Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story by Adrian Wanner

Abstract

MLR, IOI.2, 2oo6 617 Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to theAnti-Story. By ADRIANWANNER. (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory) Evanston, IL: Northwestern Uni versity Press. 2003. Xii+2i6 pp. $79.95. ISBN o-8I0I-I955-2. Adrian Wanner had published four articles as preliminaries to the present study. The last of these was entitled 'Russian Minimalist Prose: Generic Antecedents to Daniil Kharms' "Sluchai"' (Slavic and East EuropeanyJournal, 45 (200I), 45 I-72). The final book no longer features Kharms in its title, adopting amore genre-based alternative; nevertheless Kharms, reached fully or formally only in the last of the eight chapters, seems still very much the end product, or overall goal, of this study. However, only a relatively small number of Kharms's anti-stories (ormini-stories) are discussed in any detail. The main value of the book, therefore, resides in its examination of the 'generic antecedents'-and this, in particular, in relation to the at times surprising anticipations of the Kharmsian absurdist miniature that it uncovers. The 'oxymoronic genre' of the 'prose poem', it seems, originated in France with Baudelaire (in I855). Russian literature adopted it in the person of Turgenev, with his very differently toned Stikhotvoreniia v proze, or Senilia (i 882). Its popularization by and in the wake of these two figures was to ensure it 'aprivileged position in the birth of literary minimalism' (p. 6). Senilia frequently gave way to juvenilia, while both 'subversive' (or even absurdist) and 'conservative' (and/or 'realist') models, lasting or re-emerging up to the present day, had been established by these Franco Russian founders. The link here between Turgenev and Baudelaire is described as 'circumstantial', although the exact match with the Baudelairean title of the French translation of Turgenev's work, in which he had a hand himself (Petits poemes en proses), hardly seems to be a complete coincidence (p. I9). There were also thematic reworkings, in the form of Turgenev's 'conservative recuperation of Baudelaire's subversive model' (p. 33). After a brief chapter on 'The Russian Prose Poem as a Realist Genre', mainly exemplified by Bunin, Wanner turns back a little to Symbolist prose miniatures, a category inwhich Bal'mont, Briusov, Belyi, and Annenskii all have something to of fer, along with Rozanov and the little-known Evgenii Lundberg. This is followed by substantial chapters on the 'Little Fairy Tales' (Skazochki) of Sologub and the prolific supposed 'dreams' (sny) of Remizov. Sologub's miniature dialogue 'Chto budet?' ('What Will Be?') is reminiscent of the Cretan liar conundrum, while the semantic 'disruption' (sryv), characterizing the 'genuine dream' according to Remizov, may be equated with the 'shift' (or 'semantically related sdvig') of the Futurists (p. 96). The Futurists themselves, of course, had something to contribute too in the line of prose miniatures. Khlebnikov, Livshits, and Elena Guro all figure in the discussion, as does-perhaps more surprisingly (as a prose writer)-Kandinskii, while David Burliuk can apparently even be credited with coining the term 'minimalism' (in a I929 catalogue essay on John Graham, ne Ivan Dombrovskii). The minimalist label has been, of course, primarily associated with the visual arts, and this relationship is not lost sight of for very long. Of the Kharms mini-text 'A Meeting' (or 'AnEncounter': Vstrecha), for example, it is said that '[t]he reader is left with the same frustration thatmight befall an art lover who visits amuseum or gallery in search of aesthetic illumination and encounters only piles of bricks and stacks of plywood' (p. I30). Thus does Kharms, at times at least, approach postmodernist ideas of art in general, and of American literary minimalism of the I980s. In an epilogue Wanner goes on to look briefly atmore recent Russian practitioners of the prose poem. In the 'conservative' (ex-Turgenev) tradition, Solzhenitsyn has followed his Krokhotnye rasskazy of the i960s (translated in Stories and Prose Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, I971)) with a revival of the prose miniature form (from I997); another moralistic Russian nationalist exponent, though coming from 6i8 Reviews the opposite side of the Soviet era, is lurii Bondarev. On the 'subversive' front, Wanner points to the Conceptualists and, in particular, to the 'card catalogues' of Lev Rubinshtein...