7 - At the “I” of the storm: the iconic self in Remizov's Whirlwind Russia

Summary

The Poet must remember that his poetry is guilty of the banal prose that is life, and the human being of life should know that … the frivolity of his everyday questions are to blame for the barrenness of art … It is easier to create without answering for life, as it is easier to live and not reckon with art. Art and Life are not one, but they must become united in me, in the unity of my responsibility.

(Mikhail Bakhtin)

Rozanov understood that the new mode of living-as-creating (literatura) had to be a discourse of the self in which the trivia of private, everyday existence would no longer be compelled to repeat a pattern external to it in order to acquire meaning, since the act of living such moments would actualize their essence. He failed to appreciate, however, that this self would have to be a transcendent entity at one with others, and so remained trapped in the game of alienations and appropriations played out between a private individual and an other who, not with standing the sleights of hand, remain at odds. It was through a quite unwanted turn in the course of history that Rozanov was able momentarily to evade the trap and approach his ideal.

My last chapter will contend that, by turning a quirk of fate into a creative principle, Aleksei Remizov advanced Rozanov's mission to completion (though not to victory). I will argue that, in Remizov's neglected chronicle of the revolutionary years, the upheavals brought upon the lives of ordinary Russians are exploited to attain the penultimate stage in the transformation of Russia's anti-aesthetic.