The End of the “Human Document”: Georgij Ivanov's The Disintegration of an Atom

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Russian LiteratureXLIX (2001)371-391 North-Holland

THE END OF THE "HUMAN DOCUMENT": GEORGIJ IVANOV'S THE DISINTEGRATION OF AN ATOM

LEONID

LIVAK

Until today, The Disintegration of an Atom (Raspad atoma, 1938) remains among Georgij Ivanov's least known writings and one of the most obscure pages of Russian 6migr6 literature in the inter-war period. Few 6migr6 works provoked such contradictory responses as this text, classified by Vladislav Chodasevi6 as "a lyrical poem in prose" (1938: 9). The flurry of critical opinions that appeared in the wake of its publication, ranging from disgust (Iegulov 1939) and dismissal (Chodasevi6 1938; Nabokov 1940) to cautious approbation (Gippius 1938; Zlobin 1939), soon gave way to a "conspiracy of silence" whereby, according to Roman Gul' (1973: 68-69), 6migr6 critics boycotted Ivanov's text. The demise of 6migr6 literary life in 1940 perpetuated this critical status quo. The present article proposes to study The Disintegration of an Atom from a literary-historical perspective. By placing Ivanov's work in the context of the contemporary developments in Russian 6migr6 and French literatures one can reveal the contradictory meanings this text had for its 6migr6 readers and its significance for our understanding of the 20th-century Russian literary process.

1.

The Esthetics of Disintegration

In 1919, Paul Valfry argued that the post-war intellectual was a "European Hamlet" in spiritual crisis (1957: 992-993). Echoing Valfry, Marcel Arland suggested in 1924 that young French writers suffered from a "new malady of

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the century" ("un nouveau mal du si6cle") because the culture of positivism, which had hurried the "death of God", was itself compromised by the war. Losing the last existential protection, these young writers regarded literature as a means for self-study; "sincerity" had to replace "literary fiction". This "documentary" literature had to be an "exact painting of reality", answering the urgent questions of existence by reflecting the psychological and intellectual vicissitudes of its creators (1952:11-37). In the 1920s, many French literary reviews published "examens de conscience", in which young writers aired their existential anxiety or inquidtude. The post-war "sensibility" engendered a new literary type: an anxious young man who was socially and existentially disoriented. His appearance was heralded in 1920 by three novels: Jacques de Lacretelle's La Vie inqui~te de Jean Hermelin, A n d r 6 0 b e y ' s L'Enfant inquiet, and Louis Chadourne's L 'InquiOte adolescence. Declaring the failure of their civilization, French writers gave in to desperate pessimism as a viable credo in art (Beauvoir 1958: 318). Their contemplation of the "existential void" developed into the parti pris of "tragic lucidity" with the focus on moral and physical disintegration. "We have left the era of esthetics to enter into the tragic age," wrote Jean-Richard Bloch in 1930.1 This taste for dramatization found fruitful ground in the concept of the "human document" as it had been developed by the French naturalists. The dirty side of life seemed "truer to reality" by virtue of its shock value. Louis-Ferdinand C61ine's novels Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) and Mort g~ erddit (1936) were the summits of the post-war "sensibility". They fulfilled the esthetics of the "new malady of the century" by virtue of an "anti-literary" language; the autobiographical erosion of the frontier between the writer and his text; the primary treatment of the most important questions of existence with death as the novels' leitmotif; and the anxious and desperate young hero Ferdinand Bardamu. Voyage discarded all previous existential protection from death. It compromised religion in the character of the abbot Protiste; ridiculed science in the scenes of Bardamu's visit to the Bioduret Institute; mocked philosophy in a parody of one of Montaigne's letters; lowered love to a repellent physiological function; and presented work as the infernal delirium of the Ford plant. In 1933, Georges Bataille wrote that C61ine's novel did not essentially differ from monastic meditation in front of a skull. 2 Meditation in front of a skull recalls Hamlet and the image of the "European Hamlet", proposed by Val6ry. Many 6migr6s agreed that old literature had reached the limits of artificiality: its replacement with a new type of literary discourse was inevitable (Vejdle 1937: 139-145). In the early 1930s, Georgij Adamovi~ and his artistic associates - the "Paris school" - elaborated their own concept of the "human document". As a thematic genre a priori, it extended to both prose and poetry. Adamovi6 argued that the Western cultural crisis forced

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"6migr6 Hamlets" to sacrifice artistic harmony, grace, unity, and "other beautiful things" in order to describe the modern human condition (1935: 2). The "human document" was a "responsible literary form" ("otvetstvennaja literaturnaja forma"; Fel'zen 1934: 285) in which the artist wrote only about those things he had experienced (Janovskij 1983: 247, 277); the goal was to "photograph rather than create" ("fotografirovanie, a ne tvor~estvo"; Mandel'gtam 1936: 5). This documentary motivation was supported by deliberate artistic imperfection symbolizing the subordination of "form" to "content". It goes without saying that the "human document" relied on artistic imagination and conventions seen by its adherents as faithful to reality. The genre's goal was the effect of truthfulness. The critics of this esthetic doctrine viewed its division of a literary text into opposed "form" and "content" as a practical impossibility (Bern 1934: 14; Chodasevi6 1991: 591-593). But from an artistic point of view, it was more interesting to tackle the impossible. C61ine set an example in this enterprise, turning a "human document" into an artistically significant work (Mandel'gtam 1936: 5). Like their French counterparts, 6migr6 literati saw C61ine's novels as Zola's artistic revenge against Proust (Adamovi6 1933: 3). The interiorized self-reflection of Proust's narrator gave way to the external world; C61ine's perception of extra-artistic reality replaced the outdated Proustian concept of what is "real". Adamovi6 deplored the fact that the depiction of human tragedy in French letters of the 1920s was not tragic enough: ~ I g qeyloBeKa, KOTOpbI~yMI,lpaeT Ha BeTpy H no~I OTKpblTblM He6OM,

~Ipyro~ qenoBeK, zvpyqaromm~c~"bien au chaud", noel nyXOBbIMo~lenoiora, c cn~le~KamI, c ;IOKTOpaMn, C e~eMnHyTHbIMBI~ICJIyUlnBaHIteM nym,ca, Z~aanero H aTO -- 6Jmronoayyue. (1930: 136) The man dying in the wind and in the open finds all too comfortable the agony of another man, who suffers bien au chaud, under a goosefeather blanket, surrounded by nurses and doctors who constantly check his pulse. This was an allusion to Proust's "comfortable suffering", which included the corrections Proust brought shortly before his death into the scene of Bergotte's agony (La Prisonnidre) on the basis of his personal experience. The road to salvation from the post-war spiritual crisis ran through the "trial by crudeness" ("ispytanie grubost'ju") which constituted for the %migr6 Hamlets" the essence of the modern human condition (Ocup 1933: 134; Zakovi~ 1930-1931: 259). The credo of existential pessimism found additional justification in the 6migr6 opposition to Soviet literature. Soviet ideologues insisted on spiritual disintegration in the West, singling out C61ine as an example of a literature of disintegration: "The literature of disintegration is not our literature, but it is

