The Vortex That Unites Us: Versions of Totality in Russian Literature

By Jacob Emery

The Vortex That Unites Us is a study of totality in Russian literature, from the foundation of the modern Russian state to the present day. Considering a diversity of texts that have in common chiefly their prominence in the Russian literary canon, Jacob Emery examines the persistent ambition in Russian literature to gather the whole world into an artwork. Emery reveals how the diversity of totalizing figures in the Russian canon—often in alliance with ideologies like the totalitarian state or enlightenment reason—strive for the frontiers of space and time in order to guarantee the coherence of the globe and the continuity of history. He expores subjects like romantic metaphors of supernatural possession; Tolstoy's conception of art as a vector of emotional contagion; the panoramic ambitions of the avant-garde to grasp the globe in a new poetic medium; efforts of Soviet utopians to harmonize the whole of social life along aesthetic lines; Mandelstam's evocation of writing as a transcendental authority that guarantees a grandiose historical rhythm even when manifested as authoritarian repression; and the mass market of cultural commodities in which the exiled Vladimir Nabokov found success with his novel Lolita. The Vortex That Unites Us reveals a common thread in the disparate works it explores, bringing into a single horizon a variety of typically siloed texts and aesthetic approaches. In all these cases, the medium of totality is the body, inspired by artistic vision and compelled by aesthetic response.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501769399

Book preview

Cover: The Vortex That Unites Us, VERSIONS OF TOTALITY IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE by Jacob Emery

THE VORTEX THAT UNITES US

VERSIONS OF TOTALITY IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

JACOB EMERY

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Versions of Possession

2. The Epidemic

3. The Panorama

4. The Orchestra

5. The Market

Afterword

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter 1 includes parts of several previously published articles, which have been substantially reworked and mixed in with new material: Repetition and Exchange in Legitimizing Empire: Konstantin Batiushkov’s Scandinavian Corpus (Russian Review, October 2007); "Between Fiction and Physiology: Brain Fever in The Brothers Karamazov and Its English Afterlife," written with Elizabeth F. Geballe (PMLA, October 2020); Sigizmund Krzhizhanovksy’s Poetics of Passivity (Russian Review, January 2017), and A Clone Playing Craps Will Never Abolish Chance: Randomness and Fatality in Vladimir Sorokin’s Clone Fictions (Science Fiction Studies, July 2014). A partial version of chapter 2 was previously published as Art Is Inoculation: The Infectious Imagination of Leo Tolstoy (Russian Review, October 2011). A partial version of chapter 4 was previously published as "Keeping Time: Reading and Writing in Conversation about Dante" (Slavic Review, Fall 2014). And a partial version of chapter 5 was previously published as "Humbert Humbert as Mad Man: Art and Advertising in Lolita" (Studies in the Novel, Winter 2019). I am grateful to those journals for permission to reuse this material and to their editors, staff, and peer reviewers for improvements made along the way.

I would like to thank Amy Farranto and everyone at Northern Illinois/Cornell University Press, including the anonymous reviewers, for helping shepherd this book to press; my mentors—Julie Buckler, Tomislav Longinović, Stephanie Sandler, Marc Shell, William Mills Todd III, Justin Weir, and my late advisor Svetlana Boym—for their patience and support; my colleagues at Indiana University, especially Elizabeth F. Geballe, Herbert Marks, Eyal Peretz, and Russell Valentino, who provided stimulating discussions and penetrating critiques throughout the writing of this book; Alex Berg, Ian Chesley, Rebecca Cravens, David Damrosch, Caryl Emerson, Ilya Kun, Natalia Kun, Robert Latham, Mark Lipovetsky, Ainsley Morse, Eric Naiman, Nariman Skakov, Alexander Spektor, Dennis Yi Tenen, and Julia Vaingurt, each of whom improved this book through some combination of comments, conversation, and intellectual generosity; Ilya Bendersky, David Gramling, Olga Hasty, Colleen McQuillen, Harsha Ram, and Tatiana Venediktova, who invited me to share early versions of this work at the Tolstoy Museum, the ACLA meeting at New York University, Princeton University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Moscow State University Summer School in the Humanities; and the audiences at those talks for their attention and response. This work was partially funded by the Davis Center at Harvard University, Indiana University’s College Arts and Humanities Institute and Russian and East European Institute, and by Indiana University Research through the Grant-in-Aid Program, all of which provided material support at various stages. Thanks as ever to my students, my apologies to everyone I have forgotten in this all-too-brief list, and one final thank-you to Amy and Otis, whom I never forget.

