Опубликовано в журнале НЛО, номер 4, 2010
THE ANTINOMIES OF INTELLECTUAL TRANSFER
This section is devoted to various strategies for importing ideas with a prospect of forming an independent (or even an “original”) ideological or scientific system. The section opens with an article by Sergei Kozlov (Russian State University for the Humanities) “Ernest Renan and the French ideology of scholarship”. The author looks into the making of young Renan through the prism of the opposition between French and German intellectual cultures that was extremely important for every budding scholar. Renan made an unequivocal choice in favour of the German true scientific approach as opposed to the traditional French “literariness” and rhetoric (understood as a synonim for nonstrict thinking).
Mikhail Velizhev’s (The Academy of National Economy under the Government of the Russian Federation, Moscow) article ““Civilisation” and the “middle class”” discusses the context and the nature of the assimilation process for the concept of “civilisation” in the early 19th century Russia. The author stresses that initially the mode of its perception was dominated by the overtones characteristic rather of “culture” (education, literature). For example, S. Uvarov, Nicholas I’s Minister of Public Education, aimed at the widest possible expansion of education, however that expansion was to happen within the strict limits and horizons of the estates of the realm. The understanding of civilisation as being associated with trade, industry and social matters was actualised in Russia only during the times of Alexander II’s Great Reforms.
LITERATURE, ANTHROPOLOGY
AND THE “JEWISH QUESTION”
Konstantin Bogdanov’s (University of Konstanz, Germany; Institute of Russian Literature, St. Petersburg) article deals with a strange metaphor in Dostoyevsky’s “Mr. Prokharchin” where an ink-blot is called a “Yid”. The author demonstrates that in Polish 19th century literature and in German Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment culture there existed a stable link between these notions (via the concepts of “impurity” and “stain”). He pays special attention to Romantic literature and especially to Friedrich Schiller’s ▒The Robbers’. The famous words of the central hero of the play about the powerless and damned “puny age of ink” happen to be linked with anti-Jewish motifs (his distaste for mercantilism, usury and soulless enterprise, etc) and xenophobia that were also at times peculiar to Dostoevsky as an essay-writer.
Alexander Panchenko’s (Institute of Russian Literature, St. Petersburg) article deals with one of the motifs in the long history of cultural relations between the Jews and the non-Jewish people (including the Eastern Slavs and Russians): that is, the legend about Jews committing ritual murder of Christian babies and using their blood (“blood libel”). Starting with one of the passages in “The Brothers Karamazov”, the author looks into the roots of the legend and demonstrates the paramount significance of this motif being in fact an adoption from the Western — pre-eminently Polish — sources.
GOGOL’S HERITAGE
Vladimir Zvinyatskovsky’s (Ukrainian-Americal Liberal Arts Institute, Kiev) article “Gogol’s “additional canon”: Ukrainisation strategies” writes the reception of Gogol’s works into the history of formation of Ukrainian national culture. The author discusses a verse letter by a poet T. Shevchenko addressed to Gogol and analyses comments by a writer P.Kulish. He comes to a conclusion that Gogol’s body of works should be treated as a Russian-speaking branch of Ukrainian culture, as a case where national nature, mental characteristics and an inner world of a Ukrainian person were exposed through the means of a foreign language.
Eкаterina Dmitrieva (Institute of World Literature, RAS) in her article
“N.V. Gogol: a palimpsest of styles/a palimpsest of interpretations” demonstrates to what degree creation of different versions of “canonical Gogol” depends on the institutional conditions (mainstream ideology, fashion and public interests) and on the actual potential of the texts themselves. The author examines the seminal binary oppositions in the way Gogol is perceived (Realism vs. Romanticism, metaphysics vs. irrationalism, Christianity vs. paganism, etc.) She comes to a conclusion that the uncommonly wide range of these interpretations defines the very nature of Gogol’s writing.
Claude de Greve (University of Paris X, France) in her article “The canonisation and the instrumentalisation of Gogol in France” demonstrates the reception dynamics of his works in France and identifies three major stages in the process of Gogol’s canonisation linked to highly important political contexts (the formation of the French-Russian Alliance of 1893, the revolution of 1917 and the post-WWII period). Claude de Greve explains the reasons behind the emergence of such images as “Gogol the imitator”, “Gogol the realist”, “Gogol the satirist”, “Gogol the representative of the “Russian soul”, etc. She demonstrates the mechanisms through which Gogol was “appropriated” by people of polarly opposite ideological beliefs.
