AESTHETICS OF FILM EDITING IN THE ART PRACTICE OF PAVEL ZALTSMAN

An analysis of the use of montage techniques as a literary method in the works of Pavel Zaltsman is presented in this article for the first time. The influence of the concept of analytical art and the practice of film editing of the 1930s on the formation of Zaltsman’s aesthetic views is revealed. At the time, the idea of montage became a kind of a cultural “fashion” of the time, and the basic principle of montage was applied not only to cinema, but also to poetry, prose, and painting. The research focus in the case of Zaltsman is retrospective. The authorial attitude of the writer Zalsman is compared with what Sergei Eisenstein did in the movie. The idea of post-utopian modernism – the portrayal of history and/or modernity in personal and social experience as a series of painful ruptures – is presented as the main narrative in Zaltsman’s unfinished novels: Puppies and Central Asia in the Middle Ages (or The Middle Ages in Central Asia). The article justifies that Zaltsman’s texts, which have become famous in our time, were generated by time itself and implement the artistic principles of the early avant-garde. The forms of interaction of the verbal, the intermedial, the cinematic, and the visual lead (in the case of Zaltsman’s texts, as described in the article) to the creation of a discourse that transforms reality in the reader’s mind. Zaltsman recodes the word in the specific and thoughtful way of structuring the text, which turned out to be possible thanks to the use of film editing techniques. The main feature of montage aesthetics in Zaltsman’s texts is dividing the text not into chapters, acts or scenes, but into fragments and episodes that reveal the writer’s montage optics. As a result, montage in the text, just like in the movies, creates subjectivity – the opportunity to perceive the reality through the eyes of the character. In the aesthetics of the novels, the montage of both planes (images) and episodes (actions) can be traced, which shapes the polyphonic novel as a film discourse. Despite the incompleteness of Zaltsman’s novels, the ideology and aesthetics of the literary texts are interesting from the standpoint of our time as they give a detached and objective view of what is happening that the author outlined using film editing techniques, and are expressed in the most original form of presenting a historical narrative that resonates with our time.

avant-garde, discursive practice, intermediality, cinema, literary text, narrative, montage, poetics