The author as hero: Self and tradition in Mikhail Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita', Boris Pasternak's 'Doctor Zhivago', and Vladimir Nabokov's 'The Gift'

This dissertation examines the concept of authorship as it relates to the presentation of self and literary tradition in The Master and Margarita, Doctor Zhivago, and The Gift. These novels employ a common modernist literary device sometimes referred to as the mise en abyme: the interpolated literary works of the fictional heroes are emblematic of the larger novels themselves. I use the formal reflexivity of the mise en abyme as a springboard for discussing two fundamental aspects of modern authorship--the author's attitude toward selfhood and toward the literary tradition. This triangular conceptualization of authorship isolates one issue common to much of European literary modernism--the crisis of individual identity--and one issue particular to the Russian post-Revolutionary literary milieu, the writer's separation from literary tradition. By confronting these three novels from the perspective of European modernism as well as from the perspective of their Russian context, I try to balance broader theoretical concerns with the specific problems that faced these three writers. In my interpretation of each novel, I describe how the author's reconfiguration of literary tradition profoundly affects his concept of personal identity and his mode of self presentation. The multiple takes on the literary and historical past in Bulgakov's novel suggest a version of identity whereby the self is embroiled in a field of mutually exclusive forms of discourse and their attendant ideologies. Pasternak's goals are more intimate. He likens the literary past to lost childhood; the author thus continually strives in poetic metaphor to replicate the identity between language and self he perceives to have existed in his own past. In Nabokov's case, literary history is tied to the emigre's sense of a lost homeland, and selfhood here is envisioned as a "topographical" orientation toward transcendent values. In all three novels, the recovery of literary tradition not only shapes the author's retrieval of identity but, more significantly, also seems to make that retrieval possible.