Boym - 1996 - Estrangement as a Lifestyle Shklovsky and Brodsky

8/12/2019 Boym - 1996 - Estrangement as a Lifestyle Shklovsky and Brodsky

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Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and BrodskyAuthor(s): Svetlana BoymSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 17, No. 4, Creativity and Exile: European/American Perspectives II(Winter, 1996), pp. 511-530Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773211.

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Estrangement s a Lifestyle:Shklovskyand BrodskySvetlana BoymComparative iterature, arvard

Abstract The essay reflects on nostalgia and estrangement, on exile and home-coming, on modernistpoetics and cosmopolitan identities.Through unconventionalmodernist autobiographies,Victor Shklovsky'sZoo;or,Letters otaboutLoveand ThirdFactory, nd Joseph Brodsky's"Less Than One" and "In a Room and a Half," theessay traces a cultural history of "estrangement"-from the avant-garde and for-malist "art as a device" to a dissident artof survival.The exilic autobiographiesoffera counterpoint to Benedict Anderson'sanalogy between the narrative of individualbiography and the "imagined community" of a nation. The essay does not limititself to the "poetics"of exile but looks at how the actual experience of exile reviseswriters' metaphors and creates a new bilingual consciousness-that of a prodigalson who never comes back.

The word nostalgiacomes from two Greek roots-nostos (home) and algia(longing) -yet this composite word did not originate in ancient Greece. Itis only pseudo-Greek, or nostalgically Greek. The nostalgic disorder wasfirst diagnosed by seventeenth-century Swiss doctors and detected in mer-cenary soldiers (Lowenthal 1985: 11).' This contagious modern disease ofhomesickness-la maladie du pays-was treated in a seventeenth-centuryscientific manner with leeches, hypnotic emulsions, opium, and a trip tothe Alps. Nostalgia was not regarded as destiny, nor as part of the human1. I am grateful to Paul Holdengraber for sharing with me the origins of nostalgia.On lamaladiedupaysand maldusiecle ee also Levin 1966: 62-81 andJankelevich 1974.PoeticsToday17:4 (Winter 1996) Copyright ? 1996 by the Porter Institute for Poetics andSemiotics.

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512 PoeticsToday17:4condition, but only as a passing malaise. In the nineteenth century, thegeographic longing was supersededby the historical one; maladie du paysturned into mal dusiecle,but the two ailments sharedmany symptoms.I will not suggest a therapy for nostalgia, but only its provisional clas-sification. Affectionately parodying Roman Jakobson's theory of the twotypes of aphasia, one could speak of two types of nostalgia. The first onestressesnostos, emphasizing the return to that mythical place somewhereon the island of Utopia, with classical porticos, where the "greaterpatria"has to be rebuilt. This nostalgia is reconstructiveand collective. The sec-ond type puts the emphasis on algia, and does not pretend to rebuild themythical place called home; it is "enamoured of distance, not of the ref-erent itself" (Stewart 1984: 145).This nostalgia is ironic, fragmentary,andsingular.If utopian nostalgia sees exile, in all the literal and metaphoricalsenses of the word, as a definite fall from grace that should be corrected,ironic nostalgia accepts (if it does not enjoy)the paradoxesof exile and dis-placement. Estrangement, both as an artistic device and as a way of life,is part and parcel of ironic nostalgia. Its nostos could exist in the pluralas geographical, political, and aesthetic homes. This essay is a part of myinvestigation of twentieth-centuryideas about home--from metaphorical,transcendental homelessness to literal loss of home and the relationshipbetween home and nationhood, home and culture, homesickness and thesicknessof being home.Benedict Anderson in ImaginedCommunities1991[1983])suggests a con-nection between the history of the nation and individual biography:bothare seen as narrativesof identity and personhood that sprang from obliv-ion, estrangement, and loss of the memory of home. In a lyrical pas-sage, Anderson draws on a developmental metaphor of the adolescentwho wishes to forget childhood and the adult who desires to reinvent itby looking at an old photo of a child who supposedly resembles him orher.2Anderson proposes thinking about nationalism anthropologically (inthe order of kinship, religion, or culture),rather than ideologically (in theorder of liberalism and fascism). (One could also examine liberalism andfascism anthropologically to see what kinds of imagined communities theypromote.) What is important for the national imagination is not history,but biography, not scientific facts, but collective myths. However, Ander-son treats "biography"merely as a popular nineteenth-century genre, aconfessional narrativethat "begins with the circumstances of parents andgrandparents."What he leaves out are the stories of internal and external2. "How many thousand days passed between infancy and early adulthood vanish beyonddirect recall How strange it is to need another's help to learn that this nakedbaby in the yel-lowish photograph sprawled happily on the rug or cot is you " (Anderson 1991[1983]: 204).



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Boym* Estrangements a Lifestyle 513exiles, misfitsand mixed bloods who offerdigressionsand detours from themythical biography of a nation. The story of their consciousness does notbegin at home, but rather with their departurefrom home. In fact, manymodernist autobiographieswritten in the twentieth century problematizethe three roots of the word auto-bio-graphy-self,ife, and writing-by re-sisting a coherent narrativeof identity, for they refuse to allow the life of asingle individual to be subsumed in the destiny of a collective. Instead ofcuring alienation-which is what the imagined community of the nationproposes-they use alienation itself as a personal antibiotic against the an-cestral disease of home in order to reimagine it, offering us new ways ofthinking about home, politics, and culture. Modernist texts have no placein Anderson's account of the national literaryimagination.3

My examples will be two stories of modern exiles and authors of un-conventional modernist autobiographies-Victor Shklovsky and JosephBrodsky.Both addressedestrangement and nostalgia, and both, at differ-ent historical moments, left Soviet Russia. For Shklovsky this departureturns out to be a round-trip:from his Berlin exile back to the fatherland,where he is forced to become a "spiritualexile," to denounce the formal-ist theories of estrangement, and then to practice them between the lines.Brodsky,on the other hand, is forced to leave Soviet Russia to become anaturalizedAmerican.Yet he never leaves his poetic home of an imaginedLeningradianclassicism and the boundaries of the timeless poetic empire.The two stories are not antipodes, but two different bifurcations of cul-tural fate, two reflections on the fate of Russianmodernism and its imag-ined communities. They reveal a twisted relationship between creativityand unfreedom, art and compromise, theoretical practice and physicalsurvival.The autobiographicalnarratives of these two theoristsand practi-tioners of estrangement share one reference the Marxist-Leninistsloganthat became an ideological commonplace and a cliche of Soviet every-day life: "Material being determines consciousness."This slogan revisesHegelian alienation and emphasizes the primacy of matter over spirit.Thetwo exiled writers use this ideological commonplace to narrate their ownstories of how material existence relates to consciousness.

