SUMMARY
COSMOPOLITANISM IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: INTERPRETATION AND PRAGMATICS
Robert Fine‘s (University of Warwick) article "Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism: Western or Universal?"
questions the degree to which Enlightenment-era cosmopolitanism was influenced
by its Western origins: was it genuinely universal, or Euro-centric after all? Galin Tihanov
(University of Manchester), whose article
is entitled "Cosmopolitanism in the Discursive Landscape of Modernity: Two
Enlightenment Articulations", tackles the issue of cosmopolitanism’s con-nections
with nationalism. He focuses on the ideas of eternal peace and "world
literature". In "Cosmopolitan Book Publishing: The case of the Encyclopedie", David Adams (University of
Manchester) analyses the history of the reception of the French
Encyclopedie, proceeding from the ways in which the work was
translated into different languages, distributed via selections of individual
entries, reworked and used for the creation of similar reference publications.
In her article "Literary Cosmopolitanism and the Geography of Genius in
Eighteenth-Century France", Ann Jefferson (University
of Oxford)
explores the concept of genius in the cosmopolitan context of the era: how it
was interpreted and what kind of role it played. The subject of
Andrei Zorin‘s (University of Oxford) article
"Leaving your family in 1797: Two identities
of Mikhail Murav’ev" is "cosmopolitan iden-tity". Zorin uses
Murav’ev as an example to show how two emotional matrices co-existed within a
single personality: the first of these presumed the concern (obligatory for a
nobleman in the imperial service) over practical questions related to one’s
career, while the second required that one live in accordance with certain
stances adopted from European sentimental literature, which demanded adhe-rence
to a completely different value system. Pyotr
Druzhinin‘s article "The Pushkin House under fire from
Bolshevik criticism" recalls another, very dark dimension of the concept
of cosmopolitanism, one that emerged under Soviet power: Druzhinin presents and
contextualises a 1951 letter to G. Malenkov
from I. Lapitsky, the notorious initiator of
pogroms and all-round odious figure. The letter is a denunciation
in which work done in the famous Pushkin House is described in a monstrously
distorted light.
THE SEASONS OF PHILOLOGY
This section opens
with an article by Sergei Kozlov (RSUH Institute for Advanced Studies in the
Humanities), "The autumn of philology". This is the
text of a talk given at a round table held at the Higher School of Economics in
Moscow 4 April 2011,
entitled "Will philology remain ‘queen’ of the
humanities?" Drawing atten-tion to the imprecision of various uses of the
word "philology", Kozlov points to the specifics of this or that
discipline of the "philological cycle" and their histo-rically
changing configurations. Criticising the "methodological conjuncture"
manifested in different forms of academic administration and institutional
organi-sation, Kozlov questions the individual research strategies of
practicing philolo-gists, who are forced in their work to have dealings with
the changing demands of the intellectual market and the formal requirements of
the day. Kozlov identifies as overall trends in contemporary philology both
methodological pluralism and the striving for methods to be appropriate to
their material.
The section continues
with polemics in response to Kozlov’s article, with participants hailing both
from philology and other disciplines in the humanities. They include Sergei Oushakine, Tatyana Venediktova, Nikolai
Poseliagin, Konstantin Bogdanov, Kevin Platt, Pavel Uvarov, Mikhail Velizhev,
Maksim Waldstein, Boris Dubin and
Mikhail Yampolsky. This polemics, which touches on some of the
most central questions relating to the self-definition and identity of
scholarly activity in Russia
and USA
(including questions of method, history, institutional status and disciplinary
boundaries) provides yet another opportunity for humanities scholars to give
meaning to and ground their professional and ethical choices. Kozlov’s response
to his colleagues’ comments is also included.
The section concludes
with a translation of an article by Sheldon
Pollock (University of Columbia),
"Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World".
Pollock’s article is, formally speaking, not at all connected to the polemics
around Kozlov’s article or other so-called "Russian conversations"
(the article focuses on classical Indian and Chinese philology); however, it
poses essentially the same questions in radical fashion, in the comparative
perspective of postcolonial criticism.
ESSAYS ON ESSAYS
The article "Belles-non-fiction as symptom"
by Anatoly Barzakh presents a
com-prehensive polemical response to the section on "The essay as a
liminal form of writing" published in NLO 104. According to Barzakh, the basic problem lies not so much in the essay as
such (its "core" as illuminated by Montaigne remains unchanged), but
rather in certain fundamental transformations that have taken place in the
literary field as a whole. A symptom of these transformations is the emergence
of a new form of literary activity, which Barzakh rather ironically suggests we
christen "belles-non-fiction". Investigating the blurring of generic
boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, the penetration
of scholarly into literary discourse and vice versa, Barzakh comes to a
paradoxical conclusion: despite all of the costs and dangers of this blurring,
this "liminal" literature is the most interesting and valuable of all
contemporary forms and genres today — perhaps because of its very self-destructiveness.
CHARLES BERNSTEIN: TESTING THE SIGN
This section is
devoted to Charles Bernstein, the
major contemporary American poet and co-editor of the famous L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
journal. In his intro-ductory article, "Testing the sign", translator Yan Probstein
(Touro College, New York)
provides a detailed description of Bernstein’s poetics, paying special
attention to the Language
School in American poetry
and its roots in Russian Formalist theory and practice. Next comes
"Introjective Verse", Bernstein’s mock- manifesto that parodies
Charles Olson’s programmatic article "Projective Verse" (a
translation of this article was published in NLO 105). The section concludes with a selection of poems from various books by
Bernstein, in Probshtein’s translation.
NOS-1973: RETRO-REVIEW
Through a series of
open debates, the jury of the NOS-1973 prize selected
Strolls with Pushkin by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) out of 15 works written or first published in 1973. In this piece by Andrei Uritsky (Moscow)
is a sort of review- mystification, or retro-review, written as if Strolls with Pushkin had been
publi-shed only now, in 2011.