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HOBUU jмnоnогицecкиu BecmHUK. 2019. №4(51). --
E.V. Glukhova (Moscow)
HETEROTOPY OF THE COUNTRY ESTATE IN THE POETICS OF RUSSIAN SYMBOLISM (PART I: ZINAIDA HIPPIUS)*
Abstract. The article describes the phenomenon of describing a country estate in the literature of Russian modernism as a heterotopy. The estate narrative of Russian literature of the 19th century demonstrates that the most significant events in the hero's life take place in the noble estate, and consequently, the duration of the action and the plot are maximally compressed, and at the same time extended in time. We should not forget that in fact the noble estate served as a repository of intellectual and cultural memory. After the destruction of the landowner estate in Soviet times, the most important signs of the manor heterotopy are preserved: this is the memory of a geographical place, a memory of the manor topos. The heterotopic model of the Russian estate demonstrated exceptional stability for a long time, having functionally transformed, on the one hand, into a summer residence (dacha); on the other hand, the function of the cultural memory is taken over by the modern museum-estate. The article analyzes the stories of Zinaida Hippius "The Witch", "Two - One", "Out of Time". The manor space of Hippius stories not only creates scenery for the storyline, but also reflects the natural world bursting into the hero's mind, that conflicts with the rational-conceptual line of urban behavior. Elements of the folklore-mythological narrative characteristic of the aesthetics of Russian symbolism are revealed (the story "The Witch"). At the heart of the semiosphere of the country estate's world of Hippius stories is the Turgenev's plot of a summer romance flirt. Contact with the elements of nature is not only a triumph of the irrational and mystical in the hero's mind, but also signs of his initiation: thus, the story "Two - one" is devoted to the topic of the physiological maturation of the hero, who overcomes the boundary between the memory of the manor paradise of his childhood and growing up. In one of Gippius' later stories, the world of country estate culture turns into a fantastic and closed world where time flows according to its own laws, and the manor with its old library becomes a repository of the cultural memory of a passing era ("Out of Time"). The semiosphere of the homestead world in Hippius stories demonstrates the hero's movement to a functionally different space compared to his usual world, where real events can receive a fantastic explanation ("The Witch"), and time flows according to its own laws, turning out to be a frozen capsule of time ("Out of Time"). Actual events occur both in a metaphorical (memory and living memory) and mythological (false synchronization) time section (the stories "Out of Time" and "Two - One"); the movement of historical time itself is extremely slow and completely freezes ("Out of Time").
Key words: Russian country estate; estate topos; heterotopy; Zinaida Hippius; Russian symbolism; space and time of literary text.
* This study in IWL RAS was supported by Grant from the RSF (project no. 18-18-00129). 178
Е.В. Глухова (Москва)
Гетеротопия усадьбы в поэтике русского символизма (часть первая: Зинаида Гиппиус)**
Аннотация. В статье описывается феномен изображения усадьбы в литературе русского модернизма как гетеротопии. Усадебный нарратив русской литературы XIX века демонстрирует, что в дворянской усадьбе происходят наиболее значительные события в жизни героя, а следовательно, время действия и сюжет оказываются максимально сжатыми и одновременно протяженными во времени. Фактически усадьба выполняла функцию хранилища интеллектуальной и культурной памяти. После уничтожения помещичьей усадьбы в советское время, сохраняются важнейшая примета усадебной гетеротопии: это память географического места, воспоминание об усадебном топосе. Гетеротопная модель русской усадьбы продемонстрировала исключительную устойчивость на протяжении длительного времени, функционально трансформировавшись, с одной стороны, в дачное хозяйство; с другой стороны, функцию хранилища памяти культуры принимает на себя современный музей-усадьба. В статье проанализированы рассказы З.