Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie
2006 No.005


SUMMARY

(SELF)DEFINITION OF A HUMANITIES SCHOLAR

In this section we present two texts offered as papers at the annual "New
Literary Review" conference (the so-called "Bath Readings") in April 2006.

In the first article, "The Cold Embrace of "Science" or: Why the Humanities
Better Be "Humanities and Arts"", Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford
University) describes the Humanities and Arts as spaces that enable the
practice of riskful thinking. Instead of contributing to the shaping of
standard professional competence and instead of answering preexisting
questions, the Humanities play to their full potential whenever they
dedicate themselves to the production of new problems and questions. In
order to do so, the Humanities are well advised to re-interpret their lack
circumscribed social functions as the freedom for counterintuitive thinking.
Gumbrecht also discusses in detail the institutional future of the
Humanities, examining the changing organisational and intellectual framework
of the modern university system.

In his article "Humanities scholar - where, when and why? Sociometry and
(Russian) language" Konstantin A. Bogdanov (Universitat Konstanz, Konstanz,
and Institute of Russian Literature, St. Petersburg) studies the birth and
codification of the concepts of "humanitarian knowledge" and "humanities" in
the Russian cultural space of the second half of the 19 th century - the
first third of the 20th century. Using a synthetic method that combines the
approaches of history of concepts and traditional lexicography Bogdanov
notes within the semantics of the Russian word "humanities scholar"
(gumanitarij) a characteristic ambiguity or even an internal opposition
between two types of connotations: on one hand, "scholastic" and "academic"
ones, on the other - "civic" and "political journalism" ones, with the
political connotations being the more tangible of the two. According to
Bogdanov, the twin concept to that of a humanities scholar is that of a
member of intelligentsia (^intelligent). "Humanities scholar" and "a member
of intelligentsia" are linked by the concept of "humanity", that is also
very important. An exaggerated attention that Russian thinkers paid to a
figure of a member of intelligentsia has been for a long time blocking
reflection over critical and rational functions of a scholar proper.


STRUCTURES OF HISTORIC NONSIMULTANEITY: MODERN MIDDLE AGES

Ludolf Kuchenbuch (Hagen FernUniversitat, Germany) in his article
""Feudalism": on the strategies of usage of one "uncomfortable concept""
examines a complex and ambivalent part of that key term in the social life
of the Middle Ages. While admitting that feudalism itself is in many ways a
modern concept used mostly to provide negative characteristics to the
"backward" remnants of the past, Kuchenbuch still stresses its importance
and irreplaceability for characterizing "organically" unequal and
hierarchical relationships of the people of the Middle Ages. The ceaseless
and constantly rethought "invention" of "one's own" Middle Ages going on in
the modern times does not hinder medievists. On the contrary, it sets a
framework for their studies. But after the reflection performed by the
French Annales School, that framework should be noted and reflected upon.

Tamara Kondratieva's (Universite de Valanciennes et du Hainaut-Cambresis,
France) ""Modern state" as an authority based on the Domostroy? (regarding
the debates on social and cultural roots of Stalinism)" is structured as a
reflection on the phenomenon of "reactualisation of the past". From the
author's point of view the Soviet system not only followed the earlier
tradition of the state having wardship over its subjects but also
resurrected the old, pre-imperial symbolic practices of distributing
resources and privileges from a single centre personified by a figure of a
charismatic ruler (be it a tsar or a leader). In that way, a counter to an
outwardly rational, bureaucratic and modern system of rule, the structure of
resource distribution of the Stalinist USSR recreated the feudal structures
of kormlenie and bestowals of the 16 th-17 th century Moscow Rus, though the
Stalinist bureaucracy was not genetically linked to those ancient
institutions.

CINEMA, INTELLECTUALS AND THE CRISIS OF MODERNISM

Robert Bird (The University of Chicago) in his "Russian Symbolism and the
Rise of Cinema Aesthetics: Viacheslav Ivanov's Influence on Alexander Bakshy
and Adrian Piotrovskii" argues that as long as symbolist aesthetics remained
dominant in Russian art, the cinema was denied recognition as a legitimate
art form. By extension, the recognition of the cinema as art (in the
mid-1920s) marked the death-knell of the symbolist aesthetic. At the same
time, symbolist ideas lay at the basis of some important cinema theories of
the 1920s. In particular, Viacheslav Ivanov's aesthetics had a defining
influence on Alexander Bakshy's and Adrian Piotrovskii's theories of "poetic
cinema", specifically in the conceptualization of the screen and narrative
as the means by which the cinema gains power over space and time,
respectively.