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good that our enemy is disintegrating," proclaimed Karl Radek at the first congress of Soviet writers. 3 Therefore, 6migr6 writers could regard the esthetics of disintegration as valuable both artistically and spiritually. It opposed Soviet literary discourse with its mandatory optimism and rejected the very terms in which official Soviet culture formulated its view of Western and 6migr6 letters. Adamovi~ wrote in 1932: ~Ba C.rlOBa eme HaCqeT pa~locTn, KOTOpym-~IeBO36y'ac4IatOT y 6OJIbmeBtlKOBnopa~enqecva~e cy~enH~... Ylycra~, Ha 3~lOpOBse!Ha4lo ~e OTJIltqaTI, CJt OT HII'X H e TOJIBKO B H e U l H e , H e I4 B l t y T p e H H e , l i e TOJIbKO B t t e a ~ x , HO 14 B c p e j I c T B a X .

A couple of words concerning the joy which defeatist opinions allegedly stir up in the Bolshevik camp.., Let them rejoice! We must differ from them not only in appearance but by our inner essence, not only by our goals but also by our means. (335) As a result, spiritual and physical disintegration became the preferred subject of the "Paris school". There was hardly a story or a poem in the first issues of the review Numbers (Cisla) that did not mention death or present its graphic descriptions. Emigr6 literature had its own "Russian C61ine" in the persona of Vasilij Janovskij. C61ine's success gave validity to Janovskij's esthetics. Janovskij's initial renown was due to his story 'The Thirteenth' ('Trinadcatye', 1930), which shocked by virtue of its "obscene" vocabulary: semja (semen), matka (uterus), podmyvat'sja (to bathe genitals), and sif(a slang word for syphilis). The writer reinforced the linguistic shock by the graphic depiction of violence, sex, and disease. The situational parallels in Janovskij's post-1932 works and in C61ine's novels are obvious. Janovskij's hospital scenes hearken to Ferdinand Bardamu's depiction of suffering and agony. The autopsy scene in 'A Doctor's Story' ('Rasskaz medika', 1933) is based on Bardamu's anticipation of a "beautiful autopsy" for a still living patient and on the antopsies he witnesses in the Institut Bioduret (V, 280-282, 374). 4 In his 1938 novel Portable Immortality (Portativnoe bessmertie), Janovskij follows C61ine's example (V, 17-18) of drawing people and animals entangled in their own intestines and resorting to animalistic images (rats, bed bugs) as metaphors for the human condition (Janovskij 1953: 177). He borrows from C61ine (V, 280-282, 387) such details as pickled corpses and body parts next to which medical personnel has lunch (167, 173). He sends his hero on a tour of Parisian public lavatories (172, 174), recalling Bardamu's visit to a New York "fecal cavern" (V: 195-196). In his way of life, the hero of Portable Immortality is practically identical to Ferdinand Bardamu. He lives in Parisian working class suburbs and works in a clinic for poor patients. The degeneration of his social environ-

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m e n t - sexual maniacs, alcoholic and syphilitic parents, abused children, rats, refuse, and violence - seem copied from C61ine's novels. The emotional attachments of Janovskij's hero are directly proportional to the physical degradation of his objects. Discovering that a female corpse in a morgue belonged to a virgin, he felt happy, grateful, and eternal thanks to his sudden tenderness for and affinity to the body of the virgin who had remained pure in a dirty world, while around him medical students where chatting about sexual intercourse with corpses (1953: 168). Janovskij was not the only "6migr6 Hamlet" to use "anti-literary" language and to describe the Parisian social depths. Boris Poplavskij also introduced the elements of crudeness into his novels Apollo the Ugly (Apollon Bezobrazov, 1931) and Homeward from Heaven (Domoj s nebes, 1935), using such taboo words as nasrat' (to shit), kondat' (to "come"), bljad' (whore), onanizm (masturbation), and providing detailed descriptions of genitals, semen, and sexual intercourse, s This crudeness also marked Ekaterina Bakunina's novel The Body (Telo, 1933), whose female narrator graphically depicts physiological functions, sexual acts, and male and female genitals (1933: 32-33, 44, 59). The esthetics of disintegration spread beyond the circle of the "Paris school". In 1937, Nina Berberova published her story 'The Lackey and the Wench' ('Lakej i devka') which featured an existentially disoriented heroine who was engulfed by the absurdity of life and sported a sado-masochistic interest in suffering (1949: 190-191, 196, 199). Paranoid about losing her lover, she tries to kill him but is strangled instead. Gaito Gazdanov's novel Night Roads (No?nye dorogi, 1939-1940) is steeped in the same esthetics. It is a night cabby's narrative about his experience in the Parisian social depths, whose very title evokes Voyage au bout de la nuit. But by the end of the 1930s, the "Paris school" esthetics, especially its vision of realism in literature, was questioned by the very people who had promoted it earlier.

2.

The Twilight of the "Human Document"

In 1939, a group of the "Paris school" writers published a collection entitled The Literary Audit (Literaturnyj smotr). Adamovi6 contributed an article 'On the "most important"', in which he questioned the last ten years of his activity as a critic. He doubted the very possibility of speaking truthfully about the most important questions of human existence in literature. His doubts were brought about by the fact that most 6migr6 writers could now easily write artistically convincing but similar pieces "about the most important". As a result, he was no longer sure what that "most important" really was because its literary displays had come to resemble parodies in their clich6 similarity (1939: 17-18). To insure their "sincerity", 6migr6 writers

