http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2004/69/index-pr.html

NLO, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2004 #69
Summary

(transl. by Ignatius Vishnevetsky)


BELLES LETTRES
This section opens with Stepan P. Shevyrev’s (1806—1864) unfinished poem 
“Illness” (preparation of the text, commentary, introduction, and editing by 
L.I. Sobolev) will be published for the first time.

MATERIALISM OF THE SIGN AND THE FLESH OF LANGUAGE

The article by Esa Kirkkopelto (University of Strasbourg / University of 
Helsinki) analyzes the essence of democracy drawing upon Aeschylos’ 
“Eumenides” and the reading of this tragedy by Hegel. Democracy is normally 
seen as the secularization of politics, the overcoming of the mythological 
order. Tragedy, according to Hegel, is the vehicle of this democratic 
secularization. But how does tragedy do it? Does it function in a 
sacrificial way, through the death of the sacred and the sacralization of 
death? Or does it do otherwise, through the materialization and estrangement 
of language in the act of voting (“voicing”) with pebbles. Such 
materialization allows, according to Kirkkopelto, to deconstruct the 
ordinary notion of democracy as the self-presence of the collective will, by 
introducing estrangement and distance into it.

Keti Chukhrov’s (Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 
Moscow) “Nonsense as an Instrument of the Sublime” approaches the work of 
Aleksander Vvedensky (1904—1941) as being principally different from the 
Russian poetic tradition. From the author’s point of view, Vvedensky (and 
Tsvetaeva too) break with the practice of presenting a poetic object that 
has been established in the time of Pushkin, and therefore was closer to 
European poetry, e. g., to the work of HÚlderlin. Unlike the “fleshly” 
imitations of the physical world, which are characteristic of the Russian 
poetic tradition, the metaphysical concerns of a sublime worldview 
complicate the significational functions of creative language as such. 
Vvedensky’s “nonsense” is interpreted not only as an artistic device, but as 
a radical defamiliarization of the world of objects and meanings, as a 
pathway towards specific slowing down and even stoppage of momentary 
causality within the confines of a poem (the author follows P. 
Lacou-Labarthe understanding of sublime).

Ikina Okuneva’s (Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 
Moscow) article “The Corporeal in Nikolai Leskov’s “The Enchanted Wanderer”” 
is devoted to the reading of his famous story through the aesthetical 
interpretation exemplified by Walter Benjamin in his essay on Leskov’s 
style. Boris Eikhenbaum’s dissection of the story’s techniques, Roland 
Barthes’s strategy of analytical reading, Benjamin’s grasp of attributes of 
the artistic and social experience of storytelling allows us to see the 
specifics of Leskov’s literary works. The world of Leskov’s heroes does 
resemble neither the mythologized totality of the epos nor the space of 
individual character’s growth found within modern(ist) novels. As the 
primary descriptor of the main character of “The Enchanted Wanderer”, 
Okuneva chooses the superficial characteristics of the events that befall 
him, without dealing with the character’s individuality. The corporeal level 
of experience corresponds to the very particular role played by the narrator 
in the story. The narrator’s point of view becomes more problematic (and 
turns into the author’s point of view) only during the hero’s most important 
decision, when he decides to avoid his own doom, which is foretold in the 
initial part of the story.

Artem Magun’s (Smolny College of Fine Arts and European University, St. 
Petersburg) article “On the Corporeal” summarizes the new approach to the 
understanding of literature, polemical to the semiological and cultural 
methods of the 1960’s — 1980’s. Following the accomplishments of Walter 
Benjamin, Philippe Lacou-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, partially the work 
of Jacques Derrida and Valery Podoroga, this approach draws researchers’ 
attention to the solution of problems and conditions of artistic 
representation via analysis of the materiality of the text and the 
corporeality of the language.

