(transl. by Ignatius Vishnevetsky)
Опубликовано в журнале НЛО, номер 5, 2004
BELLES LETTRES
This section opens with Stepan P. Shevyrev’s (1806—1864) unfinished poem “Illness” (preparation of the text, commentary, introduction, and editing by L.I. Sobolev) will be published for the first time.
MATERIALISM OF THE SIGN
AND THE FLESH OF LANGUAGE
The article by Esa Kirkkopelto (University of Strasbourg / University of Helsinki) analyzes the essence of democracy drawing upon Aeschylos’ “Eumenides” and the reading of this tragedy by Hegel. Democracy is
normally seen as the secularization of politics, the overcoming of the mythological order. Tragedy, according to Hegel, is the vehicle of this democratic secularization. But how does tragedy do it? Does it function in a sacrificial way, through the death of the sacred and the sacralization of death? Or does it do otherwise, through the materialization and estrangement of language in the act of voting (“voicing”) with pebbles. Such materialization allows, according to Kirkkopelto, to deconstruct the ordinary notion of democracy as the self-presence of the collective will, by introducing estrangement and distance into it.
Keti Chukhrov’s (Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) “Nonsense as an Instrument of the Sublime” approaches the work of Aleksander Vvedensky (1904—1941) as being principally different from the Russian poetic tradition. From the author’s point of view, Vvedensky (and Tsvetaeva too) break with the practice of presenting a poetic object that has been established in the time of Pushkin, and therefore was closer to European poetry, e. g., to the work of HÚlderlin. Unlike the “fleshly” imitations of the physical world, which are characteristic of the Russian poetic tradition, the metaphysical concerns of a sublime worldview complicate the significational functions of creative language as such. Vvedensky’s “nonsense” is interpreted not only as an artistic device, but as a radical defamiliarization of the world of objects and meanings, as a pathway towards specific slowing down and even stoppage of momentary causality within the confines of a poem (the author follows P. Lacou-Labarthe understanding of sublime).
Ikina Okuneva’s (Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) article “The Corporeal in Nikolai Leskov’s “The Enchanted Wanderer”” is devoted to the reading of his famous story through the aesthetical interpretation exemplified by Walter Benjamin in his essay on Leskov’s style. Boris Eikhenbaum’s dissection of the story’s techniques, Roland Barthes’s strategy of analytical reading, Benjamin’s grasp of attributes of the artistic and social experience of storytelling allows us to see the specifics of Leskov’s literary works. The world of Leskov’s heroes does resemble neither the mythologized totality of the epos nor the space of individual character’s growth found within modern(ist) novels. As the primary descriptor of the main character of “The Enchanted Wanderer”, Okuneva chooses the superficial characteristics of the events that befall him, without dealing with the character’s individuality. The corporeal level of experience corresponds to the very particular role played by the narrator in the story. The narrator’s point of view becomes more problematic (and turns into the author’s point of view) only during the hero’s most important decision, when he decides to avoid his own doom, which is foretold in the initial part of the story.
Artem Magun’s (Smolny College of Fine Arts and European University, St. Petersburg) article “On the Corporeal” summarizes the new approach to the understanding of literature, polemical to the semiological and cultural methods of the 1960’s — 1980’s. Following the accomplishments of Walter Benjamin, Philippe Lacou-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, partially the work of Jacques Derrida and Valery Podoroga, this approach draws researchers’ attention to the solution of problems and conditions of artistic representation via analysis of the materiality of the text and the corporeality of the language.
ILLNESS OF THE WRITER:
A CREATIVE REFLECTION AND A CLINICAL STATE
This section is devoted to various types of what A.W. Frank calls “Illness Narratives” in the work of 17th century writers. It opens with an introductory article by the compiler, Professor Alexandre Stroev (UniversitÎ de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest) “The Writer: Imaginary Invalid or Unwilling Healer?”, in which the reasons for literature scholars’ attention to this subject are explained, and we are presented with a brief history of the birth and development of the myth of the writer-invalid in the European, and, above all, French literature of the 18th — early 19th centuries. In Stroev’s opinion, the study of literary diseases is directly linked to a growth of interest in all things corporeal, and, from another perspective, to the problems of professional writing, which has taken along with it society’s preconceived notions about typical “writer’s diseases”.
One such disease is analyzed in Alexandre Stroev’s article “My Inkwell Will Kill Me: The Epistolary Troubles of Friedrich Melchior Grimm”. Grimm considered his primary duty to be writing to various public figures: he wrote to monarchs and dignitaries, his enlightened benefactors. From this work he amassed a substantial fortune and gained wide influence in the courts of Europe; this same work ruined his health: towards the end of his life, Grimm went almost completely blind.
Korinna Beil-Goureau’s (UniversitÎ de Brest) work ““The Fevers” of GÎrard de Nerval: A Difficult Admission of Madness” demonstrates how hard it was for the great French Romantic to admit his own insanity to himself and to those around him: in letters Nerval often refers to his disorders as “fevers”. The researcher analyzes Nerval’s complex epistolary strategies: he defends himself against accusations of insanity, but at the same time presents proof of his reasoning madness. The descriptions of the disease change constantly depending on the addressees and his relationship to them. Thus, Nerval tries to convince his doctor not of his health, but rather of his eventual recovery, while to his father, who was a medic by profession, he tries to show his depth of knowledge in medicine and idealizes the state of his disease.
Jean de Palacio (UniversitÎ Paris IV — Sorbonne) analyzes “The epistolary pathologies of Jean Lorrain” — the late 19th-century French writer and belletrist. It is the author’s opinion that, while suffering from a second bout of syphilis, Lorrain aestheticized the symptoms and ugly effects of his disease in his letters, turning it into a work of art.
