Опубликовано в журнале НЛО, номер 2, 2009
MORPHOLOGY OF CONFLICTS WITHIN THE ACADEMIA
This section begins with an article by Carlos Spoerhase (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany) “History of science as history of conflict (on the basis of discussions on literary theory).” The author employs broad historical, scholastic and philosophical perspective to look at conflicts within literary theory not as on external circumstances of its development, but as essential factors that form this branch of knowledge. Spoerhase dissects modern approaches to the debate phenomenon developed by sociology and sociology of science paying spcial attention to polemics between the partisans of culture studies (Kulturwissenschaften) and traditional philology in modern Germany.
Glenn W. Most’s (University of Chicago) article “One Hundred Years of Fractiousness: Disciplining Polemics in Nineteenth-Century Classical Scholarship” looks into the three most important discussions that laid the foundations of philological knowledge as such (including fields outside the limits of Classical studies). Debates around Friedrich Creuzer separated rational study of ancient mythology from its artistic or religious transformation; polemics between Gottfried Hermann and August Böckh about publishing a body of Greek inscriptions divorced studying the crème de la crème of Greek literature from Classical mass literature; and finally an argument on Max Müller’s interpetation of Aeschylus’ “Eumenides” posed a question of pragmatics of Classical studies in its dependence on “profane” circumstances of the modern era.
Céline Trautmann-Waller
’s (Université Paris III, France) article “Philology of objects or philology of words? A story of one discussion and its modern repercussions” offers a detailed study of the debate that occurred in Germany between the partisans of pure literary studies and history-oriented scholars of context of Classical cultural development. The importance of this debate between the Leipzig and the Berlin schools lies in the explicit way they posed the question on the correlation between functional and substantial issues within aesthetic evolution, for those positions voiced at the time could be recognised, although in a transformed shape, in the current arguments on the specifics of humanities, Bourdieu’s polemics with post-structuralists, etc.Anton Sveshnikov’s (Omsk State University, Omsk, Russia) article “The tale of how Lev Platonovich quarreled with Ivan Mikhailovich (A story of a professorial conflict)” analyses a rift between two major pre-revolutionary medieval scholars in Russia — Ivan Mikhailovich Grevs, a professor of the St. Petersburg University, and his pupil Lev Platonovich Karsavin. In the 1910s Karsavin got enamoured with the ideas of the “history of spirit” and empathical interpetations of medieval piety and so moved quite far away from the “starry-eyed” ideals of his mentor. Besides, he had broken the unwritten rules of their corporation (“respect for one’s elders”) and therefore could make a proper career only during the crisis of the post-revolutionary period. An eccentric attitude adopted by Karsavin after he emigrated led him to veer from the path of a historian primarily towards the field of religious philosophy.
GENEOLOGY OF A PROVOCATION:
ON THE HISTORY OF THE
“PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION”
In February — March, 1921, Catherine Radziwill (CR), well-known during the 1880s—1890s as a member of the highest circle of European nobility, and, subsequently, in 1902, made notorious by her conviction for fraud and forgery in Capetown, South Africa, came forward with testimony that attributed the creation of the Protocols to Russian agents in Paris acting at the behest of Petr Rachkovskii. Her story became the basis for the so-called “secret police” version of how the document came into being; although sharply challenged by scholars, including, most recently, by Cesare G. de Michelis, this version continues to enjoy wide currency. The article “Princess Catherine Radziwill and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Mystification as Way of Life”, by Lev Aronov (State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow), Henryk Baran (University at Albany) and Dmitri Zubarev (International Historic-Enlightenment Human Rights and Humanitarian Society “Memorial”, Moscow), examines CR’s narrative about the Protocols within the context of her highly checkered, little-known career, and considers, in particular, whether the pattern of CR’s behavior throughout her long life — as aristocratic grande dame, crook, writer, journalist, and purveyor of fabricated literary and historical documents supports or undermines the credibility of her 1921 testimony. The detailed discussion is based on previously unknown documents from American and Russian archives (the most important of these are published in the Appendix), as well as numerous materials from the Russian, British, and American press.
In the article “In Search of Testimony about the Origins of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Handwritten Edition that Disappeared from the Lenin Library”, Michael Hagemeister (University of Basel) presents archival findings that shed new light on the origins of the Protocols. During the famous Bern Trial (1933—1937), both the plaintiffs (Swiss Jewish communities) and the defendants (Swiss Nazis) commissioned extensive archive research and sought out witnesses in order to prove either that the work had been fabricated at the end of the 19th century by the Paris agency of the Russian political police, or, on the contrary, represented a genuine document supposedly composed in a Jewish-Masonic lodge. The vast amount of material collected at that time that currently is scattered through different archives throughout the world included photocopies of several pages from an early lithographed handwritten edition of the Protocols, the only known copy of which was kept in the Lenin Library in Moscow. Already by the late 1930s, following the conclusion of the Bern Trial, this copy was found to have disappeared from Library’s stacks. Until now, the photocopies sent to Bern in 1934 by Moscow lawyer Aleksandr Tager also were considered to be lost. As a result, the handwritten edition itself became part of a chain of mysteries surrounding the origins of the Protocols. Recently, however, the photocopies have been discovered in an archive in Zurich. The article discusses this find and its implications and presents some of the information collected during the Bern Trial.
