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| Reviews |
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1. Slavonica. Vol. 3/2 (1997), 116–117. There has been a good deal of writing about Marina Tsvetaeva in recent years, especially around 1992, the centenary of her birth. Much of it concerns her biography, understandably, because hers is one of the key narratives of modern Russian literature; but regrettably little has proceeded from sustained wrangling with her poetry. Timo Suni's book, which is the statutory pre-print of a doctoral dissertation, is a welcome exception. He has learned from his wrangling precursors, M.L. Gasparov and Michael Makin; but he evidently completed the work too soon to take into account the brilliant vignette in Catriona Kelly's History of Russian Women's Writing, 1820–1992 and the accompanying anthology. Suni has scrupulously conceptualized his presentation. To begin with, he reviews the theory of composition, gives the reception history of Krysolov, and summarizes the plot 'in his own words' (Gasparov seems to have rehabilitated this procedure, which used to be a no-no). In the body of the book Suni deals in turn with rhythm, style, space and time, characters, and plot. These five major sections are further subdivided: and all the way through no opportunity is lost to pile on the footnotes, some of them very long. In addition, at several points Suni gives lists of possible alternative interpretations, and also diagrams. To my taste the book is over-theorized. As a result of all this, the book is hard work, to put it mildly. But then, so is Tsvetaeva, and due complexity is infinitely preferable to inappropriate smoothing. One technical point: when typesetting Tsvetaeva's texts, it is essential to make a distinction between dash and hyphen; here both are represented as hyphens, in the body of the book and in the complete text of the poem that is helpfully included as an Appendix. I have no serious quarrel with this discussion of the poem's 'mythologism'. Suni's reading will enrich our understanding of what Tsvetaeva was about, with reference to a large number of acknowledged and unacknowledged spheres of reference (sorry, diskursy). I have been mainly concerned with the analysis of Tsvetaeva's versification, and I was happy to discover that Suni's description of Krysolov coincides almost exactly with the results of mine, carried out in 1975–76 but never published. One of the reasons why I did not take my work further was that I could not find an appropriate method for incorporating the higher architectonics of the poem, i.e. the ways in which the text of Krysolov is articulated (as are almost all Tsvetaeva's longer works) at levels higher than the stanza, — in such a way that would take account of all the repetitions and parallelisms, the use of which I take to be a more palpable token of Tsvetaeva's shamanistic mentality than the broader cultural paradigms that Suni puts before us here. I was also defeated by the sheer richness of the poem's phonology, especially as manifested in rhyme. I found solutions to neither of these problems here. Future research may perhaps tackle them; it will certainly be facilitated by the existence of Suni's conscientious, accurate, and penetrating study of this great poem, for my money the supreme single work of Russian satirical literature.
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2. Slavic and East European Journal. Vol. 42/1 (1998), 142–143. Timo Suni's dissertation was published as part of the doctoral degree requirements at the Institute for Russian and East European Studies in Helsinki. As such, the book is naturally more summary than innovative in its contents. Nevertheless, Композиция "Крысолова" и мифологизм М. Цветаевой is a substantial and informative work, albeit a brief one, and worthy of scholars' attention. Suni's presentation of the "state of the art" on research in to Tsvetaeva's long poem Krysolov (1925) nicely integrates the wealth of articles and anthologies that came out in connection with the centennial conferences in 1992, and with that background established he contributes several insightful outlines of the poem's plot and resolution. Suni performs a primarily semiotic reading, including elements of formalism and structuralism — as the summary in english point out. Sections and subsections are numbered (e.g., 2.4.1.); fortunately the author spares us numbered paragraphs, a mannerism that allows constant awareness of the text's organization and easy reference point-by-point but also makes the text difficult to read as any kind of narrative. Suni's skill as a writer and crisp, effective Russian style underline