Estrangement here will be seen as both an artistic device and a wayof life. I will not only address the poetics of exile, but also the notions ofexilic self-fashioningand arts of survival.Exile cannot be treatedas a mere3. Whatcharacterizesheimagined ommunity fnations nAnderson'sccounts a desireforthenonarbitrarinessf thesign,anda search or a sacredorprivate anguageproper othatcommunity.Butisn'tthisdesire ornonarbitrarinessf the signexactlywhatRomanJakobsondefinedaspoetry?What s, then,therelationship etween henonconsanguineouspoeticcommunity ndthecommunitymaginedbyculturalnationalism?



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514 Poetics Today17:4

metaphor--otherwise one could fall into the somewhat facile argumentthat every intellectual is always alreadya "spiritualexile."Rather, it is theother way around: actual experience of exile offers an ultimate test to thewriter'smetaphorsand theories of estrangement.The myth of the prodigalson returning to his fatherland, forgiven but never forgotten, is rewrittenthroughout these texts, without its happy traditionaldenouement.Yet the modern disease of nostalgia, even when its symptoms are hid-den, has many side effects. The home that one leaves and "a home awayfrom home,"which one creates,sometimes have more in common than onewould like to admit. A portable home away from home, which an emigreferociouslyguards, preservesan imprint of his or her culturalmotherland.The exiles might be bilingual, but rarely can they get rid of an accent. Afew misplaced prepositions, a few missing articles, definite or indefinite,betray the syntax of the mother tongue. While in the traditional biogra-phy of the imagined community of a nation exiles are the ones who "losttheir souls," in the postmodern story exiles embody the dream of "madpolyphony, for which every language is a foreign one" (Scarpetta 1981;Todorov 1992: 16-26). In contrast to those alternatives,which offer eithera claustrophobia of strictly guarded borders or a metaphorical euphoriaof their total dissolution, my modern parables tell of painstakingjourneysthat celebrate the limited practices of estrangement and also reveal themany defense mechanisms against polyphonic madness, not allowing usto turn foreignnessinto another euphoric poetic and theoretical trope.External exile from Soviet Russia has additional complications, asidefrom the obvious political dangers. In the tradition of Russian philosophyfrom Chaadaev to Berdiaev, transcendental homelessness is seen not as afeature of modernist consciousness, but as a part of Russian national iden-tity. Metaphorical exile (usually away from the transient, everyday exis-tence) is a prerequisitefor the wanderings of the "Russiansoul"; as a re-sult, actual exile from Mother Russia is viewed as unprecedented culturalbetrayal. For a writer, it is more than just a betrayal; it is a heresy. Afterthe nineteenth century,literature became a form of Russian civic religion.Yet the cosmopolitan ideal of a "republicof letters"is foreign to Russianculture. Rather, there is a Russian empire of letters, and the writer is asubject of that empire. Hence exile is a cultural transgressionthat threat-ens a writer'svery survival,both physical and spiritual.VictorShklovskyand the Poetics of UnfreedomVictor Shklovsky,best known in the West as one of the founding fathersof Russian formalism and the theorist of estrangement (ostranenie),was



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Boym* Estrangements a Lifestyle 515

briefly a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and in 1918votedfor the restoration of the short-lived Russian Constitutional Assembly. In1922, during the show trial of Socialist Revolutionaries, Shklovsky wasdenounced by an informer and had to flee the country to avoid imprison-ment (Sheldon 1977:vii). Having narrowlyescaped arrest,the writer foundhimself in Berlin, where he began to compose a series of unconventionalautobiographical texts- TheSentimentalourney,an account of Shklovsky'strials and tribulations during the Civil War, and Zoo;or,LettersNot aboutLove,an ironic epistolary romance based on the author's correspondencewith Elsa Triolet. The theorist'sepistolary love is unrequited;the only let-ter to which he receives a positive response is the last. This last letter,how-ever, is no longer addressed to a woman but to the Central Committee ofthe Communist Party.Here Shklovskybegs to be allowed to returnto Rus-sia: "Icannot live in Berlin. I am bound by my entireway of life, by all myhabits [vsem bytom i navykami] to the Russia of today.... My nostalgia[toska]n Berlin is as bitter as carbide dust"(1990: 346).4Is there a connec-tion between this old-fashioned nostalgia and the theory of estrangement,or do they contradicteach other?

The theory of estrangementis often seen as an artisticdeclarationof in-dependence, the declaration of art's autonomy from the everyday.Yet inShklovsky's"Art as a Device" (1917),estrangement appears more as a de-vice of mediation between art and life.5By makingthings strange,the artistdoes not simply displace them from an everyday context into an artisticframework;he also helps to "return sensation" to life itself, to reinvent theworld, to experience it anew. Estrangement is what makes art artistic, butby the same token, it makes everydaylife lively, or worth living. It appearsthat Shklovsky's"Art as a Device" harbors the romantic and avant-gardedream of a reverse mimesis: everyday life can be redeemed if it imitatesart, not the other way around. So the device of estrangement could bothdefine nd defy he autonomy of art.

Tracing the genealogy of estrangement, Shklovsky also questions theautonomy and unity of the "national language." Ostranenie means morethan distancingand making strange;it is also dislocation, depaysement.tranis the root of the Russianword for country-strana. Shklovskyclaims thataccordingto Aristotle,"poetic language"has to have the character of a for-eign language (chuzhezemnyi):For he Assyriansit was Sumerian, Latin formedieval poetry, Arabism in literary Persian, old Bulgarian as a founda-4. I use Richard Sheldon's translations with slight modifications. For an interesting accountof irony and eroticism in Shklovskysee Steiner 1985: 27-44.5. See Striedter 1989, Erlich 1981,and Steiner 1984. On the connection between the theoryof estrangement and romantic aesthetics see Todorov 1985: 130-48.



