The Biography of the Object

Abstract

TreViakov wrote Biography of the Object (or Biography of the Thing /biografiia veshchiy) at a time when the champions of the new proletarian realism were campaigning for the reinstatement of the sovereign human subject at the center of the fictional narrative. Under the slogan of the ^zhivoi chelovekj, members of VAPP (The All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers) and the Na literaturnom postu [On Literary Guard] group advanced the psychological novel as the most suitable means for constructing an image of the that was nuanced and complex enough to reflect the psychic density and existential inscrutability of human experience. But as some members ofLef pointed out, this cultivation of psychological complexity usually yielded stories that did not make sense. For example, Osip Brik noted in a review ofFyodor Gladkov's Cement (1925) that it was impossible for the reader to reconcile the novel's two plots: the protagonist Gleb's reorganization of production at the local cement factory, and the simultaneous foundering of his relationship with his wife. Although Gleb the producer and Gleb the husband coincide chronologically, they never converge. Brik explained that the schizoid structure of the novel's hero originated in a literary device that compresses multiple actants into a single character. What seemed to endow the heralded person with emotional complexity and richness was, in other words, just an aesthetic convention which in no way corresponded to the actual psychic structure of living people. The hero of the psychological novel was not one person, but a compound figuration of the multitude, as Brik explained: Heroism is a literary device that makes possible the attribution to a single (the hero) a sum of deeds (exploits) that in reality have been produced by the labors of an entire series of people. l TreViakov's biography of the object can be understood as a method for unpacking these impossibly dense accumulations of deeds within the device of the hero. Unlike the traditional novel, which filtered the complicated interactions of manifold social groups through the impacted psyche of a single character, TreViakov's object biography is a kind of ant iBildungsroman that focused not on psychological consistency, but on people who are declined