sensitive readings of the poem, as a whole and in fragments. The names Suni cites most often are Lotman and Mints, along with other representatives of the Tartu school and the rich semiotic studies of Tsvetaeva published further west, particularly those by Jerzy Faryno and Svetlana El'nitskaia. Attention to these excellent semiotic studies of Tsvetaeva gains by reference to other approaches — biographical (heavily represented in work on the poet), political and cultural interpretations, and technical studies of her versification. Suni makes as much of Michael Makin's book on Tsvetaeva and the Poetics of Appropriation [New York, 1993], and Catherine Ciepiela's articles on Krysolov, as of the semiotic approach he himself favors. Comfort with scholarship from a variety of styles and disciplines echoes the balanced selection of work from Eastern Europe, Western Europe and North America — just one factor, perhaps in the high quality of much Finnish Slavists' research. Suni makes small valuable points throughout the book, uniting ideas from two separate sources or refining and clarifying points in other scholars' work. Readers will probably find the las section, devoted to Tsvetaeva's siuzhet, the most original and intriguing. Suni's descriptions and diagrams of elements of plot and characterization chosen in binary opposition, and of the progressions between these binaries, are hardly startlingly new, but they set up useful perspectives on this poem and her work in general, while ringing true with accumulated interpretative wisdom and with Tsvetaeva's own declarations about value hierarchies. The end of Krysolov, for example, where the piper drowns the children of Gammel'n, is presented with respect for the visceral upset it produces in some well-intentioned readers, while demonstrating that the "tragedy" fits very well (and causes less pain?) within the categories Suni has set up. As befits a dissertation, the scholarly apparatus is extensive: there is an index of names, and a 41-page bibliography quite up-to-date at the time of publication (1996). The technical quality is excellent; I noted only one error — oddly enough, in the text of Tsvetaeva's poem itself (chapter 1, line 85), which is appended at the end of the volume, based on the Russica edition. Suni has produced an elegantly written work of general value for Tsvetaeva specialists, scholars of twentieth-century Russian poetry, comparativists who read Russian, and any good academic research library.
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3. Slavia – časopis pro slovanskou filologii. Vol. 67/4 (1998), 567–568. Finský Ústav ruska a východní Evropy vydává doktorské disertace, obhájené na finských univerzitách v oblasti široce pojaté slavistiky. Uvedená práce vznikla na Helsinské univerzitě a vyšla naštěstí rusky — ve finštině by v zahraničí zůstala téméř bez odezvy. Poema Krysolov z roku 1925 vznikla téméř celá ve Všenorech u Prahy. Dílo vyšlo tiskem v Praze v eserském časopise Volja Rossii v roce 1926. Hned po vyjití si díla povšiml D. Svjatopolk-Mirskij. Pasternak dostal Krysolova v Moskvě poštou a podle jeho svědectví se věc líbila i N. Tichonovovi, dále Asejevovi, Kirsanovovi a jiným ruským autorům. V Sovětském svazu mohl Krysolov vzjít teprve v roce 1965. P. Antokolskij tehdy považoval dílo ya vrchol tvorby Cvetajevové. Je ovšem třeba podoknout, že cenzura vyškrtla asi desetinu textu oprávněné obavě, že čtenáři si jinak domyslí, že jde o alegorii vábení lidi bolševiky. Sovětska kritika se ostatně snažila interpretovat text jako útok na fašisty. Suni podává přehled dosavadní literatury předmětu a obšírně se věnuje upřesnění terminologie. Zajímavá je kapitola o rytmu v tomto díle (29–56), kde se velmi podrobně analyzuje zvuková stránka textu a uvádějí se statistické údaje. V kapitole pod názvem Stylistika (57–81) se konstatuje, že Krysolov je epická poema, obsahující dramatické scény. Velkou úlohu hrají přitom lyrické pasáže. Na s. 75 se tvrdí, že Krysolov má "karnevalový ráz" a jedná se tudíž o "lyrickou satiru". V další kapitole Prostor a čas (82–92) se argumentuje opozicí "uzavřený svět" a "otevřený svět" a je reč o světě "v čase" a o světě "mimo čas". Cvetajevová používá prostředků parodie, nebot autorka počitá s tim, že je znám přiběh krysaře z Hameln. Jsou zjistitelné prvky autorské (vlastně romantické) ironie (95–99). Zaujme teze o trojí interpretaci hlavního hrdiny (115–125): trickster, skomoroch a Dionysos. Syžet samozřejme nepředstavuje novum, zato zpracování je plné překvapení. Doktorská disertace je velmi dobré úrovně a ukazuje, že ve Finsku vyrůstají rusisté nové generace, kteří mohou závažnými pracemi přispět k rozvoji světové slavistiky.
