Emigre Literature Research Articles

Caraid nan Gaidheal and ‘Friend of Emigration’: Gaelic Emigration Literature of the 1840s

This study focuses on Gaelic emigration literature which was published in the aftermath of the Highland potato famine of 1836-37 and before that of 1846-50. The end of the eighteenth century had witnessed a steady flow of emigrants out of the Highlands in response to a complex mix of factors, including landlord pressure, population growth and the prospect of a more prosperous future elsewhere.

The Surrealist Compromise of Boris Poplavsky

T he artistic legacy of Boris Poplavsky (1903-35) remains one of the most obscure pages of the story of Russian literature in exile. Until today, Poplavsky's poetic collection Flags (Flagi, 1931) has been regarded as representative of his early, writings.1 But the term surrealism, as used by most students of his art, is problematic, for it denotes any artistic exploration of dreams, shocking images, and the unconscious.2 In my study, refers to the artistic program of Andre Breton's group-the original and only meaning of the term familiar to Poplavsky. Furthermore, the recent discovery of Poplavsky's poems in the archives of Il'ia Zdanevich and Nikolai Tatishchev shows that Flags is simply the first published collection of Poplavsky as an poet. Although he had not published before joining emigre literary life in 1928, outside emigre circles he had made two abortive attempts with his collections rhe Gramophone on theNorth Pole (Grammofon na severnom poliuse) and The Dirigible of Unknown Destination (Dirizhab' neizvestnogo naprav/eniia).3 These newly found poems challenge the accepted view of Poplavsky's artistic evolution. Defining surrealism with no relation to the program of Breton's group, Simon Karlinsky suggested that, after the publication of his surrealist collection Flags, Poplavsky gave up surrealism out of deference to the Parisian school of fashionable existential angoisse that became dominant in the emigre literature at that time.4 In this article, I will contest this common view of Poplavsky's poetic trajectory. I will argue that, against the backdrop

RUSSIA’S SILVER AGE IN TODAY’S RUSSIA

The culture of Russia’s Silver Age (1890-1917) has taken its place in the history of the arts of the country after having been forbidden under the Soviet regime. With a relative "thaw" under Khrushchev, the works of Sergei Esenin, Ivan Bunin and some of Marina Tsvetaeva’s works became available. Today, after the fall of the Soviet regime, what used to be forbidden is now widely published often in cheap editions. What used to be elite culture has become mass culture. However, it unclear how the culture of the Silver Age can address the problems of today's extremely politicized Russia. A similar problematic faces the new wave of interest for other cultural trends, which have also garnered the particular interest of Russian society: the culture and literature of Russian emigration and the literature of the Underground.

Russian Emigre Literature in the Context of French Modernism: The Case of Iurii Fel'zen

Russian Emigre Literature in the Context of French Modernism: The Case of Iurii Fel'zen

Vladimir Nabokov’s Poetry in Russian Émigré Criticism: A Partial Survey

Vladimir Nabokov began his illustrious literary career as a Russian poet. This simple comment bears stating if for no other reason than to draw attention to an aspect of Nabokov's writing which is often neglected. The author of many unpublished poems and a considerable number of published ones in several volumes which span his career, Nabokov retained a life-long interest in poetry. Indeed, Nabokov's oeuvre is symmetrically and suggestively contained within the matching bookends of two volumes of poetry-his first publication of 1916 and his final, posthumously published work of 1979-both entitled simply Stikhi. Despite the prominent presence of poetry in his oeuvre, criticism has accorded Nabokov's poetry far less attention than his prose. Possible reasons for this relative neglect are close at hand. Foremost amongst these must be Nabokov's brilliance as a writer of prose. Whatever the relative merits of his poetry-and as we shall see below, judging the aesthetic quality of his poetry is not an unproblematic undertaking-the startling quality of his prose contributes to the diminishing of his achievements in other artistic realms. Relatedly, Nabokov's poetry suffers obscurity in part as a result of historical and linguistic circumstance. Published in Russian and often in emigre journals with limited circulation, much of Nabokov's poetry bore the same undeserved fate which afflicted much of emigre Russia's astounding artistic output between the wars. In transferring the bulk of his artistic activities to English and prose, Nabokov began the process of winning a larger audience for his art. In making this move, however, he seemed to leave behind the language and genre which helped to form his art and which introduced him to his first extended readership. It is to this art form and audience that I would like to return in the following paper. With this study, I intend to make a limited contribution to the larger topic of a much needed critical assessment of the place of poetry in Nabokov's oeuvre. Here I wish to undertake a partial examination of the response to Nabokov the poet in emigre criticism from the early 1920s, when Nabokov first began to appear as a regularly published poet, until 1956 and the appearance of Gleb Struve's Russkaia literatura v izgnanii (Russian Literature in Exile).2 My reasons for concluding this survey in 1956 are essentially twofold. By 1956, Nabokov was a well established English language prose writer, who no longer sought an extended audience for the occasional Russian poems he continued to write. Secondly, Struve's seminal account of emigre Russian literature offers a synthesising interpretation of this particular cultural phenomenon which, in its very conclusiveness, seems to suggest a historical point of closure. With regard to an appraisal of Nabokov's role and value as a poet, Stuve's sensitive assessment also had something of a finalising, and in this sense restricting, function. In the final analysis, Struve's influential interpretation judged Nabokov to be a prose writer who wrote poetry until he switched to the medium better suited to his skills. Rather than placing Nabokov's efforts in prose and poetry on a continuum of related abilities, the two realms were conceived of as separate and even conflicting in his art. Already in 1956, Struve looked back on Nabokov's poetic production as if on a closed chapter in Nabokov's writing. Since then, critical reception of Nabokov's poetry has been effectively entombed in the perception of it as the immature expression of his artistic ability, cut off by language and artistic mode from the remainder of his oeuvre. As much by accident as design, this interpretation, while undoubtedly not intended to be restrictive, has remained the dominant approach to Nabokov the poet and has yet to be systematically examined. As the totality of his oeuvre makes clear, however, Nabokov retained a life-long interest in poetry. His numerous fictional and non-fictional works continually return, in the most diverse ways, to poetry. …

