On textolatry: Mandelstam's 'The Egyptian Stamp' (1928) and Pasternak's 'The Tale' (1929)

On Textolatry is a study of Mandelstam's The Egyptian Stamp (1928) and Pasternak's The Tale (1929). These works are examined as textual examples that illuminate the prose innovations of the 1920s, a period of turning abruptly away from lyric verse. This dissertation deals with the movements of this "era of prose", including ornamentalism, proza poeta (poet's prose) and the "literature of fact", and demonstrates how the concepts of these schools are manifested in the texts in question. Mandelstam's The Egyptian Stamp is discussed as a work which makes unique use of the "litmontage" technique, demonstrates the collision of epic and lyric characteristic of proza poeta and produces an overabundance of graphophilic textual imagery. Pasternak's The Tale is read as a text that polemicizes with the tenets of literatura fakta (the liturature of fact), deploys proza poeta's "emotional" word within a semantically-driven prose text, and reveals its self-conscious stance towards genre within the movement for denovelization. This dissertation employs narrative and genre theory and gives close readings of these difficult texts, while making use of Russian-language material, English translations and transliterations are used throughout. The conclusions reached in these chapters show The Egyptian Stamp and The Tale to be richly evocative of the experiments which ran counter to the movement for a conventional novelistic art. These works emerge as self-reflective and self-reflexive literary artifacts that expose and express textolatry, the obsession of texts with their own textuality.