Cyclic forms as a way of presenting existential issues in A. M. Remizov's story "Sisters of the Cross"

Demidov Nikita Mikhailovich ORCID: 0000-0001-8336-4333 Postgraduate student, Department of Theory of Literature, Lomonosov Moscow State University 123181, Russia, Moscow, Isakovsky str., 28k2, sq. 574 josefkessler.vonwissenstein@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

A. M. Remizov's contribution to Russian modernist prose, despite the complex history of the reception of his work, is hardly in doubt for a modern literary historian, unlike the mystery of the writer's creative consciousness. The originality of his method allows us to talk about a special author's "I", the communicative pathos of which reflects the full versatility of the writer's artistic method, where myth and the spontaneity of the accumulation of metaphysical experience become part of the strategy of finding answers to existential questions, among which, in addition to the usual pair of "life-death", the phenomena of redemption, Christian asceticism, agony as a special acute phase of the experience of being (in Russian literature, this phenomenon was first described by Remizov). The ideological and aesthetic program of the talented writer has evolved from a somewhat naive juxtaposition of intuitive knowledge and empirical knowledge to the perception of being as an outlandish environment inextricably linked with human suffering and evil, located between the pole of the earthly and the heavenly. The peculiarities of the poetics of the original modernist, one way or another centered around the specifics of the neo-mythological transformation of the ancient Russian context ("Holy Russia"), the steady dominance of female images and the syncretism of paganism and Christianity typical of Russian modernism ^[1], can also not do without a special organization of the narrative structure as a way of explicit expression of these principles, based on key issues of being. The existential problems that accompanied all of Remizov's work are revealed with extraordinary force in the story "The Sisters of the Cross": the tragedy of the characters lies in some "restlessness", the illogicality of their own existence (which is not realized by all the characters), the position of exiles within the fictitious reality of the work. Various forms of cyclization as the realization of the existential aspect, their role in the construction of the artistic space of the writer's key text will be the subject of this article.

Remission and cyclization

It is impossible to imagine the study of Remizov's work without a preliminary remark about the creative expansion of the author's consciousness, which is directly responsible for the meaningful realization of the existential issues. We are talking about the active authorization by the writer of the external environment and the socio-cultural phenomena that it contains, including someone else's literary material. This feature indicates the importance of the biographical method in analyzing the writer's work, the need to take into account his attitude to "borderline" forms of being. Such a desire for self-expression and independent immersion in the material selected for artistic creation is not limited to pointing out the "mythological nature" of the author's thinking; we should talk about a special intersubjective method of the writer, where "the uniqueness of Remizov's creative consciousness was the ability to transform the phenomena of world history, mythology and culture into a concrete and individual. "I"-centrism concerned not only literature, but also such an elementary and intimate sphere of life as everyday life" ^{[3, p. 2]}. It is necessary, however, to warn the reader against literally following the approach, which in the science of literature is called teleological; being a good compromise between biographical and formal, it can give certain problems an unjustified hierarchical status of the starting point of the author's idea and the main substantive focus of the work, from which all others proceed. The same existential problem should be discussed in terms of its fixation in the composition, even if the high narrative activity of a writer like Remizov forces the researcher to choose the existential aspect as the category that most fully reflects the author's intention. In the work, the logic of the development of the author's ideas owes its stylistic realization to the fantastic manner of narration, and its "stability" to the concepts of a single "artistic ensemble" and cyclization, the writer's attraction to which attaches special importance to both motives and all literary phenomena based on repetition. The ensemble, understood by E. Tyryshkina as a less strict structure than the cycle, represents a holistic coverage of the collected works for a certain period, compiled with a well-traced logic ^{[7, p. 33]}. The researcher takes into account Remizov's scrupulous approach to compiling his collected works (using the example of 1910-1912 creativity) and the principle of including texts in separate volumes, where the central position of the "Cross Sisters" is confirmed by the strengthening of the motional structures inherent in the writer before and did not disappear in the future. The characters' sense of some "inappropriateness" of their own existence is directly connected with the chaotic, unknowable structure of the world of the work, pushing social and historical conditions into the background, and fragmentary descriptions of broken destinies (especially women's, representing a continuous chain of loss and violence) are repeated one after another in a monotonous tone. This "monotony" in Remizov is not accidental and is an intra-textual form of cyclization as a striking stylistic feature of the writer. Let's focus on the concept of a cycle in more detail to clarify the peculiarity of this approach.

