Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie,  No. 001, 2005

SUMMARY

The section "The Poetics and Rhetoric of Sociology" is represented by Sergey
Kozlov 's (Institute of Higher Researches in Humanities, RSUH, Moscow)
article "The Crash of a Train: Max Weber's Transport Metaphor". In this
article the concept of railroad movement (fraught with potential
catastrophy) is seen as a basic metaphor of Weber's sociology. The article
treats railroad images, motives and symbols in biographical mode, as
childhood impressions and images, as well as illustrations of the principles
of purposeful social movement. Kozlov tries to reassess the idea of "basic
metaphor" introduced by the American philosopher Stephen Pepper, later used
by Heiden White, in order to recreate the coneptual intruments of
sociological theory and political thinking of Max Weber. The railroad
metaphor is most productive in analyzing the themes of choice and rational
counting of consequences, with the author turning to the philosophy of law
widely used in Weber's sociology.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF BODY: THE FIGURES OF THE CORPOREAL

This section continues the analysis of body and the corporeal started by the
New Literary Review in the middle of the 1990s (in the genre of
body-studies) and carried on with a cultural-philosophical angle in issues
65 and 69. The article "Mapping the Body: The History of Body Between
Constructivism, Politics, and Experience" written by a historian Philipp
Sarasin (University of Zurich, Switzerland) comes first and is devoted to
the historical thematization of the corporeal, mainly new-European. The
corporeal, as the author argues, cannot be reduced to discoursive strategies
or the chaos of incompatible singularities, in Michel Foucault's manner. The
author sees the corporeal as a historical projection not as a significant
construction or natural phenomenon, but as a special correlation and
intersection of discursive and material orders.

Oksana Timofeeva (Institute of Philosophy, Moscow) in her article "Text as
the Embodiment of Flesh: on the Morphology of G. Bataille's Experience"
views the original concept of flesh as central point of Batai's philosophy,
both pre- and anti-theoretical one. Overcoming the traditional philosophical
idealism and creativity in the way of "base materialism" turns out to be
possible, as Batai sees it, in turning to the aesthetics of surrealism and
economics of unproductive expenditure ("The Cursed Lot"). The author pays
special attention to Bataille's reasessment of the basic psychoanalytical
motives and philosophy of Freud and Lacan.


Andrey Astvatsaturov 's (Siriolny College and State University of
Saint-Petersburg) ""Thinking Body" in the Search for a Language. The Case of
Henry Miller" is devoted to interpreting and reassessing the body and the
concept of the corporeal in Henry Miller's fiction and essays. The author
also analizes Miller's avantguard aesthetic ideas, when the latter tried to
rethink the concepts of education, the destination of literature, and the
basic principles of Eiropean "intellectualist tradition" in general, in
terms of the primace of flesh.

Last but not least, Ilya Kalinin (The Neprikosnovenny Zapas magazine,
Moscow) in his article "History as the Art of the Articulation" discusses
the place and meaning of bodily metaphors in scientific and fictional
writing of Russian formalists in great detail. In terms of representing the
personal and historic experience of formalists themselves abundant bodily
metaphors play a far greater part than just illustrating things, according
to Kalinin. As the author argues, history leaves notes on the bodies of its
characters and creators, as well as on the body of the watching historian
himself (i.e. formalists themselves). The key formalist notions of
fragmentarity, decomposing and destruction are rethought by the author in
comparison with Walter Benjamin's concepts which are close to these (the
idea of allegory, ruins, etc.).

