New Literary Review, 2004, # 66 (Russia)

http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2004/66/s35-pr.html

New Literary Review

Summary
(transl. by Y. Leving, F. White)

PARADIGMS OF INTELLECTUAL HISTORY:
FROM COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATIONS
TOWARD INDIVIDUAL PRACTICES

The section is devoted to key Western intellectual concepts, such as
intellectual history and the history of mentalities, their critical
re-evaluation in the contemporary inderdisciplinary studies, and their role
in establishing post-Soviet Russian intellectual activity.

In his introductory essay, Alexander Dmitriev (New Literary Observer,
Moscow) summarizes the total impact of the schools of “Annales”, “New
Cultural History”, and the Cambridge school of history of ideas on the
development of Russian historiography of the 70 — 90-s. Intellectual
history, in his opinion, has taken its root into the Russian academic
tradition without working out, however, either original methodology or
practical tools.
The history of ideas was even less fortunate and was totally unacknowledged
and ignored.
An article by the well-known French historian Roger Chartier (Acole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris), “Intellectual History and the
History of MentalitIs: A Dual Re-evaluation” (1980, 1983), has gained long
ago a reputation of a must in acquiring the problematic of intellectual
history. Beginning with the early Lucien Febvre’s writings, Chartier views
the attitude of the historians belonging to the “Annales” school towards
subjects of intellectual history with the help of such concepts as “mental
equipment” (L. Febvre) and “the third level’s quantitative history” (P.
Chaunu). The concept of “History of Mentalities,” according to Chartier, has
been limited by the point of view of collective psychology and does not take
into consideration developments of the intellectual history advanced by such
scholars as E. Panofsky, A. Koyre, L. Goldmann and others.

Roger Chartier’s answers to the questionnaire of New Literary Observer “Post
scriptum, or Twenty years later” reveal the scholar’s vision of the same
problems from the present day perspective. From 1970s, Chartier’s own major
subject became the history of public sphere and distribution of printed
media and books in Europe and France of the 15th—18th centuries. The scholar
believes that this area represents a kind of synthesis of collective and
serial “History of Mentalities” with an individual and rationalistic
“history of (great) ideas”. In this interview, Chartier clarifies once again
his specific approach to the subject against other recent well-known
theories — concepts of Linguistic Turn, New Historicism, RezeptionsEsthetik.

An essay by prominent British historian Quentin Skinner (University of
Cambridge), “The Rise of, Challenge to and Prospects for a Collingwoodian
Approach to the History of Political Thought” analyzes the context of
history of ideas (as manifested in the writings by P. Laslett, J.G.A.
Pockok, John Dunn and Skinner himself). Following Collingwood, the author
defines a historian’s primary goal as a quest for the initial question that
evoked the appearance of a given theory. Departing from that impulse and
Wittgenstein’s idea of the “linguistic games,” Skinner presents a full-scale
dispute with Derrida’s deconstruction (“On Grammatology,” “Spurs: Nietzsche’
s Styles”) and Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic concepts.

COMMENTARY:
SOCIAL, HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL REFLECTIONS
Mikhail Gasparov (Institute of Russian Language, Moscow) contributes an
article “Yuri Lotman and the Problems of Commentary.” In his renowned
commentary to Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin, Yuri Lotman states
that there are two levels of interpretation: “conceptual” (dealing with the
entire text) and “textual” (touching upon some “obscure” words and
fragments). However, suggests Gasparov, there is no gap between conceptual
and textual explanations of the text, therefore one may speak of different
levels, rather than two different types of commentary. Commentary is the
translation of an alien culture into the language of domestic ideas and
mentalities. Lotman’s achievement consists, according to Gasparov, in his
proving that the Pushkin Age is as remote from us as the Ancient World.
However, the context of the past can be reconstructed through commentary.

Sergey Zenkin (Russian State University for Humanities, Moscow), “The
Commentary and its Double.” The author distinguishes two practices of
explaining a text: a commentary and a close reading. The former is directed
towards clarifying unintelligible parts of text, i.e. all kinds of “proper
names”, once occurring items; the latter, on the contrary, seeks to explain
all elements of text, just as somebody “commenting” on a sports game. These
two different tasks imply unlike techniques of explanation and unlike
manners of writing, which are especially divergent in some boundary cases:
commenting notions, codes of behaviour, intertextual quotations. The
commentary and the close reading, the author claims, are involved in the
same complex relationship as literary history and literary theory are, so
far as applied to a single text.

