So the first glance at the book is clearly inspiring.
However, after reading the work, feelings remain rather ambivalent.
The very release of the book “The Abolition of Death” in the series “Modern Western Russian Studies” seems to suggest an orientation towards a special audience – philologists and literary scholars (professional readers). But it seems that the professionals will not be able to learn anything new from the work of Irene Masing-Delitzsch. In the last half century, literary theory has gone far ahead; we can look for opaque places in works, when influenced by which the texts begin to contradict themselves and literally fall apart (“deconstruction” by Jacques Derrida), we can describe special distinctive features that allow books to be “most adapted” to the market and literary struggle (” Evocriticism “by Brian Boyd), we can look at this or that narrative as a dense chain of triangles” subject – object – mediator “(” mimetic desire “by Rene Girard), we can understand the form of a work as a” diagram “of social forces, this is a work of organizers (” materialistic conception of form ”by Franco Moretti). Unfortunately, Irene Masing-Delitzsch’s book does not offer new reading tools and generally does not seek to talk much about literary theory; several times, Mikhail Bakhtin’s “carnival” will appear here (used in the spirit of rather “anti-Bakhtin” – for a derogatory description of the people: “The appearance of the people of the flesh in the” Columns “corresponds to their inner essence; “: Their bodily form is” never self-sufficient, never complete “because they are constantly involved in some physiological act – they eat, drink, sweat, copulate, bear children, have abortions, defecate, and so on”), twice the “defamiliarisation” of Viktor Shklovsky will appear. Obviously, the main stake of the book lies not in the further development of “theory”, but in something else.
In the perception of such texts, a lot depends on the position of the reader: for someone this method of “free literary associations” will bring real pleasure (like talking with a professional who knows his subject perfectly), and someone, on the contrary, will be greatly irritated by completely speculative moves like the conclusion that the Red Army men from the “Twelve” Bloc were anarchists, since “earlier it was said about their weapons:“ rifles are black belts ”. Recall that black was the color of the anarchist movement “or such a statement:” The thug Nil Krasavtsev is also a beast – his very name reminds of beauty, and the most dangerous predators are often beautiful. ” But surely the topic of “overcoming death”, which Irene Masing-Delitzsch successfully found, could be traced at a much more interesting level of the medium of literature itself: how it affects the type of adjectives, the frequency of nouns, the use of adverbial expressions, the order of words in a sentence, melody of phrases, a choice of poetic sizes? It would be extremely curious to know how the “rescue program” worked at the level of organization of “literary life”, at the level of the authors’ ties with the medical science of that time, at the level of the existence of literature as a special social institution.
Alas, none of this is in the book “The Abolition of Death”.
But there is, as already mentioned, an interested retelling, an original “rereading map” drawn by an extremely enthusiastic person. In fact, the corpus of Russian literature, created at the beginning of the twentieth century, is quite extensive, and not everyone wants to read it “in a row.” The work of Irene Masing-Delitzsch offers a special, rather unusual route, along which you can walk through this building, look at it from a new angle, and shift and rearrange some of the accents. The main problem is that movement along such a route does not fundamentally change anything in the long-established understanding of selected authors: Fedorov remains, as he was, a strange visionary, Gorky is a homegrown Nietzschean, Zabolotsky is the heir to Tyutchev’s philosophy of nature, and Blok is a decadent, unsuccessfully trying to reconcile yourself with a new social order. And it seems that if you have already read the analyzed works, Irene Masing-Delitzsch’s book will not tell you anything new. It’s another matter if you are not yet familiar with the artistic worlds of Sologub’s “Created Legend” and Ognev’s “Eurasia” – you will be given detailed, rich, interesting retellings, effectively connected with each other by thematic “subtext of the struggle for the abolition of death.” There is a strong suspicion that this was precisely the original pragmatics of the book; Most of all, The Abolition of Death (the original version of which was published in English in 1992 at Stanford) resembles an author’s course given to American Slavic students.