Soviet Ellipsis: Omission as Technique in Russian and Ukrainian Interwar Literature

• In Event: Unspeakable Things: Omission, Ellipsis, and Erasure from Censorship to Creative Strategy, 1910-1930s

Abstract

In Russian and Ukrainian literature and art, ellipsis (i.e. conscious omission) is an essential and widely employed strategy for creative production. Non-figurative expression undoubtedly counts among the most consistent forms of omission as it dogmatically rejects any reference to reality. In formalist terms, the use of omission indicates the intention to provoke defamiliarization, and thus intensify perception. In the Soviet framework, however, the use of ellipsis is due to more than just the aesthetic experiments of the avant-garde and their methodological foundation. Rather, the political conditions also led to omission becoming a strategy to counter censorship and ideological constraints.

This paper will examine ellipsis as creative device to undermine (constructed, symbolic) constraints and to express that which cannot be voiced. I will first give a brief introduction to the theoretical framework of Soviet ellipsis, which is conceptualized for different medial, temporal and semiotic contexts and draws on methods from border aesthetics, amongst other things. In this sense, ellipsis is conceived as a deliberate act of leaving out that is performed by an author, actively, and intentionally. As such, it both alludes to and appropriates the very strategies of state-imposed constraints for itself. Using selected prose, poetry, and treatises from the interwar period (Iohansen, Chuzhyi, Kharms, Terentiev), I will identify different shapes of ellipsis, ranging from the direct syntactic meaning of a graphemic substitute for deleted text (…) to more abstract manifestations operating on semantic or narrative levels (allusion, de-semantisation, narrative gaps).

Author

• Vera Faber, U of Oslo (Norway)