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had to separate altogether the "most important" from literary discourse. "As I write this, I am fully aware that I do not know how to unite the two, and that is the most important," finished the critic in a gasp of mannerish desperation ("Samoe va~noe, 6to j a n e znaju, kak soedinit' odno s drugim - i pi~u sejgas eti stroki, znaja, 6to ja etogo ne znaju"; 19). The fact that these words came from Adamovi6 himself can be considered a significant artistic event in 6migr6 letters. Adamovi6's esthetic foes had pointed out long before that the antiartistic rhetoric of the "Paris school", expressed in the subordination of art to reality and by the cult of "anti-literary" elements in literature, contradicted the group's desire to continue creating art. Chodasevi6 likened those "~migr6 Hamlets" who spoke about "truthfulness" in literature to an acquaintance of his, who killed silence by loudly admiring it (Janovskij 1983: 119). The practical impossibility of "truthful" literature was pointed out more and more often in the second half of the 1930s. Finally, Jurij Terapiano declared that the concept of the "human document" rested on a misunderstanding. It relied on the illegitimate separation of "form" and "content" in which the very undermining of "form" already illustrated one's attention to it and thus betrayed a definite artistic motivation (1938: 171-172). Terapiano's view came as a logical development of the esthetics of disintegration - the negation of the negation of art (since the "human document" was already such a negation). This development resonated loudly in The Disintegration of an Atom. "Estheticizing" art was no longer possible, but "anti-estheticizing" art had proven to be equally deceptive. One could now indulge in the desperation of this vicious circle and write literature about the impossibility of literature. The war aborted the evolution of this esthetics which, nonetheless, triggered an important artistic event - Georgij Ivanov's "poem in prose" about its own impossibility. The Disintegration of an Atom is a monologue delivered by a first person narrative voice. Its confessional motivation, the first person narrative, and the correspondence of the protagonist's social and professional situation to those of his creator fit the requirements of the "human document". But the fusion of author and hero is not complete. Ivanov's hero, an 6migr6 writer who lives in Paris, has been abandoned by his beloved and this event initiates his monological discourse, whereas the wife of Georgij Ivanov, Irina Odoevceva, never left her husband. The hero's monologue revolves around the "allconsuming universal ugliness" ("vsepoglog6ajug6ego mirovogo urodstva"; Ivanov 1938: 6), metaphysical solitude and the sensation of the absurdity of existence, which plague his daily life along with many other familiar elements of the "new malady of the century". The text's strong lyrical undercurrent springs from the fact that it is a reflection of an abandoned and lonely man who mourns his bygone love. With the disappearance of love, his existence is deprived of its last meaning

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and protection with regard to the absurdity of life and to the abomination of the m o d e m human condition. The loss of his love is only the last in a series of losses he, as an 6migr6 writer, has experienced since his departure from Russia. The equilibrium of the narrator' s world is destroyed both by personal and social cataclysms. And now, having lost everything - his country, his culture, his beloved, - he is an existentially "naked" man especially keen on noticing the signs of disintegration in European culture in general. Thus, he depicts his every day life in Paris as earthly "hell", familiar to his readers from the writings of Crline, Janovskij and other "new children of the century". He is a "man of the thirties" (Ivanov 1938: 28, 34), whose "God is dead" (10) and whose "epoch is decomposing as he speaks" (16): }[ x o q y CaMbIX npocTbIX, CaMbIX 06bIKHOBeHHbIX Bemefi. Yl xo,ay no-

pa;IKa. He MOa Bal~a, ~¢ro nopz;IoK pa3pymeH, l/xo~y ~¢meBHoro noKOn. Ho ;lyma, iaK Ba6a3auyqeHnoe noMofinoe BeJIpo -- XBOCT ceJIe)IKtI, ;IoxJIa_q KpI,ica, 06rpbl3KrI, oKypKrt, TO HbIp/t/t B MyTHylO FJIy-

6tory, TO noKaabiBazcJ, Ha noBepxHOCTb, necyrc~ B neperoHr,H [...] Caa~lI~OBaTr,I.~ TaeH -- )IJ,ixasne M~poBoro ypoAcTBa -- upecne~ceT MeH~ KaKcTpax. I want the simplest, the most ordinary things. I want order. It is not my fault that order has been destroyed. I want peace for my soul. But my soul is like a stirred up refuse bucket - a herring tail, a dead rat, food leftovers, cigarette stubs dive into turbid depths and resurface, racing each other [...] Sweetish decay - the breath of universal ugliness haunts me like fear. (8-9) Ivanov's earthly hell is even more literary than that of Janovskij, no matter how much the writer tries to scandalize his reader with such "obscene" vocabulary as onanizm (masturbation, 12, 66), matka (uterus, 26), podmyvat'sja (to wash genitals, 14), kondat' (to "come", 66), and semja (semen, 83). By 1938, Russian 6migr6 readers had gotten so used to "anti-literature" that very few of them were actually scandalized. The literariness of Ivanov's hell is only reinforced by the contrast of "obscenities" with the refined language of the narrative. Ivanov' s style has nothing of the occasional awkwardness of Janovskij's language, his vocabulary is richer, and his command of Russian is more sophisticated. That is why Chodasevi6 (1938: 9) and Nabokov (1940: 284), getting back at their artistic foe, could call Ivanov's language and imagery too pretty and literary, denying The Disintegration of an Atom its status as a "human document". Instead of shocking the reader, the images of death and disintegration in Ivanov's "poem in prose" evoke similar details in contemporary Russian and French texts. The Disintegration of an Atom was published almost simultaneously with Portable Immortality and the striking coincidences of "dirty"

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details suggest that Ivanov and Janovskij resorted to common literary topoi in the artistic milieu of the "Paris school". Both writers describe the life and violent death of a rat as a metaphor for the human condition; this metaphor is also present in C61ine. 6 Both Ivanov and Janovskij dwell on the description of underground Parisian public lavatories as the harbor of human refuse. In Ivanov's text, an old tramp puts a piece of bread under the stream of urine in a public lavatory to take home the soaked piece and enjoy it with red wine (65). Janovskij's hero has a weakness for Parisian lavatories, where homeless beggars and drunk philosophers spend their nights accompanied by urinating and defecating visitors (1953: 172, 174). And in both cases one recalls Bardamu's visit to a New York public lavatory (V, 195-196). Ivanov's description of cancer ridden body parts pickled in glass jars (26) recalls similarly pickled corpses and body parts in Portable Immortality (167, 173) and Voyage (V, 280-282, 387). All three writers like to depict human beings and animals entangled in their own intestines, 7 and spare no sensibilities in graphic scenes of agony. ~ The very title of Ivanov's text calls up literary associations because it alludes to a commonplace expression in the "Paris school" critical discourse the "disintegration" ("raspad", "droblenie") of human identity as a result of the contemporary spiritual crisis and the loss of religious faith. Ivanov himself used this ctich6 to compare the effects of Proust's analytical method to the atomic disintegration of radium: -

1-Io~B21eHHe t-[pycTa B .llHTepaType - IIOXO:,Ke Ha OTKpBITHe pa)IH~ B XltMHH [...] f~efleTBtle e r o Ha o K p y • a l o m e e TaHHCTBeHHO -- Heo61~IKI-IOBeHHa~t cH.rta p a 3 p y m e H r m , HeO6I~IKHOBeHHaJt 6JIarOTBOpHalt CrlJIa [...]

