics like Northrop Frye, who argues that, when it comes to fiction, “the formula ‘A is B’ may be hypothetically applied to anything, for there is no metaphor, not even ‘black is white,’ which a reader has any right to quarrel with.”8 This attitude assumes a radical difference between the real world, in which things are identical only with themselves, and the fantastic possibilities of art, in which anything can be made metaphorically identical with anything else. By exploiting these contingent identities, the smoke and mirrors of Nabokov’s story appear to humanize, even transfigure, the lonely and humdrum world of the narrator.9 In practice, however—in Bely’s fiction as in Nabokov’s, in Gustave Flaubert and in William Shakespeare, in mass as in canonical literature—the relationships articulated in mirrors tend to map onto family structure. Literary mirrors most commonly identify parents and children, and especially fathers and sons. The phenomenon we have just read as a declaration of fiction’s independence from the world seems from this point of view to be overdetermined by family relationships, which entail equivalences that are fundamental to the social economy: the exchange of generations and the inheritance of capital. “The conservatism of everyday life secures for children the social positions and functions of their parents,” wrote Aleksandr Bogdanov shortly before the Russian Revolution, and “develops the activities of a child in the image of his father or mother.”10 With this in mind, specular substitutions involving parents and children can be seen to express underlying economic relations of substitutability.11 Echoing ideologies of kinship identity and mechanisms of inherited class, they demand critical approaches that correlate economic structures and literary forms, like Claude Lévi-Strauss’s effort to formulate a “new science” capable of analyzing “homologies” between kinship, language, and economics.12 Marxist criticism especially has been invested in explaining cultural texts as projections of the economic and historical conditions in which they are produced.13 From this point of view, Nabokov’s triangulation of narrator, father, and son in the barroom mirror no longer symbolizes art’s redemptive break with reality. The story is now an impoverished exile’s fantasy of participating in a world where he is only a paying customer, exchanging money for the alcohol or artistic vision that will distort his perspective so that he can feel, at least for a moment, “at home” in the bar and in Berlin. Although he uses the mirror to insert himself into the relationship between the father serving drinks in the bar and the child drinking soup in the next room, that relationship is fundamentally one of the domestic economy from which he is excluded. In fact, the metaphorical exchange performed by the mirror is implicated in a series of material exchanges, most obviously and literally the financial transaction whereby the beer sold in the public house pays for the child’s dinner in the adjoining private room. This exchange makes legible

Introduction

3

a contrast between the disenfranchised exile whose intoxication subsidizes the publican’s family and the soup-drinking son for whom the industrious bartender lays in a more lasting inheritance. The narrator’s previous claim that the “kindly mirror” of art is made for “our great-grandchildren,” for “posterity,” now appears as a part of this effort to insert himself into a more literal lineage by way of the poetic imagination.14 On this reading, the future that the narrator imagines as an audience for his art is actually social class perpetuated over generations. And the “rows of emerald-glittering empty bottles, collected from taverns,” previously described in a meditation on “various kinds of work I observe from the crammed tram,” appear in retrospect to establish the theme of the attractive but empty play of light on glass, which the alcohol- or art-besotted narrator takes to ennoble his poor existence—the profit of the exercise accumulating in the pockets of the German bartender, that sober family man.15 Although these two brief readings of “Guide to Berlin” are in tension, they are not actually contradictory and might even be made to speak to each other. For example, the fantasy of art’s power to transform the world can be read as a powerful reflex against poverty and marginalization.16 For the moment, however, I would like only to stress how the mirror that identifies two distinct characters seems to open up two distinct readings, associated with distinct and frequently opposed approaches to aesthetic texts. On one hand, the specular identification performs for the reader the transfiguring power of art and requires a formalist reading that treats the artwork as a contingent world, constructed out of poetic metaphors specific to the text in question. On the other hand, that same metaphorical identification reiterates fundamental structures in the social economy and requires the reader to consider the artwork as expressing economic and material phenomena. The major argument of this book is that the widespread trope of specular misprision, by manifesting aesthetic estrangement and social overdetermination in a single image, makes visible a level of organization on which these two critical perspectives complement each other. Specular misprision is an example of literature’s narcissism, since it reflects within the frame of a metafictional image how an imaginary world is spun out of verbal figures; at the same time, the trope alludes to its economic context by representing family relations, an institution that, Karl Marx writes, “contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society.”17 In this fashion, the metafictional self-absorption that seems most radically to isolate fiction from social reality can also figure the organization of economic life. By engineering the metaphorical exchange of parents and children—an exchange basic to the social economy as well as the figurative structure of many literary texts—scenes of specular misprision present a pivot point between the social and the artistic imagination.

4

Introduction

The interpenetration of these two spheres is uniquely urgent in early Soviet Russia, in which an efflorescence of experimental art and formalist theory coincided with a programmatic effort to reshape both cultural life and family structure. The primal scene of division of labor, of the power of men over women and the old over the young, the family is for Marx himself the “germ” of every exploitative practice; as the environment in which children are educated and socialized, it is the incubator of every ideology.18 Fiction’s preoccupation with family relations began long before Marx, of course. To say nothing of Oedipus or Abraham, nineteenth-century Russian fiction is studded with titles like Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 Fathers and Sons and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s 1880 Golovlyov Family. Specular misprision too has a distinguished history in the Russian tradition. Its two most famous family novels—Leo Tolstoy’s 1878 Anna Karenina and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1880 The Brothers Karamazov, which represent the canonical family plots of adultery and parricide respectively—both exploit identification in mirrors as a structural device. In Anna Karenina, the Anna-Kitty-Vronsky triangle, which sets up the motif of sexual betrayal and the major device of parallel plots, is first revealed to Kitty “in the mirror of Anna’s face,” which articulates her attraction to Vronsky as well as her identification with her rival.19 The death and morality theme too is voiced through the specular identification of Levin and his tubercular brother, whose decrepitude Levin learns to discern in his own reflection.20 In The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri sneaks onto his father’s property to claim an inheritance some time after assaulting him in a mirror-lined room. He watches through the window as the old man examines his bruised countenance in one of those same mirrors. As Dmitri thinks to himself, “He’s alone,” Karamazov suddenly turns from the looking glass to the window, forcing the son, who is spying from the yard over Karamazov’s shoulder, to shrink away into the shadows.21 The window framing the son’s face is clearly compared to the mirror framing the father’s face, and Karamazov’s start from the mirror to the window even implies that he has glimpsed his son’s reflection alongside his own (though he may have mistaken it for Grushenka, the woman they both desire). To the extent that the sensualist father and the sensualist son are identified by the mirror and the book as a single self-destructive force, in competition over the same woman and laying claim to the same money, it is a more profound question than Dmitri understands to ask whether his father is at this moment alone. The family dynamics of both these novels become important subtexts for Bely’s Petersburg, the focus of this book’s first two chapters. However, my aim in this study is not so much to provide a descriptive account of kinship themes in the history of Russian fiction as to focus on the special case of Russian modernism in order to make a theoretical argument about kinship structure and literary language. Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s use of specular identification, masterful as it is,

Introduction

5

is essentially of a kind with kinship tropes in nineteenth-century European fiction more generally; these texts exemplify the prominent role of family relations in figurative and plot structures, but without providing a special vantage point on the problem.22 Russian modernism articulates the pivot between aesthetic and social structure in a unique way because the artistic experiments of the early twentieth century coincided there with a conscious and programmatic policy effort to reshape kinship structures. Friedrich Engels prophesied that “the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting.”23 When the Bolsheviks took power, they expended considerable energy on alternatives to genealogical kinship as the organizing principle of reproduction of labor and access to social privilege. Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution states the radical goal that a united and rationally organized humanity would reject “the dark laws of heredity” entirely and “create a higher, social biologic type” through new reproductive technologies.24 That Trotsky’s fantasies come in a book of literary criticism suggests that we are dealing with a historical moment in which literature and kinship are conceptually interdependent. Some texts of nineteenth-century Russian literature consider alternatives to the bourgeois family (most influentially, the love triangles and utopian communities of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1862 What Is to Be Done?) or foregrounded legal fictions of kinship (Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk District, in which an illegitimate child’s inheritance plays an important plot role). But in the early Soviet context, literary conceits are actually continuous with the figurative thinking informing contemporary policy. When a character in Yuri Olesha’s 1927 novella Envy accuses a cafeteria director of dreaming to wipe away “from the little faces of your babies their resemblance to you—that holy, beautiful, family resemblance,” we can contextualize his sentiment not just within the novel’s own thematics of family resemblance (including a central scene of specular misprision), but within policies intended to eradicate the individual bourgeois household by arrogating to state kitchens the family’s raison d’être, the nourishment of children.25 When fiction of the period replaces genealogical relations with blood transfusions, as in Aleksandr Bogdanov’s Red Star, or with a series of numbers generated by the Child Rearing Factory, as in Evgenii Zamiatin’s We, it is important to remember that radical alternatives to the genealogical family were a matter of political policy and scientific research as well as the literary imagination. Bogdanov wrote Red Star before the revolution; after it, he headed a publicly funded Soviet research institute devoted to “physiological collectivism”—an immortal community of individuals linked by blood transfusions, which he believed was destined to supersede family ties in life, just as in his novels.26 Many scholars have seen these Communist fantasies of a transformed society as continuations of the artistic avant-garde. In a 1926 manifesto, painter Kazimir

6

Introduction

Malevich envisions genetic technologies as fantastic as Trotsky’s. “A new picture is formed by a new aesthetic activity. New animals are born in our modern factories, are colored according to our taste, and released in the world”—apparently as brightly pigmented herds resembling suprematist canvases.27 According to Boris Groys, early Soviet culture broadly shared this impulse to shape life after an ideal image, “a visualization . . . of the new world and the new humanity.”28 For Irene Masing-Delic, the prototype of this aesthetic was philosopher Nikolai Fedorov’s exhortation, in his 1906 Philosophy of the Common Task, to resurrect the bodies of dead ancestors in order to reconstitute the family of Adam; the crucial avant-garde concept of “life-creation” (zhiznetvorchestvo) similarly aimed for “the transcendence of realism in an art that was to model life into an aesthetic text where the laws of current reality would be invalidated.”29 Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov explicitly compares himself to Fedorov when he advocates the “common task” of discovering linguistic principles for “the whole family of languages” and thus a universal tongue “in whose verbal mirrors the whole itinerary from New York to Moscow would be reflected.”30 By linking poetic activity, a universal “family of languages,” and the mimetic function of the “verbal mirror,” Khlebnikov gathers together the basic ingredients of specular misprision.31 Avant-garde ambitions to create a universal idiom, the zaum language of Futurist poetry, can be compared to contemporary aspirations toward a universal kinship, whether a mystical family of Adam or a global siblinghood of the proletariat. Because Russian modernism’s efforts to rethink family structure magnify the interaction of kinship metaphors and aesthetic figures onto a global historical scale, the period elucidates the complementary relationship of kinship and literature, and especially the metaphoric thinking that underlies both. Bely called metaphor “the goal of the creative process”; Olesha described his writing as a “metaphor shop.”32 For these authors, the kinship exchange dramatized in specular misprision represents the larger action of metaphoric figures—exchange, substitution, identity—and hence literature itself, since, as Marc Shell writes, “literary works are composed of small tropic exchanges or metaphors.”33 Metaphor is also at work in the reproduction of labor, the substitution of children for parents across generations. Mark Turner notes that “kinship relations give . . . our closest metaphors for metaphor itself. . . . From parent to child we see repetition and variation, similarity and difference.”34 What Danilo Kiš calls “the universal myth of the chain of generations” is an essentially metaphorical mechanism by which society understands itself to be a continuous entity although composed of successive elements, originating in the past and proceeding into the future without changing its essential identity.35 A society that successfully reproduces itself across generations is like Theseus’s boat, whose rotten timbers, Plutarch says, were replaced so many times by “new and sound ones . . . that the vessel became a standing illustration

Introduction

7

for the philosophers in the mooted question of growth, some declaring that it remained the same, others that it was not the same vessel.”36 One philosopher who did not consider the problem of identity through time to be a “mooted question” was David Hume, whose 1738 Treatise of Human Nature contains a penetrating discussion on the topic. Because Hume explicitly contends that personal identity, literary works, and the social economy stem from a single kind of metaphorical thinking, his argument lays the ground for my own. “We have a distinct idea of an object, that remains invariable and uninterrupted thro’ a suppos’d variation of time; and this idea we call that of identity or sameness,” notes Hume, while “we also have a distinct idea of several different objects existing in succession; and this to an accurate view affords as perfect a notion of diversity, as if there was no manner of relation among the objects.”37 Although these two concepts of self-identity and succession are properly speaking opposites, the imagination “facilitates the transition of the mind from one object to another, and renders its passage almost as smooth as if it contemplated one continu’d object.”38 This perception of identity between distinct objects is not only an epistemological, but an ontological error, “for when we attribute identity, in an improper sense, to variable or interrupted objects, our mistake is not confin’d to the expression, but is commonly attended with a fiction”—that is, a belief that is realized in behavior.39 Hume’s attention to the “fictions” of equivalence between entities resolves into an interrogation of the concept of personal identity, a quality we attribute to a succession of different perceptions and mental states “because of the union of their ideas in the imagination.”40 What we sense as identity, Hume argues in a famous passage, is not a continuous and self-identical ego, but rather our capacity to generate fictive connections between our different states—our capacity, in other words, for figurative thought. Without “uniting principles in the ideal world,” Hume writes, “every distinct object is separable by the mind, and may be separately consider’d, and appears not to have any more connexion with any other object, than if disjoin’d by the greatest difference and remoteness. ’Tis, therefore, on some of these three relations of resemblance, contiguity and causation, that identity depends.”41 In modern critical parlance, these are the figural relations of metaphor (resemblance) and metonymy (contiguity and causation), by whose means the mind “not only discovers the identity, but also contributes to its production.”42 Figuration, or fiction-making, is according to Hume the very mechanism of identity, which cannot be said to exist until it is “discovered” or “produced” by symbolic thought. He explicitly extends this principle to the formation of social groups, as he “cannot compare the soul more properly to anything than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members . . . give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts.”43 From this

8

Introduction

point of view, the individual self, like the world as organized by human activity, is the product of a metaphorical operation. In a passage that appears in some versions of the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume engages in an excursus on literary form, arguing that “unity of action” in narrative art is likewise generated through the principles of resemblance, continuity, and causation, and that literary works present an especially profitable field, both more “entertaining” and more “instructive” than abstract philosophy, for formulating the figurative principles that underlie both literary form and social organization.44 When novelists introduce familial identity as a key element in the figurative structures of a narrative, the figure can therefore be read in a double way: an invention of the literary imagination, but one that communicates with related social fictions. Genealogical tropes speak in particular to ideologies that articulate social class and the distribution of capital across generations, the “reproduction of the conditions of production” by which a society survives in a recognizable form across generational time.45 In his historical study of the king’s two bodies, the medieval legal fiction that the hereditary monarch shares a corporate identity with his antecedents and heirs, Ernst Kantorowicz speaks of such conventions as a “manmade irreality—indeed, that strange construction of a human mind which finally becomes slave to its own fictions.”46 The early Soviet period, which powerfully demonstrates the interpenetration of literary fictions and social policy, shows how figurative principles that arise in one arena come to extend into another. Anthropological discourse has long stressed the fictional character of the family and demanded robust theories of metaphorical thinking in order to conceptualize kinship’s intersection with cultural and economic life. “What confers upon kinship its socio-cultural character,” writes Claude Lévi-Strauss, “is not what it retains from nature, but, rather, the essential way in which it diverges from nature.”47 David Schneider has argued that social life is extended into fiction and fictions are implemented in social life through complex processes of figuration in which there is no readily identifiable proper and improper term. Consanguineous kinship itself is a folk biology, meaningful only insofar as it partakes of “the fundamental system of symbols and meanings which inform and give shape to the normative level of action.”48 For Schneider, family ties are “sometimes figured as genetic, sometimes hereditary, sometimes in emotional terms,” and concepts like “the perpetuation of the self in one’s own children” are simultaneously “images of the ties that bind and the continuity of life. Cooking and care may express these ties, but they also constitute the ties.”49 There is no “proper” term in the metaphoric relation that is kinship identity, because kinship is at the same time the fiction of identity that motivates economic behaviors, like cooperation and caregiving, and the economic institutions, like the domestic household or inherited wealth, that motivate the ideology of family identity.50

Introduction

9

Kinship thus articulates base and superstructure; it illustrates how cultural fictions inform social organization at the same time as economic structures determine cultural concepts. One model for approaching the interrelationship between cultural texts and economic phenomena is New Economic Criticism, which according to a programmatic essay by Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee asks how “textual economy . . . mirrors economic conditions.”51 Rhetorical and monetary exchanges mirror each other on a profound structural level, they argue, because metaphors by their nature imply relations of transfer and exchange.52 Their claim is anticipated in part by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who argues broadly that language, kinship, and trade are all “forms of exchange which are obviously interrelated,” and that “it is therefore legitimate to seek homologies between them.”53 Although narrower than potentially homologous systems like economic and linguistic exchange, which aspire to provide universal substitutes through the assumption that everything can be bought or named, heredity too assumes that one thing (a child) can be substituted for another thing (a parent) in order to instantiate identity. The involved relationship between imaginative figure and social and economic facts suggests that the study of literature—a discipline evolved precisely in response to the rhetorical morasses presented by systems of mutual figuration—is uniquely positioned to question, explore, and experimentally reconstitute the key fiction of the family. This is especially true in the early Soviet period, when both literary conventions and economic practices were being redefined. In fact, we might understand kinship as a realized metaphor, to use Viktor Shklovsky’s term for the emergence of figural elements into the “real world” of a novel. Shklovsky first deployed this term in reference to Andrei Bely’s 1918 novel Kotik Letaev, a book with a central specular misprision scene.54 Bely also influenced Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie), which has been important to explicitly Marxist theories of culture in reinterpretations by Sergei Eisenstein, Bertolt Brecht, and others.55 Shklovsky himself described defamiliarization in reference to Tolstoy’s 1886 story “Kholstomer,” in which a horse speaks of the human institution of private property in uncomprehending terms that make ownership, serf labor, and monogamous marriage seem absurd and immoral.56 The term thus enters the theoretical canon as a critical technique for exposing economic relations as social fictions. Defamiliarization is a key mechanism of specular misprision, in which the reflex of recognition—a character seeing his image in the mirror—is short-circuited by a literary metaphor, thereby exposing an underlying ideology of kin identity. In the texts examined below, scenes of specular misprision dramatize some explicit understanding of kinship. Bely takes the “one flesh” of parent and child to symbolize an aesthetic unity; gothic plots characterize the self as a “haunted house” inhabited by its ancestors; and early Soviet fictions like Olesha’s Envy engage the alternative kinships promised by communism.

10

Introduction

Like the materialist criticism that flowered at the same time, the major formalist concepts developed in the early Soviet period are relevant to literature’s relation with economic facts well beyond their original context. For example, the foot passengers traversing bad weather in the first chapter of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, “adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at these points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest,” anticipate by these turns of phrase the legal morasses of London’s inheritance courts, where the filthy lucre of disputed trusts, increasing with interest, fattens the courts but not the dispossessed heirs—realization of metaphor and estrangement of economic life together.57 However, Russian modernism provides unique opportunities to demonstrate the interpenetration of these devices with the social economy and kinship structure. In this context, Bely is an emblematic figure because of his own incoherent sympathies with both l’art pour l’art and socialist revolution; a central one, as the leading avant-garde novelist and the source of major formalist concepts; and an illuminating one, since he was himself a sophisticated theorist of metaphor. This book therefore begins with an extended reading of Bely’s masterpiece, Petersburg, the rough analogue in Russian literature of James Joyce’s Ulysses and a novel whose two editions, printed in 1916 and 1922, bracket the Russian Revolution. This novel’s mirror scenes link the author’s political and aesthetic preoccupations in a single object—a task he never adequately accomplished in his polemical writings. In Petersburg, as one of its characters realizes while looking at his own reflection, poetic production is identified with procreation, the entire world of the novel being metaphorically “engendered” by the poetic imagination. These verbal tropes are treated as continuous with political ideologies, which the text also presents as realized metaphors. Petersburg provides a frame of reference within which to explore the literary ramifications of both kin identity and mirroring. The latter half of the book turns from aesthetics to historical context in order to describe the migration of social fictions into artworks and of literary metaphors into social policy. It begins with a comparative account of gothic fictions by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Miroslav Krleža, Isak Dinesen, and Ivan Bunin. Evidently preoccupied with reproduction of labor, often manifested as an ancestral curse, gothic texts contrast these inherited burdens with alternate principles of kinship identity that would organize new economic systems and make possible a new art. For example, in the tales of Isak Dinesen and Ivan Bunin, blood siblinghood and milk relations—what anthropologists call “metaphorical” or “fictive” kinship— exist alongside the genetic lineages that undergird exploitation of women and the peasantry. Like the authors of Russian modernism, Hawthorne, Krleža, and Dinesen are concerned with alternative kinships that take shape at a moment of crisis in the history of hereditary castes: the rise of Jeffersonian democracy, the

Introduction

11

fall of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, and, in Dinesen’s historical fiction, a preoccupation with inheritance mechanisms in the period just before and after the French Revolution. The gothic, in these Western contexts as well as in the Soviet 1920s, is the genre that articulates the uneasy shift from aristocratic to some other form of patrimony. These gothic texts demonstrate how fiction encodes conflicts between dominant principles of kinship and the alternate modes of family identity that, at least during periods of historical flux in the social economy, might conceivably take their place. However, they also frame the exceptionality of the early Soviet context, in which avant-garde art and socialist policy were actually able to treat these alternative kinships as the basis of a future society, which would possess new forms of art and family. Yuri Olesha’s 1927 novella Envy, in which a vast communal kitchen creates new systems of familial identity, stands at the center of the final chapter. Like works by filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and artists of the Proletarian Culture group, Envy displaces the primal moment of production and consumption—nursing at the mother’s breast—from the bourgeois household to a collective mother distributing milk to the whole siblinghood of the proletariat. This negation of the family erases cultural and social continuity, but it also promises new relations of kinship and new horizons for art. Where gothic fiction is haunted by ancestral curses but dreams of alternatives to the family, futuristic Soviet texts propagandize a society beyond genealogy—but remain doubtful as to the possibility, or even desirability, of the family’s eradication.

C H A P T E R

O N E

A UNIVERSE AKIN

1. ORIGINARY ECONOMIES

The main character of Andrei Bely’s 1916 novel Petersburg, Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, has his father’s ears—oversized greenish ones that protrude from either side of his head. On a literal plane of reference, of course, this statement is bizarre. The ears are patently Nikolai Apollonovich’s own. Moreover, if we open the floodgates of figurative meaning, then those ears turn out to be implicated in literary as well as paternal genealogies. The elder Ableukhov, a largeeared political functionary with a philandering wife named Anna, has inherited all these qualities from the cuckolded husband in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. What seems at first to be a stock metaphor of genetic identity in fact refers us beyond biological relations to fictional ones. In the process it asks hard questions about inherited traits, monogamous marriage, and other supposed guarantors of kinship. The pinnacle of Russian avant-garde prose, Petersburg is grounded in tropes of parent-child identity that open the perceived transmission of identity across generations onto theoretical issues of rhetorical exchange and the creative imagination. Alongside his career as a poet and novelist, Bely was a theorist of symbol and metaphor who blended the Aristotelian categories of figure with the system expounded by the nineteenth-century Russian theorist Aleksandr Potebnia.1 Bely parses the metaphorical process in his 1910 essay “The Magic of Words,” which provides “the moon-white horn in the sky” as an exemplary trope invoking the crescent moon. For Bely the substitution “indicates (1) the determination of the genus through the species (horn through white horn) and (2) a qualitative distinction between objects (a moonlike horn is qualitatively distinct from any other kind of horn).”2 Referring Bely’s own schema back to the metaphor of a child having his father’s ears, we can easily discern both the generalizing movement between species and genus (the epithet “father’s ears” encompasses other large greenish ears, not the father’s alone) and the individuating distinction made between objects

14

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(these ears distinguish this child from the children of other fathers, whether their ears are large and greenish or not). A system of potentially unlimited exchange obtains between these generalizing and individuating tendencies. Metaphor is the essential postulation of identity out of difference; in logical transcription, Bely notes, metaphor would appear simply as A = B.3 A sociological aspect of the process of hereditary identification through a metaphorically grounded system of substitution and exchange is also in play in that, to use Claude Lévi-Strauss’s summation, “every society desires first to reproduce itself; it must thus possess a rule to assign children the same status in the social structure as that of their parents,” whose places they take as their forebears pass away.4 Discourses like genetics and law might shy away from examining the figurative basis of systems of equivalence and exchange, but literature revels in it. For Bely, metaphor is the stuff that art is made of. His essay stresses that the “actual substitution of objects (metaphor)” creates “an irreducible unity” that “is the goal of the creative process. . . . We find ourselves standing on the boundary between poetic creation and mythic creation.”5 The mythopoetic thrust of his theory, which insists that metaphoric thought creates new entities that are irreducible to any literal synonym, anticipates more modern developments in the philosophy of cognition and involves itself in a larger problematic of personhood. The interplay between metaphor and family structure plays a prominent role throughout Bely’s writing, but I focus here on his masterpiece, Petersburg.6 A unique attempt to conjoin heredity and metaphor into a single complex system, the book’s two major editions, in 1916 and 1922, bracket the Russian Revolution— an event that coincided with a flurry of experiments in both family structure and artistic convention. The novel’s first chapter begins with a wry interrogation of kin identity’s limits. Parodying the eighteenth-century convention of introducing characters in genealogical terms, Bely informs us that “Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov was of venerable stock: he had Adam as his ancestor.”7 The statement is funny, to be sure, and on the face of it absurd, but the heredity theme running through the whole novel warns us against discounting its significance. An inventive, stylistically venturesome account of a young man commissioned by a revolutionary group to assassinate his father, a conservative senator, the book is no simple rehashing of the Oedipal scheme but a dense, vertiginous tissue of figurative language. It is also a profound meditation on the nature of hereditary identity, which it holds to be serious and real. One scene in the novel recounts how the senator-father touches the hand of his son, the would-be parricide, and dismisses his instinctive reaction of terror with the thought that his son “was the flesh of his flesh, and to be frightened by one’s own flesh was disgraceful.”8 The son too “was sensually absolutely equal to his father: moreover he was often surprised by the circumstance that psychically he did not know where he ended and where

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in him psychically began this senator, this wearer of sparkling decorations on a gold-embroidered chest.”9 The novel never misses an opportunity to point out where father and son share a distinguishing trait (a fondness for watermelon or a susceptibility to indigestion or the habit of talking to himself), and they seem to have trouble telling themselves apart, each at several points mistaking his own reflection for his relative.10 The characters themselves sense hereditary structures as a transcendental force beyond their own powers of understanding. “When faced with the elegant pirouettes of familial logic, Apollon Apollonovich felt an interminable weight, and he did not know how to express his objections.”11 A full reading of the heredity theme in Petersburg implicates the trope of parent-child identity on every level of the novel’s composition. Bely’s play with sound patterns involves individual phonemes and morphemes in the webs of kinship; the related play with sonic resemblances between words leads us to perceive the book’s constant punning as the revelation of family resemblances on the level of the word; hereditary preoccupations are, as we have already seen, readily identifiable on the level of the sentence; the general movement of the narrative is driven by the tension between parricide and family identity; and the novel’s metafictional admission that it is “spawn” (otrod’e) transforms the book itself, on the highest diegetic level, into the realization of a familial metaphor.12 After all, according to Petersburg’s author, metaphorical language is the ultimate inheritance—“the one useful legacy we have to leave to our children.”13 For the moment, however, I want only to stress that Petersburg grapples continuously with this basic conundrum that parent and child are at once the same in the same flesh, yet somehow horribly, inexplicably different, so different that one of them is capable of killing the other. This paradox involves Petersburg in the basic problems of philosophy as well as in the literary and linguistic operation of metaphor. “To think is to identify,” writes Theodor Adorno, but dialectic thought also entails “the consistent sense of non-identity.”14 In fact, the book is doubly structured by the kinship theme because the coherent development of its plot is driven by the threat of parricide—the radical division of son and father into subject and object—even as the aesthetic unity of its rhetorical structure is grounded in statements of parent-child identity. When the bomb with which Nikolai Apollonovich is to kill his father explodes harmlessly in the last few pages, the novel fizzles anticlimactically. The tension between familial identity and familial violence defused, the plot has nowhere to go. All these issues are part and parcel of Bely’s extravagantly metaphorical style, in which words are substituted freely, always referring beyond themselves to the more literal words and meanings that they replace, without obscuring the fact that they have been exchanged for those words and remain different from them.

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The power of symbolic thought, as Bely writes in a 1910 essay, leads us “out from ourselves, as from an insignificant grain of sand in the desert of existence, to ourselves as Adam Kadmon, as to a universe where I, you, he are all one, where father, mother, and son are all one. . . . And this ‘one’ is the symbol of a mystery that never reveals itself.”15 Like the opening of Petersburg, if in more mystical than ironical vein, this passage traces individual lineage back to a mystical point of origin for the whole human race. Throughout Bely’s work, kinship identity is representative of a radical potential for universal identity through creative language. In the conclusion to its brief prologue, the novel ascribes a similar origin to writing itself, which is emblematized by the city of Petersburg as it appears on maps: “two small circles, one set inside the other, with a black dot in the center; and from precisely this mathematical point, which has no dimension, it proclaims forcefully that it exists: from here, from this very point surges the swarm of the printed book; from this invisible point speeds the official circular.”16 Both literature and law, this passage reminds us, are made of language; both the fiction we are reading and the juridical code that regulates our behavior exist because they say they exist. Where the first words of the narrative name the mythic source of the human family, Adam, the last words of the prologue pinpoint the source of language in this dimensionless dot. Across the threshold of text and paratext, Bely invites us to compare multiplying words with multiplying generations. The germinal point of Petersburg or Petersburg is the novel’s title and hence its first word. Adam too is the source not only of humankind but of language, which he created by inventing names for everything in Eden.17 This initial juxtaposition is reinforced throughout the novel by passages in which one-dimensional points become sources of language. Nikolai repeatedly thinks of his father, Senator Ableukhov, who is both an ancestor and a writer of laws, as one such central point. The reader is implicated in the image of a central point that is the source both of genetic stock and language because, by tracing the lineage of his characters to the mythic common ancestor of all humankind, Bely makes the problem germane to the entire human family. When readers, who are physical beings, identify with Petersburg’s characters, who are verbal figures, they are caught up in this genealogical descent from a common source. 2. CONCEpTUAL COpULAS

“Blood is a very special fluid,” remarked Bely’s occult mentor Rudolf Steiner in a 1904 lecture, in which he posited a primeval shared identity for the whole of the human race.18 Anthropologist Robin Fox observes that, while “it is possible to imagine a society that ignored kinship ties altogether and built its social system completely out of other sets of relationships . . . no such society has ever existed.”19

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One of the great tasks of literature—in works as diverse as Herodotus’s Histories, Evgenii Zamiatin’s We, or Georges Perec’s W—has been to imagine alternatives to the consanguineous family, but these imaginings have always been opposed to the prevailing fact that sexual reproduction is also the reproduction of labor and the perpetuation of social categories.20 The need to engender and identify children who will take the place of the living is both a social imperative and a literary preoccupation that stretches back to the advent of written narrative. Some thinkers have argued that modernism is a break with heredity as much as with the preindustrial past. For Alexis de Tocqueville, democracy “makes every man forget his ancestors” and the defining trait of the modern age is that “the woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced.”21 However, children continue to filter into the economic class of their parents despite our dreams of social mobility, and modern reproductive technologies may actually reinforce, rather than disturb, ideologies of inherited identity.22 “As repositories of information,” writes Marilyn Strathern of genetic science’s impact on popular notions of kinship, persons related by family ties “are replicas of one another.”23 Tropes of familial identity remain current in modernist literature in Russia, home to a programmatic effort to redefine kinship for the industrial age, as well as in America, de Tocqueville’s exemplar of democratic modernity. “Is not a brother his brother also, the one blood cut up in lengths? . . . Who’s to say that I’m not my brother’s wife’s husband and that his children were not fathered in my lap? Is it not to his honor that he strikes me as myself?” muses a character in Djuna Barnes’s 1936 decadent novel, Nightwood. With these words, Barnes evokes the same metaphorical matrix of identity and substitution that motivates the biblical tale of Onan, who refuses God’s command to sire a son in his brother’s name.24 The metaphorical operation that is central to kin relations has long been recognized as fundamental to literary study. Aristotle called metaphor the “most important” element of style and defines it as the substitution of a figurative term for a literal one.25 He treats only a very limited set of metaphors, however, and his basic definition has been recast variously as synonymy (lion means Achilles, neither more nor less) and as a mystical overflow of signification (the metaphor is indescribably more than either lion or Achilles, and defies our primitive notion of meaning).26 Some scholars, following Quintillian, hold that metaphors are essentially compressed similes, or some other species of metaphor by analogy. For others, metaphorical language derives its force from an emotional connotation of the metaphorical word. The “controversion theory” pioneered by Monroe Beardsley explains metaphor as the foregrounding of a logical absurdity on an immediately apprehensible level of a text, an aesthetic device that forces the reader to “seek a second level of meaning on which something is being said.”27 What is now called the “interaction theory,” which dates back to classical rhetoric but is now

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usually cited in reference to the work of Max Black and I. A. Richards, describes metaphor as the interaction between a figurative term, or “vehicle,” and a literal “tenor,” or “what is really being said,” resulting in “a meaning (to be clearly distinguished from the tenor) which is not attainable without their interaction.”28 Finally, since the 1970s broader interest in fields like cybernetics and anthropology has been sparked by the theory of cognitive metaphor, which argues that, while metaphors may be expressed or instantiated in words, “the metaphorical ideas themselves are conceptual matters, matters of thought that underlie the particular words that express them.”29 While each of these theories has a strong point, none of them is entirely satisfactory, and in the meantime most of us use the term happily and indiscriminately in reference to various figures of resemblance, identity, and substitution. Even if it is alarming to assume that we know metaphor when we see it, as the philistine knows art, some appeal to intuition may be necessary. Metaphor involves both identification and predication, which Paul Ricoeur describes as “the fundamental polarity of language, which on the one hand is rooted in named individuals, and on the other hand predicates qualities, classes, relations and actions that in principle are universal.” Logical operations, Ricoeur contends, are based on this dissymmetry between the individualizing and the abstracting or even universalizing function. Because individuals exist empirically and abstract universals are products of cognition, this dissymmetry is also an ontological contrast between existent and nonexistent entities. “The identifying function always designates individuals that exist (or whose existence is neutralized, as in fiction),” writes Ricoeur, whereas “in having the universal in view, the predicate function concerns the nonexistent. . . . The dissymmetry of the two functions thus also implies the ontological dissymmetry of subject and predicate.”30 Ricoeur uses this distinction to demonstrate that some conflicts between theories of metaphor derive from a misconception of language as operating exclusively in one of these modes. However, the distinction between identification and predication may also help explain why metaphor resists definition, at least in a literary context. It seems to me that a predicative approach to metaphor is necessarily inexact in that, while poetic metaphor flirts with universality by promising “a universe in which everything is potentially identical with everything else” (to use Northrop Frye’s apt formulation), it does so by means of specific acts of identification and exchange within a fictionality “in which the formula ‘A is B’ may be hypothetically applied to anything, for there is no metaphor, not even ‘black is white,’ which a reader has any right to quarrel with in advance.”31 The question of what metaphor is may therefore have been most ably answered by Frye’s conclusion that “the metaphor, in its radical form, is a statement of the A = B type,” precisely because Frye’s definition—or Bely’s, who encapsulated metaphor using exactly the same

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formula—is essentially a tautology that identifies metaphor as an act of identification.32 At the same time, this identification takes place only through a predicative act. Even a metaphor of the “A = B” type is formed by reference to an individual and existent entity on one hand, a universal and fictional entity on the other. Metaphor cannot be reduced to a relationship of substitutability between these two entities because within the metaphor, as Giorgio Agamben argues, “there is no proper term that the metaphorical one is called upon to replace.”33 The predicate of a metaphorical sentence like “A is B” serves to characterize and individuate its subject rather than to refer beyond it to any exterior, potentially universal predicate; at the same time, the subject is only apprehended through the predicate that identifies it. The metaphor’s truth value is thus a dialectical recursion to the identity of the subject rather than an analytic proposition about something beyond the metaphor’s structure. Hegel’s Logic, in what we can retrospectively read as describing the metaphorical process, defines the philosophical subject as “the identity of identity and non-identity.”34 Even while the metaphoric movement includes an abstraction (from species to genus, say, as per Bely), its individualizing function remains apparent. To highlight this aspect of metaphor has the advantage for literary studies of enjoining readers to engage the specifics of the literary text rather than to seek confirmation in it of a predicative, potentially normative preconception about metaphorical language. As Benjamin Hrushevski has remarked in an insightful study, theorists have primarily been interested “in explaining what ‘metaphor’ is, rather than in developing tools for description and analysis of actual metaphorical texts.”35 Although fictional existence may be “neutralized,” as Ricoeur so dryly puts it, that existence is nevertheless manifested to the reader by virtue of the tropes that hypothesize it. This set of contingent copulas, by insisting that A equals B within the horizon of the text, creates literary meaning or even, according to Bely, suggests a cognitive reality—what “in the deepest essence of my creative selfassertion I cannot help believing is the existence of some reality whose symbol, or representation, is the metaphorical image I created.”36 Once again, mental fiction and a sense of reality come together in the metaphorical act, and Bely emphasizes both. In essence, this study asks an old, broad question: how are we to approach these contingent, metaphorical realities and synthesize their figurative being with our own? The tropological structure of Petersburg, like the texts studied in chapters to come, does a fair job of addressing this question—better, I think, than Bely’s theoretical essays do. Petersburg represents itself to the reader through kinship metaphors, which stabilize and emphasize how the novel renders a world for us out of verbal figures. All literary works comment on themselves, if only because, as Paul de Man has shown, there exists between the figurative and literal modes of

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a text a productive tension that makes every act of reading an allegory of reading.37 However, a text’s figural structure is itself identified with parallel systems of identification and substitution, like kinship or money, which are represented in the same text and which therefore take on a metapoetic function. As such, literary metaphors participate in both the immediately metaphorical processes of creative language and the essentially metaphorical aspects of the society whose fundamental categories inform the literary work’s figurative structure. Far from being a simple reflection of or comment upon society, literature is rather cognate with it, insofar as the same kind of creative thinking underlies them both. 3 . T h E G R E AT W O R D

As one might expect of a novel written by a theorist of metaphor, Petersburg’s figurative underpinnings are both sweeping and intricate. The primal, dimensionless dot is the metaphorical source of the novel we read and the legal codes that regulate our behavior, but it is metaphorically identified with another image of emanation from a single source—Adam, who is the source of the human family and the origin of patriarchal law. The following pages aim to sketch the hermeneutical problems that Petersburg’s omnipresent metaphorical play forces on its readers and to show how the novel presents itself as the realization of a familial metaphor. In an illustrative passage from the first chapter, Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov has just left home. As he nears the river Neva, “Apollon Apollonovich was thinking: about the stars, about the inarticulateness of the stream [of people] flying past; and, swaying on the black cushion, he was calculating the power of the light perceived from Saturn.”38 At this initial stage it seems as if the two objects of Apollon Apollonovich’s thought—the meditation upon heavenly bodies taking place in his imagination and the proletarian flow of people across the bridge—are connected only metonymically, by virtue of the fact that he contemplates stars (Saturn in particular) while perceiving the “stream” of workers outside the windows of his carriage. The relationship between the parallel processes of thought and perception is revolutionized through a metaphoric act of identification a few lines further on. Among the horde of people crossing the significantly named Nikolaevsky Bridge from working-class Vasilievsky Island, Apollon Apollonovich recognizes a shabby man carrying a bundle as a former visitor to his son’s room. He experiences a queer reaction, explainable only by the fact that this man, Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin, is carrying the time bomb with which Apollon Apollonovich’s son Nikolai will shortly be asked to murder his father (although at this point in the narrative none of the three characters knows the package’s contents, which are not disclosed until halfway through the book). The moment of recognition or identification, when Apollon Apollonovich makes eye contact with the unwitting bearer

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of this murderous instrument, is doubled to reflect the senator’s psychical and sensual reactions, respectively. As he contemplated the flowing silhouettes—the bowlers, feathers, service caps, service caps, service caps, feathers—Apollon Apollonovich likened them to points in the celestial vault; but one of those points, breaking loose from its orbit, rushed at him with dizzying speed, assuming the form of an enormous and crimson sphere, that is, what I mean to say is:— —as he contemplated the flowing silhouettes (service caps, service caps, feathers), Apollon Apollonovich saw on the corner among the service caps, among the feathers, among the bowlers, a pair of furious eyes: the eyes expressed a certain inadmissibility; the eyes recognized the senator; and, having recognized, grew furious; perhaps the eyes had been waiting on the corner; and, having caught sight, widened, lit up, flashed.39

The first paragraph renders the “literal” march of the plot indecipherable by articulating the event through a disconnected image drawn from Apollon Apollonovich’s internal world. The senator’s twin preoccupations, the imagined fundament and the perceived passersby, seem to be linked by analogy: Apollon Apollonovich has likened the proletarians to points in the celestial vault. The basis of this likeness is for the moment unintelligible, but the flow of text takes Apollon Apollonovich’s train of thought at face value and proceeds to describe how one of these heavenly bodies—presumably Saturn, the last-named object of the senator’s calculations—falls out of its orbit and rushes toward the senator in the form of a crimson sphere.40 This heavenly body is now identified as one individual in the crowd of workers by the narrator, who breaks in, using the formula “that is” (to est’), to tell us that the description of the planet falling out of its orbit is in fact a paraphrase of the description of Dudkin’s eyes widening in recognition (or vice versa). The two paragraphs purport to describe the same incident, though they share only the motif of the expanding circle and otherwise are quite divergent. Their relation provides a mise en abyme of the novel’s complicated tropological substructure. “Established here is the pattern that underlies the entire novel,” note Robert Maguire and John Malmstad of these juxtaposed passages, “a sphere, or a circle, that widens and brings about disintegration and death. At this point we do not know that we are dealing with a symbol.”41 Yet the symbol’s function in Petersburg is scarcely orthodox. The literary symbol is usually understood as a compact encapsulation of the novel’s central preoccupations. The textbook example is the vessel from which Henry James’s The Golden Bowl takes its title, an apparently flawless crystal container that is in fact worthless due to a crack running under

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the gilt; although only an expert eye could discern the fault, the bowl might split apart at any moment, just like the unhappy family whose agonies the novel details. Its presence on the mantelpiece above the family hearth therefore serves to knit together the vagaries of the plot even as it augurs the unraveling of the household. Instead of tying Petersburg’s different strands together into a single compact image, however, the motif of the expanding circle interrupts the narrative midsentence and fractures it into two parts. These parts are presented as equivalents even though they have no semantic relation. Indeed, the link between them, the expression “that is,” is only a copula, a simple statement of identity. These two paragraphs, the expression insists, the one describing the heavenly vault and the one describing the earthbound pedestrian, are the same paragraph in spite of the obvious, apparently unbridgeable differences between them. The imperative to discover and motivate that identity is clearly a problem of language, figure, and fiction, insofar as we are dealing here with a metaphoric subject and predicate in a work of literature. But it also possesses epistemological force as the relation between the subject and object of understanding; cosmological force as the relation between heaven and earth; and sociological force as the relation between the aristocratic and laboring classes, meeting here on the bridge between the upper-class English Embankment and working-class Vasilievsky Island. Apollon Apollonovich’s figurative universe is undone when a shabby proletarian with a bomb penetrates into it from the outlying districts by way of the Nikolaevsky Bridge; late in the book, the senator’s literal home is destroyed when that same proletarian brings the bomb to the senator’s house by way of the senator’s son, also named Nikolai. In his critical writings Bely calls symbol and metaphor synonymous in their purest forms, and the key symbol of his greatest novel, the expanding circle, operates here in the metaphorical mode by individuating the two passages even as its presence in both serves to identify them with each other.42 Although Bely was a proud theorist of the symbolist movement in literature, his take on the symbol as a concept was, as Yuri Lotman has insightfully commented, an idiosyncratic one. Unlike his symbolist colleagues, Lotman remarks, Bely “sought not only new words or even just new meanings for old words—he sought a new language. The word ceases for him to be the sole bearer of linguistic meaning.”43 As a result, “semantics” comes to exceed “the limits of the discrete word—it gets ‘spread’ through the whole text. The text is made into a great word, in which discrete words are only elements, complexly affecting one another within the integrated semantic unity of the text.” At the same time “the word decomposes into its elements, and lexical meaning is transferred to units of the lowest levels: morphemes and phonemes.” Lotman’s essay specifically addresses Bely’s poetry, but a similar tension between the “integrated semantic unity” of the text and its continuous disintegration into constituent elements is at play in his novel as well.44 Although the heavenly bodies

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and proletarian passersby have no semantic ground in common apart from that which the narrator asks us to accept on faith, they are linked through the microand macrostructures of the text: first through euphony (the same sound combinations are repeated in both paragraphs, and particularly the morphemes shar [sphere] and shir [expand], otherwise unrelated), and second through a barrage of images of roundness (the points, orbits, spheres, bowler hats, and dilating eyes) that signals a shared imagistic substructure. While the former function continuously draws our attention to elements of Bely’s language that are smaller even than the word, the latter invokes the symbol of the expanding circle that is common to the entire text. Both of these aspects relate figurative identity to kinship. On one hand, the novel’s thematic unity is related to the family identity shared by all Adam’s descendants in spite of their differences, since symbolic thought creates a world in which “I, you, he are all one, where father, mother and son are all one.” On the other, Bely’s exploitation of chance similarities between sounds is simply an artistic adaptation of the pun, a device he claims in his autobiography to have inherited from his father, apparently an inveterate punster.45 Nikolai Apollonovich’s father shares this fondness for punning and the majority of his jokes turn on family relationships. For example, his first pun, on borona (harrow) and baron (baron), turns a servant of peasant stock into a noble scion. The senator’s generation of illegitimate meanings can be correlated with the possibility that he has produced illegitimate children; one character, a double agent affiliated both with a revolutionary cell and the tsarist secret police, presents himself as the senator’s bastard by a seamstress. Apollon Apollonovich’s play on words is not just a lighthearted blague, but one more effort by the novel to discover the identity between the hierarchically separated terms that are disseminated from the novel’s mythic original point, its Adam. In a system of linguistic figures these are proper and improper meanings; in familial terms they are legitimate and illegitimate offspring; and in economic terms they are upper and lower classes.46 Hence the thematic allegories systematically paralleling language, family, and the social economy are of a piece with the novel’s wordplay. Metaphors and puns work to identify with one another objects so far removed from their common point of origin that literal thinking cannot perceive their kinship. Ableukhov’s puns on heredity are showcased instances of the relationships created by sonic similarities that pervade the novel more generally, and predispose us to consider all these similarities as “family resemblances.” 4. A UNIVERSE AKIN

The nature of any symbolic unity resulting from the novel’s puns and metaphors remains, however, profoundly in question, largely because we see its unsettling

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traces in dismembered words. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that every image in the book can be traced back to the circle symbol—the figure in the text of the mystical “ ‘one’ that is a symbol of the mystery that never reveals itself ”—as surely as every character’s lineage can be traced back to Adam.47 Yet the symbol’s fractured omnipresence serves, like the bomb that is the circle’s most obvious incarnation, to atomize the text as much as to unite it. The twinned paragraphs describing the mutual recognition of Apollon Apollonovich and Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin supposedly deal with a single phenomenon, but also present a gratuitously doubled entity.48 Both the starry sky and the plodding pedestrians are presented through images of an expanding circle, but the symbol’s potentially unifying action is undercut because it is split between two pieces of text that have only that symbolic motif in common. Because the figurative image of the planet falling out of its orbit precedes the literal description of Dudkin’s dilating eyes, because the novel so frequently operates in a hallucinatory mode, and because the two images have no semantic ground in common, the hierarchy between the literal and figurative is itself disrupted. One way of conceptualizing the catachretic difference expressed within this self-proclaimed identity is to refer back to the parallel processes of sensation and contemplation that organize Apollon Apollonovich’s experiences on the bridge. This contrast is a recurrent motif. As we know, the son “was sensually absolutely equal to his father: most of all he was often surprised by the circumstance that psychically he did not know where he ended and where in him psychically began the senator.” Here the statement of father-son equivalence, initially put in terms of bodily sensation, is repeated and said to be a mental process: identity itself divides into two modes of experiencing that identity, the sensual and the psychical. In the same fashion, Apollon Apollonovich’s divergent mental and sensual preoccupations repeat first in abstract cognitive terms (the astronomical calculations), then in sensual physical terms (the earthly passersby) a single universal symbolic identity, which annihilates the opposition between earth and sky as easily as it annuls that between sensation and contemplation. A related oxymoron in the 1909 essay “Emblematics of Meaning” describes how “the single, unified symbolic life” appears to us “in all its simplicity, charm, and diversity.”49 A profusion of Edenic imagery conjures up this unified diversity of the symbol: “flowers and fruits of the Tree of Life . . . a paradise that was lost once upon a time and found again. The heaven of cognition, along with the earth of life, is henceforth one firmament in which heaven and earth mingle as one.”50 The purpose of the symbol here, to merge the sky of intellect and the earth of sensation, is enacted in our passage from Petersburg, whose copula identifies Apollon Apollonovich’s starry “heaven of cognition” with the proletarian “earth of life” he in fact perceives. Apollon Apollonovich is explicitly a descendant of Adam, and

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the Eden of symbols in “Emblematics of Meaning” is accessible only by claiming our universal inheritance, “the symbolic earth of Adam Kadmon.” A long tradition including Enlightenment luminaries like Gottfried Leibniz as well as mystics like Jakob Böhme and John Comenius has attempted to recover the language spoken by Adam, imagined as a lost mode of symbolic thought in which every word is a true name identical with what it signified, for “Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”51 In the figurative landscape of Bely’s texts, poetic language aspires to this faculty of the first man, who possessed a language capable of bridging the extremes of heaven and earth, thought and sensation, spirit and body. If symbolic language is constitutive of identity and if its paradigmatic instance is genetic identity, then every metaphoric creation is at once proof of our continuing identity with Adam and a partial disclosure of the world as he experienced it—a perfectly integrated system of true names. Bely was keenly alive to the tradition holding that Adam’s naming is “the very source of our own language, which therefore could be believed to contain recoverable elements. . . . By virtue of this link through language, it was as if Adam inhabited everyone [sic] of us, with the implied and often articulated promise that we could again become like him and perhaps live in the peaceful and ordered utopia of his innocent days. His naming was our Ursprache.”52 A particular influence on Bely was the occult philosophy of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, both of whom took Adam to persist in the bodies of his descendants as their ultimate connection with the divine, just as his speech persists in fallen modern languages as their primal link to truth. Petersburg is, among other things, an elaborate encoding of anthroposophist doctrine.53 In Steiner’s tract Cosmic Memory, the recovery of ancestral naming is explicitly the discovery of humanity’s mythopoetic potential. A neo-Lamarckian passage describing how descendants inherit the capacities of their ancestors prophesizes that humankind will one day regain its latent potential for creation through symbolic thought, so that when a man “thinks ‘red,’ ‘red’ will actually be before him. He will be able to create images, and not merely conceptions.”54 The living spark in our corrupted language as well as in our alienated bodies, Adam’s power to bestow true names is the model for Bely’s “new language” of metaphor, which is to restore the creative force of language to a world where “all the names for things have flown away, and the different kinds of creation have crumbled into dust.” Bely concludes that “we must, like Adam who was created before all other men, give names to these things,” so that “everything that had been killed in cognition and creation is now summoned back to life in the Symbol.”55 This theoretical statement about the aesthetic imperative to recreate Adamic language through symbols is implemented as a fictional trope in Petersburg, whose overarching and omnipresent symbol, the circle, is itself conditioned by

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occult representations of Adamic language. Madame Blavatsky’s magnum opus Isis Unveiled begins by invoking “the Divine Essence emanating from ADAM like a luminous arc proceeding to form a circle.”56 Bely’s writing configures this image as the explosive bomb that returns to bring death to the father as well as Adam’s resurrection in the symbolic language recovered by his descendants. Shortly after beginning his study of esoteric literature, Bely wrote a 1908 short story entitled “Adam” in which the title character returns to the “paradise” of his birthplace through a hallucinatory landscape of crucifixion imagery, only to destroy his childhood home, with his father in it, in a suspicious fire; afterward, he is hailed as a (apparently false) messiah.57 The main character’s simultaneous identity with Adam and Christ derives not just from orthodox Christian doctrines of Christ as the “Second Adam,” but also the theosophical notion that Adam represents mortal man’s genetic link with his origins in divinity. The story’s brew of Oedipal conflict and eschatological imagery establishes a clear network of associations among human origin, Christ-like divinity, and the plot element of parricide. All these elements recur in Petersburg; so do numerous coincident details, for example the cornflower-blue eyes of Adam and Nikolai Apollonovich. An important scene late in the novel derives directly from a passage in “Adam”: Apollon Apollonovich gazes into the fireplace to discover that “spread out in the shape of a cross Nikolai Apollonovich was suffering there from the radiance of the light and indicating the red sores on his palms with his eyes.”58 One in a series of recognition scenes in which father and son see each other, often in mirrors, in terms that confuse their identities, the shared identity is here Christological. Nikolai Apollonovich—the parricide who, like Adam, rebels against his father—is seen by Apollon Apollonovich as the Christ or “Second Adam” who obediently allowed his father to kill him. For Bely the mystery of the incarnation is the mystery of metaphor because, writes John Kopper, it involves “the paradoxical identity and non-identity of the Word and flesh . . . figures the symbolizing properties of language, and is thus a metaphor for metaphor.”59 Bely plays upon the hereditary metaphor voiced by Christ himself, “I and my Father are one,” in order to reenact God’s sacrifice of his son as Nikolai Apollonovich’s attempted murder of his father.60 As a senator, Apollon Apollonovich is also a lawgiver; insofar as he is identified as the disseminating original point of the novel, he is the creator of a world. Parricide and infanticide become essentially indistinguishable through the blurring of parent and child, creator god and created man. In a crucial section entitled “The Last Judgment,” Nikolai Apollonovich falls asleep with his head resting on the bomb and undergoes an astral journey suffused with occult imagery.61 “Heredity told; heredity flowed into his consciousness; in his sclerotic veins heredity pulsed with its millions of yellow blood corpuscles.”62 These millions of

