The Vortex That Unites Us

The Vortex That Unites Us is a study of totality in Russian literature, from the foundation of the modern Russian state to the present day. Considering a diversity of texts that have in common chiefly their prominence in the Russian literary canon, Jacob Emery examines the persistent ambition in Russian literature to gather the whole world into an artwork. Emery reveals how the diversity of totalizing figures in the Russian canon—often in alliance with ideologies like the totalitarian state or enlightenment reason—strive for the frontiers of space and time in order to guarantee the coherence of the globe and the continuity of history. He expores subjects like romantic metaphors of supernatural possession; Tolstoy's conception of art as a vector of emotional contagion; the panoramic ambitions of the avant-garde to grasp the globe in a new poetic medium; efforts of Soviet utopians to harmonize the whole of social life along aesthetic lines; Mandelstam's evocation of writing as a transcendental authority that guarantees a grandiose historical rhythm even when manifested as authoritarian repression; and the mass market of cultural commodities in which the exiled Vladimir Nabokov found success with his novel Lolita. The Vortex That Unites Us reveals a common thread in the disparate works it explores, bringing into a single horizon a variety of typically siloed texts and aesthetic approaches. In all these cases, the medium of totality is the body, inspired by artistic vision and compelled by aesthetic response.

Jacob Emery is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Associate Professor of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University. He is the author of Alternative Kinships and, together with his sister, the novel A Clockwork River.

This is an impressively and substantively sweeping book. Its chronological scope spans the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries. Its range of works, authors, genres, and movements match informative breadth with erudite depth.

Emery looks at five fabulously diverse "versions" of the unifying impulse directed at living bodies: possession, epidemic, panorama, orchestra, and market. Each has its own appetite, exemplary authors, and treasure box of metaphors. Equal time is allotted to prose and poetry.

thought-provoking.erudite.Emery's core contention that Russian culture is a continuum of totalizing aesthetic and ideological tendencies is persuasive.

Thought-provoking and erudite, Emery's core contention that Russian culture is a continuum of totalizing aesthetic and ideological tendencies is persuasive.

Indeed, while the aesthetic visions analyzed in the book aim for closure, Emery dwells in their details and ambiguities, offering terrific insights into numerous texts.

Richard Tempest, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, author of Overwriting Chaos:

Fluidly written in language that is accessible to scholar and non-scholar alike, this book will be certain to provide intellectual insight and pleasure to the informed reader while prompting them to look at canonical texts from a new perspective.

Thomas Seifrid, University of Southern California, author of Andrei Platonov and The Word Made Self:

Impressively wide-ranging, this book sweeps its light across a landscape of seemingly unrelated moments in the works of Russian writers. Emery's elucidation of ambiguities haunting each writer brings fresh attention to their works, while his overarching claim about totality will provoke fertile discussion of our understanding of Russian literature.