EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of Modernism: St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro 9781526102744

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Durham Modern Languages Series

EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of Modernism •

St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro

•

Sharon Lubkemann Allen

EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of Modernism

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Durham Modern Languages Series Series editor: Michael Thompson Essays in later medieval French literature: The legacy of Jane H. M. Taylor. Edited by Rebecca Dixon Fire, blood and the alphabet: One hundred years of Lorca. Edited by Sebastian Doggart and Michael Thompson Aura by Carlos Fuentes. Edited by Peter Standish The flâneur and his city: Patterns of daily life in Paris 1815–1851. Richard D. E. Burton Malherbe, Théophile de Viau and Saint-Amant: A collection. Edited, with introduction and notes by, Richard G. Maber Intertextuality in modern Arabic literature since 1967. Edited by Luc Deheuvels, Barbara Michalak-Pikulska and Paul Starkey Candide en Dannemarc, ou l’optimisme des honnêtes gens by Voltaire. Edited by Édouard Langille The limits of performance in the French Romantic theatre. Susan McCready Confabulations: Cologne life and humanism in Hermann Schotten’s ­Confabulationes Tironum Litterariorum (Cologne, 1525). Edited by Peter Macardle Confabulationes tironum litterariorum (Cologne, 1525) by Hermannus Schottennius Hessus. Edited by Peter Macardle Malherbe, Théophile de Viau and Saint-Amant: A selection. Edited by Richard G. Maber Collaboration and interdisciplinarity in the Republic of Letters: Essays in honour of Richard G. Maber. Edited by Paul Scott Pyostryye skazki by V. F. Odoyevsky. Edited by Neil Cornwell Saramago’s labyrinths: A journey through form and content in Blindness and All the Names. Rhian Atkin Framing narratives of the Second World War and Occupation in France, 1939–2009. Edited by Margaret Atack and Christopher Lloyd

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EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of Modernism St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro

Sharon Lubkemann Allen

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York

distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Sharon Lubkemann Allen 2013 The right of Sharon Lubkemann Allen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 07190 8770 7  hardback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

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To David, Sophia, Katarina, Isaac

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There is a curvature in literary style as there is curvature in space … If parallel lines do not meet it is not because they cannot, but because they have other things to do. Gogol’s art as disclosed in The Overcoat suggests that parallel lines not only may meet, but that they can wriggle and get most extravagantly entangled, just as two pillars reflected in water indulge in the most wobbly contortions if the necessary ripple is there … So to sum up, the story goes this way: mumble, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, and back into the chaos from which they had all derived. At this superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned with pitying the underdog or cursing the upperdog. It appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships. Nabokov

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Contents

Contents Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction

page xi xv xviii 1

Part I  Eccentricity and modernity 1 Urban contexts, urbane consciousness and the eccentric slant of modernisms 1.1 Retracing urban/e dimensions of the modernist novel 1.2 Reconfiguring modernist reflection: fractured mirrors, refractory narrators 1.3 Re-mapping modernism: eccentric vs concentric design and dynamics 1.4 Reframing the modernist sentence: concentric memory, eccentric madness and dialogism

11 11 23 39 66

2 Eccentric cities and citytexts: transpositions, translations and transformations of authority and authorship 95 2.1 Eccentric domains: St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro 95 i Form: schizophrenic designs 95 ii Foundations: displaced capitals 135 2.2 Eccentric dynamics in Russian and Brazilian literature: displacement, digression, dialogue, dissembling and dissent 164

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Contents

Part II  Eccentric narrative consciousness 3 Gogol’s open prospects: digressive copy clerks 193 3.1 Gogol’s eccentric ‘parallel lines that do meet when the necessary ripple is there’: texts, cultural contexts, criticism 193 i Logos: travestying Peter 193 ii Cosmos: transcribing and transforming the Petersburg text 207 3.2 Reading between the lines: authority in ‘The Overcoat’ (dialogues between author, narrator and hero) 222 3.3 Intertextual lines: crossings on ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ (intertextual dialogues) 227 3.4 Realignments: critique and creativity within ‘The Notes of a Madman’ (contradiction and dialogue) 236 4 Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s unending undergrounds: dead men writing 4.1 Towards a theory of underground laughter: carnival, degeneracy, degeneration, and generation 4.2 Generation/s of eccentrics: formation of an underground aesthetics in marginocentric capitals (subtexts, contexts, pretexts, early texts and resonances of underground consciousness) 4.3 Generation in the underground text i Romancing the reader ii Refractory and refractive rambling in the city iii Gambling on drunken digressive discourse and winning an afterlife

253 253

276 315 315 333 348

Part III  An encompassing eccentric line 5 Hallucinated cities 5.1 Evolving eccentricities: revolutionary Russian modernisms and Brazilian ‘modernismo’ 5.2 Eccentricity in the ex-centric city and in exile: Russian, Luso-Brazilian and transnational post-modernism

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355 356 375

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Contents

ix

Postscript: theory of the novel and the eccentric novel’s early play with theory

386

Bibliography

394

Index

425

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List of figures

Figures List of figures

1 Olivier Truschet & German Hoyau. Plan dit de Bâle. 1552. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Collection Gérard Leyris. page 51 2 Matthaüs Merian. Le Plan de la Ville, Cité, Université et Faubourgs de Paris avec la description de son antiquité et singularités. 1615. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Collection Jean-Loup Charmet.

52

3 Victor Hugo. Annotated Statistique des égouts de la ville de Paris, from the notebooks for Notre Dame de Paris. Bibliothèque Nationale de France-Richelieu.

54

4 Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret). Pages 38–9 from Destin de Paris, avec des illustrations de l’auteur. Paris: F. Sorlot, 1941. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/F.L.C. 55 5 J. Meijer. Plan for the Site of St. Petersburg or Plan of Nyen’s location and the Neva Channel. 1698. Military Archives of Sweden – Riksarkivet.

103

6 Carl Fredrik Coyet. St. Petersborg. 1821/22. Military Archives of Sweden – Riksarkivet. 105 7 Johann Baptista Homann. Topographische Vortfellung der Neuen Russisches Haupt Resident und See Stadt S. Petersburg … / Map of St. Petersburg. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets. 108–9

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List of figures

8 Matthaus Seutter. Nova et accuratissima urbis St. Petersburg … 1734/37. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 110 9 Plan der Kayserl. Residentz Stadt St. Peterburg … 1737. Engraving by G. I. Unverzacht. St. Petersburg: Petersburg Academy of Sciences, 1741. National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg.

111

10 Luís dos Santos Vilhena. Planta da cidade de S. Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro. 1775. Ink and wash sketch. Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro. 112 11 Jean Massé. Planta da Cidade de São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro. 1713. IICT – Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon. 113 12 Nova Planta da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro. E. & H. Laemmert, 1867. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 114–15 13 Christopher Marselius. The Shore Opposite the Fortress. 1720s. Indian ink with pen and brush. Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg.

118

14 Aleksei Fedorovich Zubov. Sankt Pieter Burkh / Panorama of St. Petersburg. 1916. Etching with line engraving. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets. 118–19 15 D. Miguel Ângelo Blasco. Prospectiva da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro. 1760. Watercolor on paper. Arquivo Histórico do Exercito, Rio de Janeiro.

120

16 Marc Ferrez. Cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Panoramic photograph. 1889. 121 17 Vue des bords de la Neva en remontant la riviere entre l’Amirauté et les batimens de l’Academie des Sciences. Engraving by I. Sokolov, after drawings by M. I. Makhaev. Plate 11 of 12 accompanying I. F. Truscott’s Plan of the Capital City of St. Petersburg with the Depiction of its Most Distinctive Views. St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1753. The Russian National Library, St. Petersburg. 122–3 18 Grigorii Grigorevich Chernetsov. Panorama of the Palace Square from the Scaffolding of the Alexander Column. Lithograph in 3 parts. The State Hermitage Museum,

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St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets. 124–6 19 Rua Direita. Photographic print by unknown photographer. Late nineteenth century. Arguivo Geral da Cidade, Rio de Janeiro. 128 20 Ivan Nostits. View of Nevsky Prospekt by the Gostiny Dvor Shopping Arcade. Photograph, albumen print. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

128

21 План столичнаго города Санкт-Петербурга/Plan de la ville capitale de St. Petersbourg. St. Petersburg: A. Savinkov, 1825. Coloured engraving. The National Library of Russia. 130–1 22 Rio Iavero. Engraving c.1598 by Baptista Van Deutecum. Published by Olivier Van Noort. Description du Penible Voyage Faict entour de l’Univers ou Globe Terrestre. Cornelis Claes, 1602. 136 23 Plan de la Baye, Ville, forteresses, et attaques de Rio Janeiro Levé par Le chevler de la Grange … au mois de 9bre. 1711. Bibliothèque 137 Nationale de France, Paris. 24 Pieter Picart (Pickaert). Saint Petersburg. 1704. Engraving. The National Library of Russia.

139

25 Pieter Picart (Pickaert). Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress and the Holy Trinity Square. 1714. Etching with line engraving. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

140

26 Fedor Iakovlevich Alekseev. View of the Stock Exchange and Admiralty from the Peter and Paul Fortress. 1810. Oil on canvas. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. 142 27 Quinhentos mil reis. Brazilian banknote depicting the harbour in Rio de Janeiro. Casa da Moeda, Rio de Janeiro. 143 28 Vasilii Surikov. View of the Monument to Peter I in Senate Square. 1870. Oil on Canvas. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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List of figures

29 Pedro I in Tiradentes Square. Unknown photographer. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 145 30 Valentin Aleksandrovich Serov. Peter I. 1907. Oil on canvas. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

147

31 Alexandre Benois. Carnival on the Fontanka. 1900. Gouache and graphite on paper.

149

32 Karl Petrovich Beggrov. Shrovetide Fete with Tobogganing on the Tsaritsyn Meadow in St. Petersburg. First half of the nineteenth century. Lithograph with tinted watercolour. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

150

33 Flooded St. Petersburg, 7 November 1824. Unknown artist. Drawing published in a yearbook on notable objects and events, Erinnerungen an merkwürdige Gegenstánde und Begebenheiten. Vienna: V. Jahresband, 1825. 64. 155 34 Augusto Malta. Avenida Central. Photograph. c.1906. Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro. 157 35 Chernetsov. Detail from Reviewing of the Guards on Tsaritsyn lug in St. Petersburg in 1831. 1831–37. Oil on canvas. All-Union Pushkin Museum, St. Petersburg. 163 36 Carlos Julião. Detail from Configuração que mostra a entrada do Rio de Janeiro. c.1799. Gabinete de Estudos Arqueológicos da Engenharia Militar, Lisbon. 164 37 Alexandre Benois. Frontispiece for Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. 195 38 Ilya Yefimovich Repin. Saint Petersburg. Nevsky Prospekt. 1887. Graphite pencil and ivory black on paper. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

232

39 The Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg, Russia. Stereograph published by The United States Stereograph, 1908. The Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 334 40 Gala Day in Busy Streets of Rio de Janeiro. Stereograph published by the Keystone View Company, n.d.

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Acknowledge

Acknowledgements ledgements

Like any cartographer drawing new boundaries, I set out with many maps in hand. Over the past decade of exploration, I collected countless others. Any new cultural territory or trajectory, literary domain, dimension, or dynamic delineated in EccentriCities is deeply indebted to scholars whose work in diverse disciplines illumined Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s eccentrics and eccentric cities. I could not have navigated so many crossings without expert guides and extraordinary encounters. Robert Louis Jackson framed my first forays into this terrain and encouraged me at critical junctures along the way. Katerina Clark, Joseph Frank, Anna Lisa Crone, Julie Buckler, and especially Michael Wachtel contributed immensely to my work on Petersburg and urbane Russian literature. For finding my way in Rio and across the vast landscape of Brazilian modernism, I am most grateful to K. David Jackson and Nelson Vieira, both of whom also offered incisive commentary on the entire manuscript as it neared its final form. The work would not have reached that form without copious early critical readings and continued conversations with Maria DiBattista, Michael Wood, Robert Bird, Sarah Clovis Bishop and Anne Caswell Klein. But more than any other scholar, my work is indebted to and inspired by the extraordinary imagination, critical attentiveness and generous spirit of Caryl Emerson. Spanning continents and centuries, discrete disciplines and cultural domains, this study would not have been possible without the support of research grants from Princeton University, a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship within the lively University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum, a Fulbright Scholars Fellowship in Lisbon, as well as a Drescher Fellowship, Scholarly Incentive Grants, and a Provost’s Fellowship from the State University of New York, College at Brockport. I am especially grateful for the interdisciplinary vision, insightful commentary and

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Acknowledgements

protracted commitment of my series, commissioning, production and copy editors at Manchester University Press, from Michael Thompson to Tony Mason, Sarah Hunt, Lianne Slavin and George Pitcher. Many other institutions have collaborated in bringing this work into being. In Russia, I received invaluable assistance from scholars at the Hermitage, Tretyakov Gallery, Russian National Library and especially the Institute of Russian Literature/Pushkinskii Dom and the F. M. Dostoevsky Literary Memorial Museum. I am particularly indebted to Natalia Ashimbaeva, Vera Biron, Natalia Chernova and Boris Tikhomirov. In Paris, I benefited greatly from access to archives at the Bibliothèque Nationale and Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, as well as comments from and conversations with Jean-Yves Tadié and Guy Rosa. In Portugal, my work was enriched by exchanges with many scholars at the University of Lisbon, especially Miguel Tamen, João Figueiredo, António Feijó, Helena Buescu, and Ângela Correia. In CLEPUL and CompaRes, I finally found an eclectic international group of comparatists concerned with crossings between Slavic and Luso-Brazilian cultures, committed to cultivating interdisciplinary dialogues and collaborative cross-cultural investigations. Archives ranging from the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro to the Military Archives of Sweden and Portugal provided maps and other images essential to the interdisciplinary scope of this study. Closer to home, the insights and inquiries from my colleagues and students at SUNY continually refined my vision and voice. Long before I first ventured into Dostoevsky’s Petersburg in Blannie Curtis’s wondrously curious Lisbon classroom, followed Machado de Assis’s Brás Cubas through Rio, and revisited Lisbon in the company of Pessoa, I lived under the strange spell of eccentricity and ex-centricity: feeling the draw of displacement. Insider and interloper in a decentred cultural capital, I played street soccer to strains of ‘Grandola, Vila Morena’ in the aftermath of 1974. As a child constantly moving between cultures, copying was always a way of coping, and erring a way of creating and staking out my own claims. For my fascination with eccentricity and creativity, I am grateful to my parents – my restless, Rio-born but unrooted father, carving exquisite creatures out of deadwood wherever he finds it; my continually uprooted mother, cultivating roots on the road, collecting and grafting. My brothers Stephen and David have shared and long encouraged my restless spirit. With their spirited imagination, Sophia, Katarina and Isaac have made my road most extraordinary. From early forays in Petersburg to our

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recent year in Lisbon, they and David have explored this terrain, real and imaginary, with me. David has turned every detour, digression and delay into discovery. He has not only tolerated, but immeasurably enriched my eccentricity and EccentriCities.

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Abbreviations

Abbreviations Abbreviations

CHRL The Cambridge History of Russian Literature (Moser) DI

The Dialogic Imagination (Bakhtin)

DPSS

Dostoevsky, Полное собрание сочинений

GPSS

Gogol, Полное собрание сочинений

MPBC Memórias Pósthumas de Brás Cubas (Machado) PDP

Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin)

PM

Philosophy of the Mind

RdJ

O Rio de Janeiro na literatura portuguesa (Coelho)

SEEJ

Slavic and East European Journal

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EccentriCities

Introduction Introduction

Every work of genius slants the rational plane, or so claim twentiethcentury writers as disparate in style and distant in setting as Mário de Andrade and Vladimir Nabokov, re-casting creative consciousness in their respectively ‘hallucinated’ cities of São Paulo and St. Petersburg.1 While these writers eccentrically reconfigure and relocate creative consciousness in citytexts marked by peculiarly modern tempos and marginocentric topographies, they also recuperate an ancient association between art, alienation and urbanity, central to the Western canon. In work that blurs boundaries between theoretical, critical and creative literature, they align insight and innovation with a deep and diverse literary tradition defined by dissent, deviance, digression, displacement and dispossession. Yet modern exploration of that domain takes treacherous turns. Modernist poetry and prose slides steeply into the recesses of the mind, bent in time and space along Einsteinian lines, marked by the explosive energy of dizzying metaphor and metonymy, disrupted memory and disorienting madness. Seismic chronotopic shifts in literary texts can be partly accounted for by socio-political ruptures and scientific revolutions, by rapid change predicated on rationality but revealing the irrational. Chronotopic complexity and contradiction explored by writers such as Nabokov and Andrade stems from cross-cultural as well as historical flux. The chronotopic expansion of modernist literature derives, paradoxically, from concomitant compression. Turning inward, modernist works characteristically chronicle centrifugal social and cultural movement by angling through seemingly narrow streams of consciousness, often 1 Mário de Andrade, Hallucinated City/Paulicéia Desvairada (1922). Bi-lingual edn. Trans. Jack E. Tomlins (Nashville, TN: Vanderbuilt University Press, 1968), 9; Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (Norfolk: New Directions, 1944), 140–1.

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obsessive and obstructed. Retrospective, recursive, reflexive, refractive and refractory, modernist poetry and prose register from anxious and alienated perspectives the changing surface of the cityscape, its shifting patterns of circulation, disorienting discursive crossroads, and continual socio-political reconfiguration. Through a doubly reflexive turn, they reveal the unconscious, both cultural and individual, through highly self-conscious writing. In dialogue with modern science, modernist literature explores not only complicated dimensions, but also dynamics of consciousness. Like modern psychiatry and physics, it surveys systems along borders and breaking points. It traces frayed edges and irregularities, ruptures and sutures in a tensely stretched social fabric, ill-suiting its eccentric characters. But more akin to other contemporaneous arts, modernist and postmodernist literature, in which the pathological and paradoxical filters into self-conscious form, investigates the chaos on which modernity verges – its decentring, its forgetting, its contradictions – from within. That is, it looks at and into the man beneath his patched overcoat, retracing unruly city and sentence by turning through unruly subject. It surveys social and literary landscapes refracted through alienated consciousnesses.2 Circling predominantly within the confines of the city and subjective consciousness, the modernist sentence is acutely aware of its limits, of the period (historical and grammatical) that finalizes authority or suggests what postmodernists will call the death of the author. It explores what Nordau, in 1892, already calls the dead end of decadence, ‘stemming from the rise of the overwrought city, the source of nervous fatigue and mental exhaustion’.3 But this ‘pathologically defective’ literature4 also finds creative impetus in the concentration and corresponding ‘intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’ noted by Simmel in his 1903 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’.5 Whereas Nordau finds the fragmentation 2 Cf. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1880–1930 (Sussex: Harvester, 1978), 47; Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch, Modernist Conjectures: A Mainstream in European Literature, 1910–1940 (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1987), 43. 3 Max Nordau, Degeneration (1892) (New York: H. Fertig, 1968 [1895, 1892]), 536; cited in Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 126. 4 Lehan, The City in Literature, 126. 5 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), in Donald L. Levine (ed.), On Individuality and Social Forms; selected writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324–39, 325.

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Introduction

3

of urban life either a dead end or context for competitive Darwinian development,6 Simmel’s theory takes as its premise the necessity of urban disruption and digression for creativity, contending that ‘man is a creature whose existence is dependent on differences, i.e. his mind is stimulated by the difference between present impressions and those which have preceded.’7 Development is not necessarily progressive but differential. Framing this difference in temporal terms – urban ‘tempo’ and urbane memory (‘the rapid telescoping of images past and present’) – Simmel suggests what this study delineates as the more conventional concentric framework for the (re)constructions of reality within modernist consciousness,8 critically incisive and creative revisions contingent on social dismembering and remembering. The concentric citytext’s casting of difference in terms of alienated and aberrant consciousness, dissenting and digressing on both social and aesthetic planes, may register as eccentricity. But concentric modernist figures face fragmentation and creatively refract reality primarily through disrupted individual and cultural memory, social descent and ascent, dissent defined through memoried realignment. If such characters actually skirt the city centre, alienated consciousness is marked by a sense of exclusion from a clearly demarked core or of ex-centricity, involving departure from or deconstruction of a centre that remains a retrospective point of reference. Yet Simmel also suggests the simultaneous, spatialized difference (‘multiplicity’ perceived upon ‘crossing the street’9) defining divided, doubled consciousness in the eccentric or marginocentric cultural contexts central to this investigation – eccentricity much further elucidated by Bakhtin’s and Mário de Andrade’s explorations of urbane polyphony, by Lotman’s and Bakhtin’s discrete delineations of dialogue and dialogism, interpolated semiospheres and speech genres. Eccentric creative consciousness is marked by the many contradictions inherent in being cast on the margins of paradoxically marginocentric geo-cultural sites. Rather than primarily defined by diachronic development and disruption, eccentric consciousness is configured by the subject’s and city’s displacement and delay, digression and deviance. Time and memory are still disrupted, but also delayed, doubled and creatively distorted through transposition and translation. Divided consciousness is marked as madness, 6 Lehan, The City in Literature, 126. 7 Simmel, ‘The Metropolis …’, 325. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid.

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expressed as contrariness and contradiction, more than discontinuity and decay. These differences are foregrounded in the most reflexive strain of modernist fiction, where, anticipating the heightened self-consciousness of postmodernist fiction, the subject sentenced to the pressures of urban life, ‘struggling to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence’,10 also struggles to maintain autonomy, authority and originality under historical, ethical, aesthetic and (in eccentric contexts) cross-cultural pressures, as self-authored fictional construction. Such fictional writers arbitrate against dead-ended ­trajectories in the city and citytext with discrete arguments for the concentric and eccentric chronotopic expansion of the urbane sentence. This study seeks to bring greater clarity to discrete urbane architectonics of modernist literature within a distended Western (including Slavic and Latin American) tradition. It traces different slants of the rational plane in modernist fictions, which similarly assert creative freedom, critical originality and cultural authenticity and authority by rupturing, deconstructing and reconstructing consciousness along differently temporalized and spatialized axes respectively aligned with concentric and eccentric cultural construction. It does so by focusing on fictionally realized (both represented and recognized) correspondences between urban development and urbane consciousness. Distinguishing between pathologically memoried and mad (particularly manic and paranoid schizophrenic) modes of cultural consciousness, concentrated in reflexive citytexts respectively located at the centre of European modernism (early twentieth-century Paris and London) and on its historical and geographical edges (mid-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg and Rio to twentieth-century Moscow, São Paulo and Lisbon), this investigation seeks to redefine some of the dimensions, dynamics, creative capacities and critical contributions of discrete literary modernisms – concentric, but especially, eccentric. Eccentric cities, self-consciously cast on geographical margins and constructed through a kind of bricolage that collapses cultural and historical difference onto a single dialogic plane, give rise to seemingly anachronistic modernist texts. The strange correspondences between self-realizing nineteenth-century Russian and Brazilian citytexts, undetermined by significant direct cross-cultural contact, elucidate the formative relation between particular urban contexts and urbane modes of modernist consciousness. Remarkably similar eccentricities 10 Ibid.

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Introduction

5

shape fictions rooted in and refracting St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro, as a function of peculiarly parallel development on geo-political and mythical planes, on the material landscape and within cultural memory. Offering an alternative mapping to the many surveys of modernism grounded in concentric contexts (Paris and London, in particular) and to consequently concentric constructions of modernist consciousness, as well as an alternative to examinations of eccentric modernism only in terms of derivation and delay, this study traces eccentric anticipations of European modernisms and postmodernisms. It re-examines the development of literal and literary landscapes underpinning paranoid schizophrenic constructions of eccentric consciousness in Nikolai Gogol’s and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Petersburg tales and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s Rio narratives. Re-grounding these works through a diachronic and interdisciplinary structural survey of eccentric cities and citytexts, the study reconsiders these works as critical and creative responses to urban/e European genres as well as earlier strains of Russian and Brazilian literary and artistic representation. Their reflexive narrators are also read as seminal reconfigurations, generating a continually displaced line of ‘scribblers’ in the self-conscious fiction of the eccentric and then ex-centric city. While the work foregrounds incipient modernisms by focusing on eccentric urban formation and formative urbane texts, the concluding section of this study looks forward to extensions of the eccentric line through a concomitant logic of discontinuity and dialogue, parody and stylization, carnivalesque laughter and paranoid creativity in recognized Russian and Brazilian modernisms and postmodernisms, focusing on eccentric consciousnesses framing the hallucinated cities drawn by writers including Andrei Bely and Mário de Andrade, Mikhail Bulgakov and Osman Lins, Clarice Lispector and Liudmila Petrushevskaya – relocating and re-casting marginocentric cultural debate and cultural memory. In its initial reframing and conclusion, the study also briefly reconsiders the impact of nineteenth-century eccentric narratives on such modernist writers as Woolf and Proust – re-mapping London and Paris – as well as Pessoa, whose polyphony resounds in Saramago’s postmodern ex-centric re-mapping of Lisbon. Anticipating and, in the Russian case, directly informing the anxieties of European modernist and postmodernist consciousness through their peculiarly reflexive, refractive and refractory construction, the Russian and Brazilian narrative traditions examined here offer different models for the split, multiple subject. They frame an eccentric ethical aesthetics contingent on a cross-cultural

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dialogue relevant to contemporary transnational post-colonial and cosmopolitan literature and theory. While demonstrating the greater gravity of madness or memory within eccentric and concentric citytexts, in which the self is polarized respectively in space or time, this study seeks to attend to the complex chronotopic dimensions of particular narrative consciousnesses. It traces the interplay of memory and madness in discrete texts. We find past as well as culturally transposed presences transfigured in Pushkin’s and Gogol’s madmen’s paranoid projections. Dostoevsky’s underground man’s interlocutors are engaged through both recollection and paranoid anticipation. Similarly, the underground man and Brás Cubas anticipate Proust’s Swann and Marcel as they confront their own manias as a creative condition for recollecting narrative. Bulgakov dramatizes in his displaced poet the creative capacity of memoried madness in the moonlit rewriting of the ending of his masterful novel. Spaces evoked by pathological memory, mania and schizophrenia are all the more crossed in Pelevin’s and Lin’s urbane fictions, indicative of the ways in which recent eccentric citytexts contend with now piled-up histories, while concentric citytexts contend with decentring post-colonial discourses. The postmodern eccentric citytext accrues local time and memory, and the concentric registers present difference encompassing disruptive displacement and distant memory. EccentriCities argues that cultural distance remains the most definitive dimension for eccentric revision, even as it spatially remaps cultural memory in the ex-centric domain. If creative consciousness in nineteenth-century Petersburg and Rio texts is (and in later larger Russian and Brazilian contexts remains) more liminal, marked by manic schizophrenia and other forms of madness, while consciousness in once concentrically coherent Paris or Moscow texts still reflects historical haunting, all these cities and their fictions share places (public squares and private rooms, tenement stairways, taverns, salons, prisons, madhouses) that function as spaces of linguistic, social, ideological, mythical and literary convergence. These are threshold sites for aesthetic refractions and self-realization. Yet the maps, lithographs, and photographs considered here alongside literary citytexts, evince how these commonplaces are differently charted in eccentric and concentric texts. They discretely frame these sites for dialogue within the city, by visually as well as verbally emphasizing different dimensions. Their chronotopic dynamics are contingent on peculiar political-ideological and material principles of (re)construction in the city. While evident on the surface, these different dimensions and

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dynamics of eccentric and concentric construction are more exposed in verbal and visual texts that turn towards edges (both literal and literary margin or visual frame) and into the underground (literal urban foundation and urbane consciousness). EccentriCities retraces St. Petersburg and Rio as sites whose underground narrators’ mad and memoried, contradictory, cross-cultural modes of creativity underpin not only later competing modernisms, but also current dialogues in literature and theory.

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Part I

Eccentricity and modernity

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[Nineteenth-century writers] built their myths by returning to [the city] obsessively, in a variety of ways, from a variety of angles, their obsessive concern being with the character of this new urban life, with what happened to the traditional staples of human nature when placed in an unnatural setting and subjected to pressures, many of them new in kind and all of them new in degree. The results – strangeness, alienation, crime, as matters of fact – explain much of the common technical inventory: a carefully fostered sense of mystery (atmosphere), of grotesquerie, a penchant for stark contrasts, for the improbable, the sensational, the dramatic. Technique and theme, in short, go hand in hand, and both are directly connected with urban social history. We need a study of that connection, but it would make a book in itself.1

1 Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens and Gogol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), viii.

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Chapter 1

Ecc

Urban contexts, urbane consciousness and the eccentric slant of modernisms Urban contexts, urbane consciousness

Retracing urban/e dimensions of the modernist novel While modernism ranges far beyond the bounds of the city, it emerges from crises concentrated in urban centres and urbane consciousness. Modernist writers converge in St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro, Moscow and São Paulo, as in Paris, London, Lisbon, Prague, New York and other cities whose contours filter into their fictions. These cities concentrate publication venues, a reading public and the political and critical establishments that redefine modern literary production. Within a broad Western tradition, works such as Bely’s Петербург (Petersburg), Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Time Past), Pessoa’s O Livro do desassossego (The Book of Disquietude), Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Kafka’s Der Prozes (The Trial), Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses, and Mário de Andrade’s Pauliceia Desvairada (Hallucinated City) chronicle the pressures of the modern city in cultural crisis. Their doubly inward turn, into the mind and the margins of the text, appears motivated by the increasing alienation and self-consciousness of modern urban life. Thus, historical, geographical, sociological and psychological dimensions of modernism are often mapped in relation to the city.1 1 In The City in Literature, Lehan argues that ‘the city has determined our cultural fate for the last three hundred years’ (3), but surveys the city represented in the novel ‘as an evolving construct’ in socio-economic terms, rather than as it structures the novel. He reads ‘the text [as] a form of reading the city’ (8), while suggesting that ‘the ways of reading the city offer clues to ways of reading the text, urban and literary theory complementing each other’ (9). In Modernism, Bradbury and McFarlane define ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism’ first in temporal terms – bracketing the four decades leading up to and immediately following the First World War, in terms of a ‘preoccupation’ with consciousness that ‘arises under the pressure of history’ (47) and as psychological experience of ‘the push of modern times’ (47), ‘consciousness … obsessed

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Insofar as they take the city as setting and its denizens as characters for the novel, modernist fictions extend a literary line including the Parisian physiologie and roman feuilleton, developed through such variants as the Petersburg ocherk. The rambling of modernist narrators is related to that of the flâneur made famous by Balzac’s fictions. While exploring the layered social and psychological domains delineated by writers such as Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert and Zola, modernist narrative often turns into more degenerate spaces in the literal and social urban landscape than realist or naturalist fiction, and into darker recesses of individual and cultural consciousness than romantic realism. It blurs boundaries, turns on uncertainty and into the uncanny.2 It grants greater access to the city and self, albeit through an apparently depersonalizing dialogue within a split self and relatively impersonal intertextual dialogue, paradoxically expanding its reach by pushing inwards through an abstracted experience of the concrete and through linguistic and literary openings in the city text.3 But in its digressive exploration of the creative potential inherent in prosaic and pathological aspects of urban space, speech and subject, the rambling of ‘high modernist’ narratives such as Proust’s or Joyce’s resembles, more closely than the flâneur’s reporting of urban event and character in fairly good faith, the admittedly evasive accounts of earlier eccentrics voicing culturally and critically marginal works. It by a compulsion to keep up, reduced to despair by the steadily increasing speed of the total movement’ (22). Yet they spatialize this ‘crisis of culture’ (26), locating it in the city (rather than in the trenches, for instance). If ‘modernism … is the one art that responds to the scenario of our chaos’, that scenario as well as its literary response is played out in Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Chicago and New York, to which half of the chapters in the book are devoted, in and beyond the section framed as ‘A Geography of Modernism’. The city is explored primarily as context for literary production and as setting within the novel, yet it also frames Donald Fanger’s exploration of evolving genre in ‘The City of Russian Modernist Fiction’, in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1880–1930 (Sussex: Harvester, 1978), 467–80. Cf. David Weimer, The City as Metaphor (New York: Random House, 1966); Jean-Yves Tadié, Le roman au XXe siècle (Paris: Belfond, 1990), especially Chapter IV, ‘Roman de la ville, ville du roman’; Anne-Marie Quint (ed.), La Ville dans l’histoire et dans l’imaginaire (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1996); David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism (New York/London: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2 Cf. Lehan’s The City in Literature and Anthony Vidler’s Warped Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 3 Cf. Lehan, on a denser city refracted through modernist subjectivity (5), on centrifugal meaning mediated by the complexity of centred modernist text (70), on disinterested recursivity, reflexivity, duration restructuring modernist time and space (80).

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Urban contexts, urbane consciousness

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evokes Gogol’s ambivalently urbane skaz narrator pursuing digressive clerks and artists through Petersburg, Gogol’s madman chronicling his own disintegration in the city, Hugo’s self-exonerating condamné executing his own recursively and retrospectively open sentence against a death sentence, and Baudelaire’s refractory poète-chiffonier recuperating and recycling urban detritus – apparently anachronistic figures, more subjective in relating urban life, more strained in their relation to the city, and more depersonalized than Balzac’s flâneurs. We revisit territory traced in Gogol’s chronicles of displacement, Hugo’s cautionary narrative against forgetting and dismembering, and Baudelaire’s poetry of recycling in the modernist recovery of cityscape, culture and consciousness in a condition of uncertainty, confronting apparently insoluble crisis.4 Recognized by recent critics, these echoes have required some rethinking of literary lines. Yet modernist novelists including Proust, Gide and Woolf directly associated their reconfiguration and relocation of modern fiction with earlier embodiments of alienated consciousness in French and Russian literature, prosaically fleshing out Baudelaire’s poetic sentence and adapting the cross-cultural crisis of consciousness and conscience in Dostoevsky’s fictions to their own cultural contexts – fraught first by historical disruption and only later by a sense of cultural displacement and decentring. But rather than 4 Chambers argues in ‘Zizanie dans la métropole, ou la séduction du désordre’ that there is ‘une certaine littérature de la ville, dont le Baudelaire des «Tableaux parisiens» et du Spleen de Paris est peut-être le fondateur’; these works give rise to a city ‘[qui] se pense doublement’ as ‘lieu de désordre, bruit, fragmentation, entropie’ and ‘lieu de rencontre, séduction’: Ross Chambers, Paris et le phenomène des capitales (Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1984), 37–8. In the same collection, Jacques Body in ‘De quelques capitales de la douleur’, builds on Simmel’s claims, contending that the city of modernist fiction is a space of discontinuity, difference, and alienation that underpins creativity, operating according to a ‘loi de l’inconnussion’ already announced by Restif de la Bretonne, which is ‘condition d’une certaine liberté, d’une sorte de fécondité’ (53). In broader terms, Bradbury and McFarlane note that ‘Modernism would seem to be the point at which the idea of radical and innovating arts … reaches formal crisis … The crisis is a crisis of culture; … It is the art consequent on Heisenburg’s “Uncertainty principle”, of the destruction of civilization and reason in the First World War, of the world changed and interpreted by Marx, Freud, and Darwin, of capitalism and constant industrial acceleration, of existential exposure to meaninglessness or absurdity. It is the literature of technology. It is the art consequent on the dis-establishing of communal reality and conventional notions of causality, on the destruction of traditional notions of the wholeness of individual character, on the linguistic chaos that ensues when public notions of language have been discredited and when all realities have become subjective fictions’ (26–7).

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merely reaffirming the influence of a Russian psychological realism reduced in translation and refracted through literary debates staged largely in London and Paris though resounding as far as Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, this study seeks to more radically re-map modernism as urban/e phenomena. Unruly realist as much as high modernist works are often already constructed by the bricolage that Lyotard recognizes as the principle of postmodernist architectural construction, neither forgetful nor totalizing (an impulse he attributes to modernist, particularly Futurist, architecture). They are engaged in what Lyotard recognizes in avant-garde art as ‘postmodernist’ recovery and scrutiny of the past, suggesting continuities rather than discontinuity between modernism and postmodernism.5 The literary sentence in these citytexts, with its capacity for urbane re-membering (destructive, deconstructive and creative), arbitrates against a real death sentence in the city, positing ambivalent self-authoring against absurd authority. The ‘crisis of presentation’ afflicting cultural and individual consciousness in the city results ‘among other things, in a penchant for forms which, by turning in upon themselves show the process of the novel’s making, and dramatize the means by which the narration is itself achieved’.6 The reflexive strain of the modernist novel under focus in this investigation explores both urban landscape and literary form as these are refracted within alienated urbane consciousness, paradoxically self-aware and articulate pathological figures. While the city is the context in which romantic and realist as well as modernist fiction represent doubting and doubling of 5 See Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Defining the Postmodern’, from The Postmodern Explained (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 6 Bradbury and McFarlane, ‘The Introverted Novel,’ Modernism, 395. Distinguishing the ‘seriousness’ of modernist ‘narrative introversion’ from earlier ‘humorous’ modes of self-conscious narrative (as in Tristam Shandy), Bradbury and McFarlane characterize modernist form as ‘active form’, implying the complicity not only of the reader in fictive creation but that of ‘fictional characters [who] are connoisseurs of fiction too’, proximate to their authors ‘to the point where it sometimes seems that the characters have read the novel in which they exist’ and ‘in the process of its making, they have amended it’ (396–7). By entering into a dialogue with the author, reflexive characters re-place the author within the fiction and threaten to replace the author, co-opting the process of creation. ‘The process of making not only becomes part of the significant logic of the story: it can, indeed, become the story … language ceases to be what we see through, and becomes what we see’ (401). In part 3 of the essay, Bradbury and McFarlane offer an incisive summary of modes and manifestations of introversion or reflexivity in the modern novel. Cf. Ken Frieden, Genius and Monologue (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 19ff.

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the self, in modernist works charting their own becoming in the context of urban crisis, the multiplicity of the self is concomitantly represented in urban space, urbane consciousness and narrative structure. Sentenced consciousness frames our perception of the city. The cityscape literally unfolds within the turns of a grammatically recursive sentence and reflexive generic structure, yet modes of urban construction frame urbane consciousness and begin to redefine grammar and genre. Reflexive variants of the novel especially elucidate the formative presence of the city in the modern novel. Urbane narrative consciousness registers, recognizes and resists the urban framework. Such works not only make explicit the fact pointed out by Tadié in his essay ‘Ville, architecture du roman’: cities may order and disorder novels, urban topography orienting narrative trajectory, while the ‘eruption of the megapolis’ ‘multiplies’ and ‘pulverizes’ narrative discourse.7 Reflexive first-person narratives also expose the particular dynamics of that correlation and critically reflect on violently urban/e modes of creation – retrospective, refractive, revisionary. Like the postmodern architecture Lyotard describes, reflexive fictions arbitrate against abstraction, even as they contend directly with their own abstraction and arbitrariness. They are conscious of urban context and urbane consciousness as spaces that must be inhabited, conducive not just to the circulation of bodies and texts, but to humane intercourse, ensuring significance, survival. By fleshing out urbane authorial consciousness circulating in the city, confronting and recalling others and self as other, these fictions manifest the ways in which particular architectonics of cities – the (re)imagining of the city (re)drawing of streets, sectioning into quarters or neighbourhoods; the dynamics of underground and surface circulation; the (re)definition of horizons, of socio-economic, political and symbolic systems; even shifting modes of monumental construction and placement of public art, architectural redesign and shifting styles of interior decoration – impose different constructive dimensions and dynamics on literary language and form.8 For first-person narrators in fictions such as Dostoevsky’s Записки 7 Tadié, Le Roman au XXe siècle, 150–1. Tadié argues that impressionist fictions are fragmented by the city, whereas futurist, cubist or expressionist works of literature are not fragmented by, but rather show ‘ces villes en morceaux’. 8 Thus, Tadié contends ‘la littérature … montre une âme inséparable du corps et, de ville en ville, d’immenses individus différents les uns des autres’ (‘Roman de la ville …,’ 128). To the question, ‘quelles sont les contraintes que le modèle de la ville impose au langage du roman?’ Tadié answers: décor, arrière-plan, personnage principal, totalité,

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из подполья (Notes from Underground) and Machado de Assis’s Memórias Postumas de Brás Cubas (Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), the retreat into a corner of the city instigates the writing of the narrative. As Irving Howe observes of Notes from Underground, ‘the city bears … what might be called a dialectical intimacy with the narrator: each of his intellectual disasters is publicly reenacted as a burlesque in the streets,’ so that ‘the city provides’ the author (and this peculiarly self-conscious self-authoring narrator) ‘with the contours and substance of his metaphysical theme’.9 However, that metaphysical theme, a matter of freedom related as directly to aesthetic or authorial discourse as to questions of cultural and political authority in reflexive modernist works, is not merely retrospectively explored through an urban dialectic. Just as there is no synthesis in the developing urban landscape, there is no final metaphysical realization in these self-realizing novels. The subject’s relation to the city is dialogic, involving the continual re-presentation of the city’s contradictory discourses in narrative that consciously re-maps city and re-designs citytext, reorienting the reader in relation to both. The eclectic city, refracted within consciousness, becomes pretext, subtext and context for the realization of the polyphonic novel, reorienting narrative form towards humanizing ambiguity. Metaphysical and moral concerns are connected to the material and, at the same time, to the literary and meta-literary planes of these novels, where the narrator reaches towards a reader, made responsible to this multiplicity. This critically urbane, concomitantly confined and digressive narrative consciousness, whose central ethical concern is embedded in aesthetics, is entrenched as a feature of modernism by the time Proust’s Marcel recovers multiple places, persons and pasts from his present corner in Paris; yet its relation to discrete modes of urban development and circulation is relatively unexamined in literary criticism and theory. Urban contexts are recognized as essential to modernism, typically dated in Europe from the 1880s or the close of the nineteenth century, in Russia from the early twentieth century, in Brazil with the manifestos of ‘modernismo’ issued in the 1920s.10 However, the significance of this division par quartiers, réduction à un immeuble, parcours ou déambulation, horizon, participant de l’action, symbole, essence, système. 9 Lehan, The City in Literature, 46. 10 Cf. Fokkema and Ibsch’s introduction to Modernist Conjectures, especially 16–29; Bradbury and McFarlane (eds), Modernism; Victor Erlich, Modernism and Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Jones and Feuer Miller (eds), The

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urbanity shaping the modernist novel is asserted mainly in terms of its general character – undifferentiated and derivative. This reduction of the city in the text is both a function of and perpetuates misreadings of the citytext. Recent scholarship examines more closely the interrelation between specific socio-historical, cultural and literary geographies, narrative and cognitive structures.11 More interdisciplinary in scope, recent mappings of modernism also stretch beyond conventional historical and geographical bounds. Yet the concentric city remains at the core of most of these revisionary studies, not only as site but, more problematically, as structure in terms of which eccentric citytexts are understood as colonized, co-opted, and corresponding derivatives or as contrastive, but incoherent, chaotic, disorderly deviations. In this study, the eccentric is repositioned in dialogue with the concentric, still provoked and provocateur, but speaking from and in terms of its own complex cultural context.12 Eccentric literature recalculates modernist time and place (history) and structure (chronotope and consciousness), through the narrators who playfully and perversely cast themselves as deviants and their works as paradoxically authentic, authoritative and even ethical deviations. Cross-examining dynamics of urbane discourse and consciousness in discrete Russian and Brazilian contexts elucidates both eccentric derivations of European modernism and distinctly eccentric modes of modernist construction. Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel; Assis Brasil, O modernismo (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas, 1976); Sílvio Castro, Teoria e política do modernismo brasileiro (Petropolis: Vozes, 1979); Afrânio Coutinho, Conceito de literatura brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas, 1976). 11 Works such as Robert Alter’s Imagined Cities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s Geographies of Modernism (London/New York: Routledge, 2005), Paul Harding’s Writing the City (London/New York: Routledge, 2003), Pericles Lewis’s Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2000), Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London/New York: Verso, 1998), and Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smith’s co-edited volume Space and Place: The Geographies of Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997) cross between cities, while Andrew Thacker’s Moving through Modernity (Manchester University Press, 2003), Olga Matich’s edited Petersburg/Petersburg (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), and Julie A. Buckler’s Mapping St. Petersburg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) focus on the shifting forms of London’s and St. Petersburg’s respective citytexts. 12 Matich explores such complex interconnectedness of circulation in early twentiethcentury Petersburg and the Petersburg text in her Petersburg/Petersburg, looking at parallel trajectories between bringing text and meat to market, for instance, while also looking at how traces of the latter surface within and between the lines of the citytext.

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Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s, Machado de Assis’s and Lima Barreto’s alienated narrators recover ground in the city and gain footing in cultural consciousness through partial representation, problematized recollection, paranoid projection and schizophrenic response, corresponding to their respective city’s eccentric modes of cultural conception. Their fictional recollections of urban spaces and reflections on urbane narrative recall domains and dynamics already registered in a reflexive line of visual (cartographic, lithographic and other artistic) as well as literary representations. But looking through more layered critical lenses at copied and contradictory construction, these writers interrogate further what is represented and its mode of representation. Their fictions explore, in disrupted, digressive internalized dialogues and direct confrontation with death, both the end of consciousness and the ethical ends of aesthetic consciousness.13 The closed circle of these eccentric narratives ultimately encompasses an infinitely open space, stretching like early maps and panoramas of Petersburg and Rio towards unmeasured horizons, drawn out in these fictions within what would seem infernal, dead-ended underground discourse. These eccentric undergrounds can be compared to the depths mined as openings in the concentric citytext through the unearthing of individual and cultural memory, chronicling of socio-ideological and material upheaval, and exploration of socially and historically layered language. In both concentric and eccentric contexts, underground discourse explores new dimensions within the confines of the city and the non-transcendent subject. As Georges Poulet notes in Les Métamorphoses du cercle, this involves a circling towards a centre reconfigured in modernity as interiority, which supplants external authority and objectivity. At its limits, the subject deploys exteriority, and there is a constant movement between centre and periphery, constant expansion and concentration.14 13 See Val Vinokur’s revisionary reading of death and dialogism in Dostoevsky’s work, refracted through the lens of Levinas’s ethics of non-reciprocity in The Trace of Judaism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), chapters 1 ‘Idiots and Demons: Dostoevsky’s Aesthetic Perils’ (discussing the ‘ends of consciousness’ on 15–17) and 2 ‘And I Most of All: Levinas in The Brothers Karamazov’. 14 Georges Poulet’s ‘subjective geometry’ shares an affinity with Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological reading of transpersonal space in La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957), while differing in Poulet’s pluralist conception of imaginary space, insisting on a culturally and individually unique and irreducible, dynamic circle (Les Métamorphoses du cercle [Paris: Plon, 1961], 10, 21), more akin to that we find in Lotman’s semiosphere, constantly in collision with other spheres, which interpenetrate and disrupt a domain already demarked by internally colliding spheres.

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We recognize redesigned space and movement in these eccentrically circling narratives as alternative to and anticipation of the works of such concentric writers as Baudelaire, Flaubert, James and Eliot, examined by Poulet. Both eccentric and concentric reflexive modernist narrating consciousness represents the concomitant insideness and outsideness that Bakhtin ascribes to the author of the polyphonic novel. But Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s eccentric narrators register more peripherally engaged and polyphonic cosmologies than Baudelaire and Flaubert, and anticipate the more dynamic dimensions of Proust’s and Woolf’s memoried fictions, in an underground charted on the surface and in the simultaneity and schizophrenia of the eccentric city. It is the alienation of fictive narrators in the city that generates not only self-consciousness but the authorial capacity ‘for hearing and understanding all voices immediately and simultaneously’ – an urbane capacity that, according to Bakhtin, is characteristic of the novelistic genre of modernity. The compression of the city gives rise to that polyphonic and dialogic structure of the novel recognized by Bakhtin as a ‘new artistic model of the world’.15 Bakhtin’s understanding of the dialogism inherent in Romantic, Realist or Modernist novels is wholly urbane. Gachev maps Bakhtin: ‘Bakhtin is the City (and not the Countryside), People, heteroglossia (and not silence), dialogue (and not a unified or single Logos), polyphony (multivoicedness), pluralism, and not singleness … And so is the novel as a genre. It is also the city! And its genres are the formation of cultural consciousness …’16 That is, the capacity of authorial consciousness to flesh out in fictive dialogue multiple ‘speech genres’, with their sociological and ideological particularity, depends on attentiveness to the circulation of language in the city and its satellites, to the plural discourses of urban characters and to displaced urbane consciousness. In that model of character development that Bakhtin derived from his reading of Dostoevsky’s novels, fictive consciousness develops at crossroads and on thresholds concentrated in the town or city. The other’s perspective is necessary for the realization of the self,17 and the city is the quintessential space in which the subject 15 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (PDP) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 3. 16 Georgii Dmitrievich Gachev, Русская дума (Moscow: Новости, 1991), 105, 108, my translation. 17 PDP, 288. Bakhtin defines the ‘other’ or ‘You’ not as object but as subject, defined from within but in the presence of the other, in terms of borders and limits delineated in discourse. Cf. Mikhail Epstein, After the Future (Amherst: University of Massachusetts

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is forced to face himself in the gaze and understand himself through the utterance of others. The resulting sense of irreducible difference is critical for authentic realization, always responsive, whether ethically responsible or irresponsible. This dependence on contact for the development of fictive consciousness can be found not only in the urban Dostoevskian novel that Bakhtin privileges, but generally in the Bildüngsroman or roman d’éducation, which in the nineteenth-century revolves increasingly around the hero’s coming to, circulating within and departing from the city. Whether the city functions as a point of arrival, as Paris for Balzac’s Rastignac and Petersburg for Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, or of departure, as for Flaubert’s Frédéric or Machado de Assis’s Rubião (in discrete anti-Bildüngsromans), the realization of the hero is wholly urbane, conscious of the interplay of meaning in interlocking urban discourses. In Notes from Underground and Posthumous Memoirs, as in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Proust’s Recherche, not only points of departure and arrival, but also the distance travelled lies (or is recuperated) within the city. More essentially, in such reflexive novels, urban discourse and literary dialogism are realized both though the ‘face to face’ encounters recognized by Bakhtin,18 but also through a facing of self as other through continual repositioning, replacement, and remembering. Polyphony resounds in modernist narrative in the intercourse between fictive characters who converge in the novel as they might in the city, in impossible conversations created by the recursive turns of an urbane narrative consciousness, in intertextual dialogues instigated by a cosmopolitan author (double-voiced discourse in which fictive narrator and other characters may or not be conscious participants), and in the interpenetration of different forms of urban discourse. Press, 1995), 5. Gachev looks at this question of self and other defined by encounter in Bakhtin, from both perspectives: On the one hand, ‘Ты – это Другой как «я», изнутры него: и мы уже не обьекты друг другу, как вещи, противостоим, а СО-стоим в обществе общенья и повернуты лицами друг ко другу и превращаем Другое – в Друга’ (Русская дума 105–6). On the other hand, turning Tiutchev’s question, how can the other understand you, ‘Ответ Бахтина: ‘Как тебе понять себя – без Другого?’ (115). 18 For Bakhtin, the ‘minimum’ requirement for individuality (with connotations of independence, autonomy, freedom, imagination) is the presence of two separate beings directly facing, engaging each other (not multiple selves, not a self and an objectified ‘he, she, they’): ‘Ничего не получается, когда Личность пытаются постигать по модусу и под соусом «Я» и «Он-она-оно». А когда Личность – не одна, а всегда – Лицо к Лицу, минимум, – два, тогда всегда, минимум, – ДиаЛогос, а не МоноЛогос’ (Gachev, Русская дума 116).

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A hybrid genre, the novel, particularly in its modernist and postmodern variants, incorporates the language, form and content of newspapers, of political, juridical, aesthetic, scientific and philosophical debate and of multiple strains of popular speech concentrated in the city. If this is particularly clear in recognized modernist citytexts such as Bely’s Petersburg, Mário de Andrade’s Hallucinated City, and Joyce’s Ulysses, we find that Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s, Machado de Assis’s and Barreto’s narratives anticipate their hybrid forms and self-consciously derivative, divided, textually mediated motley characters, while also anticipating a postmodern casting of authorial consciousness along these lines. Theirs are ‘modern characters’ such as Strindberg describes in a preface to Miss Julie (1888), ‘living in an age of transition more urgently hysterical at any rate than the age that preceded it’, whose situation requires that he ‘have drawn them as split and vacillating’. Strindberg speaks to a corresponding generic vacillation: ‘My characters are conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul.’19 This characterization of the composite subject of modernist fiction is prefigured also by Hugo’s gamin and word-mongering urban narrators as by Baudelaire’s aged chiffonier, collecting and recycling fragments of speech and material as they cut across layers and spheres of the concentric cityscape. But sociohistorical speech forms, customs, costumes, literary models, etc. in early Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro citytexts are drawn from far more widely dispersed, displaced, contradictory and temporally collapsed cultural references, which, as Schwarz points out in his seminal study of Machado de Assis, are poorly suited to these contexts, hence peculiarly revealing.20 We might recall the ‘baggy’ form of Russian fiction recognized by James and Woolf’s evocation of Russian writers in her call for unbuttoned prose adequate to the unravelled subject of modern fiction – except that these writers’ associations draw on a Russian literary canon delimited not only by the dissemination of problematic translations, but also by critical interpretations such as de Vogüé’s, designating the ‘soul’ as the special domain of the Russian novel and excluding from its canon precisely the more eccentric strains focused on here: Gogol’s Petersburg tales and Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground resist the rallying of 19 Cited by Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism, 47, 81. 20 See Roberto Schwarz, ‘As idéias fora do lugar’, in Ao Vencedor as Batatas (São Paolo: Duas Cidades, 1992), 27.

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an alternate Russian realism in critique of French naturalism.21 These complex and much contested Russian narratives, along with ambiguous Brazilian novels like Machado’s Posthumous Memoirs, challenge the ethics and aesthetics of European romanticism and realism as well as anticipate and offer alternatives to European modernism, while critically redefining their respective literary traditions by concentrating and directly confronting the contradictions of marginocentricity. The shifting reception of these works by Gogol, Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis, both at home and abroad, demonstrates how literature not only registers the city, but also changes the way in which the city and citytext can be read. These highly intertextual and metatextual narratives’ engagement in what Bakhtin calls ‘Great Dialogue’, always represented for readers in relation to discrete cultural contexts,22 shifts literary ‘horizons of expectations’.23 Urban novels also shift actual and imagined horizons of the city. The novel becomes a kind of map, prospective as well as retrospective. City planners redraw the city in terms of their and others’ reading. Even as the novel becomes a signpost in the city (and the reading of novels increasingly a way in which characters orient themselves in society), the city becomes a changing sign in the novel. The citytext as well as actual cityscape in the reflexive modernist novel become common ground on which the novel as a genre both deconstructs and reconstructs itself. Gogol’s madman Poprishchin and the skaz narrators of the other Petersburg tales, like Dostoevsky’s, Machado de Assis’s and Lima Barreto’s far more sophisticated and self-consciously modern writers survey the city as layered literary space – always already represented, subtext for their own writing. At the same time, the actual city, as literary centre, literally conditions their writing within the novel (their private and professional style, the addressees and dissemination of their texts, etc.), not to mention the substance, style and distribution of the actual novels. These self-consciously urban/e narrators together register common ways in which the modern novel is contingent on the concentration in burgeoning urban centres of a newly literate public, of new forms of publication and of a new kind of critical discourse broadening the implications of literary imagination. Thus, 21 See Bruno Gomide, chapter 2: ‘Um Naturalismo Superior’, in ‘Da Estepe à Caatinga’ (Ph.D. diss., UNICAMP, 2004). 22 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 4–7. 23 See Hans Robert Jauss’s ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’ (1967), reprinted in David H. Richter, ?The Critical tradition, 2nd edn (Bedford: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 937.

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these reflexive novels recover the city’s layered, labyrinthine terrain as setting, subject and internal structure. Proust underlines the relation between city and aesthetic consciousness by aligning aesthetic models (Swann and Charlus especially) with different sites in the city, each conditioned by different modes of re-membering the past; by mapping his narrator’s developing relation to memory in terms of his own turns in the city; by having his narrator finally stumble over Paris’s stones into a mode of remembering Venice, Paris and Combray, reviving mythic and personal past in the present. Anticipating Proust, Dostoevsky dislocates literary and cultural paradigms through narrative displacements in Petersburg. Dostoevsky’s underground narrator relates his pathologically self-conscious, apparently abstracted, digressive prose to Petersburg’s own abstraction and intentionality. Likewise, Machado de Assis’s literally underground, posthumous narrator Brás Cubas relates a narrative developed through delay, digression, doubling back, to a parallel process of coming of age, his own and Rio’s. Insofar as reflexive fictions such as these chart their own making in terms of aesthetic realizations instigated by the architectonics of the city, which their narrators read and respond to as expression of cultural consciousness, they lay the groundwork for a structural study of the ‘mind’ or imaginative structures of the modern ‘citytext’. Reconfiguring modernist reflection: fractured mirrors, refractory narrators One might question the reliability of the modernist novel’s mapping of its own mentation. Potential problems in pursuing correspondences between the structure of city and citytext through a study of reflexive modernist fiction arise from the possible distortions inherent in ‘narrative introversion’ and, particularly, the pathological nature of its subjective refraction of reality – manifest in both its break with Realist conventions of time and space and its interest in far more aberrant, unRomanticized psychology and culture, often characterized as not only ‘irrational’, but also incomplete, impersonal and even inhuman.24 As Lukàcs notes in his extended critique of ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, the modernist novel is problematic for reflective studies. Yet this slanting of modernist fiction not only into subjectivity, but precisely into pathological consciousness, with its peculiarly ‘deformed’ chronotopic dimensions 24 See Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism, 7.

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and propensity towards open-ended dialogue rather than determined dialectic development of character, precludes another danger inherent in many projects of mapping the novel – that of reducing narrative to a mere reflection of the city (so that criticism becomes a form of tourism or tautology). In most readings of the reflective relation between modern city and fictive consciousness, narrators become shadows of an author, representing a lived life or socio-ideological stance in the city (Dostoevsky attributed the underground man’s ideas or spite; Hugo’s accused narrator reduced to diatribe against the death penalty; Proust re-membered through the predilections of Marcel, whose narrative is read as roman à clef ). The city in the fiction becomes a guide to forgotten physical and social topographies. Recovering few new traces, this study rather proposes a comparative reflection and re-mapping of modernist narratives on geo-historical grounds, reconsidering the city not only as it is cognitively mapped but as it frames a mode of cognition revealed by that mapping. One difficulty in articulating what Gelley terms cultural territoriality (‘the ways that space is subjected to the constraints of human needs and cultural norms’) ‘is that space is both the framework of our analysis (the schematic construct we require as operators of relation …) and the topic of analysis (objects and places)’. Whereas ‘the former draws us to a metatheory of representation, where space is understood as the condition of the apprehension of phenomenal reality. The latter runs the risk of being no more than a catalog of lived spaces, on a phenomenological model’. Gelley argues that we need ‘an intermediary level of conceptualization to deal with the conversion of space into territory’.25 Reflexive modernist fiction serves as such an intermediary, articulating distinct dynamics in the mutual conversions between discrete cultural territorialities and cultural texts, literal and literary territories. If it fails to offer an objective reflection of urban dimensions, modernist fiction’s subjective refraction frames such plural perspectives and polyphony as called for by Bakhtin, arguing against mere reflection, reading monological fiction as deformed and diminished, pre-determined and dead-ended mirroring of city and subject. But for Bakhtin, reflexive modernist fiction merely constitutes another sort of mirror or hall of mirrors through its introspective turn. The subject confronts only his own oblique gaze and not the direct gaze 25 Andrew Gelley, ‘City Texts’, in Mark Poster (ed.), Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 244. This might be read through, but not as the ‘cognitive mapping’ addressed in Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960).

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of a dialogically enlivening other – the integral, inviolable other in whose eyes the subject can see himself ‘fully’ in a series of face to face encounters involving mutual responsibility. ‘The chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels,’ polyphony indicated ‘a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses’, ‘not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse’.26 Polyphony requires a multiplicity of ‘concrete consciousnesses’ or subjects, and only secondarily a multitude of incorporated ideas, ‘styles’, ‘accents’, etc. It is not the internal structure or logic of an idea, style or intonation which fundamentally defines the subject; rather intersubjectivity, an internal relation to an ‘outside’, an ‘exotopy’ is necessary for the realization of authentic dialogues and selves. For Bakhtin, even the work of literature and a culture as a whole can be understood or realized fully only from the perspective of another culture.27 The subject in the polyphonic novels of Dostoevsky, according to Bakhtin, is realized through an open-ended dialogue, in a circling structure of mutual call and answer.28 We might say that the subject is co-created through verbal intercourse, which must be free rather than coerced, as Sartre suggests the acts of writing and reading must be free and function as guarantees of freedom, engaged in ‘good faith’.29 The comparison here is not arbitrary, since Bakhtin casts the author as conscious equal within this dialogic relation of integral subjects. Whereas the author seeks to restore dialogue and instigate dialogic realization, the self-authoring hero usurps and resists others’ authority. For Bakhtin, the interiority, or underground, of first-person heroic consciousness is an infernal realm that ‘tends toward a vicious circle’, ‘a vicious circle of dialogue which can neither be finished nor finalized’.30 And while Bakhtin seems to embrace the unfinalizability of the polyphonic form bounded by the aesthetic unity of actual authorial outsideness (the author’s unfinalized final word), he views such unfinalizability in fictional authorial discourse as inauthentic and unproductive because it draws characters, author and even reader into the circle of underground consciousness, without seeming to allow for an autonomous other who might utter a final word 26 Bakhtin, PDP, 6–7. 27 Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 7. 28 Bakhtin offers a persuasive exemplary reading of dialogue between Ivan and Aliosha Karamazov. 29 See Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la literature? (What is Literature? [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988]). 30 Bakhtin, PDP, 229–30.

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or defining judgement. According to Bakhtin, this internalized form of narration (in The Double, Notes from the Underground and dialogues between Ivan and his devil) is characterized by a circulation of language that goes nowhere: ‘a peculiar perpetuum mobile is achieved, made up of his internal polemic with himself, an endless dialogue where one reply begets another, which begets a third, and so on to infinity, and all of this without any forward motion’.31 This circling immobility is governed by an arrested mirrored gaze,32 a reflexive ‘sideward glance’ and ‘loophole’,33 indicative of an orientation and space which contradictorily admit and deny the presence of the other, ultimately turned away from the other and the city. This is tantamount to an author who manipulates heroes and readers, retaining ironic authority, offering only a pretense of freedom. While Bakhtin recognizes the multiplicity of perspectives or voices materialized in the underground narrative, he argues that within reflexive consciousness none among this multitude of resonating voices (each of which has its peculiar accents, ideas, social and chronotopic dimensions) is fully realized; rather, ‘just as [the underground narrator’s] body has become an ‘interrupted’ thing in his own eyes’, they are reduced to shadows and fragments, ‘among which he cannot find himself and his world’.34 The narrator’s laughter is that of damned, not only disoriented, but damning and disorienting others. That is, the underground narrator’s haunted terrain is a Dantean inferno: frozen Petersburg landscape demarked by tragic circling and incommunicability, from which neither imagined interlocutors nor the underground narrator can surface. The underground narrator ruminating at the centre is the most petrified figure of all, stuck in wet snow like Dante’s Satan in ice, but masticating and dismembering others’ discourse rather than gnawing on their bones. Underground actualization and authority reads as false to Bakhtin, for whom ‘no human events are developed or resolved within the bounds of a single consciousness’. Self-nomination 31 Ibid., 230. 32 Bakhtin implies that the reflexive consciousness of the underground hero, narcissistically submerged in its loophole (having to retain the final word), conceives of the other and the self only through an inherently imaginary, alienating, exotopically displaced rather than genuinely dialogic self-realization such as dramatized in Lacan’s psychological myth of the ‘mirror-stage’ (cf. Bruce Kawin, The Mind of the Novel [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982], 222). 33 Ibid., 234. 34 Bakhtin, PDP, 236.

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can only be ‘imposture’.35 Imposture is at the heart of Bakhtin’s critique of modernist interiority. Underground authority is undermined further by anonymity and the absence of a straightforward signature. Yet Bakhtin overlooks in reflexive, self-realizing modernist fictions an unconventional, unorthodox (though in Dostoevsky’s work, neo-Orthodox) signature, which reassigns authority and authenticity while relocating autonomy and responsibility.36 The plural, recollected or schizophrenically projected perspectives of modernist narrators actualize what Bakhtin acknowledges, that ‘a single consciousness is contradictio in adjecto. Consciousness is in essence multiple’.37 Modernist writing, with its consciously double-voiced words, not only bears within it but bares traces of other intentions. These intentions are explicitly recognized and dialogically engaged in reflexive modernist fictions, orienting and reorienting themselves responsively, even when doubling and doubting irresponsibly. Parody and self-parody can preserve the other, while also making the other responsible to critique. It is as self-conscious parodic and parodied writer and reader that Dostoevsky’s underground narrator realizes his own and others’ multiplicity. That is, the underground man’s writing, not just muttering, fleshes out his ‘reflections’ in his little corner by continually critically and creatively refracting, re-reading, re-interpreting, re-writing them. In this way, the underground narrator differs from other figures that Bakhtin lists as a single cast.38 The contradictory dynamics of the underground narrator’s written sentence, while still registering as disintegration and indecision, counter the dissolution of self and other by asserting a potential ‘both and’ as well as ‘neither nor’ and ‘something else’ (rather than a singular subject or exclusive ‘either or’). Though it appears irresponsible, this digressive, deconstructive writing restores 35 Ibid., 288. In his essay, ‘Toward a Philosophy of the Act’, Bakhtin decries a similar usurpation in the unethical ‘speech act’ withdrawn from the world of action. He imagines such a verbal space as a dead or infertile cavity, in which there is only знание (znanie) without признание (priznanie), knowledge without apprehension (or more literally appropriation, the при- prefix implying bringing to oneself, with its implications of signature and realization) (Caryl Emerson, Rethinking Bakhtin [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989], 18–19). 36 This argument is developed in my essay ‘Unorthodox Confession, Orthodox Conscience: Aesthetic Authority in the Underground’, Studies in East European Thought 59:1–2 (June 2007), 65–85. 37 Bakhtin, PDP, 288. 38 Bakhtin groups the underground narrator with Golyadkin and Ivan Karamazov, among others.

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responsibility by noting difference, while also dissolving distances as well as real or pretended indifference. Dostoevsky’s fictional author potentially realizes an outside reader partly through the realization of an inside reader. He reaches through the imaginary towards the real city, and follows limited literary guides through the sort of loopholes through which Dante crosses with Virgil between circles in his inferno and then into purgatory. He also moves past these literary guides as he reflexively confronts the anxieties and pathologies deforming the ‘real’ in unadmittedly subjective realist fiction and subjects these to scrutiny from multiple perspectives. While his attentiveness to Liza’s speech and silence may not seem to draw him to paradisal refraction, his refractory dialogues might redeem fragmented modernist discourse. The modernist novel may force the reader to focus first on the broken edges or frame of the narrative mirror, on the broken subject that makes the mirror itself appear, but it also reveals the infinitely refractive space of the mirror, once shattered. On the late end of Brazilian modernism, in a collection of chronicles reflecting on art and writing, Clarice Lispector argues that ‘any one mirror is an infinitude of mirrors’. At the same time, she notes a necessary fragmentation of the mirror for the multiplication of perspectives: ‘Few mirrors are needed to create a scintillating and somnambulistic mine: two suffice for the one to throw up the reflection in the other, with a vibration which travels like a tense, insistent message ad infinitum, a liquid into which you can plunge your fascinated hand and retrieve it dripping with reflections.’ She calls the mirror a ‘field of endless silence’ that, like a fortune teller’s crystal ball, is paradoxically full of speech, analogous as a means of self-knowledge (past, present, potential) to the word with which the writer ‘fishes’ for what lies behind the word and which is then assimilated by what it reels in.39 The mirror offers an infinitely discoasted horizon, an inexhaustible void, ‘the deepest space which exists’ and within which one can ‘advance at will without ever stopping: Anyone in possession of a broken fragment may carry it with him when he goes into the desert to meditate. Whence he also will return emptyhanded, enlightened and translucent, and with the same inherent silence as that of the mirror. – Its form is of no importance: no form is capable of circumscribing or altering it; no quadrangular or circular mirror exists: 39 Clarice Lispector, ‘Miraculous Fishing’, in The Foreign Legion: Stories and Chronicles, Trans. Giovanni Pontiero (New York: New Directions, 1992), 119.

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the tiniest fragment is always the entire mirror: remove its frame and it spreads like spilling water.40

This concept of the fragmented mirror – a shard subjected to violence and isolation in order to become more refractive; delineated, but limitless; distorting, dissembling (as Lispector claims that writing must do) in order to speak the truth;41 truest when emptied of a recognizable self and divested of only apparently circumscribing shapes, but also casting sequences of shadows42 – more fully characterizes the relation of the reflexive modernist narrator to the city than Bakhtin’s reading of posturing introspective reflection. It suggests potential for ethically refractive modernist reflection not accounted for by Lukàcs, though recognized by Adorno and strains of Althusserian Marxism. The refraction of and through a fragmented self, in urban desert and underground, in fictions by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Machado de Assis and their successors, humanizes rather than dehumanizes. At the same time, we have a more alienated and violent version of dialogic realization than Bakhtin’s – one can imagine how dipping one’s hand into the shard of the reflective subject might result in a retrieval ‘dripping with reflections’, a more pained image of the city in flux. Here we have a darker vision of ripples and shadows than those Nabokov finds in Gogol’s fictions, or of the palm reading to which Gogol compares his mapping of Petersburg. When we confront Dostoevsky’s Golyadkin in the opening passage of the The Double facing himself by looking through a window and around his room, confronting cityscape and objects with agency and capable of speech, and then literally looking in a mirror (and through literary memory – recalling Gogol’s Petersburg tales) to frame himself, we find a subject who is not diminished by his ironizing narrator, but developed through continual reflection – his own and his narrator’s. He is, moreover, self-aware and suspicious of his own frameworks for self-definition and resists determination by others, in ways that anticipate Dostoevsky’s underground narrator and Machado de Assis’s narrators in ‘O Espelho’ (The Mirror) and Posthumous Memoirs, mostly by making the reader complicit with his own contradictory reflections. Machado de Assis dramatizes both negative and positive aspects of such urbanity in his short story ‘The Mirror’, which chronicles 40 Lispector, ‘Mirrors’, Ibid., 108. 41 See ‘To lie, to think’ and ‘Without any way’, Ibid., 119, 121. 42 ‘Mirrors,’ Ibid., 108.

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the arrival at self-consciousness that the philosophical narrator of Posthumous Memoirs articulates from the beginning. Within a frame narrative alluding to a trivial philosophical discussion among friends gathered around a card table, in which he has hardly partaken, the narrating hero of ‘The Mirror’ finally voices his view and, more significantly, his experience of the ‘double soul’ in a context very like that provincial distension of urban/e experience represented in Gogol’s Inspector General and Dead Souls. In the narrator’s ‘theory of consciousness’,43 the subject is doubly constituted: ‘Há duas almas, a que olha de dentro para fora e a que olha de fora para dentro’ (there are two souls, that which looks out from within and that which looks in from without). The most fully alive subject is only that in equilibrium. But the modern subject suffers a loss of internal referent or perspective. He is all external perspective (like Proust’s socially dressed characters seem, following Dostoevsky’s and Gogol’s petty heroes, who appear at first only externally determined by their social ranks, uniforms or overcoats). If such external points of reference may be socio-historically contested, as they typically are in concentric fictions, concerned with redressing social rise and fall they are also rendered problematic because culturally transposed – this is an ill-fitting, disintegrating European uniform. Nevertheless, the suit seems definitive. In what seems a striking reference to Gogol (whom Machado de Assis had read in French and German translations), the narrator notes ‘Há casos, por exemplo, em que um simples botão de camisa é a alma exterior de uma pessoa’ (there are cases, for example, in which a simple shirt button is the exterior soul of a person). He recalls himself as a petty officer removed from human contact by the contingencies of a provincial relocation, followed by family deaths, social revolts, etc. In his absolute isolation, only a literal mirror, the sole heirloom trace of the family’s urbanity in this provincial context, can begin to remind him of and recall him to himself. But in the mirror he perceives merely disjointed fragments, until he faces the mirror in uniform. In this guise, he can see a self he vaguely remembers, a subject defined according to paradigms of romantic and realist fictions. Yet the self is doubly hollowed out – his objectified reflection is dehumanized, but he feels inhuman on the inside also. He has become as spectral as Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich once bereft of overcoat in ‘Шинель’ (‘The Overcoat’), and as looming 43 Paul Dixon, ‘Feedback, Strange Loops and Machado de Assis’s “O espelho”’, Romance Quarterly 36:2 (May 1989), 213–21, at 213.

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or threatening a cultural presence, accusatory. This confrontation with vacuity results in a new, schizophrenic cultural self-realization. It is with this hollowing out and disintegration that Machado’s self-conscious heroes and narrators must struggle. The fickleness and falsity of the externally weighted ‘double soul’, a form of urbane reflection prefiguring the shifting shape of the subject in the social dimensions of Proust’s novel (with Swann as the first instance), can fatally mask the authentic self. That false urbanity is first unmasked as mere sophism – empty, distorting words. Urbane imposture can be surmounted through a withdrawal from conventional social intercourse (false mirroring) into a paradoxically engaged isolation within urbane consciousness, which may still reflect the falsity of society, but may also be brutally true reflection. This critical reflection of cultural commonplaces is especially ethical in its written expression, a form of re-engagement. Through such moves in Proust’s Recherche the temporally disintegrating self is remembered. In Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs, creative authority depends on a death that instigates rebirth as writer in dialogue with the reader. In ‘The Mirror’, Machado’s hero sees himself going mad in his confrontation with a disintegrating self. He becomes least substantial in his attempt to avoid madness through the recovery of a uniform(ed) self. He engages in an enlivening and ethically responsible dialogue only in what appears to others again as madness, divesting himself of the uniform and critically deconstructing both social reflection and his reflective narrative. Through his apparently aloof recounting and his paranoid (hence actually not indifferent) reflexivity, he delineates a discursive space for authentic, albeit paradoxical self-realization. Having told his own story, the narrator literally walks out of the tale. Paul Dixon, in his analysis of the motivic and structural aspects of the mirror in the tale, points out the reflexive structure of the frame tale vis-à-vis the internal narration. The retrospective narrator appears only when he speaks and disappears from the text when he is no longer in authorial guise, as the youth exists only when reflected in his uniform. Thus, he retains for himself the kind of loophole Bakhtin finds in underground discourse. Dixon argues for such an interpretation on the grounds that the narrator speaks only on the condition that his interlocutors are silent and before they can reply. Yet we might counter that the narrator’s literary point of departure and final literal departure (when he notices that his interlocutors have fallen asleep) is rather occasioned by their averted gaze and stopped ears. They are unresponsive, and he will recount and remain only insofar as his reflections can hold

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them responsible. He attempts to disrupt conventional framing and silence false reflections through paradoxically uninterrupted narrative about the disrupted self. The interrupted and disrupted self is that to which the author makes the reader responsible in the framing tale. Like his own author, the narrator offers a final word that is open to and requires a response, but not open to the false dialogue embodied by the others in the text, for whom the circulation of words and ideas is mere play and the self analogous to a suit of cards. Using the same cards, he dictates new rules of the game. It is this sort of megalomaniacal, yet strangely recalculated self whom Machado incorporates as the epitome of the modern authorial subject in Posthumous Memoirs and his parody of madness, ‘O Alienista’ (The Alienist). In Posthumous Memoirs, Brás Cubas reflects this same ‘finality’ that is dialogically open-ended or responsible. Only ‘finado’ [dead] – finalized, literally underground, enclosed in text as arbitrarily cut off as the underground narrator – does Brás Cubas engage in an ethical act. The recursive time and space of writing constitutes the ‘life’ of the novel. The life-bearing capacity of writing is part of the sense underlying Brás Cubas’s claim, ‘a letra dá vida’ (the letter gives life) – an assertion made within a refractory discursion on his capacity to find the relation between things, compare them, and conclude or formalize them, rather than leave them up to the spirit ‘que é o objecto de controvérsia, de duvida, de interpretação, e conseguintemente de luta e de morte’44 (that is the object of controversy, of doubt, of interpretation, and consequently of conflict and death). The paradox is that his contradictory ‘final edition’ of his life both regenerates the spirit of interpretation and preserves the possibility of real finalization by an other, insofar as it asserts what Bakhtin saw as that necessary outsideness and judgement of the non-authoritarian author. Through his anxious, recursive responses, he incorporates other voices (actual interlocutors, projected readers and critics), preserving ‘spiritual diversity’ or what Brás Cubas calls spiritual freedom as well as the ‘liberdade’ (a freedom that becomes a kind of libertinism for this perverse narrator) afforded only to ‘finados’ (the dead/finalized). The problematic socio-political stances of the writer are subject to ethical judgement through a dialogically ethical aesthetics. More than the underground man’s, Brás Cubas’s seems an ethical speech act, insofar as he takes responsibility for the digressive 44 Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Memórias Pósthumas de Brás Cubas (MPBC) (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Nacional, 1881), cxxvii.

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posthumous novel he writes as well as for his lived indifference to others, in light of which he compares himself to Gulliver, a giant diminishing the stature of others, but also, viewed against other backgrounds, reflecting their unscrupulousness and viciousness.45 As a writer, he is not indifferent – despite his initial pretence – and he is equally vicious. But his perverse and paranoid prosaics stem not only from a consciousness of the limits of cultural framework and literary form, akin to the underground narrator’s; he is also conscious of readers as co-authors and critics who co-opt the text, which he equates to life. He has no illusions concerning absolute autonomy, while seeking to resist determination and redefine authority as much as the underground man. Unlike the latter, he is not cut off before he puts the period on his own sentence. His consummation of the novel constitutes its final contradiction: the novel becomes testament both confirming and countering his pessimistic assertion that all he never becomes and the progeny to which he never gives birth add up to his ultimate ‘pequeno saldo’ (small gain) over life. His novel renders those negatives positive through a dialogically negating and interrogating narrative. We circle back to his initial claim that his death gives birth to the writer, who (re)generates both self and others through the re-presencing of doubt. Doubt determines the refractive, recursive time (not timelessness) of the narrative. While doubt, doubling, duplicity and digression pervade his narrative from its inception, in his authorial contradictions we may also chronicle a real novelistic development. He develops a form that Machado de Assis will incorporate in three of his four future novels, and claim as his own. In this sense, Machado de Assis’s embodies the creative attentiveness in which hero even authors his author. Dostoevsky’s underground narrator and Gogol’s madman, turning back into the underground and asylum, still sputtering when their narratives are cut off, also generate a version of their author’s aesthetics. Paradoxically, Dostoevsky’s underground narrator may be the more morally conscious, albeit equally unconscionable narrator, relative to Gogol’s and Machado de Assis’s. The seeming moral and aesthetic failure marking Dostoevsky’s successive novels (particularly The Idiot and Demons46) is foreseen by the underground narrator. Our closer readings will demonstrate how Gogol’s, Dostoevsky’s, and 45 Ibid., xcix. 46 See Vinokur, The Trace of Judaism, Chapter 1, ‘Idiots and Demons: Dostoevsky’s Aesthetic Perils’.

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Machado de Assis’s eccentric narrators finalize their narratives with an inward turn that opens into dialogue with their authors and readers. Bakhtin asserted that Dostoevsky’s polyphonic authority grew out of attentiveness to his heroes, themselves responsible to the layered intersection of voices and speech genres in the city. This study argues, against Bakhtin, that such attentiveness underpins an already ethical aesthetic realization on the part of the refractory underground author, who also ‘re-creates the logic of the subject itself, but does not create that logic or violate it’.47 This, despite admitted spite. Their own contradictory narration arbitrates against Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground narrators’ attempts to create and control the other arbitrarily. Consciousness conspires with conscience. The underground man contends that he simply fleshes out and gives full voice to what remain skeletal ideas in less creative consciousnesses. He, not only his author, suggests that the grotesque figures (including contradictory selves) that surface in his narrative are true embodiments of a more shadowy reality lived out on the ‘real’ nineteenth-century St. Petersburg landscape. He also admits the apparently contradictory automatism and autonomy of recollected and projected interlocutors, casting them as type but noting their capacity to turn away, to head in directions different than any of the lines of logic with which he might try to hem them in. Like Dostoevsky’s aesthetic, the underground man’s is chronotopically rooted and dialogically developed in the city: he inscribes in his narrative the ‘objective complexity, contradictoriness and multi-voicedness of Dostoevsky’s epoch, the position of the déclassé intellectual and the social wanderer, his deep biographical and inner participation in the objective multi-leveledness of life and finally his gift for seeing the world in terms of interaction and coexistence – all [that] prepared the soil in which Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel was to grow’.48 Similarly, Machado de Assis casts Brás Cubas as self-nominating brother to the republic, coming of age with it, as reader and writer, both in his actual life and his aesthetic afterlife.49 Yet Bakhtin imagines a doubly active and passive, disinterested relation of author to his protagonists. Authorial consciousness ‘discovers’ the ‘self-developing logic of personality, one that occupies positions and makes decisions’,50 which the author develops only in that sense of 47 Bahktin, PDP, 286. 48 Ibid., 31. 49 Cf. MPBC, XIV, XVI. 50 Ibid., 286.

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uncovering (voicing or rendering visible) in written dialogue. In terms borrowed from political and theological discourses, Bakhtin requires that the authority of the polyphonic author be neither dictatorial nor authoritative. The authorial subject is constituted by enunciations which are finalizing, but conscious of not being the final word on a subject. In making a judgement about the other, the author posits his own outsideness vis-à-vis the subject. He also creates a subject free to correspond or not to that judgement, able to respond. In his essay on the ethics of the speech act, Bakhtin defines this authoring in terms of вживание (vzhivanie, ‘living into’), denoting displacement into another, alongside the outsideness that he later sees as the condition of a critic’s creative understanding of the novel.51 For all their insideness, these underground narrators are wholly conscious of their outsideness with respect to others. As well as demonstrating how refractory and pathologically riven consciousness can be creatively refractive, modernist narratives delineate a jealous form of dialogic authorial engagement. Proust dramatizes such a paradoxically disinterested paranoid creativity, depicting jealousy as a form of disinterested love that gives rise to imaginative truth. In the aesthetic gestation of the narrator/author of his Recherche, jealousy is that stage of love in which the lover is no longer self-absorbed, in which the lover recognizes the other lives, internal and external, of his beloved; like the madman of Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s fictions, he may project imaginary lives for the one he loves, primarily through retrospective revisions. Thus, Swann describes the jealous imagination in terms of the tasks of historian and critic – ‘le déchiffrement des textes, la comparaison des témoignages et l’interprétation des monuments’ (the deciphering of texts, the comparison of testimonies and the interpretation of monuments) – and ultimately the creative ‘recherche de la vérité’ (search for truth) of the novelist.52 He jealously re-members Odette through reflection on banal words and prosaic traces. Significantly, his most fantastical re-interpretations are essentially true. Yet finally, Swann figures as the failed artist, because he cannot sustain either his jealous obsession or the paradoxically disinterested aesthetics he discovers through it. Odette is a book he closes, ceases to read and interpret, ceases also to author, as he loses himself in social intercourse – a self-absorbed distraction from that disinterested obsession. Marcel, 51 See Emerson on ‘Toward a Philosophy of the Act’, in Rethinking Bakhtin, 23. 52 Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard/ Pléiade, 1987–89), Vol. I, 269–79.

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who transposes the alterity of jealousy into the isolation of novelistic consciousness, never ceases to read others. He sustains the liminal stance of voyeur and spy that Swann occupies only momentarily in his jealousy. His narrative consciousness develops through a series of such jealous and benevolently loving readings, beginning in his childhood library (with his books, his family and Combray, which his tante Léonie explicitly reads as a text) and extending to the most urbane Parisian collection of persons and pasts. Moving through the infernal spaces of Paris salons, within which he arrives also at the inverted cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, he crosses into an internal purgatorial space – the sphere charted in reflexively self-realizing narrative form, debating the possibility of retrospective, recursive textual redemption. Brás Cubas anticipates Proust’s conception of the human subject as a text, whose multiple lives reflect different editions, critical revisions and interpretations. He registers time by positing a final edition authored and signed in death. But he also casts this as an edition still open to interpretation, sitting alongside earlier editions, with no more authority, subject to the same ravages of time and readership (consumed by bookworms, collected by bibliophiles who do not crack the spine, misread by critics, etc.). Placed on the same shelf, difference becomes a function of space, one self indifferently juxtaposed to another self, both present. Brás similarly articulates in spatial terms the Bakhtinian differentiation between unethical or inauthentic and ethical authorial responsibility. Here the conflict is also seen as one between love and egoism, dramatized in Gogolian and Sternean terms, involving ‘a ponta do nariz’ (the tip of the nose). There is ‘o amor que multiplica a espécie e o nariz, que a subordina ao indivíduo’ (love that multiplies the species and the nose, which subjects it to the individual).53 The individual subject or author who cannot look beyond his nose is rendered as impotent. For such apparently self-absorbed narrators as the underground man or Brás Cubas, the question is whether – and if so, how – they can look beyond the tips of their noses. They manage to do so only through awkward contortions, retrospectively confronting perverse and unproductive romances and perversely romancing projected readers. These confrontations are, nevertheless, productive. Acknowledging his critic as co-author, even while attempting to unseat those uncritical, unresponsive, irresponsible readers that he defines as bibliophile, Romantic, Realist, cynic, Brás Cubas creates a space inside the fiction 53 Machado de Assis, MPBC, XLIX.

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for a critique of both its formal limits and his own moral and cultural limits. The underground narrator similarly casts his critic as pretext for and responsible to his text. Anxiously baring creative devices, admittedly dissembling but insisting on the truthfulness of their distortions and the coherence of contradictions, these Petersburg and Rio narrators undermine Realist conventions. Of course, despite such claims as Balzac’s ‘all is true’ framing Père Goriot’s objectivity and typicality, Realist and Naturalist novels comprise neither comprehensive nor uncritically framed reflections. Nor do Romantic fictions constitute unconsidered subjective mirrors. Yet it is partly because these narrative frameworks are read as reductive positivist or sentimental representations that critics such as de Vogüé and, in Brazil, Silvio Romero, Clovis Bevilaqua, Artur Teófilo among others, invoke an alternative Russian realism, marked by moral conscience, contingent on an exploration of a distinctly Russian consciousness and unconscious, linked to a landscape, viewed from a distance that suggests depth.54 Late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Brazilian critics find in this Russian literature a critical counterpoint to French currents copied in Brazilian literature, but inadequate to their similarly peripheral and plural culture. Though predicated on misreading and mistranslation mediated by concentric critical conventions, amalgamating Russian literature into a missive for psychologically probing, culturally particularized narrative, these critics also begin to point to the parallel delay, digression, and deviant literariness of Russian literature, especially when they look outside the disseminated canon. This eccentric literature excluded from de Vogüé’s and others’ critical cast turns out to have much in common with the modern(ist) Brazilian literature that reaches from Machado de Assis to Mário de Andrade. Whereas the ‘alternative realism’ of Turgenev’s and Tolstoy’s novels, along with such works by Dostoevsky as Notes from the House of the Dead and Crime and Punishment, is defined not in terms of its ‘literariness’, but by moral witness,55 these more eccentric fictions by Gogol and Dostoevsky, like their Brazilian counterparts, turn through digressive language, literary form and divided consciousness, bearing witness through wit, linking ethics to a deviant aesthetics. The urbane narrator in such self-realizing fictions not only sees but is seen and sees himself as refractory agent whose modes of refracting urban reality 54 See Gomide, Da Estepe à Caatinga, Chapter 2 ‘Um Naturalismo superior’. 55 Ibid., 156.

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are shaped by culturally-specific phobias, paranoia and other psychopathological disorders. Thus, in a reappraisal of Russian literature in Brazil that figured significantly in his reorientation of Brazilian literary history, Augusto Meyer defines both Brás Cubas and the underground narrator56 in terms of ‘conscious inertia, despair, masochist pleasure, self-destruction, profound gravity, sick consciousness/conscience [consciência doentia], morbid introspection, incestuous voluptuousness’; they are ‘cerebral monsters’.57 The monstrosity of the self reflects that of the city, which had already become in fictions such as Balzac’s and Zola’s a multifaceted, multivoiced novelistic character in its own right, marked by manic appetites, partial remembering and pathological social re-membering, and a protean capacity to reconfigure itself culturally and realign itself historically. In reflexive modernist fiction, the city’s monstrous form is defamiliarized through a monstrous fictional form – the ‘livro-monstro’ Meyer describes in his 1935 ‘Note on Dostoevsky’,58 his first approximation of Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis, focused on their liminal, first-person underground narratives, as works peculiarly capable of elucidating a common ‘cruel lucidity’.59 However, in these reflexive fictions, the defamiliarization of both city and citytext is achieved not by engaging in what Meyer ultimately argued was ‘intuitive’ creation connected to a ‘spiritualist modernism’, 56 Or, actually, Brás Cubas and Ordinov, the protagonist from Хозяйка whom Meyer reads as underground narrator because of mistranslation and compression of the two texts by Halpérine-Kaminsky and Morice, L’esprit souterrain (Paris: Plon, 1886) (Gomide, 116). 57 Gomide, Da Estepe à Caatinga, 432. 58 Ibid., 429. Describing Dostoevsky’s move beyond Realist feuilleton and Romantic melodrama in his refraction of real events (Nietcháiev’s crime and political turbulence underlying events in Demons) to redefine fiction in which the material is motivated by the metaphysical and characters are marked by autonomy and agency, Meyer argues that Dostoevsky’s characters become unpredictable, unfinalized, dialogically engaged with the author (429). 59 Gomide argues that Meyer focuses on these works not only because of their aesthetically disrupted and dissenting character ‘made of leaps, elipses, hesitations’, peculiarly diseased consciousness/conscience, and ‘corpses and death on every side’, but also because these particular texts showed these authors as ‘traveling companions in insufficient interpretations, the work of lacrimose interpreters or anatolian critics’. Meyer seeks in Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and in Notes from Underground the moment in which literary genres are transfigured (Gomide, 432, referring to Meyer’s essay ‘O homem subterrâneo’, opening Meyer’s seminal volume Machado de Assis, but also a manuscript note by Meyer, referring to Notes from Underground as a ‘livro-semente’ (seed book), my translation).

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but by having the literal and imagined city internalized and the citytext critically analysed within fictional consciousness wholly implicated in what it subjects to critique. Internalized by a rationalizing irrational mind, the rationalized but irrational modern city becomes more of a monstrosity, yet it also becomes more human, since we can explore its particular pathological dynamics in terms of a fictionally lived life, the life of a fiction and the development of fictional form. Re-mapping modernism: eccentric vs concentric design and dynamics By cross-examining material and mythological dimensions and dynamics of the city in critically reflexive citytexts (including cartographic and other visual representations correlated to literary re-imagining), this study seeks not only to redefine geographical and chronological limits of modernist fiction, but more essentially to elucidate correspondences between particular modes of urban formation, forms of cultural consciousness and narrative form. Thus, this re-mapping of the modernist citytext traces contours on, but also beneath the surface, seeking to recover motivations and means for the (re)construction and disintegration of modern city, subject and narrative. This study foregrounds dynamics of dialogue, division, displacement, digression, doubling, disintegration, dismembering, remembering, discovering, recovering, and covering up in modern cities and citytexts. In each (con) text, it asks how the voice of the actual other and of the other self (as an individual or cultural entity) is represented. Who and what circulates? How do subjects and texts circulate and confront each other in the city? What defines dialogue within and between subjects and (con) texts? What determines authority, authenticity, originality? How do discrete modernist literary modes of construction originate and develop in different urban contexts? The first sense in which this analysis seeks to understand the city as formative presence in the modern novel is mythological, though also materialized. That is, it surveys literary texts as part of a developing urban myth, embedded within the material city, also understood as dynamic cultural text – always cognitively mapped, imaginary, inscribed in the landscape, using literal language(s) and other sign systems. The citytext (both literal city and its literary text) can be charted in terms of Lotman’s ‘semiosphere’: an indefinitely complex interrelation of signs in time and space, a kind of dynamic cultural

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consciousness, marked by a vast memory and inner dialogue involving interally embedded and colliding semiospheres, always in dialogue with other cultural spheres, and constantly re-envisioning itself through that intercourse.60 As Lotman and Toporov point out in their seminal studies of the ‘Petersburg text’, the city itself is an interpretive construct also open to interpretation in its monumental or poetic expressions as well as in its most mundane or prosaic ones. Eccentric cities, such as Petersburg or Rio – capitals that re-place the boundaries of empire and reorient or replace cultural capital – are especially textual, insofar as they are projected on the page before they begin to be built. They are intertextually designed, intentionally constructed as copies and revisions. Their designs are immediately contested, countered by contradictory (re)visionary designs. Urban development is marked not only by contradictions, but also continual reorientation, which we can chart not only through conventional map reading, but also by reading the contrastive framing of cartographic records (shifting geographical perspective, realized in different languages, bound by different signs of authority). These eccentric capitals’ texture and textuality (not only its documents, but discourse in circulation, architectual styles, street signs and shop signs) are multilingual, and this plurality is one indication of the cross-cultural constructive principle that structures eccentric polyphonic modernism. While the concentric city, likewise, absorbs and adapts other urban models and artefacts in its redesign, it tends to assimilate these – transposing, translating, repurposing plundered monuments, materials and myths less anxiously. Concentric anxieties are concentrated more in intratextual realignments, related to the city’s layered cultural construction. We see this in mainly monolingual maps that consistently centre the city, mark past boundaries within present borders, signal historical monuments and register social hierarchies within the frame. We find this difference similarly traced in the Paris palimpsest deciphered by writers from Hugo to Proust. Hugo invites the reader of his ‘Paris Guide’: Entrez dans cette légende, descendez-y, errez-y. Tout dans cette ville, si longtemps en mal de révolution, a un sens. La première maison venue en sait long. Le sous-sol de Paris est un recéleur; il cache l’histoire … Sous le Paris actuel, l’ancien Paris est distinct, comme le vieux texte dans les interlignes du nouveau.61 60 Lotman, ‘Dialogue Mechanisms’, in Universe of the Mind, 150. 61 Victor Hugo, Paris-Guide, Chapter II, ed. Jean Massin (Paris: Club français du

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(Enter into this legend, descend into it, wander within it. Everything in this city, so long in the throws of revolution, has a sense [or meaning]. The first house you come across knows this in depth. The underground of Paris is a repository; it hides history … Under the present Paris, ancient Paris is distinct, like the old text between the lines of the new.)

Hugo’s narrators not only read mundane and monumental edifices, most notably Notre Dame, but also dig through the argot and history in the city’s sewers and torn-up streets. While circulating at eye-level on a textualized surface, the nouveau roman still reads Paris as palimpsest, looking for underlying traces in layered affiches. We might contrast such a memoried cityscape, which Hugo, like Proust, casts as palimpsest rendered legible only through trauma that trips through forgetfulness,62 to the divided, doubled Petersburg landscape, marked by distant cultural references, disorienting in the present and defining cultural memory in terms of ecclectic and contradictory outlooks. Brodsky’s ‘Guide to a Re-named City’ (Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad) orients the reader not through descent, but difference between two tyrants whose monuments mark two points of entry and departure from the city. These examples suggest how the material aspect of the city figures in urban myths and motifs, but also how material modes of construction underpin poetics. Modes of urban (re)construction are informed by geographical and geological features, socio-political structures, and cultural configurations. The development of memoried narrative and poetic structures, intertextual dialogue, language, subject and setting within the Paris text corresponds with the city’s gradual growth, centred in a maternally cast and ageing Île de la Cité, encompassing embryonic and evolving outgrowths within expanding concentric enclosures (enceintes), situated also at the centre of France, but eventually encompassing in its cultural domain all of Europe and then reaching well beyond those boundaries, only to have those edges press back and impress themselves on the city. Moscow, similarly, figures in Russian cultural consciousness as a layered, livre, 1967–69, 1967–69), 580. Cf. Hugo’s representations of the city in ‘Paris à vol d’oiseau’ in Notre-Dame (Book 3, Chapter 2) and ‘Paris étudié dans son atome’ in Les Misérables (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1951) (Part III, Book 1). Saint-Beuve concludes in a letter to Hugo, ‘You are more vertical than horizontal in relation to the human condition’ (April 14, 1831, cited by Jacques Seebacher, Victor Hugo ou le calcul des profondeurs [Paris: PUF, 1993], 185, my translation). 62 Hugo, L’Homme qui rit, ed. Yves Gohin (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985), II.iii.8 & II.iv.1.

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organically developed centre and ‘spiritual core’ – essentially preserved even when replaced as political/cultural capital by St. Petersburg (1703), when evacuated (1812), when repositioned as centre of an expansive Soviet empire. These are places structured by memory – digging deep, piling up, preserving cultural continuity, while also becoming increasingly destabilized by discontinuity primarily represented as internal historical rupture or reversal. These dynamics are reflected in texts that explore long familial lines, gradually layered and labyrinthine landscapes, social and linguistic layers and roots, social revolution in terms of uprooting and realignments with the past. Conversely, Petersburg and Rio texts are shaped by the marginal geographical position of these eccentric cities, by decentred construction imposed by topographies that resist imported centralizing designs and by continual redefinitions and re-positioning of authority on these cultural margins. The city’s secondary significance for this inquiry is structuralist and socio-historical, insofar as the literal incorporations of local forms of speech and ideologies mark the boundaries of the subjects dialogically reconstituted in the urbane novel. The specificity of the city suffuses narrative consciousness. It is in this secondary light that this inquiry pursues the ‘sociological stylistics’ called for by Bakhtin (but not accomplished on this terrain), conceiving of the study of language as a space ‘populated’ by a multiplicity of intentions as the only ‘stylistics capable of dealing with the distinctiveness of the novel as a genre’.63 It investigates discrete urban discourses in order to demonstrate the capacities for polyphony within introspective urbane narrative and to elucidate the particular polysystems64 at play in different modernisms. To differentiate subjects in the polyphony of the split self that knows itself as and through others, we may take as point of departure Bakhtin’s description of speech genres, discourses with discrete chronotopic dimensions, but also nested and interpenetrating, developing on both psychological and sociological planes of existence. Speech genres, according to Bakhtin, represent a responsive, ‘real’, historically possible life for language. The author’s attentiveness to socio-historically and -ideologically framed speech genres gives rise to the utterances and intonations through with the author fleshes out living figures, whether or not these fictional speakers are conscious of this generic 63 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (DI) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 294, 300. 64 See Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘Polysystem Theory’, Poetics Today 1:1–2 (1979).

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rootedness.65 What Caryl Emerson has recognized as Bakhtin’s more ‘temporally’ defined speech genres – historically conditioned – can be elucidated by Lotman’s related, but more spatially as well as temporally complex conception of the memoried semiosphere, translated from the plane of culture onto the plane of a narrating consciousness.66 The semiosphere is a form of consciousness. In Lotman’s ‘modelling’ of cultural consciousness, time is based on ‘physics’, or ‘time as revolutionized by Einstein’ and ‘space exists so that relationships can be revealed and might exist’. In contrast, Bakhtin’s model of consciousness, based on a study of individual characters and texts, within a history of the novel, involves a more Euclidian ‘biological’ time, within which relationships are marked by ‘commitment’. ‘Speech genres’ are defined by ‘unrepeatable utterances’.67 But Lotman’s and Bakhtin’s theories intersect when Bakhtinian time and space become more flexible and dynamic categories, belonging to the domain he understands as dialogic rather than dialectic, multiplying meaning within a threshold chronotope, such as charted in Lotman’s analysis of creative collisions in ‘Culture and Explosion’.68 A more lively structural model, Lotman’s semiosphere has much in common with Bakhtin’s understanding of narratives permeated with microdialogue and engaged in Great Dialogue, bending time in all directions. It suggests the dialogized or double-voiced word (in which multiple meanings continuously contend with each other and time turns back on itself even as it moves forward). At the same time, Lotman’s theory allows us to extend Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony from a particular fictional context to a larger cultural narrative, as well as from the purview of authorial consciousness to 65 Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 79, 356. 66 In ‘Jurij Lotman’s Last Book and Filiations with Baxtin’ (Welt … Slavistik 48:2 (2003), 201–16), Caryl Emerson argues ‘Lotman is more likely to pose a “domain” question: Where am I, and what boundary must I cross so that my moving self can be seen …?’ (Cf. ‘Semiotic space’, ‘The notion of boundary’ and ‘The semiosphere and the problem of plot’, in Lotman, Universe of the Mind, [London/New York: I. B. Tauris, 1990]). ‘Baxtin was also much preoccupied with spatial placement; his early work focuses on a virtue he calls vnenachodimost’, “outsideness”. But beyond the fact of our necessary non-coincidence with others, Baxtin’s distinctions remain rather crude … The vital question he poses is more likely to be temporal: With your help, I can become someone else. How much time do we have?’ (205). 67 Ibid., 205–6. 68 Ibid., 209–15. Here Lotman has moved beyond binary codes of culture that Bakhtin finds reductive in earlier Tartu cultural semiotics, because such binaries cannot account for the complex intentionality inherent in individual utterance.

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multiple narrative and cultural consciousnesses, and into the compressed domain of an internalized multiplicity – an internalized city that also involves cross-cultural contact. Lotman describes the semiosphere as an urbane site in which consciousness is plural and productive, engaged in more chronotopically complex configurations and collisions than those Bakhtin explores in Dostoevsky’s fictions. For both Bakhtin and Lotman, creative vision extends from that liminal vantage point on the threshold or edge of the semiosphere as well as along ruptures within its dense space, where consciousness becomes capable of attending to the inter-illumining difference of externally and internally colliding semiospheres, speech genres, ideologies – expressed as utterances. This is the nexus necessary for dialogue, resulting in both decision (in the ‘non-interrupted time of narrative’ that Bakhtin reads in Realist and Romantic terms and in the historical reorientation of culture charted by Lotman) and narrative undecidability or dialogism (in the ‘interrupted’ time of reflexive, underground or modernist narrative, intratextually and intertextually dialogic, belonging to Great Time).69 Georg Simmel’s analysis of the city and modern consciousness, similarly interested in the relation of cultural and social forms (though not focused as much as Bakhtin or Lotman on the structure of narrative or of narrating consciousness as on individual fictive consciousness that might be objectively represented within narrative70), conceives of a likewise complex ‘cultural transformation’ of ‘worlds’ tending towards increasing heterogeneity, towards discrete or incommensurable difference in their interaction with each other within the increasingly dense sphere of the city. What the particular combination of Lotman’s cultural theory and textual analysis elucidates that Simmel’s more social analysis or Bakhtin’s more literary differentiation of heroic and authorial spheres of consciousness do not, is how the internally self-realizing consciousness of reflexive modernist fiction can move, expand and contract, as it attends to shifting centres within it as well as to collisions with the worlds outside. This fictional consciousness becomes more authorially capacious as it grows more 69 Emerson makes a compelling case that Lotman’s space can ‘be interrupted’ whereas Bakhtinian time cannot. But Lotman shows us the historicized reorientation of culture in uninterrupted diachronic terms and Bakhtin also allows for ‘interrupted’ or reoriented time in the dialogic framework of the text and in ‘great dialogue’ involving intertextual dialogue and critical reception. 70 See Levine’s introduction to Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), xiv, xvii.

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densely populated with intentions, even obsessive and contradictory. The self-authoring modernist text might not only place into dialogic play a multiplicity of utterances resounding in urbane consciousness, but reconstitute urban context as text and citytext as utterance to which the reader must respond. The semiosphere, semiotically coherent despite its continually changing density, shifting core and plural discursive parameters is particularly useful for understanding the poetics of firstperson narratives contending with continually displaced, divided, doubled cultural and generic identity, narratives that push beyond the limits of a Bakhtinian understanding of more polite polyphony towards what he might read as cacophany. In their cultural semiotics of the Petersburg text, Toporov and Lotman suggest an unequal binary opposition between concentric and eccentric cities and citytexts.71 The concentric city (in their case, Moscow) is deeply rooted in tradition, spiritual in essence, concrete in its monumental architectural forms, organically grown in variegated strata that bear traces of human will. The polyphony inherent in the concentric city’s discourse is determined by time, by social and historical layers, and by the city’s absorption of external voices. But because of the city’s gradual, organic development, its varied texture is characterized by a kind of coherence; the concentric citytext is marked by neither abstraction nor strangeness, except as occasioned by traumatic temporal ruptures (such as the evacuation and burning of Moscow with Napoleonic invasion, which results in a kind of erasure that becomes both a form of forgetting and a trace for memoried cultural reconstruction). Conversely, the eccentric city (Petersburg) is unrooted, perversely constructed and fated, abstract, immediate and immediately contradictory. Without tradition, it appears militantly, monologically and rationally ordered on the surface, but its eclectic uniformity reflects multivalence and an unruly nature. By borrowed design – bricolage – it compresses historical difference and collapses cultural distance. The eccentric city’s phantasmal irrationality is manifest in the strangeness of the city on a landscape registered as barbarous, bordering on sea and immense interior that resist imprint and reorient construction. The opposition of concentric and eccentric cities is asymmetrical insofar as the eccentric city consciously requires and incorporates the 71 Cf. V. N. Toporov’s ‘Петербург и Петербургский текст русской литературы’ (Tartu: Tartu State University Press, 1984) and Lotman’s ‘Символика Петербурга и проблемы семиотики города’ (Tartu: Tartu State University Press, 1984).

