Russian Montparnasse Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris

by Rubins, Maria

• ISBN13: 9781137508003
• ISBN10: 1137508000
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-09-30
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book is a case study in transnational modernist literature generated by exile, dislocation and cross-cultural exchanges, focusing on the younger writers of the interwar Russian Parisian diaspora, known as Russian Montparnasse. Maria Rubins argues that their hybrid, bicultural and bilingual writing transcended the Russian national master narrative, anticipating more recent diasporic tendencies. The book sets the Russian Montparnasse corpus into trans-cultural and intertextual dialogues with key Western and Russian texts to demonstrate that their artistic response to the main challenges of urban modernity and cultural rupture resonated with broader aesthetic trends in interwar Europe. By systematically reassessing the role of Russian Montparnasse in the articulation of modernism, this study expands our knowledge of the evolution of the transnational literary canon, contributes to the academic debate about national vs. transnational analytical approaches to bicultural artistic production, and challenges the conventional status of language as the chief marker of literary affiliation.

Author Biography

Maria Rubins teaches Russian and Comparative literature at University College London, UK. She has published extensively on Russian literature, franco-Russian cultural relations, exile, Russian émigré literature, bilingual and transnational writing, and contemporary francophone fiction. She is the author of Ecphrasis in Parnasse and Acmeism: Comparative Visions of Poetry and Poetics (2000), editor of reference editions and annotated volumes of Russian émigré prose, and translator into Russian of French and English authors, including Irène Némirovsky, Judith Gautier and Elizabeth Gaskell.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Russian Montparnasse as a Transnational Community
PART I: NARRATING THE SELF: THE EXISTENTIAL CODE OF INTER-WAR LITERATURE
1. In the 'Waste Land' of Postwar Europe: Facing the Modern Condition
2. Who Needs Art? The Human Document and Strategies of Self-Representation
3. Human Document or Autofiction?
PART II: READING AND WRITING THE 'PARIS TEXT'
4. 'A Shared Homeland for All Foreigners': The Paris Myth.
5. An Illusory City: Denationalization and the 'Mission' of the Diaspora
6. Below and Beyond: Alternative Paris
PART III: CHALLENGES OF THE JAZZ AGE
7. Post-Traumatic Hedonism
8. Art Deco Fiction
9. Anthologizing the Jazz Age: Gaïto Gazdanov's The Spectre of Alexander Wolf
PART IV: THE CANON RE-DEFINED: READING THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS IN PARIS
10. 'A third-rate rhymer … but a poet of genius': Lermontov and Russian Montparnasse
11. 'Backyard' Literature: Vasily Rozanov's Unlikely Posthumous Fame in Paris and Beyond
12. Dialogue with Tolstoy
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index