CC BY
1
DOI 10.54770/20729316-2023-4-240
O.A. Bratina (Yekaterinburg), А.V. Markov (Moscow)
FANAILOVA'S TWO FEMALE HOLY FOOLS: BEFORE THE LITURGICAL MOMENT
Abstract _
The article examines poems by E. Fanailova that depict the modern holy fool, drawing on French sources (Simone Weil) and Russian sources (Xenia of Petersburg). At the core of both poems is a literal inversion that mirrors the plot of the Book of Job: the discovery of the underside of speech through double negation in the case of Weil, or through the total allegory of God as the creator of text-texture-sewing in the case of Xenia. In both poems, the primary device is polyphony, with various characters' voices, simultaneously incapable of negation. Holy foolishness is thus understood as the embedding of Job's story in a liturgical context: Fanailova employs the technique of peeping and eavesdropping to create a reverse perspective on the liturgical institution of polyphony. The fool challenges conventional notions of appropriateness, including literary decorum. The critique of literary appropriateness, aligning in some respects with postmodern cultural criticism, introduces persistent stylizing strategies consistent with the narrative: from Mikhail Kuzmin's legacy in the poem about Xenia to the theater of the absurd in the poem about Simone. This adopts a strategy of style separated from the female protagonist by one or two generations, enabling a positive stereoscopic model of culture. This model incorporates the principles of liturgical sequences, litany, or akathist into the poem. Thus, the poem about Xenia discerns the structural and compositional principles of the troparion and the synaxarion. Fanailova, using postmodernist polyphony, establishes a positive concept of the occurrence of sainthood in history.
Key words
Fanailova; holy fool; close reading of poetry; liturgical poetry; stylization; lyrical plot.
О.А. Братина (Екатеринбург), А.В. Марков (Москва)
ДВЕ ЮРОДИВЫХ ФАНАЙЛОВОЙ: ПЕРЕД ЛИТУРГИЧЕСКИМ МОМЕНТОМ
Аннотация
В статье рассматриваются стихотворения Е. Фанайловой, изображающие тип юродивой эпохи современности, на французском (Симона Вейль) и русском (Ксения Петербургская) материале. В центре обоих
стихотворений стоит буквально понятая инверсия, подражающая сюжету книги Иова: открытие изнанки речи через двойное отрицание, в случае Вейль, или через тотальную аллегорию Бога как создателя текста-текстуры-шитья, в случае Ксении. В обоих стихотворениях главным приемом является многоголосье, голоса различных героев, которые при этом не способны на отрицание. Юродство понимается при этом как вписывание сюжета Иова в литургический контекст: Фанайлова использует прием подглядывания и подслушивания, с целью создать обратную перспективу литургического учреждения многоголосия. Юродивый преодолевает привычные представления о приличии, в том числе, о литературном приличии. Критика литературной уместности, в отдельных чертах совпадающая с постмодернистской критикой культуры, позволяет ввести ряд устойчивых стилизующих стратегий, консистентных для нарратива: от наследия Михаила Кузмина в стихотворении о Ксении до театра абсурда в стихотворении о Симоне. При этом принимается стратегия стиля, отделенная от героини одним или двумя поколениями, что и позволяет создать положительную стереоскопическую модель культуры. Такая модель уже позволяет внести в стихи принципы литургических последований, литании или акафиста. Так, в стихотворении о Ксении распознаются структурно-композиционные принципы тропаря и синаксаря. Это позволяет Фанайло-вой, используя постмодернистское многоголосие, создать положительную концепцию присутствия святости в истории.
Ключевыеслова
Фанайлова; юродивый; близкое чтение поэзии; литургическая поэзия; стилизация; лирический сюжет.
Introduction
The appeal of contemporary Russian poetry to images of holiness is always complicated by the inertia of genres: holiness does not exist simply as a fact; its recognition is the effect of the collision of several narratives, none of which expresses it fully. Rather, the recognition of holiness emerges at the crossroads of different genres, as a certain gaping, an impossibility of speech. Thus, although the small canonical genres dedicated to the saints, such as the troparion and condacion, connote vitae, they are arranged differently from the hagiography [Бибихин 1975]. If the vita is structured as a linear narrative, with the necessary points of persuasion, from the miraculous birth to posthumous wonders, the troparion or other hymn is a thematic narrative, with unexpected turns of theme and sharp contrasts, which allow us to perceive the idea of sainthood. The Leskov-inspired narrative, perceptively examined by Benjamin [Benjamin 2000], was meant to provide a point of perception of the saint where the narrator, followed by the reader, encounters the distinct ideas of sainthood gradually, in his or her experience, and the linear narrative maintaining the effect of reality. Leskov's legends, unlike authentic hagiographies, produced a special effect
of reverse perspective: we do not so much take a life step inspired by the examples of vitae or accept the system of proofs of sainthood, but rather we see that literature has developed a special way of talking about sainthood, which proves that sainthood has already deformed the subject-object organization of the text.