Pa~rtfi, TaK :~e TarmcTBeHHO, KaK paapymaeT mlrI rlctleaaeT - pa3pymacTc~ CaM, nepepom)laeTc~, nepecTaeT ~bITbpaJIrleM. Proust's appearance in literature resembles the discovery of radium in chemistry [...] It exerts mysterious influence on its surroundings - its power can be both extraordinarily destructive and beneficial [...] As mysteriously as it destroys or cures, radium can disintegrate, regenerate, and stop being radium. (1930: 272) Ivanov's ambiguous attitude toward disintegration, whose results may be both negative and positive, echoes Adamovi~'s valorization of the esthetics of disintegration as artistically and existentially fruitful because only by dying could a seed engender new life (1932: 333). Ivanov aired the same opinion: ~ e y l o riogTa - C03~aTb "KycOqeK BeqHOCT[4", IIeHO~ rI46eJI14 B c e r o BpeMeHHOFO -- B TOM qI4cYle, Hepe2tKO, H tIeHofi CO~CTBeHHOI~ FH~eYlH.

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The poet's deed is to create a "piece of eternity" at the price of seeing everything temporal die; this often includes his own death. (1931: 233) These words were written at a time when the "Paris school" was just developing its esthetics of disintegration in literature. By 1938, Ivanov's perception of it had undergone considerable evolution. It is amusing to read the reviews of The Disintegration o f an Atom which defend the crudeness of this text, full of literary allusions, as realistic in that it has nothing to do with literature. These reviews, reminiscent of the "6migr6 Hamlets'" advocacy of Janovskij's literary crudeness in 1930-1931, seem anachronistic at a time when the doctrine of the "human document" began to be regarded by its former proponents as a hackneyed literary model. Yet, Zlobin wrote that anyone who took a stroll in Paris could observe the scenes described in Ivanov's book (1939: 158), while Gippius observed: "His descriptions of 'universal ugliness' are excessive [...] Balance is upset. But where in our 'universal reality' do we find balance?" ("V opisanijach 'mirovogo urodstva' est' peregiby [...] Ne sobljudena mera. No gde v dannoj 'mirovoj real'nosti' najdem my meru?.."). She identified Ivanov's authorial figure with his protagonist-narrator and wrote that the text could be regarded as the confession of a contemporary (1938: 147-149). But the closer one reads Ivanov's "poem in prose", the stronger one feels its lack of originality with regard to other contemporary texts that espoused the same esthetics of disintegration. Consequently, one cannot help questioning the author's intentions. Why would a poet with significant literary experience, who from the late 1920s on rallied for "anti-literary simplicity", fill his narrative with the most commonplace literary and critical clich6s of the day? If he indeed wanted to write just another "human document" about the search of God - as some critics thought - he should have tried to play down the "literary" side of his work. 9 But Ivanov did the exact opposite. Even Gippius felt that The Disintegration o f an Atom went beyond the mere "documentary" rejection of literary fiction (1938: 143-144). Ivanov's narrator is torn between his desire to confess and his inability to believe any word in a literary work, thus forcing the reader to conclude that "truthful literature" is an oxymoron.

3.

Art as Necrophilia

After the loss of his beloved, Ivanov's hero finds himself in a complete existential void. But rather than stimulating his art - as Adamovi6 had suggested it could, esthetically valorizing the roles of solitude and death in the "new malady" - this situation deprives artistic expression of all meaning and makes the writer-protagonist infertile. This is a radical shift away from

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I v a n o v ' s earlier position, w h e n he agreed with A d a m o v i 6 that "existential solitude" liberated the writer's consciousness and turned his attention to "the m o s t important" questions o f existence. In 1930, I v a n o v wrote a short p o e m : Xopomo, qTO HeT I~apsl. XopolItO, qTO HeT PoccI4g. XopollIO, qTO Bora HeT. TOJIBKO~eolTafl 3ap~I, TOOlt~KO3Be3jIbI37eji~rtbie, TOJIbKO MH.rlJIMOHBIJIeT. Xopomo qTO -- rmqero, XoponIo qTo - HI4KOFO, TaK qeprlo rI TaK MepTBO-rqTO MepTBee 6~,~Tb I~e MO~eT I?l qepnee He 6t,maTb, qTO HHKTOrlaM He nOMOa
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Thank you for everything: for the war, The revolution, and the exile, For the indifferent and bright country Where we are now "dragging our existence". No fortune is greater than to lose everything. No fate is more joyous than that of a wanderer, And you have never been closer to God Than here, tired of being bored, tired of breathing, Without forces, without money, without love, in Paris. (Novyj korabl', 4, 1928) Adamovir's expression "dragging our existence" hardly refers to his life in Paris, where he found intellectual and artistic freedom. He means earthly existence, with respect to which such elements of the "new malady of the century" as existential solitude, anxiety, fatigue and despair appear esthetically and spiritually valuable. Both Ivanov and Adamovi6 regarded the disappearance of cultural and social protection as beneficial for 6migr6 writers. Absolute solitude brought them closer to God, deepened their selfknowledge, and stimulated their art. However, by 1938 Ivanov's view of the "new malady" and its relation to art must have changed. An dmigr6 critic pointed out that the fashionable cult of permanent spiritual crisis among "rmigrd Hamlets" logically led to the demise of the "human document". If all values were compromised, argued the critic, then truth would sooner or later become dubious as well and one would no longer know what the "most important" questions of existence were (Gomolickij 1939: 35-36). Any attempt to write literature in this state of mind would resemble "a perverse rape of dead poetry in which one no longer believed" ("Protivoestestvennoe nasilie nad poeziej, v kotoruju ne veri~'", 37-38). This image was suggested to the critic by the necrophiliac scene in The Disintegration of an Atom, which functions as a metaphor for the hero's infertility in life and art: COBOKyI~IeHUe C MepTBO~ ~IeBOqKO~. T e a o 6b~no COBCeM MarKO, TO3abKO XOJIO~IHOBaTO, KaK IIOCJIe Kynaub~. C Hanpg~em4eM, c OcoreHHBIM HacJIa)K/Iem4eM. O s a aez
Copulation with a dead girl. Her body was completely soft and somewhat coldish as if after bathing. With tension, with special delight. She seemed to be asleep. I did not do her any harm. On the contrary, these several impulsive minutes life was still continuing around her, if not for her. A star was paling in the window, jasmine had finished blooming. Semen flowed out and I wiped it with a handkerchief. (25)