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516 PoeticsToday17:4tion of the Russianliterarylanguage"(Shklovsky1929: 21; my translation).He goes on to say that Pushkin and Tolstoy used Russian almost as a for-eign language for the French-speakingRussian nobility. Hence, the earlytheory of estrangementalreadyquestioned the idea of language as organicand, in the Russiancontext, the strict opposition of Russia and the West.Now that formalism and structuralismare often perceived as safely old-fashioned, we could defamiliarize some of the critical cliches about lan-guage, the autonomy of art, and art as a device. In fact, early modernisttheories of language developed in response to the reemergence of neo-romantic nationalism. In the least-quoted chapter of Saussure's CoursenGeneralLinguistics, e writes that the sign is not organicallymotivated, thatthere is no connection between language and blood (1966: 222-23). TheSaussurian sign is motivated only by cultural convention. Conceived onthe eve of WorldWar I, this kind of structurallinguistics or poetics of es-trangement presented an alternative to official patriotism and suggesteddifferentways to create imagined communities.

Shklovsky does not follow Anderson's proposed model of autobiogra-phy, yet nostalgia for an imagined community and reflection on estrange-ment and exile are his central preoccupations. LettersNot aboutLoveare,of course, letters about love and an example of a modernist exilic lover'sdiscourse in the paradoxical style of literary montage. Alya, the "newEloise"of the formalist lover,prohibitshim from speakingabout love andbegs him to discuss his literary theory instead. Shklovskypresents him-self as a biographer and theorist against his will. The letters promise notto speak about love, yet they breakmany promises. They both fictionalizeand resistfictionalization.The text could be comparedto some theoretico-autobiographical writings of Walter Benjamin, like One-WayStreetandMoscowDiary,dedicated to or addressedto the Latvian actress and writerAsja Laciswho eludes and escapes him.6In Shklovsky'saccount, his unre-quited love for Alya mirrorshis relations with Berlin. He never ceases todramatize the irredeemable cultural differencebetween them, presentingAlya as "a woman of European,ratherthan Russianculture."In fact, theyboth come from a very similarbackgroundof Western-orientedurban in-telligentsia.76. The difference being, of course, that "Alya"writes back and Shklovskypublishes her let-ters verbatim. Ironically, Maxim Gorky,while praising Shklovsky'sfictionalized epistolaryautobiography, particularly appreciated Alya's letters. Hence, she inspired him to speakabout literature, instead of love, and he, in turn, directly or indirectly, inspired her to be-come a novelist. Shklovsky'saesthetic (and pathetic) framing of her letters took them out ofthe everyday context and rendered them literary,encouraging their author, Elsa Triolet, tobecome a writer of fiction.7. Later their fates radically diverged, revealing many more political and literary ironies.



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Boym* Estrangements a Lifestyle 517It turns out that the theory of estrangement and actual exile do not

necessarily go together. Berlin, where Shklovsky found himself in 1922,might seem to be an ideal place for the modernist critic. (Shklovskywasone-quarter German but did not speakthe language.) It was the center ofthe German avant-garde,frequentedby many Russian and Europeanart-ists, where the paths of Bely, Berdiaev,Nabokov, Kandinsky, and othersmight have crossed. Yet Shklovskyperceives the safe haven of West Euro-pean everyday existence (which, for an impoverished emigre, was hardlyvery comfortable) as a major threat to his survival as an intellectual andas a Russian theorist and practitioner of estrangement. In one of his let-ters to Alya, he describes the "literaryenvironment" of the exiled formal-ists. The protagonistsare Roman Jakobson and PeterBogatyrev,the latterthe author of a pioneering formalist analysis of costume and marionettetheater.

Europebreaksus,we arehot-tempered ere,we takeeverythingeriously....Roman ook Peter o the restaurant; etersat surroundedbythe windows hatwere not scratched,n the midst of all kinds of food, wine and women. Hebeganto cry.He couldn't ake t anymore.Everydayife[byt]heredefrostsus.Wedon'tneed it. ... But thenagain,for thecreationofparallellisms,nythinggoes. (Shklovsky1990 [1923]: 297)European everyday life could be fine for an artistic device, but not for

living. Shklovsky proudly proclaims that he will not exchange his craft(thatof a literarytheorist)for the Europeansuit, as if the two were incom-patible and one could not practice formalist theory and wear a decent suit.While Shklovsky'sletters are about allegories of the homelessness of aRussian intellectual, Alya's are often about domesticity and intimate re-lationshipswith her surroundings,which are not defined in national termsat all. In fact, the opening line of her first letter is the exact opposite ofShklovsky'sBerlin nostalgia: "I settled comfortably [uzhilas']in my newapartment"(ibid.). But it is precisely her comfort that makes her episto-lary lover uncomfortable:"I don't complain about you, Alya. But you aretoo much of a woman. ... In the store a woman flirts with things. Sheloves everything.This psychology is European"(ibid.: 306). The modern-ist lover is jealous of her flirtationwith foreign things. It appears that thewoman-expatriateloves her foreigndress,while her male counterpartcan-not fit into a Europeansuit.Unlike Shklovsky,Elsa did not return to Russia. She emigrated to France and married LouisAragon, who was then still a surrealist. When Shklovskywas forced to denounce formalismin the Soviet Union and many fellow supporters of leftist art were executed or forced intosilence, she would become a great supporterof the Stalinist Soviet Union in France.



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518 PoeticsToday17:4Shklovsky's Russian Berlin is compared to the realm of shadows, aHades of sorts. Real life is elsewhere. In Shklovsky'sRussianBerlin "thereis no force of gravitation, no movement. Russian Berlin does not go any-where; it does not have a destiny." He writes: "We are refugees. Noteven refugees, but fugitives [vybezhentsy]nd now we are 'house-sitters.'

