Опубликовано в журнале НЛО, номер 6, 2010
ANTHROPOLOGY AS CHALLENGE
The section opens with an article from Kevin M. F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania), “Why Study Anthropology? (A Humanist’s Account, in Lieu of a Manifesto),” which narrates the history of methodological and theoretical developments in the humanities over the course of the last half-century. Platt argues that what were once known as “departments of literature” and may now be better described as “departments of cultural studies” are anachronistic and quickly losing the last vestiges of their social function. As a remedy to this crisis situation, the author proposes a partial rapprochement with social scientific methods that could recover the lost viability of cultural studies while still preserving the core competence of the humanities— the participation in the production and transmission of cultural values.
The section continues with a discussion of the problems raised in the aforementioned article and connected with the concept of the “anthropological turn” in the humanities, particularly literary criticism. The participants in this virtual round-table include scholars from various disciplines, all of whom sent their polemical responses to Kevin Platt’s “manifesto” to the editors of NLO: Dina Gusejnova, Tatiana Venediktova, M. Lipovetsky, S. Zenkin, Aleksandr Etkind, Viktor Zhivov, Konstantin A. Bogdanov, Marina Mogilner, Bruce Grant, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. The polemic encompasses discussion of questions of contemporary scholars’ professional identity in a context of interdisciplinary search, the institutional aspects of the changes occurring in contemporary humanities and social sciences, the status and hierarchy of disciplines having been problematized, as well as problems of the universal, worldview-related, ethico-political dimension of these practical shifts.
THE SOCIALIST TRAGEDY OF ANDREI PLATONOV
In this section, Platonov’s work is viewed in the context of contemporary philosophy and relevant political theory. Among the numerous intellectuals and writers who were inspired by the revolutionary utopia and invested a great deal of creative energy and work in it, Andrei Platonov is a very unique figure. Coming from the industrial proletariat, he became one of the first major Russian writers for whom the revolution was to consist in crafting a truly Marxist literary practice, firmly examining topics of community, sexuality, gender, labor, production, death, so-called “nature”, utopianism and the paradoxes of creating a (better) future. However, his extraordinary writing was “forgotten” twice: first, as a result of Stalinist censorship, which rejected Platonov because of his deviation from the general line of “social realism,” and second, by later interpretations of his complicated prose as yet more ironical allegories of “real socialism.”
The articles by Artemii Magun and Oksana Timofeeva are united by a common strategy of the intrusion of philosophy into literature and the exposure of the fundamental anthropological modes of Platonov’s prose. In his article “Andrei Platonov’s negative revolution,” Artemii Magun (Smolny Institute of Free Arts and Sciences) views Platonov as a philosopher and intellectual who used literature as a means to uncover new forms of production of revolutionary subjectivity through such “negative” affects as anguish, melancholy or anxiety. Oksana Timofeeva (NLO, Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht) in “Poor life: animal technician Viskovsky against philosopher Heidegger” presents an analysis of the figure of the animal in Platonov’s prose. Platonov’s animal is compared to some other philosophical figures, such as Heidegger’s animal “poor in world,” Agamben’s “bare life,” the sacrificial animal in Georges Bataille, etc. This comparison reveals animal-ness as a part of the “tragic” dialectics of nature, manifesting extraordinary messianic expectations of the epoch, and shows Platonov’s “communists” or “Bolsheviks” as a kind of paradoxical “revolutionary animal.”
GONCHAROV: AMBIVALENCY AS A PRINCIPLE OF WRITING
In the section’s first article, “▒A pale, unclear figure’: the image of the pomeshchik in Goncharov’s novels,” Bella Grigorian looks at the images of Goncharov’s pomeshchiki and demonstrates how “instructions” relating to agriculture and household management permeate his prose. Grigorian places a Bakhtinian emphasis on Goncharov’s aesthetic “refraction” of the practical guides that he read with such interest and attention, as “an artist of the word.” Grigorian also shows how the ideal pomeshchik resists his own literary representation. There is a place for this figure in Goncharov’s aesthetic outlook, but Goncharov never focuses on it completely, leaving this marker of social progress on the periphery of his artistic view.