The cycle (as well as cyclization) is considered as a way for the author to organize his own texts, place them in collections according to a certain thematic feature, and in a broad sense as a conditional designation of large forms of lexico-semantic repetitions used in the function of supporting the content of the composition of a literary work. Remizov's repetitive textual components have repeatedly become a topic of scientific understanding, their correlation by semantic groups has been studied, such as nature, color, light, sound, etc. ^{[2, pp. 148-159]}. We will be interested in constructions that have a cyclic nature, but at the same time are not limited to lexical and semantic repetitions, with the undoubted importance of the latter. The "applied" understanding of the cycle can also be associated with an approach where the psychological characteristics of the author's personality ("I"-Remizov's centrism) are simultaneously superimposed on the perception of the literary artifact itself. Let us explain: the classical definition of a literary cycle implies the opposition of the integrity of a literary artifact and the relative autonomy of its parts, and the recognition of this fundamental principle in relation to a specific literary phenomenon and the "recognition" of the literary cycle is the responsibility of the reader — both real and implicit. On Remizov's part, this manifests itself in a fantastic manner and a specific form of authorization, which we wrote about above, but the reader's side is also important. The latter's powers of observation, the ability to combine disparate fragments, may be related to the writer's tendency to cyclize his work or to a kind of literary game, where rudiments of cyclic forms are needed to create a false horizon of readers' expectations. The task of the reader here is to try to guess the very existence of cyclical trends (the cycle itself may be absent). Remizov's strategy certainly belongs to the first category, both in the case of the place of the "Cross Sisters" in the artistic ensemble of his works, and when considering the principles of cyclization within the story. Nevertheless, the image of Glotov can be perceived as an unrealized cyclic component; introduced at the beginning of the work on a par with Marakulin (we observe a similar beginning in Gogol's story "How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich", where there is also a comparative characteristic of the characters), he appears (or is remembered) at unpleasant moments for Marakulin: the suspicion that it was Glotov arranged Marakulin's dismissal, a meeting at the theater and Glotov's caustic comment about her, etc. Glotov can be perceived both as a double antagonist of Marakulin, and as an image of a cold, indifferent person, but at the same time his modest role in the narrative is felt. He is perceived not as a stable element of the motivational structure, but rather as one of the ordinary carriers of the world, immune to human suffering, which bothered the writer so much — in this sense, he does not stand out from such spiritual callousness of such inhabitants of the Burkov house as General Kholmogorova or old man Gorbachev. The cycle can also be perceived as a constructive principle of individual author's or general genre evolution (such as, for example, the gradual return of the genre of the picaresque novel, borrowed in the 18th century, in the first half of the 20th century (Ehrenburg, Kaverin), and then in the 20th (Aleshkovsky)) along with the desire to maintain the compositional integrity of the works. The motives reflecting the writer's existential problems: grief, suffering, the position of an outcast, whose bearers are the inhabitants of Burkov's house, owe their motivational functions not only to their regular repetition in the "Cross Sisters", but also to the metatext of Remizov's heterogeneous creativity in general. As part of the cyclization strategy, this means some flexibility of the literary work as a whole, openness to its diverse interpretations due to some structural incompleteness of the motif, which is fragmented and meaningfully constantly updated in the narrative structure of the work and beyond, and therefore cannot be fully understood. The motif structure of Remizov as a whole can be considered as evidence of symbolist influence and is a necessary means of organizing the narrative and updating the text-myth (when the writer brings to the foreground of the narrative the image of suffering Russia: a description of Kostrinsk, the bloody overshadowing of himself with the banner of Marakulin's mother in the temple, etc.).

