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Conclusion The Odessan Self IN THE PRE C ED I N G pages, I have posited that the literalY projection ofa specifically Odessan self-consciousness is characterized by several interrelated discursive features: paradox, multivocality, and camivalesque inversion; a sense ofexile in both time and space, often manifested in the narrator's positioning ofhimselfas an outsider in the world he depicts; a roguish manipulation ofthe distinctions between autobiographical and fictional narrative; and a preoccupation with stories (often, "lies") that come true, and their inverse, "truths that become stories." I refer above to a "blurring of distinctions" between autobiography and fiction-or as Shklovsky would have it, "literature" and "memoirs"but it is perhaps more accurate to say that the already vague boundaries separating those two narrative modes are cannily exploited by the Odessa writers, often on several levels at once. When Babel's "autobiographical" narrator pits his own credibility against that of an autobiographical narrator he has invented-Great-Uncle Shoyl-the immediate effect is to place the main narrator above Shoyl in the epistemological hierarchy, as someone whose story is "more true" than the ones Shoyl tells. When, however, Shoyl's allegedly mendacious stories are independently verified by another character , they become more "true" within the world of the narrative, while the narrator's claims become more suspect. Meanwhile, outside the world ofthe narrative, Babel's adoption of the autobiographical mode to tell stories in which he blandly breaches the autobiographical pact creates an additional contradiction; his quaSi-autobiographical stories become "true" in the sense that they invite credence from the reader, taking a place (albeit under false pretenses) in the popular perception of Babel's "real life." Similar translations between the world of fiction and the world of memoir take place when Paustovsky's "real life" is invaded by a story, in the guise of Sashka the fiddler from Kuprin's "Gambrinus"; when Kataev, standing before the grotto of Dionysus, sees a Bagritsky poem come to life before his eyes, creating the effect of an experience that postdates his "memory" of it; or when Olesha cites an apocryphal Florentine reader's response to 143 Conclusion Dante's "autobiographical" account of Hell. In each of these examples, and the many others cited in the foregoing chapters, what is at stake is the difference between "authenticity" and "invention"; the two categories almost never emerge intact, instead metamorphosing into each other when the reader least expects it. The borderlands between autobiography and fiction prove, for the Odessan writers, a particularly fruitful playground in which to explore, and subvert, this dichotomy. Ifthe most striking feature ofOdessan self-narrative is its love ofparadox , its second most striking feature is its collaborative effect. As Arkady Lvov puts it, Paustovsky served as Babel's "apostle and author of an apocrypha " about him, a role which not incidentally increased Paustovsky's own standing, since "that apocrypha, A Time of Great Expectations, the fourth book, proved the most widely read portion of his Story of a Life."1 This apostolizing on Paustovsky's part helped cement a canonical conception of "Odessa" or "South-West" literature that had been put in place by Babel and Shklovsky, forcing a resentful Kataev (at least in Lvov's account) to choose between conforming to the canonical lore about the Odessa school, or deviating from it and being accused of "lying," "heresy," and even "vampirism." Plus ra change, plus c'est la meme chose: freed from the more extreme constraints of Socialist Realism, Kataev found himself battling a separate orthodoxy . At the same time, it is his deviation from that orthodoxy that accounts for much of the pungency of My Diamond Crown; paradoxically, it is in violating the boundaries of received truths about the "Odessa school" that Kataev shows himself most Odessan. The paradox of the narrative that is at once fictional and mendacious is a central interest of all four authors I have examined in this study. These two essential qualities in the narratives I have examined-their play with fiction and truth, and their mutually interactive character-can be seen as related: what is at stake is a narrative breaking of bounds. Whether or not they would have conceded it, these authors share an interest in stories that break free of their generic and epistemological territory and invade other spaces: other narratives, other people's books, the "real world." For each of the authors analyzed in this study-Babel, Paustovsky, Olesha, and Kataev-my main goal has been to describe the...

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