,46 6sr--

Response to a Question

from the l{oa,t Mir Editorial Staff

The editorial staff of Nouy lllir has asked me how I would evaluate the

current state of l i terary scholarship.

Of course, it is diff icult to answer this question categorically or with

much assurance. When evaluat ing our own t imes, our own contempo-

raneity, we always tend to err (in one direction or another). And this

must be taken into account. Nonetheless, I shall attempt a response.

Our l iterary scholarship holds great possibil i t ies: we have many

serious and talented l iterary scholars, including young ones, and we

have high scholarly traditions that have developed both in the past(Potebnya, Veselovsky) and in che Soviet period (Tynyanov, Toma-shevsky, Eikhenbaum, Gukovsky, and others). ' Of course, the exter-nal conditions necessary for its development also exist (research insti-tutes, faculties, f inancing, publishing possibil i t ies, and so forth). Butin spite of all this, it seems to me that our recent l i terary scholarship(from essentially almost all of the past decade) is, in general, neitherrealizing these possibil i t ies nor satisfying our legitimate demands.There is no bold statement of general problems, no discoveries of newareas or significant individual phenomena in the boundless world ofl iterature; there is no real, healchv struggle among scholarly trends. Acertain fear of the investigatory risk, a fear of hvpotheses, prevails.Literary scholarship is sti l l essentially a young science. Its methodshave not been developed and resred through experience, as have thoseof the natural sciences; thus, the absence of a struggle of trendsand the fear of bold hypotheses inevitablv lead to a predominanceof truisms and srock phrases. Unfortunately, we have no shorrageof them.

Such, in my view, is the general nature of our contemporary l iteraryscholarship. But no general description is ever completely fair. In ourQoy, ofcourse, fairly good and useful books are being pubtished (espe-cta l ly on the h isrory of l i terature) , inrerest ing and profbund ar t ic les

Response to a Question from l'/oay Mir ,€f) 3

I

iliri'

2 0s' Response to a Question from lVoz,y Mir

are appearing, and there are, f inally, large phenomena to which mvgeneral description cannot possibly exrend. I have in mind NikolavK<rnrad's book, I{?.sr and East, Dmitry Likhachev's Poetics of AncietttRussian Literature, and Researc/t on Sign ,9ytems, in four installmenrs sofar (the school of young researchers headed by Yury M. Lorman).2These are the most highlv gratifving phenomena of recent years. Ishall perhaps touch on these works during the course of our furtherd iscussion.

Since my primary purpose is to discuss the tasks facing l irerarvscholarship, I shall l imit myself here ro rwo tasks rhar are related onlyto the l iteracure of pasr epochs, and then in the mosr general terms. Ishall not touch at all upon the study of modern l iterature and lirerarycrit icism, alrhough ir is precisely here thar we find most of the impor-tant and immediate tasks. I have selected the two problems I intend todiscuss because, in my opin ion, they have a cer ta in r ipeness aboutthem; productive development of them has already begun and it mustbe cont inued.

Fi rs t of a l l , l i terary scholarship should establ ish c loser l inks wi th rhehistory of cu l ture, [ , i terature is an inseparable par t of cu l rure and i tcannot be understood outside the total context of the entire culture ofa given epoch. It must not be severed from the rest of culture, nor, asis frequently done, can it be correlared u'ith socioeconomic factors, asit were, behind culture's back. These factors affect culture as a whole ,and onlv through it and in conjunction with it do they affect l i terature.For a fairly long period of t ime we have devoted special arrenrion roquestions of the specific f-eatures of l i terature. At one time this was,possibly, necessary and useful. One must say, however, that narrowspecification is alien to the best traditions of our sctrolarship. Recallhow very broad were the cultural horizons in the research of Potebnvaand especially of Veselovsky. In our enthusiasm for specificarion wehave ignored questions of the interconnection and interdependence ofvarious areas of culture; we have frequently forgotten that the bounda-ries of these areas are not absolure, rhar in various epochs they havebeen drawn in various ways; and we have not taken into account thatthe most intense and productive l ife of culture takes place on the