Some scenes in Lorrain’s novel “Wandering Vice” (Le vice errant) resemble his letters. The letters of Lorrain in essence, present in themselves a combination of shamelessness, which on purpose parades the pains of the body, with chastity, which jealously hides the spiritual.
Frederick H. White (Memorial University, Newfoundland), in “Leonid Andreev: Performance and Deception”, suggests that Andreev’s creative performance (literary and personal) confuses, replicates, and disguises madness, bringing into doubt what is sane and insane behavior. Working backward chronologically, White argues that Kornei Chukovskii was the first to identify Andreev’s performative act, associating it with his manic periods; Andreev, himself, played a role in asserting his mental health to the public, and yet, at the same time, he explored the idea that the creative act might blur into madness in his story “The Thought”. This article reopens the subject of Andreev’s mental health for scholarly debate and provides an alternative reading for one of his literary works within the framework of the Illness Narrative.
LITERARY BEHAVIOR AS A PROJECT
Kirill Ospovat’s (Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow) article ““Sublime Misanthrope”: Social Aspects of Lomonosov’s Literary Behavior” employs sociological methodes of Russian formalists, who usually linked a writer’s behavior to particular aspects of his creativity. Lomonosov’s proverbial “rudeness” is viewed by Ospovat as opposed to high society’s politeness, as something prescribed by the ethics of the natural scientists and by the “misanthropic” Western European admirers of Horace (Boileau, MoliÏre, and J.-B. Rousseau).
REMAKES: REFLECTIONS
OF THE SHIFTING OF EPOCHS
Almira Ousmanova’s (European Humanities University, Minsk) article “Difference and Repetition, or Once Again About Love in Post-Soviet Cinema” focuses on the “close reading” of two films: the first one is well-known film “Once Again About Love” (Grigory Natanson, 1968, based on the play “104 Pages About Love” by Eduard Radzinsky) and the second film is “Sky. Airplane. Girl”, its remake released in 2002 (Vera Storozheva, story and leading female role by Renata Litvinova). Both films deal with the question of “the Soviet” and its structures of feeling. One of the crucial issues to be discussed is how films can be used for studying the history of emotions, and, more specifically, how cinematic love stories represent and articulate socially and historically grounded love discourses. Another important question to be addressed concerns the phenomenon of “remake”: is there a cultural need for remaking old films and what needs to be “rewritten” in terms of gender relations, sexualities, visual representations, cultural and sociopolitical realities. Since this remake has been produced by women-filmmakers, the problem of women’s cinema and female gaze is given a special attention.
Marina Zagidullina (Cheljabinsk State University). “Remakes, or the Expansion of Classics”. This article is devoted to the current state of the remake — that is, to the creation of new texts based on well-established classical works. In the books of the “New Russian Novel” series published by Igor Zakharov (“The Copper Vase Of Old Man Hottabych” — Sergei Oblomov’s remake of Lazar Lagin’s novel “Old Man Hottabych”; Ivan Sergeev’s remake of Ivan Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons”; Leo Nikolaev’s remake of Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”; “The Idiot”, Fyodor Mikhailov’s remake of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel), the modern rules of the creation of a remake are shown as a type of popular literature. An attempt is made to find the remake’s place in the modern literary process.
IN MEMORIAM
This section commemorates the poet and artist Dmitry Avaliani (1938—2003): it consists of poems and visual-textual compositions not published during his life, as well as articles about his work.
CHRONICLES OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
Aleksander Chantsev’s (Moscow) article “After Murakami Went Out Of Style: Japanese Literature in Russia in the New Century” studies the reception of translations of Japanese literature in the USSR in the 1960s and in Russia in the 1990s — early 2000’s. The most popular Japanese authors in the USSR in the 1960s were Abe Kobo, Oe Kendzaburo, and Kawabata Yasunari, who were important to the nonconformist intellectuals. These writers’ works went against the official Soviet ideology and therefore represented for Russians the most important branches of Western literature. In the 1990s in Russia, Yukio Mishima was popular, then Murakami Haruki. An interest in Murakami Haruki took the shape of a large-scale youth fad in Russia. As of right now, the Murakami Haruki fad is passing, and younger Japanese authors are grabbing the public’s attention — Murakami Ryu, Banana Yoshimoto and others. One can say with certainty that Japanese culture is currently influencing not only intellectual, but mass-market literature as well, as well as Russian television shows, etc.
Reviews of new fiction books are also presented in this section, and also in “Bibliography” (the books on the humanities and literary criticism).
MODERN RUSSIAN FOLKLORE:
SYMBOLS AND TEXTS
The New Literary Review continues with its new rubric, curated by linguist and folklorist Alexei Plutser-Sarno (Moscow). Every publication in this series consists of two articles: one with a vocabularial and lexicographical bent and the other detailing nonverbal symbols and actions. Plutser-Sarno’s dictionary entries are devoted to Russian profane expressions and their current uses, while the semiotic part is dedicated to an expressive gesture or sign. In this issue, A. Plutster-Sarno publishes two articles: “Fucking Shit” and “The Symbolism of Clapping”. The contexts of the expression “fucking shit” (pizdets) in the first article are taken primarily from Russian Internet sites. In the second article, it is shown that applause, previously used to show approval or support, is tied in Slavic folklore with the netherworld and is considered an attribute of the lowest natural demons (mermaids and the likes).
Transl. by Ignatius Vishnevetsky