http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2004/68/index-pr.html

«NLO» 2004, ?68
Summary

(transl. by Ignatius Vishnevetsky)


“SECULAR REVELATION”:
WALTER BENJAMIN AND FRENCH AVANT-GARDE OF THE 1930’s

In his lifetime a marginal figure deliberately remote from the German 
intellectual mainstream, Walter Benjamin was keenly interested in French 
culture. This interest played a role in the posthumous canonization of 
Benjamin (from the 1960’s onwards) as a major European thinker of the 
period.

A Russian translation of Benjamin’s essay Surrealism: A Snapshot of the 
European Intelligentsia (1928) is published here for the first time. It is 
an important evidence of Benjamin’s interest in the work of Breton, Aragon, 
and their allies, whom he considered heralds for the newest changes in the 
European cultural life and also direct heirs to artistic experience and 
anarchistic worldview of Comte de Lautreamont and Rimbaud. The new creative 
experience of the surrealists and analytical foundation of their radical 
project (despite a strong streak of irrationalism) serve as a point of 
departure for Benjamin’s own musings on the purpose of art in Europe.

This section also contains a translation of Michael Weingrad’s (University 
of Leeds, UK) article Benjamin and Bataille: The College of Sociology and 
the Institute of Social Research initially published in New German Critique 
No. 84 (2001). Weingard discusses the relationship between Benjamin and a 
group of radically-minded French intellectuals (Georges Bataille, Pierre 
Klossowski, et al.) during his forced sojourn to France when fascism made 
considerable advances in Europe. Weingard analyzes the correspondence 
between Benjamin and two former researchers from the then closed Frankfurt 
Institute of Social Research-Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. This 
correspondence reveals that the ideas of their French colleagues were 
approached through the prism of German emigres’ internal discussions about 
the social engagement of art, the role of ideology, and intellectual’s 
mission in a society. Benjamin’s proximity to Bataille (in the way he 
thought of the phenomenal popularity and effectiveness of Hitler’s 
propaganda and approached the irrational element in National Socialism) does 
not hide their considerable differences and Benjamin’s skeptical attitude 
towards the intellectual enterprises of Bataille and the other participants 
in the so-called College of Sociology.

STATUS AND REPRESENTATION:
SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ARCHAIC

This rubric deals with strategies of political self-affirmation of different 
groups inside the ruling elite and ideological and artistic concepts of a 
period, chiefly of Homeric and post-Homeric Greece.

In “Achilles’ Choice” Vadim Mikhailin (Saratov State University) and Anton 
Ksenofontov (Russian Christian University of Humanities, St. Petersburg) 
reconstruct the system of meanings and oppositions used in the best-known 
episode from the Iliad — the confrontation between Achilles and Agamemnon 
during the siege of Troy. Achilles is presented in the poem as a model 
“individualistic” military aristocrat of the archaic era. The key epic 
notion of “fate” is directly linked to the interaction and struggle of 
organizing economic and heroic military elements, which are identified with 
the “elder” and “younger” brother “parts” in the tribal economy.

A chapter from Francois de Pollignac’s book La naissance de la cite grecque: 
Cultes, espace et sociÎtÎ, VIII — VII siÏcles (Paris: La Decouverte, 1984; 
English edition: Chicago University Press, 1995) is dedicated to the role of 
the sacred places outside the Ancient Greek cities. Those places separated 
the culture from everything hostile to it thus symbolizing the strength of 
each given polis. Of a specific importance were the cults of Hera and 
Apollo: procreation, initiation of young people, and each city’s struggle 
for its status among the neighbors and in Greek society in general played a 
significant role in their design. Trade and farming economy was often at 
odds with the system of values of military aristocracy, when it came to 
self-affirmation of various political elites, to armed conflicts and 
attempts to politically unify the cities.

CREATION OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY:
THE HISTORICAL, THE PRIVATE, AND THE FICTIONAL

The first article in this section is Irina Paperno’s (Berkerly University, 
USA) Soviet Experience, Autobiographical Writing and Historical 
Consciousness: Ginzburg, Herzen, Hegel.

Taking memoirs of the Soviet experience published since the late 1980s as a 
starting point, the article traces the presence of Hegelianism in the 
autobiographical writings and historical consciousness of the 
twentieth-century Russian intelligentsia. The author traces the roots of 
Hegelian idiom to Alexander Herzen’s paradigm-making memoir, My Past and 
Thoughts, and shows this text as based on the structural pattern of Hegel’s 
Phenomenology of Spirit. It is argued that Hegelian paradigms and Hegelian 
discourse have been mediated by professional historians of literature, such 
as Lidiia Ginzburg, in her literary scholarship (her work on Herzen and the 
memoir), as well as in her autobiographical writings published in recent 
years.

Violetta Gudkova’s (Moscow) study How the Officialdom ‘Worked’ with the 
Writer: The Evolution of Self-Representation in Yuri Olesha analyzes several 
autobiographies written by Olesha at various moments of his life. With the 
growth of political pressure he suppressed the things that may compromise 
him: his own noble background, his first attempts at writing before the
Revolution of 1917, and the plays he wrote in the late 1910’s — early 1920’s. 
Archival documents and publications in periodicals are used as a basis for 
restoration of the earliest, least documented phase of Olesha’s creativity, 
when he thought of himself as both a playwright and a prose writer. In the 
late 1930’s — 1950’s, when Olesha considered himself “completely alien” to 
the new totalitarian times, he wrote practically nothing for publication.

In her paper The Poetics of Private Space in Marina Tsvetaeva: The Realm of 
Non-routinized Natalija Arlauskajte (Vilnius University) reads Tsvetaeva’s 
fiction and private correspondence as certain configurations of an imaginary 
(auto)biography. The author then progresses to the description of this 
imaginary space, which in a secular world of Tsvetaeva substitutes for the 
space of the sacred. This highly eroticized sphere is precisely what Max 
Weber in his 1915 study of the religious mentality called the space of the 
“non-routinized”.

