Russian Montparnasse
Subtitle: transnational writing in interwar Paris
By: Maria Rubins, University College London, UK
Series: Palgrave studies in modern European literature; Palgrave studies in modern European literature
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 302
ISBN-13: 9781137508003
Subjects: Exiles' writings, Russian; Russians; Russian literature; Intellectual life; History and criticism; French influences
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 236-289) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : Russian Montparnasse as a transnational community; title: Narrating the self : the existential code of inter-war literature. In the "waste land" of postwar Europe : facing the modern condition; title: Who needs art? the human document and strategies of self-representation; title: Human document or autofiction?; title: Reading and writing the "Paris text". "A shared homeland for all foreigners" : the Paris myth; title: An illusory city : denationalization and the "mission" of the diaspora; title: Below and beyond : alternative Paris; title: Challenges of the Jazz Age. Post-traumatic hedonism; title: Art Deco fiction : literary reflections on the seveth art; title: Anthologizing the Jazz Age : Gaïto Gazdanov's The spectre of Alexander Wolf; title: The canon re-defined : reading the Russian classics in Paris. "A 'third-rate rhymer' ...but a poet of genius" : Lermontov and Russian Montparnasse; title: "Backyard" literature : Vasily Rozanov's unlikely posthumous fame in Paris and beyond; title: Dialogue with Tolstoy; title: Conclusion.