list of things coming to life

[Anne Fisher]

Dear SEELANGers,

Here are the results of my earlier query on things coming to life in Slavic
literature and film. My apologies for not thanking contributors individually
for their wonderful suggestions and ideas; hopefully this list will suffice as
my act of contrition. 

I have tried to present the list in groups or categories of “coming to life.” Of
course, the attempt to define the boundaries between different ways of coming
to life is its own topic, so in the interest of not letting this project get
completely out of hand (no Frankenstein’s monsters today!), I have left these
groupings very fast and loose. 

Thank you, 

Annie Fisher
 
Human Facsimiles or Body Parts (two entirely unrelated categories, actually) 
- Pushkin (Bronze Horseman, Ruslan and Liudmila [Ruslan is dead, the head that
speaks], Queen of Spades, Stone Guest, and Jakobson’s essay “The Statue in
Pushkin’s Poetic Mythology”)
- Erofeev ("Moskva-Petushki" - hallucinations about the statue of Minin and
Pozharsky)
- Gogol’ (Viy, "Strashnaia ruka," Nose - V. V. Vinogradov has a long study on
Gogol's Nose, where he talks of some related stories)  
- Odoevsky (mannequins, story[-ies] from Russian Nights)
- Dostoevskii (The Double, Bobok)
- Belyi (Petersburg - reprise of the Bronze Horseman)
- Prague legend of the Golem
- Sologub (The Petty Demon – Nedotykomka)
- Gombrowicz (Ferdydurke)
- Aleshkovsky (Kangaroo)

Inanimate Objects
- Olesha’s “Envy” (and M. O. Chudakova’s discussion of the idea that in him
“things come to life” in “Masterstvo Iuriia Oleshi”) 
- Lermontov (Shtoss – cards)
- Dziga Vertov’s “Man With a Movie Camera” 
- the first episode of Kieslowski's Dekalog, in which a linguist imputes
volition to computers (with disastrous results)
- Gogol’ (Overcoat) 
- Pelevin (a story that's something like "The Adventures of Shed 12," about a
sentient shed that wants to become a bicycle; more in Pelevin, and something in
Petrushevskaia)
- In literature on The Queen of Spades some other stories are mentioned where
playing cards come to life
- Svankmajer's films (shorts or possibly "Alice")
- It is worth considering that what you are describing could be called
animation, and the strong traditions of animated film in Slavic countries
hold a great many examples of it.
- the strange, unnatural fire balls in Mikhalkov's "Burnt by the Sun"

“Personification” (things that are not normally considered alive, but which take
on voice and personality), or comparing people to things and vice versa:
- the writing of Gogol, Dostoevskii, Platonov, Belyi, or Zoshchenko 
- if we include metaphor, then much of the “Southern School” (again, see
Chudakova)
- Shalamov’s bulldozer dinosaur(s) 
- Nabokov's "Visit to a Museum" (surreal moments) 
- Gastev’s Proletkul’t poetry (lines between flesh and metal, man and machine
break down)
- finger puppets in Florensky 
- Vysotsky's "Pesnia samoleta-istrebitelia" ("Ia—'IaK', istrebitel',—motor moi
zvenit")  

In a metaphorical or figurative sense
- Dostoevskii's Raskolnikov, Tolstoy's Natasha Rostova, Andrei Bolkonskii, Anna

Karenina, Konstantin Levin, and Kitty Shcherbatskii all come to life or back to
life in different ways
- Bulgakov, “A Dog’s Heart”” (Sharik coming to life as a sentient being; could
also fit under “Sci-Fi”)
- Evgenii Shvarts' "Everyday Miracle" in its entirely is a case of things/people
coming to life, and, taken broadly, all of Shvarts' works are about becoming
real human beings, independent and self-reliant
- the figures on ancient coins (and ancient coins themselves in a broader sense)
coming to life (e.g. in the dances of Isadora Duncan,  in a new Christian
synthesis, etc.) in Rozanov's writings 
- binoculars and tools and technologies coming to life as human organs in Pavel
Florensky's thought (i.e. in the sense of Romantic notions of organ projection,
which he takes pretty literally) 
- museums coming to life (the "living museum" is an important trope of utopian
[Christian and Soviet] discourse in the early twentieth century) 
- Gaidai’s film “Brilliantovaia ruka”

Sci-Fi (presents a nice problem: if these are in fact sentient beings, whether
or not they are recognized as such, can they be included in thinking about
*things* coming to life?)
- the Strugatskii brothers' Soliaris (the thing with the ocean-earth) 
- Stalker
- the amphibian-man, by whom I don't recall at the moment, but it was made into
a film in the 1950s 

Works with which I am not familiar, and can’t “categorize:” 
- Gabriel Choreb (HOGTOWN)
- Pushkin (The Golden Cockerel)
- Andreyev (The Red Laugh) 
- Khlebnikov (The Crane, The Marquise des S., and The Stone Woman) 
- Sologub (The Worm, Snegurochka) 
- Mayakovsky (Extraordinary Adventure...)
- much of Guro's prose
 
Interestingly, there were fewer suggestions from 20th-century literature or
non-Russian literatures than I was expecting. Also, the divisions between
categories really start to break down if one considers devils/deviltry,
madness/psychological problems (an interesting example from non-Russian lit is
Tomek Tryzna's novel "Miss Nobody"), objective reality vs. subjective 
"visions" of things coming to life, etc. I would enjoy continuing the discussion
of these themes/works (off-list, of course!). 

And, just for fun, some suggestions from non-Slavic sources: 

- Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)
- Pinocchio
- Hawthorne (short stories The Artist of the Beautiful, Feathertop, )
- Woody Allen (short story "The Kugelmass Episode" the protagonist is chased by
a large and hairy irregular Spanish verb [tener, to be specific])
- Tommaso Landolfi (short story Gogol's Wife, many others) 
- T. H. White's "Sword in the Stone" (not the revised version in "The Once
and Future King") utensils come to life
- Lucian (where?) (the original version of the Sorceror's Apprentice) brooms
come to life
- “The Lives of Things" by the phenomenologist Charles C. Scott  
- the bed episode in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Middle High German
text Parzival
- Alice In Wonderland
- J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (the ring)
- Edgar Allen Poe (The Purloined Letter, others) 
 


-- 
"Most of Russia would be happy to see him carried through the streets in a 
cart so that they could poke sticks at him." (In reference to jailed Russian 
multi-billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky.) - quoted in The New York 
Times, "Tycoon Finds Russian Jail Falls Beneath His Standards," January 22, 
2004.


Anne Fisher
University of Michigan Slavic Department
phone: (734) 764-5355
fax: (734) 647-2127
email: aof at umich.edu

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------