Опубликовано в журнале НЛО, номер 4, 2006
NONCLASSICAL PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS
OF THE RUSSIAN FORMALISM
This section opens with an article by Carlo Ginzburg (University of California, Berkeley) “Making Things Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device”. The famous Italian historian depicts the history of young Viktor Shklovsky’s key concept “estrangement” (ostranenie) from the autobiographical musings of Marcus Aurelius and the way they were perceived during the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the moralist and pamphlet writing techniques of La Bruyere and Voltaire (both of them had been important for Lev Tolstoy, whose writings Shklovsky was mainly using to illustrate the estrangement principle). On the other hand Ginzburg demonstrates a peculiar parallelism between Shklovsky s theories and the understanding of art by one of his contemporaries Marcel Proust both as a critic and as the author of “Àla recherche du temps perdu”.
Mikhail Yampolsky (New York University) in his article “Differentiation or Beyond Objectness (Heine’s Aesthetics in Tynianov’s Theory)” studies specifics of Heine’s influence on Yuri Tynianov’s theory of parody and his concept of archaism as innovation. Tynianov attaches special significance to juxtaposing the material, physical expressive aesthetics of Heine and the emotional and personalistic works of Block. Spinosa-derived concepts of Heine (the notions of mask, arabesque, etc.) make Tynianov theories richer and more complex than the formalistic principle of subjective perceptibility used by Viktor Shklovsky. On the other hand, Tynianov s non-Platonic aesthetics turns out to be close to the basic ideas of Baktin s book on Francois Rabelais, rather than to the phenomenological and neo-Kantian philosophic program of the Bakhtin of the 1920s.
Sergey Zenkin (Russian State University for the Humanities), in his article “Thing, Form, and Energy (Russian Formalists and Durkheim)” describes some epistemological convergences between Emile Durkheim’s sociology and the literary theory of the Russian Formalism. They concern especially the concept of the human things (social facts as things and works of art as artifacts estranging other things), evoluating towards an energetic idea of the things of the world.
Ilya Kalinin (The NZ. Debates on politics and culture magazine, Moscow). “History of Literature as a Familienroman (Russian Formalism Between Oedipus and Hamlet)”. This article is devoted to point-by-point comparison of conceptual patterns of the formalist theory of literary evolution and the psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex. The theoretical model of literary history is studied in its two versions represented by Y. Tynianov’s theory of parody and V. Shklovsky’s concept of canonisation of the junior branch. Each of these variants has its analogue in the psychoanalytic theory of psychological personality development.
Dragan Kujundzic (University of California at Irvine) in his article “Parody as a Recycling of Literary History” analyses the specifics of Yuri Tynianov s key concept in the light of the heritage of Nietzsche and the post-structural philosophy of Foucault, Derrida and Paul de Man. Parody (together with the concepts of death, burial, physical dismemberment and mechanical reattachment of the remnants) is treated as a driving mechanism of literary evolution and cultural history construction. For Tynianov literature is a recycling machine, both in terms of processing the old, broken forms into new ones, and in terms of the Nietzschean “eternal return” that enables the old literature to return as new in or through the masquerade of parody.
EMPRESS CATHERINE II
AND HER AUTHORIAL STRATEGIES
Andrei Zorin (University of Oxford) in his article “A Rare Thing: “Sandunovs’ scandal” and the Russian Court in the Times of the French Revolution” reconstructs the circumstances of a cause celebre that took place on 11th of February 1791 on the stage of the court theatre during the performance of Catherine’s II comic opera “Fedul and his Children”: at the and of the performance a young actress Elizaveta Uranova threw herself at the feet of the Empress present in the audience and begged to be protected from the pursuit by the Chancellor A.A. Bezborodko. In A. Zorin’s opinion the whole scene had been directed by the Empress in order to dampen the ambitions of the Chancellor A.A. Bezborodko and the personal secretary of the Empress, A.V. Khrapovitsky and to establish within the theatre an order based on strict moral principles. Otherwise, Catherine thought, Russia could expect misfortunes similar to those France was going through at the time. Zorin interprets the plot of Catherine’s opera “Fedul and his Children”: as an allegory of transfer of the court theatre that had previously existed under the leadership of A.V. Khrapovitsky and P.A. Soymonov under the direct control of the sovereign — the day after the scandal both grandees were removed from their theatrical positions.
Angelina Vacheva (St. Clement of Ohrid University, Sofia, Bulgaria) in her article ““Don’t judge me with the other women”: memoirs of Catherine II and “Letters of Miss Fanny Butler” by Madame Riccoboni” uses textological parallels between memoirs of Catherine II and a novel by a French writer Marie Jeanne Riccoboni to voice a theory that the Empress of Russia emulated that novel in one of the key episodes of her autobiography — the story of her first romance with S.Saltykov. The Empress modeled the story of her youth and the memories of her innermost feelings after examples offered by popular works of literature that provided her with convenient and successful narrative models for realizing the ideology of her personality.
AVANT-GUARDE PLOTS
IN THE LITERATURE OF THE 1920s — 1930s
Michail Weiskopf (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in his article “Between the Bible and the Avant-Guarde: Jabotinsky’s Fabula” discusses connections between Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky’s prose and Russian modernist literature, including his influence on the cult of the fabula among the Soviet authors of the early 1920s.