Body Inc.: A Theory of Translation Poetics by Pamela Banting

W O R K S C IT E D Chicago Cultural Studies Group. “Critical Multiculturalism.” Critical Inquiry 18 (Spring 1992): 530-55. Gunew, Sneja. “Multicultural Multiplicities: Canada, U.S.A., and Australia.” Social Pluralism and Literary History: The Literature of Italian Emigration. Ed. Francesco Loriggio. Toronto: Guernica, 1996. 29-47. Loriggio, Francesco. “The Question of the Corpus: Ethnicity and Canadian Literature.” Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature. Ed. John Moss. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1987. 53-69. Padolsky, Enoch. “Cultural Diversity and Canadian Literature: A Pluralistic Approach to Majority and Minority Writing in Canada.” International Journal of Canadian Studies 3 (1991). Rpt. in New Contexts of Canadian Criticism. Ed. Ajay Heble, Donna Palmateer Pennee, and J.R. (Tim) Struthers. Peterborough: Broadview, 1997. 24-42. d o n n a p a l m a t e e r p e n n e e / University of Guelph Pamela Banting, Body Inc.: A Theory of Translation Poetics (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1995). xx, 250. $16.95 paper. By her own admission, Pamela Banting speaks only English. In her ac­ knowledgements, she (ironically?) thanks her professor “in Spanish 100” a decade ago for having “impelled this project in translation” (xviii). It is a project in “improper” translation, translation effects within a single “na­ tional” language. “The Promise of Translation,” title of the final chapter of her Body Inc.: A Theory of Translation Poetics, holds out the hope of a model of translation as seduction, translation as promissory, which doubles the covenant of a people among themselves even as it delays or defers such shared meaning by foregrounding the differences between languages. Follow­ ing the logic of translation she presents, Banting’s book offers no revelation, but revivifies the promise, suggestively braiding three strands of argument concerning the poetics of ordering the long poem, Canadian literature theo­ rizing, and translation as somatized practice. These are concisely linked in the final sentence of the book: “Translating, the long poem composes the body Canadian” (231). Translating Derrida into Canadian terms and in the process rewriting Robert Kroetsch to stretch further his punning “For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem,” this book enacts the poetics of deferral it proposes by preferring such (in)conclusions. Some of the strands are subject to more delay than others. A more salient formu­ lation of their interweaving is offered in the second last sentence: “The long poem is an ‘owner’s manual’ for the body.” The amassing of rich detail con­ cerning the theoretical positions on language and translation of Fred Wah, 224 Daphne Marlatt, and Kroetsch supports interesting and insightful readings of a number of their poems in an argument for an embodied poetics where text and body overlap, enwrap, interrogate each as signifier for the other. Translation, however, as becomes an art of approach, is a promise not fully respected (kept). Banting adopts Roman Jakobson’s distinction between three different types of translation to organize the sections of her book, one devoted to each of the poets whose texts are examined in three or four chapters. Fred Wah’s work with the pictograms of B.C. First Nations people and with the paratactical syntax of Chinese, his father’s tongue, is classified as “interlin­ gual” translation. Robert Kroetsch’s concern to rewrite classical epics in prairie vernacular, his focus on alphabets, archeology, and a decoding that will recover lost connections by rooting the borrowed word in an experience that questions its “proper” usage, is identified as “intralingual” translation or rewording in the same (national) language. Marlatt’s project of shifting the body from under the weight of the patriarchal dictionary that involves etymological investigations in order to re-member lost sensory memories of the body, an approach to language that sees it as part of a continuous rela­ tion to the phenomenological world where it is simultaneously mothertongue and (m)othertongue, is categorized as “intersemiotic” translation or rework­ ing of one sign system into another. Ethnicity, region, and gender as these inform language practices are the operative frames for Banting’s analysis of contemporary Canadian poetics. In each section, however, she blurs Jakobson’s distinctions to demonstrate that all three types of translation are practised...

