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Conclusion: Musings on ModiWcations of Exorcism 118 I HAVE USED examples drawn from the work of Pushkin , Lermontov, and Gogol to illustrate that what I call a psychological dominant of an author of this type—a prose writer with a transcendent poetic mentality—can be traced by using two things simultaneously: the author’s texts and the author’s life. In other words, it can be found at the crossroads of intertextuality and biographism. As this is not a book of literary theory but rather a collection of speculative essays, I have thus far avoided speaking about the theoretical possibilities inherent in my approach. Nevertheless, if only because I teach in a literature department and my colleagues would Wnd it strange were I to avoid the topic entirely, I would like to take a little bit of space to muse on these implications. Because the tasks of the biographical and intertextual schools differ signiWcantly from mine, let us turn to their essence as I understand it. In so doing, we will try to see at which point(s) our three roads meet and at which they go in other directions. The difference between biographism and intertextuality was cogently described by Joseph Brodsky in his speech about Thomas Hardy, “Wooing the Inanimate.” Brodsky says: True, the literature on Thomas Hardy the poet is fairly negligible. There are two or three full-length studies; they are essentially doctoral-dissertationsturned -books. There are also two or three biographies of the man, including one he penned himself, though it bears his wife’s name on the cover. They are worth reading, especially the last if you believe—as I expect you do—that the artist’s life holds the key for the understanding of his work. If you believe the opposite, you won’t lose much by giving them a miss, since we are here to address his work [emphasis added].1 Indeed, biographism insists that the artist’s life “holds the key” to his work, that the events of the author’s life are reXected in his or her production . To my mind, one of the best examples of precisely this approach was given by George Orwell in his essay “Charles Dickens.” Orwell writes: Conclusion 119 The one detailed account of child labour that he [Dickens] gives is the description in David CopperWeld of little David washing bottles in Murdstone and Grinby’s warehouse. This, of course, is autobiography. Dickens himself, at the age of ten, had worked in Warren’s blacking factory in the Strand, very much as he describes it here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, partly because he felt the whole incident to be discreditable to his parents, and he even concealed it from his wife till long after they were married. Looking back on this period, he says in David CopperWeld: “It is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.” . . . Obviously it is not David CopperWeld who is speaking, it is Dickens himself.2 It is difWcult to argue with Orwell: David CopperWeld is indeed a cry of anguish. Dickens, who survived exactly the same life troubles as his hero, cries out with two voices here. It is also true that the novel grows out of the facts of Dickens’s life. Orwell’s interpretation of David CopperWeld is that it is such a result, and biographism is concerned with literary works as the results of an author’s life. Again, there is no need to dispute whether this is true: everything that an artist creates has of course a direct connection with either how he or she lives or at least how he or she feels (or has been feeling ) at a given moment. The task of biographism is to Wnd those connections, to provide us with them. However, in interpreting a text in this way biographism changes neither the meaning of a literary work nor its value. David CopperWeld is a great novel even without our knowledge of the facts of Dickens’s life. It is already an overt cry of Dickens...

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