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concentric in its self-realization, whereas the concentric city conceives of itself as centre. Without offering a comprehensive review, this study builds on extensive critical scholarship on Rio and Petersburg as cities defined by spatially distended cultural anxiety.72 As Toporov and Lotman note, Petersburg is peculiarly self-conscious, counterposed to ancient Moscow.73 Insofar as Lotman and Toporov’s studies (like Nekrasov’s, 72 The most notable studies of Petersburg contrasts include Antsyferov’s Душа Петербурга (1922), Петербург Достоевского (1923), Быль и миф Петербурга (1924); Nazirov’s ‘Петербургская легенда и литературная традиция’ in Традиции и новаторство (1973); Dolgopolov’s ‘Миф о Петербурге и его преобразование в начале XX века’ in На рубеже веков: О русской литературе котца XIX – начала XX века (1977); Kaganov’s Санкт-Петербург: образы пространство (1995, Of Space: St. Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal Arts, 1997); significant shorter studies include Lotman’s ‘Символика Петербурга и проблемы семиотики города’ and Toporov’s ‘Петербург и Петербургский текст русской литературы’ as well as essays by Mints, Bezrodnyi, Danilevskii and Timenchik in Семиотика города и городской культуры:Петербург, Vol. XVIII in the series Труды по знаковым системам (1984). Concise critical analyses in English include Sidney Monas’s ‘St. Petersburg and Moscow as Cultural Symbols’ (1983) and ‘Unreal City: St. Petersburg and Russian Culture’ (1984); Robert A. Maguire’s ‘The City’ (1992); Aileen Kelly’s ‘The Chaotic City’ in Toward Another Shore (1998, 201–20); Gary Rosenshield’s ‘The Bronze Horseman and The Double …’ (Slavic Review 1996), 399–428. Buckler re-evaluates the ‘eccentric’ myth of Petersburg by examining literature and other forms of cultural expression from the ‘middle’ in her compelling Mapping St. Petersburg (2005). Matich’s recent Petersburg/Petersburg (2011) offers a more historically constrained, but innovative interdisciplinary study of modernist Petersburg. There is a high degree of theorizing in twentieth-century Petersburg poetry and fictional prose as well, drawing, like these essays in cultural semiotics, not only on Petersburg legends and traditions (collected and commented by Naum Sindalovskii in his История Санкт-Петербурга в преданиях и легендах [1997] and Петербургский фольклор [1994]), but also a self-consciously constructed and critiqued myth expressed by writers such as Gogol and Dostoevsky in correspondence, essays and fiction; V. G. Belinsky in works such as ‘Петербург и Москва’ (written 1844, published along with similarly slanted essays and fictional works in Nekrasov’s Физиология Петербурга, 1845; reprinted in a 1984 edition with an incisive introduction by Nedsvetskii); or A. I. Hertzen’s ‘Москва и Петербург’ (first published in the journal Колокол, 1857) and ‘О развитии революционных идей в России’ (discussing Petersburg as revolutionary space). While there are early essays on Rio as literary space, beginning with Machado de Assis, extensive surveys of Rio as discrete literary site are more recent, including Manuel Bandeira’s Rio de Janeiro em prosa e verso (1965), Jacinto Coelho’s O Rio de Janeiro na Literatura Portuguesa (1965), António Cândido’s more general Formação da Literatura Brasileira (2nd edn, 1964), Afrânio Coutinho’s Conceito de literatura brasileira (1976) and various works by Roberto Ventura and Flora Sussekind. 73 See Toporov, ‘Петербург и Петербургский текст…’ 13. Lotman configures Petersburg as self-conscious, and Toporov values texts demarking consciousness on the threshold.

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Belinsky’s and other earlier cultural analyses) largely limit its contrastive construction to Moscow,74 their binary opposition fails to account for the eccentric city’s revisionary self-realization in light of several concentric variants – for Petersburg, including at least Moscow, Paris, London and Rome (as vying concentric models) – and other eccentric spaces – the Caucasus and points further south, Siberia and East Asia, even underlying swamp, settlements and Petersburg’s immediate borderlands, and at a greater distance countries such as Spain and the American continents, which have a particular resonance as extremities in the Petersburg text, as Russia will also have for Brazilian cultural debates. These complex lines of contrast are more examined in recent scholarship. Though the concentric city’s construction may include a construction of the self in terms of the other (such as analysed by Said in his study of orientalism in French literature and culture), the self is unquestioningly privileged, the other exoticized outsider. In particularly ironic but illuminating Brazilian appropriations of European discourse, Russian culture is cast as counterpoint to Brazilian civilization – first, devalued as unintelligible, uncivilized marginal culture, then revalued as an alternative model of realism more adequate to a culture on European margins than a copied Brazilian naturalism. Gomide’s Da Estepe à Caatinga: O Romance Russo no Brasil (1887–1936) eludicates both contexts and consequences of these shifting perspectives. Both misreadings, mapping Russian literature as chaos and moral cultural model, demonstrate how eccentric constructions of self and other are partly mediated by European, particularly French, translations and criticism. In scholarship spanning the twentieth century, Meyer, Pinheiro de Lemos and Schwarz offer corrective approximations between Brazilian and Russian literature and culture, paradoxically based on contradictory reappraisals of literary texts. The eccentric city and eccentric culture conceive of themselves as the simultaneous locus of civilization and barbarity, self and otherness – contradictions inherent in cultural dislocations and doubling. The eccentric city is always a ‘copy’ and revision, modern in its peculiar self-consciousness and in the anxiety regarding its originality and authority. That is, the concentric city also declares its authority in the eccentric city, and that authority is affirmed even as it is parodied. The authoritarian regime associated with eccentric colonial capitals such 74 Though they construct the ‘Petersburg text’ largely in opposition with Moscow, in other studies Toporov and Lotman trace Russian cultural formation involving dialogues between East and West.

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as Petersburg and Rio is also threatened by their marginocentricity. Eccentric fictions’ dislocations of authorship and displacement of generic boundaries reflect the threat also always present to eccentric authority. Having repudiated or arbitrarily reconfigured the past, replacing cultural capital by literally re-placing capitals on vulnerable margins, eccentric cities are open to revision and replacement. In contrast, while the concentric city may redefine its dimensions defensively by excluding other cultures as well as offensively by expanding cultural territory, revising boundaries and rebuilding within its walls, its authority is disputed at the core. One administration may uproot another, but establishes itself on the same ground, often reappropriating ancient markers of authority. Unearthed monuments serve as navigational markers in an uncertain future. The concentric city’s horizons are historical. That is, while the development of cities such as Paris involves spatial expansion (as well as contraction, more of cultural territory and domain than literal urban terrain), the axis more critical to concentric representation and self-realization is temporal – whether marked by continuity or discontinuity. This may be exemplified by the embodied representation of the city. The modern concentric city may be imagined as marred by dismemberment or decay, marked by decadence and disintegration; but its authority depends on age and creativity on capacity for memory. Co-opted authority involves coming of age, confronting the past. The concentric city (whether Paris, Moscow or London) is also typically cast in terms of the female body. Across its long literary tradition, Paris is variously reconfigured as saintly and desecrated, virginal and maternal site (images conflated in Hugo’s Notre Dame), redressed as cultivated and cultured woman (as in Balzac’s and Proust’s stratified salons), repositioned as prostituted beauty (throughout Balzac’s and Zola’s fictions) and reimagined as fugitive figure or unfertile, senile and stumbling (unattainable passante and petite vieille in Baudelaire’s poetry). This feminine character is inscribed with monumental authority in the medieval cathedral, with more mobility and marginal anxiety in depictions of modern metro, tramways and passages. Public conveyance and sites of encounter, linking centre and margin, high and low society, proliferating tramlines and passages mapped by Benjamin evoke those more ambivalent promiscuous figurations of political and industrial revolution such as the prostitute crowned during the revolutions of 1848 in Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale or Zola’s elevated and then debased Nana, both representing an uncertain social and historical flux.

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They more closely approximate the open lines that define eccentric cities, particularly as they function as points of cross-cultural contact. Yet these places are still imagined as cultural repositories. The panoramas painted in the passages place Paris at centre. These are points of origin for fashion and ideology. Both embodiment of the city and notions of origins and originality begin to be challenged by modernist representations of a cityscape crossed by bisexual, gay and lesbian figures. Yet these bodies are uncovered in the underground and on the outskirts of the city in Proust’s novel. On the cityscape, the representation of the city in terms of the phallic Eiffel tower is descried by contemporaries not only as architectural aberration, but as a kind of mythical travesty or transgendering. The emblematic tower is recast in such fictions as Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro when mounted by the savvy Zazie (outsider at home in the cityscape, a gamine replacing Hugo’s gamin, engendered not by the city itself but by an idea of the city, yet capable of negotiating its labyrinthine streets and speech) as well as her feminized, cross-dressing uncle (who misreads most monuments in the city, as a measure of cultural forgetting). In Queneau’s Zazie, as in Proust’s Recherche, the métro functions as core point of reference for cultural dialogue, even though it is never actually visited. Evacuated underground and deferred referent in Queneau’s text, where everything rises to the surface of the city, the métro is travestied underground in Proust’s modernist text, transgendered womb, fostering a kind of eccentric aesthetic rebirth through its critical inversions, though the narrator surfaces again into an urban space and urbane consciousness defined more by discontinuities and doubling in concentric memory. In Jacques Réda’s post-modern Le Citadin: chronique, the métro becomes the locus of more ex-centric cultural memory, through ruminations drawing into the city’s core trajectories travelled on its outskirts (banlieue), spaces made central to Réda’s re-mapping of Paris in works ranging from Hors les murs: poèmes to Les Ruines de Paris, La Liberté des rues, and Accidents de la circulation – poetic and prosaic expressions that enlarge not only the surface of the city, but most essentially its cultural memory. Modernist works by Breton to post-colonial works, especially by immigrant writers such as Sebbar and Boudjedra, recast both body and boundaries of the city through immigrant figures, reaching not only into present margins but through their recoloured, re-accented, reconfigured present into distant pasts, to retrace speech and scars on the surface of the city. Yet such re-mappings revisit, even as they critically respond to literary and other

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Figure 1  opposite Olivier Truschet & German Hoyau. Plan dit de Bâle. 1552.

artistic (cartographic and lithographic, photographic and cinematic) representations of Paris as concentric capital, centre and condenser of empire. Ex-centric re-mapping is haunted by both concentric and eccentric perspectives. These perspectives may be differentiated partly in terms of depth and horizons. The early modern ‘Plan dit de Bâle’ (1552, Figure 1) and ‘Plan dit de Braun’ (1572) prototypically take a bird’s eye view that registers both concentric and layered construction. Sketched in three dimensions, these maps display not only urban breadth, but verticality, compounded by a fourth verbal dimension. Reading Bâle’s map in Le Dessus des cartes, Picon points out how the city has piled up (‘La ville s’est développée sur elle-même’), with narrow, elongated houses pressed together along streets whose names have also been impressed and compressed into this increasingly dense space. At the same time the city spills outside city walls (‘l’agglomération déborde hors des murs’), with organic growth around religious establishments.75 While they seem to offer a single view, these early modern maps bend the plane, shifting perspective near its upper and lower edges to offer a panoramic perspective that places the city at the centre of a territory whose horizon presses against and pushes beyond the limits of the map. Paris lies at the centre of the globe and reaches as far as the eye can see. Both flux and control are demarked by the Seine that flows through the centre of the city, feeding the city’s burgeoning body, life-blood linking it to its offspring (cité mer, cité mère). Many maps offer visual grounds for the literary representation of the city as a womb. Even in more technical, fully modern delineations of the expanding city mapped under Alphand’s direction in 1878, we get a sense of the city linked to its embryonic environs by a sort of umbilical cord. In centuries of maps, we read the city’s ageing as well as branching out, interior intensification and peripheral new growth, repetitions and ramifications, such as we read time and trauma within a tree trunk’s rings. But the organic growth of the city as well as its vertical orientation are more evident in the earlier maps, more poetically framed: If we are given Paris’s ‘true natural portrait’ (‘Icy est le vray pourtraict naturel de la ville, cité, université et faubourgs de Paris …’) in the ‘Plan de Bâle’, Merian’s 75 Antoine Picon, Le Dessus des cartes (Paris: Picard, 1999), 36.

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Figure 2  opposite Matthaüs Merian. Detail from Le Plan de la Ville, Cité, Université et Faubourgs de Paris avec la description de son antiquité et singularités. 1615.

seventeenth-century map (Figure 2) gives us a city turned further on its horizontal axis to reveal more of its building up as well as building out. This revised ‘Plan de la Ville, Cité, Université et Faubourgs de Paris’ denotes Paris past and present, explicitly ‘describing’ its ‘antiquities’ and ‘singularities’, demarking its walls and monuments in greater relief. The city’s expanding enceinte stretches towards the horizon, again pushed to the upper edges of the map; while at its centre the Île de la Cité is moored vessel seemingly orienting rather than oriented by the compass at the map’s lower edge, dictating authority much as the historical faces and hierarchically arranged fashions framing the map. Such figurative framing and historical relief is commonplace in the cartographic representation of concentric cities such as Paris and London, and mirrored by both embedded and panoramic lithographs, paintings and photographs, which emphasize the city’s verticality. This is also the primary dimension of Dickens’s and Hugo’s literary historical surveys of literal urban strata, layered speech, architectural styles and social revolutions. Such verticality can be read in the socio-economic differentiation described floor by floor in Madame Vauquer’s pension in the opening scenes of Balzac’s Père Goriot, where social rupture is also registered through the historical collision of semiospheres within the city – socially circumscribed salons, streets, and sections of the city, each marked by discrete speech genres, whose intercourse results in a slightly shifting centre. Eccentric challenges to central authority, in both Hugo’s and Balzac’s fictions, are represented outside Paris’s walls, but filter into the city through its layered construction – through the argot, alienated consciousness, and cultural detritus concentrated in Hugo’s sewer, a subtext as unsettling as Proust’s later métro and memory, and a space similarly mapped as part of a metatextual retracing of narrative construction. In Hugo’s notebooks we find numerous sketches not only of his characters (changing over time), but of the changing cityscape: architectural details, shifting city streets and neighbourhoods. He traces his characters’ trajectories on both surface maps and on the ‘Statistique des égouts de la ville de Paris’ (Figure 3), tracing past and potential in underworlds and undergrounds. In contrast to Hugo’s memoried reorientations of citytext, invested

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Figure 3  Victor Hugo. Annotated Statistique des égouts de la ville de Paris, from the notebooks for Notre Dame de Paris.

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Figure 4  Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret). Pages 38–9 from Destin de Paris, avec des illustrations de l’auteur. 1941.

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in disorderly as well as monumental reconstruction, modern rebuilders such as Alphand raze unseemly and unsanitary sections of the city, seeking to open up central avenues for circulation within a labyrinthine metropolis. Yet prescribed uniformity preserves monumental markers of the past and uncovers prosaic traces as it exposes urban layers. It creates openings to the past as much as passages in the present. Recent architectural revisions of the city such as Le Corbusier’s Le Destin de Paris reprise concentric images, though they may emphasize crosscuts as well as cross-cultural horizons. In paired sketches (Figure 4), we see Paris again as organic site with the Seine as life-blood, but also as closed concentric circle; with the second figure, Le Corbusier calls for an opening up of the centre with the extension of ancient radiating roads, coursing through the urban core rather than halted at the periphery. Echoing his appeal at the top of the preceding page for an urban garden or green city, he recasts the city as an organism, called to rise and live. Both invocation and the evocation of earlier traces turn to the past to enliven the present. The concentric metropolis is represented as necropolis, tomb as well as womb; the city’s past, however decayed or decadent, is fertile ground. In contrast, literal and literary mappings of eccentric cities often cast them as fatal constructs, unnatural cities, not only unrooted in their immediate territory, but pitted against a natural landscape that resists cultivation. Marginal progeny of Russian and Portuguese motherlands, the eccentric cities of St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro are typically represented as masculine and militant. Like their framers, they are configured as conquerors and usurpers, concomitantly potent and impotent or filicidal. Taking his cue from earlier writers – i.e., in an already copied but also creatively re-cast text – Gogol parodically juxtaposes Moscow and Petersburg as mother and son, Зато какая дичь между матушкую и сынком! Что это за виды, что это за природа! … Она ещё до сих пор русская борода, а он уже аккуратый немец. Как раскинулась, как расширалась старая Москва! Какая она нечесанная! Как сдвинулся, как вытянулся в струнку щеголь Петербург!76 76 Gogol, «Петербургские записки 1836ого года», 177. Gogol’s prose here is highly colloquial: the term дичь suggests wilds or wilderness but also nonsense; the terms for mother and son, endearing diminutives, are also potentially demeaning. His language is repetitive and exaggerative. The exclamatory interrogation ‘Что это за’ might be translated ‘what in the world can we make of …’; each city/character’s look or nature employs terms that have physical and psychological implications [вид, природа].

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(But then what a wilderness stretches between mama and her baby boy! What is this look they each have, what is their nature! … Even now, she wears a Russian beard, but he’s a proper German. How old Moscow has spread out, how she has broadened! How dishevelled she is! How that fop Petersburg has got on, how he has stretched out!)

Gogol’s colloquial term дичь suggests wilderness but also nonsense. His diminutive terms for mother and son are endearing, but potentially demeaning. His language is repetitive and exaggerative. The exclamatory interrogation ‘Что это за’ might be translated ‘what in the world can we make’ of … The contrastive look [вид] and nature [природа] of these cities implies physical and psychological aspects. At the turn of the century, Rio is similarly imagined by Barros as ‘a city dynamic in everything’ in comparison to which, ‘Lisbon, Rome, even Paris are like the old women from the time of the pavana who would stand on tiptoe and sway instead of walking.77 In contrast to these unseemly skirted cities, Rio stretches out, elegant, growing ‘by extension’.78 Gogol sardonically denotes the extremity and dandification of eccentric culture in terms of wild tempo and terrain in his ‘Petersburg Notes for 1836’, opening with the rhetorical question, ‘… And by the way, where was this Russian capital tossed – on the edge of the earth!’79 The ellipses here are Gogol’s, structuring his commentary as digressive continuation of implicit dialogue, beginning with a critical turn framed as an aside. His capital is perversely conceived by ‘strange Russian’ interest in the cold and perversely inclined to alien acculturation. In anticipation of Baudelaire’s Parisian poet and in different dress, Gogol imagines Petersburg as ‘fop’ or ‘dandy’, imposing but also poseur, looking in the mirror that are Petersburg’s reflective surfaces (its canals, to be sure, but also its gilded buildings, glittering shops, crowded streets, etc., all imitative, in grand style and grotesque proportion).80 Dostoevsky will turn the reflective dreamscape into potent nightmare; Bely, transform that phantasmagoria into reality; and well into the twentieth century, Brodsky will argue still that during Petersburg’s white nights ‘it’s hard to fall asleep, because it’s too light and because any dream will be inferior to this reality. Where a man doesn’t cast a 77 João de Barros (1881–1960), ‘Impressões do Rio’, in Coelho (ed.), O Rio de Janeiro na Literatura Portuguesa, 271, my translation. 78 Ibid., 271. 79 N. V. Gogol, «Петербургские записки 1836ого года» (1837), 177, my translation. 80 Ibid., 177–8.

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shadow, like water’.81 Both ‘original’ and ‘renamed’ cities are marked by a strange insubstantiality and dissolution, even in their most concrete aspects, because these are reflections. The reflective nature of the city is also reflexive and refractory (as embodied by Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin or Turgenev’s Rudin, like Machado de Assis’s Brás Cubas).82 As he poses, the Petersburg dandy is as self-aware and ambivalently playful, albeit more alienated son than that malandro of Brazilian fiction.83 Both marginocentric city’s and citytext’s promiscuous consorting with other cultures, consistent digression and deviance threatens centralized authority and coherent identity. Like the concentric capital, the eccentric city may construct and maintain a memoried, monumental core (partly expressed as canonical literature), but both literal and literary monuments are inherently ambivalent, mobile fixtures on a landscape full of doubles. As Toporov points out in his analysis of Petersburg’s literary text, urban models inform narrative consciousnesses rooted in them, even as the narratives reform the myths: authors, like their characters, are bound by the city to speak its particular truths.84 The digressions, displacements, schizophrenic doubling and paranoid dialogue in Petersburg and Rio texts reflect the cities’ construction as eccentric, threshold ports, threatened by and threatening both Europe and the vast wilderness interiors on the verge of which they were constructed. The eccentric narrators in the texts that claim to speak for the city express in both substance and style of writing conditioned by the spatial dimensions of imperialism and colonialism what Toporov describes as the modern conflict between belonging and alienation, ordered rational culture and immitigable irrational nature, displaced memory and prophetic potential in an apocalyptic Petersburg text. Yet eccentric writers, as early as Gogol and Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis, recognize in the literature of very distant margins reflections of their respective cultural and personal ‘anxieties of influence’.85 81 Joseph Brodsky, ‘A Guide to a Renamed City’, Less than One (New York: Farrar et al., 1986), 94. 82 See Kelly, Toward Another Shore, 11, 47–51. 83 See John Gledson (ed.), Schwarz’s Master on the Periphery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, [2001]), xiv–xv. 84 Toporov, ‘Петербург и Петербургский текст…’, 16, 20. 85 Orlando Figes offers an incisive summary of anxieties informing modern Russian literature as expressed by Herzen and Chadaev, in Natasha’s Dance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 63. In his introduction to his English translation of Schwarz’s A Master on the Periphery, Gledson retraces Schwarz’s delineation of similar anxieties

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Gogol is among the first Russian writers to note the similarities between the texture of Petersburg and of new cities in the colonial Americas. These are cities cast onto ‘new shores’, on the edges of vast interiors with ages not recognized by the cultures for which they are entry points. They are cities literally dictated into being by conquering visionaries, planners both original and, because their visions are derivative (displacing European ideas and ideals), of questionable originality. In a letter full of assertions that signal what had already become commonplaces in the mythologization of Petersburg, after first contrasting the city with Moscow (as Brazilian writers contrast Rio with Lisbon), Gogol reaches abroad to define the arbitrary city that Dostoevsky would call the most abstract city in the world: ‘Petersburg is “masculine”’, he writes, qualifying the claim in terms of a military orderliness and mercantile interest, ‘German in its passion for order, routine and cleanliness, obsessed with money and business, intellectually insignificant, socially fragmented, and essentially non-Russian’. He defines its non-Russianness with an analogy to an urban culture that might belong to Rio or New York: There is something about it that resembles a European colony in America: the same dearth of deep-rooted national characteristics, and the same admixture of foreign elements that has not yet amalgamated into a solid mass. It contains just as many different layers of society as there are nations. These societies are completely separate: aristocrats, civil servants, artisans, Englishmen, Germans, merchants – all comprise completely different circles, which rarely mingle and which live and enjoy themselves largely in ways that are invisible to the others. And if you look more closely, you see that each of these classes is composed of many other small circles that do not mix either.86

Here class differences are collapsed into cross-cultural distinctions, mapped in terms of discrete circles and circulation on a single plane. The ‘circularity’ of the model is wholly distinct from that of the concentric city, with its historically layered spheres and revolutionary upheaval. Yet this disconnected, non-Russian Petersburg concentrates all of Gogol’s expressed through a literary reflexivity in Alencar’s work, made more productive in that of Machado de Assis. Cf. Coutinho, Conceito de literatura brasileira, 259. 86 Gogol notes the foreign quality of the city in his correspondence (X, 139) as well as in this article of 1837 («Петербургские записки», GPSS, VIII, 177–80). On Dostoevsky’s similar characterization of the city as masculine, unnatural, perverse, pathological and ailing, see Donald Fanger’s discussion of Dostoevsky’s feuilletons in Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 135–7, 141–51.

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Russia. The ‘colonial’ aspect of Petersburg is defined paradoxically, both in terms of planned, coherent form (based on a foreign model) and of chaos, cacophony, or infinitely differentiated multiplicity (because of the multiplication of models incompatible both with each other and with this place). Gogol’s is not exactly the hybrid, organically evolving, grafted or fascicular model of culture imagined by post-colonial theorists. Intercourse between displaced cultural ‘circles’ is ‘rare’ and problematized by mutual invisibility or untranslatability. Different societies evolve in this eccentric context, but they retain their difference from each other and, further, internally differentiate or fragment. An alienation defined by alignment with foreign ideas marks some of Dostoevsky’s characters as schizophrenic (voicing contradictory ideas through a divided personality), but also drives several to suicide, which both Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment and Kirilov in Demons speak of in terms of travel to the Americas. Subsequent writers, ranging from the satirists Ilf and Petrov to the poet and essayist Brodsky compare Petersburg’s ‘alienated’ cultural consciousness (‘if we can speak of some general concept, or tonality … of Petersburg culture’) and literature (marked by ‘the awareness that it is all being written from the edge of the earth’87) directly to that of Rio. Brodsky echoes Gogol in reverse, eyeing Rio through the lens of Petersburg, rather than Petersburg in light of American colonial cities, when he claims that the city is not only ‘abstract’ and incapable of ‘generating many memories’, but ‘biological neutrality incarnate’, its facades and streets incapable of evoking ‘associations’, ‘with the exception perhaps of the edifice hulking over the passenger pier, resembling simultaneously St. Isaac’s Cathedral and Washington’s Capitol’. Characterizing Rio’s present ‘intensity, density, diversity’ without reference to its colonial past – the city, like its vegetation ‘neither corresponds to nor echoes any species a European is used to’ – Brodsky sees it in terms of escape, ‘a total flight from the known reality into pure geometry’, an evasion of the past of ‘a former Nazi’ for whom ‘everything is behind, just a blinking green light ahead’. What the city remembers (its copied architecture) raises questions of authenticity. As site of ‘pure geometry’, Rio represents an ahistorical model of authority, aligned with utopian vision, irresponsible and unethical in its forgetting. But we may read Brodsky, speaking of 87 Thus Brodsky describes Petersburg in a conversation with Volkov (reported in St. Petersburg, 421, cited in Kelly, Toward Another Shore, 214). Joseph Brodsky similarly characterizes Petersburg in ‘A Guide to a Renamed City’ in Less than One and Rio in ‘After a Journey …’, in On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Farrar et al., 1995).

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modern Rio, as descrying his own ‘renamed’ city, embedding in this other landscape his own sense of cultural, historical crisis – rooted in Petersburg’s ‘originally’ ‘copied’ construction and displaced cultural memory, its peculiar ‘way of translation and transmission of memory’ through the transposition of alien forms rendered nearly unrecognizable in a Soviet context.88 In this strange figure of fleeing Nazi, rather than wandering Jew, he may offer a reflection of earlier reflections on the psychological proximity and shared ambivalence of prisoner and guard in Soviet Petersburg, similarly homeless in reduced space, under a red flag. The blurring of boundaries and the rippling of lines into strange reflections is a constant in representations of Petersburg and Rio. Looking from Rio in the direction of Petersburg, Machado de Assis would be among the first to refer to Russian literary and socio-political upheaval as a way of speaking of Brazilian cultural construction and crises. In his seminal study of Machado de Assis’s work as fundamental to Brazilian literature and culture, Roberto Schwarz suggestively sketches some of the similarities between contexts. Comparing the development of Brazilian and Russian cultural consciousness in his essay ‘Ideias fora do lugar’ [‘Ideas out of Place’], Schwarz describes the space of the eccentric city or colonial culture in terms of displaced language and ideas, distended and distorted horizons, ill-fitting clothing, clowning and mania, dialogue between lunatics, parody and creativity. He finds in early eccentric literature a diminished capacity for the kind of ‘serious’ self-critical reflection characteristic of modern concentric cultures. Instead, in the eccentric context, there is a kind of focus on the immediate that renders the miniscule in exaggerated proportions and a displacement of the horizon that renders relative any defining boundaries. Everything is copied in the eccentric context to the degree that it all becomes laughable: Rather than against a defined horizon, [European ideas in Brazilian culture or literature] were appearing against a vaster background that rendered them relative: the goings and comings of arbitrariness and favour. Their universal intentions were shaken at the base. Thus, what in Europe might have been a true facet of criticism, among us could be the singular disbelief of any fool, for whom utilitarianism, egoism, formalism and whatever it might be, represent[ed] one suit among others, very much in vogue but unnecessarily tight. We are seeing that this social ground is of consequence for the history of culture: a complex gravitation, in which the hegemonic ideology of the West cuts a derisory figure, of an obsession 88 Svetlana Boym, ‘Estrangement as a Lifestyle’, Poetics Today 17:4 (Winter 1996), 523.

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Eccentricity and modernity among obsessions [mania89] … Something, comparable, perhaps, to what was going on in Russian literature.90

Schwarz argues that Brazil’s and Russia’s similarly delayed importation of Western ideas brought into dialogic contact ideas that in the West developed dialectically. The dislocation and delay, pretention and pathological obsession with relation to Western ideas and ideologies result in a more complex socio-cultural middle ground, represented in both the substance and structure of work that subverts the standard Western ‘bourgeois’ novel. Westernizing figures become lunatics, thieves, opportunists, etc.91 Without exploring in great detail points of contact between particular Brazilian and Russian literary works, he nevertheless draws the general conclusion, on the basis of a common kind of self-consciousness and anxiety permeating these two cultures’ recognized masterpieces, that eccentric cultures are uniquely capable of condensing world history: The social reasons for the similarity are self-evident. In Russia, too, modernization dissolved [literally, became lost] in the immensity of the territory and of social inertia, clashing with civil intuition and its remains – a clash experienced as inferiority and national shame by many, without losing its capacity to serve as criteria for others to measure the breakdown [or madness, delirium, digression (desvario)92] of the progressivism and individualism that the West imposed and imposes on the world. In the exacerbation of this conflict, in which progress is a disaster and delay a matter of shame, lies one of the profound roots of Russian literature. Without forcing too far an unequal comparison, there is in Machado … a similar vein, something of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, Chekhov and perhaps of others also … In sum, the very disqualification of thought among us, that we felt so bitterly, and that still asphyxiates our twentiethcentury scholarship, was a point [in the sense of a sharp extremity (uma ponta)], a neuralgic point [in the sense of condensation or an endpoint or period in a sentence (um ponto nevrálgico)] through which world history passes and reveals itself.93 89 Or, ‘of an air put on among airs’: the Portuguese term mania implies something put-on, an air, mask or habit that is pretentious, but also, as the term mania in English suggests, obsessive. The implicit link between pathology and copying is especially relevant. 90 Schwarz, ‘As idéias fora do lugar’, Ao Vencedor as Batatas 27, my translation. 91 Ibid., 27–8. 92 The Portuguese term desvario also defines madness or delirium in spatial terms of digression or getting off track. 93 Ibid., 28–9.

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Engaging in verbal play like that of Gogol’s narrators and Machado de Assis’s Brás Cubas (who focus on bodily as well as geographical extremities to delineate an eccentric perpective), Schwarz thus aligns Russian and Brazilian literature in spatial terms. They are cultures defined by their extremity on a socio-geographical plane, by their internal concentration of extremes and by their functioning in relation to Western culture like a verb or punctuation mark at the end of a sentence that condenses and redefines its parameters, dynamic and meaning. Schwarz later draws a line between Russia’s and Brazil’s literary perspectives related to the ‘linha “malandra”’ (a rogue or roguish line) that Antônio Cândido traces in Brazilian literature. The eccentric line is roguish in its play with origins and unnatural alliances – Brás Cubas’s lineage is falsified, Akaky Akakievich’s mere copy, and so forth. It roguishly tends towards not only literary, but social deviance and political dissent. As a ‘line’ drawn on a geo-cultural plane, it represents the city as a threshold, tensed between multiple claims. There are no stable, core or ‘direct lines’ of literary or institutional development, but rather competing and contradictory socio-historical and cultural lines so densely and dynamically interwoven that one incisive and imaginative Russian cultural theorist and historian attempts to model an adequate theory on ‘some marvelous disco machine’ allowing us to see ‘various points on the model all rotating about each other’ as variant ‘literary institutions permit the literary process to do’.94 With Mills Todd’s model we have something like Lotman’s semiosphere, though reduced to mechanically turning lines of light emanating from a fixed refractive, spinning sphere, excluding (unless one imagines a room filled with such disco balls) the multiple external spheres with which eccentric cultural projections always come in contact. But in Mills Todd’s actual cultural analysis, ‘the tempo, force, and relative importance of all types of interaction [within and among the coordinates of coexisting literary institutionalizations] vary, and all respond to broader changes in society as a whole’. Mills Todd elucidates radiating ‘conflicts among entire complexes of literary institutions during the early nineteenth century’, including ‘incipient professionalism’, a ‘patronage system’, and a ‘salon system’,95 all of these adopted and adapted forms. Similarly, the eccentric 94 Remarks by Mills Todd, reported by Morson in Literature and History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 127. 95 Ibid.

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capital is strangely centrifugal on a geographical plane.96 Constructed along carefully planned, controlled, constrained lines intended to impose order on unruly and interrupted terrain identified alternatively as an ‘edge’ and a ‘void’, an ‘open portal’ and a ‘wilderness’, eccentric cities such as Petersburg and Rio tend towards apparent ‘formlessness’ or eclectic form. They strain with an unequal and constantly shifting force in different directions. Consequently, the centripetal force associated with authority, drawing diverse elements into the urban centre in order to control and dictate, is undercut. The other, or rather multiple others, exercise authority in eccentric capitals, which internalizes this outsideness. The eccentric city and citytext condenses world history by representing an unresolved complex of intersecting historical ideas, which cannot be contained, absorbed or homogenized as in concentric counterparts, with relatively stable core, able to anchor almost any line to some layer of its own cultural memory. If the eccentric city is also imagined as ‘atom’, like Paris as most famously memorialized by Hugo,97 it is plurally so – involving atoms in process of accelerated fusion. Such points of encounter are explosive, as the clash of cultures in Bely’s pre-atomic Petersburg is a ticking bomb, or in the sense explored by Lotman’s ‘ruptures’ and semiospheric collisions. The ideological, political, cultural lines that run through the eccentric city fuse through force, often mechanically or explosively, rather than organically (rendering the organic model/term ‘hybridity’ somewhat problematic). Or they resemble that exceptional organic rhizomatic entity imagined by Deleuze and Guattari, no longer defined by ‘lines of articulation or segmentation, strata and territories’ (concentric measures of meaning), but rather by ‘lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification’.98 In eccentric cultures we find a kind of narrative and theory whose unity is paradoxically defined not by self-identity, continuity or consonance, but by dissonance, dialogue, discontinuity and the continuous dynamic of contradiction. However, the dialogism inherent in eccentric cultures not only disrupts and dismantles, but also exposes an already disrupted dialectic development in European literature, culture and ideology. Extending Toporov’s reading of Petersburg authors and heroes framed by the city, we may note how the urbane narrators in works ranging from Hugo’s 96 See Belinsky, ‘Петербург и Москва’. 97 In Notre-Dame de Paris and in his ‘Préface’ to Paris-Guide. 98 See Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

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Notre Dame de Paris and Le Dernier jour d’un condamné, Nerval’s Aurélia and Baudelaire’s prose poems to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Valéry’s Monsieur Teste and Breton’s Nadja are all in some sense gamins de Paris, deftly but also often fatally navigating urban layers and labyrinth, negotiating social difference and revolutionary upheaval, like Hugo’s Gavroche. Though the streets and social spheres retraced in these works differ, the realization of these narratives similarly depends on a vertical compression (mythical, historical, social, linguistic) linked with the recycling and remembering through which Paris is continually reconstructed. The memory of Hugo’s far more time-constrained condamné is more fragmentary in its personal dimensions than that of Proust’s sentenced narrator, ultimately registered in layered speech genres, scant signatures, ellipses. Marcel’s personal recollection, on the other hand, is monumental and mythical in its proportions. Even while fragmentary and breathless, it recuperates meaning across greater gaps, and also in far greater gasps. Yet these Paris narratives are both marked by a genuinely memoried mode of narration against which the fictions of more phantasmal cities St. Petersburg and Rio projected on the periphery define themselves, not only by fragmenting but falsifying memory and tending towards madness. This dissembling and deviation from romantic realist conventions on the part of Petersburg and Rio writers such as Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis leads to accusations of deformed fiction (though theirs are recognized as magnificently failed copies, revealing the particularities as well as limits of marginal cultures); or it constructs a new framework for fictional authority and authenticity, while deconstructing and delimiting Eurocentric fictional frames. The relation of different cities and citytexts is, of course, complex, irreducible to any simple binary contrast or study of influence. Insofar as they (cor)respond to European models, Petersburg’s and Rio’s urban designs and development are derivative and, like the modern Russian or Brazilian novel, might be registered as colonial progeny of the European citytext – especially mestiço or mongrel gamin de Paris, self-consciously playful bastard brother of the romantic realism developed in the Paris text. This finds expression in Russian and Brazilian critics’ continual concern with delay and difference in the development of a modern national literature, as in expressly ‘modernist’ writers’ counterdefinitions in terms of European manifestos. Yet the modernist novel, in its Euro-centric variants, is also a gamin strangely fathered by outsider and usurper – transnational, translated and translingual texts

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disseminated in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. By the end of the twentieth century, post-colonial French fiction is fully malandro, mestiço, marked by mongrel marginal discourse and multicultural even in its memoried range. Eccentric narratives sire the concentric modernist texts that serve as their own models, in literary and theoretical terms – so that the paternity and progeny of texts is as uncertain as that of Joyce’s Shakespeare according to the digressive recalculations of Stephen Dedalus, another eccentric who famously employs silence, displacement and duplicity in defense of free expression. Reframing the modernist sentence: concentric memory, eccentric madness and dialogism During the interlude between the publication of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), Zamiatin wrote, ‘Real literature can exist only where it is made not by industrious and dependable clerks, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics.’99 His dystopian novel Мы [We] (1921), written with an emerging totalitarian society in view, dramatizes the consequences for the Soviet writer who dissents. Yet the novel’s imaginary future city, with its transparencies obscured by fog settling in its streets and by the ‘fog’ of self-consciousness that afflicts the hero as he writes, also represents another refraction of imperial Petersburg. Utopian in its conception, its reflective, ordered surfaces hover on the edge of and over chaos. Its regimented hours and social circuits are cast through digressive, deviant and ultimately pathologically diagnosed consciousness. Thus, Zamiatin’s novel draws into the domain of futuristic fiction, which would constitute one among several satirical lines in a Soviet future, that eccentricity and eccentric city delineated in Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s similarly dystopian and aesthetically deviant fictions. Zamiatin’s narrating hero shares the disquieting perspective of the dubiously reliable clerk, digressing on Petersburg’s streets and retired to the madhouse or the underground. In this sense, We represents the continuation of a strain of Russian literature that never represented what Woolf terms the ‘real’ from the vantage point of conventional copiers – i.e., Woolf’s disparaged ‘industrious and dependable clerks’100 – but rather defined ‘real literature’ by erring 99 Сочинения IV.255, cited and trans. in Kelly, Toward Another Shore, 210. 100 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The English Modernist Reader (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 110.

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in the city and on the page. Zamiatin only registers the increasingly eccentric position of the real Russian writer, for whom censorship is not just a matter of the controlled literary execution descried by the hack writer of Dostoevsky’s ‘Bobok’, but of literal execution. When Russian and Brazilian writers as various as Zamiatin, Olesha, Bely, Bitov, Bulgakov, Sokolov, Petrushevskaya and Pelevin, Andrade, Lispector, Lins, Veríssimo and Sant-Anna represent the writer as mad, they extend a Dostoevskian underground into domains at once more everyday and more extreme in their literal and literary dimensions. The eccentricity and ex-centricity of fictions located in contested centres corresponds to a historical, political and cultural unravelling that results in more extreme (if not necessarily more fictively evocative) alienation than that represented by Akaky’s mumbling into coat buttons or Golyadkin’s scrambling after one lost. If an unravelling of the social fabric, resulting in an unravelling of individual and cultural subject, weaves through modernist fiction, only certain threads have been traced. In 1924 Virginia Woolf writes, ‘on or about December 1910 human nature changed.101 That date, marked by death of King Edward and the first post-impressionist exhibit in London and, more generally, by the industrial, social and political unrest leading up to the First World War indicates changes primarily in English and European consciousness, concentrically universalized. Critical moments in the modern unravelling and re-fabrication of Brazil or Russia are different: perhaps 1889, 1905, 1914 and 1917, years immediately following emancipation of serfs and slaves, marked by the establishment of a republic, war and more or less successful revolutions. Despite these different concentrations of political and cultural pressures on the writer, in her essay on ‘Modern Fiction’ of 1919, Woolf argues like Zamiatin, ‘if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose’ or, in other words, if he could write about the ‘real’ and write ‘real literature’, then there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown 101 Woolf, ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, in The English Modernist Reader (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986).

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Eccentricity and modernity and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?102

Thus, Woolf aligns modern writing, which comes ‘closer to life’,103 with negation of convention fashioned in the city. Rather than projecting an (im)possibility, Woolf might be retrospectively registering Brás Cubas’s deviant, digressive, admittedly drunken narrative style. Her vision has affinities with the ‘liberated language’ Mário de Andrade stakes out as the domain of real literature in his ‘Extremely Interesting Preface’ to Paulicéia Desvairada [Hallucinated City]: ‘subjective’, ‘hallucinatory’, ‘stumbling’, ‘slanted’, ‘ambiguous’, and ‘polyphonic’.104 More particularly, Woolf describes modern fiction in terms of a reality re-sewn in the ‘varying’, ‘unknown’, ‘uncircumscribed’, ‘aberrant’, and ‘complex’ fabric of consciousness, evoking the ‘patched’, clownish costume and unbuttoned prose, if not the ‘alien and external’ or mis-sized and mis-placed ideas, in which Schwarz finds nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brazilian and Russian literature similarly dressed. The pulsating ring of light Woolf imagines elucidating reality is not so different in effect from the distorting tropical glare in the Brazilian text or the Petersburg fog on the lamps of the Nevsky Prospekt, except that her fiction (as most British and French modernist fictions as well as most critical geographies of modernism) tend to look out from the centre of this light (from a consciousness such as Clarissa’s or Septimus’s, haunted by personal and historical memory in Mrs. Dalloway, crossing paths in central spaces in a concentric city), rather than from its edges (the vantage point of Gogol’s narrator when he distrusts Petersburg’s lamp posts, imagined from a critical distance as lit by the devil at the conclusion of ‘Nevsky Prospekt’) or from underground patches of darkness infiltered by distinct lights (as in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s undergrounds). But embracing Joyce’s eccentric writing as a universal model for the modern writer, Woolf argues, ‘let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’.105 While the incoherence in Joyce’s fiction reflects a more eccentric culture, it 102 Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The English Modernist Reader (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 108. 103 Ibid. 104 Mário de Andrade, Hallucinated City (1922) (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 5–18. 105 Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, 109.

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is closer to home. Reality in ‘modern fiction’ registers as a network of impressions – threads of light, loose threads, threadbare existence, irrationally strung; it is to be found ‘very likely in the dark places of psychology’.106 These threads are only apparently ‘disconnected and incoherent’ because there is, for Woolf, a historical ‘order’ and ‘pattern’ – or patterned disorder – that we can understand by observing this consciousness from within, if we manage to disregard every nonessential ‘mixture of the alien and external’. As Thacker notes, this interior pattern is registered by Woolf in relation to the city – in a ‘textual space’ that involves the interaction of spatial forms and social space in the literary text. Through the interplay of ‘interior and exterior space’, the ‘psychic speculations of a person walking a city street are superimposed upon the national spaces of a great imperial power’.107 If Woolf’s characters’ deambulations in the London landscape are fairly circumscribed, their circulation and contact in the city gives rise to wide-ranging digressions mediated by memory. Woolf’s fiction provides a corrective response to her claim in Jacob’s Room, ‘the streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted’,108 partly by recharting human passions mediated by cultural mapping. Yet Woolf turns to the Russian literary tradition as pioneering the turn into ‘unexpected places’ within consciousness, through ‘protesting’, often ‘despairing’, generically indeterminate and ultimately ‘inconclusive’ literary forms. Describing in more prosaic terms Bakhtin’s ‘unfinalizable’ polyphonic novel, she registers her sense in reading Russian fiction ‘that, if honestly examined, life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over’.109 To a Russian capacity to ‘suffer’ and seek to ‘understand’ this ‘hopeless interrogation’, Woolf counterposes an English instinct to ‘enjoy’ and ‘fight’ (recalling Sterne and Meredith).110 In an ironic twist, her own fiction veers towards suffering, while her reading of Russian fiction, mediated by such figures as de Vogüé, misses the mordant humour, satire and at times even an open guffaw resounding within the pathological suffering and note of ‘protest’ that Woolf attends to in Russian fiction, a laughter related to and relayed by such reflexive, self- as well as other-parodying eccentrics as Dostoevsky’s underground narrator. Such laughter resonates also 106 Ibid., 110. 107 Brooker and Thacker, Geographies of Modernism, 3–4. 108 Woolf, Jacob’s Room. 109 Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, 110–11. 110 Ibid., 111.

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in Machado de Assis’s fiction, echoing Sterne and Gogol. Yet Woolf aptly observes that the similar atomization of modern life is registered in a differently distraught pattern in British than in Russian cultural landscape and literary form. Like their Russian predecessors and contemporaries, British and French writers typically associated with modernism (Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, and Woolf; Proust, Gide and Breton, for instance) represent the writer as an eccentric, often suffering from physical or psychological ailments, and/or pursuing a mad muse (as in Breton’s Nadja). But this eccentricity differs from its Russian counterpart in a way elucidated by James’s famed formal characterization of Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s distended prose, digressing all over the map, both geographically and generically. Only transnational British modernists (writers such as Conrad and Rhys) register some of this eccentric range.111 The deviations of the concentric novel are generally more constrained, motivated by memory and its failures, contained within that biologically coherent and biographically contingent self, as degenerative and sociohistorically discontinuous as that subject may be. The mania explored by the fiction often involves historical haunting, trauma or lapse that give rise to revision of past and present cultural, literary and socio-political domains. This revision may enlarge cultural territory, but usually by tripping through memory, rather than by direct confrontation with or reorientation towards other cultures in the present. Proust’s narrator tripping over Paris cobblestones, confronting shadows from Venice and Combray on Paris streets and in its salons, provides one example of this. The only writer in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway serves as another, more ­ concentrated, embodiment of ruptured concentric cultural consciousness. Septimus’s much studied madness stems from historical and personal trauma and takes the form of a hallucinatory memory disorder.112 He composes fragmentary poetry, writes down on scraps of paper seemingly random words and phrases, and dictates his hallucinations to Reza, his alienated and alien (Italian) wife. Reza serves in a literal 111 See Brooker and Thacker, Geographies of Modernism. 112 Cf. Nancy Topping Bazin, ‘Bazin, ‘Postmortem Diagnosis of Virginia Woolf’s “Madness”: The Precarious Quest for Truth’; Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf ’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness; DeMeester, ‘Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway’; Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language; Kaup, Mad Intertextuality: Madness in Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing; Thomas, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Smith and Contemporary Perceptions of Shell Shock’.

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sense, as do the author and reader in the literary arena, at once as preserver of his writing and critic, salvaging scraps in order to define the distance between herself and Septimus, to obtain a diagnosis that might restore sanity and ‘real’ communication. The distance between Reza and Septimus has little to do with cultural differences, which would be critical in an eccentric narrative. Rather, it is measured by their discrete memories and the way that their memory shapes the present. Reza’s recourse to Italy and Romantic narrative are represented as nostalgic. In these characters, Woolf exemplifies Jameson’s distinction between a diachronic modernism and synchronic postmodernism.113 Divided between past and present selves like Septimus, Reza recalls a more idealized and nostalgically removed past, while his is nightmarishly present. For both, discrete distant wartime landscapes are absorbed and radiate within a London present. Septimus represents an extreme case of the kind of temporal schism suffered by many characters in Woolf’s novels. He is directly connected to other characters through their crossed paths in the city and discursive commonplaces. They read the same texts and each other as text. Yet not only common urban phrases, but also phases resonate in different consciousnesses. Woolf’s characters are essentially linked by pathological modes of memoried consciousness. The disorientation suffered by all of Woolf’s characters in London is more temporally disrupted than that explored by Bely in Petersburg, Kafka in Prague, Joyce in Dublin or Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto in Rio. The central characters in Joyce’s Ulysses and Dubliners, in Kafka’s Trial and tales such as ‘The Judgment’ and ‘Description of a Struggle’ are displaced or divided between places, into which different times are collapsed. They embody the forms of doubleness Deleuze and Guattari recognize in their study of Kafka’s work as emblematic of ‘minor literatures’ – involving paradoxes, stemming from anachronism, delay, displacement in the present, more than discontinuities between present and past.114 In contrast, Woolf’s Septimus and Clarissa must reconcile present self with past self, present with past other, incommensurate past potential and present realization. Thus Septimus, though he sees that there is only a tree before him, also sees the trenches and 113 See Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). 114 See Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), Chapter 3: ‘What is a Minor Literature?’

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Evans (who should be dead) behind it; and Clarissa, re-encountering Peter, tries to recover the distance between them not in terms of his return from India (in terms of colonial displacements that would be central to the eccentric text), but in terms of his return from the past, from Bourton. Peter provides a kind of eccentric consciousness in the text (a little like Brás Cubas in Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs, half-aware, half-unwittingly fleshing out a self-directed critique of a colonial past as displaced figure of colonial power). But Peter’s is a relatively marginalized consciousness or minor strain in the polyphonic narrative construction. Clarissa’s and Septimus’s more central incapacity to read the present except as incoherent in relation to the past results in isolation for both characters. The only alternative to isolation and irremediable misunderstanding available to the clinically diagnosed Septimus is suicide. His death has the authorizing function that it frequently has in the concentric novel (forcing a circling back to the beginning or writing of the novel), even in this novel so seemingly de-centred, shifting between consciousnesses. Clarissa, whose ambivalent consciousness frames the novel, is offered an alternative to her own death sentence (and a death sentence on a culture) in recognizing Septimus’s death, news of which circulates at her party. Her realization depends less on his being ‘other’ than it does on his life, like hers, now past and in no direct way connected to her own past, mediating insight into an open-ended, still resonating, undissolved totality in terms of which she can make sense of the disconcerted and fugitive time of her own life, marked by Big Ben’s always resounding and ‘dissolving’ ‘leaden circles’.115 Time is the critical aspect of this ghostly sort of identification with the other. Or, if we think in terms of the semiosphere, the dominant cultural axis on which Woolf’s urban novel and urbane consciousness within it revolve, as they turn through the city, is temporal, especially historical. The city and the novel pulse, expand, contract and revolve around a temporalized self (a heartbeat and a history) and around the ‘suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they say, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable’.116 Though time is ‘irrevocable’ – life terminated by death and words disintegrating, like ‘leaden circles dissolv[ing] in 115 The motif, which repeats throughout Mrs. Dalloway, is first mentioned on the second page of the Everyman’s Library edition (New York, 1992). 116 Ibid.

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the air’ – it leaves traces, which register through confrontations, real and imagined, in a layered city – with its discrete classes, ‘carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans’ on streets and its aeroplanes in the sky, ‘making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh’.117 The paradoxical aspect of the narrative’s temporal structure has to do with the way those circles and traces seem at once leaden, indissoluble and irrevocable, capable of violent collision, and yet dissolve over time. Moments coalesce, but grow distant and seem incongruent, irrecoverable in their solid, coherent form – increasingly illegible or incoherent monuments. Moments dissipate and time subjects traces to disintegration and differentiation, like those letters written by an aeroplane in the sky seen from different perspectives. However, even more essential dissipation occurs within the moving mind, within the divided perspective of one person who keeps turning away from and looking again at the past, trying to remember and helplessly associating faint traces in the present, confronting memory itself, debating its authenticity, agency and authority, its distortion, disintegration and creation. Here we have what has been typified as modernist refraction and resonance, cast through the retrospective imagination of an urbane character – similar, it seems, to what we find in Bely’s Petersburg, Joyce’s Ulysses, Lima Barreto’s Life and Death of M. J. Gonzaga de Sá [Vida e morte de M. J. Gonzaga de Sá] or Mário de Andrade’s Hallucinated City. Though ever-present and even more foregrounded framework in these eccentric fictions, memory is represented as absolutely failed or reconfigured faculty. One cannot make sense of signs in these cities principally in terms of local historical revolutions, ruptures, or recuperations. The significance of the past in eccentric fictions lies rather in its displacement and replacement. According to a concentric model of memory, the city that keeps distending and whose authority is consequently always decentred seems ‘dead, because it keeps no dead’, having ‘no history and little imagination’, like Petrópolis, on the outskirts of Rio, as critiqued by Lima Barreto’s Gonzaga de Sá, thinking in European paradigms.118 Insofar as Gonzaga de Sá’s insights into Brazilian culture depend on his own capacity to remember (as one in a long line of Sás, reaching back through colonial history to Eustácio de Sá as well as to a colonial culture in which, presumably, Portuguese, 117 Ibid. 118 Lima Barreto, The Life and Death of M. J. Gonzaga de Sá (1919), trans. R. and J. Dwyer, in Maria Luisa Nunes (ed.), Lima Barreto, Bibliography and Translations 41, 50.

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Africans, and indigenous peoples freely mix to create a utopian model of an organically evolving hybridity), he represents a concentric perspective on an eccentric culture. However, his critique and the dynamics of the narrative are also generated through his ‘living everyday in the minute details of the city’ not only with a ‘flexible memory’, but with a capacity to engage in dialogue with markedly different characters in the present. Gonzaga de Sá’s concentric colonial mode of memory is a dead-ended dimension unavailable to Rio’s others inhabitants, even to the narrator Augusto Machado, whose memory goes back as far only as his (still reflexively continued) dialogues with Gonzaga de Sá. Ultimately, this dialogue with Gonzaga de Sá (internalized as part of Augusto Machado’s internal dialogue with the reader) and his manner of death, rather than a biologically or biographically defined life lived under the pressure of death, reveal his character.119 Like Machado de Assis and the eponymous author of his Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Lima Barreto and the fictional biographer Augusto Machado explicitly subvert conventions of biography. A similarly framed narrative, Lima Barreto’s Life and Death of M. J. Gonzaga de Sá includes a ‘foreword’ (dated 1918) signed by Lima Barreto as editor and publisher of a biography written by his fictional ‘friend’ Augusto Machado. This foreword questions, without ultimately correcting the latter’s lack of historiographical rigour, the fictional writer’s digressions and authorial intrusions, which make the narrative as much personal essay or auto-biography as biography. It includes also Augusto Machado’s own ‘necessary explication’ (dated 1906) in which the author insists on his own non-literariness, the aberrance and originality of his hero (a minister’s secretary rather than a minister), a lack of erudition (though the text, in fact, makes constant references, by way of contrast, to works ranging from classical to contemporary European and Brazilian literature). Like Brás Cubas, Augusto Machado constructs his writing as a new lease on life, not because it provides him with an afterlife, but because it gives him a ‘reason to live’, insofar as biography as a kind of ‘moral literature’ is equivalent to a ‘pharmaceutical remedy’. Yet this explicitly moral aim or social corrective is provided, in fact, not by a model ‘life’ but rather by a mode of contact between consciousnesses (Lima Barreto’s, Augusto Machado’s, Gonzaga de Sá’s). This dialogic, dissenting, satirical construction of meaning, on the one hand, represents contiguity with Machado de Assis’s fiction. On 119 Ibid. 38.

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the other hand, by dissolving differences between discrete authorial, narrating and heroic consciousnesses,120 rather than multiplying a self already split by standing in all these positions, Lima Barreto limits perspectives opened up by Machado de Assis. We might read in the conversation between Machado and Gonzaga de Sá a dramatization of the Brazilian debate, appropriating and resisting concentric readings of Russian fiction. As Gomide notes, Gonzaga de Sá voices de Vogüé’s view of Dostoevsky (as a reader of the Revue des Deux Mondes), aligning him with other ‘pious’ ‘anti-naturalists’ including Tolstoy and Eliot, invoking conscience in Notes from the House of the Dead and conversion in Crime and Punishment.121 But Augusto Machado more approximates underground anxiety and aesthetics, reflexivity and refraction. Gonzaga de Sá may (re)construct himself nostalgically, through partial memory, according to a concentric model; but Augusto Machado, whose voice frames the fiction through a collapsed, dialogic representation rather than dialectic realization, counters with an eccentric ethics contingent on divided consciousness. He not only represents a doubled self, but also offers us Gonzaga de Sá’s self-construction and his double, representing cultural contradictions. As Coates notes, ‘stories that deal explicitly with the Double seem in the main to be written by authors who are suspended between languages and cultures … here the Double is the self when it speaks another language’.122 Plural languages or cultures may emerge through the upheaval of memory, as in the concentric text, or its collapse, where difference is compounded by cross-cultural ­transposition, as in the eccentric. The gains and losses ostensibly calculated over a lifetime in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground narratives, partly cast as memoirs of life above ground, in fact, add up to nothing within the developmental framework of European realist or romantic fictions – no progeny, no progression or disintegration, only consistent negatives which are recounted as positives in similarly irrational final summations. This eccentric summation differs from that of fictions such as Woolf’s (which begins to introduce a kind of eccentric equation through feminine figures and forms, crossing generic boundaries through the re-gendering of literal and literary space) or Proust’s (where sexual inversion introduces eccentric perspectives) or even Flaubert’s (where 120 Ibid.; cf. commentary by Nunes, 4–5 and Resende, 20–1. 121 Gomide, ‘Da Estepe à Caatinga’, 244–5. 122 Paul Coates, The Double and the Other (London: Macmillan, 1988), 2.

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an education ends in writing about nothing, remembering what might have been). In these concentric fictions, eccentric perspectives elucidate an unfinalized past, complicated further in post-colonial ex-centric fictions. In contrast, eccentric fictions immediately collapse and displace multiple historical crises within presently divided consciousness; critical errors are both exposed and occasioned by displacement and delay. Though the immoral accounting of Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s eccentric narrators may be subject to irony, their marginal mode of recounting provides an alternative model of moral authorship, contingent on eccentrically reconfigured memory. Modernists such as Bely, Barreto and Joyce similarly contend with anxieties concerning the authority and authenticity of ‘middle age’ through dialogues within and between figures such as Nikolai and Apollon Apollonovich, Augusto Machado and Gonzaga de Sá, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus, for whom there are no clear lines of paternity or locus of authority. Bloom, like the underground narrator at forty, but also the youthful Nikolai Apollonovich and Stephen Daedalus as well as dead old Brás Cubas are engaged in perpetual identity crises, contending with culturally divergent and historically compressed perspectives.123 Conversely, dialogic recollection, recognition and realization connecting Woolf’s Peter and Clarissa or even Clarissa and Miss Kilman is determined by clear origins, even when exploring present social disparities. Sociohistorical origins and transformations function similarly as grounds for dialogic realization in Proust’s Recherche. The past re-surfacing in the present elucidates the present through reflections, but also by representing temporal ruptures. There is no transcendence in the modernist literary sentence. This temporal sense of crisis is offered by Kermode as corrective for Frank’s claim of ‘spatialized form’ as normative of modernist fiction, a claim rooted in Frank’s reading of eccentric texts (overlooking formative aspects of eccentric contexts as ‘social space’124 for interacting speech genres). Lodge adds to ‘spatial form’ an analysis of ‘rhythm’ and 123 They anticipate Lins’s post-modern collapse of literal distance between Recife and Olinda, together with that between founding and modern occupations through the layered gazes of his narrator, Julia Marquezim Enone, and Maria da França in A Rainha dos Carceres da Grécia [The Queen of the Prisons of Greece], similar to Pelevin’s collapsed distance between city and civil war front, Petersburg text and Moscow asylum, and the immediately post-Revolutionary and post-Glasnost years in Chapaev and Pustota [Buddha’s Little Finger]. 124 Brooker and Thacker, Geographies of Modernism.

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‘leitmotif’ under the descriptive ‘technique’ of ‘repetition-and-variation of motifs, images, symbols’, as well as ‘allusion to or imitation of literary models, or mythical archetypes’.125 Temporal disruption and recovery in the concentric text give rise to conceptions of a pathological modernism such as we find in Trotter’s Paranoid Modernism (focused on London), Terdiman’s Present Past (focused on Proust’s Paris), and Spender’s The Struggle of the Modern, works concerned with ‘the realized consciousness of suffering, sensibility and awareness of the past’.126 As Pike notes, this temporal sense of crisis informs also Freud’s pre-modernist analysis of the memoried city – structured, like consciousness, as a dense, ghostly site. Freud delineates the modern city’s neurosis in terms of a haunted present, resulting in the distinction Pike draws between ‘static city’ and ‘city in flux’.127 Using Freud’s terms to define literally layered cities like Rome and Paris, built on or overlooked by cemeteries, Pike also suggests a ‘figurative’ reading of the city: ‘If the underground is the region of the unconscious “id”, the horizontal surface of the streets and the view from above may be taken to represent generally the rational sphere of the “ego” and “superego”.’128 This sense of ‘underground’ related to a past unconscious re-ordered or constrained by the present is a reading only possible in the concentric city, in which consciousness is attached ‘to the roots of the human psyche and civilization’, ‘fixed in space, but doubled in time’.129 The reflected truth of the city lies in what Henry James calls ‘the whole condensed past’ that forces on both fictive and authorial consciousness ‘a spatial representation of a long time-scale’. Alternatively, the city in flux depicted by proto-modernist writers such as Baudelaire or Hugo conditions poetic consciousness with a greater capacity for cultural memory than the city itself, in the throes of upheaval.130 Baudelaire’s shifting city is lit by those fugitive moments Hugo poeticizes as crépuscule, moments of transition expanded by Proust, Gide and other twentieth-century writers. Paris in transition, capital of the nineteenth century, and more particularly ‘le Paris baudelairien’, figures in Eurocentric criticism and theory as ‘capitale 125 Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism, 432. 126 Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 72. 127 Burton Pike, The Image of the City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 21. 128 Ibid., 34, 37. 129 Ibid., 51. 130 Ibid., 16.

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de l’aliénation de soi et préfiguration moderniste de notre société de spectacle’.131 The urban contexts and urbane dynamics of consciousness drawn out by such Paris writers underpin models constructed by such seminal twentieth-century philosophers, sociologists, literary and cultural historians and theorists as Simmel, Benjamin, Foucault, Certeau, LeFebvre and Jameson, even as they apply their models to other cultures. The urban underpinnings of Proust’s Recherche ground several such projects, including Prendergast’s proposed mapping of the memoried structure of modernist texts. Here Benjamin’s microanalysis of the Parisian arcades provides a central model of modernity and ‘its complex, unsettling effects on both society and the psyche’: ‘the culture of the “commodity”, a culture of movement and dislocation in which the eye and the mind are increasingly solicited, and threatened, by an unprecedented range of stimuli masquerading as the utopia of the New’.132 Benjamin demonstrates how the tempo of circulation in modern life gives way to an art characterized by an increasingly ‘mobile point of view and fugitive impression’.133 Such solicitation might seem to suggest simultaneity, doubling and divided consciousness, but this mobility involves memory, disintegrating with the distraction of novelty. The present recedes into the past, fades or becomes fragmented over time. Prendergast, reading Proust’s urbane novel in terms of Benjamin’s chronicling of the city (contingent in turn on his reading of Aragon, Baudelaire, Hugo), constructs a general model of the modern(ist) text impressed by time. Michel Raimond’s Crise du roman similarly reframes the modernist novel in formal and historical terms related to temporal rupture and dialogue. In Paul Ricoeur’s Temps et récit, the intrigue of modernist fiction, chronicling its own realization, as well as that of earlier fictive forms (realist, romantic, etc.), constitutes ‘the privileged means by which we reconfigure our confused, incoherent, and ultimately mute temporal experience’.134 Like those reflexive fictions by writers ranging from Hugo to and beyond Proust, focused not only on the survival but expansion of sense in the terminal sentence, Ricoeur’s theory of narrative traces a trajectory ‘on that ascendant or regressive path of temporal experience’, demarking ‘an arrest at that midway 131 Patrice Higonnet, Les Mythes de Paris (Paris: Collège de France, 1999), 16. 132 Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 5. 133 Ibid., 6. 134 Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit (Paris: Seuil, 1983–85), 13, my translation.

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[mediating] level between intratemporality and radical temporality, marked by being-unto-death, which Heidegger terms historiality’.135 Antoine Compagnon’s Entre Deux Siècles foregrounds this threshold in Proust’s Recherche. This temporality also marks Eliot’s modern poetics and Woolf’s modern fiction. The literal death sentence confronted by Woolf’s writer is self-imposed in response to historical pressures. Delusional, while also offering a fairly coherent and compelling critique of contemporary medical and social responses to trauma, Septimus’s end also reflects fatalism in the modern author (not to mention Woolf’s particular authorial anxieties and feminist critique). Yet his real biological demise, together with a biographical, sociological and historical sense of disintegration, is necessary to the realization of Woolf’s fiction, as it is also to Proust’s. In contrast, in eccentric fictions, by Dostoevsky or Machado de Assis, Barreto or Bely or Joyce, death is indistinguishable from life. It is one among several thresholds visited early in the day of the fiction. In concentric fiction, death draws multiple past selves and others into view. In eccentric fiction, death functions as one more displacement that delineates ever-present divisions within the self and between the self and the other in the present. This spatialized margin anticipates a post-colonial re-mapping of ‘différance’ in terms of distance rather than nostalgic deferral. Though death and the disintegration of both body and mind are constants in modernist fiction, concentrated in the alienation of the artist and contingent on a general sense of historical crisis or rupture,136 we need to re-define the literary forms and functions of disrupted subject and cultural consciousness in discrete contexts. The ‘different modernisms’ that Bradbury and MacFarlane suggest we might find in works so concerned with creating internally coherent artistic worlds through negation of past and present fictions that the aesthetics of an individual author seem to shift from work to work,137 can partly be accounted for in terms of adjustments in spatial form or time out of joint. Eccentric literature and theory contend with the strong gravitational pull of concentric discourse on disturbances of memory. In relative terms, they account for different dynamics of memory, determined by displacement and deviation. They represent different anxieties and 135 Ibid., 127. 136 Cf. Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism, 26–7. 137 Ibid., 29, reframing Howe’s claim that ‘modernism does not establish a prevalent style of its own; or if it does, it denies itself, thereby ceasing to be modern’: Irving Howe, Literary Modernism (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1967), 13.

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require a different diagnosis of modernist consciousness, still marked by a memory disorder, but couched within and compounded by various forms of disorderly ‘madness’. In modernist literature, memory and madness thrive in paradoxically communal and alienating spaces of city and citytext. Neither necessarily involves literal withdrawal from urban space, but rather fragmentation and refraction of the self in urbane consciousness. Though both can be described in terms of absences, they may also involve a surplus of presences. These may be read as spectral distortion and subjective irresponsibility: authorial irony invites this interpretation of the ghostly doubles and paranoid projections confronted by protagonists on city streets in Gothic fictions. But when translated into the ironically self-realizing consciousness of reflexive modernist fictions, which build new theories of authorship on the foundations of psychological realism, these spectral doubles gain a psychic and cultural reality that resists Romantic irony. Clinically, schizophrenic consciousness is inhabited by multiple personalities with fully realized speech genres and lively memories – by unmerged subjects who are, at the same time, submerged in a dialogue partly circumscribed by the consciousness that authored them and retains a kind of objective outsideness to them all insofar as the schizophrenic can be conscious of plural selves, provoking dialogue between them as well as engaging external others. These selves retain a certain autonomy and agency. What is disconcerting about schizophrenia (actually and fictionally authoring lives) is that the line between the imaginary and the real is dissolved; the insanity of the one not only reflects, but responds to the insanity of the other. Paranoid consciousness constantly projects antagonists. It may flesh out opposing ideological and social standpoints. In this sense, the paranoid schizophrenic, like the eccentric novelist, creatively populates his own sphere of reality through contradictory logic, which both is his and has lives of its own. The concentric modernist narrator who recollects interlocutors based on fragmentary, failing or manically obsessed memory similarly displays a pathological mode of novelistic creation, which involves both active remembering and memory that acts. Memory and madness are peculiarly ‘human’ measures for re-mapping the making of the modernist novel. In this study, these general terms partly replace metaphor and metonymy – terms typically used to describe the imaginative processes of fiction, particularly modernist works, but representing more impersonal mechanical

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operations than those actually embodied in reflexive fictions and less capable of the kinds of erring (in the sense of both digression and deviance) in which modernist fiction engages. Memory and madness literally re-place metonymy and metaphor within the mind, implicating not only reasoning, but also emotional response and ethical responsibility. This shift of analytical terms is particularly warranted in reflexive variants of the modernist novel whose first-person narrators seek in recursive turns within the city, self, and sentence dialogically responsive and responsible modes of creatively re-membering and re-placing self and other. Pathological re-membering and schizophrenic re-placement may be means of mimicking and masking, dividing and deluding, but they might also be means of generating the ‘multiple unity of the self’ and ‘spiritual diversity’ that characterize the urbane, polyphonic novel. Bakhtin describes a ‘polyphonic unity’ that is determined neither by ‘plot’ (which little exists in reflexive texts that recursively revise chronology and causality), nor ‘will’ (which, as Bakhtin notes, mostly flounders in these withdrawn, often sick, heroes), nor the ‘evolution of a unified spirit’ (a critique of Hegelian dialectic development incompatible with dialogic open-endedness), but which also precludes the ‘subjectivism’ and decadent ‘solipcism’ that Bakhtin, citing Kirpotin’s critique of Joyce’s and Proust’s uprooted psychologism, finds incompatible with ‘spiritual diversity’ – a community or communion mediated by disinterested authorial engagement.138 Particularly through new readings of eccentric texts, this study seeks to demonstrate how madness as well as disrupted memory can instigate creativity within urban/e space and time, re-placing solipsistic with threshold consciousness, continually re-turned to the other. Memory and madness may induce subjective multiplicities that relocate within the fictional subject the creative outsideness of the novelistic author with respect to his heroes. Such a claim counters Bakhtin’s contraposition of paradoxical underground narrator and polyphonic author139 primarily by contesting Bakhtin’s casting of such an author as disinterested. If underground consciousness reflects a dead-end in the city, how much more lifeless Bakhtin might have found the narrative of Machado de Assis’s Brás Cubas, reconstituting self and others across the radical spatio-temporal divide of death, from a tomb that must be the ultimate underground and that, in fact, gives rise to writing as paranoid and contradictory in its 138 Bakhtin, PDP 21–2, 31, 37. 139 Ibid., 32.

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expression of ideas as the underground man’s. ‘Memory’ is not only as dubious a mode of responsible reporting in this underground narrative, but similarly gives rise to perverse recalculations and paradoxical intercourse with the reader. However, Brás Cubas’s interlocutors are granted agency and authority (if not full autonomy in this co-dependent eccentric context) through contradictory turns of speech. They recur to the narrator and reader, interrupting and re-orienting his and our thoughts, as the underground narrator’s remembered and imagined interlocutors do also (Liza’s silent speech act still requiring a response or responsibility twenty years after their encounter and over a century after publication). There is no clear origin or originality in these constructions; in these eccentric texts and contexts, such terms are deconstructed. Authenticity and authority, intention and interpretation are reconfigured; they take plural paradoxical form. Creativity is contingent on copying. Displacement, in this case death, is cast as the threshold for authorial transubstantiation, for the birth of the ‘defunto autor para quem a campa foi outro berço’ (deceased author for whom the coffin was another cradle) – an expression that involves a significantly different spatial imaginary than the frequent poetic translation: for whom the tomb was another womb. The narrative does trace historical, linear time, and not only through the disrupted chronology of memoir. There is the time of writing, of remembering. As narrator/author, Brás Cubas has not transcended time; his body is literally disintegrating. Yet doubling collapses temporal difference between coffin and cradle or first and second cradle, each surrounded by a handful of spectators. Like his biological predecessors, Brás Cubas is continually re-authoring and re-authorizing his origins, revising grounds for authority. Death has not freed him from the other (as he claims at first, as a matter of course), nor from the divided self. Like Dostoevsky’s narrator, the turn into the underground has put pen in hand, but has not given rise to a different kind of self-authoring. As in Dostoevsky’s underground narrative, there is a reconceptualization of time in the novel: the historical/biological time of the Bildüngsroman is collapsed into the present where characters and ideas are continually debated (without dialectic realizations). ‘Embodying the non-linear movement of Brás’s inner deterioration, the novel’s form springs from a silent [and double-voiced] ceaseless conflict in which the reader’s expectations about the “unity” and “coherence” of a literary work are frustrated by the psychologically realistic yet metaphoric depiction of a

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human mind in conflict with itself.’140 Like Dostoevsky’s underground narrative, Machado de Assis’s is characterized by ‘a circularity of form’, a ‘decidedly non-linear, non-progressive, non-Aristotelian structuring’.141 This circularity anticipates Proust’s Recherche, in which the recursive sentence allows multiple selves and others to coexist. But the refractory, recursive, reflexive sentence is already part of lived life for these eccentrics in their marginocentric capitals. Parody is merely doubled and metatextually mapped in the pathological remembering and paranoid dialogue with the reader that review the novel’s own making and foresee its multivalent afterlife. By reconsidering such seminal and surviving, though presumably dead-on-arrival and dead-ended narratives by Gogol, Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis – narratives that begin and end in the asylum, underground, grave – this study seeks to redefine geographical and historical spaces and structures of modernism. But it also contributes to a broader argument contending against interpretations of reflexive modernist fiction as ultimately destructive or deconstructive. At stake in such a challenge to the negative reading of introverted, alienated modernist discourse are also those definitions of marginalized and mad consciousness as mute (without language) or muted (because forced to speak in a language that is not its own). Without rejecting diverse claims concerning the interrelation of language and power and without rehearsing the long history of dissent, muted as a mode of diseased and deviant discourse, relegated to literal insane asylums on the margins of a sanitized city, we can interrogate the assumption that mutated and muted speech lacks authority. These fictions suggest rather that it might be more authoritative because not authoritarian. They complicate Felman’s analysis of the relationship between writing and madness, for 140 Earl Fitz, ‘The Memórias Pósthumas de Brás Cubas as (Proto)type of the Modernist Novel’, Latin American Literary Review 18:36 (1990), 19–20. According to Fitz, Machado de Assis’s novel manifests ‘four essential characteristics’ of the modernist novel: ‘it challenges bourgeois attitudes about meaning and morality in art by being self-consciously aware of the artifice of its own composition; it is primarily concerned (thematically speaking) not with action or event in the external world, but with the representation of inward states of human motivation and consciousness; it conveys a disquieting sense of the nihilism, capriciousness and disorder that lie behind the orderly and ‘realistically’ depicted surface of human existence; and it frees itself from dependence on linear, cause-and-effect plot structures’ (7). 141 Ibid., 20. This claim implies an argument developed in later analysis of Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground narratives, against Jackson’s claims concerning the Aristotelian structure of part II of Notes from Underground.

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example, which focuses on alterity and alienation, building on Foucault’s definition of ‘madness’ as ‘primarily, a lack of language’ or ‘the silence of a stifled, repressed language’ which finds its voice in literature that is both complicit and dissenting in its self-critical use of conventional structures, whose unconventionality renders it suspect but whose critique is also compromised by its own structures of misapprehension.142 The voice of madness, and that of dissenting literature, becomes problematic ‘both as Other and as Subject’, because it must contend with the difficulty of speaking ‘from the place of the Other while avoiding the philosophical trap of dialectic Aufhebung, which shrewdly reduces the Other into a symmetrical same’.143 According to Foucault, focused on the writing and testimony of the clinically insane and socially marginalized, ‘the task is no doubt doubly impossible: since it would have us reconstitute the dust of actual suffering, of senseless words anchored by nothing in time; and especially since that suffering and those words can only exist and be offered to themselves and to others in an act of division which already denounces and masters them.144 Felman, following Foucault, argues that conventional or normative speech contains and constrains the ‘silence’ of madness. But this analysis argues rather for a plural – eccentric and ex-centric as well as concentric – modernist structure, literary syntax and semantics (a modernist polysystem), even while taking into account the fact that concentric conventions are registered in fictions that read themselves as a kind of silence or scrawl in the margins, contingent on pathologically anxious and reflexive consciousness. When Dostoevsky’s narrator admits no readers, and Brás Cubas only five or so, they devalue even as they revalue their respective parodies. But rather than subsumed or constrained by conventional discourse, we might read this eccentric line of literary development as the encompassing one, internalizing and critiquing the centre – colonizing the colonizer. Dostoevsky’s eccentric fictions both anticipate and inform introspective concentric modernist remappings of corresponding ruptures in city, self and sentence. Radical subjectivity in which any intersubjectivity is internally refracted, compounded by internal discord, is typically construed by critics in terms of Freud’s and Hegel’s definitions of madness as somatic and psychic regression or reduction of consciousness, manifest 142 Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 14, 16. 143 Ibid., 42. 144 (Preface to Histoire de la folie …; cited in Felman, 43).

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in unconsciously deviant cultural and social interactions.145 The external remains the framework for making sense of the internal world, negatively cast as non-sense, in-sane, even if ‘positively’ separated or ‘sunk into itself’.146 Hegel notes that this separation may have social causes, ‘the violent upheaval and putting out of joint of the general state of the world’,147 using terms analogous to those used to define a helpless turn into an introverted and spatio-temporally distorted domain in modernist fiction. The strange logic Hegel finds within dream and madness can be found in most modernist works: ‘the bizarre, topsy turvy world of dream life provides its own “laws”, just as in certain forms of madness the mind is subject to “a perfect type of chaos” where “the mind is liberated from the usual parameters of causal connection and spatiotemporal ordering”’.148 Already in fictions such as Gogol’s ‘Записки сумасшедшего’ (‘Diary/Notes of a Madman’149), the protagonist’s writing is the space in which culturally conditioned, monomaniacal delusions unfold with what Foucault delineates as ‘a rational consistency in [the madman’s] irrationality’ and a ‘monomaniac fixity that insists on attaching reality to the flow of images to which it is prey’.150 But authority is continually re-placed through the expression of radically alienated perspective on lived and literary planes. Critique emerges from within, from extreme internalization of cultural authority. Distinguishing between idiocy (which includes not only natural and exogenous ‘idiocy proper’, but also the ‘distracted mind’ and the ‘rambling mind’ which will be essential to our study of eccentric literature), madness or ‘folly proper’ (including ‘world-weariness’ and ‘melancholia’, categories 145 In his introduction to Madness, Masks, and Laughter (Madison, WI: 1995), Rupert Glasgow offers an incisive summary of madness or folly defined in terms of ‘otherness,’ of the ‘unknowable’ from an official or rational vantage point, of the ‘unarticulable’ – surveying views ranging from Freud’s conception of the unconscious to Foucault’s description of madness as a cultural otherness (excluded by post-Enlightenment rational discourse), to clinical and cultural descriptions of madness in terms of social disorder, sexual disorder, spectacle, etc. Cf. Daniel Berthold-Bond’s Hegel’s Theory of Madness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 146 Philosophy of the Mind, Vol. 3 of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), §408Z; cited in Hegel’s Theory of Madness 20. 147 Ibid., 28 (citing PM §408Z). 148 Ibid., 33 (citing PM §408Z). 149 While Gogol’s ‘Записки сумасшедшего’ is typically translated ‘Diary of a Madman’, in this study the use of the title ‘Notes of a Madman’ allows the closer comparison to Dostoevsky’s underground notes, also Записки. 150 Cf. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York: Pantheon, 1965), cited in Glasgow, 166.

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more aligned with degenerative/creative concentric consciousness), and ‘mania or frenzy’, Hegel defines madness in terms of a dynamic relationship between the rational and irrational, real and dreamed. All of these various forms of madness manifest a sort of ‘double personality’: madness ‘has two centres, one in the remainder of its rational consciousness and the other in its deranged ideas’. Insofar as he appears fairly coherent at first and capable of conventional reasoning at times, Gogol’s madman might coincide with Hegel’s concept of an originally non-disrupted, single, coincident self. The disrupted subject’s doubling gives rise only to a ‘communion with himself in the negation of himself.’ The mad subject remains ‘unconscious’, unreflective and, in that sense, voiceless, or in more Bakhtinian terms, cacophonous rather than polyphonic. But an originally ‘cohesive’ self, a cogent external self, or a truly ‘unconscious’ self is not actually the starting point of Gogol’s, Dostoevsky’s or Machado de Assis’s fictions, nor is it the basis for authorial coherence or cultural authority. According to Felman, ‘a book like Foucault’s reminds us that throughout our cultural history, the madness that has been socially, politically, and philosophically repressed has nonetheless made itself heard, has survived as a speaking subject, if only in and through literary texts’; ‘madness and literature are precisely linked by what attempts to shut them out’.151 Thus, in L’Être et la folie, Berthomme traces a ‘folie poétique’ at the centre of cultural discourse, initiated by marginalized or sacrificed figures such as Socrates.152 The ‘commerce’ between madness and literature is described by Thiher in Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature as an outcome of an alterity or reflexive logos rooted in the polis, traced back to Athens.153 In contrast to medical and social discourse, imaginative ‘literature can mediate madness from within’ insofar as ‘the very mimetic nature of literature allows it access to madness by speaking it’.154 Glasgow notes further that it does so in such a way that reveals social and linguistic conventions and ‘releases’ 151 Felman, 15, 16. David Trotter’s Paranoid Modernism and Louis A. Sass’s Madness and Modernism (New York: Basic, 1992) make similar claims. 152 Bernard Forthomme, L’Être et la folie (Paris: École des Hautes Études, 1997), 77–8. Socrates’ ‘parole vive’, aligned with possession, irrationality, contradiction, engages in ‘la contre-danse des mots, de ses jeux’ – giving rise to literary madness linked with jealousy, alterity, violence, suffering and sainthood. 153 Allen Thiher, Revels in Madness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 2. 154 Ibid., 12.

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language from its ‘functional transparency’ so that it ‘rejoic[es] in its own materiality’.155 But for Glasgow, comedy becomes a ‘domesticated’ verbal ritualization of madness156 distinct from what he delineates as an unknowable, unvoiced ‘pure madness’,157 even while countering that there is really no ‘pure folly’ to be known, because ‘madness in practice necessarily coexists in a relationship of mutual interaction with the sanity that would gag it. Reciprocal mimicry is the primary point of intersection, folly imitating the language of normality and vice versa in a world permeated not by the single autocratic voice of reason but by a medley of heterogeneous discursive types’.158 As Foucault also notes, ‘the paradox of this nothing [madness] is to manifest itself, to explode in signs, in words, in gestures’.159 Madness expresses itself by violating norms of speech, sanctioned when recognized as giving voice to daemonic possession (oracular authority still present in nineteenthcentury figures of the fool) but devolving into apparently irrational, inadmissible forms of protest, conscious and unconscious. Thus, literary madness is increasingly desacralized, laughter diminishing its authority, while sometimes strengthening its anti-authoritarian critique. The powerlessness of mad discourse has in part to do with the position of the madman, increasingly associated with urban margins, where a more disorderly city is on display and deviants are increasingly isolated. We see this in the modern sanitized Paris with construction of such institutions as the Hôpital Général de Bicêtre and La Salpêtriere, constraining deviance of all kinds on its edges. One paradox in eccentric sites such as St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro is that the madman inhabits marginal space both when he circulates in the city centre and when outcast or underground. From such internalized margins, figures 155 Glasgow, Madness, Masks and Laughter, 29–31, 177. 156 Ibid., 177. Variants of ‘comic folly’ include naive transgression of social norms (unconscious, hence laughable or pitiable, and in bestial turns subject to brutalization), but also conscious rejections of social masks (as demonstrated by the anarchist, glutton, wastrel, rogue), a manic or melancholic confusion of appearance and reality, and monomaniacal self-delusion (161–78). Comic folly presumes a split between private and public spheres (167), an intentionality and an explicit critique of the discarded social mask (173), but is tamed in the sense that it includes safe bounds such as the stage or costume as in sanctioned carnival celebrations (174), vicariousness (175), an ‘aesthetic distance [that] ensures that the madness remains unthreatening’ (176), even as it evokes the ‘active laughter of complicity’ that breaks through the spectator’s social mask (162). 157 Ibid., 170. 158 Ibid., 170–1. 159 Ibid., citing Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 107.

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such as Gogol’s Poprishchin, Dostoevsky’s underground narrator and Machado de Assis’s Brás Cubas do not seek what Hegel terms ‘self-identity’ but rather posit a dissonant identity through their ‘tortured dialogue’.160 They recompose the subject as split self even as they rewrite genre and grammar. Given their self-conscious, critical and complicit relation to the norm, such alienated figures render problematic Derrida’s assertion not of a historical but essential ‘relationship of mutual exclusion between language and madness’, rooted in an assumption that the ‘normal meaning’ inherent in any sentence is not accessible from within madness.161 Instead, these fictions offer a complement to Nietzsche’s attack on causality, in order to similarly affirm consciousness as a fiction and language as a creative instrument precisely because of its irrational logic, its semantic and syntactic open-endedness. In sum, the reduction of ‘mad’ narrative to a position of voicelessness or powerlessness ignores those pathological variants that creatively distort or recast the normative (grammatical, literary or political), while recognizing their own tenuous grasp of grammar, their ambivalent authority, and the ethical dangers they pose. In the marginocentric context and textual tradition, power and powerlessness are both framed through madness. Hence the first ‘madmen’ we confront in our analysis of Petersburg and Rio texts are the city’s deviant designers, whose designs are stylized and parodied by digressive writers, constructing a consciously deconstructive citytext. The peculiarly conscious deviance in both eccentric and concentric literary texts begins to be elucidated by such comparisons of clinical and literary manifestations of schizophrenia as Sass undertakes in Madness and Modernism and by the literary manifestations of paranoia and pathological memory defined by Trotter in Paranoid Modernism and Terdiman in Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. We may recall Blanchot’s L’Espace littéraire on the space of modern literature as that of withdrawal, absence and especially distance defined as le vide, le dehors, éloignement (emptiness, outsideness, distantiation) within an inner space of retreat and reflection, correlated to the anonymity of the city, to exile and alienation, resulting in connections rendered visible.162 Tadié similarly points in his ‘Introduction à la vie littéraire du XIXe siècle’, to a ‘culte du moi’ (an obsession with the self) in which the subject is characterized chiefly by ‘inquiétude’ (disquietude) rooted in urban 160 Cf. Berthold-Bond, Hegel’s Theory of Madness, 27, 35. 161 Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différance (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 84–5; cited in Felman, 44. Cf. Kawin, The Mind of the Novel, 99–100, 116. 162 Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1968 [1955]), 10–15.

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flux.163 These studies focus on the modernist representation of the split self as hyper-conscious, in contrast to those ‘psychiatric conceptions of schizophrenia as essentially a kind of dementia, as well as psychoanalytic notions about the dominance of primitive instinctual forces, of “primaryprocess” modes of thinking, and of self-world fusion akin to infancy’.164 While they still define the divided subject in terms of the conflicting desires denoted by Hegel, these desires sparked by displacement and disrupted memory find dialogic expression through both conscious contradictions and ‘transindividual’ unconscious ‘structured like a language’, though (according to Hegel) ‘not at the disposal of the subject in re-establishing the continuity of his conscious discourse’ but rather ‘discernible’ in symptoms, speech and memory. Insofar as modernist fictions reflexively read these symptoms, speech and memory, they explore the ‘radical alienation and distortion inherent in the very foundation of one’s identity’, in the grammar of the unconscious as well as of dissenting consciousness.165 Yet modernist fiction expresses a pathologically divided consciousness (rambling, melancholic or manic; cultural as well as individual) that differs significantly from the Hegelian definition of non-coincidence with the self as a regressive stage involving the negation of identity. Whereas Hegel’s idea of a cure is temporally defined in terms of dialectic recuperative development (rendered conscious in dream and anxious desire) and, at the same time, has to do with spatial relocation, a drawing of the self out towards a rational centre that defines the self (realizing desire outside dream), modernist and postmodern literature turns further into an ‘irrational’ core, into dream, memory and deluded consciousness, densely populated with multiple selves and others, as these are remembered, refracted, projected within urbane consciousness to redefine a plural, dialogic subject. In framing his study of madness and modernism, Sass takes as starting point for a modern revision of actual and literary schizophrenia the Dostoevskian underground model of ‘too much consciousness’ conceived as ‘a thoroughgoing illness’,166 asking, ‘What if madness, in at least some of its forms, were to derive from a heightening rather than a dimming of conscious awareness, and an alienation not from reason but from the emotions, instincts, and the body?’ He demonstrates that ‘close attention to what many schizophrenics actually say or write may well 163 Tadié, Le roman au XXième siècle, 46–8. 164 Cf. Sass, Madness and Modernism, 11. 165 Ibid., citing Hegel’s ‘Discourse at Rome’. 166 Ibid., 7.

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lead, in fact, to a quite different, rather stranger impression: of … a world marked less by the mysteries of hidden depths than by the uncanniness of immense spaces and the enigmas of gleaming surfaces and brilliant light, where the purity of the silence and solitude is not broken by bestial cries so much as by the incessant murmur of inner witnesses’.167 Modern art and clinically assessed schizophrenic consciousness are connected by an ‘acute self-consciousness and self-reference’, ‘alienation from action and experience’ into the domain of psychic reflection, and ‘hyperreflexivity’. The divided self is here defined by attentiveness to internal and internal/ external dialogue rather than by Hegel’s inattentive and inarticulate inverse dialectic; it designates an acute realization of multidimensional time and space and language, rather than a loss of objective bearings, language or temporal and spatial relation. Countering claims such those made by Gardner’s in ‘Art and Insanity’, modernist fiction may not be ‘playing at madness’ to surreptitiously re-assert sane monological claims,168 but voicing madness to make its multivalent claim. Like madness, modernist memory is ordered by the ‘modern logic of discontinuity’,169 rather than the coincidence or transcendent self-identity in terms of which thinkers as distinct as Locke, Hume and Hegel defined recollection.170 It reflects what Terdiman recognizes as the divided structure of consciousness that gives rise to the multiplicity of the subject. It is also a populated ‘site and source of cultural disquiet’, as ‘the uncanny ambiguity of memory manifests itself in … discomfiting survivals’. In the reflections instigated by the ‘past present’ within novelistic consciousness, there is a kind of circling such as Heidegger finds in the relation between being and Being in language. As Ricoeur notes in his study of Proust in Temps et récit II, the palimpsest of the city, self and narrative transects time (time is ‘traversé’ not ‘dépassé’).171 There is the multidirectional double-voicedness such as Bakhtin explores in his intertextually and critically framed ‘Great Time’, whereby past and present texts are mutually transformed by memoried contact. As 167 Ibid., 4–7. Sass explores the schizophrenic sense of a ‘cosmic’ scope, a concentric sense of the interrelation of things, and of ‘chaos’, relevant to a refractively-lit, expanded eccentric world (7). 168 Cf. Gardner, On Moral Fiction, 183, 202–3. 169 Richard Terdiman, Present Past (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 23. 170 Anthony Kerby surveys theories of time and memory in relation to the construction of identity in the first chapter of his Narrative and the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 171 Ricoeur, Temps et récit II, 258.

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Terdiman observes, ‘dialogism’ can be ‘a memory model. It seeks to recall the semantic and social history carried by a culture’s language, but which tends to be forgotten’. Rather than ‘dispossession’, interdependent and double-voiced discourse constitutes the ‘liberating recollection of the collective condition’ of language.172 If pathological memory might be mapped as a vortex that threatens personality with implosion, disintegration and forgetting – the ‘non-being’ that is ‘unheard’ and ‘unremembered, which is Bakhtin’s characterization for the disintegration or death of the subject – it might also give rise to a recuperation of plural self and society, the re-establishing of community through consciousness of double-voicing and distortions that reaffirm difference within and between self and other. The past can be re-membered only across real ruptures – ‘des fissures, des tailles véritables’.173 Recollection, like schizophrenic or paranoid projection, depends on a divided self – on a concomitant outsideness and insideness within consciousness, a threshold sensibility that allows the perception of the other and of ‘soi-même comme un autre’,174 responsible to each other. If that remembering, like any reiteration, deforms rather than merely repeating, it can also creatively transform.175 Regarding memory’s disintegration and creative disregard, the reflexive narrator may assume a position of respect and responsibility. However responsible, memoried representation poses ethical problems. If creative consciousness informed by pathological re-membering, schizophrenic division and paranoid projection seems particularly irresponsible, this may be because it gives rise to disorderly fictions. Subjects speak out of place and out of turn. Modernist consciousness is carnivalesque in its penetrations, inversions, approximations; in its potential for bringing things together in time, space and dialogue that are not typically able to speak to each other; in its capacity even to bring back to life what is dead. But this is a function also of what Bakhtin recognizes as carnivalized discourse in the polyphonic novel, 172 Terdiman, Present Past, 45. 173 Ricoeur, Temps et récit I, 186. 174 Ricoeur, Temps et récit II. Ricoeur describes ‘la voix du narrateur, parlant de nulle part’ (though it is actually always speaking from a historical/storied position) that generates ‘un autre fois lui-même multiplié sans fin’ (254). On the doubling of the self and authentic dialogue within the self, see Paul Ricoeur, Soi-meme comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990). 175 Terdiman reads memory’s ‘reproduction as transformation’ rather than repetitive, reiterating or reifying self-identity (58–60).

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where the authorial can create dialogue through juxtaposition and approximation of subjects, speech genres and literary forms from disparate contexts. Yet modernist narrators’ deviant discourse and disrupted memory restructure plot and syntax in seemingly incoherent, inconvenient, insensitive and potentially unconscionable ways. This study re-reads Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s undergrounds not as carnivalesque but as carnival. Despite their carnival debauchery, such alienated modernist narrators are also anxiously self-conscious, hyper sensitive and self-critical authors; their pathologies result in an ethical re-examination of the fictive frame – nothing lies outside the bounds of obsessive interrogation. Mário de Andrade, in his preface to Hallucinated City, claims the incoherence and confusion inherent in modern writing as necessary expression of the unconscious and of the crowd. On the other hand, he relates its apparent randomness to a conscious polyphonic resonance and collaborative construction of meaning. Mário de Andrade’s discussion of polyphony is particularly interesting, as it parallels Bakhtin’s redefining of urban/e prosaics and novelized poetics, without having any direct connection. In an analysis of his own disrupted poetic lines (lacking conventional narrative or horizontal melody, linked like words in Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis by ambivalent ellipses), Andrade points out ‘an arpeggiated chord, harmony … But if instead of using only disconnected words, I use disconnected phrases, I get the same sensation of overlay, not now of words (notes) alone but of phrases (melodies). Hence: poetic polyphony’.176 These phrases, like the personal utterances that matter to Bakhtin, are in Mário de Andrade’s poetics dependent on juxtapositions and encounters in a prosaic, profane ‘hallucinated’ city and in urbane forms of individual and cultural consciousness. Bakhtin discussed the polyphonic structure of the novel that both participates in ‘Great Dialogue’ and is permeated with ‘microdialogue’ or ‘dialogue [that] ultimately penetrates within, into every word of the novel, making it double-voiced, into every gesture, every mimic movement on the hero’s face, making it convulsive and anguished’.177 Mário de Andrade describes this polyphony more vividly than Bakhtin, spatializing it in terms of hallucination, schizophrenia, paranoia, drunkenness and other forms of pathological deviance in the city, while remarking the creative potential for pathologically urbane consciousness. 176 Andrade, Hallucinated City, 12. Cf. discussion pp. 365–70. 177 Bakhtin, PDP, 40.

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In a typically eccentric turn at the end of his preface, Mário de Andrade reflects on the ‘madness’ that gives rise to his prosaic verse in refractory terms, with a disgust and spite for the reader (with whom he collaborates), analogous to that of Dostoevsky’s consciously deviant underground writer. He defines his aesthetics, too, through contradiction, attacking the premise of his ‘Extremely Interesting Preface’, and remarking on the imbecility of systems. At the same time, he explicitly employs the self-conscious madman’s contradictoriness, staking out a systemic claim concerning confined and copied creativity: ‘I could have quoted Gorch Fock. I would have been spared this Extremely Interesting Preface. “Every song of freedom is born in prison.”’178 His citytext (not just ‘hallucinated city’ but ‘Pauliceia desvairada’, italics added) demarks his discrete prison and song. This preface indicates a broader pretext: We may circle back to Mário de Andrade’s claim that ‘all the great artists, whether consciously … or unconsciously (the greater part of them) were deformers of nature’.179 And Andrade’s São Paulo encompasses Rio de Janeiro, London, and many other cities. If madness, in its Dionysian form, is an involuntary possession, as much as Proust’s involuntary memory, both also involve a structure of creative attentiveness. Mário de Andrade suggests an aesthetics akin to the responsible passivity descried by Levinas in the ethical subject, who is radically other, but also constituted in relation (as implied in the doubled or mutually directed meaning of the sentence ‘il me regarde’, in which, ‘he is the topic of my regard … only because I am the accusative [or the ‘accused’] of his look’180). Levinas ‘tries to dislodge’ a ‘philosophy of dialogue’ ‘from the … symmetrical arrangements’ of ‘communication’ by locating the ‘retraduction of responsibility’ or ‘response of responsibility’ within a singular recollecting logos that is self-responsible and responsible for the Other as such.181 He plays ‘with the double meaning of envers as the side 178 Ibid., 18. 179 Ibid., 9. 180 John Llewelyn, ‘Levinas, Derrida and Others…’, in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (London/New York: Routledge, 1988), 139–40. Llewelyn offers a compelling comparative analysis of Levinas and Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gadamer, Heidegger, etc., on the relation between self and other as defined in/by language. Also in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, see Bernasconi’s ‘‘Failure of Communication’ as a Surplus …’. Cf. Bernhard Waldenfels, ‘Response and Responsibility in Levinas’, in Peperzak, Ethics as First Philosophy (London/New York: Routledge, 1995) and Adrian P. Vinokur, The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas. 181 Waldenfels, 39–42.

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that is turned over and turned to the other’,182 in a sense analogous to that of underground discourse, paranoid in its incorporation of others’ contra-dictory discourse, but also possibly ethical in claiming responsibility for others’ claims. Modernist turns to readers, theorists and critics are fraught with the potential imposture or inauthenticity that Bakhtin described in terms of the inverted ‘loophole’ and ‘sideward glance’ of the underground man vis-à-vis other Petersburg characters. The reflexive, manic, paranoid gaze, more than most, is ‘held hostage’ in face-to-face encounters. Engaged in judgement or forced to ‘choose between two faces’ (which, for the madman, may be his own as well as those of an other and a third), the madman’s own countenance may manifest itself as the ‘demonic “mug”’ Vinokur denounces in parsing the language – лицо (litso/face), лик (lik/countenance) and личина (lichina /‘concealment, the opposite of countenance’) – of face-to-face confrontations ‘central to Russian literature’.183 The interrupted and irrational perspectives of modernist fictions, nevertheless, frame the transformation of the prosaic word into a compelling pluralist novelistic poetics that provokes responsibility in the reader. Anticipating cosmically creative pathological memory in Proust, manic schizophrenia underpins the lucid and creative critique of an absurd, arbitrary, alienating reality in Gogol’s ‘Notes of a Madman’. If Poprishchin’s madness has been read as circumscribed by a kind of parentheses demarked by authorial irony and asylum, Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis’s underground fictions puncture those parentheses, insofar as their respective narrators respond to the authorial irony that brackets these fictions. These works are carnivalesque to an extreme, forcing contact between discrete cultural contexts, ideological constructs, social classes, speech genres, literary genres, fictional and actual authors, writer and reader. They draw on St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro as contexts where carnival can be strangely sustained.

182 Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être (La Haye: Nijhoff, 1974), 131, 134, 149, 191; noted in Waldenfels, 51. 183 Vinokur, The Trace of Judaism, 7.

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Chapter 2

Ecc

Eccentric cities and citytexts: transpositions, translations and transformations of authority and authorship Eccentric domains: St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro

Form: schizophrenic designs Lines linking eccentric cities bend through space and time – stretching between St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro by curving through and around a European centre and a Eurocentric history. Until recently, these cities were connected only occasionally by actual contact, more consistently by concentric ripples of modern history. They were linked directly by Portuguese navigators, sailors, soldiers and merchants who headed southeast and southwest to establish Portugal’s portals into Old and New Worlds and to secure its hold on empire, but also sailed northeast with goods and skills that helped build Peter the Great’s naval power and port city, Russia’s portal to the West.1 We can trace the trajectory of a few Brazilian diplomats along lines that swerve north across the Atlantic, landing in Lisbon or London and crossing through Paris to Europe’s eastern edge, accumulating European perspectives on Russia along the way. A few Russians travel these lines in reverse, exploring a New World similarly cast as exotic and barbarous, but also conducive to the founding of peculiarly modern cities, outposts and condensations of civilization. French, British and other European models and material, ideas and ideologies, partly expressed in literary texts, reach both shores 1 Cf. William Rougle, António Manuel de Vieira na corte russa no século XVIII (Lisbon: Ministério da Educaçao, 1983); Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 57.

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at similar moments in the definition of a modern cultural identity. These shores are reached, though also indirectly, by those few already noted exchanges of their own political-ideological and literary production, typically filtered from one sphere to the other through Paris and French translation – with texts first and more frequently flowing east to west. But except for that mutual affiliation with or colonization by Europe, there is little familiarity between Russian, East European and Luso-Brazilian contexts until the very late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when politically motivated, often mandated and materially facilitated displacement gives rise to intercourse partly charted in the concluding section of this study, registered in the mutually comparative reappraisal of respective literatures (by critics such as Meyer and Schwarz), in direct intertextual dialogues (by writers ranging from Lima Barreto to Mário de Andrade), and in cultural transpositions in works by transnational and transcultural writers including Rawet, Lispector, and Brodsky (still disproportionately travelling Westward). In these works we find direct and displaced references to similar conditions for cultural production. We find similar modes of defining creativity through digressive, dissembling, dissenting prose, associated with diseased consciousness – diagnosed most commonly as schizophrenic, developing in the context of an arbitrary eccentric cultural formation or what Haroldo de Campos defines as continual ‘transformation’,2 and extending or reterritorializing eccentricity to act as counterpoint to the pathological forgetfulness dictated by both Russian or Brazilian imperialism and European colonialism. Yet these more recent writers merely stand at vantage points more conducive to surveying what have long been strangely parallel lines. As much of a stretch as a comparative study of these distant cultures still seems, the semblance in the construction of eccentric capitals, structuring of cultural consciousness and slanting of Russian and Brazilian literary lines is striking. While cautioning against a reductive, prescriptive ‘theory of the cognitive aesthetics’ of ‘ex-centric (that is, out of the center, de-centered) literature’3 such as Jameson’s deprecating designation of Guimarães Rosa’s work, Haroldo de Campos draws on Mukarovsky’s conclusions concerning multiple, contextually modified, mutual ‘influxes’ as well as on Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ (‘Anthropophagus 2 Haroldo de Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’, in K. David Jackson (ed.), Haroldo de Campos (Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, 2005), 3. 3 Here termed eccentric, to differentiate it from a once, but no longer concentric (hence temporally and spatially ex-centric) literature.

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Manifesto’, 1928) to describe parallel parodic modes of cultural formation under the sign of the baroque.4 Yet this is an alternative, antagonistic baroque, redefined and reconfigured. Campos invokes Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma as emblematic of the eccentric hero ‘without a precise definite character’.5 Machado de Assis figures as ‘the most representative of our writers of the past’ because of his composite, non-aprioristically typified Brazilian character. The seventeenth-century Gregório de Matos and twentieth-century Oswald de Andrade represent the ‘continuous hybridization process’ in the (trans)formation of Brazilian literature, a complex mode of development Campos describes through his own arabesque verbal play: ‘The alternating under-current of the sub-altern’s language ad-ulterates (mongrelized) the over-altern’s rhetorical master code, by committing incestuous intercourse (ad-ulterium) with the colonizer’s imposing mother’s speech …’6 This development takes the form of ironic imitation and ‘metalinguistic’, metaliterary uncovering of combinatory devices – that is, it involves self-critique as well as critique of the other. This Brazilian baroque ‘means at the same time hybridism and creative translation: translation as transgressive appropriation and cross-breeding, as the dialogic practice of telling the other and telling oneself through the other under the sign of difference’.7 One explication for the apparently anachronistic and alternative baroque modernist turn of eccentric fiction is that it develops in an essentially modern site – in that sense of the modern that knows self as ‘other’. Russian and Brazilian literary criticism and theory are disciplines forged in an identity crisis concerning displaced language and forms in the eccentric city. Beyond the autobiographical resonances of fictions by authors who worked as clerks in the city, this crisis suggests why Petersburg’s and Rio’s fiction is so early a space inhabited by mad scribblers, concerned with the creative capacities of the copyist, his authenticity, autonomous signature and authority. Characteristically an antihero and often a hack, the protagonist in the eccentric citytext typically tracks a woman through the city. She often wears Parisian fashions and he pursues her with Parisian literary model as map. Yet the romancing of eccentric lover and writer are marked by misreading and redressing. Attempts to seduce are self-consciously parodic and perverse. The eccentric digresses from social and literary 4 Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’, 6–7. 5 Ibid., 4. 6 Ibid., 5, italics in the original. 7 Ibid.