Russian poetry, addressing the lives of the saints, usually resolved the tension between the act of repentance, which has not only a narrative but also a way in the canonical understanding of the saint's life if one cannot accept his or her identity without one's own repentance and the requirement of narrative enter-tainingness, without which narrative lyrics can not exist. Thus, the post-symbolist Mikhail Kuzmin in "The Comedy about Evdokia", like Alexei Remizov in his prose legends, simply depicts repentance performed in public, theatricalizes it, whereas in 1970s Olga Sedakova in the legends about the saints in her poetic book "The Wild Briar" [CegaKOBa 2010, 60-64], on the contrary, understands repentance as the disappearance of the speaker from view, as the humility of nature itself, followed by the humility of the word. From this follows the problem of the present article: how this movement from theatricalization to humility is conceivable as persuasive inside the aesthetical principles of contemporary Russian poetry. We know two instances of this kind of poetry: these are the poems of the priest Sergei Kruglov [KpyraoB 2022] and of Elena Fanailova.
Both of these Russian poets have an active presence on the Internet and easily take the spoken-written language of blogs and social media into their poetry. But the vectors of their hagiographic poetry are opposite. Kruglov depicts the clash of two affective orders. On the one hand, our strong affects are evoked by the actual consideration of the icon with its deeply meaningful symbols, such as the angel's sword or the withered mouth. On the other hand, we need to imagine the tame or humble affects of the saint himself, who is either granted or asked to speak. In this way, a consistent narrative about the saint is constructed, far from the affects of the novel, but embedded in the reverse perspective of a renewed symbolism: the iconic symbol is the most powerful reality, while the life of the saint is the realization of that humility, which we too can partake of in this movement of narrative.
Fanailova acts differently: she does not have an icon in mind, but only the everyday face of the saint, imbued with the holiness of casual gestures and increasingly expressive actions. In Fanailova, the saint engages the now existing literary strategies, writing, oral conversation, or online conversation, to show that whatever the affects in these strategies, weak or strong, they become part of the saint's liturgical transformation. In this sense, Kruglov's movement can be tentatively compared to a synaxarion, a solemnly organized hagiography, with its collision of the effects of solemnity and humility, and Fanailova's movement can be compared to a troparion, where unexpected turns in the depiction of the idea of sainthood as an incomprehensible transfiguration are well within any ordering of affectively rich presentation. Where in Kruglov's work, particular icons, which confront incompatible forms of speech, are at the heart of the lyrical tension, Fanailova presents iconostasis, as rows of images and image-binding constructions, that engage new forms of speech in the plot, including slang and communication in a friendly circle.
Materials and Methods
Fanailova turned to such a type of holiness as female holy foolishness: in this type of asceticism, holiness cannot be proved by merit; on the contrary, it always manifests itself in a paradoxical way, incomprehensible to most people. Female holy foolishness is especially incompatible with the idea of everyday merit, but at the same time the very image of a woman as being rejected, as being ready to accept martyrdom, makes it possible to connect that very incomprehensible transformation with the reflection on denial, namelessness, deprivation of a habitual name, when merit can be visualized only in a holy vision or a dream. In contrast to hagiographical expositions, where the holy vision is localized as part of the saint's triumph, here the vision is the only way to somehow perceive the humiliation and annihilation of the body, its permanent namelessness, the only way to assemble the situation of the collapse of previous ways of life into a construction of stable affect. It was therefore natural that cinematic versions of holy fools emerged, working with both individual and social affects and ultimately hinting at the reverse perspective of liturgical merciful intervention in our common existence [Братина 2023].