THE STRUGGLE FOR LITERARY REPUTATION: GENRES AND CHARACTERS

Ilya Vinitsky (University of Pennsylvania). ""Dead Poets Society":
Mediumistic Poetry as a Cultural Phenomenon of the Second Half of the
Nineteenth Century". The author examines the phenomenon of posthumous
authorship (i.e. literary texts produced during mediusmistic seances) that
had emerged in the early 1850s in America and conquered Europe by the
mid-50s. According to the spiritualists beliefs, each mediumistic poem was
considered as the final word of the author, a summa summarum of his/her
literary and human experience. Vinitsky argues that literary works by
spirits generate a paradoxical genre resting on the boundary between
literature and folklore, faith and science, forgery and myth. In the words
of Yuri Lotman, the deciphering of these unreliable texts might become an
important source of our knowledge concerning the literary mythology and
cultural consciousness of the second half of the 19th century, - a period of
the booming literary market and the flourishing of ideological criticism. In
this context, the Russian mediumistic works should attract special attention
for they may be considered one of the utmost expressions of the notorious
quasi-religious cult of literature and literati (especially the departed
ones) that had emerged by the end of the 19th century.

Victor Zhivov (University of California, Berkeley) "Herzen's Apology in
Phenomenological Guise ("Herzen's Philosophical Weltanschauung' by G.G.
Spet)" After the Bolshevik revolution, Russian intelligentsia had to
construct a new intellectual space to justify its existence. A reappraisal
of Russian spiritual and intellectual traditions was part of this task.
Alexander Herzen could be regarded as a crucial figure in this process.
Whereas Bolshevik authors claimed him to be their predecessor,
non-revolutionary intelligentsia tried to appropriate him as a champion of
freedom and individualism. The paper analyzes strategies of this
appropriation used by Gustav Spet in a book about Herzen's philosophical
development published in 1921.

"Correspondence of A.D. Siniavskii With the Editors of the Series
"Biblioteka poeta": Transformations of the Soviet Literary Field", with the
comments and foreword by Anna Komaromi (University of Toronto). This
correspondence, found in the Siniavskii archive at Hoover Institution, spans
the years 1962 - 1965 and relates to Siniavskii's introductory article for
the 1965 'Biblioteka poeta' edition of Pasternak's poetry. The foreword
treats the substance and method of Siniavskii's disagreements with the
editors. Examined in conjunction with the Pasternak Affair and Trial of
Siniavskii and Daniel, Siniavskii's recalcitrance can be considered an
illustration of the emergence of an autonomous Soviet literary field,
conceived according to Pierre Bourdieu's description.

Olga Panova (Moscow State University). "Rimbaud and Simulacre"; Dominique
Noguez "The Three Rimbauds" (Paris, Edition de Minuit, 1986). Dominique
Noguez's book is a brilliant philological "romance" describing Rimbaud's
afterlife. According to Noguez, Rimbaud didn't die in 1891, but lived until
1937, and having returned to Paris from Ethiopia in 1893, published several
prosaic works such as "African Nights", "Black Gospels", "The System of
Modern Life", became a Member of Academie Francaise and was recognized a
modern classic. He married Paul Claudel's sister Louise, exchanged letters
with T. Mann and F. Pessoa, and ambivalent relations with surrealists and
futurists and finally after his conversion to Catholicism came back to his
native Charleville and ended his life as a provincial bourgeois that lost
all the illusions of his rebellious youth. Noguez's book is parodying modern
literary criticism that can create and kill poets, re-make their biographies
and deconstruct their work, offer simulacres instead of real things.

The "resurrected Rimbaud" without his shocking and enigmatic persona, his
visionary prophetic poetic poetry becomes an average French intellectual of
the early XX century, a poor copy of Paul Valery or Andre Gide. Rimbaud
invented by Noguez helps make evident all latent sides of the adolescent
poet's character and make reality the main myths such as "Rimbaud - angelic
catholic poet", "Rimbaud - positivist and socialist", "Rimbaud - bougeois",
etc. All these images of Rimbaud stop being hypotheses and versions and get
a life of their own giving rise to a simulacre that replaces the true figure
of Rimbaud, "enfant terrible" of the French poetry.

