Опубликовано в журнале НЛО, номер 5, 2006
(SELF)DEFINITION OF A HUMANITIES SCHOLAR
In this section we present two texts offered as papers at the annual “New Literary Review” conference (the so-called “Bath Readings”) in April 2006.
In the first article, “The Cold Embrace of “Science” or: Why the Humanities Better Be “Humanities and Arts””, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University) describes the Humanities and Arts as spaces that enable the practice of riskful thinking. Instead of contributing to the shaping of standard professional competence and instead of answering preexisting questions, the Humanities play to their full potential whenever they dedicate themselves to the production of new problems and questions. In order to do so, the Humanities are well advised to re-interpret their lack circumscribed social functions as the freedom for counterintuitive thinking. Gumbrecht also discusses in detail the institutional future of the Humanities, examining the changing organisational and intellectual framework of the modern university system.
In his article “Humanities scholar — where, when and why? Sociometry and (Russian) language” Konstantin A. Bogdanov (Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, and Institute of Russian Literature, St. Petersburg) studies the birth and codification of the concepts of “humanitarian knowledge” and “humanities” in the Russian cultural space of the second half of the 19 th century — the first third of the 20th century. Using a synthetic method that combines the approaches of history of concepts and traditional lexicography Bogdanov notes within the semantics of the Russian word “humanities scholar” (gumanitarij) a characteristic ambiguity or even an internal opposition between two types of connotations: on one hand, “scholastic” and “academic” ones, on the other — “civic” and “political journalism” ones, with the political connotations being the more tangible of the two. According to Bogdanov, the twin concept to that of a humanities scholar is that of a member of intelligentsia (▒intelligent’). “Humanities scholar” and “a member of intelligentsia” are linked by the concept of “humanity”, that is also very important. An exaggerated attention that Russian thinkers paid to a figure of a member of intelligentsia has been for a long time blocking reflection over critical and rational functions of a scholar proper.
STRUCTURES OF HISTORIC NONSIMULTANEITY:
MODERN MIDDLE AGES
Ludolf Kuchenbuch (Hagen FernUniversität, Germany) in his article ““Feudalism”: on the strategies of usage of one “uncomfortable concept”” examines a complex and ambivalent part of that key term in the social life of the Middle Ages. While admitting that feudalism itself is in many ways a modern concept used mostly to provide negative characteristics to the “backward” remnants of the past, Kuchenbuch still stresses its importance and irreplaceability for characterizing “organically” unequal and hierarchical relationships of the people of the Middle Ages. The ceaseless and constantly rethought “invention” of “one’s own” Middle Ages going on in the modern times does not hinder medievists. On the contrary, it sets a framework for their studies. But after the reflection performed by the French Annales School, that framework should be noted and reflected upon.
Tamara Kondratieva’s (Université de Valanciennes et du Hainaut-Cambrésis, France) ““Modern state” as an authority based on the Domostroy? (regarding the debates on social and cultural roots of Stalinism)” is structured as a reflection on the phenomenon of “reactualisation of the past”. From the author’s point of view the Soviet system not only followed the earlier tradition of the state having wardship over its subjects but also resurrected the old, pre-imperial symbolic practices of distributing resources and privileges from a single centre personified by a figure of a charismatic ruler (be it a tsar or a leader). In that way, a counter to an outwardly rational, bureaucratic and modern system of rule, the structure of resource distribution of the Stalinist USSR recreated the feudal structures of kormlenie and bestowals of the 16 th—17 th century Moscow Rus, though the Stalinist bureaucracy was not genetically linked to those ancient institutions.
CINEMA, INTELLECTUALS
AND THE CRISIS OF MODERNISM
Robert Bird (The University of Chicago) in his “Russian Symbolism and the Rise of Cinema Aesthetics: Viacheslav Ivanov’s Influence on Alexander Bakshy and Adrian Piotrovskii” argues that as long as symbolist aesthetics remained dominant in Russian art, the cinema was denied recognition as a legitimate art form. By extension, the recognition of the cinema as art (in the mid-1920s) marked the death-knell of the symbolist aesthetic. At the same time, symbolist ideas lay at the basis of some important cinema theories of the 1920s. In particular, Viacheslav Ivanov’s aesthetics had a defining influence on Alexander Bakshy’s and Adrian Piotrovskii’s theories of “poetic cinema”, specifically in the conceptualization of the screen and narrative as the means by which the cinema gains power over space and time, respectively.