Н. Гиппиус «Ведьма», «Двое - один», «Вне времени». Усадебное пространство не только создает декорацию к сюжетной линии рассказа, но и отражает врывающийся в сознание героя мир природы, конфликтующий с рационально-схематической линией городского поведения. Выявляются элементы фольклорно-мифо-логического нарратива, свойственного эстетике русского символизма («Ведьма»). В основе семиосферы дачно-усадебного мира рассказов Гиппиус лежит тургеневская фабула летнего любовного романа-флирта. Соприкосновение с природной стихией - это не только торжество иррационально-мистического в сознании героя, но и знаки его инициации: так, рассказ «Двое - один» посвящен теме физиологического созревания героя, который преодолевает границу между воспоминанием об усадебном рае своего детства и взрослением. Мир усадебной культуры в одном из поздних рассказов Гиппиус превращается в фантастический замкнутый мир, где время течет по своим законам, а усадьба с ее старинной библиотекой становится хранилищем культурной памяти уходящей эпохи («Вне времени»). Семи-осфера усадебного мира в рассказах Гиппиус демонстрирует перемещение героя в функционально иное пространство по сравнению с привычным ему миром, где реальные события могут получать фантастическое объяснение (рассказ «Ведьма»), а время течет по своим законам, оказываясь застывшей капсулой времени (рассказ «Вне времени»). Фактические события происходят как в метафорическом (память и ожившее воспоминание), так и мифологическом (ложная синхронизация) временном срезе (рассказы «Вне времени» и «Двое - один»); движение же собственно исторического времени предельно замедленно и вовсе замирает («Вне времени»).
Ключевые слова: русская усадьба; усадебный топос; гетеротопия; З.Н. Гиппиус; русский символизм; пространство и время художественного текста.
** Исследование выполнено в ИМЛИ РАН за счет гранта РНФ (проект № 18-18-00129).
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The concept of heterotopy, introduced by Michel Foucault, absorbed quite slowly by literary criticism, still remains a feature of the philosophical and cultural sphere [Шестакова / Shestakova 2015 b], which can be explained by its interdisciplinarity and actual existence as a scientific metaphor. Following the logic of modern philosophical and literary interpretation, heterotopy is not just another space, but a place where spatio-temporal relations are built differently than in the conventionally combinatorial models. According to V. Podoroga, "there are no particular heterotopies, they are all known and familiar to us: theater, library, house, cemetery, cinema, museum; human life is determined by movement along the path from birth to death within such heterotopic spaces. <...> If living space is able to reproduce and develop itself, it means that its heterotopic structure is stable and effective" [Podoroga].
A Russian country estate also undoubtedly belongs to heterotopic structures: they emerged over the course of one and a half centuries of pre-revolutionary Russia. A Russian country estate, with its special world order and passage of time, focused on the reproduction of the seasonal peasant cycle, with a typical set of sustainable models of lifestyle and domestic behavior. The structure of a Russian estate has some distinguishing features: the architecture of the manor house, its location in the center of the estate complex, the organization of courtyard services around it, with a mandatory linden alley, with an apple / cherry orchard, a pond or a cascade of ponds. The structure of the homestead world within itself is beyond the boundaries of the usual cultural binary oppositions such as "city - village", "urban environment - rural life".
In the tradition of 19th-century Russian literature, the estate is not just a decoration for the events that take place, but the place where the action is localized in a different space-time segment: the flow of time there go either way. It is no coincidence that the most significant events in the lives of the heroes take place in the noble estate (Captain's Daughter by Pushkin, Dead Souls by Gogol, Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard). Starting with the literature of classicism, a number of stable narrative models are assigned to the estate culture: at the turn of the 18-19th centuries, these were epistolary and memoirs (for example, T. Bolotov's historical notes, which he wrote in his village, after he retired [Болотов / Bolotov 1907]), women's home albums, poetry (Pushkin's productive creative autumn in the Boldino estate).
