All Future Plunges to the Past

All Future Plunges to the Past explores how Russian writers from the mid-1920s on have read and responded to Joyce's work. Through contextually rich close readings, José Vergara uncovers the many roles Joyce has occupied in Russia over the last century, demonstrating how the writers Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin draw from Joyce's texts, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, to address the volatile questions of lineages in their respective Soviet, émigré, and post-Soviet contexts. Interviews with contemporary Russian writers, critics, and readers of Joyce extend the conversation to the present day, showing how the debates regarding the Irish writer's place in the Russian pantheon are no less settled one hundred years after Ulysses.

The creative reworkings, or "translations," of Joycean themes, ideas, characters, plots, and styles made by the five writers Vergara examines speak to shifting cultural norms, understandings of intertextuality, and the polarity between Russia and the West. Vergara illuminates how Russian writers have used Joyce's ideas as a critical lens to shape, prod, and constantly redefine their own place in literary history.

All Future Plunges to the Past offers one overarching approach to the general narrative of Joyce's reception in Russian literature. While each of the writers examined responded to Joyce in an individual manner, the sum of their methods reveals common concerns. This subject raises the issue of cultural values and, more importantly, how they changed throughout the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, Russian emigration, and the post-Soviet Russian environment.

José Vergara is Assistant Professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College.

The importance of this study is not simply as a record of the impact of Joyce on Andrei Bitov or Mikhail Shishkin but the critical questions Vergara asks in his interrogation of Joyce's effect on current Russian writers and culture. A further effect is learning how to read five Russian works through a Joycean lens.

"Vergara's new book represents the most detailed tracing of Joyce's influence in Russian literature. It reveals Joyce lurking just beneath the surface of canonical works we thought we knew well.

All Future Plunges to the Past is an excellent book for Joyceans, Slavicists, and those interested in reception studies and comparative literature.

José Vergara's book attentively traces Joyce's influence on Russian literature, which still remains to a large extent terra incognita. All Future Plunges to the Past is useful and topical, highlighting important trends in the Russian literary history through the Joycean prism. Having made a few observations above, below I would like to offer some further remarks.

Vergara's examples of intertextual connections between Russian texts and Joyce's œuvre collectively provide valuable insight into the evolution of intertextuality in Russia over the course of the long twentieth century. All Future Plunges to the Past demonstrates how each of these five important Russian writers adapted Joyce's stylistic and philosophical methods as they attempted to bridge the time and space between Russia and European (post)modernism.

All Future Plunges to the Past will be of interest to those studying the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian novel and, more broadly, the spaces of Western European cultures in Russian literary representation. The clearly composed text and the precise documentation will assuredly facilitate further research.

José Vergara's study makes a compelling case for persistent attention to the legacy of James Joyce within Russian literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What Vergara convincingly shows is that for Russian writers in the twentieth century, Joyce figured as the pre-eminent modernist writer of prose the standard to emulate adapt or rebel against.

The homeopathic capacity of a book to have a transformative effect in trace quantities is central to All Future Plunges to the Past, Jose Vergara's nuanced study of Russian responses to James Joynce. Vergara gathers a wealth of seemingly slight snippets of evidence in five chronologically organized case studies, which taken together demonstrate a productive and illuminating engagement with Joyce.

José Vergara's important new book presents an illuminating account of the reception of a major figure of Western modernism. Vergara is the first to explore in detail how Joyce's texts served as a source of inspiration and a polemical tool for major Russian authors of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.

I heartily recommend it to anyone even vaguely interested in the topic. This is a book I'll be returning to for years to come.

Mark Lipovetsky, Columbia University, coauthor of A History of Russian Literature :

Although Joyce's influence on some protagonists of this book is elusive, his presence in their texts is now unquestionable. All Future Plunges to the Past is a fascinating book that establishes a tradition of Joycean modernism in Soviet, émigré, and post-Soviet literature. This is especially paradoxical, since during the most part of Soviet history Joyce had been under the solid ban in the USSR. Nevertheless, José Vergara demonstrates with skill and talent that dialogues with Ulysses in Yuri Olesha's Envy and Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House are as perceptive and as substantial as in Nabokov's, Sasha Sokolov's, and Mikhail Shishkin's novels. Reading Russian writers "through Joyce" not only enriches our understanding of their seminal works but also contributes to the yet unwritten history of Russian modernism as a global phenomenon that begins at the turn of the 20th century, crosses the Soviet period and does not end even today.

Eliot Borenstein, New York University, author of Plots against Russia:

José Vergara single-handedly redeems the entire conceit of the influence study. In short, this is a marvelous book.

Galya Diment, University of Washington, author of A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury:

The contribution of this highly relevant book could be very substantial.

The joy and mental workout of All Future Plunges come not from nitpicking particular Joycean tropes or images but rather from considering Joyce as a cultural phenomenon for all who followed to engage with, immerse them- selves in, and speak to.