[sidel'tsy]" ibid.: 318). Unwittingly, Shklovsky repeats here some of thecliches reiteratedby several generations of Russian intellectuals and trav-elers in Western Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth century-Westernizers and Slavophiles, philosophers of the Russian idea and, sur-prisingly,formalists. Europeanculture is identified with "apetit bourgeoisideal of a little house and a cup of cabbage soup, a dress for the daughterand school for the son" (Herzen 1986 [1865]: 353-56). "Westernmercan-tile civilization"is seen as a stable culture that celebrates the cult of thingsand domesticity,while Russiais the land of"transcendental homelessness,"where byt (everydayexistence) is opposed to bytie spiritual,revolutionary,or poetic being). The utopian communal home of the future can be builtonly in the land of spiritual homelessness. Estrangement might well be adevice in art and life, but it has to signifyculturally.In TheSentimentalJour-neyShklovskyremarksthat, after the revolution, Russianlife nearly turnedinto art (1990 [1923]:271).8Perhapshe realized that in Europe the dreamof reversemimesiswould never come true because, for better or for worse,everydaylife would remaineverydaylife, no more and no less. It would notyield to the Russian artistic device. Shklovsky'sromantic and avant-gardeconception of aesthetics relies on the high prestige of art, and its intimatelink to the conception of national identity. In this intellectual tradition"Russia" s not merelya geographical or ethnic unitybut an imagined com-munity of fellow intellectuals and artists for whom art is a civic religion,even if its rituals became modernist. In his imagined Europe, the Russiantheorist feels himself as another lost emigre with imperfect table manners.In the last letter of Zoo,addressedto the Central Committee of the Com-munist Party of the Soviet Union, Shklovsky declares that the addresseeof his prior correspondence, Alya, was not a real person, but only "a real-ization of a metaphor."The "woman of European culture"is killed intofiction. But the vertiginous ironies and metamorphoses of the text leaveus wondering whether the "Central Committee of the Communist Party"is also only a metaphor. But the writer had to restrain his literary gamesonce he returned from exile to his estrangedmotherland.In his postexilic text, ThirdFactory1977[1926]), Shklovskyproposes notto speakabout estrangement, but ratherto theorize about unfreedom. He8. Shklovskyhere refers to his conversation with Boris Eikhenbaum.



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Boym* Estrangements a Lifestyle 519tries to think of unfreedom not as the opposite of creative activity, but asits necessary precondition. He proposes to demonstrate that most greatliterature from Cervantes to Dostoevsky was created under the circum-stances of unfreedom-understood in the broad sense of social, political,and economic restrictions. The Marxist dictum that was turned into aSoviet commonplace is creativelyrewrittenby Shklovsky:"Materialbeingdetermines consciousness but conscience remains unsettled" (Shklovsky1926:15).9This unsettled consciousness is dramatizedthroughoutthe text.ThirdFactory pens with an anecdote about MarkTwain, who wrote let-ters in duplicate:the firstone was destined forhis addresseeand the secondfor the writer's private archive. In the second letter he recorded what hereally thought. This is perhaps the earliest formulation of Soviet double-speak. It will become a foundational fiction of the Soviet intelligentsia-the Aesopian language, the way of reading between the lines and under-standing one another with half-words. Between the 1930s and the 198os,this language would bind together the imagined community of Soviet in-telligentsia.The key formalist idea of "laying bare the device" has a paradoxicalhistory in the Soviet context. After the revolution and civil war, defamil-iarizationturned into a fact of life, while the everydaymanner of existenceand the maintenance of bare essentialsbecame exotic. Moreover,the prac-tice of aesthetic estrangementhad become politically suspect. In her diaryof 1927,Lidiia Ginzburg(literarycritic and Shklovsky'sstudent)observed:"The merry times of the laying bare the device have passed (leaving us areal writer- Shklovsky).Now is the time when one has to hide the deviceas far as one can"(1989: 59; my translation).

Shklovskyconstructshis new autobiographicalventure as a montage ofanecdotes and aphorismswhose multiple ironies do not allow the readerto establish a single stable meaning. It could be read as an enactment ofpolitical, personal, and artisticcompromise. In the text, amusing and im-personal storytellingalternateswith privateconfessionsintended for someimaginary"gentlereader," ollowed by shrill declarations to the "comradegovernment"that from now on is perceived as the writer'spermanent ad-dressee. One no longer needs to address letters to the "comrade govern-ment";"the comrade government reads them anyway."ThirdFactorydiscusses three kinds of home, not all of which would besubjects of nostalgia. Shklovsky'smetaphor for home is not organic butrather productionist: home is one of the "factories."The first factory is9. Two different Russianwords are used-soznanie in the firstcase and sovest'inthe second.Sovest's distinctly Russian moral consciousness, while soznanies connected to knowledgeand rationality.



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520 Poetics Today 17:4childhood and school, the second is the formalist Circle OPOYAZ, andthe third is, literally, the Third Factory of State Cinema Studios, whereShklovskywas officially employed, but it also standsfor postrevolutionarySoviet life.The firstfactory-childhood and school-are hardly idealized.Shklovskydeclares his mixed blood and eclectic middle-class background,with German, Russian, and Jewish grandparents, and undermines thefamiliar Russian trope of the happy childhood and the lost Eden, as it isrepresented in Aksakov,Tolstoi, and others. There is no family garden,no idyllic estate in the countryside; instead, Shklovsky'sfamily purchaseda dacha;a small vacation place that put them permanently in debt. Inthe first factory the child felt quite displaced; later he was thrown out ofschools and universities; thus he could be placed on the same list withLukacs, Benjamin, Barthes, and other celebrated twentieth-century theo-rists who never completed their doctoral dissertations.It is the "second factory,"the formalist circle, that became Shklovsky'strue home and most beloved imagined community that he missed in Ber-lin. He is particularlynostalgic for the early years of OPOYAZ, the homeof continuous conversation, collaborative work, friendship, and the col-lective intellectual labor of theoretical estrangement. By the mid-192osthe formalists were under attack on all sides by Marxists and traditional-ists, whom Shklovskycalled the makersof "red restoration."Among otherthings, formalistsand constructivistswere accused of being "capitalistsandspiritual emigres."So the exile returns to his homeland only to be called a"spiritualemigre"-one of the worst insults in the Soviet Russian context.The third factory of the Soviet fatherland did not embrace its formalistprodigal son. To describe the current situation of the formalist "secondfactory,"Shklovsky tells a story about the "Flax Factory"in the chapter"On the Freedom of Art."