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This scene evokes a similar scene in Portable Immortality, when medical students find out that the corpse lying on the dissecting table belongs to a virgin. But Janovskij's narrator did not go as far as raping the virgin, although his adoration verged on lust. An echo of the same motif is also found in Poplavskij's Homeward from Heaven, whose narrator describes his sexual intercourse with a virgin "amid the icy hell of dead, tormented and corpselike white bodies" ("sredi ledjanogo ada mertvych, vymu6ennych i trupopodobnych belych tel"; Poplavskij 1993: 193-194). This necrophiliac motif hearkens to Proust's protagonist Marcel, who stops going to a bordello after giving the sofa of his deceased aunt to its owner. The idea that prostitutes entertained visitors on the sofa from Combray, a symbol of his pure childhood, made Marcel "suffer more than the idea of raping a dead woman" ("J'aurais fait violer une morte que je n'aurais pas souffert davantage"; Proust 1997: 148). The anti-Proustians ~t la C61ine, for whom there was no pure past, were naturally tempted to exploit this image. The sexual intercourse with a dead girl in The Disintegration of an Atom implies much more than Ivanov's avidity for a literary scandal. It is a metaphor of the narrator's artistic and spiritual impotence. The protagonist seeks love as the only protection from solitude (17) but enters into a vicious circle: solitude splits his personality like an atom (58), making him infertile both in love and art (62). As a "new child of the century" with a "fragmented consciousness" he is unable to believe in anything. He is unable to inspire love (his beloved thus leaves him) because he does not believe in its existence. He sees love as a myth that rationalizes the physiological nature of sex. He cannot write poetry because he regards literature as a medium in which truth is impossible and discards all belles-lettres as make-believe: JIio,aH ~I,ayr no ysmue..lI~o,ai~TpH)IIIaTlaIXFO,ZIOBjIBa~tlaToro BeKa [...] MomHo onncaTb cero~IHammI~ Beuep, IIapmlq yJImty, t~rpy TeHe~ U CgeTa B I~epI~CTOMHe6e, nrpy cTpaxa vi gajIe:~II,i g OjII,tHOKO~ qeJIo-

BeqecKo~ Ayme. Moxno cnenaTl, ~TO yMno, TaJIaHTJIHBO, o6pa3HO, IlpaBAOnO~IO6HO. Ho qy~Ia y~KeCOTBOpItTI, Hem,aa - ~O)KT,ItCKyCCTBa HeJII,3~lBbljIaTb3a npaB~y. HenasHo ~TOeme ynaBa2iocb.H BOT... People are going down the street. People of the nineteen thirties [...] One could describe today's evening, Paris, the street, the play of shade and light in the plumose sky, the play of fear and hope in the solital3, human soul. One could do it with intelligence, talent, imagery, and verisimilitude. But a miracle is no longer possible - the lie of art cannot pass for troth. Only recently this was feasible. And now... (28)

In search of a literary identity and a viable literary method, Ivanov's protagonist turns to major traditions and trends in both 19th-century Russian literature and in 6migr6 letters: Pu~kin's "harmonious art", the metaphysical

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tradition of Dostoevskij, Tolstoj's ethically preoccupied art, the "esthetic" camp in 6migr6 literature, represented by Nabokov and Chodasevi6, and, finally, the "human document" doctrine itself. Observing all these literary trends and traditions from the standpoint of a "man of the thirties", Ivanov's hero discards them one by one, for they cannot help his artistic infertility and existential absurdity. The protagonist-narrator subscribes to the common "Paris school" view that Pu~kin embodies "old sensibility" in which the artist finds himself in harmony with the world surrounding him and with his art, for he believes in the necessity and emotive power of art. For the "Paris school" writers, Pugkin symbolized the rupture between their esthetics and those of the 6migr6 "fathers" (Dolinin 1997: 704-706; Fedotov 1942: 197). According to their cultural mythology, Pugkin's "brilliant" and "optimistic" art reflected pre-war sensibility with its positive outlook; Pugkin's "success" in both art and life confirmed that he could be the literary model only for the "fathers". While Chodasevi6 cited as his ideal Pugkin's example of artistic harmony, whereby "form" and "content" were inseparable and the author kept his distance from the hero (1936:167-171), Adamovi6 and the literati around Numbers argued the impossibility of Pugkin's "harmonious art" for the modern man with "fragmented consciousness". The "modern" consciousness of Ivanov's protagonist prohibits him access to Pugkin's art and world-view, for this consciousness postulates the impossibility of harmony between the artist, his art and life: IIo uy~oMy ropo~ly H)IeT noTep~IHHbI~ qeJIOBeK. I]yCTOTa, KaK Mop-

CKOfi np~ns, HOHeMHOI'y3a~IeCTbIBaeT ero. OH He npOTHBnTC~ e~. Yxoaa, OH 6OpMOqeTnpo ce6~ - IIymKnHCI~a~ Poccn~, 3a~IeMTbl nac o6Manyna? IIytuI~nHCKa~Poccun, 3a~IeMTbI nac npejlaaa? A lost man is walking in an alien city. Emptiness, like a sea fide, gradually engulfs him. He is not resisting. Going away, he murmurs to himself: "Pu~kin's Russia, why have you lied to us? Pu~kin's Russia, why have you betrayed us?" (80) The protagonist thinks that his contemporaries no longer understand the language of Pu~kin's "harmonious art" thanks to the profound transformations in their "modem" consciousness. Even if they tried to emulate Pu~kin's poetry, contemporary Russian poets could not do anything except for "muttering something in foul language from a metaphysical fence" ("bormotat' maternuju bran' s metafizi6eskogo zabora"), such as the trans-sense poetry of the Russian futurist Kru6enych - "dyr bul ~6yl u b e ~ u r " (41-42). A far cry from Pugkin's art, the trans-sense poetry is, for Ivanov's hero, proof of the imminent death faced by Pu~kin's artistic tradition. Discarding Pu~kin, he is forced to reject the art of his admirers - the "estheticizing" 6migr6 writers

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who lay emphasis on such "formal" aspects as style and composition, revealing their belief in the intrinsic value of art and in its primacy over extraartistic reality. Implying, first and foremost, Nabokov and Chodasevi6, Ivanov's protagonist envies those "sentimentally heartless" people who still "believe that the artistic reflection of life is a victory over life" provided "one has a gift, a special creative twitch" to "transform the absurdity of life, vain suffering, solitude, torment, and sticky sickening fear by the harmony of art": )t 3aBn~o BceM 9THMeme Me nepe~eatumacz rla 3eMne mOa~M ~yBCTBHTeJIbHO-6eccep~leqHOl~ [...] llopo;II,I, KOTOpble BepgT, qTO llJIflgTHqecKoe oTpa~eHHe 3~H3HII eCTb no6eAa HaJl HeM. BblJl 6t,1 TOJIt~KO