Another important feature of the Russian estate world is that it served as the guardian of intellectual and cultural memory: in every estate there was always a library [Дмитриева / Dmitriyeva 2018]. As noted by researcher: "Heterotopies are also characterized by special time relationships - they can accumulate time (such as museums and libraries), abolish it, interrupt. Therefore, heterotopies are a special kind of spatio-temporal unity associated with the transformation of subjectivity" [Беззубова / Bezzubova 2011, 201]. It can be argued that the landowners' houses, full of books and art objects, performed the functions of museum repositories at the turn of the 19-20th centuries. One of the first post-revolutionary decrees of the People's Commissariat for Education called for the nationalization of cultural values, and the first expeditions to save the heri-
tage went to country estates: for national antiquities, objects of art and books [Кончин / Konchin, 1988].
There was only one step from the accumulation of national and cultural memory to its destruction. This process was recorded by A. Chekhov in the drama The Cherry Orchard, showing the arrival of a new generation of capitalists who massively bought up the noble nests, restoring order there. After the revolution, even more radical changes took place: the landowner estate was destroyed, which symbolically meant the destruction of national cultural memory. At the same time, the most important signs of heterotopy of the Russian estate are preserved and above all is the memory of places, the memory of the estate topos (the term is being actively developed in the project "Russian estate in Literature and Culture: Domestic and Foreign View" [Дмитриева / Dmitriyeva 2019; Богданова / Bogdanova 2019]), geo-poetics. Thus, the heterotopic model of the Russian estate demonstrates exceptional stability, having functionally transformed, on the one hand, into a country house - dacha; on the other hand, the museum-estate takes over the function of a cultural memory store.
In our article, we would like to outline some ways of describing the Russian estate as a heterotopy in the literature of the Silver Age. We know of at least two articles, considering the estate topos of Russian literature from this perspective [Кривонос / Kryvonos 2015; Шестакова / Shestakova 2015 a]. First of all, we need to identify possible points of contact between the heterotopia as the concept of non-classical philology and literary criticism of traditional concepts such as the art space and time.
We will turn to the early description of the concept of heterotopy in Fou-cault's works, in which he pointed out that a heterotopy is not just another space, but a gap, a breakdown of the smooth implementation of everyday life, revealing a complex system of special spaces (rhizome), places of human activity and life-feeling. "Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy 'syntax' in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to 'hold together' " [Foucault 2002, xix].
We assume that the estate topos of Russian literature not only demonstrates another dimension of the hero's being in it, but, according to the inertia of the story, а hero always situated in a different space, while being in the estate's plot, with significant events occurring and not necessarily due to external circumstances; meanwhile, the current time in the country estate changes in comparison with the urban one. Let's try to confirm our guess, using as an example the stories of Zinaida Hippius.
The prosaic legacy of Hippius largely emerged in the mainstream mass fiction of the late 19th century. Her stories often addressed the poetics of Tur-genev's. It should be noted that the country estate prose occupies a relatively small place in the Hippius heritage, is connected with the typology of the love line of the estate narrative of the 19th century, but at the same time it shows
the motifs of the Symbolist prose with an interest in folklore and mythological universals, and with the type of existentially unsatisfied hero. Of the five early books, the following stories were devoted to the estate theme: "Closer to Nature", "Goddess", "Humility", "Miss May", "The Witch", "Morning of Days", "Out of Time", "Two - One".
