Le corps de la mère, ultime refuge pour les héros œdipiens de la littérature russe contemporaine : Vie­Éros­Thanatos

Abstract

If there are examples of fusional mother / son couples in contemporary Russian literature, for some of its authors the son’s desire for his mother , described by Freud as one of the stages of the male’s sexual development , seems to take a particular form. Indeed, for the male hero the maternal body appears as a substitute for the universal maternal body which they would like to penetrate in order to re­enter prenatal nothingness , expecting in this way a soothing dissolution or an ulterior rebirth . This particular desire for the mother ’ s body – which is strictly speaking asexual – can be linked to the psychoanalytic theory of the death drive which merges with the Russian tradition , where the Earth is a second mother : a man comes out of his mother ’ s womb in order to return into the womb of the Earth. This article examines the representation of sexuality in four examples of contemporary Russian prose (Spjaščaja Krasavica (2005 ) by Dmitrij Bortnikov, Ėdipov kompleks (2002 ) by Dmitrij Lipskerov , Ovsjanki (2008 ) by Denis Osokin, Ispug (2006 ) by Vladimir Makanin ) that could illustrate the underground eros (Elena Tihomirova , 1992 ) characteristic of Russian Post­Soviet literature . Our analysis focuses on the protagonists ’ desire for the maternal / feminine body accompanied by self­destructive tendencies in order to bring out a configuration of instincts, which is different from that proposed by Freud where Life = Eros, and which determines their supposedly perverse behavior.