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Suicide as Literary Fact in the 1920s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Anne Nesbet
Anne Nesbet*
Affiliation:
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Colorado, Boulder
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Extract

In the search for meaning which its conclusion provokes, a life, inevitably, is scrutinized for patterns, symbols, and general themes; it is read, in short, as a text. Suicide becomes a bloody signature on the bottom of a ragged page, the final and incontrovertible assertion of authorial control over one’s own life. At the same time, however, the suicide relinquishes all future control over everything, including future interpretations of his or her life-as-text. As a Pyrrhic means of giving the planned, narrative structure of a text to life, suicide functions as an uncanny fulcrum between “meaningful” life and “meaningless” death; hence its fascination. The supreme instance of human will triumphing over cruel nature’s whims is also the moment of greatest surrender to death’s lack of meaning. Witnesses and analysts rush in to provide interpretation and theory.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , Winter 1991 , pp. 827 - 835
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Inc. 1991

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References

The author would like to express her appreciation to Michel Cadot, Robert Hughes, Anton Kaes, and Eric Naiman for their thoughtful comments and assistance.

1. Lotman, lurii M., “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. Nakhimovsky, Alexander D. and Nakhimovsky, Alice Stone (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 86 Google Scholar.

2. See Masaryk, Thomas Garrigue, Der Selbstmord als sociale Massenerscheinung der modernen Civilisation (Vienna: Carl Konegen, 1881)Google Scholar and Durkheim, Emile, Le Suicide: Étude de sociologie (Paris: Felix Alean, 1897)Google Scholar.

3. See Berdiaev, Nikolai, O samoubiistve (Paris, 1931)Google Scholar. I will return to Simeon Frank later in this article.

4. Tynianov, Iuri, “Literaturnyi fakt” [1924] in Arkhaisty i novatory (Moscow, 1929), 26 Google Scholar.

5. Döblin, Alfred, “Der Bau des epischen Werkes” (1929) in Theorie und Technik des Romans im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Steinecke, Hartmut (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1979), 27 Google Scholar. AH translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

6. Shklovskii, Viktor, “Ocherk i anekdot” in O teorii prozy (Moscow, 1929), 246–250 Google Scholar.

7. Rul’, no. 2248, 19 April 1928, 4.

8. Ibid., no. 2249, 20 April 1928, 5.

9. Dni, 21 April 1928, 1.

10. Simeon Frank, “Tragediia russkoi molodezhi,” Rui’, no. 2251, 22 April 1928, 6.

11. “Nebyvaloe samoubiistvo,” Rul’, no. 2258, 1 May 1928, 1.

12. Bergman, G., “Esenin—znamia upadochnykh nastroenii” in Protiv upadochnichestva: Protiv “Eseninshchiny” (Moscow, 1926), 5 Google Scholar.

13. Bergman discusses the tragic history of the youth group known as “Vol’nitsa,” Protiv upadochnichestva, 6-7.

14. “The suicide of Kuznetsov was an event of great societal importance. It exposed the dangerous disease prevalent among a certain segment of our literary youth.” Lalevich, G., “O bolezniakh i opasnostiakh” in Protiv upadochnichestva, 17. Kuznetsov, Nikolai (1904-1924)Google Scholar was a young proletarian poet with connections to the Pereval group.

15. Bergman, Protiv upadochnichestva, 6. In 1926 NEP already had a long history of being blamed for all sorts of spiritual dismay, suicide as well. Already in early 1922, M. Reisner makes the connection between NEP and suicide explicit: “Things are hardest right now for revolutionary romantics. The vision of the Golden Age erupted so close to them. It has seared their hearts. Like a taut string their will strained towards one shining goal and now, it seems, has snapped. And already one hears sad rumors. In one place a hero of the war, on returning home, has shot himself,” Reisner, M., “Staroe i novoe. (Iz pisem o kul’ture),” Krasnaia nov’, no. 2, (March-April 1922): 284 Google Scholar.

16. Die literarische Welt, no. 41 (14 October 1927), 10, in Kaes, Anton, ed., Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1918-1933: Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Metzlersche, 1983)Google Scholar.

17. From Georg Minde-Poueťs introduction to Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig: Schlüter, 1928), vii.

18. London Times, 28 December 1811, in Henrich von Kleists Lebensspuren. Dokumente und Berichte der Zeitgenossen, ed. Helmut Sembdner (Bremen: Carl Schunemann, 1957), 419-420.

19. Döblin, Alfred, Berlin Alexanderplatz (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1961), 167 Google Scholar.

20. Between 1920 and 1923 the number of reported suicides was remarkably constant at about 13,000. Then in 1924 there were 14,338; in 1925, 15,273; in 1926, 16,480; in 1927, 15,974; and in 1928, 16,036. These statistics come from the Statistiches Jahrbuch ßr das Deutsche Reich, Statistisches Reichsamt (Berlin: Pottkamer und Muhlbrecht, annual).

21. Nabokov, Vladimir, Dar (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1952), 50 Google Scholar.

22. Ibid., 59. The next phrase in the list of “interesting things happening” is “kae-kak slonchalsia Lenin” (59), a sort of historical red herring where the 1928 suicide of Aleksei Frenkel’ is concerned.

23. Likewise, of course, Dar is dedicated to Nabokov’s own Vera and describes the fate of a fictional Ol’ga.

24. The German context eliminated the difference between the names of “Aleksei” and “Aleksandr,” since for the German press Aleksei Frenkel’ was always known familiarly as Alex.

25. Use of the adjective original would seem rather dangerous in this context, since there were a number of newspaper versions of the story, and thus no originary original that we can identify with any certainty.