Romance as an Experimental Form in Polish and Russian Early Modernism

In my dissertation I examine a group of modernist novels that attempt to braid together two seemingly divergent literary modes: modernism and popular fiction. I argue that in the field of the novel popular culture was able to educate modernist writers on how to narrate their key ideological positions. The introductory chapter describes the situation of the novel in Polish and Russian early modernism and poses the question of the modernist authors’ need to experiment with popular literature. In this chapter I also develop an argument for the applicability and usefulness of the concept of romance in theorizing the relationship between the two modes. In the first chapter I present Fedor Sologub's novel-trilogy The Created Legend as an example of a “modernist romance” by using Northrop Frye’s structural approach. I also argue that the trilogy can be read as a narrativized justification of the author's sudden rise to prominence in the Russian literary field. The second chapter examines Jerzy Żuławski’s science-fictional epic The Lunar Trilogy. I look at spatial architecture, the protagonists, and temporality in this work as three loci in which the modernist ideology and romance engage in a dialogue. In order to ground my discussion in particular historical developments, I situate each of these narrative components in the larger cultural context of late-nineteenth-century modernity. Chapter 3 considers Evgeniĭ Zamiatin’s essayistic work and his novel We against the background of “the crisis of the novel” in post-revolutionary Russia. Incorporating its author’s reflections on the uses of engaging plots and the fantastic in contemporary literature, We enters the dialogue with various forms of romance, most notably gothic and spy fiction, yet without severing its ties to literary modernism. Significantly, the novel presents the figure of the author as the modern incarnation of the romance hero. Thus, I conclude my study by suggesting that the modernist experimentation with popular literature gradually moves towards what Harold Bloom termed “the internalization of romance,” a process whereby modernist authors adapt the imagery and narrative structures of romance to build elaborate allegories of the precarious position of the writer in the modern world.Ph.D