The celestial ferry: Elena Shvarts’s ekphrasis as the sum of readerly experience

Abstract

The article analyzes Elena Shvarts's late poem "Chinese Toy", where the poet describes the Kunstkamera exhibit in an unusual way, turning the mechanical principles of the ship motion and Chinese mythological imagery into a tool for blurring the boundaries between conception and givenness. The aim is to find how this magical realism, which reconceptualizes reading, is embedded in the understanding of reading that Elena Shvarts offers in the post-Soviet period of her work. With methodological reference to classical semiotic positions, Lotman's theory of oppositions and Jakobson's theory of shifters, it is ascertained that we are facing a reverse ekphrasis: the artifact itself demonstrates the principles of the animation of the static. Turning to Chinese mythology and Chinese mechanics allows us to reject the Western understanding of ekphrasis as a situative enlivening of the depicted and to accept the reinvention of cosmogony in China, which is expressed in the artifact mentioned in the poem. Shvarts performs a reduction of the sublime experience in order to overcome the persistent ideas about reading as constructive imagination and to show alternative mechanisms of reading. The new way of reading, implied by the poem, turns out to be a metacriticism of the former figure of the reader as a flaneur, an observer of the various fatal mechanics of the universe. Both in the lyrics and prose of the late Shvarts, a unified mechanics of the universe appears, in relation to which the reader's experience looks like a game, and the reader's imaginary is one of the toys in this game.