boundaries of its individual areas and not in places where these areirshave become enclosed in their own specificity. Our historical and liter-

ary crit ical research usually contains characterizations of epochs to

which the l i terarv phenomena under s tudy refer , but in the major i tyof cases these characterizations differ in no way from those that are

oiven in general histories; they do not inclucle a differentiated analysis

ii,Tf triHr n **il'i,''...l"'.';' i1F'' - ",ffi il,-{'iof culture, amounts to a superhcial struggle of l i terary schools' and in

i,J"rn times (especiallv the nineteenth centurv)' amounts essen-

tially to an uproar rn the newspapers and magazines' exerting no es-

senrial influence on the great and real . l i terature

of the epoch' The

oowerful deep currents of culture (especially the lower' popular ones)'

;;;;--r.*"l iy determine the creariviry of wrirers, remain 'ndis-

l;;;, and sometimes researchers are completely unaware of them'

il; i l approach does not make it possible ro penerrare into the

iipri, "rir"at

works, and literature itself begins ro seern a trivial in-

stead of a ser ious Pursul t '

The task I am discussing and the problems related to it (the prob-

lem of the boundaries of the epoch as a cultural entity, the problem of

a rypology of cultures, and so iorth) loom very large when one consid-

"" ir," [u"rtio. of baroque literarure in Slavic countries, and espe-

cially the discussions, continuing to this day' of the Renaissance and

human ism incoun t r i eso f theEas t .Theneed fo radeepe rs tudyo f thei n s e p a r a b l e l i n k b e t w e e n t h e l i t e r a t u r e a n d c u l t u r e o f t h e e p o c h i smanifested especially stri kin gly'

The outstanding works of recent l i terary scholarship that I have

mentioned-Konrad, Likhachev, Lotman and his school-with all

the diversity of their mechodoloey are alike in that they do not sepa-

rate l iterature from culture; they strive to understand lite rary phenom-

ena in the differentiated unity of the epoch's entire culture' It should

be emphasized here that l i terature is too complex and multifaceted

a phenomenon and literary scholarship is sti l l too voung for it to be

possible to speak of any one single "redeeming" method in l iterarv

scholarship. Various approaches are justif ied and are even quite neces-

sary as long as they are serious and reveal something new in the l iter-

ary phenomenon being studied, as long as they promote a deeper

understanding of it.If i t is impossible to study l iterature apart from an epoch's entire cul-

ture, it is even more fatal to encapsulate a l iterary phenomenon in the

single epoch of its creation, in its own contemporaneity' so to speak'

W. usuully strive to explain a writer and his work precisely through his

own time and the most recent past (usually within the epoch' as we

understand it). We are afraid to remove ourselves in time from the

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4 AO Response to a Question from Nozty Mir

phenomenon under investigation. Yet the artwork extends its rootsinro the disrant past. Great l i terary works are prepared for by cen_ruries, and in the epoch of the ir creation ir is merelv a marrer of pick-ing the fruit that is ripe after a lengrhy and complex process of maru ra_tion. Trying ro undersrand and explain a work solely in terms of thecondi t ions of i ts epoch a lone, so le lv in rerms of the condi t ions of themost immediate time, wil l never enable us to penetrate into its seman_t ic depths. Enclosure wirh in rhe epoch a lso makes i t impossib le toundersrand rhe work's future l ife in subsequent centuries; this l i fe ap_pears as a kind of paradox. works break through the boundaries oftheir own time, they l ive in centuries, rhat is, in great t ime and fre_quendy (with great works, always) their l ives there are more intenseand fu l ler than are thei r l ives wi th in thei r own t ime. To put i t some_what simplisticallv and crudely, if the significance of anv work is re_duced, for example, ro its role in the struggle against serfdom (as isdone in our secondary schools), this work wil l lose all of its significancewhen serfdom and its remnanrs no longer exist in l i fe. It is frequentlvthe case, however, that a work gains in significance, that is, it entersgreat t ime. But the work cannor l ive in furure cenruries without havrngsomehow absorbed past centuries as well. If ir had belonged entire/y rntoday (that is, were a product only of irs own time) an<J nor a conrinua-tion of the pasr or e ssentially related to the past, it could not l ive in thefuture. I iveryrhing rhat belongs only to the present dies along with thepresent.

