From: zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.soviet,rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Erofeev religiosity and his influences
Date: 15 Nov 92 23:26:03 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1992Nov15.182605.17478
Distribution: world
Organization: The Phallogocentric Cabal

In article <1992Nov14.233716.17454@husc3.harvard.edu>
verbit@brauer.harvard.edu (Mikhail S. Verbitsky) writes:

>I would like to give an overview of a
>recent discussion on the subject of a Russian writer
>Ven. Erofeev and his book Moscva-Petushki. The discussion
>was started with the letter of a Finnish netter Antti 
>who asked about this book and added that he liked it, 
>that the book is comparable to Henry Miller's one
>(I guess, he meant Tropic of Cancer) and it is a perfect
>treatment of hangover. The Russian netter Dima was
>aggravated with the last statement and wrote an angry
>letter that Antti, as he perceives, never read
>a Real Literature and therefore does not understand
>its use (presumably, the use of literature as
>a hangover treatment is not kosher). In my
>turn, I wrote that Dima does not understand
>Erofeev himself and explained why I think
>that, in case of Moscva-Petushki, the use
>of the book as a hangover treatment is quite 
>kosher, while the comparison with Miller
>is not. 

While I appreciate your iconoclastic animus, I am also quite puzzled by
the impticit concern with extending the strictures of Jewish dietary
laws into the literary domain.  If you sanction the use of Erofeev as a
hangover treatment (I prefer Tylenol #3), would you likewise approve of
using Rabelais for ass-wipe?  (Cf. the duscussion of _torchecul_ in
Chapter XIII of _Gargantua_.)  If so, would you prefer to utilize the
mortal remains of the author himself, an original manuscript, or a cheap
paperback edition?

>What I wrote was somewhat vague, but it boils
>down to the following. The Russian writer Vassily
>Rozanov (admittedly, the primary influence on
>Erofeev) once wrote: "Literature is my pants.
>Whatever I wish I do there" This statement
>is one of ultimate literature nihilism:
>Rozanov could publish simultaneously two
>articles in two different newspapers which 
>defended two opposite point of views - naturally,
>under pseudonym. The most infamous example is 
>when Rozanov wrote two articles about the monument
>dedicated to Russian Tsar Alexander III.
>One of these was negative and contained, in particular,
>a very sarcastic epigram on the ugliness of a monument
>(with overtones of political criticism:
>	Stoit komod,
>	Na komode begemot,
>	A ne begemote shapka.)

Other than yourself, who ever admitted that Rozanov was *the* primary
influence on Erofeev, and how was this thesis supported?

>Other one was positive and described it
>as strikingly beautiful monument to the greatest
>of Russian monarchs. This inconsistency
>and ambivalence was characteristic for
>all Rozanov's writings: he believed that
>anything he wrote belongs to literature,
>because he did not believe in literature itself.

Ergo?

>The literature got revenged on Rozanov through
>Erofeev, who wrote an essay "on Rozanov". There,
>he uses Rozanov's method describing his life, love
>and suicidal urges seemingly without connections 
>with Rozanov at all. Nevertheless, there is
>a message concerning "the topic": one of his major
>Rozanov's ideas were that Christianity 
>is deadly wrong with its idea of chastity
>(his idea of love between Jesus and apostols
>was that they loved each other homosexually,
>though he was not a gay). Naturally, Erofeev
>destroys Rozanov conception by showing that
>earthly love is destructive urge which has
>nothing to do with moral and Christianity.

So?

>Generally, in this essay he is rather ironic
>towards Rozanov, and Rozanov's method gets
>strangely perverted: though latter could
>write about whatever he does in his pants,
>when he wrote an essay about Gogol, he
>wrote about Gogol most part and about other
>stuff - less. Erofeev rather parodizes
>him when he does not write more than
>several words in a long essay which is 
>supposed to be a literature criticism.

So?

>The same literature nihilism is obvious in
>Leniniana by Erofeev, I would refer from
>repeating stuff I already wrote.

Now you get to the fallacy of _non causa pro causa_.  You assert, and
apparently believe, that something called "literary nihilism" of Erofeev
is the principal cause of the phenomena described above; yet you neither
bother to define literary nihilism as such, nor justify your reasoning
by abduction.  One telling nihilist parallel: just because Nietzsche
denounced conventional virtues, and described truth as nothing but an
army of metonyms and metaphors, does not entitle you to conclude that
his philosophy does not valorize a certain Virtue (for it does), or
fails to attribute to itself the status of Truth (for it does not).
Generally speaking, you should not take people at their word, but look
to the logical implications of their positions.  Max Weber called for
value-neutral science, only to succeed in valorizing scientific
conflict, and rightly so.

