Опубликовано в журнале НЛО, номер 6, 2012
BOOK
AS EVENT
The "Book as event" section, compiled by Boris Dubin
and Oxana Timofeeva, presents a discussion of Sergei
Zenkin’s The Undivine Sacred (Moscow, RSHU, 2012). Zenkin’s book is an
investigation into one of the most important categories of human culture. The
sacred lies at the foundation of religious experience(s), rituals and
institutions; as it maintains itself in contemporary culture, Zenkin believes,
it is in active competition with rationalist thought. Not only theology but
also philosophy, sociology, anthropology, contemporary literature and art are
all engaged with studying the sacred. The Undivine Sacred is the result of long and
complex work with several important texts of European culture (of literature,
phi-losophy, science), the authors of which sought in one way or another to
approach the phenomenon of the sacred.
The authors examined in the book include Marcel Mauss, Emile Durkheim,
Mircea Eliade, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Jean-Paul Sartre, Rudolf Otto,
Gerard de Nerval, Jacques Lacan, Claude Levi-Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas,
Theophil Gautier, Robert Antelme, Giorgio Agamben, Rene Girard, Martin
Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Nikolai Gogol, Karl Marx, Valery Podoroga, Mikhail
Yampolsky, Yuri Lotman, Joseph de Maistre and others. The story moves from one
text to another, and out of the many individual narrative lines (literary,
scientific, philosophical) emerges a single overarching narrative, which Zenkin
has dubbed an "intellectual history of the sacred". Beneath the modest
awning of "intellectual history" hides, however, an original
authorial project: a sort of alternative history of cultural reflection, which
as it unfolds reveals the concept of the sacred as its basic dynamic element.
Zenkin’s book brings anthropology, sociology, philosophy and literary
criticism into intelligent dialogue, occasionally interrupting but for the most
part comple-menting and supplementing each other. Indeed, when the subject
under investi-gation is so ill-defined and in no hurry to subjugate itself to
the traditional methodology of individual disciplines, it makes sense for these
disciplines to "com-
bine forces" — where cultural anthropology throws up its hands in the face of the
"non-human" or sociology unexpectedly loses interest when greeted
with the unsociologizable, philology comes into its own — in order to give way in
turn to philosophy, and so on: mutual assistance in place of competition. The
discussion here involves the Russian philologists, philosophers, sociologists
Boris Dubin, Oxana Timofeeva, Mikhail Yampolsky, Viktoria Faibyshenko, Sergei
Fokin, Aleksandr Ulanov, Tatiana Venediktova, Ksenia Golubovich
and Sergei Zenkin, responding to the critical observations
and problematic questions of his colleagues.
THE
PATRIOTIC WAR OF 1812: 200th ANNIVERSARY OF THE EVENT AND THE MYTH
In his "Introduction," Oleg Proskurin emphasizes that the
Patriotic War was elected to be the most important war in the history of
Imperial Russia and went on to influence the portrayal of the Great Patriotic
War; both have been wrapped in myths and these myths still dominate our
reception of the actual events. The following essays deal with the mechanics
and dynamics of the 1812 mythology
and representation.
Vadim Parsamov ("Constructing the idea of the people’s war in 1812") analy-ses the concept of
the 1812 people’s war as created by the government and political conservatives.
The government represented by A.S. Shishkov, secretary of state, and F.
Rostopchin, governor of Moscow, wanted to regard the war against Napoleon as
the people’s war but was at the same time afraid of possible riots.
Ideologically, the concept of the people’s war was also used to justify the
serfdom.
Natalia Potapova in "Didactics of Conflict: the War of
Alexander Martin‘s essay, "Moscow in 1812 and the fate of the imperial social project," explores "the
chaos that engulfed Muscovites as the war unfolded, and how these events were
remembered over the course of the nineteenth century," defining the social
meaning of the war that weakened the imperial social project in the long term
but stabilized the regime for some time.
Oleg Proskurin ("Russian Hercules: French origins of a Russian 1812 patriotic caricature")
interprets the anonymous caricature entitled "Russian Hercules drove the
French into the woods and crushed’em like flies" in the light of its
origin, a French Revolutionary drawing called "Le Peuple mangeur de
rois." The author argues that the Russian caricaturist polemically
inverted his source of inspiration, creating an image of Russian people for
educated circles along the vision of 1810s conservatives.