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convention. Among less self-aware eccentric protagonists, following Romantic models, Gogol’s Poprishchin and Machado de Assis’s Rubião pursue their respective Sofias. But here the resemblance to the courtship and coupling characteristically played out in concentric citytexts ends. The women pursued in the eccentric citytext often turn out to be shadows or copies, not of past loves as they can be in modern concentric literature such as Flaubert’s or Proust’s, but of some distant, displaced or inherently duplicitous ideal. Like a disproportionate number of actual women in the early stages of the eccentric city’s construction,8 they may be prostitutes. Some give rise to delusion and disillusionment as Brás Cubas’s Marcella (figured a little like Nana, but complicating the Naturalist model of decay and degeneracy, with disease and deceptions). Others inspire delirium such as pursued by Piskarev as alternate framework within which he can realize romantic dreams, redeem fallen model and reconcile with his muse (only to derail Romanticism with suicide). Or they may provoke such denigration and disgust (directed at self and other) as the Underground narrator’s, remembering Liza. Feminine objects of desire may be actual foreigners, aligned with alien, parodied cultures, such as the German wife pursued by Gogol’s pragmatic Pirogov.9 They are often mere projections and reflections of impotent heroes’ own alienation. Occasionally, they turn out to be substantial figures, with lives that might have been fleshed out in concentric Romantic or Realist fictions; but fertile figures stand so far outside the sphere of the eccentric hero as to seem indifferent, indecipherable and inaccessible. They may represent the natural family or social hierarchies of another city and story. They fail to respond like the mother to whom Poprishchin futilely appeals from asylum. They speak through silence and departure, like the underground narrator’s Liza, with whom the underground narrator cannot catch up in real life or re-lived narrative. They figure authoritatively like Virgília, who becomes one of Brás Cubas’s contesting readers; or like the raped and finally murdered Nastasia Filippovna, who ‘scripts’ not only the lives of the characters but the very narrative of The Idiot through her absences.10 But 8 On women in the eccentric citytext, see Monas, ‘St. Petersburg and Moscow’, 27–8. 9 In contrast, the foreigner later pursued in concentric, increasingly ex-centric is not ironized. Thus Breton’s Nadja’s personality mediates the narrator’s view of the city and the self. Despite her difference, she is appropriated to the self, her madness standing for his own. 10 See chapters 1 and 3.III–IV in Sarah Young, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (London: Anthem, 2000).

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if the eccentric city unfolds partly through such apparently failed and unproductive pursuit, this also turns out to be a detour in an ultimately reframed citytext, remapped through rivalry within a divided subject and his doubles. Gogol’s noted characterization of St. Petersburg as masculine and Moscow as feminine reiterated an already well-worn claim,11 partly reflecting Petersburg’s founding by soldiers and the subsequent density of the city’s male population – ministers and minor civil servants, military, merchants, artisans, factory workers and household servants. In 1725, men outnumbered women three to one.12 While this demographic gradually shifted with the changing function of the city, Petersburg’s population remained disproportionately male through the nineteenth century. Manpower in colonial Brazil, as on Russia’s edges, was similarly conscripted for military conquest, the subsequent construction of the city and then service within the new civil and commercial institutions through which Petersburg and Rio continued to conquer Russian and Brazilian interiors. This demographic reality re-enforced a mythological characterization of Petersburg and Rio as ready-made projections, eccentric outposts and capitals, designed by visionary and mutinous monarchs. Pike describes Petersburg ‘on the edge of [European] culture’ as a ‘latter-day Minerva’, sprung from Peter the Great’s imagination.13 Without connecting it directly to the Brazilian cityscape, Campos similarly describes the ‘Baroque’ ‘birth’ of Brazilian literature as a ‘non-origin, a non-infancy’ – a birth ‘as an adult (like certain mythological heroes)’.14 These critics invoke a rationally and militantly authoritative goddess. Similarly, female figures in the eccentric citytext are often critical and contesting, unconventionally reconfigured or ‘trans-created’.15 As such, they mirror more central (but paradoxically marginal, often both emasculated and powerful) masculine protagonists. Intercourse in the eccentric novel rarely produces legitimate offspring. Protagonists come from uncertain origins. If given a childhood, it is marked by alienation. Children abandon and are abandoned by parents in the eccentric citytext. Like the city and citytext, they are born under an already complicated sign of the baroque. If Petersburg protagonists 11 Cf. Toporov, ‘Петербург и Петербургский текст …’ 12 Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight, 25. 13 Pike, Image of the City, 89. 14 Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’, 3–5. 15 Ibid., 9.

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have a patronymic (and beginning with Pushkin’s Evgeny, they may not), their relation to their father may be mere reflection (Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich, Bely’s Apollon Apollonovich) or marked by opposition (Nikolai Apollonovich, dyonisian disorder opposing apollonian rationality within a divided consciousness). Petersburg is a city of ‘casual families’, as Dostoevsky describes it,16 or the space in which the natural family is replaced by the adulterous or adoptive relationship, as in Tolstoy’s fictions. Family origins are falsified in Machado de Assis’s fictions, where intergenerational discourse generates no insight into anything but contiguous dissembling and contradiction. But problematic origins and otherness in the eccentric city are productive. As evasion, absence, abstraction and antagonism redefine the feminine in the eccentric citytext; eccentric masculity is redefined through ambivalent double-voicing, anxious dialogue and digressive copying – modes of counter conquest or ‘counter-quest’,17 generation and regeneration. This admittedly degenerate eccentric dynamic of generation crosses literal and literary generations and genres; creativity is redefined in terms of distance (contrast) and redirection (quest). It depends on contradictory ideational aspects of the city as well as conflicts between the ideal and real. Petersburg writers confront dead aspirations on the surface of the city. Ivanov, commenting on the feverishness of Dostoevsky’s ‘soul’, which he sees as stemming from the city, asks ‘Is not Petersburg itself … a purely imaginary and contrived conception? Is not its relation to the essence of Russia like that of a mirage to reality, of a deceitful mask to the true countenance?’18 The contrived character of the eccentric capital is materialized. Mask is paraded as countenance in both city and citytext. But rather than being disqualified by this artificiality and arbitrariness, as Monas notes, ‘for the golden age of the Russian novel, Moscow, in this properly literary sense, is not a city at all. St. Petersburg is the only real city’.19 This has to do with the concentration of what Campos recognizes as ‘universal codes’ and concerns, which are ‘devoured’ and transformed by Machado de Assis.20 Monas affirms of Petersburg, ‘There all the standard themes are enacted: 16 Cf. Dostoevsky, Дневник писателья, 1876, 1877, PSS XXII, 30; XXV, 178ff. For incisive commentary on this passage, see Kelly, Toward Another Shore 5–6, 64. 17 Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’, 5. 18 Vyacheslav Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life (New York: Noonday, 1960), 72–78; also cited in Pike, 93–4. 19 Monas, ‘St. Petersburg and Moscow’. 20 Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’, 8.

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ambition fulfilled and unfulfilled; dissociation of sensibility; intellect and affect running different ways; schizophrenia; hallucination; talent corrupted and innocence led astray; mysterious underground networks that parallel the labyrinths of the streets; bodies and souls bought and sold; the whore with a heart of gold and the golden beauty with the heart of a whore; the parade of contrasts.’21 Rio, with its contrasts and contradictions, its abstracted architectural and cultural forms, its alienated and fragmented consciousnesses, its fantastical tropical lights, is similarly a definitive site of Brazilian culture.22 In these eccentric capitals the ‘standard themes’ are ‘enacted’ simultaneously, as street theatre, which has as its backdrop expansive cultural horizons. Petersburg and Rio are represented as uniform spaces inhabited by uniformed figures, whose self-accused representatives expose the emptiness of arbitrarily imposed authoritative forms. These theatres stage empty suits (authority parodied in Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’, recognized in Machado de Assis’s ‘O Espelho’ in that mirrored confrontation with self in marginal space, literalized later in Bulgakov’s ex-centric Moscow), nevertheless capable of inflicting real death sentences. On Petersburg’s and Rio’s flooded literary landscapes death presents itself without any necessary intervention of time or history – i.e., decay. Literal death is predicated on contradictions inherent in unnatural designs, realized on marshlands legendarily and literally filled in with bones, collapsing social ground through natural disaster.23 Brás Cubas’s untimely death, like Akaky’s, is partly caused by stormy weather, pitted against his as well as the city’s aspirations. Its natural staging reflects the eccentric city’s unnatural conception as a kind of death sentence for an old culture. By extension of its own logic, the eccentric city is itself always under threat of dispossession. There is an everyday carnival pretence and power-play in the eccentric city, distinct from the seasonal carnival moment and sustained but suppressed subterranean carnival space in the concentric city (uncovered in literary representations of sewers, cemeteries, social and architectural substrata of the city, contesting monumental cultural memory). Eccentric carnival is related to the city’s surface posturing and imposture, to its insistent cultural differentiation as well as hybridity. Coutinho notes the carnivalesque spirit of Rio’s culture in his Conceito de Literatura Brasileira: ‘That amalgamation of 21 Monas, ‘St. Petersburg and Moscow’. 22 As pointed out by Coelho, Carvalho, Coutinho, Freyre, Ventura. 23 Cf. Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight, 139.

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all the provinces is what formed the carioca spirit, made up of all but different from any.’ The carioca spirit, given to laughter rather than annoyance, reacts with pranks, wit, anecdotes. Rather than quarrelling, it ‘takes its revenge through sarcasm and satire’. Its spirit is rebellious, anti-authoritarian – ‘ frondeur’.24 Using a foreign term to sum up Rio’s rebelliousness, Coutinho suggests the difference constantly at play in this laughter, pointing to the counter-definition and internal contradiction on which eccentric creativity depends. At the same time, he notes the unifying effect of this contrarianism, based in part on the authority and amalgamation of the capital. Like Buckler’s recent analysis of eclecticism in St. Petersburg, Coutinho discusses Rio de Janeiro as centralizing literary site and symbolically structuring figure for Brazilian literature, paradoxically defining culture through hybrid, but also heterogeneous literary forms, both of which function parodically and link the popular to the political.25 If the carioca spirit seems more benign or at least more playful in its laughter, while Petersburg’s carnivalesque atmosphere appears more grotesque (as the underground narrator’s smile also seems more a grimace than that of Brás Cubas), both cultural discourses slant in the same direction. Brás Cubas’s dissenting laughter not only tilts towards delirium, but also involves digression, deception and disturbing delusion, as a function of both his critical distance from and doubling of Rio’s discourse. Like the underground narrator’s, Brás Cubas’s extreme (mis)behaviour is conventional. His similar distortion, elision and compression of conventional biographical detail reflect the rearrangement, irrelevance or unintelligibility of traditional historical benchmarks in the eccentric capital. Belinsky, in his seminal essay, ‘Petersburg and Moscow,’ notes the compressed timeframe for Petersburg’s construction and production: ‘all that should have taken a year to achieve was accomplished in a 24 Coutinho, Conceito de Literatura Brasileira, 90. 25 Coutinho notes the immediate connection between popular and political functions of literature in Rio (79), while likening its central place in defining of Brazilian cultural consciousness to Paris’s definition of French cultural identity (87, 90–91). Coutinho’s insistence on Rio’s centrality builds on his argument that ‘a ausência de um centro dominante deixa os indivíduos presos a preconceitos, à timidez, a pressões exteriores, a limitações impostas à sua personalidade, a uma falta de concorrência que os prende nas próprias deficiências, nas limitações do meio local, na sua falta de estimulantes’ (87). Coutinho precisely fails to distinguish the eccentric capital’s anxieties (related to exterior as well as interior pressures, authority and origins, etc.) and the surfeit of stimulation (external as well as internal) reflected in Rio’s intertextually and reflexively engaged literature.

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Figure 5 J. Meijer. Plan for the Site of St. Petersburg or Plan of Nyen’s location and the Neva Channel. 1698.

month.’26 Like the citytext, the city is constructed using a complex of ‘pre-formed’ ‘codes’.27 As Meijer’s 1698 ‘Plan for the Site of St. Petersburg’ or ‘Plan of Nyen’s location and the Neva Chanel’ (Figure 5) exemplifies, the eccentric city is imagined and inscribed as text before it is built. At the same time, Meijer’s map recovers similarly muted elements in Russian and Brazilian histories – the ways in which eccentric construction builds not on empty space or a blank page, but on a place whose pre-inscribed 26 V. G. Belinsky, «Петербург и Москва» (St Petersburg, 1845), reprinted in Otradin, Петербург в русском очерке XIX века (Petersburg) (Leningrad, 1984), 18. 27 Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’, 4.

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Figure 6  opposite Carl Fredrik Coyet. St. Petersborg. 1821/22.

lines also act as pretexts, subtexts and contexts structuring this transformative transposition of ideas and ideologies. Meijer’s map recalls not only the Swedish town of Nyen, founded in 1611 and rebuilt with reinforced fortifications and extensive civic and clerical buildings after being burned by invading Russian forces in 1656, but also a dense network of roads, fishing settlements and military structures that are reinscribed within Petersburg’s boundaries. Nyen’s modern European (five-bastion) fortifications underpin Petersburg’s stylizations. Peter admires and adapts Swedish road construction. As Akukhanfusa notes in Vattenstäder, ‘the network of all the state roads of the Swedish period has been preserved almost in its entirety, in part connecting up over long stretches with the modern main roads, or remaining as part of a network of minor roads and local thoroughfares’.28 By Peter I’s death in 1725, Petersburg encompasses over fifty-five pre-Petrine settlements, and eventually, over two hundred – re-naming and re-orienting roads, co-opting settlements, all the while claiming to design and construct the city from scratch. In the abstractly pre-imagined, pre-mapped city, we see competing forms, often incompatible or awkwardly adjusted to the actual landscape. Le Blond’s projection of St. Petersburg (‘Le plan masse de Saint-Pétersbourg, 1717) is paradigmatic of arbitrary form in its almost parodic imitation of Paris, imagining the city as concentric enclosure. An oval reaching out to the edges of a page, abstracted from the larger territory, Le Blond’s plan for Petersburg reorients and redesigns the literal landscape, shifting its axis to achieve greater symmetry, encircling its open arteries within a first defensive wall, appropriating minor arteries as a second ring. The city becomes a circle, with lines radiating from a central square. The city is gridded, but rivers and islands disrupt the pattern. As multiple plans for and mappings of an unfolding Petersburg and Rio make clear, these imagined cities are immediately revised. They are stretched in different directions along the horizon, with abandoned projects still in view. Coyet’s 1722 mapping of St. Petersburg (Figure 6) surveys the city under construction, as figured by city planners and builders who 28 Kerstin Akukhanfusa, Vattenstäder: Sankt Petersbourg – Stockholm (Jyväskyla: Riksarkivet/Arkitekmuseet, 1998), 27, 31.

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frame our view. Though undifferentiated in Coyet’s line drawing, construction completed, in process and projected is denoted in detail in his inset explication. Here Vasilyevsky Island is demarked as ‘core of the capital’ ‘designated by His Imperial Majesty’ as a function of size and accessibility. It is to be encircled with containing and defensive walls and transected by canals crossing each other at internal rectangular harbours. But the core will shift, canals prove impractical and bastion remain incomplete. As in Petersburg’s reflexive literary texts, the map within the map (in the hands of city planners) points to the framing of the city, but also that of the citytext, and to the adjustment between imaginary and real. Though differently dressed and coloured – like the stone buildings tinted in red and wooden buildings in that pale Petersburg yellow we find so frequently in Gogol’s, Dostoevsky’s, Bely’s Petersburg text – the figures of planners and builders are placed on a level plane, walking amidst the rubble of a city being built. Whereas the cityscape is drawn on a two-dimensional plane, its verbal explication is inscribed as if on stone, framed by three-dimensional architectural form, disproportionately grand in the foreground, dwarfing the figures of planners and builders as well as the buildings rising on the edge of the empire. Coyet’s sketch of Petersburg is set also under the sign of Imperial eagle. It stakes out its authority as ‘humble’ copy of a 1721 drawing ‘faithfully’ reflecting Peter’s vision. Through the interplay of plural visual and verbal planes, Coyet constructs a divided and dialogic citytext. Subsequent mappings of the city are similarly abstracted, flattened rather than drawn in relief, yet not two-dimensional. Rather than chronicling historical depth and hierarchical difference, cartographers map the city from multiple perspectives, redefining the city through their rewriting, redesign and reorientation in the margins of the map. Homann’s engraved map of St. Petersburg (1825) (Figure 7), framed by images of empire and cultural exchange, suggests the temporal compression, cross-cultural orientation, marginocentrality, contradiction, abstraction and arbitrariness of Petersburg. While Coyet’s Petersburg, pushing onto the western edge of the map, is braced against sea and extensive swamplands, suggestive of the city’s status as cultural outpost; Homann’s map offers a closer view of a controlled and cultivated landscape. In an inset, the city is set as portal, pitched at the centre of a horizon stretching west and east, reaching Europe and interior through open sea and river. It is presided over by the Apostle, standing at heavenly city gates, holding the keys, communicating with another

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figure, perhaps his namesake? The city’s function as port of cultural exchange is figured in the collection of classically abstracted characters representing modern arts and sciences, at the centre of which we find Peter I framed; his portrait reads as imprecise mirror reflection. Militant imperial power is inscribed in ordered circle, under the more disorderly figuration of culture. The pluralist construction of the map, like that of the city, is Baroque. The nearly contemporaneous Seutter and Kayserl maps offer us other examples of the plural perspectives and planes used to map an eccentric Petersburg. Seutter’s map (Figure 8) is divided, situating the city within latitudinally stretched region above a close-up view. In a region dominated by water, forest and swampland, the city is shifted west, while the compass tilted east defines the centre. This compass is doubly mirrored in the close-up, reflected in the compass form of the Peter and Paul fortress at the centre as well as in the reduced compass at nearby juncture of branches of the Neva. We see this double compass, tilted west, also at the centre of the Kayserl map (Figure 9). While there are mappings of many cities in different languages (for the invader, traveller, etc.), Petersburg’s and Rio’s early maps are markedly polylingual and peculiarly variable in their political framing and cultural orientation. Seutter’s map, in Latin and German, is devoid of Imperial markings (though denoting Peter’s Imperial founding of the city in its title). The bilingual Russian and German Kayserl map (the first map of the city printed in Russia) is framed by double-headed Imperial eagle as well as coat of arms, canons and other instruments of conquest. But these are piled up alongside anchors, instruments of art and science, and again maps within the map. The head poking grimly out of the ground, cast back against map or plan, and looking up at the eagle’s open beak and wings suggests imagined city and spoken creation in rather grotesque form, almost invoking the dead on whose bones the city is legendarily build. But this symbolic figuration of the city again enters into dialogue with other elements of the map. On Kayserl’s as on Homann’s map, the city is largely reduced to lines and geometrical shapes, yet the ships sailing through it are drawn in detail. The city is unbounded except by open water and waterways. Figure 7  overleaf Johann Baptista Homann. Topographische Vortfellung der Neuen Russisches Haupt Resident und See Stadt S. Petersburg … / Map of St. Petersburg.

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Figure 9  opposite Plan der Kayserl. Residentz Stadt St. Peterburg … 1737.

Figure 8  Matthaus Seutter. Nova et accuratissima urbis St. Petersburg … 1734/37

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Figure 11  Jean Massé. Planta da Cidade de São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro. 1713.

Figure 10  opposite Luís dos Santos Vilhena. Planta da cidade de S. Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro. 1775. Ink and wash sketch.

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Figure 12  Nova Planta da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro. E. & H. Laemmert, 1867.

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Regional mappings of Rio similarly cast it as margin, marked by flux signaled not only by rugged landscapes and open waterways, but also by ships engaged alternately in commerce and conquest. Vilhena’s ‘Prospecto da cidade de S. Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro’ (1774) (Figure 10) shows us this open city through a triply divided view: panoramically rising along stretched shoreline, regionally situated within the bay fronting sea and backed up against uncharted interior, geometrical grid again explicated in inset notes. At the mid-range bird’s-eye view offered by José Bulhões in his 1796 ‘Plano da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro’, we see an expanded grid set against more defined interior mountain ranges as well as further reaching settlements and strategic fortifications, such as also frame views of Petersburg. Other close-up mappings of Rio similarly show us an abstract city under construction – its outer lines continually redrawn because consistently sketched partly as record, partly as projection. Thus, Massé’s 1713 Planta da Cidade de São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro, Com suas fortifficaçoins (Figure 11) outlines in red an interior defensive wall, expanded and redesigned in Funck’s 1768–91 ‘Plano da Cidade de S. Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro …’ (published in 1796). Figueira’s 1750 ‘Carta Topografica da Cidade de S. Sebastião do Rio de Janeyro …’, Bulhões 1796 revised and expanded copy of Funck’s map, and the Nova Planta da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro published by Laemmaert in 1867 (Figure 12) show us rather an open city, stretching in diverse directions beyond projected walls, reaching increasingly further afield. The axis of the compass spins according to the purpose of the map. While primarily in Portuguese, these maps by cartographers of culturally diverse origins also represent the polylingual and political redesign of the city and reframing of its cartographic representation. These cartographic representations reflect, like the city they represent, revisions of ready-made frameworks. They chart new cartographic domains and invest cartography with a dynamic reflexivity. Ready-made models compress construction, while immediate and constant revision gives the eccentric city the aspect of constantly being constructed. Even after two centuries, writers including Gogol and Dostoevsky, Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto represent the construction project initiated at the city’s founding as ongoing and paradoxically consistent with initial construction because similarly marked by contradiction. The literal as well as cultural territory is fluid, still in a process of formation, as described by Dostoevsky:

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Even up to the present Petersburg is still in dust and rubble; it is still being created, still becoming. Its future is still in an idea; but this idea belongs to Peter I; it is being embodied, growing and taking root with each day, not alone in the Petersburg marsh, but in all Russia, all of which lives by Petersburg alone.29

If Dostoevsky offers an organic view of the material and imaginary marginocentric capital, it is marked by that rhizomatic growth through segmentation, transplantation and lines of flight that we find in Deleuze and Guattari’s reframing of postmodern texts. Rather than layered at the core, competing conceptions of the city stretch it in different directions. Rather than reviving old models and recycling old materials, the city continually makes use of newly imported means and manpower. Thus, cultural memory, while reifying Peter’s eccentric mode of constructing the city through extension, continues to reach towards and transpose other urban models, creating a composite cultural memory and cultivating difference. Both Rio’s and Petersburg’s distension toward distant horizons (measured by immediate extensions of city limits, but also expansive empires), their reclamation of land from the sea, of islands and marshlands and, in Rio’s case, mountains, results in the representation of the eccentric city as surreally stretched space. As Kaganov’s analysis of Petersburg insists, the dominant dimension of cartographic and pictorial representations of the eccentric city is the horizontal line – expanse of land, water and sky.30 We may contrast not only cartographic, but also panoramic representations of Petersburg and Rio with those views of Paris that impress upon us the verticality of the city and press the city upwards as well as out towards the edges of the frame. In contrast, the ‘bird’s-eye view’ in an early eighteenthcentury ink and brush sketch of The Shore Opposite the Fortress by Marselius (Figure 13) shows Petersburg at a distance, viewed from and as background to fortresses that mark it as margin of empire. Approaching the city from the sea, but lowering our line of vision (positioning the viewer on some merchant ship), Zubov’s eye-level engraving of St. 29 Dostoevsky, Feuilleton of June 1, 1847, cited/trans. in Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 143. 30 Grigory Kaganov’s Images of Space: St. Petersburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1997) best charts these dimensions in Petersburg. Cf. A. M. Gordin’s Пушкинский Петербург (St Petersburg, 1991) and Lincoln’s Sunlight at Midnight, which argues that in Petersburg, ‘as in Russia itself, space has its own meaning’ defined by ‘monumental scale’ (87–8).

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Figure 13  Christopher Marselius. The Shore Opposite the Fortress. 1720s. Indian ink with pen and brush. Figure 14  Aleksei Fedorovich Zubov. Sankt Pieter Burkh/Panorama of St. Petersburg. 1916. Etching with line engraving.

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Petersburg (Figure 14) stretches the city along the shoreline. The city is a line compressed between water and sky, where text and ships, both flouting imperial and polylingual signs are writ larger. Vilhena’s panorama of Rio de Janeiro (Figure 10), like Blasco’s eighteenth-century watercolour (Figure 15) similarly sketches cityscape along shoreline, ships foreground, backed against uncivilized mountains, under immense open sky. Rather than enclosure, the bay is represented as opening also in Marc Ferrez’s late nineteenth-century and Augusto Malta’s early twentiethcentury panoramic photographs of redesigned Rio de Janeiro. While reversing perspective – staging these photographs from the mountains to take in expanded cityscape against background of bay and sea – these photographers’ work still represents both internal construction and external cultural orientation of the eccentric capital in terms of horizontal plane and horizon (Figure 16). Reprised in Khrzhanovsky’s visionary cinematic revision of ‘Room and a Half’, Brodsky recalls similar views in his father’s photographs, turned towards and away from Petersburg under different kinds of siege. The sea, which he photographs all his life, represents freedom. The city

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Figure 15  D. Miguel Ângelo Blasco. Prospectiva da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro. 1760. Watercolor on paper.

and its inhabitants’ lives are ‘deflected river[s] running to[wards] alien, artificial estuary’, their natural course betrayed by linguistic turns. Brodsky detects the unspoken (suppressed, damned, dammed-up speech) or the undercurrents of a cultural imaginary in his father’s images. His poetics stems from his father’s eccentric aesthetics. Describing himself as a ‘tributary’ of that ‘turned, deflected river’ he sees the city against an even broader horizon in the context of exile.31 We find such horizontally stretched views also in images embedded within the eccentric cityscape: Brodsky’s ‘typically, Petersburgian impeccable perspective’ from his balcony, by then taking in both distant cultural horizons and disrupted cultural memory.32 As Kaganov notes in commentary on an engraving by Vinogradov, practically indistinguishable from the one here by Sokolov (Figure 17), both modelled after Makhaev’s drawing of the banks of the Neva, the river is represented as roadway rather than waterway: ‘In essentially all of Makhaev’s prospects, the Neva is shown as if it were a ceremonial highway leading off into infinity’, despite details of the everyday in the foreground or small disasters like the near collision of boats in this image.33 31 Brodsky, Less than One, 482. 32 Ibid., 457. 33 Kaganov, Images of Space, 27.

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Figure 16  Marc Ferrez. Cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Panoramic photograph. 1889.

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Figure 17  Vue des bords de la Neva en remontant la riviere entre l’Amirauté et les batimens de l’Academie de Sciences. Engraving by I. Sokolov, after drawings by M. I. Makhaev. 1753.

Here we also have a sense of city in constant flux, marked by imported ideas and goods. Architectural uniformity is artistically mirrored by centred and nearly symmetrical representation, stretched along a ‘strict central axis’.34 Yet potential disorder is registered in the minor and mundane, as in the literary citytext. Ships and shadows slide into and beyond the margins, extending and opening up the image. Chernetsov’s famed nineteenth-century panorama of Petersburg from the scaffolding of the Alexander Column on the Palace Square (Figure 18) gives us a sense of contiguous monumental construction. While including measured height, its monumental dimensions are predominantly horizontal. Rather than piling up, the city is still stretched towards 34 Ibid.

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distant horizon between empty square and sky. The image in the round is neither closed, nor exactly level from plate to plate. Through the early nineteenth-century, represented views within these rising cities follow the horizontal, rather than vertical plane. Typically, the street directs our vision, as it will direct trajectories in the Petersburg and Rio literary text. Perspective stretches along long prospects or avenues towards distant horizons, exploring expansive squares that can seem at once crowded and empty. Yet central avenues may be interrupted or angled, as are the ironically named Rua Direita (Figure 19) and the Nevsky Prospekt (Figure 20). Just a few years before Gogol’s letters and fictions mapping a gridded Petersburg on an open, windswept margin, a Portuguese writer similarly describes Rio (in 1816) as ‘very level and regular’; ‘its streets are very

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Figure 18  Grigorii Grigorevich Chernetsov. Panorama of the Palace Square from the Scaffolding of the Alexander Column. Lithograph in 3 parts.

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straight’ though ‘the one that goes by this name is crooked, and they make a checkerboard in the manner of a garden’.35 Rio is sheltered from the open sea, built in the bay, as Petersburg in the Neva’s delta. Yet it is also constructed on a floodplain and obscured by fog. The urban ‘garden’ the writer finds here is not a natural paradise but one imposed on an unruly landscape according to imported ideals, just as Petersburg’s canals, streets, summer garden and environs are modelled after Venice and Versailles. Retracing streets running east to west, the Portuguese writer offers what might be a mirrored reflection of Petersburg. He concludes by circling back to openings in the cityscape: ‘These said streets are all straight, so that from Market and Rio one can see the Field of S. Domingos, … Straight Street, the Palace Square and the Pier have lamps every twelve paces, which on dark nights are lit by the galley prisoners, and make for a good sight seen from the River.’ Here again we might be seeing Petersburg’s open perspectives, its pier, its port and palace squares, its prospects and its flickering lights – lit by civil servants or, as Gogol’s narrator concludes in ‘Nevsky Prospekt’, lit by the devil. D. Pedro de Sousa e Holstein similarly emphasizes the regular aspect of the city, describing squares, flanked by monumental and mundane construction, dividing the city, condensing its contradictions, denoting its reorientations – Tynianov’s reading of form and function of ­Petersburg’s space:36 In contrast to Moscow’s interior, twisted spaces with their organic sense, Petersburg’s space is open – in that sense continuously in view – but also fragmented. No space responds to another. Sense is discontinuous. In Petersburg there are no blind alleys whatsoever, and every lane strives to be a prospect … The streets in Petersburg were formed before the houses, and the houses only realized their lines. The squares were formed before the streets. Thus they are utterly autonomous, independent of the houses and streets forming them. The unit of Petersburg is the square.37

Both Rio’s and Petersburg’s open plan is constructed with neo-classical discipline and proportion, unobstructed spaces suggestive of open community, commerce and public discourse. But this openness and 35 J. M. P. S., Definicão da Amizade – Seu Aumento no Tempo da Felicidade e Diminuição no da Desgraça (Porto, 1816), 7–10, in Coelho’s anthology, O Rio de Janeiro na literatura portuguesa (RdJ), 113–14. 36 ‘A Cidade de S. Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro’ (1843–44), 363–66 and ‘O Campo de Santa Ana e o Museu Nacional’, 375 (in Coelho RdJ, 115–23). 37 I. N. Tynianov, ‘Кюхля’ (1925), cited in Otradin, Petersburg 27.

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Figure 19  Rua Direita. Photographic print by unknown photographer. Late nineteenth century. Figure 20  Ivan Nostits. View of Nevsky Prospekt by the Gostiny Dvor Shopping Arcade. Photograph, albumen print.

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order breaks down precisely because arbitrarily imposed upon the landscape rather than corresponding to its actual contours. In Petersburg, the uniformly neo-classical facades along Neva and Nevsky are mandated. In Rio, construction is similarly regimented after the arrival of the Portuguese court. But uniformity is undermined by flood and socio-political flux. Architecture becomes more eclectic as it cuts across autonomous squares, chronicling aesthetic shifts aligned with political reorientations, not over centuries so much as decades, resulting in simultaneous construction. Behind facades, buildings are increasingly divided into those corners made famous in Dostoevsky’s and Bely’s fictions, recalled in Brodsky’s ‘Room and a Half’ and again in Petrushevskaya’s and Pelevin’s novels under different regimes. As Brodsky notes, this immensity redefined through infinite division results in both differentiation and remarkable coherence, like that of prison cell and coffin. Construction along Petersburg’s outlying canals and streets crosscutting prospects, like that along Rio’s far-reaching avenues, is less regimented, marked by the disparities and deceptions explored by Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s deambulating narrators, later by more wide-ranging exiles. The city mainly disperses, but any crowding and piling up on these marshlands also remains close to the surface, where initial footprints and costs of construction remain evident. While embracing and pursuing further Peter’s steps towards the West, writers from Karamzin to Brodsky comment on the enormous human costs of Petersburg’s construction. Forced colonization and construction in these outlying capitals not only requires massive displacement but results in countless deaths, primarily from disease fostered by Petersburg’s and Rio’s swamps and slums. Thus, Kliuchevsky, in his late nineteenth-century history, depicts Petersburg as a sprawling graveyard. This is a graveyard without conventional markers. There are few literal traces of those who died during the early development of the city. Traces are rather literary, abstracted and figured anonymously in minor stories based on shifting oral legends. Works such as Pushkin’s Медный всадник (The Bronze Horseman, 1833, published posthumously in 1837) and Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ revise the citytext by resurrecting and naming the dead. But only a few such tales register exceptional

Figure 21  overleaf  План столичнаго города Санкт-Петербурга/Plan de la ville capitale de St. Petersbourg. St. Petersburg: A. Savinkov, 1825. Coloured engraving.

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calamitous moments when the city’s dead actually rise to the surface. On the other hand, the reference to swamp filled in with skeletons becomes a commonplace in the Petersburg text.38 Rio de Janeiro is built on similarly treacherous coastal and rainforest terrain that seems to swallow up the dead without leaving any traces. Absorbing more or less willing Portuguese immigrants and unwilling African slaves (populations that are counted and discounted), it is especially built on the backs of unregistered indigenous populations. Yet these inhabitants make their mark in the fictionalized cityscape in such urbane poetry as Gregório de Matos’s, with its ‘trans-ethnical language’,39 also leaving traces in the language resounding on city streets and registered on street signs. In the twentieth century, lives lost or marginalized in both these cities leave more material marks within the cityscape, through such signs as Leningrad’s burial mounds during the siege and Rio’s favelas (still largely anonymous, collective signs). But even these undeniable reproaches on the urban landscape, as well as more marginalized presences and less memorialized absences, are more critically recognized and centrally realized in the literary citytext. Death is immediately associated with the eccentric capital in its fictive representations not only because of the actual costs of conquest and construction, but also because such cities seek to replace a capital and renew a culture that they see as dead or dying. If concentric cities give birth to the eccentric, as extensions of empire, these inheritors and executors also become executioners of a centre perceived as dried up womb as well as tomb. These cities distance themselves from a culture of death partly by denying their dead. In contrast, Belinsky descries Moscow as countryside cemetery where monuments are gravestones.40 Whereas the centrist marginocentric cityscape tolerates a great deal of social cruelty in the name of progress (so that modern/modernist architecture is descried by theorists such as Todorov as utopian and forgetful), the eccentric literary citytext exposes and reverses that denial, while recognizing disintegration and death as conducive to creativity. Both eccentric city and citytext are apocryphal text, representing unauthorized freedom. Petersburg and Rio are depicted as apocalyptic 38 Exemplary of anthologies of Petersburg texts, Otradin cites several reiterations of this claim, including an excerpt from Shiskhov’s novel Емелян Пугачев: of the thousands who build Petersburg, «пятая часть их ложилась «костьми» в заболотенные земли Петербурга» (18–19). 39 Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’, 4. 40 Cited in Otradin, Petersburg, 21.

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cities, representing the culmination and devastation of culture. Both function, as Katerina Clark will say of Petersburg, as ‘crucible of revolution’.41 Tynianov relates eccentric dynamics of political revolution again to the city’s position and design, recalling the unfolding of Petersburg’s 1825 and 1917 revolts on squares (more like Rio’s open parade grounds, similar sites for reform, than like the blocked streets of revolutionary Paris). Linking insurrections on these squares to threats and lines of escape on river and canals, he descries Petersburg as fluid space as well as site of socio-historical flux. 42 The Decembrist revolutionaries, like Paris’s upstarts, uproot Petersburg’s pavements to fight against authority. But they dig up recent imported material, employing European ideology to combat a militant order that similarly borrows forms from, but also contradicts Western ideals. They paradoxically reach through Peter’s window to the West to combat the abuses with which he imposed Westernization. Maira’s early nineteenth-century painting of the changing of the guards on Dvortsovaia Square and Raev’s Dedication of the Aleksandr Column (1834) typically stage the eccentric city, placing uniform architecture, as well as uniformed soldiers and spectators on parade against expansive backdrop. Kaganov points to a ‘secret terror’ in Raev’s painting: ‘In the inhuman immensity of Petersburg space, the artist feels an eerie, stultifying force.’43 These squares serve as sites for the display of authority, before they become sites of the disorder played out in fictions such as Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman and Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ as well as in history. This is a paradox similarly on display in visual and literary representations of Rio’s squares as site for speeches and coronations, the slave trade and revolutions, partly surrounded by neo-classical architecture, but set against the backdrop of sea and mountains, pocked by motley boats and shanty towns. Both images and stories show us how the peculiar geographical as well as socio-political positioning of the eccentric city gives rise to challenges to authority. Petersburg on its forty-four islands and Rio on thin strips of land between mountain ranges and sea, are porous ports. They become gateways for not only commercial but intellectual 41 Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Cf. also Robert Maguire, Exploring Gogol (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Kelly, Toward Another Shore, 203, 205. 42 Tynianov, Кюхля; cf. Hertzen, and Olga D. Forsh, Собрание сочинение (Moscow: Художественная литература, 1962–64) on undercurrents and secret societies after 1812. 43 Kaganov, Images of Space, 99.

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exchange that threatens the stability of these eccentric centres. As new capital, Petersburg becomes both site and subject for debates between Slavophiles and Westerners concerning the orientation of Russian culture.44 Despite its distance from Europe, Rio becomes the similarly unsettling site for the infiltration of French and British ideas in Luso-Brazilian culture (as a port more open to economic and ideological exchange with both Paris and London than is Lisbon, despite the latter’s greater proximity to these European centres).45 Imperial geography is similarly slanted through Petersburg, insofar as the city becomes a point of filtration for the southern and eastern as well as western infiltration of Russian consciousness. Cultural passage through Petersburg is often literal as well as literary, flowing in part through the travel, epistolary and poetic narratives composed by Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Pushkin and their contemporaries for Petersburg circles, and later infiltrating the Petersburg prose and poetry of writers such as Bely and Blok.46 Rio concentrates cross-cultural contact and debates concerning Brazil’s immigrant, indigenous and hybrid cultures, disseminated not only in urban tales, but also the early Indianist literature of Alencar and literature that turns into and returns from the interior after Mário de Andrade and Graciliano Ramos. In a rather paradoxical recounting of a ‘Belle Epoque’ of Brazilian letters, when Rio’s status as literary capital is signalled by the creation of an Academy of Letters under Machado de Assis, Carelli contends that Rio distinguishes itself from its colonizing cultures as the city of Euclides da Cunha (drawing Sertão into contact with city) and of Lima Barreto (attentive to racial and class conflict): ‘Avec eux, par de là la dépendance des modèles français, la littérature 44 The Archaist/Arzamas, Slavophile/Westernizer debates are noted at different points in this chapter and in discussions of Pushkin’s and Gogol’s hybrid literary language and style in the next; incisive yet concise studies can be found in Fanger’s Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (135ff.); William Mills Todd’s Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Charles Moser’s The Cambridge History of Russian Literature (CHRL) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Victor Terras, A History of Russian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 45 Cf. ‘Rio, Brazil’s Threshold’ on similar debates/divides about Western/colonial and indigenist national ideals. 46 On Petersburg in relation to south and interior, see Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini (eds), Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997); Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural Mythology (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); and Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: The Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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brésilienne incorpore les forces contradictoires, le métissage culturel du pays.’47 The debate about a national literature and culture draws from and develops well beyond the confines of these eccentric cities in nineteenthand twentieth-century Russian and Luso-Brazilian literature. Yet even or especially as ex-capitals, these cities continue to concentrate and underwrite cultural, linguistic and generic transformations of eccentric literature. Their continued role as arbiter of eccentric culture depends on their original arbitrariness. Foundations: displaced capitals One of the peculiarities of the planters or planners of these eccentric cities was their relative indifference to local soil, settlements and populations. The conflict that inspires the building of the eccentric city involves distant centres more than local disputes. Petersburg and Rio are first military outposts, geographically and politically staking the claims of Rus and Portugal in disputed territory, defining the reach of modern empires. Peter begins to build his fort and city in 1703 on land not officially ceded by Sweden until 1721. Similarly, Rio rises as Portuguese fort and settlement on territory long contested by the French and Dutch. Unlike the concentric city, which absorbs underlying and outlying settlements and legends (so that Paris preserves not only Roman traces, but in Roman fashion also those of earlier civilizations, with memorials like the ‘Pilier des Nautes’), the eccentric city represents and then replaces another city on another site, which it defines as hostile, but also ‘unsettled’ despite earlier settlements. Though colonial conflict is more protracted in Rio than in Petersburg, the nature of the conflict is similar. In both cases colonial power is contested long before the founding of the city. This is on display in Meijer’s map of Nyen/plan for Petersburg (Figure 5), but evident in many early maps where Petersburg lies on the edge of contested borders, approached by enemy fleets. Colonial power in Rio is disputed not only before but long beyond the founding of the city, as demonstrated by similarly fleet-driven engravings published by Van Noort (Figure 22) and maps including the Plan de la Baye, Ville, forteresses, et attaques de Rio Janeiro Levé par Le Chev. de la Grange…au mois de 9bre 1711 (Figure  23) and the Prise de Rio-Janeyro: 1711 published in the 47 Mario Carelli, ‘Formation d’une capitale littéraire au Brésil’. Paris et le phénomène des capitales littéraires (Paris: Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1984/90), Vol. III, 183–9 at 187.

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Figure 22  Rio Iavero. Engraving c.1598 by Baptista Van Deutecum. Published by Olivier Van Noort. Description du Penible Voyage Faict entour de l’Univers ou Globe Terrestre. Cornelis Claes, 1602.

Recueil des combats de Duguay-Trouin. Despite Cabral’s arrival in the Guanabara bay on 1 January 1502, the first colonial settlement was actually French, established by Admiral Nicolas de Villegaignon with five hundred French settlers, most of whom perished by the end of the next decade of fighting with the Portuguese, who resettled Rio de Janeiro in 1565 under Estácio de Sá. Although the native Tamoio Indian population allied themselves with the French (as figured in Baptista Van Deutecum’s engraving for Van Noort, Figure 22), the Portuguese claim to the territory was underwritten by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, in which Pope Alexander II divided the non-European world between Spain and Portugal, then dominant colonial rivals. England, allied with Portugal and continually in conflict with Spain and France, supported Portugal’s claims to Brazil. Sanctioned by religious and secular powers, the Portuguese city was registered as São Sebastião de Rio de Janeiro in honour of the defeat of the French on the feast of St. Sebastian, 20 January 1567. The founding and naming of St. Petersburg resembles that of Rio in respects especially evident in visual representations. Legend has it that in 1703, while surveying swamplands where the Neva sweeps into the Baltic sea, searching for a site on which to build an imperial outpost,

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Figure 23  Plan de la Baye, Ville, forteresses, et attaques de Rio Janeiro Levé par Le chevler de la Grange … au mois de 9bre. 1711.

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Peter the Great cut and crossed strips of peat from Swedish land and declared to the men riding alongside him, ‘Here shall be a town.’ In fact, the fort that would be named by Peter the Great after the saints Peter and Paul and the city he would call Sankt Pieter Burkh, using a Dutch variation of his patron saint’s name on his name day in 1703, had already begun to be built a month earlier, on 16 May, by a detachment led by General Menshikov.48 But in its legendary founding, the city is cast as arbitrary, provocative mark, impressing the future on the present (since the land was not yet Russia’s) and pitting man against nature (by building a city on inhospitable marshlands). In Picart’s engraving (Figure 24), the foregrounded inn on the shores of the Neva looks like a ship, or perhaps an ark (replaced by the Hermitage in Sokurov’s recent film) promising to ‘preserve’ Russian culture on these northern shores. In contrast to the naval ships on the Neva, the inn and fortress on opposing shores suggest stability, though in competing architectural styles. Settled banks seek to control flux manifest not only in continued military threat and natural flood, but also by the intensified trafficking of cultural and political ideas, invited by Peter’s design and reflected in Picart’s often copied and widely circulated engraving of crowded banks and shipping lanes, both passerby and passing ships bedecked in European styles and flags (Figure 25). The imperial ‘necessity’ of building both Petersburg and Rio lay in strategic defence and expanded control over trade routes (Brazil’s riches resulting in Portugal’s domination of the gold trade in the eighteenth century, when Petersburg’s port controlled northern sea trade between Europe and Asia). Colonial conflict in Rio lasted longer before the establishment of the city as capital, so that Rio last served in its capacity of colonial outpost in 1711, when the city was sacked by, then definitively recaptured from the French and rebuilt. Yet Petersburg, even as capital, served longer as outpost, through the Napoleonic invasions that also instigated Rio’s replacement of Lisbon at the centre of the Portuguese Empire and even through the Second World War. We might recalculate duration if we correlate disputes over economic and political influence in Latin America to more violently disputed borders in Eastern Europe and Eurasia through the twentieth century. When St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro are designated as capitals, Russia’s Peter I (1672–1725, co-regent from 1682, tsar 1696–1725) (Figures 28 and 30) and Portugal’s João VI (fleeing from Lisbon with 48 Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight, 18.

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Figure 24  Pieter Picart (Pickaert). Saint Petersburg. 1704. Engraving.

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Figure 25  Pieter Picart (Pickaert). Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress and the Holy Trinity Square. 1714. Etching with line engraving.

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his court in 1807, ruling from Rio 1808–21), followed by Brazil’s Pedro I (1798–1834, Portuguese prince regent Pedro IV, 1821, emperor of Brazil, 1821–34) (Figure 29) reorient Russian and Luso-Brazilian culture by geographically relocating the political, economic and cultural capital of their burgeoning empires to Rio and Petersburg. The reigns of Peter I and Catherine II (1729–96, reign 1744–96), Pedro I and II (1825–91, regent from 1831, reign 1840/41–89), result in remarkable physical and psychological (ideological, political, socio-cultural) redirections of cultural interest, recasting Russian and Brazilian culture on thresholds between East/South/Interior and West/North/Europe, none of which absolutely represent past or future. Peter the Great projects a northern capital based no longer on the medieval Russian system of family alliances but on military and industrial might, administered by a professional bureaucracy, fed by a port drawing from foreign sources as well as from the countryside (with the Neva connected by canals to the Volga). His plans for the city, set in full gear when he moves to Petersburg in 1710 and declares it his capital in 1712, include naval yards, the stock exchange, academies, a government printing office and the Trinity Cathedral, all partly completed by his death in 1725, on view with Petersburg under construction and as centre of trade in Sokolov’s etching (Figure 17) and Alekseev’s View of the Stock Exchange … (Figure 26). Rio becomes capital of the Portuguese colony of Brazil in 1763 because of its port value in the gold trade in central Minas Gerais. Fleeing Napoleon’s advance, Dom João IV moves the capital of the Portuguese empire to Rio, bringing with him his court (including 15,000 noblemen plus their households) and forcing them to rebuild in Rio, much as Peter the Great forces the court to move from Moscow to Petersburg (not only relocating institutions but also remodelling them on French ideas, using French architects). João IV likewise imposes institutions, immediately constructing a naval academy, law courts, royal printing works, the Teátro de São João, a royal library open to the public in 1814, an Academy of Fine Arts, a school of medicine and the Bank of Brazil.49 Within a year of the court’s return to Lisbon in 1821, the heir to the throne, left in charge of the colonial capital, declares Brazilian independence, with Rio as capital. Like Peter I’s, Brazil’s Dom Pedro I’s liberal designs are paradoxically absolutist. That contradiction partly underpins ideological debates and uprisings that result in the 1830 49 D. Sousa e Holstein offers a detailed description in ‘A Cidade de S. Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro’, in Coelho, RdJ, 123–30.

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Figure 27  Quinhentos mil reis. Brazilian banknote depicting the harbour in Rio de Janeiro.

Figure 26  opposite Fedor Iakovlevich Alekseev. View of the Stock Exchange and Admiralty from the Peter and Paul Fortress. 1810. Oil on canvas.

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Figure 28  Vasilii Surikov. View of the Monument to Peter I in Senate Square. 1870. Oil on canvas.

outlawing of the slave trade (in name only), the 1853 de facto end of the importation of slaves, the 1867 call for the eradication of slavery by Dom Pedro II (in an address his contemporaries call suicidal), the 1888 abolition of slavery by a parliament set up as in Petersburg as a failed attempt to preserve social order, and finally, the 1889 establishment of a Republic (resulting in exile, not execution, of Pedro II). As the Portuguese Dom João IV, Brazilian Dom Pedro I and their successors imitate in both progressive and paternalist modes the very force they resist, Russian rulers (tsarist and communist) militantly implement imported ideologies and industrial advances to counteract expansive European empires. Russian tsars and Portuguese and Brazilian monarchs are commemorated with imposing urban monuments, cast in militant poses in typical European style. Thus Peter I and Pedro I sit imperially in central squares, each with an arm raised in apparent triumph, charging on horseback towards the future. Though these figures signal authority, their stance is ambivalent in both monumental cast and more prosaic representations of these monuments. Falconet’s horseman might be trampling

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Figure 29  Pedro I in Tiradentes Square. Unknown photographer.

serpents while charging forward, or he might be rearing back. His back is turned towards Russia. In Surikov’s painting of Falconet’s monument (Figure 28), Peter the Great is seen against a shadowed city, leaping over a snowbound square towards emptiness. While he is encircled by lights, Petersburg’s inhabitants race by in darkness, headed in the opposite direction. Encircled by similar lamps in Tiradentes square, Pedro I sits on a horse more firmly implanted on his baroque pedestal (Figure 29). The dynamism of the monument, and its ambiguity, stems less from the direction the horse is headed, more from the contradictory lift of the horse’s hoof and head, pulled back with the monarch’s backward glance. The monument pushes in multiple directions, not least of which pressing

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down, on a pedestal ornamented with idealized indigenous figures, who stand poised with weapons, tensed in their own internal struggle and their own outward gaze. The photographer might seem to aggrandize the statue with his shot from street level. But his everyday lighting, cropped close-up, and prosaic inclusion of a ladder reaching up to a lamp suggests access. Daylight illumines the native’s face, while Pedro I’s features are erased by shadow. With such reflections on representations, visual artists render these regents’ and regimes’ contradictory facets. Contradictions lead to the association of monarchies and militant dictatorships as well as of dissenting voices with madness.50 The characterization of Petersburg’s and Rio’s founding monarchs as monomaniacal, paranoid, paradoxical and schizophrenic links personal obsessions and cruelties (among them Peter the Great’s interrogation, incarceration and eventual murder of his son) to the imported progressive cultural visions imposed on their people. While the disproportioned construction of their respective cities resulted in the proliferation of literal diseases such as malaria, syphilis and tuberculosis, ‘schizophrenia is the symbolic disease of the [eccentric] imperial capital’.51 The ‘madness’ of the deviant monarch is also linked with role-playing, literally manifest in the monarchs’ wearing of strange costumes and propagation of alien customs. Serov’s early twentieth-century painting Peter I (Figure 30) foregrounds the foreignness that frames Peter’s founding of Petersburg and socio-political reforms in the figures that follow this commanding presence. Markedly Eastern and Western, they stoop and stumble behind his massive stride, struggle against wind and cold he faces openly, avert and close their eyes while he looks straight ahead with stern and steady gaze. The construction of Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro cannot be seen outside the context of an interest in perverse performance (Peter’s cross-dressing and playacting, switching places with a commoner in play that resulted in the death of the forced pretender; Catherine the Great’s cross-cultural redressing, accented speech, conversion, cultural reorientations, promiscuity; Pedro II’s conscious re-staging of authority through popular art and public acts). As Peter I’s performance was linked to obsession with things foreign and scientific (often understood as sacrilegious), Pedro II was similarly marked by cosmopolitan interests, 50 On João’s madness, see Coelho, RdJ, 232. Although de facto king when the court flees to Rio de Janeiro, João officially becomes king only upon the death of his mother, the mad Dona Maria I (d. 1816). 51 Monas, ‘Unreal City’, 386.

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Figure 30  Valentin Aleksandrovich Serov. Peter I. 1907. Oil on canvas.

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technological innovation and cross-cultural curiosity sometimes read as cultural irreverence. In both contexts, authority staged itself as carnival, linking to collective scandal. While images of carnival in an officially Catholic Rio proliferate as we might expect, they are mirrored by surprising stagings in and of Petersburg. While he famously illustrates Pushkin’s Petersburg poema with the unmoored Bronze Horseman hounding Evgenii (Figure 37) and the Neva’s waters rising, the painter Benois anticipates Bely’s Petersburg with his dominoes and revelry on boats marked by music and disorder, doubling a more mundane order on embankments in his 1900 gouache and graphite Carnival on the Fontanka River (Figure 31). His figures seem to circulate in daylight or at dusk; yet carnival pageantry in Petersburg and Rio plays on the particular contrasts of these northern and southern climates. Although carnival during Petersburg’s white nights might seem more like Rio’s, it is similarly spectacular and phantasmagorical when played out on its frozen landscape. Thus, Beggrov’s earlier lithograph shows a dark sea of people crowding a carnival on snowy expanse (Figure 32). Custine, coming from Paris to Petersburg, comments on the dark character of the illumined city, in terms that could equally apply to Rio’s tropical lights and pageantry: There was something deeply ominous in the theatricality of the capital’s public rituals and royal festivals, enacted against the backdrop of Rastrelli’s marvelous palaces, stupendous in their scale and magnificence: ‘You think … what I am seeing is too great to be real, it is a dream of a lovesick giant told by a mad poet.’ St. Petersburg was what it seemed on first impression, a splendid decor ‘designed to serve as the theater for a real and terrible drama’.52

Re-imagining Petersburg and Rio as the dreams of self-aggrandized, lovesick anti-heroes, the citytext similiarly recasts eccentric carnival as nightmare. Sokurov reminds of this in his resurrection of Custine as guide to the unseen film-maker wandering the halls of the Hermitage – another Russian arc, housing Russian history and collapsing cultural memory in rooms that spatialize historical thresholds and offer us contradictory perspectives on Russian originality and creativity. This Custine also offers glimpses of a grand, grotesque, ghostly Russia, 52 Kelly, Toward Another Shore, 203, citing Custine’s Letters from Russia. Kelly notes Volkov’s characterization of post-revolutionary Petersburg as ‘quintessential carnival city’ (209, citing St. Petersburg, 281).

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Figure 31  Alexandre Benois. Carnival on the Fontanka. 1900. Gouache and graphite on paper.

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Figure 32 Karl Petrovich Beggrov. Shrovetide Fete with Tobogganing on the Tsaritsyn Meadow in St. Petersburg. First half of the nineteenth century. Lithograph with tinted watercolour.

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through a trajectory introduced as trauma and madness, mirrored by the disturbing madness of Peter I, one of the first historical presences confronted by disoriented travellers and audience. Unlike their prosaic parodies, the founders of St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro were upstarts, recalled as handsome or imposing, virile adventurers, seamen, engineers, planners more than builders: Peter the Great and General Menshikov, the discoverer of the Brazilian coast Pedro Alvares Cabral, the founder of the fortified city of São Sebastião de Rio de Janeiro Estácio de Sá, Dom João IV and especially Brazil’s Pedro I. In Serov’s painting we see Peter in this light. He is similarly shadowed authority in Surikov’s and other paintings of Falconet’s monument – an ambivalent representation continually re-cast against Petersburg’s contrastive architecture, vistas, light. We can see the similar stature of these founders in cultural myth in a comical illustrative error inscribed in a brief history of Rio de Janeiro na Literatura Portuguesa, misrepresenting Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great as Brazil’s Dom Pedro I before the Palácio do Senado.53 An ‘enlightened’ monarch, interested as much as Peter in such sciences as navigation, shipbuilding, military strategy, law and administration, and as much in the arts and broader sciences and nation building as his contemporary Catherine the Great, Pedro I was likewise an unquestionable tyrant. Both Peters represent complex betrayals of place and past in their inconsistent implementation of distant ideals – resembling, not only in their capacity as foundation stones, their Biblical namesake. If these founders were cast as irrational and their ideas as rationalization of unruly play for power, the literal foundations of their capitals followed markedly rational lines. First centred on fortifications, the cities echo their design in the form of a compass, an image that would have a special sense to their founding navigators. We may contrast the spokes of the compass to the circular form or rings in terms of which concentric cities are organically imagined as burgeoning womb, layered tomb or thickening, stretching, rooting as well as branching trunk. The city as compass is recast as mechanical instrument, designed for navigating uncharted expanses. The eccentric city is constructed to provide defence and direction on edges of a physical and cultural landscape in flux. Yet these urban centres become unruly compasses – their orientation of culture uncertain. If the eccentric city is represented as unrooted, instrumental, it also has no fixed north. We find eccentric cities without a stable 53 See Coelho, RdJ, 177.

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centre of gravity and without a consistent gravitational orbit, as depicted through those constant cartographic reorientations. This disorientation is registered vividly in the recent poetry of Elena Shvarts,54 where Petersburg is imagined in terms of a kind of historical weightlessness, sent spinning by shifting winds from East or West, as Barreto also finds Rio at the end of the nineteenth century, and Lins later describes Recife.55 If Rio’s decentred development is a function of the demolition of historical markers in the context of social reform as well as of unruly sprawl, Petersburg might seem to be stabilized by a monumental St. Isaac’s, Nevsky monastery, Peter and Paul fortress with its chapel at the centre, and other massively scaled structures, each functioning as fixed point in the city and defined degree on a cultural-historical compass. But in the course of political and cultural realignments, the cathedrals and fortresses constructed to centralize authority in both Petersburg and Rio become increasingly pushed to physical margins of city and cultural discourse. They no longer anchor the centre, as in concentric cities. Rio’s fort becomes so decentred and irrelevant that it is levelled along with the morro do Castelo during the public works under Pereira Passos at the close of the nineteenth century. In his ‘Guide to a Renamed City’, Brodsky heralds the reification of imperial Petersburg, paradoxically preserved as a function of the city’s relative marginalization in the Soviet political sphere. But the monuments and buildings he describes have become architectural traces evacuated of authority or uniform facades for shifting authority. Brodsky notes the irony inherent in the neo-classical facades fronting Soviet school, factory, psych ward, prison and morgue as well as the disjuncture between facade and increasingly fragmented interior. Like the watery reflection in terms of which Brodsky describes the city, Petersburg’s stone surface can be disturbed by a historical ripple that also results in such intersecting parallels as indicated by Nabokov in his reading of Gogol and realized in his own fictions. Like Petersburg’s, Rio’s development is decentred and redirected in the somewhat parallel transition from colonial to imperial to republican to regional capital. When Brodsky notes the strange hybridity of one of Rio’s few memoried markers, ‘the edifice hulking over the passenger pier, resembling simultaneously St. Isaac’s Cathedral and Washington’s 54 See Shvarts, Стороны света (1989), Mundus imaginalis: Книга ответвлений (1996), Западно-восточный ветер: Новые стихотворения (1997), Paradise: Selected Poems (1993). 55 Cf. Barreto’s Vida e Morte de D. J. Gonzaga de Sá and Osman Lins’s A Rainha dos Cárceres da Grécia.

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Capitol’,56 he links it to two other markedly eclectic, copied constructs in eccentric capitals. The lack of historical reference points he finds in this sprawling city refracts a more modernized Rio through his memory of Petersburg as dystopian site. But as noted earlier, Brodsky’s mapping has a peculiar moral historical cast. If we recall that he represents Rio’s openness (signalled by a blinking green light) as conducive to the evasion of Nazi interrogator, rather than as escape route for wandering Jew, we might consider how in ‘The Prophet’ Rawet (of similarly Jewish Slavic origins) imagines a port city that might be Rio de Janeiro also as grounds for forgetting. We survey a city of immigrants, marked by flux, a flurry of construction and reconstructed subjects. Looking at the city as backdrop for and from the perspective of the Jew fleeing pogroms in Slavic lands, we find it remarkably inhospitable to survivor seeking someone who can recognize his suffering. Yet Rawet’s, like Brodsky’s, ethics-aesthetics of defamiliarized consciousness and conscience are contingent on equally open-ended and inhospitable cultural landscapes.57 Part of what makes these cities so compelling to these writers is the alienation provoked by their arbitrariness, contrary and contradictory architectonics and centralized but anxious authority. Both recognize the unconscionable ruthlessness of these eccentric constructions, even while rooting their own eccentric creativity and conscience within the strange and estranging nature of the eccentric capital. Because the capital of the Brazilian colonies was moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro two hundred years after its founding, motivated by the port city’s new function as funnel to Lisbon and Rome for gold discovered in 1695 in the nearby region of Minas Gerais, Delgado de Carvalho – noted historian of Rio – argues that it belongs to that category of ‘natural’ capitals including Paris and London, rather than to the ‘artificial’, among which he identifies Petersburg and Washington as well as Brasília.58 As capital, Rio develops along lines already drawn on the landscape, whereas artificial capitals are projected arbitrarily onto empty space. Yet Rio, which Carvalho does recognize as ‘eccentric capital, that is, distant from the geographical center of the country; distant also from the most densely populated centres, … a frontier city’,59 does not exactly develop naturally in the sense of London or 56 Brodsky, On Grief and Reason, 66. 57 Cf. Boym, ‘Estrangement as a Lifestyle’. 58 Delgado de Carvalho, Historia da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. 2nd edn (Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 1994). 59 Ibid. 107, my translation.

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Paris, nor is it much more than military outpost and port settlement before it becomes colonial and imperial capital. Rio’s population swells massively when it is made capital: in 1660, the census distinguishes roughly 3,000 Indians, 750 Portuguese, 100 Blacks, and an unknown number of adherents to various religious orders, but that sum leaps in 1793, when colonial capital, to 50,000 and then within twenty years up to 100,000 when hosting the Portuguese court. By 1890, this urban capital has 522,000 inhabitants,60 though soon to be rivalled and then overtaken by São Paulo as economic centre, then by Brasília as political capital – displaced as Petersburg is by Moscow, though under other conditions. Thus, Rio’s real urban development begins, like Petersburg’s, only in the eighteenth-century and on massive scale and sped-up timeline instigated by the relocation of the court.61 More essentially, as its earliest chroniclers suggest, Rio’s grid and structures mark it as a planned city from its founding as fort on the frontier. It is drawn in straight lines, like Petersburg, on similar swamp, as well as against the contours of the coast and granite peaks of three interior mountain ranges. Although the sediment on which Rio is built backs up against a much more fertile forested terrain in a tropical climate, these were not necessarily more forgiving than Petersburg’s alternately marshy and frozen swamps, harsh summers and winters. Rio’s construction also cost countless lives, lost to hard labour and disease, and required similarly imported material, such as the stone and canalization materials shipped from Portugal to build the aqueduct that would bring fresh water from the mountains into the delta (travelling farther even than the stone that Peter would require as a tax with any import to Petersburg).62 If Rio’s rainforests and coastline, with beaches such as Copacabana (originally named Copa Caguana in the Tamoio language, meaning ‘luminous place’ or ‘blue beach’), offered a natural beauty rivalled by Petersburg’s only during its white nights, this tropical terrain held similar dangers. The beautifully rugged beaches of Ipanema were named thus by the Tamoio Indians because of their reputation as ‘dangerous waters’. Like Petersburg’s swamps, the pântanos were infested with disease. The mountains not only offered rich resources and 60 Boris Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 143. 61 Cf. Afrânio Coutinho, ‘O Rio de Janeiro e a unidade da literatura’, in Conceito de literatura brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas, 1976), 76–91; Leslie Bethell (ed.), Colonial Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 128. 62 Sousa e Holstein, ‘Aqueduto da Carioca’, in Coelho, RdJ, 118.

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Figure 33  Flooded St. Petersburg, 7 November 1824. Unknown artist. Drawing published in a yearbook on notable objects and events, Erinnerungen an merkwürdige Gegenstánde und Begebenheiten. Vienna: V. Jahresband, 1825.

a retreat but also hemmed in the city’s growing population and polluted air mixing with fog, as in Petersburg. Constructed in the context of military hostilities on peculiarly hostile ground, both of these cities were also constructed by force. The conscripted labour with which both Petersburg and Rio were built included African and native American slaves in Rio, Finnish prisoners of war in Petersburg, and in both cases peasants drafted from expansive empires. In Copacabana and Ipanema we read violent urban biography in a twist of language. If both cities brought in an elite, international group of designers, these other populations served as the more dispensable construction workers, craftsmen, soldiers and servants. Portuguese and creole populations differed little from Russian serfs in terms of the economic and social constraints under which they operated within a similar system of clientelism. In both contexts of rapid construction and social reorganization there were also greater opportunities for the falsification and forgetting of socio-economic and ethnic origins, never wholly irrelevant. A remarkable plurality of ethnicities intermingled in both Russian and Brazilian cultural centres, which drew not only from Europe but also from outer reaches of empires. If the arbitrary and authoritarian construction of the city resulted in similarly extreme socio-economic disparities, contact between classes and cultures resulted in hybridity. Yet social mobility was mitigated by the fact that

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material was valued more than lives in shoring up these marginally positioned cultural capitals against invasion and natural disaster. Pushkin gives us the most famous image of a single life lost to Petersburg’s perverse marginal construction – Evgeny drowned in the wake of the Bronze Horseman. Petersburg must literally shore itself up against the threat of flooding with imported stone – its famous granite embankments. Rio must construct similar barriers to protect itself against flood and landslide. João Chagas aptly describes chaos threatening Rio’s inhabitants in terms of a dense, disorienting fog that might remind one of Petersburg, forcing caution and causing confusion. He similarly pits man against water and sky and, when the fog lifts, formidable but formless masses.63 If such monstrous apparitions in the fog of Petersburg’s flatlands could only be man-made monuments, they are marked, in the literary text, as similarly proportioned and fantastical formations. Only in daylight do they, like Rio’s similarly copied architecture, represent the cosmic order and creativity that Chagas and Pushkin pit against the chaos represented by sea and steppe. Against an ‘estuary so vast’, Chagas sees Rio at risk of being lost,64 as Petersburg might also be swallowed up by sea, rendered spectral against strangely lit and distended horizons. Rio’s planners tunnel through and raze mountains, using them as landfill. Like Petersburg’s architects, they stretch the city along the coast, fill in swamps, recovering land from the sea, connect islands, shore up the coastline and build canals to hold back the sea. Despite the apparent constriction by mountain ranges, Rio’s push up the mountainsides with both favelas and posh neighbourhoods is a means of horizontal growth, on the surface, unlike the building up on rubble and foundations of an older city. One wanderer in Rio, crossing the ‘lower and oldest part of the city’, passing by ‘those places that Prefectures always have great embarrassment in cleaning or covering up and whose existence society, in general, pretends to ignore’, finds ‘forgotten pieces’, ‘eloquent in their evocative power, true tales without words’. But he counters expectation associated with wanderings in concentrically constructed cities, where such ruins would suggest subtexts or urban palimpsest, answering his own query whether these are shadowy and aged alleys, ‘By no means. This is a network of large streets, rectilinear and regular, crossing at right angles, furnished with low houses – almost all carved out of the same stone but with the current 63 João Chagas, De Bond (1897), 4–9, in Coelho, RdJ, 171–2. 64 Ibid.

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Figure 34  Augusto Malta. Avenida Central. Photograph. c.1906.

urban appearance.’65 He demonstrates how immediate the changes in the eccentric city are and how its reorientations involve displacements on the surface, re-directions and evasions, abandonment rather than the re-appropriation of older places or identities, of history. The city is centrifugal rather than concentric or centripetal in its development. It realigns itself with each new administration, rebuilding on old terrain only in exceptional cases where what was built in some section of the city is completely razed (as in the fires possibly ordered by Catherine for the reconstruction of a disorderly wooden centre in stone or the levelling of the landscape for the construction of the Avenida Central in the early days of the Republic). Rather than a ‘centre point’ in Petersburg and Rio, there are central lines. These include the Nevsky that stretches between the Admiralty (secular order) and the Aleksandr Nevsky monastery (sacred order, then desacralized space), as well as the Neva that reaches between Russian interior and European Baltic. In Rio, these are such central avenues as the Rua do Ouvidor, Rua Direita, Avenida Central, as well as Passeio Público. 65 Raul Lino, Recordacões de uma viagem ao Brasil (1937), in Coelho, RdJ, 245.

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The vistas offered through and along these central lines are continual subjects of visual and literary representation. While projected as straight lines, these lines curve in response to actual topography, crossing each other, broadening into squares, and bending into a thick kind of space that we will read in Gogol’s texts as arabesque. This line circles back in keeping with the way Gogol describes the city in terms of circles, but not concentrically ordered. Rather, his multiple circles expand and contract; they may be miniscule, reflecting difference distilled ultimately to individual consciousnesses of characters, figuring like pinpointed circles constantly following larger lines, crossing and colliding with each other in the city’s streets. Bely reduces a fog-bound Petersburg to two pinpoint circles, in a narrative structured by wandering and doubling, wondering and doubting on Petersburg’s streets. In Bely’s work, the lines defining Russian consciousness are redrawn yet again within the cityscape and along distended cultural horizons, as ­disorientingly as in Mário de Andrade’s hallucinated city. Gogol’s circles are already culturally alien. The design of Petersburg’s streets, squares and edifices, like Rio’s, is largely drawn by foreign architects (French and Italian) or native architects trained abroad. Peter’s original plans to build a northern Venice give way to imitations of Paris and Versailles. Anna’s and Elizabeth’s revisions reflect not only turns in different cultural directions, but also development turned in different directions on the landscape. As Petersburg’s early edifices are planned by Leblond, much of Rio’s construction under D. João IV is designed by the French architect Montigny. Yet the designs are realized and revised with that baroque tendency of combination, critique and pragmatism. Visible foreign elements in Petersburg include the unorthodox spire of Peter and Paul cathedral, the Petergof palace fountains, the Smolnyi cathedral, and, under Nicolas I, what Buckler describes as the ‘“barracks-like” utilitarian structures for the ever-growing government bureaucracy’ – ‘relentlessly classical facades that obscured the identity of a given structure as public, private, cultural, commercial, or industrial, and seemed no longer to proclaim eternal civic precepts’.66 As Buckler notes, the exhausting uniformity of such facades partly instigated the drive for eclecticism. That eclecticism manifests itself not only in an increasingly differentiated or hybrid cityscape, marked by discrete architectural styles (including the neo-Grecian, neo-Byzantine, neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque), but also in increasingly hybrid and, 66 Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, Chapter 2.

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according to European standards, incoherent individual constructs. As Kaganov describes it, there is an internal doubling and contradiction that makes space denser, without suggesting any kind of organic ramification or development, but simply a filling in of empty space through division, with the representation of discontinuous, seemingly indifferent if not undifferentiated characters: Whereas space had been conceived as empty through the early nineteenth century, ‘now it was conceived as full to the brim. Space disclosed its immense internal capacity. It turned out that if you divided a single interior into a multiplicity of tight nooks its capacity would be increased many times, though it might lose its visual unity. But no one cared about that. On the contrary, such unity was avoided by all means, and fashion dictated that every little nook be furnished in its own style’.67 The fragmentation of the city’s monumental architecture is reflected in the fragmentation of its everyday spaces, represented in fictions increasingly focused on what the critic Stasov would call ‘scenes of life stirring in a thousand corners’.68 But these scenes are drawn not so much from traditional family life as a scandalous version of it in a far more unruly boarding-house culture than Balzac’s. This is a more mundane carnival in which ‘space surfeits all the senses in equal measure; it is so jammed with people that it can be assimilated only through incessant pushing and touching; in it one’s hearing wearies from cries, laughter and music …’69 Notably, this internal division and crowding does not result in the disappearance of the city’s open perspectives, the orientations and prospects signalled by its central prospekts. Rather, it results in refracted perspectives along side streets, in stairwells and shared living spaces, and, pitted against these crowded places, in the rendering of the city’s open squares and horizons as all the more ominous and phantasmagorical, unnatural and uncanny. The result of a city experienced through close but alienated contact, like the underground man’s, is an imagination that ‘cannot of itself form a unitary image of the city’ and for whom ‘the city’s integral image’ even present before one’s eyes seems a ‘fantastic, fabulous hallucination, a dream that in its turn [is] about to disappear and flow like vapor toward the dark blue sky’.70 67 Grigory Kaganov, ‘Sight Riven and Restored’, Russian Review 54 (April 1995), 229. 68 Vladimir Stasov, ‘Послу всемирной выставки’ (1862), in Kaganov, ‘Sight Riven and Restored’, 233. 69 Ibid., 238. 70 Ibid., 239, citing Dostoevsky’s ‘Петербургские сновидения в стихах и проэе’ (1861), DPSS, 19: 69.

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The incoherent surface of the city made more evident the contradictions within its socio-political institutions and cultural imagination. These contradictions in Rio were perhaps most defined and illumined by Pedro II, as in Petersburg by Catherine II, both foreigners, enlightened absolute monarchs, cosmopolitan diplomats, scholarly patrons of European as well as national, indigenous and world art and philosophy, concerned with defining an autonomous Brazilian and Russian cultural authority. Under their direction, both capitals were partly illumined, partly erased: sections gas lit and razed. Both monarchs cultivated connections with progressive Enlightenment European thinkers and writers. Connections could be material: despite the distance, Rio had a telegraph link to London in 1874. Pedro II’s construction of Petrópolis may be seen as analogous to that of Tsarskoe Selo. Through such constructs these monarchs materially promoted the arts, expanded already long-standing public collections, and cultivated a more philosophical engagement in civic discourse. At the same time, under Pedro II and Catherine II, similarly contradictory socio-economic systems were confirmed. Both continued to develop a marginal metropolis dependent on distant agricultural plantations or estates, slave or peasant population, patronage and clientelism as part of the ‘modern’ bureaucracy imported from Europe, a middle class of petty bureaucrats and professionals, merchants and craftsmen, military and students, with a working class basically comprised of displaced peasantry. This system resulted on the one hand in even greater social disparities than those stirring up revolution and reaction in European cities, but on the other in greater proximity of disparate social classes, all displaced and similarly subject to the contradictions of everyday life in the chaotic construction of the eccentric city. Yet both monarchs similarly reasserted their autocratic hold over expanding empires and resisted republican tendencies disseminated with the French Revolution. The gradual social and physical transformation of Moscow through domestic proximity, marriage as a means of social mobility and a rising merchant class, or in São Paulo through a similar culture defined by a coffee bourgeoisie, found no equivalent in Petersburg’s and Rio’s establishment, expansion and redesign as military outpost, centre of government and port of exchange.71 Pushkin’s, Gogol’s, Dostoevsky’s, Almeida’s and Machado de Assis’s fictions directly contend with the links between eccentric urban 71 Cf. Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 180; Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight, 69–70.

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formation and forms of capital, its role as port rather than producer through much of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, its function as purveyor of military and civic authority. In both cities, actual currency and bureaucratic ambition are linked with risk, fool’s gold and gambling. Rio’s economy literally grows out of the gold rush and mining in the interior as well as the mercantilism, clientelism, and imperialism that also shape Petersburg. Fictions such as Almeida’s and Gogol’s reflect more the failures of this economy, the darker, dingier side of the city’s spectacular gamble with Western fashions. This failure figures not only in a direct critique of economic foundations for interaction in the city, but also in an indirect critique focused on the city’s fragmented spaces, as recognized by such early critics as Belinsky. Both the segmented ‘uniformity’ and eclecticism of Petersburg and Rio cityscapes has been understood in relation not only to cultural and political re-orientations but also to ‘capitalist’ economics, by Soviet/Marxist historians and literary critics. Recent cultural historians such as Schwarz and Buckler offer nuanced analyses, the latter linking the turn towards eclecticism in the cityscape with a professionalized bureaucracy to changes in the citytext. Professionalization of writing influences hybridization of form (as a function of both creative freedom and market demands of a broader literary public). Buckler finds in the city’s eclecticism evidence of a redistribution of ‘cultural access, even cultural authority, amongst its diverse inhabitants’.72 ‘Major works in the Petersburg “literary mythology” reflect the [shifting and eventually] eclectic architectural vistas that constitute far more than the setting for their action. The relationship between eclecticism in literature and architecture illuminates the way in which literary structures, through rhetoric, signal their debt to the notion of culture as edifice.’73 The same seemingly 72 Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, chapter 2. 73 Ibid. Buckler introduces her study of interrelated ‘hybridity’, dialogization, ‘eclecticism’ in ‘literary genre and cityscape’ in terms similar to Schwarz’s ‘ideas out of place’, redefining space, genre and style in terms of fracture and fluidity – wine from different vintages poured into broken bottles: ‘Theorists of form and style invoke generic hierarchies conceptually in terms of high, middle, and low styles. Certain genres connote specific settings or spatial referents, as in the case of graveyard elegy, Gothic novel, and society tale.’ ‘But it is not enough to describe the urban literary setting with recourse to specific generic forms. The St. Petersburg cityscape echoes in its structures the dissolution of the neoclassical generic hierarchy within the nineteenth-century cultural context, and thus mirrors the literary innovations of the time … The hierarchy of literary genres as articulated by neoclassical theorists corresponds to the ideal, systemic conception of the neoclassical city, the model upon which St. Petersburg was planned and built. But during

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authoritative prescriptions for literal and literary construction in the city are abandoned in modern Rio, resulting in landmark structures’ increasingly hybrid forms. Cultural appreciation of hybrid architecture challenged a priori values. Architectural ‘purity’, ‘integrity’, ‘tradition’ and ‘originality’ were replaced by eclecticism. Pushkin’s and Alencar’s, Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s work similarly challenge literary norms and notions of authorship. In its representation of the urban landscape as well as in its urbane narrative structure, their work reflects an intensification of translated and transformed models.74 One of the most strikingly eclectic aspects of Petersburg and Rio, from their founding through the nineteenth century, is their verbal texture – manifest in multilingual street signs, translated and translingual bureaucratic forms and language, stylized monuments, as well as international and internationally engaged native newspapers, journals and literature. As registered in both visual and literary representations, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Petersburg and Rio are cities full of foreigners, and to a large extent of the same foreigners (French, British, German, Dutch, Portuguese), as well as cities of displaced aristocracy, merchants and peasants (Russian and Portuguese, but also drawn from many other nationalities and ethnicities encompassed by vast empires).75 The upper classes in both cities were as conversant as and sometimes far more conversant in French and English than in their native languages. The originality of nineteenth-century literature lay, in part, in its insistent use of Russian and Portuguese, albeit variants infused and transformed by multilingual writers. The highly stylized poetic Russian of Pushkin’s or Gogol’s fiction drew on archaic Russian models, modern European texts and translations, but also increasingly on the vernacular, everyday speech and incorporated regionalisms. This ‘modern’ Russian literature parodically casts itself as foreign to high Petersburg society (accustomed to speaking French), redefining the nineteenth century, writers of Romantic and Realist orientation increasingly blurred the boundaries between established genres, experimenting with stylistic effects produced by mixing lexical elements from multiple levels of the generic hierarchy.’ 74 Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, Cultura e sociedade no Rio de Janeiro: 1808–1821 (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1978), 154. 75 Describing its transient and foreign inhabitants as Petersburg’s ‘most characteristic feature’, Gordin enumerates not only a variety of displaced Russians, but Germans, Frenchmen, Swedes, Englishmen, Finns, Tatars, Poles, Georgians, Bokharans, Persians and Indians (Пушкинский Петербург, 87). Cf. Figes Natasha’s Dance, 1–68 and Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight parts 1–2. Any study of Rio de Janeiro contends with its multicultural origins and character.

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Figure 35  Chernetsov. Detail from Reviewing of the Guards on Tsaritsyn lug in St. Petersburg in 1831. 1831–37. Oil on canvas.

readership not only by exploring cultural margins and middle-ground, but also through linguistic critique and inclusiveness. Similarly, as Haroldo de Campos notes, Machado de Assis’s foremost contemporary critic cast him as alien and ‘stutterer’, denigrating his composite style as that of a ‘monkey’ and ‘mulatto’, his novels as incoherent, mongrelized, and even ‘abortive products of a powerless imagination’.76 That critique returns us to concentric assumptions concerning power and language. But Campos counters that Machado de Assis is ‘national because he is not exactly national’77 as Gregório de Matos is national because he infuses classical forms with indianisms. The dialogism inherent in the polylingualism of the eccentric text may be visualized in terms of Julião’s and Chernetsov’s famed parading of Rio and Petersburg populations. Chernetsov’s much studied painting of the Review of the Guards on Tsaritsyn Lug in St. Petersburg in 1831 (detail, Figure 35) returns us to Petersburg’s order and disorder, militant culture and cultural crossings. The city stretches horizontally under an immense open sky. The militant line is doubled by a more mobile social parade. As in Julião’s similarly famed Configuração que mostra a entrada do Rio de Janeiro (Figure 36), we find the eccentric city figured in multicoloured 76 Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’, 8. 77 Ibid.

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Figure 36  Carlos Julião. Detail from Configuração que mostra a entrada do Rio de Janeiro. c.1799.

and multi-ethnic faces, dressed in varied fashions, and facing different directions, though united as spectators and spectacle staged against discrete but similarly doubled, distant horizons. The paintings play with conventions. These cultures are similarly defined by writers engaging in transgressive, transcultural, translingual creation. Eccentric dynamics in Russian and Brazilian literature: displacement, digression, dialogue, dissembling and dissent Like the eccentric capitals in which it was concentrated and whose contradictions it reflected, modern Russian and Brazilian literature was immediately eclectic, its apparent inconsistency and incoherence structured by intertextual and intratextual contradiction and parody. Despite the apparent uniformity of eighteenth-century neoclassical poetics asserted in classic Russian literary histories, the concept of a ‘neoclassical’ literature – ‘universal, uncomplicated, immutable, uniform for every rational being’78 – constitutes a ‘myth’ as much as does that of architectural coherence.79 As myth, it represents a culture’s 78 Altshuller, citing Lovejoy, in ‘The Transition to the Modern Age’, in Moser, CHRL, 92. 79 Buckler points out both fallacies in Mapping St. Peterburg.

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attempt to compose a coherent history. Early modern Russian writers, Vasilii Trediakovskii (1703–68) and Antiokh Kantemir (1708–44) sought to distance themselves from a clerical medieval Russian tradition to define a secularized Russian literature in relation to European models, reforming literary language and genres through a deterritorialization and reorientation analogous to Peter’s relocation of political capital and socio-political reform.80 Like the ‘differential baroque’ poetry of Gregório de Matos (c.1636–95/96), ‘recombin[ing] Camões, Góngora and Quevedo’ while also ‘incorporat[ing] Africanisms and Indianisms into his … “trans-ethnical language”’, ‘resort[ing] to parody and satire in a “carnivalized” intertextual game where local elements mingle with universal “stylemes”’,81 much of these Russian writers’ work was based on their translation and adaptation of works filtering into Russia, especially through Petersburg. Kantemir’s satirical verse, partly modelled after the literarily self-conscious satires of Nicolas Boileau (translated by Kantemir in 1726 and 172782), marked the beginning of distinctly literary production in Russia,83 forging literary language and verse form in a highly self-conscious, stylized and parodic mode. Parody increasingly defined modern Russian literature. Its layered discourse or double-voicing could aptly describe debates about the origins and orientation of Russian history and historiography, language and literature, socio-cultural and political structures. However, parodic literature’s critical stance on copied, compromised or compromising social structures also resulted in marginalization. Parodic literature was related to alien forms and resulted in the writer’s alienation. On account of his satirical argument against absolute authority, Kantemir was ‘removed from the center of political life and dispatched as ambassador to London’ and then Paris. Yet his exile ironically imbued his writing with an increasingly eccentric perspective on an eccentric 80 Ilya Serman, ‘The eighteenth century: neoclassicism and the Enlightenment, 1730–90’, in Charles Moser, CHRL 45, 48–9, 55. In an address to the ‘Russian Convocation’ of the Academy of Sciences, Vasilii Trediakovsky argues for a literary variant of ‘Petrine reform’, described in more detail in his New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Verse (1735) (55). 81 Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’, 8. 82 Serman argues that Kantemir found Boileau’s satires compelling because of ‘their concern with literature itself’, ‘combin[ing] in literary form a typology of contemporary society with literary polemics’ (49–50). Kantemir’s other influences include the satirical prose of Jean de la Bruyère and Justus Van Effen as well as the classical satire of Juvenal and Horace (50). 83 Ibid., 46–7.

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culture, and though Kantemir’s work was circulated only in manuscript in Russia during his lifetime, it was posthumously published, first in French (1749), then German (1752), and finally in Russian (1792). Later dissenters including the Decembrists and the Petrashevskii circle suffered worse fates: Radischev’s literary parodies resulted in a death sentence commuted to Siberian exile and, upon his return to Petersburg, political censorship so extreme that it motivated suicide. The costs of parody under tsarist regimes presage those suffered by writers from Babel to Bulgakov in the twentieth century. With high stakes, eclecticism and hybridization of literary language and form both instigated and developed alongside the more conservative poetics articulated by Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765), Trediakovsky (who became more conservative in his later writings), and Aleksandr Sumarokov (1717–1777), whose strictly ordered poetics was expressed through serious neoclassical genres of ode and tragedy.84 We find exceptions to this seriousness in Trediakovsky’s free translations of Tallemont’s poetry and prose (made more concrete, erotic and humorous)85 and in Sumarokov’s comedies and fables, advocating ‘situational and linguistic humor within the genre, and not moralism’ by embedding the fable-writer in the mundane, collapsing distance between narrator and reader.86 Serman finds eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Russia marked by contradiction, caught ‘between the author as the proponent of a scientifically rational approach to the world … and on the other hand an ‘irrational,’ confused world of social and human relationships lacking any sort of natural, rational, moral criterion of human behavior’.87 A peculiarly urbane satirical strain in Russian literature develops in ‘high’ and ‘middle’ neoclassical forms: Denis Fonvizin (1745–1791) doubly displaced debates in the Petersburg court in his Недоросл (The Minor, 1783) by representing them in a provincial setting and subjecting them to distortion and laughter in that context (as Gogol would later in Dead Souls).88 Vasilii Maikov’s (1728–1778) urban poetry, written in neoclassical form (using the ode), incorporates a prosaic strain of city life and language. Fonvizin’s satires of high society generate a line drawn out on both sides of the Archaist versus Arzamas and Slavophile versus Westernizer debates about Russian language 84 Ibid., 47–68. 85 Ibid., 53. 86 Ibid., 65–6. 87 Ibid., 66. 88 Ibid., 73–8.

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and literary form, in works by Krylov89 (1768–1846) and Griboedov (1795–1829)90 as well as Pushkin, Gogol, Nekrasov, Dostoevsky and others. Maikov broadens that satirical line by introducing more eccentric aspects of the urban landscape (opening up literature to include more than literate society), an eclectic language and urbane narrative form, dialogized through confrontations in the city represented in both the setting and the structure of his work.91 As Serman points out, ‘along with Maikov’s hero’ Elisei (a provincial corrupted in the city), ‘we are introduced to a St. Petersburg of a sort no one had ever written about in eighteenth-century poetry before him. This was not the St. Petersburg of palaces, churches and parks, but rather the city of lower-class suburbs, of taverns and of lock-ups.’ While shifting setting and perspective in the city, ‘Maikov preserves the distinctions between the high and low style, and the poem’s humor derives partly from the collision between the two’ as well as from ‘the narrator’s [ironic] attitude toward his narration’ – an attitude openly admired by Pushkin.92 Thus, Maikov provides early models of eccentric adaptation of concentric and already eccentric cultural construction as well as of confrontation between prosaic and poetic space – literal, literary and linguistic – that increasingly defines the dynamic of the Petersburg text. Literary history generally asserts that the debates about poetic and prosaic literary language and form in modern Russia and in Brazil developed within a relatively closed circle, comprising a small literary elite, linked on the one hand to landed estates, but educated in Europe and especially conversant with French literature and culture, often 89 Krylov’s satirical fictions include society plays, but also essays published in satirical journals he founded (Зритель [Spectator, 1792] and Санкт-Петербургский Меркуры [St. Petersburg Mercury, 1793]) and his renowned fables. He was part of the anti-Western, anti-Enlightenment, anti-literary and linguistic reform archaist circle (the Colloquy) including Shakhovskoi, who also wrote society tales that would influence Griboedov. His work, like that of other satirists, continually reformed the Russian literary language with its hybridizations, borrowing from Russian but also European folklore and satirical genres. 90 Griboedov’s most memorable contribution to this strain is his satirical play Горе от ума (Woe from Wit, 1822–24), set in Moscow and embracing Slavophile ideas by parodying Chatsky, a character who returns to Moscow indoctrinated in the progressive Petersburg school of thought. For a brief analysis of the play in the context of literary debates of its day, see Altshuller, ‘Transition’. 91 Maikov wrote both satirical poetry (including Елисей, или раздраженны Вакх [Elisei, or Bacchus Enraged], a tale of peasants corrupted in the move to the city) and satirical journalism. 92 Serman, in Moser, CHRL, 80.

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corresponding and communicating in English or French, and connected by family ties, association with the court, as well as ministerial, military and mercantile service in the capital.93 The paradoxical position of these elite, in both cases, lay in their alliance with a cultural ‘centre’ on the periphery and their distant proprietary connection to the larger Russian or Brazilian landscape and population. Often irresponsible in their relation to the latter, they also misrepresented it and certainly did not write for it; nevertheless, their writing was infused by its multiple discourses, distorted as they may have been. They generally wrote in terms of the speech genres and with the authority of inhabitants of the capital. At the same time, they dissented from literary and political authorities concentrated in Petersburg and Rio, though subject to their censorship. Given the web of alliances stretched in so many directions, the elite literary ‘circles’ of Petersburg and Rio were neither as coherent nor centred as concentric counterparts. Eccentric cultural construction would have to contend with the multilingual character of the place in which literature would be ‘set’ and define itself in part in terms of the language it would ‘speak’. In the Russian tradition, Arzamas poets and Westernizers variously advocated the transposition, translation and transformation of European forms. Conversely, the Archaists argued for a return to ‘natural’ national Slavonic linguistic roots and poetic forms, and the Slavophiles who succeeded them envisioned a return to rural Russia, with its physical and spiritual centre in Moscow. Each of these relocations of cultural discourse would also redefine relations to the many ‘minor’ marginal discourses of the Russian empire. In the Brazilian tradition, there would be alternating drives towards assimilation and adaptation of various European models and towards more isolationist ‘indigenist’ literature. In both contexts, narratives that continue to define the central canon represent, both literally (in fleshed-out ideas) and literarily (in form), both sides of the debate, drawing an arabesque or more aberrant literary line and language out of conflicting orientations. Gachev describes the formation of Russian literature and culture as a process involving dialogue between Petersburg and Rus’, as writers such as Ventura describe Brazilian culture in terms of disputes between Rio and interior regions of Brazil.94 As Lowe notes in her survey of the 93 Cf. Mills Todd, Fiction and Society; Altshuller and Mersereau in Moser, CHRL; Jack Tomlins, ‘Machado’s Cock and Bull Story’, in Heitor Martins and Jon M. Tolman (eds), The Brazilian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 29–41. 94 See G. D. Gachev, ‘Космос Достоевского’ (Moscow, 1988), 386 (noted and

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urban tradition in Brazilian literature,95 one of the primary tensions in Brazilian as in modern Russian literary history is that between ‘universalism’ and ‘regionalism’. One might argue that in the Russian tradition, the universalist or Westernizing tendency prevailed, since it was highly urbane (paradoxically derivative and original) literature of writers such as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, etc., that largely defined Russian culture not only to the world, but even to itself. However, nineteenth- and even twentieth-century Europeans read this representation of Russia not as universal but as exotic and barbarous, impenetrable and indecipherable, as it had been framed by French and other travellers to Russia, and even by Russian writers in their own travel narratives and tales of provincial estates and borderlands. The cosmopolitan aspects of writing about the provinces, reflected in an often ironic and self-ironizing narrative stance, could be overlooked rather than understood in terms of cultural rupture, resulting in the refraction of Russia’s interior as well as its edges through the eccentric perspective of a literary establishment, not only educated, but also often living and writing from abroad (as represented by Hertzen and Turgenev, in particular96). The cosmopolitan writers that would define modern Russian culture contributed to that construction of a Russian landscape that Hugo depicts, in response to his reading of Alphonse Rabbe’s Histoire de Russie as an entity rising, barbaric and threatening in its impenetrable, uncharted or indecipherable expanses, on the edge of a known Eastern and Western tradition: ‘Il faut marcher comme perdu au milieu d’un chaos de traditions confuses, de récits incomplets, de contes, de contradictions, de chroniques tronquées. Le passé de cette nation est aussi ténébreux que son ciel, et il y a des déserts dans ses annales comme dans son territoire.’97 That is, Hugo’s reading of Rabbe’s Russia recovers its past in terms of chaos, confused traditions, interpolated and interrupted stories and spaces, linking historical gaps to deserted geographical expanse, where the outsider wanders disoriented, in the dark. Both temporal horizons (past and future) are shadowed and spatialized (desert and sky). And for Hugo, primary navigational markers involve invasion from beyond commented on in Rosenshield [1996], 403); Roberto Ventura, ‘Tranculturação e identidate problemática’, in his Escritores, escravos e mestiços (Munich: Fink, 1987). 95 Elizabeth Lowe, The City in Brazilian Literature (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982). 96 Cf. Kelly, Toward Another Shore. 97 Seebacher, Victor Hugo, 73.

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Russia’s bounds. As Seebacher notes, ‘cette Russie potentiellement métaphorique s’encadre “entre deux figures gigantesques, Gengis-Khan et Napoléon”’98 (this potentially metaphoric Russia is couched between two gigantic figures, Gengis-Khan and Napoleon). In War and Peace, Tolstoy similarly envisions ‘temporal’ measures for Russian history that are extrinsic and essentially geo-cultural, defining Russia as a vast ‘in-between’ absorbing incursions from and re-orienting itself in alternate directions on the map, even while asserting an internal integrity and capacity for surviving that Petersburg writers such as Dostoevsky cast into doubt. But even the distinctly ‘historical’ and ‘regional’ or ‘provincial’ literature that perdures – Karamzin’s history; Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s southern adventure Аммалат Бек (AmmalatBek); Pushkin’s Повести Белкина (Tales of Belkin), Капитанская дочка (The Captain’s Daughter), travel narratives and poems dealing with the Caucuses; Gogol’s Мертвые души (Dead Souls); Turgenev’s Записки охотника (Notes of a Hunter) and novels such as Рудин (Rudin) or Омцы и дети (Fathers and Sons); Tolstoy’s chronicles of conflict ranging from his Sevastopol stories to Война и мир (War and Peace) and Hadji Murad; and so forth – recovers the Russian landscape in a literature self-consciously marginal in relation to its own mass culture as well as foreign cultural models. If works such as War and Peace seem to affirm a core Russianness, they are nevertheless marked by cross-cultural conflict and literary debate, voiced in Tolstoy’s disruptive reflections on history and historiography as within the conflicted consciousness of even fully fleshed out, quintessentially Russian figures such as Natasha Rostova and Pyotr/Pierre Bezukhov – the latter not incidentally named and torn between Petersburg and Moscow. Collectively, these self-delineations, representing the present or the not distant past, bend biological and historical lines of development and dialogue away from any historical dialectic developing out of conflicts rooted in ancient Rus’, towards cross-cultural dialogue. Fathers and sons, locals and visitors are seen through displaced eyes, their discourses deterritorialized and double-voiced. The conflict about cultural identity may be couched as a conflict between fathers and sons, but this is also always linked to the relationship between colonizers and the colonized, conflating generations of imported ideas. And both parties may represent both sides of the conflict in a culture that is at once colonized by Europe and colonizing along its own internal, southern, 98 Ibid.

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and eastern borders. The attempt to define a national literary language and tradition in Russia and Brazil is fuelled by unstable concepts of ‘originality’ and ‘origins’.99 The ‘anachronistic’ or ‘delayed’ ideologies represented by generations further collapses historical dimensions of dialogue, which is often left unresolved, open-ended, simply abandoned by a narrator compelled to move on. This literature consistently bears traces of an eclectic eccentric urban discourse in the figure of the urban/e traveller, writer, soldier or proprietor, carried over from society tales. In framed society tales such as Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s ‘Вечер на бивуаке’ (‘An Evening at a Bivouac’), one border is carried towards another by dint of retelling in different contexts, as is also the case in Machado de Assis’s short stories, such as ‘The Mirror’. The concerns of this Russian literature of the interior, foregrounding displaced or urbane consciousness, are then often cosmopolitan ones. The literature of the interior corresponds with the citytext – both literally, through a targeted reading public, and literarily, through intertextual dialogue. Russia’s sentimental and romantic literature, including works such as Karamzin’s «Бедная Лиза» (‘Poor Liza’), or Pushkin’s Руслан и Людмила (Ruslan and Liudmila) and Капитанская дочька (The Captain’s Daughter), is defined by contrasts between city and Russian interior, northern and southern edges of Empire; but there is no clear orientation for the hero (or antihero) whose interest in border crossings, contested boundaries and cultural-identity crises reflects those already concentrated in Petersburg. This was similarly true for many of Alencar’s fictions, particularly his earlier explorations of colonial and indigenous culture, but also his later, increasingly urbane fictions (such as Senhora), pursuing a social critique within more ambivalent literary structures, playing with the boundaries of both social and literary form. Both Pushkin and Alencar’s (trans)formative work continually adapts European and indigenous literary forms.100 In neither cultural context did either strain ever die out, but the difference in the dominance of ‘universal’ or ‘regional’ literature as critically defining category speaks to the perceived difference in the nature of these kinds of interior, the interior of an apparently (politically) autonomous empire and a clearly colonial one. 99 Cf. Martins and Tolman, ‘The Brazilian Novel’ and Mills Todd, Fiction and Society. 100 Cf. Donald Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 31ff. on Pushkin’s adaptations; also Mills Todd. See Schwarz’s Ao Vencedor as Batatas on Alencar.

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In contrast with urbane Russian mappings of the interior, provinces or margins, according to Lowe ‘“regionalist’ narrative that would seem disengaged with such “cosmopolitan” concerns, though rejected by some as provincial, [was] long considered the only authentic mode of Brazilian literary expression’. This was particularly the case after the ‘modernists’ of 1922 seemed to definitively resolve nineteenth-century debates in favor of the rural and regional, at least until the ‘irrefutably urban’ turn of fiction in the second half of the twentieth century, which instigated scholarly attempts to recover a long line of urban/e Brazilian literature.101 In fact, in Brazil too, the binary distinction between ‘universalist’ and ‘regionalist’ literature is, as Lowe points out in The City in Brazilian Literature, too reductive. The Brazilian interior functions analogously to the Russian in the literature of internal and external exile or migration of the twentieth century, generating a similar strain of displaced urbane fiction. It finds earlier analogies in Russian travel literature, particularly that of travel to the south, sharing with it a spirit of the ‘pioneer’ (nostalgically revisited in modernist Brazilian literature and modernist Russian poetry102), immediately tempered by anxieties about colonialism informed by the experience of the eccentric city. In both cultures, modern writing about the interior serves as a way of displacing a border or threshold represented earliest in modern Russian and Brazilian literature by the eccentric capital, in narratives that are not naive (though they may depict naive characters and borrow ‘naive’ or ‘primitive’ language and literary forms), but rather eccentrically urbane. The literature of the interior in Russian and Brazilian literature is closer to that of the eccentric city than to European models of pastoral or regional literature. It is similarly concerned with thresholds and distances, with displacement and disorientation in the present, and with definition in terms of the other. Insofar as the eccentric citytext shares with the literature of its vast interior these peculiar dynamics, we might turn the categories around and say that it is more ‘regionalist’ than ‘universal’. When Haroldo de Campos contends that Machado de Assis is a most ‘representative’ Brazilian writer because of his ‘universalism’, he also reframes this as a complex, critical, locally contextualized engagement of universalist codes. The eccentric citytext is ‘regionalist’ 101 Elizabeth Lowe, The City in Brazilian Literature (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 71. 102 Ibid.

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in its dynamics103 as well as details – depicting the peculiar structures of Russian and Brazilian cultures as they are concentrated and confront contradictory concentric colonial cultures in the city. It is ‘regionalist’ not in the sense that it is concerned with defining this or that locality within Russia or Brazil on its ‘own’ (in the conventional sense of monological, autonomous) terms, but rather because of its ironic perspective that belongs both to a particular place crossed by plural discourses and to a broad ‘region’ of eccentricity, to particular experiences of eccentric and eclectic culture. Eccentric literature develops in Russia and Brazil in a marginal capital, but also, almost simultaneously, across its extensive empire. The degree of eccentricity, dialogization and dissent in ‘high’ literary forms multiplies through both distension and densification. That is, it also develops through the inward turn of poetry and prose, in the doubly displaced psyche alienated within an already alien city and in increasingly reflexive literary forms. In Russia, this turn can be mapped in the work of Gavriil Derzhavin104 (1743–1816), followed by that of Pushkin and contemporaries including Batiushkov and Viazemskii. These were writers influenced by European strains of sentimental and romantic literature, characterized by a sense of alienation that was compounded for the later writers by political disaffection.105 Earlier neoclassical poetry, even when written in a satirical vein, concerned the purportedly ‘universal’ or at least the impersonal. In contrast, sentimental and romantic works filtered cultural conflicts, concentrated in the eccentric capital and along the country’s volatile borders, through individual consciousness and often highly self-conscious writing. They adopted a personal parodic posture that was occupied during the period of a more impersonal poetics by more concrete, prosaic strains of laughter in ‘low’ and ‘marginal’ forms of literature, linked with the politics and everyday life of the city (a popular vein of literature to which Maikov’s work gave a nod). Batiushkov, Viazemskii and Pushkin would write across satirical genres, exploring the boundaries not only between the personal and public, the capital city and edges of empire, but also between the prosaic and the poetic.106 With a playful, familiar irreverence, permissible because of the pretence of writing 103 Ibid., 71–2. 104 Cf. Serman, 87. 105 On the adversarial position of the writer, see John Mersereau, ‘The Nineteenth Century: Romanticism, 1820–1840’, in Moser, CHRL 137. 106 Cf. Altshuller’s ‘Transition’, in Moser, CHRL.

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for a ‘closed circle’ of readers, they would draw on the prosaics of Petersburg that developed alongside that neoclassical poetics perhaps best represented by the ‘marbled symmetries’ in Trediakovsky’s poem Похвада Ижерской земле и царствующему граду Санктпетербургу (1752) (‘Praise to the Izhorsk Land and the Reigning City of Saint Petersburg’), on which Maguire bases his reading of Petersburg as ‘unbreached enclosure’107 (breached in Gogol’s fiction). The city is represented in Trediakovsky’s and Lomonosov’s poetry in terms of the horizons characteristic of the eccentric landscape; however, these margins are generally not defined by conflict. The city’s light reflects off clear surfaces (whether water or sky), not stormy ones.108 Nevertheless, there is a conflict implicit in this poetry’s conception of the city in terms of conquest and colonization. The city is under threat because distant from cultural core, surrounded by uncultivated land, aspiring to heights while lacking both the roots and reach of the gradually evolved concentric capital. The poetry’s coherent images and synthetic poetics, seeking to consolidate a position for the city in terms of its internal constructs, shoring up its position against natural and historical flux, negotiating conflicts between national and foreign literary language and form, imply in their careful balance the uncertainty underlying the eccentric city and citytext. Sumarokov’s prose makes the precarious position of the eccentric city, already suggested by Derzhavin’s poetry, more explicit.109 The balancing act within and on the edges of the city and citytext becomes more evident by the early nineteenth century, when not only in the prosaic but even in the poetic Petersburg text, ‘city and nature now faced each other more as enemies’ than as allies against arcane or antagonizing cultures. Antsiferov points to Batiushkov’s motivic incorporation of the conflict between human constructs and their cadaverous foundations. He argues that Batiushkov’s rambler through the contemporary cityscape mediates 107 Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 74–5. Cf. Antsiferov offers further grounds for such a reading in his interpretations not only of Trediakovskii, but also of Sumarokov’s «Стихиры св. Александру Невскому», «Ода на победу Петра I» and «Дифирамб I-ый» (Душа Петербурга, 49–51, 56–7). 108 Cf. Maguire, Exploring Gogol 74–5; Antsiferov, Душа Петербурга 53–5. 109 Antsiferov notes, ‘Однако, и Державину была ведома тревога за будущего города Петра’, offering as evidence fragments from «О дешевизне прирасов в столице» in which Derzhavin notes the fragility of an eccentric capital, built on an empty expanse or in space (в пространстве) (Душа Петербурга 57–8). Writers from Bely to Pelevin play with this notion of culture constructed on a void.

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between Sumarokov’s and Pushkin’s poetics of the city.110 Maguire notes Karamzin’s prosaic critique of Peter the Great’s ‘mistaken’ and even ‘pernicious’ construction of a city on a land of ‘sands, marshes, sandy pine forests, where poverty, gloom, and disease hold sway’.111 Like Antsiferov, Toporov and Lotman, Maguire argues that the contrastive aspects of both cityscape and citytext converge in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman.112 The balance in Pushkin’s poem depends on counterpoint, on prosaic consciousness displaced into poetic form with such psychological force and physiological presence that the irony cuts both ways. Pushkin paradoxically draws out a neoclassical poetic line even as he contradicts it, reorienting the Petersburg text. Earlier strains of ‘high’ satirical literature underwrite Pushkin’s Petersburg poetry and tales, most notably his novel in verse or поэма (poema, a peculiarly hybrid poetic form in Russian letters) Евгений Онегин (Evgeny Onegin, 1823–31, published in full 1833), but also in such tales as «Пиковая дама» (‘The Queen of Spades,’ 1833) and poems including The Bronze Horseman, making clear that these at once serious and satirical works, typically recognized as the foundations for what is now understood as the contrastive ‘Petersburg text’, are not creations ex nihilo, but extensions of the poetic as well as prosaic traditions of conflict developing since the founding of Petersburg. As Mills Todd notes, Pushkin ‘set literary conventions against one another, parodying them, broadening their boundaries by attempting to combine them’, as suggested by the very title of Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse:113 [It] might be argued that Pushkin’s are the first Russian texts to come adequately to grips with the wealth of cultural patterns that had been set in conflict by the Westernization of Russia during the eighteenth century. Certainly there is always something subtly formalistic and metaliterary about Pushkinian texts, always a dialogue with generic and individual precedents. But these dialogues with convention frequently serve a number of functions beyond competition and virtuosity: exploring the extent to which world views are determined by literary and cultural stereotypes; questioning the extent to which literary stereotypes are 110 Ibid., 59–61. 111 Maguire, citing Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, in Exploring Petersburg, 75–6. 112 Ibid., 75; cf. Antsiferov, Душа Петербурга, 63ff. 113 Mills Todd, ‘Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich’, in Victor Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 357. Mills Todd points to parodic broadening of boundaries through formal interpolation in Pushkin’s lyrical poetry, fictional prose and historical verse narratives.