It seems paradoxical that, as I have already said, great works con-rinue to l ive in rhe distant future. In the process of their posthumouslife they are enriched with new meanings, new significance: it is asthough these works outgrow what they were in the epoch of their cre-ation. we can say that neither shakespeare himself nor his conrempo-raries knew that "great Shakespeare" whom we know now. There is nopossibil i ty of squeezing our shakespeare into rhe Elizabethan epoch.Belinsky in his day spoke of the fact that each epoch always discoverssomething new in the great works of rhe past. But do we then attributeto Shakespeare's works something that was not there, do we modernizeand d is tor t them? Modernizat ion and d is tor t ion, of course, have exis tedand wil l continue to exist. But that is nor the reason why shakespearehas grown. He has grown because of that which actually has been andconr inues to be found in h is works, but which nei ther he h imsel f norhis contemporaries could consciously perceive and evaluate in the cr.rn-text of the culture of their epoch.

Response to a Question ftom I'troq Mir + 5

semantic phenomena can exist in concealed form, potentially, and

r,"lrevealed only in semantic cultural contexts of subsequent epochs

lh^, ^r. favorable for such disclosure. The semantic treasures Shake-

"""^r" embedded in his works were created and collected thrcugh the

.'"nruri., and even millennia: they lay hidden in the language, and not

""iV i" the l iterary language, but also in those strata of the popular

l^nguug" rhar before shakespeare's time had not entered l iterature, in

thsdiverse genres and forms of speech communication, in the forms

oi. . lgtt,y national cukure (primarily carnival forms) that were shaped

,f,rougil mil lennia, in theater-spectacle genres (mystery plays' farces'

and so forth), in plots whose roots go back to prehistoric antiquity.

and, f inally, in forms of thinking. shakespeare, l ike any artist, con-

structed his works not out of inanimate elements, not out of bricks,

but out of forms that were already heavily laden with rneaning, f i l led

with it. we may note in passing that even bricks have a certain spatial

form and, consequently, in the hands of the builder they express

something.Genres are of special significance. Genres (of l i terature and speech)

throughout the centuries of their l i fe accumulate forms of seeing and

interpreting particular aspects of the world. For the writer-craftsman

the genre serves as an external template, but the great artist awakens

the semantic possibil i t ies that l ie u'ithin it. Shakespeare took advan-

tage of and included in his works immense treasures of potential

m-aning that could not be fully revealed or recognized in his epoch.

The author himself and his contemporaries see, recognize, and evalu-

ate primarily that which is close to their own day. The author is a cap-

tive of his epoch, of his own present. Subsequent times liberace him

from this captivity, and literarv scholarship is called upon to assist in

this l iberation.It certainly does not follow from what we have said that the writer's

own epoch can somehow be ignored, that his creativity can be cast

back into the past or projected into the future. One's own present re-

tains all of its immense and, in many respects, decisive significance.

Scholarly analysis can proceed only from it and must always refer to it

in its subsequent developmenr. A work of l i terature, as we said above,

is revealed primarily in the differentiated unity of the culture of the

epoch in which ir was creared, but it cannot be closed off in this epoch:

its fullness is revealed only in great time.

But even the culture of an epoch, however temporally distant from

us it mav be. cannor be enclosed within itself as something ready-

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1 ' l

iril1

Response to a Question from Noty 'llir

6 8 DResponse to a Qucstion from ltlory Mir

made, completely finalized, and irrevocably departed, deceased.

Spengler's ideas about closed and finalized cultural rvorlds sti l l exert sgrear influence on historians and literary scholars. But these idcas

musr be subjected to significant correctives. Spengler imagined the

culture of an epoch as a closed circle. But the unity of a particular cul-

ture is an open unity.

Each such uni ty ( for example, c lass ical ant iqui ty) , wi th a l l i ts unique-

ness, enters into the single (although not l inear) process of the evolu-

t ion of human cul ture. In each cul ture of the past l ie immense seman-tic possibil i t ies that have remained undisclosed, unrecognized, andunutil ized throughout the entire historical l i fe of a given culture. An-tiquity itself did not know the antiquity that we know now. There

used to be a school joke: the ancient Greeks did not know the mainthing about themselves, that they were ancient Greeks, and they nevercalled themselves that. But in fact that temporal distance that trans-

formed the Greeks into ancient Greeks had an immense transforma-

tional significance: it was fi l led with increasing discoveries of new sr-mantic values in antiquity, values of which the Greeks were in factunaware, although they themselves created them. One must say that

Spengler himself, in his great analysis of classical culture, was also ableto discover new semantic depths in it.

' frue, in some ways he supple-

mented it to give it more roundness and finality, but nevertheless, he,too, participated in the great cause of l iberating antiquitv from thecapt iv i ty of t ime.

We must emphasize that we are speaking here about new semantir

depths that l ie embedded in the cultures of past epochs and not about

the expansion of our factual, material knowledge of them-which we

are constantly gaining through archeological excavations, discoveries

of new texts, improvement in deciphering them, reconstructions, and

so forth. In those instances we acquire new material bearers of mean-

ing, as it were, bodies of meaning. But one cannot draw an absolute

dis t inct ion between body and meaning in the area of cu l ture: 'cu l ture

is not made of dead elements, for even a simple brick, as we have al-

ready said, in the hands of a builder expresses something through its

form. -I 'herefore

new discoveries of material bearers of meaning alter

our semantic concepts, and they can also force tts to restructure them

radically.There exists a very strong, but one-sided and thus untrustworthv,

idea that in order better to understand a foreign culture, one must

enter into it, forgetting one's own, and view the world through the eyes

**d#ff***ffiiit"" in tt,t:"]:t-lenselv

important fo' tli" person who und;rstan!1

un<lerstand',tt ],:]::; ' ;;;:., ; his or her cre atiue underscandins-rn

tobe located outst.d( tn: ":^'";'^;'^^] "rnno,

even really see one's own

,i,.,.,",, n'pi""tli.:*::"'.:: :Ti.illll; -no

* i,,o,, or photographsexterior and compreYl]': '^;'"".-

,"a undersrood only bv other

"i" n"rp' "'1 ::1j^;':::"ilXl:""lll'lJI in ,pu". and because thev

people' because tney artr rvro\!v ". .--'are

otirs. is a most powerful factor tn

'5" *xru ;i,Tfi ':;,i:'::di' )) i' ;;";e'lh a'l ro re i gn cu I -

ture reveals i""lf ftlilt""a'tt#ttaly (but not maximally fully' be-

cause there will be "u1"""'

that see' *J "nd"otand

even more)' A

meaning onlv "'"u1'"

;;;;; ;.':: ] :1"'

encou nte red and come tnto

contact with another' foreign meaning: th"u "n*'g"

in 'a kind of dia-

logue, which '";;;;;;-tfre closedness and one-sidedness of these

particular -"^^'^J;";:t;l::t^ w"-'ui'" new questions for a for-

eign culrure' ones that it did not raise iself; we seek answers to our

own questions in it; and.the foreig:-:l:l:u;e responds to us by revealing

to us its new aspects and new semantic'depths" Without one's 'oun

Ques'

tio n s o ne can nor .Hili; ; ;q; ",T:. :*; :' l,ilji"li :'":il:il."\Hlof course, the questions must be sertou ' 'ng. Each

encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mlxl

rerains irs own unity and open totality, ou, iir"t are mutually enriched'

As concerns my own evaluation "t O'*Ott,, for tn.e

1:]-:l:O*"tt tt

our l i terary scholarship ' I th ink tn"y,o" qui te good in v iew of ot r r im-

mense pot"ntiul' ilti^tr unly scholaivlin*l'igutory boldness' and

without this we cannot rise ro the heights or descend to the depths'