1. The phrase comes from the title of Kuznetsov, Feliks's introduction to Lurii Trifonov, Rasskazy i povesti (Moscow, 1971)Google Scholar, cited in Shneidman, N. N., “lurii Trifonov and the Ethics of Contemporary Soviet City Life, ” Canadian Slavonic Papers 19 (September 1977) : 339 n.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. See Anne C. Hughes, “Bol'shoi mir or zamknutyi mirok : Departure from Literary Convention in lurii Trifonov's Recent Fiction, ” Canadian Slavonic Papers 22 (December 1980) : 470-480.

3. The best available treatment of Aesopian speech is Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship : Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature, Arbeiten und Texte zur Slavistik, ed. Wolfgang Kasack, B.31 (Munich : Otto Sagner, 1984). Loseff briefly considers Trifonov's 1968 story “Golubinnaia gibel'” as an Aesopian text (106-107). T. Patera's Obzor tvorchestva i analiz moskovskikh povestei Iuriia Trifonova (Ann Arbor, Mich. : Ardis, 1983), which relies on Loseff's work, offers an exegesis of the Aesopian content of several of Trifonov's major works and contends that Aesopian strategies form the essence of his oeuvre.

4. “Mne voobshche kazhetsia, chto sovremennyi chitatel’ nastol'ko namagnichen vsiakogo roda assotsiatsiami, chto emu dostatochno skazat’ odno slovo—i on vse ostal'noe tut zhe dopishet v svoem voobrazhenii.” Trifonov, Iu, “V kratkom—beskonechnoe, ” Voprosy literatury 8 (1974) : 176 Google Scholar. In the same interview Trifonov speaks of striving in his tales and novels to convey a quality of “gustota” specifically through minimal means ( “mne khotelos’ dobit'sia osoboi ob “emnosti, gustoty : na nebol'shorn platsdarme skazat’ kak mozhno bol'she, ” 174; emphasis added), and somewhat later he compares this narrative manner to Chekhov (175). The title of the interview itself—taken from a phrase used by Trifonov in its course— connotes the same effort to convey much while saying little.

5. In his interview with A. Bocharov in “V kratkom—beskonechnoe, ” 171, Trifonov says of Studenty, “la prosto ne mogu segodnia ne odnoi stranitsy etogo romana perechitat'. “

6. See “Tristram Shendi’ Sterna, ” in Viktor Shklovskii, O teoriiprozy (Moscow : Federatsiia, 1929), 177-204. This essay is available in English as “Sterne's Tristram Shandy : Stylistic Commentary” in Russian Formalist Criticism : Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln : University of Nebraska, 1965), 25-57.

7. Sigrid McLaughlin's “Jurij Trifonov's House on the Embankment : Narration and Meaning, ” Slavic and East European Journal 26 (Winter 1982) : 419-433, contains a very useful discussion of ethical themes in the work, particularly the theme (central in her reading) of the integrity with which one does or does not adhere to one's own ethical principles. I differ from McLaughlin primarily in seeing another, epistemological, level at work in the text, but I also disagree with that portion of her argument that essentially addresses that very level, if less consciously than in this article (the “meaning” to which her title refers). McLaughlin sees history in the tale, recreated in the characters’ past, as supplying ethical certitude : “From the patterns in this fabric [of history] some overbearing ethical truths surface, ” (432). I see Trifonov as being far more preoccupied with the question of whether or not these ethical truths can be known, and far more despairing about history as a source of certitude, than does McLaughlin. I find it very difficult to reconcile the moral anxieties so manifest in the tale with the puzzling relativism of her claim that Trifonov, having provided an “ethical measuring stick of crime and punishment, ” abstains from judgment and leaves it to us to “transfer and recreate [its coordinates] in our own specific private context” (432).

8. Iurii Trifonov, Dom na naberezhnoi in Druzhba narodov 1 (1976) : 96. Further references in the article are to this edition. Trifonov has been translated into English : Another Life : The House on the Embankment, trans. Michael Glenny (New York : Simon and Schuster, 1983); Students : A Novel (Moscow : Foreign Language, 1953).

