Objectification of Semantic Constants in a Precedent Text ("My Little Leniniana" by Venedikt Yerofeyev)

Bezrukov Andrey Nikolaevich ORCID: 0000-0001-7505-3711 PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Ufa University of Science and Technology (Branch in Birsk) 452455, Russia, Republic of Bashkortostan, Birsk, Internatsionalnaya str., 120-V, sq. 9 in_text@mail.ru Other publications by this author

The theme of the Russian revolution in fiction throughout the twentieth century received its pinpoint disclosure in different ways. A number of writers idolized these events, idealizing "February" and "October" of 1917, someone clearly did not recognize them, showing horror and inconsistency, there were also those who programmatically - in the mode of schematic dogmatics of socialist realism – created a new history, maybe even a new historical myth. However, the second half of the twentieth century, almost the last two decades artistically objectified the truth of the relative events of the early twentieth century. The reader has access to texts written in the footsteps of the memory of the revolutionary period: earlier – Maxim Gorky ("Untimely Thoughts"), I.A. Bunin ("Cursed Days"), A.T. Averchenko ("Little Leniniana"), M.M. Zoshchenko ("Stories about Lenin"), further – A.I. Solzhenitsyn ("Lenin in Zurich", the cycle "Red Wheel"), etc.

It should be recognized that the revolution is a landmark phenomenon in the history of Russia. Its consequences will play an echo on the entire course of social, economic, religious, historical processes throughout the twentieth century. Of course, society and people will change in this historical cycle. The fate of the heroes of both the February and October revolutions is not the same. And yet the leading or main character of the revolutionary movement of the early twentieth century is Vladimir (Ulyanov) Lenin. It remains a polysemic symbol for poets, playwrights, prose writers, and publicists. It seems that it is quite difficult to artistically verify this image, due to situational circumstances, a lot of things over time remain controversial, contradictory, sometimes unreliable. It is also impossible to achieve an unambiguous receptive ^[4] interpretation – the difference in the target, artistic and aesthetic tasks, the insufficiency of the positions of the contemporaries of the "revolutionary leader" prevents. But both the big Leniniana and the small Leniniana are still being created. The foreground is a canvas, a sculptural group, a language format.

First, in my opinion, we should compare the two forms of Leniniana. If the spherical status of the great Leniniana is focused on the image of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on a global scale, in the mode of realizing the charms of his figure and active activity for the benefit of the Soviet man, then the little Leniniana acquires other contours of its expression. In it, sometimes, reducing or leveling the status, the authority of Vladimir Lenin, pointwise analyzing the pettiness and insignificance of his actions, his remarks, language cliches, merging finally with the idea of an asocial order about the complete absurdity and wrongness of both his actions and in general revolutionary transformations in the country. In line with the contrast, an alternative to such an assessment is the literary and artistic compilation, the parody-ironic, comic-tragic pastiche of Venedikt Yerofeyev "My Little Leniniana" ^{[7, pp. 217-236]}.

The text of Yerofeyev's "Leniniana" was written for the Russian-language, literary, journalistic, religious magazine "Continent", which was published in France until 1992. The magazine was the leading publication of the "third wave" of Russian emigration. Venedikt Yerofeyev, having received a personal order from the publisher, completed the preparation of the text on February 6, 1988 (the 70th anniversary of the turning point of Russian history). As evidenced by diary entries and memoirs of friends in addition to "Leniniana" at the Veins. Yerofeyev had the idea of creating a collection of quotations from the biographies of Karl Max and Friedrich Engels, but this work was never completed. I would like to note right away that the form that the author chooses for himself is not so much a set of coherent, literal quotations, cliches and phrases of speech. In this case, in our opinion, it is advisable to assume that Ven. In this way, Yerofeyev literally replaces the figure of the "speaker" – "writer" for the role of a game mask of the evaluator. Similar experiments were typical ^[2] for Veins. Yerofeyev ^[8], he was almost always a kind of outside observer of reality, a contemplator of reality. The view from the outside is so centered in Venedikt Yerofeyev that this manner of understanding the world partly explains Yerofeyev's special stylistic game with language. It is difficult to say that this is some kind of innovative technique, because both Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times, and even more so the XIX – XX century introduced a fractal of replacing their own with someone else's. One can deliberately encounter an operation of such substitution in A.S. Pushkin, F.M. Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy, A.P. Chekhov, D.S. Merezhkovsky, A.I. Kuprin, L.N. Andreev, E.I. Zamyatin, M.A. Zoshchenko, B.L. Pasternak and other writers. But the literary focus of substitutions is generated by Venedikt Yerofeyev into a singular aesthetic code, a precedent ^[9] phenomenon with a unique, inimitable meaning is formed.

