Article

Name: The borderland between the world and the unworld in the novelized travelogue by E.E. Cummings about Soviet Russia

Authors: Feshchenko Vladimir Valentinovich

Federal State Institution of Science Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract: The paper analyzes a novelized travelogue about a journey to Soviet Russia, published in 1933 by the American avant-garde poet E.E. Cummings. The book «EIMI (I AM)» represents a unique hybridization of literary genres on the border between a modernist novel of ‘a stream of consciousness’, travel notes, and a pseudo-documentary travelogue. Crossing the border of Soviet Union is modeled by the author as a transition from the World to the Unworld. The lyrical narrator (alias the owner of the diary) describes his entry to «a world of Was» – the «subhuman communist state, where men are shadows and women are nonmen; the preindividual marxist unworld». This «unworld» becomes Hell for him. Cummings spends five weeks in the Soviet inferno, to finally get away from it by ship via Istanbul back – to the World. The conflict between the lyrical I of the avant-garde poet and the collective WE of the Soviet society creates the main liminal storyline of this experimental text.

Keywords: e.e. cummings, travelogue, liminality, marginality, transitivity

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