Abram Reitblat’s (New Literary Observer, Moscow) essay “Commentary in the
Age of the Internet” reflects on the influence of the recent socio-cultural
changes in Russia (decreasing status of literature, decline of readership,
“mythologization” of consciousness), as well as of widespread expansion of
the Internet with its great informational potentials on the function and
character of contemporary academic commentary.

Elena Mikhailik (University of New South Wales, Sydney) “A change of
 address”. As cultural context loses it’s immediacy with passage of time,
its elements that represented to contemporaries a positive (albeit fuzzy)
whole become disassociated from each other and are reclassified by the
coming generations according to the patterns that those reclassifiers
perceive as defining for the period gone by. This article discusses that
phenomenon and its consequences for commentary as an authoritative genre
using as a touchstone the heavily commented “Master and Margarita” by
Mikhail Bulgakov.
This is followed by the round table entitled “Commentary: Glance and Misery
of Genre in Modern Times,” held at the Russian State University for
Humanities on December 20, 2003. Well-known literary scholars (Nina
Braginskaya, Vera Milchina, Andrey Zorin, Viktor Zhivov, Andrei Nemzer and
others) discuss the fate and future of academic commentary in a radically
changing socio-cultural context. Such a discussion is of extreme importance
for present day Russian humanities because during the 1950—1980s commentary
was held in high esteem among Russian scholars (especially nonconformist
ones) as practically the only means of gaining new information and
introducing new ideas.

This same rubric also includes reviews by Vera Milchina (Moscow) on the 11th
Lotman Readings, “Commentary as a Historical-Cultural Problem,” held in the
Russian State University for Humanities on December 18—20, 2003, and by Ilya
Kukulin (New Literary Observer) about the round table “Academic Editions and
Popular Literature” which was devoted to the social meaning of critical
editions, organized by the book salon Bilingua (Moscow) on March 16, 2004.

LITERATURE AND NATURAL SCIENCES:
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Tatiana Smoliarova’s (Harvard University) article “Derzhavin’s allegorical
Meteorology (with special reference to the poem Rainbow)” poses the
question: how are scientific images transmitted to literature, translated
into poetry, and transformed by the poetic process? The article focuses on a
particular optical and poetic image and its history: the image of the
rainbow. It is concerned with Gavriil Derzhavin’s poem “Raduga” [“The
Rainbow”] (1806).
The poem is a graphic illustration of the double-nature of Derzhavin’s later
lyrics
which can be defined as “archaic modernity”. Deep Europeanism with its most
characteristic ideas and obsessions is gleaming through the archaizing
language, Russian folk imagery, and reactionary ideas, abundant in his poems
written in the 19th century. By the very image of the “decomposed Rainbow”
Derzhavin’s poem joins the long European tradition of the poetic
reinterpretation of the Newtonian “Optics” (1704). For succeeding
imaginations Newton had altered the rainbow, charging an ancient cultural
icon with new significance. “The Rainbow”, as well as the two other poems
forming the small “meteorological cycle” of 1806, “The Cloud” and “The
Thunder”, marks the pivotal moment of the “second allegorisation” in
Derzhavin’s poetry, the shift from the compound baroque allegories of his
early odes to the “romantic” allegory (in Walter Benjamin’s terms). The very
mechanism of such a transformation seems to be borrowed from Europe. It is
quite revealing that Derzhavin appeals to the image of the rainbow, the
transition of which from cultural icon to object of scientific inquiry and
further on to poetic image, might be considered one of the vectors of the
European culture of the eighteenth century.


Michael D. Gordin (Princeton University) presents a study, “Bridging: Euler,
Kulibin, and the Problem of Technical Expertise.” This essay examines the
efforts of I. P. Kulibin, an autodidact amateur engineer at the Academy of
Sciences in St. Petersburg, to design a wooden bridge that would span the
Neva in 1776. Kulibin built a scale model of his bridge and displayed it
before an Academy commission chaired by famed mathematician Leonhard Euler.
Although Kulibin was able to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the
academicians that the bridge would in fact be able to bear a load when
scaled up — independently worked out from mathematical principles by Euler —
the bridge was never constructed. This failure displays features of the
interaction of “high” and “low” technical knowledge during Catherine II’s
Enlightenment.