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adequate for perceiving experience; and through these essays in literary exploration, moving the world of art closer to the world of cultural and physical experience.114

Pushkin explores how ‘intersecting literary currents [including] classicism, sentimentalism, romanticism, incipient realism’ ‘proposed … literature as an ideal model for behavior, polite social interaction as an aesthetic and ethical norm, the poet’s life as an aesthetic creation, literature as an imitation of life’. His work represents the extension and interweaving of earlier parodic lines into a cohesive net, netting more contradictions of eccentric culture through highly original, though wholly derivative, hybridized literary forms. Crossing poetic and prosaic forms, Pushkin clears the way for the privileged position of prose in nineteenth-century Russian cultural self-definition as well as for the poetic and composite forms of Russian modernism in the early twentieth century. The prosaic line, thicker, offers more capacity for contradiction, eclecticism and parody, in part because of the broader cultural basis, appeal and accessibility of prosaic genres. These develop, like Russian poetic forms, partly through translation, adaptation and critique of Western models. On the other hand, as Gasperetti points out in The Rise of the Russian Novel: Carnival, Stylization, and Mockery of the West, ‘from the works the Russians chose to translate during the formative stages of their novelistic tradition, it is evident that the spirit of the subculture played a leading role … By and large Russians favored works that were eclectic, entertaining, and live with aphoristic density’, marked by ‘verbal play and sudden shifts in the story’ rather than pre-determined, monologic moralizing.115 Early novelists such as Chulkov and Komarov satirized ‘the officially sanctioned literature of neoclassicism and sentimentalism’ in part because of their own eccentric position with relation to Petersburg’s literary culture, but also ‘owing to their close association with the literary subculture. Consisting of an eclectic combination of folklore, carnival entertainment, the pulp fiction known as lubok, translated lowbrow literature imported from the West, and even the novel itself, 114 Ibid. 115 David Gasperetti, The Rise of the Russian Novel (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), 44. Gasperetti argues that the ‘eclecticism and unevenness’ of the early Russian novel reflects ‘the cultural dynamism of their day’ (3), prose forms, like poetic ones, representing not the ‘colonization’ of Russia by Western culture, but Russia’s critical, ‘circumspect’ response to Western culture (4) through parody and stylization – i.e., ‘counter-quest’ as described by Campos.

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the eighteenth-century Russian literary subculture served as an effective counterweight to the seriousness and didacticism of officialdom.’ ‘As the genre with the least number of formal constraints, the novel offered [Chulkov and Komarov] the perfect forum to mix a variety of styles and sources.’116 While circling around and exploring comic displacements within the city, urbane novels such as Mikhail Chulkov’s (1734–1792) Пригожая повариха или Похождения развратной женщины (1770) (The Comely Cook, or The Adventures of a Debauched Woman), avoided Petersburg itself, drawing on distant European models of the picaresque and rogue novel. They defined an eccentric culture through a double displacement analogous to that we find in Almeida’s fiction117 – that of the picaresque genre, in which the rogue hero is continually displaced, and that of parody, with hybrid forms poking fun at both higher genres and urban culture without offering a counter ‘indigenous’ culture, but rather working within Petersburg’s already doubly copied culture in the provinces. The prosaic Petersburg text was developed through similarly comic popular forms of literature and urban legend on which tales by Pushkin, Odoevsky, Gogol and Dostoevsky would draw. The more serious strain of the novel, the historical novel modelled after Scott, as well as the already satirically inclined ‘society tale’, are forms almost immediately parodied in literarily self-conscious works such as Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter.118 Parodic and satirical strains of laughter resonate also in ‘familiar’ as well as more political or journalistic prosaic forms developing in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Rio as well as Petersburg: These genres, including the essay, the travel narrative, familiar letter and eventually the физиолия and очерк, esboço and crônica and conto (proximate alternatives to the physiologie and feuilleton), filter, as in the European tradition, into the novel. The travel narrative and familiar letter, though travelling distances from the city, were directly and critically engaged with urban life and shared its urbane perspective even on distant cultural events. These genres mediated between high and low literature, appealing to an elite, literary culture, conversant with French, German and English literature. Because laughter in these genres was more muted and familiar than that in the bawdy picaresque novel, it was capable of more discrete indiscretions, creatively revising high literary language 116 Ibid. 117 Cf. Pacheco, A Literatura Brazileira, 16–21. 118 Cf. Mersereau, ‘Romanticism’, 157–65, Gasperetti, The Rise of the Russian Novel.

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and form. As Buckler notes, these forms also provided a model for travel literature within the city, already part of picaresque narrative. Like the feuilleton, the ocherk and conto bridged comic exteriority and novelistic interiority. It was along these generic lines, as pointed out in Lowe’s survey of urban Brazilian narrative, that ‘the founding of the Brazilian city gave immediate rise to the satirical mode in Brazil’s urban fiction’.119 Brazil’s most important writers during the colonial period, Gregório de Matos and Tomás Antônio Gonzaga (1744–1810), ‘both lived and wrote in what were capital cities at the time’, respectively the port city of Salvador in Bahía and the mountain town of Vila Rica (Ouro Preto) in Minas Gerais. Both capitals, predating Rio, were border towns of different kinds indicative of a shifting colonial economy (Salvador funnelling wealth generated by the massive sugar plantations, Vila Rica concentrating the capital generated by the mining industry). In their satirical verse, essays and epistolary writing, Matos and Gonzaga critique the decadence and hypocrisy of the city, in the manner of respective Parisian contemporaries such as Villon and Diderot, whom they knew. They sketch the city in similarly vertical terms, regarding class distinction, contrasting earthly and celestial cities and chronicling decay. Yet the relation of the satirist to the city in the works of Matos and Gonzaga is more ambivalent, explorations of a vertical social hierarchy complicated by horizontal perspectives generated by the distance of the colonial city from European civilization and the disintegration of the self in the colonial city, by an always doubled sense of displacement or ‘exile’, whether the author is writing from within or at a distance from the eccentric city.120 Their works are characterized by shifting perspectives that level ‘dialectically’ opposed categories and leave them finally unresolved. Lowe points out that the peculiarly self-conscious satire of Gonzaga’s Cartas Chilenas, like the satirical works of the Inconfidentes who were subsequently writing in association with distinctly urban literary Academies, was directed not only at ‘Brazilian’ but colonial – which is to say Portuguese – culture, and constituted an argument for Brazilian independence.121 119 Lowe, The City in Brazilian Literature, 76. 120 On the ‘repeated exiles’ suffered by Matos and their impact on his work, ‘a paradigm of Baroque antithesis’, see Lowe, 77–8 as well as Campos, ‘The Ex-Centric’s Viewpoint’. For a concise analysis of Gonzaga’s Tratado de Direito Natural and Cartas Chilenas, see Lowe 78–80. 121 As Lowe points out, the archadic poetry of the Inconfidentes (writing between 1768

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In both Brazilian and Russian contexts, political and literary debates shared prosaic forms and forums, in satirical journals targeted at a liberal, cosmopolitan literary culture. Following Catherine’s publication of satirical weekly Всякая всячина (All Sorts and Sundries), there were journals established by writers ranging from the more marginal Chulkov and Fedor Emin to Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818), founding editor of Трутен (Drone) and a writer who stood at the centre of Petersburg’s social and political life. The position of writers such as Novikov and Karamzin was indicative of the apparently close relation between published literature and official politics in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century Petersburg. This proximity was most evident later in Rio, in the central and foundational literary and political positioning of writers such as Alencar and Machado de Assis at a time when influential Russian journals would depend on a displaced perspective (most notably, Herzen’s122) occupied later by distanced and dissenting Brazilian writers (such as Clarice Lispector, Osman Lins, Lêdo Ivo and Silviano Santiago). But in fact, there was little room for open dissent or debate in either moment of apparently close association between literary and political authority. Literature would have to lose its officially approved status in order to remain at the cultural centre of the eccentric city. It retained critical authority in nineteenth-century Russia with the marginalization of the writer (making him a sort of cultural martyr)123 in a way that would happen in nineteenth-century Brazil mainly at social and racial margins (explored by Barreto), though also along political divides exacerbated during the military dictatorship of the mid-twentieth century. The consequences of censorship (before or after the fact of writing) would result in continual displacement of literary, cultural and political debate in these eccentric cultures. This would invite covert political dialogue in journals concerned more directly with literary and cultural theory and criticism. It would also induce exploration of regional consciousness and the country’s interior. But most critically, it resulted in a psychological realist and proto-modernist turn into the city refracted through alienated (already and 1795) was an extension of a larger body of political and social satire, rooted in the debates concentrated in the literary Academies of Salvador, Vila Rica and Rio de Janeiro. 122 In 1853 Herzen would found the Free Russian Press, the Polar Star in 1855, when he also published From the Other Shore, arguing against dogmatism and offering an eccentric, dissident view of both Europe (after the 1848 revolutions and reaction) and Russia. Cf. Kelly, Toward Another Shore 42ff. 123 See Serman on Radishchev (47) and Novikov (71–2).

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censored) consciousness. While the development of Sentimentalism and Romanticism might seem to indicate less concern with the city and civitas than with the conflicted self in isolation and exile, in the Russian context, Petersburg concentrated the alienated individual in crisis. In his essay on the development of revolutionary ideals in Russia, Hertzen would find in Peter the Great the ‘first free individual in Russia’ and its ‘crowned revolutionary’.124 Peter and Petersburg, Pedro II and Rio would represent in nineteenth-century literature a model of individualism and ideals as well as despotism and the denigration of the individual. These eclectic eccentric cities offered space, physical and psychological, within with to develop an internal literature of the threshold or, as Buckler terms it, of the ‘middleground’. Imagining the text as a body, Buckler argues that in the nineteenth century, ‘there seemed no limit to the possibilities for horizontal expansion in the midsection of the generic body’.125 We might be reminded of the Brazilian literature that Haroldo de Campos, echoing Oswald de Andrade, imagines devouring both immediate and distant cultural discourses, trans-creating the literary body through cannibalism.126 The grotesquely proportioned growth of the prosaic Petersburg text involved, on the part of both the Natural School and what Fanger identifies as that group of ‘Romantic Realists’ including Gogol and Dostoevsky, a concern with the everyday life of the city. Similarly, ‘inspired by Pushkin’s playfully staged collisions between prosaic and poetic elements in verse, poetic forms grew longer and more diffuse in structure, while still self-consciously asserting the elevating function of poetic form through satire and variegated tonalities’. Consequently, Buckler concludes, the distinctions between categories became less rigid, and the in-between spaces of established form dilated and eventually outgrew the named types and kinds against which these eclectic bastard aesthetic spaces defined themselves. Non-aristocratic, professional writers intent on inscribing themselves upon the cultural map produced much of this new literature. All of these changes gradually transformed the ideal generic hierarchy into a lateral, topographical network, as expressed by the physical structures of Petersburg and by literary works that variously reflect and traverse the city.127

124 «О развинии революционных идей в России», cited in Otradin, Petersburg, 16. 125 Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, chapter 2. 126 Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint.’ 127 Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, chapter. 2 [italics added].

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In her parallel analysis of architectural hybridization, Buckler emphasizes that ‘Petersburg’s architectural eclecticism … makes the diachronic survey of forms bizarrely synchronic, and transforms a hierarchical, vertical structure of cultural meaning into a horizontal network of semiotic connections’. Collapsing different forms of design or discourse into the present, the effect of architectural, like literary, hybridization is one of contradiction or dialogue – i.e., that of parody: ‘Through its architectural eclecticism, St. Petersburg deconstructs the very generic and period values it so insistently makes manifest.’128 The eclecticism of the prosaic text that both Buckler and Gasperetti emphasize as the place where modern Russian culture is defined is essentially eccentric in that it ‘represents a horizontal and relational, not a vertical or hegemonic expressive strategy’.129 We can further observe that eclecticism, while representing ‘selectivity’, also seemed a kind of insanity, more specifically cultural schizophrenia, rather than something especially rational or progressive. At the same time, the proliferation of styles could add up to something extraordinarily reasoned out, as it did in Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s or Machado de Assis’s self-rationalizing work, mixing different models to create a coherent narrative line through a single yet divided, doubled, contradictory, self-realizing consciousness. Thus, critics find in Dostoevsky’s work a ‘cognitive dissonance’ that is ‘the product of a society ideologically and structurally in the process of a transition from traditional to modern’ or a search for a synthesis where there is none, resulting in fictions characterized by open-ended dialogue or unresolved contradiction.130 Dostoevsky cannot simply draw Petersburg by tracing historical contrasts along the lines of Balzac in Paris or Dickens in London, but must redesign the citytext. The models for the Brazilian ‘urban’ text, like the matrix for the cityscape itself, were similarly those of Paris, London and Lisbon, and often of the Parisian text transported (translated, adapted) through Lisbon. Given its role as purveyor of modern French narrative, one might assume a dynamic in the concentric Lisbon text quite different from that of the Moscow text, clearly opposed in Russian cultural semiotics to Paris and other points west, with Petersburg between. However, Portuguese literature shares with that of Moscow not only concentric forms similar to those of the Paris text, but a provincialism 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid. 130 Kelly, ‘Dostoevsky and the Divided Conscience’, in Toward Another Shore, 57–8.

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that also links it with an organic and older culture. ‘Portuguese urban literature as a matrix for the themes of the Brazilian city writer is dramatically shaded by saudade, … most strongly tinged by nostalgia for the past, for childhood memories, and for a lost rural way of life.’131 The literature of Lisbon stylized and parodied by early Brazilian writers predates Lisbon’s marginal position in Europe, dating back to the work of the cancioneiros in the fifteenth-century, to Camões’ Lusiads, to travel narratives detailing Portuguese domination of the seas and commemorations of an urban court. As Lowe points out, ‘the Portuguese urban man of letters [was] traditionally a displaced country patrician, often with ties never fully severed from his country estate’ and even into modernity, later partly because of the disintegration of empire and marginalization of this European capital, Portugal ‘in many ways remained a provincial country’. This ‘provincial’ sensibility on the one hand aligns Lisbon’s literature with Moscow’s and, in its emphasis on biological lines, with that of other concentric cities such as Paris. On the other hand, it already reflects marginocentric, cross-cultural and eccentric sensibilities. While early courtly literature constructs a coherent concentric cultural memory, early Portuguese epic masterpieces such as the Lusiads also question that self-construction, through intertextual dialogue, generic play with conventions, and collapsed or unmoored histories analogous to those in Pushkin’s Petersburg poema. According to Lowe, Brazilian writers ‘empathize with this [patrician] sense of displacement’, though in their own literature, the saudade or nostalgia that characterizes Portuguese literature often takes ‘an ironic cast’.132 That irony filters into Portuguese literature in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century fiction and poetry of writers such as Cesário Verde (1855–1886), Eça de Queirós (1845–1900), and Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), once an already partly post-colonial Lisbon and Portuguese culture know themselves as eccentric and ex-centric. But Eça de Queirós’s mid- to late nineteenth-century stylization of French and British models (pushing their conventions, but with the same intentions) are more critically engaged and parodically transformed by Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis (revising intention). We might compare Machado de Assis’s and Dostoevsky’s parodic and dialogic ambivalence (often read as cynicism) to Tolstoy’s and Eça de Queirós’s more satirical and didactic (though not actually monological) 131 Lowe, The City in Brazilian Literature, 74. 132 Ibid.

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appeals for reform. Kelly contends that Dostoevsky, like Machado de Assis, has a sense of the possibility of reform from above, foreseeing the potential of anarchy resulting in a failure to achieve reform from below. But this potential is resisted by Petersburg realities represented in his fiction. Kelly likewise discusses Dostoevsky’s commitment to social engagement and particularly to the abolition of serfdom,133 which we might compare to Machado de Assis’s commitment to the abolition of slavery and other social reform, in both cases imagined as a necessarily gradual process. Tolstoy’s somewhat ex-centric Moscow, like Queirós’s Lisbon, also grounds critique. But only with Pessoa’s writing in and on Lisbon does Portuguese literature begins to offer a highly self-conscious, polyphonic, intertextually self-questioning mode that comes closer to that of his contemporary urban Brazilian writers, without wholly sharing its darker form of carnival laughter, linked to colonialism. The distinction between these ex-centric and eccentric contexts begins to dissolve in later twentieth-century stories such as Rawet’s ‘Lisbon by Night’134 and novels including Saramago’s O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis) (in which Saramago reflects as postmodern, post-Salazarist author by having Pessoa’s heteronym Ricardo Reis return to Lisbon from Brazil, on the eve of Salazar’s fascist dictatorship, to debate with his own posthumous author questions of authorship and authority) and Lobo Antunes’s As Naus (Return of the Caravels) (envisioning the return of Portugal’s original navigators to a debased and indifferent Lisbon, overrun with the retornados [returnees/ refugees] no less compromised than they, after the loss of Portugal’s African colonies in the early 1970s). These are works comparable to Bulgakov’s, Petrushevskaya’s and Ulitskaya’s revisions of Moscow, recasting and relocating cultural discourse by remapping geo-cultural and historical margins. This historical collapse and exploration of complicity, not merely stylizing but parodying concentric European models of cultural construction, comprises a critical, essential aspect of Peterburg and Rio texts and related Russian and Brazilian traditions, from their inception. Whether explicitly urban or simply urbane, nineteenth-century Brazilian literature takes the conflicts and contradictions of the colonial capital as point of departure. The wide-ranging work of Rio’s 133 Kelly, Toward Another Shore, 60. 134 From the collection O terreno de uma polegada quadrada (1969), included in Samuel Rawet, The Prophet and Other Stories (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 77–86.

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Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, Manuel Antônio de Almeida and José de Alencar parallels the developing strains in early nineteenth-century Russian prose. Alencar, commonly recognized as the father of Brazilian literature, is as prolific and varied a prose writer as Pushkin, similarly chronicling critical historical conflicts along both interior ethnic and cultural margins and along margins within an established imperial but still also marginal capital.135 Although not a poet, he shares a poetic sensibility to language and a similar interest in recovering in poetic prose a full range of poetic and prosaic registers – urban, regional and indigenous forms of speech. ‘His writings signal the beginning of a literature that is unmistakably Brazilian in genre, in themes, and in language.’136 A ‘romantic influenced by Balzac’s realism’ and ‘a Brazilian consciousness following French revolutionary models’, his work is marked by dichotomies, inconsistencies and contradictions that play out not only in plots, but increasingly in psychologically and socially complex characters, whose situations remain paradoxical.137 He writes in the same European modes, with a delay, contemporaneity and slant similar to that of Russian contemporaries – producing the stylized society tale, the sentimental novel, the romantic or adventure novel and the more realist urban or urbane narrative that comment on their own making. The latter among his works are especially self-conscious, but his Indianist or regional adventure tales, his sentimental fictions as well as his urban narratives are also critically, intertextually framed fictions. Senhora, his final and most urban/e work, is particularly full of references not only to the material and social dynamics of Brazilian society, but ‘to poets and novelists, to novels read at the time, to operas’,138 as well as to borrowed or displaced customs. Contextualizing Machado de Assis’s work within Brazilian literary development, Schwarz draws a line between the duality or incongruity of local reality and the demands of romantic plot in Alencar’s fiction, especially Senhora, and that of Macedo’s earlier A Moreninha. He draws out a historical dialectic involving the interaction of form and content, as these move ‘from being an involuntary reflex action to becoming a careful elaboration, from incongruity to artistic truth’. But this is a complex, dialogic truth, expressed through ‘affection, conscious adaptation, satirical mockery’ of European models, interested 135 Cf. Edinger’s introduction to her translation of Senhora. 136 Ibid., ix. 137 Ibid., xi. 138 Ibid., xvii.

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in exploring displaced ‘things in their true dimensions’ or in terms of local contradictions.139 The contradictions explored by Macedo’s and Alencar’s stylized fictions through ‘exacerbation or exaggeration’ are subject to open parody in Almeida’s and Machado de Assis’s more urbane, satirical fictions, ranging more broadly in the city, opening up new literary and social perspectives.140 Almeida’s Memórias de um Sargento de Milícias (1855) (Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant) suggests the military culture essential to the foundations of the eccentric outpost. It suggests, also, an exploration of cultural identity through historical survey and personal memory. As K. David Jackson notes, Almeida subverts the genres of memoir and history in eccentric ways here examined more concretely in works by Gogol, Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis, and developed further in modernist works such as Oswald de Andrade’s Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar through contemporary prose including Santiago’s work and Sergio Sant’Anna’s Confissões de Ralfo.141 Through critical simulation, Almeida depicts the city from the vantage point of scribbler rather than scribe, digressing on the page and on the street, seeing the city, like Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s narrators, from the shifting, ‘multifaceted perspective’ of the ‘plebeian writer’.142 Neither sentimental nor self-righteous about his marginal social standing, ‘Almeida was not the aristocratic bohemian of the seventeenth century or the polished eighteenth-century intellectual’ but depicted ‘an era of Brazilian urban history from the point of view of the emergent Brazilian middle and 139 Schwarz, Ao Vencedor as Batatas, passage translated and commented on by Gledson in his introduction to A Master on the Periphery, xxi. 140 Ibid., xxiii. 141 K. David Jackson ‘The Prison-House of Memoirs’, in Randal Johnson (ed.), Tropical Paths (New York: Garland, 1993), links this strain of Brazilian literature (including not only fictional, but historical and political, personal and cultural memoirs), which he finds uncharacteristic of other Latin American/Spanish literatures, to the peculiar ‘search for identity that has especially characterized Brazilian civilization since colonial times’ and to an ambivalent voice directed towards an ‘absent and distant center’. The fictional memoir is ‘writing as simulation’that according to Baudrillard‘produces a hyperrealism and the joy of an excess of meaning: “ … a thrill of vertiginous and phony exactitude, of alienation and of magnification, of distortion in scale, of excessive transparency all at the same time” (Simulations, 50). Simulation is both ritual and illusion. Reality is ritualized as “a striking resemblance of itself ” (45), while language constructed on other language produces the illusion of referentiality: “the metalinguistic illusion duplicates and completes the referential illusion” (148). Finally, simulation is capable of representing a “social microcosm” (23), attributing to the text a critical consciousness’ (199–201). 142 Lowe, 82; borrowing from Howe’s categories.

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lower-middle classes’.143 He marks the increasing centrality of marginal urban consciousness in the definition of literary culture, suggests a professionalization less linked with political authority, and turns towards the middle ground as the place of literary or cultural transformation. Almeida’s hero Leonardo Pataca is eccentric: ‘the antihero, or outsider, placed in continual opposition to the law throughout this novel, but who in the end becomes the law’.144 He does so differently than Balzac’s criminal figure Vautrin, insofar as his eccentricity is marked not only by position in a social hierarchy but by nationality, displacement, by the actual origins and mythical associations of the hero, born on board a ship en route to Brazil and imagined in terms of the Wandering Jew. Pataca provides a link to later Jewish figures in Brazilian literature, essential in Lispector’s, Rawet’s and Scliar’s definitions of eccentric culture, as in Babel’s, Mandelstam’s, Brodsky’s and Ulitskaya’s, across Russian twentieth-century literature. In both contexts the hybridization of culture involves contact between an ethnically diverse population (indigenous and imported). There are different but equally complex regional and ethnic elements to that hybridization. It is not insignificant that Pushkin and Machado de Assis, perhaps the two most significant figures in Russian and Brazilian letters, are both partly of African descent, and that this is not an impediment, is rather in Pushkin’s case even an asset, for their own social and literary position – though race and ethnicity do not serve other writers such as Barreto and Babel so well in their lived as in their literary lives. The regional (Gogol’s attentiveness to Ukrainian speech/culture, Alencar’s to Tupi) figures as significantly in the eccentric urban perspective as the international (imported European cultures). This is foregrounded in Oswald de Andrade’s ‘phonic usurpation’ of Shakespeare’s famous line, ‘transcreated’ in his ‘Anthropophagus Manifesto’ as ‘Tupi or not tupi, that is the question’.145 The Jewish line in both literary traditions represents both local and ‘cosmopolitan’ perspectives, and passing through Europe, plays a significant part in linking Russian and Brazilian literature. At Brazil’s greater remove (relative to Europe or old Empire/Portugal) and with its, possibly, more visible and audible mix of languages, cultures and races, ethnicity may play an earlier, freer part in literary dialogues. But a creative freedom contingent on displacement (realized by Brodsky 143 Ibid., 81–2. 144 Ibid., 82. 145 Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’, 6.

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specifically in terms of ethnic as well as urban alienation as well as defined by language) characterizes both cultures. The representation of a new kind of hero and narrator whose authority depends on displacement and dialogue is directly linked to a new generic indeterminacy. Lowe notes that Almeida’s ‘novel, first published in 1854–55 as a newspaper serial in Pacotilha, a literary supplement to the Correio Mercantil, was not well received because it did not conform to Romantic taste. The debate continues whether this book is Romantic, realistic, picaresque, or pre-Modernistic. It has variously been traced back to the sixteenth-century romanced chronicle; the roman comique and the roman bourgeois of the seventeenth century; the eighteenthcentury novel of customs; and the Dumas-style adventure novel. Parallels have been found between the novel and Gregório de Matos’s satirical poetry’.146 The eclecticism of the novel, its problematic parentage and parodic relationship to literary models, its eccentric perspective on an eccentric culture, its comedy and darker carnivalesque exploration of cultural consciousness, reflect designs more fully developed in Machado de Assis’s fiction. If figures such as Alencar and Almeida would offer models analogous to Lermontov’s and Pushkin’s, Macedo and Machado de Assis would redraw the city’s lines and lines of cultural/literary discourse along the more openly dissolute, digressive, refractory, refracted lines of Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s Petersburg. These writers similarly represent ‘not simply the harmonious culmination of a gradual literary “formative” evolution’ or ‘“genealogical construction”’, ‘but rather a moment of “transformative rupture”’.147 Building on the literary flux, urban/e verbal confluence, conflicted marginal consciousness and flooded margins of Pushkin’s citytext, Gogol and Dostoevsky – in dialogue with contemporary chroniclers of the city, including Odoevsky (not only with his fictional Русские ночи [Russian Nights], but also with critical essays such as ‘Как пишутся у нас романы’ [how we write novels] in Современник [The Contemporary], 1836), Nekrasov (as editor of Современник and with fictions such as ‘Петербургские углы (Из записок одного молодого человека)’ [Petersburg corners (From the notes of a young man)] included in his Физиология Петербурга [Physiology of Petersburg], 1845), Belinsky (with essays such as ‘Петербург и Москва’ [Petersburg and Moscow] also in Физиология

146 Lowe, 81–2. 147 Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’, 7–8.

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Петербурга), and others such as V. Sleptsov148 and Gleb Uspenskii149 – would be the principal designers of the Petersburg text as a space marked by doubles, disorientation, digressively creative copying, schizophrenic and paranoid scribbling. Similarly, in her preface to Aline Carrer’s Rio de Assis, Elianne Jobim notes Machado de Assis’s status as designer of the city, playing on the term ‘desenhar/desenho’ which can mean both a sketch of and design for, conflating past and future into the present. Alongside this dual aspect of Machado de Assis’s sketches, she notes the duality of the city, compounded by the dialogic aspect of Machado de Assis’s creation: ironic, but also loving, allowing his urban characters and urbane texts their own internally conflicted reasoning and the autonomous voices necessary for polyphonic dialogue. Her description of Machado de Assis’s Rio might apply equally to Petersburg but, more essentially describes the relation of the authors of both eccentric citytexts to the city or culture they represent: To study Rio de Janeiro is to discover a part of our own faces, between colony and metropolis, model and copy, nature and the baroque, ambiguous aspects inherent to belonging in the original and American world. Seaport, ‘stone body with a face’, image that lets itself be unmasked and almost ‘out of distraction’, discovers in the other its own difference, Machado de Assis’s city is narrative that invents the text, panorama that suggests the design, things that are known as aspects of the retina. Machado invents the world from the standpoint of Rio de Janeiro, or better, Machado invents us, things, world and Rio de Janeiro. Here is the supreme witchcraft: it is he who, with his precise quill, traces us and, fine irony, also gives us, generous, word/voice and reason.150

The alienated space and structure of city, self and narrative unfolds through such contra-diction in Gogol’s Petersburg tales, Dostoevsky’s 148 Vasilii Alekseevich Sleptsov (1836–1878) worked on the staff of Современник from 1862, and published works on Petersburg including the ocherk ‘Отрывок из дневника’ (written in 1864 but censored, published only in 1963), linked to cycle of feuilletons ‘Петербургские заметки’ published in Современник, 1863. 149 Gleb Ivanovich Uspenskii (1843–1902) wrote his earlier works on Petersburg and later works on rural Russian life. His Petersburg tales include ‘Петербургские очерки’ (1865), ‘Дворник’ (1865), ‘Извозчик’ (1867), ‘По чёрной лестнице’ (1867), and the cycle ‘Эпизоды из петербургских сезонов’ including ‘Нева’ first published in Новый русский базар (1867; reprinted in Otradin, Petersburg 238–43), ‘Петербургские письма’ 1879, ‘С конки на конку’ (1886, but first published as ‘Любя (из памятной книжки)’ in Южный край, no. 7, 7 December 1880), and ‘Квитанция’ (1887). 150 Aline Carrer, Rio de Assis (Rio de Janeiro: Casa da Palavra, 1999), 5.

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Notes from Underground and Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas – reflexive fictions through which subsequent chapters seek to elucidate the dynamics of eccentric modernism. These are fictions in which actual and fictional authors define their place (a critical and creative position, a position of authorship and authority) in terms of constant displacement. We will be confronted with this displacement and contradiction immediately, from titles casting these as the works of an ‘other’. As nineteenth-century European genres, personal chronicles, diaries, letters, memoirs imply intimacy and credibility. But these expectations are undermined by the radical otherness and unreliability of digressive narrator, madman, underground man and dead man as authors. These turn out to be also rather contrary characters even if one can literarily cross the distance to see through their distracted eyes (rather than the rosy glasses that Brás Cubas accuses his readers of wearing), try on tattered overcoat or elegant greatcoat and get in step with admittedly digressive and even drunken discourse. A sideways attribution of authorship allows the actual authors to distance themselves from the text, becoming implicit or explicit readers. Distanciation might be a way of voicing social critique in the context of censorship. That the internally cast authors of these fictions constantly question themselves about the authenticity of their writing, bringing up matters of copying and creativity in relation to personal and cultural crisis connected to their experience of others and otherness in the eccentric city gives us a special opportunity to examine these crossed lines of questioning in Russian and Brazilian cultural contexts.

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Part II

Eccentric narrative consciousness

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Chapter 3

Eccentr

Gogol’s open prospects: digressive copy clerks pen prospects, digressive copy clerks

O voluptuoso, o esquisito, é insular-se o homem no meio de um mar de gestos e palavras, de nervos e paixões, decretar-se alheado, inacessível, ausente. O mais que podem dizer, quando ele torna a si, – isto é, quando torna aos outros, – é que baixa do mundo da lua; mas o mundo da lua, esse desvão luminoso e recatado do cérebro, que outra coisa é senão a afirmação desdenhosa da nossa liberdade espiritual? Vive Deus! eis um bom fecho de capítulo.1 (The voluptuous, the strange thing is that man should insulate himself in the midst of a sea of gestures and words, of nerves and passions, declare himself alienated, inaccessible, absent. The most they can say, when he returns to himself – that is, when he turns to others – is that he is coming down from the world of the moon; but the world of the moon, that luminous and withdrawn corner of the mind, what is it if not the disdainful affirmation of our spiritual freedom? [Long] live God! here is a good chapter ending.)

Gogol’s eccentric ‘parallel lines that do meet when the necessary ripple is there’: texts, cultural contexts, criticism Logos: travestying Peter If Pushkin’s poema constitutes the cornerstone of the Petersburg text, Gogol’s Petersburg tales fill out the foundation. Yet the fundamental position of both writers’ works is paradoxical, insofar as it does not reflect origin or originality in their usual sense. Rather, it is contingent on their explicit reflection on their status as deviant, deconstructive copies of already-copied Petersburg texts. They represent a fundamental realignment and reification of the citytext, as significant in the domain of Russian literary and cultural history as Catherine’s redrawing of Peter’s 1 Brás Cubas, in Machado de Assis, Memórias Póstumasa de Brás Cubas (MPBC), XCIX.

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blueprint,2 resulting in a more dispersed, decentred, eclectic cityscape as well as the solidification of the city’s contours in stone. Pushkin’s and Gogol’s texts, which become almost immediately canonical, parallel on literary terrain some of the paradoxes of Catherine’s enlightened despotism and marginocentric empire. Gogol’s Petersburg tales extend the domain of the Petersburg text along lines drawn by Pushkin and Odoevsky, in directions further defined by Nekrasov and his contemporaries’ physiological sketches, by Dostoevsky’s novels and Belinsky’s criticism. They consolidate an architectonics for the citytext, using prosaic materials and a parodic mode of construction. The basic building blocks for Gogol’s Petersburg text are the eccentricities of everyday characters and speech. Petersburg emerges in the ordinary erring of estranged characters in the city, digressions of skaz narrators and marginal writing of minor copy clerks, each challenging marginocentric authority and authorship, by reflecting on but also reflecting its contradictions. In Gogol’s Petersburg tales, Pushkin’s prosaic hero survives the hounding of Falconet’s statue and replaces him at the center of the citytext. Confrontations with the authority Pushkin’s horseman represents may prove fatal to characters in Gogol’s tales, but that authority is parodied, pushed to the margins of the text. The Petersburg poema is re-mapped through the musing of uncertain narrator and unheroic hero. In Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat,’ the bronze horseman has become the butt of a joke so commonplace that is it only alluded to by Gogol’s typical Petersburg clerks: ‘даже, когда не о чём говорить, пересказывая вечный анекдот о комaнданте, которому пришли 2 Zamiatin’s notes on Pushkin suggest the comparison to Peter the Great (and a continuous line between Pushkin and the digressively copied, dissenting literature of the twentieth century): ‘Пушкин – Пётр Великий русской литературы. Пушкин – «окно в Европу». До него Жуковский, но … Влияние на Пушкина Байрона, Беранже, Шенье, Вольтера. Переводчик его – Мериме. … народность Пушкина. Впервые – нисхоэдение литературы, поэзии – «языка богов» – до языка людей и людей от народа. Сказки. Проза … Демократизм Пушкина. Пушкин и Декабристы (разговор с Николаем I). Под вечным надзором полиции, цензуры: первый из многих …’ (cited in V. A. Lavrova, Петербургский текст (St Petersburg: Издателство Санкт-Петербургского Университета, [1996], 66). From a historical perspective, Pushkin’s work would be more closely linked to Catherine’s Petersburg. Catherine’s rebuilding of Petersburg on a grand scale, her patronage of the arts and Enlightened philosophy generates the first monumental Petersburg text – imitative, but naturalized odes, lyrical poetry, familiar letters, sentimental prose. If these early Petersburg texts in turn are displaced by Pushkin’s more ambivalent monuments, more popular genres are reconstructed in Gogol’s eclectic tales.

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Figure 37  Alexandre Benois. Frontispiece for Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman.

сказать, что подрубен хвост у лошади Фальконетова монумента’3 (even, when there’s nothing else to talk about, retelling the everlasting tale about the commandant who was brought word that the horse of 3 N. V. Gogol, Полное собрание сочинений, GPSS, III.146.

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Falconet’s monument had had its tail cut off). The last in a line of pastimes in which the alienated protagonist Akaky Akakievich does not partake, the joke undercutting the monument is itself undercut by the semantically significant Gogolian qualifier, даже [even] – an equivocating term that often multiplies meanings and conjugates signifiers drawn from discrete speech registers in Gogol’s verbal economy.4 That this last resort to humour, when nothing else can be said, is also ‘even’ unsaid by Akaky may reflect his respect for signs of rank and original authority in his copies. When choosing material to make into a private ‘копию для себя’ (copy for himself), he cares ‘если бумага была замечательная не по красоте слога, но по адресу к какому-нибудь новому или важному лицу’5 (whether a paper [is] remarkable not for the beauty of its style, but for [being] address[ed] to someone new or to an important personage). Humourless as well as hyperconscious of hierarchies, he would be the least likely character to laugh at any provocation, but especially at parodied commandant or monument. However, his silence here stems more from his lack of investment in Petersburg’s fluctuating discourse, or in the order of rank and file anyplace other than on the page. Paradoxically, precisely his lack of interest motivates the narrator’s participation in yet another ‘retelling of the everlasting tale’, a retelling that inscribes and re-values this used up currency on the page, where it gains new satirical significance. While undermined by the joke and the fact that Akaky is another sort of ‘joke’ among them, the monument is also recast in this retelling that satirizes clerks who remember the monument only by dismembering it. Akaky’s failure to engage joke and city not only motivates the narrator’s critical reconstruction of both, but casts him as object of both sympathy and ambivalently directed irony. Gogol’s Petersburg narratives frequently rely on such intertextual revision, reflexivity and recursivity. Contemporary with Hoffman’s and Hugo’s urban narratives, Gogol’s tales similarly explore cultural consciousness by turning into commonplaces in the city and urban speech. But following the contours of Petersburg, Gogol traces horizontal perspectives, rather than the vertical lines of urban edifice and monument of Hugo’s historical fictions. Despite his claim that ‘You cannot come to know a city completely by walking through all its streets: for this you must go up to an elevated place from 4 See Dmitry Chizhevsky, ‘About Gogol’s “Overcoat”’, in Robert A. Maguire (ed. and trans.), Gogol from the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 321. 5 GPSS, III.145–6.

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which it would be entirely visible, as if on your palm’ (как на ладони)’,6 Gogol’s narrators and characters are embedded in a landscape in which height is collapsed and distance frames perspective – measured, as Machado de Assis’s Brás Cubas suggests, from the ‘tip of the nose’.7 Gogol’s narrators survey the city by following characters along the city’s long prospekts, turning down side streets, taking their bearings at intersections, where literal and literary signs point to distant horizons. They confront the city as textual labyrinth full of detours and false signs, but also as expanse that, in the final flight of that Petersburg clerk in Gogol’s Мёртвые души [Dead Souls] (yet another Petersburg poema), encompasses all of Russia. In the tighter confines of his urban tales as in the broader reach of this novel, Gogol draws out Petersburg’s lines until they seem to curve and/or dissolve against those displaced horizons suggested by Schwarz’s comparison of Russian and Brazilian literature.8 Petersburg is re-mapped through Gogol’s narrators’ and protagonists’ digressions in the city and in writing, subject to similar forms of disintegration. Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin’s private copies in ‘The Overcoat’, Poprishchin’s ‘recopied’ letters and stylized notes in ‘Notes of a Madman’ and Chichikov’s transcribed lists in Dead Souls9 are instigated directly by these characters’ experience of Petersburg’s texts and geo-cultural contexts. Through reflexivity akin to that of more ‘sane’ narrators in ‘The Overcoat’ and Dead Souls, these figures frame their own writing in terms of unconventional authorship and uncertain authority. Their texts are ironically cast by author/narrator as the notes of peculiarly eccentric Petersburg copiers – a dead man, a madman and a man seeking dead souls. Gogol’s most urbane figures – narrators as well as such clerks (among whom, Poprishchin, whose narrative represents a turn from public to private writing, is the closest Gogol comes to representing the ‘writer’10) – are not especially ‘literary’ types, as revealed by their limited intertextual and metaliterary discourse. To the degree that they are conscious of literary form and style, in others’ writing or speech and in their own, their standards derive from 6 GPSS, VIII.30, cited and trans. in Susanne Fusso, ‘The Landscape of Arabesques’, in Essays on Gogol (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992). 7 MPBC, XLIX. 8 For Schwarz, see above, Chapter 2, pp. 61–3 and n. 138. 9 To this list of verbal copies one might add Andrei Petrovich Charkov’s increasingly unoriginal portraits in «Портрет» (‘The Portrait’) or even Piskarev’s not especially masterful, romantically modelled painting in «Невский Проспект» (‘Nevsky Prospekt’). 10 Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 49.

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popular rather than high forms of literature and result in further but also failed satire and farce, stylizations of society tale, folktale, urban legend, news. Nor are they conscientious chroniclers of the development of urban custom and language (as Hugo’s narrators, inclusive of his erudite condamné). Neither the literal nor the literary terrain explored by Gogolian narrator and hero recover the poetic language, legend and history that ground Pushkin’s Petersburg poema – though here Pushkin’s apparent initial aspiration to a concentric model of remembering the past is undermined along with lyrical aspirations, not as in Hugo’s narratives, by faults in memory or revolutionary upheaval, but by everyday eccentric displacements, historical compression and contradiction explored further by Gogol and Dostoevsky. Already in Pushkin’s Petersburg, the past is strangely present, not as partly legible palimpsest but as ambivalent articulation, active participant, mobile monument. The task of Gogol’s writer is that of finding a compass in this disorientingly doubled present. He does so by taking his bearings less from Petersburg’s poetic monuments, and more from its popular and professional prose. If Pushkin unmoors poetic form and authority, Gogol exposes the arbitrariness and ambivalence of the prosaic. The points of his fictional figures’ literary compass include local and foreign news, bureaucratic prose, and popular fiction circulating in the city, which they also read as multilingual text. Their accented reading of foreign signs within the cityscape is one marker of difference from as well as response to European counterparts. Gogol’s protagonists, narrators, fictional writers must always deliberate between these differently magnetized and oriented perspectives. The sense of Gogol’s narratives continually doubles, re-directed through different frameworks – sometimes within a single consciousness and even within the space of a sentence, such as that in which Pushkin’s monument is refracted through the speech and silence of protagonist, antagonists and narrator. ‘The Overcoat’ ends on a similar opening up of the literal and literary landscape, recalling the ambiguity of Pushkin’s haunted tales, as the narrator reports Petersburg’s citizens’ speculations about Akaky’s spectre. The similarly relayed speculation about Chichikov’s identity on the part of the townspeople of N, circulating stories around this town that is an extension of Petersburg,11 while Chichikov is holed up in his hotel, propels him to set out again on the open road. Like Akaky, the absented Chichikov figures spectrally in Dead Souls, as impetus for 11 Cf. Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 74; Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 133–5.

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uncertain narration and as muse and model for an unreliable narrator. While the stories he engenders have to do with origins and identity, they have little to do with the past, more concerned with place, power and originality. If Gogol’s tales recall a past, they do so belatedly, as with the introduction of Chichikov’s actual past in the penultimate moment of his narrative or with the rehearsal of Akaky’s origins a page into the tale, when the past must be read in terms of an already framed present. Breaking with chronologically ordered and historically oriented literary models, Gogol’s Petersburg texts open up space and subject to the plural potential of the present. But the compression of past and future into the present is only one of many respects in which Gogol levels the literary landscape. With Gogol, central landmarks of the actual cityscape in terms of which one might survey the citytext according to concentric models – its historical authorities and heroic aristocratic figures, memorials and monumental architecture, highly literary language and lyrical tradition, all of which could claim to speak for Petersburg with an authority based on deep-rooted collective cultural memory – are marginalized or undermined, and remain so. The ‘predominant emphasis on the vulgar and often sordid elements of prose’ and on the eclectic, prosaic city that Fanger finds characteristic of Dostoevsky’s work, rewriting Pushkin’s ‘city of Peter’s making’ and renaming its ‘windows, godforsaken holes’, is already characteristic of Gogol’s writing.12 Gogol’s Petersburg is defined by duplicity and doubling that crosses rank, confronted through disoriented and stylized scribbling of eccentric narrators and heroes, displaced and digressing in the city. Like Pushkin’s monumental horseman and ‘маленький герой’ (little hero), Gogol’s clerks speak for the city when they become unmoored. But Gogol’s narratives and clerks begin on more uncertain footing than the ode and stone on which Pushkin’s poema, hero and horseman are initially perched. The authority of Gogol’s narrators and heroes is attenuated by a narrative form that immediately develops through contradiction and uncertainties. Gogol’s narrators are notoriously unreliable; his heroes reliably unstable. Characterized by Gogol’s own narrators as unremarkable and apparently ready-made,13 Gogol’s clerks are critiqued by Dostoevsky’s as 12 Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 133, citing Strakhov, Биография, писма и заметки из записной книжки Ф. М. Достоевского (St. Petersburg, 1983), 359. 13 Note the introduction to the hero in ‘The Overcoat’ as a typical (‘one’ among many) and markedly unremarkable petty official serving in a typical (‘one’ but random)

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caricatures. When finally stripped of overcoat or sanity, they seem even more insignificant and adrift in the cityscape than Evgeny – though they are marked by more creative consciousness and critical conscience. Patronymics that might suggest for Gogol’s heroes a parentage and authority Evgeny lacks, in fact, parody origins and originality. In one of the most notable instances, Akaky Akakievich’s name, repeating nonsensical sounds as well as his deceased father’s name, signals his alignment with a secular bureaucratic culture and detachment from a spiritual line. Even a randomly selected patron saint’s name would have attached him to cyclical calendar time, history, even eternity, or differentiated him from his father, but those saints names seem too ridiculous. Instead the repetition of his father’s ridiculous, phonetically repetitive name emphatically suggests his replaceability. Derived from the Greek word ‘innocuous’, semantically indicating insignificance and ‘inarticulateness’,14 Akaky’s name may also intertextually derive, like other aspects of his fiction, from ‘Notes of a Madman’, echoing Poprishchin’s given name Aksenty. In its most abstracted form (Ak ak i Ak ak ievich), alterations involve diminution and derivation. Yet we might argue, all the more so because of its conventionality, that the accentuation on the second syllable might signal the capacity of the clerk to speak back. In Gogolian verbal play, as Nabokov notes, ‘the difference between the comic side of things and their cosmic side depends upon one sibilant’.15 That is, we might read this name under that sign of an alternative baroque – not ‘aphaisic’ but ‘sophisticated’ in its ‘stuttering’ style.16 Paradoxically, extreme ordinariness makes the name extraordinary. Like Akaky’s ‘not quite’ and never ‘very’ and ‘almost’ unremarkable physiognomy, the name’s derivativeness makes it remarkable to the narrator, provoking him to recount a biography as apparently arbitrary as Akaky’s copied lines. In this account, Akaky is naturally connected to Petersburg as birthplace, but also spiritually attached to the city’s secularized reconfiguration of social authority (his godfather a chief clerk and his godmother a police officer’s wife). Though Akaky bears his father’s imprint, he is fatherless. For his widowed mother, his name is ‘fated’ and, for Akaky and the narrator, it announces his fate – his rank, his profession and a death as unremarked department: «Итак, в одном департаменте служил один чиновник, чиновник нельзя сказать чтoбы очень замечательный» (GPSS, III.141). 14 Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 154. 15 Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (Norfolk: New Directions, 1944), 142. 16 Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’, 3, 8.

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as his father’s. Like his father, he leaves behind a copy of himself, as spectral as he is as living subject and similarly making a mark only in a textualized space (in rumour and writing circulating in the city). Akaky Akakievich’s name emphasizes the way in which Petersburg (as physical, cultural, literary construct) impresses on Gogol’s characters its copied aspect, abstraction and alienation, but also instigates their similarly paradoxical originality and authority. It may be true, as Nabokov claims, that Gogol’s characters, like Pushkin’s Evgeny, essentially engage and transform their particular Russian literary landscape and language, though Gogol’s peculiar combination of lyrical glides and mumbles also ‘appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships’. That is, they may not be ‘at this superhigh level of art concerned with pitying the underdog or cursing the upperdog.’17 Yet they do reflect and critique eccentric sociopolitical dimensions and dynamics, especially through their reflexive aesthetics. Even more than Evgeny, whose feet are lapped by the rising Neva even when he is perched in relative safety on his stone lion, the height Gogol’s clerks can achieve in order to overlook the city is limited. We find them more submerged in the everyday flux of the city, mired in its bureaucracy, advertising, news, novels and novelties. Akaky is sunk to the degree that the city’s debris falls on his head while he lives between the lines of the texts he imagines himself copying. He is not ambitious; but rather than ambition being beneath him, he is beneath ambition. Although there is a long tradition beginning with Belinsky and the Natural School and continuing through Marxist and Soviet criticism that reads Gogol’s Petersburg tales as critique of unbalanced, perverse and even pathological social ambition, his heroes actually suffer under social and psychic pressures that ultimately disregard social hierarchies. These pressures amount to nature and human nature, more than inequitable social scales – though, to be sure, the thinner coat and copied lines of the clerk provide the flimsiest defences against fluctuations. Pushkin’s Evgeny looks down at the rising water, then up at the horseman; but even if they climb and fall down stairs and cross thresholds that demark social difference, Gogol’s figures function on finally levelled ground, where frigid wind and rumour whip across an open landscape that the ‘important personage’ can only cross a little more quickly in his sledge than an Akaky, who ultimately (divested of coat and the life of copyclerk) 17 Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, 149. Cf. p. 228.

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circulates freely. Like Evgeny, Gogol’s characters (both clerks such as Akaky and the important personage whose favour he seeks) stand to lose more than coats – human connection. However, they may also gain consciousness and conscience as well as a capacity to communicate and redefine community through their errant copying. As the narrator of ‘The Overcoat’ notes, the city’s ‘calamities’ (бедствия, which we may associate with both беда (misfortune or trouble) and бедность (poverty and pitiableness) of the character) are ‘spilled not only on titular, but even privy, actual, court, and any other councilors, and even on those who don’t give anyone counsel and take no counsel from anyone’.18 Here Gogol significantly blurs boundaries between ranks by approximating speech and silence. Dictating, dictated and disengaged, autonomous and alienated figures are equally impressed by the city. Disorderly, disrupted, impoverished and irrational speech also marks Gogol’s characters fairly indiscriminately, though its destructive and deconstructively creative capacities are realized to different degrees. Gogol’s Petersburg tales are populated by alienated beings crossing other alienated beings in an alienated and alienating city. Their crossings are verbally denoted by stuttering and digressive speech, often apparently failed or disrupted dialogue that leaves transformative traces in both fictive consciousness and framework of the fiction. Retracing intersecting paths within and between fictions, oriented by consistent verbal markers,19 we find in Gogol’s fiction a fragmented, refracted but coherent view of Petersburg, mapped simultaneously on physical and psychological, linguistic and literary planes. Gogol’s embedded mapping of Petersburg derives in part from a generally immersed and immediate nineteenth-century view of the city, as Fusso notes in her elucidating examination of interlocking and interdependently developing physical, psychological and aesthetic planes in Gogol’s Arabesques. Gogol’s characters are mired in a modern urban landscape that he sees as infernal in its triviality, potentially pointless circulation and fragmentation.20 But Gogol’s characters suffer 18 GPSS, III.147. 19 These might be syntactic markers like даже, whose semantic function, as mentioned earlier, has been traced by Chizhevsky (in ‘About Gogol’s Overcoat’), or semantic markers, like the verb to write and words related to writing or built on the root пис-, as noted by Gregg (in ‘Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman’, 439–40). Cf. Maguire’s discussion of ‘Verbal Units’, in Exploring Gogol, 199–213. 20 See Fusso ‘The Landscape of Arabesques’: ‘For Gogol, detail without overview is embodied in the demonic fragmentation of nineteenth-century life’ (cf. GPSS, VIII.12).

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directly from the physically contrastive nature of Petersburg and its peculiarly calculated, copied, counter-cultural construction. Gogol is concerned in Arabesques as much as in his late critical essays that author and reader, even at the expense of characters, achieve a critical height (that of the tower21) or distance (hence his own flight to Paris and Rome) whence Petersburg might be seen as a whole – pretentiously stylized and eclectic. Yet the originality and coherence of Gogol’s vision of a paranoid, obsessive, deluding and delusional, divided subject and city derives rather from immediacy. While this leads to a fragmented view, ‘overview without differentiation leads to monotony and excessive abstraction’.22 In Arabesques, Briullov’s painting provides Gogol with a model of a ‘large-scale canvas’ based on ‘all those trivialities (vsia eta meloch’) that the great artists disdained’.23 Gogol paints such a canvas through a shifting, collaborative view, involving crossings if not necessarily conscious contact between characters and narrators, traversing an open cityscape and turning into anxious alienated consciousness. Akaky, as Maguire observes, is driven by the need for enclosure against a windswept expanse, and all of Gogol’s clerks, by the need to assert their place in relation to an elusive other.24 This other is both out there and internal, as the suffering of Gogol’s clerks is always intensely private and public, individual and collective. One of the great uncertainties confronted directly in Gogol’s as in Dostoevsky’s texts involves determinism. There is a clear correlation between city and self as well as a connection between author, narrator and hero; but there is also uncertain cause and effect descried from a critical distance. If the apparently more minor losses suffered by Gogol’s clerks prove as disruptively formative in the development of contradictory consciousness as Pushkin’s Evgeny’s loss of his betrothed, the former seem more responsible for losses and their response seems more ambivalent. This is because Gogol’s clerks chase after and are hounded by their own noses and overcoats, or by others who seem no more than projections of their own ambitions and ideals. Poprishchin’s Sophie, as much as Piskarev’s prostitute are doubles (debased by their own desires pursued in shops and sidestreets as well as by the protagonists’ desires to possess or rescue). In Gogol’s city, most projections 21 See Kristin Anne Peterson, ‘The Stranger in the City…’ (PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2000), 102–8. 22 Fusso ‘The Landscape of Arabesques’, 113. 23 Ibid., 114, citing GPSS, VIII.107. 24 Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 74–6.

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are mediated by texts, literal and literary, orienting circulation on city streets. Characters construct themselves as type and are read as text, in context. But they depart from convention. The ambivalent determinism and autonomy of his heroes is framed by, but also reflectively frames Gogol’s aesthetics and ethics. As Fusso argues, Gogol declares his ‘preference for the crooked, obscure, and intricately winding path over the straight, brightly illuminated, and immediately apprehensible one’ not only as ‘a moral and cognitive preference but an aesthetic one’.25 He declares that preference in the final ‘statement’ of Arabesques ‘which has as its destination Poprishchin’s dream of escape,’ having followed ‘a winding, overgrown path out of the ordered regularity of scholarship into the intricacy and sudden variation of his artistic vision’.26 Nabokov makes a similar claim, contending that Gogol’s meaning lies in his ‘sudden slanting of the rational plane’ through a ‘combination’ of ‘movements’ that can be measured only on the literary plane, in terms of irrationally converging parallel lines and shifting pace (the alternation of verbal jerk and glide).27 But Gogol’s linguistic and literary slant towards the irrational draws on and redraws place and social plane. Gogol’s heroes have recourse to lesser authorities than Pushkin’s Evgeny. Falconet’s horseman gallops, but never dismounts. But Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin and Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin (like Dostoevsky’s Devushkin, Prokharchin and Golyadkin) appeal to parodied authorities, dismounted and dismantled doubles. When Akaky turns to the tailor Petrovich, he finds a travesty of Peter. Petrovich is commanding in his own way, but characterized by petty demonic qualities that Meyer identifies through his speech as well as bodily signs.28 Alongside folkloric associations aligned with Gogol’s Dikanka tales, signs of foreignness mark him as a petty devil, as Peter the Great’s German dress marked him in the eyes of many contemporaries as antichrist.29 Petrovich is associated with the secular as well as with the foreign through a wife he denigrates as German because she neglects feast days. He also represents cultural reorientation and usurpation through his self-transformation from the serf Grigory (a name that may 25 Fusso, ‘The Landscape of Arabesques’, 123. 26 Ibid., 125. 27 Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, 140–1. See the epigraph to the book. 28 Priscilla Meyer, ‘False Pretenders …’, in Essays on Gogol (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 64–5. 29 Ibid., 68–9.

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allude to the pretender Grishka Otrepev30) to the professional Petrovich – re-named (after Peter the Great and like Catherine the Great), freed in Enlightened fashion, setting up shop in Petersburg with a Western mercantile ambition and social mobility and, like Peter, engaging in heavy drinking and debauchery. In a typically Gogolian turn, his drinking not only debases but humanizes him, makes him approachable and more reasonable. Akaky, unfortunately, finds him sober, insistent on a completely new and costly coat; but in this moment of sobriety, too, Petrovich seems to mimic Peter’s relation with his subjects (whom he insisted on re-dressing in European style). Akaky reaches Petrovich, as Evgeny reaches Peter’s bronze effigy, through a similarly flooded landscape, but a landscape that is also debased. To reach Petrovich, Akaky mounts a stairwell awash in water and swill, in a building at a significant remove from the city’s central commercial streets. Insofar as Petrovich explicitly claims that the distance from the Nevsky Prospekt, not his own craftsmanship, is all that lowers his price, he is aware of himself as marginally ‘cheapened’. He fabricates coats along fashionable (foreign) lines, but admits necessary compromises, as with Akaky’s collar. The value of his creations depends on their not being original, but also on his adept (original) adaptations that make them seem authentic. As creator of the overcoat, his identity is as vested in the overcoat as Akaky’s. He admires the coat as it (not Akaky) walks off down the street. Thus, his creation, like Peter’s city, dehumanizes even as it is intended for human use. The coat corrupts Akaky,31 instigating ambition, but at the same time enlivens him – raises his eyes to read the city text, its advertisements, etc. As a new kind of copy as lovingly created as Akaky’s earlier letters, the coat not only provokes Akaky’s and Petrovich’s love. It brings Petrovich onto Petersburg streets, collapsing distance between Petrovich and Akaky; while it opens Akaky’s eyes to the street – first to its glitter, but then also to its extensive horizons and emptiness. Distance is similarly collapsed between Akaky and the ‘important personage’ (значительное лицо) to whom he turns as a penultimate recourse to authority, after being dismissed by police and peers in more marginal places. This personage’s offices are only somewhat closer than Petrovich’s to the central avenues of Petersburg and he is also first identified as ‘important’ in italics – thus, also displaced and 30 Ibid., 69. 31 Meyer argues that it results in Akaky’s sexual and spiritual corruption (Ibid., 69, 73.)

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parodied. The narrator’s digression on ‘important personages’ doubles his earlier critique of clerks as it deconstructs the tendency towards ‘imitation’ across the ranks redefined by Peter the Great. This important personage’s aggressive, apparently authoritative speech derives explicitly from uncertainty with respect to his status, insofar as it is immediately motivated by rivalry with another official.32 This face (лицо) is exposed as a kind of mask, that ‘mug’ or false countenance (личина). But the grimacing mask can be terrifying. During their actual encounter, the important personage seems to put Akaky back in his place, at the foot of the stairs and on the street. It seems that he even frightens Akaky to death, as Peter’s monument does to Evgeny. Yet Gogol dissolves the divide between ranks and even life and death, forcing confrontation on Petersburg streets. Akaky’s mortified silence gives way to speech beyond the important personage’s hearing, but echoing in the latter’s self-interrogation. Akaky’s death and subsequent apparition in Petersburg make an ‘impression’ on the important personage that moderates the latter’s speech and makes ambivalent any final word.33 Meyer describes this as part of a ‘pattern of double exposure’ in Gogol’s works, in which the pretence of one pretender (Akaky) is exposed by an authority, whose false pretence is, in turn, exposed.34 Meyer, however, reads Akaky’s ‘pretence’ of joining in the clerk’s world as definitively undone, while the important personage is ‘reformed’. She arrives at this conclusion not because of Akaky’s death, but because ‘language, the living word, spoken and written, is the means of redemption throughout Gogol’s work, and Akaky has none’ – that is, he has neither language nor redemption.35 But this summation (‘none’) is contingent on the calculation of Akaky’s actual stuttering, disrupted, digressive speech as adding up to nonsense or aphasia. And it requires a reading that renders Akaky irrelevant to the rumour that circulates after his actual death. Particularly when they degenerate, Akaky’s writing and speech become generative forces in the tale, instigating the dialogic realization of other characters and of the narrative itself. Akaky’s silencing results in the important personage’s and the narrator’s internal dialogues, which semantically and structurally recall Akaky’s own muttering. They face him not only on Petersburg streets or in accounts by witnesses who claim to have faced him, but in their own words that trail off in different 32 GPSS, III.163. 33 GPSS, III.173. 34 Meyer, ‘False Pretenders’, 71. 35 Ibid, 72.

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directions. The final, also ambivalent authority to whom Akaky appeals, as spectral subject and rumour in circulation, is the narrator. Like death in Gogol’s fictions, silence does not signify the end, but the beginning of the regenerative capacity of the word. The story of the important personage’s encounter circulates despite his silence,36 just as Akaky circulates through the city, a character continually reformed on others’ lips, like copied characters (буквы/letters of the alphabet) on his own, giving the narrative its own copied form. Insofar as Akaky’s dimensions become those of story in circulation, he becomes more ghostly and grotesque. He appears with distorted face or disproportionate fist, as growing rumour. Expressed as monumental fist and moustache, impressing Petersburg with fragmented but imposing body, Akaky represents both authority and resistance. That strange fist, faced close up, with its chapped lines and individuated imprint, takes the place of the ‘palm’ on which one might read the city from a critical height or distance. As urban rumour, Akaky collapses the distance between unauthoritative copier and authority not only through his apparent aggression towards the important person and policeman on city streets, but also as accuser within consciousness. As apparition rearing up on the Petersburg landscape, Akaky himself becomes a revision of the horseman unmoored. Insofar as he provokes a response and instigates responsibility as haunting figure, he becomes a more lively presence in the city. Insofar as he continues to generate literary interpretations and creative copies beyond the bounds of the story, he also represents the extraordinary capacity of the ordinary character to signify more than the sum of its parts. The absurdity and abstraction as well as the disrupted and digressive discourse that seem to add up to nothing underwrite the narrative style of the ‘Overcoat’, which is referenced in turn as point of origin for original turns not only in modern Russian, but postmodern world literature.37 Cosmos: transcribing and transforming the Petersburg text As Sergei Bocharov and Iurii Mann note of Gogol’s later work (beginning with his Petersburg tales), ‘the Devil as an active subject and cause of 36 GPSS, III.173ff. 37 See Julian Graffy’s Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ (London: Duckworth, 2000) on the origins and resonances of the claim that all Russian literature comes out from Gogol’s overcoat (17ff.), also for a compelling review and reassessment of critical reception and creative revisions of Gogol’s tale in Russian and world literature.

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fantastic action disappears from Gogol’s world, but that world becomes fantastic from within, strange in a Gogolian manner. “The fantastic has receded into everyday life, things, people’s behavior and their way of thinking and talking”’.38 Bocharov uses Mann’s claim to illumine the imprint of the irrational on the human face in Gogol’s Petersburg fictions. Observing that ‘there is no Devil who jests with the human face, but the fantastic nature of the most inventive unmotivated deformations of the human face … becomes all the deeper and more destructive of the human image’, he describes a physiological rather than a physical or psychological topography in Gogol’s fiction, in which the ‘battleground’ is the human face.39 But the physiological, physical, psychological, linguistic and literary landscape in Gogol are interwoven, as Fusso suggests. The nose that detaches itself from Gogol’s protagonist becomes a protagonist who functions on the face of the city. These doubles confront each other on that irrationally slanted plane of Gogol’s ‘at least’ ‘four-dimensional’ prose, where a ‘ripple’ links parallel lines on a reflected Petersburg surface.40 Such ‘ripples’ in Gogol’s faces, on the surface of his city and in the structure of his citytext result in a multiplication of meaning – a revaluation Nabokov sums up with a sort of Dostoevskian underground calculation: ‘Gogol’s genius is that ripple – two and two makes five, if not the square root of five, and it all happens quite naturally in Gogol’s world, where neither rational mathematics nor indeed any of our pseudophysical agreements with ourselves can be seriously said to exist.’41 This unconventional and uncanny world is naturally (essentially) related to the reflective structure and surfaces of Petersburg – that dandy that Gogol observes continually looking at his face in the mirror: Перед ним со всех сторон зеркала: там Нева, там Финский залив. Ему есть куда поглядется 42 (Before him, on every side, there are mirrors: here the Neva, there the Finnish bay. He has plenty of places to gaze at himself). If Gogol’s clerks are described as considerably more parodic and ‘pockmarked’ than the dandy that both their author and his city were inclined to be, they nevertheless demonstrate a concern with style and an increasingly obsessive reflexivity. For Kovalev, the most caricatured of 38 Sergei Bocharov, ‘Around “The Nose”’, in Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer (eds), Essays on Gogol (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 23, citing Iurii Mann, Поэтика Гоголья (Moscow, 1978), 129, 131. 39 Ibid., 23. 40 Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, 145. 41 Ibid. 42 GPSS, VIII.177.

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Gogol’s Petersburg protagonists, the instrument of reflection is the mirror, then urban spaces. Briefly, for Akaky, the city’s shop windows similarly reflect growing self-consciousness (mostly in the negative, anxious sense of the term). But the city’s reflective surfaces, instigating (re)generative as well as degenerative reflexivity in Gogol’s fiction, are usually verbal (texts copied or read, speech rehearsed and commented on), and if visual, often faces that can be read like texts. Nabokov argues that they are Gogol’s own pathological faces and voices, reflected back, but at the same time, Petersburg’s. Without denying Gogol’s personality, we focus here on how the pathological expression of his Petersburg texts stylizes (not only redraws, but also draws from) the city, by reading both his own reflections on Petersburg and his characters’ reflexively realized writing in the city. Mann notes that the fantastic in Gogol’s fiction filters into ‘everyday speech’, and more essentially, that ‘the fantastic has receded into style’.43 However they diverge, critical views of Gogol’s work converge around the linguistic oddity and originality of his writing.44 Scholars ranging from Bely to Nabokov, Vinogradov, Mann, Fanger and Maguire examine in detail how Gogol develops vivid fictive worlds through verbal play.45 But Gogol especially uses parataxis, repetition, contradiction, displacement of terms and other syntactic strategies that extend semantic space. In constructing meaning centrifugally, often in a space pulled open by the gravity of different centres or consciousnesses, the logos (the animating verbal principle or creative logic) of Gogol’s fictions is eccentric. Gogol also responds to linguistic, literary and larger cultural debates concentrated in Petersburg’s streets and salons of the eighteenth through early nineteenth centuries by parodically pushing Pushkin’s already eccentric exploration of the poetic potential of prosaic plot and language. In his 1832 essay on Pushkin, Gogol recognizes his predecessor as ‘national’ poet because of his capacity to draw out the ‘vast resources, force [or vitality, resilience], and versatility [or flexibility]’ of the Russian language, 43 Bocharov, ‘Around “The Nose”’, 23, again citing Mann, Поэтика Гоголья, 131. 44 Cf. Stephen Moeller-Sally’s Gogol’s Afterlife (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002). 45 On specific modes of wordplay in Gogol’s fictions, see Chizhevsky’s ‘About Gogol’s “Overcoat”’, 295–322; Fanger’s The Creation of Nikolai Gogol; Maguire’s Exploring Gogol (especially, ‘Verbal Units’, 199–213, ‘The Word in Dead Souls’, 214–54, ‘The Search for the Language of Self’, 295–317, and ‘The Failure of the Word’, 318–41); Alexander Slonimsky’s ‘The Technique of the Comic in Gogol’ [‘Техника комического у Гоголя,’ 1923] in Robert A. Maguire, Gogol from the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 323–73; Viktor V. Vinogradov’s ‘Язык Гоголя’ in V. V. Gippius (ed.), Н. В. Гоголь Moscow/Leningrad: ANSSSR, 1936), 286–376.

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to extend its borders and ‘explore its full expanse’.46 Like Pushkin, Gogol explores other linguistic and literary margins than those concentrated in Petersburg, both within and beyond his own Petersburg texts. While Pushkin’s southern tales, travel narratives and lyric poetry redefine cultural and political margins as well as generic boundaries, Gogol recovers in his Ukrainian tales the potential of regional and provincial dialects of the west and interior as well as structural and thematic elements of folk genres to reinvigorate Russian language and literary forms. Gogol’s language is full of place markers – most tangible to his early urban readers in the Ukrainian regionalisms and colloquialisms of the Dikanka tales. But even in these tales that are not especially urban, the verbal form of his fiction is urbane, produced in and as reflection on Petersburg, where Gogol’s ‘eccentric’ regional narrative is welcomed as exotic. Gogol finds in the Ukrainian tale a ‘ready-made genre’ that he can copy creatively in a different artistic context and on a different scale.47 His Dikanka tales yoke ‘irreconcilable poetics’ from Ukranian folktale and German fairytale to produce ‘a constant interference of systems – the timeless world of legend with what looks like historical specificity, the conventions of comedy with those of horror stories – by which not only the identity of people and things but the identity of narrative perspective on them is subject to change as suddenly as it may be unmotivated’.48 The disorienting collisions of discourses in the Dikanka tales link them to the Petersburg text. If Dikanka is cast as ‘other’ to its Petersburg readers, in fact, it is Petersburg that is defined eccentrically in relation to Dikanka, a place closer to older Russian tradition, to Moscow and Rus’, in its form and sensibilities.49 Petersburg is estranged, reflective landscape, linked to Dikanka by the road.50 The 46 Gogol, ‘Несколько слов о Пушкине’, GPSS, VIII, 50. 47 Nils Ake Nilsson, Gogol et Pétersbourg (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1954), 8–9. Cf. Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 88–9. 48 Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 90–1, referring to Holquist’s ‘The Devil in Mufti: The Märchenwelt in Gogol’s Short Stories,’ PMLA, 82 (October, 1967), 352–5, and Victor Erlich’s Gogol (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 30ff. 49 Maguire offers an analysis of the Petersburg scenes in ‘Vij’ and the Dikanka tales in Exploring Gogol. 50 The ‘road’ becomes the dominant metaphor for Gogol’s ambivalent narrative space and structure in Fanger’s analysis, redefining ‘a world of difference’ in The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (108). In narratives formally concerned with distance and deviations from literary origins, ‘originality enters by way of the shifting, peculiarly personal connections among these themes [of different genres] and the frequent ambivalence these connections reveal’ (109).

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presence of figures from Dikanka in the city provides an opportunity for reflection on Petersburg’s strangeness, rather than causing them any particular angst. Not so Gogol’s own experience of Petersburg, as an eccentric within an eccentric city. Gogol’s writing is shaped by his own sense of displacement.51 He is more closely connected to the Petersburg eccentrics about which he writes than to his Ukrainian characters (foreign enough to him that he needed to borrow their words as well as their plots52). His ambivalence regarding both Petersburg and the fictions he wrote there is perversely indicative of the city’s necessity to his fiction, since without it he lapses into silence.53 In those of Gogol’s works that have most defined the core of modern Russian literature and cultural consciousness, he turns directly into and through Petersburg, exploring its speech and spaces. Gogol’s work is typically divided into two or three phases (three if taking into account his non-fictional work and unfinished portions of Dead Souls). His most generative work is that of the second period, beginning with his Petersburg tales and including Dead Souls.54 Like Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin, Dead Souls extends Petersburg customs, speech and crises into Russia’s interior. Along with Fanger, Maguire makes this case for both Ревизор (Inspector General) and Dead Souls, describing their provincial towns as ‘gathering places for a cast of characters’ either from or imitative of Petersburg.55 Both Pushkin’s and Gogol’s local and wandering Petersburg texts are marked by a disquieting self-consciousness concerning the foreignness and fragility of Petersburg forms – social, literary and verbal. Gogol not only pursues further Pushkin’s turn into prosaic consciousness, but also turns further into the vernacular, so much so that he is read as writer in a foreign language by segments of a Russian upper class for whom Russian is a second or third language and for whom written forms of Russian were distinct from everyday Russian speech.56 51 Cf. Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol; Peterson, ‘A Powerful Stranger’, 61–110. 52 As correspondence with his mother (requesting tales, colloquial terms and expressions) during his early years in Petersburg attests. 53 For a study of Gogol’s later lapse into silence and later conception of the word as absolute or null, see Maguire’s conclusion to Exploring Gogol, ‘The Failure of the Word’. 54 Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, 31. 55 Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 74, 80. Cf. Fanger’s The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 133–5, and White’s ‘Khlestakov as Representative of Petersburg in The Inspector General’. 56 Cf. Vinogradov’s Очерки по истории руссуого литературного языка XVII–XIX вв. For a summary of the development of Russian literary language and Gogol’s place within that development, see ‘The Sense of Absence: Immediate Contexts’ in Fanger’s The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 24–44 and Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 50–68, 113–14.

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He incorporates folk narrative forms and refers to popular literature even as he draws on classical and contemporary European literature,57 forcing new collisions in the Petersburg text. This is partly a function of his fictions’ and fictional figures’ embeddedness in a textualized city. The aspect of the city that most fully expresses its meaningful contradictions, the most colourful aspect of Petersburg, for Gogol, is its verbal text – speech, but also all kinds of signs. In an often remarked upon letter to his mother, composed soon after his arrival in Petersburg, Gogol observes Petersburg’s dim light revealing that range of yellows, greys and greens most familiar to us from Dostoevsky’s and Bely’s fictional palettes; ‘the only touch of color comes in his detailed accounting of shop signs’.58 Nabokov argues rather that ‘the shop signs in the St. Petersburg of the late twenties were painted and multiplied by Gogol himself’ as a way of contrasting it to ‘provincial towns … where shop signs were of course just as fascinating’.59 The mutterings of passerby were again symbolic, this time an auditory effect which was meant to render the hectic loneliness of a poor man in an opulent crowd. Gogol, and Gogol alone, spoke to himself as he walked, but the monologue was echoed and multiplied by the shadows of his mind. Passing as it were through Gogol’s temperament, St. Petersburg acquired a reputation of strangeness which it kept up for almost a century.60

Despite Nabokov’s argument concerning Gogol’s projection rather than reflection of the city’s clustered signs and alienated speech, they crowd into his prose unoriginally, drawing from commonplace representations of this dismally overcrowded and dimly lit industrializing city. What is most original in his fictions is how Gogol represents signs and mutterings precisely as a verbal text that is coloured and multiplied in consciousness, or ‘filtered through’ the eccentric ‘temperament’ of his characters and narrators (as Nabokov claims this vivid verbal text is filtered though the author’s eccentricity). Petersburg’s reality, in Gogol’s text, is always one that is interpreted, a text translated and trans-created 57 Cf. Fanger’s The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (89–91, 113); Iurii Mann (ed.), Гоголь и мировая литература (Moscow: Наука, 1988); Viktor V. Vinogradov, Gogol and the Natural School (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1987 [Leningrad, 1929]); Anna Yelistratova, Николай Гоголь и проблемы западоевропейского романа (Moscow, 1972). 58 See his letter of April 30 (o.s.), 1829 (GPSS, X, 139–40, trans. Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 75). 59 Nikolai Gogol, 10. Cf. Moeller-Sally, Gogol’s Afterlife, 46–7. 60 Ibid.

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within consciousness. Gogol’s incorporates literal Petersburg signs as context and pretext for conversations (if not conversions) within consciousness, much as he incorporates discrete ‘literary’ signs and storylines to achieve what Fusso characterizes as ‘jarring, genrecrunching contrast’.61 Gogol’s ambivalent representation of the fabricated glitter and false flickering of signs in the city is paralleled by his play with purportedly poorly copied texts, falsified signatures, authentic rumour, stylized forms of storytelling and a re-accentuation of terms that suggests an almost postmodern sense of reversibility. His fictions as well as his later repudiation of fictional ambivalence invite an interpretation of these signs as markers of inauthenticity.62 But as Nilsson traces across a decade of letters, Gogol is as attached to the city’s changing lights and multiple perspectives as he is critical of them.63 Petersburg’s cultural disparities and dialogue matter most to him, even from a distance.64 As Nabokov noted, Gogol’s own eccentricity conspires with that of this ‘not quite real’ Petersburg; the cityscape both structures and is reshaped by skewed vision and verbal expression in the works of ‘Gogol, the ghoul, Gogol the ventriloquist, not quite real either’.65 If the originality of Petersburg lies in its peculiarly copied, reflective form, Gogol’s own originality famously depends on a similar kind of copying. His strange lists and ‘original’ language, which ‘broke free from the confines of the [Frenchified] salon and flew out, as it were, onto the street, taking on the sounds of colloquial Russian and ceasing in the process to depend on French loan words for ordinary things’,66 derived from others’ lists of words and phrases and pursued a turn to the Russian vernacular already well-established in Pushkin’s, Lermontov’s, Odoevsky’s and others’ prose. He borrows images (such as the deserted landscape through which Akaky wanders, a refracted view of Pushkin’s, Bulgarin’s, Baratynsky’s, Odoevsky’s depictions of a desolate cityscape67), entire plots68 and, more essentially, literary forms (modelling his tales on a mix of Russian folk traditions and German, French and English Romantic, Gothic, 61 Fusso, ‘The Landscape of Arabesques’, 122. 62 Cf. Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 75. 63 Nilsson, Gogol et Pétersbourg, 4–8. 64 Cf. Mills Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin, 172ff. 65 Nabokov, Gogol, 11–12. 66 Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 50, 114. 67 Cf. Nilsson, Gogol et Pétersbourg, 15. 68 Several plots, particularly that of Dead Souls, are suggested to him by Pushkin.

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Satirical and Realist models). Many of the most incisive studies of his work, including Vinogradov’s, Lotman’s and Uspensky’s, Nilsson’s and Maguire’s, examine his linguistic and literary ‘borrowings’ or ‘adaptations’. Fanger, however, underwrites his opening argument concerning Gogol’s originality in The Creation of Nikolai Gogol by citing Belinsky, wholly familiar with Gogol’s sources yet ‘who noted in 1848 that ‘Gogol had no model and no precursors, either in Russian or in foreign literature’.69 Thus, Gogol’s, like Machado de Assis’s, highly derivative work is declared original, formative as ‘transformative rupture’.70 The instrument of Gogol’s originality, Fanger argues, is reflected in the material of his notebooks. These are filled, not as Dostoevsky’s, ‘with psychological observations and ideas for his novels’, nor as Tolstoy’s, ‘with what filled his days’, nor as Chekhov’s, ‘with situations’, but rather ‘with lists of words’.71 Those lists, precursors to the apparently incoherent lists and disjointed sentences within Gogol’s fictions – joining items which belong to different planes or places – suggest the peculiar space and structure of Gogol’s poetics. Gogol constructs a language and narrative form in which meaning accrues through vivid juxtapositions, digressions, marginal reflections, ellipses, syntactic delays, qualifying terms, the absence or uncertain attribution of quotation marks, distorted copies. Akaky Akakievich, whose copying functions include his peculiar form of stylized speech, models the strange kind of communication that generates meaning in Gogol’s works: Нужно знать, что Акаки Акакиевич изъяснился большею частью предлогами, наречиями и, наконец, такими частицами, которые решительно не имеют никакого значения. Если же дело было очень затруднительно, то он даже имел обыкновеные совсем не оканчивать фразы, так что весьма часто начавши речь словами: «это право совершенно того …», а потом уже и ничего не было, и сам он позабывал, думая, что всё уже выговорил.72 (It must be known that Akaky Akakievich expressed himself for the most part with prepositions, adverbs and, finally, those particles that have decidedly no significance at all. If the matter was very difficult, then he even had the habit of not finishing the phrase at all, so that most 69 Nilsson, Gogol et Pétersbourg, 18, citing Belinsky’s Полное собрание сочинений, 13 vols (Russian Academy of Sciences, 1953–59), Vol. 10, 293. 70 Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’, 4. See discussion in Chapter 2. 71 Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 20. 72 GPSS, III.149.

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often, having begun his speech with the words, ‘That really is altogether sort of …,’ nothing at all would then come, and he himself would forget, thinking that he had already said it all.)

Despite the narrator’s implication that nothing has been said because Akaky speaks with parts of speech that have no autonomous significance, in fact Akaki fully expresses his emotional and cognitive experience through the nuanced alternation between ‘really’ and ‘altogether’ and contradiction between ‘altogether’ and ‘sort of’. This ambivalent verbal move, more than the object around which it circles, expresses Akaky and, in spite of his disclaimer concerning the ‘insignificance’ of Akaky’s discourse, is also what ‘must be known’ to Gogol’s narrator. Although the narrator’s citation of Akaky is ironic, it is also imitative in its piling up of qualifiers. Akaki is both stylistic source and subject for the narrator’s digressive and contradictory prose, similarly trailing off into ellipses. The narrator of Dead Souls likewise picks up both the digressive mode of fabrication and thread of the narrative when Chichikov cuts himself off when spinning the possible figures and fates of his dead souls. Gogol constructs what Fusso calls a ‘double act of the imagination’73 – or ‘double-voicing’ described in terms that take into account the creative, dialogic aspect of the ‘speech act’ as Bakhtin describes it in Speech Genres. The juxtaposition of the author’s digression on the task of the writer with Chichikov’s one moment of verbal creation is significant. In this creative moment, Chichikov prophetically transcends his own buffoonery and engages in that kind of play that distinguishes the creator from the street clown (‘балаганный скоромох’). He offers us a glimpse of the ‘depth of soul’ that Gogol’s narrator fully realizes by living out the ‘free life’ that he imagines Chichikov pondering for a moment in his sustained ‘speech act’. This ‘free life’ in Gogol’s text is always lived in verbal margins. The expansive, enlivening, ‘redemptive’ dimensions of Gogol’s language have little to do with time or typical plot. Rather than historical ramifications or a hierarchy of meanings in literary and popular culture (dimensions recovered through memory), Gogol is interested in local implications and possibilities for elaboration.74 Gogol’s narratives 73 Susanne Fusso, Designing Dead Souls (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 61. 74 In The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (22), Fanger elucidates Gogol’s strategy of ‘elaboration’ by layering critical lenses. Fanger conjugates Rozanov’s argument that Gogol’s originality lies in his ‘genius for combining words’ (Rozanov as quoted in V. Versaev, Как работал Гоголь, 2nd edn (Moscow, 1934), 76) with Bely’s claim that

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develop through linguistically motivated ‘fluctuations’ and through digression, including ‘lyrical digression’ or reflexivity.75 In comparing Gogol’s digressions with Pushkin’s, Fanger maps Gogol’s freedom along a different axis: ‘Gogol was to take primarily not the horizontal, stylistic freedom but the vertical one: the freedom to move from the level of presentation to the levels of reminiscence, confession, literary and social commentary, prophecy – setting against the soulless world he depicts an image of his own soulful and passionate concerns’.76 Yet Fanger also admits that ‘truths issue eccentrically’ in Gogol’s Dead Souls, in which ‘there is no privileged source among the characters’.77 In ‘The Overcoat’, even more than in Gogol’s other Petersburg tales, he argues that there is a peculiarly ‘devious’ ‘complex of narrative attitudes’, an especially ‘elusive’ narrator, ‘shifting levels bewilderingly, so that as a source of perspective he resembles the Petersburg wind’. ‘Only part’ of the tale is ‘satirical’; hence the motivation for the story (questioned by Gogol himself, in his didactic mode) ‘is that such stories put language to luminously poetic use, making art of nonsense, playing with the reader’s expectations of literature and rewarding the desirous with hints of an added significance – satirical and psychological …’78 Through competing voices and views, Gogol collapses any ‘vertical’ understanding. In Gogol’s Petersburg tales, the digressive creative capacity of the word is related to Petersburg’s physical aspects (its apparently straight but in fact angled prospects, transected by curving streets and canals; its reflective surfaces; its horizons, expanse, strange light, mist, wind), as well as to divided configurations of cultural consciousness in the Petersburg text (Pushkin’s digressive prose, dialogically creating a new kind of reader79). Despite its status as capital and whether or not it functions as the central point of reference or actual setting of the fiction, Petersburg functions in all of Gogol’s fiction not as a concentric, centripetal space that authorizes speech or makes it cohere. Gogol draws on the foreign speech in circulation within the city in order to characterize Petersburg as eccentric, unstable space in which speech and self ‘Gogol opens up techniques of writing undiscovered by anyone else, saturating the verbal texture with a rain of popular, colloquial, occupational, and local words’ (Andrei Bely, Мастерство Гоголя (Moscow/Leningrad, 1934), 200). 75 Ibid., 21, 152. 76 Ibid., 152. 77 Ibid., 179. 78 Ibid., 154–5. 79 Ibid., 152.

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are continually estranged. Subject and subtext are parodied in those foreign names of the dogs, Fidèle and Madgie, whose correspondence Poprishchin imagines in ‘Notes of a Madman’, and in the tinsmith Schiller and cobbler Hoffmann of ‘Nevsky Prospekt’. The ‘epic’ Kopeikin tale, whose ending marks the beginning of a ‘novel’ within the epic Dead Souls, similarly indicates how speech and subject that are filtered through or circulate within Petersburg are guaranteed both to degenerate and to generate story. Gogol expresses in the relation of his Petersburg copy clerks to their writing both the reductive and creative capacities of the word placed in circulation. Creatures who depend on an entirely unmarked, uncreative, unaccented transmission of words for their livelihood, Gogol’s petty clerks, minor artists and artisans as much as his digressing Chichikov come alive through their narrators’ and their own unauthorized departures from conventions that sustain them on the physical and advance them on the social plane. This tension between literal and literary modes of subsisting and establishing authenticity and authority is at the core of Gogol’s fiction. It is most evident in those tales in which copying becomes the object of reflection, debated by both narrators and reflexively conscious characters, capable of recognizing themselves to some degree as fictive constructions and as alienated consciousness (at lived and/or reliving/narrating levels of the text) and capable of commenting reflexively on existential and fictive parodies in a way that forces readers to question eccentric modes of constructing identity, memory, text. Gogol’s most masterful works are, as Nabokov and Fanger both note, in the latter’s words, ‘self-reflexive and ultimately “about” the nature of their own literary being’.80 Fanger follows this assertion by noting that this reflexivity constitutes ‘the great Gogolian theme – the possibility of literature, the freedom and power of writing to affirm its own material existence in the very registering of absences’. For Fanger and critics ranging from Dostoevsky to Maguire, the absent-minded copy clerk or the character who dies or goes out of his mind represents (renders present) that which is ‘absented’ in Gogol’s narratives. Gogol’s copiers engage in creative wordplay only when they go out of their minds – to the degree of his clinically mad narrator (с-ума-сшед-ший/out-of-mind-gone), who literally turns through his delusions into deviant behaviour in the world as well as into a digressive text, which is also one of those ‘moments of irrational insight’ 80 Ibid., 23.

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that Nabokov finds characteristic of genius81 such as experienced by Chichikov, who identifies himself then as a ‘fool’ or ‘idiot’, having pointlessly ‘dug himself in’, falling into an underground when he ‘fell to pondering’.82 In that uncharacteristic moment of transparency and unguardedness, midway through book one of Dead Souls, when Chichikov bounds across his room with his list, he also leaps beyond an infernal reality in which the value of dead souls, his inclusive, is fixed. The lists of dead souls that he has mechanically copied filter into his consciousness and there come to life. This fantastical substantiation is not intentional but bears witness to the revivifying power of language itself: ‘какое-то странное, непонятное ему самому чувство овладело им’83 (some sort of strange feeling, incomprehensible to him himself, overwhelmed him, italics added); ‘и глаза его невольно остановились на одной фамилии’84 (and his eyes involuntarily stopped at one surname). What happens to Chichikov and his dead souls is akin in certain respects to that which happens to the writer and his characters in the process of revision as Gogol described it, his own words coming to life once copied by his own hand for the eighth time. There is a give and take such as that between the characters that draw themselves on Akaky Akakievich’s lips and the clerk who simultaneously is trying to draw them out (orally and in writing) as he lovingly copies them over simply for the pleasure of copying. Chichikov’s characters, names rather than letters, are inherently more lively: names suggest histories (though these are as open-ended as the present and the future as Chichikov remembers them) and have intertextual resonances. Chichikov’s copied characters are thus capable of making a deeper impression. They ultimately become interlocutors, answering his questions with their own. In this first instance of engagement, the strange liveliness of the internalized word resurrects Chichikov as much as his dead souls: ‘он умилился духом и, вздохнувши, произнес: “Батюшки мои”’85 (he was moved in spirit and, sighing, said: ‘My dear ones’). The emphatic repetition of the root for spirit in дух and вздохнуть suggests Chichikov’s own coming to life in his encounter with the words on the page. If he abandons 81 Nabokov, Gogol, 143. 82 His musing in the original text reads: Что ж я так закопался … ни с того ни с другого сначала загородил околёсину, а потом задумался. Экой я дурак в самом деле! (Мёрмвые души, 178). 83 Ibid., 177. 84 Ibid., 178. 85 Ibid.

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this internalized imaginative rebirth, he gives rise to another dialogic realization through the narrator, facing Chichikov bounding, like his imagined souls, across the Russian plain. Digressions such as these are costly, often fatal for the hero. Chichikov’s fate is as uncertain and compromised as the past he speculates for his dead souls. At the same time, imaginative deviations in the act of copying on the part of Gogol’s heroes are as capable of reviving dead souls and fictional forms as authorial digressions. But accepting Gogol’s eccentric characters’ creative capacities as such requires an eccentric reading, against the grain or between the lines of a ‘realist’ or ‘rational’ interpretation (one line of interpretation invited and resisted by an irrational text). Because Gogol’s copiers and artists devolve into madness or die, Gogol’s contemporaries (Bulgarin to Rozanov, and even Dostoevsky’s fictional reader, Devushkin) as well as later critics from Bakhtin to Nabokov and, more recently, Fanger, Fusso, Maguire, Morson and Meyer, find them severely limited figures of creative consciousness, if ‘conscious’ at all. They rather define these characters, as Gogol did in his later incarnation as critic, as ‘mere’ imitations and imitators.86 If Gogol’s characters survive becoming conscious – that is, survive their lapses as copiers (like the painter whom the doomed Charkov construes as rival in ‘The Portrait’ and the painter of the infamous portrait itself), it is only after radical physical and psychological displacement, which the madman achieves by turning into the alienated psyche and the dead man by dissolving into spectre and rumour. However, if Petersburg seems to deaden consciousness, the dead and the mad are among the liveliest presences in Gogol’s Petersburg text. Akaky vividly haunts Petersburg, changing in form and becoming capable of evoking different, equally enlivening responses as he is passed from lips to lips as part of Petersburg myth. Petersburg haunts the living who take leave of city or senses: it informs Gogol’s vision of Paris, manifests itself in the paintings created by the artist in ‘The Portrait’ and structures Poprishchin’s ‘Spain’ in a Petersburg asylum. Insofar as Petersburg’s contradictions are confronted by Gogol’s characters, 86 Cf. Fanger’s The Creation of Nikolai Gogol on solipsistic, un-self-conscious heroes, incapable of reflecting on Petersburg (111) and on Gogol’s heroes and even narrators as model mis-readers of texts within the texts and as failed authors (261); Nabokov on their limited creative capacity (Gogol, 143); Morson’s Literature and History on their limited self-consciousness (231); Maguire on ‘imitation’ in Gogol’s fictions, as a question that ‘arises not only from Gogol’s psychological makeup, theories of creativity, and literary practices but from his adopted nationality as a writer’ (Exploring Gogol, 135).

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they prove a not only degenerative but generative force. Petersburg’s rippling, reflective surfaces provide the fatal but not finalizing context in which his characters realize the multiplicity of the self as well as the difference and distance between self and other necessary for genuine and generative dialogue. It is in the act of copying and failing to copy correctly that Gogol’s characters become refractive and reflexive, no longer ‘like a mirror, … all surface’, as Fanger frames Chichikov, in contradistinction to his creatively reflective author, with respect to the perspective each offers of the road.87 Fanger concentrates on those explicitly ‘reflexive’ moments – moments of ‘lyrical digression’ because of which, ‘Dead Souls, as Siniavsky observes, is to a considerable extent “a book written about how it is written”’.88 In Dead Souls, Fanger argues that the ‘author’s [narrator’s] voice is seldom ironic; it contains the norms on which the narrative ironies rest’, one of which is that the turn ‘“back to the road”’, back ‘“into life”’ and back towards Chichikov also represents a turn back into narrative, because ‘in Gogol’s reversible terms ‘“the world is a living book”’.89 But the irony inherent in that creative (re) turn need not be expressed here by the narrator because it has already been expressed by Chichikov, in that moment of self-critique containing an implicit critique of his author/narrator’s logos. Thus, the turn back into narrative is a turn also into and through Chichikov’s eccentrically urbane consciousness. This circling of the word is not wholly compatible with Fanger’s mapping as ‘suggestive concentricities, like solar systems and atoms, in the macro- and micro-structures of event, which may be mimetic happening or speech event, the agencies being respectively human emotion and phonemic interplay’;90 it suggests rather a more undefined and destabilizing collision of semiospheres that are more marginocentric. The tug between these spheres, like that between competing spheres and centres for the eccentric capital, is mimetic but also anti-mimetic. This contradiction as much as correspondence defines the tug within and between Gogol’s speaking/writing subjects and figures of speech, opened up by conflicting emotions, semantic contradiction and phonemic play. Despite his distance from Bakhtin’s ‘monological’ reading of Gogol, the distinction that Fanger still makes between author (concentric consciousness) and hero (eccentric), is 87 Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 169–71. 88 Ibid., 172. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 235. Cf. 141–5.

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collapsed by the very ‘road’ that Fanger finds so essential to Gogol’s fiction – a road Gogol’s fictive heroes and narrators travel together, facing in opposite directions. That facing is the necessary position for dialogue. Internalized within individual or cultural consciousness or as an aesthetic position, this confrontation might look like schizophrenia. The same disintegration that Fanger notes in ‘The Overcoat’ applies to the first book of Dead Souls: ‘on the level of theme [including reflection on aesthetics] the same ambiguity obtains as on the level of statement; and both are subsumed by the larger tendency of the narration to move on rather than to resolve’.91 Yet this road is just an extension of Gogol’s Petersburg streets, commonplace and estranging space that makes dialogue possible, precisely by affording different ‘views’.92 Gogol’s most alienated, absent-minded, unoriginal characters grow uncertain and unreliable as they become more conscious of the city’s crossed lines.93 They explore the limits and costs of the eccentric city’s claims to authority and authenticity. But if they expose its real violence (breaking apart the body, the word, etc.), they also express the creative capacity of deviance, digression, disease, even death as deconstructive, ‘deterritorializing’ devices that ramify meaning, render it relative, decentred, multiple. As fatally determined, impotent and incoherent as Gogol’s copiers may seem in the plotted line of their fictions, they reproduce and resonate within and beyond textual limits,94 as they engage in open-ended dialogue between hero, narrator and author. 91 Ibid., 160. 92 Ibid., 169. 93 Cf. Iurii M. Lotman, «Проблема художественного пространство в прозе Гоголя» (Moscow: Просвещение, 1988), 38–45; Maguire, ‘Place Within’, in Exploring Gogol; Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 154. 94 See Lotman’s and Toporov’s readings of the ‘Petersburg text’; Mann (ed.), Гоголь и мировая литература; Donald Fanger’s ‘Gogol: The Apotheosis of the Grotesque’, in Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), ‘Influence and Tradition in the Russian Novel’ in John G. Garrard, The Russian Novel from Pushkin to Pasternak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) and The Creation of Nikolai Gogol; Richard Peace’s The Enigma of Gogol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Graffy’s Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’; Moeller-Sally’s Gogol’s Afterlife; and Yelistratova’s Николай Гоголь и проблемы западоевропейского романа. For Gogol’s influence on particular authors, see Bely’s Мастерство Гоголя: Исследование; Spitzer’s The Image of the City in the Novels of Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bely; Roger Keys’s ‘The Unwelcome Tradition: Bely, Gogol and Metafictional Narration’, in Jane Grayson and Faith Wigzell (eds), Nikolay Gogol: Text and Context (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Chebotareva’s, Chudakova’s, and my own article on Gogol and Bulgakov.

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Reading between the lines: authority in ‘The Overcoat’ (dialogues between author, narrator and hero) In ‘The Overcoat’, Gogol explores city and subject through contrasting perspectives. The narrator reads between those ‘clear, evenly handwritten lines’95 through which Akaky initially sees (or does not see) the city. In his capacity as copier, Akaky functions as a type indispensable to Petersburg’s bureaucratic machine, and he seems configured as mechanically as a typeface, both reproducing and reproduced by the city. He is, in fact, so clear a copy, so clear about his purpose as copier, so clear in his copying that he is unseen by others (except the narrator, to whom he is markedly unremarkable). He is likewise unconscious of the city and un-self-conscious. There is literally no line drawn between his page and the city insofar as he walks through the latter blind, with his mind’s eye on the former. He does, however, become visible through his blind bumbling, which subjects him to the mockery of other clerks. He is marked as a distinct type, not so much because of his imprint on the city, but because of the marks it leaves on him – splattering his coat with its waste. He becomes remarkable both to other clerks and the narrator because he is an imperfect copy – paradoxically imperfect not because his page and coat are tattered and splattered, but because his copies are so precise and because his absolute involvement in copying leaves him indifferent to patches and splotches on his coat and the ambitions that make those undesirable. But he is remarkable to the narrator also because of the space he inhabits between the lines he copies, that space responsively imprinted (not just reflected) on his face in the act of copying: Вряд ли где можно было найти человека, который так жил бы в своей должности. Мало сказать: он служил ревностно, нет, он служил с любовью. Там, в этом переписываньи, ему виделся какой-то свой разноовразный и приятный мир. Наслаждение выражалось на лице его; некоторые буквы у него были фавориты, до которых если он добирался, то был сам не свой: и подсмейвался, и подмигивал, и помогал губами, так что в лице его, казалось, можно было прочесть всякую букву, которую выводило его.96 (Hardly anywhere could one find a man, who so lived in his work. It is inadequate to say, he served zealously; no, he served with love. There, in 95 GPSS, III.145. 96 GPSS, III.144.

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that copying, he saw some varied and pleasing world of his own. Delight expressed itself on his face; certain letters were favourites, coming across which, he became beside himself: and he’d laugh, and wink, and help out with his lips, so that it seemed one could read on his face each letter leading him on.)

Gogol’s use of reflexive and passive verbal forms, such as видеться for the verb видеть (to see), and the related meanings of terms such as выводить (to lead out, but also to draw or write out) emphasize the writing subject’s displacement into this cosmos framed by copied lines. Akaky is carried away by his love of certain letters, whose aspect evokes laughter and flirtatious looks. Gogol creates a sense of Akaky’s helpless movement through his alliteration and parallelism, stringing him along with phonetic repetition and conjunctions. Akaky draws these figures out by replicating them with his lips and, at the same time, they draw themselves on his face. Thus, Akaky is both agent and object of creation, possessed by even as he possesses his own (свой) world, one of the paradoxes of madness discussed earlier. This cosmos is compelling because full of variation (разноовразный) generated by zealous love, as later his pleasurable and terrifying vision of Petersburg’s flickering lights will also be generated by love for the new overcoat. Although Akaky’s conversation with the letters on the page seems wholly benign, opening onto a pleasant alternative world, in fact, as Meyer notes, he is copying only for himself.97 This exclusive engagement may be one of those ‘vicious circles’ that Nabokov finds in Gogol’s faces and plots, ‘The Overcoat’ in particular.98 Such circles dissolve into ‘chaos’. For Bakhtin, they disintegrate into senselessness. Since there is no possibility of another consciousness represented by these characters (abstracted figures, mere alphabet) on the page, this seems even more diminished and delusional imposture, more distorted reflection and romance than that of the underground. Yet Akaky’s affection is authentic enough to generate the narrator’s bewilderment and representation with pathos as well as parody. In contrast to this engagement marked by ‘love’ and ‘delight’, Akaky’s actual dialogues are wholly unpleasant, generated only by suffering, his first audible response in the narrative compelled by eventually unbearable taunting;99 subsequent 97 Meyer, ‘False Pretenders’. 98 See also Bocharov, ‘Around the Nose’, 35. 99 See GPSS, III.145. Akaky’s confrontation of his fellow clerk has most frequently been misread monologically, as voicing Gogol’s ‘humanitarian’ argument, an argument rendered ambivalent by the narrator’s ellipsis.

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conversations with others or himself are similarly fraught with anger and/or anxiety. The dynamic of loving and distressed conversations is similar, however, in that responsive contortion of the body, impressed by and trying to impress another. In these ‘conventional’ dialogues, the oddity of his lips shaped and shaping letters develops into stuttering, muttering and grimacing in silence. This engagement also opens onto a landscape marked by variation in interpretation, with sympathy, pity, mockery, irony, satire dispensed in all directions. Akaky’s verbal and facial expressions, in both cases, are ambivalent; they might signify that humanity that Belinsky remarked or nothing more than grimaces, with nothing behind the mask.100 Gogol’s narrator must negotiate disparate readings of events. More often than he sees directly into consciousness, Gogol’s narrator speculates based on conventions to which he appeals also to establish his authority; and he records events third- and fourth-hand. That is, the narrator constructs himself as a copier – he does not want to be origin or original. But in his transmission he re-accents stories, often parodically or at least ambivalently. He engages them dialogically, creatively, even if only by performing simple functions that Akaky, in his professional capacity, will not – translating from first- into third-person, using his own voice and signature, stylized as it may be.101 Gogol’s narrator’s account is marked by hesitations, digressions, negation and revision informed by his own turns in the city. The narrator remarks Akaky because he stands outside an apparently closed circle of clerks or at its margin, but that insight derives from not only immediacy but also the narrator’s own outsideness with respect to events and characters (the unpredictability of whose thoughts and impenetrability of whose souls he recognizes102) that allows him to engage dialogically and construct a polyphonic narrative. Akaky first serves the narrator as a fixed eccentric figure in terms of which the narrator can define the eccentric qualities of the city, including its differentiated social spheres. But the eccentrically ordered city that underwrites Akaky’s straight lines makes contradictory demands that cause him to deviate both on the page and in the city. Love for letters 100 Cf. Bocharov, ‘Around the Nose’, 38, on face with no soul. 101 GPSS, III.144–5. 102 Midway through the tale, following Akaky on the street and imagining what he might be thinking, the narrator qualifies his assertion ‘А может быть, даже и этого не подумал – ведь нельзя же залеть в душу человеку и узнать всё, что он думает’ (GPSS, III.159).

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on the page underwrites the love that Akaky develops for the overcoat, which replaces them as a legible sign in the city, once that enclosure on the page and his likewise paper-thin coat prove insufficient to protect him from the city’s cold.103 In order to survive (and presumably to restore his routine and return to his alternative textual reality), Akaky must deal directly with Petersburg’s other copied lines – its economic, social, stylistic conventions that the narrator has presented, like the city itself, outside his purview. When he becomes resigned to purchasing a new coat, he becomes both more copious copier and more of a copy; at the same time, he deviates as copy and copier. He becomes increasingly concerned with style. He takes drastic measures to procure the means to acquire the coat, crossing new distances and disregarding difference by asking for an advance from his superior. He becomes conscious of trajectories he has long taken through the city and reorients himself within it. His reorientation re-determines his writing, so that now it is no longer only for himself, but for another. His professional writing, even in private, is aimed at purchasing the coat, parodically and pathetically personified as Akaky’s betrothed (in this sense it echoes Poprishchin’s private writing). But Akaky’s devotion to the coat also results in distraction, so that he suddenly finds himself splattering ink and almost making ‘fatal’ errors (as he used to suddenly find himself splattered in the city). Now his eyes seem closed to his copied lines and open to the city, between whose lights and lines he finds another, pleasant and threatening, alternative world. The city’s signs, shop and house windows become reflections in terms of which he redresses himself. Once the overcoat is his, urban space opens up further, only to finally threaten with its expanse. Thus, when he heads home from his fellow clerk’s name day celebration and mock celebration of his overcoat, his and Petersburg’s prospects change again, glitter giving way to shadow. Streets empty into distended squares that seem dark horizons, though in fact these are outskirts like those he has always inhabited.104 The cityscape, blanketed in snow and fog, is deserted by all but threatening characters. Once these accost him, take his overcoat and disappear, Petersburg turns into one of those blank pages that Akaky once brought home in order to cover with ordered lines. Yet the city’s fluid, fluctuating squares seem impossible to inscribe with orderly figures, unstable surfaces like the 103 Cf. Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 74–6. 104 Ibid., 75–6.

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desert or sea he imagines them to be. Akaky’s writing, in any case, has disintegrated; every actual character to which he now appeals resists his shaping according to social and linguistic conventions; or they misread his lips. These are grotesquely fashioned, contradictory, nonsensical characters, such as he also becomes in his rumoured afterlife. However, at the very moments Akaky seems to lose consciousness or bearings (with the shocks of the cold, the loss of his coat, the loss of face in the confrontation with the important personage), he becomes more conscious of the city as a shifting text. He also becomes increasingly capable of critically interacting in that context, as unstable trace. At that cold edge of the city, with its one blind outpost, Akaky finally opens his eyes, seems able to read between lines and to speak in a narrative that has emphasized his blindness and muteness. Aside from one stunned, blinking, silent moment after meeting with the ‘important person’, he does not stop seeing and speaking until he dies (and not even then, insofar as his accusations reverberate as rumour). Akaky’s directed speech is based on a fixed line of responsibility (the policeman’s responsibility to perceive and apprehend the thieves, as later the important personage’s responsibility to pursue the matter, etc.). But, in its indirections, hesitations, repetitions and ellipses, it reflects his realization that everything appears and sounds different at different distances on this landscape. Response is not predictable, though irresponsibility may be. When he opens his eyes after being accosted, his perception of the cityscape is similar to that of the schizophrenic who experiences time and space as ‘“an immense space without boundary, limitless, flat, a mineral, lunar country … a stretching emptiness [where] all is unchangeable, immobile, congealed, crystallized”’.105 This is space that is at once defined (fixed cultural topography) and undefined (unstable centre and mobile outer boundaries). It suggests the open-endedness of Akaky’s ellipses (space semantically stretched further by Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis), fixing meaning in flux. It suggests that petrification of the self in the petrified landscape that Mann explores as the basis for mobile interpretation in Gogol’s work.106 In ‘Notes of a Madman’, Poprishchin similarly re-conceives Petersburg as a petrifying, lunar, boundless space. He similarly translates physical and psychic Petersburg space through openings in writing: by reading 105 Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism (New York: Basic, 1992), 14–15. 106 In his compelling study of ‘petrification’ in Gogol’s work (particularly The Inspector General), Mann notes paradoxically dialogic dynamics, forcing interpretation and reinterpretation.

