Enciklopedija otricanija: «Hulio Hurenito» Ilji Erjenburga

Hetényi, Zsuzsa (2000) Enciklopedija otricanija: «Hulio Hurenito» Ilji Erjenburga. Studia Slavica, 45 (1-4). pp. 317-323. ISSN 0039-3363

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Abstract

Julio Jurenito, the first and the best novel of famous master of surviving Ilia Ehrenburg is a desperate cry, an extract of total despare after the First World War. Its central figure, the Mephisto-like Master, the spirit of negation denies all ideals and achievements of humanity and mankind: faith, hope and love, science, law and arts, logically proving their falsity. The novel's overtly scatchy and journalistic form with loosly connected chapters de-stroy the traditional structure of the novel which seems to be rather a textbook of the destruc-tion, having some parallels among the post-Nietzschean European intellectuals. The novel is also a profane Gospel, a history of life and death of the Master who is at the same time the Great Provocator - Julio Jurenito's simultaneously divine and satanic (Jesus-like and Anti-Christ-like) character is a very close predecessor of Bulgakov's Woland. Jurenito refuses to acknowledge the linear time of Christianity and that of the historical evolution, and only the cyclical time, the eternal biological recurrence is a certainty in his philosophy: the eternal repetition of the seasons is the same as the threefold repetition of peace, war and revolution in history that does not depende of the will of the mankind. Ehrenburg endows Jurenito with constuctivist ideas in order to prove in his avant-garde roman de voyage that "our world is the worst among the existing worlds". He uses also the elements of different genres: satirical, philosophical, encyclopaedic, evangelical, anecdotic and those of picaresque novel. Only these many layers of cultural tradition used in his novel reverse the general negation in Julio Jurenito: its form and its extensive base of cultural reminiscences deny the denying.

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