Flax.Thisis no advertisement,'mnotemployed t the Flax Center hesedays.At the momentI am more nterestednpitch.Intapping rees o death.That ishowturpentines obtained.From he tree'spointofview, t is ritualmurder.The samewithflax.Flax, if it hada voice,wouldshriekas it'sbeing processed. t is takenby headand erked romtheground.Bytheroot.It is sownthickly-oppressed,so thatit willbe notvigorousbutpuny.Flaxrequires ppression ...I wantfreedom.Butif I get it, I'll go lookforunfreedom t the hands of a woman and a pub-lisher. (Shklovsky977 1926]:45)The flax factory offers an interesting allegory.The author tries to per-suade himself that the difference between freedom and unfreedom is only



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Boym* Estrangements a Lifestyle 521a matter of point of view, yet one thing clearly emerges from this painful,ironic tour de force: his "conscienceremainsunsettled"and very aware ofthe "shrieks andjerks"in the process of social production and the adapta-tion to "oppression."At the end of Shklovsky'spostexilic autobiography,the "thirdfactory"turns from an object of studyinto the author'sjudge:

Takeme, thirdfactoryof lifeBut don'tputme in thewrongguild.Whateverhappens, hough,I have some insurance:good health. So far,myheart has borne even the thingsI haven'tdescribed. t hasnot broken;t hasnotenlarged. (Ibid.:98)What might strike us in this quotation is a gradual slippage of images.The "Third Factory,"which initially referred to a specific Soviet institu-tion, has become a metaphor: first, for early Stalinist Soviet life, and thenfor life as such. Is Shklovsky'stheoretical autobiography an avant-gardetwist on the old Russianromantic drama of art and life? Or is it a political

allegory of the specificSoviet transformationof intellectual life?Shklovskythe ironistgives us two versions of the story:the first turns unfreedom (likeestrangement before it) into a device and a precondition for art making,not exclusive to the Soviet context. The second turns estrangement froman artistic device into a technique for survival in the Soviet Russia of thelate 192os. ThirdFactorys not only about literary production; it is alsoabout the "production"of the Soviet intellectual.

Shklovsky'stwo autobiographical texts end with a series of "ostensiblesurrenders."Yet in spite of continuous attacks on his work and the officialdemands of narrative and ideological coherence, the devices of Shklov-sky's texts remain almost unchanged. In his textual practices Shklov-sky never betrays the "second factory." He remains the great theorist-storytellerwho, like WalterBenjamin, speaksin elaborate parables, full ofself-contradiction, in a unique style of Russian formalist baroque. Shklov-sky's two "surrenders"could also be read as affirmationsof the invisibleexilic retreat of an ironist and a theorist. This exilic retreat between thetorturedlines could only be carved through the secret rituals of the nearlyextinct "formalistguild."Nadezhda Mandel'shtam commented on Shklovsky'swork in the actual"Third Factory of the Goskino-State Cinema":"Amongthe writers de-clared outside the law-not openly but hiddenly, as they always did inour country, was Shklovsky.He hid in the Film Factory the way Jews inHungary hid in the Catholic monasteries"(Mandel'shtam 1972:271).Thecomparison with Jews hiding during WorldWar II appears anachronisticyet strikingly appropriate.Jews figureprominently in Shklovsky'sparablesand anecdotes, especially in TheSentimental urney.There is a story about



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522 Poetics Today 17:4the pogrom his grandmother experienced and a story of a young Jewishartisttrying hard to adapt to the violence of Red Army life and to becomeSoviet rather than Jewish-only to be insulted constantly as a "Jew."InThirdFactoryhere is a strange refrain, "Forgetthe Jews." In his chapterabout his fellow ex-formalist Osip Brik, Shklovskywrites:

Everyyearon a certainday,theJewsstandat thetablewith staff n hand-signifyingheirreadiness o leave.Forget heJews.Let us leave. (Shklovsky977 1926]:34)The ritual celebration of exile (possibly a reference to Passover) isevoked by Shklovsky in passing as an obsessive memory. He was not a

practicingJew and theJews would soon be forgotten, or rathereliminated,from Soviet literature. (The word Jew, in fact, would appear in print onlyvery rarelyafter the late 1940os.) ut those "forgottenJews"would continueto haunt the writer who would no longer be able to leave and perform hisexilic ritual.

The theorist of unfreedom became a persona non grata for the thirtyyears following the publication of ThirdFactory.He was forced publicly todenounce formalism, but was still accused of being a spiritual emigre andlater a rootless cosmopolitan-for his essay "South West" on the literatureof Odessa and its Western connections. He was lucky to avoid arrest andthe tragic fate of many of his contemporaries and fellow formalists andconstructivists.Rehabilitated and published again in the 196os, Shklovskyinspiredthe next generation of intellectualswho appreciatedhis ironic saltomortale.While Shklovsky'sformalistyearswere forgotten together with theword, traces of his subversiveculturalmemory persisted.Did the formalistOrpheus ever remember thejourney into the Hades of RussianBerlin? Orwas actual exile not really a way out at that time? Perhapshe could havetheorized the market of unfreedom with Adorno, or become an Ameri-can academic like Roman Jakobson. But responsible theorists should notspeculate about unrealized twists of plot. They only try to see how fictionis made, not how life is made.

