Dance - Image - Text: Aleksei Remizov’s Poetics of Rewriting

My first book project is a study of a peculiar archive of cultural memory that goes back to Old Rus’. Grounded in Aleksei Remizov’s verbal and visual art, my interdisciplinary analysis focuses on the performative ritual of rewriting as remembering. Looking at books, calligraphy, drawings, and illustrated albums, I consider rewriting as translation between and across media, and as scribal activity. For Remizov, I argue, the embodied experience of drawing and copying texts by hand is inseparable from the act of imaginative rewriting, or creative remembering. His goal is not simply to represent, or depict a past deemed lost, but to inhabit it and to make it present. This project engages in the recent discussions about the archaic turn in Russian modernism, as well as about conceptions of the synthesis of the arts, and the nature of Gesamtkunstwerk. In its attention to the fluid dynamic between the verbal and the visual in Remizov’s oeuvre, it contributes to the study of text and image relations.

Redefining Ornamentalism 

This project seeks a new approach to ornamental prose, a minor trend in Russian modernist prose defined by linguistic play, which is all too often seen as gratuitous, and little has been said about the function of verbal embellishment. By shifting emphasis from the meaning of ornament as adornment to that of pattern (Russian “uzor”), this project takes up the phenomenon of ornamental prose and in particular, its slowing down of narrative time in order to play with language itself. Anchored in select texts by Andrei Bely, Boris Pil’niak, Vsevolod Ivanov, and Victor Shklovsky among others, my comparative analysis focuses on the linguistic aspects of narrative play with time. Specifically, I seek to move beyond macro-scale narratological distinction between story and discourse and offer a fuller appreciation of the role language plays in texturing narrative temporality. With its focus on temporality, my analysis explores the role of verbal patterning in creating a peculiar narrative experience of time that distinguishes this kind of prose.