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corpuscles—literally “little spheres” (shariki)—instantiate the preeminent circle motif that suggests destruction and return; at the same time, they are the very substance of the bloodline through which Nikolai Apollonovich is identical to Adam. These blood cells complete the symbol’s circular return to a prelapsarian time, at which point they reappear as an Edenic fruit carried by an Oriental ancestor, a “fragrant heap composed of pink Chinese apples: apples of paradise.”63 A dense concatenation of mystical imagery ensues in which Nikolai recognizes himself as a reincarnation of his father, of his ancestral visitor, and indeed of all his ancestors back to the very dawn of humanity, whose experiences he relives in a collapsed chronology stretching from Atlantis to the Mongol invasion to his father to his present “I.”64 Bely’s 1921 novel The Baptized Chinaman contains an analogous journey into the biological past, also culminating in the expanding sphere that is the creative human brain returning to its origin, but transposed from occult into biological terms—the Lamarckian ladder of evolution, and especially the development of the nervous system from the primitive spinal cord to the complex human brain. The biblical “chute” or “fall” (zhelob) from the original Eden here becomes the “descent” of man: “The chute that you will not master in a hundred thousand years: is the backbone; I crawled from the worm to the gorilla, to . . . to . . . the expansion of the sphere: the sphere of my head, on which I attempt to sit down; and fall once more into the antediluvian past.”65 Such passages evince the influence on Bely of the scientific doctrine of hereditary memory, according to which the individual retains more or less unconscious knowledge of his forebears, and particularly Emilii Medtner’s notion that “the individual ‘remembers’ the origin of the species.”66 Hereditary memory also factors into the anthroposophical system, which holds that primal humans “actually had the power to transmit their gifts to their descendants,” and “here the law of heredity holds sway. The children carry within themselves the physical characteristics of the fathers.”67 Indeed, Nikolai Appolonovich’s dream operates as a vivid, disorienting demonstration of Rudolf Steiner’s thesis that at the origin of humanity a son “felt himself connected with his father and grandfather as one ‘I,’ because he felt their experiences as his own. . . . He lived not only in his own personal world, but because within him there dwelt also the consciousness of preceding generations, in naming himself he included in that name all belonging to his ancestral line.”68 The collective “I” formed by the human family is emblematic, for Bely, of the “unified diversity” made possible by reclaiming the symbolic language of Adam and the collective experience of his lineage. The thesis that Adam lives on in his descendants was important in prerevolutionary Russia even beyond occult circles. Vasilii Rozanov voiced a similar idea in his 1913 volume The Moonlight People.“I live precisely in my children, my blood and body live in them, and, consequently, I literally do not die at all, but only my current

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name dies,” he propounded.69 “The body itself and the blood continue to live, and once more in their children, and then again in their children—eternally. . . . Just like ‘changing boots’: ‘one pair of boots,’ ‘another pair of boots . . .’ but ‘the person walking in them is the same.’ This ‘same person’ is ‘Adam’ himself—the ‘I.’ ” Bely’s or Rozanov’s corporate “I,” generated by shared participation in Adam’s immortality, is a breathtaking feat of the metaphoric imagination. Viktor Shklovsky singled out Bely’s efforts to conceive an infinite series in relation to a single universal term as a major innovation in poetic form; in Bely’s metaphors, he writes, “an image is capable of serving as a constant predicate to a succession of changeable subjects.”70 The universalized Adamic “I” that becomes identified with a series of ancestors exemplifies this procession of metaphoric subjects and predicates. At the same time, the conclusion that all human beings are fundamentally “the same” in their common identity with Adam, whether “a scholar or a tiller of the soil,” causes us to see Rozanov’s trope equating the scholar and the peasant—like Bely’s wordplay, which punningly identifies members of different castes—as a technique of overcoming in fiction the hierarchical social divisions predicated on the division of labor. Marxist critics of the period failed to appreciate this dimension of Rozanov’s and Bely’s writing, let alone the poetic devices that impressed Shklovksy. Leon Trotsky accuses Bely of wishing “to replace the whole world with himself ” in order to endlessly propagate his own outdated consciousness.71 Trotsky does not recognize how Bely’s figures of universalized identity resonate with the conclusion of his own literary manifesto, which projects the eclipse of “the dark laws of heredity” and the creation of a new proletarian siblinghood. Petersburg’s kinship metaphors thus encode the dream of a world beyond social divisions as well as a self-propagating structure, identified with the autonomous artwork, that emanates from an imaginary, originative point. Both lines of thought cohere in a single mystified system: the fractured descendants of Adam’s ancestral body are to be united through the metaphoric unity that spans the book’s hallucinatory universe. In the arcane 1922 volume Glossolalia, which exists somewhere on the frontier between poetic theory and poetic performance, Bely derives the symbol of the circle from Jakob Böhme’s 1612 Aurora, the preeminent argument for Adamic language in the Christian mystical tradition. “Esoteric meaning,” Bely writes, is “a circle; this is—myth; but metaphor, myth, can only be clarified inside the circle of metaphors,” which is “closed by sound.”72 In a lengthy and often obscure exegesis of Böhme, Bely identifies this circle of meaning, metaphor, and sound as the round oral cavity in which words are pronounced. Throughout Glossolalia, the mouth appears as the origin of the divine language that creates a world; language then returns to its origin in the acts of poetic speech that complete the circle.73 Bely is particularly interested in how Böhme breaks down the first sentence of the German Bible—“Am Anfang schuf Gott Himmel und Erden”—into its

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individual syllables. “The word Am collects itself in the heart, and approaches the lips, here it is captured, and soundingly returns back to its point of departure,” Böhme writes.74 His phonetic analysis is already reminiscent of futurist efforts to analyze a language of pure poetry, and Bely decomposes the sentence further into the Adamic resonances of individual phonemes. Where Böhme takes the first words of the Bible to disclose the “true sound” of the concept “in the beginning,” Bely’s analysis elaborates further that the phrase encodes the name “Adam Kadmon (ad- ad-am-on).”75 As in Petersburg, the mythopoetic origin of a world and the biological origin of humanity are identified with each other. Both participate in an essentially circular gesture. Böhme writes that when God created the world through an act of language, “the sound departed from the heart of God and embraced the whole space of this world; but as soon as it turned out to be evil, then the sound retreated back.”76 The same circle is reproduced in the oral cavity of the worshipful reader who reads the holy text, since when the divine phrase “is pronounced, then it closes the circle in the center on its throne by means of the upper palate.” In Glossolalia, the speaking mouth acquires this cosmological role through Bely’s exploitation of a visual pun on the Russian word “небо,” legible either as the sky (nebo) or the roof of the mouth (nyoba). This coincidence is exploited throughout the text in order to render the sphere of the mouth a microcosm of the earth and sky, with the tongue (“iazyk,” also meaning “language”) dancing creatively between them. Bely’s metaphors aspire in this fashion throughout his work to bridge heaven and earth, as in Petersburg when the heaven of contemplation and the earth of sensation come together in the course of Apollon Apollonovich’s ride across the Nikolaevsky Bridge. In the occult tradition from which he draws so much of his imagery, poetic language returns to the lap of Adam and the creative word of God through linguistic roots that are analogized with genealogical origin. Glossolalia’s invocation of the “root of the tongue” (koren’ iazyka) already puns on etymological descent and on the tongue rooted in the floor of the mouth. Like metaphoric thought, the poetic word is at once the sky (air, breath, heaven) and earth, or roots. As it is spoken, the creative word becomes the oxymoronic “air of the root” and flies “through the history of language . . . to resurrect that which has gone by.” It is to recreate the universal speech variously referred to as Adamic language, glossolalia, or the “tongue of tongues” (iazyk iazykov). The reunion of all human languages in a mythopoetic tongue—capable, like the original statement of God, of creating new worlds—will coincide with the eschatological union of humanity in the common family of Adam. “There will come the brotherhood of peoples,” Bely writes: “the tongue of tongues will rip apart our tongues; and—the second coming of the Word will be consummated.”77 Among the strands of mystical thought that are present in these words, there is much that is specifically Russian. Bely recalls

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Fedorov’s “common task” of reconstituting a perfect family by resurrecting the whole line of Adam as well as the phonetic analysis of poetic speech, culminating in a “universal family of languages,” which Velimir Khlebnikov had espoused as a futurist version of it. For Bely, the continual resurrection of Adam in his children parallels the creative word’s resurrection in Adamic language. He makes explicit the operation of metaphor in both these realms. As prefigured in Böhme’s analysis of Genesis, language describes a circle in its progress from perfect Adamic speech into a splintered Babel before coalescing once more, through the agency of myth and metaphor, into its original unity. The same circle is described by the human race, which fractures into Adam’s myriad descendants before finally reuniting in the “unified diversity” of the familial “brotherhood of peoples.” As the creative action of metaphorical language makes anything identical to any other thing, this common human identity makes all relatives exchangeable for one another within the circle of figures. Petersburg shares Glossolalia’s symbolic vocabulary in its use of the circle motif. Moreover, it enacts the same premise of fracture and identity by presenting a fictional world of unlimited internal exchange whose every element is conceivably equivalent to every other, the circulation of these textual elements being governed by the supple logics of kinship and metaphor. 5. ThINGS ENGENDERED

Petersburg’s reader encounters a hermeneutic dilemma here in that the text contains no internal barriers to meaning. “The principle of the reduction of apparent opposites to identity is one that can be seen in operation throughout the novel,” observes J. D. Elsworth, so “all choices are in the end the same.”78 The point struck Bely’s earliest readers. In a 1916 review that remains a classic analysis, Nikolai Berdiaev describes how in Petersburg “even the images of people . . . lose the firm boundaries separating one person from another and from the objects of the world surrounding them.” Thus “one person melts into another person, one object melts into another object, the physical plane into the astral plane, the cerebral process into the experiential process.”79 Berdiaev senses Bely’s metaphorical identification of the cognitive and the sensual; he even points to the relationship between Nikolai Apollonovich and Apollon Apollonovich as the key example of the novel’s ambiguous identities.80 Viacheslav Ivanov, who suggested the title Petersburg to its author, also considered the father and son to share a common “ ‘I’”—“a convergence of opposites and a system of absolute identity. . . . The son’s terrorism and the father’s reaction are one and the same.”81 This vast, complex novel suggests, perhaps implausibly, that it can be reduced to a single mystical unity, of which the ambiguous identity shared by Apollon Apollonovich and Nikolai Apollonovich is the figure.

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For example, we can identify Saturn, the expanding crimson sphere that threatens Apollon Apollonovich when he catches sight of the man who is carrying the bomb, with the bomb itself, which is meant to kill the senator in its explosive expansion. But Nikolai Apollonovich, who is to plant the device in his father’s house, also “is a bomb” and therefore is himself metaphorically identical to Saturn.82 Moreover, Apollon Apollonovich suffers from dilation of the heart, “the sensation of a crimson sphere about to burst into pieces,” so the bomb is metaphorically incarnate in his flesh as well.83 Not only are father and parricide one flesh and one blood (plot’ ot ego ploti, krov’ ot ego krovi), they are also united in the murder weapon that is also Saturn—both the planet and the Titan of classical mythology, who devoured his children and was murdered by one of them.84 While Nikolai Apollonovich and Apollon Apollonovich occupy the center of the knot, we can continue tracing these metaphorical identities to include every character and motif in the text. One of Virginia Woolf ’s characters observes that, in the world of literary symbol he inhabits, “nothing was simply one thing.”85 Petersburg takes this one step further by suggesting that everything is so many things that they might as well all be one thing. Remembering Frye’s definition of the literary universe as “a universe in which everything is potentially identical with everything else” through the agency of metaphor, we see how Bely attempts to push such global identity to its ultimate extreme, toward “a universe . . . where father, mother and son are one.” This all-encompassing realization of metaphor—a device by which apparently metaphoric elements of a text are reinterpreted as literal, existent components of the fiction, radically destabilizing the easy categorization of tropes and realities as distinct from each other—becomes a method by which the book conceptualizes its own genesis for the benefit of the reader. “Petersburg’s characters live in a book, of course,” notes Timothy Langen—“what is unusual is the extent to which they themselves interpret their world as if it were a book. They seek symbols and hidden meanings in the world around them, just as we readers of Petersburg seek them.”86 In their exploration of the literary universe they inhabit, Petersburg’s characters sometimes blaze a trail for the reader. Nikolai Apollonovich’s childhood memories are a case in point. He, Kolenka, was not called Kolenka, but—his father’s spawn [otrod’e]. He became ashamed. Later the meaning of the word “spawn” was fully revealed to him (through observation of shameful peculiarities from the life of domestic animals), and, it seems, Kolenka had cried; he transferred his shame to the party responsible for the shame as well: to his father. He used to stand for hours in front of the mirror, observing how his ears grew: they grew.

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Right then and there Kolenka understood that everything that exists in the world of the living was “spawn,” that there are no such things as people because they are “things engendered” [porozhdeniia]; even Apollon Apollonovich, he too had turned out to be a “thing engendered.”87

In this scene, little Kolenka arrives at his first inkling of the depraved gnostic universe he inhabits by staring at himself in the mirror and watching his ears grow. Apollon Apollonovich’s most prominent physical feature is his enormous ears, also reflected linguistically since the family name, Ableukhov, contains the Russian word for ear (ukho); to observe his ears is therefore for Kolenka to observe his kinship with his father.88 Another linguistic dimension to this kinship is encoded in Kolenka being called “his father’s spawn”; presumably he has been addressed by name and patronymic (Nikolai Apollonovich, i.e., son of Apollon) and recognizes this to express his father’s begetting of him. That he is his father’s son, proven to him by his alienated name and his reflected features, makes the boy feel a sexual shame.89 The shame is universalized when he understands that everything and everybody is “spawn” (otrod’e) and a “thing engendered” (porozhdenie), including his own progenitor. Using the terms Bely outlines in “The Magic of Words,” we readily discern in this passage the two functions of metaphor: to qualitatively distinguish the subject of the trope and to generalize one of its attributes. Nikolai Apollonovich is specified by his identification with Apollon Apollonovich, but their shared quality of engenderedness is common to everything in the text. The mirror image makes possible the identification of his own ears with his father’s ears, as well as the insight that his and his father’s ears are identified with each other by the same process that makes him his father’s spawn—indeed, the insight that all humanity originates in sexual intercourse. Perhaps the same information is imparted by the novel’s opening quip that Apollon Apollonovich is descended from Adam, but the fact comes nonetheless as a great blow to the youthful scion of the Ableukhov house. It should not, perhaps, come as any surprise to the reader, for whom Nikolai Apollonovich’s status as a “thing engendered” has been carefully prepared. His discovery that he is a shameful sexual product is later mirrored in his father’s recognition that Nikolai is a “horror engendered [porozhdennyi]” by marital rape.90 When Nikolai “transfers” his feeling of sexual shame to his father, he is therefore appropriately ascribing it to its source, the perpetrator of the rape that conceived him. Nonetheless, that inheritance of desire, like the ears, has been transferred from father to son. A few paragraphs down from Kolenka’s discovery of his sexual shame, we read that Nikolai Apollonovich now “hated his own native-born flesh; but he lusted after the flesh of others.”91 Nikolai Apollonovich’s loathed body is his

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criminal, sexual patrimony—the dumb urge to create more spawn and to continue propagating his father’s flesh, or Adam’s, into the distant future. On one hand the mutual disgust prevailing between Nikolai Apollonovich and his father poisons their relationship; on the other, their shared sexual identity renders the bond between them unbreakable. The transfer of Kolenka’s sexual guilt from himself to his father, its original author, is one instance of the circle motif underlying the whole novel in both its destructive and unifying variants. The same transfer motivates the whole Oedipal plot. Nikolai Apollonovich was once about to jump into the river after attempting a rape, but changed his mind upon seeing his reflection in the water and decided to murder his father instead, who is “flesh of his flesh” and the origin of the sexual urge that sustains that flesh through generational time.92 The central plot point of the novel thus takes place when a mirror mediates a metaphoric transfer of a property between father and son—indeed, the property of sexuality, the very mechanism of kinship, inheritance, and family life. As the child Kolenka already dimly understands by observing his inherited features and the sex life of animals, the aggression that separates him from his father as the subject and object of violence is linked to the sexuality that has created them “one flesh.” The transcendent link with the mythopoetic language of Adam, the first ancestor, is twinned in the debased processes of sexual procreation and the reproduction of images—the interpenetrating processes of generation and mimesis. Bely’s association of biological and demiurgic proliferation has parallels in Russian and other literatures. A similarly gnostic fiction by Jorge Luis Borges begins with the observation that “mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they increase the numbers of mankind.”93 This pithy phrase from a reference article about the imaginary land of Uqbar is the first inkling of a secret society of “modest demiurges,” who create a new world by describing it in a fantastic encyclopedia.94 “Almost immediately, reality ‘caved in,’ ” writes Borges, in the face of this “labyrinth forged by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.”95 In the fictitious world of the encyclopedia, to conceive of something is to bring it into being—as its history is fabricated, artifacts testifying to it are discovered in newly imagined archeological sites. The encyclopedia enacts this principle of cerebral generation by supplanting the real world. A similar principle of demiurgic creation is central to myths surrounding the city of St. Petersburg, which a Dostoevsky character calls the “most abstract and premeditated city in the world.”96 This tradition stems above all from Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 poem The Bronze Horseman, which describes St. Petersburg as a created space, brought forth by an act of thought. Its first lines parody Genesis by comparing Peter the Great, the city’s founder, to the gnostic figure of the Demiurge, the semidivine figure who created the world of matter. Throughout the following verses the equestrian monument to him is

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referred to as an “idol,” suggesting a false god who has preempted the divine prerogative for creation and fiercely enforces the arbitrary rules of his own flawed universe.97 The gnostic scheme of Bely’s novel, a world of engendered things, draws upon this scheme by treating Peter the Great as the “father” of Petersburg—a city, that, according to the introduction, exists only by the verbal act of proclamation. The mythopoetic creation of new worlds is a universal process of engendering in Bely’s novel, but it is also correlated with literary history and political structures. In Petersburg the link between sexual engendering and demiurgic creation is established when the narrator interrupts the first chapter to explain the crucial concept of “cerebral play” (mozgovaia igra).98 People imagine things, the narrator avers, and what they have imagined acquires independent being; when they imagine people, those imaginary people believe that they are real, proceed to indulge in their own cerebral play, and generate new people, who generate new people ad infinitum. Petersburg’s initial conceit is that everything in it has been imagined by the first character it introduces: Apollon Apollonovich, the primal center of his own mental universe and the ostensible source of everything that inhabits it. “His cranium [was] the womb of thought images, which at once became incarnate in this spectral world.”99 The diction (“incarnate,” voploshchat’sia) specifies a religious dimension to parent-child identity—the world made flesh, the entry of logos into matter. This is foregrounded especially in scenes in which Nikolai Apollonovich appears to Apollon Apollonovich in the image of Christ, a divine son begotten of a divine father. In this early passage, however, the images born from Apollon Apollonovich’s cerebral womb relate more immediately to the novel’s system of pagan references. “Apollon Apollonovich was like Zeus: gods, goddesses and genies poured out of his head.”100 One of the incarnated images born from this cerebral womb is Dudkin, the stranger whom the senator had originally taken for a falling star (Saturn) when he was carrying the bomb across the Nikolaevsky Bridge. Another is his own son Nikolai, who is charged with delivering that bomb to his father’s room. In this scheme a metaphoric Jupiter or Zeus becomes the father of a metaphoric Saturn or Cronos, Zeus’s own father in classical myth, who threatened his children with infanticide and was killed by his own son. The tree of generations, or of cerebral parentage, turns into a vicious Oedipal circle: the novel’s characters, all of whom are now identified both as engenderers of cerebral children and as perpetrators of parricide and infanticide, circulate on the carousel of ambivalent familial identity. This universal identity is, however, kept dynamic by the possibility of violence between equivalent terms—suicide, infanticide, and parricide. In a convoluted dream sequence, Nikolai Apollonovich recognizes his father as Saturn and realizes that inside his own “exploding ‘I’” there is “an alien ‘I’: this ‘I’ had come running from Saturn and was returning to Saturn.”101 In Nikolai’s dream

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the concept of self-identity, the I, does not bind the self into a cohesive whole. Instead, the self bursts out in a destructive circuit of rupture with and return to the primal parent that is both its origin and its telos—a violence, a fall, but at the same time a return to the mythic father that is the classical Saturn or the Hebrew Adam Kadmon, and a return to the idyll of true names and social cohesion that is the classical myth of the saturnine epoch or the Hebrew Garden of Eden. The circulating identities symbolized or engendered by Saturn extend to the whole text when Nikolai punningly misunderstands the word Saturn as its French homophone ça tourne. The phrase “it turns,” now applicable to the whole novel’s swirling imagery and cycling of textual identities, becomes a comment on how the elements of the fiction turn into one another—through kinship-associated puns like ça tourne / Saturn and, more generally, through the activity of tropes. Frequent in Bely’s critical writings, this word is derived from the Greek tropos, or “turn,” as in the English or Russian expression, “turn of phrase” (oborot rechi). Petersburg has been called the Russian Ulysses, but here it more closely recalls Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s pleonasm of multilingual puns that also aspires— in a more ribald register—to construct a universal language identified with the family of Adam.102 Just how deeply Bely takes this intertwined process of linguistic turning and imaginative engendering to run is suggested at the end of the cerebral play passage when, naming Dudkin as a spectral emanation of Apollon Apollonovich’s brain, the narrator confides that “this shadow arose by chance in Senator Ableukhov’s consciousness and received its ephemeral being there; but Apollon Apollonovich’s consciousness is a shadow-consiousness, because he too is the possessor of ephemeral being and a thing engendered [porozhdenie] by the author’s imagination: unnecessary, vain, cerebral play.”103 Little Kolenka’s epiphany late in the novel that his father, like everything else in the world, is a “thing engendered” sexually has thus been prefigured by the narrator’s coy admission that the senator, like everything else in the book, is a “thing engendered” by the literary imagination. Somewhere between these two points the apparently innocent metaphor of “engendering” a character out of authorial fantasy has come to define a horrific universe conceived in parricidal and infanticidal sin, a sin that is perpetually multiplied in mirrors, text, and human generations. The witty assertion that Apollon Apollonovich is descended from Adam remains a joke, but a joke paradigmatic of other wordplay in the novel—now legible as statements about the fictional universe’s origin and mode of being. The ghost of humorousness remains, of course (if nothing else, the narrator has played a rather mean-spirited joke on Nikolai Apollonovich), but it is accompanied by an insistent host of questions about the nature and function of what, to use a phrasing that succinctly touches upon our

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various preoccupations with metaphor, heredity and mirroring, we might call reproduction in art. The novel’s origin in cerebral play is thus superimposed upon realization of metaphor. Bely’s use of this device relates to a larger philosophy of fictionality. As far as I have been able to determine, realization of metaphor first appears as a critical term in Viktor Shklovsky’s groundbreaking Theory of Prose, where we read that Bely’s “metaphor leitmotivs exist prior to their realization in the world.”104 Brian McHale notes that the realization of poetic metaphor, the process by which entities originally introduced as figures become realities in the fictional world, works to “further foreground the ontological dimension” of fiction, which encompasses questions about what world the text describes and how that world is created and sustained.105 For example, in Bely the figurative engendering of fictional characters is realized or “incarnated” as sexual engendering, thereby staking a claim about the ontological status of fictional worlds. The concept of cerebral play already challenges the idea that the constituent elements of fictional universes can be neatly divided into the categories of the existent and the nonexistent.106 This pervasive ontological doubt appears to have affected the author as well as the text, since in the drafts of his memoirs Bely notes that in writing Petersburg he felt himself to be surrounded by “completely delirious images, evoked by the experience of . . . ‘Petersburg’; and for a long time I lived exclusively in them, so that the limit between fiction and reality was lost.”107 The narrator of Petersburg himself claims that his fictional creations transgress the limit of the novel and emerge into the reader’s world. “Thoughts exist too,” he boasts, and therefore the aged senator the author has imagined and implanted in the reader’s brain will “pursue you too, dear reader, in his black carriage: and from this day forward you will never ever forget him!”108 His macabre image suggests that creatures of the metaphorical imagination are realized not only within the frame of the fictional text, but are unleashed beyond that threshold into our own world—a central trope in the horror genre, as when Freddy Krueger is represented slashing through the cinema screen in Wes Craven’s 1984 Nightmare on Elm Street. Bely’s creation, the senator who embodies the force of patriarchal law, will pursue us beyond the book as long as we live and remember him. At stake is nothing less than reality. The novel conceives of everything in it as a thing engendered by cerebral play, and then realizes the familial metaphor when Kolenka recognizes his father’s ears in his own reflection. In this moment of anagnorisis—the moment of recognition in Aristotle’s tragic plots, its locus classicus being when the parricidal son realizes with horror his relation to his victim—readers experience their own epiphany about the nature of the fictional universe with which they are presented. The process of generating offspring has been metaphorically collapsed into the process of generating fiction.109 By the

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time we finish reading about Kolenka’s revelation, we are convinced that all things are “things engendered,” yet that revelation seems only to realize—to have been itself engendered by—a metaphor internal to the text. The categories of the literal and the figurative are placed in doubt, so that the novel indeed seems capable of engendering itself through the ubiquitous process of metaphor and the boundless identity that metaphor creates. The logic of mythopoetic origin in metaphor is thus the key preoccupation and self-definition of Bely’s novel, whether one looks at the bombastic claims of the narrator, at its rhetorical composition, or at the theoretical writings of its author. Because the novel’s origin is ascribed to a kinship metaphor and because the realization of that metaphor is so sweeping as to include “everything that exists” in the world of the novel, we can read the book’s thematic preoccupations with the problems of hereditary identity as refracted images of its preoccupation with its own nature and origin in figurative language. The “things engendered” metaphor is the rhetorical underpinning of the prologue’s bald claim that the novel has sprung into being of itself, the autochthonic child of printer’s ink, the dimensionless dot. The heredity theme in this self-contemplative novel grounds a textual dynamic in which the novel can represent and contemplate itself, much as little Kolenka, in the mise en abyme above, comes to a realization about his own nature—and the nature of the world that he inhabits—through a recognition of his father in his own reflection. 6. ThE DOUBLE AGENT

Petersburg’s self-contemplation is the narcissism of the autonomous modernist artwork, but it is also the production and reproduction of social and political structures. Behind the novel’s “complex system of interchangeable paternal, filial, and sibling relationships,” writes J. D. Elsworth, “lies the original paternity of Peter the Great to his offspring, the city.”110 Just as his father’s name is encoded in Nikolai Apollonovich’s patronymic, Saint Petersburg contains the name of its creator, who raised up a European capital in a formless swamp. The dimensionless dot is the source of both the printed book and legal writ; hereditary origin comes to figure not just metafictional self-absorption, but also the genesis of the modern Russian state and the political authority that maintains it. Although the narrator delights in avant-garde excess and revolutionary destruction, he “also identifies with the police,” as Olga Matich writes in an insightful study, and “affiliates the imagination and the act of creation with the state.”111 In its early pages, the novel addresses the reader in the role of a police agent who will pursue a suspicious character, the bomb-carrying Dudkin. “In the investigation that we have quite naturally undertaken,” explains the narrator, “we have merely anticipated Senator

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Ableukhov’s desire that an agent of the secret police should doggedly follow the steps of the stranger. While the insouciant agent is still inactive back in his office, we ourselves will be this agent”—and off we go, pursuing the twists and turns of Bely’s plot across his imaginary cityscape.112 The narrator’s royal “we” includes the reader in the police investigation, which invokes a familiar allegory of reading. By opening up a police investigation in the city Petersburg, Bely’s detective trope also suggests the interpretability of the novel Petersburg. Both objects of investigation are presumed transparent to the regulatory strategies of state authority, the censor and the police. In playing the role of the detective we are said merely to anticipate Senator Ableukhov’s desire, but then again everything in the novel is said to be a mental conception born from the senator’s whims—his parricidal son, the revolutionary agent Dudkin, and now the narrator or reader who is dispatched in his pursuit in the role of a detective. When we are addressed as a police agent born of the senator’s desire, we undergo a reversal of the ordinary hierarchies between art and life because, by identifying our own hermeneutic activity with the investigator’s detective work, we are conceived and born into the text as a brainchild of the fiction. Bely’s conscription of the reader into the role of police agent recalls Louis Althusser’s explanation of how institutions generate political subjects by addressing them as persons with fixed social roles. People do not furnish their own names and identities, Althusser argues, but are made to respond in the role of the identity they have been given “along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police . . . hailing ‘Hey, you there!’”113 This interpellation is internalized as an ideological force, however, because it is made “in the name of the Unique and Absolute Subject”—the abstract, divine and normative will, the God in whose image man is made, whose function is identified in Bely’s text with a demiurge, an author, or Peter the Great.114 As an agent of this power, the reader is charged not just with exploring Bely’s world of cerebral play, but also with enforcing, in the name of its creator, the admissible set of reactions to it. Already deputized as Ableukhov’s agent—a figurative policeman and a representative of state repression and censorship—the reader a few pages later becomes the object of Ableukhov’s pursuit through the same structure of address. “The aged senator will, oh yes, he will, pursue you too, dear reader, in his black carriage: and from this day forward you will never ever forget him!”115 In this Pushkinian reference, which illustrates realized metaphor’s confluence with internalized ideology, the senator becomes legible as a figure for Peter the Great and his imperial order. In Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, too, an artistic work actively enforces the tsar’s legacy: an equestrian monument comes to life and persecutes a clerk who had dared to denounce Peter’s city as hubris. Petersburg’s sixth chapter, in which the same statue comes to life in order to possess Dudkin’s body, takes as its epigraph

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Pushkin’s couplet “Behind him everywhere the Bronze Horseman / Galloped with a heavy tread.”116 The opening scene of The Bronze Horseman describes a mythopoetic creation paralleling the opening lines of Genesis. Peter, who is “full” of thoughts, stares at (moves his face across the waters of) the “empty” or “desolate” (pustynnyye) waves at the mouth of the Neva. (“On the banks of the desolate waves / He stood, full of great thoughts”; “Na beregakh pustynnykh voln / Stoial on, dum velikikh poln.”117) The tsar’s pregnant brain generates an empire of trade, stone, bureaucracy, and rectilineal streets upon a swampy chaos of water not distinguished from the land, making possible a comparison between the world-making capacities of the poetic and political imaginations. A near-identical couplet from Pushkin’s 1827 lyric “The Poet” uses the same rhymes and the same opposition of emptiness and plenitude to describe the creation of a poem: the artist in his moment of inspiration runs, “full of sounds and confusion, / To the banks of the desolate waves” (“I zvukov i smiaten’ia poln, / Na berega pustynnykh voln”).118 In The Bronze Horseman, an imperial capital emerges by proclamation from the teeming brain of the political genius; in the lyric, the poetic word is born from the plenitude of the poet’s imagination. The prologue to Bely’s novel identifies both sites of mythopoetic creation with the dimensionless dot, the seat of law and imagination from which legal circulars and symbolist novels alike emanate into the world. In this space that is both a poetic and a political order, Petersburg’s reader is charged with enforcing valid interpretations but also apostrophized as a subject of Peter’s quasi-textual creation. The reader is therefore a double agent, like so many of the novel’s characters—Nikolai Apollonovich, who loves and hates his father; Lippanchenko, who issues the order to kill him; Pavel Morkovin, who uses his position in the secret police to enforce this order; and the reader-cumdetective’s quarry Dudkin, the shabby revolutionary who is not just the brainchild of the demiurge Apollon Apollonovich, but, by the end of the novel, the progeny of Peter the Great. When the Bronze Horseman enters Dudkin’s rooms, he addresses the revolutionary, “Greetings, my son!” before melting into a mass of “molten, reddish-purple” liquid and “flow[ing] into his veins as metals.”119 Having received this metaphorical blood, Dudkin becomes a corporate entity with the tsar, murders Lippanchenko, and straddles the corpse in the attitude of the famous equestrian statue, which is often read as an allegory of Peter’s firm direction of the Russian nation. This pastiche of images places cerebral play in dialogue with that poem’s themes of political oppression. Both Petersburg and The Bronze Horseman describe Peter as summoning a world into being. His creative thought supersedes reality; his plenitude of spirit is blown into the vessel of the material world; the world is remade in his image. Yet this paradigmatic moment of mythopoesis and authorial

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potency—the power of the human imagination to create a new world—sets in motion new forces of domination. Vengeful statues, censorship bureaus, and secret police agents relentlessly root out dissent, whether manifested in the petty clerk of Pushkin’s poem or the restless proletarians of Bely’s novel. Peter’s city may have opened up from that mathematical point where a creative act “proclaims forcefully that it exists,” but in the same stroke it constitutes an orthopedic space that is violently imposed on its inhabitants.120 Apollon Apollonovich fantasizes of an endless city, “avenue after avenue, so that the entire spherical surface of the planet should be embraced, as in serpent coils, by blackish gray cubes of houses.”121 This oxymoronic tension between rectilinear and spherical forms—a hypostasis of the larger tension between ordered structures and the bomb—is present already in the prologue, in the image of the legal “circular” [tsirkuliar] emanating into the rectilinear grid of Petersburg’s streets.122 Petersburg or Petersburg originates in a revolutionary and poetic act that creates a new world, but becomes in the same instant a conservative and political order that claims a monopoly on force. This doubleness is perhaps most vividly played out in the fate of Dudkin. Possessed late in the novel by the Bronze Horseman and made the agent of his imperial will, Dudkin is possessed in an earlier and symmetrically inverted scene by a demonic Oriental being named Shishnarfne. In a reversal of cerebral play’s proliferation into three-dimensional space from a mathematical point, this creature becomes two-dimensional, then one-dimensional, and finally an infinitesimal spot in Dudkin’s own larynx that speaks with his voice: “Enfranshish had come for his soul.”123 Throughout the book Dudkin is haunted by this sinister nonsense word, which came to him from “the devil knows where”; it has been most plausibly derived from the French phrase en franchise, which Dudkin might have read on a container of insect powder (in Russian “Persian powder,” persidskii pershok).124 The scene puts into play a complex series of mirror inversions. Shishnarfne’s contraction from the world into the larynx, the source of language, is an inverted image of thought’s expansion from the brain by way of performative speech; his associations with the East invert Peter’s dream of a European Russia; and the French-marked magical word Enfranshish is inverted in the mirror-writing of the Persian alphabet, read right to left, as Shishnarfne. Apollon Apollonovich and Nikolai Apollonovich repeatedly mistake themselves for one another in mirrors; Nikolai Apollonovich’s parricidal intentions are formed in a moment of specular misrecognition. The uncanny sameness and opposition of Westernizing and Orientalizing forces can thus be read as another manifestation of the paradox of family identity—for double agents, as for family members, metaphor unites opposing terms. In The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin famously extols Peter’s efforts to “open a window onto Europe” by founding the city of St. Petersburg. The specular inversions of Bely’s novel suggest that Peter’s

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imitation of the West, projected onto the reflective surface of the Baltic, may instead have yielded a mirror that reflects Asia. Lurking in the background is a perennial question of aesthetics: whether art is a mirror of the world in which we live or a window onto a qualitatively different world. In the context of eighteenthor twentieth-century efforts to compel Russia to take a new and modern shape after the pattern of an autocrat’s ideal, this is a problem of historical change as well as poetic possibility. Dudkin’s consciousness, like the reader’s, is infiltrated by fictions that become real, associated alternately with revolutionary chaos and conservative order. Both these internalized fictions initially address him in terms of hereditary lineage. Shishnarfne calls Dudkin not by his revolutionary alias, but by something close to his real family name and patronymic, of which he has mysterious knowledge; the Bronze Horseman addresses Dudkin as “son” (synok) and becomes “blood of his blood” when he flows into Dudkin’s veins.125 Dudkin is associated with an important cluster of motifs having to do with family and family names. He is repeatedly referred to as a raznochinets, a member of the classless intelligentsia, but considers himself “a hereditary nobleman by birth.”126 His aristocratic connections are partially illuminated when Shishnarfne addresses him as “Andrei Andreich Gorelsky,” a significant garbling of his birth name, Aleksei Alekseevich Pogorelsky. Maguire and Malmstad note that Pogorelsky was the name of a prominent Russian writer of the time, the illegitimate son of a count, and that “perhaps Bely wishes to suggest the whole question of paternity and legitimacy that figures so largely in the novel.” By substituting Gorelsky for the proper Pogorelsky, Shishnarfne’s words may suggest that Dudkin himself is illegitimate “by employing the common Russian practice of referring to the illegitimate sons of prominent men by dropping the first syllable of the father’s name (so Repnin becomes Pnin, etc.). More significantly, Alexei was the name of Peter the Great’s son and heir, whom he had executed in 1718.”127 As in Apollon Apollonovich’s puns, the manipulation of language suggests a vast system of kin relations that spans the apparently disconnected worlds of the government and the revolution, the upper and the lower classes. This profusion of possible names is one aspect of Dudkin’s larger identity crisis, which is closely related to the opacity of his parentage. Shishnarfne reminds him that, having escaped from a prison camp and lacking a proper passport, Dudkin cannot obtain medical treatment for his delirium (of which his satanic tormentor himself may be a symptom). Yet Dudkin can solve the problem by applying for a passport in the astral dimension, the mirror world from which Shishnarfne or Enfranshish has been summoned. “You are already registered with us: you have only to complete the final pact in order to obtain the passport; this passport is in your name; you yourself will put your signature on it by performing an extravagant little action.”128 Dudkin’s astral “signature,” a magical true name or an Adamic

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word, only emphasizes Dudkin’s uncertainty over his own identity, which is suggested by the multiplicity of names he possesses and especially by his ability to sense the novel’s oppressive symbolic unity. In one pseudo-philosophical tirade he complains, “I am I, but they say that I’m not I, but some kind of ‘we’”—or again a few pages later, “you sit and ask, why am I I: and apparently I’m not I. . . . And I’d like to become myself, but here we are . . .”129 Such passages represent both Dudkin’s confused mental state and his ability to dimly sense the symbolic structures that bring together all the book’s characters into a single family; he will later embody this pluralized identity by becoming a composite being, a “we,” with his metaphorical father. Dudkin eventually extends this involved sense of plurality and nonidentity to the novel’s entire ontological field. “ ‘Objects are not objects . . . a window is not a window: it is a hole cut into the infinite.’”130 His thoughts on nonidentity mingle with ponderings on the metaphorical potential of language. Dudkin’s awareness of the metaphorical identity permeating the novel are most clearly manifested when he subjects Nikolai Apollonovich to a lecture on the taxonomy of symbolic language, insisting that trite, common words contain deeper and more frightening meanings if one reinterprets their phonemes to reveal hidden, pun-like meanings. For example, the full horror of the Russian word for “abyss” (bezdna) is revealed by understanding it as a pun and splitting it into two monosyllabic words meaning “without a bottom” (bez dna).131 It is presumably wordplay of this kind that summons into being the palindromic demon Shishnarfne/Enfranshish. Just as the possibility of illegitimate children threatens the mechanism of hereditary identity by making all people into potential siblings, Dudkin, with his precarious sense of self, fears “illegitimate” words that are not the ones intended, or that have lost their intended meaning. Sometimes he doubts whether a given word really refers to the object he has in mind, or “I want to say one word and say an entirely different word instead.”132 All of these processes are closely related to punning, which also generates a second, “illegitimate” meaning out of a single sound. The name Gorelsky, which is perhaps a badge of bastardy and which contains a wealth of associations with other sound-patterns in the novel, is a case in point. Bely later claimed that Petersburg had been composed according to a system of associations with sounds, detailing that the “k” in Nikolai represented insecurity, the “l” in Apollon smoothness and regularity, and so on.133 As outlined in Glossolalia, his phonetic scheme takes the sound /g/ to signify metal and associates /r/ with luminous energy and heat.134 Their combination is the Bronze Horseman’s sonic leitmotif. The statue’s approach to Dudkin’s apartment is announced by a crashing (grianuvshii) sound; its knock at the door is described through the words “thundered,” “awe-inspiring,” “din” (gremel, groznyi, grokhot); its “gigantic body, burning with phosphorus [gromadnoe telo, goriashchee fosforom]” enters through

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the shattered door, and the “bronze-headed giant gave chase . . . blows of metal thundered, shattering lives: blows of metal thundered, in the wastes and in the village: they thundered in the cities: they thundered [mednoglavyi gigant progonial . . . gromykhali udary metalla, drobiashchie zhizni: gromykhali udary metalla—v pustyriakh i v derevne; gromykhali oni v gorodakh; gromykhali oni] . . .”135 The same sound-cluster appears in the scene in which Dudkin refers to his noble ancestry and claims to be a hereditary nobleman. His affiliation with the Bronze Horseman is further anticipated by the remark that his pseudonym “thundered in Russia and abroad [gremela v Rossii i za granitsy].”136 Thus even his revolutionary pseudonym, as it thunders at home and abroad, anagrammatically gives away his concealed birth name, Gorelsky. The /gr/ motif of “Gorelsky” and its derivation from goret’ (“to burn”) both suggest Dudkin’s molten visitor. The morning after his encounter with the Horseman, Dudkin wakes up with a high fever. “You’re burning up [gorite],” he is told repeatedly by a neighbor. “You’ve been tossing and turning, you’re burning up [razmetalis’, gorite].”137 If we analyze these words into constituent puns the way Dudkin teaches us to do, we can reinterpret “tossing and turning” (razmetalis’) as something like “dispersed into metals”—composed of raz-, a prefix connoting spreading or fragmenting, and metall, metal. The neighbor’s diagnosis is truer than he knows. Where human kinship is often conceived through shared biological substances like DNA or blood, the fictional father-son relationship between Dudkin and the Bronze Horseman is realized in their shared linguistic substance, sounds and letters.138 Dudkin’s phonetic suitability to “pun” the Bronze Horseman signals his suitability to be identified with Peter and his project. Even the most fragmented level of the text—the circulation, the combination and recombination of sounds and letters—becomes a significant marker of familial identity and a part of the process that makes Dudkin into the image of his metaphorical father. Although the forces that pursue the reader beyond the text are, like the novel Petersburg, a fantasy, they are suggestively continuous with other kinds of power. When Bely’s fiction apostrophizes the reader as a police investigator who traces Dudkin into the depths of the novel, we are in the same stroke reminded that the real agent “exists. And he’s on the alert, so help me god, he is.”139 One figure of the “real agent” who patrols the text is the Bronze Horseman, but most real of all is the reader’s internalization of these regulatory social fictions, which are reproduced in her behavior. The imagination, that dimensionless source of both novels and law, brings forth a host of double agents who owe allegiance at once to the revolutionary force of aesthetic creation and the ideological normativity of the world as it is. Petersburg expressly empowers us to keep watch over the essentially textual world we inhabit, but at the same time shows our interest in producing a radically different world of our own.

C H A P T E R

T W O

A WORLD OF MIRRORS

1 . S E C O N D S pA C E

The world of Petersburg is “engendered” by cerebral play, but it is also reflected in the mirror of art. Both cerebral and specular metaphors permeate the Ableukhov family home. A metaphorical mind, its carpeted steps are “like the convolutions of the brain,” and its doors disclose “no drawing room . . . but rather, cerebral spaces.”1 At the same time, the house is a reflective space in which everything, including the drawing room, is “reflected in the glitter of the parquetry and mirrors.”2 Much of the narrative takes place on bridges or along the embankments of St. Petersburg’s canals, whose waters reflect back images of key events. Nikolai Apollonovich’s parricidal fantasy of assassinating his father, which is the motor of the plot, first arises when—about to drown himself and his inherited sexuality after an attempted rape of Sofia Petrovna—he glimpses his estranged reflection in the water. When Lippanchenko calls in this suicidal or parricidal intention, the message is delivered by Sofia Petrovna herself, who emerges for the purpose from an “oval, cloudy mirror” and then runs off “into the depths, into the greenish murk.”3 Costumed in a “fountain of things and muslin lace foam,” Sofia Petrovna’s emergence from the water-like mirror also encodes parricidal violence and generative sexuality, since it recalls the birth of Aphrodite from the sea foam after Zeus castrated Saturn and spilled his seed into the waves. All these specular images are lent universal and mystical significance when the astral plane is termed a “hall of mirrors,” a “second space” accompanying and allegorizing the novel’s “reality.”4 A scene in which Apollon Apollonovich literally becomes a mirror containing his son’s image illustrates the interaction of reflection and kinship in the novel. The third chapter begins by painting all of Petersburg (or, in its textual sense, Petersburg) as an amalgamation of mutually reflecting surfaces—“only lacquer, only luster; the mirrorlike windows glinted; well, of course—and it glinted behind the mirrorlike windows; there was glint on the columns; glint on the parquetry, and glint at the entryway as well; in a word, lacquer, luster, and glint!”5 The narrative

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gaze seems at length to penetrate past the windows into an interior space, but questions remain about whether this space is in fact qualitatively different. The novel’s world of reflective surfaces, all multiplying the same set of images, implicitly interrogates the mimetic status of the artwork. Is this world of repeated images a mirror that reflects the world we know, the pomp and glitter of Petersburg, or is it a window into a fantastically different space, the boundless propagation of metaphorical identity that is Petersburg? The language of the passage echoes the specular repetitions through the insistent use of the same words (and, in Russian, sounds) over and over, which already intimates the activity of kin tropes because phonic resemblances in the novel are homologous with genealogical relationships. The inhabitants of these glassy apartments are themselves glittering, animated mirrors. Old men with “bald spots shining like lacquer energetically put on starch as if it were some kind of knightly armor.”6 Their shiny heads recall Petersburg’s glinting roofs, just as their stiff clothing recalls its rigid walls; the inhabitants of the buildings are microcosms of the architecture. Although these old men seem anonymous, the simile of the knightly armor refers obliquely to the Ableukhov family crest, which represents a knight being gored by a unicorn. Soon these abstract “bald men” resolve into the figure of the senator himself, who removes a “lid of red lacquer,” dons “a blinding pair of pants” and “a uniform of bright black luster with a gilded front,” and pins on his many medals.7 Fully dressed and completely reflective, the many mirrors of the senator’s garb, distributed about his whole body, are rendered into a single coherent image with the assistance of a pier glass that reflects them all at once. “Apollon Apollonovich stood before the mirror, white and gold (all aglimmer and aglitter!).”8 He proceeds to the drawing room, where he remains “reflected in the glitter of the parquetry and the mirrors,” but stops short there at the sight of his pale, disheveled son. Nikolai Apollonovich at first is “blinded” by his father’s brilliant appearance, but, recovering his sight, sees his own reflection in the mirror that his father has become. The moment of self-identification is, once again, accompanied by a will to parricidal violence that verges on self-violence. But at that moment Nikolai Apollonovich did not at all experience an onrush of familial feelings; he experienced something entirely the opposite, perhaps what he had experienced in his own room; in his own room Nikolai Apollonovich performed acts of terrorism upon himself—number one on number two: the socialist on the noble brat; and the corpse upon the one that was in love; in his room Nikolai Apollonovich cursed his mortal self and, insofar as he was the image and likeness [podobie] of his father, he had cursed his father. It was clear that the godlikeness [bogopodobie] in him had to hate his father; but perhaps his mortal self loved his father all the same? Nikolai Apollonovich hardly admitted as much to himself. Love?

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. . . I don’t know if the word applies here. Nikolai Apollonovich knew his father as it were sensually, knew him down to the finest nuances, the barely perceptible tremors of his unexpressed emotions; more than that: he was sensually absolutely equal to his father; moreover he was astonished by the circumstance that psychically he did not know where he ended and where psychically in himself began the spirit of the senator, the bearer of those piercing diamond emblems sparkling on the glittering plates of his embroidered chest. In the blink of an eye he did not so much imagine as actually experience himself inside that sumptuous uniform.9

Nikolai Apollonovich’s alternately “sensual” or “psychic” identification with his father is a fleeting moment of prosthetic vision. In the “blink of an eye” (mgnovenie oka) Nikolai sees his alienated image reflected in the mirror that is his father; he sees himself from this point of view as if “with his father’s eyes” and is accordingly disappointed. As he blurs with and seems to enter into his father’s body, metaphors of closeness and identification come to literalize the violent scene of the Ableukhov family crest, a unicorn goring a knight. The “glittering plates” on the senator’s chest are a breastplate; the “piercing” emblems evoke a penetrative violence. Because the unicorn is a Christologically significant image, the scene possesses cosmological force to associate the violent father-son identity in the Ableukhov clan with the drama of familial murder and resurrection within the godhead, a mythic structure oriented toward an end in apocalypse, revelation, and salvation.10 The absolute identity of parent and child coincides with the absolute difference between perpetrator and victim of violence; the problem of familial identity becomes a religious mystery as well as the unresolvable dynamo of the book’s narrative tension. In this rich passage, the unity of father and son is at the same time an “act of terrorism” performed upon Nikolai’s self. He splits into subject and object, “number one” and “number two.” The two terms are united by the metaphor of selfidentity but differentiated by the mediating mirror that produces for Nikolai an alienated self-image in his father. The division articulates a political difference between the socialist and the noble, which prevails within Nikolai Apollonovich’s conflicted self as well as within his family. But the division is also an ontological one between the corpse and the lover, an image later realized when Nikolai and Apollon Apollonovich appear together in a mirror as the commedia dell’arte figures of death and the white-faced clown Petrushka (whose role is that of the rejected lover). The “corpse” and “the one in love” represent a split between mortal flesh and the loving spirit—categories confused by Petersburg’s gnostic universe, in which spiritual generation occurs in the debased forms of marital rape and sexual procreation. Nikolai’s violently divided self is explicitly named as a violently riven family through the syllogism “Nikolai Apollonovich cursed himself and,

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insofar as he was the image and likeness of his father, he had cursed his father.” This syllogism possesses expansive force: if all human beings are descended from Adam, the violence might be extended to any member of the human family. Its universal potential is stressed by the comparison between Nikolai Apollonovich’s “likeness” (podobie) to the father whose ears he has sexually inherited and his “godlikeness” (bogopodobie), a term used in Orthodox Christianity to describe the spiritual potential of every human made in the image of a universal father.11 The scene of specular misprision that culminates this evocation of a universe of mirrors therefore involves all the major themes that motivate the plot, and serves as a jumping-off point into themes of both gnostic duality and Christological unity.12 2. ThE DOUBLE IMAGE

The mirror that represents humankind’s relationship to the divine, in whose image humans were made but from which they have fallen away, is a longstanding trope. John Bunyan’s 1684 Pilgrim’s Progress allegorically represents the Word of God as a looking glass which “would present a man, one way, with his own features exactly, and turn it but another way, and it would show the very face and similitude of the Prince of Peace himself.”13 As Bely’s references to “godlikeness” suggest, the image has biblical roots in St. Paul’s metaphor of knowing God “as through a glass, darkly” (literally “in a glass, as an enigma”): human beings, who are made in God’s image, are an obscure reflection of an essentially unknowable divinity, which is to be revealed in itself in heaven.14 In a detailed exegesis, St. Augustine analyzes this image of the human being as a mirror in which one senses both a likeness to the divine and proof of the divine’s absolute otherness. It becomes for Augustine a crux of interpretation of metaphor, since it bears on the rhetorical enigma of likening essentially unlike things—which emphasizes their difference and incompatibility—as well as on human language’s adequacy to reflect the transcendental enigma that is the Word of God.15 Bely superimposes this representation, which shows alternately the world of flesh and the world of the ideal, onto the kinship relation that articulates both self and other. A father as well as a mirror, Apollon Apollonovich articulates in either role a relationship that partakes of both the spiritual and the corporeal. Like the mirror of the divine, the kinsman who is a metaphorical mirror is a venerable trope. In William Shakespeare’s Richard III, the Duchess of York has found solace after her husband’s death by looking at the “mirrors of his princely semblance” that are their two sons Clarence and Edward; now that they are “crack’d in pieces by malignant death,” and her sole remaining son is the physically and morally deformed King Richard, “I for comfort have but one false glass, / Which grieves me when I see my shame in him.”16 In a Spanish Renaissance drama of

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adulterous temptation by Lope de Vega, the king whose judgment preserves the sanctity of the marriage bed calls his son “a heavenly looking glass, / Wherein those who departed see themselves.”17 In his physical resemblance to his father and to the original founder of the royal line, whose image is propagated faithfully across generations, the child also becomes an allegorical image of the queen’s fidelity, which guarantees the bloodline’s purity.18 Here the function of metaphor to conjure a relation of identity out of an evident difference (the fictive identity of the king and his son) is coextensive with the aim of mimesis to reproduce a thing with the greatest possible fidelity (the prince is a perfect reflection of the founder of the line). At the same time, these artistic imperatives operate as a set of social fictions—gendered codes of sexual conduct and the corporate identity of king and heir—that maintain the family and state. In many works, this metaphorical identification of kinship and mirroring encodes both the creative function of art to engender a new world and the mimetic function of art to reflect the truth of the real one. Vladimir Nabokov’s 1936 Invitation to a Beheading stresses this aspect in a remarkable instance of a parent who is a metaphorical mirror. Like Petersburg—which Nabokov considered one of the four great novels of the twentieth century—this book relates aesthetic issues to gnostic motifs, describes a Platonic hierarchy of artificially engendered realities, and identifies their creation with autocratic political structures.19 The petty demiurge who tyrannizes the novel’s world is a headsman. In the flimsy world he has built in order to glorify himself, our hero Cincinnatus C. has been convicted of possessing higher reality—“gnostical turpitude”—and sentenced to death.20 In a passage often read as a programmatic statement of Nabokov’s philosophy of art, his mother visits him in prison and describes a species of novelty mirror called the nonnon. The double negative of the toy’s name is emblematic of how the distorted surface of the mirror, which disfigures ordinary objects, produces a recognizable image when given “absolutely absurd objects, shapeless, mottled, pockmarked, knobby things, like some kind of fossils—but the mirror, which completely distorted ordinary objects, now, you see, got real food . . . and the shapeless speckledness became in the mirror a wonderful, sensible image.”21 The nonnon seems to be a metaphor for art in a fallen world, in which “fossils” retaining traces of a primordial truth are made evident and apprehensible in the trick mirror of the literary work. Indeed, the nonnon allegorizes metaphor itself, which relates two improper terms in order to suggest a third, transcendent meaning. The toy thus figures fiction’s ability to represent, by manipulating metaphoric devices, a higher and otherwise inaccessible reality—mimesis at its finest.22 However, the mother’s anecdote may also be one more attempt to convince Cincinnatus that the essentially senseless, if cunningly arranged, mirrors of the novel’s world reflect a reality beyond its covers.23 In this case, the nonnon is just one more of the innumerable

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devices the headsman has planted in order to produce the false impression that his mocked-up world is somehow true or gives access to truth. The question of whether art reveals a truth in the world is also the question of whether art illuminates the identity of the self. An especially thrilling possibility of the nonnon is to “have your own portrait custom made, that is, you received some nightmarish jumble, and this thing was you, only the key to you was held by the mirror.”24 To discover one’s personal identity in an alienated object is also the task of the prison memoirs Cincinnatus is trying to complete before he dies, and hence of writing in general. What is more, this true identity is revealed as a true parentage. Cecilia C. has come to tell Cincinnatus that he has inherited his trace of higher reality from his father, who was also “real”—was, perhaps, that higherorder author whose brainchild Cincinnatus is. Suspicious Cincinnatus denies his mother’s relation to him. He accuses her of being complicit in the falseness of the prison of the world. In a key passage, this creature of fiction appears nonetheless to reveal what is true in her fictional son—to operate, in other words, as a nonnon that reveals a meaningful reality in the coordination of two apparently senseless objects, both of which are aesthetic constructs. Looking into her eyes, Cincinnatus perceives “that ultimate, secure, all-explaining and from-all-protecting spark that he knew how to discern in himself also. What was this spark so piercingly expressing now? It does not matter what—call it horror, or pity. . . . But rather let us say this: the spark proclaimed such a tumult of truth that Cincinnatus’s soul could not help leaping for joy.” As in Petersburg, reflection is metaphorically identified with engendering; Cincinnatus’s “truth,” allegorically freighted with the truth of art, reverberates between mirror images as well as between parent and child. However, this mimetic and epistemological model is ambiguously linked to a performance of feeling. The Platonic scheme of mimesis, a series of imitations in which art is a degraded copy of an ideal form, gives way to Aristotelian catharsis—the purging of “horror, or pity,” as those passions are staged in the theater of the mother’s body.25 In the process, Cincinnatus’s questions about the ontological status of his world become an interpretive issue for the reader. If mirror tropes and kinship tropes interact to generate a “tumult of truth” within the headsman’s world of cardboard contrivance, then the mimetic principle of the nonnon holds and Cincinnatus’s world retains traces—“fossils”—of its originative impulse, its divine author or an ideal form. In this case, the reader is justified in discovering spiritual insights and higher truths in Nabokov’s text. If, on the other hand, Cincinnatus has been seduced by imitations and the temptation of family feeling into ascribing a quantum of reality to a deceitful world, then he is discharging his emotions into an artistic contrivance—a trap laid for Cincinnatus that allegorizes a snare laid for the reader of the novel. By connecting Nabokov’s carefully staged dots, in this

