SUMMARY

 

POLYMORPHIC FILM LANGUAGES

Compiled by Tatiana Weiser

 

Jan Levchenko’s (Moscow Higher School of Economics) “The Death of Language in the Films of Aleksey German” is devoted to the phenomenon of speech dissipa­tion (or rather, destruction) in the films of Alexei German (1938—2013). Levchen­ko considers all German’s films successively to demonstrate the changes of dis­course — both regarding film characters and narrative structure. German starts from the traditional way of sound and speech that illustrate a visual event, but then comes to the idea of obstructed speech that hampers a spectator’s perception. An effect of sound chaos becomes a specific feature of German’s personal filming manner, and strongly affects the whole aesthetics of Late Leningrad (Petersburg) Film School.

In “Music as a Dictatorship of the Heterogeneous: on the Dissociation of Phy­sical Expression, Body and Speech in Michael Haneke’s La pianiste,” Tatiana Weiser (RANEPA / The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences) analyzes Haneke’s 2001 film. The role of the heroine as played by Isabelle Huppert is examined from a semiotic point of view. Weiser shows that Huppert organizes her role at the junction and intersection of two planes: the expressed (in facial expression, speech and writing) and the unexpressed (spiritual states and modes of being that can be read if one goes deeper into interpretations and counter to the plane of the explicitly expressed). Weiser demonstrates that Huppert’s masterful acting and Haneke’s directorial conception open up huge pos­sibilities for a philosophical-archaeological interpretation of the image.

“A Figure Passed Over in Silence: the Discourse of Sexuality in Contemporary Russian Film,” an article by Svetlana Pakhomova (RSUH), addresses Natalya Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov’s film “Intimate Parts.” It would seem that the topic of sexuality, taboo during the Soviet period, should have burst wide open on post-Soviet Russian screens. However, limiting itself to defining the totalitarian as repressive toward the personal and individual, the cinema has stalled work on this provocative problem. 2013’s “Intimate Parts” raises pointed questions of the normative nature of sexuality as expressed in public and private space, as well as socio-cultural and even legislative control over these manifestations. The margi­nalization of any kind of sexual perversity, including that expressed in words (offi­cial, professional or of the media), has plunged contemporary Russian society into a dangerous state of forced silence.

In “The Repressive Tolerance of the Post-Soviet: how to Watch Contemporary Russian Cinema,” Ekaterina Suverina (RSUH) suggests viewing the phenome­non of contemporary Russian auteur film as a coherent cultural phenomenon addressing the problems of post-Soviet contemporaneity. Suverina examines the artistic devices developed by young directors toward taking a critical view of the symbolic order as it has established itself, and the forms of social memory.

 

ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE VISUAL

Snapshots of everyday life under socialism are frequently used in the Russian blogosphere and public domain as forms of evidence about realities of Soviet daily life. But what kinds of knowledge about the Soviet past are actually produced by engagement with the domestic photo archive? Oksana Sarkisova (Central European University) and Olga Shevchenko’s (Williams College) “In Search of the Soviet Past: Amateur Photography and Family Memory” examines the ways different generations in Russian families make sense of their family photographs. The authors’ material comes from an ethnographic study dedicated to family pho­tographic archives and generational memories of socialism in today’s Russia. This research reveals a complex play of identification, projection and forgetting, and distinct generational “ways of looking” at family photos. While photographs convey presence and trigger affective investment, they are exceptionally malleable and in the end, conceal as much as they reveal about the family past.

 

A BIOGRAPHICAL PRISM - 3

Dmitry Kalugin’s (Moscow Higher School of Economics) “Representations of Authority in ‘Official’ Biographical Narratives of 1750—1850s” traces the forma­tion of a self defined by discipline, self-control, and the reliance on civil service for the sense of identity. The issue is a new form of bureaucracy that appeared during the 18th and 19th centuries, giving birth to a specific biographical discourse that embodied the state’s vision of the meaning and purposes of human existence. A study of discursive mechanisms used to promote normative concepts of service, a career, and a way of life, demonstrates the paternalistic nature of the state’s authority that informs this biographical discourse. Focusing on “familial” feelings binding a superior to a subordinate, and representing business relationships as private or familial ones, the rhetoric of paternalism creates a universal pattern of social relationships. The discourse in question was not only supposed to protect the status quo but also to counter new views of society, which since the 1850s was regarded as an active, independent entity.

Yuri Zaretsky’s (Moscow Higher School of Economics) “How Professor Philip Dilthey Stood up for His Truth” examines the “structures of the everyday” in which the lives of Moscow University professors took place, toward reconstructing the conflict between one of them — Philip Heinrich Dilthey (1723-1781) — and the university administration. Zaretsky’s principal questions are aimed at revealing the hierarchies of the ruling relationships inside the university. What place did professors occupy? What rights and obligations did they have? What were the reasons behind their disputes with the administration and how were these disputes resolved? How was authority distributed between the professorial Confe­rence, the curate and the director? Finally, on what principles and through what mechanisms did the university collaborate with the governmental powers-that-be?

