REPEATING REPETITION: ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET, VASILY AKSENOV, ANDREI BITOV, AND THE NOUVEAU ROMAN IN RUSSIA.

This article analyzes the use of narrative repetition in Vasilii Aksenov's The Burn (1975) and Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House (1978) as an intertextual strategy that borrows from and engages in dialogue with the prose of Alain Robbe-Grillet, a twentieth- century author and prominent representative of the French "nouveau roman." Drawing from Gilles Deleuze's theorizing of difference and repetition, I argue that, far from engaging in rote imitation of Robbe-Grillet, these two novels use repetition--both as a specific narrative device linked to the nouveau roman, and as a broader approach to literary creation--to chart a new direction for Russian literature capable of revealing and undermining the empty abstractions of late-Soviet culture. At the same time, neither novel can easily be considered a straightforward continuation of Robbe-Grillet's literary project, as they each diverge stylistically from the aesthetics of the nouveau roman and re-introduce questions of politics and humanist ethics that Robbe-Grillet's fiction seeks to avoid. On a broader level, these two novels can help to better understand the understudied role that the nouveau roman played in late-Soviet literary discourse about realism and the genre of the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]