"My Little Leniniana" by Venedikt Yerofeyev is being built as a full-fledged artistic experiment, where the creator authorizes the reception of historical and revolutionary events with the thoughts of another ^[14]. For postmodernism ^[5], to which the legacy of the Veins should be attributed. Yerofeyeva, such a form is appropriate and well-reasoned. The simulation of the game ^[1], the simulation of spatial and temporal landmarks, the simulation of a reliable truth under the influence of what someone has already said levels the image of the author, he becomes a textural scriptwriter, creating a kind of palimpsest. Layering the basis of quotations according to the chronology of the unfolding of facts, an assessment / objectification of real historical events is given from the angle of a creative, comic–tragic sense. It is advisable in this case to talk about the metathesis of the present/actual and figurative/aesthetic. The author deliberately builds such a dialogue within the framework of lexical connotative variance. At the same time, the main meaning is replaced by contextual, contextual increments receptive-reader.

                Venedikt Yerofeyev's "Leniniana" is a finished work that has an explicit, targeted aesthetic, ideological and moral overtone. Structurally, the text of Venedikt Yerofeyev is divided into a number of mandatory narrative components: epigraphs, the beginning of the text, the main text block, conclusion. Everything in Yerofeyev's "Leniniana" has a sign of musicality, voicing, proclamation or manifestation. The author compiles quotations in proportion to the semantic unfolding relative to the main figure – Vladimir Lenin. For Veins. It is necessary to observe the chronology of the hero's actions, the dynamics of the narrative, the objectivity and individuality of the figurative system, initially comic, finally tragic. The final result of the text is the resolution of an artistic conflict, which exposes the hero, allows the reader to change his mind about the main figure of the national history of the twentieth century. It is necessary to consolidate the idea that connotative series change their vector contextually, the destruction of the image occurs at the moment when the nominative figure is replaced by the image of the speaker. Thus, Venedikt Yerofeyev, combining cliches and cliches, quotations and speech overtones, logically links his text into a reduplicated form of artistic understanding of realities.

The image of Vladimir Lenin turned out to be so textured by Venedikt Yerofeyev that the reader does not have any doubts about its authenticity, although initially there is such an impression, because in "Leninianus" there is a mixture of characteristic features of the main figure / image, or more precisely, the genesis of the self-destruction of a historical personality. The text aesthetically manifests the extremes of assessments of being, gives a personalized view of what is happening, but it is done through the eyes of the "organizer". If at the beginning we see the image of Vladimir Lenin satirically constructed, the evidence is that the phrases he utters like: "Paris is a huge city, fairly sprawling" ^{[7, p. 220]} ... then by the end of the satire, irony descends on the tragic: "And no kidding: "If after the release of the Soviet book it is not in the library, it is necessary that you (and we) know with absolute accuracy who to plant" ^{[7, p. 231]}; "I advise you to put all theaters in a coffin" ^{[7, p. 233]}; "We still do not know how to publicly judge for filthy red tape. For this, the entire People's Commissariat of Justice should be hung on stinking ropes..." ^{[7, 233]}. By the end of the story, the hero is brought to the extreme of destruction and destruction. In fact, the remarks are heard shouting: "I ask you to immediately instruct the NKINDEL to request a visa to enter Germany for Gleb Maximilianovich Krzhizhanovsky and his wife Zinaida Pavlovna Krzhizhanovskaya. We are talking about the treatment of hernia. With communist greetings. Lenin" ^{[7, p. 234]}; "I have to stick my nose into my book, because there is no other serious plan and there cannot be" ^{[7, p. 235]}; "This and the following letter from Chicherin clearly prove that he is ill, and very ill. We will be fools if we do not immediately and forcibly send him to a sanatorium" ^{[7, p. 235]}; "Can you arrange for the planting of flowers on the grave of Inessa Armand?" ^{[7, p. 236]}. Consequently, the character has experienced the stadiality of his growing up (from the initial point of ascent to the overthrow). It is not by chance that Venedikt Yerofeyev begins the narrative by defining the boundaries of his text, as well as clarifying the entire concept: "Well, now to the point. That is, to the selected places from Ilyich's private and business correspondence from the time he learned to write until (1922) the time he forgot how to write" ^{[7, p. 220]}.