TaaaHT, OC06bX~TBopuecKH~~d~BUHKB yMe [...] rt ~Iezo c;IeJmno, Bce cnaceHo, 6eccMbicJIHlla ~H3HH~ TIIIeTa cTpa~laHbJt, O)II,IHOqeGTBO, MyKa,

~nKrI~ rotunOTBOprn,t~ cTpax - npeo6pa~eHbl rapMonne~ HcKyCCTBa. (35) The condition that only an artistic gift is necessary for the victory of art over life is a transparent allusion to Nabokov's novel The Gift (Dar), the publication of which began in 1937. The Gift contained critical attacks against the "Paris school" esthetics and its view of Pu~kin, and mocked Ivanov personally. ~° Ivanov's hero is convinced that life is "infinitely more important" than its artistic depiction (36). The sorry state of the modern human being precludes the protagonist from admiring the estheticized picture of the human condition; he experiences a tormenting desire to save and console his contemporaries rather than portray them in a "sentimentally heartless" way that would affirm the primacy of art over its subject matter. But art itself could save and console as was the case with the ethically preoccupied art of Lev Tolstoj. The problem is that "modern" consciousness is not receptive to any kind of artistic expression. If the lie of art can no longer pass for truth, one cannot create new ingenious consolations, in fact, it is almost impossible to find consolation in the old ones (30). The narrator illustrates his point with Anna Karenina. Anna's fate seems to have lost its pathos in the tragic age whose contemporaries lead a tormented existence and see the artistic representation of suffering as redundant. "Soon everything will fade away forever, leaving only the game of intellect and gift, curious reading that does not oblige one to believe in itself and does not inspire any faith," sums up Ivanov's hero in his verdict on Tolstoj. Tolstoj's own renunciation of art only confirms his thought: "Tolstoj himself felt [...] the border, beyond which there is no consolation through invented beauty, not a single tear to be shed over invented life. ''1~ The association of tears with literary fiction ("hi odnoj slezy nad vymyglennoj sud'boj") is an allusion to Pu~kin's esthetics, since the line "I will shed tears over fiction" ("had vy-

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myslom slezami obol'jus'"), from Pugkin's 1830 elegy, had long been a proverbial expression in Russian culture. In the "Paris school" opposition to Pugkin's outdated conception of art, "modern sensibility" could be embodied by either Dostoevskij or Lermontov. Ivanov's narrator chooses Dostoevskij as Pu~kin's antipode. Deploring his inability to relate to the world and to art "like Pugkin", the protagonist draws parallels between his own existential situation and that of Akakij Akakievi6 from Gogol's story 'The Overcoat' ('Sinel"). But the persona of his spiritual predecessor is, in fact, an amalgam of literary reminiscences. It includes Gogol's hero from 'The Madman's Diary' ('Zapiski sumasgedgego'), Dostoevskij's Makar Devu~kin from The Poor Folk (Bednye ljudi), and the protagonist of Notes from the Underground (Zapiski iz podpol ~a). Whether writing literature or thinking about love, Ivanov's narrator ends up in a state of complete disillusionment. Such a state, he imagines, would be provoked in Gogol's and Dostoevskij's "little people" if they discovered that the unattainable object of their adoration, the "general's daughter" and "little angel" ("angel'6ik"), had smelly feet: FonbIe /IeTcKue n a ~ q b q H K H np14maT~,i K OKOCTeHeBmHMry6aM. Om-~ UaXHyT HeBHHHOCTblO, He)KHOCTbIO, pO3OBO~ BO,~OH. H o HeT, HeT -- ae o6Ma14emb [...] T~I CKmra~CKBO3~HesnunOCTb n pO3OByIO BoJIy qeM TBOn 6enbie HOWdaHnaxnyr, Hcrixea? B CaMO~ CyTn Beme~ qeM OH14 naxHyr, OTBeTt,?TeM me, ~rro MOrt, anreab,mK [...] 3HaunT, net Mex~ly HaMH HH B q e M pa3HtnlbI FI FHylnaTbe~l T e 6 e MHOIO HeqeFo: II TBOH 6apcK14e no~rJCaVi IleyloBayl, it j l y n l y OT2IaJ1 3a Hh'X, TaK 14 TbI HarnI, ICl3,

nOCOqKn MOrt npoTyxm,m nolleay~ [...] qTO me MHe )IeJmTr, TenepL c TO60~, Ilcnxea? N6nT~ Te6a? Bce pan14o - Be~IL14 MepTBaZTeneps TLI np14~Iem~,KOM14e. Naked little fingers of a child are pressed against ossified lips. They smell of innocence, tenderness, and rose water. But no, no - you will not fool me [...] Tell me, through innocence and rose water, what do your white feet smell like, Psyche? In the very essence of things, what do they smell like? They smell like mine, my little angel [...] Therefore, there is no difference between you and me, and you should not snub me: I kissed your noble little feet, I gave my soul for them, and you should bend down and kiss my rotten socks [...] What am I to do with you, Psyche? Should I kill you? You will come to me all the same even dead. (78-80) The situational parallelism of this passage with the scene of raping a dead girl is obvious. The "little angel", the Muse of Gogol's and Dostoevskij's "little people", is dead. The wretched and pitiful "little people" Akakij Akakievi6 and Makar Devugkin, who have been stirring compassion in the Russian

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reader for almost a century, become murderous monsters who make love to their dead Muse, kissing her "ossified lips". They are as infertile in life as Ivanov's narrator and their image as murderous necrophiliacs compromises just another Russian literary trend which used to move the reader to tears, saving and consoling human spirit.

4.

Dancing on the Grave of the "Human Document"

The hero's universal skepticism does not leave intact the myths of his own time. He thus asserts the false nature of the "new malady of the century". Since modern men cannot believe in the "lie of art", no one is going to admire and repeat Werther's suicide, as they did a century ago (28-29). By the same token, since truth itself is gone along with religious faith, "reality has become unreliable: a photographic picture lies and any human document is, in advance, a counterfeit" ("Na samu real'nost' nel'zja operet'sja: fotografija l~et i vsjakij 6elove6eskij dokument zavedomo podlo£en", 37). Visiting a police headquarters, the protagonist sees photographs of suicide and murder victims. Explicit in the depiction of violence and suffering, these pictures, nevertheless, leave him indifferent: "I look and do not see anything that would disturb me, that would agitate my soul" ("Ja smotrju i ne vi~u ni6ego, 6to by vzvolnovalo menja, zastavilo dugu sodrognut'sja", 39). Suddenly, he remembers that his beloved is living at this very moment somewhere not far from him. His own suffering immediately brings him closer to the suffering of others and he is emotionally overwhelmed by the images which, a minute ago, left him indifferent. This proves his thesis that a "human document", whose goal is to photograph reality, is also a lie. One cannot rely on reality alone to understand it: "To come closer to something one needs to distort it" ("Pribli~enie vozmo~no tol'ko 6erez iska~enie", 3637), as he distorted the police photographs by personal reminiscences. But this distortion constitutes artistic activity. The logical cycle is closed: one cannot find truth either in art or in extra-artistic reality. One solution is left - to "look for God": HamH 0)IHHaKOBIBIe, paam, le, rJlyXOHeMbIe )lymH -- noqyIIJIH o 6 I R y I o uezb H - IIITOIIOpOM, IJITOnOpOM -- GKBO3b BI,'I~HMOCT~ H rloBepXHOCTB 3aBWHqHBatOTC~I K HeM. HaIIIH OTBpaTHTeYI~,HI~Ie, HectIaCTHI,Ie, O~HHOKne xrymg coe~iaH143iHCl~ 13 OAHy H mTOIIOpOM, nlTOnOpOM CKBO3B MH-

