Summary

THE MICRO-LEVEL OF THE IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT

Nikolay Mitrokhin in his "Memoirs of the Central Committee of the Communist party staff about A. Solzhenitsyn: Excerpts from Interviews" talks with the Party functiona­ries about the forbidden literature, Solzhenitsyn and related matters. Pyotr Druzhinin ("'A completely gnawed bone': How A.L. Dimshits defended his dissertation") tells the story of the notorious Party functionary's academic failure due to his strategy of attacking his opponents politically.

 

PUSHKIN AND BULGARIN: SIMILARITIES AND CONFLICTS

 

Mikhail Gronas ("Who was the author of the first book on Pushkin?") makes an attempt to answer this question and makes a conclusion that the anonymous pamphlet attacking Pushkin's "Boris Godunov" was written by F. Bulgarin, a controversial journalist and author, Pushkin's personal enemy. Abram Reitblat ("Pushkin as Bulgarin") traces the similarities between Pushkin's and Bulgarin's political views and professional (journalis­tic) tactics, finding those to be less different from each other than one could expect.

 

INTERPRETATIONS

 

Evgenii Shragowitz ("An essay on two songs by B. Okudzhava") analyses two songs by a famous Russian poet/songwriter/singer in the light of the national literary tradition.

 

LOTMAN AND THE EXPLOSION: A NEW POLITICS OF CULTURE

 

This section devoted to contemporary political-philosophical readings of Yuri Lotman opens with an article by Susanne Frank, "'The explosion' as a metaphor for cultural semiosis". Frank interprets the concept of cultural dynamics — which Lotman described using the metaphor of an explosion — as related to contemporary theory of event. Albrecht Koschorke devotes his article "On the principle of action on the cultural pe­riphery" to those aspects in Lotman's semiotics of culture that do not allow for the re­duction of cultural dynamics to the interaction of dichotomies. The idea of the periphery offers an analytical toolkit for the description of aspects typical not only of specific cul­tures and kinds of political organisation (such as empire), but also for cultural dynamics overall, the non-intentional quality of historical dynamics, its unpredictability, and the reciprocity of relations between the centre and the periphery. In "Self-description, dia­logue and the periphery in late Lotman", Daniele Monticelli discusses the cultural- semiotic work of the late Lotman in the context of political theories of modernity.

 

BETWEEN LYRICISM AND PRAGMATICS

 

In the article "Anthropologising authorship: an invitation to 'lyrical historiography'", Igor Narsky questions the place of the subject — author, researcher — and his personal experience in historiographical investigation. Tatiana Venediktova in her article "Literature as experience" proposes an attempt to look at literature through the lens of "radical empiricism" — focusing on the network of (historically variable) relation­ships between reader and text.

 

"THE WILL TO DIFFERENCE": A RETURN OF THE POLITICAL?

 

In "Poetics vs. Politics (turns of the 20^th century)", Valerii Viugin continues the dis­cussion of the anthropological turn and the prospects for knowledge in the humanities as it has unfolded on the pages of NLO. Yet, his article focuses on the past of scholarship (rather than its present or future). Having honed in on just one of the aspects of this vast topic, Viugin follows point-by-point the way in which the relationship between poetics and politics in the humanities has developed throughout the 20^th century and offers his own solution to the problem.

In "Beginnings and ends", Dmitri Nikulin takes on an analysis of the status quo in con­temporary philosophy and confirms that it is currently in a unique position, characte­rised by the absence of obviously dominant schools or trends. Meanwhile, philosophers are enjoying an unprecedented opportunity to remain unlimited by established frame­works of any one given paradigm, which enables them to discuss questions that have until now remained outside the purview of dominant philosophical movements.

 

HOW A POLITICAL JOKE IS MADE

 

In this section (the title of which refers to Eikhenbaum's famous article, "How Gogol's 'Overcoat' is made"), Aleksandr Zholkovsky in "Correct threads. A philological study" dissects the construction of political jokes about Putin and Medvedev (from the time of the latter's presidency). This clever and yet strictly academic study will undoubtedly be counted among the most significant works by this extremely well-known philologist and linguist.

 

CINEMATEXT

 

In "David Fincher's Se7en", Grigorii Amelin offers a profound and quite striking reading of Fincher's thriller. Bringing in numerology, theology and existential philosophy, Amelin presents Se7en as a sort of masterpiece of intertextuality.

 

FROM THE LENINGRAD UNCENSORED POETRY ARCHIVES

 

The "school" diaries of Elena Shvarts published in this section constitute a stunning document that tells the tale of a true "anthropological miracle": the transformation of an ordinary Soviet schoolgirl and Red Pioneer (who collected postcards dedicated to Vladimir Lenin and dreamed of a team of "red trailblazers" and of Zoya Kosmodemi- anskaya) into a poet-mystic and tremendously sensitive reader of world literature (who at the tender age of fifteen uncovered the abysses of Goethe's Faust and Kafka's Trial, and who fearlessly gazed into the abyss of her own soul). Finally, as a sort of post­mortem dialogue with Elena Shvarts, we also present the memoirs and poetry of another major poet of the same era — Aleksandr Mironov.