Cryptographic techniques that Ven actively uses. Yerofeyev, the effect of the impossibility of distorting the authentic text of V.I. Lenin is achieved. It is the quote, but without quotation marks, without distorting the meaning of what was said, that is verified by the reader as the original. At the same time, the assumption of artistic fiction in this case is minimal. The possible distortion of the image is not Yerofeyev's super task, in this case he is a potentially reliable nomination, seeking truth and objectivity. In one TV interview, A.I. Solzhenitsyn stated that, while working on the image of Lenin, "persistently collected every grain, memories of him, his true features. I don't attribute to him any trait that he didn't have. My task is to let my imagination run wild as little as possible, to recreate as much as possible from what is. The artist's imagination only helps to solder individual elements and, having entered the character, try to explain how these elements are connected to each other."

Venedikt Yerofeyev, as a word artist, follows the same principles that are traditional for literature, writing, he simply cannot distort, modify, bring everything to absolute absurdity. The poetics of postmodernism ^[12], of course, destroys familiarity and ordinariness, but the point processing of facts, details, narrative staples ^[13], the delicacy of conducting a dialogue with a potential reader are revelations that should be fixed as basic for literary work in general, because trust will be lost and the potential semantic unfolding of the text will not happen.

The precedent text of Venedikt Yerofeyev is surrounded by a number of semantic constants, each of which can be correlated with one or another episode of the narrative. At the beginning of the palimpsest, "ladies'" quotes-epigraphs sound deliberately, the author borrows phrases from Nadezhda Krupskaya and Inessa Armand. The connotative component in the manifestation procedure changes contextually: the real is replaced by the comic, the comic is absolutized to the tragic: "Still, I'm sorry that I'm not a man, otherwise I would have been ten times more wandering" ^{[7, p. 219]}. For Veins. Yerofeyev's "decent" and "not quite decent" epigraphs of persons close to Lenin speak, in our opinion, of a rational, lively, natural, naturalistic picture of historical events. The madness of the masses was formed under the influence of the madness of figures changing existence.

In the prehistory of Leniniana, Yerofeyev seems to bring the extreme points of time into a single center, the author is already at the beginning focused on replacing himself as a storyteller figure with a contemplative demiurge. The letter is thus formally divided into segments, the meaning of which is far from ambiguous. What attracts in "My Little Leniniana" is a full–fledged dialogue between the author and the historical person - Lenin, the author and the potential listener, the author and the recipient researcher. The crystallized text cash of the late XIX – early XX century works in the new historical conditions as a provoking beginning. At first glance, the quotation formula reveals a second meaning, immanent to the original: "Well, now to the point. That is, to the selected places from Ilyich's private and business correspondence ..." ^{[7, p. 220]}. In the similarity of this speech formula, Venedikt Yerofeyev is close to N.V. Gogol, to whom he aspired to concretize the prosaic and syncretic. Genre piety before the "master of the word" is observed in "Notes of a psychopath", "Moscow – Cockerels", "Walpurgis Night".