M. Weiskopf notes the dependence of the novel “Sampson the Nazarite” (1926) on Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s novel “Julian the Apostate” (1896) and the reverse influence “Sampson…” had on modern Russian literature (“Master and Margarita” by Michail Bulgakov, 1928—1940). The novel correlates with both the post-Romantic British tradition and political realities of the time.
The article by Dmitry Tokarev (Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences [Pushkinsky Dom], St. Petersburg) proposes an intertextual reading of three novels based on a motif of passing through the wall: “La disparition d’HonoréSubrac” (1910) by Guillaume Apollinaire, “A gymnast” (1929) by Youri Vladimirov and “Le passe-muraille” (1943) by Marcel Aymé. Each of these texts is analyzed through a prism of two other texts; together, they form a complex structure where the notion of influence seems to be inappropriate. Some texts of Daniil Kharms, typologically close to the novel of Vladimirov, permit to enlarge this intertextual perspective.
IN THE MEMORY OF A GENRE:
SOCIOGRAPHY OF A SCHOOL COMPOSITION
This small collection of articles is devoted to the genre of school composition that during the three recent years has been gradually magrinalised and has been loosing its grounds due to the wide spread of the Unified State Test practice. The articles by the Chelyabinsk University lecturer Marina Zagidullina and the Distinguished teacher of the Russian Federation Lev Sobolev presented in this section make up an already familiar dialogue between a partisan and an opponent of composition as a genre. M. Zagidullina demonstrates that all the weak points of composition are direct consequences of a more than 150-years-long classicisation process, ugly children of the rectified national canon and non-atrophied rudiments of the Soviet system of education. Lev Sobolev says straight from the shoulder that all the intrinsic flaws of composition can be easily conquered by a professional approach on the part of a teacher. The section opens with an article by Prof. Catriona Kelly (University of Oxford). In her publication Catriona Kelly presents a number of documents from the archive of the No. 8 Gymnasia (classical high school), St. Petersburg, relating to the suicide attempt by the future writer, Mikhail Zoshchenko, made during his final year at school after he had failed in his examination on literature (composition). The documents confirm the general accuracy of the account given by Zoshchenko in his autobiographical novel “Before Sunrise”.
DETECTIVE STORIES
OF STALIN’S ERA: ARCHAEOLOGY
This section presents several case studies of Soviet mass culture of the 1930s— 1950s. Until now most of the research on that topic had been limited to general analysis of motifs and propaganda clichés. The results of this archaeological (in Foucault’s terms) study of the works by several authors give us new opportunities to understand the public life and “soviet subjectivity” — the inner world of the people living in Soviet times.
An article by Nikolay Mitrokhin (Moscow/Bremen, Humboldt Fund Fellow) “The Jews, Georgians, Oppressed Peasants and the Soviet Gold: Valentin Ivanov’s Book “Yellow Metal” — an Unknown Source of Information on the Late Stalinist Society” discusses the circumstances under which a book by Valentin Ivanov (1902—1975), a writer famous for his pseudohistorical novels about medieval Russia, was banned in 1956 by the decision of censorship and Komsomol organisations. In his detective novel “Yellow Metal” written in 1952—56 the ritual praise of the Soviet authorities was accompanied by a detailed description of the USSR shadow economy. This description contradicting the official propaganda was one of the causes of the ban together with extreme nationalist views of the author, who in that novel attacked the Jews, Georgians, Tartars, Gypsies and other non-Russian ethnic groups and proclaimed them the main originators of economic crimes.
N. Mitrokhin shows that the ideology expressed in the novel — a combination of nationalism and secret hopes for a crisis of the Soviet system and legalisation of private property — was not the invention of the author but rather was peculiar to many social groups in the USSR — those being former rich peasants, former artisans and workers. In that sense these views radically differed from the position of the majority of the intelligentsia that hoped for political liberalisation but was completely uninterested in economic prospects and the conditions of the peasantry.
Yevgeny Peremyshlev (Moscow) in his article “Confrontation in absentia: Lev Ovalov and Major Pronin” analyses the biography and works of Lev Ovalov (autonym Lev Shapovalov, 1906—1997), author of many detective novels about a counter-intelligence officer, Major Ivan Pronin. His descriptions of improbable spy conspiracies against the Soviet regime and kitschy style had made the Pronin books an object of many parodies and Pronin himself a hero of popular anecdotes as early as the 1960s. For almost the length of his life Ovalov had been concealing his noble origins, first earnestly playing the part of an impeccable “proletarian writer” and then a model Soviet writer. In 1941—1956 Ovalov was incarcerated in a prison camp — most likely because of his novel “The Doubt Catchers” (1930), that critics accused of Trotskist propaganda. However after being released from the camp he continued writing kitsch novels in the spirit of socialist realism. The author shows the genesis of Ovalov’s style that combines the influences of Mikhail Zoshchenko and Arthur Conan Doyle, both of them adapted to the framework of Stalin’s “grand style”.
RUSSIAN LITERATURE 2006 ON SOCCER
This section presents poems and essays on the 2006 Soccer World Cup. In the essays by Vyacheslav Kuritsyn (St. Petersburg) and Kirill Kobrin (The NZ. Debates on politics and culture magazine and Radio Liberty, Prague) soccer matches are presented as events that exist within a field of strong social tension; poems by Andrei Sen-Senkov (Moscow) and Aleksandr Delphinov (Berlin) deconstruct cultural mythologies of the participant countries and the very concept of national teams. An analytical article by Maria Bondarenko (Paris) shows that modern analysis of the cultural mythology of soccer demands a changeover from “phenomenology” of sport events to their “semiology”.