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case the metaphoric identification of the parent-child relationship and the mirrorworld relationship, we become duped through our very mastery of novelistic codes. The process recalls Nabokov’s composition of chess puzzles for the “very expert solver,” who falls into traps that appeal to interpretive subtlety and skill, eventually to become an “ultrasophisticated solver” by discovering how the wool was pulled over his eyes.26 This is not a simple matter of the truth of art being opposed to art’s serenely amoral autonomy, however. In either case, Nabokov’s novel is placed in a specific relation to the world of the reader. In the mimetic reading, the work figures a transcendent truth that cannot be stated directly in a fallen existence cut short by death; in the cathartic reading, it allegorizes strategies of interpretation in a world of false consciousness ruled by hateful powers. Either way, the fiction enters into a relation with the historical context of its production—Berlin, 1936. Invitation to a Beheading can be read as a distorted reflection of Hitler’s Germany and the survival of art in barbaric times, or else as the allegory of a critical attitude to a cruel, lying world. Of course it is both; the dynamic interplay of the tropes of mirroring and sexual generation in Nabokov’s book crystalizes for us as an urgent, if also undecidable, interpretive crux. It reconceives the opposition between mimetic and autonomous art as a Gestalt switch between two noncontradictory ways of reading. Petersburg, also a gnostic universe of questionable ontological status, also created and sustained by figures implicated at once in art and in tyranny, similarly attempts to encode these two ways of reading in a single aesthetic object. Both Nabokov’s nonnon and Petersburg’s specular misprision can be contextualized with two of the most famous mirror metaphors in literary theory, which are found in the work of Pierre Macherey and Jacques Lacan. In his 1966 Theory of Literary Production, a revision of Lenin’s 1908 article “Leo Tolstoy as Mirror of the Russian Revolution,” Macherey synthesizes the precept that the economic base determines aesthetic phenomena with basic formalist axioms. He conceives of the artist as a craftsman, enjoins the reader to look for “what is specifically literary in the text,” and concludes that literariness is to be found in art’s distortive function.27 Art in this view is not a “mechanical reproducer of images,” but is “deceptive: the mirror enables us to grasp only relationships of contradiction” that “represent and evoke the historical contradictions of the period” in mutilated, partial versions.28 Furthermore, “the selection itself is not fortuitous, it is symptomatic; it can tell us about the nature of the mirror.”29 Since for Macherey ideology too is a system of selective omissions and distortions, art’s mimetic function—to make ideological structures apprehensible to critical consciousness—operates like the nonnon or like the metaphoric relation between two improper terms. The truth of the artwork derives from the coordination of two deceptive discourses, fiction and

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ideology.30 The disfiguring action of art, which “endows an object with new proportions, studies objects through other objects which are not quite the same . . . seizes, inflates, and tears the world,” is the price of representing the world and its powers in a single formally complete object, which the audience can grasp in a critical act of cognition as indicating the contradictions and blind spots of the social world itself. “Hence the childish fear of the mirror which is the fear of seeing something else, when it is always the same thing.”31 Again, Macherey’s rhetoric is anticipated by Nabokov’s nonnon, in which the child wants to see her portrait but finds the prospect “a little frightening—what if suddenly nothing should come out?”32 The fear as well as the promise of the encounter with the artwork is the possibility that the reproduction of the familiar might in fact be disrupted. As the “childishness” of this fear suggests, self-recognition mediated by an alienated image relates to individual psychology as well as mass ideology. Bely’s Kotik Letaev stages the mirror’s role in the individual’s development of language and community when the infant narrator stands before a mirror with his aunt, who points to the glass and designates its inhabitants “strangers” (chuzhie)—a scene that gathers the same basic preoccupations with kinship, mirrors, language, and self-estrangement that are central to Petersburg. John Kopper observes that this is the moment at which young Kotik begins to use proper names; he thenceforth refers to any relationship of repetition through his aunt’s patronymic, “Egorovna,” which signifies her relatedness to him, his father, and grandfather as well as her reproduced image in the mirror.33 The child thus conflates series of reflected images with series of concepts and series of procreated bodies. In his 1949 essay on “The Mirror Stage,” Jacques Lacan writes that when a child interacts with his mirror image, the situation “manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality.”34 The narcissistic infant, who had imagined himself to be limitlessly coextensive with the world, is frightened to learn that he is a finite entity bounded by the edges of his body. As he learns to identify himself with his specular double, the alienated image becomes proof of the child’s paltry insignificance in comparison with the world’s vastness. At the same time, he is gratified to observe that his actions affect the world. His intentional movements affect the specular image that repeats them, so the alienated image also becomes proof of the child’s potency, his ability to act upon the object-world outside himself. Lacan’s scheme, in which the coherent self is predicated upon its doubling and its identification with the external image, and Macherey’s, in which the truth of art comes from the coordination of two improper terms, both involve the “samebut-different” logic of metaphor. The “childish fear of the mirror which is the fear of seeing something else” relates to the primal moment of self-identification as

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well as to art’s representation of the social order. Petersburg stages this childish fear when Apollon Apollonovich lifts his young son “to that very mirror; in the mirror they were both reflected, the old one and the little one; he showed the reflections to the little boy, adding: ‘Looky here, sonny: there are strangers there.’ ” As in Kotik Letaev, it is the alien quality of the mirror image that is stressed, and which comes to extend into the quasi-specular identification of father and son. “Sometimes Kolenka cried and then screamed at night,” Bely continues. “And now, and now? Apollon Apollonovich did not see a little body, but a body: strange [chuzhoe], large. Was it a stranger?”35 How does self-identity develop across this disorienting collocation of fleshly and specular entities, young bodies and old ones? As we have seen, Kolenka’s fear of the “stranger” (chuzhoe—“alien, the property of another”) is a fear of his own flesh insofar as it is his father’s flesh, and hence a fear of the criminal sexuality that engenders a debased material world. Apollon Apollonovich also fears the strangeness of this body that ought to be “one flesh” with his own but is nevertheless capable of violence against him. Here, he articulates that strangeness for Kolenka in adult language. Murray Krieger has described this danger as inherent in fiction and as stemming from processes of metaphorical identification. “For a protagonist to be stricken by metaphor is for him or her to feel an identity, an identity both ominous and dangerous, with another character from whom the difference, a quite evident difference, is required for self-preservation.”36 For Krieger, the paradigmatic example is Hamlet’s inability to distinguish his own fate from the bequest of his murdered father. Sigmund Freud argues that the literary theme of the double, instantiated in Petersburg as the uncanny mirror image, harkens back to “the evolution of the self-regarding feeling, a regression to a time when the ego was not yet sharply differentiated from the external world and from other persons.”37 On this reading, the uncanny moment of specular misprision is the trace of the mirror scene’s failure to distinguish the child as a discrete entity apart from the world, and especially from the parents that are closest to him. The novel’s parricide plot stems from the mirror’s failure fully to distinguish Kolenka from, in Viacheslav Ivanov’s words, “his father—his other, passionately hated and vigorously loved ‘I.’”38 At the same time, the novel stakes its claim to aesthetic unity precisely on an uncompromising and universal realization of familial identity. 3. ThE MIRROR SERIES

The midpoint of the novel is a series of delirious and richly textured scenes of specular misprision, which punctuate the masquerade ball at which Nikolai Apollonovich receives orders to assassinate his father. Nikolai Apollonovich arrives at the mirrored ballroom, already full of maskers, wearing a red domino. His

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costume is meant as a sarcastic reference to the insult with which Sofia Petrovna rejected his advances (“red buffoon”), but it is taken by his father and the other guests as a declaration of socialist leanings. Explicitly designated a “labyrinth of mirrors” that “swims” with indistinct female figures, the glittering ballroom recreates for Nikolai Apollonovich as an interior space the reflective cityscape of Petersburg, projected by a mythopoetic act upon a watery void.39 “When from out of this labyrinth, from its cold greenish surface, he was assaulted by the distant echoes of questions along with the paper serpent of confetti, he was amazed the way one is amazed in dreams: he was amazed at the emergence of the not-existing reflection before him into the real world.” In its confusion of propagated images and emergent imaginings, the dream world that is a labyrinth of mirrors realizes on the material plane of the novel the astral “hall of mirrors” which Nikolai Apollonovich and Apollon Apollonovich both visit in their sleep, and in which Nikolai Apollonovich experiences himself as the sum of his lineage. The ontological asymmetry of the original and mirror worlds, the astral and material plane, the real and the imaginary, is also the articulation of a limit between life and death, or even between being and nonbeing. While Nikolai Apollonovich “considered everything as rippling reflections running across a dream, those reflections apparently took him for a visitor from the other world; and, as a visitor from the other world, he frightened them away.” The phrase “visitor from the other world [vykhodets s togo sveta]” is an idiomatic expression for “ghost.” Bely plays here with anthroposophist subtexts: according to Rudolf Steiner, the ghosts of ancestors inhabit the astral plane and thrive there in proximity to dreams with spiritual content; they are opposed to bacteria, astral creatures that “flourish most intensively when we take nothing but materialistic thoughts to sleep with us.”40 The reference to “rippling reflections” suggests the bacteria-ridden surface of Petersburg’s reflective canals and rivers and reminds us that Nikolai Apollonovich’s intention to kill his father was formed while contemplating suicide over the railing of a bridge.41 The parricidal emblem of the knight goring a unicorn participates in the same thematics of a watery world of reflection, since its violent implications appear to Nikolai Apollonovich like “a fish skimming the surface of the water.”42 Here too, the figure suggests the limit between the conscious world and dream life, between original and reflection, and between desire and realization. Later in the chapter, Sofia Petrovna emerges from a watery green mirror to deliver a letter that realizes this inner wish as a command; in interpolated scenes, her husband attempts suicide in passages saturated with the reflective water motif. The ballroom scene is thus already shot through with the novel’s major plot points and themes, especially the ever-present problem of fiction’s ontological status. “The emergence of the not-existing reflection into the real world” compactly

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describes cerebral play and realization of metaphor, which make imaginary objects into “real” elements of the novelistic world. “Bely inserts the mirror as a kind of catalyst whereby the senator’s cerebral play is projected into reality,” writes Martin Erdmann; “in this fashion he produces a mind-bending unity between the acting characters and the other signifying activity of the novel.”43 Nikolai Apollonovich’s amazement at seeing unreal things emerge from the mirror world echoes the reader’s supposed surprise, in the novel’s first chapter, at how creatures from Apollon Apollonovich’s imagination come alive in the world of the novel. This metatextual parallel signals that the characters are acting out in relation to mirror images the reader’s own interpretive strategies in relation to the novel. Apollon Apollonovich in his glittering uniform had taken on the attributes of a mirror. In the ballroom scenes, the mirrors are furnished with traits of the senator: the coldness and greenishness of the Ableukhov ears. The metonym anticipates the next paragraph, in which Apollon Apollonovich enters the room in the flesh. The language recycles and builds on the established system of mirror imagery. “Now distant echoes flew to him again, and he slowly turned around: both indistinct and dim—there somewhere, there somewhere—a dry little figure without hair, without mustache, without eyebrows cut across the ballroom.”44 Nikolai Apollonovich turns around because of a “distant echo” from the mirror world—both a literal “echo” of the preceding paragraph and the image of his father, reflected or “echoed” in the surface of the mirror, as he enters the room. His location is given only through the oft-repeated “there somewhere, there somewhere,” which sets up the deictic specification “there, there” in scenes to come. We might suppose that, as in a funhouse maze, the proliferation of images makes it difficult to pin down the exact location of the original. Apollon Apollonovich is initially described only in perileptic terms as “without hair, without mustache, without eyebrows,” which pares him down to a single positively expressed attribute—his enormous greenish ears, already implied by the “greenish” surface of the mirrors and the synesthetic confusion of reflection and echo.45 “It was not easy for Nikolai Apollonovich to gather the details of this figure flying into the ballroom—from the strain of peering through the slit in his mask he felt a sharp pain in his eyes (in addition he suffered from nearsightedness), and made out only the outline of a pair of greenish ears—there somewhere, there somewhere.” Apollon Apollonovich’s oversized and isolated ears (metonym of hearing) are contrasted to Nikolai Apollonovich’s eyes (metonym of sight), restricted by the slit of his mask. The mask has appeared early in the novel as a figure for cerebral play: “cerebral play is only a mask and under this mask is accomplished the invasion of the brain by powers unknown to us.”46 In the absence of genuinely distinguishing characteristics (he can make out only the ears, whose single characteristic, greenishness, is common to the mirror world as a

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whole), Nikolai Apollonovich nonetheless senses “something familiar, something intimately alive in it all.” As he approaches for a closer look, “the figure fell back, seemed even to grasp at its heart, ran away, and was now gaping at him. And what was Nikolai Apollonovich’s surprise: before him stood a closely kindred face; he saw it right down to the wrinkles that had eaten away at the face, the forehead, the chin and the nose; from a distance one could take that face for the face of a eunuch, a young one rather than an old one; but up close it was a helpless, sickly old man, distinguished only by his considerable sideburns: in a word, under his very nose Nikolai Apollonovich saw his father.” Nikolai Apollonovich’s own ears “echo” his father’s ears, as he discovered as a child by looking into a mirror and realizing that he was his father’s spawn; here Nikolai Apollonovich goes looking for the owner of those ears and finds himself confronted with the father whose spawn he is. The implied violence of the confrontation is apparent when Apollon Apollonovich grasps at his heart, just as when he first came into proximity with the bomb that was slated to kill him, in the first chapter, on the Nikolaevsky Bridge. Although everything here seems to take place within a cosmic system of relatedness, a universe of greenish mutually echoing reflections, the end of the paragraph abruptly divulges generational difference—Apollon Apollonovich appears to grow older, hairer, more male and more distant in age, as his son approaches him. In the next sequence, the mirror theme negotiates a shift in point of view between father and son, Nikolai Apollonovich’s entry being rehearsed from Apollon Apollonovich’s point of view.47 Although the senator remains ignorant of the masker’s identity, his confrontation with the fateful domino, like the glimpse of Dudkin carrying the bomb across the Nikolaevsky Bridge, brings on an attack of heart palpitations. “Ashamed of his fear”—the phrase anticipates his subsequent thought that “this man, all red, was nonetheless his son, flesh of his flesh: and to be frightened of one’s own flesh was shameful”—Apollon Apollonovich briefly leaves the room.48 Upon recovering, everything in the ballroom “struck his vision with its loud colors; the most insignificant images had a kind of repulsive taste that struck him personally; he saw a monster with double eagle heads; there somewhere, there somewhere—the dry little figure of a knight whose bright sword blade was in the image and likeness of a luminous phenomenon rapidly cut across the ballroom.”49 The knight, Apollon Apollonovich’s reflection, is subsequently described much as his son had seen it—“indistinct and dim,” a “dry little figure,” “there somewhere,” “without hair,” and “distinguished by the contours of its greenish ears.” In other respects the senator’s point of view inverts that of his son: Nikolai Apollonovich’s fascination with the mirror-world and the “real” figure that emerges out of it becomes Apollon Apollonovich’s disgust with the ballroom and the fantasy scene enacted upon its mirrored walls. Like his son in the previous scene, the senator stands at the threshold between the drawing room

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and ballroom. The mirror-images are conveyed to him too through violent verbal metaphors—“striking” him (porazhalo) where his son had been “assaulted” (udarilis’)—and in synesthetic terms that confuse auditory and visual input: “loud colors” (kriklivaia pestrota) where Nikolai Apollonovich had “seen” echoes. The knight, with its luminous phenomenon and the “diamond-bright emblem hanging on its chest,” already suggests the Ableukhov family crest of a unicorn goring a knight, which the specular phantasmagoria performs “when from among the maskers and Capuchins a one-horned being hurled itself upon the knight, then its horn broke off the knight’s luminous phenomenon; something clanked in the distance and the likeness of a lunar ray fell onto the floor.” As discussed above, the Ableukhov crest is also, if more subtly, enacted in the scene in which the son enters into his father’s mirrored body. Suggesting both familial violence and the union of the godhead, the very emblem of genealogical continuity becomes an image of parricidal aggression. The apparent castration carried out on the ballroom’s mirrored walls, when the unicorn’s “horn” breaks off the knight’s “luminous phenomenon,” would seem to interrupt the emanation of “spawn” and to invoke a mythic subtext in Jupiter’s castration of Saturn.50 The images of father-son violence are associated with self-violence because, in passages interpolated just before and just after this one, Nikolai Apollonovich’s friend and Sofia Petrovna’s husband Sergei Likhutin prepares to hang himself by shaving in front of a mirror—adding a sinister meaning to the perilepsis “without hair, without moustache.” To lay violent hands upon one’s hair, upon one’s body, and upon one’s kin become degrees of the self ’s division into the subject and object of violence. As Martin Erdmann has shown, the dreadful memory this scene awakens in Apollon Apollonovich is his rape of his wife on their wedding night, and the years of institutionalized rape that follow.51 The monstrousness of marital intercourse is compounded by the extramarital sexuality that may have introduced venereal disease into the family. Apollon Apollonovich suffers from a recurrent fear of syphilitic dementia.52 The image of the unicorn goring the knight “awakened an event from his past in Apollon Apollonovich’s unconscious, something long forgotten, and he sensed his backbone; for a moment Apollon Apollonovich thought he had tabes dorsalis. He turned from the colorful ballroom in disgust; and he passed into the drawing room.”53 Syphilis is significant in this context both because it is a venereal disease, thus connected to the horrid multiplication of “spawn,” and because it is a heritable disease, passed from father to child like the Ableukhov ears or the perverted Ableukhov sexuality. Furthermore, tabes dorsales affects the nervous system, the seat of the creative imagination, and the senator feels its symptoms in his backbone, which appears as a symbol of hereditary memory in Bely’s later novel The Baptized Chinaman. A kind of “original sin” inherited by the younger generation from the older generation that has engendered it, tabes

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dorsalis is subtextually tinged by Ibsen’s Ghosts, a play Bely much admired; its hero becomes an unwitting resurrection of his debauched father when he succumbs to inherited syphilitic madness.54 Syphilis engrains infanticidal violence and degeneration into the very perpetuation of the Ableukhov line, just as the unicorn goring the knight introduces parricidal violence into the symbolic representation of that line’s continuity. The fear of extramarital sexuality becomes conscious when Apollon Apollonovich learns the horrid domino’s identity. When Nikolai Apollonovich removes his mask in order to read the fatal missive, the senator wonders: “Was his son really his own son? His own son might well turn out to be the son of Anna Petrovna, simple as that, due to an accidental, so to speak, preponderance in his veins of maternal blood; and in the maternal blood—in Anna Petrovna’s blood—as precisely executed inquiries had shown . . . there ran the blood of priests (Apollon Apollonovich had made these inquiries after his spouse had left)!”55 As the fumbling language and punctilious genealogical investigation makes clear, Apollon Apollonovich’s fears that heredity identity has misfired conceal fears over the sanctity of the marriage bed. Nikolai Apollonovich’s mother, Anna Petrovna, fled the house with her lover some time before, and the sexuality that creates inherited identity may instead spread an alien taint. “No doubt the priest’s blood had defiled the unsullied Ableukhov line, and had presented the father-in-name with a simply vile son. Only a vile son—a real mongrel—could embark on this sort of undertaking (in the Ableukhov line, since the time of the Kirgiz-Kazakh Ab-Lai’s migration into Russia—since the time of Anna Ioannovna—there had not been its like).” Then again, the extramarital taint might originate in Apollon Apollonovich. The double agent Morkovin is shortly to represent himself as Nikolai Apollonovich’s half-brother, thanks to Apollon Apollonovich’s indiscretion with a seamstress; Morkovin subsequently claims to have made up this relation, but it is too late to take it back, since in this book simply to think a thing is to conceive and hence to engender it. Apollon Apollonovich attempts to separate his family from other families, and himself from his son, by appealing to the ideal of an “unsullied line” of Ableukhovs reaching back to their Mongol ancestor. His appeal to origins, however, only refers the reader back to the first sentence of the book, which shows how this logic leads rather to a universal identity in the family of Adam rather than an exclusive identity within the Alebleukhov line specifically. The comedy of errors continues as, disoriented and lost in the labyrinth of mirrors, Apollon Apollonovich first mistakes himself for the beardless boy Nikolai Apollonovich had seen in him at the beginning of the ball; turning away from his mirror reflection, he at last sees his son unmasked, but the gaze is not returned, since Nikolai Apollonovich is reading the letter from the revolutionary cell that commissions him to assassinate his father.

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Apollon Apollonovich changed the position of his body: he stood up rapidly and ran into the other room to look for the domino, but there, from out of the other room, a clean-shaven Gymnasium student poured into a tight-fitting suit quickly flew up to him; and Apollon Apollonovich was about to absent-mindedly offer him his hand; the clean-shaven Gymnasium student on closer observation turned out to be Senator Ableukhov: confusing the layout of the rooms, Apollon Apollonovich had almost crashed into a mirror. Apollon Apollonovich changed the position of his body, turning his back to the mirror; and—there, there: in the room connecting the sitting room and the ballroom, Apollon Apollonovich again saw the base domino (the mongrel), immersed in reading some (doubtless base) papers (doubtless with pornographic contents). And Apollon Apollonovich did not have enough courage to establish his son’s guilt.56

The encounters with his unrecognized reflection and his unmasked son are not just juxtaposed but explicitly echo each other, beginning with the same sentence (“Apollon Apollonovich changed the position of his body”). The young Apollon Apollonovich who appears in the mirror can even be read as an image of the son, since we are elsewhere told that Nikolai Apollonovich “resembled the senator and, even more, a photograph of the senator taken in 1860.”57 Furthermore, Nikolai Apollonovich is standing behind the senator and is therefore present in the reflected image that the senator mistakes for the “real world.” As in Nikolai’s Apollonovich’s childhood, a “stranger in the mirror” appears when both father and child are reflected in a single surface. The mirror’s function to distinguish self from other becomes increasingly foregrounded as Apollon Apollonovich struggles to come to terms with his relatedness to his son. Although the recurring refrain “there somewhere, there somewhere” has finally been resolved as “there, there,” the moment of mutual recognition to which the plot is building is once again deferred. Nikolai Apollonovich is absorbed in the parricidal message Sofia Petrovna has given him, which Apollon Apollonovich assumes to be pornographic. The senator is, of course, ignorant of how his own sexuality is implicated in all the events that led up to the letter, a text in which the father’s criminal engendering returns to him in the form of a death sentence to be carried by out his son. Looking on, he is actually reassured to reflect that “Nikolai Apollonovich was after all his son, and not just, so to speak . . . —was an individual of the male sex, begot upon Anna Petrovna, maybe—the devil only knows—where—Nikolai Apollonovich, you see, had the Ableukhov ears—ears of unbelievable proportions, and, moreover, protruding.”58 As the narrator’s halting rephrasings make clear, Apollon Apollonovich’s fear of illegitimacy is assuaged by the ears he interprets as a sure sign of a genetic relation, and “this thought about the ears somewhat softened Apollon Apollonovich’s wrath.” Yet those ears are also,

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as we have seen, the attribute that impresses upon Nikolai himself the horrific nature of existence as a continuous chain of “things engendered.” The attempted suicide of Sofia Petrovna’s husband Sergei Likhutin, who hangs himself in front of a mirror while his wife is at the masquerade ball delivering the parricidal message, provides a running counterpoint to the familial violence enacted on the ballroom’s mirrored walls. His crisis takes place in a series of fragmentary passages interspersed between these mirror scenes. Shaving his neck prior to putting on the noose, Likhutin perceives that between his body and his beard “there was no connection: except there, in the mirrors: in the light they reflected—unevenly . . . how a long reflection with a suddenly youthful face, stepping right up to the surface of the mirror, grabbed itself by its thin white throat— ow, ow, ow!”59 The violence in the mirror, the unexpected youthfulness of the reflected face, the disjoined elements that are made whole only in the specular image—all these elements are shared with the father-son scenes and imply that a self divided into parts, whether father and son or body and beard, enters into violence with itself. Once again, the mirror that stages the “connection” between those parts also becomes the scene of a violent disjuncture of the identified terms, and one that discloses the nature of the fictional world. Just before slipping the noose around his neck, Likhutin realizes that he is part of an incomprehensible universe over which he has no control. The walls of his apartment become “penetrable,” and beyond is “some kind of world invisible to him and some kind of senseless rules. . . . Reflections crept across the wall: this was probably some ship sailing past down the Moika, leaving strips of light upon the water.”60 Where the ballroom’s walls are mirrors that show another world, the wall of Likhutin’s apartment becomes a window that lets through reflections, opening Likhutin’s domestic crisis onto Petersburg’s larger processes of tropic exchange. The novel’s most stolid character, Likhutin, becomes conscious of the fictional world and its “senseless rules” only at the moment he attempts to escape it. The masquerade chapter sets up the inexorable dilemma of the novel’s suspense plot: Nikolai Apollonovich must kill his father or face revolutionary justice. However, it also possesses its own narrative arc, which emphasizes the moment of recognition. Throughout the mirror scenes detailed above, father and son fail to see each other face to face. They interact only on the figurative plane, for example in the enactment of the family crest. Their meeting takes place only at the end of the chapter, no longer at the party but in their own home. This too, however, is a hall of mirrors, in which their images are tirelessly propagated in every glass. All the mirrors burst out laughing, because the first mirror, which looked into the hall from the drawing room, reflected the white, as if floured [budto v muke], face of Petrushka, puppet-show Petrushka himself, bright red, like blood, who had rushed

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in from the hall (his footsteps clattered); and at once mirror flung reflection to mirror; and in all the mirrors puppet-show Petrushka was reflected: this was Nikolai Apollonovich flying headlong into the drawing room and stopping there as if riveted to the spot, his eyes darting between the cold mirrors because he saw: the first mirror, the one that looked into the hall from the drawing room, reflected a certain object for Nikolai Apollonovich: a skeleton in a buttoned-up frock coat, possessing a skull, from which, right and left, protruded an naked ear and a little sideburn; but between the sideburns and the ears there was a sharp little nose, larger than necessary; over the sharp little nose two dark eyesockets were reproachfully raised . . . Nikolai Apollonovich understood that Apollon Apollonovich was waiting for his son here. In place of his son Apollon Apollonovich saw only a red puppet-show marionette in the mirrors; and having seen the puppet-show marionette, Apollon Apollonovich went still; the puppet show marionette stopped in the middle of the hall so strangely, perplexedly . . .61

The scene of the confrontation mimics the layout of the masquerade ball, since it takes place at the threshold between zal (the hall or ballroom) and gostinaia (the drawing room). The configuration of the novel’s specular misprision scenes actually exhibits mirror symmetry: the first instance, in which Nikolai Apollonovich experiences himself in his father’s body, takes place in the Ableukhov drawing room as Apollon Apollonovich enters from the hall; the scenes at the masquerade ball take place across the threshold of zal and gostinaia; and in this last instance Nikolai Apollonovich enters into the drawing room where his father awaits him. In other words, over the course of the sequence of mirror scenes the two trade places within the spatial divisions of the home, just as they trade places in the mirror relationship. In this climactic passage, the moment of recognition is described from both points of view and in a parallel structure, each character stopping short at the sight of his relative in a paragraph that trails off into an ellipsis. Both characters are also transformed by the encounter—into each other, because the mirrors reflect father to son and son to father instead of showing their “own” reflections, and into the dehumanized figures of puppet and skeleton respectively. Thus the specular confusion identifies them even as it renders them inversions of one another. Nikolai is a grotesque figure of merriment, costumed and his face floured, where the father is a figure of gloom, a skeleton stripped down to his bones—the commedia dell’arte roles of death and the whiteface clown. At this point Apollon Apollonovich remembers raising his child to the mirror and pointing out the “strangers” there, a strangeness that he now feels to prevail between the “one flesh” of their bodies. Unable to initiate a “serious discussion” about their alienation from each other and from themselves, Apollon

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Apollonovich instead rushes up to the mirror, which cracks in two. “From the mirror death in a frock coat looked out at Nikolai Apollonovich . . . and the mirror exploded with a laugh: with a faint crackling sound a crooked needle ran across it like lightning; and froze there forever in a silvery zigzag.”62 The mirror continues to mediate between father and son; it now combines their two roles of death and the clown by bursting apart in an explosion both of violence and of laughter. The image operates as a compact mise en abyme for the movement of the plot, which is motivated by the violence that emerges within the shared identity of the Ableukhov family. By “exploding,” the mirror becomes the bomb, the expanding sphere that makes all things a single family or a single indistinguishable slush; at the same time, the mirror fractures into two distinct pieces, separated by a zigzag crack that recalls the zigzag gesture Alexander Dudkin’s hand had described while carrying the bomb in the novel’s first chapter. The mirror is the stage on which a universe of fragmented reflections becomes an indiscriminate exchange of identities, but it also acts out the parricide theme that divides that family unity into subject and object of violence. The tension between these two mechanisms motivates the chain of events that is the Oedipal plot, but in the same stroke ends narrative time, since the zigzag that runs across the mirror’s surface freezes there “forever.” 4. SUICIDAL SYLLOGISMS

To figure the novel’s universe of exchange within the frame of a mirror seems to suggest that the text is a whole and coherent object. At the same time, the crack in the mirror seems to enact the play of dynamic difference and fracturing violence that motivates the novel’s plot. This double function of the mirror engages a series of classic and related theoretical oppositions: figuration and mimesis, fantasy and realism, metaphor and metonymy, symbol and plot. When Apollon Apollonovich becomes a mirror hosting his son’s image, the scene might be read as a cluster of metaphors. Like a mirror, he reflects images; a mythic generator of beings, he creates offspring in his image; father and son are identified in a single entity. At the same time, it participates in a series of metonyms. Apollon Apollonovich is wearing a reflective uniform; he sires and rears his son, passing on his perverted sexuality; their proximity is a plot point in the unfolding drama.63 One reason the figurative structure of a text might privilege heredity is because it has to do at once with metaphor and metonymy, mechanisms whose interaction, according to Roman Jakobson, constitutes the verbal artwork.64 Kin identity can be expressed in terms of metaphoric substitution, as when we say that a child “has his father’s ears,” but we also speak metonymically of “a chip off the old block.” The English kinship expression “spit and image” or the Russian “like two drops of blood” (kak

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dve kapli krovi) are simultaneously metonymic (shared substance) and metaphoric (shared image). Narrative classically brings the relationship of resemblance to a fatal metonymic climax, as when Ovid’s Narcissus grasps his fatal image or when, in Bely’s early short story “The Return” (“Vozvrat,” 1905), the main character “falls into the embrace” of his reflection in a lake and drowns.65 Narratologists have described plot tension as an urge toward the dissolution of dynamic elements into sameness, the anonymity of death or the union of marriage; narrative thus develops through metonymic relations of cause and effect toward the metaphoric whole of the text.66 In psychoanalytic theory, the narrative double has been read as a fantasy of the soul or immortal self that exists outside of time, as opposed to the mortal and sexually reproduced self that grows and decays.67 In Petersburg, this tension between the fixity of the metaphoric whole and the temporal dynamism of plot is manifest in the unity of father and son, which splits violently in two at the moment it is realized in the mirror. Kinship relations figure how the book’s aspiration to be a single “great word,” in which every element is metaphorically identical with every other element and every scene reflects every other scene, is fundamentally incompatible with the violently unfolding plot. “Nothing embodies this mixed state of resemblance and proximity better,” writes Gérard Genette in an essay on Proust, “than kinship relations . . . bringing the aunt and nephew together, substituting the son for the father and the daughter for the mother, bringing the ambiguous pleasure of confusion to the point of vertigo.”68 Genette suggests that the metaphorical identity of disparate elements builds narrative tension through the threat of its dissolution. Metaphor (symbol, stasis, identity) contrasts with metonymy (mimesis, plot, juxtaposition), and this tension is most keenly felt when the text possesses a universal master metaphor that would close off the play of contrast and causation that moves the plot.69 With this in mind, Petersburg’s Oedipal plot can be read as a dynamic staging of the same-but-different structure of metaphor. The dream of perfect identity, which aspires to end history by realizing the ideal unity of the human family, is synthesized in the narrative structure of the novel with the plot-time that acts by holding off that utopian or apocalyptic union. The master metaphor of heredity is made dynamic by anxieties over legitimacy and familial violence, whose possibility grows more apocalyptic in proportion as familial identity becomes more universal. Aspirations to a universal family speaking a universal language thus invoke a symmetrically universal apocalypse that would bring about the end of time—like the family mirror, when the fracturing zigzag “freezes there forever,” apparently annihilating the very scene of representation and the aesthetic text.70 The bomb’s explosion does not kill the senator, but it does destroy the book, by withdrawing the source of narrative tension.71 Chloë Kitzinger has connected

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the fizzling-out of the novel’s linear narrative to a failure of filiation, figured in the text by degeneration and the gradual extinction of bloodlines.72 Cerebral play has brought into being a bomb that figures the expansiveness of creative thought; in a supreme act of textual self-destruction, that bomb is to destroy the very imaginative processes that generated it.73 Bely imagines that the creative word and human genealogy “complete the circle” by returning to their common origin in Adam—a destructive apocalypse at the end of time that is also a mythopoetic revelation of the original act of creation. Petersburg sets in motion a system of figures that are inevitably realized as the destruction of narrative itself. However, we are only able to discern these mechanisms because of those same metaphorically generated identities—parent with child, person with image, reflection with heredity. The identity of father and son is realized in the mirror as a metaphorical bomb that explodes the very scene of mimetic reproduction. Parricide and infanticide, which interrupt the chain of generations, are themselves “things engendered.” “There are knotlike points that draw together contradictory ambitions,” Bely writes in his autobiography, when “the unity of diversity suddenly appears; what had looked contradictory sounds harmonious; and what had cut, like scissors, suddenly closes in your strengthening will.”74 Such an epiphany promises the unified “symbol of a mystery that never reveals itself,” articulated by images of hereditary identity throughout Bely’s work and especially in the figurative structure of Petersburg.75 In the oxymoronic simile of a pair of scissors, the two blades come together into one and solve the contradiction—but only, one imagines, by cutting the “knot” in two and thus creating another division. The image recalls an important scene in Petersburg, in which scissors resolve the confusion between self and other only by becoming a parricidal instrument. He, Nikolai Apollonovich . . . Or not him? No, him—him: at the time he had told them, apparently, that he hated the repugnant old man: that the repugnant old man, the bearer of diamond emblems, was an inveterate scoundrel [otpetyi moshennik], simple as that . . . Or had he said all that to himself? No—to them, to them! Nikolai Apollonovich . . . clearly imagined: one nasty action, committed by a scoundrel on a scoundrel; suddenly he pictured the scoundrel; gleaming scissors went snip in this scoundrel’s fingers when this scoundrel clumsily hurled himself forward to snip through the little old man’s carotid artery; the bony old man’s forehead bunched up in a mass of wrinkles; the bony old man had a warm pulsing throat . . . the scoundrel went snip-snip with the scissors around the bony old man’s artery, and the stinking sticky blood poured over the fingers and the scissors alike and the little old man—beardless, wrinkled, bald—suddenly burst out crying and staring right into his eyes, into Nikolai Apollonovich’s eyes, with an imploring expression,

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squatting on his haunches and trying to press his shaking fingers to the opening in his throat, from which, with a barely audible whistle, red streams were spurting, spurting, spurting . . .76

This late passage inverts the terms of an early one, which tells us that “Apollon Apollonovich had become convinced that his son was an inveterate scoundrel [otpetyi moshennik]: so the sixty-year-old father committed daily acts of terrorism, albeit intellectually achieved, upon his own blood and upon his own flesh.”77 The caveat “albeit intellectually achieved” only reminds us of the novel’s origin in cerebral play, which undermines any distinction between an “intellectual” act and an accomplished one. Across these two chiasmic scenes, placed near the end and beginning of the book respectively, the thought processes of father and son reflect each other—the nasty action committed by a scoundrel on a scoundrel. Nikolai Apollonovich’s suicidal thoughts are realized as a parricidal plot, while Apollon Apollonovich’s fantasies of violence against his son become realized as violence against himself. Even the phonetic level of the passage encodes this cycle of procreation, identification, and violence. The verb “to spurt” (priadat’), whose repetition ends the passage, recalls the word for spinning thread (priadenie), so the scissors that cuts the thread of Apollon Apollonovich’s life also opens a new line spun by a new Fate. To judge by this and many other scenes, the narrative structure of Petersburg is something like a syllogism. Apollon Apollonovich commits an intellectual act of terrorism on his son; his son is “his own flesh and blood”; therefore Apollon Apollonovich commits an act of terrorism upon himself. Or, since the lemma renders the two figures interchangeable, Nikolai Apollonovich intends suicide; he is his father; so he makes an attempt on his father’s life. Nikolai has doubts about the origin of the idea—was it his, was it another’s, did he tell it to himself, did he tell it to another? In fact the idea is immanent to the novel’s syllogistic logic. Returning home from the masquerade, Nikolai Apollonovich sees the coat of arms over the door of the Ableukhov house and the “wild thought” enters his head that his father, Apollon Apollonovich, “was in fact that very knight; and behind this thought foggily slipped, without rising to the surface (a fish becoming visible in the deep): the ancient family crest applied to all the Ableukhovs; and he, Nikolai Apollonovich, was also being gored—but by whom was he gored?”78 The themes of Christology, cerebral play, and Oedipal violence here are all by now familiar. What I want to stress here is how Nikolai Apollonovich’s rhetorical question, in which he tries to understand the origin of violence within the unity of the family, explicitly takes the form of a syllogism. One way of understanding this syllogism is to note that the utopian mystery of metaphor—that “A” meaningfully is, yet obviously isn’t, “B”—is transformed into

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violence as those metaphors become dynamic in plot time. Apollon Apollonovich, in thinking badly of his son, commits terroristic acts upon “his own blood and his own flesh”; “Nikolai Apollonovich cursed his mortal self and, insofar as he was the image and likeness of his father, he had cursed his father”; Apollon Apollonovich remembers that Nikolai Apollonovich “was his son all the same: flesh of his flesh: and to be terrified of one’s own flesh is disgraceful”; Dudkin thinks that “the senator’s son was joined for him with the senator in a single paroxysm of disgust and in a desire to extirpate, to exterminate the whole tarantula breed.”79 The logic of hereditary identity that is a metaphor for the novel’s aesthetic unity also threatens a total violence against the integrity of the text—suicide, parricide, and infanticide become radically undecidable. Petersburg begins by invoking the common ancestor, Adam; if kinship renders every member of the human race identical, then any murder is by logical extension a genocidal apocalypse. And since the metaphor of hereditary identity is intimately identified with the unity of the creative artwork, then any violence committed in this mass of “things engendered” undoes the entire text. The total destruction the text wreaks upon itself might thus be interpreted as an inevitable and symmetrical reaction to the universe of figurative identity that it spells into being. Paul de Man writes that “precisely where the highest claims are being made for the unifying power of metaphor,” the same images can be decomposed into metonymic operations.80 Theodor Adorno ascribes the unique qualities of individual artworks to their negotiation of this contradiction: the artwork emerges from a political and economic context whose trace it bears, even as it qualitatively distinguishes itself from that context as a more or less coherent and self-sufficient aesthetic entity. “Art acquires its specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of,” writes Adorno; “its law of movement is its law of form.”81 Petersburg’s circular narrative of mythopoetic creation and apocalyptic collapse, which plays itself out both in the register of legal constitution and of aesthetic imagination, suggests this larger aesthetic problem of how an artwork reacts against the context that produces it. Because the novel claims to create itself ex nihilo and to engender itself through the multiplying figures of image, parentage, and text, it can represent its desire for formal unity only by inflicting violence upon itself in all these figurative modes. The mirrors break, the family disintegrates, the plot fails. 5 . R E A D I N G M AT T E R

Steven Kellman defines a genre of books that represent their own genesis through metaphors of paternity. He sees “the self-begetting novel,” a category that includes Petersburg and its claim to have been cerebrally engendered, as symptomatic of

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high modernism’s aspirations to perfect autonomy.82 Mirrors, on the other hand, are the classic image of mimesis, which repeats a truth that already exists in the real world. Petersburg partakes of this scheme as well, since it relates the propagation of images to the enforcement of paternal law and political organization. There is a great deal of contamination between these metaphorical schemes. Kinship is a social and economic fiction as well as a literary one, while political constitution can be seen as a performative act of the imagination. Bely’s novel is invested in pushing these categories to the breaking point. When it speaks of “the emergence of the not-existing reflection into the real world,” for instance, the image seems inherently paradoxical. How can a reflection that does not exist become a real, original thing? How can a phantasm of the imagination emerge from a mirror’s slavishly duplicating surface? The progenitive and mimetic functions seem at first blush incompatible with one another. The opposition has been entrenched in critical attitudes. Michel Riffaterre calls texts poetic only insofar as they are constituted by closed systems of metaphoric displacements that thereby, he stresses, “threaten the literary representation of reality, or mimesis.”83 Materialist criticism, on the other hand, has militated against claims of aesthetic autonomy, which one author calls “the single most effective impediment to the development of a consistently historical and materialist approach to the study of literary techniques.”84 Bely’s mirror scenes and his use of kinship tropes, however, show how these conventionally opposed attitudes interpenetrate each other—at any rate, how they can be made allegories of each other.85 Bely attempts to theorize the relationship between the determining context of thought and the mythopoetic function of the symbol in a 1909 essay. “We soar upwards to the crests of cognition, where cognition only dreams of existence, and from there we soar upward once again to symbolic unity,” Bely writes. “Then we come to understand that even cognition itself is a mere dream of this unity. In our dream we awaken into another dream.”86 In this potentially endless sequence, reality is structured like a series of nested mises en abyme, something like Petersburg’s genealogies of cerebral play or the hierarchy of realities in Invitation to a Beheading.87 As in the plot of Petersburg, this expanding unity becomes fragmented and questionable at the moment it seems complete. Bely asks whether these “dreams” of transcendent unity are not fundamentally pastiches of some determinant reality—whether, as Fredric Jameson translates the question into a materialist idiom, “our imaginations are hostages to our modes of production.”88 Bely goes on to recognize some basic level of organization that manifests itself in every act of the creative imagination. “What is created in dreams we call realities,” he writes, and “all these realities are colorful and rich. But the laws of all these realities are the same. These realities, as they are perceived through the laws, give us an image of

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objective reality.” In supposing an underlying reality that conditions every ideological and cultural form, Bely’s poetics seems assimilable to something like a theory of base and superstructure.89 In the same essay, he writes of the conditions of artistic production, describing aesthetic media and historical conventions as the “clay” in which the divine image is given flesh, setting material “limits beyond which content cannot proceed.”90 But he also argues that the virtue of an artwork’s formal harmony lies in making those limits apparent and therefore gesturing beyond them to the possibility of another reality. Art’s relationship with limits of any kind possesses an explicitly revolutionary aspect, according to a 1908 essay in which Bely claims that art is “a tactical device in humanity’s struggle with fate. As in the liquidation of class divisions a certain dictatorship of a class (the proletariat) is necessary . . . in that minute when fate turns the universe into nothing but a narrow prison, the artist recoils from the prison, occupies himself in the prison with some trifling baubles.”91 At this point, what seems like a declaration of art’s irrelevance suddenly becomes a statement of art’s revolutionary potential. “These baubles are artistic creations. No, they are not baubles: no, this is the preparation of explosive materials. The day will come when the artist will throw his raging apparatus at the prison walls of fate. The walls will fly apart. The prison will become the world.” Keying us in to a set of real—if intermittent and confused concerns—with art’s revolutionary potential, the passage is suffused with imagery later recycled in Petersburg. Here Petersburg’s major symbol of the bomb is named as art itself, whose encounter with the limits prescribed by its historical context opens up a new world on the site of “fate,” a catch-all bugbear variously legible as social class, internalized ideology, and narrative destiny. The explosive action of art, which acts by creating metaphoric unities, is compared to the political tactics that are to dissolve class identities in order to yield a single human family. Although Bely can hardly be neatly slotted into either the formalist or Marxist trends in early twentieth-century Russian criticism, passages like this one resonate strongly with both. He attempts to join a pure formalism, in which artistic “baubles” are in perfect opposition to material reality, with an incendiary consciousness that will destroy the prison of hierarchical society. The mingled political and aesthetic theory he voices here is, perhaps, more striking yet in his poetic practice—in Petersburg’s utopian project of universal kin identity. In the Soviet Union, formalism had been decried as counterrevolutionary by the 1930s. “Detaching art from actual reality, renouncing its reflection of social life and historical period, formalists deprive the artwork of its meaning,” denounces a Soviet handbook of literary terms for use in schools.92 Western Marxists have, however, persistently reengaged formalism, often with a lucidity and pugnacity that speaks to something undigested in the encounter. They criticize formalism’s dismissal of direct

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linkages between the aesthetic and the economic; note the material contingencies of formalist theory, such as the nostalgia for artisanal production evident in the fetishization of craft or the class perspective implicit in skaz; and express exasperation with a theory of literature that “systematically refuses content, and indeed aims at translating all such proposed content back into projections of the form.”93 Nonetheless materialist criticism is only partially fulfilled as descriptive sociology. It is helpless to account for artistic experience unless it also possesses mechanisms to describe artistic forms and to relate them in sophisticated ways to the aesthetic system, to the historical horizon and economic life. Suspicion of art’s estranging functions and a tendency to limit these functions to the modernist period have sometimes hampered the development of these techniques within materialist discourse. The same Soviet handbook attacks modernism for rejecting “the reflection of objective reality” in favor of the artist’s whimsical internal experience.94 Raymond Williams writes in the same vein that “the formalist emphasis on the ‘device’ as ‘estranging’ (making strange) is a correct observation of one kind of art, in a period of restless and necessary experiment against fixed (hegemonic) forms, but it cannot be extended to a principle of form as such: the materializing of recognition is an evident formal element of much of the great art of the world.”95 Williams’s version of estrangement, however, elides the critical context in which Shklovsky initially described the technique— an example from Tolstoy in which a horse speaks of the human institution of property in uncomprehending terms that make ownership, specifically of laborers like horses and serfs, absurd. The concept of artistic estrangement actually originates in reference to a technique for discovering economic conventions in texts by one of the great realists; indeed, Tolstoy was a model novelist for critics with artistically conservative outlooks, including Lenin and Lukács. Perhaps most importantly, literary works—Bely’s, of course, but also authors beyond the historical avant-garde—give pride of place to scenes that, like specular misprision, encode defamiliarization and recognition at the same time and in a single object. The distorting and mimetic functions of art may be more necessarily interrelated, and in a wider range of contexts, than Williams supposes. In the historical moment of Bely and Shklovsky, writes Irina Paperno in her essay on life-creation (zhiznetvorchestvo) in the theoretical writings of the Russian symbolists, “deliberate aesthetic organization of behavior was a part of a general utopian project of the total reorganization and divinization of the world and of man.”96 Bely’s choice in 1908 to articulate his aesthetic philosophy in terms of class conflict points the continuity of a totalizing aesthetic project with a totalizing revolutionary project that, a decade later, was to exert itself in a period of utopian fervor. “The 1920s in Soviet Russia was a unique moment in history,” writes Svetlana Boym, in which “art-making and life-making coincided, and the country

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turned into a creative laboratory of various conflicting utopian projects.”97 Experiments in artistic form and efforts to reconstitute social structures of relatedness— often, utopian revisions of kinship and family structure—appear in this context as mutually informing or even continuous projects. One strand of avant-garde ambition converged with totalitarian political processes and industrial production practices to form what Boris Groys calls the “total art of Stalinism” (Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin).98 Writers of fiction were, in Stalin’s famous phrase, “engineers of the human soul”; according to Anatolii Lunacharsky, “the task of art” was to apply “general laws of artistic taste” to “a mechanical industry even more colossal than it is now, to the construction of life and the everyday world.”99 Literature of the period therefore allows us to compare fantasies of fiction’s emergence into real life, as we have encountered them in Bely, with programmatic efforts to replace social fictions, like the consanguineous family, with newly imagined alternatives. In this context, a work of art that “speaks only of its own coming into being, of its own construction,” as Fredric Jameson summarizes the formalist attitude, accurately describes the production of life, or at least the effort to collapse the two.100 Even beyond the historical moment of the Russian avant-garde, comparative readings bring into relief the operation of the kinship metaphor in other periods and show how the family is persistently being reimagined, and society with it. Thus the decay of the hereditary aristocracy in Enlightenment Europe, in the wake of the American Revolution, or after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire can be linked to fantastic modes of kinship identity in various gothic texts, which often encode those alternative kinships in scenes of specular misprision. Indeed, even in so-called realist texts such scenes construct for the reader obviously fictional identities, which bear upon the contingent form of the given social order as well as that of the given novel. A self-referential figure like kin identity not only represents the aesthetic text’s construction and emphasizes its formal principles, it elucidates and emulates the social metaphors that regulate labor and reproduction of labor. In this fashion, works of art become capable of speaking for other categories of work, which lack figurative modes in which to represent themselves. My argument can be contextualized within a larger effort to identify and analyze systems of figural exchange that span texts and material economies. The uniquely illuminating but widely relevant moment of Soviet experiments with kinship might be compared to claims by New Economic Critics that texts written around the time that coined or paper money became widespread are privileged to open up broader observations about literary form and exchange relationships.101 The chapters to come will turn specifically to fiction’s interpenetration with its historical context, starting with the gothic—the genre most obviously dominated by family legacies, ancient curses, and the ambiguities of inheritance—and moving

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on to Soviet fantasies of a future siblinghood of the proletariat. In all these cases, the scene of specular misprision relates the figurative structure of the artwork to economic structures at work in the context of its production. Although these figurative structures are specific to the literary texts in which they occur, the fact that literature’s metaphoric structures are continuous with economic ones is an important cultural phenomenon with wider application. In gothic tales of hereditary hauntings and Soviet fantasies of a world beyond the bourgeois family, fiction’s efforts to come to grips with history and to imagine a world to come are continuous with the social fictions that structure economic life in the present.

