Deux écrivains contemporains, l'un francais, l'autre russe soviétique, ont ressenti vivement le passage inexorable du temps. Ils se sont mis à cueillir les souvenirs et les impressions de l'enfance afin de recréer le "paradis de l'enfance" et ainsi figer la vie passagère et retrouver "le temps perdu". Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922), auteur français du magnifique roman A la Recherche du temps perdu, et Ossip Emilievich Mandel'shtam (1891 - 1938), auteur russe du chef-d'oeuvre Shum Vremeni (Le Bruit du temps), se sont voués, chacun de son côté, à mettre à jour leurs premières sensations et impressions. Dans ces deux oeuvres plus ou moins autobiographiques, le Temps se montre comme personnage principal. Chez tous les deux écrivains nous trouvons un culte passionné des valeurs intellectuelles, une sensibilité développée à l'extrême, un sens du passé et une préoccupation soucieuse de sa conservation. L'objet de cette thèse est, premièrement, de faire plusieurs analogies entre les ambiances familiales et intellectuelles des deux écrivains, entre leurs caractères également sensibles et impressionnables, et entre leurs sentiments et idées philosophiques et psychologiques. On peut faire une analyse détaillée des techniques individuelles qui ont joué un rôle si important dans l'oeuvre de chacun, et, ensuite, rapprocher les méthodes employées pour réaliser leurs tentatives surhumaines, c'est-à-dire, les façons dont chacun a réussi à retrouver le temps perdu. La recherche du réel chez Mandel'shtam, comme chez Proust, commence avec les souvenirs d'enfance, ainsi qu'avee les premières impressions mystérieuses. Tandis que Proust affirme à tout instant la prédominance de la perception affective en cherchant un rapport mystique avec l'Absolu, Mandel'shtam affirme la suprématie de l'élément logique et concret dans l'oeuvre. C'est la capacité de Mandel'shtam, selon M. Gleb Struve, de contenir le général dans le concret qui donne la valeur particulière a son impression du "temps perdu". L'ouvrage de Mandel'shtam, comme celui de Proust, montre un sens historique et un sentiment vif du temps vécu. Leurs oeuvres géniales incarnent leur visions personnelles de la vie temporelle et la vie extra-temporelle. En s'élevant au-dessus du temps, Proust et Mandel'shtam ont pénétré1 le mystère de l'éternel—ils sont arrivés à l'essence de la vie. Tous deux ont réussi définitivement à conjurer et, ensuite, enserrer à jamais dans les toiles fines de leurs oeuvres le Temps élusif et passager. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

“Flesh Made Word” examines two seemingly incongruous Russian modernist writers to illuminate one remarkable species of aesthetic response to the violent pressures of Marxist ideology, especially as those pressures are manifest as sociolinguistic phenomena and practice. The unexpected pairing of Osip Mandel’shtam and Vladimir Nabokov is motivated by their shared debt to Henri Bergson’s materialist theories of embodied selfhood and subjectivity, language, and the metaphysics of art. Poetry, both writers insist, as it operates according to a non-linear logic of ever-open and expanding associations of sound and image, offers the only authentic grammar for a multifarious self that knows not the constructions of time, causality, and finality. This mode of self-expression, at once intimate and cryptic, clashes with the Marxist state’s effort to make the subject uniform and transparent—to “sentence” him to his prescribed collective identity in the bondage of speech, prose, and narrative, whose didactic agenda and linear momentum are encrypted with Marxism’s world-historical teleology. Mandel’shtam’s and Nabokov’s own texts, the study argues, operate primarily by poetic principles, and their literary practice in turn creatively anticipates theories of Bergson’s postmodernist heirs (Foucault, Barthes, Derrida), particularly as they draw bold political implications from Bergson’s theories to analyze the relationship of language, writing, and power. Barthes, for instance, claims that the “poetic” text—composed of a personal image-system, not a “structure of signifieds”—places the artist “outside the pact that binds the writer to society.” In exploring this conflict between manners of expression, the study offers innovative, cohesive readings of the writers’ most enigmatic and elusive works of poetic prose—Mandel’shtam’s The Egyptian Stamp and Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. More specifically, it examines the ways the conflict is manifest on the bodies of the narrator-protagonists. These figures are effectively twice composed: once by the mortifying narration of the State, again as they are the subjects of their own revitalizing self-writing. The texts that the protagonists produce of themselves are figured as their very flesh transubstantiated, and as nothing other than the poetic works that we are reading. These metaphysical dimensions of the fiction make forceful statements about the power of the artistic act, and especially its potential to reclaim and restore the self in a gesture of political defiance. By establishing a distinct set of images, themes, and techniques shared by the authors, along with a conceptual framework in which to discuss them, this dissertation responds to a scholarly need, until now not substantively articulated, to place Mandel’shtam’s and Nabokov’s creative projects into dialogue. As much as it invites a parallel gaze, however, the study equally contributes daring new chapters to each author’s existing body of scholarship and opens fields of inquiry that demand continued critical attention.

The 1910 polemic on the “crisis of Symbolism” began when the Symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov read a lecture entitled the “Precepts of Symbolism.” This lecture initiated a lively debate on the status of this prominent literary movement, to which many of the leading literary figures of the Silver Age contributed. Although the “crisis of Symbolism” has garnered a great deal of scholarly interest, an important aspect of this debate has remained unexplored. Ivanov’s lecture contained an attack on the notion of clarity, which he interpreted as the word’s “transparency” to reason. He argued that language is neither an adequate expression of thought, nor an accurate representation of “reality.” The lecture was itself a polemical response to a brief article written by Ivanov’s friend, Mikhail Kuzmin, and entitled “On Beautiful Clarity: Notes on Prose.” Published a few months before Ivanov’s lecture, this essay urged respect for the word, advocated such Classical values as precision, economy of means and clarity of expression. Both “On Beautiful Clarity” and the “Precepts of Symbolism” appeared at a time when pervasive loss of faith in the communicative power of language combined with the sense of social and cultural malaise led to a profound crisis that far exceeded the ranks of the Symbolists. Between 1910 and 1917, a number of Russian writers and thinkers proclaimed the word “dead” and offered programs for its revival. For Ivanov, clarity was an Enlightenment notion that he associated with rationalism and blamed for the ills of his age. For Kuzmin, however, clarity represented poetic rather than empirical meaningfulness and had little to do with the kind of empirical “transparency” that Ivanov had in mind. Both poets were after the same goal: a poetics that would bridge the perceived divide between the word and “reality.” Even as Ivanov argued for a language of mystical obscurity in the hope that such an idiom would restore the mystery and meaning of which he believed his age was sapped, he replaced clarity with a kind of Symbolist intelligibility and so a clarity of his own. This dissertation examines Viacheslav Ivanov’s, Mikhail Kuzmin’s and Osip Mandelshtam’s distinct approaches to the concept of clarity as poetic sense, formulated by these poets independently as well as in response to each other. I argue that for all three poets the notion of clarity applies to the specific relationship between the poet and the word, between the image and the word, and between the semantic content and the sound within the word. Since for all three poets, clarity is associated not only with the poetic logos in general, but specifically with the heritage of European Classicism, the Classical ideal works its way into these relationships as the “image” of sense to which the poet must aspire. For each poet, poetic clarity is an explicit concept as well an individual “model” implicit in his poetic identity.