In his article Without Support: The Autobiography and Writing of Georges 
Perec Boris Dubin (Yuri Levada’s Analytical Center and The Institute of 
European Cultures, Moscow) approaches the autobiographical texts and 
projects of Georges Perec as a kind of “negative autobiography”, a quest for 
a new literature that would be able to define and affirm itself “after 
Auschwitz”. Dubin is particularly interested in syndromes revealed through 
such writing as well as in the radical change of the author-reader 
relationship. Perec’s poetics is defined as cryptogrammic, lacking in 
self-expression, and hinting at the remains of the suppressed trauma.

IN MEMORIAM
VLADIMIR PETROVICH KUPCHENKO (1938—2004):

This section contains contributions to the outstanding scholar, the pioneer 
of Maximilian Voloshin’s studies and his first biographer Vladimir Kupchenko 
by his friends and colleagues Roza Khruleva, Boris Frezinsky, Zakhar 
Davydov, Konstantin Azadovsky, and Alexander Lavrov.

MULTILINGUAL COMMUNITIES AND LITERATURES

In his editor’s preface Kirill Kobrin (Radio Liberty, Prague) speaks of the 
cases of coexistence of different languages and cultures on the same 
territory. Any literature formed in a multilingual community relates itself 
more to the place of its birth than to a particular national tradition. This 
is most obvious in the case of Prague that harbored modern Czech, German, 
and Jewish German literary traditions. There were also cases when a 
multilingual community failed to produce any cultural synthesis, like in 
medieval Wales. The contributors to this section attempt to name some of the 
mechanisms of formation, functioning, and development of a multilingual 
community.

Aleksandr Bobrakov-Timoshkin’s (Prague) article The Phenomenon and the 
Tragedy of Prague’s Multilingualism surveys the history of Prague’s 
Czech-German bilingualism. Of a specific interest for the author is a late 
19th — early 20th century period when the mutual separation of the Czech and 
German-speaking inhabitants of the megalopolis led to a sort of cultural 
“apartheid”. Ghettoization of the cultures and attempts to transcend it were 
equally reflected in texts composed by the younger Czech, German, and Jewish 
writers of the period.

In a study Czech Version of Language Building: National Revival and Its 
Remaining Ideologemes Tomas¤ Glanc (Karlow University, Prague) argues that 
the Czech National Revival, introduced in the early 19th century by a group 
of radical intellectuals, was heavily influenced by Herder. The ideology of 
“national separation”, so active in the 19th-century Eastern Europe, 
resulted in a growing lack of understanding between Czech and 
German-speaking intellectuals in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This 
“separation” continues to act as a “residual ideologeme” (a term invented by 
Glanc) in the Slavic Studies, which are often subdivided not into studies of 
literature, culture, religion, etc., but into such disciplines as Serbian, 
Croatian, Russian, and other national studies with little or no connection 
between them. The Czech National Revival is an example of how a multilingual 
community becomes less complete, when influenced by centrifugal force.
The Anglo-Norman penetration and conquest of Wales contributed much to the 
development of the specific intellectual climate of the country. The co- 
existence of several languages and cultures in this Western fringe of 
European medieval civilization is remarkable. In the article Reading in a 
Multilingual Environment: Wales at the End of the 15th Century A.I. Falileev 
(St. Petersburg) examines the so-called Red Book of Hergest (Oxford, Jesus 
College Library MS. 111), one of the most important medieval Welsh books. 
The data offer the possibility to discuss the reading strategies of the 
Welsh in late 14th century. It is notable that the Welsh reader, for whom 
the medieval manuscripts were compiled, preferred to read (or listen to) the 
prose in Welsh rather than in the original, and was interested in the 
original poetry.

In his essay Russian-Hebrew Literary Connections in Real Time Aleksandr 
Barash (Jerusalem) discusses the relationship between two literary 
traditions during the entire 19th century. Barash pays particular attention 
to mutually rewarding influences and to their echoes in the Russian-language 
poetry of Israel and Russia, and in Israeli poetry composed in Hebrew. The 
contemporary situation is viewed with the expert eye of an active 
participant in the Russian-Hebrew dialogue who is particularly stricken by 
the coexistence of both
cultures in the Holy Land. The socio-cultural endurance of their dialogue is 
vouched by the existence of a large colony of Russian Israeli writers whose 
work is of equal importance for the mother country of their language 
(Russia) and for their historical motherland (Israel).

Aleksey Plutser-Sarno (Moscow) presents a new rubric Contemporary Russian 
Folklore: Symbols and Texts with his two essays Russian “Waste”: From Symbol 
to Text and Russian Criminal Tattoos: From Text to Symbol. In his first text 
he demonstrates how the word “waste” (otstoi) spread from the professional 
speech of car drivers, chemists, sewage-disposal men, et al., to everyday 
language as a negative definition of practically anything. The Russian 
dubbed version of “Beavis and Butt-Head” played a major role in this 
process. The second text deals with the semantics of Russian criminal 
tattoos and their social, communicational, and psychological contexts (life 
of the thieves inside and outside prison).

CHORINCLES OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE feature contributions by Ilya Kukulin, 
Boris Ivanov, Kseniya Rozhdestvenskaya, Arkady Shtypel, Yulia Idlis, and 
Dmitry Dmitriev.

Ekaterina Samorodnitskaya, Oksana Timofeeva, M.M. Krom, Oleg Kling, V.A. 
Koshelev, A.I. Reitblat, Maria Maiofis, and others review recent books in 
the BIBLIOGRAPHY section.
Transl. by Ignatius Vishnevetsky