Опубликовано в журнале НЛО, номер 4, 2009
BEYOND SEMIOTICS:
HERITAGE OF THE MOSCOW-TARTU SCHOOL
The section opens with an article by Victor Zhivov (Institute of Russian Language RAS, Moscow; University of California, USA) “Moscow-Tartu semiotics: its achievements and limitations”. The author analyses the ideas of the semiotics of the 1960s in the light of the evolution made by European structuralism (starting with Saussure) and the peculiarities of late-Soviet academic life. A juxtaposition of synchronic and diachronic approaches, a language-speech dichotomy together with an attempt to scientise humanities
(R. Jakobson) and a concept of the major part linguistics plays in humanics, demonstrated by the end of the 20th century that their base models and assumptions were rather limited. The author is especially thorough in describing ideological and cognitive reasons for eliminating philosophical interests from the Moscow-Tartu school’s field of methodological reflexion.
Ilya Kalinin’s (Neprikosnovennyj Zapas Magazine, Moscow) article “Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School: Semiotic model of culture / cultural model of semiotics” is dedicated to analysing interaction between two models of studying culture in the course of that school’s evolution: 1) a “naturalising” grammatical model and 2) a “reflexive” rhetorical one. The author shows how Soviet semiotics used certain crucial periods of Russian culture as projections of their own historical context. The author shows differences between grammatical and rhetorical approaches using, firstly, Boris Uspensky’s interpretation of Peter the Great’s reforms as anti-behaviour and an inversion of traditional precepts, and secondly using an example of understanding plural and open nature of cultural dynamics (in Lotman’s later work “Culture and Explosion”).
Sergey Zenkin’s (RSUH, Moscow) article “Continual models after Lotman” studies different models of conceptualising Lotman in the 1970s and the early 1990s. Lotman treats an opposition of continual and discontinuous as a basic duality of culture which he understands as a collective intellect. The author points out three areas where continual models can be used in the humanities: problematics of image, body and the sacred. One must add that in “Culture and Explosion” (1992) Lotman’s original subjective and hypothetical model of continual is replaced by a historicist ontological vision. That brought him out of the framework of semiotics and into the area of social and philosophical reflexion that studies not conventional signs of something else but independently substantial things and events that take place in the world according to their own logic and for themselves.
Sanna Turoma’s (University of Helsinki, Finland) article “Reconsidering Lotman’s Semiotics of Urban Space” places Yuri Lotman’s analysis of urban space into diachronic and synchronic historiographic frameworks. Lotman’s understanding of the “theatrical nature” of St Petersburg’s urban image looks surprisingly close to Simmel’s idea of Venice as an “imaginary” stage-prop city presented in an essay at the end of the 1900s. The metropolitan city had, in Benjamin’s view, the similar power to produce dynamic “culture-semiotic conflicts”. Lotman, on the other hand, resembles de Certeau’s “voyeur” (in Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life”); he does not foreground his subjective experience but is, rather, focused on broad mythic categories, which convey his city as static and inhuman. In Simmel’s phenomenology as well as in Benjamin’s theoretically multifaceted project, the city is always, and above all, a site of human, and sometimes very pedestrian, interactions. For Lotman, the city is first and foremost a concept; an operational ground for the scholar’s semiotic imagination to create abstractions and typologies.
Leonid Katsis’ (RSUH, Moscow) article “V.N. Toporov’s logos within the locus of “Petersburg’s text” of Russian literature (the St. Petersburg fragment of the researcher’s “world image”)” is dedicated to modern perception practices and discussing the key concept of one of the most prominent representatives of the Moscow-Tartu school. Using the collection “Does Petersburg’s text exist?” and an anthology of poetry dedicated to Petersburg by the first wave of Russian emigrants as material Katsis shows that interpreting “Petersburg’s text” strictly within the limits of narrative theories is not productive. Toporov himself looked at that concept first and foremost within a specific cultural and topological framework where metaphysical, eschatological and mythological aspects play a very prominent part. Toporov’s approach differs from projective and descriptive Tartu semiotics of the classical era by his willingness to work not only with actual cultural meanings and imagery but also with potential ones, and by its inevitable hisoriosophical context.
The section SOCIOLOGY OF THE 1960s AS A CULTURAL PHENOMENON opens with an article by Olga Sveshnikova (Omsk State University) “An Anniversary of Herodotus: the past of the Sixtiers in the mirror of modern sociology”. The author looks into the reasons behind modern sociologists identifying themselves with post-Stalinist emancipation of social sciences of the Thaw. She also analyses interdisciplinary links and the specifics of academic practices of the sociology of the 1960s. Nikolay Mitrokhin’s article “Notes on sociology” provides a critical analysis of a book “Dissidence in the USSR” by a famous Russian sociologist, Boris Firsov. The milieu that produced prominent sociologists of the 1960s is treated as something fairly close to the ideological CPSU nomenclatura. According to the author liberal and technocratic prospects of the sociology of that time completely failed to take into consideration the genuine, diverse, socially and culturally differentiated nature of real Soviet society. The section closes with an interview with a famous Russian sociologist Igor Kon in which he offers a retrospective evaluation of the Soviet past of modern Russian sociology.