INTERPRETATIONS
In his work “Once again on a certain expression in Yesenin’s poem “The Black Man”” Vladimir Drozdkov (Institute of World Literature, RAS) goes back to the problem that is already familiar to Yesenin scholars, i.e. the problem of the tenth line of “The Black Man”. He offers to review “the prevailing peremptory statement that the author wrote “на шее ноги””. V. Drozdkov states that “г” (“g”) in the last word should be read as “ч” (“ch”). This statement is supported by the textological analysis of the poem and by the analysis of genitive constructions (among which this controversial expression is numbered) in Yesenin’s poetry.
Vladimir Shlapentokh (Michigan State University, USA) in his article “Ayn Rand: her Marxist and Bolshevik roots” criticises the idea that the author of the “Atlas shrugged” was a partisan of liberal capitalism and a creator of an original philosophy. The author thinks that the writer “has led a fight on two fronts — against collectivism and against a democratic society” and was a supporter of the aristocratic capitalism. He also claims that “she owes many of her ideas to Marx, as well as the practice and ideology of the Russian Bolsheviks.”
AN ESSAY AS A BORDERLINE FORM OF WRITING
This section is dedicated to the phenomenon of an essay in all its aspects. It opens with an article by Konstantin Zatsepin (Samara State University) “An essay: from philosophy to literature”. The paper traces the genesis of that genre within the context of European and Russian cultures. The author pays special attention to differences that allow us to demarcate scientific, philosophical, journalistic and literary texts. These borders are moved and rethought with every coming era, and an essay serves as a boundary form that corresponds best to the 20th century experiences and that combines intellectual research and literary and/or philosophical criticism with purely creative purposes. Dmitry Golynko-Volfson (Russian Institute of History of the Arts, St. Petersburg) in his “Essay on the impossibility of an essay (Arkady Dragomoshchenko’s prose within the context of the modern essay-writing)” bases his argument on the “negative” status of an essay that eludes all definitions. It sits at a juncture between philosophical discourse, literary criticism, scientific thinking and poetic creative work. The author sees autobiographical prose of Arkady Dragomoshchenko, one of the most radical modernisers of literary Russian, as a perfect example of the “negative metaphysics of an essay”. His writing is discussed within the context of autobiographical works of Mandelstam, Konst. Vaginov and Victor Sosnora on one hand and those modern American authors that Dragomoshchenko translated into Russian (John Ashbery, Robert Creely and Eliot Weinberger) on the other. In his article “An essay: ontological provisions and formal borders” Vladimir Aristov (A. Dorodnitsyn Computation centre, RAS, Moscow) delineates ontological premises for various literary genres: epos, drama and lyrics — and describes an essay as a transitional form marked with heteroglossia and aimed first and foremost at problematising a writer’s identity. In his sketch “The essay-writers’ club and collective improvisation: creativity through communication (from the intellectual history of the 1980s)” the leading Russian essay theorist Mikhail Epstein (Emory University) describes his personal experience of turning to essay-writing in the early 1980s when it was thought that an essay is a purely Western genre completely alien to Soviet literature. In 1982 Epstein initiated the formation of The Essay-writers’ Club and suggested the heuristic model of “collective improvisation”, with several people simultaneously writing essays on a certain set topic. For Epstein this model served as a foretype of collectiveness perceived as joint creative work that did not suppress individual personalities but rather allowed to fulfil the potential of every participant. The section concludes with a critical essay on cinema by Shamshad Abdullaev (Fergana) “Fergana Film Diary” and a fragmentary, quasi-literary burlesque essay by Matvei Yankelevich (New York) “Notes on the margins”.
LITERARY PRIZE AS METATEXT
This section introduces the “Nose” literary prize created by Mikhail Prokhorov’s charity foundation in the year of Gogol’s Bicentenary. The need to explain and substantiate the choice of the 2010 runners-up and the winner (Lena Eltang with her novel “Stone maples”) resulted in a lively electronic exchange between the board members on the underlying principles of the new prize and especially on the proportional relationship between such categories as literature and sociality and on the content of these categories in modern culture. Thus was born the “metatext” the ““Nose”: After-party. A correspondence between Moscow, Cisbaikalia, Prague and Colorado on literature and sociality within the context of a new literary prize”. This exchange, far from being academic, still provides a wide-ranging reflexion on literature’s relationship with the modern social, political, cultural and other contexts.