Yuri Tsivian (University of Chicago) in his article “On Chaplin in Russian Avant-Garde Art and on the Laws of Fortuity in Art” exemines the cult of Chaplin launched by West European avant-garde artists and poets of the 1920s (Goll, Hellens, Léger). It reached Russia early in 1922 via Ilya Erenburg’s Constructivist manifesto And Yet the World Goes Round, and international avant-garde magazine Object which Erenburg edited together with El Lissitski. In Autumn 1922, a special Chaplin issue of the Moscow Constructivist magazine Kino-Fot came out with essays on Chaplin by Aleksandr Rodchenko, Nikolai Forreger, Lev Kuleshov and Aleksei Gan; it also contained a series of “Charlot” drawings by Varvara Stepanova which portrayed Chaplin in a schematized geometrical manner common to Constructivist visuals at that time; in 1924 Vladimir Mayakovsky published a poem featuring “Charlot” as a precursor of all-European proletarian revolution. This paper looks at those aspects of Chaplin’s acting style that fascinated Soviet left-wing artists and what they made of them; at Chaplin’s image in Russian as a “Taylorist actor”; at Chaplin’s impact on Kuleshov’s workshop; and, more closely, at a strange reference in both Mayakovsky’s poem and Stepanova’s to a “Chaplin” film which real Chaplin never made, Man on a Propeller.
METROPOLY AND EMIGRATION:
STRANGE (NON)MEETINGS
Nikolay Bogomolov (Moscow State University), “On one cultural stowe of Russian Paris”. A stowe (Locus poesiae) — is a term introduced by Vladimir Toporov (1928—2006) for describing a clearly geographically marked area (most often, a city area) that possesses cultural memories meaningful to the generations that follow. The article studies a small section of Montparnasse where at different times M. Voloshin, I. Erenburg, N. Gumilev, Vl. Khodasevich, Vl. Mayakovsky used to live. That section is a repository of cultural memory linked to very meaningful (not only in the French but also the in Russian context) associations with the works of Ch. Baudelaire as well as with various not easily formalised connections of different Russian poets whose ideological and literary positions were almost diametrically opposed. One of the central issues of the article is the relationship between Vl. Khodasevich and Vl. Mayakovsky.
The article by Yuri Leving (Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia) is devoted to Gisella Lachman (1890—1969), a forgotten American poet of Russian-Jewish origin. Lachman was the author of two volumes of poems entitled “Plennye Slova” (“Captive Words”, 1952) and “Zerkala” (“Mirrors”, 1965). In the late 1950s Lachman’s poetry was highly appreciated by the contemporary émigré critics and even perceived as an émigré counterbalance of the works by Soviet poetess Anna Akhmatova. Yuri Leving uses rare data from Lachman’s archive (today in the Library of Congress, Washington) to support the daring title of “American Akhmatova” given to the émigré artist by her peers in exile. Among the newly published archival documents is a revealing letter (1966) to Lachman by a literary critic G. Adamovich.
The “In Memoriam” section contains three collections of materials. The first one is dedicated to the memory of a prominent medievist historian Aaron Gurevich (1924—2006). It opens with the last interview given by Gurevich specifically for the New Literary Review journal in June 2006. Apart from that we offer the tribute to his memory by his colleagues — Natalie Zemon Davies (Princeton University), Pavel Uvarov and Kirill Levinson (both — Institute of General History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) and Mikhail Krom (European University, St. Petersburg). The second block is dedicated to the memory of a writer, literary critic and journalist Aleksandr Goldstein (1957—2006) — author of essay collections and avant-garde novels that became major events in Russian literature and opened new possibilities for Russian prose. Goldstein had lived in Baku (Azerbaijan) until 1990 when he had to immigrate to Israel. He died in Tel-Aviv. In this section we offer excerpts from his last novel “Tranquil fields” that Goldstein had finished several days before his death (the full text of the novel is expected to be published in December 2006), as well as essays by poets Aleksandr Barash (Jerusalem), Elena Fanailova (Moscow), Stanislav Lvovsky (Moscow) and Shamshad Abdullaev (Ferghana, Uzbekistan), a prose-writer Mickey Wolf (Jerusalem), and a poet and an artist Mikhail Grobman (Jerusalem). The third memorial section is dedicated to Maksim Shapir (1962—2006) — a scholar of poetry and history of literature; in contains an editorial, describing the major directions the work of that philologist took.