Introduction

The Totalities of Russian Literature

One thing that distinguishes art from other forms of knowledge is that an artwork’s formal features mark it off as a complete object from the larger world that it represents or even, paradoxically, seeks to contain. The philosopher Bruno Latour has decried the metaphoric frameworks he calls panoramas—capacious interpretive paradigms such as modernity or globalization—as false totalities that give up nuance and accuracy for scope and simplicity.¹ Whatever the value of this attitude in the social sciences, it is simply not relevant to the totalities represented in and by aesthetic objects. The avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov’s 1920 poem The One, the Only Book depicts the whole world as a vast text, with rivers laid across the landmasses like threads marking the place / Where the reader rests his gaze.² From this panoramic perspective, all the planet’s regions and its people—Race of Humanity, Reader of the Book—are united by their inclusion in the sacred volume of creation whose cover bears the creator’s signature / The sky-blue letters of my name.³ The world appears here as a version of Khlebnikov’s own oeuvre and its persistent efforts to discover the master rhythm of history, to identify a vantage point from which to take in all the earth, and to forge the universal language of concepts that Khlebnikov proposes in his manifestoes and grasps at in his poetic practice: the new vortex that unites us, the new integrator of the human race.⁴

Innovative and idiosyncratic as Khlebnikov’s project is, it belongs to an extensive tradition of texts that swell from totalizing metaphors of a literary cosmos. In the culminating image of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the narrator attains to the pinnacle of heaven, where he achieves a similar metafictional vision of the scattered leaves of all the universe / bound with God’s love into a single book.⁵ Here, too, the commonplace metaphor of the total book represents the universe as a utopian totality gathered together in a meaningful pattern by a transcendent power; in the same stroke, Dante makes a grandiose claim that the poetic text before us is commensurate with all of creation. Of course, contemporary audiences are unlikely to extend any more literal truth value to The Divine Comedy’s cosmology than they do to Khlebnikov’s assertion that he is the author of existence. In both cases, the poem’s panoramic ambitions are compelling primarily because they speak to a claim to gather the world, if only by means of allegory, into the self-enclosed totality of the artwork.

In this book, I offer a conceptual anthologizing of the Russian canon through the theme of totality. I do not pretend to exhaust the theme of totality in Russian-language literature; the One State of Eugene Zamiatin’s dystopian novel We, to name just one prominent example, is absent from the following chapters. Nor do I desire to reduce totality’s many manifestations across the longue durée of Russian culture to a single claim about Russia’s essential character or historical destiny, although I discuss numerous claims of the sort as they crop up in the following pages. Still less do I argue that Russian totalities are somehow more total than universalizing ideologies originating elsewhere, such as Christianity or positivism.⁶ Rather, I am interested precisely in Russian literature’s teeming and paradoxical diversity of totalities. This book treats in turn a poetics of possession (in authors who sketch out a historical trajectory running loosely from Russian Imperial Romanticism to post-Soviet postmodern fiction); the all-encompassing emotional community implied by Leo Tolstoy’s epidemic metaphor of artistic experience as an infection; the panoramic text of the world envisioned by Khlebnikov and other representatives of the early Soviet avant-garde; the continuous cultural tradition that is guaranteed, in the writings of the dissident poet Osip Mandelstam, by the orchestral metaphor of a common time enforced by the conductor’s baton; and the global market for cultural goods in the English-language writing of Vladimir Nabokov, whose fictional worlds, capable of both giving pleasure and entrapping unwary victims, come uncannily to mimic the logic of totalitarian regimes.

The stakes and orientation of art’s totalizing dimension shift radically across these texts and the distinct historical moments in which they originate. Despite these diverse guises and ideological thrusts, a recurrent set of intertextual references, cultural touchstones, and theoretical concepts link these texts and my readings. Aspirations to aesthetic totality become readily allied with other totalizing intellectual currents such as the totalitarian state, Enlightenment reason, globalization, or Christian universalism. Literary texts propagandize such discourses, of course, but it is more essential that totalizing ideologies find analogues in literary form. A humanity united in and transfigured by art is a central feature of utopian aesthetics since at least the French Revolution, whose democratic ideals and transformative potential inspired Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Schiller’s book describes the realm of aesthetic semblance through a series of political metaphors, casting the artistic impulse as an executive power whose jurisdiction includes all of human experience, from unconscious physiological response (the blind compulsion of natural impulse) to self-aware rational intent (the point where reason governs).⁷ Despite Schiller’s egalitarian ideals, interpretations of the aesthetic as an irresistible force communicated through the artist and welding the audience into a single unit governed by a single visionary conception can carry fascistic implications.