Women writers in Russian literature

Acknowledgments Introduction Women in Old Russian Literature by Margaret Ziolkowski Women as Performers of Oral Russian Literature: A Reexamination of Epic and Lament by Natalie Kononenko The Feminization of Russian Literature: Women, Language and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Russia by Judith Vowles Love, Work and the Woman Question in Mid Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing by Jane Costlow Women's Prose Fiction in the Age of Realism by Mary F. Zirin Nineteenth-Century Women Poets: Critical Perception vs. Self-Definition by Diana Greene Women Physicians' Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century by Toby W. Clyman For the Good of the Cause: Women's Autobiography in the Twentieth Century by Beth Holmgren Achievement and Obscurity: Women's Prose in the Silver Age by Charlotte Rosenthal Women Poets of the Silver Age by Jane A. Taubman Waiting in the Wings: Women Playwrights in the Twentieth Century by Melissa T. Smith Paradigm Lost? Contemporary Women's Fiction by Helena Goscilo Women's Poetry in the Soviet Union by Carol Ueland Russian Women Writers in EmigRE Literature by Marina Ledkovsky Index

Getting across: Border-Consciousness in Soviet and Emigre Literature

Getting across: Border-Consciousness in Soviet and Emigre Literature

Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature

Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature

Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature

Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature

Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature.

Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature.

Sea changes: British emigration & American literature

Sea changes: British emigration & American literature

The Soviet economic failure: Brutzkus revisited

IN A PREVIOUS ARTICLE in this journal,' I briefly referred to a much neglected work by Boris D. Brutzkus published in the Soviet Union in 1921-22.2 Since then this work has been republished in the Soviet Union in the journal Novyi mir,3 70 years after it was written. In a foreword to the republication, the Editorial Board of Novyi mir acknowledged receiving a xerox copy of the essay from me and quoted my assessment of the work's importance from my letter to the editor in chief, Zalygin. In an article in Russkaya mysl' on the publishing of Brutzkus in Novyi mir, Viktor Sorokin, who co-edited a republication of this and another Brutzkus article in the emigre literature in 1988,4 stated:

An Autobiography, is an Autobiography, is an Autobiography

In volume 34, nos. 1-2 (1992) of Canadian Slavonic Papers, Donna Orwin published a comprehensive review of A.B. Wachtel' s The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (1990), asserting that style and structure of the book are clear. The author moves skillfully from close textual analysis to textual history, literary biography and on to social history and politics. He has a broad knowledge of European and Russian literary history. He knows the criticism and builds upon it without unnecessary repetitions (p. 175). In the Slavic and East European Journal (vol. 35, no. 3 [1991]) an equally positive appraisal appeared, the critic (M. Ehre) again expressing an appreciation for the book's solid structure and the refreshing approach to an old subject. Wachtel should indeed be lauded for the courage he displays in tackling material which has been masticated over many times. His main thesis is that the concept of a happy childhood found in Tolstoy's Childhood (1852) inspired a variety of writers among them Aksakov, Belyi, and Bunin to write their own happy accounts about this period of life. In contrast Gorky, who belonged to a different stratum of Russian society, attacked the Tolstoyan view and responded by creating in his Childhood a type of anti-childhood. Wachtel sets himself two goals: to reformulate the formal concept of autobiography and, in the process, to provide fresh insights into the socioeconomic myth of a happy childhood as it was manifested in Russian society proper until 1917, and in Russian emigre literature up to 1930. Wachtel' s proposals are doubtless worthy of scrutiny. My own feeling is that a closer examination of his study must lead to the conclusion that the formal aspect of the works he investigates is misrepresented. For that reason the alleged impact of the famous first lines of the fifteenth chapter of Tolstoy's Childhood on subsequent Childhoods is not convincing. In stressing the division between autobiography proper (where author and narrator are one and the same person) and the autobiography (where the two are not identical), Wachtel takes his cue from Philippe Lejeune's definition of the geme: A retrospective narration in prose by a real person about his or her own life. It emphasizes the individual life and, in particular, the development of one's

Fission and Fusion: Polish Emigre Literature

Fission and Fusion: Polish Emigre Literature

The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet Literature (Including Non-Russian and Emigre Literature)

The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet Literature (Including Non-Russian and Emigre Literature)