MODERNIZATION AS MOBILIZATION: THE SOVIET CULTURE OF THE 1930s

Joachim Klein (Leiden University, Netherlands). "Belomorkanal. Literature
and Propaganda in Stalin's Times". This article deals with the cultural
history of early Stalinism, focussing on the extensive propaganda campaign
around the construction of the White Sea - Baltic Canal in the early
1930ies. This campaign was so successful that for decades to come this
project was largely associated not with the existence of a huge
concentration camp, the Belbaltlag, but with the glamour of heroic
achievement. How can the sucess of this propaganda campaign be explained?
And what induced the elite of Soviet writers to participate in it?

Serguei Oushakine (Columbia University, New York). ""Let's Fight Nature":
How We Tried to Get Rid of Heredity". Using classical texts of the early
Stalinism (M. Gorky's journalism, T. Lysenko's agrobiological work, and A.
Makarenko's pedagogical writing) as its main source, the essay explores how
persistent design and implementation of endless chains of disciplining
routines and activities were used in the 1920 - 1930s to overcome the
dissolution of the daily order of things. Uncertainty of social norms in the
early Soviet society became equated with instability of environment in
general and nature in particular. Such an equation produced an interesting
discursive and practical shift: an absence of clearly articulated models of
subjectivity was overcome and overshadowed by a very powerful and vivid
rhetoric of various techniques through which a controlled environment of
culture - a "second nature" in Gorky's word - could be created.

THE HISTORICAL NOVEL IN THE ERA OF THE CRISIS OF THE NATIONAL UTOPIAS

The article by Alexandra Bobrakov-Timoshkin (The Charle's University,
Prague) is called "Escaping the 'Memory of Genre': Strategies of
Ideologization and De-ideologization in Czech Historical Prose" is devoted
to evolution of the genre of historical novel in Czech literature of the
second half of the 20th century in the context of interrelations between
writers and the existing ideology. The author states that the so-called
"Alois Irasek action" (forming the ideological canon for historical prose in
the 1940s - 1950s, after communists had come to power) was based not only on
the dogmas of socialist realism with reference to Czech literature, but also
on the then existing tradition which took its origin in the period of XIX
century National Renaissance, when it was historical writing which reflected
the predominant ideological principles more fully. The development of Czech
historical novel duting the 1960s - 1990s is viewed in terms of the various
strategies of de-ideologization of the genre, including breaking off fully
from the tradition, with the brilliant example of Vladimir Neffs
postmodernist trilogy "Queens Don't Have Legs".

In her essay on "Philosopher's Stone, or Being on the Losing Side" Faina
Grimberg (Moscow), an author of historical novels, analyzed the position of
a historical novelist in today's world. The main issues, which Grimberg
tries to address in her novels, are an alternative interpretation of
historic events, as opposed to what is generally acknowledged, and a new
understanding of national community. Thus in her novel "Andey Yaroslavitch"
the main character of the 13th century history of Russia is prince Andrey,
the brother and rival of Alexander Nevsky, canonized by the orthodox Church.
In the novel called "A Female Flutist on Sentry Hill" the writer describes
the history of an imaginary Balkan people - tavils. On the whole, Grimberg's
main strategy is describing history from the point of view of those who
lost.
Dragan Kujundzic (University of California, Irvine). "After "After": The Ark
ive Fever of Alexander Sokurov". The Soviet period represents an absent
cause of Aleksander Sokurov's film "The Russian Ark", its catastrophic
effects on the building generate the repressed or invisible origin that
makes this movie possible. It is because it is a post-historic and
post-catastrophic event, that the explicit aspiration of the movie to be a
salvation can be at all meaningful. The Hermitage is The Russian Ark after
the catastrophic flood of Soviet History. The film also marks a departure
from the epoch of filming with the film stock, since it is entirely made in
one single shot with a high-definition video camera.

IN MEMORIAM: LEONID A. VINOGRADOV (27.06.1936 - 1.04.2004)

This section is dedicated to memory of Leonid Vinogradov - poet, playwriter
and author of novels.
The Academic Chronicles section publishes a number of reports on Russian and
overseas conferences and seminars that took place during Autumn of 2004.

The issue also presents an extensive book review.