Alogism in Russian modernism: An investigation of alogical concepts in the works of Gogol, Bely, Kruchenykh, Malevich, Vaginov and Vvedensky.

摘要

The focus of this dissertation is a particular aspect of the Russian Futurist movement that has become known as alogism. The term "alogism" was applied by Kruchenykh and Malevich around 1914 to some of their work, and could be used to bracket anti-logical trends in Russian art and literature. In the dissertation, "alogism" is interpreted as an anti-rational, essentially metaphysical development that was particularly dominant in the early days of the Russian avant-garde. This dissertation will demonstrate that it is precisely these alogical trends in Russian literary and visual arts that have led Russian artists and writers to the discovery of so-called Non-objective art in the early twentieth century. I contend that this discovery was fueled by the Futurist refusal to accept the conventionally logical perception of the world, a refusal that often was linked with the intense exploration of the spiritual properties of art. This connection between alogism and spirituality constitutes a substantial part of my study of the alogism in Russian modernism, since for the most artists involved alogism did not simply mean a rejection of conventional logic, but a movement towards some higher causality beyond the "world of appearances.";The purpose of my thesis is twofold. Firstly to establish the genealogical links between alogical concepts and devices already manifest in the works of particular nineteenth century authors with the literary and theoretical practices of the twentieth century Russian avant-garde. Secondly, to explore the interaction of literature and the visual arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia. In this connection I not only trace the developments leading to Non-objective art (Беспредметное искусство), as particularly evident in the works of such figures as Bely, Kruchenykh and Malevich, but also argue that the alogist practices of the early Russian avant-garde, practices that preceded similar experiments in the West by Dada and Surrealism, had foundations in the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition.;In order to support this central idea I investigate four main fields in which alogical devices were developed and used in the Russian modernist milieu: (1) the playful field of literary "nonsense," where a semantic shift leads to a creation of works of art that appear nonsensical from a conventional perspective; (2) the metaphysical sphere marked by dimensions other than those envisioned by conventional logic (including approaches to religion) that the technique of "shift" enables the artist to explore by undermining the traditional notions of meaning; (3) the practice of artistic epater le bourgeois which was leveled against the dominant social mechanisms; (4) the field of linguistic experiment which ultimately led to the creation of a new language.