Brodsky:Poetics of LeningradClassicismBrodsky'scultural fate might appear to be the opposite of Shklovsky's;hewas perceived as a kind of cultural martyr,arrestedby the KGB, sent toprison, and later forced into exile. And here his poetic fate makes a radicalswing: from a poet of the resistance he turns into a poet of the establish-ment in the United States, a poet laureate and a Nobel prizewinner.From Shklovsky's letters not about love we move to Brodsky's auto-



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biography that is not about life: "Awriter's biography is in his twists oflanguage" (Brodsky 1986: 3). Moreover, in Brodsky's case, his autobiog-raphy was in the twist of a foreign language, since his autobiographicalessays were written in English. From the outset, Brodsky defies the ideaof the conventional "developmental" biography that served as a model forAnderson. He seeks a different temporality and a logic that does not con-form to calendar chronology or conventional developmental narratives.Brodskyreveals that his firstsignificantmemory is the discoveryof the "artof estrangement":

I remember,orinstance, hatwhenI was about enor eleven t occurred o methat Marx'sdictum hat"existenceonditions onsciousness" as trueonlyforas longas it takesconsciousnesso acquire he artof estrangement;hereafter,consciousnesss on its own and can both conditionand ignorethe existence.(1986:3)"Artof estrangement"became a dissident art; in the Soviet artisticcon-text of the 196os, estrangement represented a resistance to sovietization.The Marxist slogan shaped several generations of Soviet dissidents of

alienation; yet the ghost of that Soviet "material existence" that Brodskyritually exorcises from his poetics leaves its traces throughout his oeuvre.If, in Shklovsky,the homeland was a factory, in Brodskyit is an empire-a First, Second, or Third Rome and its "eternal"classical poetics.This classical poetics, however, has a distinct local color. There aretwo key architectural metaphors in Brodsky-the "room and a half"and the "Greek portico." The former refers to Leningrad's interiors-its crowded communal apartments.The latter evokes Leningradian-SaintPetersburgian imperial facades. Brodskywrites in the essay dedicated toone of his favoritepoets, Osip Mandel'shtam:

Civilization s the sum total of different ulturesanimatedby a commonspiri-tualnumerator, nd its mainvehicle-speaking bothliterallyandmetaphori-cally-is translation.The wanderingof a Greekporticointo the latitudeoftundrasa translation. (Ibid.:139)10"Civilization"in Brodsky is not merely a canon but a way of translationand transmission of memory.The Greek portico is reinvented by the "all-Union homeless"poet, Osip Mandel'shtam, who once was a "littleJewishboy with a heart full of iambic pentameters."This Greek portico is notmerely a classical foundation, but a wandering structure. It is linked to alo. Since Brodsky's autobiographical writings are largely about the autobiography of con-sciousness and the art of estrangement, they are closely linked to his essays on other poets-Mandel'shtam, Tsvetaeva, and Auden among them. For an examination of Brodsky'smeta-phor of exile as a poetic palimpsest see Bethea 1994and Loseff and Polukhina 199o.



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particular "nostalgia for world culture"-to use Mandel'shtam's term-that characterizedPetersburg-Leningraddissident poetry throughout theSoviet period, offering the dream of an alternative cosmopolitan trans-historical community where the poet does not feel claustrophobicor con-fined. Nostalgia here is of a second type; Mandel'shtam never wished toreconstructthis "worldculture,but only to evoke it"(ibid.: 143).In Brodsky'sview, Russianpoetic language was a survivalist mnemonicdevice, the preservation of an alternative space of cultural memory. Theonly home a homeless postrevolutionarypoet had was a poetic one, whereclassical metrics and stanzas were pillars of memory, OmneaMea mecumporto.The poet carries his portablehome made of Leningradianhexameterlike a snail in its shell; it is this home that he guards like a patriotic vigi-lante. "The exile,"writesBrodsky,"slows down one's stylisticevolution...it makes a writer more conservative"(1988: 18).This explainsBrodsky'sde-fensive attitudes toward what he calls "language of the street";poetic lan-guage for him is not decorum but a foundation of his portable homeland.1'At the turn of the century, the search for lost classicism was strikinglyprominent among modern writersand philosophers, many of whom camefrom assimilatedJewish backgroundsin countries far removed from classi-cal civilization itself. It is as if the only homesicknessthey experienced wasmetaphorical-for the home that they and their countrymen never reallyhad. Young Georg Lukacsrepeats Novalis's notion whereby philosophy is"reallya homesickness. ... It is the urge to be at home everywhere,"thatis, a nostalgia for a certain Greek Eden that cannot be rebuilt (Lukacs1971:29). The classical metaphors of the displaced modernist writers dis-play various degrees of destruction. ForWalterBenjamin, for instance, theimportant thing was not the golden age of antiquity when the sky wasstarry and the temples were still intact, but the historical ruin that pre-serves the layers of time. Brodsky'sclassical portico is of the Age of Em-pire. It is defensively classical; ruin, the embodiment of imperfection andincompletion, is not his metaphor.

Brodsky's nostalgia pertains not only to the forms of Russian poeticclassicism but also to the ways of reading and inhabiting literature, thosesacred cultural practices of literary resistance that were so dear to him inhis youth. Like Shklovsky,Brodskyhas his own imagined community of11. Brodsky advances the somewhat paradoxical proposition that in Russia, "if only forpurely ethnographic reasons," classical or traditional metric form should not be regardedmerely as provincial atavism. In his view, "Russian poetry has set an example of moralpurity and firmness which to no small degree has been reflected in the preservationof the socalled classical form without any damage to content" (1988: 143).This is hardly an antimod-ernist divorce of form and content but rather an affirmation of a certain cultural specificitythat affects our understanding of what "form"is.



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Boym* Estrangements a Lifestyle 525Leningrad friends that he warmly evokes in his essay.It is a kind of elegyto the postwar generation that made ethical choices "based not so muchon immediate reality as on moral standards derived from fiction":

Nobody knew literature and history better than these people, nobody couldwrite in Russian better than they, nobody despised our times more profoundly.For these characterscivilization meant more than daily bread and a nightly hug.This wasn't, as it might seem, another lost generation.This was the only genera-tion of Russians that had found itself, for whom Giotto and Mandelshtam weremore imperative than their own personal destinies. Poorly dressed but some-how still elegant ... they still retained their love for the non-existent (orexistingonly in their balding heads) thing called "civilization."Hopelessly cut off fromthe rest of the world, they thought that at least that world was like themselves;now they know that it is like others, only better dressed. As I write this, I closemy eyes and almost see them in their dilapidated kitchens, holding glasses intheir hands, with ironic grimaces across their faces. "There, there..."They grin.Liberte, Egalit6, Fraternit6...Why does nobody add Culture?" (1988:30)This is an eccentric community of 196os Leningradian "spiritual exiles"who nostalgically worship fictional "civilization" in their cramped com-

