Rubins, Maria Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 535 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. A more comprehensive assessment of Békássy the poet can be made by downloading the Bodleian Library’s copy of this now-rare volume from the Internet (free of charge). This little book has been scrupulously, indeed lovingly, edited and annotated by the Gömöris and beautifully produced by Karl Sabbagh’s Skyscraper Publications. It will be of great interest not only to those concerned with Anglo-Hungarian contacts but also anyone whose appetite for reading about the Bloomsbury set remains unsated, as well as everyone with an interest in the ‘lost’ poets of the First World War. It is a worthy tribute to Békássy, in whose memory Darwin’s granddaughter Frances Cornford wrote, in 1915, the Georgian lyric reproduced here (p. 233). Its final stanza runs: We, who must grow staid and old, Full of caution, worn and cold, In our hearts like flowers keep, Your image, till we also sleep. London Peter Sherwood Rubins,Maria.Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, NY, 2015. x + 302 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £55.00. Having been violently separated from their native land and tongue, those Russian writers who found themselves in exile after the Russian Revolution began to anxiously debate the very survival of a literary tradition abroad, fiercely arguing over whether what was being written in Paris, Berlin, Prague and Shanghai could be constituted as a continuation and preservation of this tradition, or whether all such ties had been inexorably severed. In his article on ‘Literature in Exile’ (Paris, 1933), Vladislav Khodasevich, a conservative frontbencher in this debate, adamantly rejected the idea that geographical location should be an integral part of national identity, arguing instead that ‘the nationality of a literature is created by its language and spirit, not by the territory in which its life passed, not the everyday reality reflected in it’. Maria Rubins’sstudychallengesthisnotionandquestionsthemyththatémigréwriters existed in cultural isolation by placing Russian Montparnasse at ‘the epicenter of modernist transnational culture’ (p. 7), suggesting that for the younger, less conservative generation of writers at least, a wider set of considerations need to be applied. By focusing on ‘cases of linguistic ambivalence decoupling the tongue from its original territory’, Rubins calls ‘into question the conventional SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 536 status of language as the chief marker of national identity’ (p. 6). As such, her study proposes to remap and recategorize literature as something more complex than specific national and linguistic parameters, and greater than geographic locus altogether. Rubins structures her study into four parts, each of which examines a distinct aspect of Russian émigré letters by placing them against a cross-cultural background. The study begins with a detailed survey of the evolution of the ‘human document’, a term which, despite its centrality to the debate around the direction which émigré literature should take, has hitherto not received the critical attention it deserves. This genre of writing constituted an attempt by the younger generation to produce a more documentary style of literature, encompassing truthful accounts of ‘real life’, human emotion and existential experience that were often also reflected in its fragmentary form. The second section turns to location, exploring the way in which the city of Paris, with its dark underbelly of metro stations, public toilets and river suicides, may have helped further shape these particular narratives. The argument then moves to explore the wider influences of interwar mass culture, particularly Art Deco and the Jazz Age, the essence of which, she argues, had an indisputable influence on the aesthetics and poetics of modernist writing in this period. Her comparative examination of these writers reveals that their responses to certain markers of urban modernity went far beyond their shared emergence and deracination from Russian literary tradition and instead represented a far broader aesthetic movement common to writers of other nationalities in interwar Europe. In the final section, Rubins turns to examine the complicated way in which Russian Montparnasse engaged with its own national literary tradition, in particular drawing attention to the significant influence of Lermontov and Rozanov...