Abstract
During one of his habitual meditations on history, Yuri Trifonov reportedly stated, ‘Time imposes its frame on a man, but it is within a man’s power to widen the frame, if only slightly.’1 In her fiction Tat’iana Tolstaia not only widens the frame, but packs within it an assortment of experiences that insistently push against the restraining contours and, on occasion, actually extend our vision beyond the frame. The multi-layered apperception of time in Tolstaia’s fictional universe assimilates manifold temporal concepts, variously designated as folk-loric or mythic; ‘monumental’ (Ricoeur);2 ‘pure’ or ‘experienced’ (Bergson);3 and ‘great’ (Bakhtin).4 Tolstaia’s highly complex handling of time originates in her syncretism — her propensity to condense elements from disparate sources into maximally compressed texts that usually narrate metonymical lives illustrative of timeless configurations.
Time, which is the author of authors…
Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning
Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It
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Notes
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago and London, 1983–1985, 3 vols). For Ricoeur, monumental time, ‘of which chronological time is but the audible expression’, results from ‘all the complicities between clock time and figures of authority’, of official tabulation (vol. 2, pp. 106 and 112). In his massive study, he takes considerable pains to distinguish between Bergson’s spatialised time and his concept of monumental time (vol. 2. p. 190, fn. 23).
In his late period, Mikhail Bakhtin equated ‘great time’ with entire lifetimes, with ‘the sense that past events, as they become congealed in institutions, languages of heteroglossia, and genres, pose specific problems and offer specific resources for each present moment that follows’. Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, 1990), p. 414. To grasp the inner connectedness of past, present and future means to understand ‘the fullness of time’, with which Bakhtin credits Goethe. See M. M. Bakhtin, ‘The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Typology of the Novel)’, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas, 1986) pp. 10–59.
Ricoeur appropriately stresses the importance for a theory of narrative that both approaches to the problem of time remain open, ‘by way of the mind as well as by way of the world. The aporia of temporality, to which the narrative operation replies in a variety of ways, lies precisely in the difficulty in holding on to both ends of this chain, the time of the soul and that of the world’ (Ricoeur, Vol. 3, p. 14). Tolstaia’s concept of time and its narrative articulation acknowledge both ends, but valorise the ‘soul’. Her orientation at first glance seems to ally her, unsurprisingly, with Augustine and his refutation of the cosmological thesis, until a close reading of her texts reveals the extent to which Tolstaia realises that worldtime cannot be simply peeled away from soultime, but interacts with it. Unlike Ricoeur, Kermode contrasts ‘soul’ time with ‘simple chronicity’ or ‘humanly uninteresting successiveness’. Frank Kermode, The Sense of An Ending (London/Oxford/New York, 1966/1968), p. 46.
Tat’iana Tolstaia. ‘Na zolotom kryl’tse sideli’ (On the Golden Porch) (Moscow, 1987), p. 40. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations from Tolstaia’s prose refer to this edition and will be identified hereafter by page references in the body of the text. All translations from the Russian are mine.
Folkloric elements appear in most Tolstaian stories which recreate childhood: “Na zolotom kryl’tse sideli…” ’, ‘Svidanie s ptitsei’ (Rendezvous with a Bird), ‘Vyshel mesiats iz tumana’ (The Moon Emerged from the Mist) and ‘Samaia liubimaia’ (The Most Beloved). ‘Samaia liubimaia’, for instance, shifts into a fairytale mode when it introduces the childhood motif: ‘A long, long time ago, on the nether side of dreams, childhood existed [stood/stoialo] on earth…’. Tat’iana Tolstaia, ‘Samaia liubimaia’, Avrora, 1986, no. 10, p. 93. All citations from the story refer to this edition and hereafter will be identified by page numbers in parentheses within the body of the text.
On the garden topos in autobiography, see Martha Ronk Lifson, ‘The Myth of the Fall: A Description of Autobiography’, Genre XII (Spring 1979), pp. 45–67. (My gratitude to Carol Ueland for acquainting me with this article).
On the portrayal of childhood in Russian literature, see Andrew Baruch Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood (Stanford, 1990).
Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (London, 1954), p. 18.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York, 1947/1968), pp. 17, 14.
