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novels. Before Sunrise was rejected by Soviet critics as a "filthy,
repulsive, and disgusting" exploration of Zoshchenko's personal
psychological eccentricities. But from the point of view of Bakhtin's
theories of genre it may be, as Tristram Shandy was for the Russian
Formalists, one of the most typical novels in world literature.


NOTES
1. Scatton presents for a reading of the Lenin stories as a non-ironic
(and unsuccessful) celebration of Lenin in the Russian hagiographic
tradition. Loseff, on the other hand, sees the stories as a prime
example of the use of "Aesopian language" in modern Russian
literature, suggesting that they are written with the same parodic skaz
techniques as Zoshchenko's early satirical stories and that the varying
locutions in the stories set up subversive internal dialogues (202-204).
2. In the commentaries (especially Note IV) Zoshchenko espouses
a quasi-Freudian model of artistic creativity as arising from a
sublimation of frustrated sexual energies. He does not link this model
to Lidia's commitment to Communism, but the parallel is obvious.
Youth Restored thus subtly suggests a sexual motivation behind
political fanaticism, which resonates with Freud's suggestion of strong
erotic elements in the fascination that totalitarian dictators exercise on
their followers.
3. Mustaches, in fact, loomed large in Zoshchenko's career. There
is a story that Zoshchenko's political censure in 1946 was influenced
by one of the Lenin stories in which a bearded character played a
negative role. Warned that this character bore too close a resemblance
to Kalinin, Zoshchenko removed the beard. Unfortunately, this left
the character with a mustache that inevitably linked him to Stalin.
4. One might also compare Zoshchenko's narrator in this respect to
Dostoevsky Underground Man, a link that further complicates
Zoshchenko's complex figuration of the opposition between rationality
and irrationality in Before Sunrise. The Underground Man supposedly
attacks the tyranny of reason and apotheosizes passion and
irrationality. But he is such an abject figure that he inadvertently
makes points for reason as well. "Zoshchenko" is similarly abject
before being "cured" by reason, but even as he apotheosizes reason he
dialogically makes points on both sides of the debate.

-102-

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: Bakhtin, Stalin, and Modern Russian Fiction: Carnival, Dialogism, and History. Contributors: M. Keith Booker - author, Dubravka Juraga - author. Publisher: Greenwood Press. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 1995. Page Number: 102.
    
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