Alina Bodrova ("Who compiled ‘The Collection of Poems Pertaining to the
Unforgettable Year 1812 ?’") shows that the all but common assumption that the collection was edited
by Vassili Joukovski is wrong, and gives the name of the true editor — Count Nikolai Kugushev.
Timur Guzairov ("The Official History Canon Formation: ‘Non-Memorable’ Events in
‘The Collection of Poems Pertaining to the Unforgettable Year 1812’") explains the pattern of the
official interpretation of Russian involvement in the Napoleonic wars embedded
in "The Collection…"
Olga Maiorova‘s article, "War and Myth: Memories of Russia’s Victory over
Napoleon during the Polish Uprising (1863—1864)," explores how the
nationalist press of the 1860s — "Moskovskie vedomosti" and "Den’" — adopted narratives of
people’s wars as the dominant form of national myth-making. It shows that both
newspapers drew extensive parallels between the uprising and the Patriotic War (1812—1815) and argues that journalists
of the period mythologized
Vladimir Lapin ("Recollections as Commodities: Commercial Implications of the
Patriotic War of 1812 100th
Anniversary") reflects on the scale and the sweep of the anniversary that
arguably affected the whole nation both symbolically and pragmatically, giving
rise to the "commercialization of memory".
D.
A. PRIGOV’S METATEXT
This section is devoted to the work of Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov and
opens with an article from Jacob Edmond (University of
Otago, New Zealand) "Dmitri Prigov and Cross-Cultural
Conceptualism". The work of Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov has largely been
read in the context of Russian literary and artistic culture, everyday Soviet
and post-Soviet life, and Soviet ideology and post-Soviet Russian nationalism.
Yet from early in his career, Prigov’s address to this national context was
intimately related to an appeal to a wider world. His exploration of samizdat
publishing as an artistic practice, for example, connects the Russian
intelligentsia’s fetishization of the universal value contained in these
fragile, laboriously reproduced texts to the pervasiveness of repetition and
copying in international con-ceptual and post-conceptual art. Rather than
simply contrasting local culture with a global language of contemporary art,
Prigov brings together various local and transnational languages and cultural
systems in his global project. By linking di-verse discourses, genres, and
media, he allows them to articulate in new ways — a process he repeatedly
describes as "intersection". Extending Mikhail Bakhtin’s view that
the command and manipulation of genres is a form of agency, Prigov emphasizes
both the unfreedom of endless repetition and the freedom of each gesture among
the infinite possibilities of intersecting systems and languages. The section
closes with an article by Mikhail Yampolsky (New York
University), "Transit
Mode". Yampolsky begins with an analysis of those of Prigov’s poetic texts
that are built in order to block referentiality, thus creating a certain kind
of semiotics in which signification is carried out through translation,
transfer, as for instance from the text to the gesture, from one world to
another, from the textual to the material. Turning to Prigov’s visual work,
Yampolsky traces the premises, effects and parallels of this "transit
mode", including a Talmudic or Cabbalistic understanding of the letter and
of writing.
CLOSE
In "Hunters in the snow. The elegiac poetology of Sergei
Gandlevsky", Heinrich Kirschbaum (Humboldt
Universitat, Berlin) investigates the intertextual connec-tions and paradigms of Gandlevsky’s
poetry; the poet will celebrate his sixtieth birthday in December of this year.
Special attention is paid to the ecphrastic (Breughel) and cinematographic (Tarkovsky)
"winter" allusions in their correla-tion to literary ones (Pushkin,
Khodasevich, Zabolotsky). Certainly involving a self-ironic melodramatic
sentimentalism, the nostalgic melancholic on the elegy allows Gandlevsky
(picking up the despondency of metapoetic parting of Mandelstam’s
"Tristia", but on a new postmodernist level) to move his intonations
closer to that ideal and imperative inner voice of poetry that, in its
"pure form", became impossible in the age of postmodernism.
An article from Sergey
Orobiy (Blagoveshchenskii State Pedagogical University), "Sample of discipleship: Vladimir Nabokov, Sasha
Sokolov, Mikhail Shishkin", addresses the principles of literary
continuity. The artistic succession of two well-known writers (Vladimir Nabokov
and Sasha Sokolov) reveals new lines coming from a third author, emerging only
later. Nabokov often constructs his texts as metatextual trap for readers, and
Sokolov fills texts with an endless number of metamorphoses and
transformations; Shishkin, meanwhile, deliberately avoids the language game,
leading the reader to extraverbal phenomena and thus combining the tradition of
the classic Russian novel with metatextual techniques.