Fanailova's book "With Particular Cynicism" [Фанайлова 2000] includes the poem "Simona" [Фанайлова 2000, 140-146], which describes, partly in the vein of cinematic montage or TV reportage, the life of Simone Weil (19091943), a woman philosopher who leveled herself with the workers. Considering this poem as a mystery [Любельская 2016] is necessary but not sufficient. In Fanailova's multimedia book "The Russian Version" [Фанайлова 2005], which includes interviews and audio recordings of performances, one of the heroines [Фанайлова 2005, 49-50] is Xenia of Petersburg (? - circa 1802), the patron saint of St. Petersburg, a holy fool who, after the death of her officer husband, called herself by his name and walked in his clothes. There is much in common between her two heroines: in them, holy foolishness, voluntary eccentricity of behavior, prevails over other types of holiness, and their behavior, democratic and radicalizing love for God, is perceived as provocative not only in the culture of that time but also in our contemporary culture. The portrayal of both heroines allows Fanailova to question whether contemporary culture has enough imagery to depict the holy fools. The evasion of interstichic transfers, noted by researchers of Fanailova's poetry as a technique of both theatricalization and criticism of theatricalization [Бочавер 2019], also enables the implantation of troparion and liturgy in the poetry.
Results
In the book "With Particular Cynicism" both Russian images and Russian melodicism prevail: for example, one of the poems is dedicated to St. Nicholas, and it consists of speech figures and intonations of an urban cruel romance combined with a petitioning prayer. The images of world culture in the book are those of radical modernism and cinema. This corresponds to the era of the Russian 1990s, when local life, with the new forms of crime detailed in the book's
poems, remained rather importing high and low culture. The poem "Simone", ending the book, thus represents a leap towards making an imagined new script for export. "The Russian Version" book is organized differently: it constantly offers an outside view of Russia through the mention of contemporary women art activists such as Susan Sontag and Marina Abramovic. Their exploration of forms of violence allows us to construct a Russian version of politically pointed performances, and the poems sometimes resemble brief synopses of such performances. But in order to avoid a gap between performativity and intonation in these poems, which are written with great trust in the interlocutor, Sontag, Abramovic, and other heroines are also endowed with the traits of holy fools: Abramovic is presented as a wanderer, a pilgrim; the neo-folkloric intonations of this poem partly inherit Sedakova's book "Old Songs" [CegaKOBa 2010, 179— 217], where Russian sainthood is presented as a wanderlust not so much spatial as spiritual, overcoming the boundaries of life and death to hand oneself over to God. Xenia of Petersburg then turns out to be an example of a saint who has already handed herself over to God, where her situation is portrayed not on earth but in heaven: what happened after this experience of ultimate trust. Here the scenario of Xenia's life is already defined by the categories of holiness as a paradisiacal experience, and the finale of the poem rhythmically and narratively imitates Sedakova's "Old Songs".
The rhythmic prototype of the poem "Simone" is Joseph Brodsky's "Great Elegy to John Donne", where the Anglican saint poet is presented both as the author and witness of the poetic universe and as a genius of introspection. He sees heaven and hell both in the initial structure of the universe and in his own self. Simone Weil as the heroine of Fanailova makes a similar journey through the universe and herself, but she speaks first of all about the state of her body. E. Fanailova offers such metaphors for "Simone W.'s life" as: "life is a war", "the life of the body is a slaughterhouse"; "life is a body in a grave, a living grave". Life is a "hospital", "madhouse", decaying, self-destructive "body" is "hell", "fornication", "war", "grave". Sedakova's early poem "Poète maudit" is written with the same rhythm [CegaKOBa 2010, 40], so that the appearance of images of decadence as a cult of morbid condition in this poem is also rhythmically justified.
The heroine of E. Fanailova's poem is named "Simone W". Perhaps this naming is a reference to Franz Kafka's "Josef K"., as well as a stylization of a semi-anonymous online conversation, a news summary, a retelling of the life of a semi-acquaintance, details of what is not customary to talk about, what is blatantly indecent to talk about. "Simone W". becomes a twin of any person living at any time. Her "hell" is equal to the nightmare of any human life and it is unseemly, horrible, repulsive; her every gesture, her every step in it is egregious, incomprehensible, like every step of the One whose metaphor she becomes at the end of the poem. The poem reproduces the scheme of the litany and the Way of the Cross, so that the scenario ends with the complete imitation of Christ and with the adoption of corporeality into this scheme of methodical imitation.