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a Petersburg paper, he transforms himself into king of Spain;107 he contends that in writing out Spain one necessarily comes out with China;108 and he sniffs his way through turns of phrase concerning noses onto the moon. His pathological refractions of Petersburg recover not only the static surface, but also the dynamic internal structure of this desolate, disconsolate landscape, ‘open to the elements’, as Maguire demonstrates.109 Thus, Gogol’s clerks are blown across each other’s paths, their breath apparently knocked out of them by the ‘wind that blow[s], according to Petersburg custom, from all four corners, from every side street’.110 They blow across their narrators’ and authors’ paths as well. While Poprishchin’s configuration as a writer ‘is as close as Gogol came to dealing with his own craft in fiction’, Akaky Akakievich similarly underwrites the anxieties of his narrator and author concerning the ethics, aesthetics and authority of creative copying.111 In the romantic Piskarev, Gogol casts the native ‘Petersburg artist’ [Художник петербургский!] as an impossibility or improbability,112 alienated in an artificial city, contending with the city’s strange northern light, and constrained to draw the lines of their own rooms, full of artistic debris.113 Yet this is just the sort of space and scraps out of which Gogol’s most authorized artists (the rival artist in ‘The Portrait’) and writers (the urbane narrators of ‘The Overcoat’ and other Petersburg tales) create lively, original texts, crossing between crowded street and consciousness. Intertextual lines: crossings on the ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ (intertexual dialogues) As Fusso notes while surveying the ‘landscape of Arabesques’, the lines not only within Gogol’s individual works but also in his collective work can be seen as variants of the Sierpínski line or of Benjamin’s ‘tractatus’.114 These are lines that fill in space, that may not intersect and turn in different directions but finally cover a whole ground through 107 GPSS, III.206–7. 108 GPSS, III.212. 109 Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 75ff. 110 GPSS, III.167. 111 Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 49. 112 GPSS, III.16. 113 GPSS, III.16. 114 Fusso, ‘The Landscape of Arabesques’, 115–17.

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similarly patterned arabesque movement. Nabokov’s observation that ‘The Overcoat’ forms a ‘vicious circle’ (whose natural, fractal pattern looks incoherent), summed up as a series of mumbles, lyrical waves, broken by a fantastic climax that dissolves into more mumbling that finally turns back ‘into the chaos from which they all had derived’,115 might similarly apply to Gogol’s Petersburg tales as a whole. The recursive line Gogol pursues in these fictions is always ‘vicious’, fiercely satirical, but also capable of reviving consciousness and conscience, through its aesthetic ambivalence. If Gogol’s exploration of the ‘soul’ invokes otherworldly ‘shadows of nameless and soundless ships’,116 his neither anonymous nor speechless vessels seem to signal each other across his Petersburg tales, sometimes collide or at least turn in each other’s wake. In the opening digressions of Gogol’s ‘Notes of a Madman’ – involving literal digression through the city, imaginary digressions and digressions on the task of writing – Poprishchin seems to digress also beyond the bounds of this tale when he espies a ‘fellow clerk’ (брат чиновник). This figure he glimpses at an intersection (на перекрестке) leads him to imagine, in condensed form, a version of Piskarev’s and Pirogov’s more developed romantic pursuits in ‘Nevsky Prospekt’. The threads of their narratives pick up where his breaks off. Poprishchin’s projection of that other plot is internally cut off by another digression, dismissed in a way that would seem to delimit any potential recognition or realization. He recounts what seems to be the same old story. Rejecting that narrative line, Poprishchin is immediately distracted by another encounter, his response to which generates his more ‘extraordinary’ narrative. Ironically, by heading off in this other direction, his narrative again picks up the thread of this earlier tale. The apparent dismissal of predetermined protagonist and dead-ended plot marks the beginning of an ongoing intertextual dialogue about the relation of self to other, distance and displacement, desire and doubling. More essentially, the way in which Poprishchin tells that story frames the way in which he will tell his own – instigating a more indirect intertextual dialogue about genre, the relation of author to hero and the dynamics of narrative space. The sight of the other clerk generates internal dialogue in which Poprishchin is both agent and object of discourse: ‘Я, как увидел его, тотчас сказал себе: эге! нет, голубчик, …’117 (I, as soon as I saw 115 Nabokov, 149. Cf. discussion p. 201. 116 Ibid. 117 GPSS, III.194, ellipsis in the original.

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him, immediately said to myself: aha! no, my dear …). Poprishchin is syntactically split into the position of speaker and listener [Я/I and себе/ myself], discrete in their functions in dialogue, yet standing together as observers at a distance from an other [его/him]. But Poprishchin is also the subject of discourse insofar as his ‘aha’ [эге] and ‘dear’ [голубчик] are marks of recognition and association with the other. At the same time, the other is differentiated from self by being cast as ‘you’ [ты] and further distanced by the negation, ‘no’ [нет], suggesting that Poprishchin would pursue an alternative course of action in the place of the other. Yet Poprishchin does not actually, but only inwardly, address that receding figure with his accusation: ‘спешиш за тою, что бежит впереди и глядиш на её ножки’118 (you rush after that one [thing] running ahead of you and ogle her little feet). By associating with the clerk as brother but addressing him as other, by internally accusing him and sending him off in another disregarded direction, Poprishchin creates both a subtext and alternative to his own plot. The clerk’s pursuit of an objectified, fragmented other (metonymically framed, with another intertextual resonance, since that reduction of the feminine to feet can be aligned with romantic obsession in Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin), along with the characterization of a clerk as unwilling to yield to authority119 (‘Ей богу, не упустит никакому офицеру’ [by God, he won’t bow to any officer]), as well as the derogatory tone of Poprishchin’s remarks forecast other of Gogol’s fictions as well as Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s refractory underground narratives. While Poprishchin apparently gives chase in a different direction on the social landscape, his pursuit of Sophie (whose feet he also especially remarks and whose rival suitor he confronts in commentaries to Madgie’s letters) stylizes this plot. She is not the prostitute or commoner pursued by the underground man, or Piskarev, or even Akaky, running after some lady on the street for ‘some unknown’ reason,120 yet he also casts her as compromised. Poprishchin’s ‘plot’ draws out different pathological tendencies than those represented by Dostoevsky’s underground man’s paranoid schizophrenic discourse, Piskarev’s disillusionment and drug-induced delusion or Akaky’s obsession and digressive protest. At the same time, Gogol sets up Poprishchin’s point of departure in terms of intertextual and imaginary dialogue at common crossroads in Petersburg and the Petersburg text. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid. 120 GPSS, III.160.

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‘The Overcoat’ doubles back over other ground covered in ‘Notes of a Madman’, exploring and expanding the psychic and cultural space of one peculiar obsession. Poprishchin self-consciously remarks, repeatedly, the inadequacy of his own overcoat, which he perceives as incommensurate with the social position he occupies: it is dirty (like the ‘гадкая фрачишка’ [vile little tailcoat] of the ‘typical’ provincial official he has just excoriated as a cheat, unworthy of his pay, unlike Petersburg officials such as himself); it is also ‘старая шинель, запачканная, и притом старого фасона’ (an old overcoat, splattered, and, moreover, out of fashion [or more literally, of the old cut/style]). Poprishchin elaborates on the coat’s age and anachronism by focusing on the collar that will also be Akaky’s particular concern. Poprishchin’s consciousness of his collar’s unevenness anticipates Akaky’s obsession with the styling of his coat and growing awareness of how that style frames him. For Poprishchin the overcoat seems a lesser sign of a middle-aged self in crisis, confronted with outdated and futile aspirations. Yet clothing does stand in for self when, near the end of ‘Notes of a Madman’, Poprishchin cuts up and re-sews his relatively new uniform, in order to outfit himself in the foreign style he imagines suited to the king of Spain, whom he now fashions himself. Here he also travesties Petrine myths of usurpation and re-dressed culture. He similarly turns to Western style of dress, though only as he imagines it might be, without the direct contact underpinning Peter’s authority or even the indirect professional resources of Akaky’s tailor Petrovich, adapting current Western fashions to suit the man and materials at hand. Poprishchin’s fashion models, like his literary models, are already parodied forms, but they generate original designs paradoxically authenticated as copies. If the plot lines of these texts similarly concern copying and covering distances between self and other, they draw out these dynamics on different narrative planes. The distance between self and other is internalized in ‘Notes of a Madman’. Poprishchin not only tells but writes his own tale, thereby internalizing the distance between writers within the narrative as well as between hero, narrator, author and reader. He internalizes the difference between himself and the dogs, whose correspondence he composes by ‘copying’ it into his text and which approximates literary models that he also stylizes in his signed writing, while displacing his anxieties about flawed and/or creative copying. But on the plotted level of the text, internalized through retrospection and reflection, he also plays parts that in ‘The Overcoat’ will be split between characters such as Akaky and Petrovich or Akaky and the important

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personage. Poprishchin cuts and sews his own coat, signs in the place of his director and plays the part of his own interrogator and reader/jury. In his patchwork outfit and ridiculously stylized writing, he seems even more outlandish than Akaky. His suit and narrative become so deformed that they evoke a different reaction from the reader – partly represented by his servant’s shocked cry when Poprishchin first displays himself in self-sewn suit. While the reader, unlike the servant, is set up for this strangeness by the authorial framing, since the reader is told at the outset that these are notes of a madman, the reader has similarly been drawn into standard relations with Poprishchin through his initial intimating reasoning and metaliterary reflection. Poprishchin’s attentiveness to convention also makes him more responsible for his unconventionality. Because he is self-authoring, he is less vulnerable to Devushkin’s critique of Akaky as implausible construct of an ironic author. Akaky and Poprishchin are not so distant from that line of Dostoevskian fools stretching from Foma Opiskin to Fyodor Karamazov, conscious of how ludicrous they appear to others. Their obsessions link them to what society deems reasonable as much as they mark their distortion of accepted modes of reasoning. Their madness can be understood because, like that of the underground narrator, it represents an abstraction of modern Russia’s own abstraction, directly linked to Petersburg. For Gogol’s heroes and narrators as much as Dostoevsky’s doubles, that Petersburg line pursued to the breaking point runs along the Nevsky Prospekt. In Gogol’s fiction, the Nevsky offers a schizophrenic perspective of Petersburg. It condenses direct and digressive lines, light and dark, order and disorder, sanity and insanity. In the story ‘Nevsky Prospekt’, the street concentrates contrasts. It stands for Petersburg’s authentic variety, but also for its inauthenticity. In the narrator’s opening physiological sketch of the city as it cyclically manifests itself on the Nevsky, naturally shifting circulation gives way to the increasingly unnatural. That Petersburg stage is fantastically recast in the narrator’s conclusion, Он лжёт во всякое время, этот Невский проспект, но более всего тогда, когда ночь сгущенного массою наляжет на него и отделит белые и палевые стены домов, когда весь город превратится в гром и блеск, мириады карет валятся с мостов, форейторы кричат и прыгают на лошадях и когда сам демон зажигает лампы для того только, чтобы показать всё не в настоящем виде.121 121 GPSS, III.45.

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Figure 38  Ilya Yefimovich Repin. Saint Petersburg. Nevsky Prospekt. 1887. Graphite pencil and ivory black on paper. It lies all the time, this Nevsky Prospekt, but most of all when night heaves its dense mass on it and sets off the white and pale walls of houses, when the whole city turns into rumbling and glitter, myriads of carriages tumble off the bridges, postilions shout and leap on their horses and when the devil himself lights the lamps only so as to show everything not as it really is [in its true aspect].

At this final moment of the day and of the fiction, the city becomes carnival space, its boundaries at once made more distinct and blurred. The city’s colours and speech dissolve into shimmer set against shadow, indistinguishable rumbling and shouts. Social spheres strictly demarked in space and time, converge as part of the ‘dense mass’ heaved onto the street. Semiospheres (characters, social spheres, speech genres) collide like those carriages tumbling off the city’s bridges. The one group distinguished comprises messengers. These relayers of texts have a peculiar position on the Nevsky, not unlike that of the writer – marked by a more open perspective, freedom of movement, connection to different groups on the street, voice and language of their own (though reduced here to generic ‘cries’).

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The Nevsky serves as both starting point and summation of the narrator’s mapping of consciousness and conscience in the city. It links not only the narrator’s, Piskarev’s and Pirogov’s crossed paths, but also those of a multitude of minor characters, striking out from sightings and instances of speech beyond the bounds of the narrative and purview of the narrator. What the narrator sees as full of potential, he finally reconfigures as delusion and deception, demonically shaped space. The devil here reappears as a figure fleshed out within the narrator’s consciousness, framed by his conscience and fantastically reconfiguring his signature style, marked by both the superstition and suspicion of outsider and the complicity of the insider. This is a devil that the reader must respond to, but can resist. The narrator’s revision of the cityscape as a demonically mesmerizing and mentally deranging site is interesting especially because it is intertextually derivative (copied, connected specifically to the outsider’s view of Petersburg in Gogol’s Dikanka tales122 and to an older, Orthodox and folkloric critique of the Enlightenment123), but also because it is intratextually dialogic. The recursive structure of the narrative (that ‘vicious circle’ of discourse noted by Nabokov and the narrative’s still cyclical time, in which night must give way again to day) argues against a finalizing reading such as Maguire’s, granting a definitive, authorized view to the rather unreliable narrator of Gogol’s tale, conflating his disillusionment and Gogol’s distrust of the Enlightenment. The ending of the tale returns the reader to the opening view of the Nevsky Prospekt as a space crossed by different populations, speech genres and shifting spotlights, including the ‘naturally’ strange light of Petersburg as well as this demonic lamplight. The narrator’s contradictory views of the city are compounded by a plurality of other perspectives, including those self-consciously fabricated by Piskarev and Pirogov. Each of these perspectives remains somewhat outside the purview of the others. Neither narrator nor either of these figures offers the definitive perspective on the city. Rather, crossing each other and bumping into other authorities124 on the Nevsky Prospekt, they stake out competing perspectives. The Nevsky Prospekt, as a line that runs through Gogol’s texts, 122 Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 77. 123 Ibid., 78. 124 If Poprishchin foresees the perverse, self-destructive intentionality of Dostoevsky’s underground man’s bumping into the officer, Piskarev actually runs into an officer on the Nevsky, distractedly, in the way Poprishchin and Dostoevsky would like to (GPSS, III.16).

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functions as both threshold for intertextual dialogue and an opening onto dialogic narrative authority. For Petersburg’s workers and minor officials, who traverse before noon, it is not a terminus, but a means: Можно сказать решительно, что в это время, то есть до 12 часов, Невский просрект не составляет ни для кого цели, он служит только средством: он постепенно наполняется лицами, имеющими свои занятия, свои заботы, свои досады, но вовсе не думающими о нём.125 One may say decidedly, that at that time, that is, until twelve o’clock, the Nevsky prospekt doesn’t constitute anyone’s aim, it serves only as a means: it gradually fills up with people [literally, faces], each with their own occupations, their own cares, their own vexations, but not thinking of them at all.

These apparently mindless minor figures are central to Gogol’s marginocentric Petersburg tales. They ennact the display and displacing of eccentric preoccupations on the central Nevsky. The Nevsky shapes collective consciousness – as such it is a connecting space. But it does so in ways of which Gogol’s ‘typical’ characters, for whom the Nevsky is only a place of passage, are unconscious – implying a disconnect. Here we see the Nevsky being crossed by a crowd of Akakys, as we first meet him, seen from the outside, marked by a kind of integrity (a profession, an inner world, cares, etc.) but declared unconscious, crossing the city only to get from copy to copy or care to care. Only later in the day, when paths cross and persons collide, does the Nevsky, though still functioning as means rather than end, become a space for recognition and realization. Though a passage, the Nevsky is also disrupted space in Gogol’s fiction, a space in which the boundaries of the self are defined by modes, signs and moments of circulation, a space shut off to certain kinds of people or speech at different hours. As commercial as well as communicative space of port city, it concentrates various aspects of Petersburg’s concern with importing or copying: The characters who walk along the Nevsky at different hours are quintessential types (ranging from transplanted serfs to ‘governesses from all nations with their charges in cambric collars’, an array of officials, and then elegant ‘men in long frock coats with their hands in their pockets’ and ‘ladies in pink, white and pale blue satin redingotes and hats’126). They all leave their ‘traces’ 125 GPSS, III.11. 126 GPSS, III.11–12.

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(следы 127) on this ‘universal communication of Petersburg’ (всеобщая коммуникация Петербурга 128). The specificity and familiarity with which Gogol’s narrator defines types, denoting the usual shades of their clothing and their usual gestures, using diminutive forms of nouns and adjectives, reinforces their typicality. His use of foreign terms emphasizes their imitative nature. The Nevsky becomes a theatre crossed first by costumes, before being fleshed out by characters such as Piskarev, Pirogov and even Hoffmann and Schiller. It is staged as a ‘pedagogical space’ [Невский проспект – педагогический Невский проспект 129] not only during the hours it is frequented by school children and their imported governesses, but also when crossed by foreign fashions. The goods in shop windows are imports, the signs a seductive kind of copy that Poprishchin’s Frenchified Sophie will be persuaded by. As a stage and a schoolhouse, the Nevsky itself is represented as a space in which speech and gesture are rehearsed. But the strict lines or script on the Nevsky (like those on Akaky’s copied texts), seeming to preclude authentic dialogue and to determine alienation, also become those boundaries essential to dialogic creation within digressive consciousness. Gogol’s Petersburg clerks, Akaky and Poprishchin most notable among them, not only exemplify those minor officials who head to their offices along the Nevsky before noon and return home at those uncertain hours when Petersburg’s lights flicker. Like the postilions, they are cast as purveyors of texts, intermediaries rather than creators or recipients. They do not, however, typically contribute much to the general hubbub or rumble of the city, managing to ‘mumble’ only to themselves, their speech directed ‘at their buttons’. The exception occurs as they fall out of line as copiers, as type. Their eccentricity is compounded as they circulate at other times of day. In stepping out of line, they become conscious of circulation patterns, but also of parallels and intersections. Poprishchin’s turns off the Nevsky Prospekt – in pursuit of the writing of a dog and into his own paranoid or dogged prose – depend on an awakening to sights and speech to which he is not accustomed, an awakening that depends, in turn, on his waking and striking out for work late. When he first notes that other clerk, immediately critiqued by Poprishchin for a projected pursuit as ill-timed as his own, mid-day 127 GPSS, III.11. As Gogol’s narrator imagines Petersburg, it is both blank page and page imprinted with countless traces: Как чисто подметены его тротуары и, боже, сколько ног оставило на нём следы свои! 128 GPSS, III.10. 129 GPSS, III.11.

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and mid-life, the reader confronts a protagonist who is both doubled and differentiated, whose potential self-critique is displaced. Yet Poprishchin, anticipating both Akaky and Dostoevsky’s underground narrator, is never actually typical or sane, as some critics have claimed.130 When these figures turn onto the Nevsky in the first pages of their texts, they are already eccentrics. Poprishchin immediately maps on the Nevsky the discursive circling, evasion, digression and delay developed further by the underground narrator. Gogol’s ‘Notes of a Madman’ represents the most extreme alienation in Gogol’s work – i.e., the greatest possibility for undermined authority. Yet this clerk is also eccentric copier (by profession, in an objective sense), eccentric scribbler (писняк, hack writer by vocation), and eccentric author (whose polyphonic notes are generated by schizophrenic consciousness). Concentrating each of these kinds of eccentric writers’ experience and expression of Petersburg, Poprishchin manifests the particular directions, dynamics and limits of their dialogic engagement. Realignments: critique and creativity within ‘The Notes of a Madman’ (contradiction and dialogue) Poprishchin is an anomaly as first-person narrator. Whereas Gogol uses familiar, self-conscious, verbally individuated narrators in other fictions, they seem to tell stories about other characters. To the degree that Gogol’s stories are about their own making, Rudy Panko and the narrators of ‘The Overcoat’, ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ and Dead Souls also speak for themselves. The narrator of Dead Souls is concerned with writing, not only telling, in a novel that, like all of Gogol’s work, ‘straddles the boundary between oral and written presentation’, disrupting conventional literary and linguistic, ideological and institutional stances.131 But Poprishchin’s narrative, while employing the same oral strategies of indirection, ambivalence, digression and dissembling as Gogol’s other tales, also does so as consciously written narrative, as the ‘notes’ [записки] of the narrator, incorporating acts of reading and intended to be read, even if only by the narrator himself. As Mills Todd notes, ‘the orally delivered text seems to [invite] a spirit of cooperation from its listeners, a willingness to accept as natural and to overlook or tolerate 130 Cf. Peter Rossbacher, ‘The Function of Insanity …’, Slavic and East European Journal, 13 (1969), 197. 131 Mills Todd, Fiction and Society, 175, 177. Eikhenbaum, Vinogradov, Fanger and Maguire also deal with oral aspects of Gogol’s aesthetics.

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the comic strangeness, contradictions, and discontinuities’ whereas ‘the experience of reading could more readily open the text to critical scrutiny and make such discontinuities palpable’.132 Critical distances between author and narrator, narrator and subject, speaker and writer, writer and reader, and so forth are also compressed within schizophrenic consciousness. The dimensions of the city, self, and narrative unfold through dialogue, contradiction, silences, ellipses, fragmentation and fantastic ‘turns of speech’ not unlike Akaky’s and Chichikov’s and their skaz narrators’; but condensed into writing signed by a literarily designated and clinically diagnosed madman, this remapping is harder to make sense of and take seriously. The otherness represented by both subject and narrative is announced by the title. Maguire contrasts Gogol’s strategy here to the mystifying framing of detective fictions alluding to shady characters and conspiracies that will be cleared up by the fiction, ‘Gogol, on the contrary, moves from a title that seems perfectly plain and obvious, to the conclusion that nothing can be fully understood, that the ordinary yields to the extraordinary, and that puzzlement is the normal condition after events have run their course.’133 While puzzlement is the end, one might counter that Gogol’s title is not so obvious in its generic and sociological framing of the fiction.134 Drawing on fictional genres including the diary, familiar letter and notes, Gogol’s narrative bases its appeal for credibility, comprehension and sympathy on intimacy. This generic intimation is undermined by the designation of a radically other agent. Gogol distances himself and his reader from the text by replacing himself as author and by re-placing authority in the realm of the socially and psychologically unreliable (‘madman’ (сумасшедший), who in the nineteenth-century is typically understood as devoid of rational, reflective capacities). This is conventionally un-relatable or impossible-to-relate-to narrative. This seemingly paradoxical conjunction anticipates questions to be asked about all kinds of alienated voices – can the subaltern speak? Without the same sort of authorial intervention with which writers such as Hugo and Dostoevsky frame their fictions as ‘found’ and typical, authoritative and authentic, Gogol becomes an implicit reader of the text, its ambivalent interpreter in the function of purveyor. His framing of the narrative raises questions regarding the responsibility of both 132 Mills Todd, Fiction and Society, 175. 133 Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 203. 134 Cf. Peace, ‘The Logic of Madness’, 33.

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actual and fictional author for critique and censorship. The apparent contradictoriness of the title makes the making of the narrative, at least partly, its meaning. It posits the potential coherence, insight and creative capacity of the irrational. If any discourse designated as ‘irrational’ implicitly includes the presence of the rational, in ‘Notes of a Madman’ the rational is also explicitly present or plotted. Based on the narrator’s own logic as well as logic external to the text, the reader recognizes others’ claims within the text concerning Poprishchin’s madness. The reader agrees when Poprishchin interprets the servant girl’s assessment (when he rushes past her to retrieve Madgie’s letters from Fidèle’s dog bed) as the assignation of madness, without accepting his counterclaim for his own sanity (based on the written evidence with which he departs, the letters ‘in his hand’ – which can only be written by his hand). The reader remaps what Poprishchin reads as ‘Spain’ and then as coded ‘China’, rather as asylum and misreading. Thus, the reader, like the author, replaces and re-places Poprishchin within his own narrative – usurping his authority. The reader acknowledges the authority of other real and imaginary voices, whose claims Poprishchin registers and recognizes but repudiates. Thus, critics including Maguire and Peace read Madgie’s designation of Poprishchin’s inconsequential, even absurd, position in the social hierarchy as a definitive, authoritative correction. On the other hand, the reader acknowledges the voice of another author whom Poprishchin seemingly cannot take into account. Along these lines, Dostoevsky’s Devushkin, according to Bakhtin, reads Akaky (and by extension, himself) ‘as something totally quantified, measured, and defined to the last detail … hopelessly predetermined and finished off’ by his author – and Bakhtin concurs with Devushkin, noting how Dostoevsky’s hero ‘sensed the falseness of such an approach’, from a ‘monological’ position.135 Maguire argues that Gogol’s fiction is a wholly enclosed, stifling space not only for the character, but also for narrator and reader. He contends that the layering of narrative voices and ambivalence within the text constitute a dialogue, or in Poprishchin’s case a ‘dialogic monologue’,136 but one that is bounded by the author’s refusal to accept a challenge to his authority. This dialogue is terminal. Because of the ‘welter of voices’ in the text, the reader’s ‘natural desire for closure is frustrated’. That is, the plot is left unresolved or 135 Bakhtin, PDP, 58. 136 Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 53.

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unexplained in some respect. ‘At best, we may hear a final baffled voice, as in “The Nose”’, admitting, ‘“I am absolutely unable to understand it …,”’ and ‘It is this uncertainty, as the stories close, that puts reader and narrator on the same footing.’ Maguire argues that Gogol’s typical narrator ‘would never grant, even in jest, that his reader could bring “his own conjectures” into play and move beyond the always well-defined boundaries of a given story. In fact, he makes it impossible for us to do so’.137 As readers, Maguire contends, we share the limited insight of character or at best of the narrator, who has what Bakhtin called a ‘surplus’ of vision. Like the narrator, who is verbally circumscribed by a title and plot that place him in the asylum, the reader too is subject to authorial irony. The reader seems positioned at an unbreachable critical remove from Poprishchin, but mired within the bounds of uncertain interpretation determined by the text’s external framing and internal trajectory. However, Poprishchin proves something of an exception to Maguire’s further qualification of the closed circle in Gogol’s fiction – that circle both Bakhtin and Nabokov qualify as ‘vicious’, though the alienation or violence inherent in that circle implies different creative limits and capacities for these critics. What Bakhtin sees as dead-ended doubling, Nabokov reads as shadow invoking other shadowed souls. Maguire generalizes about Gogol’s narratives, ‘In the absence of vivid plot lines and solidly fleshed narrators, we are compelled to listen to the voices: they are all we have; they derive their authority, such as it is, entirely from within the story.’138 As he points out, among Gogol’s narrators, ‘probably only Rudy Panko and Poprishchin are full-blown characters in their own right, Poprishchin because he tells his own story from beginning to end, Rudy because he establishes himself as a kind of impresario in the two forewords. Otherwise, [Gogol’s] ‘narrators’ have no identities beyond their voices.’139 Poprishchin escapes the confinement of ‘narrator’ to pure voice insofar as he objectifies himself: he has a physical presence and occupies physical space as hero, narrator and author/writer. He also draws others in his writing. But he seems to write himself into a corner. Yet in the cornered displacements of others’ writing and in his own cornered rewriting, Poprishchin finds openings, crossing thresholds in the city and consciousness. He turns through Petersburg towards Spain, 137 Ibid., 198–9. 138 Ibid., 199. 139 Ibid., 199. Cf. Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 87.

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China, the moon, back into Petersburg, out of the fictional frame and back into the asylum where he paradoxically cowers into an open-ended ambivalent dialogic fiction, anticipating that discovered by Bulgakov’s mad Bezdomny [Homeless], whose similarly moonlit imagining reframes literal and literary domains in Master and Margarita, doubling the ending. If Poprishchin is physically and psychologically framed by others, this framing is mediated by language and especially writing; he knows how they see him by the way in which they speak of his writing or in his projections of their writing about him. His reflections unfold through quarrels over the terms they use, through the re-appropriation and redirection of those terms. Poprishchin’s dress and every place he goes are related to writing (to his writing profession, to pieces of writing he collects, but more essentially to styles of writing). While Madgie’s writing, echoing the authorial frame, may seem to undermine Poprishchin’s claims to authority, and other instances of misreading or his eventual reading of asylum as such seem to represent absolute enclosure, these are broken open, paradoxically, not by authorial confirmation or by cure that would involve that realization of the character by which Bakhtin or Maguire measure freedom. Rather, open-endedness depends on a recursive, inward turn – Poprishchin’s turn back into ‘madness’, into impossible and illogical writing that realigns narrative authority. External authority is encompassed by Poprishchin’s internal contradictory logic or logos. Poprishchin himself authorizes or authors contradictory authorities, even as he insists on their autonomy through his dialogic engagement, digression and dissent. His recursive writing also redefines the intervention of actual author: he implicitly challenges his own author’s signature when he signs in the place of the director. He appropriates his author’s terms in the same way he does those of others. He speaks of his ‘notes’ and of himself as the ‘madman’ that he might seem to be but is not, then that he used to be, and finally that he is and is not. By continually repositioning himself with respect to others’ writing, to terms such as ‘madness’, to literary and social forms (overlapping forums of authority in Petersburg), he forces the re-opening of ‘closed’ questions. His narrative unfolds, as Peace explicates in ‘The Logic of Madness: Gogol’s Zapiski sumasshedshego’, by pathological modes of ‘association’ and ‘dissociation’. Yet his internal double-voicing of the other and projection of self as other sets up a dialogue reasonable and responsible enough to continually disturb the reader’s sense of his own place in the text. The narrator’s logic of contra-diction, his sense of

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himself as fictive construction, and his self-alienation (however limited these may be) force us to reconsider the boundaries between self and city, text and context, insane and sane, extraordinary and ordinary. Poprishchin motivates his writing (and Gogol, our reading) of the narrative by promising an ‘extraordinary adventure’ [необыкновенное приключение (III.207)]. The expectation of a conventionally plotted tale is delayed and deflated by a disorientingly digressive narrative of ordinary encounters, non-encounters and self-encounter. The semantic space of the ‘extraordinary’ is defamiliarized through Poprishchin’s literal and imaginary digressions. Here, as in his ‘sanely’ narrated fictions, Gogol posits meaning through the multiplication of negatives, as Poprishchin expounds on what is not ‘not ordinary’. Waking up late turns out to be an ordinary event. Although under such circumstances, he would ordinarily not go to the office, his monetary interest in going this time also turns out to be usual fare, usually met with failure because of adversarial colleagues he describes through culturally clichéd contradictions related to race and rank. The one unexpected figure circulating at this hour ends up being an ordinary clerk engaged in typically perverse pursuits. Thus, the delay, digression and contradiction of Petersburg and the Petersburg text are here represented as normative. Before Poprishchin has gone anywhere in the city or with his story, he has digressed into a literary discussion of his writing, into the office, into the provinces and via Petersburg’s streets into other stories. The terms ‘extraordinary’ and ‘adventure’ function for the reader as crossroads for the doubling, deconstruction, digression and deterritorialization in eccentric narrative. Poprishchin first delays in recounting his ‘adventure’ with a digression on writing. This digression is dialogically motivated, confessional, addressed at a reader or reflective self designated by admission (признаюсь) and negation (cursory cursing) of a recollected accusation on the part of his section chief concerning lapses in Poprishchin’s official writing, involving devilish disorientation, confusion of dates and inverted upper and lower cases.140 While neither these apparently habitual deviations in official writing nor this particular digression in private writing constitute the extraordinary event that the narrator has in mind, they forecast to the reader the domain and dynamics of both event and extraordinary mode of narration: Poprishchin defines himself in terms of writing for and subject to critique by an other, who 140 GPSS, III.193.

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is a kind of double – self-conscious and condescending. The other’s attitude is ambivalent, and Poprishchin’s double-voicing of the other reflects his own ambivalence towards actual other or other self that sees his writing as errant. The chief’s term угорелый first denotes madness, linking it etymologically and metaphorically with demonic fires. The symptoms delineated here include distraction, confusion and breaks with convention. Proper social, spatial and temporal dimensions are distorted in Poprishchin’s professional writing. The unknowable self (devilishly puzzling) is defined by formal lapses and literal gaps in writing. In the section chief’s recollected/projected critique and Poprishchin’s counterargument in these first lines of the narrative we already have multiple ways of reading the irregular, irrational headings, dating and signature of the final entries of Poprishchin’s notes. But this first digression also sets up the paranoid schizophrenic dynamics of Poprishchin’s narrative, developed through double-voicing, contradiction and stylization. Poprishchin redirects terms, characterizing as devilish the treasurer’s play with numbers and the section chief’s perception of space. The accusation that gives rise to Poprishchin’s retort is directed with the diminutive term for brother (братец), both endearing and condescending, associative and dissociative, with which Poprishchin immediately afterwards denotes the fellow clerk who seems to veer off in the direction of ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ or Notes from Underground. Poprishchin’s digressions are, thus, both internally and externally contra-dictory. These patterns of crossing and digression are repeated throughout the narrative – until the finally extraordinary event becomes bewildering but generative self-interrogation, for both narrator and reader. In the opening note, however, we follow those digressions without recognizing fully the extraordinary way they cross, densifying or opening up the ordinary. To the extent that we still hope to follow an adventure (and we might still expect such a plot, since all the digressions mentioned above are condensed in a couple of pages), we think we finally might be arriving at the extraordinary (which we anticipate as cause or manifestation of madness) in the narrator’s hearing the dogs Madgie and Fidèle speak. The narrator himself notes the strangeness of this event – here is the devil in the ordinary indicated by Bocharov, represented in the common turn of phrase: что за чёрт!141 The narrator 141 GPSS, III.207. An expression echoed by Machado de Assis’s Brás Cubas, asking ‘What the Devil is absolute?’

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repositions the reader at his side by questioning the reliability of his own hearing, interrogatively speculating that he might have been drunk (Еге! – сказал я сам себе, – да полно, не пьян ли я?) However, he replies that he rarely is, without undermining his recognition that his perception (like his digressive prose) is like that of a drunk. The case Poprishchin subsequently makes that the dogs’ speech is possible, even likely, builds on a dialogue, this time, with the reader (or himself as reader of this private diary), appealing to common sense and then common texts. Poprishchin creates a place in which these voices can be heard by drawing on the stuff of popular journals.142 Here Poprishchin sets up a mode of reading his own narrative through the acts of reading and cross-examination. He sets up an eccentric intertextual mode of establishing authority or authenticity that extends beyond comparisons between his own public and private writing. The mode of writing is purportedly ‘objective’, that of the chronicler of modern urban life. Significantly, the actual stories on which he draws come not only from Petersburg, but also from Kursk and from England and Spain – a distance that, as Maguire notes, is a measure of control.143 Similarly, the style of his own narrative and even of that first text within the text (the copies or letters questioned by his director) will be eccentrically vindicated by others’ writing or stylized forms of his own writing, including Madgie’s letters and his critique of them. To the degree to which the other writing on which Poprishchin relies can also be read beyond the text (since models such as The Northern Bee are external reference points), the reader can counter the madman’s contra-dictory logic of question and answer, claiming that Poprishchin’s readings are misreadings. The reader can redraw the boundaries by replacing literary models in context just as he does landmarks in the city, doing both at once in placing Poprishchin in the asylum, when Poprishchin casts himself in Spain through an opening announced in the newspaper.144 The reader might grow impatient with Poprishchin’s writing because of its lack of self-consciousness regarding what seem unsustainable or 142 In his incisive, but interrupted and posthumously published study of Gogol’s realism (Реализт Гоголя. Moscow/Leningrad: ГИХЛ, 1959), Grigorii Aleksandrovich Gukovsky compares Poprishchin’s fabrications to material in Thaddeus Bulgarin’s officially sanctioned literary and political journal Северная пчела (Northern Bee, 1925–64), noting Bulgarin’s recognition of Poprishchin as reader of his paper (see GPSS III, 305, 309, cited in Peace, 42). 143 Cf. Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 56. 144 Cf. Peace, ‘The Logic of Madness’, 41–2; Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 57.

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unsustaining logic – as Poprishchin grows impatient with dogged (il) logic, echoing his own manager’s cursing about his own writing when he despairs of finding food to nourish his soul amidst Madgie’s rambling about dog food and all sorts of triviality (эдакие пустяки …145). But the reader’s and Poprishchin’s trust is mediated by signs of style and sense, of common sense and spirited insight. Poprishchin dissolves our impatience by finally bringing us to what he finds, emphatically (with his reiterated, for now undeflated astonishment/удивление), extraordinary: not the dog’s speech but her writing. This is writing that represents his own construction of radically other writing: the writing of dogs, dogs with foreign names, female dogs at that (gendered writing with which he becomes explicitly exasperated). This is impossible writing, as much as Poprishchin’s own. He recognizes it as unheard-of. And even as he provisionally accepts its illogical existence (by extension of that intertextual logic that allows him to hear dogs speak), he questions its possible logical coherence, on the basis of social class: ‘Правильно писать может только дворянин’146 (Only a noble can write properly). His turns through the city in pursuit of the letters requires a suspension of disbelief equal to that of the reader who sets out to read ‘notes of a madman’. As his own writing does for his reader, this dog’s writing leads him into interlocking slanted planes of city, consciousness and narrative. He is similarly interested in the possibility and potential structure of this writing, as much as in its substance – his engagement of all these aspects of this writing will redefine his sense of social and literary space. It will also provoke a shift in style. His recognition of style in the letters he ‘recovers’ and transcribes becomes a way of dealing with his own anxieties (and with the surprise/ anxieties of Gogol’s reader) about his writing. Poprishchin’s engagement with this writing of another becomes both a defence of the creative, rather than mechanical capacities of the copy clerk whose writing is punctuated by commas and periods and animated by style, and a critique of the limits of such style or stylization.147 Madgie’s writing is, after all, ‘copied’ into Poprishchin’s text in multiple respects. The conceit is that he finds and copies parts of these letters, with interpolated commentary, into his notes. The reader must assume he authors the 145 GPSS, III.204–5. 146 GPSS, III.195. 147 Cf. Peace, ‘The Logic of Madness’, 36.

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letters himself. They represent stylization sometimes of and sometimes only in the manner of his own writing. In his prefacing comments to the inserted fragments of text, Poprishchin notes that Madgie’s first letter is, in a way that vindicates his own writing (because he has actually written this, because he identifies with this writer and because he has the wherewithal to read this writing critically), sufficiently clear or accurate (письмо довольно чёткое). Yet he also remarks a kind of ‘dogginess’ in her handwriting (Однакоже в почерке всё есть как будто что-то собачье)148 – thus, establishing distance, the autonomy or authenticity of the letters, and his own autonomy and authority that can question the authenticity or authority of such dogged writing. In his incisive analysis of the notes as ‘place’, Maguire notes the ‘reactive’ nature of Poprishchin’s ‘private’, ‘creative’ writing, emphasizing the degree to which it is as poor a copy as his inauthentic, copied and replaceable official or ‘public’ writing.149 His reading of the text builds on Karlinsky’s intertextual analysis of Poprishchin as ‘too limited intellectually and culturally (a master stroke of Gogol’s) to generate any kind of inner life that in itself would be worth recording’; incapable of invention, he merely distorts, recording ‘reactions to stimuli from the world outside’, which includes both literal characters and literary models (‘words as created by others’). Maguire recalls Karlinsky’s finding of ‘“delicious mini-parodies scattered throughout the story”, such as “the parody of police investigation novels (‘I need to have a talk with your little dog’); of the literary critics who demand a humaninterest angle at all costs (‘Give me a human being! …); and of the editorial style of commenting on current political affairs (‘England will not tolerate such and such, […]’).’ This stylization of ‘low’ or ‘popular’ literature marks Poprishchin as a hack writer.150 Because ‘he looks at the outside world not to discover what lies beneath the surface but to manufacture a personal identity out of ready-made materials’, Maguire concludes, Poprishchin is a pretender.151 While he evokes sympathy as a Romantic, he seems to Maguire parodied, like Piskarev, Akaky, Chichikov, Khlestakov and generally all of Gogol’s Petersburg clerks, as pretender [самозванец] linked with Peter’s false Enlightenment.152 Despite the fact that Poprishchin and Gogol ‘draw on materials from 148 GPSS, III.201. 149 Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 52. 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid. 152 Meyer, ‘False Pretenders’, 73.

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the ordinary world to create something new and organically whole’ and ‘express [in similar ways] their anxieties about the place they occupy in the world’, Poprishchin is not a ‘genuine author’.153 Such a claim is predicated on the conclusion that Poprishchin’s copying generates only ‘homunculi’ or grotesque projections of the self, neither original nor viable in society. It assumes an unintentionality or pure receptivity such as Fanger and Maguire suggest in their depictions of Chichikov (merely reflecting the road), or an ‘autoeroticism’ such as Popkin finds in Akaky’s obsessive copying ‘for himself’: ‘He perpetually переписывает (copies) but never переписывается (corresponds) (producing, in effect, the original purloined letters).’154 This reading fails to take into account the complex, changing dynamics of copying in Gogol’s texts, in the domain of fictive consciousness as well as in the development of the narrative itself. Akaky ceases to be able to produce that sort of copy ‘for himself’. But through his dialogic engagement of others, disrupting and opening up conventional lines of discourse, he turns into living copy, continually provoking response. What is at stake in Poprishchin’s also framed copy is his responsibility and capacity to make responsible, to ‘correspond’. In Madgie’s imagined correspondence, Poprishchin gives voice to a multitude of others and to the multiplicity of the self. He gives voice to the other as such as well as to his own and others’ projection of himself as other. Madgie’s letters express his negative views (in the explicit disdain evinced towards Sophie’s rival suitor, for instance, but also in the implicit critique of Sophie’s devilry or foreignness155). In that sense, Madgie speaks for him in a dehumanizing way. Yet Madgie’s letters also express negative views against which Poprishchin counter-defines himself. She expresses, for example, the disdain that Poprishchin reads into Sophie’s smile at his near trip when he picks up her handkerchief. The ambivalence of that smile permits Poprishchin to re-interpret it earlier as possible favour. But in the letter, the critique implicit in that smile turns into audible laughter. Madgie’s laughter doubly represents both the other that alienates him and his own alienating and self-alienating laughter. It re-aligns him with society. This doubling up of laughter does not involve a simple amplification or echoing (a spatial mirroring or merging of Sophie and Madgie or of Poprishchin and Madgie). Madgie’s 153 Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 52. 154 Ibid., 199. 155 Ibid., 54.

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laughter responds to Sophie’s; it is distinct in its intensity and irony, and like Sophie’s capable of being interpreted in multiple ways, and capable of resisting those interpretations and dissolving into a potentially indifferent silence. Both Sophie and Madgie, as silent figures in the text, without an audible voice outside Poprishchin’s double-voicing, also resist Poprishchin, remain other. Yet because the other now has a voice represented in the text (like his section chief’s voice in the opening passage), Poprishchin can respond to it, contradict its claims, displacing Sophie’s muted laughter and his anxieties about his own interpretation of Sophie’s smile onto the ‘lying’ lips of dog: «Врёшь ты, проклятая собачонка!». In doing so, he posits a distance between self and other that affirms his own position and point of view. This distance is re-enforced insofar as ‘Poprishchin takes these letters as being written by another, to the point of commenting on them like a literary critic’.156 The other’s voice results in a splitting of the self into two kinds of readers, in a self-conscious kind of reflection. The approximation and distance between self and other is measured by substance and style, genre (letter vs diary), gender (female vs male) and nationality, but also by potential for dialogic development. The dog’s lies and the lie of the talking/writing dog brutally reveal plural truths. Madgie’s letters confirm displacement and mediate re-placements. Maguire emphasizes the former, arguing on the one hand for a monological reading of the text – in which Madgie’s assessment is definitive for the reader – and arguing on the other hand that the only way in which Poprishchin can react (given a structure of ‘dialogic monologue’, in which the second term is read as determinative, like ‘madman’ in the title), is by, in turn, displacing Madgie as object or obstacle to the place he wants to occupy: hence he tears up her letters. In fact, his dismissal of Madgie, like his dismissal of his section chief or of the clerk he glimpses at the crossroads (all signalled by the same send-off ‘to the devil’), does not put an end to the dialogue. It simply marks another apparent digression, involving a re-orientation in literal and textual landscapes. He replaces her writing with newspapers, but this is one way of circling back to or dialogically re-engaging her letters, since their credibility is based on what is reported in such papers. He replaces Madgie as correspondent, signing his own work as well as that of others, but identifying even more closely with her writing when he seems to reject that writing, preserved both as copied substance and style in his 156 Ibid., 53.

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notes. He similarly displaces and replaces his director, through his use of similes,157 stylization and signature. From the start, Madgie not only voices self-critique, but represents his ambivalent position as a writer. In her position of dependence on and special intimacy with the director, Madgie is Poprishchin’s double as well as rival. She not only has freer access to the Director’s study where he serves, but also enters Sophie’s boudoir, into which his entry will later be read as egregious trespass. Paradoxically, because Madgie is inhuman, Poprishchin sees her treated more humanely as well as with the indignity he feels. She is first encountered, like that earlier double clerk, on the street. She is likewise following skirts. Like Poprishchin, she is left on outskirts, excluded from the shop Sophie enters (nearly having her nose caught in the door). She evinces the same peculiar sensitivities with respect to smells and style (unsurprisingly, since she is his creation). His physical digressions through the city in pursuit of her letters reflect the way his digressive narrative follows her own digressions in the city and on the page. But like other doubles, she provides a lead, an opening of dialogue, remaining free to go her own way. Her letters lead Poprishchin to Zherkov’s apartment building, a place full of doubles – other copy clerks and Fidèle. This eccentric place in the city and the sort of ‘dogged’ copying158 that is associated with it is familiar to him. It represents the closed circle. But Madgie’s letters, found in this place (the nature of correspondence always involving displacement), provide an opening (even if only internally or imaginatively authenticated) into an alternative textual Petersburg space. In establishing a line of communication between Madgie and Fidèle that ‘underlines the lower social status of the recipient’,159 Poprishchin uses writing to bridge ‘a social gap, which cannot be bridged in the real world. [The letters] are a fantasy about communication’ between himself and Sophie, ‘in which the formula of dissociative self-identification reaches its most sophisticated form: Poprishchin both is and is not Fidèle; Medzhi [Madgie] both is and is not Sofi. The device is an экивок 157 Ibid., 57. 158 Cf. Richard Gregg, ‘Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman”’, Slavic and East European Journal 43:3 (Fall 1999), 443ff. Peace notes that not only Fidèle, the dog with which Poprishchin identifies, but also civil servants whom he describes as ‘brothers,’ all live ‘like dogs’ («как собак») (III, 196). He further notes the connection between dogs and ‘those who write’ in Gogol’s fiction, citing a saying «Писал писачка и имя его собачка» quoted by Gogol in Выбранные места из переписки с друзьями (GPSS, VIII, 272). 159 Peace, ‘The Logic of Madness’, 36.

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(i.e., double entendre) of Poprishchin’s over-driven imagination, which serves to answer the need for the “экивоки и придворные штуки” of the life of those he so envies.’160 Add to this equivocation, that Poprishchin both is and is not Madgie the writer. Her writing is like Poprishchin’s. Reprising Poprishchin’s terms or perspective in other contexts, she creates other ‘doubles’ for Poprishchin. Most notably, she characterizes the director in descriptive and dramatic terms that, as Peace points out, could equally be applied to Poprishchin:161 he is similarly engaged in a dialogue with himself and with the same dog, his speech characterized by similar tics and informed by anxieties concerning social status. Like Poprishchin, he picks up a paper and seems to seek in it some kind of answer to his repeated question, ‘получу или не получу?’ (will I get it or not), the object of which is clear to the reader but not to the narrator (in this case, his dog). Madgie’s observation that the director is ‘очень странный человек’ (a very strange man). ‘Он больше молчит’ (he would better be silent) can be linked to Poprishchin’s constant refrain ‘ничего, молчание’ (nevermind, silence), to his self-characterization (as bumbling, mumbling speaker, in his encounter with Sophie, for instance), as well as to Madgie’s own description of Poprishchin as mute servant. At the same time that Madgie’s voice echoes or re-presents his, it does not dissolve difference. It maintains the boundaries (whence a distance, a horizon) necessary to dialogue by distinguishing between clerk and director. But, like his writing, hers represents dialogues that are made possible only by dimensions of writing, and ‘mad’ writing at that – writing that represents its own dimensions as really meaningful (rather than the sort of communication that happens in the ‘real’ world). Like Pessoa’s later heteronyms, penned by him but also in their own hand, she exists in her writing, substantiated by it. Poprishchin’s play with literary forms represents his own ‘search for a style and a typology [that] becomes a self-conscious element in the Modernist’s literary production’162 and his (post)modern sense that style is the substance of the self. His concern with social position is explicitly linked with fashion worn and written. His own style is defined by contrast with literary models in his own dogged, digressive prose. Poprishchin’s reading of Madgie’s writing is a way of staking claims for his own writing, alternately by association and by dissociation with 160 Ibid, 36–7. 161 Ibid., 38. 162 Bradbury and McFarlane, 25. Cf. 13, 29.

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her style. Poprishchin’s ‘final’ critique of Madgie’s writing is a form of self-critique: «Экой мерзкий язык!» that motivates a stylistic shift and move towards a different kind of stylization, covering greater distances, by pushing further a schizophrenic, eccentric logic. Through his critical engagement with the texts he imagines she writes, Poprishchin both presents himself as ‘mad’ and ‘not mad’, occupies the ‘margin’ and writes himself into the centre in both social and writerly arenas. He is, as Maguire notes, looking for a place (место), but the dimensions of the place he ultimately seeks are not necessarily those of the enclosed and exclusive, walled-in city (the город, as it is defined by Maguire, which Petersburg can never be). The place he seeks is ‘within’ – but within more inclusive ‘enclosures’: within texts circulating within an open Petersburg, contracted within consciousness. He begins to find eccentric openings when he returns to the newspapers, not to authenticate his text in terms of ‘another’s’, but to find his own space. He writes himself King of Spain, but this Spain is Petersburg refracted, like America for Gogol, on the other verge of Europe, and then the moon. An eccentric European empire, with its own quixotic tradition, it is an analogous place where he can rule/write with authority.163 Authorized by literary revisions, he redefines the literal landscape, circulates freely. But realigned spaces such as his office and newly reached spaces such as Sophie’s boudoir resist his authority. In the constricted space to which he is removed – which he reads as Spain and we as asylum – he retreats further, physically cowering under a bed, under a chair. But for the reader, similarly cornered, only that place provides a retreat from association with authoritarian regime in the asylum. Even as Poprishchin acts more paranoid, because of a growing consciousness of the physical consequences of deviating from established lines of discourse and even as his speech relapses into the silence that characterized his ‘sane’ engagement, his writing engages itself and others more fully. In a moment of extraordinary recognition, he appeals directly to an other and recognizes himself from the outside – as madman, alienated and abandoned child, prodigal (Petersburg) son in a position of contrition and dependence. Here the reader is given an out of sorts in responding to that call for pity, but only by playing the part of progenitor (‘mother’), assuming responsibility. But readers are also asked to co-author or re-authorize Poprishchin’s fiction with that final direct question that draws both narrator and reader back into the 163 Cf. Maguire, Exploring Gogol, 56.

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logic of madness, ‘… А знаете ли, что у французкого короля шишка под самым носом?’164 (but did you know that the French king has a bump beneath his very own nose?). The rhetorical question re-opens the reader’s uncertainties about authority, identification with and alienation from this author, and the sense of the narrative. Delusion displaces connections, repositioning the reader alongside conventional Petersburg authority. The reference re-opens the narrative onto Petersburg through political caricature. It reopens intertextual discourse, since this is not original but reported news. The rejoinder also re-places Poprishchin as authority, even as he circles back into irrational writing. He recasts his reader, granting him autonomous judgement. While Gogol’s Poprishchin is not the wholly ‘benevolent’ or loving author that Bakhtin envisions, as evidenced by his muted laughter here, he nevertheless creates similarly unfinalized characters (himself, his fictive interlocutors, his reader) by restoring the ‘demarcation’ lines necessary for dialogue.165 He does so through playful, paranoid interrogation. The ‘vicious’, recursive line that closes the circle – doing a kind of violence to the subject/author by enclosing him in madness and in the madness of the text – also forms an opening, if only the narrow passage between the infernal realm of a really mad fiction and the purgatorial realm of modernist narrative, where the gravity of language is the logos that redeems meaning through a kind of call and answer both within the text and in ‘great time’. While for Bakhtin, dialogue in ‘great time’ involves intertextual dialogue and interpretation in different concrete contexts over time, it is at the same time inherent in the word itself.166 But ‘great dialogue’ also involves the ‘independence, internal freedom, unfinalizability, and indeterminacy’ of heroes, based on their capacity to engage in direct or ‘real’ dialogue with their authors. ‘This dialogue – the ‘great dialogue’ of the novel as a whole – takes place not in the past, but right now, that is, in the real present of the creative process.’ In contrast to ‘a finished dialogue, from which the author has already withdrawn and over which he is now located’, i.e. ‘an objectivized and finalized image of dialogue, of the sort for every monological novel’, the ‘great dialogue’ Bakhtin finds in Dostoevsky ‘is organized as an unclosed whole of life itself, life poised on the threshold.’167 When we turn into this narrative in 164 GPSS, III.214, italics in the original. 165 Cf. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 136. 166 Ibid., 4–5, 169–70. 167 Bakhtin, PDP, 63.

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which space and time are restructured by divided consciousness, we glimpse Poprishchin’s and Gogol’s consciousness of that great time. A monological, militant ordering of Petersburg’s bureaucratic culture and literary texts is transformed, through our embeddedness in the fog of paranoid schizophrenic consciousness, turned to the other and self as other. Copied forms are transcreated into a compelling, profoundly human and humane critique, uncensored because alienated. Gogol’s madman still hears, as does Gogol himself, Petersburg’s orderly drums, even in Spain and on the moon; he borrows Petersburg’s discourse; but he might say, like Lispector under other political and aesthetic constraints in another eccentric city, I forgot to mention that everything I am now writing is accompanied by the emphatic ruffle of a military drum. The moment I start to tell my story – the noise of the drum will suddenly cease.168

Like Lins’s narrator, scribbling in a corner of his room, similarly refuting contradictory claims of absurd bureaucracy, literary convention and militant criticism in A Rainha dos carceres da Grécia (The Queen of the Prisons of Greece), Gogol’s madman breaks his narration to remind the reader of the sounds filtering in from city street and citytext under construction. Lins’s narrator tells us that though we have not recognized the rhythms, they have informed his writing. The story absorbs the city beat – Recife’s or Rio’s or Petersburg’s militant drum, its hum-drum bureacracy, its social paces. But reverberating through cornered consciousness the rhythm returns to the city transformed, no longer militant – rather critically and creatively improvising, inviting response.

168 Clarice Lispector, cited in Robert DiAntonio, Brazilian Fiction (Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Brothers, 1984), v, my translation.

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Chapter 4

Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s unending undergrounds: dead men writing – Так вот оно, так вот оно наконец столкновенье-то с действительностью, – бормотал я, сбегая стремглав с лестницы. Это, знать, уж не папа, оставляющий Рим и уезжающий в Бразилию; это, знать, уж не бал на озере Комо!1 (Well there it is, well there it is at last that confrontation with reality’, I muttered, rushing off headlong down the stairs. This, to be sure, isn’t any longer the pope, leaving Rome and heading off to Brazil; this, to be sure, isn’t any longer a ball at Lake Como!) Obra de finado. Escrevi-a com a pena da galhofa e a tinta da melancholia, e não é difícil antever o que poderá sair desse conúbio … A obra em si mesmo é tudo: se te agradar, fino leitor, pago-me da tarefa; se te não agradar, pago-te com um piparote, e adeus.2 (The work of a dead man. I wrote it with the quill of laughter and the ink of melancholy, and it is not difficult to foresee what might come of that conjugation … The work in itself is everything: if it pleases you, refined reader, I am paid for my trouble; if it doesn’t, I’ll pay you with a fist, and goodbye.)

Towards a theory of underground laughter: carnival, degeneracy, degeneration and generation In the fictions of Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) we frequently follow eccentrics who approach others with nervous smiles and satirical 1 Dostoevsky, Записки из подполья, DPSS, V, II.v.148. 2 MPBC preface, ‘Ao leitor’.

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smirks. The more ridiculous among them give rise to scandal, provoking laughter within and beyond the bounds of the text. But scandalous laughter resounds even in those fictions whose central eccentric figures seem more self-aware, subtle, successful, more serious social critics and more self-critical. Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis’s streets, corners, side rooms and even elegant sitting rooms are crossed by minor grotesques, filing into their fictions not only from Petersburg and Rio’s popular prose, but also from Gothic Romantic citytexts by Hoffman, Sue, Soulier and Hugo, and from that more modern and mordantly satirical Realist cityscape of Balzac’s and Dickens’s fiction. Both draw on Gogol’s urban tales and, like Gogol in his ‘second period’, redefine cultural discourse by turning into displaced, digressive, dissenting, deviant and divided consciousness. They similarly survey marginal consciousness from plural perspectives. From the outside, alienation may register as awkwardness, expressed in an eccentric’s patched overcoat, profession or prose; self-consciousness may still be signalled by the eccentric’s sideways glance, cynical smile, stuttering and sarcastic muttering as he stands on a street corner or in the corner of a room. But reviewed from within, in isolation and introspective writing, that muted smile and muffled discourse resounds as multivalent laughter and multivocal dialogue. Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis expand the space of the subject by extending margins and ellipses, by drawing out reflective and reflexive lines, by fleshing out doubts and contradictions, shadows and spectral doubles through literal laughter and literary parody. While their landscapes are fatally shadowed, the twilight or ‘crépuscule’ which Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis explore is not that of degenerating or dying consciousness, individual or cultural, but that of immediately degenerate consciousness. Their protagonists are ‘dead souls’ in the sense suggested by those copious but digressively copying and apparently dead-ended Gogolian copy clerks in a copied city. However, Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s characters and fictions are more self-realized copies than Gogol’s, more consciously complicit in their absurd and arbitrary cultural contexts, and as such more marked by conscience or more responsible for the deadening of conscience. The dimensions of modern consciousness they uncover for the reader are more paradoxical. Their comic insight is predicated on the grotesque glittering darkness of the carnival city. Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s fictions are populated by eccentric characters who, like Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, often

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mumble and gesture to themselves on the street.3 Yet these eccentrics are also capable of seeing and hearing themselves as fools and madmen in the street, like Poprishchin in lucid moments and doubled discourse. The lines between which they read the city and position themselves within it may even be literal lines from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ or ‘Notes of a Madman’. Not only Makar Devushkin in Бедные люди [Poor Folk], who directly critiques Gogol (for the бедность (pathetic poverty) of his character’s consciousness and беда (misfortune) to which he subjects them), but most of Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis’s more self-conscious, literate eccentrics know themselves also as Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin’s doubles, muttering into their buttons. Should they lose one of those buttons, they know the foolish figure they cut scrambling after it, yet still play the part. Or, as Machado de Assis’s João Jacobina reflects in prefacing his tale of a divided and disintegrating self in ‘O Espelho’,4 they know that along with the loss of a loosely stitched ‘shirt button’, uniform, overcoat, worn ‘pair of boots’, ‘book’, game of cards,5 fading melody of a 3 Dostoevsky’s eccentrics include not only the bumbling underground narrator and figures such as Polzunkov, Prokharchin, Golyadkin, Devushkin and Raskol’nikov, but also Myshkin and other dreamers, many minor figures in The Idiot, as well as darker figures such as Stavrogin and various characters in Demons. Their eccentric character varies from that of buffoon (Ippolit, Marmeladov, Fyodor Karamazov, etc.) to intellectual (Raskol’nikov, Ivan Karamazov), with figures like the underground narrator in between. Dr Medonça, in Machado de Assis’s ‘Miss Dollar’, notes the ‘ordinariness of the “eccentric”’ (Contos: uma antologia, 126) and figures as one himself, a dreamer (127, 132), whose madness is mediated by reading and who is conscious of the ‘loucura’ of his own writing (139). Among Machado’s range of eccentrics, we might note Machete (who goes mad when cuckolded, but also in relation to his popular music), Dr Simão Bacamarte (the Alienist) and the entire, variously pathological population of Itaguaí, Quincas Borba and Brás Cubas. 4 Cada criatura humana traz duas almas consigo: uma que olha de dentro para fora, outra que olha de fora para dentro … A alma exterior pode ser um espírito, um fluido, um homem, muitos homems, um objeto, uma operação. Há casos, por exemplo, em que um simples botão de camisa é a alma exterior de uma pessoa; – e assim também a polca, o voltarete, um livro, uma máquina, um par de botas, uma cavatina, um tambor, etc. Está claro que o ofício dessa segunda alma é transmitir a vida, como a primeira; as duas completam o homem … Quem perde uma das metades, perde naturalmente metade da existência; e casos há, não raros, em que a perda da alma exterior implica a da existência inteira (Machado de Assis, Contos, ed. John Gledson, 2 vols [São Paolo: Companhia das Letras, 1998], v. I, 402). 5 Voltarete is a variant of the Spanish game (h)ombre or tresillo, developed in the eighteenth century, brought to Brazil by the Portuguese court, and remaining popular through the late nineteenth century. Like the card game in Pushkin’s ‘Queen of Spades’, it involves a player’s looking at the first card on top of the stock.

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simple ‘cavatina’ or rhythm of a ‘drum’, any ‘object’, operation’ or contact with another person or ‘many’, they may also lose that outsideness (the ‘exterior soul’) that completes their existence. Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s eccentrics, too, digress at crossroads and confront contradictions concentrated in the city, though recognizing themselves and their doubles as literary types, pursuing and evading predetermined plots. They likewise turn into alienated, dreamlike, moonlit, lunatic worlds through openings in the citytext. Turning into corners in the city, they turn from others towards what Brás Cubas likewise maps as ‘the moon, that luminous and withdrawn corner of the mind’ to achieve their ‘disdainful affirmation of our spiritual freedom’.6 If this affirmation is predicated on distraction, digression and displacement, they too are jostled into consciousness, compelled to ‘return from the moon’ and ‘turn to others’, within the crush of pedestrians thronging central avenues – a Nevsky Prospekt that extends, in a literary domain, into the Rua do Ouvidor. Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s eccentrics provoke that jostling in the street. They cause and even seem to seek out public scandal. They more consciously play the fool, directing ambivalent but also often more derisive, satirical laughter at others and at themselves.7 The more farcical, pathetic figures among them do so in riotous scenes, in which footlights (demarking the critical distance of the reader) are not so dissolved as in the Gogolian and Hugolian texts after which Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis model their own. The reader can more readily stand outside the circle of satirical or pathological, self-destructive laughter in early fictions such as «Господин Прохарчин» (‘Mr Prokharchin’), «Ползунков» (‘Polzunkov’), even Двойник (The Double), or ‘Frei Simão’ (‘Fr. Simon’), Iaiá Garcia and ‘O Alienista’. But many of the eccentric figures in their mature fictions scandalize in speech or writing that fully implicates imagined interlocutor and actual reader, directly or indirectly, through strangely self-conscious, concomitantly interior and exterior, ‘carnival’ forms of laughter – parodic, highly literary forms of laughter, ‘double-voiced’ and ‘dialogic’, destructive and creative. 6 MPBC, XCIX. 7 On satirical strains and laughter in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s work see especially Bakhtin, Jones’s Dostoevsky, the Novel of Discord and Dostoevsky After Bakhtin; Danow, The Dialogic Sign; Pujol, Machado de Assis, de Sá Rego’s O Calundu e a Panacéia: Machado de Assis, a sátira menipéia e a tradição luciânica, Riedel’s Metáfora: o espelho de Machado de Assis, and Dixon’s ‘Vehicle, Driver, and Passenger: Machado de Assis’s Metaphoric Humor’.

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The terms carnival and dialogic, as they are used here to describe language like laughter, derive from Bakhtin, although Bakthin did not often place them on the same plane, historical or formal – the irresponsibility of carnival and responsible civil dialogue seeming to define distinct dynamics in social and literary space, related in their leveling of authority, but representing different ethical postures and respectively less and more sustainable positions. In Bakhtin’s history of the novel, there is a threshold at which they meet, linked to urbanization. Bakhtin admits ‘carnivalized’ dialogue as characteristic of ‘irrational’ narrating consciousnesses within Dostoevsky’s fiction8 and traces Dostoevsky’s polyphonic aesthetics to ‘carnivalized genres’ rooted in cultural crisis concentrated in the city. Yet Bakhtin’s limited conjunction of these terms marks limits of his literary history, theory and criticism. A reading of recursive, reflexive narrative as a realm of carnival (not only carnivalized) dialogue, in which author and hero engage each other through exposed artifice, elucidates creative dynamics of this alternative and apparently anachronistic modernist fiction, with its peculiar realization of живая жизнь (or ‘lived/living life’, in the terms of the underground man) through what Bakhtin recognizes as живое слово (the ‘living word’). In charting the evolution of ‘the novelistic genre’, Bakhtin argued that the genres most significantly shaping ‘dialogic’ ‘artistic prose’ are ‘the Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire’.9 Bakhtin differentiates Socratic dialogue from rhetorical genres based on its being ‘thoroughly saturated with a carnival sense of the world’. This carnival sense that defines the Socratic or ‘dialogic’ realization of ‘truth’ is eccentric: ‘counterposed to official monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth, and … counterposed to the naive self-confidence of those people who think that they know something. Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people’.10 Socratic dialogue, rooted in the Athenian forum, also introduces into the centre of European literary history ‘the hero-ideologist’ (culminating in the Dostoevskian hero), a ‘man standing on the threshold,’ constituted by his ‘rejoinders’ or responses to verbal or situational provocation.11 8 Cf. Bakhtin, PDP, 137–8. 9 Ibid., 109. 10 Ibid., 110, italics in the original and in all citations from Bakhtin (he was fond of italics, perhaps as his own way of double-voicing, ironically or satirically), unless otherwise noted. 11 Though Dostoevsky contrasts the syncretic testing of the hero/idea typical in

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Bakhtin defines Menippean satire as similarly marked by a threshold sensibility in which heroes react to the latter sort of provocation in the condensation of urban contexts. As the most directly ‘carnivalized’ genre, its internal interlocutors or heroes’ reactions are instinctual, sensual, bodily (expressing laughter as guffaw), behavioural (belonging to deviant, digressive, inverting and interpenetrating carnival practice); only its author’s reactions are consciously ideological (deconstructive and dialogically reconstructive).12 As a kind of ‘syncretic pageantry’ translated into ‘a language of artistic images’, the nature of carnival in the literary text is ‘functional and not substantive’, involving ‘the very process of replaceability’;13 despite their concern with ‘ultimate questions’, the formative presence of carnival in Menippean satire and the polyphonic forms of the novel it generates means that they can offer ‘no abstractly philosophical or religiously dogmatic resolution’ but must ‘play [these questions] out in the concretely sensuous form of carnivalistic acts and images’.14 Noting the extent to which Menippean elements permeate Dostoevsky’s fiction, Bakhtin argues that any ‘absolute’ ideological position is limited to characters, while the author juxtaposes their positions according to a polyphonic, dialogic principle. Characters may be marked by non-coincidence or deviance, but they themselves are incapable of that sort of ‘reduced’ or ‘carnivalistic laughter’ that ‘could grasp and comprehend a phenomenon in the process of change and transition, … could fix in a phenomenon both poles of its evolution in their uninterrupted and creative renewing changeability’ including birth foreseen in death, gain in loss, and vice-versa.15 They are participants in the playacting and violence of carnival, its crowning and decrowning, but ‘the decisive expression of reduced laughter is to be found in the ultimate position of the author’, which excludes any absolute perspective: ‘All one-sided seriousness (of life and thought), all one-sided pathos is handed over to the heroes, but the author, who Socratic dialogue, effected through the ‘juxtaposition of various points of view’, with the anacritic testing more typical of Dostoevskian dialogue, involving ‘provocation of the word by the word (and not by means of plot situation, as in Menippean satire …)’. PDP, 110–12. 12 Menippean satire reaches (through its un-self-conscious heroes) back directly to ‘carnivalized folklore’ and (through its authors) to satirical forms of rhetoric ‘linked with Socratic dialogue: the diatribe, the … soliloquy,’ etc. (PDP, 112–13). 13 Ibid., 122, 125. 14 Ibid., 134. 15 Ibid. 164.

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causes them all to collide in the “great dialogue” of the novel, leaves that dialogue open and puts no finalizing period at the end.’16 This dialogue need not be actual dialogue, but can involve double-voiced words and refracted images: Bakhtin emphasizes that ‘the carnival sense of the world also knows no period, and is, in fact, hostile to any sort of conclusive conclusion: all endings are merely new beginnings; carnival images are reborn again and again’.17 Of course, Dostoevsky does put the actual period at the end of his novels (most notably imposing a period in Notes from Underground where the narrator himself promises one, but then reneges, replacing it with ellipses). Dostoevsky’s arbitrary ending forces us to recognize the resonances of this carnival beyond the ‘carnival season’ of the text. Bakhtin notes the paradox that by ‘mechanically’ writing off rather than ‘organically’ completing the underground narrator’s discourse, Dostoevsky ‘conclude[s] his work in a way so organic and appropriate for the hero; he concludes it on precisely that which would foreground the tendency toward eternal endlessness embedded in the hero’s notes’. ‘What the author visualizes is precisely the hero’s self-consciousness and the inescapable open-endedness, the vicious circle of that self-consciousness.’18 Bakhtin denounces the hero’s liminality and unfinalizability as vicious, but values the author’s as benevolent, as a refusal to violate the other’s autonomy. In other narratives, too, dialogue between heroes remains unfinalized. The key is that authorial discourse does not monologically determine the meaning of the hero, but allows for dialogue to continue within and beyond the arbitrary confines of the fiction. In contrast to this reserved author, our writers in the underground seem markedly lacking in self-restraint. As grounds for reconsidering the interested (i.e., lopsided, taking sides, though decidedly not ‘one-sided’ or entirely ‘serious’) ideological discourse of Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s most self-conscious eccentrics in terms of a responsible carnivalesque aesthetics, it is worth recalling in brief the context and characteristics Bakhtin identified with Menippean satire: first, its relation to the city and to actual carnival; second, the nature of carnival as such and its relation to dialogue; and third, the nature of carnivalized dialogue in Dostoevsky’s and similarly conceived fictions. Bakhtin represents the development of Menippean satire as a response 16 Ibid., 165. 17 Ibid. 18 Bakhtin, PDP, 51, 160. Cf. 232, 234.

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to ‘an epoch when national legend was already in decay, amid the destruction of those ethical norms that constituted the ancient idea of “seemliness” “beauty”, “nobility”)’ – analogous to the socio-aesthetic terms (‘the beautiful and the sublime’) interrogated by Dostoevsky’s underground narrator. It develops also ‘in an epoch of intense struggle among numerous schools and movements, when disputes over “ultimate questions” of worldview had become an everyday mass phenomenon among all the strata of the population and took place whenever and wherever people came together.’19 Such disputes cross social strata in Gogol’s and Alencar’s work and figure in every fragment and form of discourse in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s fiction. Bakhtin notes social and ontological implications of this debate: ‘the other side of this epoch was a devaluation of all external positions that a person might hold in life, their transformation into roles played out on the stageboards of the theater in accordance with the wishes of blind fate’. In the Menippea, we see spectacular determinism like that felt and resisted by Machado de Assis’s as well as Dostoevsky’s eccentrics in the context of capitals that seem no more than alternately sumptuous and unseemply backdrops precariously propped up on the edge of empires, staged against both distant cultural horizons and vast interiors. More than Gogol’s masked and unmasked clerks, theirs are self-conscious actors, reading and rewriting a variety of scripts. Bakhtin is insistent on the stakes of this engineered playacting: ‘it is essential to emphasize once again that the issue is precisely the testing of an idea, of a truth, and not the testing of a particular human character, whether an individual or a social type. The testing of a wise man is a test of his philosophical position in the world’.20 If their dialogic directorial consciousness also tests an authorial ethics and asserts their own authorial position, Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s eccentric narrators also put on various suits, to test plural philosophical positions at play in their particular material contexts. While concerned with materiality, often in its basest forms, and may have elements of ‘social utopia’,21 The menippea is fully liberated from those limitations of history and memoir that were so characteristic of the Socratic dialogue (although externally the memoir form is sometimes preserved); it is free of legend and not fettered by any demands for an external verisimilitude to life. 19 Ibid., 118. 20 Ibid., 114–15. 21 Ibid., 118.

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The menippea is characterized by an extraordinary freedom of plot and philosophical invention. The fact that the leading heroes of the menippea are historical and legendary figures (Diogenes, Menippus, and others) presents no obstacle. Indeed, in all of world literature we could not find a genre more free than the menippea in its invention and use of the fantastic. The most important characteristic of the menippea as a genre is the fact that its bold and unrestrained use of the fantastic and adventure is internally motivated, justified by and devoted to a purely ideational and philosophical end: the creation of extraordinary situations for the provoking and testing of a philosophical idea, a discourse, a truth, embodied in the image of the wise man, the seeker of this truth. We emphasize that the fantastic here serves not for the positive embodiment of truth, but as a mode of searching after truth, provoking it, and, most important, testing it. To this end the heroes of Menippean satire ascend into heaven, descend into the nether world, wander through unknown and fantastic lands, are placed in extraordinary situations …22

Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s eccentric narratives evince this apparent concern with the base (realized in extreme material crisis) and the ideal (in their heroes’ idealizations, often negated), emptied forms of individual and historical memory (failed memoirs and confessions), and fantastical, internally motivated ‘mode of searching’, ‘provoking’ and ‘testing’ truth (especially in their dreamers). They do so through a similar kind of eccentric displacement of the hero into an internal, urbane equivalent to that space Bakhtin defines as ‘three-planed construction’, but with a particular emphasis on ‘the nether world’ (or underground), still connected with the city. On the one hand, Menippea can involve ‘observations of the life of a city from a great height’,23 a distance aligned with dream and delirium in Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis’s fictions. On the other hand, it can be voiced through carnivalized dialogue in common urban places, on the ‘thresholds’ that Bakhtin finds characteristic chronotopic marker in Dostoevsky’s fictions. Thus, Bakhtin notes in Crime and Punishment, the carnivalesque confrontation of Dostoevsky’s ideologically positioned characters in the market square. In that novel, Petersburg seems to Bakhtin ‘on the borderline between existence and nonexistence, reality and phantasmagoria, always on the verge of dissipating like the fog and vanishing. Petersburg too is devoid, as it were, of any internal 22 Ibid., 114. 23 Ibid., 117.

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grounds for justifiable stabilization; it too is on the threshold’.24 In other words, as in the Menippea, the urban space of the Dostoevskian novel is defined in paradoxical terms as coherent by dint of its continual instability, eccentric or centrifugal gravity, constant discord or tensed lines stretching in different directions, continually displaced and double-voiced subjects. Consciousness, too, as a spatial and temporal construct, to the extent that it is materialized in Menippean satire, is manifestly eccentric: In the menippea there appears for the first time what might be called moral-psychological experimentation: a representation of the unusual, abnormal moral and psychic states of man – insanity of all sorts (the theme of the maniac), split personality, unrestrained daydreaming, unusual dreams, passions bordering on madness, suicides and so forth. These phenomena do not function narrowly in the menippea as mere themes, but have a formal generic significance. Dreams, daydreams, insanity destroy the epic and tragic wholeness of a person and his fate: the possibilities of another person and another life are revealed in him, he loses his finalized quality and ceases to mean only one thing; he ceases to coincide with himself.

Consciousness and the city share a contradictory form, which Bakhtin imagines as ‘interrupted’ (in temporalized terms, related to a sense of seasonal carnival). For Bakhtin, that non-coincidence and unfinalizability can be positively posited only by the actual author, not the self-authoring hero. Though Bakhtin argues that ‘the destruction of the wholeness and finalized quality of a man is facilitated by the appearance, in the menippea, of a dialogic relationship to one’s own self’, he finds this dialogue of the hero with himself ‘fraught with the possibility of split personality’25 – that is, with a disintegration unmitigated by the hero’s own recognition and realization of a paradoxical, polyphonic coherence. The pathology of the hero gives rise to the sort of ‘scandal scenes, eccentric behavior, inappropriate speeches and performances, that is, all sorts of violations of the generally accepted and customary course of events and the established norms of behavior and etiquette, including manners of speech’,26 which Bakhtin finds tragically self-destructive for 24 Ibid., 167. Bakhtin argues here that ‘the sources of carnivalization for Crime and Punishment are no longer provided by Gogol’, but rather by Balzac, the ‘social-adventure novel’ of Soulie and Sue, and Pushkin’s ‘Queen of Spades.’ 25 Ibid., 116–17. 26 Ibid., 117.

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Dostoevskian characters such as Stavrogin, Ivan and the underground man (and to a lesser extent, the line of more resilient buffoons, clowns more capable of unselfconsciously sustaining carnival). In contrast, the scandalous eccentricity of the author – his parodic, polyphonic play – is creative. It gives rise to new forms of the novel as well as to social insight. It is to the author’s credit that ‘the menippea is full of sharp contrasts and oxymoronic combinations, the virtuous hetaera, the true freedom of the wise man and his servile position’.27 That is, in Bakhtin’s view, characters (playing the various parts or fleshing out ideas in the Menippea or carnivalized novel) are neither especially wise, nor truly free subjects when they express divided consciousness in contradictory speech genres. They are free only insofar as they are subject to the genre, to the author’s freeing polyphonic authority, which positions them in ‘dialogue not as a means but as an end in itself’, ‘not [as] the threshold to action, [but as] the action itself’, not as a means of ‘revealing’ ‘readymade’ characters, but of their ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ in mutual relation to others outside themselves. Bakhtin allows an ‘authentic’ paradoxical position to none of Dostoevsky’s protagonists (excepting perhaps such ‘holy fools’ as Myshkin and Aliosha, whose voices are respectively muted and still maturing). In contrast, the wholly developed, but not clearly developing underground narrator is a false pretender, playing the part of the holy fool with his ‘calculatedly cynical’ but also ‘anguished’ aestheticism.28 Like Myshkin, he is reduced to silence, not of his own volition. The underground narrator is cut off by an author who seems to liberate not him but the reader, by taking possession of his text, isolating him in a different kind of madness than Myshkin’s. The author, according to this reading, releases the reader from the underground narrator’s plane onto his own, and the two (the author’s and the underground man’s planes) do not really interlock. ‘At the level of the novel [the juxtaposition of voices] is presented as the unfinalizability of dialogue, although originally [for the self-authoring hero] as dialogue’s vicious circle.’29 Yet such a reading is problematic insofar as the author directly engages the underground man’s fiction as necessary extension of his actual plane of discourse and the underground man frames the freedom of such an author and reader to disregard him. On the various temporal planes of this recursive narrative, the underground anticipates and develops his 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 154, 156. 29 Ibid., 252.

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author’s claims and modes of discourse. Bakhtin notes a similar kind of slippage between Golyadkin (whose consciousness is ‘dismantled’ into ‘three voices’) and the narrator of The Double, who ‘picks up on Golyadkin’s words and thoughts, intensifies the teasing, mocking tones embedded in them, and’ ‘portrays Golyadkin’s every act’ without ‘a single word or a single tone that could not have been part of his interior dialogue with himself or his dialogue with his double’ so that the voices of narrator and protagonist ‘merge’, but also ‘one gets the impression that the narration is dialogically addressed to Golyadkin himself ’ and ‘rings in Golyadkin’s own ears as another voice taunting him, as the voice of his double, although formally the narration is addressed to the reader’.30 While Bakhtin argues that Golyadkin’s ‘dramatized crisis of self-consciousness’ (in which ‘authority’ ‘has been seized by the other’s discourse, which has made its home in [that consciousness]’) gives rise to ‘three voices’ that ‘are turned to face one another’ and ‘speak with each other’ within a ‘single consciousness’, he also argues that ‘these voices have not yet become fully independent, real voices, they are not yet three autonomous consciousnesses … Each word is dismantled dialogically, each word contains an interruption of voices, but there is not yet an authentic dialogue of unmerged consciousnesses’.31 Yet in Notes from Underground, as in Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, the voices of others not only resonate within consciousness, but take up residence in a way that forces constant relocations of memory and crowds the text with realizations of meaning. The voices of self-authoring narrators and authors do not just give ‘an impression’ of facing off, but actually do so. There are at least these two unmerged authors in each text, both of whose ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ depend on their dialogic relation. This interplay between frames should not surprise us in carnival fictive forms. If Menippea is populated by contrary characters and places that are formed by contradiction, it is structured by ‘unexpected comings together of distant and disunited things, mésalliances of all sorts’.32 Those mésalliances of Menippea include the authorial play with ‘inserted genres: novellas, letters, oratorical speeches, symposia, and so on’ as well as ‘mixing of prose and poetic speech’. While Bakhtin argues that these ‘inserted genres are presented at various distances from the ultimate authorial position, that is, with varying degrees of parodying 30 Ibid., 217–18, italics in original. 31 Ibid., 219–20. 32 Ibid., 117.

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and objectification’, the underground narrator’s literary citations of Nekrasov, not only their double-voicing by Dostoevsky, engage directly in that parody.33 The underground narrator is fully aware that ‘the presence of inserted genres reinforces the multi-styled and multi-toned nature of the menippea; what is coalescing here is a new relationship to the word as the material of literature, a relationship characteristic for the entire dialogic line of development in artistic prose’.34 This dynamic, dialogic, always open-ended relation to the word is precisely what is at stake not only for Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis (as well as writers such as Gogol and Almeida before them), but also for their eccentric narrators in their discourse, spoken and written. Along these lines, Bakhtin does recognize that the element of address is essential to every discourse in Dostoevsky, narrative discourse as well as the discourse of the hero. In Dostoevsky’s world generally there is nothing merely they-like, no mere matter, no object – there are only subjects. Therefore, there is no word-judgment, no word about an object, no secondhand referential word – there is only the word as address, the word dialogically contracting another word, a word about a word addressed to a word.35

But this is more self-consciously true for Dostoevsky’s eccentrics who know themselves as verbal, and specifically literary, constructs. And this relation to the word is related to what Bakhtin finds ‘the last characteristic of the menippea’: a ‘concern with current and topical issues’ that makes it, like the novel in modernity, ‘the “journalistic” genre of antiquity, acutely echoing the ideological issues of the day’.36 In the substance and style of their writing, Dostoevsky’s underground man and Machado de Assis’s Brás Cubas, more so than scribblers like Gogol’s Poprishchin, directly engage current foreign and native debates. Bakhtin’s distinction between the dialogically responsible, reduced laughter of the ‘eccentrically’ positioned author (Dostoevsky) and the one-sided or devastatingly doubled dialogue and laughter of his urbane eccentric heroes has to do with their respective relation to ideas or ideologies and aesthetics. Whereas the hero wholly incorporates ideas (whether one or several, even conflicting ideologies, with their attendant speech genres), the author stands both inside and outside 33 Ibid., 118. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 162. 36 Ibid., 118.

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them, capable of both stylizing and parodying them. Bakhtin argued that in the ‘dreamer’ and ‘underground man’ Dostoevsky was able to ‘fuse the artistic dominant of the representation with the real-life and characterological [socio-characterological] dominant of the represented person’. Dostoevsky was able to conceive of a ‘hero who would be occupied primarily with the task of becoming conscious’.37 The Dostoevskian hero becomes more capable of perceiving the ‘abstraction’ or ‘unreality’ of the eccentric city as such.38 He becomes cognizant of his own position in the literal and literary landscape. But for Bakhtin, the hero’s ‘becoming conscious’ in Dostoevsky’s works still operates within a materialized (but not so much textualized) social and ideological sphere of actual heroic interaction. That is, Bakhtin reads Dostoevsky’s novels without keeping in view the eccentric’s conscious construction of a self whose significance is determined on a stylistic and literary as much as ideological plane in the course of literary interactions in the city and in his framing of his own narrative or citytext. Through other characters, according to Bakhtin, the author can engage the hero in a dialogue about ideas within the fiction, but he cannot directly engage him in a dialogue about the philosophical or aesthetic nature of narrative itself, a dialogue in which they would share a syntax of reduced laughter and an eccentric kind of surplus vision (parodic and polyphonic, rather than serious, one-sidedly satirical, monological). Underground ‘self-consciousness’ and ‘open-endedness’ constitutes a ‘vicious circle’39 since ‘two voices is the minimum for life’.40 Paranoid schizophrenic fictive consciousness, isolated from both public and private life in the city (and not even writing for a public), is dead-ended: murderous (distorting words and offering a word to which the other seems unable to respond, monologically ‘materializ[ing] and debas[ing] the human being’41) or, in the underground narrator’s own indictment of copied modern consciousness, stillborn. But Bakhtin fails to note that the author’s voice also answers the hero’s with a stylization of his 37 Ibid., 50. 38 Cf. Fanger, on the narrator of A Raw Youth reflecting, ‘“Perhaps all this is someone else’s dream, and there is not one real, true person here, nor one real action. Someone who is dreaming all this will suddenly wake up – and everything will suddenly disappear” ([DPSS] I.8.1)’ (Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 132). Here Dostoevsky anticipates Borges’s ‘The Circular Ruins’, among many other postmodern fictions. 39 Bakhtin, PDP, 51, cf. 232, 234. 40 Ibid., 252. 41 Ibid., 296.

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own non-ending. The hero’s self-questioning whether he should end his notes, followed by musing on intention, form, digressive design and aestheticism both double-voices and is double-voiced by the author’s own framing questions, protests and contradictions in introductory and final editorial notes. Dialogue between actual author and fictional author/ narrator, but also narrator and readers (remembered and imagined) unearths life in the underground. Comparatively reconsidering dialogues in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s narratives, this chapter argues against claims concerning dissembling and dehumanizing, disassembled and dead-ended underground narrative. But we attend first to the derisive, deconstructive and even admittedly perverse play of these narratives – to those registers of laughter that have caused them to be read as cynical and destructive. In defining a disinterested author as the only one capable of life-giving laughter (reduced laughter), Bakhtin reduces the generative capacity of carnival laughter to respectful, carnivalesque laughter. This is authorial laughter that levels the ideological playing ground for all participants, author included, but does not allow the author to become so absorbed in carnival that he engages in irresponsible violence, objectifying rather than addressing the other. Such reduced laughter is also what deconstructive and particularly post-colonial criticism have recognized as impossible laughter, insofar as any discourse and discursive engagement is double-edged, and discursive laughter is particularly cut on a bias. We may recall readings of Dostoevsky’s work as anti-semitic and Machado de Assis’s as misogynist; though there are counter-readings predicated on authorial irony framing fictional consciousness that filters such typing in their fictions. Critics continue to debate the (ir)responsible view of the texts. Critical dialogue and undecidability depends on that dialogism in which authors take part, on the possibility of complicity in double-voiced critique. Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s reflexive, self-accusing eccentrics anticipate contemporary theory in asking whether there actually can be a word addressed at a word that does not in some sense debase the other, even as it also dialogically grounds the other’s being and becoming. They dissolve the divide between gentle laughter and ungentlemanly grimace or guffaw, between violence and creativity, deconstruction and construction. Bakhtin’s claim for creative reduced laughter is built on schematic distinctions between dialogism or a carnivalesque dialogic creation and real carnival. The most essential difference seems to be that dialogue

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or reduced carnival laughter requires the recognition and respecting of boundaries, whereas real carnival involves at least temporary inversion, interpenetration and indistinction. Both collapse hierarchies, levelling the playing ground, reducing difference enough to place another position in view, even forcing confrontation. But carnival confrontation and conversation seems likely to devolve into chaos and cacophony; it may give rise to tyranny, unless controlled by a benevolent authority (or author). Carnival’s terms of engagement may seem less serious in intent, yet more serious in effect than those of civil dialogism. Civil dialogue flushes out bias in more sane and sanitized fictions linked with a constrained and controlled cityscape. Carnival is more instinctive, less controlled, fleshing out bias through such devastating sexual and social satire as we find in João do Rio’s ‘The Baby with the Rose Tarlatan’. Dialogues are double-voiced, such that undercurrents are exposed – the sewer, the unsanitary, the insane, i.e. underground discourse seeps onto the surface. Carnival is conventional and controlled insofar as it represents a collective response within a ‘ritualized’ cultural dialogue (abuses are normalized, as in Rio’s tale or our underground narratives). At the same time, re-presenting discourse in a degenerate mode, carnival not only deforms but can transform. As Bakhtin recognizes, carnival links death and birth, destruction and creation. Carnival’s collective (unconscious) character also does not preclude, but rather requires individual conscious acts. Carnival is highly individuated insofar as every mask, every dance, is at once generic and must be different. Every carnival interaction is both determined by communal convention as dialogue must also be in order to be communicative, and spontaneous, improvised, responsive to what is immediately present. Both orderly dialogue and disorderly carnival are wholly ‘present’ forms of engagement that are also highly conscious of the past, of context. Both are also contingent on social and discursive crossings, concentrated in the city. Both require and tend to extend common ground. But also, both require a consciousness of boundaries, in order to address or transgress those. Even in civil dialogue, critical and/or creative response disrespects conventions. Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s unconventional narrators as well as their more conventional characters’ literal and literary dialogues evince the reality that dialogue is rarely if ever so benign that it wholly respects the intentions of the other. Interlocutors may allow others to speak but also disrupt and distort others’ voices, misunderstand and multiply meanings. Their underground narratives mirror how disruptive apparently reduced

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and respectful authorial voices also are: Dostoevsky’s intertextual parody and authorial intrusion in Notes from Underground are no less antagonistic and ambivalent than his narrator’s intrusions on his own and others’ literal and literary discourse. However, that Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s eccentric narrators, like their authors, often aggressively violate the intentions of imagined and intertextual interlocutors, does not necessarily preclude a polyphonically coherent, insightfully critical, and still unfinalizable realization of ideological conflict. These reflexive fictions may rather suggest how creative laughter cannot be so reduced if it wants to make the reader complicit and responsible. At an extreme, Bakhtin notes that the underground narrator’s ‘double-voiced’, ‘wholly dialogized’ discourse involves ‘devouring’ fragments of others’ speech, or whole speech genres, absorbing and deforming them. In the tradition of Menippean satire, Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s eccentric heroes and narrators incorporate utterances, ideas and literary models satirically, in unseemly behaviour and an unshapely text. Brás Cubas explicity models his play after relatively eccentric authors such as Sterne, but we might also recall Bakhtin’s eccentric (and partial mis)reading of an urbane, carnivalesque Rabelais. The scatological takes on a somewhat different aspect in Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis’s narratives than in those of earlier writers. From their early farcical sketches to their later philosophical and psychological novels, Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis pile verbal on material waste, linking the decadence, deterioration and detritus of the mind to that of the body. If bodily functions are to be evoked to describe how fragments from lived life and literary tradition are filtered through eccentric consciousness within their fictions, we might reconsider the underground narrator’s admitted ailments: toothache and bile. While the toothache indicates internal decay, it implies a deleterious diet, neglected oral hygiene, etc. for which the narrator is partly, but not wholly responsible. The narrator acts (or refuses to act, to see a doctor, for example); but his actions are contingent on circumstance and convention. His helpless and intentionally protracted moan concentrates contradictions he expresses in his rant about it. The moan that comes from within and is for the self, also comes from outside and is directed at the other. Alcoholism might account for his ailing liver. As for bile, we might imagine that the words of actual or imaginary interlocutors act something like gallstones. A healthy bodily function goes amuck, the body generates an excess of spite that solidifies around

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ingested fragments, allowing them to grow and even multiply, and to cause pain. These fragmentary utterances remain intact and even grow in underground consciousness through a creative (but certainly pathological) build-up of story around them, of reflection and response. Rather than dissolving, they grow as they move through cognitive frameworks and narrative space relayed through recollected sites in the city; and they pass through – naturally or unnaturally, as conscience cuts into consciousness with surgical precision. The comparison of written expression to these modes of bodily expression is less limited than the deadness of stones (even if we recognize gallstones as organic material). As Bakhtin depicts them, utterances are lively, populated with intentions (and these intentions are what resist absorption and insist not only on survival, but multiplied meanings, development of genre and speech genre). We might recall the Russian Formalists on defamiliarization that renders the stone stony again and the other in a dead-ended relationship alive and autonomous subject again. These utterances are like stone guests (much less monumental than Pushkin’s) that come to life. That is, rather than what Bakhtin reads as abstracted and generalized other (spectral guests, speculations, type no more alive than the letters imprinted on Akaky’s lips as he copies), we find complex, particularized, unfinalized subjects dialogically realized in these underground texts, rendered precisely ‘more living’ because not engendered by conventional literary means. ‘Devouring’ underground discourse can be understood as a mode of that creative cannibalism described by Oswald de Andrade and Haroldo de Campos.42 Neither Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis, nor their fictional authors shy away from how discomfiting this idea or image is. Both their underground narrators address the alienating and absurd aspects of their authorial position. They recognize their grotesque posture and imposture. Yet their ruminations comprise that ‘realistic ballast’ that anchors the ‘improbable’ and nightmarishly, feverishly imaginary cities denoted by critics foregrounding the estranging ‘psychological realism’ and ‘fantastical realism’ (Dostoevsky’s own term) in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s works.43 Their reiteration of and reflections on 42 See Haroldo de Campos, ‘The Ex-centric’s Viewpoint’. See also Chapter 2, pp. 180, 185–6. 43 Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 84. Cf. Victor Terras, ‘The Young Dostoevsky’, in Malcolm Jones and Garth Terry (eds), New Essays on Dostoevsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) on earlier readings in this vein by Maikov and Valerian (36) and building on Király’s claim ‘that the fantastic in Dostoevsky

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their own and others’ normative speech elucidates ‘abnormal’ individual and collective ‘psychology’, socio-cultural and aesthetic structures. Their fictions not only undermine progressive social claims, but also violate the conventions of ‘real’ development and of Romantic and Realist traditions, precisely by deploying realistic detail. As Schwarz suggests in his study of ‘displaced ideas’, they investigate reasoning or rationalizing, but not rational or reasonable cultural consciousness.44 Malcolm Jones similarly notes in his study of Dostoevsky’s Novel of Discord that the city and consciousness comprise a ‘dynamic idea’ that is continually being ‘displaced’. This displacement is internalized by Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s digressive underground writers, whose transformation of the ‘entire city into a scene of perpetual and undifferentiated crime’ ‘anticipates’, long before the texts and contexts explored by Vidler, ‘the breakdown of class and character-type division embedded in the more stratified cities of old Europe’, ‘a breakdown that is precisely the result of its spatial character – “a spreading out horizontally, a flowing apart of the elements of the social structure”’.45 Not only the underground narrator’s scandalous Petersburg, but that ruminated by Dostoevsky’s more civil narrators, as both Brás Cubas’s and Machado de Assis’s Rio, are already that ‘warped space’ that is ‘lawless’, ‘abject and ignoble in its ubiquity’, ‘vehicle of masquerade’ and ‘cannibalism’.46 Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s citytexts ‘destabilize the realm of the monumental’. Their underground writers’ disparaging laughter not only disrupts authority but also breaks down any special authorial domain where laughter is reduced. Uncivil copier and civil cannibal author texts in which laughter and dialogue are loud, unruly and untimely. is generated by the hero’s consciousness, well within the bounds of psychological realism, … an advance from both Gogol and Pushkin, as well as ‘a return, on a higher level, to Hoffman’, (25, citing Gyula Király, ‘Структура романа Достоевского Двойник’, Studia Slavica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 16 [1970], 293). That psychological realism lies at the heart of many readings of Machado de Assis, including Coutinho’s, Paleologo’s and Gomes’s works, Caldwell’s The Brazilian Master and His Novels, Fitz’s Machado de Assis, Nunes’s The Craft of An Absolute Winner: Characterization and Narratology in the Novels of Machado de Assis, Gledson’s Deceptive Realism of Machado de Assis: A Dissenting Interpretation of Dom Casmurro, though many of these also attend to formal and social contexts and constructive principles. 44 Cf. Roberto Schwarz, Um Mestre na periferia do capitalismo (São Paolo: Livraria Duas Cidades, 1990), 26–9. 45 Vidler, Warped Space, 128–9. 46 Ibid., 130–1.

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Yet, not entirely unlike their authors, these narrators do restrain their laughter: it resounds in and between the lines of their texts – i.e., in the underground – far more loudly than in their interactions on the surface of the city. While they read the city as text and inhabit it as literary self-constructions, they also draw a line between city and their texts – and this is the line on which dialogue is contingent. But it is not exactly the line we expect. In their lived lives, the underground narrator and Brás Cubas are fairly unremarkable characters. They respect conventions enough to be professionally (and in Cubas’s case also socially) respectable. Unlike Gogol’s madmen, the eccentrics of Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s mature fictions remain free to circulate in a city characterized by an unconscious spirit of scandal and carnival (and by extension, in their later texts, in provincial towns across a carnivalized Russia or Brazil). Any actual isolation of their eccentrics is largely self-imposed. The underground man’s grimace and Cubas’s grin are sometimes irksome, to the point that others ignore them or leave them behind. But their public banter only barely betrays their private alienation – measured by heightened consciousness, extreme feeling, contradictory intuition, perverse ‘idiosyncracy’ and protracted ‘discord’47 expressed as parody. Their eccentric laughter is fully voiced in writing, in which respectability reads as violence and respect for self and other requires violating conventions.48 But in order to understand concretely how the cynical laughter and ‘loophole’ Bakhtin sees in underground forms of narrative might not be the ever more tightly drawn nooses49 he takes them for (engulfing laughter), we must consider how the parodic aesthetics of Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s alienated heroes/narrators 47 Jones describes Dostoevsky’s ‘idiosyncratic’ novelistic structure in terms of ‘complexity’ and ‘discord’ (Dostoevsky: The Novel of Discord, 41). 48 Matlaw notes paradoxes in Notes relating to conscience/consciousness, integration/ isolation, ‘writing directed against the process of writing’ – though these contradictions add up in his reading, differently than in mine, also to ‘responsibility’: Ralph E. Matlaw, ‘Structure and Integration …’, in Notes from Underground (Norton, 2001), 162–78. The violent discourse that Bakhtin did not recognize in Dostoevsky’s fiction as an authentic mode of dialogic authority may have been a reaction to real violence in his personal life shaped by physical infirmity and political and psychological censorship. Yet his own writing is marked by violent dialogue and violates texts; it is framed by distrust, aware of vulnerability. Bakhtin also did not teach dialogically (in his sense) but in a monotonous, mesmerizing, always double-voiced monologue. We might note the declamatory style of his writing. In a certain sense, underground narrative (both Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s) functions more as criticism than as novel; it blurs boundaries between literature and criticism in anticipation of the postmodern novel. 49 Cf. PDP, 153–5.

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also represent real openings into the city, engaging it responsively and evoking responsibility. How is their self-parodied discourse and dialogue at once unfinalized through a confessional form of ‘aestheticism’ (with always penultimate words that place after themselves only a ‘conditional period’ ‘forever taking into account internally the responsive, contrary evaluation of oneself by another’50) and finalizing (freeing the image of their creations, including themselves, to the judgement and response of the other accepted as such51)? Even in its most extreme physical, psychological, social and ideological isolation, eccentric consciousness is engaged, not only as ‘soul looking out from within’ but also as ‘soul looking in from without’,52 from conventional and unconventional positions. Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s most urbane characters define their own distance from the center in response to the gaze and discourse of another. If Bakhtin notes, the ‘discourse of the underground man is entirely a discourse-address;’ it is equally true of Machado de Assis’s Brás Cubas that, ‘to speak, for him, means to address someone’.53 Both underground texts are ‘confession characterized by extreme and acute dialogization; there is literally not a single monologically firm, dissociated word’.54 But rather than dialogized confession in the sense Bakhtin means (involving repentance and reorientation or conversion to an orthodoxy or monological position), these are unorthodox confessions of faith in dialogic discourse. The subject (even when it is another self) addressed by these narrators stands on concrete socio-historical and ideological ground. But the stance of interlocutors may also be eccentrically tensed, contradictory, continually destabilized. On physical, psychical, ideological and literary planes, these eccentrics measure the margins they inhabit from a mobile centre, because they concomitantly contend with multiple moving authorities and antagonists, among whom they can count themselves, since they are also capable of positioning themselves in multiple places at once – standing at and facing themselves across thresholds of retrospection, reflection, reflexivity, contradiction. 50 Ibid., 158. 51 Ibid., 157–9. 52 Recalling Machado de Assis’s ‘O Espelho’: see Papeis avulsos (Rio de Janeiro: Lombaerts, 1882). 53 PDP., 161. Bakhtin notes that ‘the entire style of the “Notes” is subject to the most powerful and all-determining influence of other people’s words’, which often ‘act on speech covertly from within’ or as internal ‘anticipation’ (154). 54 Ibid., 152.

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As Dostoevsky’s underground narrator famously claims, their unseemly acts (including that of consciously fabricated confession) represent extreme enactments (as well as reassessments) of marginocentric cultural consciousness; thus, he knows the perspective of his contemporary readers because he knows himself as part of and set apart from them: Знаю, что вы, может быть, на меня за это рассердитесь, закричите, ногами затопаете: «Говорите, дескать, про себя одного и про ваши мизеры в подполье, а не смейте говорить: ‘все мы’». Позвольте, господа, ведь не оправдываюсь же я этим всемством. Что же собственно до меня касаеться, то ведь я только доводил в моей жизни до крайности то, что вы не осмеливались доводить до половины, да ещё трусость свою принимали за благоразумие, и тем утешались, обманивая сами себя. Так что я, пожалуй, ещё «живее» вас выхожу. Ведь мы даже не знаем, где и живое-то живёт теперь и что оно такое, как называется? Оставьте нас одних, без книжки, и мы тотчас запутаемся, потеряемся, – не будем знать, куда примкнуть, чего придержаться; что любить и что ненавидеть, что уважать и что презирать?’55 (I know that you, maybe will get angry at me for this, may shout, may stomp your feet: ‘speak for yourself alone and for your miseries in the underground, but don’t you dare say ‘we all’. If you’ll allow me gentlemen, since I’m not really trying to justify myself with this ‘everyone’. As far as I am really concerned, well, see, I have only taken to an extreme in my life that which you haven’t even dared to take halfway, and what’s more, you’ve taken your cowardice for good sense and in so doing consoled yourselves, deceiving yourselves. So it might just be that I come out even more ‘alive’ than you. Since we don’t even know where this ‘life’ lives now and what it is, what it’s called? Leave us alone, without our little books and we will immediately become confused, lose ourselves – we won’t know what to join, what to hold onto to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise.)

Here the underground narrator offers a strangely relative equation for his ‘alive’ness analogous to Brás Cubas’s finally positively cast life in terms of its double negative. He posits life as the product of conjugated negatives (parodied negative implications of current ideas). Like the posthumous Brás Cubas, he casts his underground ‘afterlife’ as unconstrained by the cowardice that delimits and deceives his readers circulating in the city, who substitute convention as false consolation in a failure to fully 55 DPSS, V, II.x.178–9.

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confront contradiction and confusion, cruelty and chaos. But he also reflects his readers with the hesitation – his knowledge (‘знаю’/I know) immediately mitigated by ambivalence (‘может быть’/maybe) – for which he repudiates them. That is, with this pathetic qualification that concomitantly mutes his own mockery and provokes others’ laughter, he resembles the other in his critique of their critique of his extremes. Both the underground narrator and Brás Cubas consistently read others’ laughter in a cynical or antagonistic register, reflective of their own. The paradox is that this negative (pathetic and critical) laughter, which they see as determined by an arbitrary eccentric cultural context, also adds up to their individual alienation, autonomy and authority. Like most laughter (or Proust’s memory), theirs is both helpless and consciously cultivated. As they respond to shifting voices, actually or imaginarily interrupting them, they become more interrupted or multiple in their own positions, as partly manifest by their relation to laughter. Yet their rude, sometimes ruthless interruption is marked, as Matlaw notes of Dostoevsky’s underground man, by a ‘profound concern’ for ‘fellow beings’, though this is a responsibility can be expressed ironically, by taking responsibility for an irresponsible position.56 That is, this concern is expressed as consciousness of disconcert and concern regarding a lack of concern, expressed through anxious laughter and self-mockery. It involves ‘sympathy’ rooted in a ‘realization’ of a shared alienation and absurdity. Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis’s underground writers cast themselves not only as laughably cornered by, but as having laughingly chosen the corners where they re-stage the eccentric capital’s and culture’s contradictions. They connect with readers mainly through their laughter, drawing them into their carnival cities, by getting the reader to laugh with and at them. But they also corner the reader with disconcerting laughter, accusing the reader for laughing as well as for taking things too seriously. They continually unmask with their laughter, even while their laughter always also seeks to mask. Rather than masking, it points (like their ellipses, repetitions, digressions, diversions, contradictions) to their awkwardness, antagonism, anxiety, ambivalence and/or culpability. But by reinstigating laughter through retrospective, reflexive, refractive, refractory turns in the text, they expose its at least doubled aspect. Laughter in these texts expresses both 56 Matlaw ‘Structure and Integration …’, 175. Cf. Gary Rosenshield, ‘The Fate of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man …’, Slavic and East European Journal 28:3 (Fall 1985), 399–428.

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the life and limits of consciousness and conscience. Eccentrically slanted response and provocation, it guarantees the afterlife of protagonists and antagonists, authors and readers. It invites further lifegiving laughter. О, рассмейтесь, смехачи! О, засмейтесь, смехачи! Что смеются смехами, что смеянствуют смеяльно, О, засмейтесь усмеяльно! О, рассмешищ надсмеяльных – смех усмейных смехачей! О, иссмейся рассмеяльно, смех надсмейных смеячей! Смейево, смейево! Усмей, осмей, смешики, смешики! Смеюнчики, смеюнчики. О, рассмейтесь, смехачи! О, засмейтесь, смехачи! O, laugh, laughers! O, laugh out, laughers! You who laugh with laughs, you who laugh it up laughishly O, laugh out laugheringly O, belaughable laughterhood – the laughter of laughering laughers! O, unlaugh it outlaughingly, belaughering laughists! Laughily, laughily, Uplaugh, enlaugh, laughlings, laughlings Laughlets, laughlets. O, laugh, laughers! O, laugh out, laughers!57

Generation/s of eccentrics: formation of an underground aesthetics in marginocentric capitals (subtexts, contexts, pretexts, early texts and resonances of underground consciousness) In its most concentrated form, the eccentric and the eccentric city are depicted by Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis as underground consciousness holed up as if beneath the city’s floorboards for twenty years, attending to Petersburg’s past and present voices as they filter through the cracks, and as consciousness literally interred underground, recollecting from the tomb a literal and literary coming of age within 57 Khlebnikov (1908–9), in Kutik and Wachtel (eds), From the Ends to the Beginning, A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/ demo/index.html.

