The Poetics and Politics of Modern Russian Biography

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 96, 1, 2018 The Poetics and Politics of Modern Russian Biography POLLY JONES Like many genres, biography came belatedly to Russia. As with other such late arrivals, biography underwent intensive growth in quantity, sophistication, cultural significance and popularity from the era of Nicholas I onwards. It stands today as a dominant force in post-Soviet publishing. Yet studies of Russian biography’s poetics and its role as a literary and cultural institution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remain thin on the ground, a fact often lamented, yet not fully addressed, in the scattered writings on the subject.1 The present volume examines Polly Jones is Associate Professor of Russian and Schrecker-Barbour Fellow at University College, Oxford. 1 Book-length studies of Russian biography are almost non-existent, with the exception of G. O. Vinokur, Biografiia i kul´tura, Moscow, 1927; Dmitrii Zhukov, Biografiia biografii: razmyshleniia o zhanre, Moscow, 1980; D. Kalugin, Proza zhizni. Russkie biografii XVIII–XIX veka, St Petersburg, 2015, and the series published by Memorial, Pravo na imia. Biografii XX veka. Important Russian articles on the form include Boris Tomashevsky, ‘Literature and Biography’, in Krystyna Pomorska and Ladislav Matejka (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics, Cambridge, MA, 1971, pp. 47–55; Iurii Lotman, ‘Literaturnaia biografiia v istoriko-kul´turnom kontekste (k tipologicheskomu sootnosheniiu teksta i lichnosti avtora)’, in O russkoi literature. Stat´i i issledovaniia: Istoriia russkoi prozy, teoriia literatury, St Petersburg, 1997, pp. 804–17; B. V. Dubin, ‘Biografiia, reputatsiia, anketa. O formakh interpretatsii opyta v pis´mennoi kulture’, in Slovo, pis´mo, literatura, Moscow, 2001, pp. 98–119. The ‘Lives of Remarkable People’ series has attracted the most analysis, though more historical than textual. Several texts are analysed in Zhukov, Biografiia biografii; see also G. E. Pomerantseva, Biografiia v potoke vremeni: ZhZL, zamysly i voploshcheniia serii, Moscow, 1987; Ludmilla A. Trigos and Carol R. Ueland, ‘Literary Biographies in the Lives of Remarkable People Series (Zhizn´ zamechatel´nykh liudei)’, Slavic & East European Journal, 60, 2016, 2, pp. 207–20; Inna Bulkina, ‘The Lives of Remarkable People: Between Plutarch and Triapichkin’, Russian Studies in Literature, 49, 2013, 2, pp. 87–95. Several excellent studies of Russian concepts of the self shed light on biography but are not intended as direct studies of the genre: Jochen Hellbeck and Klaus Heller, Autobiographical Practices in Russia = Autobiographische Praktiken in Russland, Göttingen, 2004; Lidiia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, trans. Judson Rosengrant, Princeton, NJ, 1991; Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler, Self and Story in Russian History, Ithaca, NY, 2000. POLLY JONES 2 modern Russian biography as a literary form, a publishing phenomenon and a cultural force that reveals and contests hegemonic ideas of the role of the individual in society, and of the make-up of the human personality itself. The History of Russian Biography The history of biography is long, with textual narratives of human lives dating back at least to Ancient Greece, if not the Pharaonic era. But it is also relatively short, with recognition (even naming) and theorization of the genre hesitant and partial in many cultures.2 Biography’s very hybridity or ‘impurity’ — its fusions of art and science, history and literature — long left it excluded from generic taxonomies, or consigned to the unprestigious periphery of the various professions with which it intersected, primarily history and literature.3 Its galloping mass appeal and its tendencies to either burnish or demolish reputations (the former still much more common) tended to make critics suspicious, or even disdainful, about the idea of subjecting the genre to serious analysis. Biography for much of its 2 Biography as a term appeared in English in the seventeenth century; in Russia, the term took until the nineteenth century to be established. On the disjuncture between practice and theorization of the genre, see Daniel Madelénat, La biographie, Paris, 1984 (whose detailed genre study is intended to address the ‘lack of an -ology’ of the genre, as he terms it). On the neglect of biography in criticism, especially before the 1950s, see also David Novarr, The Lines of Life: Theories of Biography, 1880–1970, West Lafayette, IN, 1986. On the neglect of its poetics, see Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact...