As part of my ongoing project on Franz Kafka and Orson Welles, I will discuss the relationship between Welles's classic noir The Lady from Shanghai and Kafka's unfinished American novel, The Man Who Vanished. At least one critic has commented upon the more eye-catching similarities between the protagonists of these two masterpieces, but nobody has thus far relied on Welles's original script to shed some stronger light on his and Kafka's dark vision of America.

Sociologists and anthropologists seem to agree that, although violence and aggression are implanted in human nature and although there is no society without violence, the object of social sciences and humanities is the symbolical staging of violence through different languages, discourses, rituals and rhetorics. The configuration of these elements of culture defines the functions of violence, characterizing society in concrete historical circumstances. Thus, not actual violence, but what Robin Fox called ‘the violent imagination’ stands in the center of research in the humanities. Despite an abundance of western research about the history of discourses of violence and about the violent character of authoritative discourses in European culture, the study of the ‘violent imagination’ in Russian culture – even on a thematic, let alone rhetorical and discursive level – remains not a taboo subject, but is clearly marginalized and insufficiently advanced. It is possible to speak about violence in relation to the literature of the GULAG, but not in relation to the literature of the Great Patriotic War; in connection with Socialist Realism, but not with underground or émigré literature. Violence remains a characteristic of the discourses of the other, but never of one’s own. If we schematise a little, the problem lies in the fact that in Soviet and post-Soviet culture there were at least three types of violence and three versions of corresponding discourses: the retaliatory discourse of the state, the modernizing/martyr discourse of the intelligentsia, and the communal violence of the ‘molecular civil war’, to use Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s phrase. The last type is complicated by the fact that its discursive components are reduced by the performative representation. However, it would be incorrect to say that these discursive elements are completely missing, in the same way as it would be wrong to believe that the performative element is entirely absent in the ‘punitive’ and ‘modernizing’ discourses of violence.

Sponsored by the Council on Research and Creative Work (Graduate School), Dean’s Fund for Excellence (Arts and Sciences), Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of Humanities, Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities (Graduate School), International Affairs Program, the President’s Fund for the Humanities, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
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