munal kitchens. Rebelling against the imposed collectivity of Soviet every-day life, they created a community of their own, carving extra dimen-sions in Brodsky's "room and a half." For them, the works of Giotto andMandel'shtam were not merely works of art but sacred fetishes of theimagined community. Mandel'shtam emerged from the yellowish pages ofhandwritten samizdat poems that were published very selectively in theearly 1970s and immediately became the hottest items on the black mar-ket. Since virtually none of those Leningradian internal exiles was ableto travel, Giotto became known from reproductions, particularly from thePolish or East German edition of the Classics of World Art. Those bookshad a special status, aura, and "Western" smell. Yet, the Classics of WorldArt were not merely regarded as foreign objects; they were images of theother world framed by a Leningrad looking glass, inspiring mirages on therippling surface of the Neva. In retrospect, the little world of the kitchencommunity might appear to be nostalgic or even endearingly heroic, but itis also rather claustrophobic. Having outgrown this imagined community,the poet is nonetheless frequently homesick.In Brodsky's view, the poet is a private person par excellence, yet itappears that this uncompromising dream of aesthetic privacy has its foun-dations in that heroic dissident moment of the 1970S (Brodsky 1994: 466).Alexander Herzen (1986 [1865]) has insightfully remarked that for an exilehistorical time often stops at the moment of leaving the mother country;that moment forever remains the privileged point of departure. Although



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526 PoeticsToday17:4he was the same age as Dmitrii Prigovand other conceptualistpoets, Brod-sky appears to belong to a differentpoetic generation; he never places thepoetic language within ironic question marksand does not offer us a the-ater of comic poetic impostors and graphomaniacs playing with culturalmyths. Brodsky is not a postmodern poet; he is rather a nostalgic mod-ernist. His mode of modernist classicism has its own Leningradian localcolor, despite its global aspirations.It is precisely this nostalgic provincial-ism (in the best sense of the word) that makes it poetic. That Leningradianintimacy in poetic intonation permeates Brodsky'sRussian works. In theEnglish versions of his poems this quality is lost; the poet occasionallytranslates himself into the solemn rhythms of British and American mod-ernists.

Brodsky'spoetic home rests on the nostalgic foundation of the Lenin-grad kitchen community and is adorned with Mandel'shtam'swandering"Greek portico in the latitude of tundra," a feature of exilic classicism.So where did the poet emigrate and how is the "other world" to whichhe came different from that "otherworld" that he imagined in the kichencommunities of his youth?

In "Lullabyof Cape Cod" Brodskywrites:Likea despoticSheik,who can be untrueto hisvastseraglioandmultipledesiresonlywitha haremaltogethernew,variedandnumerous, haveswitchedEmpires.(1980:o8)

Not only is the poet compared to a sheik, but both his old country andhis adopted country are described as "Empires,"always with a capital E.One is safer for the everyday survival of a poet, while the other used tobe more hospitable to the survival of poetry. Analogy is one of Brodsky'sfavorite devices. In LessThanOnehe writes:"Aschool is a factory is a poemis a prison is academia is boredom, with flashes of panic" (1986: 17).Theempire is empire is empire with flashes of poetic insight and outbursts ofnostalgia.

Imperial consciousness is part of the cultural baggage that the poetcarrieswith him. There is no way to be exiled from the empire; the empireis, in fact, conducive to poetry.The poet is not looking for a liberal repub-lic of letters: like Shklovsky,Brodskyis fascinated by unfreedom. Forhim,unfreedom is a fact of life (a strange poetic revision of Soviet Marxism,Roman stoicism in Russian translation, and the proverbial Russian fatal-ism). The "eternal law" of the empire is internalized and naturalized. InShklovsky'swork Soviet life was equated with life itself; in Brodsky's,the



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Boym* Estrangements a Lifestyle 527laws of empire are equated with laws as such. Empire is not a choice, itis a fate. Although the biographies of our two writers are quite different,it seems to me that their art of estrangement is not sufficiently estrangedfrom fundamental Russian cultural myths.In Brodsky's world if one dreams of waking up outside the empire, onequickly discovers that one has only awakened inside another dream:

If suddenly you walk on grass turned stoneand think its marble handsomer than green,or see at play a nymph and a faun that seemhappier in bronze than in any dreamlet your walking stick fall from your weary hand,you're in The Empire, my friend.

(Brodsky1994: 284)The Empire in Brodsky is laid out like a Borgesian labyrinth; you might

imagine yourself emerging on the other side of the extreme polarity, butthe polarities easily exchange roles, the hero can turn into a traitor, theexecutioner into a victim. Brodsky naturalized the Russian and Soviet cul-tural duel- and also the mutual dependency--of the tyrant and the poet.This is a threat to the poet's survival but at the same time it ensures thequasi-religious prestige of culture. For Brodsky, changing countries is easierthan altering one's poetic style and system of aesthetic beliefs.Yet Brodsky's poetic "eternal return" to the classical labyrinths is alsoabout a nonreturn to the poet's actual motherland. It is no wonder that,in his autobiographical text, which is more an autobiography of con-sciousness than of life, Brodsky records two formative prisesde conscience, rawakenings of consciousness. The first one was a discovery of the art of es-trangement, and the second was the embarrassment of national identity. Ifthe first awakening of consciousness is seen as a revelation of artistic truth,the embarrassment of origin is the acknowledgment of the first lie:

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie. I happened to re-member mine. It was in a school librarywhen I had to fill out an application formembership.The fifth blank was, of course, "nationality." was seven years oldand knew very well that I was aJew, but I told the attendant that I didn't know.With a dubious glee she suggested that I go home and ask my parents.... I wasashamed of the word "Jew"itself-in Russianyevrei- regardlessof its connota-tions. (Brodsky1986: 8)Indeed, in the Soviet Union of the late 1940s and early 1950s, anti-Semitism was not only popular and government sponsored; it was also lin-

guistic. The word Jew became virtually unprintable and enjoyed the statusof a cultural obscenity. Brodsky's art of estrangement and his early em-