A persistent formation that constitutes an important through line in this book triangulates political organization with artistic genius and aesthetic response. In this scheme, an inspiration that partakes at once of artistic vision and utopian politics descends on and possesses the artist, who manifests that impulse in an artwork; the public, falling under the artwork’s spell, is moved to share in a common experience that implies a community of feeling. In the formation of this ambiguously poetic and political totality, we can discern two complementary movements that work together to bind discrete elements (whether words or persons) into a whole (whether a text or a polity). On the one hand, totality requires some expansive mechanism that spreads through space and time, a principle of transmission made manifest as imperial conquest, infectious spread, textual dissemination, or commercial networks of exchange. On the other hand, totality requires some unifying principle that gives shape to artistic material and compels every element that falls into its field of force to articulate the pattern that it perpetuates and universalizes: artistic genius, ghostly possession, literary tradition, or totalitarian authority. Harsha Ram has identified both movements in Khlebnikov’s work, which vacillates between the two equally utopian impulses of outward expansion, from the erasure of national boundaries to the final goal of planetary liberation, and of closure … an impregnable island ruled by a ‘laboratory for the study of time.’ ⁸ A similar opposition underlies Vladimir Papernyi’s hypothesis—itself a totalizing narrative that encompasses Russian cultural history in a self-perpetuating cyclical logic—that Russian culture alternates between the expansive and egalitarian Culture One and the centralizing and hierarchical Culture Two.⁹ The emblem of the latter is Boris Iofan’s plan for the Palace of Soviets, a massive perfect architectural construction, capped by a three-hundred-foot-tall statue of Lenin, that was to bring about the culmination of architecture itself, so that in the future there would be only endless reproductions of this model. In Papernyi’s analysis, the Stalinist skyscrapers that ring the proposed site of this unbuilt structure are earthly echoes of an ideal image but at the same time harbingers of a return to Culture One, since the shift in emphasis from the planning of this model to its multiplication means the decline of hierarchy and a return to horizontal expansion.¹⁰

In the more abstract terms popularized by Roman Jakobson, we might think of these two impulses as the metonymic axis, involving relationships of contiguity and causality, and the metaphoric axis of similarity and identity.¹¹ Like Papernyi, Jakobson sees cultural history as oscillating between these two poles: thus, the realist novel, essentially metonymic in its linked plot events and plethora of ancillary details, follows on a Romantic literature of allegory and is itself succeeded by the explicitly metaphorical Symbolist movement.¹² He acknowledges that both processes are always at work, however, and suggests that literature is the result of their patterned interaction. An essay by Gérard Genette, which decomposes the grand synthetic images that encapsulate Marcel Proust’s aesthetic project into the intricate systems of coincidence that motivate them, illustrates how the one principle gives rise to the other. It is metaphor that recovers Lost Time, Genette concludes, but it is metonymy that reanimates it, sets it in motion, which delivers it to itself.¹³ Following Genette, Paul de Man has suggested that any passage that is ordered around a central, unifying metaphor can be analyzed into a set of transfers and juxtapositions.¹⁴ The inference of identity and totality that is constitutive of metaphor is lacking in the purely relational metonymic contact, de Man points out, and yet upon close inspection, the assertion of the mastery of metaphor over metonymy owes its persuasive power to the use of metonymic structures through which a unified pattern comes to dominate the entire text.¹⁵

A literary totality thus emerges from a collocation of individual transfers, each one communicating an impulse that binds the myriad atoms of the text together into a coherent form. This originary impulse is readily imagined as an essentially citational authority, akin to past usage or legal precedent, whose force determines the meaning of words and application of laws in the present moment. In authors’ aspiration to write a total text, they seem to echo another, prior utterance—a voice which traverses them without belonging to them, in Avital Ronell’s phrase.¹⁶ Because this animating genius remains external to the artwork it inspires, totality is close to the Gothic and elegiac modes in which the trace of a lost origin haunts the present. The inspiration visited on Romantic poets as they wander country churchyards and contemplate ruins reflects this understanding of cultural authority. So do Soviet materialist conceptions of capital as dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor: this formula, from the pen of Karl Marx, manifests the Gothic scheme as a structure of economic and political alienation.¹⁷