In “Oblomov’s Great Voyage: Goncharov’s novel from the standpoint of the ▒instructive journey,” Marijeta Bozovic approaches Oblomov from the perspective of another marginal prose genre, the travel journal, and also discovers a pronounced ambivalence in Goncharov. Connecting Goncharov’s novel with the tradition dubbed “the modernism of underdevelopment” by Marshall Berman, Bozovic convincingly presents Russia in the position of “non-belonging” in relation to trans-European, colonial and imperial formations like the “Great Voyage” around Europe. From this point of view, the potential dialectic contradiction between the mobile Stolz and the static Oblomov appears as an aporia. In closing, Bozovic makes a reference to Samuel Beckett, focusing the reader’s attention on the question: can Olga ever go home again?
In the section’s final article, “A Common Story of a reader of the ▒Bronze Horseman’, ” Jonathon Brooks Platt develops the topic of Goncharov’s place in the discourse of modernity in Russia, and traces the contours of the literary milieu of A Common Story. Platt also concentrates on Goncharov’s ambivalent incorporation of the alien word, analyzing the meeting between Aleksandr Aduev and Pushkin in the context of the great cosmological urban-planning exploits of Peter the Great.
READINGS
In her article “Journal: on the history of the genre” Anna Zalizniak regards journal as a genre in the system of literature. The author meditates upon its history and its connections to the postmodern poetics, shows how it can be studied (what kinds of knowledge can be obtained from it) and turns to the somewhat similar forms of writing in order to point out the structural features of journal.
IN MEMORIAM
ANDREI POLETAEV (1952—2010)
This section is devoted to the memory of Andrei Poletaev, economist, historian, humanist theoretician and one of the founders of the Russian State Higher School of Economics (HSE). It includes an article by Elena Vishlenkova and Aleksandr Dmitriev dedicated to Poletaev’s memory, as well as a short bibliography of his work.
ALEKSANDR MIRONOV (1948—2010)
This section is devoted to the memory of one of Russia’s greatest contemporary poets, Aleksandr Mironov (1948—2010). It opens with a poem by Oleg Iurev (Frankfurt-am-Main), “Verses with a pinhole into the death of Aleksandr Mironov.” In his article “In radiating hells (an introduction to the poetics of Aleksandr Mironov), Valery Shubinsky (St. Petersburg) describes Mironov’s path, marking out three different stages — and three poetics — in his work. The section closes with some of Mironov’s own work: autobiographical prose, essays and poems.
GEORGES PEREC AND COMBINATORIAL LITERATURE
This section is dedicated to Georges Perec (1936—1982), a member of Oulipo and one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century, and timed to coincide with the release of the Russian translation of his central novel, La vie mode d’emploi (Life: a user’s manual). The first article is a survey piece by Ekaterina Dmitrieva (St. Petersburg), “Satisfaction from limitation: the mysterious Georges Perec,” in which she examines the French writer’s work in the wider context of avant-garde searchings and experiments in post-war literature (the nouveau roman, structuralism and post-structuralism). Dmitrieva pays particular attention to the principles of Oulipo, according to which Perec wrote most of his works, and its interaction with different art forms such as photography, painting and film. In “Translating disappearance,” translator Valery Kislov (St. Petersburg) discusses in great detail and with abundant examples his experience translating Perec’s novel La disparition (Disappearance). This novel is built around the prohibition from using the most commonly used vowel in French, “e;” correspondingly, in the translation the prohibition is applied to “o,” the most commonly used Russian vowel. The section continues with a detailed review of Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi by Pyotr Kazarnovsky (St. Petersburg), which is graced with the baroque title “▒Rather clumsy and slow,’ or Combinatorica lectoris” and which by means of its very construction — commentary nested in commentary — enters into dialogue with the playful nature of Perec’s novel. The section closes with a fundamental investigation by Tatyana Bonch-Osmolovskaya (Moscow; Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology), “Order, chaosmos and the void (mathematical forms and natural-science paradigms in Georges Perec’s ▒novels’ La vie mode d’emploi.”