Summary

MAPPING THE TURN: HOT DEBATES IN WINTER

This selection of materials continues the journal's discussion series on the anthropo­logical turn in the Russian humanities Under the influence of the anthropological "trend", literary criticism, historiography and other humanities disciplines are dis­covering new possibilities, including within themselves. In this way, the meeting with the "other" (with different methodologies, different investigative views, different value scales, etc.) is now less likely to provoke resistance connected with the conservative tendencies of science and its historical inertia; rather, such meetings begin to bear curious fruit. The mutual contesting of adjoining areas of knowledge no longer looks like fierce competition on the intellectual market, but rather like cooperation, in the process of which these areas of knowledge are drawn into self-reflection and begin to restructure themselves.

The very term "anthropological turn," however — which is the focus of the article by Nikolai Poseliagin (Moscow—Tallin), presented here for collective discussion — should not lead one astray. Rather than a call to look to something that already exists, in accordance with some prescribed scenario, the term indicates the elaboration of many different possible scenarios. Discussions of the anthropological turn reveal the extent to which the Russian scholarly community is prepared for change, as well as a number of key problem areas and symptoms. Bringing in existing conceptual expe­rience is important only to the extent to which it helps a "new anthropology of culture" to be born from the resistance to concrete empirical material (rather than the abstract appropriation of strategies of turns). Participants in the discussion include Nikolai Poseliagin, Mark Lipovetsky, Boris Gasparov, Ilya Kalinin, Sergei Oushakine, Mak­sim Valdshtein, Aleksandr Panchenko, Kevin Platt, Kirill Kobrin, Dina Guseinova, Riccardo Nicolosi, Konstantin A. Bogdanov, Hans Guenther. The selection also in­cludes a translated article by Herbert Grabes on the prospects for the anthropological turn in literary criticism.

 

PRIVATE DOCUMENT AS A FACTOR OF SOCIAL CHANGE

 

Alexandra Bekasova's article "Fathers, Sons and Public in Mid-Eighteenth Century Russia" studies the correspondence within two noble Russian families — Rumyancev and Bestujev-Riumin — in order to show how it helped to establish public opinion in Russia.

 

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LITERATURE

 

Andrey Zorin in "Once again on The Diary of One Week by A.N. Radischev: date, genre, biographical aspect" revises the studies of Radischev's work and takes a close look at the work itself tackling the related questions of when exactly it was written and how it combines fiction and non-fiction. "V.A. Zhukovski in Weimar" by Natalia Nikonova is an account of Russian poet's connection to the city. Nikonova focuses on Zhukovski's role in organizing the cultural transfer between Weimar and Saint-Petersburg, his place in the Weimar text and his writings to be found in Weimar archives and libraries.

 

ESSAYS ON PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

 

Marina Mogilner's "Anthropology as Philology, or On the Use of Mestization: I.I. Pantuhoff and his mestizos» is a case study of Pantuhoff family (Ivan Ivanovich was a controversial anthropologist and his son Mikhail — a decadent writer; the other son, Oleg, started the Scout Movement in Russia) which embodies the key trends of Russian modernity (at the turn of the XX century) and makes evident the clash between the Imperial logic of accepting differences between human beings and the logic of unification, crucial for both scientific and political projects of modernization of the Russian society.

 

IN MEMORIAM

 

This section is devoted to the memory of the prose and children's-book writer Georgii Aleksandrovich Ball (1927—2011); it opens with some of his previously unpublished short stories. In his article "On Georgii Ball as such and in context," Danila Davydov (Moscow) contemplates the paradoxical "eventfulness" or "mystery-quality" as the un­derlying framework of Ball's works and the ties between Ball and the "Lianozovo group" (Evgenii Krovpivnitskii, Yan Satunovskii, Genrikh Sapgir, Vsevolod Nekrasov et al.). In "Expressionism as technique and explanatory model (a study of three stories by Georgii Ball)," Evgeniia Vezhlian (Moscow State Pedagogical Institute) perceives a principle of form and content common to Ball's prose and the work of the Lianozovo writers as tracing back to the tradition of expressionism, with its tendency to go "beyond-the-maximum" and its blurring of boundaries between the subject and object, the real and the imaginary, the living and the dead. The section concludes with some remarks by Ainsley Morse (Harvard University), "Georgii Ball. Translator's Notes," on the specifics of translating Ball's short stories into English.

 

1950s—1980s NON-CENSORED RUSSIAN POETRY: A MODERN READING

 

This section opens with an article by Aleksandr Zhitenev (Voronezh State Univer­sity), "Mikhail Yeremin: poetics of the dictionary." Zhitenev suggests viewing the notorious "hermetic quality" of Yeremin's poetry, and particularly his gravitation to­wards the vocabulary of the hard sciences, as the most important aesthetic principle of his poetry. The rare dialectical words and special terms built into a distinctive metaphorical construction create the effect of "double reference," where one and the same structure of relationship, one and the same metaphor, is superimposed onto different realities. A paper from Grigorii Benevich (Russian Christian Humanities Academy, St. Petersburg), "Two studies of the work of Evgenii Kropivnitskii" consists of two parts. In the first Benevich analyzes "Things are hiding. It happens that...," a quatrain by Kropivnitskii (1893-1979). Using the hermeneutic method, Benevich reveals the ontological structure of the poem to be an act of communication with a providential interlocutor, without which the poem could not exist as a thing. The second part consists of an outline of the aesthetics and work of Kropivnitskii — poet, artist, composer and one of the patriarchs of unofficial culture, founding father of the Lianozovo Group.

 

LYN HEJINIAN: "TO EXCEED THE BOUNDARIES OF MERE AESTHETICS"

 

This section acquaints the reader with the work of one of America's most prominent contemporary poets and theoreticians, Lyn Hejinian. The section opens with an essay by Arkady Dragomoshchenko (SPbGU, Faculty of liberal arts and sciences), "A Mask of Motion," which guides the reader into the creative laboratory and describes the trajectory and poetic principles of this leader of the Language School. Next comes one of Hejinian's programmatic articles, "Barbarism," which reconstructs the genesis of the Language movement and its ties with American literary modernism (Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, the Objectivists). The section concludes with a translation of a prose-poem, "Altitudes," and some fragments from Hejinian's best-known work, My Life, in which she blurs the boundaries between traditional genres like memoir, poetry, essay and novel.