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and like that of Rio de Janeiro. The double alienation of the narrators of Dostoevsky’s Записки из подполья (Notes from Underground) (1864) and Machado de Assis’s Memorias Pósthumas de Brás Cubas (Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas) (1881) (whose social, physical and psychological disengagement is recollected from the radical spatio-temporal remove of death or a kind of living death) is further complicated by a double aestheticization of the city (in both past circulation and present rumination). Within the fictions themselves, authorizing a reading such as Bakhtin’s, unethical dimensions are directly ascribed to an aesthetic remove.58 These narrators’ immorality is usually historically linked with a ‘romantic’ utopian ideology and, in its parodic form, amorality is linked with a ‘nihilistic’ ideology, attributed sometimes only to the narrator-authors, but often also to the actual authors of these fictions and resulting in a pessimistic reading of all their fictions.59 While variously represented as transitional, anomalous or exemplary novels (in divergent readings that signal their contradictory nature), Notes from Underground and Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas ground countless studies of Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s engagement with modernity, almost always in relation to the city, consciousness and unconventional narrative. It is in these novels that Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s represented cities develop deeper historical, cultural, psychical, aesthetic and metaphysical dimensions.60 Jones offers an incisive critique of Soviet and and Marxist readings of the novel only in terms of ‘social dynamic’, but also complicates Fanger’s reading of Petersburg as ‘mere ballast’ and de Jonge’s as ‘mere myth’, arguing 58 Cf. also Lotman, on literariness and crime linked directly in A Raw Youth, discussed in Robin F. Miller, ‘Dostoevsky and Rousseau’, in Dostoevsky: New Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 86. 59 Both the ‘anti-confessional’ Notes and ‘anti-memoiristic’ Memoirs are read as instantiations of ‘nihilist’ philosophy and aesthetics. Cf. Grossman; Frank, ‘Nihilism and Notes from Underground’; Otávio Brandão, O Niilista Machado de Assis (Rio de Janeiro, 1958); Coutinho, A Filosofia de Machado de Assis (especially 264–5). Exceptional positive assessments based on a revaluation of the underground narrator’s aesthetics can be found in Jones, Dostoevsky: the Novel of Discord (1976); Morson, ‘Anti-Utopianism in Notes from Underground’, in The Boundaries of Genre (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) and Rosenshield’s ‘The Fate of Dostoeyevsky’s Underground Man: The Case for an Open Ending’ (1985). See Sá Rego’s and Gledson’s aesthetically and socially complicated visions of Machado’s humour, finally positive, though only partly for the narrator; also Juracy Saraiva’s O Circuito das Memórias em Machado de Assis (São Paolo: Universidade de São Paolo, 1993), Dixon’s ‘Vehicle, Driver, and Passenger’, and Fitz’s ‘MPBC as (Proto)type of the Modernist Novel’. 60 Cf. Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 182.

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for a topography characterized by greater complexity and ambivalence, centripetal and centrifugal forces, ideality and reality.61 Dostoevsky’s urbane topography (as first defined in Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment) is marked by ‘flux’ and ‘indeterminacy’, pluralism and polyphony at various ‘levels of being’.62 Jones’s study surveys some of the contradictory or centrifugal principles that govern Dostoevsky’s work, ‘too little understood and which are yet fundamental to Dostoevsky’s continuing significance in the modern world’.63 Schwarz and Gledson offer similarly complex readings of Machado de Assis’s eccentric structures and enduring significance, contingent on urbanity. Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground narratives clearly depart from the physiologie, primarily concerned with satirizing the social aspect of the city. They represent a different generation in the development of the citytext and they generate a peculiarly eccentric mode of generating texts and regenerating genres. It is in aesthetic terms that we can understand the creative capacities, as well as the degeneracy, of eccentric narrative consciousness. In these self-realizing narratives, every human dimension is expressed in terms of parody and paradox, related to the always ‘present’ reformation of the eccentric city, culture and citytext. We may recall Dostevsky’s sketch of June 1, 1847, depicting ‘the present Petersburg’ as marginocentric space, compressing time, still ‘in dust and rubble’, ‘still being created, still becoming’ in terms of a past and future Petrine idea.64 Dostoevsky’s underground narrator realizes this sense of past as present idea. Directly related to Peter’s Enlightenment and its offspring, his own ‘generations’ of ideas (the romantic utopianism and progressivism of the 1840s and the scientific rationalism of the 1860s and irrational and realist resistance to both) interact on a levelled plane, on which they are continually ‘becoming’ out of dust of potentially original creation and the rubble of transposed ideas. Critically comparing conventional readings of the underground narrator’s irrationality with Frank’s contention that ‘the underground man embodies and reflects the latest phases of that evolution [of ‘reason’ in its then-current Russian incarnation] in himself; he is a parodistic persona whose life exemplifies the serio-comic impasse of 61 Jones, The Novel of Discord, 15–16. 62 Ibid., 22, 53–4, citing Philip Rahv, ‘Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment’, in R. Wellek (ed.), Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall, 1962), 74, 37. 63 Ibid., 198. 64 Cited in Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 143.

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this historical process’ of ‘successive accretions of Western influence that had streamed into Russia since Peter the Great’, Rosenshield points out how at every moment the underground man has both a consistently contradictory relationship toward ideas and a consistent complex of ideas (romantic and realist, irrational and rational).65 There is no ‘psychological motivation’ for the development of his ‘irrationalism’ in the 1840s into the ‘rationalism’ of the 1860s. Rather, Rosenshield argues, he posits that ‘rationalism’ in the present, only to undermine it through a philosophical argument in Part I, compounded by a psychological argument in Part II. ‘The focus of the work, despite the detailed recounting of the past, is not on the past and causation (in the sense of the psychological and environmental determinants of his behavior), but on the present and on the dynamics of becoming.’ Since he confronts the same questions, the underground narrator’s ‘analysis of the past is tantamount to an analysis of his personality and situation in the present’.66 While reconsidering the relation of the underground narrator to the ‘revolutionary’ ideas of the 1840s and 1860s, Matlaw contends that ‘logically he should be considered reactionary rather than revolutionary. On the other hand, both in terms of respect for individual human value and in terms of present day antiutopian attitudes, the narrator is the true revolutionary and his contemporaries are not’.67 Both readings suggest ways in which time is collapsed within eccentric city and consciousness. Similarly, Brás Cubas confronts conflicting and developing interests not only as historical material but as part of the present context in which he is writing, anticipating postmodern concerns in his contractions and contradictions. He describes his first encounter with his first love, Marcela, not only by denoting in historical terms the place and time he sees her (‘no Rossio Grande, na noita das luminárias, logo que constou a declaração da independência’68 (in the Rossio Grande, on the night of fireworks, right after the declaration of independence), but also positing a direct correspondence between his own and collective cultural consciousness: ‘Éramos dois rapazes, o povo e eu’69 (‘We were two boys, the people and I’); ‘Teve duas fases a nossa paixão, 65 Gary Rosenshield, ‘Rationalism, Motivation, and Time …’, Dostoevsky Studies: Journal … 3 (1982), 87, citing Frank, ‘Nihilism …’, 52. 66 Ibid., 95, 97. 67 Matlaw, ‘Structure and Integration …’, 175. 68 MPBC, XI. 69 Ibid.

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ou ligação, ou qualquer outro nome, que eu de nomes não curo; teve a fase consular e a fase imperial’70 (‘There were two phases to our passion, or connection, or whatever other name, since I can’t be cured of naming; it had the consular phase and the imperial phase’). While the similarity is historically cast, there is also a strange simultaneity to these ‘phases’ in the present tense of writing, in which each judges the other’s assumptions and missteps. He also characterizes here his feeling for Marcela as having the effect of drunkenness (he staggers down the stairs in phase one, hiccups in phase two), in keeping with a continually (if unconsciously) carnivalized atmosphere in the city. This stumbling is analogous to the drunken weaving he later ascribes to his present style of writing, besotted with a less compliant, similarly costly and corrupted, romanced, romantic and deromanticized reader. He will again directly compare the drunken gait of his prose to the interruptions, indirection, indiscretions and digressions of his dialogues with his love Virgília, in similarly marginal space (secret house in Gamboa), somewhat conventionally defying social (like literary) conventions. Thus, while the genres and historical material of these notes and memoirs might suggest a ‘concentric’ model of development, where one idea would generate another that would partly resemble it and generally outlive it, they are actually driven by constant, interconnected disconcert and contradiction. Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s ‘underground’ narrators do not really ‘realize’ (in the sense of regretting or repenting of or definitively recognizing) many things over time. Rather they continually revise genre and reorient dialogue, through a reflexive fictive reframing. Like the ideological, the literary dust and rubble out of which these underground selves and texts are realized is historically and hierarchically collapsed. Past aesthetics are actively engaged in the present. Like the ideas and material used to construct Petersburg and Rio, literary models are mainly imported, although sometimes already natively worked. While the underground narrator and Brás Cubas orient their own writing in relation to earlier texts (by writers ranging from Rousseau to Nekrasov, Moses to Sterne and Garrett), their conversations with those subtexts are disorientingly open-ended; they converse with those texts as if they were contemporaries. And their ideological and literary dialogues open into Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s other novels. These self-consciously philosophizing and aestheticizing 70 Ibid., XV.

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underground narratives generate questions dramatized in later fictions such as Идиот (The Idiot) (1868), Бесы (Demons) (1871) and Братья Каратазовы (The Brothers Karamazov) (1879), Quincas Borba (1891), Dom Casmurro (1899) and Esaú e Jacob (1904) – questions concerning determinism and freedom, responsibility and irresponsibility and the disintegration and creative capacities of an apparently degenerate or prodigal culture. They provide a way of understanding the problem of literal, ideological and literary paternity and production in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s later fiction because they concentrate in a single consciousness dialogues incorporated in discrete characters in the later fictions and because they consciously dramatize the problematics of an ambivalent polyphonic aesthetic mainly implicit in the later works.71 The problem of (re)production for Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground narrators is both literal and literary. They seem incapable of productive engagements in both life and literature precisely because they aestheticize every space of encounter, representing the city as cultural construct, always already a problematically copied text. They recall their urban/e interactions in the past as ready-made texts, despite their resistance then – as in the present in which they write their narratives – to literary models. It is in relation to the city’s own unoriginal and awkward aspects that they recognize themselves also as parodies. Unlike some of Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s earlier heroes, these underground figures do not romanticize literariness in life.72 Literariness is the mark of an admitted capacity for inauthenticity, even as the originality and potency of these narrators and their capacity to speak for an eccentric culture also consciously depends on their peculiar aesthetic sensibility. Because their aesthetics are so clearly drawn from the everyday discourse of the city, their admittedly false coin can expose inauthentic cultural currency, both past and present. They undermine eccentric authority directly through critique, but indirectly through their 71 On ‘rationalized paternalism’ in Machado de Assis’s earlier works, cf. Schwarz, Ao Vencedor as Batatas, Chapter 3. 72 See the narrator’s ironization of Amaral (reader of German Romantic poetry) in ‘O Machete’ (Contos, I, 247) and the Alienist’s opportunistic reattribution of a citation from Mohammed (attributed to Benedito VIII on the wall of the Casa Verde) in ‘O Alienista’ (I, 276). Also, the inclusion of literariness as a form of madness (I, 277–8) and the definition in terms of mainly literary figures of the ‘promiscuity’ of madness (285). Wholly unoriginal, ‘ready-made’ literariness is satirized in ‘Teoria do Medalhão’ as a means of obtaining social advantage (I, 332). Cf. Rosenshield’s parallel reading of The Double.

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copying. However, these self-designated ‘paradoxicalist’ narrators simultaneously represent in negative and positive terms the origins of the city as replacement and the related displacement of the eccentric in the eccentric city. They reasonably insist on the surplus value of the irrational, revaluing the eccentric city as space for critique and creativity, devaluation and revaluation. This revaluation occurs through aesthetics of contradiction as well as a chronotopic reframing, valuing dialogue and devaluing chronology, in an anticipation of later works by Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis. As Rosenshield notes, in contrast with Turgenev and French realists such as Balzac and Flaubert, Dostoevsky recovers fragments of his characters’ pasts, yet even these often traumatic moments in the past are not formative for the present.73 Time is rather demarked by more deeply etched, stretched and subdivided divisions and distances within a continuously complex and contradictory self, split in the past as in the present, always able to see from different, simultaneous vantage points and speak in various voices. Dixon argues that the metaphorical structure of Machado de Assis’s fictions, especially Posthumous Memoirs, is similarly characterized by ‘contradiction’ and ‘self-contradiction’, ‘illegitimacy’ (a term borrowed from Buosoño’s theory of humour), and dissonance or disjuncture that ‘revives a dead metaphor’.74 Coutinho similarly notes in Machado de Assis’s later fictions a subjective, impressionistic structure of ‘discontinuity and fragmentation’ discrediting the logic of ‘cause and effect’ through the narratives’ ‘illogical, nonchronological manner’.75 In the eccentric underground text, we are offered an alternative model of being and becoming. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas explicitly resist Romantic or Realist readings that seek to understand their significance in the plot – that is, in terms of socio-ideological, philosophical or psychological development 73 ‘Rationalism, Motivation and Time …’ 90–1. Cf. Gary S. Morson, ‘Paradoxical Dostoevsky’, Slavic and East European Journal 43:3 (1999), 471–94; Jones, The Novel of Discord. 74 Dixon, ‘Vehicle, Driver, and Passenger …’, 61–3. 75 Afrânio Coutinho, Machado de Assis na Literatura Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Letras, 1990), 263. Wilton Cardoso’s Tempo e Memória em Machado de Assis (1958) and Dirce Côrtes Riedel’s O Tempo no Romance Machadiano (Rio de Janeiro: São José, 1959) are the seminal studies of time and narrative structure in Machado de Assis’s work. Cf. Christopher Eustis’s ‘Time and Narrative Structure’, Luso-Brazilian Review 16 (1979), 18–28 and Earl Fitz’s ‘MPBC as (Proto)type of the Modernist Novel’.

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over time. They do so by plotting with and against the reader, with whom they engage in a self-conscious dialogue. Mapping memory as grounds for humanity and authority, Brás Cubas claims that ‘it is that power to restore the past, to touch the instability of our impressions, the vanity of our affects’ that makes us human, ‘that makes us lords of the earth’; but he redefines these terms though his mode of remembering. He not only touches, but retouches, refracts, recreates past and present in a lordly way, offering constant ‘correctives’, ‘new editions’.76 This particular claim, couched within a powerful (if also paranoid) retort to possible resistance provoked in a romantic reader by his recounted abandonment of a lame lover, ennacts a similar kind of violation. He violates the reader’s expectations, unregretfully abandons a lame Romanticism, for which he also creates sympathy. This is paradigmatic development in these underground texts. Retrospection gives way to ‘reflexão imoral, que é no mesmo tempo uma correção de estilo’ (‘an immoral reflection that is at the same time a correction of style’) but also reflexivity (reflection on that stylization as unethical aesthetic frame and on the problematics of retrospection) that may also constitute an ethical as well as aesthetic corrective.77 Subject to their own as well as external authorial irony, the underground narrator and Brás Cubas conspire with their authors to generate an eccentric dialogic aesthetics. As impotent and unproductive as the fictional authors recognize themselves as being in their lived lives and as delimited as they suggest their writing may be, Notes from Underground and Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas become seminal texts for their actual authors’ mature work, for their respective national literary traditions and, especially in the case of Dostoevsky’s Notes, for modern world literature. These underground writers not only concentrate many of the concerns of later fictions, but anticipate the self-interrogating, dialogically engaged, eccentrically urbane narrators of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Demons and Brothers Karamazov, of Machado de Assis’s Quincas Borba, Dom Casmurro and Memorial de Aires. While not entirely anomalous as first-person narrators in Dostoevky’s and Machado de Assis’s oeuvre, these underground writers are unique in their degree of autonomy – fully authorized authorial consciousnesses, recognized as such in the notes of their actual authors. They are also uniquely conscious of themselves as authors responding to 76 MPBC, XXVII. 77 MPBC, XVI.

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and addressing these capital cities. Yet their urban/e tales represent for Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis a return to the city and an intensification of alienated forms of consciousness explored in their earliest fictions. The immediately urban/e sensibilities of Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis’s early texts may be partly understood as a function of their own formation in relation to the city. Neither Dostoevsky nor Machado de Assis was raised in the centre of their respective capitals, nor did either come from the same sort of socio-geographical or cultural outskirts represented by Gogol’s roots in Ukraine. Born in 1821 in Moscow to parents of merchant and non-monastic clerical classes, Dostoevsky moved to Petersburg in 1838 to enroll in the Academy of Engineers, where he studied architecture as well as Russian, French and German language and literature.78 His literary and philosophical sensibilities were formed in the cultural mainstream; though he was perhaps more personally aware than many of his contemporaries of the conflict between and contradictions within both Slavophile and Westerner positions. Dostoevsky’s representation of alienation in Petersburg has been read in relation to his awkwardness as a young student and writer anxious about making his way in an apparently exclusive capital (comparable to Balzac or his hero Rastignac). But Dostoevsky’s divided consciousness and that of his heroes seem marked more essentially and permanently by an eccentric intellectual sensitivity to philosophical and aesthetic contradiction, compounded by exclusion and exile, as well as by physiological and psychological pathologies, some of which were shared by Machado de Assis.79 Machado de Assis was shaped by socio-political and psychophysiological conditions extreme in different degrees. Born in 1839 78 Cf. Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). 79 See Mochulsky’s and Frank’s biographies; Dominique Arban, ‘Le statut de la Folie…’, Dostoevsky Studies … 2 (1981), 27–41; Gary Cox, ‘Dostoyevskian Psychology…’, Mosaic 17:3 (Summer 1984), 87–102; Tsvetan Todorov, ‘L’origine des genres’, ‘Le discours psychotique’ and ‘Notes d’un souterrain’, in Les Genres du discours (Paris: Seuil, 1978); Alex de Jonge, Dostoevsky and the Age of Intensity (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1975); Charles Sherry, ‘Folie à Deux …’, Texas Studies in Literature 17 (1975), 257–73; Paul C. Squires, ‘Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Psycho-pathological Sketch’, Psychoanalytic Review 24D (1937), 365–88; on Machado de Assis, see Coutinho Machado de Assis na Literatura Brazileira; Peregrino Júnior’s Doença e Constituição de Machado de Assis (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1976 [1938]); Elio Pontes, A Vida Contraditória de Machado de Assis (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1939).

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on the Morro do Livramento near the docks of Rio de Janeiro, to an impoverished ménage of mixed race (though both his father’s African and mother’s Portuguese Açorian roots represented subalterity in the context of Portuguese imperialism), Machado de Assis had a shorter physical distance to travel to the centre of the capital, but greater social gaps to cross, compounded by potentially more debilitating physical obstacles. Not only was he more lacking in social and educational means than Dostoevsky and similarly afflicted by epilepsy; but he was also a stutterer and marked by his mixed race. Yet Machado de Assis moved more deftly than Dostoevsky from the margin into the physical and cultural centre of the Brazilian capital, self-educated while working as a clerk and typographical apprentice at the National Press, then as a salesman and proofreader at the Paula Brito Bookstore and Press. It is in that more explicitly commercial context, interacting more directly in Brazil with the same kinds of academic and political circles engaged by Dostoevsky, that Machado de Assis made his initial contacts and contract with Rio as cultural capital. Both were cultural gamblers – Machado de Assis, less obviously anxious and addicted player and more constant winner, playing the same game though at a table that seemed to have lower stakes (Brás Cubas anticipates five readers and Machado is well aware that his local and international readership is relatively limited). Whatever social differences were at play in these contexts and in their texts (and one might make the case that Machado’s concern with race is comparable to Dostoevsky’s concern with class, the problem of slavery analogous in some respects to that of serfdom, particularly as worked out in their later fictions80), 80 The question of serfdom and slavery was problematic for these writers for personal reasons, but also treated obliquely for socio-political reasons (and less obliquely in later work written under different conditions). Machado de Assis’s early fictions show signs of his concern and particular approach to the question of slavery. In ‘Mariana’, for instance, the mulata is represented as source of costly fascination. The dialogue between her and the hero is fatally flawed (resulting in death, the calling off of a marriage, bachelorhood, etc.) because not realized on level ground, not sufficiently violent, direct, open to carnival. The slave figures ironically in Memoirs, as an instance for limited self-critique (more damning than no critique) and critique of both circling individual and social pathology that inflicts on others the same sort of cruelties known from within, recognizing but refusing to admit the other as another self. See also Schwarz and Gledson’s readings. See Frank’s critique of Freud’s case history of Dostoevsky, ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’ (1928, preface to Piper edition of Dostoevsky’s works in German, trans and published in the English edition 1929, included as an appendix in The Seeds of Revolt, 379–92, commentary 81–91).

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their early formation as writers involves similar moves in similarly structured cultural sites. Both were formed by progressive European ideas circulating in their capitals at similarly critical historical moments. Both read English, French and German political philosophy and literature. They found literary models in Swift, Sterne, Dickens, Sand, Hugo, Balzac, read in the original and in translation. Dostoevsky’s first publication was a translation of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1843–44), and one of Machado de Assis’s, Hugo’s Les Travailleurs du mer (1866).81 In their early fictional writing, they critically engage these authors’ more urban tales. The city becomes the constant setting or reference point in their fiction.82 They directly identify their earliest work with the citytext: Dostoevsky’s early prose recovers Petersburg through urban genres varying from the feuilleton (фейллетон) and sketch (очерк) (including ‘Господин Прохарчин’ (‘Mr. Prokharchin’) (1846) and ‘Ползунков’ (‘Polzunkov’) (1848)) to the epistolary novel Бедные люди (Poor Folk) (1846) to innovatively framed stories and novels such as ‘Белые ночи’ (‘White Nights’) (1848) and Двойник (The Double) (1846), subtitled Петербургская поэма (Petersburg poema).83 Machado de Assis writes similarly varied urban prose, including the tales collected in Contos fluminenses (Tales of Rio84) (1870) and Histórias da Meia Noite (Midnight Stories) (1873). Their early fictions are characterized by ‘deranged sensibilities’ in ‘unreal cities’, by ‘doublings of various sorts’, not only literal but literary, ‘in 81 Eugénie Grandet is translated by Dostoevsky in 1843, published in Repertoire and Pantheon in 1844; Les travailleurs du mer is translated by Machado de Assis as Os trabalhadores do mar (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Perseverança, 1866). Stylistic differences between these translated texts demark discrete orientations and distant limits within Romantic Realism. Their work on these respective texts suggests Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s diverging development as writers. With Hugo’s Travailleurs du mer, Machado de Assis sets out on a more ‘modernist’ course than Dostoevsky. 82 Cf. Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 131–4; Coutinho, …na Literatura Brasileira, 258–9. 83 By subtitling Двойник (The Double) a Петербургская поэма (Petersburg poema/ epic), Dostoevsky places it in direct dialogue with Gogol’s Petersburg tales and Мёртвые души [Dead Souls], also subtitled a poema, and with Pushkin’s poema paradoxically subtitled повесть/tale, Медный всадник (The Bronze Horseman). Cf. Frank, Seeds of Revolt, 65; Rosenshield, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness and ‘The Bronze Horseman and The Double’; Grossman’s commentary in Творчество Достоевсого; Bem, У истоков творчество Достоевского; Blagoi, ‘Достоевский и Пушкин,’ in ДостоевскийХудожник и мислител; Terras, ‘The Young Dostoevsky’. 84 The term fluminense, a variant of fluvial, also colloquially describes anything related to or any native or inhabitant of Rio de Janeiro.

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the language: puns, half-rhymes, alliteration’, by ‘the use of mirrors; the watery element of rivers, harbour, and canals that mirror reveries, dreams, hallucinations, illusions, tall tales, inventions, projections’ – that is, ‘the stock in trade, the topoi of the Petersburg [and Rio] tale’.85 In composing these, Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis draw on both lived and literary experience of the city, local and distant. Terras’s claim about the young Dostoevsky applies equally well to Machado de Assis: ‘If there is one aspect of Dostoevsky’s art which appears clearest in his early work it is his tendency to engage other authors in dialogue.’86 Beginning in the 1920s with Bem, Komarovich, Vinogradov, Tynianov and Bakhtin, scholars have denoted intertextual dynamics in Dostoevsky’s work, tracing various modes of critically and creatively engaging what Bakhtin terms ‘the “alien voice” [чужой голос], where parody is but one of its several forms’.87 These ‘alien’ voices involve not only European, but also Russian subtexts, elucidated by Blagoi and Nechaeva. Schwarz similarly ties Machado de Assis’s fiction not only to European, but to Brazilian contexts of literary debate, and to increasingly eccentric positions in Macedo, Alencar and Almeida in particular. More often than their fictions are read in terms of correspondences with or as responses to their own literary traditions, they are interpreted as adaptations of narratives by writers such as Balzac and Dickens, with local settings, subjects and speech. While Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s earliest fictions explore the uncertainties of the capital from the vantage point of the marginal figure without much capital to work with, they seem to do so by using concentric models, whether those urban variants of the Bildungsroman (Balzac’s novels of education and social mobility for the character who comes to and/or is native to the city) or those novels of generation and degeneration within the city (Hugo’s spiritual/social or Zola’s naturalist organic model). Brás Cubas, annoyed with the interruption of a romantic line of reflection – an interruption he attributes to an interlude in the past with a stubborn ass who resists his prodding (like the reader, but in this case a literal mule, balking during his wanderings across Europe), costing him generosity he regrets88 – offers his present reader only a negative sketch of education and events 85 Sidney Monas, ‘The Idiot as Petersburg Tale’, in Malcolm Jones and Garth Terry (eds), New Essays on Dostoevsky (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1983), 68–9, writing about The Double. 86 Terras, ‘The Young Dostoevsky’, 24. 87 Ibid. 88 MPBC, XXI.

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(a list of what he ‘won’t say’) that would be determinative of development in a Romantic or Realist novel or travel narrative, rather than his revised memoir, redefining life’s ‘substance’.89 As Saraiva concludes in O Circuito das Memórias em Machado de Assis, the work ultimately stakes its claims in intertextual terms. He returns to the beinning of the novel (reached again by the end) with the mention of European literary models, noting that ‘formal and thematic similarities’ between Memorias pósthumas and the romantic novels indirectly alluded to or novels by Sterne and Xavier de Maistre directly invoked, ‘if they imply a relation of hypertextuality’, nevertheless ‘do not admit any mimetic transposition of these texts, but rather the adherance to genre. Thus the metadiegetic analogies’ serve an architectonic function or as ‘architextual’ mentions linking the novel to ‘polyphonic novelistic production’, excluding ‘monologism’ in order ‘to give room to semantic dualism, the pluralism of languages, the conjunction of the serious and the comic and the multiple convergence of texts. The critical consciousness [or conscience] of the narrator, leaning on the binary life-literature, transforms the account of a life into a metatext, or rather, into commentary on literature’.90 The digressive and self-consciously literary and metaliterary ‘substance’ of his memories is already present in fictions such as ‘A Parasita Azul’, which also eccentrically recounts the dialogic, digressive return of a prodigal son post-European education. His real ‘education’ has little to do with the progression of events (whether his travels or social confrontations or promotion or marriage) and everything to do with dialogue and digression. Though they play more with materiality and time, with social hierarchies and family lines, with biography and biology, Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s early stories also follow a Gogolian line; they slant those investigations towards dealings on horizontally measured material, ideological, linguistic and literary planes. They do not chronicle organic individual or social development in the context of a shifting historical plane or lived life even when this seems the starting point of their fictions. Rather they explore historical moments, sometimes several moments collapsed or anachronistically interacting within present consciousness. Building on Bakhtin’s analysis, Holquist offers incisive commentary on the kairos as opposed to chronos in Dostoevsky’s work, or ‘time’ that ‘in a Dostoevsky novel is always 89 MPBC, XXII. 90 Saraiva, O Circuito das Memórias, 92.

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somehow discontinuous’,91 an idea developed in relation to later novels in Monas’s analysis of ‘The Idiot as Petersburg Tale’: the threshold encounter in The Idiot and Dostoevsky’s Petersburg fictions ‘is also an analogue for certain physical and psychological states – the boundary between life and death, the familiar and the strange, health and illness, reality and illusion, sanity and madness, waking and sleep, clearsightedness and hallucination, childhood and maturity’. Monas, too, notes how ‘the sense of time that accompanies the meaningfulness of this kind of space is very different from that of developmental or biographical and continuous time. It is one in which specific moments are involved with an intensity and significance that causes them to expand …’92 Reidel’s and Saraiva’s studies of Machado de Assis suggest a similarly strange chronotopic structure.93 Disrupted, disorderly and distended temporality is paralleled in both early and later works by a digressive exploration of space – similarly divided and collapsed. These writers explore margins and crossroads in a socially fragmented, but ultimately psychologically levelled landscape. Fanger notes that Dostoevsky’s ‘Petersburg is relatively complete. But its neighbourhoods are not equally represented’. He focuses on ‘middleand lower-class sections, such as the area around the Voznesensky Prospect … full of lodging houses, narrow streets and alleys, with its Haymarket Square’, rarely exploring ‘more fashionable districts, like the Liteiny’ but rather bringing the ‘nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie’ ‘out of doors or on socially lower ground’, while ‘even the ambitious Dostoevskian hero – in contrast to his Balzacian and Dickensian cousins – rarely aspires to join the ranks of his social betters’.94 Machado de Assis ranges more broadly, as noted by Gledson in his introductions to Rio de Assis and to Contos, but the point of such wanderings is not so much to note contrasts between classes or movement in the social hierarchy as shifting perspectives on similar contradictions (evident, for instance in Brás Cubas’s relation to women from different places and stations in the city). Though money and other forms of social capital often seem to 91 Michael Holquist, Dostoevsky and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 102–3. 92 Monas, ‘The Idiot as a Petersburg Tale’, 69. Cf. Coutinho, …na Literatura Brasileira, 255–6, also 262 on temporal dialogic compression of romantic, realist and symbolist positions in Machado de Assis’s work. 93 Riedel, O tempo no romance machadeano; Saraiva, O Circuito das Memórias. 94 Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 132–3.

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motivate isolation, crime or spite in their early through late fictions, and capitalism has been a central concern of sociological (especially Soviet or Marxist) readings, Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis use it prodigally. As Roberto Schwarz notes in his seminal study of Machado de Assis’s fiction, money and other objective, rational, scientific measures of social capital are replaced in the eccentric culture by ‘favour’, essential to the aggregate or slave (and serf or civil servant), a marker of dependence, but also individual freedom, dependent as favour is on exceptionality, personal interest or fascination.95 Favour is a wholly irrational measure, distinct in its eccentric context from the historical sense it had in feudal Europe, borrowing as it does the later discourse of European rationalism.96 Demonstrating the coexistence of contradictory historical moments and ideals in eccentric and/or colonial cultures – expressed in the dislocation of discourse and the paradoxes of material circulation, Schwarz indicates the correspondences between Brazilian and Russian literature at critical moments of nineteenth-century empire.97 In both cases, there is a culture and literature that is ‘dualistic’ and ‘factitious’, ‘inappropriate’ in its uses of terms and forms of discourse. Schwarz describes a contradictory form of expression based on ‘disconcerted’ experience, characterized by ‘pointed contrasts, disproportion, scandals, anachronisms, contradictions, conciliations and whatever other combinations modernism, tropicalism, and political economy have taught us to consider’.98 Money and other markers of a vertically differentiated or historically developed society, including speech genres and ideologies, lose ‘objective’ value. They are anachronistically, arbitrarily revalued when placed in circulation in an economy that devalues every coin. In Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s fictions, money may be used in a given moment as the tool in an act of violence or generosity, but it is no more significant in itself than Raskolnikov’s use of an axe in particular. It might define a place in a social heap, as in Balzac’s or Zola’s differently material Paris or Dickens’s London, but the category itself is irrelevant. Money can no longer consistently purchase intercourse 95 Cf. Schwarz, ‘Ideias Fora do Lugar’, in Ao Vencedor as Batatas, 11–31, especially 17, 20. 96 Ibid., 17. 97 Schwarz suggests, but does not actually effect, a comparative study of Machado de Assis’s and Gogol’s, Dostoevsky’s, Goncharov’s and Chekhov’s fictions, while noting the ‘desigualdade’ (unequality/disequilibrium) of that list and these literary traditions (Ibid., 26–8). 98 Ibid., 21, my translation.

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or interest, social or sexual, as in Balzac and Zola’s cities, as suggested by Liza’s return of the underground narrator’s degrading payment for services rendered and Marcella’s shifting role in socio-economic and sexual transactions with Brás Cubas. It is part of a language that Schwarz notes is evacuated (resounding in literature like ‘uma espécie de oco dentro do oco’ [‘a kind of hollow within a hollow’])99 or levelled on a landscape with an infinitely displaced horizon, where the realization of ambition and desire is infinitely distant and deferred.100 This horizon is at once factitious and wholly real – realized or materialized in the social, economic, and physical space of a city that is in some ways (advertising, art, architecture) indistinguishable from citytext.101 The events that matter in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s fictions occur in common spaces (stairwells, public squares, streets, etc.), or in private spaces (private rooms, including cornered consciousness), or in actual correspondence or conscious literary correspondences, in which boundaries are not demarked on a vertical but on a horizontal axis, between doubled, bumping, interpenetrating ideas and intuitions. Though the boarding house figures prominently in Dostoevsky’s early urban fiction as in Balzac’s and Zola’s, like that apartment house visited by Gogol’s Poprishchin, it is a space of doubling and of correspondences that level the ground, bring margin and centre together rather than reinforcing social difference, and demonstrate degeneration in terms of rise and fall. Dostoevsky makes use of the ‘corner’ of the ‘boarding house’ long before Notes from Underground, in such works as ‘Mr. Prokharchin’, ‘Polzunkov’, Poor Folk, The Double – in all of which it functions as a space not only occupied by the hero but intruded upon by his various interlocutors or doubles – other selves who may live out similar or radically distinct, but always autonomous alternate fates, for which they are themselves responsible. His mocking housemates suppose that Mr. Prokharchin seeks to screen himself off (behind both screen and speeches) because he is hiding hoarded earnings. Though they suppose his trove to be of little worth, they speculate loudly so that their stories may seep through barriers into Prokharchin’s consciousness; they even sneak false figures behind the screen, trying to provoke self-exposure. They regard him as spectacle, in that divided space and on the street, where they watch him wandering around, spectators to his 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid., 26–7. 101 Cf. Schwarz, Um Mestre, 21–5.

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spectatorship. But when Prokharchin dies and his money is eventually ripped out of his mattress – literally over his dead body, arched stiffly off the kitchen floor onto which it has been spilled, still seeming to accuse with a wink, but ignored by most interlocutors – it is not only unspent, but unusable. Not this ridiculously grand sum, but rather Prokharchin’s staggering accusations and arbitrariness are all that enter into exchange. The rate of exchange in both Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s eccentric narratives is such that a coin well-spent (stuffed in an envelope to silence a servant or flung on a table to devalue a prostitute) can communicate as effectively as 3,000 rubles; and either amount poorly invested (representing and garnering no loving or pathological interest – i.e., responsible, but provoking no reflection or response) is irrelevant and inadequate. The kind of doubled, divided private space in ‘Mr. Prokharchin’ and Poor Folk is again materialized in Notes from Underground in the divided rooms inhabited by both the underground narrator and Liza, and in Crime and Punishment in those inhabited by Raskolnikov, Sonia and Svidrigailov.102 Richard Gill’s analysis, ‘The Bridges of St. Petersburg: A Motif in ‘Crime and Punishment’, offers a focused view of public spaces in Dostoevsky’s early fiction, more extensively examined in Anstyferov’s Петербург Достоевского and Grossman’s Dostoevsky. These thresholds reflect continual conflict, a capacity to return to ‘old’ ideas, the persistence of paradox, rather than a process of development. Many physical threshold spaces in Machado’s early fictions function as they do in Dostoevsky’s, principally roads, not least of which the Rua do Ouvidor in ‘Miss Dollar’, the present/ending of ‘Mariana’, ‘The Alienist’ and ‘The Mirror’. While the interior spaces in Machado de Assis’s fictions are not physically divided in the same sense (the Rio that he explores is not generally suffering from housing shortages – except in fictions such as ‘O Machete’ or ‘Father and Mother’), they are spaces of continual misunderstanding that is not predicated on but crosses class, and sometimes even race. The tension between these different dividing lines levels ground. In ‘Father and Mother’, failure to respond humanely (to save a runaway slave’s unborn child’s life) is a function of inhumane thinking, determined by class (economic necessity) and crossing class (denigrating race); conversely, in Posthumous Memoirs the apparent racial divide is trumped by violence informed by a class divide, as one former slave beats another for funds owed. In the 102 Cf. Nathalie Babel Brown, Hugo and Dostoevsky (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978).

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inserted tale of ‘Mariana’, social differences – one character having succeeded in the ministry of finances, another a meagre escrivão (clerk) – are a source of awkwardness but not the threshold, a moral psychological one, at which dialogue and judgement are determined. Machado de Assis’s eccentric use of conventionally exclusive and hierarchical familial and social forums such as the salon, the opera, etc. clarifies the distance between eccentric and concentric narrative. The opera, for instance, functions in his work, as in Tolstoy’s fiction, as a context for estrangement, not only for the reader, but for fictive consciousness – but rather than space for seduction and gradual transformation (as it is for Natasha, if not Tolstoy’s reader), it becomes a more Dostoevskian space in which the fictional subject remains divided, continually dialogically redefined, capable of insideness and outsideness. It generates reflection that both corrupts/aestheticizes and becomes the context for authentic realization and creative engagement within the domain of fictive consciousness. While some of this eccentric levelling of socio-economic and historical grounds for fiction emulates Gogol’s and Alencar’s, Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis introduce distinctive (de)constructive processes. Both offer a ‘new word’ and new mode of speech, critically engaging contemporaries (especially writers such as Turgenev and Eça de Queiróz) who seemed to be trying to define Russian and Lusophone literature and life concentrically.103 Their prosaics consolidate the national claims and extend the eccentric line of contemporary writers such as Pushkin, Odoevsky and Gogol in the case of Dostoevsky, and Alencar, António Gonçalves Dias, Manuel António Alvares de Azevedo and Visconde de Almeida Garrett in that of Machado de Assis.104 At the same time, by exploring different margins of consciousness, they de-centre national literary traditions, redefining the parameters and destabilizing paradoxical central and centripetal eccentric Petersburg, Lisbon and Rio myths. In his novels Poor Folk and The Double as well as in short stories such as ‘Mr. Prokharchin’, «Елка и свадьба» [‘A Christmas Party and a Wedding’] (1848), ‘White Nights’, and ‘Polzunkov’, Dostoevsky engages Pushkin’s and Gogol’s Petersburg through a ‘parodic’ and ‘polemical’105 103 Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 133–4. Cf. Constatino Paleologo, Eça de Queirós e Machado de Assis (Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1979). 104 Cf. Coutinho, …na Literatura Brasileira, 250. 105 Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 133, 148–9, 152–3, 165.

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‘prosaic’ ‘depoeticization’106 which also critically re-engages European models.107 Through refractions – such as Golyadkin’s own reflection on his intact (not missing a nose), still indistinct face (unlike Akaky he glimpses his own baldness and qualifies his own unremarkable features as he looks in a mirror) and on its relation to Petersburg (which returns his gaze through a window, relocating him in a dark and disorienting reality he distinguishes from delightful dream imagined in terms of Gogol’s Poprishchin’s dislocation in a distant kingdom) – Dostoevsky deepens correspondences between city and consciousness and digs into the capacity of consciousness to reflect on those correspondences. His early fictions already reflect not only the physical and psychological topography explored in his later fictions, similarly unromanticized, but also their dialogic narrative structures, partly incorporated in a hybrid of the personal, ambivalent skaz narrator and feuilletoniste.108 The subtitles of his early fictions (labelling Poor Folk as novel, The Double a Petersburg poema, ‘Mr. Prokharchin’ a story and ‘The Landlady’ a tale), together with the self-conscious play with literary forms within them (using inserted or stylized forms, such as Devushkin’s letters; direct and indirect intertextual references through his characters’ literary self-construction and authorial allusion; as well as double-voicing and indirect free discourse, distending the narrative reach of ‘dismantled consciousness’ in The Double), indicate both his broadly intertextual and intratextual dialogic experimentation with literary genre. Machado de Assis’s early poetry, drama, novels including Ressurreição (Resurrection, 1872), A mão e a luva (The Hand and the Glove, 1874), Helena (1876), and Iaiá Garcia (1878), as well as the stories of Contos fluminenses and Histórias da Meia Noite similarly explore Rio not only as physical but also psychological and literary space, variously 106 Rosenshield ‘The Bronze Horseman and The Double …’, 414–15. 107 Cf. Terras, ‘The Young Dostoevsky’; Iurii Tynianov, «Достоевский и Гоголь: К теории пародии» (Moscow, 1977); Vinogradov, «Школа сентименталного натурализма»; Bem’s ««Шинель» и Бедные люди» and ««Нос» и Двойник»; Bakhtin, PDP; Terras, ‘The Young Dostoevsky’. 108 Fanger points out that ‘Only in Crime and Punishment – which he originally conceived in the first person – are signs of a personalized narrator completely absent. The Russian word zapiski (notes) appears not only in the title of Notes from Underground and Notes from the House of the Dead, but in the subtitles of The Insulted and the Injured, The Gambler, and A Raw Youth. A vaguely personalized chronicler perplexingly appears and vanishes in The Possessed and in The Brothers Karamazov, and even for a moment in The Idiot (at the beginning of Part II)’ (Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 151).

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structured, populated by characters self-conscious of themselves as cultural and literary types based on their own readings of Alencar, Dias, Sand, etc.109 We might note that Machado de Assis has not only his own eccentric citytext, but bits of Pushkin and Gogol, as well as the early Dostoevsky, as models and referents. The catalogue of his library (partly dispersed) registers at least one translation of Gogol, but he read widely and, like Dostoevsky, often from other private and public collections. Gomes notes the direct reference to Gogol’s Dead Souls in a chronicle (in the section of ‘Bons dias!’ of the Gazeta de Notícias, signed with one of Machado de Assis’s many pseudonyms (in this case ‘Boas noites!’) but attributed directly to the author.110 By the 1870s what Meyer disparages in his 1938 note on Dostoevsky as those ‘adapted and sometimes disfigured’111 French translations of Russian novels were widely read in Brazil. Gomide offers the most comprehensive study of the shifting critical reception of Russian literature and a particularly incisive analysis of how Meyer’s revised reading of Dostoevsky alters the Brazilian perception of Machado de Assis, but also redraws Dostoevsky with a more ironic, malicious, humorous Machadian profile.112 Gomes signals that Machado de Assis may have read translations of Taras Bulba, Notes of a Madman and Viy as early as 1845, together with Sainte-Beuve’s studies in La Revue des Deux Mondes, which reached Rio as readily as St. Petersburg (and mentioned in Machado de Assis’s fictions). There are parodic references to readers of romance novels,113 but direct references in later novels such as Esaú e Jacó to characters who have read Russian novels.114 Machado de Assis draws on motifs of the nose, boots, madness, underground, and can use Petersburg (as Dostoevsky imaginatively used America and even Brazil in Notes from Underground) as displaced or borrowed capital, negatively represented through uprisings concentrating crises of identity,115 deflecting a 109 Thus, the narrator of ‘Confession of a Young Widow’. 110 Eugênio Gomes, ‘Machado de Assis e Gogol’. 111 Gomide, Da Estepe à Caatinga, 430. 112 Ibid. Gomide’s analysis includes appendices listing translated Russian and related critical works published and circulating in Brazil. 113 For instance, Margarida and Mariana (Contos, I.138, 143, 159). 114 Cf. Gomes, ‘Machado de Assis e Gogol’, and Charles Param, ‘Machado de Assis and Dostoevsky’, Hispania 49 (1966), 81–7. 115 For instance, Brasil’s atmosphere of political, economic, moral crises (related to the pressure to abolish slavery, the pressures of developing capitalism, conflicts between crown and republicans) is represented through a reference to the Slavic uprisings and crises of national identity in ‘Uma visita de Alcibíades’ (Contos, I.232).

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critique of Rio and Brazilian cultural discourse. But the motivic and methodological affinities in their work are far less a matter of Russian literary influence than that Machado de Assis developed a similarly eccentric critique of cosmopolitan local culture, exploring the tensions and contradictions inherent in this imported, paradoxically imposed, posturing cosmopolitanism. Machado de Assis developed his eccentric modes of psychological exploration, literary parody, social satire and irony also through dialogism that included a dialogue with the reader. The narrator’s direct dialogic engagement with the reader is significant in early fictions such as ‘Frei Simão’ and especially ‘Miss Dollar’, in which its parodic play with literary terms/models in the introduction of the eponymous hero is compounded by the actually marginal, mediary role she plays in the action of the story. Though discussed in human terms, Miss Dollar turns out to be a dog, who defines in relation to a differently pathological character (not a monomaniac), the importance of the outside soul, though her response, like Gogol’s madman’s Madgie’s, has to be wholly imaginary. Machado de Assis similarly redefines the bounds of madness, of fiction, of dialogue. The dialogue with the reader in ‘Miss Dollar’ is echoed in a dialogue between characters about themselves as readers. This occurs also in the satirical ‘Diálogo’ that is ‘A Teoria do Medalhão’. In the epistolary tale, ‘Confissões de uma viúva moça’, it becomes a dialogue between the narrator/writer and her friends (or self as earlier reader). In such dramatized confessions as those of ‘O Espelho’, the reader becomes part of the audience engaged by a similarly literarily self-conscious narrator, who challenges his literal (fictional) listeners to listen on his terms, without interruptions (though, in fact, they interrupt and then comment on his tale, as much by their indifferent turn into a carnival city as by their carnivalesque discussion), in ways suggestive of Brás Cubas (contending with similarly irresponsible projected listeners).116 Machado de Assis’s early fictions contain many other elements found in Dostoevsky’s work, similarly redefining geo-cultural and generic boundaries by pursuing digressive eccentric logic, necessary to the peculiar social, moral and aesthetic equations both authors will fully, and explicitly, develop in their respective underground narrator’s ‘equations’. We may understand the eccentric aesthetics articulated in and by Notes from Underground and Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, not 116 Cf. Contos, I.401–10.

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as discontinuous with or negation of, but as the irrational summation of their early works (the surplus in which two times two is five, or that surplus in dialogic exchange that Bakhtin makes equal to the survival, the living word). Though the eccentric narrator does not develop so much in ‘chronological’ terms within the text, he does require the development of a peculiar historical context (in which the eccentric city has a history) and he reflects or sums up the development of his own author’s aesthetic sensibility. The underground’s eccentric narrator becomes viable in Dostoevsky’s literary oeuvre only after a period of long gestation. That is, we can read all those earlier eccentrics as glimpses of the underground narrator in a process of becoming; as he himself, like Golyadkin looking in the mirror to not find Poprishchin, finally reflects on his own and our being born from books – the parody is most alive, whereas the perfect copy would be the end of ‘living life’. The counterparts to Dostoevsky’s early eccentrics in Machado de Assis’s early works include Frei Simão, whose ‘fragmentos incompletos, apontamentos troncados, e notas insuficientes’ [‘incomplete fragments, truncated notations, and insufficient notes’] serve as proof to his fellow friars of his insanity – he is variously called ‘doido’, ‘louco’, subject to ‘alienação mental’ and ‘delírio’ – and offer a precedent for Brás Cubas’s similarly lucid, if ambivalent, social critique. In that narrative the father literally outlives the son, showing up also mad, at his mad son’s funeral, while they both survive on the page. Father and son are complicit, in their contradictory responses, in each other’s madness, a function of social conventions but also of their own refractory consciousnesses. The madness of the hero in ‘Três tesouros perdidos’ (‘Three Lost Treasures’) and ‘O Machete’ (a popular musical instrument) involves doubling, replaceability, cuckolding, but at the same time paradoxical insight. In ‘Three Lost Treasures’, madness is represented in a comic mode (as in Dostoevsky’s more farcical ‘Mr. Prokharchin’ and Village of Stepanchikov). When the cuckolded husband comes to himself he is ‘mad … entirely [literally swept] mad’117 (Quando deu acordo de si estava louco … louco varido!). But he is also lucid in his self-conscious critique, as the narrator notes in his final comment on the hero’s calculation of loss, ‘Neste último ponto, o doido tem razão, e parece ser um doido com juizo’118 (On this final point, the madman makes sense, and he seems to be a madman 117 Machado de Assis, Contos, I.65. 118 Ibid.

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capable of reason). In ‘O Machete’, madness is directly associated with authentic as well as inauthentic ‘romantic’ creativity, without being romanticized. In ‘Miss Dollar’ and ‘O Alienista’, eccentricity is defined in relation to literariness and, more essentially, as the normal state of self and culture. Mendonça’s eccentricities are both literal (involving his conversations with dogs) and literary (his dependence on stylized sayings). The alienist Bacamarte argues that sanity or reason is a matter of balance, while insanity involves imbalance.119 But he arrives through realization in stages parallel to the history of the Republic, of ‘terror’, ‘rebellion’ and ‘restoration’, at an encompassing state of madness and the ‘discovery of the perfect disequilibrium of the mind’ (‘a descoberta do perfeito desiquilibrio do cérebro’)120 Having read Dostoevsky’s and Machado’s early prose, we might concur with the Bacamarte, speaking after gathering most of the townspeople of Itaguaí into the Casa Verde: A locura, objeto dos meus estudos, ora então imaginava perdida no oceano da razão; começo a suspeitar que é um continente.121 Madness, object of my studies, I have until now imagined lost in a sea of reason; I begin to suspect it is a continent.

Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s early fictions explore this continent from varied vantage points. In his feuilleton of 15 June 1847, describing the ‘dreamer’, Dostoevsky’s narrator seems to review eccentric aspects of Gogol’s heroes, as Dostoevsky’s own earliest eccentrics (most notably, Devushkin) encountered them in their reading. The dreamer is first cast as tragically determined by a perverse nature (physical, psychical and moral), framed by exhausting literary and social imperatives.122 His character is apparent to a narrator capable of seeing beyond the mask that impresses itself on other passers-by: Do you know what a dreamer is, gentlemen? It is a Petersburg nightmare, it is a sin personified, it is a tragedy, mute, mysterious, gloomy, savage, with all the furious horrors, with all the catastrophes, peripeties, plots, and denouements – and we say this by no means in jest. Sometimes you meet a man, distracted, with a vague, lackluster look, a pale, rumpled face, who seems always to be occupied with something terribly distressing, 119 Ibid., 286. 120 Ibid., 313, 325. 121 Ibid., 284. 122 As in Pushkin’s poema, cf. Rosenshield’s ‘The Bronze Horseman and The Double …’, 416–17.

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some most puzzling business, sometimes exhausted as if from heavy labors, but as a matter of fact producing absolutely nothing: such is the dreamer, seen from the outside.

This dreamer has Akaky’s hemorrhoidal face and seemingly tragic fate – as Devushkin imagines these in his critique of what he sees as Gogol’s narrator’s caricaturization. As Devushkin would have it, his unproductivity (tragedy) or even perversity (sin) is motivated by an unknowable, externally conditioned trauma or dilemma. More penetrating than Devushkin, Dostoevsky’s feuilletoniste undoes some of the mystery, still from an external perspective. The dreamer has the contradictory personality we will encounter in the underground narrator, ‘always difficult because he is uneven to the extreme: now he is too gay, now he is too gloomy, now a boor, now attentive and tender, now an egoist, now capable of the noblest feelings’. He is knowable insofar as he is predictably unreliable and perversely unproductive. He is also made responsible. His chosen position in the city is a measure of his disengagement. He ‘settles for the most part in profound isolation, in inaccessible corners, as if hiding in them from people and from the world’ or, as Fanger notes, ‘“from the light”: the Russian word svet means both’. In this introduction to the dreamer, we have the devil (already present as figure of speech and variously transfigured as Rutenspitz and Zimoveikin in The Double and ‘Mr. Prokharchin’) reintroduced in the dual aspect he will take in Dostoevsky’s later fictions: both metaphysical (defined by sinfulness) and aesthetic (defined by parody in the sense of unoriginality). This infernal casting of the dreamer is refined by the narrator of Notes from Underground and in Ivan Fedorovich Karamazov’s debates with his markedly literarily conscious devil in Brothers Karamazov. As Morson notes, Ivan’s dreamed devil (also self-identified dreamer) not only engages in literary parody, but describes hell as eccentrically constructed: its ‘institutions’ and ‘reforms’ ‘copied from abroad’ – including the reform that determines mental (reflective) rather than material punishment.123 The devil speaks as divided, contradictory self.124 But dreaming also signals the divine in direct relation to storytelling in The Idiot. In Crime and Punishment, it 123 Cf. Morson, ‘Paradoxical Dostoevsky’, 491, 482. Ivan’s devil reflects an unexpected ambivalence in Dostoevsky’s later work about the East/West conflict centred in Petersburg: ‘Though usually a liberal, the devil here combines Slavophilism with a parody of Konstantin Levin’s ideas [in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina] about reform’ (490). 124 F. F. Seeley, ‘Ivan Karamazov’, in Malcolm Jones and Garth Terry (eds), New Essays on Dostoevsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 131; cf. 116–19, 126.

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motivates crime, but also confession and conversion, instigated as it is in its negative as well as positive effects by encounter. In this earlier casting of the dreamer, Dostoevsky signals how the fantastic will be filtered through seemingly perverse, pathological consciousness into a dialogic literary form that has both destructive and regenerative capacities. The ‘liminal state’ of the dream, related to psychological ‘transformation’ as well as to ‘transgression’, to recursivity, reflection or the crossing of story within story, is related to St. Petersburg’s status as a ‘liminal city where things happen “as in a dream”’, as Monas notes.125 In their isolation, dreamers imagine or transform themselves in light of ‘intentions that crowd into the city’.126 These intentions are first, for the dreamer, literary: They like to read, and to read all sorts of books – even serious, specialized ones – but usually drop their reading after the second or third page, for they have satisfied themselves fully. Their fantasy, mobile, volatile, light, is already aroused, their impression is already attuned, and a whole world of dreams, with joys, with griefs, with hell and heaven, with captivating women, with heroic feats, with noble activity, always with some titanic struggle, with crimes and all sorts of horrors, suddenly takes possession of the dreamer’s whole being. The room vanishes, as does space; time stops or flies so fast that an hour seems a minute [… until] he throws himself onto the bed almost unconscious, and falling asleep, still feels for a long time a sickly sweet, physical sensation in his heart.

Reading gives rise to impression by and imaginary transposition into a literary landscape. The reader is possessed by the romantic text. But his reading also leads to more modernist chronotopic transformation – not only dispossessing the dreamer of locale, logic, ordinary tempo and chronological time by displacing the dreamer into daydream, but seeping through exhaustion into unconscious sleep and through emotion into conscious wakeful perception, bending time and space in the actual city. These dreamers read not only literary but also literal context: On the street [the dreamer] walks with his head hung low, paying little attention to those around him, sometimes even here forgetting reality; but if he notices anything, then even the most ordinary little trifle, the most empty routine matter, immediately assumes for him a fantastic coloring. His glance is already attuned so as to see the fantastic in everything. Closed shutters amid broad daylight, a twisted old woman, the gentleman coming toward him waving his arms and talking aloud to himself (the sort, incidentally, of which you meet so many), a family 125 Monas, ‘The Idiot as Petersburg Tale’, 70. 126 Ibid.

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picture in the window of a poor little wooden house – all these are already almost adventures.

Both text and citytext are point of departure for adventure. Dreaming represents both dependence on and disengagement from the city and citytext.127 It may also represent the narrator and author’s dependence and engagement, insofar as Dostoevsky’s feuilletoniste both critiques and shares the dreamer’s vision of the city and sketches out plots and structures of Dostoevsky’s later fictions. Here is the family, for instance, that Dostoevsky’s narrator sees through the window in The Idiot and in Brothers Karamazov. Machado de Assis’s female narrator in ‘Confissões de uma viúva moça’ similarly anticipates, in part, later fictions and an eccentric aesthetic, as she ‘deconstructs’ her dreams and reading in writing for dreamers and readers like herself. She imagines the weekly letters in which she will make her confession to her friend as a serialized fiction, of uncertain but truthbearing form, exchanged between intimately conversant or ‘confabulating’ souls.128 Her stated intention is to make this correspondence public, in order to reform other readers like her old self.129 Her aim in writing is that of distant confession (from Petrópolis), as a prelude to encounter (on her return to Rio), on honest terms in which she can ‘embrace’, ‘kiss’, ‘thank’ her reader, conditions that carry a promise for the necessity she feels ‘to live’.130 But these two intervening years of exile, she counts as ‘nulos na conta da minha vida: foram dois anos de tédio, de desespero íntimo, de orgulho abatido, de amor abafado’131 (‘null in the account of my life: they were two years of tedium, of intimate despair, of humiliated pride, of stifled love’). They begin to be redeemed only in writing that both reflects and reflects on dream. In the self-conscious narratives of Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground authors, casting their daydreams as romances, realizing and parodying them in their reflective dialogues 127 Ibid., 71. 128 Machado de Assis, Contos, I.95. 129 The narrator admits, on the one hand, that ‘time’ and ‘absence’ and ‘the idea of her deluded heart’ make possible her present confession, but the passing of that time is marked by only one occupation, that of reading. Similarly, her delusion was fed by reading. Like Emma Bovary, she finds in her affair the realization of a ‘love’ she had not experienced until then ‘except in books’ (Ibid., 111), but unlike Bovary, she survives not only the disappointment of a lover whom she judges early on as ‘no more than a bad reader of romances’ (107) but that of a lover who is a very good reader (121), fulfils the type and incites her to an underground ‘delectation’ in this vice (116, my translations). 130 Ibid., 95. 131 Ibid.

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with the reader, there is a surplus already paradoxically present even in the negatives. In these fictions, too, we as readers become more directly implicated witnesses to the process whereby ready-made, confessed ‘adventures’ come to life, parodically but also authentically, with actual unresolved novelistic potential. The dreamer, as both underground narrator and Ivan’s devil directly point out, has a longing for incarnation, authenticity or ‘living life’. But he lives as parody, since he finds actual life in the city incommensurate with the reified ideals that the abstract city stands for and the abstract self seeks. Hence, The minutes of sobering up are terrible: the unfortunate cannot bear them, and immediately takes his poison in new, increased doses. Again a book, a musical motif, some ancient recollection, an old one, from real life – in a word, one of a thousand of the most trivial reasons – and the poison is ready.

Paradoxically, the word or text that ‘poisons’ is the only means of survival, not of an ideal as such, but of an ideal and its parody – of plural eccentric consciousness, with its dream-induced delusions, denials, but also deconstructive critique. This dreamer realizes he is a dreamer, just as the madman diagnoses his own madness. But both continually redraw the line between reality and dream, sanity and insanity, preferring poison to sobering antidote. Gogol’s ‘unfortunate’ Poprishchin seems to sober up in those instances he censors himself, but also represents such a dreamer who takes refuge from reality by reverting to a fantastic re-reading of time and space, speech and ritual. Hence the difficulty of reading his physical withdrawal under a chair to avoid the antidotes of the day as any less dead-ended than Piskarev’s opium-induced delirium, leading to his demise and others’ indifference. The difference lies in Poprishchin’s (re)turn into textual space (his own writing), akin to Akaky’s ghostly haunting not only of Petersburg, but of narrative voice, reconfiguring Petersburg poema. As a measure of the development of the eccentric character and an eccentric aesthetics, we can compare Devushkin’s critique of Gogol’s fiction as lifeless parody with the underground narrator’s more indirect engagement of Gogol and turn to parody as a paradoxically destructive (even auto-destructive) but also life-sustaining mode. Taking his cue for analysing Dostoevsky’s engagement of Gogol from Devushkin’s critique, Fanger (following a trend established by Belinsky, developed by Bem, Vinogradov, Tynianov and Bakhtin) contends that in Poor Folk,

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Dostoevsky ‘humanizes all that is mechanical and lifeless in Gogol’s story’ replacing the ‘overcoat, which was to Akaky Akakievich the equivalent of a female companion’ with ‘an actual female companion in the person of Vavara Dobroselova. The very names of the protagonists reflect this change: whereas Gogol’s hero bears the ludicrous surname of Bashmachkin (from bashmak, shoe), Dostoevsky’s is called Devushkin (from devushka, girl, maiden)’.132 Certainly Dostoevsky ‘rationalizes’ Gogol’s fiction, making integral to his tale his hero’s (perhaps his own) misreading of the fiction. Dostoevsky’s epistolary novel opens with the voice of the hero. Relative to Akaky, at first glimpse, Devushkin is more alive, more self-conscious, more literate and even literary, despite his limited capacities as critic and self-conscious writer.133 He reads Pushkin as well as Gogol, and considers Pushkin’s representation of the downtrodden stationmaster more sympathetic and natural. He sees and responds to Akaky rather than just a series of characters (A’s and K’s) on the page. Yet Devushkin has less capacity for development than Akaky, as reader and as object of reading. Akaky becomes a far more complex character in the course of the fiction, in part because of internal changes under external pressures, but also in part because of the outside narrator’s shifting, sometimes contradictory perspective. Devushkin bases his interpretation of Gogol’s tale on the opening claims made by Gogol’s narrator. He reads only so far into the fiction, following the plot, ignoring the changing framework, full of ambiguities and awakenings for both hero and narrator, in order to critique ‘The Overcoat’ as caricature of clerks such as himself. He accuses Gogol of that to which Gogol’s narrator in fact admits: limited access to his hero’s consciousness and motives. But at the same time, he predetermines these judgements in approaching the text from a relatively narrow and unquestioned social and literary frame of reference. Devushkin is a romantic realist reader like those that the Underground narrator and Brás Cubas will take to task. If he is a more reliable, discerning reader than Poprishchin, he remains concerned only with the level of plot. He finds the hero hemmed in by the literal laughter of those around him as well as by the laughter of the narrator/author, both of which lead to his death. Rejecting the fantastical premise of an ending in the manner of gothic ghost story, he also does not recognize how the hero’s own laughter and language, his speech and speech pathologies, survive both 132 Fanger, ‘A New Gogol’, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism 152–3. 133 Cf. Frank, Seeds of Revolt, 152–5.

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within the fictive world and in the fictive frame in ways that undermine such one-sided authority and certainty – not through sympathy, as in the Pushkin tale with whose hero Devushkin is glad to identify, but through paranoia and polymorphous discourse, forms of pathological interest in and identification with or responsibility to another. The only possible significance of Gogol’s fiction for Devushkin lies in his fellow clerk’s social recognition and physical survival – i.e., in his own shortsighted concerns. It is in these terms that Devushkin describes how he would develop the fiction differently. In doing so, he seems to dictate his own plot: Devushkin experiences in September of his narrative the alternative ending he describes in his letter of 8 July: the clerk survives, is summoned by his superior, socially rewarded with sympathy and financially rewarded with the advance that not only Akaky, but also Poprishchin needs. While Devushkin thus seems to have greater control over his own fate, he is finalized in a way that Akaky and Poprishchin, despite their respective death and isolation, are not. He fails to recognize himself as his own copied fabrication whereas Akaky and Poprishchin consciously refashion themselves. Golyadkin’s more developed vision at the end of The Double is likewise limited in comparison to Gogol’s madman, who knows himself as framed by language, by news and rumour, by dialogue. As Rosenshield notes in his argument concerning Dostoevsky’s depoeticization of Pushkin’s Petersburg, Golyadkin evokes the Gogol’s devil and Pushkin’s Peter in the wholly debased, demythologized, objectively pathological figures of Petrushka and Rutenspitz. Poprishchin and Akaky directly confront the absurdity or irrationality that Golyadkin never comprehends as such and Devushkin never really faces. Unlike Akaky, Devushkin can never operate on level ground in his confrontation with authority or author, in part because he is unchanged by dialogue. He is a poor reader because too literal a reader, too certain and uncritical. Insofar as his good fortune arrives when the object of his affections is clearly irrecoverable, if she ever was authentically engaged with him, he is subject to the very dramatic form of irony that he reads into ‘The Overcoat’.134 He is also subject to stylistic irony. As Terras argues, building on Shklovsky’s incisive reading, Golyadkin is a literary parody of the Romantic doppelgänger who does not recognize himself as such.135 134 Cf. Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 153. 135 Cf. Terras, ‘The Young Dostoevsky’, 32–5, 60–1.

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Though his letters (письма: personal, if stylized correspondence) start out by seeming more substantial than Akaky’s copied letters (others’ official correspondence, with elaborate or strange signatures never his own or else just буквы: letters of the alphabet), Devushkin’s writing is similarly disconcerted with reality and similarly stylized. It shares the limited sense of style marking Akaky’s and Poprishchin’s writing at the beginning of their tales, with failed symmetry, syntax or literary conventions understood as marks of social status. Devushkin, in fact, recognizes his own lack of ‘polish or style’, but protests that he is ‘nevertheless a man’.136 Akaky and Poprishchin open their narratives with similar protestations, but then contradict the claim through their increasing obsession with style. When their externally fixed style gives way to error and digression, they find themselves free and vested in more active stylization. Disillusionment provides insight for these characters, as for Machado de Assis’s confessing correspondent, whereas Devushkin remains deluded, naive, an eternal ‘devushka’ (as pathetic as Dostoevsky’s cuckolded ‘eternal husband’). He is never a conscious ‘confabulator’, like Machado de Assis’s confessing correspondant. His own confessions, like hers, purport to honesty, but unlike hers do not recognize their own stylization; seeming more ‘pure’, his confession is more blinded and ineffective, self-exonerating rather than rendering self and other responsible. Devushkin’s misreading, overlooking stylistic correspondences and structural turns in Gogol’s narrative, defines the limits of his own authority and creativity within the text. Devushkin’s style, like his perception of the city, and unlike Akaky’s, does not develop, positively or negatively. As he never reads between the lines of literary text or personal letter, he also never digresses in Petersburg or in his writing of the Petersburg text. Speaking with conventional authority, he lacks authority. As Dostoevsky’s eccentric heroes, like Machado de Assis’s, become increasingly self-conscious and conflicted, undermining their own authority, they paradoxically speak more authoritatively. The more reflective, scholarly hero of Dostoevsky’s ‘Хозяйка’ (‘The Landlady’) is described, like Akaky, as one who reads the city’s ‘base prose’ (пошлая проза) ‘as if between the lines of a book’ (как в книге между строк).137 He is cast in a literary role, setting out in the city in the guise and with the gaze of the ‘flâneur’ – his eccentric relation to the city marked by 136 See Devushkin’s letter of 21 August, DPSS, I, 82. 137 DPSS, I, I.i.264, 266.

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this foreign term. The lines he reads and in terms of which he defines the city and his place within it come from books by Pushkin and Gogol, German philosophers and Russian historians. His own literary project – on which he pins his highest hopes in what the narrator terms his ‘uncreative moments’ (в нетворческие минуты), but which he cannot realize and ultimately repudiates because of the distraction and determinism he feels in the present – is a history of the Church. This young aspiring writer is not only more literary but also more immediately self-aware of himself as literary or cultural construct in the city than are Poprishchin, Akaky or Devushkin. He is also immediately aware of himself not only as social outcast but, like Gogol’s Poprishchin and Dostoevsky’s later Underground man, as one taken by other passers-by ‘for a madman’ or for ‘a most original character’ or ‘crank’ or ‘eccentric’ (за сумасшедшего или за оригинальнейшего чудака 138). Either he or the narrator, since agency in the text is ambivalent, offers further commentary on that casting of the self through another’s consciousness: this is an interpretation ‘which, by the way, was altogether just’ (что, впрочем, было совсем справедливо 139). His own view of his new thoughts as original is thus objectively confirmed; but there is an irony implicit in the narrator’s insistence on this urbane originality, couched in clichéd philosophical and literary terms. The ‘original’ ‘system’ at which he arrives is derived from contorted city and citytext. This irony is dramatized through his own and others’ distorted readings of the city. Thus, we find Katerina morally, physically and possibly psychically debased, partly in consequence of romantic misreading. The narrative closes by noting how this ‘original’ eccentric has replicated himself in his friend Iaroslav Il’ich, whom he confronts after he himself has ceased reading the texts he recommended because the ‘forms’ he consequently confabulated ‘seemed to have grown intentionally into giants in his imaginings, with the sole purpose of mocking the impotence of him, their creator’; though ‘he himself laughs’, neither he nor his laughter move.140 He finds Iaroslav Il’ich wasted away, with dimmed eyes, in one of the ‘deserted, distant places, seldom frequented by people’ along which he often chooses to walk ‘aimlessly’ at dusk.141 His friend, who 138 DPSS, I, I.i267. 139 Ibid. 140 Казалось, все эти образы нарочно вырастали гигантами в его представлениях, чтоб смеятся над бессилием его, их же творца. Но теперь он сам смеялся в иные минуты над своим слепым убеждением и – не подвигался вперёд (DPSS, I, II.iii.318). 141 Он часто любил бродить по улицам, долго, без цели. Он выбирал

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now seeks to avoid him, proves a cynical conversant – his cynicism a mark to Ordynov of ‘consciousness’, of ‘wisdom’ about the perfidy of friends gained by reading these texts. In response, Ordynov ‘did not say a word to contradict him, but he began to feel unspeakably, agonizingly sad: it was as though he had buried his friend’.142 Like Golyadkin, Ordynov watches himself double. And though he doubles in more realist and rational modes, rather than through realistically depicted paranoid projection, this proves equally disorienting. Ultimately, it results in a displacement that reflects an empathetic and self-critical responsive outsideness, in which Ordynov still understands his created interlocutor’s contradictoriness from within, as if transposed into his own underground. If Ordynov experiences the city as context for this reflection, he does not go so far as to realize in his own writing its creative refractive capacities. With Iaroslav Il’ich’s re-opening of the plot that he had considered closed (involving his alternately romantic and realist engagement with Murin and his mistress), he is re-immersed in dialogue that remains wholly within the bounds of the fiction, of the city, without critically re-engaging the citytext or re-framing the underground as textual opening.143 The eccentric hero’s vision in other tales such as ‘The Landlady’, ‘The Weak Heart’ and ‘White Nights’, though involving ‘the intuition of a new dimension to the city’ seen under the sign of the moon,144 (a literal, rather than the literary lunar landscape of Gogol’s Notes of a Madman), is not equal to the realization of the actual author for whom a kind of lunacy or alienation instigated by Petersburg mediates an eccentric poetics. Blurring the boundaries between author’s and hero’s consciously eccentric discourse, Notes from Underground opens under the sign of lunacy that Dostoevsky’s earlier fictions, like Gogol’s, gradually develop. The Underground narrator is a less pathetic figure than Poprishchin, insofar as his painful, humiliating retreat into his corner before he begins writing is instigated by his own obstinacy, misapprehension and sadism. While there are similarities in the stories each self-accused madman tells, there is a marked difference in the преимущественно сумеречный час, а место прогулки – места глухие, отдалённые, редко посещаемые народом (DPSS, I, II.iii.319). 142 Ордынов не противоречил ни в чём, но несказано, мучительно грустно стало ему: как будто то схоронил своего лучшего друга! (DPSS, I, II.iii.320). 143 Cf. Bem, «Драматизация бреда (Хозяйка Достоевского)» in О Достоевском, I, 78; Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 167. 144 Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 168.

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reflective and retrospective distance from which they recount these. This distance and the dynamics of refraction are likewise exponentially greater within the space of the entombed, pathological narrating consciousness of Posthumous Memoirs, relative to the fragmentary memoirs of Frei Simão and the confession of the young widow. These underground narrators represent the perverse and parodic character of the dreamer, by reflecting on their own state, as Dostoevsky’s feuilletoniste declaims, ‘Is it not a sin and a horror! Is it not a caricature!’145 They concomitantly represent the cultural centrality of this ‘eccentric’ character, echoing in their own claims the feuilletoniste’s claim, ‘And aren’t we all more or less dreamers!’146 While Dostoevsky’s underground narrator is one of those dreamers who lives ‘in isolation, in a corner, and most of all in a circle’, that circle lies at once on the margins and in the centre of a city that ‘is nothing but a collection of an enormous number of little circles, each of which has its regulations, its decorum, its law, its logic, and its oracle’.147 The aesthetic loophole through which Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground narrators recognize their place in the city differentiates their circular discourse from that circle within which the dreamer ‘forgets – in fact does not suspect – that life is a whole art, that to live means to make oneself a work of art, that only in the presence of generalized interests, in sympathy for the mass of society and for its direct, immediate demands, and not in somnolence, not in indifference, from which the mass is falling apart, not in isolation, can his hidden treasure, his capital, his kind heart, be polished into a valuable, genuine, gleaming diamond’.148 Brás Cubas, Quincas Borba, like Dostoevsky’s underground man, and after him also Raskolnikov, Verkhovensky, Myshkin, Ivan and Smerdiakov and even Alyosha and Dmitri Karamazov, are all highly conscious of their lives as artistic material that signifies only in relation to the public sphere, even if their lived artistry devolves into artfulness, engaging only with the relatively unimaginative (but to Dostoevsky’s feuilletoniste, tired of the ennui and innaction of the superfluous character, still welcome) violence of ‘old villains of old melodramas and novels’ predisposed to going ‘around with a knife stabbing people, just like that, not stabbing 145 Dostoevsky’s feuilleton of 27April 1847; cited/trans. in Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 138. 146 Ibid. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid.

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for a penny, but for God knows what’.149 Both Brás Cubas and the underground narrator motivate the seemingly ‘gratuitous’ crime. They deflate the moral purchasing power and cosmopolitan capital of their discrete material positions, though they both negotiate with conventional socio-economic and philosophical currency as they wrestle with determinism, despair, dignity and depravity. They revalue an apparently irrational eccentric freedom that reasons against Eurocentric universalism, against coherence and exact translation as bases for communion and communication. Critically conscious, creative (mis)translation or transcreation is the alternative currency by which these narrators ask that their writing and life be judged. This is capital whose value depends negatively on ‘the presence of generalized interests’, on a contradictory response to the ‘immediate demands’ of others, though that response can be made in apparent isolation or as a move towards isolation. Their isolation draws others into itself and reconnects with others’ worlds – whether other self, imaginary reader or past interlocutors whose voices continue to resonate in the present. The autonomy of self and other is guaranteed by answerability and unpredictability. The best interest of the other is not dictated by a certain reason (with that determining, typed certainty suggested by Gogol’s narrator at the opening of ‘The Overcoat’). Rather, plural reasons and reasonings are always at play, responsive and responsible to each other, inclusive in their misapprehensions. This is a currency whose value is determined not by a fixed progressive rate; Eurocentric cosmopolitan values, including ‘Reason’ and citizenship, are continually renegotiated alongside other concentric and eccentric values, in an always fluctuating exchange in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s fictions. If among their beggarly eccentrics, fools, idiots and madmen Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground narrators are the most clearly extreme – paranoid and schizophrenic in their personal, ideological and aesthetic engagements, positing a kind of orthodox ethics of response through a wholly unorthodox aesthetics through which they recall and rationalize unethical acts – then they provide a test of eccentric currency, whose value is underpinned by dissent. They concentrate various modes of dissent on lived and literary planes. Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis arrive at this peculiar concentration by employing an eccentrically retrospective mode of constructing consciousness, which renders past as ‘presence’, presenting ‘immediate 149 Ibid., 139–41.

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demands’. The fictional authors’ unconventional modes of retrospection may be motivated and elucidated by some of the ways in which these fictions constitute returns for their actual authors. Whereas their narrators principally retrace turns taken within the city while ‘buried’ within it, Notes from Underground and Posthumous Memoirs mark literary returns for Machado de Assis and Dostoevsky immediately following fictions set outside Petersburg and Rio. These coincide with the authors’ literal returns to their respective cities after different kinds of exile. These fictions are typically understood in the context of crises, described in dialectic terms involving conversion or disillusionment. We might rather understand these crises in terms of displacement, of a spatial distance that stretches an eccentric sensibility, compounding divisions and adding new directions of interest. The authors’ own experience of exile, forced and self-imposed, might underpin their underground narrators’ spatio-temporal framing of their psychological and aesthetic remove as grounds for greater authority. While this remove might have resulted in a more defined or redefined political stance for the actual authors, it multiplies and intensifies the ideological and aesthetic tensions in their fictions. Both Machado de Assis’s and Dostoevsky’s political, philosophical and theoretical writing becomes progressively more monological and moralistic; but their fictions remain dialogic and contradictory. Both refine their polyphonic poetics in the course of displacements, though framed by different personal and political fortunes. Like Dostoevsky, Machado de Assis garnered immediate attention in contemporary literary circles with his early stories and novels. Unlike Dostoevsky, his relation to civil and literary authorities was marked by neither open anxiety nor antagonism. He was given progressively more important positions in ministries of agriculture and transportation and in the chamber of commerce, and eventually founded and presided over the Brazilian academy of letters. In contrast, Dostoevsky’s early political and literary affiliations with revolutionary circles famously resulted in political exile and, despite a shift towards more conservative politics, in continual official suspicion.150 While Dostoevsky likewise became a dominant figure in cultural debates, he struggled longer on social margins, writing under more pressing material and political constraints. His gambling binge in Europe, which he terms his ‘second exile’, fed by 150 Cf. Joseph Frank’s The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) and The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton, 1986).

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debt as well as obsession, marks a further intensification of ‘nationalism’ in Dostoevsky’s fiction, but still an eccentric nationalism, ambivalent. As Monas notes, ‘having left Saint Petersburg he was the more obsessed with that city’,151 condensing the contradictions in his own thinking. Jones points out in that Dostoevsky’s ‘life on his return to St. Petersburg in December 1859 was only slightly less dramatic [than his departure]. Beset by debts and creditors and importunate relatives, in chronic bad health in spite of his robust constitution, a victim of frequent and debilitating epileptic attacks and a gambling obsession – none of which he needed therefore to plagiarize from Romantic literature – his fortunes reached their lowest ebb in 1864 (the year of publication of Notes from Underground) with the death of his first wife from consumption, the death of his brother and business partner Mikhail, the death of his closest literary collaborator, the brilliant and eccentric Apollon Grigoriev, and the inopportune closure by the government of his main source of income, the journal Time.’152 The darker humour of Dostoevsky’s underground may be shadowed by these disasters. Machado de Assis is only once compelled to leave Rio to seek relief from for epileptic seizures, which Dostoevsky begins to experience with frequency in exile. But Coutinho argues that Machado’s ‘resentment’ derived in part from ‘personal motivations of a social, psychological, and hereditary order, which gave the author an exaggerated consciousness of human miseries’. His personality cultivated or ‘refined’ a ‘taste’ for suffering. ‘His resentment was tied to his physical infirmities [epilepsy and stuttering] and to his race’ and his pessimism only ‘in part a consequence’ of philosophical engagements that ‘provided a philosophical framework for his natural tendencies’.153 Thus, both authors’ parodic or eccentric aesthetics and purported philosophical pessimism are ascribed in part to their experience of psychical and physical disorders as well as to social alienation and political disillusionment.154 Certainly, in the wake of 151 Monas draws this conclusion by examining Dostoevsky’s letters to Maikov and Sarukhanian’s study, in ‘The Idiot as Petersburg Tale’. 152 Jones, ‘Introduction’, New Essays on Dostoevsky, 6–7. 153 Coutinho, …na Literatura Brasileira, 260. 154 Cf. cited studies by Freud and Mochulsky; Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life; Squires, ‘Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Psycho-pathological Sketch’; de Jonge, Dostoevsky and the Age of Intensity; James L. Rice, Dostoevsky and the Healing Art (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985); and Thomas Fiddick, ‘Madness, Masochism and Morality’, in Branimir M. Rieger (ed.), Dionysus in Literature (Bowling Green, 1994), 89–100. Cf. Peregrino Júnior, Doença e Constituição de Machado de Assis, and Érico Veríssimo, ‘Reflexiones sobre un enigma literario: Machado de Assis’.

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discrete displacements experienced as extremes, both redefine (or really refine) the dimensions of their respective capitals. While Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, as defined in his feuilleton of 1 June 1847, already includes all of Russia, it literally does so only in Dostoevsky’s comic novel Село Степанчикого (Stepanchikov’s Village [1859]) and semi-autobiographical Записки из мёртвого дома (Notes from the House of the Dead [1860–62]). Dostoevsky’s Petersburg is distended, just as Rio in Machado de Assis’s critical essays – most notably, ‘Instinto de nacionalidade’ (The Instinct of Nationality [1873]) and ‘A nova geração’ (The New Generation [1879]), and in the collection of stories and essays published as Papeis avulsos (loose or scattered papers; but the adjective avulso implies something torn out or apart violently, disconnected, isolated155). But aspects of the city are diffuse, dispersed. Returning to the city as past and present setting for and within consciousness in Notes from Underground and Posthumous Memoirs, Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis unearth interconnected eccentric social, ideological and aesthetic forms. Their underground narratives delineate fundamental questions, offering a close-up view of a city within a larger landscape, a frame within a frame that is both defined by and defines that larger cultural context. Both the underground narrator and Brás Cubas discuss the prospects of departure from the city. For the underground narrator, the unlikely prospect of leaving its stifling prospekts is rejected as irrelevant, since this abstract and arbitrary city has seeped into consciousness and is thus inescapable. For Brás Cubas, who recalls departures and returns, distance only compounds contradictions and divisions already drawn within eccentric consciousness. At the same time, for these and contemporaneous urbane consciousnesses in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s fictions, life in the eccentric city is marked by paradoxically prospective as well as retropective nostalgia for exile.156 Exile would be that forced exit of the dissenter, towards freedom. But Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground authors authorize their own forced freedom. Embedded in the city, their underground represents an internal eccentric exile that frees writing, to reach far beyond marginocentric Petersburg and Rio in later fictions. Like Gogol’s, neither Dostoevsky’s nor Machado de Assis’s eccentrics are all urban characters. Yet Dostoevsky’s Demons and Brothers 155 Cf. Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, 6th edn (Porto Editora, 1992), 191. 156 We find such figures in Machado de Assis’s stories such as ‘Frei Simão’, ‘Confissões’ and ‘Parazita Azul’. On Dostoevsky’s sense of exile, see Jones, in New Essays on Dostoevsky, 10–11.

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Karamazov and Machado de Assis’s Quincas Borba and Dom Casmurro have been read as Petersburg and Rio texts because of the urban discourses and social forms they extend into provincial places, where displacement, delay and disproportion are exaggerated. Reflexive eccentric consciousnesses in the later novels confess formative urban interactions and construct consciously urbane fictions.157 De Jonge points out that Dostoevsky’s interest in intergenerational development and dialogue constitutes at most a ‘psychological’ chronicle.158 Jones argues that Dostoevsky is not a conventional historian but rather chronicler of ‘Ideas’ that are still active, dynamic, continually decentred. Chronology is disrupted in the later novels insofar as ideas that ‘should’ belong to disparate generations and social spheres collide, as genres continue to do. Like Dostoevsky, Machado de Assis plays the part of chronicler and parodies the role.159 Neither is chronicler of socio-historical shifts in the sense defined by Balzac’s Comédie humaine. Rather, Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis eccentrically re-ground genres concerned with generation and inheritance as well as regeneration. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground parodies the model of marriage in both Sentimental Russian literature and Chernyshevsky’s socially progressive What is to be done?; Demons directly and The Brothers Karamazov indirectly parody the relation between literal and ideological fathers and sons drawn out by works such as Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, constructed on a concentric model,160 though fraught with eccentric contradictions, displacements and delay. Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro and Esau and Jacob parody the similarly progressive and degenerate concentric conceptions of family in Eça de Queiróz’s Os Maias. Monas notes how the problems of both ‘filicide’ and ‘parricide’ in Dostoesvky’s work are related to the Petersburg text,161 and we will see anticipations of these acts in the attitudes towards and projected dialogues with anticipated sons in Notes from Underground, with parallels in Posthumous Memoirs. In Dostoevsky’s and Machado’s ‘family’ fictions, old ideas/ generations remain in play, though possibly in a state of decay and certainly dialogically disrupted. New ideas are immediately in as grave a state of disintegration. On the ideological plane of Demons, 157 On Machado de Assis’s later novels as Rio texts, cf. Jorge de Sena’s ‘Machado de Assis and his ‘carioca’ quintet.’ 158 de Jonge, Dostoevsky and the Age of Intensity, 51. 159 Cf. Portela, ‘Machado de Assis, Cronista do Rio de Janeiro.’ 160 Monas, ‘The Idiot as a Petersburg Tale’, 74–5. 161 Ibid., 68.

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as on that of Notes from Underground, the ideas of the 1860s and of the 1840s engage each other directly. Within his larger discussion of rationality and irrationality in Dostoevsky’s Demons, Davidson points to anachronistic ideological dialogues: ‘the very historicity of Pyotr Verkhovensky (a nihilist alive at the right time) draws attention to the lack of historicity in Stavrogin (a Romantic alive at the wrong time)’. In order to claim that ‘the true historical clash is between the generations, between Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky the liberal father and Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky the nihilist son’, he argues that ‘Stavrogin cannot be part of this public political conflict because … he is so closely identified with his “intellectual father” … even though he is the same age as his “intellectual brother” Pyotr whom he comes to oppose’.162 In this reading ideological dialogue between contemporaries is detached from history and public space, but carried on in a scandalous eccentric, private space of consciousness and text. Yet in the novel, Stavrogin’s anachronistic (and paradoxical, self-consciously parodied) romanticism as well as Verkhovensky’s nihilism are directly linked to the eccentric city and its satellites, spaces marked by displaced and delayed ideas. Their arguments play out in text and context. And the son who sends the father out on the road also has an open road ahead. Seeley’s notes a similar temporal ideological compression and displacement in Brothers Karamazov, particularly in relation to Ivan as the ‘last of line’ of Dostoevsky’s ‘philosophizing doubles’. Seeley insists on exploring processes of heredity rather than coexistence, despite a non-chronological development of ideas and ideologies in the novel.163 But modes of telling transform both meaning and means of becoming, as Jones suggests in The Novel of Discord. Though these might have been fictions about development and decay, detection or recognition, paternity in Demons and Brothers Karamazov is recast as rivalry. Both fathers and sons are defined by contraditions. Despite the crime (patricide committed by more than one son in thought), the questions of legitimacy/illegitimacy, of responsibility/irresponsibility, and even of justice must be debated in terms of paradox and parody. Fyodor Karamazov is defined by his scandalous style. Like Brás Cubas’s father, he is Petrine in his prodigality and pretence. He provokes (though one could also say disseminates) paradox. 162 R. M. Davidson, ‘The Devils: The Role of Stavrogin’, in Malcolm Jones and Garth Terry (eds), New Essays on Dostoevsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 100. 163 See F. F. Seeley, ‘Ivan Karamazov’.

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This paradox also marks narrative authority in the later fictions. The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, Quincas Borba and Dom Casmurro are marked by significant self-conscious ‘digression’. The Idiot is sometimes read as failed narrative because of the narrator’s shifts. In Chapter CXXX of Dom Casmurro, Machado de Assis’s narrator paradigmatically apologizes for disorderly fiction, for which he is actually unapologetic, insofar as he, like both underground narrators, leaves his narrative ‘corrected’ only in afterthought, presumably as a function of publication costs, but effectively as a challenge to conventional plotting of cause and effect. The narrators of later fictions partly play the buffoon, and Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis continue to give authority to idiots, madmen and fools. In Crime and Punishment, Demons, and The Idiot we find ourselves in alienated society; in The Brothers Karamazov madness breeds. Manias are fleshed out by many urbane figures in Machado de Assis’s four ‘Carioca’ novels subsequent to Posthumous Memoirs. Eccentrics to an extreme, Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground writers concentrate cultural manias, while offering us an embedded view of degenerate and degenerative eccentric consciousness capable of generating dialogic narrative, regenerating genres and rendering readers more responsible to cultural contradictions. In that they do not obscure the paranoid, parodic and paradoxical productivity of eccentric consciousness, these are peculiarly responsible fictions. But what can these underground writers generate through their pathologically urbane reflections on city and citytext, self and other? Generation in the underground text A letra dá vida.164 The letter gives life.

Romancing the reader The narrators of Notes from Underground and Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas celebrate, somewhat spitefully, their failure to produce offspring in the course of debased sexual encounters. Yet they insist, perhaps as perversely, on the originality and authenticity of the cultural and moral consciousness they produce through similarly deviant verbal intercourse, 164 MPBC, CXXVII.

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actual and literary. From a postmodern standpoint, the underground narrator and Brás Cubas may seem partly justified in redirecting reflexive literary critique to dismantle the reader, but they seem at their worst when they justify in literary terms the words and actions with which they denigrate Liza and Eugênia. Both revise their humiliating treatment of the other through layered lenses of immediate reflection and distant retropection, the underground narrator offering the justification, «Оскорбление, – да ведь это очищение; это самое едкое и больное созание! … Оскорбление возвысит и очистит её … ненавистью … гм … может, и прощением … А, впрочем, лерче ль ей от всего это будет?» А в самом деле: вот я теперь от себя задаю один праздный вопрос: что лучше – дешёвое ли счастие или возвышенные страдания? Ну-ка, что лучше?165 (‘Insult – yes, well, that is purification; that is the most caustic and painful [means of] consciousness! … Insult will elevate and purify her … through hatred … hmmm … maybe even through forgiveness. And, in any case, won’t it be easier for her because of all this?’ But by the way: well, I’ll now ask an empty question of my own: what is better – cheap happiness or sanctification through suffering? Now then, what’s better?)

The narrator’s insistence with the reader undermines the force of what might have been left as monological rhetorical question; but it also implicates the reader in the reasoning process. Like his ellipses, his hesitations and qualifications function as pregnant pauses, giving birth to reflections. The underground narrator also repositions himself as reader and critic when he remarks his immediate and ‘longlasting’ ‘satisfaction’ with his ‘phrase about the usefulness of insult and hatred’ (долго доволен фразой о пользе от оскорбления и ненависти). Through literary analysis, he parodies his stylized justification, insofar as he slants (literally italicizes) his aestheticism, foregrounding it and implying its inadequacy – it is no longer entirely satisfying. At the same time, his turn towards aestheticism both in the past and in a more critically reflective present may also represent an attempt to deflect the reader’s gaze, like his own, from one that would seek out Liza (who has already/long ago disappeared into Petersburg’s muted, snowy streets) as reference point for moral response to his words. 165 DPSS, V, II.xi.177–8.

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Brás Cubas, like others of Machado de Assis’s hero/narrators (Mendonça and Andrade, for instance, in ‘Miss Dollar’), resembles the underground narrator in this continually displaced aesthetic re-valuation of existentially and ethically fraught engagements, with women and (in his case also a female) reader. He abandons Eugênia with a material rather than moral excuse: because she is lame; and he recasts her as a figure in a generalized human tragedy of predetermined natural selection for which he is not in any way responsible, as the underground narrator does not think himself responsible for Petersburg’s prostitutes, etc. Unlacing his boots after returning home, having dissembled to Eugênia about the nature of his departure (though she, like Liza, not only reads through, but calls him on his lies), Cubas reasons perversely, like the underground narrator, that pain gives rise to pleasure and wisdom. His reasoning similarly moves between past and present, replacing the reader and romance on the same plane, where release from suffering (stumbling in painfully tight boots or bumbling prose) results in pleasurable relief.166 The reader, like Eugênia, may be pitied, if similarly permanently hobbled. The role of the reader (another ‘two-bit actor’ in a human tragedy) may be similarly interrogated; reduced to a minor part, the reader’s absence might also ‘send the human tragedy sprawling’.167 The Classical allusion to Epicurus and mock Biblical tone underpinning his assessment lend it a certain authority. Cubas draws out the tone of a literary allusion to Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus with which he has just described his inner conviction to return to the city (ostensibly to pursue the career and marriage his father has suggested to him).168 If that authority is later undermined by admission that he does not pursue those practical aims (the reader remembers he knows that the ‘conversion’ did not take hold by the time he retrospectively employs the metaphor of conviction), it is immediately undercut by his authoritative retrospection (‘from the other shore’), when he cannot quite reconcile past/present inferrence about pain and pleasure with Eugênia’s pitiful existence. His aesthetic claim is undercut also by anticipated resistance from the reader, whom he imagines wanting to speak up for that ‘solitary, silent’ figure. But his engagement of the reader invokes her humane sensitivity, only to redefine a common humanity in aesthetic (dramatic) terms. He counters his reader’s imaginary accusation: 166 MPBC, XXXVI. 167 Ibid. 168 Ibid., XXXV

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Não alma sensível, eu não sou cínico, eu fui homem; meu cérebro foi um tablado em que se deram peças de todo o gênero, o drama sacro, o austero, o piegas, a comédia louçã, a desgrenhada farsa, os autos, as bufonerias, um pandemônio, alma sensível, uma barafunda de coisas e pessoas em que podias ver tudo, desde a rosa de Esmirna até a arruda do teu quintal, desde o magnífico leito de Cleópatra até o recanto da praia em que o mendigo tirita o seu sono … Retira, pois a expressão, alma sensível, castiga os nervos, limpa os óculos, – que isso às vezes é dos óculos, – e acabemos de uma vez com esta flor da moita.169 (No sensitive soul, I am not a cynic, I was a man; my brain was a stage on which plays of every genre were staged, sacred drama, austere tragedy, melodrama, high comedy, rumpled farce, inquisitions [autos-da-fé], buffooneries, pandemonium, sensitive soul, a hodge-podge of things and people in which you could see everything, from the rose of Smyrna to the rue in your garden, from the magnificent bed of Cleopatra to the corner of the beach on which the beggar shivers in/shakes off his sleep … So erase that expression, sensitive soul, castigate your nerves, wipe your glasses – sometimes this is a matter of glasses – and let’s have done once and for all with this blossom in the brush.)

The aestheticization of their engagement allows these underground narrators to dissolve the boundaries of the stage. The reader is staged as part of a human, if not particularly humane drama. Humanity is redefined not in terms of reason, but all those reasons that seem like unreason, motivating different genres, plots. The term ‘genre’ in Portuguese is also the scientific term for genus – so one can imagine a consciousness populated with a variety of both fictions and figures. This may be the staging of a fool’s discourse, ‘full of sound and fury’, full of farce and buffoonery, and marked by suffering and violence, but not, according to Cubas or Machado de Assis, signifying nothing. Should Cubas’s reader protest, she is accused of using distorted or dirty lenses (a way of both implicating and excusing her for blindsided universalism). The reader capable of maintaining a critical distance can counter that this accusation is just an aesthetic deflection or delusion on the part of the fictional author. Such a reader is likely to concur with the narrator’s final conclusions that his failure to reproduce is fortunate, while resisting the figure-distorting mode of calculation, according to which ‘two times two is five’ and negatives add up to positives, since this also recalculates the reader’s worth. By that mode of calculation, the reader’s positive assertions also add up to conventionally blinkered vision. 169 Ibid., XXXIV.

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Brás Cubas’ final recalculation assumes, like the underground narrator’s irrational mathematical and existential summations, a rational framework for the projected reader (this ‘qualquer pessoa’/‘anyone’ who constitutes the ‘everyman’ of his fiction): Somadas umas coisas e outras, qualquer pessoa imaginará que não houve míngua nem sobra, e conseguintemente que saí quite com a vida. E imaginará mal; porque ao chegar a este outro lado do mistério, achei-me com um pequeno saldo, que é a derradeira negativa deste capítulo de negativas: – Não tive filhos, não transmiti a nenhuma criatura o legado da nossa miséria170 (Having added this and that, anyone will imagine that there was neither shortage nor surplus, and that, therefore, I made it out even with life. And he will imagine wrong; because having arrived at this other side of the mystery, I found myself with a small balance, which is the last negative in this chapter of negatives: I had no children, transmitted to no creature the legacy of our misery.)

In literary terms, this standard framework is that of the Romantic Realist novel, in the Balzacian tradition, according to whose formula (that sum of a social climb and family, less moral costs), Brás Cubas appears less vested than a Goriot or Rastignac. He pays few dues for socio-economic privilege and racial bias. He seems to come out in the clear only insofar as he achieves nothing by them. At death, he is relatively clearsighted and detached, while Goriot is blinded, then lucid but raving, having overvalued a worthless attachment to daughters who disdain him once he has served the social aims that also necessitate their disdain. In both his lived life and literary afterlife, Cubas recognizes the problems with leaving behind an inheritance (in this negative economy, a contribution to moral bankruptcy). But his bankruptcy, unproductivity and impotence in life not only constitute an ironically moral legacy (deconstructing arbitrary authority in Brasil); they give rise to an ethical poetics. Cubas does more than change the value of signs and figures in the equation (inputting negatives rather than positives, alienation rather than attachment). He changes the dynamics of the equation: continually reimagining how the sum should be calculated, bracketing different terms, reversing directions. His recalculation represents not only a negation of the reader’s expectations (like the underground narrator, he is admitted ‘anti-hero’ and dissembling, digressive memoirist), but 170 Ibid., CLX.

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also a negation of his own position as reader earlier in the text, giving birth to himself as romantic hero and romantically imagining giving birth to a son. Cubas recalls how he imagined his son (in the womb at the time) bringing him to tears by fulfilling his own conventionally defined social aspirations. As he envisions the boy, his son turns from his mother’s breast to immediately become lawyer, author, dandy. This son, as embryo, already has ‘todos os tamanhos e gestos’ (every size and gesture) and is ‘interminável nos limites de um quarto de hora’ (interminable within the limits of a quarter of an hour).171 Present and future are explicitly collapsed within a dialogue with his son.172 Time is further collapsed by recollection that represents a dialogue between past and present, a recollected ‘diálogo com o embrião’ (dialogue with the embryo) that he recasts in terms of an even more ancient past, ‘o velho colóquio de Adão e Caim’ (the old conversation of Adam and Cain), ‘uma conversa sem palavras entre a vida e a vida, o mistério e o mistério’ (a conversation without words between life and life, mystery and mystery).173 This definition of dialogue gives us a sense on the one hand of the integrity he ascribes to each interlocutor, known always from the outside, as mystery, their ‘life’ defined in dialogic terms. On the other hand, theirs are old, if not worn-out, words and silences, so that their dialogue can be described only in literary terms. It can be parodied because of its apparent trans-temporality as cliché. A discontinuous sense of time (or real, historical time) seems to be re-established by the arc of disillusionment, marking a break between remote or even recent past (the time when he projected the future and when he recalled having done so) and this final moment of reflective narration. Desire seems to turn into desirable failure/refusal to reproduce, in a way that seems to mark a development of character, paralleled in both actual life and that second life of writing. Yet just as he immediately and continually interrogates the generic conventions critical to his literary production, Cubas parodies his romantic conjuring of his son already in both ‘past’ moments of dialogue with his son and earlier dialogue with himself about that dialogue with his son. Conversely, even as his final reflective sentences seem to definitively abort his romantic idealization of child or literary life, Cubas’s writing fleshes out and carries on his vision, embodying in its structure 171 Ibid., XC. 172 Ibid. 173 Ibid.

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and language both romantic and parodic forms and gestures. If not a literal Cain, he gives birth to a kind of murderous, marked writing, with the same strange promise of survival and progeny attached to its disfigurement and disengagement. Cubas compares himself to both Adam and Moses – on the one hand, an ‘original’ man who is also made ‘in the image of’ and who names things (in his case, calling them out by not naming them),174 but also liberator and leader of a people heading towards a land he sees only as promise, from the perspective of lawgiver and chronicler, defining the nation from a literal and historical margin. In order to give birth to an original text, Cubas redefines these margins: his narrative explicitly begins and ends with the death that concludes Moses’s chronicle.175 More interestingly, it charts a parallel afterlife as much as life, marked by privilege predicated on lies, by authority expressed with Mosaic stuttering, delay, digression. Cubas also has to contend, like Moses, with a refractory people, displaced and disgruntled, carrying with them to their promised land the ways of an alien culture: The text, written ‘from the other side’ is addressed to a people who have not made the crossing, who are still in the desert or ‘see through a glass darkly’ – to the blurry-eyed, bespectacled romantic reader ‘who imagines wrong’. Cubas recognizes how his digressive writing resembles the dialogue with the child he will not actually have and may seem to his actual reader, as his conversations with her womb seem to Virgília, a kind of disregard for those actually present before him.176 But precisely this disregard provokes critical response from the other as well as self-critique. With introspective dialogues about dialogues, Cubas’s parodic imagining instigates a looking outward ‘beyond the tip of his own nose’.177 The resistance of the imagined other returns him to the actual other. Cubas recognizes his dependence on Virgília to realize his romancing, as well as the freedom of Virgília to abort or abscond with his actual child or story, as that of the reader to abandon his pages or adapt his meaning. His final recalculations facing Virgília on his deathbed at the opening of the narrative and facing the reader at the close of the narrative represent paradoxical re-engagement through an apparently disengaged internal dialogue. In the final sentences of the narrative, he distances himself from the reader with an authority based on the advantage of ‘absolute’ 174 Ibid., cf. LV. 175 Ibid., I. 176 Ibid., XC. 177 Ibid., XLIX.

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retrospection (on the ‘other side of the mystery’); but he also repositions himself alongside the reader by reasserting as common denominator ‘nossa miséria’ (‘our wretchedness’). The apparent pessimism of that final denominator is mitigated by the qualifier, which suggests restored communion with the reader, in a less romanticized but potentially productive engagement. The father in ‘Teoria do Medalhão. Diálogo’ notes to his son in a discourse meant to guard his son against any original thought: ‘o adjetivo é a alma do idioma, a sua porção idealista e metafísica. O substantivo é a realidade nua e crua, é o naturalismo do vocabulário’ (‘the adjective is the soul of the idiom, its idealistic and metaphysical portion. The substantive is reality naked and raw; it is the naturalism of language’).178 Immediately following a list of clichéd, ambivalent adjectival ‘distinctions’ that the father imagines uttered about his son at the peak of his powers and on the heels of recommendations that his son use only the most commonplace of literary allusions (Romantic, Realist and Classical) and, better yet, ‘frases feitas, as locuções convencionais, as fórmulas consagradas pelos anos, incrustadas na memória individual e pública’179 (‘ready-made phrases, conventional locutions, the formulas consecrated by years, incrusted in individual and public memory’), this definition of language reads as parody. This exact copying of conventionally conjugated substantives and qualifiers generates nothing substantial. But through parodic play – digressive copying – both Brás Cubas and Machado de Assis connect with their readers to produce lively critical reflections on a culture in which both are, in different ways, complicit. Each digressively dialogically realized consciousness in the narrative retains its autonomy and ambivalence. It is also authorially double-voiced. Cubas’s self-authored parody paradoxically authorizes Machado de Assis’s authorial irony and ambivalence. The underground narrator similarly parodies Romantic idealizations of literal progeny and literary production. But neither his idealizations, nor his negations are as fully realized as those of Brás Cubas, who actually conceives a child, though the child is miscarried180 and who publishes, though hardly succeeds as a professional writer. Though imaginatively conceived in the course of a sexual encounter, the child the underground narrator envisions has no basis in reality, but only in Romanticism. It is conjured aloud rather than privately, both to comfort and to taunt Liza, 178 Contos, I, 335. 179 Ibid. 180 Cf. MPBC, XCV.

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whose romantic desire can momentarily displace his. Engaging Liza’s romantic imagination through a rhetorical dialogue, he depicts a loving bond between husband and wife transformed by the obligating presence of children, provoking a sense of responsibility and a different kind of response: ‘чувствуешь, что ты им пример, что ты им поддержка; […] Как тут не сойтись тесней отцу с матерью?’181 (you feel that you are an example to them, that you are a support; … How here can a mother and father not grow closer together?). Paradoxically, the child exposes and expresses a ‘terrible’ love, ironically denoted in the narrator’s response to his question: Любишь ты маленьких детей, Лиза? я ужасно люблю.182 (Do you love little children, Liza? I love them terribly). The terrible aspects of love in this imagined scene are elaborated through silence, laughter, a biting gaze … all cast as something already known (or, in Machado de Assis’s terms, ‘conventional’ and ‘consecrated’, ‘incrusted’ in ‘individual and collective’ consciousness): Знаешь – розовенький такой мальчик, грудь тебе сосёт, да у какого мужа сердце повернётся на жену, гляда, как она с его ребёнком сидит! Ребёночек розовенький, пухленький, раскинется, нежится; ножки-ручки наливные, ноготочки чистенькие, маленькие, такие маленькие, что глядеть смешно, глазки, точно уж он всё понимает. А сосёт – грудь тебе ручонкой теребит, играет. Отец подоидёт, – оторвётся от груди, перегнётся весь назад, посмотрит на отца, засмеётся – точно уж и бог знает как смешно, – и опять, опять сосать примётся. А то возьмёт, да и прикусит матери грудь, коль уж зубки прорезываются, а сам глазёнками-то косит на неё: «Видишь, прикусил!» Да разве не всё тут счастье, когда они трое, муж, жена и ребёнок, вместе? За эти минуты много можно простить’ (You know – a rosy little boy like that, sucks at your breast, and what husband’s heart can turn on his wife as he sees how she sits with his child!  A rosy, chubby, little boy stretches out and snuggles; his little hands and feet are pudgy; his little nails are clean and tiny, so tiny that it is funny to see, his little eyes [look] just as if he understands everything. As he suckles, he tugs with his little hand at your breast, playing. His father approaches, he tears himself from your breast, bends himself back, looks at his father, breaks into a laugh – God only knows how it’s funny – and again, again he latches on to suck. Or else he’ll up and bite his mother’s breast, if he’s already cutting teeth, while glancing sideways at her with his little eyes [as if to say]: ‘See, I bit you!’ Now isn’t all this 181 DPSS, V, II.vi.158. 182 Ibid.