The plot of the estate in Hippius's narrative is sketchy enough: usually the hero comes to visit the estate and becomes a kind of catalyst for transforming the usual life. Hippius accurately reproduces the toponymy of a country estate in her stories: a manor house located on a hill, a terrace in front of it, where tea drinking under lindens takes place; near the house there is a park with alleys; the manor idyll is completed by a pond or lake overgrown with water lilies. The reproduction of the loci of the Russian estate in these stories does not just create a decoration for the plot lines, but reflects the natural world bursting into the hero's mind, conflicting with the rational-schematic line of his or her urban behavior. The alley, as part of the manor garden ensemble, opens up an interaction with the natural world, conceived by Hippius on the sensual-erotic metaphor of smell and touch; means of expressiveness emphasize the connection of the homestead world with an irrational principle that changes the usual course of reality. Elements of the folklore and mythological narrative characteristic of the aesthetics of Russian symbolism are revealed in the story "The Witch". The arrival of the French governess, the lonely and miserable M-me Lino, is the beginning of the story. She wholeheartedly became attracted to the servant Marfushka, a girl, who is dreamy and overwhelmed by longing. The other servants in the estate seriously suspect that the old governess is a witch, otherwise why did the maid love her so much? Marfushka is overcome by obsessive visions of the witch's flight; for her this is an opportunity to escape from the boring routine. The theme of the presence of otherworldly forces manifesting themselves in everyday manor life is emphasized, along with a deliberately mysterious description of the manor lake: all this turns the ordinary reality of the manor into a new mythological space. Lake water is a sign of double peace, a failure in another space, organized according to the irrational laws of folklore and mythological universes. Lake, pond, water serve as a place of communication with the other world; water, as a reflection of the heavenly abyss, is a mirror reflecting the entrance to another world. Water in the stories of Hippius was associated with the motif of death; the heroine of the story, Marfushka, peers into the depth of the lake, trying to see where "even a green strand of hair, though the pale hand of a mermaid" [Гиппиус / Hippius 2002, 140]. The image of the mermaid, as a harbinger of Marfushka's imminent death, is symbolically emphasized by the long greenish dress worn by the deceased daughter of the governess and which she gives to Marfushka. One night, having tried to secretly dress, she feels the coolness of his mysterious greenish cloth; in this mermaid dress, having felt the irresistible call of freedom, she runs away to the lake and imagines that the world under her feet will be overturned in the glassy blackness of the lake surface. The ending of the story is symbolic: Marfusha jumps down into the lake, but it seems to her that she flies up to the moon, realizing one of the
favorite gnostic formulas by Merezhkovsky: "The sky above - the sky below".
At the heart of the semiosphere of the country-estate world in all Hippius's stories is the plot of the summer romance flirtation, which is quite traditional for the Turgenev country estate's prose. In the story "Two - One", the contact of the hero with the natural elements in the estate is not only a triumph of the irrationally mystical in his mind, but also signifies his initiation into the adult world. The story is dedicated to the physiological growth of a hero who overcomes the boundary between the children's paradise world (his memories of his childhood in the estate) and growing up. A young man, a schoolboy who failed his exams, comes to rest in the estate, where everything for him is filled with memories of the blessed world of childhood. The hero painfully feels his loneliness against the background of spring flowering and the emerging life; he idly spends time walking around the lake and the old park as he is tormented by the question: what is love? Vague desires form, which are reflected in the tactile-sensory world surrounding nature: "He has not even yet shut the door when moist murmurs, insatiable and gentle whispers of dewy soil revealing itself, growing nocturnal herbs crawled into the room, and everything began somehow moving, around and deep down, breathing and scenting, sighing and living, ascending, being dark, warm, and tender" [Гиппиус / Hippius 2001 b, 145-146].
The young man learns the signs of the familiar world of his childhood, wanders in an old park and sits on the balcony of the manor house; the device of his manor world bears signs of the blissful state of paradise, innocent and already leaving, he "sat all evening on the round balcony, from where the river can be seen, the forest in the distance, beyond which the sun falls" [Гиппиус / Hippius 2001 b,148]. Thus, the estate becomes a memory space, where the historical tide is stopped; the time acquires a mythological cyclical nature. "Vladya loved this place near the bathhouse when he was a boy. Then he forgot, and now he walks again, sits on the bathhouse stairs, or on the grass, lies in the sun" [Гиппиус / Hippius 2001 b, 149]. And near the bathhouse he was seduced by the courtyard girl Mavrushka, inviting him to come to this place he had loved since childhood - at night, for love and joy. Fear and horror overcomes a hero who has lost his innocence, he falls ill, his mother and sister come to him from the city. She immediately understands that something irreparable happened to her brother, because they were always close in childhood. The hero tells his sister his story, and together, through the window (like him) they go to look at that place near the bathhouse, near the river where everything happened. Thus, the heroes re-cross the initial border together and this border - between the memory of paradise - childhood in the estate and growing up. Hippius endows the natural world around the estate with animistic-sensual movements - this once again emphasizes that even becoming everyday, the estate space is fundamentally different: "Today a fog rose from the river, long, with long tongues, whiter than white air, all alive, but under the fog below something rustled, chattered, the coronet lamented in a piercing whisper, and the starless sky stood high, motionless, and cold" [Гиппиус / Hippius 2001 b, 168].
