Cracks in the Iron Curtain: Reception and Influence of the Nouveau Roman in Late-Soviet Russia

Abstract

This dissertation uncovers the understudied role of the French nouveau roman within late-Soviet cultural discourse and literature. The nouveau roman’s reception during this period of time reveals how the literary and theoretical works of these French authors played an important part in late-Soviet debates regarding the definition and flexibility of realism and the novelistic genre: while sometimes rejected by Soviet critics as part of a broader attack against Western modernism, the radically experimental styles of the new novelists also opened up a new aesthetic space beyond the realm of socialist realism which would be explored and creatively exploited by certain Russian authors and critics. Thus, in examining the movement’s reception in Russia, I focus not only on how it was read by Soviet readers, but also the variety of ways in which it was used by critics, officials, translators and other authors to different aesthetic and political ends. Bringing together existing hermeneutic models from Pierre Bayard, Steven Mailloux, Hans Robert Jauss, and others, I demonstrate how non-specialist Soviet readers came to understand the nouveau roman without necessarily reading the works of its authors first-hand. Instead, the group was rendered comprehensible through an intertextual network of summaries, quotations and fragments in the Soviet press designed to replace the need for full translations, thereby limiting the interpretive freedom of participants in Soviet discourse about the group. Nevertheless, over time critics were able to present rhetorically compelling interpretations of the new novelists’ prose through a humanist lens that reconfigured the movement as a development of traditional realism rather than a radical break from it. This interpretive strategy, in turn, helped to justify further official translations of the new novelists’ fiction and essays, while simultaneously expanding the limits of what constituted “realism” to encompass the disorienting formal devices of the new novelists.

Building on this history of reception, my dissertation shows how late-Soviet and post-Soviet Russian authors like Vasily Aksenov, Andrei Bitov, Varlam Shalamov, Vladimir Sorokin, and Aleksandr Il’ianen responded to the experimentation of the nouveau roman in their own literary work. Using an intertextual framework based on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of repetition and difference, I examine how these Russian authors “repeated” formal features of prominent new novelists in order to simultaneously differentiate their writing from both the nouveau roman and Soviet literary norms. Each author uses the nouveau roman as a point of departure that leads them in distinct and sometimes incompatible directions regarding the ethical status of literature and the narrativization of reality, often emphasizing political themes that the new novelists themselves sought to avoid in their fiction. These comparisons prompt a re-examination of the “antinovel” as a prominent genre associated with both the nouveau roman and Russian experimental fiction in the late 20th century. Despite their formal similarities, the Russian authors I examine are asking fundamentally different questions about the genre of the novel from those asked by the nouveau roman. Whereas the latter presents a critique of the traditional, realist novel as a way of differentiating that tradition from better, more open forms that the novel might adopt, I suggest that Shalamov, Sorokin and Il’ianen’s antinovels explore broader anxieties about the novel as such, including the limits of its social value and inherent structural limitations.