That inability to discriminate between generations is perhaps best illustrated by the classic child’s avowed intention of marrying her/his parent, interpolated in ‘Svidanie s ptitsei’, where Petia decides to marry the ‘seven-thousand-year-old’ Tamila instead of his mother, as he originally planned: ‘Earlier he’d planned to marry his mother, but now that he’d already promised Tamila…’ (116). An index of Peter’s infantilism is his regressive fantasy of retreat into marriage with his grandmother: ‘nado bylo emu v svoe vremia zhenit’sia na sobstvennoi babushke i tikho tlet’ v teploi komnate pod tikan’e chasov’ (179). (On the Freudian implications of this, see Helena Goscilo, Tolstaian Love As Surface Text’, SEEJ, vol. 34, no. 1 (1990), pp. 40–52). Nabokov notes: ‘the inner knowledge that I was I and that my parents were my parents seems to have been established only later, when it was associated with my discovering their age in relation to mine’ (p. 14).
For a more thorough analysis of the lapsarian myth in Tolstaia’s early stories, see Helena Goscilo, ‘Paradise, Purgatory, and Post-Mortems in the World of Tat’jana Tolstaja’, Indiana Slavic Studies, 1990, No. 5, pp. 97–113.
Lifson, p. 50.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Through the Looking Glass (Harmondsworth/Baltimore/Victoria, 1948/1968), p. 254.
Kermode, p. 53.
See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse (Ithaca, New York, 1980/ 1987), pp. 35–40.
On this, see, respectively, Ricoeur, passim, and Hayden White, Meta-history: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), and The Tropic of Discourse (Baltimore, 1978).
But not the items it would be most natural to omit. See David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing (Ithaca, New York, 1980, pp. 75–6). See Roman Jakobson, ‘The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles’, Funda-mentals of Language (The Hague/Paris, 1975), pp. 90–96.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination( Austin, Texas, 1981), pp. 155–7.
Tolstaia’s depiction of Simeonov’s ‘imagined’ world carries so much aesthetic seductiveness and emotional conviction that the hermen-eutically-inclined critic is practically forced to read it not as an individual’s fantasy, but as a penetration into a transcendent realm accessible only to the elect — an ‘extratemporal otherworldly ideal’, in Bakhtin’s words (The Dialogic Imagination, p. 158). Those two options recall E. T. A Hoffman, of course, and above all such works as ‘Der Sandmann’. A tropological solution to ontological and metaphysical issues such as Tolstaia’s has come under criticism, most notably by Paul de Man. See Paul de Man, ‘Impasse de la critique formaliste’, Blindness and Insight, ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis, 1983).
Heidegger in Sein und Zeit (1927) usefully observes that things or entities (‘stuff’ — Zeug) for ‘use’ (Gebrauch) that are at hand or ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden) articulate their identity in the process of unreflecting usage and unobtrusively tend to comprise that part of our environment which we take for granted. When the ‘unusability’ of equipment is discovered, it becomes ‘conspicuous’ (auffällig) and present-at-hand (vorhanden) as well as potentially un-ready-to-hand (unzuhanden). See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, 1962), pp. 95–107.
Passages such as these expose the facile nature of many generalisations made by two well-known émigré commentators, Genis and Vail’; here, specifically, their palpably inaccurate claim that ‘In Tolstaia, things in general are happier than people — unlike people, they don’t change.’ See Petr Vail’ i Aleksandr Genis, ‘Popytka k begstvu: II: Gorodok v Tabakerke — Proza Tat’iany Tolstoi’, Sintaksis, 1988, no. 24, p. 129.
On Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov in this connection, see Matt F. Oja, ‘Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, and the Mission of Memory’, Survey, Vol. 29, no. 2 (Summer, 1985), p. 62.
Raisa Shishkova, ‘Nich’i babushki na zolotom kryl’tse’, Kontinent, 1988, no. 56, p. 399. Genis and Vail’ conceive of time’s passage as Tolstaia’s greatest enemy, but fancifully ascribe what they call her enmity toward the relentless flow of time to her refusal to grow up: ‘In brief, the author is a person who refuses to grow up. That’s precisely why her main enemy is the unstoppable movement of time.’ Vail’ and Genis, p. 126.
Cited in Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man. An Introduction w a Philosophy of Human Culture (Garden City, New York, 1944), p. 72. See also Ricoeur’s comments regarding the constructions of history (as reconstructions answering to the need for a Gegenüber) on the ‘relation of indebtedness which assigns to the people of the present the task of repaying their due to people of the past — to the dead’. Ricoeur, Vol. III, p. 157.
Tat’iana Tolstaia, ‘Somnambula v tumane’, Novyi mir, 1988, no. 7, pp. 8— 26. All citations from the story refer to this edition and hereafter will be identified by page numbers in parentheses in the body of the text.
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© 1992 International Council for Soviet and East European Studies, and Sheelagh Duffin Graham
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Goscilo, H. (1992). Tolstaian Times: Traversals and Transfers. In: Graham, S.D. (eds) New Directions in Soviet Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22331-2_3
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