ILLNESS OF THE WRITER: A CREATIVE REFLECTION AND A CLINICAL STATE

This section is devoted to various types of what A.W. Frank calls “Illness 
Narratives” in the work of 17th century writers. It opens with an 
introductory article by the compiler, Professor Alexandre Stroev (UniversitÎ 
de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest) “The Writer: Imaginary Invalid or Unwilling 
Healer?”, in which the reasons for literature scholars’ attention to this 
subject are explained, and we are presented with a brief history of the 
birth and development of the myth of the writer-invalid in the European, 
and, above all, French literature of the 18th — early 19th centuries. In 
Stroev’s opinion, the study of literary diseases is directly linked to a 
growth of interest in all things corporeal, and, from another perspective, 
to the problems of professional writing, which has taken along with it 
society’s preconceived notions about typical “writer’s diseases”.
One such disease is analyzed in Alexandre Stroev’s article “My Inkwell Will 
Kill Me: The Epistolary Troubles of Friedrich Melchior Grimm”. Grimm 
considered his primary duty to be writing to various public figures: he 
wrote to monarchs and dignitaries, his enlightened benefactors. From this 
work he amassed a substantial fortune and gained wide influence in the 
courts of Europe; this same work ruined his health: towards the end of his 
life, Grimm went almost completely blind.

Korinna Beil-Goureau’s (UniversitÎ de Brest) work ““The Fevers” of GÎrard de 
Nerval: A Difficult Admission of Madness” demonstrates how hard it was for 
the great French Romantic to admit his own insanity to himself and to those 
around him: in letters Nerval often refers to his disorders as “fevers”. The 
researcher analyzes Nerval’s complex epistolary strategies: he defends 
himself against accusations of insanity, but at the same time presents proof 
of his reasoning madness. The descriptions of the disease change constantly 
depending on the addressees and his relationship to them. Thus, Nerval tries 
to convince his doctor not of his health, but rather of his eventual 
recovery, while to his father, who was a medic by profession, he tries to 
show his depth of knowledge in medicine and idealizes the state of his 
disease.
Jean de Palacio (UniversitÎ Paris IV — Sorbonne) analyzes “The epistolary 
pathologies of Jean Lorrain” — the late 19th-century French writer and 
belletrist. It is the author’s opinion that, while suffering from a second 
bout of syphilis, Lorrain aestheticized the symptoms and ugly effects of his 
disease in his letters, turning it into a work of art.

Some scenes in Lorrain’s novel “Wandering Vice” (Le vice errant) resemble 
his letters. The letters of Lorrain in essence, present in themselves a 
combination of shamelessness, which on purpose parades the pains of the 
body, with chastity, which jealously hides the spiritual.
Frederick H. White (Memorial University, Newfoundland), in “Leonid Andreev: 
Performance and Deception”, suggests that Andreev’s creative performance 
(literary and personal) confuses, replicates, and disguises madness, 
bringing into doubt what is sane and insane behavior. Working backward 
chronologically, White argues that Kornei Chukovskii was the first to 
identify Andreev’s performative act, associating it with his manic periods; 
Andreev, himself, played a role in asserting his mental health to the 
public, and yet, at the same time, he explored the idea that the creative 
act might blur into madness in his story “The Thought”. This article reopens 
the subject of Andreev’s mental health for scholarly debate and provides an 
alternative reading for one of his literary works within the framework of 
the Illness Narrative.

LITERARY BEHAVIOR AS A PROJECT

Kirill Ospovat’s (Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow) 
article ““Sublime Misanthrope”: Social Aspects of Lomonosov’s Literary 
Behavior” employs sociological methodes of Russian formalists, who usually 
linked a writer’s behavior to particular aspects of his creativity. 
Lomonosov’s proverbial “rudeness” is viewed by Ospovat as opposed to high 
society’s politeness, as something prescribed by the ethics of the natural 
scientists and by the “misanthropic” Western European admirers of Horace 
(Boileau, MoliÏre, and J.-B. Rousseau).