Hippius's story "Out of Time" is one of the last on the theme of the depart-
ing, dying manor. The main character - the artist - comes to visit the estate of his distant relatives, two old maids. During a trip to their distant estate, he feels a sense of moving into a completely different space: "It seemed to me that I was in some unknown world. Weird! There are trees, moss, grass, sky and air. In Peterhof, too, trees, moss, grass, sky and air. Meanwhile, I felt that I was seeing all this for the first time" [Гиппиус / Hippius 2001 a, 370]. The time line in their estate world froze about half a century ago - this is emphasized by salon conversations of the period of the 1840s, full of themes of Pisarev and Dobroly-ubov; mistresses of the estate reread and discuss half a century old magazines and books from their old library: "And a strange thing! After a while I did so heartily denied Pisarev and Dobrolyubov as if their articles had just been published and I had to polemicize with them in a magazine tomorrow" [Гиппиус / Hippius 2001 a, 382]. The artist does not dare to draw a picture in the yellowed album of the owners of the estate, it seems to him that the sheets are scattered from decay; the clavichords played by the older sister vaguely remind him of scenes from his distant childhood. The youngest of the aunts - whose youthful portrait hangs on the wall and fascinates the artist with her lovely beauty - flirts with him and falls in love with him. The artist is captured by the frozen time that bound the inhabitants of the estate. Resisting this temporary trap, the artist flees in horror from this mummified and crumbling world.
Thus, the world of estate culture in one of Hippius's later stories turns into a fantastic closed world where time flows according to its own laws, and the estate with its library heritage of ancient manuscripts becomes a repository of the cultural memory of the passing era. It is impossible not to notice that the space and time of the homestead world in Hippius's prose quite obviously has the properties inherent in heterotopy as another space. The world of estate culture exists as a time capsule, more in the consciousness of heroes than as a real-life object. Perhaps this was due to the recognition by Hippius that the world of Turgenev's landowner estate with its world of romantic young ladies, portraits of ancestors, old clavichords, old architecture - all this is destroyed and is becoming a thing of the past.
Thus, the semiosphere of the homestead world in Hippius stories primarily demonstrates the hero's movement to a functionally different space compared to his usual world, where real events can receive a fantastic explanation (the story "The Witch"), and time flows according to its own laws, turning out to be a time capsule (the story "Out of Time"). Actual events taking place both in the metaphorical (memory and living memory) and mythological (false synchronization) time section (stories "Out of Time" and "Two - One"); then the movement of historical time is extremely slow and completely freezes ("Out of Time").
(Translated to English by the author of the article, edited by E.E. Tchougounova-Paulson).
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Elena V. Glukhova, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Candidate of Philology, Senior Researcher. Research interests: Russian literature and culture turn of the 19th-20th centuries; heritage and biographies of Silver Age writers such as Andrei Bely, Alexander Block, Viacheslav Ivanov; mythopoetics of Russian Symbolism; ego-document studies; prosody.
E-mail: [email protected]
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-3847-0369
Глухова Елена Валерьевна, Институт мировой литературы им. А.М. Горького РАН.
Кандидат филологических наук, старший научный сотрудник. Область научных интересов: русская литература и культура рубежа XIX-XX вв.; творчество и биография писателей Серебряного века: Андрея Белого, Александра Блока, Вячеслава Иванова; мифопоэтика русского символизма; стиховедение; поэтика эго-документа.
E-mail: [email protected]
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-3847-0369