SOCIAL AGGRESSION IN THE EARLY 1910S:
A PROLOGUE TO WWI?
Alexander Zholkovsky (University of Southern California, Los Angeles). “Sbrosit’ Ili Brosit’?” (“To Throw To Dump Or To Throw To Kill?”). Proceeding from a semantic ambiguity in the Russian Futurists’ famous call, in their 1912 “A Slap in the Face of Public Face,” “to throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy et al. et al. overboard from the steamship of modernity,” the author shows that they meant not merely to dump the classics in the Bloomean sense but rather to execute them thus — in keeping with their generally violent and sadistic proto-Bolshevik modus operandi. The essay goes on to discuss the literary and cinematic motif of execution by drowning in the context of its historical counterparts with special focus on the imagery, practices and artistic portrayal of the Civil War of 1918—1920. Among the likely sources of the “throw to kill” motif the 1908 silent film about the seventeenth-century Russian peasant rebel Stepan Razin is considered as well as its treatment in the work of the Cubo-Futurists Vasilii Kamenskii and Velimir Khlebnikov.
Yuri Leving’s (Dalhousie University, Galifax, Canada) article, “Antipathy with History (The Nabokovs and the Suvorins in Life and Prose),” studies a tangled history of relations between the representatives of two prominent Russian families over the period of three generations. The long-term hostility between the conservative Suvorins and the liberal Nabokovs culminated in an unrealized duel between Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and Mikhail Suvorin in 1911, the event which, as Leving states, had produced a strong impact on the literary output of the former’s son, the writer Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. To restore a complex cultural, historical and literary mosaic, the present study encompasses the newspaper publications of the period, individual diaries, as well as archival data.
AXIOLOGY OF MEMORY
IN LITERATURE I: PE ´ TER ESTERHA ´ ZY
This issue of the “New Literary Observer” offers two sections united by a single title “Axiology of memory”. We understand this term as personal reflection on those values that define the direction that “working through the past” takes. Memory that facilitates overcoming traumas rooted in the past appears like a force-field generated by an interference of personal efforts. In modern Russian culture discussions on this axiology of memory are very rare and the need for them is very acutely felt. Therefore we decided to start this discussion using a novel by a Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy “Revised edition” (“Javított kiadás”), that, as it seems to us, has found a new artistic language that allows one to speak of an inconclusive and lacking of catharsis form of overcoming personal trauma. This novel was published in Hungary in 2002 and its Russian translation saw the light in 2008 (in New Literary Observer publishing house). The novel is based on real events. It’s a story of how a writer Péter Esterházy got from the archives of the Hungarian secret police a file on his father who as it happened had served as a secret informer for decades; the main part of the novel is a diary where Esterházy says his farewell to a heroic image of his father. The social, cultural and psychological meaning of the novel and the place its translation takes within Russian context is analysed by the participants of a virtual “round table”, held by the NLO editorial board — writer Evgeny Popov (Moscow), poet and journalist Elena Fanaylova (The Radio Liberty, Moscow), as well as Boris Dubin (Levada Center, Moscow), Aleksandr Etkind (Cambridge University), Andrey Uritsky (Moscow), Irina Kaspe (Institute for theoretical and historical studies in the humanities, Higher school of Economics, Moscow), a Latvian writer and literary critic Ieva Kolmane (The Karogs magazine, Riga) and Aleksandr Chantsev (Moscow).
AXIOLOGY OF MEMORY IN LITERATURE II:
A DISCUSSION AROUND THE POEM BY VITALY PUKHANOV
AND THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD
What proved to be an example of an axiological reflection on memory within Russian culture was not a novel, but rather a short poem by Vitaly Pukhanov (Moscow) dedicated to the Siege of Leningrad during the WWII, that was published in February 2009 and caused a massive political debate in the Russian-speaking section of the Internet. Apart from the poem itself we also publish an article by Stanislav Lvovsky (Moscow) that offers an analysis of this discussion and the areas it fails to mention. Irina Kaspe picks up the train of thought started in her article on Esterházy and speaks of the return of the phenomenon of shocking reading to our modern culture. She also explains that the central part of what is called “working through the past” lies in creating a subject for this work. One of the main things Pukhanov was accused of was using an improper, supposedly “too merry” meter in a work dedicated to the Siege — for this reason we added a study of the poem’s metrics written by Ilya Kukulin (The New Literary Observer magazine, Moscow) to the section. The section concludes with the publication of Vitaly Pukhanov’s Internet statement in wich he answers political and ethical accusations piled at him.