The author's concept of the text during the modular combination of quotations practically does not change, there is no need for what can be said and what is undesirable. Ven. Yerofeyev foreshortened to present the figure of Vladimir Lenin. For the scriptwriter, it is contradictory, ambiguous, real, sometimes comical, most importantly – effective, absurd, cruel, relativistic. Topographic as a leading factor in the resolution of concepts is specially studied by the author. At the same time, not only the chronos of the narrative is taken into account, but also the punctuality of finding the figure, since the marking of the place is given as objectively as possible: Europe, Switzerland, Geneva, Germany, Munich, France, Tiergarten, Paris, St. Petersburg, Soviet Russia, Shushenskoye, America. Thus, the context of social and everyday, personal and public is positioned as modern for the reader. Recognizability is not so much facts as opinions and judgments "from an outsider" that create the opposition "he" (the hero) – "he" (the author). The pronominal forms "I", "me", "me", "my" begin to work in line with the partial layout. The fractionality of the phrase is sometimes not fixed graphically, formally, but the diffraction of meaning is obvious: "And Mitya? First, does he follow a diet in prison? Probably not. And there, in my opinion, it is necessary. And secondly, does he do gymnastics? Probably not either. It is also necessary. At least I know from my own experience and I will say that I did gymnastics with great pleasure and benefit at bedtime. You'll stretch out, sometimes, so that you'll even get warm. I can also recommend him a rather convenient gymnastic technique (although ridiculous) – 50 bows to the ground" ^{[7, p. 221]}.

The main character of "Leniniana" is ironic and self-critical of himself. The advice to brother Dmitry Ulyanov looks like instructions, for example, as texts of ancient Russian literature, in particular "The Teaching of Vladimir Monomakh". The form of the sermon contrasts with the historical collision of the late XIX – early XX century, the mixture of European consciousness and the mentality of the Russian. The Yerofeyev text is also ironically complicated by Vladimir Lenin's deliberately sounding confessions: "I found that Nadezhda Konstantinovna looks unsatisfactory. About me, Elizaveta Vasilyevna (potential mother-in-law of Ilyich) said: "You've been blown away!" – the review, as you can see, is such that it's better not to" ^{[7, pp. 221-222]}; "Europe after Shushensky, of course, is dog shit. "Stupid people – Czechs and Germans" ^{[7, 222]}.

The maxim of semantic constants in "My little Leniniana" Ven. Yerofeyev becomes a probabilistic dialogue with what has already been said. By appealing to Fyodor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, Mikhail Zoshchenko, there is an imaginary realization of the travelogue reception. The journey as such turns into a reverse form of accepting the truth and truth of life. For Venedikt Yerofeyev , Lenin 's phrases sound like horror: "I don't find anything funny at all in flirting with religion, but I find a lot of vile things" ^{[7, p. 222]}, "Everything. The February coup in Russia. Lenin: "Nerves are strung up, it is strictly necessary to jump, jump" ^{[7, p. 224]}, "Arrests that must be made on the instructions of Comrade. Peters, are extremely important and should be produced with great energy" ^{[7, p. 225]}, "Comrade. Zinoviev! Only today we learned in the Central Committee that the workers in St. Petersburg want to respond to the murder of Volodarsky with mass terror and that you have held them back. I protest strongly! We compromise ourselves: we threaten even in the resolutions of the Council of State with mass terror, and when it comes to business, we slow down the revolutionary initiative of the masses, which is quite correct. It's not-possible-but! It is necessary to encourage the energy and mass character of terror!" ^{[7, p. 225]}. With the manifestation of such, at the level of vocabulary, the everyday life, politics, the fate of people, the laws of the dynamics of the whole society, the pathetic and the tragic are pointwise combined into a single, conceptual node. Semantic gaps are filled with obvious falsehood and deception, the growth of a certain ontological discontent is growing in progressive dynamics. Building the text on the principle of bringing it to the absolute, Venedikt Yerofeyev, as it were, anticipates the death of the leader of the revolutionary movement. To say, in addition to "Be merciless against the left SRS and notify more often" ^{[7, p. 226]}, "These pathetic and hysterical adventurers must be ruthlessly suppressed everywhere" ^{[7, p. 226]}, "It is necessary to carry out merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards. Doubtful people should be locked up in a concentration camp outside the city" ^{[7, p. 226]}, "It is necessary to exert all forces, immediately impose mass terror, shoot and take out hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, former officers, etc. Not a minute of delay" ^{[7, p. 226]}, "Lie down with all your might to catch and shoot Astrakhan bribe takers and speculators. It is necessary to deal with this bastard so that they will remember it for all years" ^{[7, p. 226]}, "There is simply nothing to shoot without asking anyone and without allowing idiotic red tape" ^{[7, p. 227]}. Thus, the comic and ironic narrative is transformed from a light eulogy into a tragic parody with elements of melancholy. Venedikt Yerofeyev cannot speak sarcastically about this, he is a sophisticated observer, his interest is in probabilistic exposure of a historical person, even more precisely in explaining and clarifying the truth of the events described.

