Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia: Envy and Authorship in the 1920s

by Yelena Zotova

Overview

In Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia, Yelena Zotova argues that the concept of envy underwent a peculiar transformation in the Russian Modernist prose of the 1920s due to a series of radical shifts in societal values, with each subsequent change thwarting Russia’s volatile axiological hierarchy. Industriousness and austerity, inferior to playful genius in Pushkin’s “Mozart and Salieri,” became virtues, while the intrinsic value of nonutilitarian art was officially nullified by the Bolshevik state.Consequently, a new literary type emerged, and envy, described as “wingless desire” by Russia’s chief poet Alexander Pushkin, obtained new ownership as the envied became the envier. Superimposing twentieth-century theories of envy onto Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Author and Hero in the Aesthetic Activity” (1923), Zotova proposes that Salieri’s envy could be the wingless embryo of the Bakhtinian authorship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781793605580
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	12/10/2020
Series:	Crosscurrents: Russia's Literature in Context
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.49(h) x 1.07(d)

About the Author

Dr. Yelena Zotova is associate teaching professor at The Pennsylvania State University.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

A Note on Translation and Transliteration

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Hermeneutic Challenge of Envy

Chapter 1: When Author Envies Hero

Chapter 2: Wingless Desire: Mozart and Salieri as Author and Hero

Chapter 3: A Purgatory for the Hero: Iurii Olesha’s Envy

Chapter 4: The Author in Hades: Konstantin Vaginov

Chapter 5: The Surplus of Vision in the Works of Alexander Grin

Afterword: Envy, Conscience, and Taste

Bibliography

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

Wingless Desire is a trove of fresh insights for Bakhtin enthusiasts and adepts of Russian Modernism. A book for specialists, in order to appreciate the full scope of Zotova’s argument, it is helpful for the reader to have some familiarity with Bakhtin to begin with. That said, Zotova’s arguments are lucid, at times even striking, and parts of the analysis virtually crackle with brilliance. Zotova’s monograph is an accomplishment to envy.

The Russian Review

A timely, well-researched, and thought-provoking work on an understudied topic, Wingless Desire weaves together psychology and literary theory to analyze the theme of envy in Russian literature. Combining a broad scope with nuanced close readings of key texts, this book traces a line from Pushkin’s nineteenth-century classic, Mozart and Salieri, to the twenty-first-century events in the Crimea. Literary scholars will find the readings of the texts illuminating, while scholars of Russian culture and politics will find the connections drawn between literature and life eye-opening.

Elena Pedigo Clark

Tracing envy as an archetypal motif in nineteenth- through twentieth-century Russian fiction, Yelena Zotova juxtaposes diverse literary and philosophical approaches—namely, Rene Girard’s notion of the novel as modeling and overcoming mimetic desire and Bakhtin’s personalist claim that creative answerability affirms the ‘I’ by addressing the Other as subject, not an object of desire. Likewise, Zotova unexpectedly synthesizes Russian personalism with the neo-Kantian philosophical school. Envy as a literary motif helps the reader overcome its curse haunting us in real life. Zotova fully reveals fiction’s power to attain this catharsis.

Olga Meerson