The mythological and religious substratum of the story as the foundation of the existence of Remizov's heroes contributes to the integrity of the compositional structure, which at first glance is unstable due to Remizov's subjective lyrical intonation and his specific fantastic manner, which, being first embodied in the novel "Pond", was ambiguously perceived by contemporaries, in particular A. Bely. The narrator's voice in such a text is difficult to distinguish from the point of view of the central character. According to G. Slobin, "pervasive lyricism no longer represents a deviation from the main theme — as it was, for example, in Gogol's "Dead Souls" — it is tied to a new narrative dynamics" ^{[5, p. 61]}. The destruction of the boundary between the point of view of the author and the hero (for example, the presence of repetitions in both the author's speech and the speech of the heroes) should not be absolutized, but such an "intimization" of the artistic space gives a special characteristic to the elements of the composition, including images and motives. The "fragmentary nature" of the image we mentioned requires the reader to actively reconstruct it on the basis of countless associations, omissions, etc., which is relevant throughout the event of the story. The need for constant adjustment of the interpretation of the image is combined with the tendency to cyclization indicated by us, which is not limited to the motivic structure. According to I. Pospisil's apt remark, "on the one hand, a literary cycle means not only some closure, completion, but also a certain openness or semi-openness of the artifact, the autonomy of its parts and structural flexibility" ^{[10, S. 88]}. Remizov's motives are dynamic and abrupt; they owe their grotesque characterization to this quality. As a student of Gogol, Remizov attached special importance to the material world and the important function of details in the development of the plot action, however, the ornamentation of prose, including due to the fantastic manner indicated by us, inevitably led to a weakening of eventfulness (which is true for ornamental prose in general, see, for example, Andrei Bely's Petersburg). It would be a mistake to talk about the destruction of the narrative basis in Remizov, given that "ornamental prose does not achieve the highest thematic complexity in the complete destruction of its narrative basis, but where paradigmatization encounters resistance from the plot" ^{[8, p. 266]}. The strengthening of the semantic potential of the narrative is achieved in the "Sisters of the Cross" through the active use of the grotesque. Its influence is difficult to overestimate: it is a key element of Remizov's dreammaking and is generally used by the writer as a technique that gives the subject of the statement additional certain meanings, in addition to the basic one, but at the same time diligently conceals it. Ambivalence of meanings is most pronounced in bizarre dreams, but is not limited to them. The violence and humiliation that dominates the characters does not allow them to completely lose faith in themselves precisely because of the grotesqueness, and, consequently, the incomprehensibility of these motives; Remizov actually requires the reader to try to grasp the mystery and horror of life with his mind, which is difficult due to the practical impenetrability of the grotesque from a meaningful point of view.

The "pole" of A. Remizov's work, based on a parable, apocryphal, legendary, encloses a person in a space of suffering and temptations, where there is no place for rebellion, and characters prone to developed self—reflection — like Marakulin - are only able to painfully experience their own identity without hope of gaining inner freedom or achieving specific goals in life. The hero's activity in an impersonal world, where the problem of good and evil defies logical comprehension, is possible only as a timid attempt at rebellion, which, according to Remizov, is a priori destructive. An important role in shaping the dynamics of the characters of the story is played by a specially arranged chronotope, where the mysticism of everyday life attaches special importance to every minute of the life of the characters, who surprisingly do not give up trying to achieve their goals despite a series of tragic events and the futility of their efforts. This radically distinguishes their existence from the existential tension of Dostoevsky's characters, painfully experiencing their condition; both the women in the story, Marakulin, and even Plotnikov gravitate towards submission or, like Akumovna, to a form of humility bordering on madness. The vector of their existence — steady dying, resembling an ominous ritual — is incredibly similar to Heidegger's concept of "being-to-death": death in the story is an element that completes the integrity of the image, shows the ontological dimension of the hero and his understanding of his existential possibilities. It is safe to say that there are no figures freed from the burden of suffering in the "Cross Sisters", it is difficult to find characters who consciously rebel against such an existential way of life or at least consider themselves "superfluous" in it — Remizov's heroes, including minor ones, unlike, say, Onegin, Rudin, they do not acutely feel the lack of soil under their feet and their own uselessness. The atmosphere of chaos and horror in which Remizov's characters are immersed can be considered a legacy of the Gothic tradition in Russian literature, which was especially vividly manifested in symbolist prose (Bryusov, Sologub, Bely) ^{[6, pp. 55-69]} and continued to have a steady influence on Remizov's work. Mystery and existential fear, which, in accordance with the logic of the construction of the Gothic novel, consistently increase in the course of the narrative, find their concrete embodiment not only in dreams, where reality is transformed in the most bizarre way, but also in the altered state of consciousness of the character, located on the border of reality and delirium, which allows us to talk about Remizov's anticipation of the poetics of surrealism. Sleep accounts for the greatest proportion of grotesque, allegorical images that bring confusion to the consciousness of the characters, although it is done in different ways: Marakulin is not aware of the causal relationship between grotesque dreams and his life experience, which leads to a misunderstanding of why he should suffer; Akumovna, unlike Marakulin, is aware of the meaning She is stronger in faith, is not afraid of frightening images, walking through torments in a dream has already mentally prepared her for death. Remizov's transformation of the poetics of the Gothic genre lies in the fact that the inexorable movement of the heroes towards spiritual death echoes not the dynamics of chronological time, but mythical time; the chronotope in the "Sisters of the Cross" serves as a tool clarifying the portrait of the character, his habitual role in the organization of space and time is significantly weakened, including due to an unusually strong to involve the reader in the artistic space, where, according to Remizov's plan, he must know it from the inside, trying to put together a shaky empirical reality. Neither Marakulin nor Akumovna, as the central characters, are able to solve this problem, and Remizov enters into a literary game with the reader, urging at least him to challenge chaos. Thus, the historical, mythopoetic layer, the foundation of which forms the St. Petersburg myth and the context of ancient Russian culture, is an inaccessible area even for Marakulin, with all his powerful ability to reflect. Marakulin's living embodiment of fatalism, along with Akumovna (it is enough to point out the recurring scene of fortune-telling), is the understanding that a person is weak and mortal. Characters trying to find inner wholeness or realize their place in the world, including through open madness, like Carpenters, fail. The theme of rebellion is repeated in "The Sisters of the Cross" no less often than, for example, in "The Clock", but it becomes important to understand the futility of not rebellion at all, but the rebellion of reason against the world order based on the divine will. In this regard, it is necessary to warn against using the term "little man" in relation to the characters of the story: Remizov, transforming the corresponding Gogol experience, does not focus on the socio-historical cause of the hero's suffering — they are purely existential. In the studies devoted to Remizov's work, both domestic and foreign, the emphasis is rightly placed on Remizov's original creative method, its uniqueness; meanwhile, the existential situation in the "Three Sisters" can be clarified from the point of view of the historical and genetic approach. V. Svaton wrote about a special meaningful type of novel in foreign and Russian literature, which is called "roman ?ivotn?ho zvratu" — literally "the novel of turning life around", where the linearity of the plot, characteristic of, for example, the novel of upbringing of the XVII–XVIII centuries, was revised. The unpredictability of life, understood by writers (in our country, according to the scientist, this revolution began to take place from the 1825-1830s), led to a complication of the images of characters, who began to open up great opportunities for self-realization, and, consequently, to a complication of the plot as an element of composition ^{[11, pp. 81-95]}. The motif of the road and space characteristic of this type of novel, the equal hierarchical position of history and everyday life in Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and especially the retrospective view of life lived ("The Death of Ivan Ilyich" by L. Tolstoy, "superfluous people" in Russian literature) did not disappear anywhere at the turn of the XIX–XX century. Russian literature, but the antinomy of everyday life and history has become sharper, the deep connection of the simplest things with the global, supra-world context has intensified. Remizov did not escape this influence. As D. Kshitsova writes, "one of the purposes of modernity was to indicate bodily and mental suffering as if in a curved reality, in the refraction of which the symbol grows to a parable of ambiguity" ^{[9, S. 108]}, and Remizov consistently adhered to this scheme, actualizing the most important issues of being for him with motivic structures with appropriate "variables" for chaos, nightmare, a mixture of the real and the unreal and accentuating the accompanying features of the characters already beyond the pages of the "Crusade Sisters".