Even texts that seem to oppose centralized authority conjure up some compensatory figure that promises to bind the text, and the totality of culture, into a whole. The dissident martyr Osip Mandelstam’s last essay, Conversation about Dante, likens culture to a flock of birds that has settled down on grain strewn in the shapes of letters, so that they collectively spell out a preexisting text that none of them individually intends or understands. In Mandelstam’s conception, a writer is like a scribe who is obedient to the dictation of a transcendent force that is interpretable as poetic inspiration but also as political tyranny.¹⁸ (The poet disappeared into Stalin’s camps not long after he wrote these words.) In a 2000 book subjected to a public desecration and legal persecution by allies of Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Sorokin evokes a similar scene: a multitude of torchbearers floating down a river, disposed so as to spell out a propaganda message in letters of fire for the audience gathered on the embankments.¹⁹ Casting human bodies as an artistic or quasi-artistic medium, such images allude to an avant-garde aspiration to work not in representations but in the material of life itself.

As the 1913 Futurist manifesto Why We Paint Ourselves proclaims, We have joined art to life.… Life has invaded art, it is time for art to invade life.²⁰ By annulling the boundary between life and art, the whole world was in this view to become subject to the dynamic, creative process that radical artists called zhiznetvorchestvo, or life creation. In Boris Groys’s intentionally provocative account, the avant-garde mind-set was internalized by the Soviet leadership, which became a kind of artist whose material was the entire world.²¹ Mankind will educate itself plastically, it will become accustomed to look at the world as submissive clay for sculpting the most perfect forms of life, writes Leon Trotsky in his Literature and Revolution.²² In a striking illustration of the tendency that Groys calls the "total art of Stalin [Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin], Trotsksy projects that the entire economic, social, and everyday life of the nation was to be subordinated to a single planning authority commissioned to regulate, harmonize, and create a single whole out of even the most minute details"—the fulfillment, on the grandest possible canvas, of an aesthetic ideal, into whose vortex life and art alike were to be drawn.²³

From Point of Origin to Point of Sale

The seminal literary instance of life creation is the opening sequence of Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 poem The Bronze Horseman, which mythologizes Russia’s passage from provincial backwater to global modernity through Peter the Great’s foundation of a new capital on the shores of the Baltic. For Groys, the scene is the locus classicus of Russian totalitarianism and codifies its myth of the demiurge, the transformer of society and the universe.²⁴ In the poem’s iconic first lines, the tsar stands "on the shore of the desolate waves [pustynnykh voln] where he intends to build the city that will bear his name.²⁵ In the lack of distinction between land and water, the gloomy chaos of moss and fog suggests the uncreated world at the opening of Genesis, without form, and void [pustoi]; it is the godlike tsar who is full of sublime thoughts [dum velikikh poln], pregnant with the city that he will make to rise from the mire on this spot.²⁶ Created with a word of command resembling the divine performative let there be light," Peter’s brilliant new capital is the product of a language that does not just represent but makes the world. The mythopoetic word of the tsar is at once aesthetic and political—the creation of a luminously beautiful thing and the exercise of authoritarian power. In the main plot of Pushkin’s poem, a statue of the tsar seems to become animated and to persecute the lowly clerk who dares to defy his legacy; Petersburg and its inhabitants are haunted by the tsar’s implacable ghost, which compels them to live according to his tyrannical vision.

Peter’s center of empire is paradoxically situated on that empire’s margins, on land recently seized from Russia’s haughty neighbor Sweden. The native Finnish fisherman, the sad stepchild of nature, is silently effaced in favor of the Russians, who are apparently nature’s true inheritors.²⁷ When the boom of the ice breaking up in the river during the spring thaw joins with the boom of the cannon from the Petropavolvsk fortress to celebrate the gift of a son to the house of the tsar / Or a victory over the enemy, the principle of filiation and the natural world’s benediction of Russia’s imperial designs are plain.²⁸ The idea that the tsar has imposed his creative vision onto the blank slate of nature gives way to images suggesting that Peter is himself an instrument of nature or of some historical destiny that nature represents. On this inauspicious spot, Nature … has fated us, Peter muses, to cut a window onto Europe.²⁹ These lines, as well known as any in Pushkin’s oeuvre, clash with the divine performative let there be light. The architectural metaphor implies that light is not created by fiat but is accessed by opening a window onto the West and its Enlightenment culture, commensurate with the physical trade routes that are to integrate Russia into the global economy. Every nation’s flag will visit the new waves leading to this new city, the poem prophesies; the landlocked empire’s newly established port will attract and organize the universe around it, so that ships / in a mass from every end of the earth / stream to our rich wharfs.³⁰ St. Petersburg is an emblem of centralized imperial power, achieved through the compulsive vision we have identified with metaphoric totality, but at the same time it represents Russia’s integration into, even subjection to, the expansive historical forces that spread modernity and revolution around the globe.

