Опубликовано в журнале НЛО, номер 1, 2009
CULTURAL PROJECTIONS OF THE SUBLIME
The section opens with an article by a well-known French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940—2007) “The problem of the sublime” where the author looks into the genesis and the main interpretations of this concept within the philosophical and aesthetical framework from Pseudo-Longinus to our times. He pays particular attention to Hegel’s approach, since Hegel linked the sublime to the transcendental and thus brought the pre-existing tradition to its logical conclusion. For him it is not Beauty that serves as a first step towards the sublime, but on the opposite, the sublime is an initial flaw of Beauty. Starting with Nietzsche and the exhaustion of a romantic approach the sublime in the modern art is understood as an image without an image (Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno).
Andreas Schönle
’s (Queen Mary College, London) article “Apology of a ruin in the philosophy of history” looks at various philosophical, culturological and philological interpretations of a ruin as a natural relic of human history perceived within an aesthetic dimension of the sublime (the author uses Hegel’s and Simmel’s concepts of a ruin and especially that of a ruin in the catastrophic historiosophy of Walter Benjamin as central for his work).Ilya Kalinin’s (The Neprikosnovenny Zapas magazine, Moscow) article “The principle of estrangement as an experience of the sublime (From the poetics of memory to the poetics of literature)” is dedicated to the ways in which we can interpret estrangement as a work of the sublime. It is due to the fact that only the subject’s relation with the sublime creates a form of estrangement that is directed not on the object but on the subject himself. The author uses theoretical works of the Formalists and Viktor Shklovsky’s autobiographical prose as his basis for establishing a link between estrangement and the sublime.
Katerina Clark’s (Yale University) article projects the philosophical and aesthetical idea of the sublime as a mix of rapture, horror and signs of the presence of the Absolute in our human world (Schiller, Hegel) on the cultural history of Stalinism. Clark focuses on the concept of imperial periphery of the USSR and Russia (especially its northern one) as a space where the sublime is located (a certain parallelism between Papanin’s polar expeditions and the show trials; an interpretation of hidden tensions in the Socialist Bildungsroman “The Two Captains” by Veniamin Kaverin).
INVENTING ANTIQUITY IN RUSSIAN MODERNIST CULTURE
The section opens with an article by Sergei Krikh (Omsk University, Omsk) “Mikhail Rostovtsev: being in the similitude and being an image”. The author analyses cultural and ideological context of the works of Mikhail Rostovtsev, an outstanding Classical historian, and studies the roots of Rostovtsev’s “modernising” understanding of Antiquity, in which he followed Eduard Meyer’s footsteps. His liberal approach to stylistics; his deliberate policy of synthetising different sources; and his perception of the period under study as one characterised by a crisis (with a reference to the experiences of European decadence and Bolshevism) — all these components allowed for Rostovtsev’s total success in the 1920s—1940s. However in the 1950s—1970s his “modernising” approach was rejected by the next generations of scholars for being obsolete and one-sided. That choice had pre-determined the formation of the modern image of a historian — a figure that was doomed to evoke reverence and respect but lacking current interest.
Sergei Zavyalov (University of Helsinki). “Vyachelsav Ivanov as a translator of Greek lyric poetry”. The article uses Pindar’s First Pythian Ode and fragments of Alcaeus’ scholion as examples to analyse the ways Vyachelsav Ivanov worked with Classical materials as a translator. It pays special attention to the context within which Ivanov’s translations appeared and to their future fate. The author does not observe any signs of excessive translating licence Ivanov was traditionally accused of; however the feature that even their detractors considered to be the strong side of these translations, i.e. their virtuosity in conveying extremely complex metric patterns of the Greek texts, today starts to contradict both the scholastic discoveries of the recent decades and the general tendencies of European poetry (a passionate adept of which Vyacheslav Ivanov had always remained).
PUSHKIN’S STUDIES OF THE 2000s:
AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF ONE POEM
Konstantin Bolenko’s (The Memorial country estate of Arkhangelskoye, Moscow) article discusses three separate plot lines connected to Aleksandr Pushkin’s epistle “To a Grandee”. The first one: including a poetic description of Nikolay Yusupov’s mansion into the poem might have been an answer to a poetic description of Arkhangelskoe that had been created earlier by Aleksandr Voeikov. The second one: an evolution of the title from “To a Grandee” to “An epistle to P. N.B.Yu” and back again might not have been a product of chance and could have played a certain part in the polemics around the poem. The third one: this epistle to a degree might have been an answer to critical opinions on Yusupov produced by certain contemporaries of theirs, including the French writer Jacques-Arsène-Polycarpe-François Ancelot, who had used Yusupov’s Tartar origins to discredit him personally and Russian aristocracy as a whole.
