Van Baak Joost. The House in Russian Literature: A Mythopoetic Exploration

Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2009. — 528 p. — ISBN: 9042025492; 9789042025493.The domestic theme has a tremendous anthropological, literary and cultural significance. The purpose of this book is to analyse and interpret the most important realisations and tendencies of this thematic complex in the history of Russian literature. It is the first systematic book-length exploration of the meaning and development of the House theme in Russian literature of the past 200 years. It studies the ideological, psychological and moral meanings which Russian cultural and literary tradition have invested in the house or projected on it in literary texts. Central to this study's approach is the concept of the House Myth, consisting of a set of basic fabular elements and a set of general types of House images. This House Myth provides the general point of reference from which the literary works were analyzed and compared. With the help of this analytical procedure characteristics of individual authors could be described as well as recurrent patterns and features discerned in the way Russian literature dealt with the House and its thematics, thus reflecting characteristics of Russian literary world pictures, Russian mentalities and Russian attitudes towards life. This book is of interest for students of Russian literature as well as for those interested in the House as a cultural and literary topic, in the semiotics of literature, and in relations between culture, anthropology and literature.What is a house?The House as Archetype and Archetope of Human Culture. Its Origins and Universal Features in Relation to the Indo-European Tradition.
The House Myth and the House as a Model of the World. Some Observations about the Russian Cultural Tradition.
The Psychopoetics of the House and Archaic Thinking.
The House and its Functions in Structuring Narrative and Poetic Worlds: the House as Myth.
The house myth in 19th and 20th century Russian literature and culture.
1. Two Strong Images.
2. The Domostroi and Some Other Old Russian Reflexes: Ostrovskii, Dostoevskii, Leskov, Zamiatin.
Peter the Great’s Window on Europe.
Chaadaev’s Homelessness. The Beginning of a Long Tradition.
Some Diachronic Considerations. The Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. The Natural School.
The Slavophile Domus.
Pushkin’s Houses. The Craving for Homeliness.
Lermontov’s Cosmic Homelessness.
Gogol’. The Bachelor, and the House as a Box.
The House Myth Between the Natural School and Realism. From the City to the Countryside 159.
The Russian Estate. The Domus Myth and the ‘Nests of the Gentry’.
Turgenev and the Domus.
Goncharov. Homelessness Between Arcadian Dreams and Precipices.
Saltykov-Shchedrin. Houses of Death.
Tolstoi and Family Life.
Bunin. Remembering the House. The Body in the World.
Dostoevskii. The Underground Man and the Accidental Family.
The End of Realism. The Onset of Modernism. New Anxieties.
Garshin’s World as Prison.
Chekhov. Ambiguous Dachas and Mansions.
Symbolism. Demonic Urbanism and Catastrophic Expectations.
Briusov and Blok.
Belyi’s Cosmic House. The Big Bang and the Temple of the Body.
From Symbolism to Futurism.
Guro. A New House and a New Life. The Magic of a Child’s Vision.
Khlebnikov. The House of Language. A Body to Live in.
Maiakovskii. Realising the Metaphor. The Self as a House.
Zabolotskii. Modernist. Archaist.
The Catastrophe. The Loss of the Centre.
Pil’niak. Life and Death of the House.
Zamiatin. The Cave Myth Revisited.
Platonov’s Paradoxes and Pseudologics. Negative Spaces and Houses on the Move.
The House and Socialism. Trifonov, Chukovskaia and Akhmatova.
Anti-Houses. Under the Doom of the Kommunalka. Deformations of the Utopian House.
Bulgakov. The House as a Metaphysical Home.
Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag World. ‘Matriona’s House’.
Erofeev. Venichka’s Homelessness in the Soviet Universe.
Sorokin’s Roman. A Postmodernist Attempts the Destruction of the Domus.
Makanin’s Underground. Homeless Under a Roof.
Conclusions.