REMAKES: REFLECTIONS OF THE SHIFTING OF EPOCHS

Almira Ousmanova’s (European Humanities University, Minsk) article 
“Difference and Repetition, or Once Again About Love in Post-Soviet Cinema” 
focuses on the “close reading” of two films: the first one is well-known 
film “Once Again About Love” (Grigory Natanson, 1968, based on the play “104 
Pages About Love” by Eduard Radzinsky) and the second film is “Sky. 
Airplane. Girl”, its remake released in 2002 (Vera Storozheva, story and 
leading female role by Renata Litvinova). Both films deal with the question 
of “the Soviet” and its structures of feeling. One of the crucial issues to 
be discussed is how films can be used for studying the history of emotions, 
and, more specifically, how cinematic love stories represent and articulate 
socially and historically grounded love discourses. Another important 
question to be addressed concerns the phenomenon of “remake”: is there a 
cultural need for remaking old films and what needs to be “rewritten” in 
terms of gender relations, sexualities, visual representations, cultural and 
sociopolitical realities. Since this remake has been produced by 
women-filmmakers, the problem of women’s cinema and female gaze is given a 
special attention.

Marina Zagidullina (Cheljabinsk State University). “Remakes, or the 
Expansion of Classics”. This article is devoted to the current state of the 
remake — that is, to the creation of new texts based on well-established 
classical works. In the books of the “New Russian Novel” series published by 
Igor Zakharov (“The Copper Vase Of Old Man Hottabych” — Sergei Oblomov’s 
remake of Lazar Lagin’s novel “Old Man Hottabych”; Ivan Sergeev’s remake of 
Ivan Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons”; Leo Nikolaev’s remake of Leo 
Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”; “The Idiot”, Fyodor Mikhailov’s remake of Fyodor 
Dostoevsky’s novel), the modern rules of the creation of a remake are shown 
as a type of popular literature. An attempt is made to find the remake’s 
place in the modern literary process.

IN MEMORIAM
This section commemorates the poet and artist Dmitry Avaliani (1938—2003): 
it consists of poems and visual-textual compositions not published during 
his life, as well as articles about his work.

CHRONICLES OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Aleksander Chantsev’s (Moscow) article “After Murakami Went Out Of Style: 
Japanese Literature in Russia in the New Century” studies the reception of 
translations of Japanese literature in the USSR in the 1960s and in Russia 
in the 1990s — early 2000’s. The most popular Japanese authors in the USSR 
in the 1960s were Abe Kobo, Oe Kendzaburo, and Kawabata Yasunari, who were 
important to the nonconformist intellectuals. These writers’ works went 
against the official Soviet ideology and therefore represented for Russians 
the most important branches of Western literature. In the 1990s in Russia, 
Yukio Mishima was popular, then Murakami Haruki. An interest in Murakami 
Haruki took the shape of a large-scale youth fad in Russia. As of right now, 
the Murakami Haruki fad is passing, and younger Japanese authors are 
grabbing the public’s attention — Murakami Ryu, Banana Yoshimoto and others. 
One can say with certainty that Japanese culture is currently influencing 
not only intellectual, but mass-market literature as well, as well as 
Russian television shows, etc.
Reviews of new fiction books are also presented in this section, and also in 
“Bibliography” (the books on the humanities and literary criticism).

MODERN RUSSIAN FOLKLORE: SYMBOLS AND TEXTS

The New Literary Review continues with its new rubric, curated by linguist 
and folklorist Alexei Plutser-Sarno (Moscow). Every publication in this 
series consists of two articles: one with a vocabularial and lexicographical 
bent and the other detailing nonverbal symbols and actions. Plutser-Sarno’s 
dictionary entries are devoted to Russian profane expressions and their 
current uses, while the semiotic part is dedicated to an expressive gesture 
or sign. In this issue, A. Plutster-Sarno publishes two articles: “Fucking 
Shit” and “The Symbolism of Clapping”. The contexts of the expression 
“fucking shit” (pizdets) in the first article are taken primarily from 
Russian Internet sites. In the second article, it is shown that applause, 
previously used to show approval or support, is tied in Slavic folklore with 
the netherworld and is considered an attribute of the lowest natural demons 
(mermaids and the likes).

Transl. by Ignatius Vishnevetsky