The Paper's reporter Luo Xin intern Wu Mian
Contemporary Russian-speaking poet Maria Stepanova's novel Memory of Memory won several awards in Russian literature that year, and this year was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. In November last year, the book was published by CITIC Dafang Chinese Simplified edition.
"Memory and Memory" was published by CITIC Publishing & Dafang Chinese Simplified edition
"Memory and Memory" is mainly strung together by two lines: one is the author's literary and philosophical speculation on old objects, documents, and people who try to "remember", and the other is the author's search for family relics, retracing the history of his own family in modern Russian history, and piecing together the life story of a Jewish family for generations. In retrospection and speculation, "Post-memory Russia" is considered, the sages of the entire European and American literary and artistic circles, including Russia, are re-examined, and the relationship and logic between the past and the present, the deceased and the living, are re-sorted.
On March 21, translator Liu Wenfei, president of the Russian Literary Research Association, writer Xu Zechen and media personality Bai Lin visited the Beijing Joy City store of the one-way space, from Stepanova's "Memory memory", talking about the political and aesthetic concerns of today's Russian literature, and analyzing the inseparable connection between the book and the "Silver Age" a hundred years ago.
From left to right: Bai Lin, Liu Wenfei and Xu Zechen
Form "inheritance", content "rebellion"
In the Western literary world, "Memory and Memory" is considered a long novel, but the domestic academic community defines it as documentary prose. Liu Wenfei first answered the reader's question about the genre of "Memory and Memory": "Chinese and the Understanding of European and Americans in the literary genre are not the same, and the genre of Chinese is generally a quartile, which is novel, poetry, prose and drama. But The Anglo-American (including The Russian language) is a three-pointer, they are drama, fiction and poetry, and prose is not a separate literary genre in the minds of Europeans and Americans. ”
After reading "Memory and Memory", Liu Wenfei thought of Mandelstam's "The Hustle and Bustle of the Times", Pasternak's "People and Things" and other "poets' autobiographies". He roughly divided the Russian autobiographical novel into two categories, one is the autobiography of novelists, such as Tolstoy's "Childhood, Youth, Youth", Gorky's autobiographical trilogy, which adopts the so-called realist writing method, flat and direct narrative, and everything is the poet's autobiography, or the autobiography of the poetic body, poetic autobiography, such as "The Hustle of the Times" and "Man and Things", which are the literary products of the "Silver Age".
In Liu Yunfei's view, Stepanova's "Memory of Memory" is quite traditional in form, continuing the form of the autobiography of the poet of the "Silver Age". "Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova, the four of them basically represent the poetry of the 'Silver Age'. Their influence on Stepanova's book is evident. ”
Photo of the author Stepanova family (back of Grandma Tai)
But on the other hand, Liu Yunfei believes that "Memory memory" is very "anti-silver age" in terms of content. He cited several details of Stepanova's creative process, including Stepanova's mistaken age of Grandma Sarah, and was deeply moved by what she thought was her hometown courtyard, but later found that the house number was wrong. The last paragraph of the book says that "memory is unreliable", which is the main theme of the novel in Liu Yunfei's view. This was the first point of her betrayal of the Silver Age tradition, a postmodern way of becoming suspicious of literature. And the writers of the 'Silver Age' would have regarded literature as sacred as heaven. ”
Another point is the issue of stepanova's Jewish identity. No Russian writer before her dared to write about Jewish history as proudly and proudly as she did. Liu Yunfei said that the "Silver Age" was a non-national and super-national art era, and people at that time only emphasized their identity as poets and painters, and did not talk about the identity of the nation. Therefore, "Memory and Memory" is very traditional in form and "Silver Age", but in terms of content, it is a kind of "deviation and rebellion".
Poet Maria Stepanova
The signals and revelations brought by the "fragmentary"
Xu Zechen also shared his reading experience. In his view, "Memory memory" is first of all very suitable for reading as a pillow book, it is fragmentary, you can blow which page to see which page; at the same time, "Memory memory" is extremely informative. "If you really want me to give this book a definition: what exactly does it belong to? I would say it's an encyclopedic work. It is cross-genre, with elements of fiction, essays, academic papers, archaeology... Every time I look at a page, I feel like I've gained something. ”
From the perspective of the concept of novel writing, Xu Zechen also feels that "Memory and Memory" has a lot of fit. "Looking at this work, everyone thinks of Tokarczuk, and the works of the two of them are very similar in form. For example, "Cloud Tour" can be said to be a splicing of pieces, and Tokarczuk himself makes no secret of saying that the writing of this novel did not have a grand structure from the beginning. He said that works such as "Cloud Tour" and "Memory and Memory" appear today and are accepted by a wide range of readers, at least it shows that they are in some way in line with this era.
"We say every day that this is an era of fragmentation, especially of fragmented reading and fragmented information. But the novel we are asking for now is still a beginning and a turn, a beginning, a development, a climax, a tight logic and structure. Today, it is difficult for us to find a whole structure for the world, as we did in the nineteenth century, or as we did in the mid-twentieth century. Xu Zechen believes that the fragmentary structure may slowly become a very important vein in the structure of the novel. As a writer, he felt that this might be a signal, or a revelation.
In addition, he paid special attention to the small objects in "Memory Memory", such as postcards and letters. "There's a saying in the novel to the effect that our memories can't be attached without these little things that seem useless in everyday life. These small objects are also my favorite in the past few years of writing, and "Jerusalem" and later "Going North" have used a lot. He said, "If you make the social information or life information attached to each small object a little bit clearer, I think the personal history will be clear." On each small object is not just an individual, but also an era. ”
The literary drift bottle of the "Silver Age"
Xu Zechen loved Russian literature. "Their work, whether it's a personal narrative or a grand narrative, you can see a very natural fit between personal history and public history. The personal history written by each person has great coverage and can eventually be embedded in the public history. Everyone's destiny creates a strong tension with the state that you don't see in most of the works of other countries, even China, and that's probably why I love Russian literature so much. ”
Liu Yunfei recently wrote an article called "The Paradoxical Trend of Russian Literature After the Collapse of the Soviet Union." "The current Russian literature, including Stepanova, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present, we can summarize the trend that after the dissolution, it is to avoid Soviet literature, the farther away the better, the faster the better. How it was written before, we now have to write it in a different way. It used to be realism, now it's modernism, and there's postmodernity after modernism; the more popular it was written before, the more obscure it is now; the more melodious it was before, the more niche I write now. ”
He said that post-dissolution Russian literature had these three paradoxical tendencies: from non-ideology to another official ideology; from the dissolution of national literature to the flourishing of a new literary and cultural identity; and from realism to postmodernism to neorealism.
In his view, the "Silver Age" was forcibly interrupted, it was a "very wise child who died before he was fully grown." "The 'Silver Age' has been basically deconstructed to the present, but the cultural tradition of the 'Silver Age' is still very deep in Russia. I remember someone saying in Moscow: 'Russians are literary animals.' You can't change his animality, literature is something in the blood, in that sense, if the 'Silver Age' is the Russian Renaissance, a great literary age, it will never be out of date. Good literature must be recognized generation after generation, but if it is understood by its contemporaries, it is not a true masterpiece. In this sense, every generation or two someone picks up the 'Silver Age' literary drift bottle. ”
Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Zhe
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang