Unknown Parabolas

Abstract

This essay describes the powerful effects of my encounter with Valery Podoroga, emphasizing not only Podoroga’s interest in mimesis, but also his own capacity for mimetic openness. It begins autobiographically, recounting Podoroga’s lecture on Andrei Platonov’s “Eunuch of the Soul” at a conference at Duke University in 1990. I discuss Podoroga’s description of the “unknown parabolas” that characterize the experience of reading Platonov. In this understanding, reading pulls us through a parabola away from and then back to ourselves according to a path created by the form of the text itself. Hearing Podoroga speak that day alerted me to a shared interest in the affective power of reading, but it also described my own experience of hearing Podoroga: I was taken out of myself and returned through an “unknown parabola” to a different self, set on a new trajectory, one that happily brought me into the orbit of his sector at the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow. The second half of the essay shifts to a consideration of Podoroga’s reading of Varlam Shalamov (who Podoroga turns to in his remarkable book about the Gulag and Auschwitz, The Time After (Время после. Освенцим и ГУЛАГ: мыслить абсолютное зло). For Shalamov (what Podoroga calls) “catastrophic space” produces a specific, somewhat surprising desire to be like trees. The life and death of trees become reference points, a way of being that brings Shalamov into another world, an alternative to the camps. In writing about this desire to be like trees after the fact, Shalamov gives readers a figure for apprehending the weird, inapprehensible, catastrophic space of the camps. In his persistent fascination with tree existence, Shalamov takes his place in a long arboreal counter-tradition preoccupied with being or becoming like trees. This relation to trees is not interested in categorizing or mastery. Instead, it is animistic, an imaginative mimetic understanding traveling along the paths of similarity and which, even in its apparent impossibility, itself creates unknown parabolas for him and for us.