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here happiness, when all three, husband, wife, and child, are together? For these moments a lot can be forgiven.)

This image of family happiness might seem innocent, were it not for the context in which we read it – not only as part of a dialogue following debauchery in the backroom of a brothel or explicitly generated by a desire to debase self and other, but even within its own strictly literary context. Cynicism shadows the underground narrator’s interrogative affirmation to Liza, in which child mediates mute affection rather than a husband’s habitual wrath. In emphasizing the point that the child guarantees forgiveness, the underground narrator indicates the necessity for repairing the relationship from which the child is born. The child is not entirely innocent either, his gaze fraught with a version of that murderous intent inherent in Cubas’s retrospective recasting. When the infant turns from his mother’s breast, at which he playfully tugs and bites, to stare directly at his father, and when he looks at his mother sideways after having bit her, what his impudent eyes ‘already know’ is the pathological and paradoxical nature of loving relationships as the underground narrator has just described them in projected domestic scenes, in which love is communicated by inflicting pain that can occasion reconciliation.183 The child’s ‘sideways glance’ is disconcertingly like that which Bakhtin recognizes in the underground narrator. It is as much a reflection of the underground man’s self-image, of his contradictory desires and needs as that which he sees in the mirror moments before imagining this child.184 In other words, the child is cast by the underground narrator as both redeemer and rival. The child’s ambivalent laughter is not so distant from his own. Modified by the expression ‘God only knows’, it inverts the similarly indeterminate ‘what the devil’ sort of phrase he applies to himself. The child is as malleable and recalcitrant as writing for the underground narrator. His image of the child, as Liza notes, is wholly literary construction.185 Like the romantic narrative in which he is a player and like fragments of actual romances that the narrator has also imaginatively conceived and even begun to write down, the idea of child is aborted before brought to term: child, before Liza can become too attached to it as possibility, let alone reality; writing, before it is even finished, let alone sent off to be published. In the remembered timeframe 183 Cf. DPSS, V, II.vi.157–8. 184 Cf. Matlaw, ‘Structure and Integration …’, 170. 185 ‘Что-то вы … точно как по книге’ (DPSS, V, II.vi.159).

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of the novel, the underground narrator is incapable of bringing into being either child or work that would bear the imprint of progenitor/creator: his ‘image and likeness’ [образ и подобие]. Parodically, the underground narrator’s discourse, like Brás Cubas, recalls Biblical creation, copying its claims and co-opting its verbal method. But the underground man, breaking off his narrative (prospective and retrospective), reflects on an incapacity or unwillingness to fulfill his part of this ‘great obligation’ [великий долг] that would produce something capable of ‘carrying on [his] ideas and thoughts’ [чувства и мысли твои носить на себе], once he has died and/or cannot speak for himself.186 He himself seems to recognize, like Bakhtin, that he cannot get outside himself. Critically conscious, if also moved by the pathos of his ‘literary’ projection, the underground narrator recognizes in his imagined (and imaginatively aborted) child, as in his writing, a form of self-parody, where nothing can perdure. Yet the child is imaginatively realized and aborted in the context of an actual dialogue in which parody provokes interest, both concern and self-concern, in Liza – and, on the plane of retrospective reflexive narration, in both the narrator and his projected and real readers. The implanted seed survives. The little writing that he makes public prior to his retreat underground as well as his underground writing similarly survive through parody. As does Brás Cubas’s writing, though his parody is differently perverse and productive. Their (re)casting of lover and child may parallel their different cast of readers and writing. The underground narrator casts himself as antagonized by a reader whom he casts as rival, like Liza and the peers he earlier imagines as having fixed him in their imagination. Brás Cubas more casually describes this ‘final edition’ that he is writing as opportunity to define himself from the outside rather than to be defined, to act simultaneously as author, editor, reader and critic.187 Both cast imagined reader, like recollected lover and projected child, as conventional. But Cubas realizes his desire for writing to the same greater degree that he realizes his desire for a real child – that is, he purports to actually engage the reader in his project and seems to watch it begin to gestate in the mind of the reader, whereas the underground man even before the fact of conception sees the failure of the full-grown child and finished text and immediately revokes his promise of such finalization. Cubas anticipates the publication of his memoirs, even if 186 DPSS, V, II.vi.158. 187 MPBC, XXVII.

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they will only be read by a handful of readers, while the underground narrator insists on the impossibility of publication and unreality of his reader, reduced to mere device. Readers in both cases are cast as resisting their own casting within the text. The narrators’ respective modes of relating to their readers, mirroring their relation to actual interlocutors (particularly those with whom they are most intimate), are consciously paradoxical and paranoid. Cubas relates to his reader as he does to Virgília, recognizing her freedom to come and go, in part as a means of convincing her to stay. He cajoles, reasons with, plays devil’s advocate with, sometimes disdains his reader. In contrast, the underground narrator more grudgingly admits his readers’ and Liza’s autonomy, more admittedly mocks their romantic delusions, and tries to seduce or hold them more aggressively. As with Liza (as much a rival as any other figure in the text), his circling with the reader might be understood in terms of a duel. He is forever challenging his readers, telling them (‘gentlemen’) to stay still. Similarly, his ‘dialogues’ with Zverkov, Apollon and Liza are punctuated with demands that they ‘stand still’, ‘turn around’ to face him, and ‘answer’ him.188 The underground narrator’s, like Cubas’s, is full of stops and starts, unfinished, abandoned, digressive thoughts; but the breaks are more constant and the turns unremitting, whereas Cubas sustains dialogues longer. Both plots (basically chronologically recounted) are similarly interrupted in terms of the readers’ confusion and contradictory recasting of reader as confidant, collaborator, unconscionable and/or unconscious, but also authoritative critic. The underground narrator consciously gives birth to the reader and recognizes the reader as his own reflection. His imaginary interlocutor bears his imprint and that of the city. But the narrator also declaims the illegitimacy of this reader. This illegitimacy lies in the literary nature of the reader, in the reader’s unreflective reflection – i.e., his reflection of an unreflective culture. It has to do with a reader whose life is copied out of a book (a poor translation or stylization at that) and reads only in terms of conventions, whose life is plotted. In contrast, the narrator frames his legitimacy and originality in terms of critically distorted reflection. Paradoxically, that critical reflection or consciousness is also a reflection of Petersburg’s eccentric culture – a reflection of a reflective 188 We may note how repeated commands/appeals to the reader echo those made to Apollon and Liza in the final scenes recounted by the narrator: стой! воротись! отвечай! (DPSS, II.viii.169, II.ix.173).

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(copied) culture carried to the extreme of refraction and reflexivity. The city gives birth to both the underground narrator and his interlocutors, as it does to Brás Cubas and his readers. Generated through a kind of digressive and deviant, retrospective and reflexive romancing of the city, the underground narrator also recognizes the reader, like Brás Cubas, as a kind of ‘baroque’ and/or ‘cannibalistic’ creation, born already fully formed and free. Rather than just perversely introspective, underground engagement of the reader might also be read as incest. In any case, this imagined intercourse is as perverse and conventional as that with lovers in these texts. Yet imagined and actual readers, as seemingly constrained as those women in these paternalistic texts, can similarly resist rationalizations, break with romantic rationale, critique their own and the narrators’ literariness and speak through silences in the text. Women have remarkable agency in these underground narratives. Liza’s final, unexpected remark in the text is one that registers only after her departure, when the narrator, having half-heartedly run and called after her to make an apology, returns to his apartment and remarks his returned banknote. However he chooses to recast his own or her actions, his registered surprise at this resistance (noted emphatically in the reiterated question: Что ж? я мог ожидать, что она это сделает. Мог ожидать? Нет. [What was this? I could have expected that she would do this. Could I have expected it? No.]189) represents her free response to both his romancing and reflection. Her gesture, a silent but resonating speech act, resists and interrogates his literary (negating) anti-romance (his giving her the banknote having been, he notes, a wholly ‘assumed, cerebral, purposely contrived, bookish’ cruelty190). What she has ‘said’ reverberates in the text as a dissonantly creative note, to which his voice responds again and again (in a structure of call and answer, recall and response that is paradoxically imitative and improvised, original in its combinations). This structure anticipates later modernist and postmodern literary and musical constructions, polyphonic and atonal. The underground narrator, in fact, first casts the story he recounts in musical terms, since it recurs to him ‘like a vexing recurring motif, which does not want to stop nagging’ him – or literally, which does not want to unwind, unbend, unfasten or shake itself off (как досадный 191). When музыкальный мотив, который не хочет отвязаться  189 DPSS, V, II.x.177. 190 ‘Эта жестокость была да того напускная, до того головная, нарочно подсочинённая, книжная …’ (DPSS, V, II.x.177, italics in the original). 191 DPSS, V, I.xi.123.

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questioning his own motives for composing these written notes, at the end of the first part of the narrative, he concludes ‘there may even be a thousand reasons’ (Причин может быть и тысяча), even opposing ones, among them the possibility of ‘augment[ing] his style. Or else: perhaps, [of] really gain[ing] relief in the course of writing things out’ (слогу прибавится. Кроме того: может быть, я от записывания действительно получу облегчение). 192 This musical motif not only bends through his consciousness, but he is bent around it, as agency shifts in the continuation of his thought: ‘it is necessary to unwind myself’ (надобно от него отвязаться193). This statement not only anticipates that late Tolstoian sense of music that infects, bothers and bends the mind, provoking desire and murderous intent.194 There is also the correlation between music, memory, desire, debauchery and writing that is later dramatized in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.195 Here the narrator, unlike Proust’s Marcel, seems to want to be freed from the refrain through writing (and freed from his various pathologies); at the same time, like Proust’s narrator he courts nagging memories to generate writing. The paradoxical possession and self-possession of the madman are evident in this verbal play. Remembering here, as in Proust’s work, is involuntary, insofar as this motif presents itself to the narrator (припомнилась оно мне) and ‘does not want to unwind itself’ (не хочет отвязаться). That is, memory has agency of its own. It guarantees the agency and autonomy of the voice it remembers. But the narrator’s verbal turns, even when expressing his need or desire to free himself, constitute a kind of winding around memory. This winding around memory to unravel it both deconstructs and reconstructs memory – the particular memory and memory as a more abstract domain or dynamic. The narrator’s refractory, refractive writing depends as much, if more negatively so, on this plaguing motif as will Swann’s story and Marcel’s. It involves relating an affair as sordid in its intentions, misapprehensions, etc. But there will be a difference in Proust’s use of musical motifs and memory, marked by an alternation and accretion of meaning over time. This motif, though remembered by the underground narrator, contains dissonance already in the past and again in the present, distinguishable 192 Ibid. 193 Ibid. 194 That is, related to Tolstoy’s views in the later period of What is Art? and of ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. 195 In critical and fictional works, Proust relates both his own and his narrating protagonist’s development as writers to their reading of Dostoevsky.

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only by ideological notation or expression, the narrator’s understanding of the nature of this music, and its potential to extend the composition. Its reverberations have to do with simultaneous counterpoint. It is in the immediacy of different intentions, in dialogues with both Liza and the reader, in remembered life and reflexive writing, that we find the peculiar nature of eccentric modernist consciousness. As the narrator attests after noting his potentially countless contradictory motives for writing: Тут, впрочем, целая психология 196 (Here, by the way, is a whole psychology.)

Of course, these pathological narrators may be as respectively unsuccessful in seducing and sustaining a relationship with readers as with lovers. In keeping with their recalculation of losses in love and life, both blame anticipated failure to generate a viable text on the reader. Cubas’s dialogue with the reader, at first glimpse, is less paranoid and less alienating. Like Poprishchin, he seems to be romancing the reader by offering legitimizing literary precedents, placing himself in the rank of contenders. He casts his readers as a future reality and not merely other self to which diary is written or the ‘negative’ device the underground denotes as a means of making self honest (generating answerability). The tone adopted towards the reader is generally conciliatory, explicating unexpected narrative turns, apologizing for digressions, questioning defiant narrative strategies, signalling returns to convention or recalling lost connections, establishing common ground. Cubas argues, more convincingly than Dostoevsky’s narrator, that underground consciousness has no interest in being refractory. He makes the case that the dead narrator is digressive as a function of indifferent sincerity; he has no stake in representing himself to social advantage. Thus, he contends that he willingly gives up to the reader, to the critics and to the worms this ‘final edition’.197 Yet even as his appeal to the reader seems sincere, involving self-critique of lived and literary deviance (as the underground narrator’s critique can also seem for a turn or two in a sentence), Cubas’s narrative turns against the reader: Começo a arrepender-me deste livro … cheira a sepulcro, traz certa contração cadavérica; vício grave, e alias ínfimo, porque o maior defeito deste livro és tu, leitor. Tu tens pressa de envelhecer, e o livro anda devagar; tu amas a narração direita e nutrida, o estilo regular e fluente, 196 DPSS, V, I.xi.123. 197 MPBC, XXVII.

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e este livro e o meu estilo são como os ébrios, guinam à direita e à esquerda, andam e param, resmungam, urram, gargalham, ameaçam o céu, escorregam e caem … E caem! Folhas misérrimas do meu cipreste, heis de cair …’198 (I begin to regret this book … it smells of the tomb, has a certain cadaverous contraction, a grave vice, alas the most infamous, because the greatest defect of this book is you, reader. You are in a hurry to grow old, and the book moves slowly; you love straight and sustained narration, regular and fluent style, and this book and my style are like drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, start and stop, grumble, groan, guffaw, threaten the sky, slip and fall … And fall! Miserablest leaves of my cypress, you will fall …)

Cubas frequently reiterates his regret with respect to the project of writing and his promise to correct or erase irrelevant, incoherent, morally or stylistically unconventional chapters (cf. Chapter XVI, framed as ‘correção de estilo’ [correction of style]; XLV as notes to ‘capitulo triste e vulgar que não escrevo’ [sad and ordinary chapter that I won’t write]; Chapter XCVIII). In this passage, he sets up self-critique by recollecting the tomb (locating responsibility for the degeneracy and disintegration of narrative in dead consciousness), elsewhere by pointing out his reclusiveness or recognizing moral depravity and mental disintegration. But through subtle and sometimes sudden turns of speech, Cubas turns his invective against the reader. He realigns the reader with the grave, with deviance (vice) and defect. The reader’s fatal failure is measured in terms of time, tempo and his traversing of space – uninterrupted, linear and logical. The reader is cast as serious, sober and straight; while the text is staggering and scandalous, cadaverous or drunk. But the awkwardly slipping, grumbling, groaning, guffawing, gesturing text is authentic. The reader is not, unless he too digresses; despite the fact that Cubas’s critique becomes all the more vicious when the reader is caricaturized as critic (in his chapter on the Bibliômano/ Bibliomaniac, LXXII). The critique of the other is also self-critique, insofar as one actual reader and critic represented in the text is Cubas himself. As a young man, he reads and self-consciously stylizes Romantic and Realist narratives. Later, he does so more cynically, as published writer. The contradictory construction of himself as reader, writer and critic is achieved through Gogolian verbal juxtapositions (he is ‘buliçoso’ and ‘apático’, caught 198 Ibid., LXXI.

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between ‘ambição’ and ‘desânimo’), metaphor, and comically qualifying language. (We hear echoes of Gogolian satire in the ‘certain reputation of polemicist and poet’ he achieves199.) As much as his projected readers, he embeds his own consciousness within infertile urban context and literary convention. As he reads and reinterprets earlier chapters in his memoir, he also acknowledges himself as reader/critic, even as he anticipates other readings. As a critic continually analysing his own and others’ style, lived and literary, Cubas is as concerned with originality as the bibliomaniac is with possessing, rather than understanding, the original. But this originality is paradoxically affirmed by reframing our concepts of origins, authenticity and authority – no longer defined in terms of contiguity or coherence. The continual promises to emend or erase differences of style are ones that Brás Cubas contradicts in practice. Schizophrenic narrative becomes the assertion of self, of an original style – a way of generating a kind of narrative or memory (that essentially, definitively humanizing capacity) that is exemplar unico. The uniqueness of this exemplar lies in its contra-diction, continually re-placing the reader in relation to the text, re-placing expectations through intertextual contrast. Each reading is its own life, generating other editions. Admittedly unproductive in conventional terms (anti-heroes), both the underground narrator and Brás Cubas suggest that by turning inward they can at least produce an unrivalled, original, final, singular but not single ‘edition’ of themselves. They justify their retrospective and reflexive turns both to themselves and to another reader by defining a different aim for ‘introspective’ narration. They start with the reader’s expectations, noting that rather than generation, confession or memoir might instigate a kind of regeneration. But they admit that any attempt to achieve redemption through repentance inherent in true confession is compromised by a more perverse tendency to rationalize or aestheticize the self in their own eyes or those of the reader, to achieve justification through false confession.200 While the 199 ‘Escrevia política e fazia literature. Mandava artigos e versos para as folhas públicas e cheguei a alcançar certa reputação de polémista e de poeta’ (MPBC, XLVII). Cf. Melquior on these stylistic strategies in Machado’s work. 200 While Bakhtin calls this an ‘authentic confession’ (PDP, 152), he does not find it redemptive (154); rather he characterizes the confessions of Dostoevsky’s line of underground characters, including Stavrogin and Ivan, as failed (152). For readings of false or parodied confession in Dostoevsky’s fictions, cf. Barbara Howard’s ‘The Rhetoric of Confession’, SEEJ 25:4 (Winter 1981), 16–33, and Robin Feuer Miller’s ‘Dostoevsky

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titles and opening lines of these fictions seem to align them with literary traditions informed by retrospection, their dialogue with the reader, dialogue with the self, and self-conscious parody of generic conventions continually return the narrative to the present. These narrators remember no essentially different past self, no qualitatively different way of relating to others. Their narratives are dead-ended in the sense that there is no demonstrable development in the consciousness of either hero during his forty-odd years of lived life. Rosenshield makes the case for Dostoevsky’s underground narrator,201 and Fanger, pointing out the eccentricity of the underground, characterizes it as ‘not a Petersburg story but existence’.202 Cubas remains consistent with the tyrannical, indulged and self-indulgent, but critically acute and self-aware child that he remembers being; he is consistent in his jabs, merely shifting subjects and instrument from the time he rides his slave and strikes him with his toy sword. The lived life of both leads nowhere but underground and grave characterized by the same contradictory, divided consciousness, conscious bias and debased conscience, reflecting cultural divisions and contradictions. Despite these narrator’s claims that in the underground and in the tomb there is nothing left to hide, there is also no new realization, in the sense of philosophical or moral development, either instigated by crossing these seemingly ‘finalizing’ thresholds or in the time ‘lived’ within the underground. The act of writing is the only apparent difference or consequence of crossing that threshold, but they have also written before. However, there is a narrative surplus or positive, which lies in writing. When Cubas claims that ‘the letter gives life’,203 his apparent inversion and Rousseau: The Morality of Confession Reconsidered’. Howard argues that the underground narrator’s ‘use of rhetoric to combat rhetoric threatens to deprive the underground man’s experiment of its validity’, making a case for confession that can succeed only if unselfconscious or ‘pure form’, ‘empty form’, ‘whereas the underground narrator’s confession is infected by consciousness and by vanity’ (64–5). Miller’s critique of Dostoevskian confession similarly links inauthenticity to literary consciousness capable of ‘outraging’ an audience through ‘indecent exposure’ (85–6). See also Matlaw’s comparative reading of Dostoevskian confession in terms of Muffat’s Confessions d’un enfant du siècle (‘Structure and Integration …’, 164–5). For a more extensive critical engagement, see my ‘Unorthodox Confession, Orthodox Conscience: Aesthetic Authority in the Underground’. 201 Cf. Rosenshield, ‘The Fate of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man …’ and ‘Rationalism, Motivation, and Time …’. 202 Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 179–81. 203 MPBC, CXXVII.

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of the Biblical differentiation between letter and spirit is instructive. If survival and surplus do not lie in writing instigated by or occasioning repentance or some kind of psychological or historical realization – in conversion, currative or corrective, providing relief – then one might anticipate some aesthetic realization, leading up to or during the time of narration. But these retrospective accounts, unlike Proust’s, do not circle back towards the beginning of the narrative in the same sense of generating that writing or recounting a life that results in a writer’s afterlife. What these writers write in the underground is markedly similar to what they wrote while alive, parodic and paradoxical, antagonistically directed at re-reading and reforming readers. Their writing does not change in the course of writing. While acknowledging that they write under temporal pressures – another forty years of arguing with imaginary critics and the forty days or years it will take worms to eat up a decaying body or chew their way through the pages of a book abandoned by critics to a library’s dusty shelves – these pressures are as artificial as the lives they do not in fact chronicle. Chronology is superseded by analogy, digression and contradiction. The anti-narrator, like anti-hero, develops through unresolved intertextual dialogue. There are external referents, and some texts are other editions of the self. But all these texts sit together on the ‘critic’s’ shelf in that disorder that Brodsky denotes in memory’s ‘library’ in ‘A Room and a Half’. In acknowledging this disorderly reading and provoking a disorderly reader, these narrators are more eccentric and modern than Gogol’s mad narrator, who engaged in direct dialogue with the reader only in the last moments of his narrative, the closing of the circle that represents an opening. In Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground narratives, this open-ended dialogue is present from the beginning of the narrative, and the point of the narrative is to sustain and expand this opening. It is an opening framed by an eccentric city read as copied text. For the reader who seeks an origin for their original eccentric textuality, these narrators trace the confines and contradictory freedom of their respective undergrounds through digressive rambling in the city. Refractory and refractive rambling in the city At first glance, these need not be read as citytexts. Their titles speak abstractly of space and time, not concretely of place and history. But they do suggest eccentricity, linked in authorial notes and the texts themselves to the eccentric city. The designation of Dostoevsky’s fiction

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Figure 39  The Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg, Russia. Stereograph published by The United States Stereograph, 1908.

echoes the paradox of Gogol’s title, ‘underground’ implying as much as distance as ‘notes’ implies intimacy with the reader. Dostoevsky invited comparison by echoing the term ‘notes’ (записки). But his repositioning of authorship is not so immediately controversial insofar as it does not necessarily undermine authority by displacing it into this alienated space, which we do not yet know as the domain of consciousness marked by contradiction and pathological obsession. The impossibility inherent in Machado de Assis’s title is less apparent. The generic framing as ‘memoirs’ (though the Portuguese term ‘memorias’ may also simply mean ‘memories’) similarly posits intimate recollection, possible confession. This settling of or with the past seems only more firmly fixed by the designation ‘posthumous’, a temporal marker that the reader takes as a fictional editor’s or the actual author’s (Machado de Assis’s) mark, merely a reference to publication. The added chronotopic distance implied by posthumous publication need not in any way adversely affect the text. It seems as neutral as the naming of Brás Cubas and both might serve as a guarantee of greater authority. But the titles of both Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s fictions are authorized by and re-authored within the text more directly than Gogol’s. The narrators of these fictions themselves define their literal and literary space, the underground man titling the first part of his narration ‘underground’ and Brás Cubas explicating that these are not posthumously published memoirs but the memoirs of a posthumous author. The underground man recognizes the eccentricity that his author or

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Figure 40  Gala Day in Busy Streets of Rio de Janeiro. Stereograph published by the Keystone View Company, n.d.

fictional editor remarks, even while he echoes (in his conclusion, but also in his early digression on Petersburg) the author’s claim about his cultural embeddedness and necessity. Like Gogol’s narrator, he makes our standing less certain by having his own alienation in view. He sees his alienation far more clearly, constantly confronting himself, even as he views himself inconsistently, in the sense that he sees from varied vantage points. Thus, from the infamous opening of his narrative he remaps his distance in terms of disease (physiological/psychological), deviance (spiritual/moral), and insufferable difference (sociological/ material): Я человек больной … я злой человек. Непривликательный я человек (much debated by translators,204 this might be rendered, ‘I am a sick man … I am an evil/spiteful man. I am an unattractive man’). He develops each of these dimensions through contradictory perspectives that render his consciousness all the more eccentric, even while continually reconnecting it to the city and citytext. With his redefinition of posthumous writing, Brás Cubas immediately reveals an eccentricity we did not recognize in his own title, destabilizing us more disconcertingly. Yet he also relocates this perspective within eccentric cultural context, unearthing eccentric literary subtexts and returning us from entombed consciousness to tombstone on the outskirts of Rio, skirted by first sketchy characters. In their respective footnote and prefatory note, the actual authors recognize the capacity of these fictional authors to 204 Cf. Pevear’s preface to his translation of Notes from Underground, xxii–iii.

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cross literal and literary boundaries, partly to show how these territories are bound together. Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis, unlike Gogol, face their fictional authors within their inserted notes, blurring the line between the fictional and the actual. They do so to distance themselves. But they also recognize the cultural viability of these internal authorial voices by engaging them in dialogue. The first, well-known lines of both Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s narratives suggest the schizophrenic nature of the texts, involving hesitation, doubt, contradiction, spite. Dostoevsky’s self-conscious narrator also directly frames underground consciousness (both the subject of narration and narrating subject) as pathological and urbane. He appropriates the designation of disease in the opening lines and the designation of place in the subtitle as his own. Having just performed one of his adroit shufflings back and forth between fictive frame and framed fiction, asking what/who will be the subject of his writing at the end of the first chapter of Part I, he offers his most renown reflection on the interrelation of physical and psychological space: Клянусь вам, господа, что слишком сознавать – это болезнь, настоящая, полная болезнь. Для человеческого обихода слишком было бы достаточно обыкновенного человеческого сознания, то есть в половину, в четверть меньше той порции, которая достается на долю развитого человека нашего несчастного девятнадцатого столетия и сверх того, имеющего сугубое несчастье обитать в Петербурге, самом отвлеченном и умышленном городе на всем земном шаре. (Города бывают умышленные и неумышленные.)205 (I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, an actual, full-fledged sickness. For customary human existence, ordinary human consciousness would be more than sufficient; that is, a half, a quarter of that portion that falls to the lot of a developed man in our unfortunate nineteenth century and [who] has, moreover, the particular misfortune of residing in Petersburg, the most abstract and premeditated city on the entire globe. (Cities can be premeditated or unpremeditated.))

Petersburg’s abstraction and intentionality underpins his pathological perspective. It likewise structures his premeditated prose. He argues, at various points, that his writing is peculiarly authentic memoir insofar as it digressively pursues unpremeditated lines of retrospection and reflection. Yet he premeditates this unpremeditated digression and predicates his authority also on meditating consciousness, underpinning conscience. 205 DPSS, I.ii.101.33–41.

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On the other hand, as a function of this conscience, the underground man is the first to problematize the ethics of his narrative construction not only on the ideological and sociological planes, but also the aesthetic. His pause in writing at the end of Part II follows recognition that his narrative might be neither confessional nor the agent of conversion; nevertheless, he continues to write. Insofar as we recall this, his continued writing at the end of the novel, cut off by the actual author, also lies within the aesthetic scope of the novel. He admits to those aberrant aspects associated with the inward turn of the modern novel: the real social alienation of narrators in the urban landscape they internalize, their apparently solipsistic retreat into retrospection, their pathologically obsessive memory and paranoid reflexivity. He accuses himself of moving in a vicious circle in his underground and in Petersburg itself. When he looks in the mirror and at the texts that he writes, he sees himself, as Bakhtin sees the self-authoring hero, first as a usurper. Yet as the underground man constantly projects reflections in his dilated little corner, darting between intonations, rather than disintegrating, he develops a logic of ‘incessant’ (безпрерывный) discontinuity, of shuffling thought and narrative. The narrator jostles against convention in aesthetically interpolated material and imaginary frameworks. In his material encounters, he recognizes himself as failed or inauthentic literary construction, parodying sentimentally romantic subtexts. Seeking the ‘literary’ rather than prosaic quarrel in his ‘duel’, he faces the incomprehensibility of poetic language, and particularly of culturally and temporally displaced poetics, in his current prosaic Russian context.206 When the underground writer describes his own scribbling of a tale (повесть), he categorizes it as an абличение rather than разоблачение (with a misspelling translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky as ‘esposé’). Submitted to and rejected by the actual journal Отечественные записки (Fatherland Notes), he recognizes it as a text that cannot be read and is already parodied. His is an admittedly anachronistic exposé (before the event), while his literary letter challenging his opponent to the duel is so belated (two years after the assumed offence) as to be nonsensical (and self-censored, never sent). Both his imaginary projections (unwritten fictions) and actual (but unread) literary creation are motivated by the sort of pathological 206 With the underground narrator’s, ‘Черт знает что бы дал я тогда за настоящую, более правильную ссору, более приличную, более, так сказать, литературную! DPSS, II.i.128.24–25, we find a challenge modelled on Gogol’s Lieutenant (поручик) Pirogov; ‘На обыкновенном языке о «пункте чести» не упоминается.’, 50, II.i.129.7–8.

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jealousy and anger that will underpin aesthetic realization in Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and in Proust’s Recherche. Like his unread story and unsent letter, he deconstructs his composed, ‘ready-made’ dreams, which also seem to find no external realization in his lived life – though they are parodically expressed to Liza and read by her both seriously and as literary parody. Liza reflects the narrator in her critical capacity to recognize immediately that his language is unoriginal (‘out of a book’) and inadequate (incommensurate with her reality in important respects) – and to believe and disbelieve in it at the same time. Like his bits of writing, whose romantic and parodied intentions resonate in this underground, his dreams continue to resist debasement even in the underground. They coexist with his debaucheries. Discontinuity gives rise to the paradoxicalist’s both/and. As belittled as he feels (self defined abjectly, as neither/nor: neither insect, nor man of action), he also reads his paradox as plenitude, in contrast to the diminished, predetermined either/or of the coherent man of action. His premeditated digression and contradiction is one defence against unpremeditated predetermination. Among his remembered interlocutors, Simonov seems the most predetermined, the most emblematic exemplar of the ‘swarm’ that the narrator both aspires to join (as productive insect or unconscious actor) and to move (provoking pity by being so pathetic, or pricking consciousness like a Socratic gadfly). But in their remembered interactions Simonov resists reification, responding unexpectedly to the narrator’s feints. He paradoxically reflects the narrator’s own resistance to Simonov knowing him by heart.207 In this reflected autonomy, we also find a reflection of the narrator’s imagining his projected readers resisting his knowing them by heart, knowing how they know him or how they resemble him. This doubling and discontinuity multiplies rather than negates perspectives. Discontinuity gives rise to ‘polyphonic unity’. The narrative’s logic of discontinuity is essentially spatial. As the narrator circles and turns, he re-states or re-members himself as other – not ‘the other I was in contrast to whom I’ve become’ but ‘a simultaneously other self’. He knows others also as multiple. Liza, as much as the narrator, is at once pathetic and heroic, incorporating the multiple literary types that converge in the plurality of real existence. The narrator is concomitantly sincere Romantic, literary parody and author of that parody. Their plural aspect is especially manifest in their location within 207 DPSS, II.iii.137.40–1.

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fragmented space (defined by ‘hole’, ‘corner’, or ‘partition’ that is also critical to character development in Poor Folk and ‘Mr. Prokharchin’208). Divisions are demarked not only by walls, but also by windows and mirrors. The underground narrator faces others in constricted spaces that open up onto other scenes in the city. He looks in the mirror, hears through the partition – and what he sees and hears is multiple. The failure to correspond does not mean that one image cancels out another; rather they respond to each other, rendering each responsible. In his imaginary, ideological mapping, the underground narrator describes his underground as constricting (he is banging his head against a wall), yet his walls are strangely porous – his head penetrated and densely populated by others’ turns of speech that never die. The paradoxical logic of the eccentric cosmos is that it not only crosses paths with, but is crossed by other cosmologies. Here we have Lotman’s complex, dynamic semiospheres, colliding and interpenetrating. Drawn and driven. Eccentric consciousness is genetically incapable of indifference. The underground narrator is least of all indifferent or disengaged when he claims to be. But, at an extreme, the terms of his engagement may be those of paranoid schizophrenic, for whom the logic of the other survives internally, especially through antagonistic dialogue. What sort of uncivil dialogue is this in which subjects address each other by shouting, sputtering, stomping, smirking, satirizing, seducing and sometimes recurring to silence? It is not that censored, constrained and dead-ended discourse that the underground narrator associates with his civil service and with conventional intercourse on Petersburg’s streets. It is not the usual banter in bars, bullying of bosses, services silently rendered in brothels, all duly paid for at the going rate. Instead, this dialogue is correlated to Petersburg’s disorderly spectacle and carnival, to filled and flooded prospects, where nature and human nature collide with ‘civilizing’ cosmopolitan or colonial culture. The underground man’s consciousness registers Petersburg’s flickering lanterns, fluctuating weather, surfeit of languages as they tap, howl, jangle. Despite the admitted ‘abstraction’ of underground consciousness, both fictional and actual author materialize the ideological landscape of Petersburg in the 1840s/60s. The underground narrator partly re-maps Gogol’s turf: the Nevsky Prospekt with its shifting and shadowed characters. In his remembered circling in the city, the underground narrator seems to confront Gogol’s Pirogov 208 See Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, 154–5.

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on the Nevsky prospekt209 and then stylize Akaky Akakievich’s (and Dostoevsky’s own Golyadkin’s) request of a loan for the similar purchase in the Gostinyi arcade of beaver collar210 for use on an overcoat that is no longer seen as either end or insurmountable obstacle. The underground narrator’s opponents and objects of desire are both shadows and fully fleshed out – not only as he projects and recalls his encounters with them, but also as he closes his eyes when he bumps against them. Whether or not he moves them, they move him. They and he move us. The underground man can never dismiss the other as demonic deception or turn definitively from the other into delirium or delusion. Rather, he has to contend with others on their own terms as well as his. He confronts them dialogically in the sense that he constitutes them and is constituted by responding to their discourse, never only internally defined. He cannot just speak for them, nor do they speak for him. He feels no communion or compassion, but his antagonistic confrontations are equally problematic – accusatory communication constantly breaks down. Hypersensitive, he feels the slightest bump as insult, while he also feels and sees, both immediately and retrospectively, that his own insult has not been felt, nor he seen, and that his contact with others has not thrown anything in the city off-course or on a new course. He seems more spectral and voiceless than Akaky’s ghost. While he cannot directly confront figures of authority in the city and, thus, recognizes their capacity to overlook him; his looking askance at and making himself a spectacle in the eyes of his rivals results in his and our same recognition of their capacity to remain indifferent, to avert their gaze. He is not even read seriously by other clerks. Yet his interlocutors are shadowed by this capacity for indifference; that is, turning away from him, they are solidified and cast a shadow in the city, illuminated by underground consciousness. To the extent that they seem unconscious to the underground narrator, they are rendered insubstantial (mere copies); but his uncertainty at their laughter and indifference also restores them as inscrutable subjects. If the underground narrator must blink or squint or only cast a sideways glance after receding authorities and rivals, fully facing only their long shadows, in contrast his eyes are wide open in and after his encounter with Liza, whom he sees as subaltern. She is more fully fleshed out for the reader. He not only looks at her in varied lights, but constantly confronts her changing gaze, which differs from 209 DPSS, II.i.128.40. 210 Ibid., II.i.131.

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others in its direct (though almost wordless, voiceless) compassion and critique.211 With her varied responses to his seductions and sedition, she embodies an ethical responsibility he seeks from the reader through his confrontational framing of the fiction. Note that he reads her response as laughter. Though Liza is often read as rejected redemptive figure (an Orthodox alternative to his unorthodox aestheticism), like the narrator, she represents both constraint and freedom, in no less ambivalent speech and silence. But her responsiveness may objectively as well as subjectively mediate соборность (Orthodox community or what Soloviev describes as ‘unitotality’ and ‘unity in freedom’) for the narrator.212 As his responsive aesthetic and acknowledged aestheticism may mediate responsibility for the reader. That is, Dostoevsky may restore an Orthodox morality to secular modern Russian cultural discourse by displacing it within an unorthodox aesthetic discourse, at once alienated, alienating and insistently recalling the autonomous other into a dialogically realized relation. Translated into underground consciousness, others become subjects of reflection, to whom the narrator looks to see himself, but who accrue contradictory aspects and intentions, akin to his multiple motivations for writing. They do not just stand there. Instead, they act as living word: as he rambles on about them, they also move and jostle the narrator. What happens in his retrospective and reflexive narrative turns is no different than what happens when the narrator feels compelled to circulate on Petersburg’s most crowded streets, his head aching and spinning, along with his feelings and thoughts. Describing his disorientation, he links his wandering with wondering, neither of which leads to a definite end, even when he returns home.213 The crowd exacerbates suffering, increasing the intensity of feeling and thought. But his home also feels crowded as a space where he stands accused. As a mode of dialogue, confession is revised as a spatial and temporal model for underground discourse, defining the relation between self and other in this eccentric city and citytext. While the narrative is read as failed confession, for many of the reasons the narrator himself delineates in Rousseau’s and other confessions, the chronotopic framework for sacramental as well as literary confession involves a series of paradoxes, 211 Ibid., II.i.132.12. 212 For Soloviev’s definition, see R. Hillier, ‘Bearing and Sharing All’, pp. 442, 445. For further elaboration of this concept, see Alen, ‘Unorthodox Confession, Orthodox Conscience’. 213 Ibid., II.viii.164.11–29.

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most notably illumination in darkness, communion mediated within divided space, concomitant presence and absence. Another must be present for the confession to be given, but the confessor functions objectively rather than subjectively, as a literary figure, consciously playing a priestly role, giving voice to the words of an authoritative Other. As Hillier points out, in the Orthodox tradition the kenotic confessor also acts as a subjective mediator of sobornosť, as fellow sinner, who stands accused and absolved with the confessant. In Notes from Underground this kind of triadic confession and communion is aesthetically realized through the narrator’s sideways word. The underground narrator longs to utter ‘a new word’, but the only new word he can offer is by the distortion or negation of hackneyed, banal and empty words. Jackson argues that the underground man’s interactions or ‘experiments’ are ‘abstract, psychological, and essentially amoral’ as well as ‘unfree’.214 This is true in that they are conditioned by compromised literary (and corresponding psychological, philosophical, socio-ideological) models. But his self-conscious parody of these discourses succeeds in emptying words of their emptiness (or of their unconscious, commonplace use) to restore them to life. The key to this ‘living word’ is not an absolute – neither the underground narrator nor Brás Cubas has any transcendent authority – but ambivalence, figured as that inhuman fly buzzing on the Nevsky,215 as well as that humane Socratic gadfly in the city and citytext. The narrator’s moral authority stems from his confessing complicity, uncertainty and contradiction. The narrator’s capacity to keep himself in view as he circulates in the city and as he writes the citytext positions him, like Bakhtin’s dialogic author, inside and outside. But the underground narrator realizes this as a schizophrenic consciousness. Actual schizophrenics cannot speak in two voices/persons at once. One alternates with another, which it may or not remember and respond to. Likewise, the narrative posits simultaneous perspectives through dialogue in real time. The narrator constantly constructs himself as a retort. Petersburg emerges in the text as a retort to the projected reader. At the end of the first chapter, the narrator imagines his interlocutor, impatient, irritated by his chatter, interrupting him to ask him to explain ‘кто ж я таков именно?’ (who am I then exactly? or what sort of person am I then?). In response, 214 Jackson, ‘Aristotelian Design …’, in The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes, 174–6. 215 DPSS, II.i.130.1–19. Cf. p. 338.

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the narrator maps himself as subject of narrative in terms of the city’s physical and social topography. He is a collegiate assessor, retired on a small inheritance, installed in a corner at the edge of town. But he locates more than his own social history on the city grid. The corner into which he has settled is that literal space framing literary space – both setting and mindset, context and climate of writing.216 The underground man is eccentrically positioned within the eccentric city; paradoxically, in this position of alienation vis-à-vis the city, he incorporates its own eccentric conception. His physical location corresponds to his perceived ideological and aesthetic extremism, even while it also links him to mainstream Petersburg. As he positions himself in the city, the narrator also parodies the Petersburg text. He recalls the realist terrain that is part of Pushkin’s and Gogol’s Petersburg, and the ground on which the Petersburg of the naturalist school is constructed – Petersburg’s costliness (the costliness of its construction in lives, the costliness of living in it, its bureaucratic economy), climate (its mists, its harmful extremes, its perverse placement). He admits socio-economic determinisms of urban life into his retrospective narrative, as Dostoevsky also notes that this is a necessary figure of a particular time and place. While dismissing this determinism on an ideological plane, in order to take responsibility for his own irrationality as a means of guaranteeing free agency, he does not dismiss the essential relation between Petersburg and his urbane consciousness or aesthetic. He weaves the climate of the city into his narrative as a model for his own perverse, ambivalent narrative. The narrator first posits coherence if not causal relation between the treacherous climate of city and self: for instance, he uses the same terms to qualify both, when discussing contradictory knowledge and impulse:217 returning to his corner ‘в иную гадчайшую петербургскую ночь’ he savours some ‘гадость’ committed that day (I.ii.102). What is interesting from the standpoint of narrative construction is the intentionality of underground circumlocutions, like his circling through the city. He is internally compelled to do both. The narrator’s stylistic self-consciousness (and the explicit claim that the writing will at least transform consciousness through style) makes more significant this wordplay in which the self is constructed in terms of the city. At the end of Part I, the underground man frames the 216 Ibid., I.i.101.15–28. 217 The term implies something nasty, vile, repulsive, foul; related to unclean reptilian/ amphibian creatures – murkiness of swampy terrain –, defecation of animals/vermin, perverse or foul intentions, dirty tricks.

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‘stories’ he begins to recount in Part II as a turn out of the underground. This turn involves on the one hand a retrospective return to the city, on the other hand a turn towards a different kind of rambling rather than ranting: he claims his recollections will have no logic, no dissembling unity, but rather rely on a more honest digression. Yet there is an immediate direction or coherence to Part II that is also linked to the city, apparently arbitrarily. Part II internally coheres and connects to Part I through the climatological: Incidents in Part II are recalled through a recurrence of Petersburg’s wet snow. The climatological could just be grounds for analogical structure, except that these events are also recounted with a relatively straight chronology. Because of that, Part II is often read in terms of teleological development, leading to Part I (among the most compelling readings, Jackson’s analysis in terms of Aristotelian tragedy218). Yet critics ranging from Anenkov to Frank have traced in this ‘wet snow’ an underlying literary topography parodied in Notes from the Underground. The argument is often that the parody is author(iz) ed by Dostoevsky, not by the narrator. But the Petersburg climate, its capacity not only for shadows but for creative projections, filters into the underground man’s psychology and informs his style. The perverse cold of Part II is as extreme as the stifling heat of Part I, where his refusal to depart is a parodic echo of Pushkin’s Peter the Great’s stubbornly firm foothold. That initial insistence on remaining, then indifference to whether or not he departs, leaves unresolved the degree to which the city essentially defines the self. The narrator’s abrupt shift in this passage – interrupted with ‘а впрочем’ (by the way) – is not so discontinuous as it seems, not so much a turn away from positioning the self in the city as one of those differently angled views of urbane consciousness. What follows the underground narrator’s framing of the narrative subject here is the diagnosis of hyperconscious, schizophrenic underground mindset and narrative as a disease related to urbanity. Underground narrative parallels eccentric urban form partly in its parodic recuperations of other texts. Also, in its multiplication of points of view, orientations and lines of construction. The original aspect of the city is defined by style (or what the underground man also calls ‘sauce’), a sauciness related by the underground narrator (and Brás Cubas) to suffering. There is both muteness and excess in this Petersburg snow described repeatedly as wet and yellow, snow that muffles the ground and Liza’s retreat, but not the 218 See R. L. Jackson, ‘Aristotelian Design …’ in The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes.

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underground, where that retreat is unmuffled retort requiring response and responsibility. That yellow snow that covers the city and runs through its romantic, realist, modernist city text might be said to be the colour of eccentric consciousness. We find an interesting analogy in tropical light in the yellow flower that Brás Cubas characterizes as diseased and melancholic. Both snow and flower are elements of nature, rather than human constructs; evanescent rather than constant. Yet in these eccentric texts and contexts, these mundane and momentary elements are unnaturally coloured and made more permanent markers for mapping consciousness. Monumental urban constructs are irrelevant in both underground texts. Streets and public spaces, semi-private salons and side rooms in restaurants, as well as secret retreats on the margins of the city are coloured through a similarly digressive gaze. Brás Cubas’s city is as fragmentary as the underground narrator’s, similarly mapped as divided and doubled space, legible as parody rather than palimpsest. Rio de Janeiro might seem to have a historical cast, defined through desire and disillusionment, as the narrator recalls his trajectories through the city: first, as a young man in pursuit of romance in a brothel, then confronting the city again through realist lenses precisely when he returns from Europe to Brazil. In contrast, the underground man describes his trajectory through Petersburg streets also as ‘confrontation with reality’, but he contrasts his turn towards the brothel precisely with escape to Brazil. But in Machado de Assis’s novel Brazil and Rio in particular, like Russia and Petersburg in Dostoevsky’s underground, are grounds for both evasion and responsibility as well as for constant contradictions. While the city socio-politically undergoes what would seem to be significant changes, Brás Cubas shows us a constant cultural geography. While slaves are freed, they assimilate the violence of slavery in their own interactions, playing this out publicly in the street where they were once up for auction. Political arguments are arbitrary plays for power, including Cubas’s own eloquent but ineffective and immediate compromised intervention in parliament (arguing for the reduced size of the Shako worn by the National Guard, on grounds of style, safety and dissent – the last reason just added as an aside: ‘the nation needed citizens whose brow could be raised, proud and serene, in the face of power’219). Cubas’s courting of political authority differs little from his courting of prostitute or married lover, involving similar purchase of favour 219 MPBC, CXXXVII.

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and shifting of position. He hedges his bets no differently than his earlier self or his father. Because of retrospectively cast critique (with such summations as ‘Marcela loved me for fifteen months and eleven contos, no more, no less’220), it might seem that that the narrator’s perspective on Rio changes; but like Petersburg for the underground narrator, the Rio of Cubas’s childhood and young adulthood (those ‘first editions’ of his life) is experienced as paradox and parody then as much as when reframed through real, retrospective and reflexive returns. That is, when he first pursues Marcela and Parliament, he already recognizes his false currency (stolen from his father in more ways than one) and its value fluctuating with response. His valuation depends on indifference and interest. He plays his romantic and political cards as a kind of cardsharp, cheating when he can. He is ‘effectively persuaded’ of his own claims about Shakos only when Quincas Borba rehearses the aesthetics of his argument, but he also devalues those claims insofar as they are recognized only for their aesthetic authority, guaranteeing no actual authority through a position in parliament. His investment is also shaped, as in Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, by borrowed ideas, drawn to the authority of the foreign, while also despising it. Beginning with their encounter on the Rossio Grande (a central square named after the Rossio in Lisbon) ‘the night of the fireworks celebrating the declaration of independence’ in 1822, his conversely ‘captivating’ affair with the ‘Spanish’ Marcela goes through its ‘consular’ and ‘imperial’ ‘phases’ in a house in Cajueiros, into which he purchases entrance and pays his way with trinkets (perhaps for sale in Marcela’s later shop, when her body is pockmarked and no longer saleable, as the underground narrator imagines Liza’s will be) as well as with his father’s ‘legacy’ of colonial gold doubloons.221 But these ‘phases’ are collapsed through contradictions and cross-cultural reference, as in Poprishchin’s lunatic world. Marcela’s past in Rio, like his and his father’s, is imagined in terms of distant horizons (Spain and France) and constantly refashioned. It is similarly recast around a hodgepodge of objects whose value and origin is as unfixed as her attachment to different men. These include a gold cross (from her father, from Second Lieutenant Duarte) and Indian platter (more colonial collateral), which Cubas despises because it reminds him of a past lover whom he recasts as present rival. His romancing of Marcella sends him reeling into Rio’s 220 Ibid., XVII. 221 Ibid., XIV–XV.

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streets like a ‘typhoon’, ‘uncertain’ or ‘unsteady as a drunkard’ (‘incerto como um ébrio’222), as his romancing of the reader results in a ‘book and style’ that ‘stagger left and right, walk and stop, grumble, howl, guffaw’ and ‘stumble’ or ‘slip’ and ‘fall’ ‘like drunkards’ (‘este livro e o meu estilo são como os ébrios, guinam à direita e à esquerda, andam e param, resmungam, ameaçam o céu, escorregam e caem’).223 Brás Cubas, like Machado de Assis’s other characters, turns down the Rua do Ouvidor to purchase, dream, define himself and others. Machado de Assis consistently describes this street in Gogolian terms, stretched between Europe and Brazil, marked by flux and different faces at different hours of the day. These are all masks, but this masking is the true face of the city. In ‘Tempo de Crise’ (Time of crisis) in Contos avulsos, the narrator asserts A rua do Ouvidor resume o Rio de Janeiro. A certas horas do dia, pode a fúria celeste destruir a cidade; se conservar a rua do Ouvidor, conserva Noé, a familia e o mais. Uma cidade é um corpo de pedra com um rosto. O rosto da cidade fluminense é esta rua, rosto eloquente que exprime todos os sentimentos e todas as idéias …224 (Ouvidor Street sums up Rio de Janeiro. At certain times of the day, divine wrath might destroy the city; were it to preserve Ouvidor Street, it would save Noah, his family et al. A city is a body of stone with a face. Rio de Janeiro’s face is this street, an eloquent face that expresses all sentiments and all ideas …)

Rio de Janeiro is implicitly cast as condensation of humanity, precisely at that critical moment when it is subject to divine destruction, evoked in terms of catastrophic flood, not unlike Petersburg. Like the Nevsky, Rua do Ouvidor is the face of a stony city, inadequately shored up against floods (both literal and cultural). Its eloquent expressions, of course, are those of shop windows again, where Brás purchases ill-fitting dreams and desires as well as his more elegant imported outfits – he inherits more means, both literal and literary wealth. He seems to squander both in his rambling in the city and citytext. With their underground narratives, both Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis offer an embedded rather than panoramic view of both literal and literary landscape.225 222 Ibid., XIV. 223 Ibid., LXXI. 224 Cited in Carrer, Rio de Assis, 31. 225 Matich offers a very compelling analysis of the embedded views in Dostoevsky’s and subsequent Petersburg fictions.

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For their underground writers, literary ideas confront each other on city streets. Though less apparently anxiously and antagonistically, Brás also seeks to bump against other characters on the street – his romance is only worth investing in when unconventional and unpromising, like his writing. He turns towards the margins of the city where he meets with his lover, the margins of history where he romances the reader, and the margins of novel and memoir, where, alternately refractory and restrained, he refracts literary form to make sense of the complexities of a complex culturally colonized, colonizing and already post-colonial reality not too unlike that of the Dostoevsky’s underground narrator. Gambling on drunken digressive discourse and winning an afterlife The notes of Dostoevsky’s underground narrator and memoirs of Machado de Assis’s Brás Cubas unfold, like Gogol’s Notes of a Madman, through a logic of contradiction and digression, which extends beyond rambling in the city through paranoid dialogues with a reader. These dialogues might be characterized as fighting over a bone (usually a word, a mode of thinking or writing, an idea) such as Machado de Assis depicts in his representation of the dog fight witnessed in the street by Cubas and the clinically insane Quincas Borba. Illustrative of Borba’s humanitas, these growling dogs seem to dehumanize human discourse. Yet they also represent a struggle in which both dogged narrator and reader may be nourished and survive, though not without violence done to either subject. Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s narrators have obsessions similar to those that Gogol’s madman defines in his composition and critique of the letters of a dog: an interest in breaking beyond social invisibility by asserting their individuality. The bones they gnaw on have generally been understood to be ideological – ideas skeletally structuring other characters and society, fleshed out in moral postures and social practices, or in those fragments of speech that they devour and ruminate. But their obsession with the reader (self and other), against whose interwoven aesthetic and ethical expectations they continually counter-define themselves and bring other characters to life, is really where we find the bone of contention. They gnaw on the bones of fiction, of genre. They snarl at the reader and fight with the reader over these bones. They bury and unearth them. Literary bones are not only structuring obsession, but lifeline of the fiction, though only prophetically fleshed out within the frame, resurrected like the dry

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bones of Ezekiel by means of a verbal summons. Reconfigured genre does not remain buried in the underground. And the reader in the text is also unearthed in underground discourse, re-placed in circulation in the eccentric city. Insofar as the readers imagined in the text do and do not correspond to actual readers, they instigate eccentric reflections beyond the bounds of the text in the actual readers who must read but may resist them as doubles. Brás Cubas and the underground narrator anticipate this afterlife, wherein the actual reader’s critical aesthetic corresponds to their own. And they insist on this kind of regenerative cannibalism, where the reader also devours the reader. Dostoevsky returns to Petersburg and consciousness explored from within in two late fictions: ‘Кроткая’ (‘The Meek One’), in which he formally and ideologically translates and transforms Hugo’s Le dernier jour d’un condamné for an eccentric cultural context, and ‘Бобок’ (‘Bobok’), in which he anticipates Machado de Assis’s narrative voiced from the grave. Though social satire seemingly delivered by dissolving differences between living and dead discourse, with the exception of that interest in and misused freedom of exposure that Brás Cubas also claims, ‘Bobok’ is actually a fiction concerned with apparently dead-ended, eccentric position of the writer in society. Death serves as a threshold the narrating writer can cross through dream, delirium, possible indigestion, in the course of digression through a graveyard. He has to be deviant and is accused of deviousness. His retelling is marked by multiple double-voicings, which render his motivations and methods suspect. Yet this similarly drunken, digressive writer, admitted voyeur (or overhearer, since he cannot see into the underground), is peculiarly capable of generating response and responsibility among the real dead – since there is no divide between necropolis and present metropolis. Positioning his writer on the other side of the tombstone, Machado de Assis more directly confronts modernist and postmodern concerns with the death of the author as well as differential and deferred meaning. In essentially male narratives, within which the women are directly defined primarily in terms of projected desire or (dis)possession, there is a perverse kind of paternalism typically associated with the eccentric city. The underground narrator’s origins are only mapped in terms of the city, its social structures and institutions. While Brás Cubas remembers both his parents and parentage, they are similarly sketched in terms of place and his relation to them defined by departures, digressions, belated returns, deformed reflections. His uncles represent ideologically opposed postures, but similar posturing. Recounting his ancestry, he

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recalls imaginary – or rather, continually re-imagined – origins. Brás Cubas’s father’s advice that there are different modes of measuring a man’s worth, but the most sure is to secure the acclaim of others, might be Peter’s legacy in his refashioned St. Petersburg. By this logic, Poprishchin seeks to legitimize authority in terms of other texts and contexts. But Gogol’s, Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s fictions do more than show us how easily a stylized overcoat can be stolen or overlooked. Poprishchin speaks with authority through his ambivalent authorship, which is both insufferable and makes us complicit in his suffering, even as it engages us with its lunatic freedom. The more philosophically slanted underground narrator and Brás Cubas seem more likely to note with Machado de Assis: ‘A liberdade é uma ilusão, mas os determinismos são volúveis e contraditórios.’ (Freedom is an illusion, but determinisms are inconstant and contradictory.) The first term, here translated in its figurative sense of inconstant or variable, has a spatial sense also, related to ‘volver’ and ‘voltar’ (to ‘turn’ or ‘return’). Determinisms wind around the subjects remembered by the underground narrator. Which takes us back to these undergrounds as a kind of constrained consciousness, where aesthetic liberties might also be determined by eccentric cultural contradictions and constitute only a delusion of grandeur rather than real freedom. We might recall the ironic comparison drawn by Brás Cubas, describing his ‘cativeiro pessoal’226 (‘personal captivity’) coinciding with Brazil’s collective independence. Conversely, Brazil’s continued dependence on other cultures to recognize and structure its authority coincides with his playful and perverse mode of authoring and authorizing his posthumous memoirs. Both underground writers ground unethical aestheticism as much as revisionary aesthetics (with different claims for ethical reflexivity) in their respective eccentric cultures. They are not abstract or alien characters in their cities, though they are alienated and peculiarly capable of abstraction; rather, their consciousnesses are concretely framed by the contradictions in their respective capitals. They are complicit critics – and in this dual aspect, they reflect their readers more than most of their remembered interlocutors, whom they regard as relatively unconscious and unselfconscious. Liza and Virgília are exceptional, as readers of ‘earlier editions’ of these writers, critically discerning their aestheticism, explicitly as well as implicitly resisting the ways in which the underground man and Brás Cubas read, stepping beyond (and thus 226 MPBC, XIII.

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demarking) the margins of the underground and through those margins introducing alternative plots and problematics of consciousness into the text, even as they also concentrate and conjugate logos. Though their intercourse in the text results in no biological progeny, Liza and Virgília participate productively in indirect underground dialogues – alongside actual readers. The nature of underground discourse is indiscrete. The underground narrator and Brás Cubas seek to penetrate others, to possess consciousness and body by knowing it from within, but in the process their discourse is interpenetrated by the discourse of the other, inviolable, generating a viable novel, a ‘living word’. Both retrospective and prospective attempts to utter a finalizing word (or write a final edition) turn through eccentric contra-diction into unfinalized dialogic engagement. This literary form of engagement with a reader, which looks like a drunken carnival dance, generates new forms of consciousness and conscience. Petrushevskaya’s and Jorge’s imagined daughters, refractorily re-writing requiems for Soviet and Salazarist regimes, are among the most compelling and similarly productive of these underground narrator’s contemporary descendants. Like the underground narrator and Brás Cubas, Petrushevskaya’s Anna Andrianovna in Time: Night and Jorge’s unnamed narrator/ Walter’s daughter in The Painter of Birds dissemble. They distort their own and others’ image. They don literary masks to denigrate and usurp authority. They are deviants. But their literary deviations expose this deviance and point to the paradoxically double legitimacy of their usurpation. In their complicity or conventionality as well as in their self-conscious critique, Dostoevsky’s underground writer and Machado de Assis’s Brás Cubas are true sons of Petersburg and Rio, modern Russia and Brazil. Writing in the margins of city and citytext, they speak with authority about marginocentric capital and culture. They also produce legitimate literary lines – continually remapping margins of city, citytext and cultural consciousness. This eccentric literature is consistently marked by madness. It is also modernist from its inception, marked by polyphony and uncertainty, often refracted through divided consciousness, fleshed out in paranoid and schizophrenic figures. Though these figures increasingly circulate beyond the bounds of the marginocentric capital and citytext, they recall Petersburg’s and Rio’s founders and formation – a mad gamble in geo-cultural margins. Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground texts become central subtexts in Russian and Brazilian cultural memory, underpinning or serving as point of departure for continually displaced

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dissent. Memories and memoir represent merely the collateral with which these narrators guarantee their own and our gamble on this writing. It is a falsified guarantee, a romantic realist promissory note they cannot and will not live up to – or whose terms they rewrite. But it buys enough good faith that they can engage the reader. They remind the reader of that collateral often enough that the reader remains invested. Meanwhile, they underhandedly change the rules of the novel. They collapse past and present in their refractions of eccentric cities through reflexive eccentric consciousness, to force the reader to confront the costs of culturally displaced and dysfunctional ideas and ideologies, aesthetics and ethics. They damn themselves in doing so, but they win their gamble by also condemning the reader – for complicity in unethical cross-cultural exchange – and by calling the reader to ethical responsibility. It is this gambling by writers such as Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis, against conventions generated in fictions by writers such as Hugo and Balzac, already partly retooled by Pushkin and Gogol, Alencar and Almeida, that redefines the stakes and structure for their already modernist fiction. The kind of self-consciousness they put into circulation, a divided, contradictory self-consciousness of narrator and reader, eccentrically minted, is re-coined by writers such as Proust and Gide (revesting a concentrically memoried citytext), Pessoa, Breton and Woolf (re-imagining increasingly ex-centric citytexts), Bely and Barreto (in eccentric citytexts complicated by history), Mandelstam, Maiakovsky and Mário de Andrade (in eccentric citytexts extended through exilic displacement and historical replacement), and then by writers across a postmodern, post-colonial world encompassed by an eccentric literary line. The underground narrator and Brás Cubas may also win their gamble for an afterlife, lived in style. That is, the literary styling of their lives may make those lives dead-ended, but their literary style perdures and produces ‘living words’. If they are living ‘anti-heroes’, in contrast to the reader they denigrate as conventional and dead, then the reader they generate might be the living ‘hero’. If the viability, legitimacy and potency of Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s eccentric narratives might also be affirmed by the fact that they become seminal narratives of eccentric, threshold cultures, it is paradoxically guaranteed also by the fact that what the eccentric narrative generates is critical reflection of that centre – literature that displaces and doubles its paranoia, playing out and critiquing its perverse authority.

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Part III

An encompassing eccentric line

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Chapter 5

Hallucinated cities ties

In one peculiarly odd digression in Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’, Petersburg is blurred through the narrator’s failing memory. In an aside to the reader after having lost track of his hero along some side street, the narrator explains, Где именно жил пригласивший чиновник, к сожалению, не можем сказать: память начинает нам сильно изменять, и всё, что ни есть в Петербурге, все улицы и домы слились и смешались так в голове, что весьма трудно достать оттуда что-нибудь в порядочном виде.1 (Where exactly the clerk who had invited [Akaky Akakievich] lived, unfortunately, we cannot say: our memory is beginning to slip seriously, and all that is in Petersburg, all the streets and houses have so mingled and become muddled in my head, that it is impossibly difficult to determine where anything comes from in its proper aspect [view].)

In this reflection, Petersburg’s spaces are no longer divided or doubled, no longer mapped through digression, but rather disorientingly merged and muddled through the slippage of memory. The city is distorted under temporal pressure, its unintelligibility marked by a failure of the mind to retain distinctions. While the narrator is not arguing that the city itself has developed or disintegrated over time, the disintegration of narrating consciousness results in a temporalized confusion of places something like the confusion of persons experienced later in Proust’s fiction. In Gogol’s tale this turn towards time is only momentary. It mimics, re-maps and critically re-assesses a concentric mode of narrative evasion. Whereas the narrator begins with uncertainty as to destination and direction, his disorientation becomes a confusion of origins, such as we find in the ex-centric postmodern and post-colonial Paris, London or Lisbon text. Unlike other digressive interventions through which Gogol’s 1 Gogol, «Шинель» GPSS, III.158.

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narrator explores spatial divides and doubling, this temporal dynamic seems to reduce rather than multiply the capacities of consciousness. There is a sense of loss such as attends Proust’s narrator early in the Recherche without any parallel recovery of distinctions within and across time, or the redefining of distorting memory as grounds for polyphony and dialogism. In contrast, memory in later Petersburg and Rio fictions will function not only still as a redefined device in fictions that continue to collapse historically discrete discourses onto a present plane still constructed through displacement and delay, but also as a productive form of disrupted consciousness. Temporal distinctions collapsed through the reflexive redirection of dialogue in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s undergrounds are recuperated in Bely’s and Lima Barreto’s multivocal mappings of cityscapes marked by revolutionary and republican rupture. Cultural horizons of their still marginocentric capitals extend further, compounding contradictions (and thus distinguishing these cross-culturally complicated memoried modernist configurations of cultural discourse from their European counterparts). But the differences necessary to dialogism in these eccentric citytexts are also mediated by generational conflict and degeneration. Digressive, divided, dissenting, contradictory lines of eccentric cultural construction are further complicated in citytexts written from internal and external exile, once these cities of St. Petersburg and Rio are themselves displaced, dispossessed of political authority, though they remain sites vested with eccentric cultural authority. In her essay ‘Pushkin’s Children’, Tolstaya sketches out a trajectory of Russian literature, along which twentiethand twenty-first-century writers retrace the contours of consciousness within a politically re-centred and constrained culture; the position of the writer in that context, as in the context of Brazilian political constraint and late post-colonial anxiety, remains eccentric, vested in underground discourse, dialogue and dissent.2 Evolving eccentricities: revolutionary Russian modernisms and Brazilian ‘modernismo’ The eccentric Petersburg text delineated by nineteenth-century writers such as Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Goncharov3 is drawn out with 2 See Tatiana Tolstaya, Pushkin’s Children (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 80–97. 3 Cf. Maguire, ‘The City’, 21–30.

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distended cultural and historical horizons by writers such as Bely and Mandelstam. This eccentric line stretches deeper into Russia and into different domains of Russian literature under pressures of censorship and exile, but first through more playful, though still critical, and always critically self-conscious creations such as Saltykov-Shchedrin’s История одного города (1869) (History of a Town) and Господа Головлевы (1870s) (The Golovlevs) and Sologub’s Мелкий бес (1907) (Petty Demon). Like Gogol’s Inspector General and Dead Souls, Dostoevsky’s Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, both Saltykov-Schedrin’s novels and Sologub’s Petty Demon extend Petersburg space into the provinces, exploring the symptoms of a schizophrenic society along internal cultural margins. The satirical dynamic still depends on displacement or deterritorialization and a divided consciousness and conscience. In Petty Demon, Peredonov, the urban/e but wholly ridiculous hero of the novel constitutes a parody of underground consciousness, cornered in an interior that exacerbates rather than dissolving the antagonisms and alienation of the capital, ironized primarily through a dehumanizing breakdown in dialogue and through darkly carnivalesque laughter that reaches its culmination in a literal carnival scene of masking and unmasking, conflagration and devolution into madness. In another sometimes absurdist vein, but one that also humanizes through incongruities, the Odessa and Конармия (Red Cavalry) tales of Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel (1894–1941) draw on the Petersburg tradition of cultural and psychological conflict within the present, extending that line along the fronts of the First World War, Revolution and Civil War (anticipating an even greater historical and cross-cultural complication of these conflicts in Pelevin’s contemporary reflection on the periods bracketing the Soviet Union in Чапаев и Пустота (1996) (Buddha’s Little Finger, 2000). Babel’s narratives complicate the eccentric line by drawing out an even more eccentric cultural tradition in Russia than that represented by the Dostoevskian Petersburg line: a Jewish/Yiddish tradition developed in Odessa, somewhat analogous to Gogol’s Ukraine in its cultural-geographical eccentricity,4 but with a more problematic and polyphonic history. In connection to that marginal, cosmopolitan culture, Babel also drew on a French tradition cultivated in Odessa, also known as a Russian Marseilles and thus mapped eccentrically with respect to Paris, Moscow and Petersburg. While taking Odessa 4 Babel, while living in Petersburg predicts the rebirth of the Gogolian Ukrainian tradition, cf. Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Terras, 32.

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as starting point, the hybrid satirical dramas and fictions collaboratively composed by Ilf (Il’ia Arnol’dovich Fainzil’berg, 1897–1937) and Petrov (Evgeny Petrovich Kataev, 1913–1942) extend the eccentric line in yet another direction, crossing both generic and geographical borders, within Russia and abroad, travelling through Crimea and the Caucasus and as far as the Americas, to critique but also reinvigorate modern Russian and Western culture. Ilf and Petrov variously displace their critical discourse: in Светлая личность (A Pure Soul, 1918) Ilf and Petrov offer up a critique of modern materiality through the fantastic and grotesque representation of a fictional city, such as we find also in their two cycles of stories written as ‘Tolstoevsky’: including their own 1001 nights ‘or a New Scheherazade’ and their ‘extraordinary’ stories from the city of ‘Kolokolensk’ (published in the journal Чудак (The Eccentric). Like Gogol (and Machado de Assis) before them and Bulgakov after them, their stories from the 1930s include ‘Ikh bin с головы до ног,’ a tale of a talking dog named Brunghil’da, parodying urban discourses. The Ostap Bender wandering through Russia to meet a tragic fate in Двенадцать стулев (Twelve Chairs, 1927) is resuscitated (revising Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s posthumous critiques) in Золотой телёнок (The Golden Calf, 1931), to explore Russia’s potential in a shifting post-revolutionary landscape in terms of dreams of Rio. Ilf and Petrov’s eccentric Ostap Bender exposes the problematics of different utopian schemes through his deviance, digression, dissembling and unrealized dreams of living as a millionaire in Rio de Janeiro. He represents, too, a Soviet and Soviet realist refusal of eccentricity and individuality, even as he embodies that eccentricity within a paradoxically sanctioned, even canonized Soviet literature, accepted partly perhaps because of its departure from the Soviet city. Ilf and Petrov also distend their critique to Western Europe and N. America with Одноетажная Америка (One-Storied America, 1936) – the ‘storied’ in this context referring to various kinds of levelling, measured in the height of houses, individualism and democracy framing dialogism, a multiplicity of stories and potential for babble or indistinction also, but not the same kind of encroaching monologism as in Russia. More marginally, a final Odessa writer, Iury Karlovich Olesha (1899–1960), who worked in Odessa and Moscow with Ilf and Petrov as well as Bulgakov and whose fiction involves similar intercourse between different literary and speech genres, returns us to the eccentric line as it wends through the Russian city and the urban clerk’s consciousness.

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In Зависть (1927) (Envy), Olesha more directly transcribes or ‘copies’ the Petersburg text into a Moscow-based Soviet modernity. The actual city in the novel, like Zamiatin’s in We, is a ‘futurist’ space that satirizes contemporary culture, in part through a divide between two brothers, whose patronymic links them to Peter and Petersburg. Andrei Petrovich Babichev, massive, authoritative figure, parodies both past and present pretensions to progressive authority, with his own size and that of his company secured by the making of sausages. The motif of paternity or historical development is compressed into the present through the dialogue or contradiction between brothers and doubles cohabiting a single, fragmented plane, not unlike that on which father and son or past and present self converge in Dostoevsky’s and Bely’s fiction. The little Ivan Petrovich Babichev, with his irrational passions, has as double Nikolai Kavalerov, a typically eccentric firstperson narrator (in the first part of the novel), self-authored (claiming to have thought himself up), without a patronymic, without a fear of time or old age, digressive and dissembling storyteller of epic (Odyssean) proportions, but also too much comedian, resembling a carnival king or Dostoevskian buffoon.5 Kavalerov re-enacts the underground narrator’s bumping duel, but inhabits a more aggressive, modernized materialized landscape, in which he claims that ‘things don’t like [him]’, and in which he perceives rivals or doubles even in letters on billboards (print more antagonistic than Akaky’s hand-copied pages). Antagonistic perspectives proliferate through parodic intertextual play. The novel also stylizes Gogolian and Dostoevskian subtexts, using such strategies as rumour, scandal, the laughter and play of the buffoon, speculation and spiteful or paranoid revision to double or distend meaning. The novel is fraught with literal and literary sideways glances, as a way of exploring motifs of authority and authenticity, invisibility, inaccessible interiority and distorting originality. The narrator explicitly considers the possibility that the landscape is seen through the wrong end of binoculars and through the convex mirrors on street corners, which he considers analogous to the hero’s anachronistic sensibility. The novel extends the Dostoevskian subtext into the twentieth century by carrying over the self-conscious ‘anachronism’ of the irrational underground in a purportedly progressive social landscape. This sense of time out of joint suggests not a historical development of the underground, but only a displacement into another historically specific social context. It 5 Maguire incisively links Olesha’s work to Petersburg subtexts in ‘The City’, 36.

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is displacement rather than development that generates further internal and intertextual reflection on the nature of the eccentric character: on the part of the маленький человек (little man) who knows himself not only as the product of his own pathological thought (‘I thought myself up’), but as someone else’s ‘afterthought’. The ‘after’ in this case again does not involve much of a temporal factor, but rather an alienating, marginalizing one, through which the self is authored by the other’s imagination – as suggested much later in Pelevin’s Chapaev and Pustota. Though there is a play between ‘old’ (imperial) and ‘new’ (Soviet) Russia, the dynamics of jealousy in Envy still have little to do with the past. As Maguire points out, even the ‘new’ Soviet attitudes embodied in Olesha’s Moscow ‘resemble the antiseptically purposeful people, often revolutionaries, that populate such nineteenth-century novels as Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?’,6 critically engaged by Dostoevsky’s underground narrator. As in Bely’s Petersburg (1916, revised 1922), self-consciously intertextual characters, author and narrator collapse the past into the present. In Petersburg, Bely’s Apollon Apollonovich recalls his past in terms of Pushkin’s poetry, having ‘ever before his eyes that same, fatal, unbelievable space’. On every rung of the ladder, social or historical height notwithstanding, as Apollon Apollonovich attests, ‘there, from there, – beckoned the icy hand; and boundlessness flew: the Russian empire’.7 The dimension available for the doubling of consciousness is primarily space, not the difference between past and present self or social values. On the one hand, the novel develops linearly, as the second half of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground appears to do, with what seems to be the same sort of tragic Aristotelian inevitability that Jackson argues for in his analysis of Notes.8 With even greater historical particularity, the novel traces events unfolding between 30 September and 9 October 1905. Yet ‘the lines intersect several great circles, which dip back into time past, ahead into apocalyptic time future, and even into an astral “fourth dimension”’. This results in the re-presentation of the nineteenth-century Petersburg text and ‘the appearance in fictional present time of characters and events from Russian history’, primary 6 Ibid. 7 Petersburg, Chapter 2, trans. and cited by Susanne Fusso in ‘The Romantic Tradition’, in Charles Moser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 182–3. 8 R. L. Jackson, ‘Aristotelian Design’, in The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981).

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among them Peter the Great.9 Fictional space is equally crossed by figures from Russian literary history, shadows from Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky, in a way that is ‘very much in keeping with the Russian tradition of “literariness” (literaturnosť), which does not prize “originality” in the sense that most non-Russian Western cultures do’.10 This ‘copied’ quality of the text and its construction of space and character through bricolage is most evident in the figure of Apollon Apollonovich, who approximates, among many other things, Akaky Akakievich’s ‘devotion to bureaucratic drudgery’ and view of ‘Russia as a vast, threatening expanse, an “icy plain” that is “roamed by wolves”’, which include an ever expanding group of ‘revolutionaries’ as well as ‘“Eastern” elements variously identified as Mongolians and Turanians’.11 Maguire finds Apollon similarly searching for impossible enclosure, in an open city and self. Not only Apollon, but his son Nikolai Apollonovich in domino disguise, and other more minor figures flesh out Petersburg’s immediate and historically compounded contradictions and openness. As Maguire notes, ‘what is true for Apollon holds for Belyi’s novel at large. Nothing is clearly delineated; everything blends and blurs, so that conventional markers like “fact” and “fiction”, “past” and “present” are ultimately meaningless. Dependent on “polyvalence and ambiguity”’, even Bely’s language, rooted in Gogol’s, ‘reveals the presence of the same impulse that drove all the Russian arts of the early twentieth century toward a conflation and synthesis of genres, styles, and materials’ to offer ‘no reliable phenomenological world’, but only unstable, schizophrenic narration. Most essentially, Maguire argues, ‘nothing is left of those “great thoughts” which had originally created the city’; ‘rather, “paradoxically”, in “the most thoroughgoing novel ever written about Russia’s capital city”, Petersburg is written “out of existence”’.12 In fact, even if Bely aspired to write a sequel to Petersburg, titled The Invisible City, which ‘would no longer “rummage around in vileness” and the fragmentation that Bely associates with a modern urbanity and abstraction concentrated in Petersburg and its language, but would “depict wholesome and ennobling elements of Life and Spirit”,’13 he 9 Maguire, ‘The City’, 31–2. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. Cf. Maguire and Malmstad, ‘The City in Petersburg’, in Andrey Bely, Spirit of Symbolism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 105–9 and ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Petersburg, viii–xxvi. 12 Maguire, ‘The City’, in Moser (ed.), Cambridge, 33. 13 Ibid., 33; Maguire and Malmstad, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Andrey Bely, xvii.

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neither accomplished the task, nor exploded or imploded the myth of the eccentric city in Petersburg. His deconstructive reconstruction of the Petersburg text both remembers and re-members, continuing to question the city’s contradictory character. Bely’s Petersburg recovers the complex materiality and conflicting ideologies of the modernizing city and language precisely through its further fragmentation,14 as do subsequent, utopian and dystopian displacements of the Petersburg text such as Aleksei Tolstoy’s Aelita and Zamiatin’s We. The contradictory physical and psychological character of the city remains consistent in the pervasive icy expanses and insanity of Petersburg and in Aelita ‘Petersburg ravaged by revolution and civil war, an “insane city” of empty, wind-swept streets, boarded-up buildings, freezing interiors’ and ambivalent aspirations.15 At the same time, the bounds of the Petersburg text are broadened in the context of the extended threatening cultural dialogue inscribed in these twentieth-century works through literal, literary and linguistic openings. As Maguire and Malmstad note of Bely’s Petersburg, the city has become ‘hallucinatory’ and ‘can proclaim its existence only in words’ which they find now ‘devoid of the vital energy that originally gave birth to them and the city itself. The city has become a parody of creation, reproducing dead copies of itself that have no effect on anything, a point emphasized throughout the novel by the capital’s inability to exercise control over a Russia that is being torn apart by revolution.’16 But if the city’s actual, problematically monologized political authority is displaced or undermined with the removal of the capital to a reconstructed Moscow, its aesthetic authority is distended, and its ambivalent mode of articulation of Russian cultural consciousness through disease, dissembling, dissenting, digression is adopted by writing in an ex-centric Moscow and the scattered sites of internal and external exile. That boundless space that defines the Russian literary tradition has continually a concretely Petersburg subtext at its eccentric centre (as we will find in the Brazilian tradition, a Rio subtext). Whether the fiction tends towards a futuristic realism, as Olesha’s or Zamiatin’s city, or towards the fantastically real, as do Bely’s Petersburg, or Daniil Kharm’s and Vaginov’s, Tynianov’s and Bitov’s darker Leningrad fictions, the city remains wholly, and often self-consciously, interior and intertextual creation. Bitov, affiliated with Petrograd’s Дом исскуства (house of 14 Maguire and Malmstad, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, xvii–xxii. 15 Maguire, ‘The City’, in Moser (ed.), Cambridge Companion, 33–4. 16 Maguire and Malmstad, ‘The City’, in Andrey Bely, 108–9.

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art), a space that came to be known as a ‘crazy ship’ or ship of fools, charts Leningrad’s shifting political, social, literary topography with peculiarly postmodern navigational tools in Pushkin House. More than in Bely’s ‘motley’ Petersburg, in Bitov’s Pushkin House the ‘metaliterary impulse has decisively taken over the mimetic’, anxiously implicating even the author-creator in an ironic historical framework defined by reading.17 Thus, carnival discourse continues to shift from city into citytext, slipping (like Gogol’s devil) into everyday speech and then into style. This is the case even in fictions that seem to abide by conventions of realism or naturalism, as do Tynianov’s, in which realist fragments are dialogically juxtaposed and framed by a playful metaliterary consciousness. A perverse and pathological as well as productive metaliterariness resounds in contemporary Russian fiction, not only as a function of its ‘postmodern’ position, but as a conscious, critical, creative distension of this eccentric tradition. This reflexive character of even apparently conventionally realist prose is evident also in the urban Brazilian text after Machado de Assis, in the works of Lima Barreto and other modern writers including João do Rio, Aluísio Azevedo, Graciliano Ramos and Ivan Ângelo. Those layered authorial signatures and prefaces framing Lima Barreto’s Vida e Morte de M. J. Gonzaga de Sa (The Life and Death of M. J. Gonzaga de Sá, 1919) and, more essentially, the intertextual asides and mix of literary genres and linguistic registers within the narrative (discussed earlier), provide examples of this kind of play with literary conventions and interplay of authorial consciousness. Lima Barreto’s urban/e prose includes also Recordações do Escrivão Isaías Caminha (1909) (Memoirs of the Clerk Isaias Caminha), Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma (1911/15) (The Sad Ending of Policarpo Quaresma), Clara dos Anjos (a collection of stories including the novella Clara dos Anjos, 1923–4/40), other stories and chronicles such as those collected in Vida Urbana; artigos e cronicas (1956) (Urban Life; Articles and Chronicles), and his literary criticism collected in 1953 as Impressões de Leitura.18 In these works, Barreto’s chroniclers and clerks, ostensibly writing ‘memoirs’ and ‘biographies’, 17 Fusso, ‘The Romantic Tradition,’ 187. Fusso offers an incisive reading of Bitov’s Pushkin House as postmodernist text, 184–7. 18 Compelling studies of his work in historical context, and particularly in relation to Machado de Assis, include Maria Luisa Nunes (ed. and intro.), Lima Barreto: Bibliography and Translations (New York: G. K. Hall, 1979); Beatriz Resende’s Lima Barreto e o Rio de Janeiro em Fragmentos (Rio de Janeiro: 1993); and the critical edition of Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresmo (1915), ed. Houaiss and Figueiredo, 1997.

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in fact, typically record literal and literary dialogues and digressions, rather than histories, in a chronically decentred, forgetful city. A capacity to recall a historical or literary past, as Gonzaga de Sá contends, might be redemptive, but it is not available – there is only a present continually defined by shifting horizons (imported European literature and ideology and a receding interior). Gonzaga de Sá seeks to remember (and re-member society) through a kind of interracial, cross-cultural intercourse he associates with a spontaneous, organically connected colonial society (the falsity and futility of which the mulatto narrator discerns). Sá lives ‘everyday in the minute details of the city’, through which he turns ‘with a very flexible memory’. With the levelling of the city, he bemoans ‘past events, memories that we are losing’, noting the displaced ‘centre’ of contemporary culture on the margins of Rio, in a Petrópolis that has ‘no history and little imagination’, that is ‘dead, because it keeps no dead’.19 In theory, Augusto Machado’s ‘biography’ would be an extension of his project of remembering, but in fact, it skips over much of a life and a history, to explore the forgetfulness and disparities of a historical moment. The problematic of memory (or lack thereof) in the ageing eccentric city and culture is explored by writers such as Mário de Andrade (in the novel Macunaíma, the masterful stories collected as Contos de Belazarte (1934), and poetry including Paulicéia desvairada (1922) [Hallucinated City]), as by Graciliano Ramos (in his later urban novels such as Angústia (1936) (Anguish) as in Vidas Secas (1938) [Barren Lives]), even as these writers turn from Rio into seemingly more ‘organically’ developing cities such as São Paulo and into increasingly urbane spaces of the interior. The Rio subtext in their works is analogous to the Petersburg subtext informing Bulgakov’s mad, modernized Moscow in his satirical stories collected in Дьяволиада (1925) (Diaboliad) and Роковие яйца (1925) (Fatal Eggs) and in his novel Мастер и Маргарита (Master and Margarita) as well as earlier maverick lines of Chekhov’s prose, linked in many of its formal qualities and historical-material concerns to Machado de Assis’s prosaics, exploring Dostoevskian dimensions of displaced individual and collective psychology in fictions such as «Дама с собачкой» (‘Lady with a Dog’), «Человек в футляре» (‘Man in a Case’), and Палата номер 6 (Ward No. 6).20 Brazil’s greatest 19 Life and Death, ed. and trans. Nunes, 51, 39, 50, 41. 20 Cf. Carol Flath, ‘Chekhov’s Underground Man …’, Slavic and East European Review 44:3 (2000), 375–92.

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writers during the modernist period are as anomalous as Chekhov relative to a ‘modernism’ that was defined in the Brazilian context in contradistinction to European modernisms. In his preface to Paulicéia Desvairada,21 Mário de Andrade describes his project as the launching of a ‘hallucinism’ wholly linked to an urbane Brazilian consciousness contingent on displaced ideas, anachronism (‘I am old fashioned, I confess’), dream and madness (rather than a ‘prophet, I have deemed it more proper to represent myself as a madman’), negation (‘I am not a Futurist (after Marinetti)’), contradiction and babble (‘Even now I do not remain silent. They would mock my silence as much as they mock this uproar’), stylization and parody, quotation, double-voicing, ridiculousness (‘I do not flee from the ridiculous. I have illustrious companions’), breaking with conventions (‘I believe that lyricism, born in the subconscious, purified into a clear or confused thought, creates phrases which are entire verses, without the necessity of counting so many syllables with predetermined accentuation. Run-on lines are a welcome respite to those poets who are trapped in the Alexandrine prison.’), violence (‘Let [poetry/lyricism] stumble, fall, and wound itself’), exaggeration (‘through exaggeration, life and dreams are linked. And, employed consciously, it is not a defect, rather a legitimate means of expression’), defamiliarization (‘Taine said that the artist’s ideal consists of “presenting not the objects themselves, but rather of presenting clearly and completely any essential and outstanding characteristic of them, by means of the systematic alteration of the natural relationship between their parts, so as to make that characteristic more visible and dominant”’), arbitrary beauty (‘all the great artists, whether consciously … or unconsciously … were deformers of nature’), but also freedom that is not abused, but bridled for philosophical and religious truths. This freedom is rooted in ‘liberated words’, but not systematization, as Andrade accuses Marinetti of having done, ‘I employ liberated words. I feel that my cup is too large for me, and yet I drink from the cups of others.’ In what senses in the word liberated? In relation to the sounds of the Brazilian language (with its ‘ão’) and through ‘poetic polyphony,’ the overlay ‘not now of words (notes) alone but of phrases (melodies)’ resonating in the city. 21 All the fragments that follow come from Mario de Andrade, ‘Extremely Interesting Preface’, in Hallucinated City, bi-lingual edn, trans. Jack E. Tomlins (Nashville, TN: Vanderbuilt University Press, 1968), 5–18.

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Thus in Hallucinated City are employed melodic verse: São Paulo is a stage for Russian ballets;

harmonic verse: Pack of dogs … Stock Market … Gambling …;

poetic polyphony (one and sometimes two and even more consecutive verses): The gears palsy … The mist snows …

The domain in which ‘poetic polyphony’ or ‘poetic harmony’ is achieved, according to Mário de Andrade, arguing against Hugo, is not the senses, but consciousness or ‘the intellect’ – capable of ‘co-ordinating consecutive acts of the memory which we assimilate in a final whole’. His understanding of consciousness then depends on its capacity to compress the ‘diachronic arts’ of poetry (or narrative) into a spatialized, dialogized, harmonized simultaneity. This respects the ‘ambiguous form’ of language and the collaborative, dialogic relation between writer and reader. At the same time, Mário de Andrade echoes Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes from Underground and ‘the Machado de Assis of Brás Cubas’ (listed among those consciously irrational great artists) or at least the Brás Cubas of Machado de Assis with his claims, ‘I sing in my own way. What do I care if no one understands me?’ and his concomitant insistence on someone who will understand; or with the confession ‘My hand has written about this book that “I neither had nor do I now have the slightest intention of publishing it.” Jornal do Comércio, June 6’; or the negations, ‘this whole preface, with all the nonsensical theories which it contains is not worth a damn’ and ‘I will not go on. It disgusts me to hand over the key to my book. If you are like me, you already have the key’; and then the contrarian, ‘I do not want disciples.’ Like the underground narrator and Brás Cubas and their successors in prose, not only as prose writer, but as poet and theorist, Mário de Andrade negates his self-negation, to generate a text in which he admits both belief and vanity: No father will abandon his hunchback child, who is drowning, to save the beautiful heir of his neighbor, for the simple reason that he is a father … Every writer believes in the worth of what he writes. If he shows it, it is out of vanity. If he does not show it, it is also out of vanity.

So his hallucinated citytext is admittedly, and proudly, ‘deformed’, usurping or displaced heir to that ‘great art’ that is always ‘deformer of

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nature’. Or, borrowing again, even while insisting that his ‘originality’ lies wholly within himself, Mário de Andrade concludes, ‘I could have quoted Gorch Fock. I would have been spared this Extremely Interesting Preface. “Every song of freedom is born in prison.”’ The prison that generates Mário de Andrade’s Hallucinated City can be mapped on the cityscape, in the eccentric citytext (with its vast network of cross-cultural intertextual references), and in the concrete scents, tastes, sounds, fragments of speech resounding in his contemporary São Paulo – a poetic space crossed by distant cultural references and prosaic local speech, like that of Bely’s poetic prose. Thus in ‘Nocturno’ (Nocturne) in the Cambucí district: Num perfume de heliotrópicos e de pôças gira uma flor-do-mal … Veio do Turquestan; e traz olheiras que escurecem almas … Fundiu esterlinas entre as unhas roxas nos oscilantes de Ribeirão Preto … – Batat’assat’ô furnn! … (In a perfume of heliotropes and puddles whirls a flower-of-evil … She came from Turkestan; and she has circles under her eyes that obscure souls … She has smelted English pounds between her purple fingernails in the bordellos of Ribeirão Preto … Get-a you roast-a yams! …)22

Mário de Andrade hears the Brazilian city, with its particular Portuguese intonations, but sees in it also a series of other places, actual and literary. His own extensive exposure to what Russian writers from Mandelstam to Brodsky recognize as ‘world culture’, crossing his path through the Livraria Transatlântica (transatlantic bookstore) in São Paulo, and his process of ‘transcreation’ (transcreação), is well documented.23 And he attests both in abstraction, in the preface, and in more concrete terms, in his correspondence, that his poetic vision of the city follows not only from his parody of foreign models but also from his pursuit of a foreign muse.24 If many of these models, like those of his Russian ­contemporaries, are French, German and British, he also turns 22 Hallucinated City, 54–5. 23 Cf. Telê Ancona Lopez, ‘Arquivo e História’, in Gilda Salem Szklo, ‘Un desejo quasi enraivecido de Rio’, Mário de Andrade e o Rio de Janeiro, (Rio de Janeiro: Casa de Rui Barbosa, 1996), 11–22. 24 Ibid., 19.

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towards Russia. The landscape of the city is ‘a great open-air spectacle’, ‘theatrical’ and (like Petersburg’s) ‘frozen’, its ‘green waters’ ‘the color of lunatics’ eyes,’ its streets crossed by men ‘sleepwalking’ and wandering or circling (rodando) in a nefarious band, ‘dressed in electricity and gasoline’ while ‘sicknesses frolic’ around them. Echoing Machado de Assis and anticipating Schwarz, Andrade concludes his ‘Paisagem n. 2’ (Landscape 2): São Paulo é um palco de bailados russos. Sarabandam a tísica, a ambição, as invejas, os crimes e tambem as apoteoses da ilusão … Mas o Nijinsky sou eu! E vem a Morte, minha Karsavina! Quá, quá, quá! Vamos dansar o fox-trot da desesperança, a rir, a rir dos nossos desiguais! (São Paulo is a stage for Russian ballets. Here tuberculosis, ambition, envies, crimes dance the saraband and also the apotheoses of illusion … But I am Nijinsky! And death, my Karsavina, comes! Ha! Ha! Ha! Let’s dance the foxtrot of desperation, laughing, laughing at our unequals!)25

Here we have a poetic vision analogous to Bely’s, with the poet conscious of himself as domino or revolutionary and damned figure, constructing a carnival city through laughter. If Mário de Andrade’s urban poetry refers to a delayed, displaced, deformed or negated European urbanity and an analogous Russian song and dance, it is also wholly rooted in the particularities of Brazilian urban life, exercising poetic freedom and expressing individuality ‘through the recuperation of a public world … in the context of a creative and creating political community’.26 His modernist poetics are ‘syncretic’, his ‘project of a profound national culture passing through erudite culture until arriving at forms of popular culture, at his popular rural creations’.27 That erudition is concentrated for Mário de Andrade in Rio de Janeiro, with its literature and frenzied life – ‘essa mescla indiscreta, suada, desraçada, essa leviandade geral, essa rapidez geral, essa vivacidade 25 Hallucinated City, 60–1. 26 Szklo, ‘Mário de Andrade: um pensamento sempre moderno’, in ‘Un desejo quasi enraivecido de Rio’, 30, my translation. 27 Ibid., 27.

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interior, essa megalomania que não é apenas dos homens, é do próprio ambiente’ (that indiscrete, sweaty, de-racialized mix, that general levity, that general rapidity, that interior vivacity, that megalomania that doesn’t just belong to its inhabitants, but to the place itself) – towards which he feels the ambivalence, attraction and revolt, ‘um desejo quasi enraivecido’ (the nearly mad desire) of the Paulista.28 The poems written during his ‘exile in Rio’ (1938–41) depict the city in terms of carnival, in a ‘carnivalesque polyphonic’ dialogue with Manuel Bandeira’s Carnaval (1922), which Resende characterizes as solitary and sad.29 In contrast, Andrade’s ‘Carnaval Carioca’ (1923) (Rio Carnival) is self-described as ‘delirious’, giving rise to something approximating ‘the 300, 350 mários that he afirmed existed’ and to ‘the multiple cities that the city of Rio de Janeiro contains. Within the various possible cities move the innumerable mários’ – musician, poet, ethnographer, journalist, sensualist, harlequin modernist, outsider, insider, conscious and unselfconscious participant.30 Rio becomes an increasing presence in Bandeira’s and Andrade’s work, with its Mistura muito excelente de chás … Esta foi açafata … – Não, foi arrumadeira. E está dançando com o ex-prefeito municipal. Tão Brasil! De fato este salão de sangues misturados parece o Brasil …31 (Excellent mixture of teas … This girl was a lady-in-waiting [literally, dresser of the court] … – No, she was a chambermaid. And she’s dancing with the ex-municipal governor. So Brazil! In fact, this salon of mixed bloods looks like Brazil …)

Andrade imagines the city and its inhabitants in terms of imported and blended teas, classes, bloodlines, costumes – intermingling in a dance. This Carioca carnival concentrates Brazil. Fictions such as Andrade’s Macunaíma map this eccentric mix beyond the cities of Rio and São 28 Mário de Andrade, letter to Manuel Bandeira, cited by Beatriz Resende in ‘Carnaval Carioca: Mário de Andrade e o Rio de Janeiro’, in Szklo, ‘Un desejo’, 87. 29 Resende, ‘Carnaval …’, 90–1. 30 Ibid., 91–4. 31 Ibid., 95.

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Paulo. Retracing references to ‘cultural crossings’ in Andrade’s Danças dramáticas do Brasil and essay on Aleijadinho, Szklo notes how the ‘authenticity of our national soul lies in its incongruities’.32 When Russian and Brazilian modernist fiction turns into the interior and an urbane interiority in order to continue to explore eccentric margins, it remains eccentric in its particular attentiveness to the ethnic and racial conflicts, languages and dialects, taking as point of departure their convergence in the city and often returning to reconsider them in that context. The self-conscious play of the fiction is focused on language in the works of Brazilian writers such as Ramos and Andrade, José Bento Monteiro Lobato (in stories such as ‘O Colocador de Pronomes’ (1920, ‘The Placer of Pronouns’)), as in the works of Brazilian poets such as Manuel Bandeira and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Brazilian writers share this tangible concern with language with their Russian contemporaries, particularly poets, as divergent as Khlebnikov, Maiakovsky and the OBERYu (Society for Real Art, or the Russian Absurdists). The debates about language in a totalizing Russian/Soviet context generate counterposed and sometimes contradictory theories, framed by Eikhenbaum, Shklovsky and Tynianov (who define but then move beyond formalism), Marr, Vinogradov, Shor, Iakubinsky, Voloshinov and Bakhtin.33 These perspectives find analogies in the Brazilian context, within which Mário de Andrade offers one of the most productive theories as well as practices of language. Passos notes how ‘the lesson of Mário de Andrade bore fruit in the regionalism of the social novel of the 1930s – the movement that immediately follows the publication of Macunaíma – [in which] the exploration of linguistic and cultural particularities, albeit from a more traditional narrative perspective, forms the foundation of the search for a new national literary aesthetic’. In the work ‘of perhaps the most notable Brazilian writer of the twentieth century, João Guimarães Rosa’, ‘the theme of the hybrid protagonist, hesitating between two cultures, would regain its experimental character in the tale “Meu tio, o Iauarête” (1961),’ as ‘in the novels Maíra (1976), by Darcy Ribeiro, and A expedição Montaigne (1982), by Antonio Callado’. Thus, Mário de Andrade’s linguistic project reaches forward, even as it also reaches back to Machado de Assis’s (and even Alencar’s), as the modernist Russian 32 Szklo, ‘Un dejeso’, 27. 33 For an incisive summary of the debates about language in the 1920s and 1930s, cf. Katerina Clark’s Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, Chapters 9: ‘Promethean linguistics’, and 10: ‘Straight Talk and the Campaign Against Wagner’, 201–41.

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linguistic project and play with literary convention reaches back to Gogol and Pushkin. In all these texts, among others, we find the true legacy of Macunaíma: the combination of the motifs of hybrid language, identity, and death as a solution for the most ancient desire of youthful Brazilian literature: to certify that its ‘impure speech’34 was capable of expressing the ineffable and responding with beauty to the question that never seems to exhaust itself: after all, who are we, who live in two worlds?35

This sense of inhabiting two worlds (as much as a boundary between eras), or rather, of inhabiting increasingly multiple worlds that collide and converse in a carnival linguistic, literary and literal space is a constant in Brazilian and Russian prose and poetry, yet it becomes more explicitly defined and complicated by historical contradictions in its designated modernist forms. Clark’s extensive examination of diverse literary production in the context of a carnivalized revolutionary and post-revolutionary city in Petersburg: Crucible of Revolution demonstrates how eccentric cultural consciousness manifests itself variously in modernist Russian poetic discourses. These are traditionally divided along lines of Futurism (with Maiakovsky staging unconventional dramatic poetic productions in what Kelly describes as a dynamic chaotic atmosphere of the city36), Symbolism (informing Bely’s poetry and poetic prose in Petersburg, but also cutting through Blok’s urban/e poemy) and Acmeism (in Mandelstam’s and Akhmatova’s work especially, in the latter case informing ‘the Dostoevskian power with which she uses her city’s concrete reality to convey the grotesque banality of the evil that some of her contemporaries tried to justify in the name of great historical goals’37). Symbolists such as Bely begin to complicate eccentric dynamics of cultural memory. Bely would claim that his Petersburg lay within an uncharted ‘fourth dimension’: his would be a Petersburg that did not yet exist on any map.38 His Petersburg prospekts stretch towards familiar horizons, but 34 Mário de Andrade, ‘Epilogue’ to Macunaíma, in Obras Complétas (São Paolo, 1944; Paris, 1988). 35 José Luiz Passos, ‘Macunaíma’, trans. Sharon Lubkemann Allen, in Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 36 Aileen Kelly, ‘The Chaotic City’, Toward Another Shore (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 207–10. 37 Ibid. 38 Cf. Petersburg, trans. Maguire and Malmstad, 207; Kelly, Toward Another Shore, 205.

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also further east and south. His Petersburg reaches further towards inner limits of consciousness and the subconscious, pushing fragmented narrative consciousness towards its limits. But Bely’s Petersburg also draws on a kind of historical and intertextual memory that had not yet been explored as irrecoverable ‘past’ by the Petersburg text. Unlike earlier underground figures, from Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin and Dostoevsky’s underground narrator to Olesha’s Kavalerov, Nikolai Apollonovich has a present father, though one he abandons, in a revolutionary departure not unlike those through which Blok represents intergenerational cultural conflict in Возмездие (Requital) (a work that poetically stylizes more than it parodies Flaubert’s already parodic Education sentimentale, which collapses past into present recounting, within which unrequited passion and unresolved pursuits are still full of potential). Though questions of paternity and progeny, origins and originality, authority and authoring are cast in immediately pre- and post-revolutionary fictions such as Bely’s and Blok’s partly in terms of differences between generations, they continue to be explored in terms of delay as well as dialogue and duplicity in the present. This is also the case in the Futurist line. The eccentric Futurist line continues that concretely ‘ahistorical’ tradition that finds the city’s and culture’s significance wholly materialized in the present. This is one of the first eccentric lines to infiltrate contested centres and ex-centric contexts such as Moscow and Lisbon: two concentric cities suffering from acute memory crises in the context of twentieth-century totalitarianism strangely marked by utopian reconstruction involving both massive clearing (erasure) and commemoration (an attempt at regrounding authority) partly in response to eighteenth-century marginalization (in Imperial Russia and Europe), delayed modernization and resistance within unruly residual empires. Maiakovsky’s and much of Pessoa’s multivocal poetry and prose reconceptualizes modern Moscow and Lisbon in eccentric terms, re-mapping these as mundane sites, purportedly without memory. They not only register modern markers in the city (tobacco shops and electrified streets), but re-map the city through modern linguistic collisions. Strange metaphors and street cries open up boundaries between prosaic and poetic language, with visible disruption in poetic space and sound, such as we also see in Andrade’s hallucinated citytext. Comparing Maiakovsky and Pessoa, Octávio Paz describes ‘literatura de periferia’ (literature of the periphery) as ‘zona mal iluminada em que se movem – conspiradores ou lunáticos? – as sombras indecisas

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de Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis e Fernando Pessoa’39 (literature of the periphery, poorly illuminated region in which move – conspirators or lunatics? – the indecisive shadows of Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and Fernando Pessoa). Reading these three among the many heteronyms through which Pessoa’s Lisbon is polyphonically reconfigured, Paz points to Pessoa’s literal and literary schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive writing. Pessoa himself, like Maiakovsky, in various voices, casts the poet as eccentric, divided consciousness. A futurist poetics claims to be intentionally forgetful, in the sense that Lyotard discusses in defining modernism as re-vising the present with disdain or disregard for the past. Thus, Maiakovsky’s urban poetry redraws Moscow like Petersburg as site of culture in flux, marked by desire illumined by flickering light, crossed by motley costumes, slang and slogans of revolution. He re-imagines the city in his 1913 poem ‘Из улицы в улицу’ (‘From Street to Street’) as industrial space, fragmented and choked by wires, crossed by rails, clouded, redressed or undressed by perverse, denuded lamplight, which violently strips the street of its stockings (Лысый фонарь сладострастно снимает с улицы черный чулок). Though rails are glimpsed around clock towers and the lamp is bald, these registers of time on Maiakovsky’s street measure tempo, pressure and perversity more than history. Maiakovsky reconstructs Russian cultural geography in terms of contradictions in the present, and then of cultural crossings and cross-cultural critique in poems set in Paris and New York. Unlike the eccentric line represented in Acmeist poetry, which continues to transpose and collapse cultural memory into a present defamiliarized by that collision, the futurist model seems to disregard tradition in its negotiation of cultural identity. However, it also eccentrically re-articulates the past through its self-conscious disarticulation.40 Maiakovsky’s, like Pessoa’s and Andrade’s Futurist modernism, in contradistinction to Marinetti’s idealism, is marked by deconstructed past and present and by cultural collisions and crossings. Though writing from the centre of Soviet cultural propaganda, Maiakovsky’s poetry and plays are increasingly marked by eccentric critique, dis-covering complicity. As innovative as any Futurist or avant-garde poet such as Khlebnikov 39 Octavio Paz, ‘O Desconhecido de Si Mesmo’ (Lisbon: Iniciativas Editoriais, 1980), 10. 40 Maiakovsky, for instance, not only casts, but recasts the Parisian woman in his 1929 ‘Парижанка’, cutting out or explicitly defacing a conventional depiction, to make room for his own.

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or Khodasevich, a more eccentrically positioned Tsvetaeva plays on the paradox of a rearticulating disarticulation in the context of political and cultural disruption, dispossession and displacement. In her 1925 poem dedicated to Pasternak, measuring ‘Dis-tance: versts, miles …’ (Рас-стояние: версти, мили …) meant as a means of silencing and separating dissenting poetic voices, Tsvetaeva traces one of many trajectories taken by an eccentric literary tradition: here the distance is deconstructed so that ‘stance’ answers ‘dis’, ‘miles’ not only distend but translate ‘versts’, versts and milestones recall earlier poems, distances disperse ‘conspirators’ across the world’s ‘slums’. Tsvetaeva’s poetic ‘conspirators’ include also Blok, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Rilke and, later, Brodsky. With them, she conspires to recast poetic and cultural consciousness dialogically and through displacements. She frames her early chronological collections of lyrical poetry spatially, in terms of distances and discursive orientation, as Версты (1921) (Milestones) and Версты, Выпуск 1 (Milestones: Book 1), with cycles of ‘Poems on Moscow’, ‘Poems to Blok’, ‘Poems to Akhmatova’. In these collections, Tsvetaeva reveals her essential tendency ‘to don verbal masques, to speak as another character, to merge the dramatic and the lyric in monologues, dialogues, choruses, and one-sided perorations’.41 Like Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova’s Anno Domini MCMXXI and Requiem re-map the alienated stance of the artist not only on city streets and outside prison walls, but in domestic spaces, exploring new dimensions of personal as well as collective memory, introducing new perspectives within the Petersburg text by crossing boundaries of genre and gender. While embedded in Petersburg, Akhmatova’s poetry, like Mandelstam’s and Tsvetaeva’s, also revises the city and citytext through displaced cultural references. Yet Mandelstam’s Катень (1913/16) (Stone) and Tristia (1923), the poetry of his later Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks, as well as prose including his anti-memoir Noise of Time (1923), The Egyptian Stamp (1927), Fourth Prose (1928–30), Journey to Armenia (1931–32), and Conversation about Dante (1933), like Tsvetaeva’s Milestones, Поэма без героя (Poem without a Hero) and Поэма конца (Poem of the End), and prose are marked by multiplied disruptions and displacements, discovering new thresholds for dialogic writing in the margins of the eccentric city and citytext – thresholds reprised, relocated and reconfigured again in Brodsky’s retrospective and reflexive critical essays and poetry. Mandelstam insists, like Dostoevsky, on a ‘living 41 King, ‘Tsvetaeva’, in Terras, (ed.), Handbook of Russian Literature 486.