These tropes, and the tension between them, are not original to Pushkin. He draws on commonplaces already established by Mikhail Lomonosov in his 1761 Peter the Great: A Heroic Poem, which repeatedly depicts the tsar on a foggy shore devising some visionary infrastructure project, and in a 1755 panegyric that praises Peter for opening the gates of Russia onto the ebb and flow of the expansive Ocean to let in commerce, arts, and science.³¹ The expansive Russian state, in this resembling the world as a whole, is practically surrounded by great seas, writes Lomonosov, whose waves groan beneath the weight of the Russian fleet as Russian flags disperse on voyages of colonial exploration.³² Konstantin Batiushkov, in his 1814 Walk to the Academy of Arts, painted a similar scene of a silent, swampy "desolation [pustynia] in which Peter spoke—and Petersburg rose out of the wild swamp, a wonder of civilization destined to overcome nature itself and gather to its bosom a cosmopolitan mixture of all nations.³³ According to the semiotician Yuri Lotman, Petersburg has since its foundation served as a culture generator, in which different national, social and stylistic codes and texts confront each other across centuries of Russian history: autocracy and freedom, Russia and the West, center and periphery, nature and culture, primordial water and hewn stone, a utopian ideal city of the future and yet the terrible masquerade of the Antichrist."³⁴ Russia’s window onto Enlightenment humanism and secular rationality is at the same time a signal instance of Russia’s brutal history of forced labor, a fragile capital of the uncanny built by serfs and enslaved prisoners of war at terrific human cost. Marshall Berman describes St. Petersburg as the inaugural scene of peripheral modernity—a partial integration into the protean flux of capitalism, whose attendant inequalities and incitements have become our common condition across the planet.³⁵

According to Nikolai Gogol’s own (very suspect) testimony, the plot of his 1842 satire Dead Souls, another seminal work from the formative period of modern Russian literature, originated with Pushkin, who donated it to him as a sort of sacred trust.³⁶ This monstrously funny picaresque novel, about a con man buying up the titles to deceased serfs in order to mortgage them for their paper value and invest the funds in real estate, stages a very different intersection of global commerce and national destiny. It was to be the opening salvo of a national epic whose three projected volumes, modeled after the three parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy, would deliver Russia from the hell of serfdom through a purgatory of self-reflection and into a paradisiacal destiny. The project can be seen as one episode in the history of art’s effort, over the course of the nineteenth century, to take religion’s place as the unifying force of European culture. In a central scene, the novel’s antihero, Chichikov, reads through the bills of sale for dead serfs and, carried away by a sort of inspiration, begins to paint verbal pictures resurrecting them. In his reverie, he imagines a runaway who has found work as a Volga barge hauler and breathlessly evokes the stevedores who noisily pour peas and wheat into the deep vessels, pile up sacks of oats and groats—the collective produce of Russia, gathered with the melting of the spring ice and hauled away to global markets.³⁷ All as one, Chichikov apostrophizes this phantasmal mass of workers, you’ll buckle down to toil and sweat, pulling the rope to the strain of a single song endless as Rus.³⁸ The barge that gathers together Russia’s wealth is a microcosm of the nation as a whole; the single song endless as Rus, to whose rhythm Russia moves through slavery and corruption to its salvific destiny, is its artistic analogue and a metaphor for Gogol’s own novel.

