Resilient Revelations: Apocalyptic Fiction in the Soviet 1920s

Clairon C Palmer

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/N23M79

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Resilient Revelations: Apocalyptic Fiction in the Soviet 1920s

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This dissertation investigates the nature of apocalyptic fiction in the first Soviet decade. In my introduction, I consider the secondary or underground status that apocalyptic thought assumed during this period vis a vis the prevailing cultural ethos of utopianism. I assert that Russian literary apocalyptic persisted as a genre by assuming highly dialogized, self-critical forms that may be called "meta-apocalyptic." A meta-apocalyptic fiction works both to unmask the utopian pretensions of the new society and to comment on and reconfigure its own, pre-Revolutionary shape. The meta-apocalypticist would restore to eschatological myth its independence from both history and social life by proposing that the most legitimate territory for cataclysmic ends and rebirth is the individual, creative consciousness. The first work from this period that I discuss as an embodiment of the meta-apocalyptic idea is Pil'nyak's Mahogany. This novella's subtle apocalyptic figuring contrasts sharply with the exclamatory end-thinking that characterizes the author's more famous "Scythian" works. The mature Pil'nyak dialogizes apocalyptic myth with byt, rediscovering what he depicts as that myth's lost ontological function by relocating it in the everyday and redistributing the End across small and innumerable birth-death narratives. The next chapter explores the clash of salvational mythologies that Olesha stages in Envy. Modernist apocalypticist-schismatics, Envy's anti-heroes assail utopian socialism by means of vulgarity and imperfection. Creation and creativity, they proclaim, are born of strife. Ultimately, Olesha presents the most viable transcription of the apocalyptic promise of renewal and redemption as an aesthetic phenomenon that is personal and subjective and that invariably registers as failure in the objective world. The topic of "aestheticized apocalypse" is developed further in my final chapter on The Egyptian Stamp by Mandel'stam. Here I look closely at the apocalyptic threshold or limen which the poet translates into bold structural and thematic experiments. Further complicating this work is the idea that the apocalyptic possibility--the possibility in Mandel'stam of the revelatory Word--languishes in contemporary socio-cultural conditions. In places, the novella's delirious affirmation of "threshold poetics" more closely resembles a brave examination of poetic collapse.

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