9. For example, while trying to force Lev to reveal the names of some schoolmates who attacked him, Lev Shulepnikov's father, an NKVD agent, locks him in a dark bathroom crawling with cockroaches. Patera points out the patent echo of the opening passage of Crime and Punishment in the second paragraph of Dom na naberezhnoi ( “V odin iz nesterpimo zharkikh avgustovskikh dnei 1972 goda, ” 83), notes the coincidence of the first name of Trifonov's suffering heroine with that of Sonia Marmeladova in Dostoevskii's novel, suggests an allusion to the novel “frames” the Glebov-Sonia relationship, and argues that Glebov is a kind of modern Raskolnikov struggling to come to terms with his own moral crime. See Obzor tvorchestva, 300-302.

10. Patera is particularly diligent at unearthing these parallels. On the autobiographical elements underlying Studenty (and by extension Dom na naberezhnoi), see Obzor tvorchestva, 86-90.

11. Patera comments on the “obviously false” optimistic ring of this ending within the minor key of the work as a whole. Obzor tvorchestva, 305.

12. Cited in Shneidman, “Iurii Trifonov, ” 345; emphasis mine.

13. Here again it is important to assert that by autobiographical I mean primarily the text's inscription of itself in the genre of first-person reminiscence and only secondarily—though I think the case for such a reading is strong—as a self-referential statement by Trifonov himself.

14. Hughes, “Bol'shoi mir, ” 473.

15. For example, the Bychkovs’ dominance over the childhood “turf” on Deriugin Street is recounted twice, once from Glebov's point of view, a second time from the narrator's, in whose version Glebov appears as but one among several characters (see Dom na naberezhnoi, 99 and 128). Patera deduces that the persona behind the first-person narrative is the character Medved', whom she sees as representing Trifonov; Obzor tvorchestva, 266-268.

16. McLaughlin offers a different interpretation of this narrative voice : “This narrator clearly has lived according to the ethical principles which he admired in his childhood; he has not succeeded in official terms; but he has retained his integrity and is evidently at peace and at work for posterity. He is close to a model that Trifonov leaves for the reader to ponder” (430). To me this interpretation appears to simplify in the interests of optimism.

17. My analogy is with Austin's original formulation of the distinction (later incorporated within his general theory of illocutionary acts) between constative utterances (which describe) and performative ones (which are constitutive of an action performed within speech itself, such as the promise, “I promise … “). See Austin, J. L., “Performative-Constative, ” in The Philosophy of Language, ed., J. R. Searle (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1971) : 13–22 Google Scholar. Trifonov himself spoke of the moral and confessional aims of his works in terms suggestive of divulgence. Commenting in an interview on the (directly) autobiographical “Otblesk kostra, ” he states, “Esli govorit’ o sverkhzadache povesti, to eto, navernoe, vosstanovlenie spravedlivosti. V dannom sluchae malymi moimi silami—rasskaz o torn, chto eshche ne skazano, ne izvestno” (emphasis added). Somewhat earlier he remarks in “V kratkom—beskonechnoe, ” (175 and 173) that the hardest technique for a writer to master is that of self-investigation— “cherpanie iz sebia. “

18. “V kratkom—beskonechnoe, ” 179.

19. On the Beneficence of Censorship, 50-52.

20. See in particular Aleksandr Zholkovskii, K, “Iskusstvo prisposoblenie, ” Grani 138 (1985) : 78–98 Google Scholar. A kindred argument is advanced in Katerina, Clark, The Soviet Novel : History as Ritual (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1981 Google Scholar). My aim in this article is to explicate Trifonov's reflections on the prospects facing the Aesopian author, not to argue that Aesopian speech in general is somehow futile or depraved.

21. The coincidence of that cultural myth with Trifonov's concerns can be sensed from some remarks by Nikolai Strakhov (paraphrased by Joseph Frank in the third volume of his biography of Dostoevskii) on the Miliukov circle, which strongly influenced Dostoevskii's view of himself as both publicist and writer : “The artist, according to this view, should investigate the evolution of society and bring to consciousness the good and evil coming to birth in its midst, ” Frank, Joseph, Dostoevsky : The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1986), 50 Google Scholar. Emphasis added.