For the nineteenth-century ethnographic critic Alexander Veselovsky, the popular chorus was a spontaneous collective expression, whose dissolution into distinct genres like the epic and lyric was a symptom of society’s fragmentation into distinct classes.³⁹ In the triumphal final scene of Gogol’s novel, the fraudster’s carriage becomes assimilated to this collective song. Chichikov’s three speeding horses, which have heard from on high the familiar song, are compared to the Christian trinity and to the divine miracle that is Russia’s destiny.⁴⁰ The spiritual cargo of souls that the carriage conveys to the afterlife replaces the material cargo of peas and buckwheat that the barge carries to foreign markets; the millenarian hymn from on high replaces the work song of the laboring masses. Described as a wind by which Russia is all-inspired by God, this song from on high draws on commonplaces of the soul as an animating breath blown into matter. Its "inapprehensible mysterious force [tainaia sila] expresses Russia’s unembraceable space, in which a boundless thought is destined to be born that will paradoxically embrace the narrator himself: reflecting itself with terrible force in my very depths; by an unnatural power [neestesvenoi vlast’iu] have my eyes been illumined.⁴¹ This illumination is different in kind from that offered by Enlightenment reason. By claiming to reflect" the supernatural totality of this song in the depths of his own self, the narrator audaciously represents Dead Souls to its reader as a spiritual vessel transporting the nation to salvation.

The introduction to the 1940 edition of Gogol’s collected works admires the author’s tremendous ability to create works that reflect ‘all of Rus.’ ⁴² Over the course of Gogol’s narrative, each financial transaction with another eccentric landowner in the picaresque series that makes up the book is a partial step toward this evocation of all of Rus. The deeds of sale accumulating in Chichikov’s ledgers, the barge laden with Russia’s collective produce, the work song of its myriad haulers, the chorus that is a spiritual echo of the work song—all these increasingly bold and spiritualized images, religious, political, economic, and aesthetic, require us to perceive Gogol’s novel as a more perfect member of the same series. A compulsive, utopian, total text emerges from a snowballing cascade of individual transfers.

For Georg Lukács, the novel is the literary form that seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality immanent in the fragmentation of modern life, an effort he investigates particularly among the Russians.⁴³ In order to create a real totality such as Gogol’s authentically epic intention demanded, Lukács suggests, it would have been necessary to provide a positive counterweight to the satire; this was beyond the author’s powers.⁴⁴ Overcome with fanatic piety, Gogol burned the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls and starved himself to death in penance for writing the first one. The tragic end to the author’s life highlights the stakes of his ambition. In a preface to the first and only published volume of Dead Souls, Gogol styles the work as a collective utterance of the nation. He asks the reader to bring to mind his entire life and all the people with whom he had met, and all the events that had taken place before his eyes, and everything that he had seen for himself or heard from anyone else, … to describe all this just as it appears in his memory, and to send me every page as he writes it for inclusion in future installments of an infinitely capacious book.⁴⁵ Gogol carries on this insane but not wholly facetious invitation for six pages. At first blush a gag in the vein of Laurence Sterne, his jocular proposal that his readership convert their lives into narratives and send them in to be gathered between the covers of a book can also be seen as literalizing the collective utterance set forth in the imagery of the barge hauler’s song, the millenarian hymn, or indeed the ownership deeds gathered in Chichikov’s portfolio.⁴⁶

These universal texts produced by a collective author are the counterpart to a collective readership like the one imagined by Vissarion Belinsky in his famous open letter admonishing Gogol’s turn to religious conservatism. I do not represent a single person in this respect but a multitude of men, most of whom neither you nor I have ever set eyes on, and who, in their turn, have never set eyes on you, warns Belinsky, echoing his long-standing conviction that a Russian public would discover itself as something unified, a single living personality developing historically through its encounter with its reflection in Russian literature.⁴⁷ Belinsky’s Hegelian notion of a people becoming a unity by internalizing its represented image persists in statements of the Bolshevik period. Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet commissar of education, announced in the article On the People’s Festivals that if the masses were to achieve consciousness, they must become a spectacle for themselves.⁴⁸ The ideal was put into practice, at least in an embryonic form, by Alexander Medvedkin’s cinema train, a traveling film studio that shot footage of workers in the morning, edited it in the afternoon, and screened the completed film in the evening in the mess hall.⁴⁹ In this ideal circuit of production and consumption, the workers who starred in the film were at the same time the market that consumed it.

A Braid of Totalities

In The Bronze Horseman and Dead Souls, major works by the two towering figures of the golden age of Russian literature, totalizing figures spread across frontiers and guarantee the coherence of the globe; they reshape the future in the image of an inexorable destiny and ensure the continuity of history. Received wisdom, often an Orientalist received wisdom, has long foregrounded a totalizing