In Daria Khitrova’s (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow) work “Pushkin’s Poem “Rhyme, my sonorous friend…”: genealogy and semantics of a lyrical narrative” the abovementioned poem is discussed within the framework of aesthetical disputes of the late 1820s — primarily the discussion on “philosophical poetics” and poetic mythology that was initiated by the younger literary generation clustering around the “Moskovsky Vestnik” magazine. On the other hand, the poem is analysed as a verse answer to Wilhelm Küchelbecker — a personal friend and a literary opponent of Pushkin’s who was held at the time at the Dinaburg fortress due to his sentence for participating in the Decembrist rebellion. The text is also written into the general picture of aesthetic and genre- and style reflexions of Pushkin in the late 1820s.
“AMERICAN NEUROSIS” IN RUSSIAN CULTURE
This section opens up a series of publications dedicated to the reflexion on the Other as a psychological structure of individual and collective consciousness in modern Russian culture. Here are presented the articles that study psychological and historical roots of anti-American sentiments that had been encouraged artificially in the Russian society from the start of the Cold war and until the end of the Soviet era. Recently these anti-American sentiments have intensified again— partly through the influence of the official rhetoric and partly due to autonomous social processes.
Violetta Gudkova (Moscow, State Art Studies Institute) in her work analyses anti-American propaganda plays written in the USSR at the beginning of the Cold War (in 1947—1951). The author analyses the ways in which Josef Stalin and other Communist Party (Bolsheviks) leaders commissioned those propaganda plays; they were contracted to the most intellectual of the playwrights in the Soviet literary establishment. During the mass propaganda campaign dozens of plays were written and the most famous of them were adapted for the screen. Some of these plays were set in the US (“Russian Question” by Konstantin Simonov), but the majority of the dramas had their plot set in the USSR: they described how dangerous were for the Soviet people various “temptations” coming from the West and particularly from the US: international recognition for scientists, fascination with foreign popular culture for artistic people, and striving for personal comfort (which was not supposed to be particular for Soviet people) for everyone. These plays were characterised at all levels by a primitive dramatic structure: from stage time management to psychology and interactions between dramatic personae, etc. The article analyses the observations of “non-engaged witnesses” on the way this anti-American propaganda was perceived by the Russian elites: John Steinbeck (from his “The Russian Diary”, 1948) and liberal literary critic Mark Scheglov (who was a student under Stalin and kept a detailed diary).
A sociological essay by Linor Goralik (Moscow) was written on the basis of an Internet poll conducted by the author. Goralik asked those born in the 1970s to describe how they had been perceiving the USA during their childhood. It came to light that the mythological image of the USA that existed in their minds was split into two incompatible elements that Goralik calls “America-plus” and “Americaminus”. The second one was a collective mythological image born from Soviet propaganda, a kind of hell on earth. “America-plus” was reconstructed on the basis of films, international expositions and personal testimonies of those who had been allowed to visit the “Capitalist countries”. In this case the US were presented as a consumer paradise resplendent with easily accessible pop culture and sexual emancipation. The key word for both segments of the image of the USA was “liberty”. Surprisingly, the childhood mythology of America was totally isomorphic to the childhood mythology of sex. That was to a large extent due to the fact that both knowledge about America and knowledge abut sex were equally taboo in the USSR and yet at the same time were extremely attractive for the young people.
Roman Arbitman’s (The Saratov Region Newspaper, Saratov) article is devoted to one of the trends in the Russian science fiction of the beginning of the third millennium: militant anti-Americanism being the main plot structure for the alternative history and anti-Utopia novels (Vyacheslav Rybakov, Dmitry Yankovsky, Sergei Anisimov, Fedor Berezin, etc.) The authors are solving their ideological issues using techniques borrowed from American mass literature (Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, etc.).
Stanislav Lvovsky’s (Moscow) essay “With a twisted neck” analyses a peculiar phenomenon of the modern Russian culture: there exists a plethora of films, advertising and musical clips and rock-songs that while being anti-American in their contents or connotations are still obviously based on the elements of American popular culture. The author demonstrates that those segments of Russian political and cultural elites that are particularly vehement in their attempts to demonstrate their estrangement from the USA still depend on America and especially on American popular culture as on their significant Other.
An appendix contains an extract from notebooks belonging to a critic and an essay-writer Alexandr Ageev (1956—2008). This is a continuation of a publication started in the № 94 (2008) issue of our magazine. Ageev’s notes cover the period between 1992 and 1995 and are discussing the changes in the status of intellectuals and literature in the Post-Soviet society.