The Voices of Ukrainian Emigre Poetry

The question of poet's is a subject that is not unequivocally defined and, unlike form and genre, context and history, reception and hermeneutics, it is not a centrepiece of currently prominent poetic theories. To be sure, voice figures in historical and rhetorical, psychological and even deconstructive criticism; it is often contiguous to notions as point of view and persona; but perhaps by very fact that it partakes of several different critical domains, while at same time always being ineluctably tied to an individual writer, voice, like style, tends to be treated in a gingerly way. In Ukrainian literary criticism and literary history, it is seldom if ever treated as a separate category, as something that may usefully be distinguished from style, or creative method, or emotionality, wit, or pathos. Arguably, this lack of distinction between and the poet as such merely reflects naturalist bias of much of traditional Ukrainian literary criticism. A discussion of or voices in specific context of Ukrainian emigre poetry requires a delimitation ofthat context. As I take it, a Ukrainian emigre literature, in true meaning of term, begins only after World War II, in effect in D.P. period of 1945-1950. l It is only then that Ukrainian writers and readers are fully separated from their native environment and cast into cold reality of cultures. The interwar period, and indeed war years, present an entirely different picture: so-called emigre literature, i.e., writings of those who had left lands that had become Soviet Ukraine, was largely centred, in terms of publishing and of reading public, in Western Ukraine, then primarily under Poland; contacts between L'viv and Prague, and of course Warsaw, were practicable and sense of an authentic cultural and social, if not political, context was firmly based. In fact even these non-Ukrainian settings were hardly foreign and, taken historically, nothing new. Ukrainian literature in pastto take but examples of St. Petersburg of Shevchenko and Kulish, and Cracow of Stefanyk and Lepkyi, had often developed and indeed flourished in nominally centres. Thus difference

1944-1953: Ivan Bunin and the Time of Troubles in Russian Émigré Literature

“I will certainly stipulate in my will that my letters never be published.”Ivan BuninThe phenomenon called the “First Wave” of Russian emigre literature made its appearance in the West under unique circumstances. Disoriented and defensive, this distinguished group of cultural and literary figures had to start over, straight from the throes of the October Revolution. Émigré literature never became a “movement” in the way Symbolism was. It had too much variety, too many factions, and too few consistent platforms to fit into any “ism.” But what it did share, and what, in the absence of a viable Soviet literature, gave it a certain birthright and moral authority, was the political fact of exile. Reworked and refined in a multitude of literary permutations, the theme of exile was the émigré writer's idée fixe, always hovering at the edge of consciousness. This fact needs stressing from the outset because rarely in the course of world literature has there been so vivid an example of extraliterary causality on such a scale. And since the “birth” and “death” of the First Wave coincide neatly with events outside it, namely the Revolution and World War II, perhaps something like a biological metaphor for this phenomenon would be, in terms of literary history, not merely decorative or iconographic but bizarrely realized. The fate of Russian émigré literature between the wars suggests, in almost Spenglerian terms, that something as large and diverse as a national literature can have a life and death. One aim of this study is to show how the politics that gave the First Wave life were, mutatis mutandis, the politics that led to its eventual demise. After briefly establishing a context, I will turn to the years immediately following World War II and to the case of Ivan Bunin, a writer who was known, ironically, for his fastidious avoidance of politics. My central thesis is that the postwar years were marked by controversy and that a leading figure in this controversy was Bunin.

A Russian Cultural Revival: A Critical Anthology of Emigre Literature before 1939

A Russian Cultural Revival: A Critical Anthology of Emigre Literature before 1939

Russian Literature since the Revolution

Long recognized as the best and most comprehensive work on its subject, Edward J. Brown's fine book is now thoroughly revised and updated. It provides a compendious treatment of Russian literature from the revolutionary period to the early 1980s. Every stage in the evolution of Russian literature since 1917, every major author, all the important literary organizations, groups, and movements, are sharply outlined, with a wealth of often unfamiliar detail and a notable economy of means. Critical essays on Mayakovsky, Zamyatin, Olesha, Pasternak, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Rasputin, Erofeev, and many others offer sophisticated formal and thematic analyses of a very large array of literary masterpieces. book examines and makes intelligible the persistent conflict between the writer and the state, between the literary artist's urge for untrammeled self-expression and the pervasive control of intellectual activity exercised by the Soviet government. Chapters on The Levers of Control under Stalin, The First Two Thaws, Into the Underground, and Solzhenitsyn and the Epic of the Camps reveal the conditions under which Russian literature was produced in various periods and investigate the forces that drove an important segment of the literature into clandestine publication or into exile. Exiles, Early and Late deals with some of the leading figures in emigre literature and examines the condition of exile as an influence on literary creation. The Surface Channel describes and analyzes a number of significant works published aboveground in the Soviet Union during the sixties and seventies. Brown abandons the old distinction between Soviet and emigre literature, treating all Russian writing as part of a single stream, divided since 1917 into two currents not totally separate but subtly interrelated.