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

Abstract

This dissertation addresses itself to the enigma of Aleksei Remizov (1877-1957) as a highly original writer of “literature in the second degree.” The key to the work of this archaic modernist lies, I argue, in the idea of rewriting broadly construed 1) as a hypertextual and intermedial practice of translation or transposition; 2) as retelling: telling an old story again in a new way and—its inverse—telling a new story in an old-fashioned way, or using the language of the past to talk about the present; 3) as fictionalizing or mythologizing; and, significantly, 4) as scribal activity: rewriting in the literal sense, copying texts by hand. Each of these modes of rewriting, inherent in the conception of cultural memory that informs Remizov’s aesthetic, is crucial to the work of memory that Remizov performs in his verbal and visual art. Together they constitute a performative ritual of rewriting as reminiscing. Two texts ground my study of Remizov’s poetics of rewriting: The Dancing Demon. Dance and Word / Pliashushchii demon. Tanets i slovo (Paris, 1949) and Diaghilevan Evenings / Diagilevskie vechera (1934), an illustrated album that exemplifies his intermedial approach to art. My analysis of these works traces their connections to other texts: Remizov’s own, those of others, and—taking the term in the broadest semiotic sense—texts in other media as well. The goal of my interdisciplinary analysis is to unpack Remizov’s hypertextual practice of writing “on the basis of [existing] material” and to explore the transformative activity of palimpsesting—a rewriting that repeats, but with a difference in order to re-present. Recent work on archaic modernism, theories of intertextuality and intermediality, and the history of the book inform my argument about the crucial role that the ritual of copying texts by hand and ornamenting them with doodles and drawings played in Remizov’s aesthetic. For this writer and graphic artist, I argue, the embodied experience of writing was 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.