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

hAUNTED hOUSEhOLDS

1. ThE IMpRINT OF ThE REAL

“It is not our purpose to trace down the history of the Pyncheon family,” begins Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 romance The House of the Seven Gables, “nor to show as in a magic picture, how the rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the venerable house itself.”1 The book’s preface contradicts these sentiments, however, since it promises a genealogical account that will show how “the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones,” and hopes to “convince mankind . . . of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity.”2 The narrator’s statement that he does not intend to show these events “as in a magic picture” is also inconsistent, since the House of the Seven Gables contains “a dim, large looking-glass . . . fabled to contain within its depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there.”3 This mirror is the very scene of family history—the Maule clan that built the house and was cheated of its labor by the Pyncheon family that took possession of it is rumored to have enchanted the mirror and made it “alive with all the departed Pyncheons; not as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin.” Indeed, this “magic picture” seems to be the ideal image of the book that we are reading. “Had we the secret of that mirror,” concludes the narrator, “we would gladly sit down before it, and transfer its revelations to our page.” Hawthorne’s teasing rhetoric asks the reader at the outset to find some concealed intersection of art and inheritance. The plot reaches its climax when that intersection’s hiding place is revealed: the Maule family’s deed of ownership (now a useless scrap of paper) is discovered behind a portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, the founder of his line and therefore the immoral origin or, as Hawthorne puts it, the “Evil Genius of his family.”4 This dynamic between inherited capital and the artistic imagination is enacted for us as a Pyncheon family drama, but plays out upon larger scales of history. The theft of the Maule land comes to figure the

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disenfranchisement of the Indians, while the magic picture that freezes time foreshadows technological innovations in aesthetic media, most notably photography. Holgrave, the dilettante artist who rents the Pyncheon garret, combines in himself the disinherited member of an ancient race and the creative maker of a future art. He is a daguerreotypist, a writer of romances, and is at last revealed to be the scion of the Maules. If the “evil genius” of the Pyncheon family is explicitly that of legal contract, exploitation, and inbreeding, its redemptive future lies in the love between Holgrave and young Phoebe Pyncheon, which dissolves the novel’s conflict by joining the rival clans. Like the mirror ensorcelled by his distant ancestor, Holgrave’s daguerreotypes reveal the sins of ancestors perpetuated into the present. He shows Phoebe a picture he has taken of her wealthy uncle Judge Pyncheon, which “conceive[s] the original to have been guilty of a great crime.”5 Phoebe fails immediately to understand Holgrave’s puns on “conception” and “original,” which suggest original sin and identify photographic mimesis with the exposure of hereditary guilt; the taint of ill-gotten property repeats itself in successive generations of owners as exactly as the living image is transferred to the photographic plate. When Judge Pyncheon seeks from her a grotesque incestuous kiss, however, Phoebe recalls the image, reflecting that “this very Judge Pyncheon was the original of the miniature,” that his evil “was hereditary in him, and transmitted down as a precious heirloom from that bearded ancestor, in whose picture both the expression, and, to a singular degree, the features of the modern Judge, were shown as by a kind of prophecy.”6 Holgrave sees a diabolical inheritance where Phoebe sees an incestuous lust, but in both cases the artwork shows us exchange—financial in one case, sexual in the other—monstrously restricted to a single lineage. Thanks to the mutually supporting mechanisms of inbreeding and inheritance, present social relations recapitulate past ones and thus the same sin repeats in every generation, just as in the magic mirror.7 The metaphor of a magic mirror obviously suggests photography, which would seem to be another form of repetition, but Hawthorne also extends to Holgrave’s portraits some creative potential to break with the past. At the very least, it works to expose the sins of the Pyncheon family to its own unwitting members, who are thereby saved from the incest plot. The miniature reveals a past crime, but confounds its repetition in the present; from the perspective of the photograph, even the oil portraiture of past generations is shown to work “by a kind of prophecy” and therefore to entail some orientation onto the future. The inbred Pyncheon clan is only the preeminent among the novel’s allegories of degenerate aristocracy. Even the “hereditary marks” on the chickens are “a symbol of the life of the old house . . . degenerated, like many a noble race besides, in consequence of too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure.”8 In language anticipating that of Soviet radicals a century later, Holgrave argues for the abolition of

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the family tout court. “To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do,” Holgrave rails. “The truth is, that, once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean pipes.”9 The artist’s screeds against the fiction of inheritance—“a Dead Man . . . disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he”—acquire a properly prophetic function when Holgrave’s rant resolves into a utopian vision of a day “when no man shall build his house for posterity. . . . That single change, comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform which society is now suffering for.”10 The House of the Seven Gables, the gothic commonplace of a mansion haunted by an age-old family curse, becomes legible as a monument to the larger evil of hereditary caste and division of labor. The Pyncheon family’s demonic founder, “the original perpetrator and father of this mischief,” has brought sin into the novel’s world because he has “perpetuated himself,” living in houses built by other people and willing them to his children.11 His aspirations to found an aristocratic line perpetuating itself endlessly into the future are undone, however, by an alternate genealogy of artistic techniques—“the daguerreotype, and its resemblance to the old portrait.” Because the ancient Pyncheon family is reminiscent of Hawthorne’s own Puritan lineage, while Holgrave’s romances and photographs speak to Hawthorne’s own artistic vocation, these metafictional tropes have a dual, even contradictory function, to represent the author’s social class as well as his aspirations to eliminate it.12 A man who pays rent in a house built by his forefathers, Holgrave’s political speeches invoke the rhetoric of nineteenth-century radicals who pinned social reform to a radical reconstruction of the family.13 Holgrave’s character has satirical aspects, and the parable in which he appears, which “seems to condemn class division and inherited privilege,” ambiguously “ends by relying on both for its happy resolution,” as Anne Lounsbery notes.14 Nonetheless, utopian family structures are a constant and compelling theme in Hawthorne’s works. In the conclusion to his most famous work, The Scarlet Letter, the child of adultery witnesses “the firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.”15 Georg Lukács has broadly criticized the literary motif of hereditary determinism as occluding “deeper motives which could reveal the essence of human and social relationships.”16 Hawthorne reminds us that kinship really is a determining social fiction and that kin identity really does motivate social relationships. When fiction articulates these relationships as a set of literary figures, it is not occulting, but

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rather articulating principles of social life. In this vein David Punter has described The House of the Seven Gables as the myth of “an over-powerful haute bourgeoisie which has tried to usurp democratic privileges” by breeding itself into an aristocratic caste.17 The hereditary afflictions of the Pyncheon family—most obviously their congenital apoplexy—do not mystify economic relationships, as Lukács’s generalization would suppose, but actually make apparent, on a figurative plane, inheritance’s role in the reproduction of social class.18 Specifically, Hawthorne criticizes the aristocratic logics that the American experiment was supposed to repudiate—the wealth that stays inside the family, as the inbred blood circulates through generations of Pyncheons. As Holgrave’s fantasy of a world beyond “all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting” suggests, the nineteenth-century gothic and the Russian avantgarde can be profitably juxtaposed.19 Eric Naiman has argued that “theories about the role played in the rise of Gothic fiction by bourgeois anxieties about class legitimacy in the wake of the French Revolution find a parallel in uncertainties about the proletariat’s legitimacy as a ruling class after 1917.”20 Most recently, Muireann Maguire has examined the collisions and collusions of Socialist realism and the gothic fantastic. “Gothic obsession with property and its repossession is perhaps uniquely apposite” to Soviet redistribution of private property, she remarks, since “Gothic plot effects a comparable process of expropriation: the restitution of stolen property from its usurpers to its true heirs.”21 Like Hawthorne, Russian artists tied the prospect of new and better art to new and better family structures. The motif of specular misprision, widely used in Russian modernist fiction as in numerous gothic texts, puts the Russian experiments of the 1920s into concrete dialogue with efforts in other times and places to imagine some footing for society beyond inherited privilege. Like the early Soviet Union, the early United States boasted systematic efforts to transform the legal fictions linking distribution of capital to familial identity. “At the first session of our legislature after the Declaration of Independence, we passed a law abolishing entails,” boasted Thomas Jefferson in an 1813 letter. “And this was followed by one abolishing the privilege of primogeniture. . . . These laws, drawn by myself, laid the ax to the foot of pseudoaristocracy.”22 Like Russian writers a century later, Hawthorne wrote literary fiction in the context of legal fictions intended to reformulate or abolish the hereditary constitution of wealth. In its outlines, The House of the Seven Gables possesses a typical gothic plot— an usurper’s falsification of legal documents and murder of the rightful owner; a building haunted by an ancient curse; a true heir disclosed many generations later, who loves a daughter of the rival house, and whose feelings are contrasted with the usurper’s own incestuous designs. Indeed, these elements are already present in the genre’s canonical first exemplar. The prologue to Horace Walpole’s 1765

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Castle of Otranto has the avowed moral that “the sins of the father are visited on their children” (which we have seen to also be the moral purpose declared in Hawthorne’s prologue to The House of the Seven Gables) and the stated motivation to blend the “ancient” romance of “imagination and improbability” with the “modern” taste to “copy” nature (and Hawthorne also follows Walpole in the constructive tension between a fantastic art that invents and a mimetic art that repeats or copies).23 The theme of hereditary guilt and a preoccupation with synthesizing the poetic imagination with a mimetic mode of realism are, of course, current in modernist texts like Petersburg as well. If there are compelling parallels between the early American and early Soviet contexts of political experiment, there is also a clear literary tradition stretching back from modernism to gothic texts, which are inherently invested in kin identity as well as in the poetic imagination’s uneasy coexistence with mimetic or photographic verisimilitude. As the genre concerned above all with the uncanny survival of the past in the present, the gothic necessarily turns to figures of hereditary identity that work across generations. Often this takes the form of an unhappy aristocratic line united by some ancient sin in addition to any material inheritance. In the gothic mirror, the genealogical mechanisms that organize the reproduction of labor in real life become reflected as a fantastic, arbitrary, and supernatural agency. Insofar as it is grounded in heredity as an occulted force, gothic is deeply conservative; insofar as it renders heredity a terrifying and implausible fiction, it is profoundly radical. Its kinship metaphors encode the political opposition between aristocracy and democracy as well as the aesthetic tension between fantasy and mimesis.24 Gothic “not only distorts the proper perception of the relation between present and past,” writes Fred Botting, but “marks discontinuity between political and aesthetic versions of history.”25 Those divisions and discontinuities have been seen to inform the formal structures of gothic literature. For Maggie Kilgour, gothic represents a nostalgia for lost “organic wholeness . . . a symbolic system of analogies and correspondences” that are supposed to have bound people in simpler times to “their families, societies, and the world around them.”26 Its ancestral curses show that “the present can never detach itself from the past,” that despite historical change and social atomization the organic preindustrial life of yesteryear is still with us.27 The figurative structure of a gothic novel thus creates a unified figurative system that, argues Jerrold Hogle, aspires to integrate for its readers inherently unsettling shifts in changing social relations and modes of economic exchange—including commodity capitalism, one reason for the genre’s enduring popularity in mass culture.28 On this reading gothic can be loosely assimilated to Bely’s desire to repossess a unified system of true names, since in both cases the formal unity of the artwork is conferred by a symbolic structure rooted in kinship metaphor. In Petersburg, this structure aspires to an Adamic family of engendered things alongside the

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more obviously gothic theme of the hereditary privilege and inherited guilt that bind together the Ableukhov household. More broadly, such texts can be taken to illustrate Georg Lukács’s claim that artworks do not have the option, in a society fractured by class divisions and technical specialization, of simply representing a given totality. Rather, they must “produce out of themselves” an integrated aesthetic object that carries “the fragmentary nature of the world’s structure into the world of forms.”29 An ambitious text like Petersburg inevitably represents, in its own failure to constitute a totality, the futility of its utopian project to render a divided humanity a formal whole. Especially in its gothic manifestations, this dream of holistic form in a socially fractured world often involves some alternate metaphorics of kinship that would replace the patriarchal family—an outcome feared and desired in variable proportion. In The Scarlet Letter, that “new truth” that is to “establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness” comes in the last pages to figure the transcendent truth and rhetorical unity or “whole relation” to which the novel itself aspires, but cannot attain. Indeed, specular misprision between fathers and sons, for all that it is a mainstay of the Western novel, arguably distracts us from other fundamental identifying processes, like the “mirroring” relation between mothers and daughters that perpetuates motherhood as an institution in the bourgeois family. Here too the scene of kin identification that perpetuates a social order is at the same time the site of utopian thinking, since, as Nancy Chodorow argues in her psychoanalytic account of mother-daughter identification, “liberation from the constraints of an unequal social organization of gender must take account of the need for a fundamental reorganization of parenting.”30 Feminist accounts of the gothic have described Oedipal struggles over the inheritance of womb-like houses—witness The House of the Seven Gables—as, in Claire Kahane’s words, a “surface convention” that houses a more fundamental confrontation between self and other, the separation of the child from the mother’s body.31 This “fundamentally ambivalent struggle for a separate identity,” Kahane concludes, establishes an “ongoing battle with a mirror image who is both self and other . . . at the center of the Gothic structure.”32 If in The House of the Seven Gables it is a malevolent patriarch who inhabits an uncanny mirror, in Ann Radcliffe’s Udolpho and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood it is a mother who appears in the glass. European modernists like Isak Dinesen and Yuri Olesha, as analyzed below, turn to the same trope in ways that work against the grain of patriarchal curses and patrilineal property. In this chapter I will read gothic texts in broad comparative perspective in order to show how kin identity, as mediated in mirrors, comes to articulate both inherited caste and the alternate principles of relatedness that, during periods of profound historical change, promise to displace it. Hawthorne, the author in world literature who turns most consistently and deeply to the motif of specular

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misprision, is invested in the antiaristocratic promise of American democracy. In the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Miroslav Krleža uses the trope to critique both hereditary aristocracy and racialist nationalism. Isak Dinesen and Ivan Bunin, looking back to the French and forward to the Russian revolutions respectively, write fantasies of patriarchal village life shot through with alternate kinships—like that between aristocrats and peasant wet nurses—that encode fundamental economic relationships, especially the nobility’s dependence on the serfs who feed them. All these authors metaphorically relate artistic language to social fictions immanent in economic life. Indeed, the system of metaphorical kinship central to Bunin’s 1912 novella Dry Valley anticipates one used by Soviet politicians who attempted, a decade later, to shift the symbolic locus of kinship from the marriage bed to the communal kitchen. 2 . N AT h A N I E L h AW T h O R N E : S p E C U L AT I V E F I C T I O N S

The triangulation of art, inheritance, and mirrors is already present in Hawthorne’s first works and remains a constant theme through his last romance. In his second published story, the 1830 “Old Woman’s Tale,” a poor couple, “distant relatives, sprung from a stock once wealthy,” lacks the means to wed.33 Dozing off together in the town square, surrounded by reflective pools, David and Esther share a dream vision of their common ancestors: a “niggardly and avaricious” old woman with a shovel and an old man “stamping with his foot fiercely enough to break a hole through the very earth.”34 The moonlight shining through the specters and “dancing in the fountain” illuminates the young couple reflected in the surface of the pool even as it exposes their kinship with their sinister forebears.35 The ghostly vision discloses the location of a buried treasure, a financial stock or delayed inheritance, which will allow David and Esther to wed—that is, to make the frustrated incestuous union a legal one.36 However, the apparent dream come true may well presage a nightmare. The specters are husband and wife, but are estranged from each other by the treasure that, in ghostly pantomime, each seeks to hide from the other. There is something diabolical in the old woman’s Luciferlike limp, and the old man seems about to break through the crust of the earth. In rooting out the gold, the lovers may dig their way to a hell of avarice and inbreeding rather than a paradise in each other’s arms. In Hawthorne’s last romance, the 1860 Marble Faun, “the daughter and heiress of a great Jewish banker . . . had fled from her paternal home to escape a union with a cousin, the heir of another of that golden brotherhood; the object being to retain their vast accumulation of wealth within the family.”37 As in The House of the Seven Gables, the social evil of inbreeding—which again appears as a means of hoarding capital—is manifested as a physiological disorder. Miriam’s incestuous

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fiancé is characterized by “traits so evil . . . as could only be accounted for by the insanity which often developes [sic] itself in old, close-kept breeds of men, when long unmixed with newer blood.”38 Even Miriam’s escape from this hereditary destiny is accomplished by the logic of parentage. “Something in Miriam’s blood, in her mixed race, in her recollections of her mother” has allowed her to reject this “pre-arranged connection.” A scene of specular misprision places hereditary and artistic reproduction side by side in order to propose new metaphors in lieu of these monstrous relationships by blood. Miriam’s New England friend Hilda sits for a painting in Miriam’s studio; beside her is a portrait of the Renaissance noblewoman Beatrice Cenci, famous for abetting the murder of her incestuous father; opposite them is “a looking-glass in which Beatrice’s face and Hilda’s were both reflected.”39 Hilda fancies “that Beatrice’s expression, seen aside and vanishing in a moment, had been depicted in her own face likewise, and flitted from it just as timorously.” The thrill of specular recognition passing between the Renaissance parricide and the New England Puritan seems to be triangulated by the painter herself, who may also have abetted a murder in order to free herself from her incestuous family. “It was the intimate consciousness of her father’s sin that threw its shadow” over Beatrice, while “it was the knowledge of Miriam’s guilt that lent the same expression to Hilda’s face.” In this baroque configuration of artist, model, subject, portrait, and mirror, the Christian and Jew share by metaphoric transference the familial sins of incest and inbreeding. Yet the novel frames this new, metaphoric family as redemptive rather than monstrous. Miriam and Hilda belong to different tribes of the human family but nonetheless are “dearer than sisters of the same blood,” and they escape the heredity plot together in the final pages.40 The theme of specular misprision thus spans Hawthorne’s entire career. I want here to focus on the 1838 tale “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure,” which stages the formation most compactly, and his 1850 Scarlet Letter, which is most well known. The title character of “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure” is an imaginative but impractical man who “might have cut a very brilliant figure in the world, had he employed his imagination in the airy business of poetry, instead of making it a demon of mischief in mercantile pursuits.”41 Similar puns opposing angelic art and Luciferian lucre saturate the story. Peter has received a legacy but squandered it in various harebrained schemes. His sober-minded friend John Brown offers him a solid sum for the rotting mansion that remains in Peter’s possession—he intends to build a commercial block on the site—but Peter refuses to sell. “There seemed, indeed, to be a fatality that connected him with his birth-place.” This fatality is the quintessential gothic trope of a haunted house inhabited by family ghosts. Peter’s great-grand-uncle, also named Peter Goldthwaite, “whose character seems to have borne a remarkable similitude to that of the Peter of our story,” is rumored to have concealed a treasure somewhere in the house.42 In the tale’s most far-fetched

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variants, this first Peter Goldthwaite enriched himself by a pact with the devil, but made no practical use of his hoard before he died. This tension between a legacy from the past and a speculation on a future gain structures the story. Peter demolishes his material inheritance from top to bottom in search of a fantastic one, ending with the kitchen where his housemaid, lacking money for firewood, economically burns the rubble. In the process Peter encounters uncanny images of his namesake: in his dreams, in a charcoal sketch depicting a man and a fiend gathered together over a buried treasure, and finally in “the fragment of a full-length looking-glass. . . . When Peter, not knowing that there was a mirror there, caught the faint traces of his own figure, he partly imagined that the former Peter Goldthwaite had come back, either to assist or to impede his search for the hidden wealth. And at that moment a strange notion glimmered through his brain, that he was that identical Peter who had concealed the gold, and ought to know whereabout it lay.”43 The specular confusion of kinsmen coincides with a confusion of the real and the phantasmal, extending to the entire house as Peter’s search consumes it. At last there remains “nothing but a shell,—the apparition of a house,—as unreal as the painted edifices of a theatre.”44 A metaphorical theater, the house yields at last an equally spectacular “ghost of dead and buried wealth” in paper money, “old provincial bills of credit, and treasury notes, and bills of land, banks, and all other bubbles of the sort. . . . Bills of a thousand pounds were intermixed with parchment pennies, and worth no more than they.”45 John Brown, the businessman of narrow imagination who is looking on when the casket is opened, remarks that this is “just the sort of capital for building castles in the air.” Whether due to his own temperament for poetic fancy or to the lingering influence of his uncle’s ghost, Peter has torn down the solid dwelling of his forefathers in order to obtain the inheritance of a speculative fiction. Hawthorne’s tale reflects the development of symbolic currencies in nineteenthcentury America and especially doubts about the value of paper money. As Marc Shell observes in an essay on Edgar Allan Poe’s nearly contemporary story “The Gold-Bug,” “credit, or belief, involves the very ground of aesthetic experience, and the same medium”—writing—“that seems to confer belief in fiduciary money . . . also seems to confer it in literature.”46 If an act of Congress might turn paper into money, “why could not an artist turn paper with a design or story on it into gold?”47 As in many other nineteenth-century fictions by both American and Russian authors, the phantasm of paper currency becomes in “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure” emblematic of other investments in objects of the imagination, especially literary fiction.48 In the context of an economy becoming increasingly reliant on social fictions like credit and publicly owned stock, we can see John Brown as one of the moralists who “argued for the solidity of property over the corruptions of consensually determined, ‘fantastical’ value,” as Russell Valentino sums

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up the attitude in his book on the shift to virtual economic values in Russian and American literature.49 Judge Pyncheon too believes in “the big, heavy, solid unrealities, such as gold, landed estate, offices of trust and emolument, and public honors.”50 Hawthorne’s story ends with an apparent victory for the practical man when Brown’s offer to purchase the land is finally accepted, Peter cheerfully concocting “a plan for laying out the cash to great advantage.”51 However, despite the term “real estate,” John Brown too is speculating on the Goldthwaite legacy. He too plans to realize a profit by tearing down the mansion in favor of an imaginary castle in the air—albeit a rather bland one, a brick commercial block. For John Brown, Peter’s intention to gamble with the proceeds from selling his house proves that he is mentally incompetent to manage them. “We must apply to the next court for a guardian to take care of the solid cash,” he muses complacently in the story’s self-referential conclusion, “and if Peter insists upon speculating, he may do it, to his heart’s content, with old PETER GOLDTHWAITE’S TREASURE.” His words carry implications that contradict his apparent meaning, however. On one figurative plane, this next court is divine judgment, the guardian is a guardian angel, and Brown’s speculations in real estate are of no account in that castle in the air that is the Kingdom of Heaven, which will realize spiritual value as an everlasting reward. On another plane, that court is the editorial office that will evaluate the fictional story that John Brown unwittingly names, and convert literary to monetary value when the author receives real payment for his paper speculation, “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure.” In an 1843 sketch, Hawthorne anatomizes the world as a “Hall of Fantasy” where businessmen discuss real estate “speculations” that are “as much matter of fantasy as the old dream of Eldorado, or as Mammon’s Cave, or any other vision of gold, ever conjured up by the imagination of needy poet.”52 Real estate deals, in other words, are as much a fiction as Peter’s printed banknotes or Hawthorne’s story, which was sold for money to The Token. In stating his preference for title deeds over other kinds of speculation, John Brown, even as he names the title of the story in which he appears, is blind to the artistic fancy of which he is in fact the creation. “Why on earth should I feel called upon to write a book?” quips the hero of Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities. “I was born of my mother, after all, not an inkwell.”53 The joke is that Ulrich, a literary character, was born of an inkwell. Brown, another product of cerebral engendering, makes a similar mistake in failing to recognize his origin in the shifty process of “speculation.”54 Hawthorne himself was well aware that literary fiction might realize more value than a legal contract. In 1836 he had recouped just 5 percent of a contractually obligated salary from a bankrupt employer—but he was paid cash for “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure” and in an 1850 diary entry complains bitterly to find the story pirated by a British publisher.55 The tale can be read as a comment on the artistic imagination’s status as the model for the fictions that organize

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economic life. It represents within its frame how systems of conventional value— paper money, property titles, and deeds of inheritance—also involve an investment of fancy in an object that in the same stroke acquires real, if arbitrary, value.56 Indeed, the “airy business of poetry” seems in a modern economy more astutely alive to fluctuations of value than earthier “mercantile pursuits.” Hans Binswanger has argued that the first full vision of a capitalist investment economy appears as an allegory linking poetry and alchemy in Goethe’s Faust.57 Since money is a universal substitute that can stand in for any commodity, it is appropriate that a mass of “parchment pennies” might represent both John Brown’s business investments and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literary fancy. The gothic premise of an ancient fortune made by a pact with the devil and left for posterity in a moldering house, which appears throughout Hawthorne’s work, thus reflects upon phantasms of capitalist value. Hawthorne’s experiment with life at the utopian community of Brook Farm lasted a mere eight months; unlike Holgrave’s radical screeds, his exposure of social fictions as airy speculation hardly seems a call to action. On the contrary, it may even be a form of quietism. His campaign biography of President Franklin Pierce expresses the hope that slavery in America, the radical inheritance of social caste and alienated labor, would “vanish like a dream” of its own accord.58 But neither is the conceit limited to the genre of the romantic sketch. Hawthorne employs similar figures in “The CustomHouse,” the ironic autobiographical essay that introduces The Scarlet Letter. As Peter Goldthwaite felt the “fatality” of inheritance that “connected him to his birth-place,” Hawthorne “felt it almost a destiny to make Salem my home; so that . . . as one representative of the race lay down in his grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the Main Street—might still in my little day be seen and recognized in the old town.”59 Hawthorne explains his turn to the unprofitable business of literary fiction as a break, albeit an incomplete one, with the hereditary line and the Protestant ethic of utility. “These stern and black-browed Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for their sins, that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of my family tree, with so much venerable moss on it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself.” The idle imagination that distinguishes him from his forebears is exerted, however, in imagining himself subject to their judgment. “ ‘What is he?’ murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. ‘A writer of story-books! What kind of business in life,—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation,—may that be?’ ” The fantastic imagination seems to set Hawthorne apart from the stern bequest of these oppressive ghosts, but they live on in his literary endeavors despite everything. “Let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine.”60 The same paradox, that children are both distinct from their ancestors and subject to a

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legacy of patriarchal judgment, is projected into the future of the Hawthorne family, whose line “should at last be severed,” Hawthorne avers, echoing his character Holgrave.61 “My children . . . so far as their circumstances may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” Yet Hawthorne’s imaginary disinheritance of his children is itself a fantasy of patriarchal control over future generations and marks deeper tensions. To appease his ancestral ghosts, Hawthorne accepts a government job in the Custom-House. The comparison of money and literature we found in “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure” yields here, in the very temple of commerce, another image of exchange rates between symbolic currency and speculative fiction. Uncle Sam’s gold, which Hawthorne receives as his salary, has “a quality of enchantment like the devil’s wages,” while his fictions retain “true and indestructible value” and their letters “turn to gold upon the page.”62 As he grows accustomed to material concerns and bureaucratic life, Hawthorne finds that his imagination has become a “tarnished mirror,” no longer capable of lending spiritual dignity to ordinary objects.63 He attempts to nourish his literary vocation by sitting down to write in parodically gothic environments, haunted by the reflective processes that are at the same time the stage of the imagination. “Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the halfextinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative.”64 Far from yielding a world of the imagination that will free him from his family, Hawthorne’s efforts to “fling myself back into another age” produce the first chapter of The Scarlet Letter—a historical scene of Puritan forefathers guarding the sanctity of the family.65 Instead of freeing him from his ancestry, Hawthorne’s literary art delivers him into the original scene of cruel New England patriarchy. As in Petersburg or The House of the Seven Gables, the fiction is framed by a metaphor that takes shape across the threshold between the novel’s prologue and its opening pages, and that identifies genealogical with literary origins. Where the introductory essay ends with a mirror and a longing for freedom from the family, the narrative proper opens at the door of a prison where Hester Prynne, in the very “Utopia of human virtue and happiness” that is the American dream, has been caged for extramarital sexuality.66 She has compounded her crime by “artistically” embroidering the letter that should be a mark of shame. The letter’s ornate detail renders the adulterous stigma a literary work, possessing both autobiographical and metafictional implications.67 Hawthorne wishes to “sever” his paternal line by writing fiction; Hester’s refusal to give Pearl a father makes her an artist in the medium of letters. She is both a Puritan ancestor from whom Hawthorne can claim descent and a figure of authorship with whom he can identify.

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The biographical resonance may run deeper yet, since Hester’s crime of sex outside the family and her letter “A” invert the crime of sex within the family and the letter “I” for incest. Incest is the sin that haunts the House of the Seven Gables, among other households in Hawthorne’s oeuvre. As Hawthorne may have known, his own Puritan ancestors had been prosecuted for incest and made to wear parchments marked with the letter “I” to advertise the crime.68 Hawthorne’s abhorrence of property accumulating within an incestuous bloodline, associated with his own storied lineage, becomes, in The Scarlet Letter, an inverted fantasy of adultery, affiliated with the Jacksonian democracy that promised to efface the inherited guilt of the Old World as it spread into the new Edens of the American West. Despite the novel’s systematic inversion of patriarchal heredity, it returns in a series of mirror scenes. During her public humiliation on the scaffold, Hester undergoes an “exhibition of phantasmagoric forms” that recapitulates her entire life, beginning with an image of “her paternal home.”69 Above the door—like the prison door that stands “at the threshold of our narrative,” this door is a guardian of family order—appears a family crest, the “token of antique gentility.”70 There is “her father’s face . . . her mother’s too,” and finally “her own face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it.”71 This “dusky mirror,” which alludes to St. Paul’s efforts to discern humanity’s kinship with a father-creator “in a glass, darkly,” thus portrays the successive members of Hester’s lineage.72 Hester sees there even the man she married back in England, but her reverie is cut short when the man himself, her estranged husband Roger Chillingworth, joins the crowd below the scaffold, as if called forth by the mirror of Hester’s imagination. Pearl’s legal if not genetic father, Chillingworth’s appearance interrupts Hester’s life narrative before it reaches the woman’s adventure outside the patriarchal family, and before her family tree sprouts its illegitimate limb. Pearl does appear in a parallel scene focalized through her biological father. Arthur Dimmesdale “kept vigils . . . viewing his own face in a looking-glass” until “visions seemed to flit before him,” also of his family tree, his “white-bearded father” and “ghost of a mother” and then “Hester Prynne, leading along little Pearl, in her scarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first, at the scarlet letter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman’s own breast.”73 These visions of his unacknowledged family prompt him to go out at night—once again, Roger Chillingworth looks on from the shadows—to take his place upon the scaffold along with Hester and their daughter. Like the scarlet letter, Pearl is “herself a symbol, and the connecting link between these two.”74 If she is a symbol, however, she is an illegible one, a kind of blind spot in which both family and language become most urgent but also most indecipherable. Just as the red A is a text that advertises adultery without disclosing the identity of Hester’s lover, Pearl testifies to the fact

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of parentage, but not who her parents are.75 When she speaks a secret into the minister’s ear, her words are a kind of futurist poetry that “sounded, indeed, like human language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing themselves with”—“a tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman” that “did but increase the bewilderment of his mind.”76 At one point Pearl claims to have budded from a rosebush, the plant that grows at the “inauspicious portal” of the prison door from which “our narrative” is “about to issue” in the first chapter.77 She thus identifies her birth with the origin of the novel, and indeed the narrator performatively plucks a flower from this bush in the first chapter and presents it to the reader “to symbolize some sweet moral blossom.”78 At another point, Pearl cries, “I have no Heavenly Father,” and the townspeople, “seeking vainly for the child’s paternity, and observing some of her odd attributes, had given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring.”79 Pearl is herself a mirror reflecting a range of possible parentages—maternal through Hester, paternal through Dimmesdale, legal through Chillingworth, divine as she is the image of God, demonic as she is the violation of his law. Once, this freakish, elfish cast came into the child’s eyes, while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and suddenly,—for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions,—she fancied that she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of Pearl’s eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice, in them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in mockery.80

This evil spirit in the “unsearchable abyss” of Pearl’s eye becomes, like Pearl’s imaginary language, a symbol of the text’s carefully cultivated inscrutability. Hester seeks the moment of anagnorisis that will satisfyingly resolve her story, which Chillingworth had interrupted when she stood upon the scaffold. Her child is to be the symbol or mirror where every thread converges to show her own “miniature portrait,” just as the truth of the Pyncheon family and the novel that concerns it is distilled in a photographic miniature of Judge Pyncheon. Pearl harbors multiple paternities, however: unhappy Dimmesdale to whom the child is the badge of unacknowledged guilt, overlaid with the demonic qualities of Chillingworth to whom Pearl’s existence is an affront. Like the “A” that is the advertisement of unregulated sexuality, Pearl’s existence unsettles both genetic and legal identity by proving that they do not coincide. When Nikolai Apollonovich is reflected in the mirror of his father’s body, their ambiguous identity affirms the principle of biological kinship and the system of cosmic analogies built upon it. Pearl, on the

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other hand, reflects at once a “natural” and a “legal” father—Dimmesdale, the weak Christian who dares not disclose his lapse, and Chillingworth, the figure of Old Testament vengeance who would reject Pearl in order to bring justice to the adulterer. Perhaps most radically of all, the figure in Pearl’s eye is also a fantasy of the maternal relation that is suppressed by patriarchal law. A “natural” child, a bastard who believes herself to be born of a rose bush, Pearl is also an “unnatural child,” one who flouts every convention and is called a demon spawn. Her eye, which figures the perspective of a future generation even as it mirrors the current one, mingles Chillingworth, the cruel judge, with Dimmesdale, the minister of love. Their mixture there foreshadows the novel’s epilogue, which promises that Chillingworth and Dimmesdale will at length be united. “In the spiritual world, the old physician and the minister—mutual victims as they have been—may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted into golden love.”81 Through a familiar pun on the exchange of genetic and financial “stock,” which dates back to his earliest stories, Hawthorne appeals beyond the legally defined family to a utopian Christian kinship of “golden love”—another familiar play on words that unites material and spiritual values.82 Pearl herself is transported in the final pages to an unknown realm, as distant as a spiritual kingdom and as rich as a heavenly treasure. She sends home letters “with armorial seals upon them” recalling the decayed family crest of Hester’s English estate, “though of bearings unknown to English heraldry” and perhaps more closely related to the quasi-heraldic emblem of the scarlet letter itself.83 Their inscrutable foreignness is more akin to the magical language Pearl addresses to the minister on the scaffold than to any existent nation. Still a symbol but never a sign, perhaps Pearl’s magical tongue and mysterious family are decipherable in that far-off land where she has come to dwell, which has something in common with Russian avant-garde utopias of zaum language and ideal kinship. There are children in this distant world, or at least Hester is seen “embroidering a baby-garment, with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult, had any infant, thus appareled, been shown to our somber-hued community,” but they are cut off by the frame of the novel. We are left only with the “golden fancy” that has been identified with a heavenly currency—perhaps Peter Goldthwaite’s treasure, his ability to speculate in a better future. Pearl’s family exceeds the mimetic function of the novel. It belongs rather to that “brighter period” to come “when the world should have grown ripe for it,” and “the whole relation between men and women” placed “on a surer ground.”84 The Scarlet Letter begins at a prison door, the emblem of a debased Christian utopia, and ends with the promise of another and better community of love beyond the family—“striking roots into unaccustomed earth,” as Hawthorne in the novel’s introduction wished his own children might do.

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3 . M I R O S L AV K R L E Ž A : C I R C U L AT I O N O F M AT T E R

In Miroslav Krleža’s 1932 novel The Return of Filip Latinovicz, an artist returns to his mother in Slavonia after eleven years in Western Europe. The child of a courtesan, Filip has no way of knowing who his father is, even as he feels (or figures) that father as a ghostly presence in his flesh. His conundrum forms the basis for a shrill criticism of mythologies of kinship in social life: the decadent aristocracy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as racialist conceptions of the Volk in the nation-states that replaced it. Krleža’s critique turns upon a reductio ad absurdum argument—a Darwinian version of Bely’s Adamic family. Aristocratic lines and the ideology of the Volk, the novel suggests, make no sense in a world where, if we were actually to trace our ancestry back to an original ancestor, it would be a primeval—simian, or even saurian—beast at the wellsprings of biological evolution. Civilization seems not to run very deeply in this novel, in which global economy and the artistic avant-garde are both recrudescences of the primitive. A coach-driver whose participation in colonial wars has not blunted his provinciality represents the Central European Everyman, “supporters of the surrealist movement in its most decadent sense. They live in a primeval space” and experience themselves only as “the duration [trajanje] of matter as such. Existence among things and events.”85 Where Hawthorne is invested in showing how objects of value and social orders are generated through speculative fictions, the inhabitants of Krleža’s universe are, like it or not, matter, and perpetuate themselves through a universal exchange of substances—“one incomprehensibly immense overflow of something that spreads in space and is entangled in itself like a satiated boa constrictor; it swallows itself and vomits itself, and vulcanizes itself in pitch and filth!”86 Jean Paul Sartre once quipped that if he had known of the novel’s existence he would not have bothered writing Nausea.87 Krleža’s amazing cluster of reflexive verbs goes on to form a totalizing vision as radical, in its own way, as Bely’s “universe akin”—“movement in all directions, a confused circulation of matter without foundation and without any kind of inner meaning: of itself, by itself, it walks and buries itself, and is born again and springs up, as water, as mud, as food: kills itself, devours itself, digests itself, secretes itself, swallows itself, moves and travels, along the intestines, along roads, along ravines, along the waters!” Here, however, there is not even the trace of spirituality that is gnostic debasement. “In books this is all called: National Economy,” summarizes Krleža.88 The child of a prostitute, Filip Latinovicz’s very existence results from sexuality’s integration into the money economy. Figures of generational continuity (“buries itself, and is born again”) occur here as one element in a vast system that also includes alimentary exchange (“devours itself, digests itself ”). The book directly compares sexual and alimentary substances as commodities. The emblematic

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coachman worships the phallic idol of his horse’s genitals; “the stallion’s sperm was a valuable fluid to him, which he collected with his fingers, saving every drop and selling it at the highest market price, as his wife sold cream.”89 The journeys of people to distant places, the circulation of cultural texts, and the exchange of goods are paraded through Krleža’s novel not as indexes of human development, but as expressions of this primeval circulation—at once compelling and repulsive—of matter. A universe of circulating identity comprises a major strain in Western metaphysics. Its locus classicus is Pythagoras’s exhortation to vegetarianism in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Because the atoms of dead humans are absorbed into the bodies of other beings, argues Pythagoras, to eat them is to eat one’s own comrades, parents, and siblings. “When you take the flesh of slaughtered cattle in your mouths, know and realize that you are devouring your own fellow-labourers.”90 A somatic economy arises in which the body is constantly engaged in consuming and producing the world of which it is an integral part, and to which it stands in a perpetual relationship of exchange. A similar metaphysic of universally circulating bodily matter, assimilable to both kinship and food, is central to early twentiethcentury Russian philosophy. Nikolai Fedorov’s influential 1906 tract The Philosophy of the Common Cause called for humanity to give up the cannibalistic incorporation of substances that contain the scattered atoms of its ancestors and instead work together to resurrect its forebears by restoring to them their original atoms and thereby reconstituting their bodies.91 “There is only one doctrine which demands not separation, but reunification, to set oneself not artificial goals, but one common, perfectly natural goal for all—this is the doctrine of kinship,” writes Fedorov.92 He calls on human beings to give up food (the cannibalistic incorporation of our parents’ scattered atoms) and sex (the propagation of mortality into the fractured bodies of increasing numbers of children) in favor of the resurrection of an original, immortal family. In literary theory of the 1930s, a universe of grotesque exchange underlies Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the novel as a perpetually unfinished field of “heteroglossic” discursive forces striving to absorb one another. The novel “renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia” and is in “living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality.”93 These properties of the novel closely analogize Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque body, which similarly is “not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits . . . in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating drinking, or defecation.”94 As every speech act is for Bakhtin oriented out of itself and onto the other, always interacting with the systems of ideology and behavior through which material needs are satisfied socially, so too the body is integrated through exchange with the world outside it: the consumption and elimination of food,

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the release of sexual fluids, and the birth of children.95 These two categories of exchange, the alimentary and the procreative, constitute “the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of genetic development” where life and death intersect each other, rendering the grotesque body “two bodies in one: the one giving birth and dying, the other conceived, generated, and born.”96 In lieu of the classical aesthetic relations of harmony and beauty, the grotesque body participates in asymmetrical exchanges—one body consuming another body or the dying generation giving way to the younger one. For both Bakhtin and Krleža, the grotesque is not a solely aesthetic phenomenon; the asymmetrical oppositions of grotesque texts stem from the existence of strongly hierarchical, if potentially invertible, social classes.97 Where Bakhtin writes enthusiastically of these economies of open exchange, which he identifies variously with peasant culture of the Middle Ages and with cosmopolitan debate, Krleža’s Filip Latinovicz senses the universe of identity chiefly as a threat to individual integrity. For its early reviewers, the novel announced Croatian literature’s “entry into one of contemporary European literature’s most significant themes, namely, the theme of lost identity and the search for identity.”98 The potential for total connectedness through shared familial or alimentary substance is countered by the necessity for total violence, since all beings strive parasitically to consume one another’s substance. Moreover, Filip senses that openness to other beings—the circulation of matter in the world or the interplay of discourse in the novel—not as a plenitude but as an absence. His loneliness is precipitated by the radical uncertainty of his parentage, without which he cannot orient himself within the mammoth, vertiginous exchange economy.99 In terms of gustatory incorporation too, which exists here in perpetual counterpoint with sexual procreation, alienated modernity arises from a lack: dwellers in cities have decayed or artificial teeth, so the part of the body that chews is literally missing.100 Over the course of the novel the missing teeth and the missing father become figuratively identified with each other. Krleža’s focus on the physical exchange of substances forces us to think of kin identity not just as a literary trope of speculation and imagination, but as an element in material economies. Where Bely’s universe of identity is explicitly opposed to reality and Hawthorne treats economic life as a system of speculative relationships, Krleža’s metaphorical exchanges relate to the radically physical body and to the material circulation that produces and sustains it. In one of many misanthropic reveries, Filip reflects upon the interpenetration of conception and the grave, manifested in the novel as the genitor’s physical presence in the offspring’s body. “Every individual drags around with him the enormous circles of his existence, his own warm innards and other people’s warm innards, from which he has issued like a caterpillar.”101 The Croatian word utroba typically means “intestines,”

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but can also refer to the uterus. Krleža’s pun renders the ontogenetic process of sustaining life by consuming and digesting food (intestines) continuous with the phylogenetic process of sustaining the species through sexual procreation (the womb). The elder generation’s innards become the cocoon from which the “caterpillar” emerges, and persist as a genetic burden that individuals are forced to drag after them. Neurasthenically sensitive to the anonymous origin he bears, Filip fears the impersonal circulation of substances, the dumb Schopenhauerian urge of all matter to perpetuate itself through time. He derides his Oedipal disgust at seeing his mother on the lap of her lover, the aged Dr. Liepach. “Silly. The life of old men too, like that of other organisms, is nothing but an expression of the body and the bodily. It is an instinct in humanity that drives us towards the prolongation of life. Towards duration [trajanje]! Towards the prolongation of duration!”102 Doctor Liepach is, according to his mother’s questionable assertion at the end of the novel, Filip’s father; if so, then Filip is the extension in time of this man whom he despises, whose hands “grasp at life itself from the already dark approaches to the grave.”103 Then again, Filip can never be certain who his father is, although he is keenly, neurotically aware that he must have had one. An illegitimate child with a brace of potential paternities in a book obsessed with lineage—noble bloodlines and illustrious names, antique family portraits and patents of hereditary nobility— Filip Latinovicz experiences his father only as a gap, a haunting, an unknown curse. At stake here is the question of identity. If to engender a son is, as Filip claims, to perpetuate the father, then that son’s identity can only be established in reference to that of his sire. “The painful question of paternity which Filip poses—‘who his real father is’—is really the question of his own identity,” notes Mladen Engelsfeld: “ ‘Who am I?’”104 Filip keeps company here with thousands of fictional foundlings who seek their real parents, a stock trope in fairy tales and popular novels. Miroslav Krleža was himself the child of a demimondaine; like his character, he was reputed to be the son of the bishop of Zagreb.105 The book grants parentage a prominent role in the epistemology of selfhood.106 Filip Latinovicz has attempted to take charge of his identity through an act of performative language, changing his birth name, Sigismund, to Filip—after his legal father, a servant in the bishop’s house.107 Thus the phrase Return of Filip Latinovicz, which seems to refer to the title character’s return to Croatia from abroad, also suggests a parallel between linguistic and genealogical continuity: the paternal signifier Filip Latinovicz “returns” when Filip adopts the name. As in Hawthorne, the fact that biological and legal kinship do not coincide underlies a critique of the aristocratic presumption to inscribe biological caste in a name. Krleža gives Croatia’s inbred gentry ridiculous hybrid titles like “Count Uexhull-CuillenbandCranensteeg,” “Countess Maria de la Fontaine et D’Harmoncourt-Uverzagt,”

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or “Count François de Paul Maria Zaharia Anton Wenzel Deym”—palimpsest markers of convoluted genetic origin among a social class that defines social position in reference to lineage. Filip Latinovicz’s assumption of a new name, identifying him with one of many potential fathers, does nothing to assuage his doubts about his parentage, even as he senses that unknown patriarch or parasite working in his own flesh: The dead, the unknown and hypothetical dead in Filip, were made up of endless complexes of the most unlikely suppositions and fixations: bishops, servants, old women with jays in dark rooms, faces from the velvet album, Polish civil servants in fur-trimmed leather coats—all of them had shouted within him and had moved about his childhood bed like living creatures. Even later, as an adult, he could feel his nails growing longer of themselves, like the nails on dead hands in closed graves, and they were the nails of those unknown dead beings within him, and his hair was theirs as well! Man is nothing but a vessel full of other people’s tastes and experiences! There were moments in Filip’s life when he was convinced that it was not he, personally, subjectively, who saw what he saw, that some distant and unknown being within him was looking at things in his own way. Listening to the ringing of bells dying away in flat circles over the Krajina, as when circular ripples spread on the mirror of the waters at the touch of a bird, Filip often thought of that unknown and alien, wax-like, dead ear which was now listening to the ringing of the bells through his own ear. Out of nowhere, without cause, he would become oppressed by a painful and inexpressible sadness: that forsaken being within him was grieving for someone. He (Filip) was not forsaken, but he felt sad.108

The “inexpressible sorrows” are in fact not expressed in this passage, which carefully avoids naming the phenomenon as that of unrecognized paternity even as it foregrounds the associated epistemological dilemma of self-knowledge. Filip’s inability to “know” the being within him is related to an inability to “know” himself, as implied by the figurative “mirror,” which is empty but indexically refers to the entity that has touched its surface and then disappeared. The “circular ripples” that distort the image of the self can be collated with the “circles of his existence . . . other people’s warm innards, from which he has issued” in the passage quoted above. The procession of the “hypothetical” dead—the bishop, the manservant, the photo album young Filip had leafed through looking for his father—are the potential parents who remain physically present in him.109 In his childhood, they had shouted and moved through his body; as an adult, a dead ear listens through his own, another self watches what he sees, and his hair and nails grow with the ghostly force of another life that persists beyond its proper boundaries, like the hair and nails that seem uncannily to grow on a corpse. If the parent is a cocoon

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from which a “caterpillar” crawls out, the child is a grave in which the father is buried. Already it is suggested that this reading is more than figurative. The alien resident’s experiences are not with Filip but physically within him (u Filipu). After the impersonal pronoun “he (Filip)” the character’s name is specified parenthetically in order to distinguish our hero from his inhabitants. Filip’s sense of self dissolves into these strangers whose experiences constitute his “own” ego. “Thinking about himself and his own duration, about his beginnings and about the limits of his personality, Filip lost himself in vague pictures, and it was impossible to find himself!” The lost self disappears into the lacuna figured by the nameless phantom. “Really it appeared as if somebody else’s life streamed through our hands,” Filip reflects, “nothing but a reply to old letters read long ago, echoes of forgotten words, memories of old guilt and suffering for somebody else’s helplessness.”110 The crucial word duration (trajanje), used here to describe the temporal unity of the individual, elsewhere describes the sexual instinct by which the organism reproduces itself beyond its own lifespan; its iconic image is the strand of a corpse’s hair continuing to grow after death. Even Filip’s internal monologue is an echo of or answer to earlier words and other voices, participating in a process of linguistic circulation analogous to the circulation of substances. Without being able to name his father, however, his relations to his self are as inconclusive as the pictures in his mother’s album of photographs: “processions of dead servants, bishops, canons, chamberlains, unknown chance customers of the tobacconist’s,” any one of whom could be the father he feels inside his flesh.111 As an expressionist artist, a painter who projects his subjective experience onto canvas, Filip’s aesthetic philosophy is called into question by the fact that his emotions appear to derive from his forebears. If he feels the sadness of his forsaken antecedent although “he (Filip)” has no personal reason to do so, is he the author of the inner life expressed through his brushwork, or is that too a projection of the alien within? As his paintings of repellently sensual female flesh suggest, the problem is especially pronounced in Filip’s sexual drive, which he experiences as an impersonal force. “Before the various women it was always someone else in him who waited.”112 What a psychological reading would explain as a neurasthenic distancing of the self from the body can in this novel be read as a biological phenomenon—the selfish gene aiming for one more generation of survival. Filip’s psychology appears to be made up largely of memories inherited from his forebears, who, because they can persist into the future only through procreation, have a vested interest in his sexual life. His congeries of odd phobias, “nothing but ghosts and phantoms” and yet powerfully affecting even so, seems actually to stem from other people’s experiences.113 For example, his apparently irrational fear of hats “had at one point been explained of itself, by chance; his mother had

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told him how all the Valentis’ property in Poland had gone under the hammer, and the auctioneers, whom her father had seen as a child beating a drum outside the family home, had had tall hairy black top hats!”114 Filip’s dictum “that within us other beings live as in old graves, and that all of us are mere dwellings full of unknown dead occupants” is a phrasing of the Freudian creed that, as the American poet H.D. deftly put it, “we are all haunted houses” populated by the neurotic bequests of our childhood homes.115 One of Krleža’s lyric poems parallels H.D.’s line almost exactly, even emphasizing the gothic image: “Our ‘I’ is like an old house / full of strange dead tenants.”116 However, The Return of Filip Latinovicz literalizes this haunting as a hereditary rather than a personal memory. This fear is somehow able to affect Filip even before he knows what caused it—the experience of a maternal grandfather he never met. That experience is the loss of a material inheritance (his mother’s family’s property is alienated from the household and dispersed into the larger economy), so the inherited phobia that persists through biological generations is an anxiety over kinship’s failure to ensure material inheritance. The congenital phobia may even substitute for inherited property in its role to maintain kin identity across generations. Inherited memory, at work here as well in the figurative structure of Bely’s Petersburg, was often treated as a biological fact in the early twentieth century. “Memory and heredity almost coincide in one concept if we reflect that organisms, which were part of the parent-body, emigrate and become the basis of new individuals,” claimed Ernst Mach in 1906.117 Mach ascribes the fear of ghosts to inherited impressions; assertions of this kind inform Filip Latinovicz’s phobia of the dead.118 A 1906 popular science article also transposes gothic phantoms into the vocabulary of pseudoscience. “That a child should present certain features of his father and mother, and reproduce certain well-known gestures and mannerisms of his grandfather, is looked upon as something very ordinary. Is it not possible that the child may inherit something of his ancestor’s memory?”119 For this author, uncanny coincidences and déjà vu represent “the sudden awakening, the calling into action of something we have in our blood; the discs, the records of an ancestor’s past life. . . . We have in ancestral memory a natural answer to many of life’s puzzles, without seeking the aid of Eastern theology.” The privilege of Western science to dismiss Eastern mysticism is, however, immediately couched in a vocabulary of the supernatural. “Whether we believe in apparitions or not, this world is a haunted one,” concludes the author, waxing poetic. “Our thought-world is full of deep undertones that roll in upon us from the past. . . . The commonplace expressions, the ordinary words we use, are blocks of mind-stuff, wrought into their present state by the ponderous mace of time, and cast and recast in many brains.” The doctrine of hereditary memory was common currency in popular fiction as well as popular science—think of Jack London’s 1903 Call of the Wild, in

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which the once-tame dog slips easily into “memories of his heredity” and experiences himself as a wolf skulking at a caveman’s feet.120 Although the scientific theory of organic memory was largely discredited by the 1930s, it remained a popular means to conceptualize the link between members of a family and, ultimately, to provide a supposedly biological basis for theories of national character.121 In Central Europe ideologies of hereditary memory lingered longer than elsewhere. The quintessentially Viennese discourse of psychoanalysis maintained the belief fiercely. As late as 1939 Sigmund Freud rebuked “the present attitude of biological science, which rejects the idea of acquired qualities being transmitted to descendants.”122 The inheritability of experience is crucial to Freud’s late emphasis on philosophy of civilization, which depends on the analogy between communal memory and individual experience. “If we accept the continued existence of such memory traces in our archaic inheritance,” Freud continues, writing in exile from Nazi racialism, “then we have bridged the gap between individual and mass psychology and can treat peoples as we do the individual neurotic.” For Freud, the psychoanalytic narrative does not even require that the traumas that shape the personality be personally experienced. He explains in a 1918 case study that the key traumas shaping personal development, “scenes of observing parental intercourse, of being seduced in childhood, and of being threatened with castration are unquestionably an inherited endowment, a phylogenetic heritage.”123 For this reason, Freud’s psychoanalytic masterplot holds true regardless of actual events. “A child catches hold of this phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He fills in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth; he replaces occurrences in his own life by occurrences in the life of his ancestors.” In extrapolating a universal theory from individual cases, Freud assumes that the key traumas of psychological development are not only equivalent from one person’s narrative to the next, but that inherited experiences are waiting like understudies in the wings in case the individual’s own childhood drama fails to supply them. The psychoanalytic model’s claim to universal applicability is thus another instantiation of the issues of metaphor and substitution germane to heredity identity in general. These scientific or pseudo-scientific models of hereditary memory demonstrate that kinship metaphor, which we have already seen realized in literary and social fictions, also appears in scientific fictions. In an influential 1975 essay, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok observe that “the phantom,” their term for inherited trauma, debunks “the prejudice of the ‘I,’ ” which in traditional psychoanalytic practice “consists in hearing the first person singular whenever somebody says ‘I.’ Yet, when faced in particular with phobia, we are hard put to find the identity of this ‘I’ who is claiming to be fearful.”124 Like Krleža, they describe phobias and neuroses as originating in preceding

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generations, so it is impossible to take for granted that “the ‘I’ really means the legal identity of the subject.”125 The neurotic symptom becomes detached from the individual consciousness in which it appears: the phrase “ ‘I am afraid of . . .’ might better be rendered as: ‘there is a fear of . . .’ ” Who is it, then, that experiences Filip’s fear of hats? Is it properly Filip’s phobia, or is it the phantom that feels fear through the instrument of Filip’s consciousness, just as “he” listens to the ringing of the bells through the instrument of “Filip’s” ear? It may not be possible, at this point, to draw a useful distinction between Filip’s ego proper and the various extensions of his missing ancestry, which are so mutually interdependent and so involved in a larger metaphysics (and metafictionality) of exchange. Although the problematic of the ego obsesses Filip, the persistence of the unknown father works less to pin down a particular identity than to articulate the more fundamental problems of self-identity we are accustomed to resolving with a simple look in the mirror. Mirrors allow us to approach dangerous ground, as testified by the Gorgon’s head hung like a heraldic device above the door of Filip’s childhood home in the novel’s opening paragraph. “Medusa’s head above the entrance door contorted as if it were dying; her lips were swollen, the rusty snakes in her head clustered, writhed.”126 Krleža’s Gorgon, which stands over the entrance to the novel as well as the entrance to Filip’s native place, alludes to the stock psychoanalytic formation described in Freud’s 1922 essay “Medusa’s Head.” The desire to enter the origin that is the mother’s womb motivates the fear of castration, symbolized by the Gorgon’s decapitated head; as a representation of the vulvar wound (“swollen lips” surrounded by frightening curls), that head becomes a fetish for the absent penis, causing a petrifaction that symbolizes the male erection.127 At the same time, within the thematics specific to Krleža’s novel, the Medusa’s head is a dead object that exerts a fatal influence on the living. At once petrified and animated, it establishes on the first page the major motif of hair growing after death. According to myth, this dead face sprouting live vipers can only be apprehended in a mirror, which is exactly how Filip Latinovicz first delves into the question of duration. “Where is the proof,” he asks himself, on the morning of his return to Croatia, “that the ‘I’ endures, that ‘we’ are always and uninterruptedly ‘we?’”128 He attempts to resolve the point by running through and discrediting the possible safeguards of identity. The Christian name and surname are superficial, arbitrary signs, as he had discovered by changing his without any appreciable improvement in the clarity of his ego. His face and gestures have completely changed over the forty years of his lifetime. Even the physical substance of his body is suspect, since “today there was no longer in him a single atom of his bodily constitution of eleven years ago.”129 Finally Filip turns to a mirror hung on the café wall and, with his painter’s eye, describes himself physically as a detached object. However, this serves only to stress his self-alienation. “Strange! Such an unborn ‘somebody’

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sits in a mirror, calls himself ‘himself,’ carries that utterly vague and cloudy ‘self ’ of his within him for years.”130 As in Petersburg, the juxtaposition of the self and its reproduced image serves as the pretext for the division of consciousness into subject and object—an unborn “self ” and the other “self ” he carries within him. His doubts about his own identity already encode doubts about his parentage: the first self is “unborn” and therefore projected into a genetic future, while the self he “carries” seems to be his hereditary burden of innards. The division of the ego into these two selves motivates a rephrasing of Filip’s identity crisis in terms of the fundamental dynamic of idealist philosophy: “to be the subject and sense the identity of one’s own subjective self,” as Filip puts it.131 Filip’s formula paraphrases a crucial passage in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. Our experience of consciousness, Hegel argues, becomes an object for consciousness itself, which evolves by continually reflecting upon and incorporating its objectified self. This ongoing dialectic is the basis of thought: “the spirit [Geist] is this movement of becoming something for itself, i.e. an object for itself, and then to sublimate this otherhood.”132 Filip Latinovicz’s fretting over his paternity concretizes this philosophically insuperable schema. Self-consciousness always necessitates an understanding of the self as other, which introduces difference into identity by distinguishing the self as the subject and as the object of thought. The division of the self into subject and object is handily expressed in terms of Filip’s conscious self and the other, ancestral selves Filip is conscious of within him. The problem of the unknowable parental identity that persists within the “self,” originally marked by references to psychoanalysis, becomes here a way of figuratively grasping more fundamental problems of thought’s essential otherness to itself.133 Like the Gorgon, which can only be apprehended through its alienated image, self-identity can only be conceptualized in relation to another entity that discloses a figure of it—in other words, through metaphor. Mirrors and parentage, the propagation of human images and the propagation of human bodies, are conventional guarantors of identity. The two forms of multiplying humanity are related on the rhetorical plane when Filip’s sensation of the ancestral phantom within his self is figured as a watery “mirror” disturbed by the passage of a bird. Filip concludes that his ego does endure: “wrapped away somewhere beneath him, surreptitiously concealed, palpitated and beat that identity of his, and it was not a phantom, but flesh.”134 But the rationale of his epiphany is as fully concealed as that identity itself, which, like Filip’s parentage, exists only as a cipher. Furthermore, even this ecstatically declared identity is shown in the next paragraph to be mutable. Thinking of how he has changed over the past eleven years, Filip declares that “today he was no longer that same ‘I’—that was true!”135 He returns to a sense of continuity only through the metaphor of “an invisible bridge” that connects his past, his present, and his future—something like Hume’s