Igor Dmitriev’s (St. Petersburg State University) article “On bridges and
Street Lamps” is a critical comment on the said publication by Michael D.
Gordin. In author’s opinion, analysis of texts by I.P. Kulibin and L. Euler
proves that in contrast to M. Gordin’s statement, a tendency towards
mathematization of knowledge and use of analytical methods in engeneering
appears both in “high” and “low” traditions.

LITERATURE AND GLOBALIZATION:
WRITERS’ MULTIPLE IDENTITIES

Maria Rubins’s (University of Georgia) article “Russian-French Prose of
Andrei Makine” is the first comprehensive study of the author’s novels in
the Russian language. The article addresses the recurrent themes, topoi,
poetics, and style of the contemporary Russian francophone writer Andrei
Makine. Such focus facilitates the identification of core myths and
archetypes that resurface in distinct texts in various guises. By
juxtaposing Makine’s works against both Russian and French literary
traditions, the study reveals the hybrid, bi-lingual and bi-cultural nature
of his prose.
In a conversation with the poet and critic Valery Shubinsky (St.
Petersburg), Oleg Juriev (poet, prose writer and playwright) who is
currently residing in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, expresses his cultural and
political views which cling to the so called “liberal neo-conservatism”.
Juriev, belonging to the non-conformist Petersburg literature of the
1970—1980s, discusses various issues of contemporary Russian and German
cultures, and asserts that the “Jewish theme” in Russian literature fails to
form a cohesive context. Juriev also comments on the plot of his recent
novel, New Golem (2002), which takes place in Russia, Europe and the United
States.

In publication entitled “American Steppes and Mongolo-Venetian Borderland
(Writer’s Identity of a Writer in a Multi-Layered World),” prose writer
Vladislav Otroshenko (Moscow / Bassano del Grappa, Italy), poet and scholar
Igor Vishnevetsky (University of Wiskonsin, Milwakee) and literary critic
Ilya Kukulin (New Literary Observer) discuss the “borderline mentality”
found in writings that defy precise location on the global cultural map.
Otroshenko and Vishnevetsky expand on their own literary work, which is
partially inspired by their native South Don region, where Iranian, Greek,
Roman, Turkic, Mongolian and Slavic traditions mixed freely. They continue
with their experiences of Moscow cultural scene of the 1980’s—2000’s and
years of life and travel outside Russia. Of special interest for Otroshenko
are the Italian Peninsula (which he knows intimately) and Northern India
(where he has made only mental pilgrimages); Vishnevetsky speaks of his
experiences in West and Central Mediterranean and North America. Both
discuss the power of local mythology, the direct link between locus and
poiesis, and the ability to see connections between seemingly distant
traditions. Only through this fusion of global and local, only through the
harmonization of superficial and inner “selves” a poet and a prose writer
could achieve a result which will at the same time be appealing to a naive
reader and to a well-versed intellectual.

The section, CHRONICLES OF MODERN LITERATURE, presents an article by
Liudmila Viazmitinova (Moscow) about contemporary poets — winners of the
National Literary Prize “Debut”; Elena Gerchuk (Moscow) contributes her
essay on social discourses of modern book design in Russia, and Boris
Vitenberg (St. Petersburg) observes a recent science fiction genre of
“alternative political history”.

The BIBLIOGRAPHY section contains Abram Reitblat’s review of the collection
of essays “Liberal Reforms and Culture” (Moscow, 2003); B. Vitenberg’s
review of the volume “Russians Plus?” (Moscow, 2003) by Lev Anninsky. Abram
Reitblat and Rashit Yangirov observe N. Nusinova’s study, “Russian Cinema
Abroad: 1918—1939” (Moscow, 2003).

The ACADEMIC CHRONICLES section publishes a number of reviews on Russian and
overseas conferences and seminars that took place during Fall 2003 and
Winter 2004. Daria Li and Elena Zaiats report on a “Visual conference” at
the Russian State University for Humanities (Moscow, November 26—28, 2003);
Natalia Aleksandrovskaia describes the conference devoted to Fedor Tyutchev
and religious culture of his time held at Krakow (December 26—27, 2004);
Olga Karpova submits her account of the Moscow Andreev readings (Moscow,
January 26—27, 2004), Daria Li reports on the Crimean colloquium “Sciences
on Culture in Europe. Possibilities and Limits of Gnosis” (Melass, February
15—16, 2004), and Natalia Osminskaia writes about international colloquium
dedicated to the memory of the French writer and philosopher Maurice
Blanchot (Moscow, February 20, 2004).