From the Avant-Garde to the Neo-Avant-Garde: Deautomatisation in Jiří Kolář and Andrei Bitov as a Key to Historical Reading

• In Event: Contacts across Borders: The Literary (Neo-)Avant-Gardes between Central Europe and the USSR

Abstract

The notion of deautomatisation elaborated by Russian formalism sets in motion a hyper-historicist logic of constant transgression between forms. At the same time, during the 1920s, formalist authors developed a constructivist conception of historical epistemology, according to which the meaning of past phenomena (such as work, procedure, author, genre, epoch, etc.) depends on the set of struggles that make up each present moment, and is therefore susceptible to renegotiation and new articulations. Deautomatisation is also a deautomatisation of the solidified interpretations of the past. Romanticism, realism, symbolism, modernism, avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, postmodernism, among others, are solidified terms that we often use without fully realising their constructed character and their potential to enter other descriptive configurations. In this paper, I explore the work of leading figures of the Czech and the Russian neo-avant-garde, Jiří Kolář (1914–2002) and Andrei Bitov (1937–2018), who belonged to two different generations and worked in different literary genres. I will focus on the concrete ways in which they recover and elaborate certain avant-garde procedures while neglecting others. From this analysis, a conclusion will be drawn that we still need to put greater emphasis on the aesthetic plurality inherent in the concept of the avant-garde.

Author

• Cristian Cámara Outes, U Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)