poBoe ypOACTBO,gaK yMetOT,npo~mpamTc~ K Bory. Our similar, different, deaf and dumb souls have sensed a common goal and - like cork screws, like cork screws - move toward it through appearance and surface. Our repulsive, hapless, solitary souls have

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merged into one and, like cork screws, like cork screws force their way toward God to the best of their ability. (75) But the road toward God and Truth runs through the "chaos of contradictions", where nothing is sure. Ivanov's narrator says that one, like a rope walker, must "go along the ugly, disheveled, contradictory stenogram of life" in order to find them ("Projti had ~izn'ju, kak akrobat po kanatu, po neprigljadnoj, rastrepannoj, protivore6ivoj stenogramme ~izni", 37). The word stenogram cannot but evoke the "human document", placing the narrator into a vicious circle because "any human document is, in advance, a counterfeit". Nevertheless, Ivanov's narrator tries to look for love and to write literature, but he cannot "fertilize anything" and his poetry resembles a stillborn child (37). His discourse is constantly shifting between his artistic and emotional quests. Making love to a prostitute, the narrator imagines that he makes love to Psyche (78); having written a poem, he feels that he has raped a corpse: "sperm flows out" ("Semja vyteklo obratno", 34) as a symbol of his artistic infertility. His artistic and emotional situations finally merge in another naturalistic metaphor - a young soldier masturbates in a latrine and his semen falls into the brown mass of excrement (66-67). Ivanov thus argues against Adamovi6's and his own former idea which justified the artistic valorization of the esthetics of disintegration. The dying seed will no longer engender new life. This reversed metaphor summarizes the desperation of his hero vis-~t-vis life and art. 12 Ivanov leaves all contradictions unresolved, alluding to the suicide of the protagonist-narrator at the end of his "poem in prose". But even this denouement is not sure; at least it is not clearly stated. Such an open ending symbolizes the chaos of the inner life of the narrator caught in the vicious circle of love and solitude and the vicious circle of his own text as a work of art. The latter is especially important, for its solipsistic nature opens the text to several interpretations. The narrator, claiming that he is incapable of taking art seriously, envies writers-"esthetes" who believe that art can help them put up with reality (34-35). But the text we hold in front of us is exactly that type of stylistically refined literature capable of provoking esthetic pleasure even in places that are supposed to shock. Chodasevi6 and Nabokov stopped at the first possible interpretation, classifying The Disintegration of an Atom as a heap of literary banalities that fail to produce the coveted effect of the "human document". The second possible interpretation, aired in Zlobin's and Gippius' critical opinions, envisions the text as a successfully realized "human document" that reflects the deepening disintegration in the consciousness of the "European Hamlet". The newly fashionable reflection on the relativity of the "most important" and on the impossibility of the "human document" as an alternative to art only supported this interpretation. It enhanced the sensation

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of the narrator's "fragmented" consciousness, whose contradictions marked the text. The protagonist-narrator creates a "human document" being aware of its impossibility; he seeks God and Truth, knowing that both concepts have become relative and "dead"; convinced of his existential infertility, he, nonetheless, persists in attempts to fertilize his art and life, engendering stillborn poems and emotions. But there is also another possible interpretation. One can consider Ivanov's "poem in prose" as the gesture of an agent-provocateur. Ivanov's supreme artistic self-affirmation may have consisted of presenting common tropes and topoi from the writings of "dmigr6 Hamlets" in the most literary and estheticized way. In this manner, he could make fun of everything and everybody around him. Thus, his narrator devalues all the main concepts of the "Paris school" esthetics: the "human document", the "new malady", the salvation in religious "rebirth", and the notion of the fertilizing and selfsacrificial death. The images commonly used by Ivanov's 6migr6 peers to create the effect of anti-literary crudeness acquire in his text clearly esthetic value because "they are arranged so gracefully and in complete accordance with [...] universally accepted esthetics" ("Svoi neizja~6nye obrazy Georgij Ivanov umeet raspolagat' tak izja~6no, do takoj stepeni po vsem pravilam [...] ob~6eprinjatoj estetiki", Chodasevi~ 1938: 9). As a result, the truth of life, which "6migr6 Hamlets" had advocated from the early 1930s in contrast to the estheticism of literature, loses its meaning and becomes an apparent literary convention. By ridiculing the esthetics to which he himself only recently subscribed, Ivanov turned his weapon upon himself and his artistic oeuvre of the last ten years. The universal devilish laughter of his narrator could be the best manifestation of a "European Hamlet's" complete spiritual disintegration. Adamovi6 did not comment in writing on The Disintegration of an Atom. His significant silence and subsequent article 'On the "Most Important"' may illustrate that Ivanov's "poem in prose" made even more evident inner contradictions in the concept of "truthful" literature and especially in its view of the relations between art and life as those of a faithful ("responsible") copy and an original. On the eve of the war which put a definitive end to Russian literary life in France, the "Paris school" esthetic doctrine of the "human document" was as good as dead. The Disintegration of an Atom heralded the disenchantment of the "Paris school" writers with the "human document" doctrine and its vision of the relationship between art and reality, largely contributing to their demise. The disenchantment of the "Paris school" writers with the literature of the "human document" indicated the end of an artistic epoch in 6migr6 letters and the decline of 6migr6 modernism. One can only surmise what literary forms and trends the "Paris school" writers could have followed after 1940. Symptomatically, The Disintegration of an Atom coincided chronologically

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with the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre's first novel, La Nausde, with which Ivanov's text had many thematic and compositional affinities. Considering that La Nausde was the first significant event in the budding literature of French existentialism, the retrospective suggestion by Numbers' editor that the "Paris school" went neck and neck with the nascent French existentialism (Ocup 1961: 131) seems quite plausible.

