Summary

COSMOPOLITANISM IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: INTERPRETATION AND PRAGMATICS

 

Robert Fine's (University of Warwick) article "Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism: Western or Universal?" questions the degree to which Enlightenment-era cosmopolitanism was influenced by its Western origins: was it genuinely universal, or Euro-centric after all? Galin Tihanov (University of Manchester), whose article is entitled "Cosmopolitanism in the Discursive Landscape of Modernity: Two Enlightenment Articulations", tackles the issue of cosmopolitanism's con­nections with nationalism. He focuses on the ideas of eternal peace and "world literature". In "Cosmopolitan Book Publishing: The case of the Encyclopedie", David Adams (University of Manchester) analyses the history of the reception of the French Encyclopedie, proceeding from the ways in which the work was translated into different languages, distributed via selections of individual entries, reworked and used for the creation of similar reference publications. In her article "Literary Cosmopolitanism and the Geography of Genius in Eighteenth-Century France", Ann Jefferson (University of Oxford) explores the concept of genius in the cosmopolitan context of the era: how it was interpreted and what kind of role it played. The subject of Andrei Zorin's (University of Oxford) article "Leaving your family in 1797: Two identities of Mikhail Murav'ev" is "cosmopolitan iden­tity". Zorin uses Murav'ev as an example to show how two emotional matrices co-existed within a single personality: the first of these presumed the concern (obligatory for a nobleman in the imperial service) over practical questions related to one's career, while the second required that one live in accordance with certain stances adopted from European sentimental literature, which demanded adhe­rence to a completely different value system. Pyotr Druzhinin's article "The Pushkin House under fire from Bolshevik criticism" recalls another, very dark dimension of the concept of cosmopolitanism, one that emerged under Soviet power: Druzhinin presents and contextualises a 1951 letter to G. Malenkov from I. Lapitsky, the notorious initiator of pogroms and all-round odious figure. The letter is a denunciation in which work done in the famous Pushkin House is described in a monstrously distorted light.

 

THE SEASONS OF PHILOLOGY

 

This section opens with an article by Sergei Kozlov (RSUH Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities), "The autumn of philology". This is the text of a talk given at a round table held at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow 4 April 2011, entitled "Will philology remain 'queen' of the humanities?" Drawing atten­tion to the imprecision of various uses of the word "philology", Kozlov points to the specifics of this or that discipline of the "philological cycle" and their histo­rically changing configurations. Criticising the "methodological conjuncture" manifested in different forms of academic administration and institutional organi­sation, Kozlov questions the individual research strategies of practicing philolo­gists, who are forced in their work to have dealings with the changing demands of the intellectual market and the formal requirements of the day. Kozlov identifies as overall trends in contemporary philology both methodological pluralism and the striving for methods to be appropriate to their material.

The section continues with polemics in response to Kozlov's article, with participants hailing both from philology and other disciplines in the humanities. They include Sergei Oushakine, Tatyana Venediktova, Nikolai Poseliagin, Konstantin Bogdanov, Kevin Platt, Pavel Uvarov, Mikhail Velizhev, Maksim Waldstein, Boris Dubin and Mikhail Yampolsky. This polemics, which touches on some of the most central questions relating to the self-definition and identity of scholarly activity in Russia and USA (including questions of method, history, institutional status and disciplinary boundaries) provides yet another opportunity for humanities scholars to give meaning to and ground their professional and ethical choices. Kozlov's response to his colleagues' comments is also included.

The section concludes with a translation of an article by Sheldon Pollock (University of Columbia), "Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World". Pollock's article is, formally speaking, not at all connected to the polemics around Kozlov's article or other so-called "Russian conversations" (the article focuses on classical Indian and Chinese philology); however, it poses essentially the same questions in radical fashion, in the comparative perspective of postcolonial criticism.

 

ESSAYS ON ESSAYS

 

The article "Belles-non-fiction as symptom" by Anatoly Barzakh presents a com­prehensive polemical response to the section on "The essay as a liminal form of writing" published in NLO 104. According to Barzakh, the basic problem lies not so much in the essay as such (its "core" as illuminated by Montaigne remains unchanged), but rather in certain fundamental transformations that have taken place in the literary field as a whole. A symptom of these transformations is the emergence of a new form of literary activity, which Barzakh rather ironically suggests we christen "belles-non-fiction". Investigating the blurring of generic boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, the penetration of scholarly into literary discourse and vice versa, Barzakh comes to a paradoxical conclusion: despite all of the costs and dangers of this blurring, this "liminal" literature is the most interesting and valuable of all contemporary forms and genres today — perhaps because of its very self-destructiveness.

 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: TESTING THE SIGN

 

This section is devoted to Charles Bernstein, the major contemporary American poet and co-editor of the famous L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal. In his intro­ductory article, "Testing the sign", translator Yan Probstein (Touro College, New York) provides a detailed description of Bernstein's poetics, paying special attention to the Language School in American poetry and its roots in Russian Formalist theory and practice. Next comes "Introjective Verse", Bernstein's mock- manifesto that parodies Charles Olson's programmatic article "Projective Verse" (a translation of this article was published in NLO 105). The section concludes with a selection of poems from various books by Bernstein, in Probshtein's translation.

 

NOS-1973: RETRO-REVIEW

 

Through a series of open debates, the jury of the NOS-1973 prize selected Strolls with Pushkin by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) out of 15 works written or first published in 1973. In this piece by Andrei Uritsky (Moscow) is a sort of review- mystification, or retro-review, written as if Strolls with Pushkin had been publi­shed only now, in 2011.