Elena Fanailova creates a text and a heroine, Simone W., who wanders through this text, which is at once postmodern and reminiscent of liturgical
and mysterial text: it appears as an iconography of hell and cult, life, death and postmortem, the history of the masses and individual history at the same time. "Simone W". is as "mad" and immortal as heroes and saints. Traveling through nothingness, through the valley of her own death and the universal hell, she becomes beyond the definitions of life and death, gender and face, becoming a continuously lasting, replicating text.
Fanailova also recurs to speech with a double bottom, to that triumphant self-denial (almost abandoning herself in the Garden of Gethsemane) that is noted in Marina Tsvetaeva's self-definition metaphors. A similar transformation takes place: double negation (with each stage of negation having a different strength: the negation of the negation is weaker than the first negation) gives way to affirmation; double negation can become almost an oxymoron in form. Assertion lends itself to statement only indirectly [Мусхелишвили и др. 2014, 3-7]. Fanailova calls Simona's gesture "a bluff of jouissance", "performing harakiri", and it is the same double deception in which the speaker (and the one sneering at himself) is right and true. The way out to what demands to be articulated is through the negation first of "jouissance" through "bluff", then through the negation of "bluff". What is so called ceases to be so in the eyes of the author, not in the eyes of the crowd of spectators who suggest to Simone that it would be better to die ("it will be unpleasant for us, but peaceful"). This is an extremely serious gesture, and therefore cannot have an extremely serious name, otherwise the gesture is simply unrealizable. It is a double game thanks to the second bottom of the words, it is not a game.
Although "Simone" is a narrative poem, one cannot help but see liturgical motifs in it. Chief among these is the role representation of Simone as an angel of vengeance, an actress in the theater of cruelty, a director of auteur cinema, and a programmer. Any of these roles clarifies her suffering corporeality while requiring resolution in the reverse perspective of an already realized sanctity. Since the heroine represents the Western world, this perspective is only created through speech inversion:
Любви бесчеловечного объема Не даст ей мир до смертного парома.
Love of inhuman volume
Will not give her the world till death's ferry.
A straightforward word order would be the culmination of Simone's theme as a denouncer of the heaviness of capitalism (her opposition: La pesanteur et la grace). But the inversion accentuates the "inhuman", i.e. belonging already to the order of grace, to the spiritual body, according to the Apostle Paul [1 Cor. 15: 44-46], the figure of love. It already belongs to the world of accomplished holiness, as in a troparion or any praise of a saint, while in the next line the condition of this - contemplated through iconically organized (organized as Byzantine icon with reverse perspective from heaven to our world) tropari-on - heaven state is named. It is the grace for the dying, thanks to which capi-
talism can be abolished and the ecclesiastical attitude to the living and the dead can triumph.
The poem about Xenia included in The Russian Version is presented by the author as a conversation with Arkady Ippolitov, Russian art historian and curator who in his writing and exhibition work is making Russian versions of Baroque, Classicism, and Romanticism, in the sense of paying attention to the Russian reception of world styles. In his books and collections of essays, Ippoli-tov has repeatedly shown how, including key philosophical texts of Russian culture, such as Vladimir Solovyev's poetry or Rozanov's travel notes, there is a special empathy for these eras. Thus, already this subtitle provides a reverse perspective of the operation of powerful images, such as the ecclesiastical and liturgical images of Baroque and Classicism, in meditative poetry or free Rozanov-like discourse. Fanailova's style combines both. Unlike the two previous poems in the cycle "Lives of the Saints in Retellings of Relatives and Companions", this poem has no proto-text: for the first poem, "Apostle Andrew: A Brother's Story", the obvious proto-text is Ilya Kormiltsev's song "Walking on Water", while for the poem "St. Tikhon of Zadonsk: Ana Stefanovska-ya's story" - Pushkin's everyday anecdotes, "Count Nulin and The House in Kolomna", allowing for leisurely chatter and the refutation of the cumbersome tradition of literary conventions. Rock poetry and Pushkin's everyday poetry anticipate the deliberate extraliterary nature of the third poem, which incorporates both folk lamentations and liturgical forms, such as the troparion.
Xenia is presented in accordance with the traditions of popular veneration as the guardian of St. Petersburg. The lamentation at the beginning of the poem reproduces folk forms of speech, but of a person today: Xenia, dressed in men's clothing, is reproached for looking like a "freak" and "Marlene Dietrich". Holy foolishness stands on the other side of the culture of any time, and further in the poem it says:
Ксения перекусила белую нитку Черными от невской воды зубами.