The formation of the semantic field of Venedikt Yerofeyev's "My Little Leniniana" consists in stating the changes that occur with the main person of the text – Vladimir Lenin. The transition from the real-historical to the comic, and then to the tragic, is supported by a conditional dialogue with Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The subject matter of the text is a combinatorial infinity of what has been said. The quoted language layer of "Leniniana" is pastiche and stylization, symbolism and language experiment, which is limited to the phrases "real", "pronounced", "fixed". A certain spatio-temporal migration of the main image not only motivates the word/phrase, but also manifests the truth of natural life. Venedikt Yerofeyev manages to merge the form, the difference of genres, the plot, the normative and poetic language into a single monolith. Following the principles of postmodernism ^[12], the author actually transforms "someone else's" into deliberately "his own". Without changing the construct of thought, he composes a fundamentally different text, a text that is modern and relevant for a potentially "new" reader. It is language ^[11] that becomes a factor of substitution, it is language that provides a new turn of connotations. Taking into account the requirements of postmodernism, the game with significations becomes an explicit form of concretization of meaning. In this case, the speaker is not a literal, rhetorically derived figure, Ven. Yerofeyev experiments with fragments of replicas, he builds a mosaic of artistic multidimensionality. Attention to the language of V.I. Lenin – there is a generalization of reception modes. The critical view also resolves the combinatorics of thought.

                The stylistics of the analyzed text can be evaluated as synthetic. Combining different layers of ^[6] language – colloquial, journalistic, official-business - Vein. Yerofeyev still creates an artistic canvas. Before the reader is not a clerical language, which only fixes phrases-formulas, acquaintance goes along the vector of the aesthetic. The combinatorics of "My Little Leniniana" can be traced at all levels of the language, but to a large extent it is manifested in vocabulary and syntax.

The life - like situation is supported by point time boundaries – 1889, 1895, 1896, 1898, 1899, 1900, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1910, 1912, 1914, 1915, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922. At the same time, the author deliberately knocks out a number of periods that are significant for the concretization of the image of Ilyich. The events of 1917, 1918, 1921 and 1922 are the key to understanding the nascent madness in the mind of the main character. Revolutionary knocking down, a new point of the dynamics of life change the psychotype of Lenin. They seem to be subjecting everything to a personal reassessment: religion, system, relationships, plans, imaginary friendship, love, art, politics, power. For Lenin, the present is replaced by fiction, passion and desire.

By the beginning of the 1920s, we hear obvious pseudo-patriotic slogans, fake manifestos, slogans, thoughts aloud. The reaction to the movement of history is dulled, the intuitive guess is leveled, the pathological cry sounds more and more against the background of depression and madness. The associative series to the end of the text is so spherical that quotations taken out of context are self-sufficient. They contain the memory of successes, dreams, passionate desires, faces. Venedikt Yerofeyev finishes the text musically, at the same time as tragically as possible: "And in conclusion – two soft chords. The first of them causes tears, the second – too" ^{[7, p. 236]}.

The final semantic constant is the textured transition from the sublime to the grassroots. The postmodern bricollage thus implements the author's code, the scriptwriter improvises in the field of ontological. Following the author, the reader no longer understands unambiguously where the "own" intention is, and where the "alien" one is.  At the same time, the way of thinking reaches an immanent oscillation between personal/individual – general / conceptual. The Vein Model. Yerofeyeva is close in line with such dynamics to the mythological construct, which syncretically combined the real, fictional, historical, religious, intuitive, social, artistic, aesthetic. Improvisation, spontaneity, the mechanistic dogma of Lenin's linguistic truth is transformed into a living, natural speech stream. It seems that such a procedure is close to a dotted, billable syllable or discourse ^[3], that is, speech in action, speech in the context of a voluminous, multiconfigural connotative edit. The reader, breaking away from the actual author's text, deciphers the semantic field further.