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concept of self-identity, which is constructed through the imagination’s ability to project figurative identities onto beings who persist and change through time.136 For all its philosophical poignancy, the scene does not impart the ironclad definition of the ego that Filip obsessively searches for. The fact that the search continues for the remaining two hundred pages of the novel shows that Filip himself finds it ultimately unsatisfying. Filip, a painter, sees himself in the mirror’s frame as a picture he has worked on for a lifetime but cannot finish—as if “he had returned to an old picture he had never mastered . . . as if he had awakened in his own grave.”137 Filip’s meditation projects his consciousness onto moments anterior and posterior to his proper existence. The “invisible bridge” spanning the “unborn” self and the “grave” suggests Filip’s personal duration stretching into the past and future of the family line. In polemical writings Krleža resorted to the same metaphor to describe the progress of the human species from its historical origins into the future: “Really we are only a bridge of human hope over which the generations will cross.”138 A member of the Communist Party since 1918, Krleža imagines in this essay that present conditions might be transcended by a process of generational succession that would not repeat the past but rather lead to a qualitatively different future. The unfinished artwork that is Filip’s self-identity, which he painfully forges in the space of his father’s absence, is from this perspective the unfinished project of human history to create itself out of the past. Because Filip has an unknowable father—more obviously unknowable than other fathers—he is able to displace the problem of self-knowledge onto determinant heredity, and therefore objectify it as something that can be approached by reason. Having a concrete (if unknown) object, the mysteries of genealogical origin are theoretically solvable even if the problematic of the ego is not. The figure of parentage makes the dialectic of self-identity, through which history is to progress, objectively apprehensible. In a more modest way, the problem of self-identity is illustrated by hair, nails, teeth, and the other parts of the body that can be separated from it.139 Occupying a marginal position on the frontier of our physicality, such parts test the connection between self and body—or, to put it in Krleža’s terms, the connection between the perpetuation of identity and the circulation of matter. If, as Foucault suggests, we gain control over concepts by assigning places to them, our hair and nails (or teeth, or blood) demonstrate that the “location” of the self in the body is capable of disruption and reinterpretation.140 The consciousness of the self in a material body is problematized by the universe of matter in which fissionable entities constantly dissolve and recirculate. Hair in this novel is always the hair of ancestors—the corpse’s hair that continues to grow after death, and whose lengthening strand figures the chain of generations perpetuating ancestral identity. In love tokens or black magic hair serves as a synecdoche of the self, but in Filip’s case his hair symbolizes not his “own” identity

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but the deceased who continue to work in his body. In one grotesque variant of this scheme, a dermatologist named Kyriales “worked for years on important histological sections and one such important section of a mouse hair was known to science by the feminine adjective Kyrialic!” After Kyriales’s suicide the scientific name of this section of hair, like a child, carries his memory into perpetuity. “To his eternal memory international science had christened a microscopic section of a hair.”141 The bathetic christening of the mouse hair underscores the novel’s criticisms of the rural aristocracy, who take great pride in compound names like “Countess Orcyval, née de la Fontaine-Orcyval et Doga-Ressza of the de la Fontaines of Žabokrek.”142 For these aristocrats, heredity is a matter of blood and not decree. That stance is, however, undermined by the fluidity of the novel’s names. Filip was born a bastard named Sigismund; his lover Boba was born a noblewoman named Xenia. Krleža gives us the exact dates on which patents of nobility were issued in order to emphasize the conventionality of hereditary caste. The Liepachs, although their estate is hung with portraits “painted with an old-fashioned look so that the Liepach family would look as ancient as possible,” had their blood blued only in 1818—a point that deflates the “association with cosmological origins” that underlies aristocratic claims to privilege.143 Constructions of identity produced through language—whether the performative language that creates noble families or the designative language that names them—are mutable, arbitrary, and ambiguous. Arguing for the novel’s engagement in debates about Croatia’s cultural and national identity, Ralph Bogert notes of Filip’s “family” name that the “Latin” root is combined with the Slavic suffix meaning “son of,” implicitly connecting Filip’s personal bastardy to Croatia’s disputable claim to classical culture. The orthography of that name “is neither German (Latinowitsch), Hungarian (Latinovicz), Polish (Latinowicz), Czech (Latinovič), nor Croatian (Latinović); it is Austrianized, Latinized, generically Slavic.”144 This confusion affects conceptual as well as linguistic formulations of identity in the novel. Filip’s futile search for self in ancestry figures that of the Croatian nation. Filip lists the major characters to show that the genealogical basis of aristocracy and nationhood alike is a fiction, or “mental phantom,” as mongrelized as the orthography of his family name. Some Caucasian Greek, from Smyrna by his mother, from Kiev by his father, a Georgian, who had worked as a journalist at Riga, and now dragged himself through the Pannonian forests and had black pyjamas, and made punch like that Lermontov had drunk as a young man in love in Tblisi. And Bobočka was a Hungarian, a Pannonian, from Međumirje, with some Kraut and South Styrian mixture in her blood of the minor nobility, so that she didn’t even know Croatian! And he, on his father’s side, was no one, while the Valentis had traveled to Krakow from Verona,

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and in Vilnius had married Lithuanian girls; his father the chamberlain, Filip, was born in Ždala, while his mother was a Hungarian from Szekesfehervar. Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Veronese, Pannonians, Hungarians, from what distances, from what distant incomprehensible fogs had their bodies journeyed to this Danubian muck, to crawl here now in these small surroundings, the blood running and beating in their veins. And who could remain constant in all that movement and complication? He had been right the other night, that unpleasant Greek, that “nationality was a petit-bourgeois prejudice.” . . . And that man had listed off a whole phrenological bibliography to prove that the Volk was a mental phantom.—“In general minds contain nothing but phantoms.”145

National, racial, or class identity is impossible to define here because the prevailing circulation of substances applies to “blood” as well as other forms of matter, all of which are subject to mutable definitions. As Marc Shell points out, the utopian motto “all men are brothers” is jarringly close to the racialist credo that “only my brothers are men.”146 The statement that the meaningfulness of ancestry is a “mental phantom” has a double meaning. The ancestral identity of the Volk is a phantom because it is an invention, an abstraction, a form of cerebral play; at the same time, ancestral “phantoms” are an active force within Filip’s body and consciousness. The novel denies the meaningfulness of national or racial origin, but meticulously recites the bloodlines of its characters. The phantom may be a fiction, but it is a powerful and active one that compels the novel, albeit in a bitterly mocking register, to trace the origins of its characters ever farther up the family tree. Whether aristocratic or völkisch, any myth of ancient lineage applied ad absurdum leads beyond the social to the mythic or evolutionary horizon. Bely too parodies noble genealogies by saying that the Ableukhovs are descended from Adam; in The Baptized Chinaman, he traces the evolutionary ladder from humans to invertebrates. A sufficiently detailed family tree will always provide a common ancestor, both in the sense of a shared forebear and in the sense of a nonaristocratic one. The Return of Filip Latinovicz finds this common ancestor in biological atavism, a “wild, primitive force, hairy as a gorilla,” that constantly threatens to show itself.147 Kyriales calls humanity “a shameless, lying, stupid, malicious, monkey-like beast.”148 The face of Filip’s mother is “really a monkey’s face,” and the local noblewomen are described as “human she-apes” in their mindless imitation of fashions.149 Their sartorial apery signals a blood more ancient and at the same time more common than they know. Boba, the inexplicably seductive woman who gathers all the novel’s male characters about herself and who is murdered by a jealous lover in the novel’s climax, is said to clothe commonness in an aura of aristocracy. “To cover filthy and obscure phenomena with the magic of blue blood, to deceive upstart gentlemen bankers

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and parvenus with that blue-blooded magic, and at the same time to empty their massive iron safes—that was Bobočka’s secret.”150 Born into a noble family but declined to the position of provincial café cashier, Boba too senses her current identity to be formed by a phantom lineage within her. Listening to Filip’s invocation of the dead beings dwelling inside him, she claims that her own carefully mapped-out genealogy, like Filip’s unknown family tree, is mystically involved in her experience of selfhood, and also mediated by the art of portraiture. “Looking at the portraits of her grandmothers and great-grandmothers in the rooms in Buda, she had often thought that she herself was one of those many Radaj portraits, that she moved about, lived, but was falling into those dark brown spaces with yellow armchairs and her place was there above the cupboard, in a golden frame!”151 Nonetheless, Boba’s “magic of blue blood” seems to have more to do with her simian than her aristocratic ancestors. She wins over Baločanski—the “toothless” man who will nonetheless bite out her throat in the book’s last pages—through an appeal to his primitive instincts. “Bobočka was right,” Baločanski muses: “ ‘One should live freely, like monkeys in tropical jungles!’”152 Boba’s tenet that humans should imitate monkeys, a satire of modernity’s demands to be liberated from the bonds of its own civilization, paraphrases the German doctor who seduced her as a teenager by appealing to free love’s naturalness: “The monkeys in tropical forests live the most sensible life.”153 The ideology of hereditary atavism finds its ironic capstone when Baločanski, on the verge of giving up his bourgeois lifestyle and devoting himself entirely to Boba, poses the rhetorical question, “What is will power? Monkey-like imitation of certain customary gestures!”154 Because the quotations above occur only a page apart in the novel, Baločanski’s quotation (or imitation) of Boba’s words (themselves a quotation, or imitation, of the man who seduced her) are part and parcel of the monkey-like process of imitation that propagates social values and mores. Through this process of imitation—the tendency figured by heredity and mirroring—the incessant exchange of material substances becomes intertwined with the propagation of ideologies, fictions, and fashions in social life. As demonstrated by the “she-apes” imitating Hollywood styles, the very tendency to “ape” civilized fashions and values becomes proof of humanity’s unredeemed, essentially simian nature, the urge for duration or prolongation. Boba pushes this identification with an evolutionary forebear too far. Under her influence, Baločanski feels an ultimately primeval ancestor stir within him, and “that slimy, flatulent, rotting, monstrous beast within him felt the need to stretch itself out like an enormous antediluvian monster, to live, to forget, to bite into somebody’s throat.”155 Following the principle of hereditary memory to its logical extreme, this vampiric beast lurking in Baločanski’s flesh would be the original Darwinian father and primeval founder of the line: a saurian beast from

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the verge of time who now “returns.” Acting through Baločanski’s body just as Filip feels his unknown father to exert himself in his flesh, it is this beast, roused by Boba’s sexual enticement, which tears out her throat at the end of the novel. As Filip maintains, everything “buries itself, and is born again”; there is no longer a distinction between the dead parent and the living child; the subject and object of generations have been collapsed into the persistence of a single being, in a single universe of circulating particles or world of mutual imitation; the invisible bridge that traces the identity of the self beyond the boundaries of the individual lifetime must stretch back to the prehuman, if it is not to extend forward into a qualitatively different world. All this, Krleža implies, is the logical, if ironized, consequence of the emphasis that provincial gentry and nationalist ideologues place upon the antiquity and purity of their bloodlines. Civilized people in general are distinguished in this novel by their decayed teeth, and one might expect the primeval lizard’s urge to “bite out someone’s throat” to be stymied by the fact that Baločanski is missing his front teeth. Amidst the litany of Filip’s irrational, inherited phobias, we find that he fears “the teeth of corpses”; we discover an object for that fear when Krleža writes that Baločanski’s “front teeth were missing, so that he looked like a toothless corpse.”156 Just before the murder, Filip thinks to himself, “No, Baločanski was not dangerous! He was a degenerate, a cowardly wretch! Insane, toothless filth!”157 The issue of missing teeth is connected to the novel’s larger issues of body and identity when we consider that teeth are the very organ of consumption and are, like hair and nails, a part of the body that is also eminently separable from it. They are further related to the cannibalistic universe of exchange through the theme of the vampire: hair, nails, and teeth growing after death are signs of vampirism in European folklore, and of course vampires appear in mirrors as a significant absence.158 The primeval patriarch, a parasite who exerts himself in the bodies of the living just as Apollon Apollonovich’s sexual urge expresses itself in the body of his son, is signified precisely by the growing hair, nails, and teeth of Krleža’s characters. Images of male sexual vitality in the novel—in every instance minor characters gathered around Boba—stress these qualities. In the first flush of adolescence Boba fights off boys with “curly hair and healthy teeth.”159 Baločanski is jealous of her relations with men “with thick, coarse hair slicked back with brilliantine, with strong teeth.”160 The ominously erotic gravedigger who exhumes Kyriales’s body has “curly hair,” and, drinking soup from their shared cup, “his teeth clinked on the enamel”—his living hair and teeth presiding ghoulishly over the uncovering of a corpse.161 Where hair and teeth operate as figurative extensions of ancestral identity, the book’s last scene violently realizes the metaphor. Entering Boba’s room, Filip discovers that “Baločanski had bitten out her throat.”162 The antediluvian beast’s urge

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to “bite out someone’s throat” has expressed itself through a toothless madman. The apparent paradox of a toothless man biting out a throat is the realization of an insistent metaphor and is illuminated by one of the novel’s most enigmatic scenes, Kyriales’s drunken, prophetic monologue “about what the dead in their graves think about returning to this world.”163 According to Kyriales, after death “there is no longer anything and everything is just a decayed tooth that is no longer there, and a completely cold, marble, alien tongue. But there had been a tooth in that place once . . . there an illegitimate child spent his childhood crying in shame.” This tooth that simultaneously is and is not there hints at Baločanski’s toothless mouth that nonetheless rips through flesh; this unnamed bastard’s miserable childhood hints at the mystery of Filip’s parentage. The topos of the phantom tooth is also that of the illegitimate child’s shame. Sharing a single site, they can be read as incarnations of a single phenomenon—the desire of the dead to “return to this world,” instantiated in the ideology of the Volk; in the pretentions of the hereditary aristocracy; in the circulation of matter that is “national economy”; and, ultimately, in all the genetic and mimetic processes that reproduce labor and social castes. At the end of the day, Filip may be better off without knowledge of his parentage. 4 . I S A K D I N E S E N A N D I VA N B U N I N : h O U S E S O C I E T I E S

“A child of the country would read this open landscape like a book,” begins one of Isak Dinesen’s gothic historical fictions. “The irregular mosaic of meadows and cornlands was a picture, in timid green and yellow, of the people’s struggle for its daily bread.” The book of the earth, which tells the story of peasant labor, is mirrored by another text, “the writing in the sky,” which promises “continuance, a worldly immortality,” to aristocratic families that “hold their ground through many generations.”164 The opposition between upper and lower classes, image and writing, earth and heaven, seems insuperable. Nonetheless, when the scion of the noble house—significantly named Adam—returns to the garden of his youth in the first pages of the story, a peasant boy greets him with the unsettling and unresolved question: “Do you mean to tell me that you are I?”165 The “child of the country,” privileged by the story’s first sentence as a reader of the landscape, suggests with this arbitrary and unanswered question that the text of the world, which seems radically divided into binaries, might harbor some suppressed metaphorical identity between peasants and lords, the picture of the earth and the writing of the sky, the young and the old, “you” and “I.” By the end of the tale, all these categories have in fact turned out to be fragile fictions. Within Dinesen’s world of heritable class distinctions, confusion derives from the exchanged substances that make up her fantastic feudal economies—the milk that nursing women give to their own and to other people’s children, the blood that

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vampires suck and blood brothers share, or the genetic material that is passed on in and out of wedlock. All these relationships, as Susan Hardy Aiken notes, potentially challenge “the widespread conventional trope of writing as pregnancy or childbirth” that envisions “both narrative structure and literary history as forms of male succession.”166 Alternatives are manifested as metaphorical identities, transmitted by some substance that circulates in violation of the normative bourgeois family, often revealed in scenes of specular misrecognition. A vampire “gazing down into the water” sees her victim’s face, “as if he had lifted it to tell her that if she died he must die too”; a witch shows a young woman her incestuous parents in the “thick silver mirror” of a millpond.167 The vast chaos of Krleža’s “circulation of matter” is, in Dinesen, channeled into the discrete species of substance—blood, milk, sperm—whose total interaction constitutes the system of human relations and the functioning of the economy. Legal identity falsifies these relations by elevating some of them above the others. The alternatives, however, remain apprehensible if one reads the productive lands and the manor houses as metaphorical artworks that disclose a suppressed history in an obscure symbolic mode. Dinesen’s insistence on the role of women in the nominally patriarchal reproduction of inherited castes exposes a host of alternative matrices of identity that interact with and might conceivably replace both genetic inheritance and aesthetic regimes. For example, in the story “Caryatids”—the title refers to women as the anonymous “caryatids” who prop up noble houses—the patriarchal narrative of aristocratic lineage is displaced by maternal relations when a mother is reflected to her child across a “milky mist,” in “the lacteal surface of the water.”168 In the same story, a noblewoman nurses a peasant infant; incompatible with the patriarchal control of maternal functions that sustains hereditary castes, their relationship constitutes an alternative kinship grounded in milk rather than genes. That kinship suggests an alternative social order, perhaps more generous and free. When a child of adultery assumes another man’s inheritance (“The Dreaming Child,” “Sorrow-Acre”) or a wet nurse’s child is exchanged for an infant lord (“A Country Tale,” “Caryatids”), we exult in the switch as redressing some wrong done to women and children as vehicles of male identity and patrilineal property. It seems to remediate the injustice of caste, to restore symmetry—harmony, beauty, fairness—to a manifestly hierarchical order founded on a lack of reciprocity between serfs and nobles, women and men, children and elders. By disjoining legal and biological kinship, Dinesen does away with one mode of equivalence across generations, which depends upon monogamous marriage and consanguineous inheritance, but she makes possible other, experimental modes of equivalence. The vampire’s blood or the wet nurse’s milk suggest new social orders, based in new systems of metaphorical identification, according to which the aristocratic

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heaven and the indentured earth might at last reflect one another through mutual misrecognition and displacement. This point moves to center stage in my following chapter, which will read literary fictions together with early Soviet speculation about the obsolescence of the consanguineous family. Dinesen’s own tales are fascinated with a revolutionary moment: typically historical, they stage conflicts that point to the French Revolution’s efforts to annihilate the aristocracy and to proclaim a universal brotherhood. If gothic fictions are haunted by the legacy of injustice that is hereditary class, and therefore endlessly preoccupied with the past, we have seen that each one also carries some utopian alternative—a world of speculative value in which children do not inherit land but rather build their own houses, their “castles in the sky,” on “unaccustomed ground”; a bridge from the present generation into an unknown future beyond inherited class and racial identity; a child’s fantasy of being the lost child of a lord, or the lucky foundling who has taken his place. In early Soviet fiction and policy, conversely, the emphasis seems to be on the future—sometimes prescribed in enthusiastic detail—but those predictions remain haunted and trammeled by the past. Ivan Bunin, whose career had notable peaks on either side of the Russian Revolution, wrote chronicles of the declining rural aristocracy that link the fortunes of the gentry to their fictions of kin identity. In his elegiac novel The Life of Arseniev, a semiautobiographical work written in European exile in 1934, the narrator indulges in a long pastiche of kinship imagery, claiming that “we lack a sense of our beginning and end,” that his family “is included among those ‘whose origins are lost in the mists of time’ . . . ‘noble though impoverished.’ ” The commonplaces of hereditary identity are ironized by their appearance in scare quotes. As Arseniev’s rehearsal of platitudes unfolds, we discover once again that a family singled out by its antiquity dissolves into a common, universal origin. “Is it not a joy to feel one’s connection, one’s communion, with ‘our fathers and brethren, friends and kinsmen’? . . . Kinship with Him Who is the sole father of all that is.”169 Bunin’s rehearsal of aristocratic ideology and its religious buttressing in this post-Soviet text recapitulates themes already present, on the eve of the revolution, in his 1912 novella Dry Valley (Sukhodol). Unlike Krleža’s universe of circulating identity, which remains essentially abstract despite its vague identification with “national economy,” this text integrates the metaphysics of exchange with the mechanisms of a concrete social reality. Life in the village of Dry Valley is articulated by genetic relations, but also by subterranean kinships through milk, blood and performative language that, for Bunin as for Dinesen, supplement and potentially replace patriarchal consanguineous inheritance. Narrated by the scion of a dying house, who communicates to the reader events previously narrated to him by his father’s milk sister (molochnaia sestra, a kinship

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term referring to children who have been nursed by the same woman), Dry Valley presents aristocratic lineage both as a cultural mythology and the locus of specific economic relations. Despite its self-congratulatory fictions of aloof independence, the Khrushchev house is in fact “related” to its serfs, due both to a profusion of illegitimate progeny and to the economic links between the gentry and the peasants who “feed” it in their capacity as wet nurses, farm labor, and servants at table. Although denied by the official genealogy, these alternative systems of relatedness constitute meaningful family ties. True, we Khrushchevs were aristocrats, registered in the sixth book, and among our legendary ancestors there were many noble men of ancient Lithuanian blood and Tartar princelings. But the Khrushchev blood had mingled with the blood of the household servants and peasantry since time immemorial. Who gave life to Peter Kirillych? The legends differ on this point. Who was the parent of Gervaska, his murderer? From our earliest years we were given to understand that it was Peter Kirillych. What was the origin of the marked dissimilarity in the characters of our father and uncle? There are different versions of this as well. And Natalia was our father’s milk sister, and he had exchanged crosses with Gervaska. . . . It was long, long since time for the Khrushchevs to reckon with their relations [poshchitat’sia rodnei] with their servants and peasants!170

Bunin presents a strictly genealogical definition of lineage as inadequate on several counts. It might be more accurately conceptualized as a “house society,” an anthropological term that refers to corporate entities perpetuated by transmitting names and goods through members recruited by a range of means, usually including both genealogical and “fictive” or “metaphorical” ties like adoption, milk, or spirit.171 At Dry Valley, Bunin suggests, the corporate identity formed by the supposedly consanguineous “noble family” is incomplete without considering its kinship with the serfs they own. In the first place, there is a proliferation of unrecognized genetic relatives. Illegitimate children of the noble house are raised among the peasants and later engage in incestuous sexual relations with their legitimate brothers and sisters, a practice voiding any distinction between the aristocratic “family” and the peasants who serve it; sexual relations that seem to be hyperexogamous are in fact incestuous violations of the social structure’s foundation. Another complication is introduced by the systems of metaphoric kin relations that are integrated with consanguineous relations, of which Bunin here gives two examples. Natalia, the nurse who relates the family legends to our own narrator, is repeatedly identified as the “milk sister” of that narrator’s father; in addition, that father has “exchanged crosses” with Gervaska, who is thus his sworn brother as well as his illegitimate

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biological sibling, his serf, and his servant at table. The first example refers to the relations between two persons nursed by a single woman—milk brotherhood (molochnoe bratstvo), a widely recognized relationship that the Russian church considered an impediment to marriage.172 Sworn brotherhood (pobratimstvo or krestnoe bratstvo), on the other hand, was created through performative language and gesture. Symbolized by the exchange of crosses between individuals, sworn brotherhood too was integrated with consanguineous kinship, to the point that an incest taboo applied in the popular imagination, if not in church law. As one peasant informant put it in the 1890s, “Now, I have a sworn brother: we became friends, exchanged crosses, and became as kin. . . . We do not give each other gifts and must not marry each others’ sisters.”173 The noble house has therefore failed to “reckon up” (poshchitat’sia) with its unrecognized kin on two related levels. First, it has not come to terms with the essentially fictional nature of the claim that the peasantry and nobility are of different blood; second, it has not acknowledged that blood relations are an insufficient definition of kinship, due to extensive and substantial “fictive” ties like milk and cross brotherhood. In a gothic realization of the Christian metaphor of the “human family,” the apparently separate social classes are in fact relations in the first degree. Sexual relations between nobles and peasants, who are supposedly “too far apart” from one another to be married, are really incestuous, and it is only the legal fiction of legitimacy that makes it seem otherwise. The utopian dream of universal siblinghood is realized on the agricultural estate as a matrix of self-perpetuating economic and sexual exploitation within a single family. Leslie Fiedler’s influential work on the gothic argues that the genre’s ascendance can be correlated with the bourgeois class’s obsession with its social legitimacy, an obsession that literature allegorizes as anxiety over parentage.174 In his reading of Dry Valley as a gothic text, Dale Peterson foregrounds the spooky homology of the house society and the gothic motif of haunting or possession by ancestors, “a vestige of the past that solicits or compels an unnatural extension on life. . . . Contemporary characters and settings are suddenly displaced by the posthumous validity of an ancestral presence or artifact.”175 From the beginnings of gothic as a popular genre in the eighteenth century, the paradigmatic crime that haunts a family is incest, implicitly present in Dry Valley through the plethora of peasant women who are born to the mistresses of their masters and then become mistresses of their half-brothers in the next generation. Yet consanguineous incest is symptomatic here of more deeply rooted misuse and misunderstanding of kinship in its performative and economic aspects. The grim misfortunes of Dry Valley’s rulers proceed from a refusal to admit that their serfs are also their sons, daughters, and siblings, and from a reluctance to square things with their enslaved brothers.176

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The key verb poshchitat’sia suggests both interpretations, as its connotations are both cognitive, to recognize or come to terms, and economic—to settle accounts. Metaphorical kinship between members of different classes starkly interrogates the limits of the aristocratic family, openly naming as such kinsfolk who have been denied any material birthright through the legal fiction of legitimacy. In the climax of the family history, Gervaska murders his consanguineous father, who has denied their biological relation in order to employ him as a household servant, even as the fiction of performative kinship has openly made him the sworn “brother” of the master’s legitimate son. Thanks to the interpenetration of literary fiction and fictive kinship, the community is haunted and united at once by blood and by a common story.177 “The servants, the village, and the house comprised a single family. . . . The life of a family, a lineage, a clan, is deep, complex, mysterious and in part terrible. But in its murky depths and in those very legends, that past, it is also strong.”178 The novella we read purports to be a retelling of these mysterious and terrible legends, as passed on to us by the narrator who got them in turn from his nurse, his father’s milk sister. The very murkiness of the legends she tells corresponds to the pervasive fictionality that clouds the relations between the family’s (mostly unacknowledged) members, and she purportedly tells them in a unique “Dry Valley language” (sukhodol’skii iazyk) spoken only by members of the estate’s extended family. “When we first began to speak we spoke the Dry Valley language. The first stories, the first songs to touch us were also Dry Valley, Natalia’s, our father’s.”179 A shared language—the production of stories—coincides with shared substances, biogenetic materials or milk, which also create kinship. The eager consumption of these ancient legends suggests the consumption of peasant labor that sustains the whole society, servant and lord alike. The narrator explicitly compares his story, or retelling of Natalia’s story, to the single family that spans the social classes. “Could anybody ever tell stories like Natalia? And who was closer kin to us than the Dry Valley peasants?”180 A highly developed example of skaz—Boris Eikhenbaum’s term for a narrative that represents itself as continuous with oral speech—even the story’s vacillation between high and folksy registers duplicates, on a stylistic level, the division between and interdependence of gentry and serfs. The fiction of this difference is a key element in the story’s idiom as well as its plot. Sometimes Dry Valley’s language is affected and stylized, full of archaicisms (as in the extended quote from Life of Arseniev above), while at other points the narrative quotes Natalia’s dialect directly or lapses into a peasant idiom.181 “The two voices,” writes Julian Connolly, “are interwoven in a lyrical chorus in which Natalya’s simple, folksy chronicle of events is overlaid with the poetic, reflective voice of Khrushchov,” so that “even in the narrative structure of Sukhodol one perceives the close linkage of the gentry and the peasantry.”182 Like the family legends it expresses, the Dry Valley idiom

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is inherited through a compound lineage of blood, milk, and performative language. “You know I’m Arkadii Petrovich’s milk sister,” Natalia (the illiterate prior narrator) reminds the (literate present) narrator, “a second aunt to you.”183 The two narrators—masters of oral and written language respectively and members of different social classes—are joined by their shared lineage through blood and milk and by the shared family history they recite together, uniting in the moment of narration. Here Dry Valley represents itself as a guilty, gothic variant of one of Russian literature’s enduring themes: the poet’s homage to his childhood nurse, who tells him folk tales in the popular idiom and thereby provides an enduring connection to the “Russian soul” as well as care, affection, and nourishment. The motif ’s preeminent example is the childhood of Alexander Pushkin, who wrote poems crediting his nurse for his love of Russian language and folklore. She was a myth from the very beginning—Vladimir Nabokov refers to her as “a kind of collective ‘my nurse’”—and was mythicized further by Slavophile critics eager to turn a writer of indisputably aristocratic origins into a poet of the people.184 “This, then, was [Pushkin’s] first inspiration,” Ivan Aksakov declared in 1880, “the first muse of this great artist and first genuinely Russian poet, this simple Russian country woman. . . . As if pressed to the breast of his earth-mother, he greedily drank in her stories the pure stream of the people’s speech and soul.”185 Collactaneous relations provide the metaphorical basis for an alternative genealogy that identifies the aristocratic poet with the common people whose pure tongue he is to apotheosize; at the same time, Aksakov’s image implies a gentry class fed by the agricultural labor of its peasantry.186 The scheme might apply to national as well as caste divisions, as when the poet Vladislav Khodasevich, of Polish and Jewish heritage, claims to have “sucked out” a Russian identity from his nursemaid’s breast.187 The poet is identified with those who served and fed him rather than members of his own class—even if Pushkin himself, in his own writings, maintained a highly ironic attitude toward aristocratic appropriations of peasant culture, especially as they dovetailed with the appropriation of peasant labor.188 As multiple Soviet books entitled Pushkin’s Nurse testify, the mythologized relationship between the upperclass poet and his peasant nurse proved equally useful to Soviet critics desiring to retain Pushkin in the canon while defusing his class origins.189 All these idealizing accounts, whether Slavophile or Soviet, elide the point that milk relations form a potential kinship system rather than just a handy metaphor of the “closeness” between infant poet and peasant nurse. They also downplay the economic exploitation inherent in their relationship, itself a displacement of the fact that the noble classes in general were “fed” by the peasants who worked their fields. In prerevolutionary Russia, which suffered the highest infant mortality rate in Europe, wet nurses had typically just lost biological children, so the hardships

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of the peasants and the plentiful supply of milk were intrinsically connected.190 Milk kinship therefore articulates as well as bridges extremes of inherited privilege. The ascription of a poem’s plot and language to the relationship between an author and his illiterate wet nurse, whether in Bunin’s novella or Pushkin’s poetry, can even be understood as a problem of base and superstructure, insofar as a paradigm of cultural inheritance is superimposed upon a relationship of economic exploitation. Questions of base and superstructure are doubly relevant when we consider that Bunin’s paean to the rural aristocracy predated by only five years the revolution that toppled the Russian aristocracy. In its aftermath, the Soviet leadership pledged to completely reformulate both economic and kinship relationships. According to some of the more extreme rhetorical formulations, the role of the consanguineous household in cooking and providing for children was to be superseded by communal parentage. In being fed from this common source, all Soviet citizens were to become siblings to one another in a global “brotherhood” of the proletariat. Milk kinship, which Bunin had already enlisted as a system coexisting with and providing a critical counterpoint to collactaneous relations, became a metaphor in works of propaganda and a building block in proposed systems of socialist relations. Filip Latinovicz’s morbid sense that the succession of generations is intimately bound up with the body’s own process of production and consumption was projected, in early Soviet culture, into the organization of social life as well as into the figurative structures of Soviet literature.

C H A P T E R

F O U R

ThE LAND OF MILK AND MONEY

1 . T h E E X T I N C T I O N O F T h E FA M I LY

Friedrich Engels projected that the end of private property would entail a release from the private household: “The coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting.”1 Although capitalism was more resilient than Engels expected, the Soviet Union in its first and most radically utopian years represents a unique attempt to establish a society in which reproduction of labor would take place outside the horizon of the family. The state aimed to accomplish this especially by appropriating the function of providing food to children. This shift is central to Yuri Olesha’s 1927 novella Envy, which concerns the construction of a gigantic cafeteria called the Quarter Ruble. Like many other texts of the 1920s, Envy articulates alternative versions of the kinship created by the care of infants. A coherent set of metaphors of the nurturing body presents a locus of resistance to Soviet ideology on the one hand; on the other, utopians were enlisting the same metaphors, on a grand and industrial scale, in the service of an imagined socialist society. For the most part this imagined society was gendered as male and grounded in a discourse of production explicitly opposed to that of reproduction. Engels discriminates between these concepts as “the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production” and “the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.”2 The distinction is key in works like Envy, whose figurative structures consistently oppose economic substances like food (production) and biogenetic substances like DNA (reproduction). As Sylvia Yanagisako and Jane Collier-Fishburne have observed, production and reproduction “stand in a means-end relationship to each other.”3 Work in production enables the material well-being and reproduction of a society and its institutions, the family among them; sexual reproduction and the care of children in the family provide labor and markets.

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Thus the care of children in infancy is a precondition of what Engels calls the “propagation of the species,” but—as starkly illustrated in Bunin’s Dry Valley—it is also implicated in a system of economic relationships usually brought under the category of production. Because noble infants in prerevolutionary Russia were typically fed by peasant nursemaids, because village women were commonly paid to take in nurslings from foundling homes, and because peasant mothers often nursed one another’s babies, the socially necessary act of feeding reinscribes economic relations of exploitation and cooperation in every generation. Conversely, even these apparently “economic” links constituted a metaphorical kinship system, as witnessed by the existence of the terms “milk sister” (molochnaia sestra) and “milk brother” (molochnyi brat), which refer to the relations between individuals nursed by a single woman. Commonly known in anthropological literature as “fictive” or “metaphorical” kinship, such relations play essential roles in social life (adoption or stepchildren, for example) as well as in works of imaginative literature that enlist them as tropes. While genealogical and metaphorical kinships typically coexist, there are communities in which genealogical kinship is immaterial, like monastic brotherhoods.4 Anthropologists have moved away from treating metaphorical kinships as figurative extensions of a genealogical norm, instead stressing the multiple potential constitutions of kinship and its multiple points of entry into economic life. For example, Janet Carsten’s cross-cultural work in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia demonstrates that birth is only one of many factors constitutive of personhood; among the Langkawi Malay, “fluidity of identity continues to a remarkable degree into adulthood” because kinship relations are conceptualized in large part through food, which creates “both persons in a physical sense and the substance—blood—by which they are related to each other.”5 While we are accustomed to figuring kinship through biogenetic substance, any number of real or imaginary substances might perform the same function, as spirit, food, breast milk, or blood have in various contexts.6 My point here is simply to emphasize how completely metaphorical kinships, like the milk siblinghood mentioned above, can be realized in social life. Envy depicts a clash between pre- and postrevolutionary generations over the mechanisms by which identity is to be passed from one generation to the next. It figures the destruction of the bourgeois family as the relocation of cooking from the family hearth to factory kitchens. The transition from domestic to communal nourishment is rooted in the family’s traditional role in producing food for children, but it also enlists the “family substance” of food, mediated by industrial technology and socialist institutions, in the service of an imaginary future. Prerevolutionary gothic texts were already alive to food’s symbolic role in the traditional family and its potential to criticize economic systems. Jenny Kaminer

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describes how, in Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Golovlyov Family (1880), the “sanctity of the mother-child relationship” is violated “by its introduction into the market”; the clan’s matriarch traffics in myths of self-sacrifice, and the rotten food she gives her children becomes a symbol of how “the material has subsumed the emotional or spiritual. . . . Food, like the myth of the self-sacrificial mother, becomes a kind of currency.”7 In aggrandizing to itself the feeding of children, the industrialized kitchen represents an existential threat to the very concept of familial identity, as the reactionary Ivan Babichev stresses in a jeremiad against his estranged brother Andrei, a Communist technocrat and the director of a huge cafeteria. “What does he want to drive out of your hearts? Your own home!” he rails. “Mothers! He dreams of wiping away from the little faces of your babies their resemblance to you—that holy, beautiful, family resemblance [sviashchennoe, prekrasnoe semeinoe skhodtsvo].”8 The collectivization of the kitchen is to bring about a revolution in kinship relations, or at least a redefinition of the shared substance that establishes continuity across generations. Babichev’s phrasing—“holy, beautiful, family resemblance”—carefully pinpoints conservative anxieties over religion, the aesthetic, and the family, all of which come together in the icon of the Madonna his words invoke. The fledgling Communist state had a vested interest in replacing traditional ideas of kinship with its own systems of affiliation. Ivan Babichev’s predictions draw on denunciations of the genealogical family by early Soviet ideologues who argued for communal child care, since, as Elizabeth Waters describes the attitude, “the state alone was able to create the necessary educational environment for the development of the communist personality.”9 For coming generations, predicted many supporters of the revolution, kinship would be defined by the economic relations between producers and consumers of food rather than the biogenetic relations between parents and children. Anatolii Lunacharsky, commissar of enlightenment and a patron of the avant-garde, proclaimed that “the group home is the best way of bringing up children, a genuinely socialist upbringing, and uproots the child from his familial surroundings and their petty-bourgeois structure.”10 The point is propounded by Sergei Wolfsohn in a 1929 monograph on “geneonomy,” a newly invented science concerned with “the complex of all sociological phenomena connected, whether directly or indirectly, with the production of people.”11 As the family loses its function as the basic economic unit of society, Wolfsohn predicts, it will wither away. “With the disappearance of capitalistic relations the family, as the cell of private ownership, as the mechanism for the hereditary conservation of property, loses its purpose for existence. All these functions, carried out, to a greater or lesser degree, within the purview of the family, atrophy under socialism.”12 Socialist society will “alienate” these functions, Wolfsohn declares, by removing them from the private family and making

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of them a collective task. “Already in the twilight of capitalism the family barely possesses any functions of labor and production; its role in bringing up children is severely limited, its political functions are dying out, and even its domestic functions are narrowing. Under socialism the disintegration of the family will achieve its final completion. Socialism brings with it the extinction of the family.”13 If the socialist economy was to successfully supersede the bourgeois economy, it had first to assume the family’s economic functions, and most obviously the preparation and distribution of food. Predicting that new members of society would in the future be brought up in crèches attached to factories, thereby annulling the very distinction between production and reproduction, Wolfsohn pointed to the explosion of milk kitchens and other communal facilities for very young children as signs of the consanguineous household’s imminent superfluity.14 The geneonomist’s projections recall those of more famous visionaries like Alexandra Kollontai (the first commissar of social welfare), Ivan Kuzmin (a communal housing architect whose buildings separated parents from children), and urban designer Leonid Sabsovich.15 All these thinkers recognized that “communal nourishment, destined to deprive the family of . . . its primary functions,” was vital for breaking out of the domestic chrysalis.16 In 1919 Lenin had already issued decrees stipulating that children were to receive food at the expense of the state.17 Sabsovich, whose tract The USSR in 15 Years agitated for the reorganization of every level of society, affirmed the importance of the communal kitchen in doing away with the consanguineous household. “The annihilation of the individual domestic household must be accompanied by the communal fulfillment of the basic needs of the workers,” he declared. “Gigantic factory kitchens—sufficient in number to serve the entire population—must entirely replace the domestic production of food,” to be complemented by “communal cafeterias in the workplace, in places of leisure, in children’s crèches, in institutions for the communal upbringing of children, and so on; in some cases it will also prove necessary to comprehensively distribute prepared foods to people’s ‘homes.’”18 Sabsovich uses the word “home” only in scare quotes. As Ivan Babichev understands, the socialization of nourishment was the corollary to the destruction of the bourgeois family. The Western avant-garde also boasts grand projections of future cities with alternate social organizations—I am thinking of programmatic designs by Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, and others—but the Soviet Union literalized such aims in policy. On the Path to the Communal Upbringing of Children, a 1930 pamphlet published by the Commissariat of Enlightenment, projects a future in which there are no relations between parents and offspring. Having been “placed on the foundations of a genuine Marxist-Leninist theory of collective upbringing . . . orphanages [detdomy] will gradually be transformed into institutions for the collective upbringing for all the children of the laboring masses.”19 By 1930,

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at the beginning of the Stalinist era, this vision of the future was already semianachronistic.20 Yet the replacement of capitalist inheritance with collective goals and the replacement of private upbringing with a universalized family has deep roots in Russian utopian thought. Maksim Gorky’s 1907 novel Mother, made into an influential 1926 film by Vsevolod Pudovkin, describes a gradual expansion of family feeling, from the first chapter’s “human relations . . . dominated by a lurking sense of animosity . . . a malady of spirit inherited from their fathers” through rousing speeches about “the future kingdom of human brotherhood” to the final revelation that “we are all comrades, all kindred spirits, all children of one mother, who is truth!”21 The prosperity of socialism in this novel is imagined as private patriarchy’s dissolution in favor of an idealized common mother whose children are the global proletariat. More idiosyncratically, Nikolai Fedorov had ascribed poverty and famine to humankind having forgotten its kinship ties and atomized into selfish individuals. “Why is nature not a mother to us but a stepmother or a wetnurse who has refused to feed us?” reads the heading to one essay in his 1906 Philosophy of the Common Cause. The metaphor of a transcendental mother supplying a universal family was realized in the Soviet Union’s state-run milk banks. Under a policy adopted in 1924, “every mother and wet-nurse feeds her own child directly at her breast, while the excess milk is sterilized, mixed with the milk of other women, and used to feed children who have no access to a mother’s breast”—that is, children raised in the orphanages proposed as experimental models for the communal upbringing of proletarian children.22 Such children were to be related to one another through the substance of a collective mother, centralized and technologically mediated by Soviet power. This futuristic socialist fantasy of a collective mother continues to draw on traditional and reactionary images of the nursemaid rooted in the Russian earth, who in Bunin or the myth of Pushkin’s nurse is emblematic of peasant production of food and illustrates precisely the fractured and oppressive mechanisms of inherited caste that the Soviet experiment attempted to do away with. Moreover, maternal metaphors recall nationalist as well as international communities, as Pamela Chester has noted of landscape paintings that depict Mother Russia as a provider.23 In a grotesque passage of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, a rowanberry tree serves as a running metaphor for the anthropomorphized Russian land, capricious mother to a hungry people: “Some kind of living intimacy prevailed between the birds and the tree,” writes Pasternak, “as if the rowanberry tree . . . unbuttoned its blouse and gave them the breast like a mother with an infant. ‘Whatever shall I do with you! All right, eat, eat me. Have your fill.’”24 Nursing mothers are a stock metaphor of bourgeois sentimentalism and nationalist conservatism, even if they are also, in some collectivized version, the condition of universal kinship in a world beyond private patriarchy.

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2. COMMUNAL MOThERS

In the Soviet Union, milk’s potential to supplant genealogical kinship was enhanced by the fact that, as Bunin had stressed, collactaneous relations already formed a metaphorical kinship in Russian peasant society, and hence among the newly and partially urbanized proletariat as well.25 A communal source of breast milk would therefore have illocutionary force to render all Soviet children meaningfully related to one another in a single collactaneous family, sustained and created by a single figurative mother. This situation would realize the metaphorical universal family envisioned by utopian thinkers who, like Bely, imagined tracing all human ancestry back to a single primordial Adam—though in terms of nutriment rather than biogenetic substance. Soviet Russia’s turn to milk as an expression of metaphorical brotherhood has precedents in revolutionary France, where the slogan fraternité was, as Marc Shell writes, “literalized at national milkdrinking rituals”; a commemorative medal struck for one such festival “depicts milk or water spilling from the breasts of a statuesque alma mater, raised on the ruins of the Bastille and inscribed ‘Ce sont tous mes enfants’ (They are all my children).”26 Like prerevolutionary Russia, eighteenth-century France possessed an extensive wet nursing market and a vocabulary of milk siblinghood (frère de lait). The Russian innovation was to attempt to realize this metaphor through a centralized milk bank mediated by futuristic technologies of distribution and pasteurization—illustrating on an “infant” scale the processes that were to unite every Soviet citizen in a collective economy, superseding even the biological functions Trotsky dismissed as the “dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection!”27 In this respect we can compare milk banks to other embryonic institutions that aspired to communalize substances of kinship, most famously the blood transfusion experiments championed by Alexander Bogdanov—also Lunacharsky’s brother-in law, author of science fiction utopias, inventor of a systems theory prototype called “tectology,” and leader of the “Proletkult” (“Proletarian Culture”) movement. Pointing to the immunity conferred by vaccination and the hypothetical heritability of acquired traits, Bogdanov hoped that the collectivization of blood, “the deep physiological interchange of the life of individuals,” would extend to every individual human the benefits of species experience.28 As propounded in his science fiction novel Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda, 1908), communal exchange of transfused blood between all the members of society would render the participants immortal as individuals—a transcendent and universal version of the exchange of substances between sexual partners, which ensures survival on the species level.29 This communion puts socialist ideals into practice and “accords with our entire system: the comradely exchange of life not only in theory, but even in physiological reality.”30 Bogdanov’s preoccupation with a collective circulatory system

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attempts to realize as a utopian kinship the exchange of alienated life described in Marx’s famous image of capital as “dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor.”31 Marx’s simile informs the imagery of numerous socialist writers, including Krleža’s characterization of the national economy as a parasitic flow of bodily matter. In Russia, the trope of the capitalist bloodsucker was already well established in prerevolutionary propaganda like Gorky’s Mother, in which capitalism’s need for labor power appears as a vampiric desire for the proletariat’s “hot blood and vitality”—the upper classes “smacked their lips and coveted these bodies, that could work and grow rich.”32 The theme was stylized further in Soviet texts like Mayakovsky’s 1929 farce The Bedbug, which directly compares the petty bourgeoisie to parasites. Another Bogdanov novel features honest-to-goodness vampires, literal bloodsucking capitalists who hoard alienated life. In Red Star’s fantasy of blood communion, as in his own transfusion experiments, Bogdanov redeploys the trope in order to imagine nonhierarchical and nonalienating exchange, destined to supersede capitalist distribution of commodified life.33 A single organism united by a single bloodstream, Bogdanov’s collective body is blood brotherhood realized on a global scale—a collective family that rationalizes and literalizes the messy immortality approximated by sexual reproduction. If blood powerfully figures kinship in folk biology and figures labor relations in Communist propaganda, so too does milk constitute a familial as well as an economic substance. Nursing represents the individual’s first participation in the social economy—the primal moment of production and consumption—and is therefore uniquely able to figure kinship in an economic idiom. Furthermore, the socialization of breastfeeding can be taken as the ultimate test of socialism’s emancipation from the family unit. Traditionally carried out by the genetic mother or within relations of class exploitation, breastfeeding is the last stand of the household economy’s relevance in an imagined socialist society. David Ransel refers to the wet nursing business prior to the revolution as “a school for capitalism among the peasants,” which taught women to compete for individual contracts from foundling homes and wealthy parents.34 In the era of dawning socialism, the nursing of nonconsanguineous children became an emblem of the economic system that was to replace both capitalist and genealogical relations. Collective nourishment by a communal mother, whose mingled and technologically mediated milk was fed to the infants of a new world, presented a powerful metaphor for the oft-invoked brotherhood of the proletariat—as well as an occasion for this “brotherhood” to exclude women from its ranks. The intention to eradicate the family entirely was typical only of the Soviet Union’s early years, and collective milk banks, while maintained throughout the Soviet period, seem never to have been utilized on a wide scale in connection with infants who had “private” mothers capable of nursing. However, even private

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mothers were conceptualized in the 1920s as members of a collective devoted to producing healthy workers. Alexandra Kollontai stresses the mother’s obligation to breastfeed her child—“the other tasks involved in caring for the younger generation can be carried out by the collective”—but takes care to distinguish this responsibility from an obligation to the individual family.35 During pregnancy, the mother “no longer belongs to herself, she is serving the collective, ‘producing’ from her own flesh and blood a new unit of labour, a new member of the labour republic.” The nursing mother represents an incarnation of the collective even when she feeds her consanguineous child; maternal affection is an “instinct, which for the labour republic has valuable potential,” but it must be generalized beyond the genetic family. Kollantai concludes by rehearsing the contemporary slogan: “Be a mother not only to your own child, but to all the children of the workers and peasants!” She enjoins women to be common mothers instead of hoarding their maternal love for use within the genealogical family, which is the vector of inherited caste. Kollontai’s view of the individual nursing mother as an organ of the larger, supramaternal “labor republic” emerges clearly in the rhetoric of early Soviet culture, which transposes the communal mother from a maternal and biological discourse of the organism into a male and technological discourse of industrialization. A 1924 lyric by Mikhail Gerasimov, a poet associated with Bogdanov’s Proletarian Culture movement, adopts the voice of a cyborg-like infant raised in a factory crèche, identified with products of socialist industry and “rocked in a steel cradle.” For this child, the sound of gears and spindles is “the calling of my mother.”36 Brought to term underneath one of the machines by an anonymous laborer, the infant seems to have been “produced” by the factory itself in order to replenish the ranks of its future workers—a radical assimilation of reproduction into production. In an image that identifies the nourishment of human labor with the electrification campaign that was to bring “enlightenment” and production power to the backward Russian countryside, the factory nurses its baby at an electrified breast: “A burning and scathing flame / Hung down over me. / My lips began greedily to suck / On the electric nipple.” The electric nipple here is assimilated to an electric light bulb, according to Julia Bekman Chadaga “a key element of the Lenin cult” that symbolized technological progress as well as enlightenment in a broader sense.37 The commonplace metaphor “light bulb of Lenin” (lampochka Il’icha) referred to the Soviet leader as a beacon leading Russia to its future maturity, not least through insistent calls for the country’s electrification.38 Electricity in Gerasimov’s propaganda poem will sustain both factories and the children they foster, negating the production/reproduction distinction. The poem’s infant speaker has no special relation to any consanguineous mother,

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being related instead to the factory, its workers, and perhaps the entire global proletariat.39 “Only the people in blue called me son,” he states, referring to the blue overalls worn by factory workers.40 Destined to supplant the household as society’s fundamental economic unit, the factory is a synecdoche for the totality of the future Soviet economy—a perfect provider for future generations of workers. At the same time, the speaker of Gerasimov’s poem figures the Soviet state as an infant being produced by industrial labor, inspiring workers of the present day to bring communism’s promise to maturity. The General Line (Staroe i novoe, 1929), a film about the collectivization of a dairy farm by Sergei Eisenstein, features striking images of the socialist state as a milk-producing mother to its myriad children. Following an initial establishing shot of a babe at the breast, the movie illustrates the destructive effects of individualized inheritance by showing how the heirs of a patrimony split up their childhood home board by board and construct miserable shanties out of their fractured common property. “This is how households are ruined and impoverished,” reads the intertitle, as we see shots of ploughland fenced into miniscule, useless plots.41 Against this backdrop of collective property disintegrating into smallholdings, the movie’s protagonist, Marfa, organizes a collective dairy farm. When they have saved enough money to buy a bull and maintain their herd of milch cows, Marfa falls asleep with her head on the cash box. This initiates an extended dream sequence in which a spectral bull appears in the clouds above the drought-stricken steppe. Fertilizing rain spills down upon the herd of dairy cows, spliced with shots of milk cascading through sluices and tubing, rivers of milk flowing across the steppe, and myriad piglets guzzling contentedly at the teats of a gigantic sow: the well-fed citizens of the Soviet state suckling their communal mother.42 In this example of Soviet pastoral, nature and automated industry merge in the role of the all-providing mother, whose bounty collects of itself for the benefit of the infant society. The sequence ends when the piglets plunge into a river of at least metaphorical milk, emerging on the other side into the futuristic techno-utopia of the state farm where Marfa buys the bull—a filmic realization of a Russian proverb for plenty, “rivers of milk, shores of pudding” (molochnye reki, kisel’nye berega). Milk represents the preeminent form of food in general, which will be provided in abundance from a common source, Eisenstein implies, by the total industrialization of Soviet society—even and especially the industrialization of biological materials. Not only does Eisenstein’s sequence muddle the distinction between production and reproduction, it creates ambiguity over the gendered substances conventionally associated with those categories. The bull’s image precipitates a downpour of milk presumably because it will sire multiplying generations of

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cattle and because cows do not produce milk until they have been impregnated. Thus the substance that pours from the spectral bull onto the herd of dairy cows is figurative milk, as stressed by the montage of dairy scenes, but also implicitly semen. A notorious scene in which the local commissar equips the dairy farm with a centrifugal cream separator drives home the comparison of lactic and sexual fluids. The machine, bristling with phallic spouts, is set in motion for an expectant audience of peasant girls. As an attractive young man enthusiastically turns the crank, the women kneel down to stroke the spouts until improbable geysers of cream erupt and splatter across their faces. The sequence culminates in a quasi-biological increase in the kolkhoz’s population. Alternating with gouts of fluid, intertitles read “and so the members of the collective farm increased [i pribavilos’ chlenov kolkhoza]—4, 17, 20, 29, 38, 43, 46, 48, 50.” The sexual wordplay on “member” (chlen) underscores the cream separator’s metaphorical identity with the impregnating bull. Just as the bull had drenched the unproductive community of female cows with an inseminating fluid in order to “increase the herd,” the technologically mediated cream that spurts out over the community of milkmaids renders them more numerous and productive through a male industrializing intervention into feminine and organic life. In both cases, the metaphorical identification of sperm and milk renders sexual reproduction (fertilizing semen) and economic production (milk produced for sale) versions of each other. The ambivalent fluid that spews about the dairy farm or fertilizes the dry earth thus reenlists in the Marxist narrative a classic series of essentially mythic or mythicized oppositions: a sexual congress of male and female, heaven and earth, technology and biology, production and reproduction, proletarian factory worker and peasant collective farmer. At the same time, it subordinates the organic and the maternal to a grid of male technological mastery, above all Eisenstein’s highly theorized techniques of metaphor in film media.43 Milk becomes semen, a kind of man-milk, insofar as it is mediated by industrial and cinematic technologies. In case Eisenstein’s audience has somehow missed the point, a subsequent scene shows the collective farm celebrating the “marriage” of the bull and a cow, which is bedecked for the occasion in festive bridal ribbons.44 Cheered on by the workers, the bull mounts the cow, at which point the film cuts to a montage of semen/ milk shots deriving both from the cream separator scene and from Marfa’s dream of the celestial bull. Eisenstein appeals to traditional peasant culture—pagan rituals of fertility and abundance—but projects that mythology onto a modern, even futuristic society in which production and procreation, economic and sexual substance, are metaphorically assimilated to each other as a single function of the industrial state.45

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3 . M E TA p h O R I C A L p R I S M S

While The General Line is explicitly propagandistic, Olesha’s Envy is deeply ambivalent toward both the domestic household and the Communist formations that might replace it.46 It represents pre- and post-Soviet families as gathered around a pair of estranged brothers: Andrei Babichev, director of a communal cafeteria called the Quarter Ruble (Chetvertak), and Ivan Babichev, drunkard and dreamer. Andrei has removed Ivan’s daughter Valya from her father and engaged her to his own adopted son Volodya Makarov, a Soviet “new man.” While Volodya is away on a visit to his biological father, Andrei adopts a penniless drunk named Nikolai Kavalerov, the narrator of the novel’s first half. After Volodya returns, Kavalerov is compelled to move in with his former landlady Anichka and discovers a new substitute father in Ivan Babichev, with whom he organizes a “conspiracy of feelings” against the rational Soviet future. Eventually resigned to their anachronism, Ivan and Nikolai form a parodic ménage à trois with Anichka—a send-up of the bourgeois family as well as the Oedipal triangle of mother, father, and son—while the parallel triangle formed by Andrei, Volodya, and Valya proceeds into the future that belongs to them. At the end of the novel the six characters are therefore organized into two clear-cut and symmetrical groupings. Ivan, Anichka, and Nikolai represent the old world, a sexual community fed and supported by Anichka, who works as a caterer out of her private kitchen. The perfectly chaste new society formed by Andrei, Valya, and Volodya, on the other hand, will be fed by a scientifically organized factory kitchen created and supervised by men.47 Robert Maguire has called this starkly simple formula a “trap to catch the careless reader,” and in fact the new world/old world opposition is only one of several potential groupings.48 As members of a single consanguineous family, Andrei, Ivan, and Valya might be grouped together in opposition to the other characters. Then too the parent generation, comprising Andrei, Ivan, and Anichka, might be opposed to the younger generation represented by Volodya, Valya, and Kavalerov. The question of how the reader is to meaningfully group the characters is informed by the novel’s participation in contemporary debates about the eradication of the family and its replacements under socialism.49 Olesha figures the death blow to “family resemblance” as the moment in which infants are no longer fed by their genetic mothers in the privacy of the home. Envy assimilates childbirth itself into alimentary production because Andrei Babichev, the nourisher of the new society, produces food through maternal metaphors. The source of every foodstuff, he “would like to cook all the omelettes, all the pies, all the cutlets, and bake all the bread himself. He’d like to engender the food himself. He gave birth to ‘The Quarter.’”50 His name derives from the word baba, most commonly encountered as a coarse term for a woman but also meaning “midwife” and, in prerevolutionary

