The Explosive World of Tatyana N. Tolstaya's Fiction by Helena Goscilo

Author:Helena Goscilo [Goscilo, Helena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Affairs & Administration, General
ISBN: 9781315284873
Google: xIMYDQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 32205829
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1996-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Tolstaya basically dissociates herself from the zealot’s insistence that art serve a divine purpose, a view dogmatically espoused by Gogol in his “Portrait” and Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druz’iami), by Leo Tolstoy in What Is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo?) and his postcrisis writings, and subsequently revived by such Symbolists as Andrei Bely and Viacheslav Ivanov. The binarism of Tolstaya’s tropes (which tend to pit matter against spirit), however, and her poeticized treatment of the imagination prompt her reader to associate art with a transcendent dimension of human experience, even though her deflationary irony destabilizes any statements that ignore subjectivity, context, process, and pluralism. Tolstaya’s fiction proposes no answers to how the transcendent dimension fits in with the mundane, practical aspects of existence. Her emphasis on the primacy of language in literary creation, on the dissociation of the aesthetic from the human within the artist herself, and on the disjunction between the artist and the artistic product aligns her perhaps most intimately with Pushkin, who also spoke matter-of-factly about divine inspiration while in the same breath, in forthrightly prosaic terms, dissecting a writer’s technical difficulties and treating finished texts as negotiable commodities. Unlike philosophy, literature operates not by compelling argumentation but by seductive example, and in that sense Tolstaya’s “Fakir” and “Okkervil River,” by virtue of their impact on the reader, make the case for art without conclusively defining its function. For Tolstaya, like Pushkin, makes her readers luxuriate in “the pleasure of the text,”41 immerse themselves in “the exuberant dance of language, delighting in the texture of words themselves” (Eagleton, 82–83), transferring the act of reading from the laboratory, as Eagleton felicitously puts it, to the boudoir—a wonderland in its own right and in Tolstaya’s writing.

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