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528 PoeticsToday17:4barrassmentof origins are interconnected. The unpronounceable Russianwordyevrei,shameful for a seven-year-oldboy, is recovered (redeemed) inthe English word Jew, printed in thousands of copies by the establishedAmerican poet. ForBrodsky,the switch to writing in English is not merelya poetic catastrophesignifying the loss of a mother tongue, but also a wayof transferringand preservingcultural memory.Translationplays such animportant role in his work. Poetry is a vehicle for memory, lines are railsof "public transportation,"and metaphor (fromthe Greek metaphorein)s atransferof meanings.Nomadism and translation are key concepts in Brodsky'srecent reflec-tion on the fate of EuropeanJews in the twentieth century.He ponders thelessons of survivorsand the reasonswhy so manyJews stayedin Nazi Ger-many despite all signs of disaster. (In Stalin's Russia, unlike in Germanybefore 1939, leaving the country was not an option [see Brodsky [1993:64].) The nomadic impulse, estrangement, and exilic ritual offer anotherchance of escaping the fate of a passive victim on the grand historicalscene of the crime. "'Scatter,'said the Almighty to his chosen people, andat least for a while they did" these lines become the leitmotif of the essay(ibid.).The figureof the Jew in Brodskyis similar to that of Shklovsky.It isa wandering ghost on the marginsof their texts; it haunted severalgenera-tions of secularand assimilated SovietJews who sought neither traditionalnor Zionist ways and for whom, after the 1930S,the Jewish tradition wassimply unavailable.Brodsky'sJew is a nomad; in the best possible circum-stances, he manages to remain faithful to the diasporic predicament.ThediasporicJew seeks not the promised land but only a temporary home. Itseems that for Brodskythe art of nomadism is a commemoration of thosefor whom exile was unavailable (or inconceivable)-those who made thetragic mistakeof putting down roots in Germany and preferrednot to takea chance and leave. Hence the art of estrangement offersa survivalkit. Asfor exile, it is not just a misfortune-it is also a cultural luxury.It comes as no surprisethat Brodsky'smost personal text, "In a Roomand a Half," dedicated to the memory of his parents, is written in English-a language his parentsdid not know. It was composed shortlyaftertheirdeaths in 1985, when the Soviet government refused to grant the poet anentry visa to attend their funerals. Brodskywrites:I write this in English because I want to grant them a margin of freedom; the

margin of freedom whose width depends on the numbers of those who may bewilling to read this. I want Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky to acquirereality under a foreign code of conscience, I want English verbs of motion todescribe their movements. This won't resurrect them, but English grammarmay at least prove to be a better escape route from the chimneys of the state



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Boym* Estrangements a Lifestyle 529crematorium than Russian.... May English then house my dead. In Russian Iam prepared to read, write verses or letters. For Maria Volpert and AlexanderBrodsky,though, English offers a better semblance of afterlife,maybe the onlyone there is, save my very self. And as far as the latter is concerned, writing thisin this language is like doing those dishes; it's therapeutic. (1986: 461)

Some things could only be written in a foreign language; they are not lostin translation, but conceived by it. Foreign verbs of motion could be theonly ways of transporting the ashes of familial memory. After all, a foreignlanguage is like art--an alternative reality, a potential world. Once it isdiscovered, one can no longer go back to monolinguistic existence. Whenexiles return "back home" they occasionally discover that there is noth-ing homey back there and that one feels more at home in the comfortableexilic retreat that one has learned to inhabit. The exilic state has becomefamiliar, and it is the experience of returning to the country of birth thatmight become defamiliarizing. One shouldn't ask writers-in-exile whetherthey plan to go back. It is condescending and presumes that the biographyof a nation carries more weight than the biography of a writer and his orher alternative imagined community. To return, as in the case of Shklov-sky, could be experienced as a second exile, claustrophic rather than liber-ating, unless, of course, one's vocation is the poetics of unfreedom.

Nation, ethnicity, blood is not the only foundation for imagining homeand community. Modernist writers are not entirely cured of homesickness,but their "home" is impure in material and eclectic in style-be it a styleof formalist baroque or Leningradian classicism.

ReferencesAnderson, Benedict

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1974L'Irreversibletla nostalgieParis: Flammarion).Levin, Harry1966 "Literaturein Exile," in Refractions:ssays n Comparativeiterature,2-81 (London:Oxford University Press).Loseff, Lev, and Valentina Polukhina, eds.

1990 Brodsky'soetics ndAestheticsLondon: St. Martin's).Lowenthal, David1985 ThePast Is a ForeignCountryCambridge: Cambridge University Press).Lukacs, Georg1971TheTheory ftheNovel, ranslatedby Anna Bostock (Cambridge:MIT Press).Mandel'shtam, Nadezhda1972KnigavtoraiaParis: YMKA).

de Saussure,Ferdinand1966 Coursen GeneralLinguistics,dited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, translatedby Wade Baskin (New York:McGraw-Hill).

Scarpetta, Guy1981ElogeducosmopolitismeParis:Grasset).Sheldon, Richard1977"VictorShklovskyand the Device of Ostensible Surrender," n Shklovsky199o.Shklovsky,Victor1929"Iskusstvokakpriem" [Art as a Device], in 0 teoriiprozyMoscow: Federatsiia).1977 [1926] ThirdFactory Tret'ia abrika], translated by Richard Sheldon (Ann Arbor,MI: Ardis).1990 [1923] Sentimentalourney:Zoo,or,LettersNotaboutLove Sentimental'noe puteshestvie:Zoo ili pis'ma ne o liubvi], translatedby Richard Sheldon (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis).Steiner, Peter1984RussianFormalism: MetapoeticsIthaca, NY: Cornell University Press).1985 "The Praxis of Irony in Viktor Shklovsky'stZoo,"n RussianFormalism: RetrospectiveGlance: Festschriftn Honorof VictorErlich,edited by Robert LouisJackson and Stephen

Rudy (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for International and Area Studies).Stewart, Susan1984 OnLonging: arrativesftheMiniature,heGigantic,heSouvenir,he CollectionBaltimore,MD: Johns Hopkins University Press).

Striedter,Jurij1989 Literary tructure, volution, nd Value:RussianFormalism ndCzechStructuralism econ-sidered(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).Todorov,Tzvetan1985"PoeticLanguage: The Russian Formalists," n Steiner 1985.1992"Bilingualism,Dialogism, and Schizophrenia,"New Formations7.

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Boym - 1996 - Estrangement as a Lifestyle Shklovsky and Brodsky