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Russia, “wet nurse.”51 His specifically maternal function to bring forth and nourish the infant Soviet economy is suggested from the start. He is introduced as having “breasts” and drinks two glasses of milk every morning.52 Milk, precisely because of its ambiguous association with both the public and the domestic economy, is a preeminent theme. In a 1936 speech, Olesha decried James Joyce for saying that “cheese is the corpse of milk,” insisting that from the point of view of “artistic dialectical truth . . . milk can never be a corpse; it flows from the mother’s breast into the child’s mouth, and therefore it is immortal.”53 In Envy, the milk theme is consistent with a more general tendency to treat the propagation of the Soviet family over time as continuous with the production of economic substances. The representative of the collective farm, the communal source of food, smells like milk.54 In the background of various scenes “a glass was filled with milk,” or “people were watching the milk about to boil over.”55 Olesha’s stage version of the novel (Zagovor chuvstv, 1929) carefully preserves these apparently incidental appearances by transposing them into dialogue and actually adds new ones, notably the scientifically prepared milk porridge served in a children’s cafeteria.56 After being ejected from Andrei Babichev’s home, Nikolai Kavalerov fantasizes about a return to infancy by observing “splendid mothers. . . . The ample young breasts visible in the blouses were white. Lonely and rejected, I drank in this whiteness, whose name was: milk, motherhood, marriage, pride, purity.”57 His nostalgic idealization of inaccessible milk-producing mothers, like his envy of the beloved infants who are fed by the breasts he himself “drinks” only by way of verbal metaphor, are consistent with a larger discomfort with female characters, who typically appear in Olesha’s fiction as distant objects of desire. Eliot Borenstein has described how currents of early Soviet thought that aspired to a brotherhood of the proletariat, precisely in rejecting the procreative family as the basis of social identity, treated women as “an obstacle whose elimination serves to bind the collective together.”58 In this vein, Andrei Babichev’s appropriation of birth and breastfeeding can be read as a misogynist fantasy of a world in which maledominated production will have rendered women superfluous. In the same way, an explicitly masculine technology supplants the functions of bearing and feeding babies in precisely those texts by Gerasimov and Eisenstein that are structured through metaphors of milk. The mother is conspicuously absent in Envy, writes Julia Vaingurt, destroyed by the violence of the technological age, and the Quarter Ruble actually works to “compensate for her loss.”59 Although Soviet figures of kinship are deeply rooted in metaphors of motherhood, they are oriented onto a fantasy of a society in which there may no longer be any literal mothers at all. Ivan Babichev criticizes socialism on this very point, repeatedly accusing his brother of considering women to be “receptacles”—objectified bodies enlisted into the service of the state.60 Although Ivan appears to mean that his brother

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thinks of women merely as incubators for the coming, wholly Soviet generation, à la Kollontai, the text systematically conceptualizes female bodies as containers full of nourishment. Valya appears several times beside vessels that leak fluid, and Anichka can be “squeezed out of her casing like liverwurst.”61 As suggested by Kavalerov’s desire to “drink” the whiteness of a nursing mother’s breast, desire for these women is at once sexual and infantile—like the roué in Freud who, recalling his voluptuous wet nurse, regrets that he “didn’t make better use of my opportunity.”62 In another Olesha story, a man finds his lover sleeping on a park bench and “laid his head on her breast, his fingers felt the chintz, his head lay on her sweating breast, he saw her nipple, pink, with tender wrinkles like the skin that forms on boiled milk.”63 The last detail turns the loved object into milk inside and out—a milk-producing breast inside a skin of more milk—and sexual desire into a fantasy of consuming the sexual object.64 Accusing Andrei Babichev of lusting after his niece, Nikolai Kavalerov assumes that the Soviet bureaucrat also encodes sexual desire in gustatory metaphors. “I can hear you now: Oh, what a tasty little piece [lakomyi kusochek]! You glutton, you worship your own gut. Is there anything that would stop you where your physiology is concerned? What would stop you from ruining the girl? The fact that she is your niece? But you laugh at the very notion of family, of genealogy.”65 The supersession of sexual by alimentary relations, Kavalerov fears, will annul the incest taboo, the very condition of culture, and liberate Andrei’s voracious patriarchal libido. Placed beyond natural law by his command over food, which in the socialist future will be centrally distributed from his industrialized kitchen, the cafeteria director becomes a Soviet Saturn devouring his nubile children.66 The distinction between an economic kinship that replaces blood relations and a consanguineous kinship that organizes domestic economy is, then, the fault line across which the novel’s various social configurations are opposed. For a reactionary reader, communism is tarred with the ultimate taboo: if all proletarians are brothers and sisters with a single communal parent, then all sexual relations are indeed incestuous. On the other hand, for a reader who agrees that the consanguineous family “will achieve the distinction Engels foretold for the state: it will be relegated to the museum of antiquities, to rest in peace there alongside the spinning wheel and the bronze axe,” such taboos are indeed irrelevant.67 But because the two kinship systems are metaphorically identified and capable of displacing each other, it is impossible to say which character stands on which side of their axis of reflection. Kavalerov accuses Andrei Babichev, the new Soviet man, of being overcome with sexual cum gustatory desire for his niece, but in fact it is Kavalerov himself who belongs to the younger generation, longs to escape his family legacy, and desires to consume women, Valya in particular, orally. Kavalerov is correct to sense Andrei’s sexual interest in his niece: Olesha’s stage play actually

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eliminates Volodya in order to engage Valya (tactically made an adopted rather than biological daughter) directly to her uncle. But Kavalerov may also be correct that, in a global siblinghood generated by anonymous parents, consanguineous incest would no longer be a meaningful category. The definition of and choice between these confused and competing metaphorics of kinship is a hermeneutic matter for the reader as well as an ideological matter for its characters. “It is not just readers who see the stories allegorically,” notes Eliot Borenstein; “the characters themselves display an equal knowledge of their allegorical function.”68 Just as Bely’s characters model the reader’s perplexity through their own attempts to understand their world of engendered things, “by repeatedly confounding attempts at interpretation that occur within the text, Oleša’s novel calls into question the very possibility of interpretation of the text.”69 Audrey March has similarly noted that Olesha’s “unique use of tropes” has a metafictional function to comment on the book’s “extradiegetic level, the level where discourse is produced.”70 In this fashion, different readings of kinship tropes organize mutually exclusive readings of the book. Interpretations of Envy as staging a struggle between bourgeois and Soviet values will tend to oppose the characters across the axis of a pre- and post-Soviet generation; critics who focus on psychoanalytic themes like the incest subtext or Nikolai’s parricidal rebellion against Andrei will concentrate on the consanguineous family and its metaphorical analogues; and roughly Bakhtinian readings, which privilege the book’s bodily imagery and the irreconcilability of its various philosophical diatribes, will cohere around Anichka and Andrei Babichev, the grotesque sustainers of opposed social systems. That is to say, the map of standard interpretative approaches coincides with the novel’s various symmetrical groupings of characters: the generational division between parents and children, the genealogical division between consanguineous and adoptive lineages, and the economic division between industrialized and private households. Each of these basic conflicts can be taken as a metaphorical extension of every other. For example, Ivan Babichev denounces the Soviet future when he crashes a wedding and warns the bridal pair, “Don’t unite. Bridegroom, forsake your bride. What will be the issue of this union? You will bring into the world your own enemy. He will devour you.”71 Ivan’s injunction “don’t unite” [ne nado soediniat’sia] clearly inverts the Communist slogan “Proletarians of the world, unite [soediniaites’]!” but the choice between political constitutions is phrased at once through the novel’s extended metaphors of procreation (“the issue of this union”) and cannibalism (“will devour you”). Indeed, Ivan Babichev’s threat that the couple who desires to start a new family will be consumed by their offspring exactly inverts Kavalerov’s fear that Andrei Babichev, for whom the family is an outdated concept, desires to sexually “consume” his young niece. In this figurative scheme, the

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political allegory of the coming Communist era itself becomes susceptible to Oedipal interpretations and Bakhtinian images of the grotesque, whose fundamental tendency is “to show two bodies in one: the one giving birth and dying, the other conceived, generated, and born.”72 The metaphors of procreation and consumption that express the theme of generational conflict are part and parcel of the text’s striking ambivalence toward the Soviet project, which in itself poses questions about how families should be formed and how people should be fed. These allegories are employed self-consciously and ironically, always destabilized by the metaphoric process that, as Shklovsky observes of Bely, renders any given image “capable of serving as a constant predicate to a succession of changeable subjects.”73 A hilariously phallic sausage is brought to a Jewish butcher to be “circumcised” shortly after Andrei Babichev has “given birth” to it—a sausage that, Borenstein shows, is simultaneously interpretable as a phallus, as excrement, as a child, as a bride, and as Andrei Babichev himself.74 These symbols are so explicitly marshaled by a reader of Freud that they dissolve into the novel’s more general production of figures and fictions. The specter of the nuclear family’s obsolescence renders even the Oedipal framework, the crucible of the self, potentially obsolete. At one point, supposedly out of the blue, Andrei asks Kavalerov, “Who is Jocasta?”75 The question triggers our instinct to seek Freudian allegories, but Andrei’s ignorance might signify either the classic Oedipal problem of recognition or the incipient irrelevance of the old psychological structures and the old art that concerned them. Andrei might be read simultaneously as the patriarch who sexually dominates his kin, the tragic hero unaware of his sin against the family, and the post-Oedipal innocent belonging to a kinship structure beyond the family triangle. The ambivalent insistence on and negation of Oedipal dynamics is dramatized by the efforts of characters to allegorize the novel’s plot in Freud’s familiar terms. Nikolai vaguely considers and discards the option of killing his fatherfigure Andrei in the novel’s second half; when he confides his intention in Ivan, Andrei’s brother himself attempts to take on the role of Oedipus by crying out to his daughter, “Valya, put out my eyes, I want to be blind.”76 In a strict transposition of Sophocles’s trilogy, Valya would now be Oedipus’s daughter Antigone, who in an interpretive tradition stretching back to Hegel is the defender of the family against the state, symbolized by her uncle Creon.77 Valya, however, frustrates the Oedipal narrative by ignoring Ivan’s absurd, melodramatic request; certainly she refrains from defying her uncle Andrei, representative of the new state, in a tragic act of self-sacrifice. Freud’s essentially metaphorical process of displacement, by which a dream-sausage might at the same time be a phallus and a child, is the very literary technique by which Olesha gleefully scrambles the Oedipal elements: a metaphorical son considers murdering a metaphorical father, who is ignorant of

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the parricidal scheme and has apparently not read the play, leading the brother of the intended victim, himself a metaphorical father who has replaced his brother in the metaphorical son’s esteem, to demand of his daughter that she put out his eyes.78 Every part of the Oedipal plot is present, but detached from the family triangle by a new Soviet kinship and distributed equitably among the characters. Rather than a repressed dynamic concealing itself in the metaphorical structure of the text, the psychoanalytic drama is explicitly invoked by those characters who would stabilize the text’s ambivalent tissue of metaphors by fixing it in the Freudian scheme—a scheme that proves, however, inadequate to the task, perhaps a bourgeois anachronism. The book’s recognizably Oedipal but parodically post-Oedipal conclusion finds Kavalerov living with Ivan and Anichka in a seedy sexual community devoid of jealousy, the father figure and the son figure taking turns in the mother figure’s bed. In Olesha’s post-Marxist society, Sophocles’s tragedy is repeated as farce.79 Nevertheless, the farce depends for its effectiveness upon the actual possibility of the consanguineous family’s obsolescence, just as its Rabelaisian idylls—“we are going to transform those miserable puddles of soup of yours into glistening seas,” declaims Kavalerov, imagining himself as a prophet of the kitchen revolution, “borscht into oceans of borscht, heap up kasha in mounds, unleash glaciers of fruit jelly . . . your plates will be clean as lilies, your milk thick as mercury”—derive their force from the palpable potential of a new economy of abundance.80 Because Olesha’s plot revolves around a proposed transformation in food distribution and a potential revolution in family structure, which moreover render eating and procreation metaphorically continuous, neither eating nor begetting can ground a firm allegorical interpretation. Because Envy cannot take for granted any of the social structures that underlie our habitual interpretive practices, Freudian paradigms included, the novella forces us to grapple directly with the metaphorical mechanisms at work in both the bourgeois kinship of genetic relations and the Communist kinship of alimentary relations. Envy can thus be plausibly read as an elegy to the old world or a hymn to the new, a retelling of the Oedipal legend or the staging of its irrelevance, a nightmare or a joke. Its quality of open-ended interpretability derives from its competing systems of mutual figuration and the transformative poetics of possibility they enable. The perception and realization of metaphoric potential is central to Olesha’s fiction, in which, as Nils Nilsson has argued, “all things in the universe are wonderfully connected with each other” and the imaginations of the characters “work along metaphorical lines,” facilitating a fictional “world of startling metaphors. . . . The metaphor itself comes true, is materialized. It is not just a simple comparison, made in passing, we witness a fantastic metamorphosis.”81 We have observed the same thing of Bely, but the point acquires new urgency in its explicit

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dialogue with Soviet ambitions to realize an imaginary society. Conflicts between characters associated with the socialist future and the capitalist past respectively are not just ideological, but derive from a mutual misunderstanding of the other’s figurative practice. Nikolai Kavalerov bluntly accuses Andrei Babichev of being unable to understand “figurative language, which is incomprehensible to you.”82 One way to understand this is to take Kavalerov as a mouthpiece for the author; on this reading, Olesha attacks the new world, in which his intensely figurative art would have no place. In fact, the choice is not between figurative and literal language, but between opposed understandings of what constitutes a meaningful figure. These understandings are grounded in mutually exclusive metaphorical systems and associated with paradigmatic notions of kin identity. As Ivan Babichev says, the factory kitchen erases “family resemblance,” but it also institutes its own figures of identity, which Ivan, who aspires to a specifically Oedipal blindness, cannot see. The “poetic” view of the world as focalized through Kavalerov’s magical, metaphorical vision transforms manufactured products into metaphorical foods: a tugboat becomes an almond, a pillow becomes a pig, the patterns on a blanket “swelled out and turned into pretzels.”83 Kavalerov does not appreciate the symmetrical transformation of food into industrial goods when he copyedits one of Andrei Babichev’s manuscripts a few pages later. “The blood collected at the time of slaughtering can either be processed into food, for the preparation of sausage, or used in producing light and dark albumin, glue, buttons, paints, fertilizers.”84 If the revolutionary Andrei Babichev fails to understand Kavalerov’s “figurative language” as an aesthetic process that creates a world of transformative potential, neither does the frustrated artist Kavalerov understand Babichev’s transformations of slaughterhouse waste as a mode of his own aesthetic—the realization of metaphor’s magic in the material of the world, where it produces desired objects out of waste and offal. 4 . S TA M p S A N D S U B S TA N C E S

As Eliot Borenstein notes, for Olesha’s characters the “very tendency to ‘think in images’ challenges a symbolizing authority irrevocably linked to the father.”85 When Kavalerov imagines a transformed world, he defies the paternal law that regulates the world as it is. That authority is, however, only emphasized by Kavalerov’s futile efforts to correlate conventional terms with “improper” metaphorical predicates. Because of the paternal privilege to define meaning, the Soviet effort to reformulate family structure is a more penetrating criticism of the Oedipal structure of signification than any of Kavalerov’s defamiliarizing metaphors. Yet the redefinition of kinship along economic lines also takes place in the realm

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of figure—the shift from genetic to economic constitutions of identity. If metaphor is that mode of language in which neither of two equated terms can rightly be said to be “proper,” Olesha’s profusion of transformative metaphors demote paternal lineage from its privileged role in various discourses—the ground of signification in psychoanalysis, the germ of capitalism in Marxism—to a hackneyed literary device: social evolution is literary evolution. Thus if Olesha’s characters “cannot escape the context of the family,” their inability to do so must be contextualized within the multiplicity of possible families generated by the novel’s various different understandings of kinship exchange—always haunted by the lingering norm of consanguineous identity but always fearful of the future relations that might replace it.86 The tension between these kinships motivates the novel’s narrative, in which a new system of social institutions assumes the function of defining the family, as well as its tropology, which systematically identifies economic with biological relations. Temporal succession and metaphorical identity come together in an important scene in which Kavalerov looks into the mirror and discovers his father’s image in the glass. Kavalerov’s prized aesthetic imagination is persistently mediated by defamiliarizing technologies of vision—the “rose and blue world” whirling “in the mother of pearl lens” of the button on a pair of underpants, a “landscape looked at through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars,” or the “secret world” of a street mirror “in which everything that you’ve just seen repeats itself ”—so the defamiliarizing mirror that produces unexpected images would seem to be a site of poetic freedom.87 However, the mirror motif also articulates Kavalerov’s identity with his father, to whom his poetic practice is a challenge and from whose legacy it is a deviation. “Once when I was changing my shirt I caught sight of myself in the mirror and was suddenly struck by my amazing resemblance to my father,” Kavalerov relates.88 “It was a resemblance in outward form—no, it was something else, a sort of sexual resemblance I would call it: It was as though I sensed my father’s seed in me, in my very substance. And as if someone said to me: You’re done. Finished. There won’t be any more. Sire a son.” Kavalerov’s words refer back to the “holy, beautiful, family resemblance” that Ivan Babichev invokes as the icon of the bourgeois world, but translate it from a discourse of maternal love to a discourse of paternal legacy. The alienating function of the paternal mirror is crucial to Envy’s formal structure. In an image of mimesis that initiates the narrative, Kavalerov’s first substitute father, Andrei Babichev, wears underpants whose button distortively reflects the world. Kavalerov finds his second substitute father when Ivan Babichev, approaching from behind, emerges into the world of the novel out of a street mirror.89 The image of the chain of generations that Kavalerov discovers in the paternal mirror while “changing my shirt” echoes the stock trope that the body of the parent

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lives on eternally in generations of offspring. “Just like ‘changing boots,’ ” Vasilii Rozanov puts it—“ ‘one pair of boots,’ ‘another pair of boots . . .’ but ‘the person walking in them is the same.’”90 At least in its paternal variant, Olesha interprets the sexual “seed” that biological relatives share as a trap rather than transcendence: to sire a son is to admit that one has given up one’s youthful ambitions. In his short story “Human Material,” a father who has failed in life attempts, because “life does not repeat itself,” to force his son to implement in his stead “the plan, which my father had worked out on a foundation of envy.”91 According to Olesha’s novella of the same name, envy is the purest and last passion of the bourgeois age; here it is the motive for sexual reproduction, the repetition within the family line that is the foundation of bourgeois economy. As personal failure becomes projected onto and repeated through generations, it becomes the masterplot for the failure of the species. Kavalerov strives to kill the father in himself by opting out of the chain of generations.92 “I’m not a daddy, you slugmullion!” he declares, dwelling morbidly on his attraction to Anichka; “you won’t snare me, you bitch!”93 He sleeps with her nonetheless, although she is apparently menopausal, and the paternal inheritance Kavalerov loathes is “finished”—as his mirror image would put it—by historical forces rather any heroic refusal of fatherhood. When the factory kitchens wipe the “family resemblance” from the faces of infants, as Ivan Babichev claims, they will efface precisely this “sexual resemblance” that Kavalerov despises in himself. In the stage play, Nikolai Kavalerov’s obsession with paternal identity is given voice by a bourgeois vulgarian with a pregnant wife who asks the mountebank “miracle-worker” Ivan Babichev to fulfill “a paternal dream, so to speak . . . might it be arranged that the baby’s face looks like me?”94 Whether articulated as the dream of a father or the fear of a son, in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter or Olesha’s Envy, consanguineous identity is implicit in an anxiety of patriarchal legitimacy that is fundamentally incompatible with a universalized kinship built upon maternal metaphors. Olesha’s autobiography, No Day without a Line (1960), illuminates the transition from a despised paternal to a desired maternal resemblance. The author recalls his father, an impoverished Polish nobleman, taking him to the barber and ordering “Cut the heir’s hair!” as the young Olesha was placed before the mirror. “It was depressing to hear,” Olesha writes. “And shameful. And for some reason I remember that sadness to this day. What kind of heir was I? Heir to what? I knew that my father was poor. So what was I heir to? My father in general, a repetition of him?”95 Perhaps Olesha would have felt differently if his father had been able to offer a substantial material inheritance; as it stands, he speaks of inherited paternal identity as an outmoded function of capitalism and prefers an alternative identification with his mother. “In childhood people said I looked like my father,” he writes.96 “However, when I had come to understand that the mirror reflected

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no one other than myself—when I had learned, if I can put it this way, to look in the mirror—I, on the other hand, perceived a resemblance to my mother rather than to my father.” Strangely, to see “no one other than myself ” is in the same stroke to perceive another person—the mother—in an act of utopian identification that cuts against the grain of patriarchal normativity and is therefore beyond the imagination of others. “I spoke of this discovery and they laughed at me. The idea that I resembled my father was so strongly held that, I repeat, they laughed at me!” Olesha continues. But however many glances I cast at the mirror, every one told me I was right—it was my mother’s face looking out of my own face. From my boy’s face, besmirched with every kind of unclean thought, came the lovely face of my mother! I don’t know why I was the only one to see this resemblance at the time, but really it was I alone who saw it. However, gradually other people also began to exclaim: “How like his mother!” And the others realized that, besides the resemblance to my father, a resemblance to my mother had settled in my face as well. This came with the years, as I turned from a boy into a young man. . . . The more secretive, the closer my inner life came to first love, the clearer my resemblance to my mother stood out. The more firmly I felt that I was standing on the threshold of another existence, linked to a woman, the longer the nose, lips, eyes of my mother alone lingered in me. And then, embarking upon life, I did not imagine myself otherwise than resembling my mother.

The “unclean thoughts” that besmirch the future author’s face seem to be his sexuality, the “seed” that links the author Olesha to his father as it links the character Kavalerov to his. The outlines of the situation recall Nikolai Apollonovich’s horror at the “stranger” in his flesh and his reflection. Yet upon learning to “look in the mirror”—a skill which in Envy is paradigmatic of the metaphorical imagination on which Kavalerov prides himself, but of which Kavalerov has a narrow conception—Olesha arrives at an alternate mode of specular identification. His patriarchal inheritance, associated with material capital, debased sexuality, and the obligation to “continue the line,” gives way to a maternal inheritance. Initially recognized only by the imagination of the child or artist, this alternate resemblance spreads and becomes generally acknowledged. The maternal identity is also related to an (idealized) sexuality, but phrased primarily in terms of the self, the self ’s desire for itself, its desire for one of the possible selves offered by the preceding generation. Love of the mother, hatred of the father—Olesha’s autobiographical reflections might be merely another rehashing of the Oedipal scheme, were it not for the

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historical accident of Soviet utopianism that makes the choice between parents a jointly economic and poetic intervention into the ground of the family triangle. The contrast between the potential guarantors of personal identity, the genetic and the economic, is foregrounded by Envy’s first direct evocation of the genealogical theme, when Kavalerov discovers that hereditary identity can be deciphered on the surface of Andrei Babichev’s body. When I saw that back, that plump torso from behind, bathed in sunlight, I nearly screamed. His back gave everything away. The fat on his body was a tender yellow color. The scroll of another man’s destiny was unrolling in front of me. Babichev’s forebears had taken good care of their skin. The rolls of fat had been gently arranged on their bodies. They had bequeathed to the Commissar that fineness of skin, that noble color and pure pigmentation. And the main thing, that which filled me with a sense of triumph, was that I saw a birthmark on the small of his back—a special, inherited, aristocratic birthmark, a tender little thing, translucent, filled with blood, attached to the body by a little stem—the sort of thing by which mothers recognize their kidnapped children decades later.97

Peter Brooks has described such somatic symbols, which are found throughout the history of Western literature, as compactly mediating the concepts of body, identity, and textuality. “Given its most formulaic version in the notorious croix de ma mère of melodrama, the token affixed to or engraved on the abandoned orphan . . . enables the establishment of identity,” he writes; “the sign imprints the body, making it part of the signifying process.”98 The continuity of Babichev’s signifying body with the larger text is underscored by its explicit comparison to a scroll. A few pages before, Kavalerov had noted that “man is surrounded by little inscriptions, a squirming ant swarm of little inscriptions.”99 The birthmark appears to be one such telltale inscription, labeling the supposed revolutionary as the member of an aristocratic lineage. The pedigree legible on the unrolled parchment of his back, which parallels Kavalerov’s inheritance of a visible “sexual seed,” appears to belie Babichev’s devotion to abolishing private inheritance and the “family resemblance” that figures it.100 However, Envy never tells that story whose potential is written on Andrei’s body, a body that is, Janus-like, inscribed differently on either side. The ancient scroll of his pedigree faces backward, while his front is marked with a token of personal experience and economic exchange, directly opposed to hereditary continuity and aristocratic caste. Kavalerov’s exultation at discovering his adoptive father’s hidden lineage is effaced when Andrei turns around: “On his chest, under his right collarbone, there was a scar. Round, slightly in relief, like the imprint of a coin in wax. It was as though a branch had grown in that place and been

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chopped off. Babichev had done time at hard labor. He tried to escape and they shot him.”101 Kavalerov’s similes of the coin and the broken branch respectively make legible a simple allegory in these two somatic marks. Andrei’s back, marked with proof of his breeding, is turned to the prerevolutionary past of patriarchal inheritance, while his front faces the future and is stamped with a coin, a token of economic exchange and the origin of his restaurant’s name, the Quarter Ruble.102 The imprint of this figurative coin is imagined as the point at which a branch was “chopped off,” compactly symbolizing detachment from the family tree, whereas Andrei’s aristocratic birthmark is connected to his body by a “stem.” Like a coin himself, Andrei Babichev is marked differently on obverse and reverse. The effacement of the organic metaphor of the “family tree” by the numismatic simile of the coin suggests the effacement of the genealogical family in favor of groupings based on economic relations. Andrei’s brother Ivan also has a somatic mark—the pattern of veins in his hand, which he calls a “tree of life.”103 His daughter Valya, in perhaps Olesha’s single most famous image, is described as “a branch full of flowers and leaves” as she rushes past Kavalerov without noticing him.104 The family tree is a mark of the Babichev household; even Kavalerov, when he is evicted from Andrei Babichev’s home, feels “as though a branch had snapped off and I tumbled down from a splendid tree—an overripe, lazy fruit, smashed by the fall.”105 If the image of the breaking branch is, as Andrew Barratt argues, emblematic of “the romanticism of the past” or, to use Angela Carter’s phrase, the “bourgeois aesthetics that always sees an elegiac charm in decay,” it is also emblematic of Kavalerov’s exile from the Soviet Eden, which will be inhabited by freely adopted rather than restlessly prodigal sons.106 Specifically, the paradise of Andrei Babichev’s home belongs to Volodya Makarov, who had rescued Andrei from death during the Russian Civil War. “They were about to put my head on an anvil,” says Andrei, “and smash my face in with a sledgehammer,” when Volodya saved his life; henceforth the two were “joined for good.”107 Nikolai Kavalerov, who rejects the father in himself, yet fails to enter into relations that do not metaphorically repeat paternal ones, is excluded from this postgenealogical household. Olesha suggests that family feeling will persist there, albeit in a new mode. Andrei Babichev mawkishly muses of Volodya that “there, in the new world, the love between father and son will also flourish. Then I have a right to rejoice; I have the right to love him both as a son and as the new man.”108 Andrei’s communal kitchen may wipe consanguineous resemblance from the faces of children, but it will institute alternative mechanisms of affection, of resemblance, and even of identity. Nikolai Kavalerov senses this when he notes of Volodya Makarov that “Babichev was nurturing and grooming his own likeness. . . . The way he looked at me said: ‘sorry, but you’re mistaken. You’re the hanger on. I am fully entitled. I am the heir apparent.’”109 In isolation, this comment might be read as an expression

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of Nikolai’s all-consuming envy, but Volodya himself confesses in a letter to his adoptive parent that “I copy everything you do. I even smack my lips when I eat, the way you do.”110 Volodya’s imitation of the genetically unrelated man who feeds him is the corollary of Ivan Babichev’s prophecy that Andrei Babichev’s factory kitchen will erase the “family resemblance” from the faces of consanguineous children. Like every customer of the Quarter Ruble and, by metaphorical extension, every citizen of the centralized Soviet state, Volodya’s food is provided by Andrei Babichev, whom the young man comes to resemble in the very act of eating. The old scheme of hereditary identity or sexual resemblance is opposed to a new Soviet identity formed in the relation of production and consumption. The critic Andrei Belinkov has compared Olesha’s “sociology of metaphor,” an “attempt to bind the fragmented parts of the world together by means of their resemblance,” to Soviet efforts to rationalize and unify the disjointed life of the czarist period.111 On this reading the function of literature remains a formalist effort to constitute a coherent textual universe by poetic means—a universe akin—but it is paralleled by policy efforts to redefine the material processes that create kinship. To put the matter figuratively, it isn’t that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but that you are what—and how—you eat. 5. GENRES OF IDENTITY

A society based on economic rather than consanguineous relations would demand new modes of storytelling. “It’s good that legends are already being made up,” muses Andrei Babichev. “The end of an era, the transitional period, these demand their own legends and fairy tales. Goodness—I’m glad to know that I shall be the hero of one of those tales [skazka].”112 Andrei Babichev’s metafictional statement asks us to entertain Olesha’s book as representative of this prospective genre. At the same time, Andrei’s fantasy of himself as the hero of a “transitional” tale ironically counterpoints Kavalerov’s reveries of nineteenth-century rags-to-riches narratives in the style of Balzac. Deeply ambivalent toward the place of verbal art under Soviet power, Olesha’s book depicts the legends of the past in confused communion with legends of the future. It attempts to occupy the historical pivot point between the individualist fantasies of the bourgeois age and the new, collectivist fantasies—to narrativize a radical break precisely in the metaphors that undergird both societies and stories. A tropology of transformation is key to Olesha’s efforts to imagine this new society that is to take shape through a sea change in the metaphorical constitution of identity.113 If the basic synchronic form of metaphor is the paradox “A = B,” that structure is temporalized as a process of becoming. The verb “to become,” writes Christine Brooke-Rose in her Grammar of Metaphor, is “perhaps the closest to

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the copula itself.”114 Olesha’s tropes—Kavalerov’s tugboat that becomes an almond or Babichev’s blood that becomes a button—typically turn on images of transition and transformation. M. Numano writes that his metaphors “forcibly link two things by an external similarity alone and intentionally underscore the difference between them,” instead of revealing an inherent resemblance between outwardly different things and emphasizing the constitution of identity.115 As in Petersburg, metaphor’s inherent tension between identity and difference is manifested in Envy’s plot as antagonism. Kavalerov, whose efforts to discover difference in the world are an attack on the symbolic authority of the father, fails to overcome his own inherited identity and ends up in a shabby allegory of the patriarchal household. Communist kinship, on the other hand, is to overcome its historical origins precisely by taking over the functions of the bourgeois family. Here it is not just old and young generations that struggle with each other, but two distinct modes of the reproduction of labor. In the context of a comprehensive social revolution, there is a world of difference between metaphors of being and metaphors of becoming. Olesha’s Soviet fairy tales systematically play out modalities of the fulfillment and frustration of genealogical inheritance. His first novel, Three Fat Men: A Fairy Tale (written in 1924 but published only in 1928) inverts the classic fantasy of a peasant child revealed to be a king’s son: an infant of the lower classes has been kidnapped by a trio of grotesque monopolists and raised to be the heir to their wealth, an event forestalled only by a socialist revolution that reunites the boy with his proletarian twin sister.116 In Envy, Andrei Babichev, the nemesis of genealogical inheritance, imagines himself as the hero of a future Soviet “fairy tale”; freshly evicted from Babichev’s apartment and walking homeless in the rain, Nikolai Kavalerov recalls the fairy tale in which a father promises his paternal inheritance to the son who best learns his trade, ruefully comparing his present degradation to the “fabulous [skazochnyi] fencer who walked through the rain warding off the drops with his foil” and “got his paternal inheritance.”117 In both books, an impoverished child is temporarily inducted into a household of privilege—whether by a capitalist mogul or Soviet technocrat. Both Envy and Three Fat Men derive from the stock plot of the noble foundling who comes into his patrimony when his identity is revealed, common in fairy tales as well as in modern renditions like Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, one of Olesha’s favorite books.118 The material basis to the fairy-tale theme of inheritance is stressed in Olesha’s 1927 short story “Legend.” Eliot Borenstein and Aleksandra Notkina have separately approached this brief piece as diagnostic of Olesha’s family themes; its rhetoric of continuity is shared by Envy and by Olesha’s autobiographical writings.119 The story’s child narrator Kolya—diminutive of Nikolai and thus akin to the narrator of Envy—is oppressed by the “legend” of generational continuity,

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a social fiction materialized in the possessions he is doomed to inherit. “Every object bound my birth to me . . . ascribed something to me,” Kolya complains of his father’s goods, which identify him with his paternal lineage; “I don’t want to be a continuation.”120 The child’s material surroundings—rendered uncanny and active by a force recalling Marx’s commodity fetish, “a definite social relation between men, that assumes . . . the fantastic form of a relation between things”— reduce him to a link in the chain of generations, a vector of inherited wealth.121 Generational continuity is symbolized above all by a grandfather clock, marking endless time, to whose chimes the successive heirs have been conceived and born.122 The monotonous flow of bourgeois time is interrupted by history when a Red Army squadron arrives. Kolya flings open the door of the bedroom where his father has barricaded the family, shouting “Open fire! Shoot the bedroom! The mystery! The buffet, the legend, all the buttons! Cut me loose from him, from his moustache, from his thoughts. Free me.”123 The incitement to parricide includes not only the father (and, implicitly, the mother and the self—a complete eradication of the family triangle) but also the oppressive wealth of inherited objects that are, for Olesha, inseparable from inherited identity. Georges Bataille has referred to the “partially malevolent solicitude” that incurs the son’s obligation to adhere to bourgeois norms, a debt he passes on together with any material inheritance to his dutifully sired children.124 Liberation from biological kinship is central to Olesha’s ambition, avowed in the 1933 newspaper article “Literature—the Common Cause of the Writer and the Worker,” to represent humanity as “freed from the domination of money.”125 The problem of achieving historical continuity in the absence of the continuity of generations—the two forms have traditionally been identified, as the grandfather clock of “Legend” suggests—is also the problem of achieving a system of economic organization that does not depend upon biological inheritance. Since Olesha understands all these processes of identification through time as figurative, he turns to verbal tropes in order to imagine a poetic and economic structure that breaks with the biological family. In Babichev’s body, which is marked with the broken branch of the family tree on one side and a metaphorical coin on the other, a historical break in generational time coincides with an emblem of economic exchange. Olesha’s ruminations on fiction imply a hope that this kind of metaphorical thinking is capable of conferring temporal continuity into a future beyond biology. The figural richness of his fiction aims, like genealogy, to overcome the bounds of the individual lifetime. He admiringly quotes Proust’s adage that “only metaphor is capable of granting a kind of eternity to style,” since eternity can only be conceptualized, he writes, through metaphorical means.126 Olesha’s autobiographical writings refer to “giving birth” to metaphor, just as his character Babichev metaphorically “gives birth” to the food that grounds a future kinship; as

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Kazimiera Ingdahl notes, “to ‘give birth’ to metaphors is equivalent to overcoming time, i.e. conquering old age and death. . . . The driving force behind the metaphorical expansion in Olesha’s prose originates in the author’s aspiration to liberate himself from successive time.”127 Late in his life Olesha wrote of his literary career as a “metaphor shop” (lavka metafor) forced out of business by the bad taste of his customers, who prefer stale metaphors like “pale as death” to volatile ones that are realized of themselves—figurative cherries so vivid the shop is plagued by sparrows, or the erotic image of a puddle lying under a tree “like a gypsy woman,” which bursts into flames and threatens the rest of the stock.128 Itself a trope, the “metaphor shop” completely identifies the creation of fiction and the marketing of metaphor. It hints, moreover, that Soviet communism proved a less than ideal environment for the literary imagination. There has been no qualitative break because postrevolutionary readers, like their bourgeois predecessors, remain indifferent even to the metaphors most eager to burst into being. Where “Legend,” set before the Russian Revolution, appeals to the coming order to destroy fatherhood, in Envy the revolution has already taken place and patriarchal inheritance is on the wane. The Babichev family is entirely fragmented; the brothers are estranged and Valya is raised separately from either of them. Volodya pays a visit to his biological father outside the frame of the action, but the detail only demonstrates that his relationship with Andrei is not, as Kavalerov’s is, pathologically Oedipal. Envy’s only consanguineous father-son relation is internal to Kavalerov—the loathed sexual seed of which he cannot rid himself, the haunting insistence that every son is the proxy of his sire, and the need to make of every older man a father figure. All Kavalerov’s social relationships, inevitably failed ones, are relations of substitution. Babichev plucks him from the gutter as a temporary replacement for Volodya; he is in love with Valya, but she is already engaged; he dreams of romance with young mothers, but there is always a child already at the breast. (“I call the bitches, but they don’t come,” as he charmlessly puts it.129) Because Kavalerov’s sexuality is imagined as an identity with his father— and the norm of patriarchal inheritance that organizes bourgeois capital—its only outlet is the paradigmatic capitalist encounter of prostitution, the exchange of the body for money. Just after Kavelerov contemplates his sexual resemblance to his father, he has a dream that suggests how deeply his sexuality is integrated into the market economy. “A beautiful woman, laughing softly, slips between the sheets with me. My tenderest wishes are coming true. But how, how will I pay her back? I get scared. No one has ever loved me without being paid for it. . . . ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ replies the dream girl, ‘It’ll only be a quarter!’”130 This is, of course, the price of a meal at Andrei Babichev’s restaurant—another example of the metaphorical exchangeability of food and sex and the respective economic and kinship systems associated with them. Although debased by Kavalerov’s contempt for sexuality

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outside the bourgeois family, his dream might also suggest the easy and abundant affection promised by the future organization of society. The household he ends up in is also a degraded image of the Quarter Ruble. Like Andrei Babichev, Anichka is the provider of food, but on a petty-bourgeois scale and inside the home, where she cooks meals for a hairdresser’s cooperative. Also like Babichev, she takes in strays and feeds them, though in a grotesque sexual register: “She feeds cats, . . . She throws them some sort of organ meat.”131 Her total sexual availability is saturated with images of generational exchange. Kavalerov’s self-perceived “sexual resemblance” to the parent generation is grotesquely literalized when Anichka says of his performance in bed, “You remind me very much of my husband,” who “took me . . . the same way.”132 Her husband’s portrait, “somebody’s youthful-looking grandfather,” hangs over the bed and, when he looks at it, “the memory of his father changing his shirt flashed before Kavalerov’s eyes.”133 In the novel’s scene of specular misprision, Kavalerov discovers his father’s sexual seed in himself while changing his shirt before the mirror; after they have sex, Anichka actually proceeds to repair his clothes with patches cut out of her dead husband’s garments. Family resemblance and the accumulation of capital have been degraded to patching together second-hand clothes. Cluttered with her dead husband’s possessions, most ostentatiously the gigantic bed he had won in a lottery, Anichka’s room constitutes a preserve of the bourgeois system of relations, complete with a private kitchen she has established in the corridor. Here narratives of biological continuity and accumulated capital remain in force, at least for the time being.134 Nonetheless the family unit Kavalerov forms together with the parent-figures Anichka and Ivan Babichev, at once a parodic sexual communism and a metaphorical projection of the nuclear family, is unmistakably in its twilight years. The future of procreation itself is somewhat in doubt. Anichka, aged 45, is portrayed as menopausal, while Valya is essentially prepubescent, with the posture “of a child” and “little girl’s legs.”135 Volodya, her fiancé, will not even kiss her, he says, until the grand opening of the Quarter Ruble four years hence.136 The novel takes place in a kind of hiatus of procreative sexuality, in which the women of the older generation are no longer fertile and those of the coming generation are not yet so. The propagation of the species will resume only when the Quarter Ruble has superseded the domestic kitchen and effaced “family resemblance” once and for all. Caught in this turning point, this hesitation in the reproduction of labor and therefore of historical continuity, Envy is profoundly ambivalent—at once nostalgic for fairy tales and hopeful about a future poetics of exchange. Not long after its publication, the possibilities it suggested were actively suppressed. Although Olesha’s novel remains uncommitted either to the capitalist past or the socialist future, it does commit to the dizzying systems of rhetorical exchange enabled by

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that very ambivalence. Against the assumption of hereditary identity, it insists that the human imagination is capable of bringing into being other forms of economic and creative life. By recognizing parentage as figure, Olesha renders it contingent upon the economic relations of identity with which it is entwined. His palpable nostalgia for the old, individualistic world is balanced by a poetics of possibility—a complex of metaphors that was not, though it might plausibly have been, realized in social life.

A F T E R W O R D

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“Man makes man,” writes Aristotle. His tersely worded observation might be read as a statement about biological reproduction, by which human beings make more human beings; about mimetic representation, through which human beings create legible images of themselves; or about thought, which generates and defines the very category of humanity.1 Literary fiction, an aesthetic medium that is inherently involved in problems of human identity and social organization, relates these three meanings of the Greek verb tekhne—the making of people, the making of art, and the work of the imagination.2 Pierre Macherey has interpreted Aristotle’s maxim as an intellectual cul-de-sac in which humanist thought and mimetic art are “dedicated entirely to the repetition of a single image,” the ceaseless discovery of “what is already there; creation is self-multiplication.”3 Biological proliferation and the proliferation of mirror images are stock metaphors that express this scheme of sterile, narcissistic, endless self-sameness. The two metaphors are superimposed on each other when a literary character mistakes his own mirror image for the presence of his father—a trope that seems starkly to illustrate Macherey’s vision of modern life as a hall of mirrors, reproducing a single predetermined image in every field of human endeavor. The interaction of biological and specular identification in such scenes, however, yields an uncanny difference within processes of repetition and identification: the mirror image is not exactly that of the person looking. In their interaction, mimetic and familial identity make visible the possibility of error inherent in to reduplication. The Socratic imperative to “know thyself,” emblazoned at the entrance to the Delphic oracle, has often been understood as “know thy parents.” When Oedipus goes there to ask the sibyl who he is—who his parents were—the answer demonstrates the intimate relation, even the figurative identity, between knowledge of lineage and knowledge of self. Oedipus is able to answer the Sphinx’s riddle, whose answer is “humanity,” but he is unable to specify which human he is, or to which

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humans he is related. Outside of the theater, it is tempting to think of these matters as pertaining to natural law rather than oracular proclamation, and therefore perfectly knowable. A late medieval travelogue describes “a manner of serpents, by the which men assay and prove whether their children be bastards or none, or of lawful marriage. For if they be born in right marriage, the serpents go about them, and do them no harm, and if they be born in avowtrie, the serpents bite and envenom them.”4 These vipers are privy to a class of knowledge that is not granted to humans themselves—exactly who their parents are, and by extension who they themselves might be. Contemporary legal evidence like genetic testing may have a more solid scientific basis, but it too is a fantastic prosthesis projecting an aura of infallibility; DNA tests come with a significant margin of error, compounded by their inability to account for widespread biological phenomena like twinning and chimerism.5 Juridical codes typically rely on legal fictions to establish paternity, such as the German Civil Code’s claim that “an illegitimate child and its father are unrelated,” or, conversely, English law’s presumption that a husband is the father of his wife’s children despite any contrary evidence.6 Perhaps most importantly, shared genetic material is too narrow to represent the complex range of actual family relations, which can include any number of elective or metaphorical kinships.7 Kinship looms so largely in our sense of identity because it articulates inherited social class and other aspects of the reproduction of labor. Because children in some loose sense assume the social places of the parent generation, despite having different experiences and bodies, they can be thought of as simultaneously equivalent to and different from their forebears. In a philosophical tradition stretching back to Hegel, self-identity is defined as “the process of its own becoming,” which takes place through the act of self-contemplation.8 Generational succession dramatizes how identity is constituted; it provides a stage on which to play out the formulation of identity. From this point of view, statements of familial identity provide an opportunity to look at how identity takes shape and to hazard guesses as to how identities might evolve. In literary structures grounded in kinship metaphor, we perceive the individual imagination and becoming of self together with the social imagination and the historical becoming of humanity. One way of continuing this study would therefore be to examine discourses that speculate on the future of the species. The eclipse of the aristocratic clan in The House of the Seven Gables is linked to new technologies of reproduction; early Soviet writing on the family is inherently futuristic. Would a technology like cloning provide a new framework for thinking about kin identity? A clone, like a mirror, reproduces an image of the self; like parents and children, clones share genetic material; the figure of the clone therefore implies the same problematic of identity and difference as the scene of specular misprision, but with a new emphasis on

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biological technologies.9 One might adduce many other speculative situations.10 In Vladimir Savchenko’s Self-Discovery, a cybernetic apparatus breeds copies of its creator in an amniotic vat; as they interact with one another, they develop distinct personality traits. In Lidiia Obukhova’s Lilith, an extraterrestrial has a child with a human woman; the mysterious compatibility of their chromosomes is a fantasy not just of a common human identity, but a cosmic “equality of all galactic creatures [ravenstvo galaktian].”11 In Obukhova’s novel, identity extends to the whole universe; in Savchenko’s, difference develops within the individual. Both thought experiments try to conceive a kinship beyond human sexuality—an alien or nonorganic relatedness. The shift of focus from personal to species identity is, perhaps, inherent in science fiction discourses. Ray Bradbury’s 1950 Martian Chronicles ends with a family that has migrated to Mars from an earth destroyed by nuclear war. The father takes everyone on a trip into the ruins of an ancient city, promising to show them Martians. “The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad. The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water.”12 The book ends on this ellipsis, which forces the reader to linger in the uncanny estrangement of the species. Specular misprision shows the human family reproduced and society continuing, but in an alien environment and as an alien race that is not obliged to repeat the apocalyptic fate of the Earthlings. Human survival is here contingent on humanity developing the ability to see itself as something other than what it is or has been. Bradbury’s futuristic scene illustrates a redemptive or enlightening potential to specular misprision, which I want in closing to suggest is typical of such scenes and perhaps typical of metaphor in general. In Gustave Flaubert’s historical tale “The Legend of St. Julian Hospitator,” the hero, intending to drown himself in a pool, sees there “a gaunt old man, with a white beard and a face so sad Julian could not restrain his tears. The other wept too. Without recognizing his own reflection, he vaguely remembered seeing a face like this before. Then he gave a cry—it was his father; and he thought no more of killing himself.”13 When a character is confronted with a mirror, we expect a performance of recognition, according to Aristotle an essential plot function whose finest examples involve self-discovery accompanied by a reversal of fortunes (as when Oedipus’s self-identification is in the same stroke the tragic revelation of his parentage).14 But instead of showing Julian his own face, the mirror shows him his dead father, whom Julian had killed by mistake many years before. This uncanny misrecognition now confounds the circuit of self-knowledge and perpetuates Julian’s own life. In Bradbury’s story, a family perceives itself in its reflection as another species that will descend from them and, by identifying itself with the future Martians,

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abjures the self-annihilating violence of the human race; in Flaubert’s, an individual sees his image in a pool as the father who begat him and renounces suicide. Once in a futuristic and once in a historical idiom, once on the level of the species and once on the level of the individual, the life-saving epiphany comes by way of a misrecognition that confuses self and kin—a mistaken, but not unrelated, identity. At stake is not just self-understanding on the level of psychology, but a philosophical and aesthetic problematic of identification. “To think is to identify,” writes Theodor Adorno, but dialectic thought also entails “the consistent sense of non-identity.”15 Specular misprision dramatizes the point that every identified object generates, in the act of thought, another and different object. As the dialectical tradition observes, even the law of identity, “p = p,” involves two distinct objects—a subject p and a predicate p on either side of the equals sign. As Vasili Rozanov writes in his 1917 Apocalypse of Our Time, hereditary identity articulates this aporia. “A equals A and can never become not-A. There is nothing in the universe that departs from this principle of logical identity,” and yet “the very essence of the ‘father’ lies in his constant and uninterrupted victory over this axiom.”16 Specular misprision brings out the insistent nonidentity haunting even the most straightforward identifying act—that of recognizing oneself as such. Such scenes do not simply equate the person and the image, the subject and the predicate, but enact the figural thinking of identity. For Bradbury and Flaubert, the uncanny difference that haunts the scene of self-recognition is not just a threat to the integrity of the self; it engenders the salvific possibility of survival and becoming into the future. Metaphor’s counterintuitive identification of plainly distinct terms generates ideas that straightforward thinking cannot. As Aristotle’s Rhetoric asserts, “strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can get hold of something fresh.”17 For Aristotle, both the aesthetic appeal and intellectual usefulness of “a new idea, a new fact,” derive from the misprision inherent in the metaphorical situation. “Aristotle’s book says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself / in the act of making a mistake,” explains Anne Carson in her poetic commentary to Aristotle’s text. “Metaphors teach the mind / to enjoy error / and to learn / from the juxtaposition of what is and what is not the case.”18 Elsewhere Carson examines the Velasquez painting Las Meninas, in which a princess occupies the foreground while the king and queen who are the ostensible subjects of the artist appear only in a mirror painted in the depths of the canvas. Much as the narrator of Nabokov’s “Guide to Berlin” uses a mirror to insert himself into the relationship between the barkeeper and his son, this painting inserts the viewer into the royal family. To look into this painted mirror is to identify with the rulers and fantasize about being king, but because the mirror offers the faces of strangers, it also registers our absence from the world of the artwork.19 We grasp in a moment of figurative insight how the

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painting is organized around our privileged perspective, Carson writes, but also how it excludes us by offering another person’s specular image. We are both the center, the king, and absent, inconsequential. This paradoxical encounter between our world and the painted one is essentially the paradox of metaphor, Carson concludes—the figurative unity of contradictory elements she takes to be typical, even constitutive, of aesthetic experience.20 The paradox of metaphor is central to artistic form, but also to the economic and political structures that artworks encode. Las Meninas itself stages the political authority of kingship and, in the family triangle of the reflected monarchs and the foreground princess, kinship’s intersection with institutions of power. As we have seen throughout this study, kinship metaphor in literature models and comments on the metaphorical extension of identities in the social economy. Fiction is not the only discourse to observe these phenomena—David Hume perceives acts of figuration to underlie all social constructs—but it is among the richest and most powerfully self-reflexive.21 In the literary trope of specular misprision, the figurative structure of the artwork and the reproduction of labor enter into a relationship of metaphorical identification. In a period like the Soviet 1920s, in which social fictions of kinship are in flux, this mistaken identity meaningfully alters them both. I am alluding here to theoretical models that take cultural texts and economic systems to mutually constitute each other through their relation to a common ground, often referred to with a capital letter as “History” or “the Real.” We may lack direct knowledge of what Althusser calls a “process without a subject” because, as Fredric Jameson argues, it “can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force.”22 We know this “ground and untranscendable horizon” only as it appears in some discourse that claims to represent it—an economic axiom, say, or a novel. This very enigma compels us to find meaningful correlations—metaphorical identities—between literary structures and other phenomena. The symbolic edifice oriented onto an unfamiliar element is the very structure of metaphor, in which, Giorgio Agamben argues, “there is no proper term that the metaphorical one is called upon to replace.”23 In its irreducibility to the simple substitution of “A = A,” metaphor points toward that “barrier resistant to signification in which is guarded the original enigma of every signifying act.”24 Like the scene of specular misprision that dramatizes it, metaphor orients us onto the blind spot that triangulates the poetic imagination and economic life.

NOTES

Notes to Introduction 1. Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage, 1997), 160. 2. Ibid., 157. 3. Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text, trans. Jeremy Whitely with Emma Hughes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 55. 4. Nabokov, Stories, 159. 5. Stendhal, Scarlet and Black, trans. Margaret R. B. Shaw (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1953), 93. On the mirror as a figure for mimesis, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 30–35. 6. A novel by Vladimir Sorokin, a pastiche of literary clichés, employs an appropriately banal variant: a woman glimpses her reflection and sees her mother in her own aged body. “In the entryway hung a wide old mirror. . . . I see a mass of old women, exhausted faces, everyone shoving, and I can’t find myself no matter how I try, simply can’t! And then I saw my mother; she was looking at me out of that mirror. I moved my hand across my face—so did she. I shook my hair—so did she.” Vladimir Sorokin, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2002), 2:796. All translations mine unless otherwise noted. 7. I borrow this shorthand definition of metaphor from Peter Brooks’s analysis of plot construction. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1984), 91. 8. Andrei Bely, Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Steven Cassedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 108; Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, 2 vols. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), 1:241. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 124. 9. Versions of this aesthetic stance are of great antiquity. In The Republic, Socrates maintains that the “faculty in man to which imitation is addressed” is the “weakness of the human mind” manifested in refraction, Gestalt switches, and other instances in which perception deviates from reality— that is, art is defined by how it appears to depart from the truth. Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Random House, 1937), 1:860. 10. Aleksandr Bogdanov, Essays in Tektology, trans. George Gorelik (Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publications, 1980), 100. Claude Lévi-Strauss arrives at a similar formula: “every society first desires to reproduce itself; it must thus possess a rule to assign children the same status in the social structure as that of their parents.” The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 57. 11. For example, holding parents responsible for the actions of minor children, devolving power of attorney onto an incapacitated person’s nearest relative, or distributing wealth over time largely through the mechanism of children acceding to the possessions of their parents. 12. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 83. 13. These efforts to decipher the cultural superstructure as determined by the material base have been influentially synthesized with Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism in Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 77–80.

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14. Nabokov, Stories, 157. 15. Ibid., 157–58. 16. See, e.g., Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 2. 17. Quoted in Friedrich Engels, The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State in Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan (New York: International, 1972), 122. 18. Ibid., 121. In the last years of his life Marx planned a book on kinship that would build on the anthropological work of Lewis Henry Morgan, and left voluminous notes toward the project. See Thomas R. Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 250–55. 19. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Aylmer Maude, rev. George Gibian (New York: Norton, 1995), 74; Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v chetyrnadtsati tomakh (Moscow, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1928), 18:87. The philanderer Stepan Oblonsky actually reads the telegram announcing Anna’s arrival while being shaved before a mirror by his valet and confidante (“from their looks, as they met in the glass, it was evident that they understood each other”), thereby establishing a link between mirrors, adultery, and a duplicitous world of socially conventional appearances in the novel’s very first pages. Ibid., 4; 18:6. 20. Ibid., 319; 18:368. 21. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point, 1990), 391; Fedor Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1958), 9:488. The main room of Karamazov’s house is lined with “mirrors in fanciful frames”; after receiving a beating there at Dmitri’s hands, Karamazov examines his wounds in a mirror he demands from Alesha (a son who strikingly resembles his mother rather than his father). Ibid., 122, 141; 9:156, 9:179. 22. This tendency is perhaps most pronounced in naturalism, a literary trend many critics see as defined by some kind of biological determinism or compulsion. See, e.g., George Lukács, Marxism and Human Liberation, ed. E. San Juan Jr. (New York: Dell, 1973), 118; for a more recent feminist critique of naturalism as a complex of ideologies concerning biological reproduction, see Jennifer L. Fleissner, The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 2–3. 23. Engels, Origin of Family, 138–39. 24. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 207. 25. Yuri Olesha, Envy, trans. Clarence Brown, The Portable Twentieth Century Reader, ed. Clarence Brown (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 351; Zagovor chuvstv (Saint Petersburg: Kristall, 1999), 89. 26. Nikolai Krementsov, A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1. 27. Kazimir Malevich, Malevich on Suprematism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 56. 28. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (London: Verso, 2011), 113. For a Western, capitalist example of the avant-garde “view of the world as an object manipulated by technology and as a system of relations that must be grasped in their ensemble,” see Barbara Johnson’s essay comparing Stéphane Mallarmé and Ferdinand de Lesseps, the impresario of the Suez Canal. Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 60–61. 29. Irene Masing-Delic, “The Living Work of Art,” in Creating Life, ed. Joan Grossman and Irina Paperno (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 59. Another precursor of these ideas, and one who directly influenced Andrei Bely, is Vladimir Solovyov, for whom “true spirituality” is the resurrection of the body in a common spiritual community of mankind, originating in “the family . . . the formative element of any community.” Vladimir Solov’ev, Chteniia o bogochelovechestve (Saint Petersburg: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1994), 336, 352. 30. Quoted in Boris Gasparov,“Futurism and Phonology: Futurist Roots of Jakobson’s Approach to Language,” in Cahiers de l’Institut de Linguistique et des Sciences du langage 9 (1997), 111. Structuralist theorist Roman Jakobson described Khlebnikov’s efforts in passages that, Gasparov continues, “can be taken as a paraphrasis of Jakobson’s own efforts to build a unifying and universal linguistic theory.”