THE RETURN OF THE AUTHOR,
OR ON THE OTHER SIDE OF INTENTION
Studies of literary works presented in this collection disprove the post-structuralist thesis of the “death of the author”. The 20 th century literature includes works that are rich in philosophical and historical allusions, and made as collages or written in a modality that makes it hard to identify the subject of a statement (self/not self) — however they still contain as their inalienable part an affirmation of existential intention, that is of a personal task that an author of each of those works strives to complete in the process of writing. In our new grounding for the concept of intention we take into account the works of Antoine Compagnon.
Emily Van Buskirk (Harvard University) in her article ““Self-distancing” as an ethical and aesthetical principle in Lydia Ginzburg’s prose” examines self-distancing or ▒samootstranenie’ in the prose of Lydia Ginzburg as a technique designed to enable the creation of art as well as the adherence to moral standards. It further argues that samoostranenie is instrumental in the ability of Ginzburg’s analytical prose to blur the boundaries between genres and disciplines, and specifically to move away from autobiography and memoir. The article takes up the prose of Ginzburg’s blockade period, when attempts to view the self as other acquired new urgency and significance. The levels of “self-distancing” in Ginzburg’s generalized account, “Zapiski blokadnogo cheloveka” are revealed by a comparison to a previously unpublished and newly discovered story, detailing the guilt and regret over cruelty towards a loved one who was nearing a blockade death.
The article by Nikolay Nikolaev (Research library of the St. Petersburg State University) “On authenticity of Victor Kheif in Vladimir Earl’s novelette” discusses the artistic means by which an avant-guard poet Vladimir Earl (b. 1947) created a portrait of Victor Kheif in his novelette “In search of lost Kheif” (the title is an allusion on the title of Marcel Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu”). Victor Kheif was one of the most remarkable representatives of a vivid phenomenon of Russian unofficial culture — a café in the Malaya Sadovaya Street in Leningrad. In that café poets and artists used to meet (the so-called Malaya Sadovaya circle). Particular attention is paid to the textual sources of the novelette and the ways they were interpreted.
Eleonora Lassan (Vilnius University). “”Pluralism is possible, consensus is out of question”: Yuri Davydov’s novel “Bestseller” in the light of the “linguistic turn” in humanities”. Yuri Davydov’s (1924—2001) novel “Bestseller” (2000) — is a complex narrative permeated with literary quotations and games; it involves dozens of characters from various historical periods, from Apostle Paul to our contemporaries. The main plot is the biography of a historian and journalist Vladimir Burtsev (1862—1942), who in 1938 managed to prove that so-called “Protocols of th Elders of Zion” was a forgery produced by the Russian secret police. It was the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, still the basis of many anti-Semitic statements, that Yuri Davydov ironically called “a bestseller of the [20th] century”. Eleonora Lassan analyses Davydov’s historical thinking using the models of historical narrative provided in the works of Heyden White and Frank Ankersmith, and studies interactions between various subplots of the novel employing Mark Turner’s concept of blending.
Artemy Magun (European University in St. Petersburg), “The layers of the retina”. The article reviews the new book by the Saint-Petersburg poet Alexander Skidan. The new manner of Skidan presents us with the poetical collages consisting of the fragments of theoretical texts or everyday speech. The article discusses the continuities of this style with the Soviet conceptualism of the 1970s and 1980s, but it also finds the fundamental innovations: the radical destruction of the subject, which does not leave space to any irony. The art is totalized so as to incorporate everything, and this means that any subjective position is immediately sucked into the text and questioned by it. Skidan gives an image of this situation when he writes of the “exfoliation” of the retina of the Saint-Petersburg apartment building lobbies. This image points at the constant “exfoliation” of the text itself, where at each stage the objective image becomes a meta-commentary of the writer’s or reader’s position. It also alludes to the traumatic catastrophe that makes this kind of versification possible, the historical event that is poetically productive, precisely because it destroys any possibility of remaining distant from the word or image.