Please join the Barnard Slavic Department and the Harriman Institute for a talk by Evgeny Pavlov (University of Canterbury, New Zealand).
Evgeny Pavlov will focus on two experimental books of prose by the Russian poet Arkady Dragomoshchenko (1946-2012), 'Raspolozhenie v domakh i dereviakh' [Disposition among Houses and Trees] (1978) and 'Kitaiskoe solntse' [Chinese Sun] (1997). Though he insisted on calling both books “novels,” Dragomoshchenko was equally insistent on there being no difference between poetry and prose. Time and memory are central to both texts, as they are to the entire corpus of Dragomoshchenko’s writing. The earlier novel, written before the "linguistic turn” in Dragomoshchenko’s poetry in the mid-1980s, and originally available only in a small handful of typewritten samizdat copies, finally came out in book form in 2019. Its publication makes it possible to trace the evolution of Dragomoshchenko’s strategy of the poetic narrative from the relatively conventional, if discontinuous, 'Raspolozhenie' to the radically disjointed 'Kitaiskoe solntse' whose fabric woven out of childhood memories, half-forgotten dreams, and unconnected, barely comprehensible plot lines is held together by gaps in memory and understanding, baring the (non)space between the consciousness and the body in which the axes of the future and the past intersect. This fabric is akin to Indra’s endless net where each jewel reflects all other jewels and is in turn reflected in each and every one of them.