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word’, linked not only to eccentric estrangement or defamiliarization, but to dissent, displacement, death and dialogue with a reader. His poetics, like Tsvetaeva’s, is reshaped by an urbane eccentric sensibility compounded by exile. With the impending and eventually accomplished revolution in Russia, ironically realized through an influx of European ideas and Lenin’s return from Europe through Petersburg’s portal, there is a different sense of historical rupture and discontinuity in the Petersburg text. While Revolutionary Russia is also ground for revolutionary literature, not only in that sense of literature that incites to partisan action, but also in the sense of revisionary literariness, it gives rise to yet another staged text and context where eccentric aestheticism, linked with difficulty and dialogism, expresses disillusionment and becomes a form of costly, but creative dissent. Eccentric lines of Slavic literature colonize concentric cultural contexts and enter into creative contact with other eccentric traditions (including Brazil’s) partly through exilic literature. Russian modernists perform on Paris, Lisbon and Rio stages, publish in émigré presses, and re-frame not only their own, but these other citytexts from this doubly eccentric vantage point. Brazilian writers work in Lisbon and Paris, first freely, then fleeing censorship. The extension of an eccentric prosaics and poetics in late-modernist and postmodern Russian and Brazilian literature, composed in the context of twentieth-century political constraint and displacement, involves even greater play with paradox, while continuing to critically reflect on as well as directly reflect divided cultural consciousness through representations of and framed by madness and pathological memory. Eccentricity in the ex-centric city and in exile: Russian, Luso-Brazilian and transnational postmodernism The revolutionary and republican removal of political authority from St. Petersburg and Rio paradoxically reinforces their cultural marginocentrality. On the one hand, these capitals concentrate marginalized cultural monuments: the problematic legacy of colonial/imperial past is still legible between the lines of the city and citytext. On the other hand, not only cultural memory but marginality makes these sites conducive to current dissent. They continue to function as unstable cultural compass. Both become ‘supreme memory place’ in their respective literary traditions, as Renate Lachmann describes Petersburg in her study of Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian

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Modernism.42 Significant works continue to be written and set within St. Petersburg and Rio, yet they become imaginary settings and subtexts, undergrounds that surface in other spaces. While Brazil’s cities are all, to some degrees, eccentric colonial constructs, so that Mário de Andrade’s modernist re-mapping of São Paulo as hallucinated city is a mode of naturalizing it, of recognizing its eccentric aspects in the context of an encompassing eccentric Brazilian cultural landscape; Russia’s cities, Moscow especially, must be denaturalized to be rendered as eccentric. But the dissenting postmodern Russian citytext reads the Soviet capital as denatured and re-natures it through delirium, digression, divided consciousness and paradoxical dialogism. In Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, the concentric city becomes alienating space, unmasked by posturing foreigners and demonic figures, refracted through alienated consciousness, inscribed in digressive narrative, possibly scribbled by a schizophrenic. As examined in more detail in my comparative analysis of Gogol and Bulgakov’s ‘Purgatorial Landscapes’, the novel redraws public and private space, turning both into the reflective, doubled and divided threshold territory of eccentric novels. With Gogolian playfulness and Dostoevskian perversity, Bulgakov’s devil not only filters again into everyday speech and into literary style but is literally figured in the city, re-introducing on all these levels an eccentric irrationality and responsibility. Neither so fantastical in its chronotopic compression and recasting, nor reaching as far abroad in its cultural references, Petrushevskaya’s Время ночь (1992) (The Time: Night, 1994) represents equally strange permutations of the Moscow text in the postmodern and late-/post-Soviet context. Madness has receded back into everyday speech and style marked by that пошлость or triviality Nabokov distinguishes as the domain of Gogol’s prose. But it discovers the particular prosaics of Russian женская проза (women’s prose) and быть (everyday existence). The madness of both Bulgakov’s and Petrushevskaya’s texts is literal, like that of Gogol’s narrator, even as it affects the literary. Bezdomny, after being clinically diagnosed and carted off to an asylum, is ‘cured’, turned official historian, only to turn both inward (into irrational imagination) and outward (into the moonlit cityscape, where he confronts doubles 42 Lachmann (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 20. This is, as Jennifer Day noted in a paper on ‘Memory and Space in the Petersburg City-Text’ (delivered at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, December 2002), ‘a designation that becomes especially appropriate in the twentieth century, when the city’s very identity as Petersburg becomes dependent on the act of remembering’.

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ranging from Ivan Petrovich to the Master novelist), in order to authorize and perhaps actually author a fiction that undermines that history. We find a similarly eccentric strain of madness in Petrushevskaya’s novel; though here the senility of old age is linked with schizophrenia. The narrator/author’s mother Sima, despatched to a psychiatric ward, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder and dementia rooted in Stalin-era paranoia. Madness, as in Gogol’s fiction, spreads laterally, violating bounds between self and other, implicating every layer of society as well as the reader; but in Petrushevskaya’s fiction this is also a madness that breeds. This alienation characterizes the lines between mother and daughter, who diagnose and denounce each other and themselves. Anna’s conclusion, following Alyona’s accusations in one of many squabbles about food, ‘параноики и шизофреникн, просто бред преследования’ (paranoia and schizophrenia, pure gibberish about persecution) might also be self-diagnosis. Notes written on scraps and seemingly randomly compiled, Petrushevskaya’s work resembles and raises some of the same questions concerning cultural memory and authority as Pessoa’s similarly ex-centric Livro do desassossego (Book of Disquietude), Osman Lins’s A Rainha dos Cárceres da Grécia (The Queen of the Prisons of Greece), and Pelevin’s Чапаев и Пустота (Buddha’s Little Finger). Madness figures in Petrushevskaya’s text in more complex ways than earlier underground narratives, because we find not only a schizophrenic, paranoid narrator, conscious of herself as fictive construction, but multiple self-conscious divided narrators and interpolated narratives. There are several scribblers in this citytext: mother, daughter and ghostly underwriters (Akhmatova and Dostoevsky, most notably) – all of whose authority remains ambivalent, contingent. Petrushevskaya’s novel is set in late-Soviet Moscow. Yet the toponym Moscow itself surfaces into the narrative only once. Petrushevskaya’s city, like Mário de Andrade’s in stories such as ‘Piá Não Sofre? Sofre’ (‘It Can Hurt Plenty’) and Lins’s in The Queen of the Prisons of Greece is represented rather through abstraction of space and absences, but also a decidedly unabstract negation and economy of lack – hollow stomachs, hollow relationships, hollowed out discourse, in at once overcrowded and hollowed out homes. The domestic sphere and stratified society, time and tradition, decay and generational difference of the Moscow text are compressed into divided interiors where history is collapsed into family discord, disorderly memory, inscribed on disordered scraps of paper. Petrushevskaya’s narrative also turns out of the house onto streets as

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blinded as any fog-bound prospekt in Dostoevsky or Bely – spaces in which consciousness is similarly split and there are plural alienated consciousnesses present, doubled and differentiated. Community and communication break down, undermining conventional concentric and eccentric cultural claims. The myth of the dissident as that of a raskol’nik or dissenter are reduced in Petrushevskaya’s novel to the tale of petty mafioso and minor poet. Schizophrenia and paranoia are functions of a housing crisis and food shortages. Poetic performance is reduced to a potato, such as that turned by Zhenia, Anna’s fellow entertainer one evening, into a puppet. Anna uproots language (its myth of origins) in mocking Zhenia’s etymological self-definition (as ‘stranger’). Anna’s own name is linked to something both more concrete and related to literary production and survival – to Anna Akhmatova, to the poet’s life and place, more than to her poetry. Poetry is essentially absent from this text, as the purported ‘novel’ written by Julia Marquezim Enone is absent in all but the tiniest and most questionable of fragments in Lins’s urbane narrator’s novel about a novel. Petrushevskaya’s poet, instead, gives us self-parodied underground prose; to a much lesser degree than Lins, she also gives us a parodic critique of literary criticism rather than criticism. But this unconventional diaristic prose and anti-criticism function as a freer form of poetry – a kind of prose (diary, memoir, confession, novel) and poetry or poema (requiem) that has undergone transubstantiation, like the potato Anna turns from puppet into a sustaining meal. However, there is in Anna’s schizophrenia a violence more frightening than that of the impotent underground narrator, here related to real generations and realities of (rather than speculation on) abortion and euthanasia. But the text is not structured according to a biological or blood line, anymore than a rational line. Death is not an end. Like Bulgakov’s Master’s novel, this is also a posthumously realized text, published after Anna’s death (suicide?), but also co-authorized and authored after death. Genre and generations are not fixed. Mothers and daughters speak as equally irrational coequals in this Moscow text of adulterated or ‘unnatural’ families. They are free, like Dostoevsky’s underground narrator’s remembered and projected interlocutors, to walk out of the house and text, even as their voices continue to resound within it, with a variety of intonations and implications. Petrushevskaya’s reconfiguration of the underground changes what it is capable of generating – reflections on and within women’s discourse, a Soviet and post-Soviet experience and a postmodern intertextual

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self-consciousness. As feminine text, Petrushevskaya’s novel shifts the interior terrain of social interaction and of mental alienation. It inhabits the peculiar ‘corner’ of the ‘kitchen table’, consisting of prose fragments composed by a woman poet, read by a daughter who is literally as well as literarily subject, part-author and questioning authority, and purveyor of the manuscript. With multiple versions of the ‘copier’ incorporated in the text (mother/daughter, poet/performer, writer/critic/editor, etc.), Petrushevskaya reconsiders the old Petersburg questions concerning the creative capacity of the copyist and the autonomy of fictive creation or double. Petrushevskaya’s novel, reflexively playing with the space within which its subjects live, reflects a strange compression, violent and dark: a space in which mother and child must prey parasitically upon each other. But Petrushevskaya suggests parasitism with creative potential. She executes an embodied underground consciousness, able to give birth to an actual child who voices and double-voices the text. The child, rather than the parent, delivers the text, co-authoring it as ambivalent reader, collaborating with the actual reader and framing our response and responsibility. Clarice Lispector’s chronicles from the ‘bottom drawer’ in A Legião Estrangeira (1964) (The Foreign Legion: Stories and Chronicles, 1992) suggest a similarly displaced and transformed Brazilian underground consciousness – urban/e but domestic, hyper-conscious, refractory, reflexive, but concretely linked to the female body and unquestionably fertile. What is at stake in the chronicles, as in many of Petrushevskaya’s works, is the relationship between literature and ‘reality’, interior and exterior life. The starting point for Lispector, as for Petrushevskaya, is with reflexive fragments (the unpoetic, unpolished, unpublished/ unpublishable production of the poet), citations, commentary, refractory reflections, dialogues with the projected selves and others, stashed away in the bottom drawer of some kitchen cabinet. All writing is copied text, creativity dependent on distortion or lie – such as Anna Andrianovna’s framed copying of her daughter’s diary or writing in her daughter’s voice, or her daughter’s framing of the text.43 But the nature of this lie is that it gets to the ‘brutal truth’. ‘To write often means remembering what has never existed.’44 Like Petrushevskaya’s and Lispector’s, postmodern fictions by Lins and Pelevin embody this concept in self-conscious 43 Cf. Liudmila Petrushevskaya, Время ночь: повесть (Moscow: Vagrius, 2001), 119–22. 44 Clarice Lispector, The Foreign Legion, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (New York: New Directions, 1992), 120, 121.

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eccentric characters who remember fiction as reality, question history as a fiction. Lins does so in The Queen of the Prisons of Greece through an interesting play between a male narrator/author/critic, identifying with an absent female author. While marginally exploring transgendering as a manifestation of cultural schizophrenia, Pelevin’s Buddha’s Little Finger (Чапаев и Пустота) pursues a more explicitly self-critiquing Dostoevskian line, collapsing historical difference, exploring contradictory cultural orientations, romancing a reader through rival authorship and authority, through conscious dissembling and dream akin to that described by Lins’s narrator: these fictions recover the ‘mythical vision of space’ of ‘ancient cartographers’, on whose maps familiar boundaries dissolved in dreams. Their maps weren’t a mere projection of known oceans and lands; they enlarged the world, they didn’t limit themselves to what travelers might encounter; in addition to guiding, they led astray; while informing, they were also a record of fears.45

Re-mapping modern cultural consciousness, Lispector and Lins, Petrushevskaya and Pelevin explore extremes earlier charted in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground narratives. In his preface, Pelevin’s fictional editor tells us that the narrative that follows is ‘not “a work of literature”’, but ‘a psychological journal’ or ‘diary’ or a record ‘fixing’ the ‘mechanical cycles of consciousness’, written to achieve a ‘complete cure for what is known as “the inner life”’.46 We might characterize that inner life, charted in the form of diaristic notes in Lins’s novel as well, in terms of a schizophrenic cultural consciousness (directly aligned with and parodying Dostoevsky’s Petersburg text in Pelevin’s work). Its contradictions are mapped out on a historically distorted and geo-culturally distended landscape. Yet rather than curing Pustota, Pelevin releases him and his reader into that inner life, where historical and cultural distances are collapsed, forcing doubling, continuity, contradictions and complicity into view. Both past and present are represented as plural and interact on a single, polyphonic plane. This occurs also in Sokolov’s School for Fools, Lins’s The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, as well as in ex-centric Portuguese works including Saramago’s All the Names and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Antunes’s Return of the Caravels, and Jorge’s The Painter of Birds. 45 Osman Lins, The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, trans. Adria Frizzi (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1955), 126, 17.v.75. 46 Viktor Pelevin, Чапаев и Пустота (New York: Penguin, 2001), 7.

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As a nascent body of critical scholarship has begun to show, we find ourselves disoriented in similarly shadowed urban landscapes, refracted through schizophrenic urbane consciousness in contemporary Slavic and Luso-Brazilian fictions, confronting still (or again) eccentric cities and cultures in crisis, with uncertainties and upheaval compounded by our access to them through haunted consciousness. We might further explore how these bodies of literature (as well as film) similarly recast recent crises by reclaiming the privileged perspective of eccentric characters, erring in the margins of both city and citytext, pathological and alienated, but complicit and even paradoxically embodying an alienating cultural consciousness they subject to critique. On the opposing edge of modernity, the displacement and historical dialectic that is already collapsed and compressed into internal dialogue in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s underground novels is exacerbated in even more self-consciously eccentric and ex-centric fictions. In cultures still characterized, as Schwarz wrote of nineteenth-century Russia and Brazil, by displaced ideas, these works still re-imagine their own histories in relation to Western history, from marginal temporal, spatial and social perspectives. Like the ‘minor literatures’ described by Deleuze and Guattari in their analysis of Kafka, they continue to redefine literary genre and cultural consciousness through ‘a relation of multiple deterritorializations with language’.47 That is, they renew language in the broadest sense of the term, acting as ‘peripheral elements’ that reinvigorate the complex ‘polysystems’ delineated by Even-Zohar.48 This displacement of languages (literary as much as literal) is not only spatial but temporal. Their engagement in that ‘Great Dialogue’, which crosses both cultural and historical boundaries in Bakhtin’s theory of evolving literary and ‘speech genres’, is peculiarly self-conscious, anxious, framed by alienation and an ambivalent sense of the self. That angst-ridden dialogism is rooted in a binary self-construction, or self-definition as other, through rupture, such as articulated by Lotman. But unlike nineteenth-century counterparts, these contemporary works recover a far more disparate set of discourses, and they cover a vaster terrain and temporality, crossing greater distances and rifts, both internal and external. They reflect far more open, porous borders in actual and virtual space, enabling a more rapid, fluid cross-cultural 47 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 19. Cf. discussion p. 387. 48 Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘Polsystem Theory’, Poetics Today 1:1–2 (1979), 303.

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exchange. Deconstructing any conventional, linear notion of history or cultural formation, they bridge distant moments of historical crisis by means of literal as well as imaginary returns, mapped on layered and extended eccentric and ex-centric cityscapes and citytexts, read within reflective, reflexive narrative consciousness. The recovery of both past and riven present is partly mediated by literature – by intertextual references, both implicit and explicit. These cross-references reflect new crossings, including contact between and spreading influence of Russian and Brazilian eccentric traditions. If Russian and Brazilian cultural domain and dynamics are still reconfigured through alienated consciousness, such alienated figures increasingly infiltrate and redefine an ex-centric Lisbon or Paris text. Distant present and past are drawn into already temporally disrupted modernist discourses by immigrant and other marginal writers. Rather than finding, as Hugo anticipates for his readers of a Paris ‘palimpsest’, a singular old text legible in the layers and between the lines of the city, in contemporary literary constructions of Lisbon and Paris we confront multiple, contradictory texts and distant geo-cultural contexts surfacing though ‘astonished memory’ as well as already circulating in the margins of the city and citytext. The extention of the eccentric line through émigré, if not exactly transnational, translingual writing, was already explored in part by Gogol and Dostoevsky, who headed abroad out of a sense of cultural ambivalence, under economic duress or in pursuit of personal obsessions; it was explored differently by Turgenev, out of a kind of attraction and interest in assimilation; and by Herzen and later writers such as Zamiatin and Babel, out of political necessity. But the writing of displaced writers, émigrés or exiles such as TertzSiniavsky, Voinovich, Brodsky, Nabokov, immigrants such as Rawet and Lispector,49 is marked by exponential eccentricity. On the one hand, an eccentric point of departure may become central to the exile’s orbit. In his lecture on ‘The Condition of the Writer in Exile’ Brodsky describes the writer in exile as astronaut sent into space in a capsule of language – language as enclosure. Nabokov, who might be more likely to cast the exile as dog in space, describes his verses, even those written in Paris, as exhalations of Petersburg’s air. Breathed into this other atmosphere, eccentric discourse might 49 For a compelling recent study of Jewish Brazilian writers of Russian and Polish, see Nelson Vieira’s Jewish Voices in Brazilian Literature: A Prophetic Discourse of Alterity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), focusing on Rawet, Lispector and Scliar.

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dissipate or be distilled. Todorov, speaking of his own position of eccentricity, describing his dialogism or ‘doublethink’ in historical terms, decries abstraction: ‘ma mémoire a généralisé mon propre cas en le confondant avec celui des mes proches ou même avec des images tirées des lectures.’50 Space recedes entirely into the self and ‘the city conceived on this plane [of exile] is, more than any other, subject to re-ordering by the individual consciousness since its very existence is determined by the ability or capacity to remember’.51 Brodsky problematizes the arbitrary detail and disorderliness of such memory, diminished further by translation and translingualism. But his eccentric formation also arbitrates against that devaluation of arbitrary detail, distortion and deterritorialization. Brodsky offers an exemplary ‘classical’ modernist poetics, formed by Petersburg’s estrangement as well as his own estrangement from Petersburg, creating through infinite reflections and echoes, even though ‘he never places the poetic language within ironic question marks and does not [seem to] offer us a theater of comic poetic impostors and graphomaniacs playing with cultural myths’52 as does Nabokov’s parodic polyphonic prose. Boym observes in ‘Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky’ (writers she qualifies as ‘unconventionally modernist’, ‘internal and external exiles, misfits and mixed bloods who offer digressions and detours from the mythical biography of a nation’53) that ‘in Brodsky’s case, his autobiography was in the twist of a foreign language’. It was doubly so, insofar as even in Petersburg ‘civilization’ involved ‘not merely a canon but [already] a way of translation and transmission of memory’:54 Brodsky defines civilization in terms of the second of his ‘two key architectural metaphors’ – the ‘room and a half’ and the ‘Greek portico’: ‘civilization’ is spiritually mediated by ‘translation’ materialized through the transposition of this Classical structure through Petersburg onto the Russian tundra. In the poetry of the Jewish, ‘all-Union homeless poet Mandelstam, ‘this Greek portico is not merely a classical foundation, but a wandering structure’,55 which Brodsky’s ‘room and a half’ also 50 Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Dialogisme et schizophrénie’, in Benjamin A. Stolz et al. (eds), Language and Literary Theory, Vol. 5 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 566. 51 Day, ‘Memory and Space’, 7. 52 Svetlana Boym, ‘Estrangement as a Lifestyle’, Poetics Today 17:4 (Winter 1996), 526. 53 Ibid., 513. 54 Ibid., 523. 55 Ibid.

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becomes. If there is a sense in which eccentric culture, transported, is reduced – to that mere shard of a mirror carried into the wilderness described by Lispector – it is also an infinite prism, a liberating ‘prisonhouse of language’.56 Brodsky’s ‘Room and a Half’ transcreates his parents according to a discrete code of conscience not only through its transpositions, translation and translingual turns, but especially through his eccentrically reflexive return to the Petersburg text. The poetry, prose and eccentric poetics of such exiles and émigrés as Lispector, Nabokov and Brodsky are ‘not lost in translation, but conceived by it’57 in a doubled sense, since such writers are polylingual or translingual already, before departures from eccentric cultures. Lispector’s fiction – centrally concerned with Rio, ranging into other urban sites and Brazilian interior, partly written in Paris and in French as well as in Portuguese, by a Polish Jewish immigrant to Brazil, in dialogue with Luso-Brazilian as well as Slavic, Yiddish and French literary traditions – offers us a concentrated concluding view of the transnational connection between discrete eccentric, marginocentric, concentric and ex-centric citytexts. In her introduction to the translation of Lispector’s collection of stories Soulstorm, Grace Paley speculates that Lispector’s work centrally concerns a kind of spatialized dialogue: ‘one language trying to make itself at home in another. Sometimes there’s hospitality, sometimes a quarrel’.58 She suggests that Lispector’s extraordinary ‘tone, the rhythms that even in translation (probably difficult) are so surprising and right’ derive from ‘that meeting’.59 Paley, herself a Russian Jewish immigrant, offers a peculiarly Dostoevskian or Machadian underground image of Lispector’s writing, ‘Once you have stood a sentence on its head or elbow, the people who live in those sentences seem to become states of literary mind – they seem almost absurd … some of the characters try desperately to get out of the stories. Others retreat into their own fictions – seem to be waiting for and relieved by Lispector’s last embracing sentence.’60 Paley responds to her observation of Lispector’s ‘many solitary middle-class Brazilian women, urban, heavily European’, first by reading into the text that ‘longing for Europe’ or ‘the Old World’ such as many read into fictions by eccentric 56 Ibid., 526. 57 Ibid., 529. 58 Grace Paley, ‘Introduction’, in Clarice Lispector, Soulstorm, trans. Alexis Levitin (New York: New Directions, 1989), ix. 59 Ibid., ix–x. 60 Ibid.

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writers. Yet she concludes having ‘decided I was wrong. It was simply longing’.61 Lispector writes of this longing of the writer in terms of the search for language or ‘fishing’ for a word adequate to a reality, whose cultural complexity Paley describes with reference to the meeting of ‘African black, Indian brown and golden, European white’ displaced in an urban context within which Lispector ‘had to find a new way to tell. Luckily it was at the tip of her foreign tongue’.62 Lispector also locates the writer behind bars and describes her as deviant, digressive, distracted, compulsive dissembler. In a more literal sense than Felman’s comparative study of ‘madness’ in French and American literature, a comparative reading of Brazilian and Russian fictions demonstrates how each eccentric tradition ‘speaks from a plural place and from a dialogical perspective’ playing out an ‘encounter’ and ‘interval’ between cultures as well as their ‘eccentricity with respect to each other’.63 These traditions anticipate the ex-centricity at the heart of contemporary European theories, while their exilic literature directly contributes to it.

61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., xi. 63 Shosana Felman, Writing and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 20.

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Postscript: theory of the novel and the eccentric novel’s early play with theory entric novel’s early play with theory Theorists such as Felman borrow the spatialized discourse of eccentricity to describe ex-centric developments in recent French fiction, as do Deleuze and Guattari in describing a modern shift from a ‘root-book’ model to a fragmented ‘radicle-system or fascicular’ model.1 But Russian and Brazilian nineteenth-century literature and early twentieth-century cultural theory anticipate and complicate Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of modernist fascicular (hybrid, influenced) and postmodern rhizomatic (independent) development. The rhizome (as cultivated and uncultivated text, culture), with its anti-memoried dynamics and mobile middle, ‘pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite’.2 This is precisely the sort of eccentric text, cultural and individual consciousness that we find in Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s Petersburg and Rio narratives, re-writing the novel through intertextual flight, digressions in cultural margins and between conventional lines. We see this mode of mapping reprised in urbane Russian and Brazilian traditions, continually redrawn through literary trajectories full of digressions, contradictions, compulsive attachment and detachment. The rhizome 1 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe the ‘root-book’ as ‘the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book)’ (a concentric model) in contrast to the ‘radicle-system, or fascicular root’ with its ‘immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafted onto it’ so that it can flourish (a more complicated concentric model, tending towards the ex-centric). 2 Ibid.

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as a model aptly describes the anachronism of the eccentric text, the ‘short-term’ or ‘antimemory’ represented by displaced, compressed, interpolated historical discourses, even in such genres as the memoir – whether signed by Gogol’s or Dostoevsky’s, Machado’s or Barreto’s or Lins’s fictional diarists or by ‘actual’ authors such as Brodsky and Lispector. The rhizome also recognizes the dynamics so essential to eccentric as to ‘minor’ literatures, ‘work[ing] over its material … in a relation of multiple deterritorializations with language’3 to challenge authority and redefine authorship. Yet Deleuze and Guattari’s vegetal rhizome is not a wholly apt model for eccentric cultural texts in at least one important sense: its ‘vegetal’ ‘unconsciousness’ and indifferent non-relation to the ‘root-cosmos’ and ‘radical-chaosmos’. Eccentric texts and contexts are not exactly ‘an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states’. The rhizome is a strange sort of sexual organism that in some senses approximates the peculiar mode of (re)production represented by the perverse, violently sexual, and apparently impotent narrators of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, whose aesthetic ‘becoming’ is unconventional. But while the contradictory circling in their texts does undo ‘hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths’, these narrators/texts are anxiously aware of that undoing. Their discourse draws out competing ‘generals’, fictionally fleshed out in fragmented, faulty memories, engaged in conflict on a historically collapsed field, battling together against tendencies towards forgetfulness or unconsciousness. That is, eccentric culture is polycentric and mobile, fascicular and fragmented, polyphonic and schizophrenic in a way that approximates acentricity and impersonality. Their books are ‘multiplicities’ and ‘assemblages’ that are ‘unattributable’, but that also directly confront the reader with uncertainty: ‘we don’t know yet what the multiple entails … after it has been raised to the status of a substantive’. Eccentric texts are not, like ex-centric culture, nostalgic for that ‘root-cosmos’ or intoxicated by a new sense of ‘chaosmos’. But by foregrounding uncertainty, they constitute a new ‘subject’ whose unity is defined by contradiction. So eccentric culture is rhizomatic in its plurality, but it is not ‘vegetal’ or unconscious. Hence Dostoevsky’s association of both underground narrator and Myshkin with mice, Kafka’s metamorphosed Samsa and human mole in ‘The 3 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 19.

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Burrow’, Machado de Assis’s and Bulgakov’s dogged fictions, Veríssimo’s and Lispector’s reimagined roaches – all of these animalize rather than vegetalize consciousnesses, problematizing cultural displacement, deviance and disorientation by displacing consciousness, humanizing what seems inhuman and dehumanizing the inhumane, but reducing neither to a vegetative state, even at death’s threshold. In self-conscious fictions as early as Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s, eccentric literature anticipates these contemporary theories and elucidates the ‘transcultural’ dynamics of an increasingly decentred, multicentred and cosmopolitan literature – with its ‘transmutations’ of form occasioned by acculturation, deculturation and reculturation,4 or what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘reterritorialization’.5 If we trace many of the modern theories concerning alienated consciousness and culture to disruptions within the concentric city as well as to the challenges posed by post-colonialism; we tend to overlook anticipations and complications of those theoretical lines in the cultural semiotics of earlier, self-consciously eccentric contexts, continually re-membering or re-defining literary tradition in terms of otherness or outsideness. Pushkin aligns himself with an African past and problematically fleshes out conflicts between Russian and Caucasian consciousness, exploring colonialism not only to construct a blackamoor romantic identity but also to assert and 4 The concept of transculturation was first defined as such in 1940 by the Cuban anthropologist and ethnographer Fernando Ortiz in his study Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y azúcar, and adopted/adapted to literary study, according to Burton-Carvajal, by the Uruguayan literary critic Angel Rama in Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (1982). In a final chapter, ‘Transculturação e identidade problemática’, of Escritores, Escravos e Mestiços em um País Tropical: Literatura, historiografia e ensaísmo no Brasil, Ventura takes Rama’s work as point of departure in outlining transculturation as the dominant and problematic dynamic of Brazil’s literary discourse. Ventura opposes this sense of culture to one (such as Freyre’s or Coutinho’s) that follows a dialectic model of synthesis or fusion of European, African and indigenous cultures (182). He measures the development of a national Brazilian literature according to European matrices, but focuses on post-colonial works of the modernist and postmodernist periods, including Andrade’s Macunaíma and Ribeiro’s Maíra, as exemplars of the complex internal and external dimensions of a culturally multivocal, dialogic and polyphonic construction. He traces open-ended interweaving of indigenous creation myths, Afro-American rituals, European immigration stories, and narrative dealing with São Paulo’s industrialization. Rather than on foreign origins and synthetic originality (Alencar’s Iracema), Brazilian cultural identity is based on a ‘psycho-social cultural ambivalence’ and ‘understood as a problem’ (186–7). 5 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Chapter 3.

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assault ties with empire and imperialism, authority and arbitrary social ascent. His African ancestor’s blood not only suggests an exoticism and outsideness but also an insideness, tying Pushkin to Peter I and to an urbane, cosmopolitan Petersburg society, thereby becoming a sign of both freedom and subservience, or of Pushkin’s complicity in a culture characterized by paradox. Gogol and Machado de Assis play variants of this hand, as part of their gamble on eccentric authorship and authority. The eccentric citytext has always offered a different way of thinking about language and literature as modes of cultural formation and repositories of cultural memory, critically contending with the relationship between ‘centre’ and ‘margin’ so central to relatively recent and already problematized interdisciplinary modes of inquiry such as post-colonial studies. Hence perduring theoretical models developed by literary and cultural theorists including Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum on defamiliarization or estrangement; Tynianov on stylization and parody; Bakhtin on speech genres, dialogism and outsideness; Lotman on cultural ruptures, semiospheric collisions and dialogue; Schwarz on displaced ideas; theories further developed by Ventura, Todorov, Lachmann, Boym and Epstein. Across these theorists’ work eccentric cultural consciousness is debated in terms of the relation between copying and creativity. Building on studies of Petersburg and Rio texts, Lotman and Schwarz define parody and metaparody as creative model not ‘despite’ but because of particular kinds of material displacement and ideological conflict. The eccentric city draws out and condenses aspects of other cultures through conquest and commerce, in which there is, as Gledson and Schwarz point out, an assimilation of imported ideas to things.6 Their displacement across borders or to the edge of empire (re-imagined as centre) not only distorts details and transforms uses, but in doing so functions as a counter-critique. The details, dimensions and dynamics of textual models similarly change when displaced. Fictions in which characters fail to develop according to literary convention or historical norms can be read as failed fictions. Or they can generate new theories of fiction. It is by attending to the range of Machado de Assis’s language and literary structures that Schwarz’s study of Brazilian literature redefines the relation between the social and literary. Similarly, Dostoevsky’s work compels Bakhtin to call for a ‘sociological stylistics’. This must be an especially complex 6 John Gledson, ‘Introduction’, in Roberto Schwarz, A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), xxi.

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‘sociology’ insofar as the society and language of the eccentric text includes encounters between cultures. To the degree that Bakhtin fails to account for the intercultural aspects of Dostoevsky’s work, he ignores an essential aspect of dialogue and development in the texts. The moral and cultural failures of Machado de Assis’s and Dostoevsky’s heroes, for Schwarz and Bakhtin, have to do with more traditionally historically-conditioned ‘character’ development. But the authorial success or modern succession of this eccentric literature forces a rethinking of the direction of dialogue and development. It slants the line of moral responsibility onto an aesthetic plane, on which not only the eccentric author can speak with authority, but a self-conscious immoral hero can paradoxically develop a moral narrative that indicts his lived life while implicating subtext, context and reader in reflexive revaluation. These texts explore the confines and consequences of displaced ideas through the similarly displaced and self-consciously parodied literary discourses of their heroes. Digging spitefully into their undergrounds, they redefine their lack of freedom from the discourse of the other as freedom and responsibility to respond. These underground writers foresee many of the conditions of ‘unfreedom’ critical to modernist and postmodern creativity. In cultural theory and criticism and in a strain of contemporary self-conscious fiction, we find the eccentric line strangely completing a circle. Even as transnational fictions extend the reach of eccentric self-definition into increasingly ex-centric domains such as the Lisbon and Paris text, there is a coupling of a paranoid, schizophrenic eccentric psychology and an ageing, pathological concentric physiology and psychology in the hybrid literary texts of Russian writers such as Sasha Sokolov (in School for Fools) and Tatiana Tolstaya (in stories such as «Петерс» (‘Peters’) and «Милая Шура» (‘Sweet Shura’), analogous to that we find in works such as A Costa dos Murmúrios (The Whispering Coast) by the Portuguese writer Lídia Jorge and in the works of Brazilian writers such as Lya Luft. Thus, there is a sense in which, once it encircles the globe, the eccentric line becomes concentric and eccentric at the same time. The contradictions inherent in such a proposition are explored by Felman in Writing and Madness, The fact that madness has currently become a common discursive place is not the least of its paradoxes. Madness usually occupies a position of exclusion; it is the outside of a culture. But madness that is a common place occupies a position of inclusion and becomes the inside of a culture … the inside, paradoxically, to the extent that it is supposed to ‘be’ the

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outside. To say that madness has indeed become our commonplace is thus to say that madness in the contemporary world points to the radical ambiguity of the inside and the outside, insofar as this ambiguity escapes the speaking subjects … A madness that has become a common place can no longer be thought of as a simple place (topos) inside our era; it is rather our entire era that has become subsumed within the space of madness.7

Todorov offers a cautionary note against this generalized carnival atmosphere, where all space is threshold, characterized by euphoric doubling within self-designated avant-gardes, celebrating ‘la beauté du métis’ (the beauty of the mestiço), making ‘l’éloge du cosmopolitisme’ (writing in praise of cosmopolitanism), and speaking of ‘la passion du polylogue’ (the passion of the polylogue). As a qualification to the ‘polyphonie démesurée’ (unmeasured polyphony) called for in Guy Scarpetta’s Éloge du cosmopolitisme, a work aimed at marking the end of ‘la langue’ (language) and redefining the domain of ‘écriture’ (writing) ‘comme une traversée des frontières, comme migration, et exil’ (as a crossing of frontiers, like migration and exile), Todorov points out an unease, uncertainty, even darkness or blindness that attends consciousness on the threshold.8 In ‘The New Nomads’ and Writing in Translation, Hoffman notes similar dangers to redefining home as homelessness. Lev Tolstoy already makes the case that Dostoevsky ought not to be held up as a model of moral consciousness, because he is ‘all struggle’.9 Critiquing Dostoevsky’s denigration of Afanasii Fet’s ‘innocent lyrics’ vs his praise for Pushkin’s playful poetry and prose, Tatiana Tolstaya cites Dostoevsky’s speculation as to what impression Fet’s nightingale might ever make on a reader during the Lisbon earthquake? She retorts, ‘Yes of course, Dostoevsky is right, but we aren’t having an earthquake, and we aren’t in Lisbon, and, after all, are we not allowed to love, to listen to nightingales, to admire the beauty of a beloved woman?’10 While tracing developments in a literature and culture ‘for whom freedom and beauty had more meaning than truth and morality’, she notes that ‘Dostoevsky’s argument held sway for a long time … because of the way Russians 7 Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985 [in French, Paris, 1978], 13–14. 8 Cf. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Dialogisme et schizophrénie’, Papers in Slavic Philology Vol. 5 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 566–73. 9 See Aileen Kelly’s ‘Dostoevsky and the Divided Conscience’, in Toward Another Shore (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 55–79. 10 Tolstaya, Pushkin’s Children, 85.

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perceive Russian life: as a constant, unending Lisbon earthquake’.11 While Tolstaya partly misreads Dostoevsky’s ‘argument’ in terms of an ideological line in nineteenth-century Russian and later Soviet criticism, she rescues his ‘artistry’ from the tragic fate she ascribes to Tolstoy and Gogol, ‘driven into the narrow, cramped cage of forced morality,’ by suggesting that Dostoevsky may have been ‘saved by the indomitable passions that raged in his soul’—that is, by contradiction that filters into the ideological dialogism of his work, into language and form aligned with an eccentric Russian kind of freedom and beauty. The line Tolstaya draws between Russia and Portugal here is purely literary, a line between cultures in crisis, caught in a moment that represents modernity’s break with the past and linked to Russia’s and Portugal’s modern sense of self as eccentric cultures. The specific link to Lisbon’s earthquake suggests the need for a literature responsive to cataclysm, to cultural tremors and a continual rebuilding on copied, displaced and disproportionate Euro-centric models. We might recall Gogol’s comparison of Petersburg and colonial cities in the Americas or Brodsky’s linking of Petersburg with Rio as places without a past, built with borrowed cultural models and transposed cultural memory, reflective surfaces – where local memory accrues in the layered reflections of a reflexive literary tradition. Tolstaya indicates such a crisis in Soviet literature, required to reconstruct spaces of inner freedom when access to actual cultural openings are closed, and again, in post-Soviet literature, when open borders expose an anachronistic, arbitrary attachment to past cultural constraints. Tolstaya’s stories as well as her essays argue for duration and diffusion related to the everyday. But she exposes divided consciousness, dissembling and delusion, displaced attachment and distorting memory in the everyday. Her characters live with domestic disorder, contradictory stories, and disillusionment. As one instance of polyphony in her fiction, Peters continues to hear sultry song along with the echoing slap of the old singer’s flabby skin against his bathtub rim. That is, while cyclical time is disrupted and concentric cosmos decentred through coming of age, disillusionment and death, the everyday is also always marked by eccentric Dostoevskian contradiction and self-consciousness. But there is a past/present difference Tolstaya remarks that has more to do with a loss of unfreedom. Tolstaya points out that the post-Soviet writer always struggles with the significance of a word no longer ‘buried’ in the margins, in intertextual dialogue and double-meanings, circulating in underground 11 Ibid.

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and foreign publications, and in the eccentric language of a line of writers in different degrees of exile reaching from Pushkin to Tolstaya herself. That is, she notes the difficulty, observed also by Slavic emigrant Brazilian writers such as Lispector, Rawet and Scliar, as well as natives such as Lins, for authority freed from the contingency of dissent. These writers’ reflexive literary fictions suggest that creativity remains contingent on copying, coping and contradiction. Like Lispector’s characters in Paris, Rio, etc., Tolstaya’s characters wandering through a nightmarishly materialized Russia are still eccentric ‘sleepwalkers in a fog’. Sentencing eccentric culture, underground narrative turns out not to be a death sentence, but a modernist sentence that opens onto over a century of ethical reflection and rewriting. The boundaries of the underground and its dialogic discourse have grown to encompass Sarraute’s and Des Fôret’s Paris, Ellison’s and Auster’s New York, Saramago’s and Antunes’s Lisbon, Coetze’s Cape Town and Agualusa’s Luanda. Across the twentieth century, underground narrative has grown more aware of the potential for tyranny and violence at eccentric extremes as well as at monologically dictating centres. One of the paradoxes understood by the modernist text – concentric or eccentric – is that the most capacious, enduring text is the one that confronts its own limits, grimaces and grins, feints, but draws us in to an expansive, urban/e space, created by lapses in memory and schizophrenic (il)logic that make room for the multiple self, the other, the self as other. We might understand the eccentric’s purview and perdurance by listening to Lispector, echoing Dostoevsky’s paradoxicalist, defamiliarizing by exploring contradictions between the lines and in the margins of modern consciousness: No, I was never modern. And the following happens: a painting becomes for me when it strikes me as odd. And when a word strikes me as odd, that’s when it takes on meaning. And when life strikes me as odd, that’s where life begins.12 Ah, this flash of instants never ends. Will my song of the it never end? I’m going to end it deliberately, with a voluntary act. But it continues on in constant improvisation, creating always and forever the present which is the future … Everything ends but what I write you continues on … Still, the best hasn’t been written. The best is between the lines.13 12 Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life (Agua Viva, 1973). Trans. Elizabeth Lowe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 68–9. 13 Ibid. 78–9.

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Bibliography

Bibliography Bibliography

Outline I Theoretical and comparative studies (modernist and postmodern narrative; memory, madness and urbanity in the novel; concentric and ex-centric citytexts: Lisbon, London, Paris) II Eccentric cities and citytexts A Petersburg i Russian urban and literary formation, modernism, cultural memory: cultural semiotics, comparative studies, critical interpretations ii Foundational Petersburg texts: selected eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Russian works iii Eccentric, ex-centric, and exilic Russian citytexts: selected twentiethcentury works iv Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: cited works and criticism v Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky: cited works and criticism B Rio de Janeiro i Brazilian urban and literary formation, modernism, cultural memory: cultural semiotics, comparative studies, critical interpretations ii Brazilian citytexts before and after ‘modernismo’: cited works iii Machado de Assis: cited works and criticism

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Index

Index

abstraction 12, 15, 23, 45, 59–60, 99, 101, 106–7, 116, 129, 200–3, 207, 223, 231, 258, 266, 270, 302, 312, 328, 334–42, 350, 361, 367, 377, 383 acentricity 387 afterlife 34, 74, 83, 91, 98, 206, 218, 226, 267, 270, 274–6, 302, 315–34, 348–9, 352 Akhmatova, Anna 374, 377–8 Alencar, José de 59, 134, 162, 171, 179, 184–7, 260, 287, 293–5, 352, 370, 388 alienation, alienated consciousness 1–3, 10–15, 18–19, 26, 29–31, 53, 58–62, 67–70, 78–94, 98–101, 153, 159, 163–5, 173, 180, 185–9, 193, 196, 201–3, 212, 217–21, 223–41, 246, 250–6, 270–2, 275–7, 284, 307, 311, 315, 319, 327–9, 334–43, 350, 357, 360, 374–82, 388 Almeida, Manuel António de 160–1, 177, 184–7, 265, 287, 352 ambivalence, ambiguity 13–14, 16, 21–2, 48, 58, 61, 68, 72, 88, 92, 100, 144, 151, 171, 178, 183–8, 194–8, 203–7, 210–15, 223–4, 228, 237–48, 256, 269, 275–8, 281, 294–9, 306, 311, 322–4, 341–3, 350, 362, 366, 369, 377–82, 388

Lubkemann Allen, EccentriCities.indd 425

Index

Americas in Russian literature 47, 59–60, 250, 295, 358, 392 anachronistic or anticipatory modernism 4–6, 13, 19–23, 36, 57, 71, 79, 83–97, 171, 230, 237–40, 257, 266–72, 279, 283, 288–90, 314, 327, 359, 365, 385–92 Andrade, Carlos Drummond de 370 Andrade, Mário de 1, 3, 5, 11, 21, 37, 67–8, 73, 92–3, 96–7, 134, 158, 352, 364–76, 388 see also hallucinated cities; polyphony Andrade, Oswald de 96, 180, 185–6, 270 Ângelo, Ivan 363 anonymity 27, 88, 129, 132, 228, 351 anthropophagy, cannibalism 96, 100, 180, 186, 269–71, 327, 333, 348–9 Antsiferov, N. P. 46, 174–5 Antunes, António Lobo 183, 380, 393 anxiety 2, 5, 28, 32, 37, 40, 46–8, 58, 62, 75–6, 79, 84, 89, 92, 100–2, 153, 172, 203, 224, 227, 230, 244–9, 275, 284–5, 310, 348, 356, 363, 381, 387 see also disquietude arabesque 97, 158, 168, 203–4, 227–8

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426

Index

arbitrariness 15, 32–4, 48, 59, 61, 94–106, 129, 135, 138, 153–5, 198–200, 254, 259, 275, 290–2, 312, 319, 344–5, 365, 383, 389, 392 architectonics of citytext 4, 15, 23, 40, 60, 129–33, 153, 156–64, 194, 199, 288–91 argot 41, 53 see also prosaic speech; slang asylum, madhouse, prison 6, 33, 61, 66, 76, 83, 93–4, 98, 152, 219, 238–43, 250–2, 365–7, 374, 376, 384 authenticity 4, 17, 20, 25–7, 31, 39, 60, 65, 73, 76, 82, 91, 97, 172, 189, 217, 221–3, 230–1, 235, 243–50, 263–4, 272, 293, 298, 302–4, 315, 330–1, 336, 359, 370 authority 2, 4, 14–18, 25–7, 31, 33–6, 39–40, 42, 47–8, 53, 58, 60, 64–5, 73, 76, 82–8, 97, 101–2, 106, 133, 138–53, 160–1, 165, 179–80, 194–207, 216–17, 224, 227–30, 233–52, 257, 263–4, 268, 271–5, 281–3, 304–5, 310, 315–17, 319–22, 331, 334–6, 340, 342, 345–52, 356, 359, 362, 372, 375–80, 387–93 authorship dead-ended, death of the author 2, 4, 18, 23–4, 26, 31, 72, 79, 81–3, 219, 228, 239, 261–7, 349, 374, 377–9 dialogic 19, 25–7, 32–5, 42–5, 80–1, 88, 97, 106, 189, 206–7, 210–15, 218–21, 227, 233–6, 258–75, 301–2, 315–52, 357–93 self-aware, self-authoring (author figured within the work) 4, 14, 17, 21–2, 25–6, 29, 31–7, 44–5, 61–7, 80–3, 92, 97, 185–6, 189,

Lubkemann Allen, EccentriCities.indd 426

194, 197, 204–7, 215–19, 227, 230–62, 254–6, 258, 263, 265, 269–71, 278–84, 288, 301–5, 315–52, 359, 363–68, 373–4, 378–9, 387–90 see also reflexive narrative urbane 4, 13–23, 33–4, 37–8, 42–7, 58, 80, 106, 161–2, 166–72, 178–89, 194, 197, 224, 236–52, 272–3, 333–52, 355–93 autonomy 4, 20, 25, 27, 33–4, 38, 80, 97, 127–9, 160, 171–3, 188, 202–4, 240, 245, 251, 264, 270, 275, 283, 291, 309, 322, 326–8, 338–41, 379 Azevedo, Aluísio 363 Babel, Isaac 166, 186, 357–8, 382 Bachelard, Gaston 18 Bakhtin, Mikhail 3, 19–36, 42–5, 69, 81, 86, 90–4, 219, 223, 239–40, 251, 256–77, 287–8, 294–7, 324–35, 331, 337, 342, 370, 381, 389–90 see also carnivalized discourse; chronotope; dialogism, dialogic discourse; doublevoiced discourse; loophole; monologism; outsideness; polyphony; speech acts; speech genres; spiritual diversity Balzac, Honoré de 12–13, 20, 37–8, 48, 53, 159, 184, 186, 254, 262, 282–91, 313, 319, 352 baroque 97–100, 107, 145, 158–9, 165, 178, 188, 200, 327 Barreto, Afonso Henriques de Lima 18, 22, 71–6, 79, 96, 116, 134, 152, 179, 186, 352, 356, 363–4, 387 Batiushkov, K. N. 173–5 Baudelaire, Charles 12–13, 19, 21, 48, 57, 65, 77–8

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Index Belinsky, V. G. 46–7, 64, 102–3, 132, 161, 188, 194, 201, 214, 224, 302 Bely, Andrei (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev) 5, 11, 21, 57, 64, 67, 71, 73, 76, 79, 100, 106, 129, 134, 148, 158, 174, 209, 212, 215–16, 221, 352, 356–63, 367–8, 371–2, 378 Bem, A. L. 286–7, 294, 302, 307 Benjamin, Walter 48, 78, 227 see also passages Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Aleksandr 134, 170–1 Bevilaqua, Clóvis 37 Bildüngsroman or roman d’éducation 20, 76, 82, 287–8, 372 Bitov, Andrei 67, 362–3 blindness see gaze, glance Blok, Aleksandr 134, 371–4 Bocharov, Sergei 207–9, 223–4, 242 border, boundary 2–3, 19, 26, 40–9, 59, 61, 64, 75, 135, 138, 162, 170–8, 202, 210, 226–43, 249, 254, 268–72, 289, 291, 296, 307, 318, 336, 349–51, 358, 362, 371–81, 389, 392–3 see also margin, threshold Boym, Svetlana 61, 158, 383–4, 389 Brasil, Assis 17 Brazil in Russian literature 47, 59–61, 96, 253, 295–6, 345, 358, 368 Breton, André 49, 65, 70, 98, 352 bricolage 4, 14, 45, 361 Brodsky, Joseph 41, 57–60, 96, 119–20, 129, 152–3, 186–7, 333, 367, 374–5, 382–4, 392 bronze horseman (Falconet’s statue) 129, 148, 144–5, 151, 156, 194–5, 204–5 Buckler, Julie xiii, 17, 46, 102, 158–61, 178–81 buffoon 215, 255, 263, 315, 318, 359 Bulgakov, Mikhail A. 5–6, 67, 101, 166, 183, 240, 358, 364, 376–8, 388

Lubkemann Allen, EccentriCities.indd 427

427

Cabral, Pedro Alvares 151 Campos, Haroldo de 96–103, 132, 163–5, 172, 176–180, 186–7, 200, 214, 270 Cândido, António 46, 63 Carelli, Mario 134–5 carnival, carnivalized discourse 5, 87, 91–4, 101–2, 148–9, 159, 165, 176–7, 183, 187, 232, 253–76, 280, 296, 339, 357–9, 363–71, 391 cartography 6–7, 18, 39–40, 50, 53, 106, 116–17, 152, 380 see also map, mapping Catherine II (Catherine the Great) 141, 146, 151, 156, 160, 179, 191, 194, 205 Caucasus 47, 134, 170, 358, 388 censorship 67, 165–8, 179–80, 188–9, 194, 238, 272, 337–9, 357, 375 Certeau, Michel de 78 Chagas, João 156 Chekhov, Anton 62, 169, 214, 290, 364–5 chronicle (conto, crônica) 28, 154, 170, 177, 187–9, 198, 243, 286–94, 298–313, 321, 333, 363, 379 see also feuilleton; ocherk; physiologie chronotope 1, 4, 6, 17, 23, 26, 34, 42–4, 72, 261, 282, 288–9, 300, 335, 341, 376 Chulkov, Mikhail 176–7, 179 Clark, Katerina xiii, 133, 370–1 clerk, copy clerk 66–7, 97, 193–252, 254, 260, 285, 290, 303–4, 340, 355, 358, 363 colonialism and post-colonial critique 6, 17, 48–9, 58–61, 65–6, 72–9, 84, 96–9, 134–41, 153–6, 170–89, 267, 290, 339, 346–8, 355–6, 364, 375–6, 388–93

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428

Index

commonplaces, crossroads, crossings 2–3, 6, 19, 31, 34, 53, 59, 64, 68, 71, 132, 158, 176, 194–7, 202–3, 212, 221, 227–9, 231–5, 241–2, 247, 256, 261, 268, 289, 291, 322, 339, 345, 360, 373, 391 Compagnon, Antoine 79 concentric cities, urban (re)construction 6, 17–18, 40–2, 45–56, 135, 151 critical models (literary history & theory) 37, 47, 67–70, 73–4, 77–9, 287–8, 309, 386–7 cultural consciousness 40, 46–9, 77–8, 181–2, 375–6, 388–93 cultural memory 3–4, 18, 40–2, 48–9, 56, 64–5, 73, 77, 135, 181, 372, 388–92 narratives, citytexts 4–6, 17, 21, 40–2, 48–9, 53, 68–73, 159, 181–3, 220–1, 287–8, 293, 319, 333, 352, 372–8, 384 and memory 4, 18, 40–2, 53, 64–5, 68–73, 77–80, 182, 198–9, 328, 333, 352, 355, 372, 386, 392–3 confession 216, 241, 261, 273–7, 295–6, 300–8, 331–7, 341–2, 378 conformity see uniformity conscience 13, 27, 33–4, 37–8, 74–6, 153, 200, 202, 228, 233, 254, 270–6, 288, 332–52, 357, 384 consciousness cultural 4, 17, 19, 37, 39–40, 43–4, 61–2, 89–94, 96, 180–1, 185–7, 209, 216, 278–9, 312–15, 333–52 divided 1, 3, 5, 12, 21, 27, 30–2, 35, 37, 60, 67, 71–8, 82, 88–91, 99–100, 170, 181, 202–3, 216, 247, 252–5, 263, 282–4, 293, 299, 332, 351–2, 357–9, 369, 373–7, 392

Lubkemann Allen, EccentriCities.indd 428

ethical, moral see conscience paranoid 4–6, 12, 18, 31, 33–5, 80–94, 203, 229, 242, 250–2, 266, 304, 307–9, 315, 326, 329, 337, 339, 348, 351–2, 359, 377–8, 390 pathological 2, 4, 23, 35, 38, 61–2, 66, 69–71, 79–94, 96, 221–3, 226–7, 236–52, 266, 269–71, 297–302, 307–9, 315, 329–93 reflexive 2, 5, 20, 23, 27, 31, 58, 75, 80–91, 94, 181, 208–9, 217, 220, 230, 266, 273–5, 280, 283, 288, 297–8, 302, 320, 325, 331–3, 359, 365–8, 373–4, 377–80, 382, 387, 390 refractive 2, 5, 12–16, 23–4, 27, 35–6, 58, 66, 73–5, 80, 89–90, 153, 180, 189, 212, 220, 227, 250, 259, 275, 283, 308, 327–8, 348–52, 376 refractory 2, 5, 13, 23, 27–8, 32–7, 58, 93, 189, 212, 229, 269–75, 297, 302, 321, 327–9, 348–52, 365–6, 377–9, 387 retrospective 14, 34–5, 40, 65, 71–3, 77–83, 90–4, 185, 217, 230, 283, 309, 316–17, 321–2, 325, 328–51, 363–4, 374, 381–2 urbane 4–11, 14–20, 30–1, 34, 37–45, 69, 72–3, 80, 87–9, 161–2, 171, 180–1, 188, 235, 269–82, 306–7, 312, 315, 331–93 see also alienation, alienated consciousness; conscience; concentric cultural consciousness; eccentric cultural consciousness continuity 14–16, 40, 42, 48–50, 57, 64–6, 74, 89, 96, 117, 135, 138, 168, 179, 262, 292, 309, 315, 331, 350, 356–75, 380–1, 390–3

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Index contradiction 1–4, 16, 21–2, 26–7, 29, 32–4, 37, 40–1, 45, 47, 60, 63–4, 75, 80–2, 86, 89, 93–4, 100–2, 106, 116, 127, 133–5, 141–53, 159–66, 172–81, 184–5, 189, 194, 199, 209, 215, 219–20, 224, 233, 236–52, 262–9, 272–84, 289–90, 297–315, 324–52, 356–65, 370–3, 380–2, 387–93 see also paradox, paradoxical narrative copy 40, 47, 54, 57, 60–1, 63, 65–6, 81, 93, 98, 153, 156, 165, 177, 188, 191, 196–225, 230, 233, 235, 243–8, 252–4, 266–7, 270–1, 279–80, 297, 299, 304–5, 326–7, 334, 340, 359, 361–2, 379, 392 see also clerk, copy clerk cosmopolitanism 296, 309, 318, 339 Coutinho, Afrânio 17, 46, 59 cultural critique 32–3, 37, 39, 72–3, 79, 84–7, 94, 97, 158, 161–3, 171, 175–89, 201, 231–6, 254, 267, 274–5, 281–2, 296–7, 301–3, 311, 319–22, 329–36, 345–52, 357–65, 370–5, 381, 388–9 cultural semiotics 43, 180–1 da Cunha, Euclides 134 death 2–3, 18, 27, 31–3, 38, 72–4, 79–81, 91, 100–1, 107, 129, 132, 146, 166, 183, 189, 197, 200, 206–7, 215–21, 253–4, 258, 266–70, 277, 282, 289, 303–4, 311, 319, 321, 329–32, 349, 352, 362–4, 368, 371, 374, 378, 388, 392 see also sentence, death sentence decentring 2, 6, 13, 42, 72–3, 96, 152, 194, 221, 293, 313, 364, 388, 392

Lubkemann Allen, EccentriCities.indd 429

429

defamiliarization 4, 10, 32, 38, 45, 61, 85, 90, 96, 146, 152–3, 156, 193–4, 198, 207–8, 210–18, 227, 231, 233, 237, 241–2, 249, 270, 274, 289, 293, 365, 372–6, 378–9, 383, 389, 393 de Jonge, Alex 277, 284, 311, 313 Deleuze, Giles and Félix Guattari 64, 71, 117, 381, 386–8 see also rhizomatic literature; minor literature; deterritorialization delay 3, 5, 23, 37, 62, 65, 71, 76, 171, 184, 199, 214, 235–6, 241, 313–14, 312, 337, 349, 356, 368, 372 delirium 62, 98, 102, 261, 302, 340, 349, 369, 376 see also dream; hallucination delusion 79, 85–7, 98, 102, 203, 217, 223, 229, 233, 251, 301–2, 305, 318, 326, 340, 350, 392 depersonalization, dehumanization see humanism, humanity, humane discourse; impersonality; insect; dog, dogged prose Derrida, Jacques 79, 88 Derzhavin, Gavriil 173–4 deterritorialization, reterritorialization 64, 96, 165, 170, 221, 241, 357, 381–3, 387–8 see also displacement; transposition deviance, deviant 1, 3, 17, 37, 58, 63–70, 79–93, 81, 146, 193, 210, 217–21, 224–5, 241, 250, 254, 258, 315, 327–35, 349, 351, 358, 385 dialogue, dialogism, dialogic narrative discourse 3–6, 12, 16–20, 24–9, 31–5, 38–46. 57–94, 97, 100, 106, 161, 163, 167–8, 170–5, 181–3, 186–8,

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430

Index

202, 206, 215, 218–51, 254–73, 281–3, 293, 296–307, 310, 315–52, 356–7, 363–4, 366, 372–85, 389–93 internal dialogue with the author 33–4, 38, 74, 80, 94, 198–9, 203, 206–7, 220–1, 237–8, 251, 257, 263–4, 267–9, 283, 322, 335–6 internal dialogue with the reader 31, 34, 36, 74, 94, 231, 253, 256, 263–4, 267–9, 283, 296, 301–2, 309, 315–34, 340–1, 351–2, 355–6, 375–82, 387, 390–1 difference 3–4, 6, 13, 20, 27–8, 34, 36, 40–1, 44–5, 59–60, 64–5, 71, 75, 79, 82, 91, 97–8, 102, 106, 117, 158, 171, 188, 198–201, 210, 220, 225, 230, 249, 268, 285, 291, 293, 331–5, 349, 356, 360, 372, 377, 380, 392 digression 1, 3, 13, 18, 21, 23, 27, 32–3, 37, 39, 57–8, 62, 66–70, 74, 81, 96–102, 185–9, 194–207, 214–21, 224, 228–31, 235–6, 240–3, 247–9, 256, 275, 280, 288–9, 305, 321–2, 326–49, 355–64, 376, 383–6 discontinuity, disruption 1–5, 13, 18, 39, 42–5, 48–9, 53, 64, 70–94, 120, 127, 159, 169–70, 187, 202–3, 206–7, 214, 234, 262–71, 275, 287–9, 296, 313, 326, 337–8, 342–4, 356, 374–5, 382, 388–9, 392 see also rupture (cultural) disease 38, 70, 71, 81–3, 89, 96–8, 129, 146–8, 154–5, 175, 221, 289, 300, 335–6, 344–5, 362, 368 mental see consciousness, paranoid and pathological; madness; mania, manic obsession; memory, pathological; paranoia; schizophrenia

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disillusionment 98, 229, 233, 305, 310–11, 320, 345, 375, 392 dismembering 3, 13, 26, 39, 48, 196 displacement, dislocation 1, 3–6, 13, 19–21, 35, 39, 45–8, 58–62, 66, 71–3, 76, 79–84, 88–9, 96–8, 129, 132, 141, 148–54, 157, 160–2, 166, 170–89, 194, 197–9, 205, 209–11, 214, 219, 223, 227–8, 234–6, 239, 247–8, 256, 261–2, 264, 271, 282, 290–1, 295, 307, 310–14, 317, 321, 328–9, 337, 351–2, 356–68, 374–5, 379–92 see also deterritorialization; transposition dispossession 1, 91, 101, 300, 356, 374 disquietude 1, 66, 78, 83, 88, 90, 211, 377 see also anxiety dissembling, deception, deviousness 1, 29, 33, 37, 39, 62, 65–6, 81, 90, 96, 98, 100, 102, 189, 199, 216, 232–3, 236, 247, 267, 301, 317–21, 344, 349–51, 358–62, 379–80, 385, 392 dissent 1, 3, 63, 66, 74, 83–4, 89, 96, 102, 146, 166–8, 173, 179, 194, 240, 309, 312, 345, 351–2, 356, 362, 374–8, 393 distance 6, 20, 28, 37, 41, 45–6, 49, 58, 68, 71–2, 76, 79, 87–8, 96–102, 117, 120–3, 132–5, 151–3, 160, 165–85, 189, 197, 203–7, 210, 213, 220, 225–31, 237, 243–50, 256, 260–4, 273, 282, 285, 291, 301, 306–21, 334–6, 346, 367, 374, 380–2 divided culture or cultural space 41, 45, 59–60, 71, 76, 79, 106–7, 116, 127–9, 136, 152, 159, 161, 180, 203, 216, 234, 282, 289, 291–2, 339–51, 355–6, 377–8 see also consciousness, divided

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Index Dixon, Paul 30–1, 256, 277, 282 dog, dogged prose vi, 201, 217, 230, 235, 238, 242–52, 292, 296–8, 348, 358, 366, 382, 388 Dostoevsky, Feodor Mikhailovich 5, 13, 18–29, 33–4, 38, 46, 57–60, 62, 65–70, 75, 79–94, 98, 100, 116–17, 129, 159–62, 180–9, 199–200, 203, 205, 212, 226, 233, 236–8, 253–352, 356–61, 364, 366, 371–93 ‘Bobok’ 67, 349 The Brothers Karamazov 18, 24–7, 231, 255, 263, 281–3, 294, 299, 302, 308, 312–15, 331, 357 Crime and Punishment 20, 37, 60, 75, 255, 261–3, 278, 290, 292–4, 299–306, 308, 315 Demons 18, 33, 38, 60, 255, 281–3, 312–15, 331, 357 The Double. A Petersburg Poema 26–9, 67, 204, 255–6, 264, 286, 291–9, 304, 307, 340 The Idiot 33, 98, 204, 255, 263–4, 281–99, 301–8, 315, 339–40, 387 ‘The Landlady’ 305–7 ‘Mr. Prokharchin. A Story’ 204, 255–6, 286, 291–4, 297–9, 339 Notes from Underground 6, 15–16, 20–9, 33–4, 38, 69, 79–84, 88–9, 92, 98, 101, 159, 229, 233, 236, 242, 257–60, 264–82, 291–2, 296, 299, 303, 306–10, 315–52, 356–61, 366, 372, 378, 380–1, 393 ‘Petersburg Notes’ 278, 286 ‘Polzunkov’ 255–6, 286, 291–4 Poor Folk 204, 219, 231, 238, 255, 286, 291–4, 298–9, 302–6, 339 ‘White Nights. A Sentimental Novel’ 286, 293, 307 doubles, doubling 2–3, 11, 14, 23, 27–36, 39, 41, 45–9, 58, 71,

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75–86, 91, 99, 107, 148, 158–9, 163–6, 173, 178, 188, 198–209, 228, 230–1, 236, 239–42, 246–9, 254–77, 291–4, 297, 307, 314, 338, 345, 351–2, 355–6, 359–60, 375–80, 383–4, 391 double-voiced discourse 20, 27, 43, 82, 90–4, 100, 102, 165, 170, 215, 240–2, 247–9, 255–77, 294, 322, 365, 379, 392 doubt 14, 27, 32–3, 68, 84, 158, 170, 254, 272, 336 dream, dreamer, dreamscape, nightmare 57, 66, 71, 85–6, 89, 98, 148, 159, 204, 255, 261–2, 266, 270, 287, 294, 298–303, 308–9, 338, 347, 358, 365, 380, 393 duplicity see dissembling, deception dystopian literature 66, 153, 362 eccentric cities, urban construction 6, 40–2, 45–7, 56–64, 95–6, 99–164, 174, 188, 356–7, 374–5 cultural consciousness 3, 44–7, 57–8, 61, 88, 93–6, 116–17, 133–5, 159, 174, 180–7, 209, 216, 220–1, 234, 271–82, 312, 321–7, 331–93 narrative, citytexts 4–6, 17, 21, 40–2, 73–5, 79–80, 83–8, 94–102, 105, 116–17, 123, 129, 132–5, 153, 156–89, 193–393 and madness 4, 80–8, 90, 146–51, 181, 208, 221, 226–7, 231, 236–52, 254–63, 271–2, 309–10, 334–52, 355–62, 376–93 and memory 58, 60–1, 65, 73–6, 79, 117, 148–53, 156–7, 169, 185, 198–201, 215, 261, 268, 270, 277, 283, 297, 309–10,

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319, 328–9, 332, 352, 355–66, 371–80, 383, 387–92 eclecticism 16, 41, 45, 64, 102, 158–81, 186–9, 194, 199–203 economics, cultural economy 11, 15, 53, 59, 134, 141, 154–5, 160–1, 178, 225, 289–93, 304, 309, 319, 343–6, 366, 377–8 Eikhenbaum, Boris M. 236, 370, 389 ellipses 26, 57, 65, 92, 214–15, 226, 237, 254, 259, 275, 316 embodiment 48–50, 56–60, 79–82, 179–80, 188, 207, 221, 224, 258, 269–70, 320–1, 333, 346–51, 379 Emerson, Caryl xiii, 27, 35, 43–4 empire see imperialism emptiness see void, vacuity, evacuation epilepsy 285, 311 error, errant or erring consciousness 3, 23, 66–8, 76, 81, 151, 168, 194, 225, 242, 305, 337, 381 see also deviance; digression estrangement see defamiliarization ethical narrative, ethical responsibility, ethics and aesthetics 4–5, 16–22, 27–37, 76, 81–2, 88, 91–4, 153, 176, 204, 207, 219, 227, 237–40, 246, 250–60, 267–83, 291–3, 304–9, 314–30, 337–52, 373, 376, 379, 390–3 ethnicity see race, ‘trans-ethnical’ ex-centricity, ex-centric narrative 3–6, 49–50, 65–7, 76, 84, 96–103, 182–3, 352, 355, 362, 372–93 expansion, extension (of cultural, political, literary space; of consciousness) 1, 4–5, 12, 18, 41–4, 48–54, 57, 72, 77–8, 90, 101, 116–19, 132–3, 138, 148, 151, 158–60, 175–80, 197–8, 203, 209–10, 215–16, 221, 225,

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230, 238, 244, 254, 263, 272, 279, 289, 334, 356–8, 362–4, 369–75, 380–1, 389, 393 face, face-to-face confrontation 20, 25, 30, 49, 53, 92, 94, 146, 164, 174, 185–8, 206, 208–9, 218–19, 222–6, 234, 264, 273, 294, 298–9, 304, 316–17, 321–6, 336–40, 345–7 Fanger, Donald 10, 12, 59, 134, 171, 180, 198–200, 209–21, 236, 239, 246, 266, 270, 277–8, 286, 289, 293–4, 299, 302–8, 332, 339 farce 198, 256, 269, 297, 318 feuilleton 12, 38, 59, 117, 177–8, 188, 286–94, 298–313, 379 finality, finalized discourse 25–6, 35 see also unfinalizability, unfinalized discourse flâneur 12–13, 305 Flaubert, Gustave 12, 19–20, 48, 75–6, 98, 282, 301, 372 Fonvizin, Denis 166–7 fool 61, 87, 218, 231, 255–6, 263, 309, 315, 318, 363 forgetting, forgetfulness 2, 13–14, 41, 45, 49, 60, 89–91, 96, 132, 153–4, 215, 300, 308, 364, 373, 387 see also memory, disrupted and pathological Foucault, Michel 78, 84–7 Frank, Joseph xiii, 76, 277–86, 303, 310, 344 freedom 4, 16, 20, 25–6, 32, 35, 66–8, 82–3, 93, 119, 132, 161, 180, 187, 193, 205, 213–17, 232, 240, 248–51, 256, 260–3, 273, 281, 290, 305, 309–12, 321, 326–8, 334, 341–5, 349–50, 365–8, 375, 378, 389–93 Freud, Sigmund 13, 77, 84–5, 285, 311

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Index Freyre, Gilberto 388 Fusso, Susanne 202–8, 213–15, 219, 227, 360–3 Gachev, G. D. 19–20, 168 gambling 161, 285, 308–11, 346–52, 366, 389 gamin 21, 49, 65–6 Gasperetti, David 176–81 gaze, glance (sideways) 20, 24–6, 31, 68, 76, 94, 145–6, 185, 208, 222–8, 233–5, 254, 260, 273, 289, 294, 300–5, 318–19, 324, 340, 359, 377–8, 391 gender and sexuality 49, 75, 85, 97–100, 203–5, 244, 247, 268, 291, 315–34, 340, 345–7, 352, 374, 380 genre 5, 12, 14–15, 19–22, 33, 37–8, 42, 45, 48, 69–70, 74, 79, 88, 92–4, 100–2, 161–89, 194, 197–8, 210, 213, 228, 237, 247–50, 256–70, 278–88, 294, 313–18, 348–9, 361–3, 374, 378–93 Gide, André 13, 70, 77, 352 Gledson, John 58–9, 189, 271, 277–8, 285, 289, 389 Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich 5, 12, 18, 21, 29–30, 33, 36, 46, 57–60, 62–3, 66–7, 70, 83, 116, 127, 158, 161–2, 174, 180–1, 187–9, 193–252, 254–6, 260, 265, 270–2, 330–1, 334–40, 343, 346–50, 352, 355–63, 371–2, 376–7, 382, 387, 389, 392 Dead Souls 30, 166, 170, 197–9, 209–21, 227–9, 231–7, 242, 245, 254, 286, 295, 302, 357 Dikanka Tales 204, 210–11, 233, 236, 239 ‘Inspector General’ 30, 208–11, 226, 245, 357 ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ 68, 98, 127, 197,

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203, 217, 227–36, 242, 245, 256, 302, 336–40, 347 ‘The Nose’ 36, 208, 239 ‘Notes/Diary of a Madman’ 6, 22, 33, 85–6, 88, 94, 98, 197, 214–55, 265, 291, 294–7, 329, 339–40, 346–50, 394 ‘The Overcoat’ 2, 30, 63, 67, 100–1, 129, 133, 194–209, 213–38, 245–6, 254–6, 270, 296, 299, 302–6, 309, 340, 355, 359, 361, 372 ‘Petersburg Notes from 1836’ 56–7 ‘The Portrait’ 197, 219, 227 Gomide, Bruno 22, 37–8, 47, 75, 295 Goncharov, I. A. 62, 290, 356–7 Gonzaga, T. A. 178–9 grammar 15, 63, 88–9, 97, 176, 200–4, 209–11, 215–16, 223, 324–5, 328–31, 374 Great Dialogue, Great Time 22, 43–4, 90–2, 251–2, 258, 360–1, 365–6, 381 see also intertextuality Griboedov, A. S. 167 Grigoriev, A. A. 311 grimace 102, 224, 267, 272, 323, 393 Grossman, L. P. 277, 286, 292 grotesque 10, 34, 57, 102, 148–9, 180, 207, 226, 246, 254, 270, 358, 371 Guimarães Rosa, João 96, 370 hallucination, hallucinated cities 1, 5, 68–70, 73, 92–3, 101, 158–60, 289, 353, 362–76 see also delirium; dream Halpérine-Kaminsky, E. 38 Hertzen, A. I. 46, 58, 133, 168, 179–80, 382 heteroglossia, heteroglossic see multilingual, polylingual; polyphonic; translingual historical collapse or temporal

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434

Index

compression 4, 30, 45, 60–4, 71, 73–6, 82, 101–2, 106, 129, 133, 148, 152–3, 157, 165, 169–74, 181–6, 198–200, 210, 215, 218, 260–1, 278–80, 288–90, 293, 297–8, 313–14, 320–1, 332–4, 348, 356–64, 372–83, 387–9 historical realignment 11–13, 18, 38, 40–5, 48, 53, 56, 59, 64–5, 68–73, 77–9, 91, 165, 170, 193–4, 198, 345, 352, 372, 390 Holquist, Michael 210, 288–9 horizons 15, 18, 22, 28, 47–8, 50, 53–4, 61–2, 92, 101, 104–7, 117–28, 156–9, 164, 169–81, 196–7, 205, 216, 225, 249, 260, 291, 346, 356–7, 364, 371–2 Hugo, Victor 13, 21, 24, 40–1, 48–9, 53, 64–5, 77–9, 169–70, 196–8, 237, 254, 286–7, 352, 366, 382 humanism, humanity, humane discourse 15–16, 21, 24, 30, 39, 80, 133, 166, 201–2, 205, 220, 224, 245, 248, 252, 255, 266–7, 278–9, 283, 292, 296, 317–18, 336, 339, 342, 347–8, 387–8 hybridity 21, 60, 64, 74, 97, 101–2, 134, 152–64, 175, 294, 358, 370–1, 386, 390 Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) 47, 136, 250 identity 58, 64, 76, 88–90, 96–7, 102, 157–8, 170–1, 185, 198–9, 205, 210, 217–18, 239, 245–8, 286, 295, 299, 304, 314, 371, 373, 376, 380, 388 Il’f, Il’ia (I. A. Fainzilberg) 60, 358 immigrant writers 49, 153, 382–4, 388 see also transcultural, transnational imperialism 40–2, 58, 66, 69, 95–6,

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104–7, 117–19, 132–62, 168–73, 182–6, 193–4, 250, 260, 280, 285, 290, 346, 360, 372, 375, 388–9 impersonality 12–13, 23, 29–30, 80–1, 173, 205, 246–8, 267, 342, 348, 357, 387–8 impostor, poseur, imposture 27, 29, 31, 57–8, 61–62, 94, 101, 129, 151, 223, 270, 347, 383, 389 see also pretender; usurper, usurpation indigenous, native 73–4, 132–6, 145–6, 155, 160–5, 168, 171, 177, 184–6, 227, 388 insect 338, 342, 388 interior (architectural space as in private rooms; city core) 15, 50–4, 69, 127, 152–9, 291–2, 357, 362, 377–9 interior (regional space, extent of Russian or Brazilian empire) 45, 58–9, 99, 102, 106–7, 116, 133–5, 141, 154, 160–1, 168–84, 209–11, 260, 361, 364, 370, 384 interiority 1–4, 12–13, 18–19, 24–9, 39–44, 68–9, 80–94, 234, 245, 250, 254, 264, 321, 331, 337, 340, 359, 362, 368–72, 377–80, 386, 392 interruption see discontinuity, disruption intersubjectivity 25, 35, 341–2 see also dialogism, responsibility intertextuality, 12, 20, 22, 40–4, 74, 90–1, 95–6, 102, 164–72, 176–9, 180–5, 194–200, 210–14, 227–34, 243–6, 251, 265, 269, 286–8, 294–6, 306, 320–1, 325, 331–7, 359–72, 378–82, 386, 390 see also Great Dialogue; reader within the text irrationality 1, 23, 39, 45, 58, 69,

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Index 75, 84–94, 151, 166, 202–9, 217–19, 238–44, 251, 257, 271, 278–82, 290, 296–7, 304, 309, 314, 343, 359–60, 365–7, 376–80 irresponsibility 20, 27–8, 36, 60, 80, 91, 168, 226, 257, 267, 275, 281, 296 isolation 2, 29–31, 36, 72, 87, 180, 254, 263, 266, 272–3, 289–90, 299–300, 304, 308–9 Jackson, K. David xiii, 96, 185 Jackson, Robert Louis xiii, 83, 342–4, 360 James, Henry 21, 70, 77 Jameson, Frederick 71, 78, 96–7 jealousy 35–6, 86, 337–8, 360 Jewish writers and figure of wandering Jew 61, 153, 186–7, 358–9, 383–5 João IV 138–46, 151 Jones, Malcolm 16, 256, 271–2, 277–8, 282, 311–14 Jorge, Lídia 351, 380, 390 Joyce, James 11–12, 21, 66–81 Kafka, Franz 11, 71, 381, 387–8 Kaganov, Grigory 46, 117–20, 133, 159 Kantemir, Antiokh 165–6 Karamzin, N. M. 129, 170–1, 175, 179 Karlinsky, Simon 245 Kelly, Aileen 46, 58, 100, 133, 148, 169, 179–83, 371, 391 Khlebnikov, Velimir (Viktor Vladimirovich) 276, 370, 373 Komarov, Matvei 176–7 Krylov, I. A. 167 labyrinth, labyrinthine city 23, 42, 49, 56, 65, 101, 197 laughter 5, 26, 61, 69–70, 85–7, 102, 159, 166, 173, 183, 223, 246–7,

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251, 253–8, 265–76, 303–6, 323–4, 330, 340–1, 357–9, 368 layered city 6, 12, 18, 21–3, 34, 40–2, 45, 50, 53–6, 59, 64–5, 73, 76–7, 117, 151, 377, 382, 392 Le Corbusier 55–6 LeFebvre 78 Lermontov, Mikhail I. 187, 213 liminality 6, 36–8, 44, 300 see also borders; margins; periphery; thresholds Lins, Osman 5–6, 67, 76, 152, 179, 252, 377–80, 387, 393 Lisbon 4–5, 11, 14, 57, 59, 95, 134, 138, 141, 153, 181–3, 279, 293, 355, 372–5, 382, 390–3 Lispector, Clarice 5, 28–9, 67, 96, 179, 186, 252, 379–88, 393 ‘living word’ 206, 218–20, 246, 257, 270, 274, 297, 302, 315, 332–3, 341–2, 349, 351–2, 374–5 Lobato, José Bento Monteiro 370 Lomonosov, Mikhail 166, 174 London 4–5, 11–14, 47–8, 53, 67–77, 93–5, 134, 153–4, 160, 165, 181, 290, 355 loophole 26–31, 94, 272, 308, 339 Lotman, Iurii 3, 18, 39–40, 43–7, 63–4, 175, 214, 220–1, 277, 339, 381, 389 see also borders; cultural semiotics; dialogue, dialogism; semiosphere Lukàcs, Georg 23, 29 lunacy, lunatic see madness 255–6, 297, 307, 346, 350, 368, 372–3 Lyotard, Jean-François 14–15, 373 Macedo, Joaquim Manuel de 184–7, 287 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria 5, 18–23, 29–38, 46, 58, 61–5, 70–1, 74–6, 79–84, 88, 92–3, 97–8, 100, 116, 129,

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436

Index

134, 160–3, 171–2, 179–89, 197, 214, 226, 253–6, 260–5, 267–352, 356, 358, 363–70, 380–1, 386–90 ‘The Alienist’ (‘O Alienista’) 32, 255–6, 281, 292, 298 ‘Confessions of a young widow’ (‘Confições de uma viúva moça’) 296, 301, 305, 308 Dom Casmurro 281–3, 313–15 Esaú e Jacob 281, 295, 313 ‘Father and Mother’ 292 ‘Frei Simão’ 256, 296–7, 308, 312 Iaiá Garcia 256, 294 ‘Mariana’ 285, 292–3, 295 Memorial de Aires 283 ‘The Mirror’ (‘O Espelho’) 29–32, 101, 171, 255, 273, 292, 296 ‘Miss Dollar’ 255, 292, 296–8, 317 ‘O Machete’ 255, 281, 292, 297–8 Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas 6, 15–16, 20–3, 29–34, 36–8, 58, 63, 74–6, 81–4, 88, 92, 98, 101–2, 197, 264, 268–89, 291–2, 296–336, 338, 342, 345–52, 356, 366, 380–1, 386–90 Quincas Borba 20, 98, 255, 281–3, 308, 313–15 short stories (contos) 286, 294–7 ‘Theory of the Medallion’ (‘Teoria do Medalhão’) 281, 296, 322 madness, madman 1–6, 13, 21–2, 31–5, 38, 61–2, 65–7, 70, 80–90, 93–4, 98, 146, 151, 189, 219, 223, 226, 230–1, 236–55, 262–3, 281, 289, 295–307, 311, 315, 328, 348, 351, 357, 365, 375–85, 390–1 see also consciousness (pathological, paranoid); disease; mania; obsession; paranoia; schizophrenia

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Maguire, Robert 46, 133, 174–5, 197–203, 209–27, 233, 236–62 Maiakovsky, Vladimir 352, 371–3 Maikov, V. 166–7, 173, 270–1, 311 malandro, linha malandra 58, 63, 66 mania, manic obsession 2, 4, 6, 32, 38, 61–2, 70, 80, 85–9, 94, 146, 262, 296, 315, 330–1, 369, 383 Mann, Iurii 207–9, 212, 221–3 map, mapping 5–6, 11, 14–19, 22–4, 29, 39–40, 47–56, 59, 69–70, 78–80, 91, 97–9, 103–7, 116–17, 123, 135, 153, 170, 172–4, 180, 183, 197, 202, 216, 220, 233, 236–8, 256, 283, 335, 339, 343–5, 349–51, 355–7, 367–76, 382, 386 cognitive 24, 39, 49–50, 69, 80, 83, 91, 194, 202, 233–8, 256, 283, 339, 343–5, 355, 382 see also cartography; re-mapping modernism; territory margin 3–7, 11–12, 42, 47–9, 54–8, 65–8, 72, 79, 83–8, 99, 101, 106, 116–17, 122–3, 132, 152, 156, 160, 163–74, 179, 182–7, 194, 199, 205, 210, 215, 224, 250, 254, 273–80, 285–96, 308–10, 321, 345, 348, 351, 356–60, 364, 370, 375, 380–2, 389–93 see also border; liminality; periphery; threshold marginocentricity, marginocentric cultural consciousness 1, 3–5, 22, 42, 48, 58, 83, 88, 106, 116–17, 182, 194, 220, 234, 250, 274–8, 312, 351, 356, 375, 384 mask, masquerade 31, 48, 53, 61–2, 67–8, 78, 81, 87, 100, 144, 163–4, 188, 206, 223–4, 260, 268, 275, 298, 347, 351, 357, 376 see also redressed culture; uniform, uniformity

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Index Matich, Olga 17, 46, 347 Matos, Gregório de 97, 132, 163, 165, 178, 187 memory 1, 3–6, 18, 20, 23, 30–42, 48–9, 58–60, 65–6, 70–83, 88–94, 101, 117, 120, 148, 153, 182, 185, 196–9, 215–18, 261, 264, 267, 275, 283, 317, 322, 328, 331–3, 337–42, 349–51, 355–6, 371–3, 387–93 see also concentric cultural memory; eccentric cultural memory Menippea, menippean satire 257–65, 269 metaphor and modern(ist) narrative 1, 80–2, 170, 210, 242, 282, 317, 331, 372, 383 metonymy and modern(ist) narrative 1, 80 metro 48–9, 53, 229 Meyer, Augusto 38–9, 47, 96, 295 Meyer, Priscilla 204–8, 219, 223, 245 Miller, Robin Feuer 16–17, 277, 331–2 Mills Todd, William 63, 134, 164, 168, 171, 175–6, 213, 236–7 minor literature 71, 122, 129, 168, 378, 381, 387 mirror, literal and literary reflection 23–32, 37, 57–8, 61, 101, 107, 122, 127, 148, 151, 161, 171, 208, 220, 246, 287, 294, 297, 324–6, 337–9, 359, 384 Mochulsky, K. D. 284, 311 Moeller-Sally, Stephen 209, 212, 221 Monas, Sidney 46, 98, 100–1, 146, 287–9, 300, 311–13 monologism, monological narrative discourse 24, 45, 90, 173, 176, 183, 220, 223, 238, 247, 251–2, 257–9, 266, 273, 288, 310, 316, 358, 362, 393 monstrosity 38–9, 156

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monument(s), monumental commemoration 40–1, 45, 48–9, 53–8, 65, 73, 101, 117, 122, 127, 132, 144–5, 151–2, 156, 159, 162, 194–9, 206–7, 270–1, 345, 372, 375 Morson, Gary Saul 63, 219, 277, 282, 299 Moscow 4, 6, 11–12, 41–2, 45–8, 56–9, 76, 99–102, 127, 132, 141, 154, 160, 167–70, 181–3, 188, 210, 284, 357–64, 372–8 multilingual, polylingual 19, 40, 75, 107, 116, 119, 132, 162–8, 198, 339, 384 mute, muted see silent, speechless myth 5–6, 10, 23, 26, 39–41, 46, 49, 58–9, 65, 77–8, 99, 134, 151, 161, 164–5, 186, 219, 230, 277, 293, 304, 362, 378, 380, 383, 388 Nabokov, Vladimir vi, 1, 29, 152, 200–13, 217–19, 223, 227–8, 233, 239, 376, 382–7 narrative consciousness 6, 15–16, 20, 36, 42–3, 58, 278, 372, 382 see also consciousness narrator, first-person 15, 25, 38, 81, 236, 283 see also author, fictional native see indigenous Naturalism 12, 22, 37, 47, 75, 98, 287, 322, 343, 363 Nekrasov, N. A. 46–7, 167, 187–8, 194, 265, 280 Nerval, Gerard de 65 Nordau, Max 2–3 nose 36, 197, 203, 227, 248, 251, 294–5, 321 see also face; Gogol ‘The Nose’ nouveau roman 41 Novikov, Nikolai 179 Nunes, Maria Luisa 75, 271

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Index

obsession 2, 10–11, 35, 44–5, 59–62, 80, 88, 92, 146, 203, 208, 229–31, 246, 305, 310–11, 334, 337, 348, 373, 377, 382 ocherk 12, 178, 188 see also chronicle; feuilleton; physiologie Odoevsky, V. F. 177, 187–8, 194, 213–14, 293 Olesha, I. K. 358–60 open-endedness see unfinalizability opening 12, 18, 54, 119, 122, 127, 167, 185, 198, 223, 226–7, 233–4, 239–56, 272–3, 307, 333–5, 362, 392 origin 39, 49, 61, 63, 66, 76, 82, 86, 99–100, 116, 153–5, 165, 171, 176, 186, 193, 199–200, 207, 213, 224, 263, 282, 331, 346, 349–50, 355, 372, 378 original, originality 4, 39, 47, 49, 58–61, 66, 74, 82, 135, 148, 162, 169, 171, 176, 193–227, 230, 246, 251, 278, 281, 299, 306, 315, 321–2, 326–34, 338, 344, 359–61, 367, 372, 388 other, otherness vi, 15, 19–20, 25–35, 39–40, 42, 47, 64, 69–72, 79–86, 89–94, 97–8, 172, 189, 220–31, 237–52, 256, 262–75, 285, 291, 301–5, 309, 315–16, 321, 329–32 , 338–42, 348, 360, 379–81 outsideness 19, 25, 32, 35, 43, 47–9, 64–5, 80–1, 88, 91–2, 169, 186, 224–5, 233–4, 245–50, 256, 263–5 overcoat vi, 2, 30, 67–8, 101, 189, 200–5, 223–5, 230, 254–6, 303, 339–40, 350 see also Gogol ‘The Overcoat’; mask, masquerade; redressed culture; uniform, uniformity

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pageantry 258, 269 see also mask, masquerade; spectacle, stage, theatre palimpsest 40–1, 90, 156, 198, 345, 382 paradox, paradoxical narrative 1–3, 14, 17, 28, 31–5, 39, 42, 47, 60, 64, 71–3, 79–82, 87, 101–2, 116, 133–4, 141, 152, 168–9, 175, 184, 193–200, 222–3, 230, 240, 248, 259, 262–3, 272–82, 292–3, 296–7, 302, 312–15, 321–52, 358, 361, 374–5, 381, 390–3 see also contradiction paranoia 4–6, 12, 18, 31–5, 38, 58, 80–3, 88, 91–4, 146, 188, 203, 229, 235, 242, 250–2, 315, 326, 329, 337–9, 348, 351–2, 359, 377–8, 390 parentage, paternity, paternalism 33, 54, 65–7, 75–6, 100, 144, 170, 187, 200–1, 204–5, 250, 281, 285, 297, 313–15, 319–27, 346, 349–52, 359, 366, 372, 377–9 Paris 4–6, 11–16, 20–3, 36, 40–2, 47–57, 64–6, 70, 77–9, 87, 95–7, 102, 117, 133–5, 148, 153–4, 158, 165, 178, 181–2, 203, 219, 290, 355–7, 373–5, 382–4, 390–3 parody 5, 27, 32, 47, 54, 61, 69, 83, 164–7, 175–7, 181–5, 200, 223, 245, 254, 264–72, 278, 287, 296–304, 313–14, 322, 325, 332, 337–8, 342–6, 357–8, 362–7, 380, 389 passage, passages (arcades) 48–9, 56, 78, 134, 234, 251 Peace, Richard 221, 237–49 Pedro I 141–6, 151 Pedro II 141, 143–6, 160, 180 Pelevin, Viktor 6, 67, 76, 129, 174, 357, 360, 377–80

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Index periphery 18, 37, 65, 68 see also liminality; margin; threshold Pessoa, Fernando xiv, 5, 11, 182–3, 249, 352, 372–3, 377 Peter the Great 95, 99, 138–51, 175, 180, 194, 204–6, 279, 344, 360–1 Petrov, Evgenii (E. P. Kataev) 60, 358 Petrushevskaya, Liudmila 5, 67, 129, 183, 351, 376–80 physiologie 12, 177, 188, 194, 208, 231, 278 Pinheiro de Lemos, Sílvio 47 pluralism 18–19, 24–7, 37, 40, 42, 45, 64, 75, 80–4, 89, 91, 94, 106–7, 155, 173, 199, 233, 247, 254, 260, 278, 288, 302, 309, 338–9, 344, 369, 378–80, 385–7 polyphony, polyphonic narrative discourse 3, 16, 19–20, 24–5, 34–5, 40–5, 68–9, 72, 81, 86, 91–2, 183, 188, 216, 224, 236, 257–69, 278, 281, 288, 310, 327, 338, 351, 356–7, 365–9, 373, 380, 387–92 polysystems 42, 84, 381 portal, port cities 58, 64, 95, 106–7, 127, 133–8, 141, 153–4, 160–1, 178, 188, 234, 375 postmodernism 2–6, 14–15, 21, 71, 89, 117, 183, 207, 213, 272, 279, 315, 327, 349, 352, 355, 363, 375–93 Poulet, Georges 18–19 pretender 146, 204–5, 219, 245, 263 see also imposter, poseur, imposture; usurper, usurpation prodigal son 250, 281, 288 progenitor, progeny see parentage, paternity, paternalism promiscuity 48, 58, 146, 281

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prosaic or everyday discourse 12–13, 33, 35, 40, 49, 54, 92–4, 144–6, 162, 166–7, 173–84, 194, 198–9, 203, 209–16, 264, 293–4, 337, 367, 372–8 see also argot prospect (materially present site and psychologically future horizon) 22, 120, 123–4, 127–9, 159, 193, 216, 225, 312, 325, 339, 351 prostitute, prostitution 48, 58, 98, 203, 229, 292, 317, 345 Proust, Marcel 5–6, 11–13, 16, 19–20, 23–4, 30–1, 35–6, 40–1, 48–9, 53, 65, 70, 75–83, 90, 93–4, 98, 275, 328, 333, 338, 352, 355–6 Pushkin, Aleksandr 6, 58, 100, 133–4, 156, 160–2, 167–87, 193–213, 216, 219, 255, 262, 270–1, 286, 293–5, 303–4, 344, 356, 360–1, 371, 388–93 The Bronze Horseman 129, 133, 148, 156, 175, 193–204, 286, 304 Evgenii Onegin 58, 100, 175, 211, 219 ‘The Queen of Spades’ 175, 255, 262 Queirós, Eça de 182–3, 293, 313 Queneau, Raymond 49 race and ethnicity 132–4, 155, 162–5, 179, 184–7, 241, 319, 364, 368–70 Radischev, Aleksandr 179 Ramos, Graciliano 134, 363–4, 370 Rawet, Samuel 96, 153, 183, 186, 382, 393 reader complicit, co-author 33, 36, 238, 250, 269, 316, 321, 326, 350–2, 387, 390 reorientation of 16, 22, 36, 45, 94,

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440

Index

216, 238–43, 250–2, 263, 269, 293, 315–6, 331–4, 340–1, 351–2, 387, 390 within the text (narrator and/ or characters as readers and critics) 22, 27–8, 35–6, 71, 82, 189, 204–5, 209, 211–13, 218–19, 222, 236, 238–9, 243–7, 269–72, 281, 296–308, 316–17, 320–4, 330–3, 337–8 urban (readership, distribution) 11, 22, 161, 171, 326–7 see also dialogue with the reader realism, realist narrative 12, 14, 19, 22–3, 28–30, 36–8, 44, 47, 65, 75–83, 98, 117, 161–2, 176, 184–5, 187, 213–14, 219, 243, 254, 270–1, 278–82, 286–8, 307, 319, 322, 330, 343–5, 353, 358, 362–3 reception, literary 22, 37, 44, 47, 61–3, 75, 207, 295, 331 see also reader within the text recursive narrative 2, 12–15, 32–6, 81–3, 196, 228, 233, 240, 251, 257, 263–4, 273–5, 300, 328–9, 343–52 Réda, Jacques 49 redressed culture 48, 97, 106, 146, 205, 225, 230–1, 299, 345–6, 368–9, 373 reflection, literary see mirror reflexive narrative 2, 4–5, 12–39, 44, 58, 69, 78–94, 106, 116, 173, 189, 196, 201, 208–9, 216–17, 220, 254, 257, 267–9, 273–5, 280, 313, 316, 320, 325–52, 355–63, 374, 378–9, 382–4, 390–3 refractive narrative 2, 14–16, 23–4, 27–9, 33, 37–8, 66, 73, 80, 89, 153, 169, 180, 187–9, 198, 202, 213, 227, 283, 294, 307–8, 327–8, 348–52

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regional, regionalism 116, 152, 162, 168–73, 180, 184–6, 210, 370 see also interior re-mapping modernism 14, 17–24, 28, 39–50, 65–70, 76, 79–80, 83–4, 91, 97–8, 106, 180–1, 237, 277, 334–52, 386–93 reorientation 16, 27, 38–40, 44–5, 53, 70, 104–6, 127–9, 140–1, 146, 151–2, 157, 165, 175, 204, 225, 273, 280 repetition 43, 50, 77, 91, 200, 209, 218, 223, 226, 230, 242, 249, 275, 322, 326, 344 response, responsibility 18, 25–37, 42, 45, 72, 81–2, 91–4, 176, 198, 203, 207, 219, 222–8, 231, 237–40, 246, 250–60, 267–83, 287, 291–3, 296–9, 304–9, 314–30, 337–52, 372, 376, 379, 390–3 see also ethics; dialogue, dialogism revision, revisionary history, (re) visionary story 3, 6, 15–18, 35–6, 40, 47–8, 54, 70, 82, 89, 104, 116, 119, 129, 158, 178, 182–3, 196, 207, 218, 224, 233, 250, 280, 288, 295, 316, 341, 350, 358–60, 374–5 revolution see rupture (cultural) rhizomatic literature 64, 117, 386–7 Ricoeur, Paul 78–9, 90–1 Riedel, Dirce Côrtes 256, 282, 289 Rio de Janeiro 1, 4–6, 1, 14, 21, 45–8, 57–65, 68, 87, 93–5, 99–104, 107, 112–17, 119, 121, 123, 127–9, 132–8, 141–8, 151–64, 256–7, 260, 271–82, 284–6, 292–5, 310–15 , 334–52, 357–8, 362–4, 368–9, 375, 384, 392–3 Rio, João do (Paulo Barreto) 218, 363 rival, rivalry 99, 136, 154, 206, 219, 227–9, 246, 248, 314, 324–6, 331, 340, 346, 359, 380

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Index romance, romancing the reader 12, 35–6, 67, 97–9, 148, 205, 222–9, 235, 241, 274, 279–83, 293–5, 301, 317, 323–30, 341, 345–8, 367, 372, 391 roman d’éducation 20, 48, 76, 287–8, 372 see also Bildüngsroman romantic irony 80, 283 Romanticism, romantic narrative 12, 14, 19, 22–3, 30, 36–8, 40, 65, 71, 75, 78, 80, 98, 161–2, 171–80, 184–7, 197, 213, 227–9, 245, 254, 271, 277–83, 287–9, 294, 298–307, 311, 314, 319–30, 337–8, 345–6, 352, 388 Romero, Sílvio 37 Rosenshield, Gary 46, 168–9, 275–86, 294, 298, 304, 332 rupture (cultural) 1, 40–5, 53, 64–5, 70, 73, 76–9, 84, 91, 133, 148, 169, 179–80, 187, 198, 214, 279, 356–7, 362, 372, 374–5, 381, 389, 392 Russia in Brazilian literature 47, 61–3, 75, 95–6, 290, 295–6 Sá, Estácio de 136, 151 Saint Petersburg 1, 4–6, 11, 21, 26, 34, 39, 45–8, 56–66, 68, 87, 94–5, 99–111, 117–64, 167, 170, 180–1, 193–253, 256–7, 260–2, 271–82, 284–9, 292–4, 298–300, 308–52, 334–52, 355–63, 368, 371–2, 374–5, 389, 392–3 Saltykov-Schedrin, Mikhail 357 Sant’Anna, Sérgio 67, 185 Santiago, Silviano 179, 185 São Paulo 1, 4, 11, 14, 93, 154, 160, 364–70, 376, 388 Saramago, José 5, 183, 380, 393 Sá Rego, Enylton de 256, 277 Sarraute, Natalie 393

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Sartre, Jean-Paul and authorship, freedom 25 scandal 148, 159, 254–6, 262–3, 271–2, 290, 314, 330, 359 schizophrenia 4–6, 18–19, 27, 31, 58, 60, 80–96, 101, 146, 181, 188, 221, 226, 229–31, 236–7, 242, 250–2, 266, 309, 331, 336, 339, 342–4, 351, 357, 361, 373, 376–83, 387–93 Schwarz, Roberto 21, 47, 58, 61–3, 68, 96, 161, 184–5, 197, 271, 278, 281–91, 368, 381, 389–90 Scliar, Moacyr 186, 382, 393 script, scripting 98, 235, 260 semiosphere 3, 18, 39–40, 43–7, 53, 63–6, 72, 78–9, 101, 166, 220–1, 232, 339 Sena, Jorge de 313 sentence death sentence 3–4, 13–15, 31–6, 65–7, 72, 74, 78–82, 101, 166, 183, 200, 221, 228, 239, 262–70, 282, 290, 352, 358, 363, 381, 384, 393 urbane narrative sentence 2–4, 13–15, 18, 27, 33, 62–6, 72, 76–84, 198, 214, 320–1, 329, 384, 393 sex, sexuality and seduction 49, 75, 85, 205, 268, 290–1, 315, 322, 387 see also gender and sexuality; embodiment shadows vi, 24, 26, 29, 34, 58, 70, 122, 145–6, 151, 156, 169, 201, 212, 225, 228, 232, 239, 254, 311, 324, 339–40, 344, 361, 373, 381 Shklovsky, Victor 304, 370, 388–9 Shvarts, Elena 152 Siberia 47, 166 signature 27, 36, 65, 74, 97, 213, 224, 230–42, 248, 295, 305, 363, 387

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442

Index

silence, speechlessness 28, 31–2, 66, 83–4, 90, 98, 103, 178, 196–211, 224–8, 237, 247–54, 263, 275, 292, 298, 315–16, 320–4, 327, 339–45, 365 Simmel, Georg 2–3, 13, 44, 78 simultaneity 1–5, 19, 47, 78, 101, 129, 173, 181, 202, 218, 275, 279–82, 325, 329, 338, 342, 366 skaz 13, 22, 194, 237, 294 slavery and serfdom 67, 132–3, 141, 144, 155, 160, 183, 204, 234, 285–95, 332, 345 Slavophile vs Westernizer debates 134, 166–8, 284, 299 Sleptsov, V. A. 188 Sokolov, Sasha (A. V.) 67, 380, 390 Sokurov, Aleksandr N. 138, 148 Sologub, Fedor (F. M. Teternikov) 357 Spain 47, 136, 219, 227, 230, 238–52, 346 spectacle, stage, theatre 14, 78, 82, 101, 133, 148, 161–4, 231–5, 275, 291–2, 317–18, 339–40, 345, 366–8, 375 speech act 27, 32, 35, 82, 215, 327 speech genre 3, 19–22, 26, 34, 42–4, 53, 65, 76, 80, 88, 94, 168, 232–3, 263 ‘spiritual diversity’ 32, 42, 81, 383 ‘spiritual freedom’ 32, 193, 256 Sterne, Laurence 36, 69–70, 269, 280, 286–8 Strindberg 21 style 40, 53, 58, 67–8, 79, 134, 138, 144, 158–67, 177, 181, 196–200, 205–9, 225, 230, 233, 240, 243–50, 265, 272–3, 280, 283, 305, 315, 328–31, 337, 343–7, 353, 361, 363, 376 stylization 5, 88, 104, 162, 165, 176, 182–5, 197–203, 209, 213–14, 224, 229–31, 242–50, 266–7,

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283, 294, 298, 305, 316, 326, 330, 340, 350 subject see consciousness suffering 69–70, 77, 84–6, 153, 203, 223, 311, 316–18, 341, 344, 350, 372 suicide 60, 72, 98, 166, 262, 378 Sumarokov, A. P. 166, 174–5 Sussekind, Flora 46 Tadié, Jean-Yves xiv, 12, 15–16, 88–9 Terdiman, Richard 77, 88–92 territoriality 24 territory 13, 24, 48, 50, 54, 62, 64, 70, 104, 116–17, 135–6, 336, 376 Tertz, Abram (Andrei Sinyavskii) 382 thresholds 6, 19, 29, 43–4, 46, 58, 63–4, 79, 82, 91, 134, 141, 148, 172, 180, 201, 233–4, 239, 251, 257–63, 273, 289, 292–3, 332, 349, 352, 374–6, 388, 391 see also borders; displacement; margins Tolstaya, Tatiana 356, 390–3 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich 37, 70, 75, 100, 169–71, 183, 214, 293, 299, 328, 358 Toporov, V. N. 40, 45–7, 58, 64, 99, 175, 221 transcreation 186, 212, 252, 309, 367, 384 transcultural 96, 132, 155, 164, 388 transculturation 388 ‘trans-ethnical’ 155, 163–5, 186–7, 385 transgender 49, 378–80 translation 3, 14, 21, 30, 37–40, 47, 61, 65, 82, 85, 95–7, 162–8, 176–81, 212, 224–6, 258, 286, 295, 309, 326, 335–7, 349–50, 374, 383–4, 391 see also untranslatability translingual 65, 162–4, 382–4

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Index transnational 6, 65, 70, 96, 375, 382–90 transposition 3, 6, 30, 36, 40, 61, 75, 95–6, 103–4, 117, 168, 278, 288, 300, 307, 373, 383–4, 392 see also displacement trauma 41, 45, 50, 70, 79, 151, 282, 299, 392 Trediakovsky, V. 165–6, 174 trivia, triviality 30, 202–3, 244, 302, 376 see also prosaic or everyday discourse Tsvetaeva, Marina 374–5 Turgenev, I. 37, 58, 169–70, 282, 293, 313, 382 Tynianov, I. N. 127, 133, 287, 294, 302–3, 362–3, 370, 389 Ulitskaya, Liudmila 183, 186 uncanny 12, 90, 157, 208 underground domains of cultural memory, underground circulation in the city 18, 49, 53, 66–7, 82, 261, 271–83, 321–2, 345, 359, 376, 384, 387–93 see also concentric cultural memory; metro underground narrative, narrating consciousness 23–7, 31–5, 38, 44, 66–9, 75, 81–94, 189, 253–73, 301, 308–52, 356–70, 376–80, 384, 390–3 unfinalizability, unfinalized discourse 24–6, 32, 35, 38, 44, 69, 72, 76, 81, 88, 153, 171, 181, 218, 221, 226, 233, 238–40, 251, 258–9, 262–70, 273, 280, 302, 334, 351, 388 see also opening, open-endedness uniforms and uniformity 30–1, 45, 56, 101, 122, 129, 133, 152, 158, 161, 164, 205, 230, 255

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see also mask, masquerade; pageantry; redressed culture; spectacle, stage untranslatability 60 urban/e narrative construction 1–6, 11–23, 34, 39–48, 58, 64, 69, 80–8, 92–4, 97–100, 145–6, 161–2, 171–3, 177–8, 180–9, 193–252, 256–73, 284–92, 298–302, 333–52, 355–93 Uspenskii, G. I. 188, 214 usurper, usurpation 25, 56, 65, 204–6, 230, 248, 337 see also impostor, poseur, imposture utterance 20, 42–5, 92, 269–70 see also speech act vacuity, void, evacuated memory 28–31, 42, 45, 49, 64, 88, 101–4, 122–3, 145, 152–3, 159, 174, 205, 225–6, 261, 291, 300, 316, 332, 342, 362 Valéry, Paul 65 value, revaluation, recalculation (cultural) 208, 316–19, 327, 329, 332, 339, 343–52 Ventura, Roberto 46, 101, 168–9, 388–9 Veríssimo, Érico 311 Veríssimo, Luis Fernando 67, 388 Vidler, Anthony 12, 271 Vieira, Nelson xiii, 382 Vinogradov, V. V. 209–14, 236, 287, 294, 302, 370 violation 34, 87, 262, 269, 272, 283, 341, 373, 377 violence 15, 29, 54, 64, 73, 138, 155, 185–7, 221, 239, 251, 258, 267–72, 283–5, 290–2, 308, 312, 318, 341–5, 348–50, 365, 373, 377–93 Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior, Vicomte de 21, 37, 69, 75

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444 Woolf, Virginia. 5, 11, 13, 19–21, 66–73, 75–6, 79, 352 Young, Sarah 98

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Index Zamiatin, Evgenii 66–7, 194, 359, 362, 382 Zhukovsky, Vasily A. 194 Zola, Émile 12, 38, 48, 287, 290–1

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Lubkemann Allen, EccentriCities.indd 446

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