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4. The Slavonic and East European Review. Vol. 77/2 (1999), 323–324. The present study aims to fill a gap in Tsvetaeva studies and to provide a comprehensive analysis of Tsvetaeva's satirical narrative poem 'The Pied Piper', written in 1925. Previous comments on Tsvetaeva's satirical poem by Etkind, Ciepiela, Makin, Razumovskaya and Elnitsky suggest that Tsvetaeva's image of rats is double-edged. In the view of these scholars, Tsvetaeva targeted both German philistines and Soviet Bolsheviks. Suni's book is a published version of a PhD thesis prepared at the University of Helsinki. It may be treated as a complementary study to Catherine Ciepiela's PhD comparing Tsvetaeva's 'The Pied Piper' with Blok's 'The Twelwe'. Suni's analysis turns into a discussion of Tsvetaeva's treatment of popular European mythology in general, rather than into a focused study of Tsvetaeva's appropriation of a German legend. The book includes an Introduction, six chapters and a Conclusion. It discusses the rhythmical and metrical elements of Tsvetaeva's poem, its stylistic qualities, spatial and temporal categories, as well as its plot and characters. To a great extent the six chapters of this study set six disparate directions which future investigations into Tsvetaeva's poem may choose to follow. Perhaps the most coherent and innovative part of this book can be found in part 2.4. (pp. 100–126) focusing on characters. Suni compares the main protagonist — the Pied Piper — to Russian fools (skomorokhi), to tricksters and to Dionysus suggesting that Tsvetaeva's protagonist possesses features of all of them. Suni successfully demonstrates Tsvetaeva's aesthetic and spiritual links with writings of Ivanov and Nietzsche that favour the Dionysian line of interpretation. It is defined here as the Dionysian myth (mythologema). In its theoretical framework Suni's study relies heavily on the work of Russian semioticians including Toporov, Lotman and Mints and partly on Bakhtin's writings on carnival. Yet Suni's dependence on Russian structuralist theory evaporates very quickly when it becomes necessary to extend the analysis to a broader context, especially in relation to the role of irony in Tsvetaeva's poem. This is especially evident on page 98 when the scholar poses the question of whether Mints's definitions of Romanticism and Modernism offer any differentation between the two movements. On another occasion Suni suggests that the narrator's self-representation is multi-faceted and is beyond definitions (pp. 72–74). It would have been appropriate at this point to refer to Barthes's description of postmodernist narrative as authorless. It is also surprising not to find in such a study a clear definition of literary myth and theme. Several French scholars including Raymond Trousson, Pierre Albouy and Pierre Brunel produce a useful clarification of this term. Thus, Brunel explains that 'If there is no extra meaning added to what has been handed down by tradition, there is no literary myth, just a theme or subject' (Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes. London and New York: Routledge, 1996, p xiii). Clearly in the case of Tsvetaeva we should be talking about literary myth since her appropriation of the German legend and the Dionysian myth russifies them. Chapter 2.3.4. 'Text and the romantic irony' (pp. 95–99) establishes close links between the German Romantic tradition and Tsvetaeva's Romantic imagery (especially on p. 97–98). It is surprising however that Suni fails to mention Tsvetaeva's links with Hoffman. Although she did not openly pay homage to Hoffman in any of her poems, we should not underestimate the fact that Tsvetaeva's son was given a family name Mur (that is he was named after Hoffman's famous male cat–protagonist). It is especially important for the ideological stances and imagery of the poem 'The Pied Piper' because Tsvetaeva refers directly to her son in Chapter I and inserts a note that her son was born while she was working intensively on her satirical pem. It is also difficult to understand how Suni could reconcile two incompatible views on the origin of Tsvetaeva's logaoedic metre (pp. 34–35). Thus Suni seems to agree with Kholshevnikov about the links between Tsvetaeva's logaoedic metre and 'dolniks' (prevalent in Russian folk songs) while claiming that Etkind is right, too, noticing the profound difference between Tsvetaeva's 'restricted logaoedic speech' (p. 35) and the flexibility that accentuated metre allows. According to Suni, forty-four per cent of 'The Pied Piper' has logaoedic metre. This aspect of Sunis's study needs further re-assessment. (My personal interpretation differs in many of the examples Suni cites in the study.) It seems that the presence of German phrases and words in Tsvetaeva's poem should be taken into consideration also. Suni's study contains many useful observations on Russian modernism. Its strength lies in the attempt to consider Tsvetaeva's poem in the context of European cultural tradition It will be of interest to scholars of European modernism and of comparative literature. It does not break new ground, however, in Tsvetaeva studies.
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