LITERATURE OF STALIN’S ERA:
GENRES AND THEIR CREATORS
Evgeny Dobrenko (University of Sheffield, Great Britain) in his article “Raek Communism: Poetics of Utopian Naturalism and the Stalinist Kolkhoz Poem” states that the genre of the kolkhoz poem occupied a prominent place in Stalinist literature. The article examines its genesis, development and structure for the first time and focuses on such issues as style, set of characters and plotlines. The examination of the poetics of the kolkhoz poem through the lens of ideology allows an understanding of the transformation of utopian discourse in Stalinist culture.
POLEMICS
In her note “Nonhumans and the Critics (Reaction to M. Lipovetsky and
A. Etkind “The Return of The Triton: The Soviet Catastrophe and The Post-Soviet Novel”)” Dina Khapaeva (Helsinki Collegium; Smolny College, St. Petersbourg) responds to the interpretations by Mark Lipovetsky and Alexander Etkind of several themes that she developed in her book “Gothic Society. Morphology of A Nightmare” (NLO, 2007). She argues, first, against attempts to establish quasi-mystical relations between memories of political terror and the proliferation of non-humans in contemporary Russian prose, and to present the later as a unique feature of post-Soviet literature as a genre. She demonstrates that the appearance of nonhumans — monsters, vampires, etc — as the new protagonists in literature, visual arts, and computer games at the expense of humans signifies a profound shift in aesthetics world-wide. This Gothic aesthetic fostered by the Russians’ refusal to condemn Soviet crimes has become a symbolic expression of the expansion of a specific morality and social relations, as reflected in post-Soviet literature that profoundly alters humanistic values. Second, she argues that psychoanalytical notions such as ▒trauma’, ▒grief’ and ▒melancholy’ when applied to post-Soviet attitudes to Stalinism, support a distorted vision of Russia’s cultural and political conditions, which are in fact characterized by an aggressive, rather than ▒melancholic’, glorification of Stalinist past.
In his brief response, Alexander Etkind (Cambridge University, UK) clarifies the theoretical aspects of the disagreement between Dina Khapaeva and himself. Mark Lipovetsky (University of Boulder, Colorado), in his turn, argues against the opponent’s anti-anthropological interpretation of various monsters in contemporary Russian culture and offers his reading of these images through the concept of the Other.
IN MEMORIAM
Mikhail Gendelev (1950—2009)
This section is dedicated to the memory of Mikhail Gendelev, a prominent poet who had been living and working in Israel since 1977. Gendelev put forward the concept of “Russian-speaking Israeli Literature” and called himself an Israeli poet writing in Russian. All articles in this section refer to this paradoxical self-definition in one way or the other. Aleksandr Barash (Jerusalem) and Maya Kaganskaya (Jerusalem) reconstruct Russian poetical context (Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Lermontov, Mandelstam) that Gendelev maintained a highly charged dialogue with using a foreign-speaking tradition existing outside that context. Valery Shubinsky (St. Petersburg) traces the genesis of Gendelev’s poetics, uncovering its roots on one hand in the Leningrad Underground movement of the 1960s — 1970s, and on the other in his military experience gained in Israel (Gendelev took part in the first Lebanon campaign as a doctor). Anna Isaakova (Jerusalem) writes about Gendelev’s dandyism and proteism as a peculiar ethical and at the same time stylistic imperative driving the poet, whose work is permeated with ludic element and saturated with multiple lyrical “I”s. Mikhail Weiskopf (Jerusalem) poses a question about the theological substrate of Gendelev’s poetry and discusses poet’s litigation with God of the Jewish tradition who permitted the Holocaust to happen (but also with God of Descartes). The section closes with Mikhail Gendelev’s essay “A Japanese in boiling water”, written in 1999 and dedicated to Anna Gorenko’s death.
Aleksei Parshchikov (1954—2009)
Aleksei Parshchikov — one of those who formed and determined the face of modern poetry not only in Russia, but — and this is no exaggeration — around the world. Like Gendelev he had been living abroad since the early 1990s (in the USA, Switzerland and Germany), and that circumstance probably predetermined his ambiguous position on the Russian poetical map: on one hand he received unquestioned acclamation, on the other after the end of the perestroika magazine boom the readers’ and literary critics’ interest in “complex” intellectual poetry has markedly waned. The section dedicated to his memory opens with a poem by Dmitry Dragilyov (Erfurt) “To Parshchikov’s Memory”. Arkady Dragomoshchenko (St. Petersburg) and Marjorie Perloff (University of Southern California), who calls Parshchikov “a visionary and an ecological poet avant la lettre”, share with us their memories of him. Hendric Jackson (Berlin) tells of his experience of translating Parshchikov into German. Mikhail Epstein (Emory University) dwells on cosmism a universality of Parshchikov’s artistic method and on a generous gift of friendship he possessed. Eugene Ostashevsky’s (Florence) article is devoted to Parshchikov’s cross-cultural poetics that exists on a juncture point where many different traditions meet. In particular it traces the influence that Ukrainian Baroque School and American Language School had on his work. Dmitry Golynko-Volfson (St. Petersburg) uncovers pre- and intertexts of Parshchikov’s poem “Rural Cemetery” and describes its poetical system as something akin in its structure to modern installations and video-art. The section closes with a collection of Parshchikov’s letters and three of his previously unpublished poems.