Xenia bit the white thread
With teeth black from the Neva water.
Xenia identifies herself both with her dead husband and with the fate of St. Petersburg, which is threatened by floods. That is, the disguise is interpreted as a way to save St. Petersburg, to turn inside out the order in which the man-made element fights with the non-man-made element, which is the plot of Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman". Then the white thread of sewing turns out to be the thread that binds the universe together according to new laws, already of mercy, of supplication for weak people: the world turns out to be sewn by a merciful text, where simple attention and diligence is stronger than the elements. This corresponds to the composition of the troparion, where the saint is presented not so much as performing feats of faith, but as being revealed to the world: his or her feats have already been rewarded in heaven and
these rewards constitute the characteristic of his or her personality, while on earth, during the singing of the troparion, we can mark the threads and lines of the saint's distinctive intervention corresponding to his or her vocation. The reverse perspective of the troparion enters seamlessly into Fanailova's system of speech strategies, thanks to the convergence of folk speech and the anxiety affect of contemporary people, which generates this expectation of distinctive intervention. The troparion is also replicated by the lines:
Ксения три дня отлежала на гробе, Встала сильнее урана.
Xenia rested on the coffin for three days, She got up stronger than uranium.
This is how the troparion is structured: a key life event is understood as rich in symbolism that transcends all earthly boundaries, so that the miraculous intervention of the saint, which continues to the present day and which is hinted at in the next line, is interpreted as the work of a power from above, of holiness itself, rather than of individual feats. In this way, the description of the heavenly sewing room as the proper ordering of the universe in this poem turns out to be a precursor to the Liturgy: the low images of fashion turn out to be both the content of concern for the world, but also a complete negation of themselves. Such a double negation, the low everyday life that is portrayed as part of Heaven concept but at the same time denied as unnecessary to Xenia, corresponds to the idea of the liturgical sacrifice as being offered disinterestedly, liberating both from original universal sin and personal sin, the Sermon on the Mount [Matthew 5:24] demanded reconciliation as a condition of the sacrifice. This liberation from personal sin is already embedded in the liturgical reverse perspective of excessive grace.
Discussion
Thus, both of Fanailova's poems explore holy foolishness as a type of holiness most closely linked to the experience of the body. The bodily is identified with the catastrophic, and old narratives, even if enriched by cinematic or journalistic experience, cannot prevent catastrophe. Therefore, only the incorporation of bodily experience into liturgical forms can demonstrate how catastrophe is made impossible.
Fanailova's poems can use stylizations, but not as a way of implementing narrative, but as one of the voices in a conversation that does not become dominant. The organization of Fanailova's texts is multimedia, but this multimedia is not theatrical but polyphonic. It allows the voice of the troparion, the voice of the liturgical invocation, and the voice of mercy to be introduced into the poetry. The stylized forms of liturgical chants in Russian poetry become part of overcoming the inertia of a subject that otherwise over-theatricalizes itself. The use of double negation limits both the theatricalization of affects and the inertia of the affects of everyday speech. And the introduction of female holy
fools allows for the juxtaposition of different orders of affect without allowing any of them to be overly amplified by any of the referenced media, theater, or film, or blogging. This complicated construction of Fanailova's poems about women saints introduces not only hagiographical but also liturgical modes of utterance into contemporary everyday speech.
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Братина (Штайн) Оксана Александровна, Уральский федеральной университет.
Кандидат философских наук, доцент Департамента философии. Научные интересы: эстетика, философия религии, теория культуры, современная русская поэзия. E-mail: shtaynshtayn@gmail.com ORCID ID: 0009-0004-1701-3147
Марков Александр Викторович,
Российский государственный гуманитарный университет. Доктор филологических наук, профессор кафедры кино и современного искусства. Научные интересы: теория литературы, визуальные исследования, теория культуры. E-mail: markovius@gmail.com ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6874-1073
Oksana A. Bratina, Ural Federal University.
Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, Associate Professor at Philosophy Department. Research interests: aesthetics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of culture, contemporary Russian poetry. E-mail: shtaynshtayn@gmail.com ORCID ID: 0009-0004-1701-3147
Alexander V. Markov,
Russian State University for the Humanities.
Doctor of Philological Sciences, Full Professor at Department of Cinema
and Contemporary Art. Research interests: literary theory, visual studies,
cultural theory.
E-mail: markovius@gmail.com
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6874-1073