NOTES

4

5

6 7 8

9 10

11

"Nous avons quitt6 l'~re de l'esth6tique pour entrer dans un age tragique" (D6caudin 1987: 151-152). "Le roman d6j~ c61~bre de C61ine [...] ne diff~re pas fondamentalement de la m6ditation monacale devant un crane" (1993:117). "Literatura raspada - ne naga literatura, no o6en' chorogo, kogda protivnik raspadaetsja" (1934: 370). See also Gor'kij, Kirson, Nikulin (1934: 331,400401). Voyage au bout de la nuit (V) and Mort dl crddit (M) are cited from C61ine (1981). Poplavskij (1993: 253, 275, 278-279, 284, 288, 293-294); and (1996: 384, 470). C61ine (M, 517-518), Janovskij (1953: 181-182), Ivanov (1938: 21-22). C61ine (V, 17-18), Janovskij (1953: t77), Ivanov (1938: 40). C61ine (V, 299-302, 262-263, 373-375), Janovskij (1953: 234), Ivanov (1938: 38-40). Fedotov (1942: 194); Chodasevi6 (1938: 9); Nabokov (1940: 284). On Nabokov's polemics with the "Paris school" in The Gzfi cf. Dolinin (1997). "Skoro vse navsegda pobleknet. Ostanetsja igra urea i talanta, zanjatnoe ~tenie, ne objazyvajug~ee sebe verit' i ne vnugajug6ee bol'~e very [...] To, 6to sam Tolstoj po6uvstvoval ran'~e vsech, neizbef~naja ~erta, granica, za kotoroj nikakogo ute~enija vymyglennoj krasotoj, ni odnoj slezy had vymy~lennoj sud'boj" (30). Cf. the scene of masturbation in a Berlin underground public toilet in Chodasevi6's poem 'Pod zemlej' (1923) where it also functions as an inversion of the Biblical aphorism about the death of a seed and alludes to the narrator's fear of artistic and emotional impotence (Bethea 1983: 293-294). -

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LITERATURE Adamovir, Georgij 1930 'Kommentarii', Cisla, 1, 136-143. 1932 'O literature v emigracii'. Sovremennye zapiski, 50, 327-339. 1933 'Pute~estvie vglub' nori'. Poslednie novosti, 4418, 3. 1935 °Zizn' i "2izn'"'. Poslednie novosti, 5124, 2. 1939 'O "samom va~nom"'. Literaturnyj smotr. Svobodnyj sbornik (Eds. Z. Gippius, D. Mere~&ovskij). Paris, 15-19. Arland, Marcel 'Sur un nouveau Mal du Si~cle'. Essais et nouveaux essais critiques. 1952 Paris, 11-37. Bakunina, Ekaterina 1933 Telo. Berlin. Bataille, Georges 1993 'Voyage au bout de la nuit'. 70 critiques de Voyage au bout de la nuit 1932-1935 (Ed. A. Derval). Paris, 117. Beauvoir, Simone de 1958 Mdmoires d'une jeune fille rangde. Paris. Bern, Al'fred 1934 'Soblazn prostoty'. MeG 11-12, 14-16. Berberova, Nina 1949 'Lakej i devka'. Oblegdenie udasti. Sest'povestej. Paris. Bethea, David 1983 Khodasevich. His Life and Art. Princeton. Crline, Louis-Ferdinand 1981 Romans, Vol. 1. Paris. Chodasevir, Vladislav 1936 'Avtor, geroj, port'. Krug, 1,167-171. 1938 'Raspad atoma'. Vozro~denie, 4116, 9. 1991 'O forme i soder~anii'. KolebIemyj treno~nik (Ed. N. Bogomolov). Moskva, 591-593. D4caudin, Michel 1987 Panorama du XX si~cle franfais. Paris. Dolinin, Aleksandr 1997 'Tri zametld o romane Vladimira Nabokova "Dar"'. V.V. Nabokov: Pro et Contra, Sankt-Peterburg, 697-740. Fedotov, Georgij 1942 'O pari~.skoj po~zii'. Kov~eg. Sbornik russkoj zarube~noj Iiteratury. New York, 189-198. Fel' zen, Jurij 1934 'Sergej Sargnn. Put' pravyj', Cisla, 10, 283-285. Gippius, Zinaida 1938 'Certy ljubvi'. Krug, 3, 139-149.

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Gomolickij, Lev 1939 Arion. Paris. Gor'kij, M., Kirson, V., Nikulin, L. 1934 Stenografideskij otdet pervogo vsesojuznogo s"ezda sovetskich pisatelej (Ed. I. Luppol). Moskva, 11,331,400-401. Gul', Roman 1973 'Georgij Ivanov'. Odvukon '. New York, 63-79. Ivanov, Georgij 1930 'Anketa o Pruste'. Cisla, 1,272-273. 1931 'Boris Poplavskij. Flagi'. Cista, 5,231-233. 1938 Raspad atoma. Paris. Janovskij, Vasilij 1953 Portativnoe bessmertie. New York. 1983 Polja Elisejskie. New York. Mandel'~tam, Jurij 1936 'Smelt' v kredit'. Vozro~denie, 4035, 5. Nabokov, Vladimir 1940 'Literatumyj smotr'. Sovremennye zapiski, 70, 283-285. Ocup, Nikolaj 1933 'Iz dnevnika'. Cisla, 9, 130-134. 1961 'Personalizm kak javlenie literatury'. Literaturnye oderki. Paris, 127-149. Poplavskij, Boris Domoj s nebes. Romany. Sankt-Peterburg/Dtisseldoff. 1993 Neizdannoe. Moskva. 1996 Proust, Marcel 1997 A l'ombre desjeunesfilles enfleurs. Paris. Radek, Karl 1934 'Zaklju6itel'noe slovo'. Stenografideskij otdet pervogo vsesojuznogo s "ezda sovetskich pisatelej (Ed. I. Luppol). Moskva, 367-373. Terapiano, Jurij 1938 'O novych knigach stichov'. Krug, 3, 171-175. Val6ry, Paul 1957 'La Crise de l'esprit'. Oeuvres, Vol. 1. Paris, 988-1014. Vejdle, Vladimir 1937 'Celovek protiv pisatelja'. Krug, 2, 139-145. Zakovi6, Boris 1930-1931 'Ve6er sojuza molodych poetov'. Cisla, 4, 258-259. Zlobin, Vladimir 1939 'Celovek v nazi dni'. Literaturnyj smotr. Svobodnyj sbornik (Eds. Z. Gippius, D. Mere~kovskij). Paris, 158-163.