Conclusion

The interdependence of the creator and his creation in the analysis of Remiz texts has traditionally been the starting point of many outstanding works devoted to the writer's work, and the task of his researchers in many ways is to "inner thematic meaning" (in the words of A. P. Skaftym) as a point of concentration of the author's ideas and the representation of the author's content, it was correlated with the corresponding components of the text ^{[4, 535 p.]}. The role of such components is usually the category of motive and theme — existential issues in the context of this article. Remizov's novella "The Sisters of the Cross" is the quintessence of this type of literary text, where the connection of the author's intention, the intention to implement it in the matrix of the work with the formal and substantive level of the work is quite obvious. Being in the "Sisters of the Cross" does not yet have the rigid predestination that Kafka's characters will face, for example: the increase in despair and alienation weakly correlates with the plot, but their nature clearly emerges at the formal structural level in the form of cyclic forms of different hierarchical levels. The forms of cyclization indicated by us as the most productive formal expression of Remizov's creative strategy allows us to combine heterogeneous forms of lexico-semantic repetitions in a general meaningful context; their conscious, thought-out repetition by the author is combined within the framework of an artistic whole in general and within the framework of a specific existential problem of interest to us. These forms are not limited to the categories of motive and theme. This is both the level of cyclization within the collection of works (the concept of an "artistic ensemble"), and the level of the story itself (the motivic structure), as well as the literary tradition as a whole. I would like to emphasize that in this work we consciously proceeded from a broad understanding of the cycle, speaking of it as a "conditional term implying a cyclical or cyclized tendency" ^{[10, s. 89]} — such a wide angle of consideration of the problem allows us to emphasize the specifics of the narrative manner in the "Crusaders", where the disturbing tone of the narrator it connects heterogeneous images, be it a person or a thing, with the mystery of their existence, which cannot be solved a priori, but it is possible not to experience the torments of reason and accept this mystery as something natural. The cycle as a phenomenon of Remizov's poetics, highlighted at the textual and metatextual level, is able in the future to cover the logic of the author's idea development throughout his work outside of the specified story, and the existential context as one of the meaningful links of the cycle will serve as an aid for further study of the writer's texts.