Olga Makarova’s (Queen Mary, University of London) “A.S. Suvorin in the Diaries of S.I. Smirnova-Sazonova. Part II” is based on the impressive collection of previously unpublished diaries (69 notebooks, 32 973 pages) of Sofia Smirnova- Sazonova, writer and journalist (1852—1921). The diaries are kept in the Manu­script department of the Institute of Russian Literature (“The Pushkin House”) in St Petersburg; they span 44 years of Smirnova’s life, the leitmotif being her close friendship with Suvorin. Drawing on the extensive diary material, the publisher brings into the public domain a series of episodes which close some gaps in Suvo- rin’s biography and add to our understanding of the famous media tycoon. The excerpts from Smirnova’s diaries are annotated, providing historical context as well as the necessary and sufficient reference.

 

IN MEMORIAM

ALEXANDER YUREVICH GALUSHKIN
(1960—2014)

This obituary section is dedicated to the memory of the literary scholar and bib­liographer Alexander Yurevich Galushkin (1960—2014), a specialist on the work of Evgeny Zamiatin and co-editor of the literary-bibliographic journal de visu. The section contains reminiscences of Galushkin from Evgeniya Ivanova, Andrey Rogachevsky, Manfred Schruba and Nikita Shklovsky-Kordi, stories by Viktor Shklovsky addressed to Galushkin (who worked as his secretary for several years), and a bibliography of Galushkin’s publications.

 

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WRITING
AND THE FUTURE OF THE HUMANITIES

This section presents a programmatic article from Mikhail Epshtein (Emory Uni­versity, Atlanta), “Scriptorics. An Introduction to the Anthropology and Persono- logy of Writing.” This is a sort of manifesto, an attempt to found a new discipline, scriptorics, which would study Homo scriptor, the writing man. Polemicizing with Jacques Derrida’s grammatology, Epshtein affirms a science of the writing man, of writing activity as a way of life and of relating to the world. Scriptorics belongs more to the anthropological cycle of the disciplines than the linguistic. This is an anthropology, etiology, psychology, characterology, personology of writing as a form of human activity, whether the ones writing are individuals or collectives, whether the relationship to writing is existential, national or confessional.

Epshtein’s manifesto is preceded by an article from Caryl Emerson (Princeton University), “The Transformative Humanities of Mikhail Epshtein. Prologue to the Future of Our Profession,” in which Emerson discusses the crisis in the hu­manities and potential ways out of it.

 

NONCONFORMISM REVISITED

In this issue of NLO, the traditional “Nonconformism Revisited” rubric is dedi-
cated to various aspects of the work of Arkady Dragomoshchenko (1946—2012),

who was not only a remarkable poet, prose writer and essayist, but also a photo­grapher (about which much less is known).

The section opens with an article by Galina Zalomkina (Samara State Univer­sity), “Recognizing the Autumnal Vegetation of Speech.” Zalomkina focuses on the description of the aesthetic boundary between philosophical seriousness and postmodern play, between the search for objective reality and the construction of reality in Dragomoshchenko’s poetic texts. In the texts, the aspiration to hear and convey the voice of the surrounding world combines with an ironic awareness of the impossibility of realizing this aspiration — because of the complicated nature of language, which itself often becomes the main object of scrutiny.

“Interlingual Interactions in the Poetry of Arkady Dragomoshchenko,” from Natalia Azarova (RAS Institute of Linguistics, Moscow), presents an analysis of the function of foreign-language disseminations in the poet’s work.

In “Dragomoshchenko’s Tautology,” Evgeny Pavlov (University of Canterbury, New Zealand) offers a reading of several key poems from Tautology (2011), in which Dragomoshchenko once again investigates the problems of sense and under­standing. In his analysis, Pavlov attempts to answer the question of what exactly stands behind the concept of tautology, central to this collection; and of how this concept correlates with the divide between “poetry” and “prose” so fundamental for Dragomoshchenko.

The section closes with a study from Denis Ioffe (Ghent University), “Arkady Dragomoshchenko’s Photographic Art: the New Visuality and the Poetics of Metaphysical Intoxication,” which focuses on the interrelations of the visual and the verbal in Dragomoshchenko’s work.

 

NEW LITERARY INSTITUTIONS:

THE ARKADY DRAGOMOSHCHENKO PRIZE

One of the main literary events of the past year was the institution of the Arkady Dragomoshchenko Prize. Dragomoshchenko is a “difficult” writer, but his expe­rience has turned out to be important for the younger generation; to wit, the ini­tiative behind the creation of the prize came from young poets (Galina Rymbu, Nikita Sungatov) and was supported by St. Petersburg’s “Word Order” bookstore, a cultural space aimed at intensive dialogue between different art forms. All of Dragomoshchenko’s undertakings are based around precisely this kind of dialogue, which enables a rethinking of the “poetic.” By naming the prize after him, the curators and organizers underscore the continuity with the profoundly reflexive, innovative type of writing developed by Dragomoshchenko at the junction of philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis and other disciplines — but also directed toward the investigation of bodily, perceptual and non-verbal experience. This unification of the intellectual and perceptual elements, which could be called the “investigative metaphor,” is something familiar to many younger writers; for them Dragomoshchenko’s writing has become a point of attraction but also one of repul­sion, spurring them on to searches in other directions. The section presents poems by the three prize finalists, Nikita Safonov, Alexandra Tsibulya and Lada Chizhova, as well as speeches by Anna Glazova (representing the jury) and Nikita Safonov (the first laureate), which were heard (along with open debates) at the awards ceremony at the New Stage of St. Petersburg’s Aleksandrinsky Theater.