Андрей Белый: автобиографизм и биографические практики

For the French scholar the rhetorical and ideological use of animalism in the representation of patriarchal power has two functions which he explains referring to the philosophy of cynicism, which aimed at proposing a model of life according to the laws of nature, i.e. in a stray and independent way, being indifferent to the essential needs and faithful only to moral righteousness. The first function which Samé describes regards identity, and it is the very act of distinguishing the animal from the human; the second has an apologetic nature, because it attempts to legitimize the use of the animal. Quoting a study by Françoise Armengaud,[691] Samé affirms that in ancient Greek society relationships such as male—female, adult—child, individual—slave, Greek—barbarian were similar to the relationships between man and animal. Such relationships designate the alienated creature, i.e. one which does not belong to itself, who does not exist in itself but only in order to be used by another. In this sense, he argues, the animal is «a-» or «non-» political, and the same are the non-men (women) or the non-free (slaves), the stateless persons (barbarians) who were all excluded from the same political field. The Cynics attributed a positive value to animalism precisely because of that exclusion from the political sphere. The a-political animal was deprived of power and opposed to the «free» man, who instead belonged to the city, the country etc., i.e. to the patriarchal order. The animal, Samé argues, «is not» what the free man «is». For this reason the very existence of the latter is legitimized also by his enslavement of the animal, the woman, the slave, the stateless person, the barbarian, i.e. of the non-men. In this perspective, the body is the political space of reference both for cynicism and, Samé argues, for authors of autofiction. Regarding poetics he examines some examples of a-political, «natural» and «abnormal» men, such as Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan. Compared to a tiger or a wild beast, he is an example of natural man opposed to the conformist society. Samé also quotes Gilles Deleuze’s studies on the return of the flesh to the body and the transformation of the human into the animal in Francis Bacon’s paintings. Within the autofictional corpus analysed by Samé are also studied the positive values of man which, under this perspective, are referred only to the body. The submission and masochism related to the sphere of non-human are positively represented by figures of animals, women and children. The father figure, i.e. the emblem of the static traditional patriarchal order, is not included. Therefore, Samé argues, the escape from the laws of psychoanalysis that regulate the father—son relationship and which constitute an important part in the first formulation ever of autofiction provided by Serge Doubrovsky[692] is realized at a literary level.

The interplay between biological life and specifically autobiographical literary representation within the postmodernist Russian context was recently studied by Philipp Kohl in relation to the work of Dmitrij Prigov, another author of novels where the self is fictional.[693] Based on the discussed theories of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who makes a difference between «bios» as political life and «zoe» as biological life, and also the distinction made by Aristotle between «bios» as a form of life in the polis and «zoe» as life deprived of political qualities, Kohl proposes the concept of «zoegraphical writing», in which the autobiographical texts refer not only to the life of the human being, but also to non-human forms of life, including animals.

Belyj, as we know, has often used forms of zoomorphism that acquire diverse values in different texts.[694] It is a rhetorical strategy of central importance for Belyj for what concerns his auto-biographical representation. The writer uses it primarily in the depiction of the relationship that, in the words of Samé, we could define «oppressor—oppressed» and that serves as a leitmotif in his autobiographical works. The devices through which the representation of the father—son and the teacher—student (mainly, but not only, Rudolf Steiner) relationship are made can be inscribed in the category. In this paper I will focus only on the first relationship, which has already been the subject of numerous studies.[695] By use of the interpretative scheme proposed by Samé, I will show how the comparison with animals can be considered a fundamental rhetorical strategy in Belyj.