Yuri Tsivian (University of Chicago) in his article "On Chaplin in Russian
Avant-Garde Art and on the Laws of Fortuity in Art" exemines the cult of
Chaplin launched by West European avant-garde artists and poets of the 1920s
(Goll, Hellens, Leger). It reached Russia early in 1922 via Ilya Erenburg's
Constructivist manifesto And Yet the World Goes Round, and international
avant-garde magazine Object which Erenburg edited together with El
Lissitski. In Autumn 1922, a special Chaplin issue of the Moscow
Constructivist magazine Kino-Fot came out with essays on Chaplin by
Aleksandr Rodchenko, Nikolai Forreger, Lev Kuleshov and Aleksei Gan; it also
contained a series or "Chariot" drawings by Varvara Stepanova which
portrayed Chaplin in a schematized geometrical manner common to
Constructivist visuals at that time; in 1924 Vladimir Mayakovsky published a
poem featuring "Chariot" as a precursor of all-European proletarian
revolution. This paper looks at those aspects of Chaplin's acting style that
fascinated Soviet left-wing artists and what they made of them; at Chaplin's
image in Russian as a "Taylorist actor"; at Chaplin's impact on Kuleshov's
workshop; and, more closely, at a strange reference in both Mayakovsky's
poem and Stepanova's to a "Chaplin" film which real Chaplin never made, Man
on a Propeller.

METROPOLY AND EMIGRATION: STRANGE (NON)MEETINGS

Nikolay Bogomolov (Moscow State University), "On one cultural stowe of
Russian Paris". A stowe (Locus poesiae) - is a term introduced by Vladimir
Toporov (1928 - 2006) for describing a clearly geographically marked area
(most often, a city area) that possesses cultural memories meaningful to the
generations that follow. The article studies a small section of Montparnasse
where at different times M. Voloshin, I. Erenburg, N. Gumilev, VI.
Khodasevich, Vl. Mayakovsky used to live. That section is a repository of
cultural memory linked to very meaningful (not only in the French but also
the in Russian context) associations with the works of Ch. Baudelaire as
well as with various not easily formalised connections of different Russian
poets whose ideological and literary positions were almost diametrically
opposed. One of the central issues of the article is the relationship
between Vl. Khodasevich and Vl. Mayakovsky.

The article by Yuri Leving (Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia) is
devoted to Gisella Lachman (1890 - 1969), a forgotten American poet of
Russian-Jewish origin. Lachman was the author of two volumes of poems
entitled "Plennye Slova" ("Captive Words", 1952) and "Zerkala" ("Mirrors",
1965). In the late 1950s Lachman's poetry was highly appreciated by the
contemporary emigre critics and even perceived as an emigre counterbalance
of the works by Soviet poetess Anna Akhmatova. Yuri Leving uses rare data
from Lachman's archive (today in the Library of Congress, Washington) to
support the daring title of "American Akhmatova" given to the emigre artist
by her peers in exile. Among the newly published archival documents is a
revealing letter (1966) to Lachman by a literary critic G. Adamovich.

The "In Memoriam" section contains three collections of materials. The first
one is dedicated to the memory of a prominent medievist historian Aaron
Gurevich (1924 - 2006). It opens with the last interview given by Gurevich
specifically for the New Literary Review journal in June 2006. Apart from
that we offer the tribute to his memory by his colleagues - Natalie Zemon
Davies (Princeton University), Pavel Uvarov and Kirill Levinson (both -
Institute of General History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) and
Mikhail Krom (European University, St. Petersburg). The second block is
dedicated to the memory of a writer, literary critic and journalist
Aleksandr Goldstein (1957 - 2006) - author of essay collections and
avant-garde novels that became major events in Russian literature and opened
new possibilities for Russian prose. Goldstein had lived in Baku
(Azerbaijan) until 1990 when he had to immigrate to Israel. He died in
Tel-Aviv. In this section we offer excerpts from his last novel "Tranquil
fields" that Goldstein had finished several days before his death (the full
text of the novel is expected to be published in December 2006), as well as
essays by poets Aleksandr Barash (Jerusalem), Elena Fanailova (Moscow),
Stanislav Lvovsky (Moscow) and Shamshad Abdullaev (Ferghana, Uzbekistan), a
prose-writer Mickey Wolf (Jerusalem), and a poet and an artist Mikhail
Grobman (Jerusalem). The third memorial section is dedicated to Maksim
Shapir (1962 - 2006) - a scholar of poetry and history of literature; in
contains an editorial, describing the major directions the work of that
philologist took.