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Insofar as much of contemporary literary theory stems from or reacts against Jakobson’s ideas, it is shaped by Russian aspirations for a universal poetics concomitant with a universal kinship. 31. This universal family and language also implies a universal economy in Khlebnikov’s essay “To the Artists of the World,” which accuses ordinary language of “divid[ing] multilingual mankind into different camps involved in tariff wars, into a series of verbal marketplaces beyond whose confines any given language loses currency.” Khlebnikov proposes a new language of hieroglyphics, “the new integrator of the human race,” based upon innate properties of sounds and recalling an original, preBabel language common to all humanity. Velimir Khlebnikov, The King of Time, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 146–47. 32. Olesha, Zagovor chuvstv, 790. 33. Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 7. 34. Mark Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 193. 35. Danilo Kiš, Encyclopedia of the Dead, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin, 1991), 63. David Schneider has defined kinship in its North America variant as “a relationship of identity. People who are blood relatives share a common identity, they believe.” American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 25. 36. Plutarch, Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 1:49. 37. David Hume, Selections (New York: Scribner, 1955), 85. 38. Ibid., 86. 39. Ibid., 87. 40. Ibid., 88. 41. Ibid., 88–89. 42. Ibid., 89. 43. Ibid., 90. 44. Quoted in Genevieve Lloyd, Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature (London: Routledge, 1993), 70–76. Where Hume embraces the excesses of the imagination, Jeremy Bentham, though heavily influenced by his predecessor’s psychological associationism, bemoans the ineluctably figurative quality of thought and attempts to formulate a properly signifying “logical species of fiction . . . very different the Fiction of the Logician from the Fictions of poets, priests, and lawyers.” Jeremy Bentham, Theory of Fictions, ed. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 18. 45. Louis Althusser, Sur la reproduction (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), 73. 46. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 5. 47. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 50. Lévi-Strauss even dismisses the notion of a biological basis to the incest taboo. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 29–32. Here he echoes Friedrich Engels: “incest is an invention, and a very valuable one, too,” because it forces family groups to enter into social relations with one another. Engels, Origin, 101. For both thinkers, to treat kinship identity as literal and biological rather than figurative and social is to reify these relations and, in the same stroke, to reify hereditary castes. 48. David Schneider, Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 262. 49. Ibid., 194. 50. Giorgio Agamben has written of metaphorical equivalence in general that “there is no proper term that the metaphorical one is called upon to replace.” Stanzas, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 148. 51. Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, “Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An Historical Introduction,” in New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee (London: Routledge, 1999), 36. 52. Ibid., 22.

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53. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 83. Lévi-Strauss has in mind marriage exchange, but the point holds true for generational exchange. 54. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1990), 175, 181. 55. On Bely’s role in the development of the concept of defamiliarization, see Thomas Seifrid, The Word Made Self: Russian Writings on Language, 1860–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 63. Explicitly Marxist reinterpretations of defamiliarization include Eisenstein’s “dialectical montage” and Brecht’s “alienation effect” (Verfremdungseffekt). See Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. Jay Leyda (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 62; Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 136–140. A materialist precursor to realization of metaphor can be found in Marx’s generalization that human labor is distinguished from animal labor by existing in thought before being realized in material. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 1:198. 56. Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 7. 57. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (New York: Norton, 1977), 5.

Notes to Chapter One 1. See the discussion in Seifrid, The Word Made Self, 58–67. 2. Andrei Bely, Selected Essays of Andrei Bely, ed. and trans. Steven Cassedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 107; Andrei Bely, Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, 2 vols. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), 1:240–241. 3. Bely, Selected Essays, 108; Kritika, 1:241. 4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 57. 5. Bely, Selected Essays, 109; Kritika, 1:242. 6. A first-rate dissertation by John Kopper devotes a chapter to the topic as manifested in Bely’s subsequent novel Kotik Letaev. John Matthias Kopper Jr., “Family Resemblances” (PhD diss., University of California, 1985). 7. Andrei Bely, Peterburg: Roman v vos’mi glavakh s prologom i epilogom (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 11. Although the 1922 edition moves faster and more robustly for having lost its first-draft flab, I draw here on the 1916 version, since Bely’s cuts excise or make obscure several relevant passages. The 1922 edition is available in a magisterial annotated translation by Robert Maguire and John Malmstad, while the 1916 text has been rendered into English by David McDuff and, most recently, John Elsworth. In order to deal in detail with Bely’s idiosyncratic, multilayered style, I have translated quotations from the book myself. I have, however, relied extensively upon these examples in dealing with Bely’s very difficult prose, and owe them my gratitude for any number of clarifications and phrasings. 8. Ibid., 219. 9. Ibid., 109. 10. See Magnus Ljunggren, The Dream of Rebirth: A Study of Andrej Belyj’s Novel Peterburg (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1982), 43. 11. Bely, Peterburg, 120. 12. Ibid., 331. 13. Bely, Selected Essays, 110; Kritika, 1:244. 14. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 5. 15. Bely, Selected Essays, 133 (I have slightly literalized the translation); Kritika, 1:76. 16. Bely, Peterburg, 10. 17. Gen. 2:19. 18. Steiner here alludes to Goethe’s Faust. Rudolf Steiner, “The Occult Significance of Blood,” Rudolf Steiner Archive, http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/OccBld_index.html. 19. Robin Fox, Encounter with Anthropology (New York: Dell, 1965), 95.

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20. Herodotus describes a Libyan tribe that practices promiscuous sexual relations and assigns children fathers years after birth; in We children are produced by technological means and assigned numbers at birth; in Perec’s W names, social status, and the opportunity to breed are all conferred by success in sporting events. 21. Quoted in Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 100. 22. For a recent study of inherited class in the United States, see, e.g., http://www.equality-of -opportunity.org/. 23. Marilyn Strathern, Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 73. 24. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1961), 160. “Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, that he spilled it on the ground, lest he should give seed to his brother.” Gen. 38:9. The tale comes to a satisfactory conclusion when Tamar seduces her father-in-law to obtain a child from her husband’s kin. 25. Aristotle, Works, Poetics 1459a. To hurriedly run through some intervening epochs, the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico called metaphor “the most luminous and therefore the most necessary and most frequent” of the four corollaries of poetic logic. The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 87. Bely, as already mentioned, called it the goal of the creative process. One contemporary critic has defined literature as an amalgamation of “small tropic exchanges or metaphors” and a primary goal of literary criticism as understanding “the connection between the smallest verbal metaphor and the largest verbal trope.” Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 7. 26. The substitution view was popular among medieval rhetoricians; the mystical view, also known as the “subvention” theory of metaphor, is best propounded by Martin Foss’s Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949). It has been claimed that all theories of metaphor are footnotes to Aristotle, but this is largely because Aristotle’s own writings on the subject are short on details and have accumulated millennia worth of glosses and reinterpretations. Paul Gordon, The Critical Double: Figurative Meaning in Aesthetic Discourse (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 20. 27. Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), 138. 28. I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 97, 100. The classical rhetorician Hermogenes similarly defines the metaphorical situation as “when a term not relevant to the subject matter but signifying some extraneous object of reference is introduced into a sentence so as to unite in its significance both the subject at issue and the extraneous object in a composite concept.” Quoted in W. Bedell Standford, Greek Metaphor: Studies in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), 14. 29. Mark Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 15. For example, the cognitive metaphor “AN ABSTRACT PROPERTY IS THE PARENT OF SOMETHING HAVING THAT PROPERTY” would generate surface metaphors like “child of evil.” Ibid., 23. 30. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (London: Routledge, 2003), 82–83. 31. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 124. 32. Ibid. 33. Agamben, Stanzas, 148. 34. Quoted in Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 7. 35. Benjamin Hrushevski, “Poetic Metaphor and Frames of Reference,” Poetics Today 5, no. 1 (1984): 5. 36. Bely, Selected Essays, 110; Kritika, 1:243. 37. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 17.

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38. Bely, Peterburg, 25. 39. Ibid. 40. Late murder scenes imagine the approach of death as Saturn falling into the victim’s body. 41. Robert Maguire and John Malmstad, introduction to Petersburg, by Andrei Bely, trans. Robert Maguire and John Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), xxi. 42. Bely, Selected Essays, 109. 43. Iurii M. Lotman, “Poeticheskoe kosnoiazychie Andreia Belogo,” Andrei Belyi: Problemy tvorchestva, ed. S. Lesnevskii and A. Mikhailov (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1988), 439. In Glossolalia, Petersburg’s arcane companion text, Bely himself writes that the “sounds of speech” contain the “meanings of an enormous word . . . concealed by a metaphorical cloud” (41–42). 44. Bely was as concerned with meter and assonance in his prose as in his verse, and he described his novels as long, metered, narrative poems, which he wrote out in prose only in order to save paper. See Gerald Janecek’s “Rhythm in Prose: The Special Case of Bely,” Andrey Bely: A Critical Review, ed. Gerald Janecek (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978), 86, where he cites Bely’s claim that “between poetry and artistic prose there is no boundary.” 45. Andrei Bely, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989), 71. Bely forces us at several points to consider overlap between Nikolai Apollonovich’s experiences and his own: their childhood nurses share a name, for instance, and at one point when Nikolai contemplates suicide, the narrator breaks in to mention that he had contemplated suicide while leaning over the railing of the same bridge. 46. Bely, Peterburg, 18. Other puns tell of a pitcher (grafin) being espoused to a countess (grafinia) and a loose woman (khalda) being the wife of a Chaldean (khaldei). The double agent Pavel Morkovin claims to be Nikolai Apollonovich’s brother by a seamstress. 47. Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 105. 48. Bely uses this device of gratuitous paraphrase repeatedly in order to sustain dual planes in the novel, for example, “He felt his body being poured into the ‘universe,’ that is into the room,” or “this occurrence took place, that is, was.” Bely, Peterburg, 45, 106. 49. Bely, Selected Essays, 131; Kritika, 1:75. 50. Bely, Selected Essays, 132 (I have slightly literalized Cassedy’s translation); Kritika, 1:75. 51. Gen. 2:19. 52. Hans Aarsleff, “The Rise and Decline of Adam and his Ursprache in Seventeenth-Century Thought,” Die Sprache Adams, ed. Allison P. Coudert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999), 277–78. 53. Ljunggren, Dream of Rebirth, 55. The most extensive study of correlations between esoteric science and Bely’s works is Frédéric C. Kozlik’s three-volume L’influence de l’anthroposophie sur l’oeuvre d’Andréi Biélyj (Frankfurt am Main: Rita G. Fischer, 1981); see the table matching anthroposophist concepts with themes in Petersburg (2:511–515). Viktor Shklovsky’s wrote of this rich reservoir of motifs that Bely may have tried to create “a multileveled structure that would vindicate the teachings of anthroposophy,” but that in fact, “overpowered by the literary material, the anthroposophical theory only served to intensify and consolidate the metaphor leitmotivs.” Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1990), 172. 54. Rudolf Steiner, Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man, trans. Karl E. Zimmer (Englewood, NJ: Rudolf Steiner, 1959), 167–68. 55. Bely, Selected Essays, 170; Bely, Kritika, 1:114. 56. H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (Point Loma, CA: Aryan Theosophical Press, 1919), 1:1. 57. For a range of readings of this story, see Charlotte Douglas’s essay “ ‘Adam’ and the Modern Vision,” Andrey Bely: A Critical Review, ed. Gerald Janecek (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978), 56–70; S. G. Isaev’s “Soznaniiu neznaemaia moshch’,” Poetika uslovnykh form v russkoi literature nachala XX veka (Novgorod: NovGU, 2001), 29–38; and the chapter “Adam” in Ronald E. Peterson’s Andrei Bely’s Short Prose (Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham, 1980). 58. Bely, Peterburg, 374.

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59. Kopper, “Family Resemblances,” 143. 60. John 10:30. 61. According to Rudolf Steiner, sleep is always an astral journey. “What is the nature of ordinary sleep? The physical body lies in bed, and the astral body lives in the suprasensory world; you ‘go for a walk’ in the suprasensory realm.” Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Development: Selected Lectures and Writings (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2003), 17. 62. Bely, Peterburg, 235. 63. Ibid., 236. 64. For another reading of this important scene, see Ljunggren’s Dream of Rebirth, 71–72. Kozlik interprets the process as illustrating anthroposophist doctrines of reincarnation. L’influence de l’anthroposophie, 2:447–48. 65. Andrei Bely, Kotik Letaev, Kreshchennyi kitaets, Zapiski chudaka (Moscow: Respublika, 1997), 243. In the same book Bely writes that this “chute” of the backbone, which is the “fall” of Adam and the degeneration of the human into the animal brain, leads ultimately to “fatherlessness.” Ibid., 239. 66. Magnus Ljunggren, The Russian Mephisto: A Study of the Life and Work of Emilii Medtner (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 1994), 19; see also pp. 14–24 for valuable information on Bely’s relationship with Medtner and on Medtner’s racialist philosophy and p. 50 for a consideration of racist and anti-Semitic elements in Petersburg. Bely refers to these mechanisms in a nonfiction context in his book Remembrances of Blok. Andrei Bely, Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Aleksandroviche Bloke (Letchworth, England: Bradda, 1971), 151. 67. Steiner, Cosmic Memory, 53, 98. 68. Steiner, “The Occult Significance of Blood.” 69. Vasilii Vasilievich Rozanov, Liudi lunnogo sveta: Metafizika khristianstva (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 1990), 70. Compare Rozanov, Apokalipsis nashego vremeni (Moscow: Respublika, 2000), 303–7. 70. Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 3. 71. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 55, 207. 72. Andrei Bely, Glossolalie: Poem über den Laut, trilingual edition in Russian, English, and German, English trans. Thomas R. Beyer, Jr. (Dornach, Switzerland: Pforte Verlag, 2003), 73. 73. Ibid., 45, 67, 229. 74. Ibid., 81. 75. Ibid., 83. 76. Ibid., 81. 77. Bely, Glossolalia, 57–59, 249. 78. J. D. Elsworth, Andrei Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 101, 103. Lotman’s theory of the “great word” is another example; note also Vladimir Alexandrov’s statement that “if all symbols reflect the Symbol, then all symbolic images must have something in common” (Andrei Bely, 105). Most recently, Timothy Langen has summed up the novel as “a sustained meditation on the nature of unity as such.” Timothy Langen, The Stony Dance: Unity and Gesture in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), xiv. 79. Nikolai Berdiaev, “Astral’nyi roman: Razmyshlenie po povodu romana A. Belogo ‘Peterburg,’ ” Andrei Belyi: Pro et Contra, ed. D. K. Burlaka (Saint Petersburg: Izd. Russogo Gumanitarnogo Instituta, 2004), 413. 80. Berdiaev continues the passage quoted above by focusing on the father-son relationship as the preeminent example of textual unity. “It is difficult to determine where the father ends and where the son begins. These enemies, who present opposing points of origin—bureaucracy and revolution— are combined into some kind of an uncrystallized, formless whole.” Ibid. 81. Viacheslav Ivanov, “Vdokhnovenie uzhasa: O romane Andreia Belogo ‘Peterburg,’ ” Andrei Belyi: Pro et Contra, ed. D. K. Burlaka (Saint Petersburg: Izd. Russkogo Gumanitarnogo Instituta, 2004), 409. 82. Bely, Peterburg, 239. 83. Ibid., 26.

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84. Ibid., 219. In fact Saturn was murdered by Jupiter—Zeus in Greek mythology—and a few pages later Apollon Apollonovich is referred to as Zeus. Ibid., 35. If we translate the Latinate names for planets into the Greek names for gods, then Apollon Apollonovich is actually threatened with a sort of mythic suicide in being murdered by his son, his “own flesh.” 85. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, 1955), 277. 86. Langen, Stony Dance, 15. 87. Bely, Peterburg, 331. 88. Chloë Kitzinger points out that oversized ears were a sign of degeneration in nineteenthcentury theories of physiognomy and therefore “double as a visible sign of both the purity of the Ableukhov line, and the degeneration that line has undergone.” “ ‘This Ancient, Fragile Vessel’: Degeneration in Bely’s Petersburg,” Slavic and East European Journal 57, no. 3 (Fall 2013), 409. She further describes the repetition of personal names in the book as “a kind of self-reproducing monstrosity, highlighting the problem of unbroken linear succession.” Ibid. 89. Philosopher and poet Vladimir Solovyov is a likely subtext here: “For the human being as an animal” sexuality is natural, but “a human being as a moral entity finds this action repugnant to his higher nature and is ashamed of it.” Vladimir Solov’ev, Chteniia o bogochelovechestve (Saint Petersburg: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1994), 333. 90. Bely, Peterburg, 362. 91. Ibid., 332. 92. On the “transfer” from the suicidal to the parricidal urge, see Alexandrov, Andrei Bely, 139. 93. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999), 68. For an extended reading of the interrelation of mirrors and paternity in Borges see Heather L. Dubnick, “ ‘Mirrors and Fatherhood’: Doubling, mise-en-abîme, and the Uncanny in the Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges,” Romance Notes 44, no. 1 (Sept. 2003), 69–81. 94. Borges, Collected Fictions, 79. 95. Ibid., 81. 96. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Great Short Works (New York: Perennial, 2004), 266. 97. Aleksandr Pushkin, Izbrannye sochinenii v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965), 1:466, 469. 98. The scholarship in cerebral play is one of the richest resources in Bely criticism; see especially Alexandrov, Andrei Bely, 109–118. 99. Bely, Peterburg, 34. This structure is, of course, homologous with the branching of Adam’s family tree, as has been noted by J. D. Elsworth, Andrey Bely, 97. 100. Bely, Peterburg, 35. 101. Ibid., 239. 102. Joyce identifies Adamic language and the human family through a metaphor identifying the phallus of Adam and the Tower of Babel (“his roundhead staple of other days to rise in undress maisony upstanded . . . erigenating from next to nothing”); the original father and inventor of language inevitably “phalls” in failure, scattering his seed in a paroxysm of expression, only to be reunited in the literary work by the artist’s creative vision. Like Bely, Joyce claims for his poetic project the miracle of Pentecost as well as the resurrective power of Christ, the second Adam who redeems fallen humanity. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin, 1976), 4. 103. Bely, Petersburg, 56. 104. Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 175. Shklovsky uses the term once more in application to Bely and again in reference to Laurence Sterne. Ibid., 181, 165. This model of the novel’s emergence from the brain into the world is consistent with Bely’s mythopoetic theory of metaphor, in which the metaphorical image is magically endowed “with ontological being independently of our consciousness.” Bely, Selected Essays, 109; Kritika, 1:242. 105. Brian McHale, Postmodern Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 134. 106. “At the root of everything in this novel lies ambiguity,” as Roger Keys has written, “the fact that it is impossible to make definite statements about the meaning, or value, or ontological status of

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anything within the fiction.” Roger Keys, The Reluctant Modernist: Andrei Bely and the Development of Russian Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 227. 107. Quoted in Ljunggren, Dream of Rebirth, 32–33. In Bely’s theoretical writings he affirmed that “the world of ‘empirical reality’ does not exist at all, and that even ‘particles, forces and ions’ are products of a creative cognitive process.” Vladimir Alexandrov, “Typographical Intrusion and the Transcendent in Bely’s Petersburg and Sinyavsky’s Lyubimov,” Slavonic and East European Review 62, no. 2 (April 1984), 165. 108. Bely, Peterburg, 56. 109. Offspring who resemble their parents and art that represents the world both articulate the more general problem of mimesis, which is linked—in a tradition stretching back to Plato’s Republic— to an effort to think about aesthetic reproduction and political constitution together. 110. Elsworth, Andrey Bely, 97. 111. Olga Matich, “Backs, Suddenlys, and Surveillance,” in Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921, ed. Olga Matich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 39. 112. Bely, Peterburg, 37. 113. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 174. 114. Ibid., 180. This is a “mirror-structure,” continues Althusser, in which people internalize and imitate this abstract universal subject, whose paradigm is the god in whose image human beings are made and whose laws human subjects must observe. 115. Bely, Peterburg, 56. 116. Ibid., 240. 117. Pushkin, Izbrannye, 1:459. Compare Gen. 1:1–10. 118. Pushkin, Izbrannye, 1:115. 119. Bely, Peterburg, 306–7. 120. Ibid., 10. 121. Ibid., 21. 122. Ibid., 10. 123. Ibid., 299. 124. Ibid, 88; Maguire and Malmstad, “Notes,” 346–47. 125. Shishnarfne seems to have access to Dudkin’s birth name thanks to his association with a fourth-dimensional bureaucracy that has issued Dudkin an astral passport. Dudkin’s literal unity with his metaphorical father, the equestrian statue—he is found astride Lippanchenko’s corpse the following morning with his arm raised to ape its pose-—has been interpreted in allegorical terms: Peter endeavors to protect his creation and namesake, the city of Petersburg, from the threat Lippanchenko represents; his instrument is his “son” because he “inherits” that onus. See especially Maguire and Malmstad, “Petersburg,” 133–34. 126. Bely, Peterburg, 276. 127. Maguire and Malmstad, “Notes,” 202. 128. Bely, Peterburg, 298. 129. Ibid., 82. On Dudkin’s “special insights” into the novel’s metafictional layers, see Alexandrov, Andrei Bely, 140. 130. Bely, Peterburg, 90. 131. Ibid., 263. Compare Dudkin’s musings, especially in the context of Bely’s fascinations with universal language, to this extract from zaum poet Velimir Khlebnikov: “I believe that before a major war the word pugovitsa [button] has an especially frightening meaning, since the war—even though as yet undreamed of—lurks in that word like a conspirator, a harbinger lark, because the root of the word is related to pugat’ [to frighten].” Velimir Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 94. 132. Bely, Peterburg, 81. 133. See Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow: MALP, 1996), pp. 130–135 (where Bely outlines a theory of “sound metaphor” in Gogol’s work) and 325–28 (where he applies this theory to Petersburg itself).

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For a detailed study of sound patterns in Petersburg, see Ada Steinberg, Word and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 47–134. 134. Bely, Glossolaliia, 199, 209, 219. As Ada Steinberg has observed, “in all of Bely’s work there is no more inspiring illustration of /r/ than the figure of the mighty Bronze Horseman. Like peals of thunder, the countless hollow-sounding /r/’s, /dr/’s or /gr/’s ring out in the description of the Horseman in Dudkin’s garret.” Steinberg, Word and Music, 112–13. 135. Bely, Peterburg, 306. 136. Ibid., 276. Bely’s experiments with universal language reveal identities shared by names that contain the same sounds in different orders (e.g., Enfranshish and Shishnarfne in the left-to-right Western languages and right-to-left Oriental languages), but at the same time this quasi-Adamic or zaum language is the reservoir of individuating phonemes that name specific lineages (like that of the g/r characters) as distinct from one another. 137. Ibid., 308. 138. See Ada Steinberg’s “Fragmentary Propotypes in Bely’s Petersburg,” Slavonic and East European Review 56 (1978), 533: “Identical rhythmical structures of their surnames, forenames and patronymics” and “similar phonic structure of their surnames” “serve as a significant indicator of the kinship of the heroes and as a key to work out their characters and interrelationships.” For examples of the device in other contexts, see, e.g., “the convoluted family trees of Wuthering Heights, which are, undeniably, unintelligible, linked only by repetition—repetition of names, repetition of syllables” or the incestuous consanguinity signaled by phonetic repetition in Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins. David Punter, “Shape and Shadow: On Poetry and the Uncanny,” in Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (London: Blackwell, 2000), 197; D. Barton Johnson, Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985), 139. 139. Bely, Peterburg, 37.

Notes to Chapter Two 1. Ibid., 35–36. 2. Ibid., 108. 3. Ibid., 161. 4. Ibid., 138. 5. Ibid., 106. 6. Ibid. 7. The senator’s medals are specified in the first chapter: “many were the stars that fell upon his chest, embroidered in gold: the stars of Stanislav and Anna, and even: even the White Eagle.” Ibid., 12. The diction of “falling stars” recalls the scene on the Nikolaevsky Bridge in which a glowing orb falls upon Apollon Apollonovich from the fundament. Anna is the given name of Apollon Apollonovich’s wife; the “white eagle” recurs, reflected in monstrous proportions, on the mirrored wall of a ballroom where Apollon Apollonovich, visualizing the Ableukhov family crest, sees himself as a knight attacked by a unicorn. The orders of St. Anna and the White Eagle were sometimes awarded “with diamonds” (s brilliantami) as a special honor, and given that the narrator repeatedly evokes the “diamonds” encrusting Apollon Apollonovich’s chest, we can infer that his medals are of this type. See Alan W. Hazelton, The Russian Imperial Orders (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1932), 34. 8. Bely, Peterburg, 108. 9. Ibid., 108–9. 10. See Martin Erdmann, “ ‘Ego et pater unum sumus’: Heraldik und Genealogie in Andrej Belyjs Peterburg,” Zeitschrift für Slawische Philologie 57, no. 1 (1998): 81–104. 11. Ideas derived from this concept are important to Bely’s sometime mentor Vladimir Solovyov, for whom the likeness of human beings to God serves to “incarnate in oneself and in the other the image of God and of two limited and mortal entities create one absolute and immortal individual.” Solov’ev, Chteniia, 323. The scheme of Petersburg, in which the human family shares this common identity, is informed by Solovyov’s ideas.

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12. On mystical transcendence, see especially Vladimir Alexandrov, “Unicorn Impaling a Knight: The Transcendent and Man in Andrei Belyi’s Peterburg,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 1–44; on the subtextual myths of the sacrificial god, see Mary Jo White, “The Sources of Andrei Bely’s Literary Mifotvorchestvo: The Case of the Ableukhovs,” in Russian Literature and the Classics, ed. Peter Barta, David Lamour, and Paul Miller (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996), 59–82. 13. John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress (London: Penguin, 1987), 256. 14. 1 Corinthians 12:13. 15. Eleanor Cook, Enigmas and Riddles in Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 39–40. 16. William Shakespeare, Complete Works (New York: Viking Penguin, 1977), II.ii.51–54. 17. Lope de Vega, Peribáñez and the Comendador of Ocaña, in Eight Spanish Plays of the Golden Age, trans. and ed. Walter Starkie (New York: Random House, 1964), 93. 18. On medieval ideologies of king and heir as a corporate entity, see Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 330. 19. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 57. 20. Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (New York: Vintage, 1989), 119. In a device recalling Apollon Apollonovich’s pursuit of the reader past the frame of the text, Cincinnatus C. escapes from the fiction into the higher-order existence of the reader at the moment the death sentence is carried out. 21. Ibid., 135. 22. See, e.g., Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 101–2. 23. Robert Alter, “Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics,” in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, ed. Julian Connolly (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 56–57; Sergej Davydov, “Invitation to a Beheading,” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir Alexandrov (New York: Garland, 1995), 189. 24. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 136. 25. Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Random House), 1:859; Aristotle, Works, Poetics 1.5 1449b22–1449b31. 26. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: Perigee, 1966), 291. In the same passage Nabokov compares himself as an author to a demiurge-like “deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients.” 27. Pierre Macherey, Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1978), 118. Compare Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1990), 5–6. 28. Macherey, Theory of Literary Production, 122, 126. 29. Ibid., 120. 30. Compare Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 32: “It is not ideology in itself which is untrue but rather its pretension to correspond to reality.” 31. Macherey, Theory of Literary Production, 134. 32. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 136. 33. Andrei Bely, Kotik Letaev, Kreshchennyi kitaets, Zapiski chudaka (Moscow: Respublika, 1997), 51. The scene is discussed in connection to Kotik’s developing mastery of language in John Matthias Kopper Jr., “Family Resemblances” (PhD diss., University of California, 1985), 149. These psychological developments are restaged later in the book, Kopper notes, in Kotik’s relationship to his father, who is both within and without the child’s body and articulates his burgeoning “awareness of boundaries, qualitative difference, the resistance of objects.” Ibid., 175. 34. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1997), 4. 35. Bely, Peterburg, 224. 36. Murray Krieger, A Reopening of Closure: Organicism against Itself (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 65. 37. Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 4:389.

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38. Viacheslav Ivanov, “Vdokhnovenie uzhasa: O romane Andreia Belogo ‘Peterburg,’ ” in Andrei Belyi: Pro et Contra, ed. D. K. Burlaka (Saint Petersburg: Izd. Russkogo Gumanitarnogo Instituta, 2004), 406–7. 39. Bely, Peterburg, 159. 40. Rudolf Steiner, The Presence of the Dead, trans. Christian von Arnim (Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic Press, 1990), 39, 37. Frédéric Kozlik writes that Bely had attended a conference at which Steiner lectured on germs; he connects the novel’s bacteria to the “yellow peril” theme. L’influence de l’athroposophie, 466–69. 41. Dudkin’s demonic possessor Enfranshish is at one point identified as a cholera germ from another dimension, whereas the Bronze Horseman refers to Dudkin as a descendant; the two phenomena are contrasted in Dudkin’s hallucinatory state when “in the cracks of sensation bacteria had begun to crawl . . . specters had begun to float.” Bely, Peterburg, 303. 42. Ibid., 217. 43. Erdmann, “Ego et pater unum sumus,” 95. 44. Bely, Peterburg, 159. 45. See Charlene Ann Castellano for a full account of synesthesia in Bely: “in Petersburg, ‘deciphering’ means taking every sign to be the sign of a sensation which is the sign of another sensation. “Synesthesia: Imagination’s Semiotic in Andrei Bely’s ‘Petersburg,’ ” (Ph.D diss., Cornell University, 1980), 192. The ballroom is Apollon Apollonovich’s physiognomy, the theater of sensation, just as the Ableukhov house is his brain (its front steps cranial bones, its carpet the corrugations of the cerebral cortex, and so on). Bely, Peterburg, 35–36. 46. Ibid., 56. This quote, especially in its resonance with scenes in which Dudkin’s body is possessed by Enfranshish and Peter the Great, stresses cerebral play’s aggressive function to invade consciousness. 47. Mirrors often function to negotiate perspective in the novel: recall how Nikolai Apollonovich experiences himself from his father’s point of view in Apollon Apollonovich’s reflective surface, or how Nikolai Apollonovich’s childhood remembrances of looking into the mirror are complemented by Apollon Apollonovich’s recollections of pointing out the “strangers” in the mirror to his little son. 48. Ibid., 219. 49. Ibid., 163. 50. Mary Jo White points out that in Greek myth goring was considered an image of castration (“The Sources of Andrei Bely’s Literary Mifotvorchestvo,” 74) and links this to themes of violent mythopoesis in the novel at large, notably the castration of Saturn/Cronos that engendered Venus/Aphrodite and Nietzschean motifs of the sacrificed god. Apollon Apollonovich’s description as a “eunuch” may also connect to a 1912 essay, in which Bely calls Neo-Kantians “a combination of a boy and an old man— neither a child not an adult, but a nasty little boy who has been castrated before puberty and is then surprised that he does not grow a beard.” Quoted by Robert Maguire and John Malmstad, “Petersburg,” in Andrei Bely: Spirit of Symbolism, ed. Malmstad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 123. 51. Erdmann, “ ‘Ego et pater unum sumus,’ ” 95. 52. Apollon Apollonovich does in fact fall into a “second childhood” (drugoe detstvo) at the end of the novel and his vacillation between a very youthful and a very decrepit appearance may signify a sexual infection. See Alexandrov, Andrei Bely, 146: Apollon Apollonovich’s “sudden onset of senility . . . may have been brought about by his son’s shocking behavior as the red domino (which is actually the senator’s own perverted sexuality returning to him in the form of his sexually troubled son).” 53. Bely, Peterburg, 163. 54. Bely considered Ibsen, along with Nietzsche and Wagner, to be one of “only three names lit like bright stars in the sky of the nineteenth century” (Bely, Kritika, 2:258). 55. Bely, Peterburg, 179. 56. Ibid., 180. 57. Ibid., 232. 58. Ibid., 181. 59. Ibid., 191.

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60. Ibid., 192. 61. Ibid., 222–23. 62. Ibid., 224. 63. Gérard Genette writes of Proustian metaphors that they operate “as ‘synesthesia’: the metonymic slide is not only ‘disguised,’ but is even transformed into metaphoric predication. Thus, far from being antagonistic and incompatible, metaphor and metonymy sustain and interpenetrate one another.” Figures III (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1972), 42. 64. Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 111. 65. Bely, Simfonii (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991), 250. 66. “Narrative is in a state of temptation to oversameness,” writes Peter Brooks, who describes kin relations, especially incest, as “the exemplary version of a temptation” to end the plot prematurely. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 109. 67. See Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. Harry Tucker (London: Maresfield, 1989), 77–86. 68. Genette, Figures III, 46. 69. Laura Mulvey describes cinematic narrative as constituted by the contradiction between the need for action and the desire to stop time in order to grasp a beautiful image (in psychoanalytic terms, union with the mother). Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 19–22. 70. Osip Mandelstam wrote that Petersburg’s effect on literary history was so destructive that it does away even with the possibility of artistic reproduction: Bely “blows up bridges which he is too lazy to cross. . . . He leaves a pile of broken stones, a dismal picture of destruction.” Osip Mandelstam, Critical Prose and Letters, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1979), 121. Mandelstam’s own “Egyptian Stamp” takes place in a delirious Petersburg landscape of soot, germs, and mirrors drawn directly from Bely. In more contemporary criticism, Carol Anschuetz points out “the terroristic act by which Bely destroys the nineteenth-century novel.” Anschuetz, “Bely’s Petersburg,” 151. 71. In Bely’s stage adaptation of the novel, The Death of a Senator, Apollon Apollonovich is in fact blown to bits. Bely, Gibel’ senatora (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1986), 201–202. For full accounts of the play and its relation to the novel, see John Malmstad, “Posleslovie,” Gibel’ senator, by Andrei Bely (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1986), 203–37.; Tat’iana Nikolesku, Andrei Belyi i teatr (Moscow: Radiks, 1995), 97–137. 72. Kitzinger, “ ‘This Ancient, Fragile Vessel,’ ” 413. 73. The equation of the creative, expansive force of the imagination with the destructive, explosive force of the bomb also appears in G. K. Chesterton’s 1906 novel The Man Who Was Thursday, where one of the anarchists exults that a bomb “ ‘expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even so, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man’s brain is a bomb,’ ” he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull with violence. “ ‘My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man’s brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe.’ ” Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (London: Penguin, 1986), 65. At the time of writing Bely did not know Chesterton’s book, which was not translated into Russian until 1916 (see L. N. Trauberg, “Chesterton v Rossii,” Gilbert Kiit Chesterton, http://www.chesterton.ru/about-gkc/0013.html, accessed May 27, 2014). 74. Bely, Nachalo veka (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1933), 13. 75. Bely, Selected Essays, 133 (I have slightly literalized the translation); Kritika, 1:76. 76. Bely, Peterburg, 221–22. 77. Ibid., 117. 78. Ibid., 217. Note the compact allusion to Christological associations of the crest and its symbolization of family continuity, the thought in the deep as the emergence of an idea from the mirror world into reality, and the suicide’s reflection in the water projected back into the world as familial violence. 79. Ibid., 285.

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80. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 16. 81. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 3. See also p. 11: “There is no text that does not contain in itself as an element, negated, what it repulses.” 82. Steven G. Kellman, The Self-Begetting Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 3. 83. Michel Riffaterre, The Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 2. 84. Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979), 104. 85. The ideology of the pure and independent artwork can be read as an allegory of bourgeois individualism, but this observation intuits an allegorical relation between aesthetics and historical conditions, so is itself undergirded by a metaphoric displacement. See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 29. 86. Bely, Selected Essays, 132; Kritika, 1:75. 87. Bely goes on to distinguish the “dream” of unity from the “act” of creation, which is essentially symbolic. “Symbolism is creation itself,” stresses Bely. He defines “symbol” as “a unity not given to us” or “an unknowable unity.” Ibid., 193. The symbolic act of creation is not therefore a knowledge made present; it withholds from consciousness the unity it mediates, denying satisfaction to the “dream of unity.” 88. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2007), xiii. 89. Indeed, Bely was reading Marx at the time. See Matich, “Backs, Suddenlys, and Surveillance,” 6. 90. Bely, Selected Essays, 190; Kritika, 1:135. 91. Bely, Kritika, 2:25. 92. L. I. Timofeev, Kratkii slovar’ literaturovedcheskikh terminov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe uchebno-pedagogichestkoe izdatel’stvo, 1963), 169. 93. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 88. 94. Timofeev, Kratkii slovar’, 88. 95. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 191. 96. Irina Paperno, “Introduction” to Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 4–5, 15. 97. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 126. 98. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 3. 99. Anatolii Lunacharskii, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomach (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1967), 7:330. 100. Jameson, Prison-House of Language, 89. 101. For an important theoretical account, see Shell, Money, Language, and Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); for a recent example that treats Russian fiction, see Russell Valentino, The Woman in the Window: Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2014).

Notes to Chapter Three 1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Novels (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 368. 2. Ibid., 352. 3. Ibid., 368. 4. Ibid., 623–24, 369. 5. Ibid., 432. 6. Ibid., 454. 7. On the possibilities of incest in the Pyncheon family, see Frederick C. Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 182–83.

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8. Hawthorne, Novels, 428. 9. Ibid., 511. Hawthorne offers the same idea as his own, complete with horticultural metaphor, in the introduction to The Scarlet Letter: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.” Ibid., 128. 10. Ibid., 509–10. Hawthorne’s late fragments seem to directly oppose these sentiments, offering positive valencies to familial identity and figuring art itself as an “ancestral home,” opposed to impermanent inns that lack “home feeling.” See Edgar A. Dryden, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Poetics of Enchantment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 162–165. 11. Hawthorne, Novels, 511–512. 12. See Crews, Sins of the Fathers, 174–75. 13. See Friedrich Engels, The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State in Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan (New York: International, 1972), 122. 14. Anne Lounsbery, Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in NineteenthCentury Russia and America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 163. 15. Hawthorne, Novels, 344. On Hester Prynne as figure of nineteenth-century feminism, see Millicent Bell, “Hawthorne and the Real,” in Hawthorne and the Real, ed. Millicent Bell (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 14. 16. Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 122. For a more extended treatment of the theme in Zola specifically, see Georg Lukács, Marxism and Human Liberation (New York: Dell 1973), 118. 17. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980), 201. 18. Thus the ancient curse that the Pyncheon family should drink its own blood, as David Punter notes, “is reflected on the literal level in the apoplexy which is hereditary in the family and which carries off the Judge; but metaphorically also, the blood which the Pyncheons drink is their own blood . . . because they will suffer nothing else to happen to it, they will allow no intermixture between their ‘gentle’ stock and lesser mortals.” Ibid., 200. 19. Engels, Origin of the Family, 138–39. 20. Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 154. 21. Muireann Maguire, Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 44–45. 22. Thomas Jefferson, The Complete Jefferson (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pierce, 1943), 284. 23. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, in E. F. Bleiler (ed.), Three Gothic Novels (New York: Dover, 1966), 18, 21. 24. On the difficulties of distinguishing between “conservative” and “subversive” gothic, see Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, “Gothic Criticism,” in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (London: Blackwell, 2000), 226–27; Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 29–30. 25. Fred Botting, “In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture,” in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (London: Blackwell, 2000), 10. This highlighting of boundaries, and particularly the boundary between the real and unreal, has been understood as manifesting “a deep anxiety about the coherence of the modern subject” as formulated by Enlightenment individualism and the rise of bourgeois capitalism. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Gothic and the Comic Turn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1. 26. Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London: Routledge, 1995), 11. 27. Ibid., 37. 28. Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit,” in Companion to the Gothic, 301–2. 29. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 38–39. 30. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 214.

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31. Claire Kahane, “The Gothic Mirror,” in The (M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Claire Kahane and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 335. 32. Ibid., 337. 33. Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982), 26. 34. Ibid., 31. 35. Ibid., 32. 36. The treasure’s burial place seems emblematic of the pool where the ancestral specters are reflected, as David in his efforts to recover the treasure “scooped a hole as large as the basin of the spring.” Ibid., 33. 37. Hawthorne, Novels, 870. 38. Ibid., 1211. 39. Ibid., 1022. 40. Ibid., 1024. 41. Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches, 524. 42. Ibid., 523. 43. Ibid., 528–29. 44. Ibid., 537. 45. Ibid., 541. 46. Shell, Money, Language, and Thought, 7. 47. Ibid., 6. 48. For a comparison of Hawthorne and Gogol on this point, see Lounsbery, Thin Culture, High Art, 175. 49. Valentino, The Woman in the Window, 5. 50. Hawthorne, Novels, 549. See Dryden, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 58. 51. Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches, 544. 52. Ibid., 737–38. 53. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Vintage, 1995), 1:535. 54. In Hawthorne’s thematically related “Devil in Manuscript,” published in 1835, a writer burns his corpus of fantastic tales—his “treasure of fairy coin” and “the unborn children of my mind,” which he handles “like a father taking a deformed infant into his arms”—out of frustration with the economics of publishing; he is delighted to find that his efforts to give a “dark idea a sort of material existence” are realized at last, when the burning manuscript sets the town ablaze. Hawthorne, Tales, 334, 336, 335, 331. “Here I stand—a triumphant author!” he exults. “Huzzah! Huzza! My brain has set the town on fire.” Ibid., 335. 55. Hawthorne, Tales, 1473; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972), 493. 56. Edgar Dryden has remarked that Hawthorne’s “mirror of imagination” displays actual things with “the quality of a mirror image,” so that the real world “can no longer be viewed as the generative source and explanation of the fictive.” Dryden, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 156. This is the same paradox, expressed in the same figurative system, as Bely’s nonexistent reflection emerging into the real world. 57. Hans Christoph Binswanger, Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe’s Faust, trans. J. E. Harrison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1. 58. Quoted in Rita K. Gollin, “Estranged Allegiances in Hawthorne’s Unfinished Romances,” in Hawthorne and the Real, ed. Millicent Bell (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 159. 59. Hawthorne, Novels, 128. 60. Ibid., 127. 61. Ibid., 128. 62. Ibid., 152, 151. Uncle Sam is the personification of the state but also, in paying the devil’s temporary wages, something like Peter Goldthwaite’s fantastical great-grand-uncle who bargained with the devil for a useless wealth.

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63. Ibid., 148. 64. Ibid., 150. On mirrors and other supplements of vision as productive of defamiliarizing aesthetic effects, see Dryden, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 29–33. 65. Hawthorne, Novels, 150. 66. Ibid., 158. 67. Ibid., 163. 68. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Anchor, 1992), 497; Gloria Erlich, Family Themes and Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Tenacious Web (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 35–37. 69. Hawthorne, Novels, 167. 70. Ibid., 159, 167. 71. Ibid., 167–68. 72. 1 Corinthians 13:12. 73. Hawthorne, Novels, 243. 74. Ibid., 251. 75. Pearl’s interaction with mirrors allows parentage to be reconstructed metonymically, as when Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the wood with Pearl remaining to one side, an accusing image in “the mirror of the brook.” Ibid., 298. 76. Ibid., 253. 77. Ibid., 213, 159. 78. Ibid., 159. 79. Ibid., 202. 80. Ibid., 201–202. 81. Ibid., 342. 82. The first “stock” pun of the kind occurs in the 1830 “Old Woman’s Tale.” Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches, 26. 83. Hawthorne, Novels, 343. On the scarlet A as heraldic emblem, see Lawrence Buell, “Hawthorne and the Problem of ‘American’ Fiction,” in Hawthorne and the Real, 74; John Carlos Rowe, “Nathaniel Hawthorne and Translationality,” in Hawthorne and the Real, 97–98. 84. Hawthorne, Novels, 344. 85. Miroslav Krleža, Povratak, 65; The Return of Filip Latinowicz, trans. Zora Depolo (London: Quartet, 1989), 59. I have slightly adapted the existing English translation, which is cited alongside the Croatian original. 86. Krleža, Povratak, 67–68; Return, 60–61. 87. Marijan Matković, “Stope na stazi,” Forum 10–12 (Winter 1982), 1038–39. 88. Krleža, Povratak, 65; Return, 58. 89. Ibid., 66; 59. 90. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 2:375. See Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 39–42. 91. Nikolai Fedorov, Filosofiia obshchego dela (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1985), 1:10, 1:277. 92. Fedorov’s ideas were influential among the avant-garde and projects of comparable scope and inspiration were proposed as policy after the Russian Revolution. Irene Masing-Delic, “The Living Work of Art,” in Creating Life, 59–61; Irina Paperno, “Introduction” to Creating Life, 6–7. Like Bely, Fedorov connects the separation of individuals with the “confusion of tongues” produced by the fall of the Tower of Babel (Filosofiia obshchego dela, 1:10). 93. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 7. 94. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 26. 95. See the development of the speech act’s orientation onto the other in V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 85–86.

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96. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 26. For Rabelais’s own presentation of the theme—“seminal propagation permits what the parents lose to live on in their children, and what dies in the children to live on in the grandchildren”—see François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Burton Raffel (New York: Norton, 1990), 156. 97. Wolfgang Kayser has derived the aesthetic category of the grotesque from violations of “the laws of statics, symmetry and proportion.” Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 21. On the relation of aesthetic beauty and social justice, see Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 96–104. 98. Zoran Konstantinović, “ ‘Die Rückkehr des Filip Latinovicz’: Zum Palimpsest einer Pannonischen Identitätssuche,” Künstlerische Dialektik und Identitätsuche, ed. Reinhard Lauer (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990), 123. 99. On Filip’s personal crisis and his disgust with the world as “projected” onto each other, see Višnja Sepčič, Klasici modernizma (Zagreb: Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 1996), 156–57. 100. Krleža, Povratak, 66–67; Return, 60. For more instances in the novel of toothlessness as concomitant of modernity, see also pp. 36, 191–92, 236. 101. Ibid., 39; 36. 102. Ibid., 104; 91. 103. Ibid., 102; 90. 104. Mladen Engelsfeld, Interpretacija krležina romana Povratak Filipa Latinovicza (Zagreb: Liber, 1975), 13. 105. “It was said in the town that the father of the tobacconist’s son was the bishop, and this rumor had poisoned Filip’s childhood irremediably and bitterly.” Krleža, Povratak, 20; Return, 22. 106. Anthropologists who study the exchange of people and bodily substances—adoption, the donation of reproductive cells, surrogate motherhood, organ donation, and so on—note that people often go to great lengths to make contact with other individuals who share this substance in order “to know who I am,” or “to find out where I came from,” as respondents to one study of adopted children put it, even when they have functioning families of their own and no expectations of future relationships with their newfound “relatives.” Janet Carsten, After Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 104. 107. A biographical element is present here as well in that Miroslav Krleža was christened after his legal father, also named Miroslav. Zvonimir Kulundžić, Tajne i kompleksi Miroslava Krleže (Ljubljana: Emonica, 1988), 122. Parish records list Krleža’s mother too as born out of wedlock. Ibid., 123. 108. Krleža, Povratak, 171–72; Return, 148–49. 109. The woman with the jay figures in the traumatic night when young Filip realized that his mother was a prostitute; the Polish civil servants appear to be more ancient ancestors on his mother’s side. Their experiences continue to affect Filip’s behavior in various ways. 110. Krleža, Povratak, 172–73; Return, 150. 111. Ibid., 171; 148. 112. Ibid., 173; 150. 113. Ibid., 187; 162. 114. Ibid., 173; 150. In his subsequent novel On the Edge of Reason Krleža defines a new species called Homo cilindricus, whose top hat is the emblem of bourgeois idiocy. In Return of Filip Latinovicz the “hairiness” of these hats participates in Krleža’s most vivid trope of dead life parasitically extending itself in a living body. Filip “especially vividly” recalls a photo of a man in a top hat from the velvet album (79) and, when he demands that his mother name his paternity, he concludes his list of possible fathers with him: “this unknown gentleman with the top hat, which of these faces here in this accursed book is my father?” Povratak, 265; Return, 226. 115. Ibid., 170; 147. HD, Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions, 1984), 146. 116. Miroslav Krleža, Poezija (Zagreb: Zora, 1969), 307. 117. Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations, trans. C. M. Williams (New York: Dover, 1959), 72.

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118. Ibid., 75. 119. Quoted in Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 9–10. 120. Jack London, Novels and Stories (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982), 41. 121. See Otis, Organic Memory, 218. 122. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Random House, 1939), 128. 123. Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories, ed. Phillip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1993), 256. 124. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 180. “Meant to objectify . . . the gap produced in us by the concealment of some part of a love object’s life,” the phantom “passes—in a way yet to be determined—from the parent’s unconscious into the child’s. . . . It works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject’s own mental topography.” 171, 173. 125. Ibid., 180. 126. Krleža, Povratak, 11; Return, 13. On this figure see Sepčič, Klasici modernizma, 150. 127. Freud, Collected Papers, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 5:105. 128. Krleža, Povratak, 46; Return, 43. 129. Ibid., 47; 43. 130. Ibid., 48; 44. 131. Ibid. 132. G. F. W. Hegel, Texts and Commentary, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1977), 56. 133. An analogue here might be found in Stephanie Sandler’s study of “lyric poems in which a woman’s act of self-identification energetically engage with an imagined other,” including “motherdaughter lyrics, a genre that has the obvious appeal of letting the poet speak to someone whom she at once deeply resembles and is separate from.” Stephanie Sandler, “Mother, Daughter, Self, and Other: The Lyrics of Inna Lisnianskaia and Mariia Petrovykh,” Engendering Slavic Literatures, ed. Pamela Chester and Sibelan Forrester (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 201. 134. Krleža, Povratak, 49; Return, 45. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., 50; 45. 137. Ibid., 50; 46. 138. Quoted in Bruno Popović, Tema krležiana (Zagreb: Izdanja Centra za kulturnu djelatnost, 1982), 215. 139. On identity and separated body parts generating identity see Ray Abraham’s groundbreaking article on organ donation, “Plus ça Change, Plus Ç’est la Même Chose?” Australian Journal of Anthropology 1 (1990): 131–46. 140. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 305. 141. Krleža, Povratak, 190; Return, 164. 142. Ibid., 243; 209. The last shred of aristocratic dignity is deflated when we consider that žabokrek means the croaking of a frog, and žabokrecina is the green slime floating on stagnant water; this Slavic slime inserted in the French “de la Fontaine” reminds us that the water in that fountain, and the bloodline of the family, is hardly “pure” or noble. 143. Ibid., 105; 92. Mary Helms, Access to Origins: Affines, Ancestors and Aristocrats (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 6. 144. Ralph Bogert, Writer as Naysayer: Miroslav Krleža and the Aesthetic of Interwar Central Europe (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1990), 239. 145. Krleža, Povratak, 239–40; Return; 206–7. 146. Marc Shell, Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics, and Nationhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), vii. 147. Krleža, Povratak, 176; Return, 153.

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148. Ibid., 194; 168. 149. Ibid., 89, 136; 79, 118. 150. Ibid., 141; 123. 151. Ibid., 171; 148. 152. Ibid., 153–54; 134. 153. Ibid., 145; 127. 154. Ibid., 155; 134. 155. Ibid., 164; 143. 156. Ibid., 173; 147. 157. Ibid., 259; 221. 158. Paul Barber, “Forensic Pathology and the European Vampire,” Journal of Folklore Research 24, no.1 (1987): 121. 159. Krleža, Povratak, 144; Return, 125. 160. Ibid., 156; 136. 161. Ibid., 242; 208. 162. Ibid., 271; 231. Compare Krleža’s cycle of dramas and short stories about a family of Zagreb bankers, their fortune derived from an ancient murder, which features a similar expression of hereditary violence. After killing his father, the main character of the first play cries out against “the Glembaj blood in me. . . . I bit into him like one jackal into another: it was the Glembaj blood gnawing in us” (Glembajevi, 494–45). 163. Krleža, Povratak, 233; Return, 193. 164. Isak Dinesen, Winter’s Tales (New York: Random House, 1942), 29, 31; Vinter-eventyr (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1972), 204–205. Dinesen published her works simultaneously in Danish and English versions; here both are cited in parallel. 165. Ibid., 32; 207. See the reading of this story in Susan Hardy Aiken, “Dinesen’s ‘Sorrow-Acre’: Tracing the Woman’s Line,” in Isak Dinesen: Critical Views, ed. Olga Anastasia Pelensky (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993), 174–198. 166. Susan Hardy Aiken, Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 5. 167. Isak Dinesen, Last Tales (New York: Vintage, 1975), 189, 121, 146; Sidste Fortaellinger (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1957), 168–69, 109–10, 133. 168. Ibid., 146–147; 133. See Aiken, Isak Dinesen, 197–20. Dinesen’s use of breast milk as a metaphor for writing, as distinct from patriarchal metaphors of engendering and sustaining narrative, recalls Hélène Cixous on “white ink” as a metaphor for a writing of the female body. See “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer, 1976), 881. 169. Ivan Bunin, Life of Arseniev, trans. Gleb Struve and Hamish Miles (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 17–18; Ivan Bunin, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1996), 5:23–25. 170. Bunin, Sobranie Sochinenii, 3:137–38. 171. A late concept from Lévi-Strauss, the “house society” is “a corporate body holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial wealth, which perpetuates itself through the transmission of its name, its goods, and its titles down a real or imaginary line.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 174. The concept has been instrumental in thinking about nonbiological kinship structures. See Linda Stone, “The Demise and Revival of Kinship,” Kinship and Family: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Robert Parkin and Linda Stone (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2004), 247–48. 172. It is difficult to establish the degree to which milk kinship played a role in Russian peasant life. Newborns were traditionally nursed for the first forty days by another woman not related by blood; the Russian church considered foster relations an impediment to marriage. It is clear that collactaneous relations presented a form of metaphorical kinship, but not the extent to which this kinship was realized in social practice in a specific region. See Eve Levin, “Childbirth in Pre-Petrine Russia,” Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and

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Christine D. Worobec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 49–50; Galina Kabakova, “Le sien et le lait maternel dans l’imaginaire slave,” La revue russe 8 (1995), 85–86; and Jean Dauvillier and Carlo de Clercq, Le marriage en droit canonique oriental (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1936), 157. 173. M. M. Gromyko, Traditsionnye normy povedeniia i formy obshcheniia russkikh krest’ian XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), 84. The entire discussion (pp. 70–92) is fascinating. 174. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 105–61. The connection between tropes of uncertain parentage and changes in class relations are more than figurative, as the Industrial Revolution both caused and was enabled by changing attitudes towards illegitimacy. James Casey argues that the opening of the guilds to bastards in the eighteenth century was taken to “undermine the whole basis of a society based on estates” and was meant to broaden and cheapen the labor supply; “illegitimacy,” he concludes, “was intimately associated with the economic growth of the nineteenth century.” James Casey, History of the Family (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 113, 142. 175. Dale Peterson, “Russian Gothic: The Deathless Paradoxes of Bunin’s Dry Valley,” Slavic and East European Journal, 31, no. 1 (1987): 38. 176. In American slave society milk siblinghood was also an active literary theme, whether in changeling tales like Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which a wet nurse’s child is switched for the plantation heir, or in overtly gothic texts like Poe’s novel Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, where the journey into allegorical childhood ends with the threatening manifestation of “the black milk brother, who has sucked at the same black breast.” Fiedler, Love and Death, 381. 177. In Bosnia, these fictional kinships sustained communities between groups who could not legally form kinship ties otherwise. Milenko S. Filipović writes that kinship by milk “contributed significantly to mutual assistance and rapprochement between followers of various Christian faiths, Christians and Moslems, or members of different ethnic groups such as the Serbs and Gypsies,” whose religions forbade them to intermarry but who created binding familial alliances through collactaneous ties. Among the People: Native Yugoslav Ethnography, ed. E. A. Hammel (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1982), 144. 178. Bunin, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:138. 179. Ibid., 3:138. 180. Ibid., 3:138. 181. See A. Ninov, “Smert’ i rozhdenie cheloveka: Iv. Bunin i M. Gorkii v 1911–1913 godakh,” Istoriia literatury 12 (Dec. 1984): 103–105. 182. Julian W. Connolly, Ivan Bunin (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 53. 183. Bunin, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:136. 184. Nabokov, “Notes” to Eugene Onegin, by Aleksandr Pushkin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 2:452–454. 185. Quoted by Iurii Druzhnikov, Duel’ s pushkinistami (Moscow: Khroniker, 2001), 45. 186. One critic has written in this vein of Bunin himself that, “in close relations with nature and the people, hearing the fairy tales, superstitions, songs, and stories of his relations, of the estate and local peasants, Bunin from his childhood knew and loved the subtle Russian nature, the Russian world, the Russian soul, Russian literature.” L. V. Krutikova, “V etom zlom i prekrasnom mire,” in Ivan Bunin: Pro et Contra, ed. D. K. Burlaka (Saint Petersburg: RKhGI, 2001), 480. 187. Vladislav Khodasevich, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, 4 vols. (Moscow: Soglasie, 1996), 1:195–96. For a discussion of this poem’s complex triangulation of a quasi-maternal Russianness with Khodasevich’s alternate Polish and Jewish maternal identities, see Edward Waysband, “Vladislav Khodasevich’s ‘On Your New, Joyous Path’ (1914–15): The Russian Literary Empire Interferes in Polish-Jewish Relations,” Slavic and East European Journal 59, no. 2 (Summer 2015), 249–50. 188. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin parodies ethnography by transcribing a peasant song, but remarks that the girls are actually forced to sing while they work so the master can be sure they are not eating his harvest of berries; in the meantime, the self-pitying narrator has “talked so long that I’ve required / A little walk, some rest and play; / I’ll finish up another day.” Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. James Falen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 81; Izbrannye sochinenii, 2:66.

