All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature by José Vergara

Abstract

Reviewed by: All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature by José Vergara Anna Maslenova All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature. By José Vergara. (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2021. xiii+254 pp. $54.95. ISBN 978-1-5017-5990-1. José Vergara's monograph studies the reception of James Joyce in work by Russian authors Iurii Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin as a pathway for analysis of themes of fatherhood, history, and literary heritage in Russian literature. Vergara explores how Russian writers assimilated the Shakespeare theory expressed by Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus in the 'Scylla and Charybdis' chapter of Ulysses, which argued that a writer can choose [End Page 275] his own father by reinventing his past through text. Although not all Vergara's examples of intertextual connections between Russian texts and Joyce's œuvre are equally convincing, they collectively provide valuable insight into the evolution of intertextuality in Russia over the course of the long twentieth century. The first chapter examines Olesha's contradictory reaction to Joyce in his novel Envy (1927). Feeling compelled to conceal his interest in modernist techniques (considered suspicious in Soviet Russia), Olesha was overtly negative about Joyce. Vergara, however, reveals numerous parallels between father-and-son characters in Envy and in Ulysses: namely, Buck Mulligan/Andrei Babichev, Leopold Bloom/Ivan Babichev, and Stephen/Kavalerov. Olesha's viewpoint, however, is more pessimistic than Joyce's: unlike Stephen, who has reinvented himself as his own father figure, Kavalerov fails to do so and thus remains an outsider within the Soviet system. Vergara's next case study examines Nabokov's many parallels with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in his novels The Gift (1938) and Bend Sinister (1947). Vergara demonstrates that Nabokov, who famously despised biographies romancées, also disapproved of Stephen's creative approach to Shakespeare's life. In The Gift, Fyodor, like Stephen, wants to connect with a literary forefather (Pushkin), but instead of distancing himself from his biological father, he merges these two father figures in his unfinished biographical novel. Vergara suggests that Fyodor ultimately abandons this novel because he respects the inviolability of his fathers' life stories. Krug in Bend Sinister, on the other hand, does not hold back from manipulating Shakespeare's life story. For this crime he is punished by the death of his son, which triggers Krug's madness. Andrei Bitov's protagonist in Pushkin House (1978), Leva Odoevtsev, also attempts, less successfully than Nabokov's Fyodor, to establish relations with his forefathers. Written during the Khrushchev Thaw, Pushkin House addresses the issue of belatedness. Leva, estranged from his biological father, searches for other father figures but fails to fill the gap. The novel, described here as a 'disorientating amalgamation of sources' (p. 77), also attempts but fails to bridge the temporal chasm between Soviet Russia and the West. Its main emotion is anxiety about Russian literature's lack of innovation, a weakness causing its authors to lag behind those of the West. Sasha Sokolov's Student So and So in A School for Fools (1973) is unaffected by that sensation of belatedness. His unusual disease allows him to travel in time and simultaneously exist in the past, present, and future. A School for Fools contains fewer direct references to Joyce than Sokolov's later novel Palisandria (1985), but Vergara finds stylistic debts to the Irish writer in the stream-of-consciousness, structural play, and 'forking characters' that Sokolov employs. For Sokolov, language is a substitute reality where Student recognizes himself as both descendant and progenitor of his antecedents. Through language, he escapes from his own epoch, where his father tries to re-educate him with Soviet newspaper propaganda. Vergara's final case study looks afresh at Shishkin's novel Maidenhair (2005) with a reading of the same author's essay 'More than Joyce'. Here, Shishkin offers an unconventional interpretation of the Ouroboros symbol in Finnegans Wake, [End Page 276] arguing that while the past creates the present, the present can also (re)generate the past by reworking previous texts. Looking backwards, for Shishkin, allows...