SUMMARY
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, No.1, 2008, page(s): 445-448
SUMMARY
REVISION AS A TECHNIQUE: PORTRAIT OF BORIS BUCHSTAB AS A YOUNG FORMALIST
This section is devoted to the early writings of one of the students of
Boris Eichenbaum and Yuri Tynianov at the Institute of Art History -
Boris Buchstab (1904 - 1985).
Stanislav Savitsky's (Institute of Art History, St. Petersburg) article
""Living literature of fact": a discussion around the "Lyrical
Digression" by Nickolay Aseev" discusses the connection between the
so-called Young Formalists (the young generation of the Formalist
School) and russian literature of the 1920s. The author uses Lidiya
Ginzburg's correspondence with Boris Buchstab, Ginzburg diary entries
and the memoirs of actress Yuliya Solntseva to describe the strategies
of reading Nikolay Aseev's poem the "Lyrical Digression" by young
philologists as a kind of experiment with an academic genre of real
commentary. The Young Formalists introduced the personal relationship of
Nikolay Aseev with an dedicatee and a prototype of the poem's heroine,
Solntseva, both into the analysis of the aesthetic structure of the
"Lyrical Digression" and into their synthetic para-literary activities
at the junction of several genres (family album, correspondence, diary
writings). According to Savitsky, an incident with Solntseva and the
"Lyrical Digression" became one of the major points of aesthetic
self-determination for Lidiya Ginzburg as well as the way to determine
the place of her autobiographical prose among the other literary
projects of the revolutionary avant-garde.
Yan Levchenko's (Moscow) article "Failure to appear before the court of
history (a commentary on one diary entry)" considers the position of the
Young Formalists in their confrontation with their teachers in the
second half of the 1920s. While the majority of previous interpretations
of the schism within the Formalist school were written as if from the
students' side, from their perspective, Levchenko notes negative
consequences of Young Formalists making too hasty an attempt to revise
the SSPL's heritage. The concept of philosophically and aesthetically
founded philology that according to young Buchstab should have overcame
the one-sidedness of Shklovsky and Eichenbaum is treated by the author
of the article as an ultimately barren one.
page 445
The final material of this bloc - a lengthy publication of the
unfinished Boris Buchstab's work of the late "Philosophy of Khlebnikov's
"translogical language"" from the author's personal archives prepared
and exhaustively commented on by Sofia Starkina (St. Petersburg). In
this work Buchstab examined Velimir Khlebnikov's linguistic experiments
and his theoretic linguistic excursus against the wide background of the
history of linguistics (including F. de Saussure and K. Vossler's
school). He demonstrated the special nature of the "dilettante" quest of
the poet and its similarity to pre-Humboldt language studies. S.
Starkina, in turn, reveals the specific character of Buchstab's research
against the backdrop of later studies dedicated to the poet's linguistic
innovations and his theoretical works (by Vyacheslav Ivanov, Victor
Grigoryev, Tatyana Tsivyan, etc.)
STALINISM AS AN OBJECT OF STUDY: METHOD'S AXIOLOGY
The editorial preface to this section explains that it is opening a big
series of publications in our magazine. Its task is to analyse the new
prospects for examining the era of repression in the USSR. It seems to
us that the "revisionist" approaches of the 1990s on one hand threaten
us with the loss of an ethical attitude to the history of the
totalitarian regime, and on the other they represent the same "master
narratives", the studies of the 1970s-80s represented. From our point of
view the most important task today is to include an axiological and
ethical self-identification of the researcher into the very methodology
of analysis of the society, culture and authority in the USSR. The
necessity of such reflection is dictated by the very nature of the issue
under examination - it's a "burning", traumatic memory - the past that
has not yet been separated from us by "epic distance". We consider the
most productive the works that analyse anthropological problems of the
era of repression - they could once again describe the repressive
atmosphere of that era, but also the creation of new artistic models
that synthesise aesthetic "demand of the moment" with cultural
preferences of the mid-20lh century intellectuals.
Arkady Bliumbaum (The Russian Art History Institute/Forum for
Anthropology and Culture, St. Petersburg) in his article "The Statue
Coming to Life and the Music Embodied: Contexts of "A Strict Youth""
discusses "A Strict Youth" (1936), a famous (yet banned right after the
filming was finished) Soviet film produced by Abram Room after a
screenplay by Juri Olesha. The film is usually regarded by scholars as
the most enigmatic one in the Soviet cinema of the Stalinist era. To
make clear the semantic world of the "strange" screenplay and "arcane"
film the author offers several political, literary and aesthetical
contexts from the 1930s as a kind of keys to the "mysteries" of "A
Strict Youth".
FROM THE HISTORY OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE OF THE 1830s-1840s: NEW ARCHIVAL
DISCOVERIES
Irina Reifman (Columbia University, New York). "An Autograph of V. A.