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189. Works devoted to Pushkin’s nurse in the early Soviet period include N. O. Lerner’s 1924 Niania Pushkina and A. I. Ulianskii’s 1940 book of the same name. 190. In most cases the wet nurse’s milk was made available for exclusive use by a landowning family as a result of her biological child’s death: Russia in the nineteenth century had an infant mortality rate of 50 percent by age five, the highest in Europe. David Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 267. The hardships of the peasants and the plentiful supply of women with milk but no child were thus intrinsically connected.

Notes to Chapter Four 1. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State in Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan (NY: International, 1972), 138–39. 2. Ibid., 71. 3. Sylvia Junko Yanagisako and Jane Fishburne Collier, “Towards a Unified Analysis of Gender and Kinship,” Kinship and Family: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Robert Parkin and Linda Stone (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 279. 4. On monastic kinship, see Marc Shell, The End of Kinship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 49–75. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, among the Cuevado Indians of Brazil, “abortion and infanticide were almost the normal practice, so much so that perpetuation of the group was ensured by adoption rather than breeding, and one of the chief aims of the warriors’ expeditions was the obtaining of children.” Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 192. Many societies, notably Austronesian ones, ascribe the birth of children to supernatural agencies and motivate superficially consanguineous intrapersonal ties through factors like the sharing of food. See David Schneider, Critique of the Study of Kinship, 72–74. 5. Carsten, “The Substance of Kinship,” 310. 6. To understand many kinship systems, concludes Carsten, “it is necessary to understand the nature and mutability of substance.” Ibid. See also Shell, The End of Kinship, 9. 7. Jenny Kaminer, “A Mother’s Land: Arina Petrovna Golovlyova and the Economic Restructuring of the Golovlyov Family,” Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 53, no. 4 (2009), 552, 557. 8. Yuri Olesha, Envy, trans. Clarence Brown, The Portable Twentieth Century Reader, ed. Clarence Brown (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 351; Zagovor chuvstv: Romany, rasskazy, p’esy, stat’i, vospominaniia, Ni dnia bez strochki (Saint Petersburg: Kristall, 1999), 89. 9. Elizabeth Waters, “The Modernisation of Russian Motherhood, 1917–1937,” Soviet Studies 44, no. 1 (1992), 128. 10. Quoted in F. I. Egerman, Na putiakh k obshchestvennomu vospitaniiu detei (Moscow: Narodnyi Komissariat Prosveshcheniia R.S.F.S.R., 1930), 3. 11. S. I. Wolfsohn, Sotsiologiia braka i sem’i: Opyt vvedeniia v Marksistskuiu geneonomiiu (Minsk: Izdanie Belorusskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, 1929), 3. 12. Ibid., 375. 13. Ibid. Opponents of communism often agreed on this last point. For example, social Darwinist William Sumner wrote that “the issue is a plain one, and one which admits of no compromise whatever: property and the family stand together or fall together: we must either maintain them both with the individualists or overthrow them both with the socialists.” The Essays of William Graham Sumner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934), 409. 14. Esther Conus cites around fifteen hundred such institutions two years after the revolution, including “567 creches, 108 breastfeeding houses, 197 consultation points, 108 milk kitchens, 207 shelters for nursing infants.” Puti razvitiia sovetskoi Okhrany Materinstva i Mladenchestva (1917–1940) (Moscow: Tsentral’nyi Institut Usovershenstvovaniia Vrachei, 1954), 130. According to Wolfsohn, the number of such institutions had risen to 3,250 by 1928. Sotsiologiia braka i sem’i, 388. 15. Kollontai and Sabsovich are discussed below; on Kuzmin, see Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 201–203.

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16. Wolfsohn, Sotsiologiia braka i sem’i, 391. See also Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings, trans. Alix Holt (London: Allison and Busby, 1977), 255. 17. Conus, Puti razvitiia sovetskoi Okhrany Materinstva i Mladenchestva, 151–53. 18. L. M. Sabsovich, SSSR cherez 15 let: Gipoteza general’nogo plana, kak plana postroeniia sotsializma v SSSR (Moscow: Planovoe khoziaistvo, 1929), 127. 19. F. I. Egerman, Na putiakh k obshchestvennomu vospitaniiu detei, 3. 20. See Waters, “The Modernisation of Soviet Motherhood,” 128–29. 21. Maxim Gorky, Mother, trans. Margaret Wettlin (New York: Collier, 1966), 12, 36, 345. 22. A. F. Tur, Spravochnik po dietike detei rannego vozrasta (Leningrad: MedGiz, 1952), 149. Human breast milk banks have operated in Europe since the 1890s, and many exist today. Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 264. They are now often facilitated by the Internet. Nancy Jeffrey, “Breast Milk Is Now Available Online,” People, June 13, 2005, 101–2. 23. Pamela Chester, “The Landscape of Recollection: Tolstoy’s Childhood and the Feminization of the Countryside,” Engendering Slavic Literatures, ed. Pamela Chester and Sibelan Forrester (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 59–82. 24. Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago (Moscow: Troika, 1994), 282. 25. On the impossibility of strictly distinguishing between rural and urban laboring populations see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 18–19. 26. Marc Shell, Children of the Earth, 143. 27. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 207. 28. Bogdanov, Essays in Tektology, 156–157. See also Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 32–33, and Nikolai Krementsov’s monograph A Martian Stranded on Earth. 29. Aleksandr Bogdanov, Krasnaia zvezda; Inzhener Menni (Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 1979), 107. 30. Ibid., 108–9. 31. Marx, Capital, 257. 32. Maxim Gorky, Mother, 327. 33. Bogdanov, Krasnaia zvezda, 125. 34. David L. Ransel, Mothers of Misery, 235. 35. Kollontai, Selected Writings, 144. 36. Mikhail Gerasimov, “Ia ne nezhnyi . . .” in Proletarskie poety pervykh let sovetskoi epokhi, ed. Z. S. Papernyi (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1959), 204–5. 37. Julia Bekman Chadaga, “Light in Captivity: Spectacular Glass and Soviet Power in the 1920s and 1930s,” Slavic Review 66, no. 1 (Spring, 2007), 90. 38. Andrei Platonov’s 1926 story “Motherland of Electricity” incorporates all these themes and ends with a pair of orphans nourished by a technologically mediated liquid. “Hope, the only thing that made us human, this hope of ours was converted into electric power,” writes Platonov—himself a Proletarian Culture associate and an engineer who worked on the 1921 electrification campaign. Andrei Platonov, Shchastlivaia Moskva: Roman, povest’, rasskazy (Moscow: Vremia, 2011), 527. 39. Again, Andrei Platonov provides a helpful counterpoint. In his elegy to the hopes of the early Soviet era, The Foundation Pit, the child Nastya is taken under the worker Chiklin’s wing; this relationship is in some ways intimate and parental, in other ways anonymous and class-based. As Platonov puts it in a stylization of Soviet jargon, “The little girl, most likely, was conceived by a workingman no different from Chiklin. So the flesh in the child was from the same class cauldron.” Andrey Platonov, The Foundation Pit, trans. Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009), 137. 40. Gerasimov, “Ia ne nezhnyi . . .” 205. 41. The General Line [Staroe i novoe], dir. Sergei Eisenstein, SovKino, 1929, videocassette. (Chicago, IL: International Historic Films, 1984). 42. The human beneficiaries before are at this point figured as farm animals, piglets wallowing in a limitless supply of collective milk; later scenes in the state farm show the pigs being butchered and cooked by the dozens in vast machines, presumably for human consumption. You really are what you

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eat in this system of metaphorical continuity. On another plane of interpretation, the suckling piglets are the self-satisfied bourgeois family whose plenty is to be distributed to the community in the coming era. The two interpretations of the porcine imagery dynamically interact as class conflict: across the river that divides the present from the future, the Communists to come consume the bourgeois hogs of the prerevolutionary era. 43. “Eisenstein’s theory of montage is itself, in part anyway, a theory of metaphor,” writes Trevor Whittock. Metaphor and Film (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 70. 44. On the revolution figured as an act of sexual congress or sexual violation, see Eric Naiman, Sex in Public, 59–64. 45. See V. Ia. Propp, Russkie agrarnye prazdniki (Saint Petersburg: Terra, 1995), 129–31. 46. Olesha’s motifs participate directly in contemporary social phenomena. For example, when Ivan Babichev declares that his brother is militating against the right of parents to stick a pacifier in their children’s mouths (Envy, 351; Zagovor chuvstsv, 89), he refers to an actual attempt to eradicate the soska, a chaw of premasticated food wrapped in a bit of rag. See David Ransel, Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tartaria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 196–98; Conus, Puti razvitiia sovetskoi Okhrany Materinstva i Mladenchestva, 133. 47. See Gleb Struve’s Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin, 1917–51 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971): “This bareness and simplicity of structure, reducing the theme to an almost algebraic and symbolic baldness, is obviously deliberate” (106). Andrew Barratt diagrams fathers and sons in the old and new worlds. Yurii Olesha’s Envy (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1981), 41. 48. Robert Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 344. My complication of the easy symmetrical opposition of characters is anticipated in part by Neil Cornwell, “Olesha’s ‘Envy,’ ” in The Structural Analysis of Russian Narrative Fiction, ed. Joe Andrew and Christopher Pike (Keele, UK: Keele University Press, 1984), 116. 49. See Eliot Borenstein, Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 4–14. 50. Olesha, Envy, 254; Zagovor chuvstv, 10. 51. This last meaning of baba is not current in contemporary Russian but is found in Dal’s dictionary and was common in the premodern period. See Eve Levin, “Childbirth in Pre-Petrine Russia,” in Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 50. The word baba was, as Elizabeth A. Wood discusses, a loaded one in Soviet rhetoric that opposed the male factory worker to the foil of the peasant woman; see The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 17, 200–203. On the feminization of Andrei Babichev, see William E. Harkins, “The Theme of Sterility in Olesha’s Envy,” Slavic Review 25, no. 3 (Sept. 1966): 445–46, where Babichev is read as a nourishing, hermaphroditic figure. Lactating men constitute a widespread motif in comparative Eurasian folklore, but I know of no strictly folkloric Russian instantiations; see Roberto Lionetti, Latte di padre: Vitalità contesti livelli di lettura di un motivo folklorico (Brescia, Italy: Grafo edizioni, 1984), 1–25, 59–84. 52. Olesha, Envy, 251, 253; Zagovor chuvstv, 7, 9. 53. Quoted José Vergara, “Kavalerov and Dedalus as Rebellious Son and Artists: Yury Olesha’s Dialogue with Ulysses in Envy,” Slavic and East European Journal 58, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 606. 54. Olesha, Envy, 257; Zagovor chuvstv, 12. 55. Olesha, Envy, 288, 322; Zagovor chuvstv, 38, 65. 56. Zagovor chuvstv, 332. 57. Olesha, Envy, 306; Zagovor chuvstv, 52–53. 58. Eliot Borenstein, Men without Women, 47. 59. Julia Vaingurt, Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 142. 60. Ivan’s romantic idealizations are perhaps no less disturbing than socialist objectifications. He attempts his own female-machine hybrid in a fantastic machine named Ophelia, afflicted with all

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the contradictory emotions of the Old World along with all the utilitarian powers of a technological utopia. See Anthony Vanchu, “Desire and the Machine: The Literary Origins of Yury Olesha’s ‘Ofeliya,’ ” in The European Foundations of Russian Modernism, ed. Peter Barta (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1991), 270–71; Julia Vaingurt, Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde, 143–146. 61. Olesha, Envy, 270; Zagovor chuvstv, 23. 62. Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 226. 63. Olesha, Zagovor chuvstv, 244. 64. As Alexander Zholkovsky notes, “ ‘Love-and-sex,’ always provocatively linked to ‘food,’ are at the core of Envy’s plot.” Text and Countertext (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 197. 65. Olesha, Envy, 292; Zagovor chuvstv, 41. 66. See Ronald LeBlanc, “Gluttony and Power in Iurii Olesha’s Envy,” Russian Review 60 (April 2001): 227–28. 67. Wolfsohn, Sotsiologiia braka i sem’i, 450. The idea of a “museum” of capitalist curiosities is a widespread period device for imagining the present through the lens of the socialist future; in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s farcical play The Bedbug, a bourgeois vulgarian is frozen in ice, awakened in the Communist future, and put into a zoo. 68. Borenstein, “Defying Interpretation: Allegory and Ideology in Jurij Oleša’s Envy,” Russian Literature XLIX (2001): 28. 69. Ibid., 25. 70. Audrey March, Time and Conflict in Jurij Oleša’s Zavist’ (Oslo: Solum, 1992), 53. 71. Olesha, Envy, 322; Zagovor chuvstv, 66. The scene also involves a religious subtext. When Ivan leaves the wedding the wine has turned to water—making him a kind of anti-Christ, an inversion of the religious figure who instituted a human brotherhood on the basis of a cannibalistic communion of peoples who “devour” their kinsman, the son of God. See Kazimiera Ingdahl’s The Artist and the Creative Act: A Study of Jurij Oleša’s Novel Zavist’ (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 1984), 97. In addition, the expression “producing a child” continues an early pun in that describes Andrei Babichev as having “pakh proizvodetelia,” translatable either as “loins of a producer” or “loins of a progenitor.” Envy, 251; Zagovor chuvstv, 8. See Harkins, “The Theme of Sterility,” 444. As we have seen, the collapse of technological production and maternal reproduction is central to aesthetic texts by Gerasimov and Eisenstein as well as sociological texts of the period. 72. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 26. 73. Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 3. 74. Olesha, Envy, 277–29; Zagovor chuvstv, 27–29; Borenstein, Men without Women, 151–153. In the preface to his unfinished play The Black Man (Chernyi chelovek, 1932) Olesha describes the title character as “someone whose ideology consists of the parodied ideology of Freud, Spengler, and Bergson,” a diagnosis that might apply to the hyperbolically Freudian preoccupations of Envy. Olesha, Zagovor chuvstv, 454. 75. Olesha, Envy, 259; Zagovor chuvstv, 14. 76. Olesha, Envy, 360; Zagovor chuvstv, 96. See Rimgaila Salys, “Understanding Envy,” in Olesha’s Envy: A Critical Companion, ed. Rimgaila Salys (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 26. In the stage version of the novel the murder is a much stronger theme; there are even two alternate endings, in which Kavalerov intends to kill Andrei and Ivan Babichev, respectively. In the play it is also clear that Kavalerov’s intent to commit parricide evolves from a previous intention to commit suicide, just as with Nikolai Apollonovich in Bely’s Petersburg. Zagovor chuvstv, 330. 77. See Hegel’s influential reading in Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baille (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 490–99. The thought recurs in Philosophy of Right, trans. J. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 114–15. 78. Freud argues that the content of dreams is determined by an unconscious force that “strips the elements which have a high psychical value of their intensity, and . . . creates from elements of low psychical value new values, which afterward find their way into the dream-content.” Interpretation of Dreams, 324.

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79. On Marx’s repeated trope of tragedy degenerating into comedy, see S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (London: Verso, 2011), 255. 80. Olesha, Envy, 255–56; Zagovor chuvstv, 11. 81. Nils Åke Nilsson, “Through the Wrong End of Binoculars: An introduction to Jurij Oleša,” Scando-Slavica 11 (1965): 49. Richard Borden also remarks Olesha’s privileging of child-like perception, concluding that “metaphor constitutes perhaps the defining motif in both Olesha’s art and his life.” “Iurii Olesha: The Child Behind the Metaphor,” Modern Language Review 13, no. 2 (Apr. 1998): 443. Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour states that “although simile and metaphor are basic components of almost any poetic language, they are exceptionally important to Olesha’s.” The Invisible Land: A Study of the Artistic Imagination of Iurii Olesha (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 32. 82. Olesha, Envy, 293; Zagovor chuvstv, 41. 83. Olesha, Envy, 269; Zagovor chuvstsv, 22. 84. Olesha, Envy, 274; Zagovor chuvstv, 26. 85. Borenstein, Men without Women, 139. 86. Ibid., 125. 87. Olesha, Envy, 251, 305, 307; Zagovor chuvstv, 8, 52, 53. 88. Olesha, Envy, 269–70; Olesha, Zagovor chuvstv, 22. I have slightly literalized Brown’s translation. 89. As Wayne Wilson has argued, the transition from the first-person perspective of the novel’s first half to the third-person perspective of the second half is motivated by Kavalerov’s specular selfobjectification. Wayne Wilson, “The Objective of Jurij Oleša’s Envy,” Slavic and East European Journal 18, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 35–36; on Ivan Babichev’s appearance in the mirror, see Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour’s “On Choosing One’s Ancestors: Some Afterthoughts on Envy.” Ulbandus Review 2, no. 1 (Fall 1979): 29. 90. Rozanov, Liudi lunnogo sveta, 70. 91. Olesha, Zagovor chuvstv, 246. 92. As Eliot Borenstein observes, “The physical father must eventually die, but he consoles himself with the survival of some of his characteristics in future generations. Olesha’s passive protagonists are incapable of raising their hands against the father and thus can only attack through inaction. . . . For Olesha, childlessness is tantamount to parricide” (Men without Women, 133). 93. Olesha, Envy, 271; Zagovor chuvstsv, 23. 94. Olesha, Zagovor chuvstv, 377. 95. Ibid., 557. 96. Ibid., 555. 97. Olesha, Envy, 259: Olesha, Zagovor chuvstv, 14. 98. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3. 99. Olesha, Envy, 254; Zagovor chuvstv, 9. 100. Compare Marina Tsvetaeva’s 1934 autobiographical sketch “Mother’s Fairy Tale,” a tissue of nested narratives dealing with the division of a mother’s love between her two children; the sisters realize that they have milk siblings as well as collactaneous ones, and their attempt to come to grips with the fact forms a fascinating mise-en-abîme of the narrative at large, developing an intricate relationship between blood, music, sheet music, and somatic marks. Tsvetaeva, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, 7 vols. (Mosvka: Ellis Lak, 1994), 5:151–52. 101. Olesha, Envy, 259; Zagovor chuvstv, 14. 102. In fact the quarter ruble (chetvertak) was removed from circulation in 1832; like the American expression “two bits,” the “quarter ruble” is an anachronism. See I. Spasskii’s Russkaia monetnaia sistema: Istoriko-numizmaticheskii ocherk (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha, 1962), 159. 103. Olesha, Envy, 274; Zagovor chuvstv, 26. 104. Olesha, Envy, 309; Zagovor chuvstv, 55. 105. Olesha, Envy, 309; Zagovor chuvstv, 55.

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106. Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (New York: Penguin, 1997), 98. 107. Olesha, Envy, 264, 338; Zagovor chuvstv, 18, 78. Interestingly, some Soviet coins of the time (the poltinnik and the 20 kopeck piece) were stamped with the image of a man raising a sledgehammer over an anvil, which may inform the “coin” metaphor of the scar and generate a connection between Babichev’s two escape attempts. Spasskii, Russkaia monetnaia sistema, 212–13. 108. Olesha, Envy, 337; Zagovor chuvstv, 78. 109. Olesha, Envy, 299; Zagovor chuvstv, 47. 110. Olesha, Envy, 301; Zagovor chuvtsv, 48. 111. A. Belinkov, Sdacha i gibel’ sovetskogo intelligenta: Iurii Olesha (Moscow: Kul’tura, 1997), 40. 112. Olesha, Envy, 324; Zagovor chuvstsv, 67. 113. Compare Victor Peppard’s assertion that Envy “contains a multiplicity of texts: the novel of manners, or its subtle parody, a symbolist fantasy, a collection of fragments and documents, and a writer’s notebook. . . . The point is that Envy is a special kind of metafiction that battles vigorously against structural and generic preconceptions that would restrict its mercurial nature.” The Poetics of Yury Olesha (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1989), 36. 114. Christine Brooke-Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), 123. 115. Mitsuyoshi Numano, “Sud’ba iskusstva Iuriia Oleshi: ego zhizn’ v metaforakh,” Novyi Zhurnal 145 (Dec. 1981): 67. 116. See Victor Peppard’s discussion in The Poetics of Yury Olesha, 27–29. 117. Olesha, Envy, 305. Olesha, Zagovor chuvstsv, 52. 118. See Barratt, Yurii Olesha’s Envy, 9; for Olesha’s appreciation of Mark Twain see Zagovor chuvstv, 750–53, and Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow: Kudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965), 472–75. Although Olesha’s diaries do not mention it, he may also have known Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which a wet nurse’s child is exchanged for a plantation heir; its Russian translation appeared in the same series as The Prince and the Pauper in 1899. 119. Borenstein, Men without Women, 128–140; Aleksandra Notkina, “Avtor i ego vremia,” Voprosy literatury 3 (May-June 2000): 109–110. 120. Olesha, Izbrannoe (Sverdlovsk: Izdatel’stvo Ural’skogo universiteta, 1988), 100–1. 121. Marx, Capital, 83. 122. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, in which the father combines winding the clock with his conjugal duties, is a likely subtext. 123. Olesha, Izbrannoe, 101. Olesha asserts in the short story “I Look into the Past” (“Ia smotriu v proshloe,”1928) that “one can divide the characters of men into two categories: one is composed of those that are formed under the influence of filial affection, the other of those who are ruled by the thirst for freedom.” Zagovor chuvstv, 257. 124. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–39, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 117. 125. Olesha, “Literatura—obshchee delo pisatelia i rabochego,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 1933, 17 December. 126. Marcel Proust, Contre Saint-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 586; Zagovor chuvstv, 790. 127. Kazimiera Ingdahl, The Artist and the Creative Act, 19. 128. Zagovor chuvstsv, 790–91. 129. Olesha, Envy, 262; Zagovor chuvstv, 16. 130. Olesha, Envy, 271. Olesha, Zagovor chuvstv, 23–24. 131. Olesha, Envy, 270; Zagovor chuvstv, 23. 132. Olesha, Envy, 372; Zagovor chuvstsv, 106. 133. Now that Kavalerov has given in to Anichka’s offer to become a “daddy,” the parent generation is represented as a “grandfather.” 134. The bed was marked in early Soviet culture as a symbol of the procreative bourgeois family, whereas “the New Man and New Woman do not have children, or if they do, they live separately from them, asserting the supremacy of the nonbiological family”—“at its most radical, the

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antiprocreationism of Russia’s utopians was a refusal of nature as well as of history and historical continuity. It denied temporality and any thought about future generations.” Olga Matich, “Remaking the Bed: Utopia in Daily Life,” in Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, ed. John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 74. On infanticidal metaphors and other images of the end of the family in early Soviet rhetoric, see also Naiman, Sex in Public, 27. 135. Olesha, Envy, 359; Zagovor chuvstsv, 95. 136. See Janet Tucker, Revolution Betrayed: Jurij Oleša’s Envy (Columbus, OH: Slavica: 1996), 55.

Notes to Afterword 1. Aristotle, Works, Physics, 198a. 2. According to Alexandr Bogandov, Friedrich Engels follows Aristotle by organizing human life under the three rubrics of “production of people, production of things, and production of ideas”; Bogdanov himself rephrases the tripartite division as “organization of the external forces of nature, organization of human forces, and organization of experience.” Bogdanov, Tektology, 3. 3. Macherey, Theory of Literary Production, 66. 4. John Mandeville, The Voiage and Travayle of Syr John Mandeville Knight (London: J. M. Dent, [n.d.].), 60. 5. Error rates in DNA testing are significant but difficult to quantify precisely, not least because “forensic laboratories sometimes suppress evidence of problems in order to protect their credibility and maintain the public perception of infallibility.” William C. Thompson, “Forensic DNA Evidence: The Myth of Infallibility,” in Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense, ed. Sheldon Krimsky & Jeremy Gruber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 228. Furthermore, such tests are not sensitive to situations in which genes and persons do not coincide. Identical twins are distinct legal persons but share near-identical genes; chimeras are single legal individuals who possess multiple sets of genes as a result of absorbing a fraternal twin in utero. In 2002 a chimera was accused of welfare fraud after genetic tests concluded that she was not related to her children; while DNA in the woman’s blood did not match that of her children, DNA from her thyroid tissues did. “She’s Her Own Twin,” http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/shes-twin/story?id=2315693, accessed March 27, 2013. 6. Lon Fuller, Legal Fictions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 30–31. 7. Indeed, familial identity involves groups ranging from the domestic household to the nation to the entire human family—all of whose members, in Christian rhetoric, are children of God, who in turn is of “one substance” with his son. Nineteenth-century philosopher Petr Chaadaev bemoaned Russia as a figurative foundling, writing that “we Russians, like illegitimate children, come to this world without patrimony, without any links with people who lived on the earth before us. . . . Our memories go no further back than yesterday; we are, as it were, strangers to ourselves.” Petr Chaadaev, Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman, trans. Mary-Barbara Zeldin (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), 37. In this metaphor orphanage itself becomes an oxymoronic “family trait” common to an entire people. 8. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 81. 9. See Jacob Emery, “A Clone Playing Craps Will Never Abolish Change: Randomness and Fatality in Sorokin’s Clone Fictions,” Science Fiction Studies, no. 123 (July 2014), 410–35. 10. These questions are taken up in sociological texts like Amy Agigian’s Baby Steps: How Lesbian Artificial Insemination Is Changing the World (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004) and Kath Weston’s Families We Choose: Gays, Lesbians, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Donna Haraway has addressed science fiction kinships in her “Manifesto for Cyborgs.” The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 31–37. The same volume contains essays exploring the ramifications of kinship technology: “It’s All in the Family: Biological Kinship Categories” and “Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience.” 11. Lidiia Obukhova, Izbrannoe (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1966), 391. Obukhova’s feminist revision of Genesis imagines its extraterrestrial Adam in terms familiar from Bely’s

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Peterburg. The human child shares an identity with the alien father because “every individual sensed himself as a link in the colossal chain of time. He knew that his child would see the world not only with his proper eyes, but with those of his father.” Ibid., 369. 12. Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (New York: Bantam: 1972), 181. 13. Gustave Flaubert, Three Tales, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Penguin, 1981), 82. 14. Aristotle, Works, Poetics, 1452a22–1452b9. 15. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 5. 16. Rozanov, Apokalipsis nashego vremeni, 305. Because he feels his identity to extend into his five children, Rozanov goes on, “I am only ‘I,’ ” but nonetheless “I am also ‘GREATER THAN MYSELF.’ ” Ibid, 303. Rozanov’s quasi-syllogistic logic makes clear the philosophical stakes of the scene of misrecognition, which brings out the insistent nonidentity haunting even the most straightforward identifying act—that of recognizing oneself as such. 17. Aristotle, Works, Rhetoric, 1410b6–36. 18. Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours (New York: Vintage, 2001), 30–31. As a novella by Thomas Pynchon deftly puts it, metaphor is “a thrust at truth and a lie.” The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Perennial, 1999), 105. 19. Carson utilizes Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, a “real place” where other sites in a culture are “represented, contested, and inverted.” Foucault’s paradigmatic example is the mirror, a space where “I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there.” Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986), 24. 20. Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1998), 71–72. 21. Similar problems are at work in nonhumanistic disciplines also. “Mathematic models are the scientific form of analogies,” notes one textbook, but “a mathematical model that is used to capture a particular aspect of two systems does not necessarily capture other aspects.” Yaneer Bar-Yam, Dynamics of Complex Systems (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 788. Thus statistics also requires discourses of reflexivity, which generate meta-models of how mathematic representations are produced and implemented. Early systems theorist Alexander Bogdanov claims that without the “basic metaphor . . . thinking about the universe would not have been possible.” Bogadnov, Tektology, 11. 22. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 122; Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 102. 23. Agamben, Stanzas, 148. 24. Ibid., 149.

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INDEX

Aarsleff, Hans, 25n52 Abraham, Nicolas, 95, 96 Abraham, Ray, 98n139 Abrams, M. H., 1n5 Adam, 6, 14, 16, 20, 23–30, 32–35, 48, 58, 64, 66, 77, 88, 100, 103, 116, 141n11 Adamic language, 16, 25–30, 33, 35, 41–43 Adorno, Theodor, 15, 66, 142 Agamben, Giorgio, 8n50, 19, 143 Agigian, Amy, 141n10 Aiken, Susan Hardy, 103n165, 104 Aksakov, Ivan, 109 Alexandrov, Vladimir, 24n47, 30n78, 33n92, 34n98, 36n107, 42n129, 48n12, 49n22, 57n52 Allegory, 23, 39, 41n125, 45, 48–51, 67, 74, 83, 107, 108n176, 124–126, 132–134; of reading, 20, 38, 51 Alter, Robert, 49n23 Althusser, Louis, 8, 38, 143 Anscheutz, Carol, 63n70 Anthroposophy, 25, 27, 54 Anthropology. See kinship and anthropology Aristocracy, 11, 22, 23, 41, 43, 46, 47, 70, 74–77, 79, 88, 91, 99–110, 112, 129, 131, 132, 134, 140 Aristotle, 13, 17, 36, 50, 139, 141, 142 Augustine, Saint, 48 Avant-garde, 5, 6, 10, 11, 13, 37, 69, 70, 76, 87–89, 113, 114. See also futurism; zaum Babel, 6n31, 30, 35n102 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 89, 90, 124, 125 Baldick, Chris, 77n24 Balzac, Honoré de, 133 Barber, Paul, 102n158 Barnes, Djuna, 17 Barratt, Andrew, 121n47, 132, 134n118 Bar-Yam, Yaneer, 143n21 Base and superstructure, 2n13, 9, 51, 68, 110

Bataille, Georges, 135 Beardsley, Monroe, 17 Beaujour, Elizabeth Klosty, 126n81, 128n89 Belinkov, Andrei, 133 Bell, Millicent, 75n15 Bely, Andrei, 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 13–16, 18–70, 77, 78, 83n56, 88, 89n92, 90, 94, 100, 116, 124–126; “Adam” (“Adam”) 26; “Emblematika smysla” (“Emblematics of Meaning”), 24, 25, 64, 67, 68; Gibel’ senator (Death of a Senator), 63n71; Glossolaliia (Glossolalia), 22n43, 28–30; Kotik Letaev (Kotika Letaev), 9, 52, 53; Kreshchennyi kitaets (The Baptized Chinaman), 27, 57, 100; “Magiia slov” (“The Magic of Words”) 13–15, 32, 36n104; Masterstvo Gogolia (Gogol’s Artistry), 42n133; Nachalo veka (Beginning of the Century), 64; Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii (At the Border of Two Centuries), 23n45; Peterburg (Petersburg), 4, 10, 13–16, 19–68, 77, 78, 94, 100, 124; “Tvorchestvo zhizni” (“The Work of Life”), 68; Vospominaniia o Bloke (Remembrances of Blok), 27n66; “Vozvrat” (“The Return”) 63 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 30 Bergson, Henri, 125n74 Binswanger, Hans, 83 Black, Max, 17 Blavatsky, H. P., 25, 26 Blixen, Karen. See Dinesen, Isak Blood, 60, 64, 98, 104, 105, 127, 134; transfusion of, 5, 10, 39, 41, 104, 105, 116, 117. See also kinship by blood; vampirism Bogdanov, Aleksandr, 2, 5, 116–118, 139n2, 143n21 Bogert, Ralph, 99 Böhme, Jakob, 25, 28–30 Borden, Richard, 126n81 Borenstein, Eliot, 122, 124, 125, 127, 129n92, 134

188

I ND EX

Borges, Jorge Luis, 33 Botting, Fred, 77 Boym, Svetlana, 69, 70 Bradbury, Ray, 141, 142 Brecht, Bertolt, 9 Bentham, Jeremy, 8n44 Brontë, Charlotte, 43n138 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 133, 134 Brooks, Peter, 1n7, 63n66, 131 Buell, Lawrence, 87n83 Bunin, Ivan, 10, 79, 105–110, 112, 115, 116; Sukhodol (Dry Valley), 105–109; Zhizn’ Arsen’eva (Life of Arseniev), 105, 106 Bunyan, John, 48 Cannibalism, 89, 102, 124. See also vampirism Carson, Anne, 142, 143 Carsten, Janet, 91n106, 112 Carter, Angela, 132 Casey, James, 107n174 Castellano, Charlene Ann, 55n45 Catharsis, 50 Cenci, Beatrice, 80 Chaadaev, Petr, 140n7 Chadaga, Julia Bekman, 118 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 5 Chester, Pamela, 115 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 64n73 Chodorow, Nancy, 78 Christ/Christology, 26, 34, 35n102, 47, 48, 65, 124n71 Cixous, Hélène, 104n168 Class, social, 20, 22, 23, 41, 68, 69, 75, 78, 90, 100, 103, 107–109, 119n39, 119n42; inheritance of, 3, 5n22, 8, 17, 41, 49, 76, 92, 99, 104, 105, 140. See also aristocracy; peasantry; proletariat; reproduction of labor Cloning, 140, 141 Coins. See money Collier-Fishburne, Jane, 111 Comenius, John, 25 Collectivism/collectivization, 5, 11, 113–120, 122, 133 Communism, 5, 9–11, 46, 47, 54, 98, 110–119, 121–126, 134, 136, 137. See also collectivism; property, communal Connolly, Julian, 108, 109 Conus, Esther, 114n14, 114n17, 121n46 Cook, Eleanor, 15 Cornwell, Neil, 121n48 Craven, Wes, 36 Crews, Fredrick, 74n7

Dällenbach, Lucien, 1 Dauvillier, Jean, 107n172 Davydov, Sergej, 49n23 De Clercq, Carlo, 107n172 Defamiliarization, 3, 9, 10, 52, 69, 127, 141 Demiurge, 33, 38, 39, 49, 51n26. See also genesis; Gnosticism De Man, Paul, 19, 66 Dickens, Charles, 10 Dinesen, Isak, 10, 11, 78, 79, 103–105 DNA. See genes Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.), 94 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 4, 33 Douglas, Charlotte, 26n57 Dryden, Edgar, 75n10, 83n56, 84n64 Dubnick, Heather, 33n93 Egerman, F. I., 114n19 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 108 Eisenstein, Sergei, 9, 11, 119–122, 124n71; Staroe i novoe (The General Line), 119–121 Elsworth, J. D., 30, 34n99, 37 Emery, Jacob, 141n9 Engels, Friedrich, 5, 8n47, 111, 112, 123, 139n2 Engelsfeld, Mladen, 91 Enstrangement. See defamiliarization Erdmann, Martin, 55, 57 Erlich, Gloria, 85 Evolution, 88, 100, 101; Lamarckian, 25, 27 Fedorov, Nikolai, 6, 30, 89, 115 Fiedler, Leslie, 85, 107, 108n176 Figure. See metaphor; metonymy Fildes, Valerie, 115n22 Filipović, Milenko, 177n108 Flaubert, Gustave, 2, 141, 142 Fleissner, Jennifer, 5n22 Formalism, 3, 4, 10, 51, 68–70, 133 Foss, Martin, 17n25 Foucault, Michel, 98, 142n19 Fox, Robin, 16 Freud, Sigmund, 53, 94–96, 123, 125, 126 Frye, Northrop, 2, 18, 31 Fuller, Buckminster, 114 Fuller, Lon, 140n6 Futurism, 6, 29, 30, 86. See also avant-garde; zaum Gasparov, Boris, 6n30 Genetics/genetic material, 6, 14, 108, 111–113, 116, 140, 141. See also kinship by genes

I N D E X

Genesis, 28, 30, 33, 37, 39, 141n11. See also Adam; demiurge; mythopoesis Genette, Gérard, 62n63, 63, Gerasimov, Mikhail, 118, 119, 122, 124n71 Gnosticism, 32, 33, 47–51, 88. See also demiurge Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 16n18, 83 Gogol, Nikolai, 81n48 Gordon, Paul, 17n25 Gorky, Maksim, 115, 117 Gothic, 9–11, 70, 71, 75–80, 83, 84, 94, 103, 105, 107–109, 112, 176 Gromyko, M. M., 107n173 Groys, Boris, 6, 70 Haraway, Donna, 141n10 Harkins, William, 122n51, 124n71 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 10, 73–87; American Notebooks, 82; “Devil in Manuscript,” 82n54; “Hall of Fantasy,” 82; House of the Seven Gables, 73–79, 82, 84; The Marble Faun, 79, 80; “Old Woman’s Tale,” 79, 87n82; “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure,” 80–84; The Scarlet Letter, 75, 78, 80, 83–87. Hazelton, Alan, 46n7 Hegel, G. W. F., 19, 97, 125, 140 Helms, Mary, 99n143 Hermogenes, 18n28 Herodotus, 17 Hitler, Adolf, 51 Hogle, Jerrold, 77 Horner, Avril, 77n25 Household. See property House society, 106, 107 Howard, Jacqueline, 77n24 Hrushevsky, Benjamin, 19 Hume, David, 7, 8, 98, 143 Ibsen, Henrik, 58, 58n54. Illegitimacy, 5, 23, 41, 42, 58, 59, 85, 87, 91, 99, 103, 106, 107, 140. See also puns Incest, 8n47, 43n138, 63n66, 74, 76, 79, 80, 85, 104, 106, 107, 123, 124 Infanticide, 26, 34, 35, 58, 64, 66, 112n4, 137n134 Inheritance. See class, social, inheritance of Ingdahl, Kazimiera, 124n71, 136 Isaev, S. G., 26n57 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 30, 53 Jakobson, Roman, 6n30, 62 James, Henry, 21, 22 Jameson, Fredric, 2n13, 67, 69, 70, 143

189

Janecek, Gerald, 22n44 Jefferson, Thomas, 76; Jeffersonian democracy, 10 Jeffrey, Nancy, 115n22 Johnson, Barbara, 6n28 Johnson, D. Barton, 43n138 Joyce, James, 10, 35, 122 Jupiter (Zeus), 31n84, 34, 45, 57. See also Saturn Kabakova, Galina, 107n172 Kahane, Claire, 78 Kaminer, Jenny, 112, 113 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 4n18, 8 Kayser, Wolfgang, 90n97. Kellman, Steven, 66, Keys, Roger, 36n106 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 6, 30, 42n131 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 109 Kilgour, Maggie, 68n90, 77 Kinship, and anthropology, 4n18, 8–10, 16, 18, 91n106, 98n139, 106, 112; by blood (consanguineous), 6n35,8, 16, 17, 26–28, 31, 43, 58, 62, 65, 66, 70, 75, 76, 80, 94, 99–102, 106–110, 112, 114, 118, 121, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129, 131–133, 136; fictive or metaphorical, 10, 106–110, 112, 116, 107n172; by genes (genetic), 8, 10, 13, 16, 17, 25, 26, 43, 59, 85–87, 90–93, 97, 103–6, 108, 112, 113, 116–118, 121, 126, 128, 131, 133; by illocutionary performance (sworn or blood siblinghood), 104, 107, 108; by law (legal), 82, 85–87, 91, 104, 107, 108; by milk (collactaneous) 10, 11, 106–110, 112, 115–117; universal, 6, 16, 25, 28–30, 32, 34, 35, 48, 53, 58, 63, 68, 95, 105, 107, 115, 116, 129 Kiš, Danilo, 6 Kitzinger, Chloë, 63, 32n88 Kollontai, Alexandra, 114, 118, 123 Konstantinović, Zoran, 90n98 Kopper, John, 14n6, 26, 52 Kozlik, Frédéric, 25n53, 27n64 Krementsov, Nikolai, 5n26, 116n28 Krieger, Murray, 53. Krleža, Miroslav, 10, 79, 88–105, 117; Glembajevi (The Glembaj Family), 103n162; Na rubu pameti (On the Edge of Reason), 94n114; Povratak Filipa Latinovicza (Return of Filip Latinovicz), 88–94, 96–103 Krutikova, L. V., 109n186 Kulundžić, Zvonimir, 91n107 Kuzmin, Ivan, 114

190

I ND EX

Lacan, Jacques, 51, 52 Langen, Timothy, 30n78, 31 Law, 10, 14, 16, 20, 26, 36, 37, 39, 40, 43, 66, 67, 74, 76, 79, 96, 127, 140. See also kinship by law; legal fiction Le Corbusier, 114 Legal fiction, 5, 8, 14, 16, 76, 104, 107, 108, 140 Leibniz, Gottfried, 25 Lenin, Vladimir, 51, 69, 114, 118 Lerner, N. O., 109n189 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 2, 8, 9, 14, 106n171, 112n4 Levin, Eve, 107n172, 122n51 Leskov, Nikolai, 5 Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 6n28 Life-creation. See zhiznetvorchestvo Lionetti, Roberto, 122n51 Ljunggren, Magnus, 15n10, 25n53, 27n64, 27n66 London, Jack, 94, 95 Lotman, Yuri, 22, 30n78. Lounsbery, Anne, 75, 81n48. Lukács, Georg, 5n22, 69, 75, 76, 78, Lunacharsky, Anatolii, 70, 113, 116 Mach, Ernst, 94 Macherey, Pierre, 51, 52, 139 Maguire, Muireann, 76 Maguire, Robert, 21, 41, 121 Malevich, Kazimir, 5, 6 Mallarmé, Stephane, 6n28. Malmstad, John, 21, 41, 63n71 Mandelstam, Osip, 63n70. Mandeville, John, 140 March, Audrey, 124 Marx, Karl, 3, 4, 9n55, 68n89, 117, 126n79, 135 Marxism/materialism, 2, 9, 10, 28, 67–69, 114, 120, 126, 128. See also base and superstructure; communism Masing-Delic, Irene, 6, 89n92 Matich, Olga, 37, 68n89, 137n134 Matković, Marijan, 88n87 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 117, 123n67 McHale, Brian, 36 Medtner, Emilii, 27n66 Metafiction, 1, 3, 15, 37, 42n129, 66, 67, 75, 84, 96, 133 Metaphor, and identification of kin 1–3, 6, 48–51, 62, 63, 77–79, 95, 139, 141, 142; in

film, 119, 120; realization of 9, 10, 15, 20, 31, 36, 37, 55, 103, 107, 115, 116, 126, 138; social metaphor, 6–10, 20, 70, 71, 79, 105–112, 115–117, 133, 140, 143; theory of, 1, 2, 7, 8, 13, 14, 17–20, 141–42; universalizing, 9, 16, 18, 19, 24, 28, 31, 63, 83, 88; in Bely, 13–15, 20, 22–26, 28–43, 45, 47, 51–53, 57, 63, 66–68; in Bunin, 105–109; in Dinesen, 103–105; in Hawthorne, 74–77, 80, 81, 84; in Krleža, 90, 97, 98, 103; in Olesha, 111, 121–130, 132–138. See also kinship, metaphorical Metonymy, 7, 62, 63 Mighall, Robert, 77n24 Milk, 10, 11, 104–110, 112, 114–120, 122, 123, 126. See also kinship by milk Milk banks, 115–117 Mimesis, 1, 33, 36n109, 46, 49, 50, 62, 63, 67, 74, 77, 128 Mirrors, 1–4, 48–53, 77, 78, 139–142; as figure of mimesis, 1, 41, 51, 52, 67; mirror stage (in psychoanalysis), 52; people as, 4, 45, 48–50, 86; in Bely, 10, 26, 31–33, 35, 36, 38n114, 40, 41, 45–48, 53–67; in Hawthorne, 73, 74, 79–81, 83–87; in Krleža, 92, 96–98, 101, 102; in Dinesen, 104; in Olesha, 128–130, 137. See also misprision, specular; nonnon; recognition of self Mise en abîme, 21, 37, 62, 131n100 Misprision/misrecognition, specular, 3–6, 9, 40, 48, 51–53, 61, 69–71, 76, 78–80, 104, 105, 137, 140–143 Money, 2, 4, 20, 70, 81–84, 88, 119, 130–132, 135, 136 Mulvey, Laura, 63n69 Musil, Robert, 82 Mythopoesis, 14, 25, 29, 33, 34, 36n104, 37, 39, 54, 57n50, 64, 66, 67 Nabokov, Vladimir, 1–3, 43n138, 49–52, 109, 142; Look at the Harlequins, 43n138; Priglashenie na kazn’ (Invitation to a Beheading), 49–52; “Putevoditel’ po Berlinu” (“Guide to Berlin”), 1–3, 142; Speak, Memory, 51 Naiman, Eric, 76, 120n44, 137n134 Narrative/narratology, 4, 60, 62–66; kinship’s structural role in, 4, 5, 8, 15, 26, 33, 36, 45, 47, 48, 43, 73, 74, 76, 104, 128; recognition in, 36, 48, 59, 141; symbol or metaphor in, 1n7, 21, 22, 62, 63, 133, 134

I N D E X

Ngai, Sianne, 3n16 New Economic Criticism, 9, 70 New Man, Soviet, 121, 123, 132, 137n134 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 57n50, 58n54 Nikolesku, Tat’iana, 63n71 Nilsson, Nils, 126 Ninov, A., 108n181 Nonnon (distorting mirror in Nabokov), 49–52 Notkina, Aleksandra, 134 Numano, Mitsuyoshi, 134 Nursing, 11, 104, 106–109, 112, 115, 117, 118, 123; wet, 79, 104, 105, 108n176, 109, 110, 112, 115, 116, 122, 123. See also kinship by milk; milk Obukhova, Lidiia, 141 O’Connor, Flannery, 78 Oedipus/Oedipal triangle, 4, 14, 26, 33, 34, 62, 63, 65, 78, 91, 121, 125–127, 130, 136, 139 Olesha, Yuri, 5, 6, 9, 11, 78, 111, 112, 121–138, 141; “Chelovecheskii material” (“Human Material”), 129; Chernyi chelovek (The Black Man), 125n74; “Ia smotriu v proshloe” (“I Look into the Past”), 135n123; “Legenda” (“Legend”), 134–136; “Literatura—obshchee delo pisatelia i rabochego” (Literature—the Common Cause of the Writer and the Worker”), 141; “Liubov’” (“Love”), 123; Ni dnia bez strochki (No Day without a Line), 129, 130; Tri tolstiaka (Three Fat Men), 134; Zagovor chuvstv (Conspiracy of Feelings), 122–125, 125n65, 129; Zavist’ (Envy), 5, 9, 11, 111, 112, 121–138 Onan, 17 Orientalism, 27, 40, 94 Orphanage, 114, 115, 118n38, 131, 140n7 Osteen, Mark, 9 Otis, Laura, 95n121 Ovid, 63, 89 Oxymoron, 24, 29, 40, 64, 140n7 Paperno, Irina, 69, 89n92 Parricide, 4, 14, 15, 20, 26, 31, 33–36, 38, 40, 45–47, 53, 54, 57–60, 62–66, 80, 124–126, 129n92, 135 Pasternak, Boris, 115 Paul (apostle), 48, 85

191

Peasantry, 10, 23, 28, 69, 79, 90, 103, 104, 106–110, 112, 115–118, 120, 121n51, 134 Peppard, Viktor, 133n113 Perec, Georges, 17 Perilepsis, 55, 57 Peterson, Dale, 107 Peterson, Ronald E., 26n57 Peter the Great, 33, 34, 37–39, 41, 55n46 Photography, 59, 74, 75, 77, 86, 93 Phylogenetics, 91, 95 Pierce, Franklin, 83 Plato, 2n949, 36n109, 50 Platonov, Andrei, 118n38, 119n39 Plutarch, 6 Poe, Edgan Allan, 81, 108n176 Police, 23, 37–40, 43 Potebnia, Aleksandr, 13 Prawer, S. S., 126n79 Proletariat, 20–24, 40, 68, 76, 117, 134; siblinghood of, 6, 11, 28, 71, 110, 115–120, 122–124 Proletkult (Proletarian Culture Group), 11, 116, 118 Property, communal, 11, 79, 110, 112–118, 121–123, 126, 132 Property, private, 2, 3, 8, 9, 76, 111–115, 118, 121–124, 131, 137, 140n7 Propp, V. Ia., 120n45 Proust, Marcel, 62n63, 63, 135 Psychoanalysis, 63, 78, 95–97, 124, 126 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 115 Puns, 15, 23, 28, 29, 35, 41–43, 74, 80, 87, 91, 124n71 Punter, David, 43n138, 76 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 33, 38–40, 109, 110, 115 Pynchon, Thomas, 142n18 Pythagoras, 89 Quintillian, 17 Rabelais, François, 90n96, 126 Race/racialism, 27n66, 79, 80, 88, 95, 100, 103, 105 Radcliffe, Ann, 78 Rank, Otto, 63n67 Ransel, David, 110n190, 117, 121n46 Recognition, 9, 20, 21, 24, 26, 32, 36, 37, 49, 59–61, 69, 80, 125, 131, 141, 142 ; selfrecognition, 52, 141, 142

192

I ND EX

Reproduction of labor, 5–8, 10, 14, 17, 37, 43, 70, 76, 77, 103, 104, 111–114, 118–120, 134, 137, 139–141, 143 Revolution, American, 70 Revolution, French, 11, 76, 79, 105, 116 Revolution, Russian, 2, 5, 10, 14, 79, 89n92, 105, 110–114, 117, 120n44, 126, 134, 136 Richards, I. A., 17 Ricoeur, Paul, 18, 19 Riffaterre, Michel, 67 Rowe, John Carlos, 87n83 Rozanov, Vasilii, 27, 28, 129, 142 Sabsovich, L. M., 114 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 4, 113 Salys, Rimgaila, 125n76 Sandler, Stephanie, 97n133 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 88 Saturn, 20, 21, 31, 34, 35, 45, 57, 123 Savchenko, Vladimir, 141 Scarry, Elaine, 90n97 Schneider, David, 6n35, 8, 112n4 Semen, 89, 104, 120 Sepčič, Višnja, 90n99 Serfdom. See peasantry Science fiction, 116, 141 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 91 Seifrid, Thomas, 9n55, 13n1 Shakespeare, William, 2, 48, 53 Shell, Marc, 6, 17n25, 70n101, 81, 100, 112n4, 112n6, 116 Shklovsky, Viktor, 9, 25n53, 28, 36, 36n104, 51n27, 69, 125 Slavophilism, 109 Socialism. See Communism Socialist realism, 76 Solovyov, Vladimir, 6n29, 32n89, 48n11 Sophocles, 125 Sorokin, Vladimir, 1n6u Spasskii, I., 132n102, 132n107 Spengler, Oswald, 125n74 Strathern, Marilyn, 17 Steinberg, Ada, 43n138 Stalin, Joseph, 70, 115 Steiner, Rudolf, 16, 25–27, 54. See also anthroposophy Stendahl, 1 Sterne, Laurence, 36n104, 135n122 Stites, Richard, 114n15 Stone, Linda, 106n171

Struve, Gleb, 121n47 Sumner, William, 114n13 Superstructure. See base and superstructure Syllogism, 47, 48, 65, 142n16 Symbolism, 1, 22, 39, 69 Synecdoche, 99, 119 Synesthesia, 55, 57, 62n63 Thompson, William C., 140n5 Timofeev, L. I., 68n92, 69n94 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 20 Tolstoy, Leo, 4, 9, 13, 51, 69 Torok, Maria, 95, 96 Trauberg, L. N., 64n73 Trautmann, Thomas R., 4n18 Trotsky, Leon, 5, 6, 28, 116 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 131n100 Tur, A. F., 115n22 Turgenev, Ivan, 4 Tucker, Janet, 137n136 Turner, Mark, 6, 18n29 Twain, Mark, 108n176, 134 Ulianskii, A. I., 109n189 Utopia, 5, 25, 63, 68–70, 75, 78, 83, 84, 87, 100, 105, 107, 111, 115–119, 122n60, 130, 131, 137n134 Vaingurt, Julia, 122 Valentino, Russell, 70n101, 81 Vampirism, 102, 104, 105, 117 Vanchu, Anthony, 122n60 Vega, Lope de, 48, 49 Velasquez, Diego, 142, 143 Venus, 45, 57n50 Vico, Giambattista, 17n25 Volk. See racialism Vološinov, V. N., 90n95 Wagner, Richard, 58n54 Walpole, Horace, 76, 77 Waters, Elizabeth, 113 Waysband, Edward, 109n187 Weston, Kath, 141n10 White, Mary Jo, 48n12, 57n50 Whittock, Trevor, 120n43 Williams, Raymond, 69 Wilson, Wayne, 128n89 Wolfsohn, Sergei, 113, 114

I N D E X

Wood, Elizabeth, 122n51 Woodmansee, Martha, 9 Woolf, Virginia, 31 Yanagisako, Sylvia, 111 Zamiatin, Evgenii, 5, 17 Zaum, 6, 29, 30, 42n131, 43n136, 86, 87. See also Adamic language; futurism Zeus. See Jupiter Zhiznetvorchestvo, 6, 69 Zholkovsky, Alexander, 123n64 Zlosnik, Sue, 77n25 Zola, Émile, 75n16

193

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