>Basically, that's from what my article consisted,
>and then the real discussion started.
>Mikhail Zeleny was arguing that Erofeev
>was a Catholic thinker and that his
>books are full of literature connotations,
>mostly from other authors of Roman tradition
>and these connotations have deeply religious
>meaning. I guess it is obvious to anyone
>who read the original book that the 
>religion there gets sarcastic interpretation,
>and this interpretation is destroying
>the meaning of religion, so I'd prefer
>not to argue about Erofeev religiosity.

You missed my point, which had nothing to do with Erofeev's presumable
religiosity, but with the *meaning* of his work.  Again, your claims of
obviousness amount to no more than an attempt at proof by intimidation,
an area in which your success will be invariably limited by the degree
of evolutionary sophistication of the life forms in your audience.
Stick to gerbils, and you will do all right, but try pulling the same
stunt on featherless bipeds, a.k.a. the risible animals, and they will
laugh you into your proper submissive status.

>The arguments in such a discussion are getting
>ridiculous. I have seen the book by someone who
>argued that Mark Twain was a deeply religious
>thinker. Surely, by the methodology of taking
>arbitrary, often irrelevant quotes :)

Straw man.

>Funny thing is that this idea of arguing
>is rapidly getting popular in Russia (that's
>strange, as I guess, M. Zeleny have not
>read those guys, as anything in Russian,
>for years :).

My department thinks otherwise; feel free to disabuse them of this
notion; -- but why stop at that? surely with no less intellectual
credibility you can go on to claim that Russian is evidently not my
native language!

>	       There is a "religious thinker"
>and "literature criticist" Boris Nepomnyashchii
>who is proving (with the real foam at his mouth)
>that poetry of the Russian poet Pushkin was 
>inspired by Christianity. In particular,
>he wrote that Pushkin's poem Gavriliada
>(a translation of some of most revealing
>parts of Evariste Parny's Guerre des Dieux) is
>influenced by Russian Orthodoxy. Why?
>Because there Madonna is getting screwed
>by Satan, God and Archangel Gabriel 
>in some two hours. Clearly, the act
>of screwing is a sign of Orthodox Christianity
>of author because it is the love of the world
>etc. etc. These guys are *completely 
>serious* (!!!), and their argumentation
>is basically the same. 

Fine.  At least I offer arguments, whereas you have none.

>Now, about things which *belong* to literature
>(while religious inspiration, I believe, does not).
>By whom was Erofeev influenced more, by
>Russian classics or by French? There is
>an easy way to answer: you need to look through
>his notebooks (which are getting printed
>one-by-one). These notebooks (totally 
>more than 40, each one about 50 pages - 
>the guy was serious) contain lots of
>quotes from books read by Erofeev -
>stuff from these books he most liked. 
>Naturally, there are lots
>of quotes by Nabokov, Rozanov, Dostoevsky
>etc., but I have not managed to find
>anything by French authors. The only
>one quote about French literature was from
>Nabokov, who wrote that Balsac, Flaubert
>and Zola was the most praised mediocrities
>in world literature, and Erofeev wrote
>his agreement with this quote.

One request: if you have access to anything published in a venue other
than _Kontinent_, I would appreciate a copy.  On the subject of your
"refutation", take note that in literary scholarship, like in any other
empirical discipline, nothing is ever refuted by claiming absence of
evidence.  The book speaks for itself, in a way that I have analyzed at
great pains, and some length.  You will not support your gainsaying of
my argument by claiming that it lacks further *extrinsic* evidence.  For
all you and I know, Erofeev, who was known for destroying finished
literary works, simply discarded his notes for _M - P_, keeping only the
pages he planned to use in the future.  The finished work stands or
falls on its own; if you think that you can refute my interpretation
with more than vacuous sneers, get cracking.

>Naturally, his method of literature nihilism
>was totally opposite to Flaubert aesthetism:
>Erofeev belongs to anti-aesthetic wing
>of a literature. For anyone who disagrees,
>my advice is to go and find his play
>Walpurgis Night, which is, IMO, the most
>anti-Flaubertian book ever written.

If you elaborate on this, you might have a good argument *against*
Erofeev's alleged literrary nihilism, seeing how Flaubert was a prime,
self-professed all-denier.  As for aestheticism or its putative
opposite, they have no bearing on my conclusion.

>This is why I objected the Miller analogy,
>whose work is in a sense similar to one
>of author of Salambo.

Now that you learned to spell proper names, why not do as much for titles?

>Misha.

cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
" -- I shall speak bluntly, because life is short."