Zhukovsky's Russian Translation of the New Testament in the New York
Public Library". The Slavic and Baltic Division of the New York Public
Library recently acquired an autograph of Vasily Zhukovsky's 1844 - 45
translation of the New Testament into Russian. The manuscript is a rough
draft and the only extent autograph: an edited version survived in a
copy made by Zhukovsky's secretary. It is also the manuscript from which
the only publication of Zhukovsky's translation (Berlin, 1895) was made.
A new scholarly publication of the original manuscript is needed: it
would greatly enrich our understanding of Zhukovsky's views as a
translator as well as his religious outlook.
Abram I. Reitblat (The New Literary Observer magazine, Moscow) is
publishing in this block the letters of a journalist, editor and
philologist Nikolay Grech to a writer Faddey Bulgarin for the years 1832
- 1843 (Bulgarin's letters to Grech did not survive). This collection of
letters continues the publications of Grech's correspondence with
Bulgarin that began in our journal in N 40 (1999) and 42 (2000).
CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN LITERATURE: BEYOND THE LIMITS OF SCHOLARSHIP?
In this section we publish the article based on the speeches made by the
participants of the roundtable organised by the New Literary Observer
magazine during an AAASS convention in New Orleans on 14 November 2007.
Mark Lipovetsky (University of Colorado, Boulder) discusses such issues
as performativity in literature and the representation of violence in
Russian culture. In his opinion, these two broad aspects of literary
analysis remain obfuscated in Russian Studies, which is partially
responsible for the "non-recognition" of such literary phenomena as New
Drama in Russian literary criticism.
Sergei Oushakine (Princeton University). "Noticing "Omitted" Names: Why
Fictive Kinship Could be Useful". Oushakine's paper points out two
plausible reasons that could explain the absence of late-Soviet and
post-Soviet literature in current studies of Russian culture. As
Oushakine argues, aesthetic canons and genealogies created during the
Cold war still remain largely intact in structuring Russia's cultural
development during last three decades. As a result, texts that could not
fit the usual paradigm "domination vs. resistance" tend to remain on the
margin of the contemporary scholarship. Similarly, the fundamental
(Marxist) fascination with intricacies of literary production results in
the persistent marginalization of practices of literary consumption:
studies of popular genres continue to emphasize how these genres emerged
rather than how and why they become popular.
Kevin M.F. Piatt's (University of Pennsylvania) contribution articulates
a critical approach to the works of St. Petersburg poet (and art critic)
Dmitry Golynko-Volfson. In the view of the author, Golynko-Volfson's
oeuvre renders plain the inadequacy of the blanket terminological
distinction "post-Soviet," still widely used to describe literary
production of the past 15 years in general. "Post-Soviet," describing
any of a number of definite stances towards a given history, fails to
capture the possibility of Golynko-Volfson's cardinally neutral,
disinterested relationship to that past. In this, Golynko-Volfson
renders necessary the development of other historical-critical
terminology. In his subsequent commentary, Piatt responds to Sergei
Oushakine's presentation, offering contrasting analysis of the dynamics
governing literary critical work on Russian topics in the USA, which he
sees as driven by market forces and the persistence of an antiquated,
yet fast fading system of cultural prestige associate with high literary
culture.
Stephanie Sandler (Harvard University) in her article "The Praise of
Translation" states that the contemporary moment for comprehending
Russian poetry is defined by the active tearing down of borders that
previously marked poetry off from other art forms. The boundaries around
the Russian language itself are more fluid. "The Praise of Translation"
comments on poetry that is itself already a kind of translation, and on
translation as a revealing critical practice. The poetry of Alexandra
Petrova provides the exemplary text.
Ilya Kukulin's article (The New Literary Observer magazine, Moscow)
"From Swarovski to Zhukovsky and back: on the way a research method
would construct a literary canon" discusses the concept of "new epos".
In 2007 poet Fjodor Swarovski proclaimed a manifesto of the "new epos"
movement that according to him had started in Russian poetry in the
first half of the 2000s. By analysing the poetry of Swarovski himself
the author demonstrates that while being aesthetically innovative it
does not match the definition of "epos". It seems that their main
features are the aesthetics of steam punk and trash science fiction
(portraying the world of "sick robots"); virtualisation of action, i.e.
presenting action not as something that has happened but as something
possible; and finally using special type of imagery built along the
lines analogical to those of the aesthetic of European avant-garde
cinema of the 1960s. Author suggests that in reality the "new epos" is
derived from both the poetics of a romantic ballade and the poetics of
"experienced imagery" developed by Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini.
In the "Bibliography" section we offer reviews of new books on the
humanities and a discussion of Ruth R. Wisse's book "The Modern Jewish
Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture" that was published in
2007 in Russian translation.
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