Vasilij Rozanov as a Forerunner of the Avant-garde

Abstract

Vasilij Vasiljevič Rozanov (1856-1914), representative of Russian modernism, writer, journalist and religious thinker, is a forerunner of avant-garde (European and Russian) art. He did not formally belong to it but he heralded it with his genric and stylistically de-hierarchical and de-canonized forms and with all of those elements or constitutive factors which were essentially different from modernism. In his work The Theory of Prose (O teorii prozy, 1929) Victor Schklovsky will interpret him in an avant-garde fashion and devote a whole chapter to his work. The main intention of the paper is to draw attention to the Russian avant- garde, more specifically the Russian literary avant-garde and to attempt to investigate the extent to which Rozamov was a "spontaneous"(Flaker), unintentional avant-garde writer incorporated into this "language of the cultural epoch" as Lotman calls the avant-garde without explicitly using the term. The article attempts to show how this author's prose evinces those stylistic features which can be deemed constitutive for the formation of the avant-garde which is explained by the fact that the sweep of action of the avant-garde is significantly broader than the core of this stylistic formation. Rozanov's dynamic forms which oppose the rationality of systematized thought are characterized by the unbreakable ties between the private/intimate and the public. In the desire to fixate the smallest and most dispersed movements of knowledge (the "manuscript nature" of the soul) in his casual and brief notes, according to the most diverse and up to then unusual themes, the documentary, real, authentic life material is transformed into literary fiction -(auto)biographical facts are raised to the level of stylistic facts. The constant merging of aesthetic and extra-aesthetic material - alongside constant demonstrative shifting of ideological positions - determined the entire output of this controversial writer whose nonsystematic thought, without doing violence to it, is almost impossible to systematically expound. Rozanov's basic books (Lonesome Things - Uedinennoe, 1926, Fallen Leaves- Opavšie list'ja, I.-H., 1913-1915 and The Apocalypse of Our Times - Apokalipsis našega vremeni, (1918) heralded existentialism and at the same time designated the discovery of a new literary genre, new methods of philosophizing and a new dimension to the writer.