                It should be noted that Lenin's lexicon, selected and processed by Venedikt Yerofeyev, strengthens the stability of its existence in the literary environment. Turning to the topic of the October and February revolutions, in the whole of 1917, writers, for example Viktor Pelevin (the story "The Crystal World"), will build a mask of similarity, a mask of substitution in a similar rhythm of narrative. The February revolution in Russia is the beginning of changes that have long been manifested in dogmatics "as it should be", and not "as it is". Experiments of the last two decades of the twentieth century draw the moment "before" and the factor "after" differently, but, importantly, without fundamental distortions of the truth – in this case, the complete works of Lenin are an auxiliary to the verification of authenticity. In the literature of the second half of the twentieth century, the aestheticization of the figure of the "leader of the Revolution" is removed, the image is created at the level of a dialogue of positions, in a communicative chain of agreement / disagreement. It seems that Yerofeyev is one of the first who was able to achieve this. After all, the beginning of "My Little Leniniana" allowed for "propriety", "electability", "cordiality", "sensuality", "poetry" of Lenin: "I began composing poems in Krasnoyarsk: In Shusha, at the foot of Sayan... but, unfortunately, I did not compose anything further than the first verse" ^{[7, p. 221]}. The research base allows for an increment of meaning, but strictly following the text.              

The subjective organization of the Yerofeyev palimpsest is structured in such a way that the transition from a temporal beginning, a spatial point, a quotation following the "author" is carried out to stronger and immanent propositions. The psychophysics of cruelty, insanity, permissiveness, lack of humanity are consciously or unconsciously manifested in Lenin's speech, his discursive practice leads to the mask of generalization of clownish, fake: "I can wear a wig" ^{[7, p. 225]}.

Thus, the strong positions of the text are fully highlighted only after a holistic perception. In line with the implementation of a single plan, pairs of "ladies" epigraphs work differently at the beginning, and the prospect of the plot in the main block, and the birth of the horizon of expectation for the finale. The main image – the image of Lenin created by Venedikt Yerofeyev is not so much an appearance, a convention, as a full-fledged figure. The author's aesthetic goal was, apparently, to create a reduced form of distance between the demiurge (omniscient figure) and the trickster. The observation of what is happening – the events of the early twentieth century, the dynamics of changes in the image of the "revolutionary fighter" – was formed by the receptive combinatorics of his title characters, the birth of the mask of an outside observer.

The metaphysics of Venedikt Yerofeyev's "My Little Leniniana" is in the synthesis of the incoherent, and sometimes the substitution of the comic for the tragic, the social for the personal. Yerofeyev's precedent text eventually becomes a point of concretization of the main cultural and historical dogmas, while the dynamics of semantic constants is mobile over time. The image of Vladimir Lenin turned out to be reliable, accurate, correct, not devoid of flaws, partly of some humanity. The ideality of the figure did not work out either, which clearly contrasts with the assessments of socialist realism, the standardization of the portrait, the face. But it was the absurdity of what was happening that, as we see in the bill layout, knocked Lenin out of the revolutionary struggle, brought him to a painful line. We further understand that a new state apparatus, a new Council of People's Commissars, new figures of history, new images will come to replace it. Lenin's name will already sound like a mythologeme in literary texts, the projection of the game will constantly increase the potential of what has been said.

Of course, the Yerofeyev text is more an attempt to beat the nomination of the figure, but, having masterfully worked out the language composition, the author as a result received a construct of aesthetic fullness. The reader, joining the facts that really happened, but as if from the words of Venedikt Yerofeyev, expands for himself the ideological complex, the worldview of the events of bygone eras. And yet the main thesis, which the author could not help saying, boils down to the fact that the facets of human life are finite, and human actions, actions will somehow be polarized by subsequent generations. First of all, society should remember its history, know the cross-sections of its social, political, religious, philosophical levels, because without dialogue, competent assessment and analysis, it will not be possible to dynamically follow the truth of life.

Venedikt Yerofeyev prophetically outlined in his "Little Leniniana" the contours of the changes of the late twentieth century on the textured, precedent material of the late XIX – early XX century. The multiplicity of guesses and assumptions worked in the format of an aesthetic product, which was masterfully and conceptually configured by a brilliant artist of the word.