Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia

Envy and Authorship in the 1920s

Inbunden, Engelska, 2020

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In Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia, Yelena Zotova argues that the concept of envy underwent a peculiar transformation in the Russian Modernist prose of the 1920s due to a series of radical shifts in societal values, with each subsequent change thwarting Russia’s volatile axiological hierarchy. Industriousness and austerity, inferior to playful genius in Pushkin’s “Mozart and Salieri,” became virtues, while the intrinsic value of nonutilitarian art was officially nullified by the Bolshevik state.Consequently, a new literary type emerged, and envy, described as “wingless desire” by Russia’s chief poet Alexander Pushkin, obtained new ownership as the envied became the envier. Superimposing twentieth-century theories of envy onto Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Author and Hero in the Aesthetic Activity” (1923), Zotova proposes that Salieri’s envy could be the wingless embryo of the Bakhtinian authorship.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2020-12-10
Mått162 x 241 x 27 mm
Vikt612 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieCrosscurrents: Russia's Literature in Context
Antal sidor296
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN9781793605580

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Table of ContentsA Note on Translation and TransliterationAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction: The Hermeneutic Challenge of EnvyChapter 1: When Author Envies HeroChapter 2: Wingless Desire: Mozart and Salieri as Author and HeroChapter 3: A Purgatory for the Hero: Iurii Olesha’s EnvyChapter 4: The Author in Hades: Konstantin VaginovChapter 5: The Surplus of Vision in the Works of Alexander GrinAfterword: Envy, Conscience, and TasteBibliographyAbout the Author

Wingless Desire is a trove of fresh insights for Bakhtin enthusiasts and adepts of Russian Modernism. A book for specialists, in order to appreciate the full scope of Zotova’s argument, it is helpful for the reader to have some familiarity with Bakhtin to begin with. That said, Zotova’s arguments are lucid, at times even striking, and parts of the analysis virtually crackle with brilliance. Zotova’s monograph is an accomplishment to envy.