Марк Данилевски: Жизнь и творчество американского писателя

American author (born 1966)

Mark Z. Danielewski ('/d//æ//n//i//ə//l//ɛ//f//s//k//i/; born March 5, 1966) is an American fiction author. He is most widely known for his debut novel House of Leaves (2000), which won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. His second novel, Only Revolutions (2006), was nominated for the National Book Award. Danielewski began work on a 27 volume series, The Familiar, although he completed only five volumes before halting the project in 2017. Danielewski's work is characterized by an intricate, multi layered typographical variation, or page layout, which he refers to as "signiconic". Sometimes known as visual writing, the typographical variation corresponds directly, at any given narratological point in time, to the physical space of the events in the fictional world as well as the physical space of the page and the reader. Early on, critics characterized his writing as being ergodic literature, and Danielewski has described his style as:Signiconic = sign + icon. Rather than engage those textual faculties of the mind remediating the pictorial or those visual faculties remediating language, the signiconic simultaneously engages both in order to lessen the significance of both and therefore achieve a third perception no longer dependent on sign and image for remediating a world in which the mind plays no part."

Danielewski was born in New York City to Tad Danielewski, a Polish avant garde film director, and Priscilla Decatur Machold. Mark was Tad's second child and his first with Priscilla; Mark's sister Anne, also known as Poe, was born two years later. The Danielewski family moved continuously for Tad's various film projects, and by the age of 10, Mark had lived in six countries: Ghana, India, Spain, Switzerland, Britain and the United States. In 1985 Danielewski, aged 19, visited his half brother, who was living on Rue des Belles Feuilles in Paris. Here, he began writing on a manual typewriter and enjoying the actual process of writing for the first time. During this period he wrote a story called "Where Tigers Dance", which he has called "so unfinished it didn't deserve to be called incomplete", but has said that it continued "to roam around" in his imagination. In 1988 Danielewski graduated from Yale with a degree in English Literature; he had studied under John Hollander, Stuart Moulthrop, and John Guillory. He was also inspired by Harold Bloom. In 1989 he moved to Berkeley, California, where he enrolled in an intensive Latin course at the University of California, Berkeley. He then pursued graduate studies at the USC School of Cinema Television in Los Angeles. During this time he became involved with Derrida, a documentary about the career and philosophy of Algerian born French literary critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida. Danielewski was an assistant editor, sound technician and cameraman, and can be seen adjusting the sound equipment in Derrida's suit jacket at one point in the film. Danielewski adopted two Devon Rex kittens, Archimedes and Meifumado, after his previous Devon Rex companions, Sibyl and Carl died.

In 2000, Danielewski toured Borders Books and Music locations across America with his sister Poe to promote his book and her album Haunted, which has many elements of House of Leaves. The album features Danielewski reading from House of Leaves on several tracks, as well as audio recordings that Tad Danielewski left for Mark and Poe, which they found after his death. In 2001, a remake of Poe's song "Hey Pretty (Drive By 2001 Mix)," which featured Danielewski reading from House of Leaves, reached #13 on Billboard's Alternative Chart. That summer, Poe and Danielewski spent three months as the opening act for Depeche Mode's 2001 North American tour. On this tour, he played Madison Square Garden. which Poe sang on the Lounge a Palooza compilation album.

After the publication of House of Leaves, Danielewski worked on two projects in tandem: his second novel Only Revolutions, and a novella, The Fifty Year Sword, an "adult ghost story". Danielewski created the book itself with the Dutch artist Peter van Sambeek. The recto pages of the book are empty except for page numbers and van Sambeek's art. There were two back to back sold out performances that night. On October 31, 2011, Danielewski produced a slightly modified production back to back at REDCAT again. There was live music by Partch Ensemble percussionists Matthew Cook and T. J. Troy, as well as Christine Marie's shadow casting and five actors reading. Pantheon organised a book tour to support it, and thanks to an ARC Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, the production of The Fifty Year Sword went to five cities around the United States in conjunction with the book release tour for the Pantheon release of The Fifty Year Sword. These performances, smaller in production than the REDCAT performances, featured different actors at every city, including Saturday Night Live alumnus Darrell Hammond in New York. Pianist Christopher O'Riley, a longtime friend and fan of Danielewski, also toured for these performances. However, his publishers pushed for him to do something more complex, with more colors, typographical intricacies and constraints. as opposed to four in House of Leaves. The novel also requires constant physical manipulation to read, whereas only certain sections of House of Leaves require readers to flip the book around. As the work progressed it became obvious to Danielewski that the novel was something of a counterpoint to House of Leaves; in fact, he has said in interviews that Only Revolutions is centrifugal while House of Leaves is centripetal. as well as the "A Spoiler" published by the French literary magazine Inculte in 2007. A paperback edition of the book was published on July 10, 2007, an audiobook featuring music by Danny Elfman was also released that year, and an interactive ebook version was released through Apple's iBooks on December 15, 2015. Only Revolutions was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award and has been translated into French, Dutch, and German. Like House of Leaves, Only Revolutions has a cult following and has been taught in universities. In 2013, two graduate students at UC Santa Barbara created an Only Revolutions database called Vizor.

Danielewski is a fan of the Scottish rock band Biffy Clyro, as they discovered when Danielewski attended one of their shows after they borrowed the title Only Revolutions for their album of the same name. They collaborated for a performance on March 2, 2011, which included readings of Only Revolutions by Danielewski, musical performances by Biffy Clyro, and a Q&A exploring how the book inspired the album. All proceeds went to Homeboy Industries, a Los Angeles based non profit that offers training and support to at risk and formerly gang involved youth.

In December 2018, Danielewski released "A Christmas Eve Carol" as a holiday card for his readers, saying, "I wrote this over twenty years ago and it kept me going when the holidays seemed too dark (and, yeah, they still get dark). Thanks to family and an old friend, I finally finished it or at least managed to come up with this threadbare recording. It's pretty much how I sing it to myself and these days to my little girl. So this year, in lieu of a holiday card with an inky, mischievous cat, please accept these few notes. They've given me comfort. May they give you comfort too whatever the hour, whatever the night."

Bray, Joe and Alison Gibbons (ed.). Mark Z. Danielewski. Manchester University Press, 2011. Moore, Steven. "Mark Z. Danielewski." in My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays. Zerogram Press, 2017, pp. 126–31. Pöhlmann, Sascha (ed.). Revolutionary Leaves: The Fiction of Mark Z. Danielewski. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Shiloh, Ilana. "The Book as Labyrinth: Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves." In her The Double, the Labyrinth and the Locked Room: Metaphors of Paradox in Crime Fiction and Film. Peter Lang, 2011.