THE RETURN OF THE AUTHOR, OR ON THE OTHER SIDE OF INTENTION

Studies of literary works presented in this collection disprove the
post-structuralist thesis of the "death of the author". The 20th century
literature includes works that are rich in philosophical and historical
allusions, and made as collages or written in a modality that makes it hard
to identify the subject of a statement (self/not self) - however they still
contain as their inalienable part an affirmation of existential intention,
that is of a personal task that an author of each of those works strives to
complete in the process of writing. In our new grounding for the concept of
intention we take into account the works of Antoine Compagnon.

Emily Van Buskirk (Harvard University) in her article ""Self-distancing" as
an ethical and aesthetical principle in Lydia Ginzburg's prose" examines
self-distancing or 'samootstranenie' in the prose of Lydia Ginzburg as a
technique designed to enable the creation of art as well as the adherence to
moral standards. It further argues that samoostranenie is instrumental in
the ability of Ginzburg's analytical prose to blur the boundaries between
genres and disciplines, and specifically to move away from autobiography and
memoir. The article takes up the prose of Ginzburg's blockade period, when
attempts to view the self as other acquired new urgency and significance.
The levels of "self-distancing" in Ginzburg's generalized account, "Zapiski
blokadnogo cheloveka" are revealed by a comparison to a previously
unpublished and newly discovered story, detailing the guilt and regret over
cruelty towards a loved one who was nearing a blockade death.

The article by Nikolay Nikolaev (Research library of the St. Petersburg
State University) "On authenticity of Victor Kheif in Vladimir Earl's
novelette" discusses the artistic means by which an avant-guard poet
Vladimir Earl (b. 1947) created a portrait of Victor Kheif in his novelette
"In search of lost Kheif" (the title is an allusion on the title of Marcel
Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu"). Victor Kheif was one of the most
remarkable representatives of a vivid phenomenon of Russian unofficial
culture - a cafe in the Malaya Sadovaya Street in Leningrad. In that cafe
poets and artists used to meet (the so-called Malaya Sadovaya circle).
Particular attention is paid to the textual sources of the novelette and the
ways they were interpreted.

Eleonora Lassan (Vilnius University). ""Pluralism is possible, consensus is
out of question": Yuri Davydov's novel "Bestseller" in the light of the
"linguistic turn" in humanities". Yuri Davydov's (1924 - 2001) novel
"Bestseller" (2000) - is a complex narrative permeated with literary
quotations and games; it involves dozens of characters from various
historical periods, from Apostle Paul to our contemporaries. The main plot
is the biography of a historian and journalist Vladimir Burtsev (1862 -
1942), who in 1938 managed to prove that so-called "Protocols of th Elders
of Zion" was a forgery produced by the Russian secret police. It was the
"Protocols of the Elders of Zion", still the basis of many anti-Semitic
statements, that Yuri Davydov ironically called "a bestseller of the [20th]
century". Eleonora Lassan analyses Davydov's historical thinking using the
models of historical narrative provided in the works of Heyden White and
Frank Ankersmith, and studies interactions between various subplots of the
novel employing Mark Turner's concept of blending.

Artemy Magun (European University in St. Petersburg), "The layers of the
retina". The article reviews the new book by the Saint-Petersburg poet
Alexander Skidan. The new manner of Skidan presents us with the poetical
collages consisting of the fragments of theoretical texts or everyday
speech. The article discusses the continuities of this style with the Soviet
conceptualism of the 1970s and 1980s, but it also finds the fundamental
innovations: the radical destruction of the subject, which does not leave
space to any irony. The art is totalized so as to incorporate everything,
and this means that any subjective position is immediately sucked into the
text and questioned by it. Skidan gives an image of this situation when he
writes of the "exfoliation" of the retina of the Saint-Petersburg apartment
building lobbies. This image points at the constant "exfoliation" of the
text itself, where at each stage the objective image becomes a
meta-commentary of the writer's or reader's position. It also alludes to the
traumatic catastrophe that makes this kind of versification possible, the
historical event that is poetically productive, precisely because it
destroys any possibility of remaining distant from the word or image