Intermediacy

About this book

This dissertation examines the problem of in-between-ness, or intermediacy, in relation to the construction of freedom in interwar Russian, Polish, and Czech literatures. Responding to Bergson, Husserl, Einstein, and the rapid industrialization of Eastern Europe that followed World War I, intellectual discourse in the 1920s and 1930s was heavily infused with challenging new concepts of space-time. Several writers in Central and Eastern Europe used these conceptual shifts to create a sense of boundlessness in literary texts, quickly discovering the necessity and the impossibility of what Erich Fromm termed an "escape from freedom," since an unbounded system allows no possibility of escape. Following in Franz Kafka's footsteps, this body of literature demonstrates how major themes of Eastern European late-Modernism--including metamorphosis, doubling, repetition, and the anachronistic blending of epochs--share a deep structure within a broader discourse about new worlds and the end of history. The protagonists of this story are Andrei Platonov, Osip Mandel'shtam, and Nikolai Zabolotskii in Soviet Russia; Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and Czeslaw Milosz in Poland; and Karel Capek, Vítezslav Nezval, and Richard Weiner in Czechoslovakia. Although these writers are usually treated principally within their national traditions, a careful, cross-cultural analysis shows striking thematic and philosophical similarities among them. Over and over again, these writers employ alternative theories of space-time to escape from lived praxis, only to find greater horror in the existential fantasies they have created. With frequent reference to these authors' aesthetic theories, as well as to such innovative metaphysical thinkers as Bakhtin, Heidegger, Lévinas, Scheler, and Buber, I show how the often strange and fantastic quality of this literature has a consistent foundation in philosophies of space-time. These manifest themselves as oppositional concepts: identity versus infection; individual versus collective; maturity versus immaturity. The heroes of these texts are "intermediate" insofar as they continually oscillate between ideals of definition and formlessness. Cramped by definition, they seek formlessness; adrift in formlessness, they retreat back into definition. Accordingly, these texts display an extraordinary degree of formal and conceptual repetition, which subverts narrative progress and, in the end, hopes to subvert death itself.