Life is good
Как вовремя меня дернуло пошариться по блогам!
Джозефина, ты рулишь!!!! *__________* Мои благодарность и восторг не знают границ!
Краткий забойный пересказ нескольких сотен страниц маразмаA brief summary of the history of Russian literary theory:
As with everything else in Russia’s history, literary theory started its long and winding road to becoming an independent, and thus also ‘real’, science much later here than in the rest of Europe. As with everything else in history, this is a story of scholarly men with long beards and their theories which resulted in or out of hard practical work, 90% out of which – because of a strange twist of fate – were called Alexander Nikolayevich. Sometime in the 18th century, while classicism and romanticism were fighting it off with each other out west, a young, poor country boy walked from Arkhangelsk by foot to Moscow in order to receive higher education. This kid’s name was not Alexander, but Mikhail – Mikhail Lomonosov. Lomonosov grew up to be what his friends but not family liked to call ‘a walking Russian university’ because he had his fingers in all scientific cookie yars of the time. Incidentally, the first Russian university in Moscow still bears his name to this day. Lomonosov wrote a book about ‘the three styles of Russian language’ which was pretty good for teaching his fellow Russians how to speak and write properly, but his work was not a real ‘literary theory’. This was because the change of epistemical systems had not yet taken place in history before Lomonosov died. Then it happened and instead of just one norm being considered to be ‘the norm’ there was a revelation in society that opened people’s eyes on the fact that the strict rules of classicism had been retarded and that romanticism – with its sharp interest toward the human personality and the individual’s freedom and all the mystical, magical ways this could be portrayed in literature – was really the way to go.
In the year 1800 something really awesome happened in Russia and after that people went crazy with romantic nationalism and the specifics of different national literatures for a whole century. The very, very old Russian epic novel “The Word of Igor’s Battle” was published for the first time and Russians were liked: ‘Wow! We have works of our own to draw inspiration from! Who needs France and ancient Greek epics anyway?’ [Since then academically oriented Russians have discussed whether or not this historical piece of fiction really is as ancient as the guys who discovered it claimed it to be for over two hundred years; the last word on this has yet to be said, but it is likely that yes, it really is THAT old.] After this everything went extremely fast – speaking in 19th century terms – and many men with long beards started to ponder on the idea of literature and how to best write a history of Russian literature. The problem of the terms ‘poetic’ and ‘rhetoric’ were obvious right from the start. ‘Poetic’ had been the term for science about poetry: about different kinds and styles and rhyme in general, whereas ‘rhetoric’ had been used in connection with prose. For the longest time prose suffered badly in Russian literary thought because romanticism refused to let go and allow for realisms to enter the scene, and everybody knows that romantics thought prose to be a ‘lower’ kind of literature, whereas poetry was the real stuff. Things looked pretty hopeless there for a while – with all this newfound and newborn love for everything ‘truly’ Russian in their hearts, and a burning wish to classify and study Russian literature, they didn’t know where to start. But things are, as is the general rule, always darkest right before the sunset. Eureka! Let’s not waste our time with all these old-fashioned poetic and rhetoric nonsense but let’s pay attention to the esthetic value of literature instead! The question on everybody’s lips was: ‘how is the idea of beauty portrayed in poetry and prose?’ And so it was decided and the men with the fluffy beards started writing books about this. The break from classicism had been finalized; now there was indeed no going back.
Merzlyakov wrote the first book on the history of Russian literature in 1811 and managed to fixate a whole bunch of names and information on authors that would’ve otherwise been lost to the cruelty of time. In 1814 Grech wrote a book about literature in which he explained that literature is a social phenomena, a product of the historical life of the nation [he didn’t know it back then, of course, but this idea of his was going to be everyone’s favorite in the 19th century]. Then Pushkin’s old schoolmate and future Decembrist Kyukhelbeker also decided to get a piece of the cake and wrote a book in which he – for the first time ever – stated that there are different directions in literature, and the success of literature depends on these directions. This was in 1824, the year before he stood up with the rest of the Decembrists against the tsar and was sent to Siberian exile for speaking his mind. Classic Russian move – get rid of the smart, free-thinking people…
It might have seemed like everything was fixed for literary science now, but – alas! – this was not the case because by the 1830’s it became obvious that the esthetic values praised before proved helpless when it came to dealing with works of literature that were not made according to the standard. The esthetic values were fixed and thus incapable of adapting to the new Russian literature with people like Pushkin, Gogol and Lermontov spinning their pens in new, unexpected directions. Thus Koshansky decided that there was a need for a ‘university-based science’ when it came to literature that would study not just simply ‘beauty’ but originality in literature. At the university many new, progressive ideas on originality flowed freely – Polevoy wrote about ‘the fight between directions in literature’ [Marxists will thank him for this a century later], thus shedding the first light on the idea of a ‘historical aspect’ when studying literature, and Kireevsky wrote a couple of works that later become the foundation for historical poetics.
Then it was time for Belinsky to enter the stage with his critical articles on literature. Belinsky was born in Finland, and grew up in a small town and later moved to the capital to receive higher education and lived a short life in outright poverty in Russia while he wrote his endless critical essays on Russian literature and made literature a communicative scene in Russia. Early in his short but fruitful career Belinsky argued that literature is only literature if it serves NO OTHER PURPOSE but literary ones; thus he considered Griboedov’s “Woe from Wit” to not be literature at all since its purpose was to make fun of current society. Later he changed his views a little bit and stopped being so categorical. Yet even when he was trying to not be categorical his friends still called him ‘furious Vissarion’ because of his outrageous manners in public. Belinsky divided writers in two groups: ‘geniuses’ and ‘talents’. The genius catches the ideas and feelings that are ‘in the air of the time’, but it’s the talent that brings them to the broad masses. The genius writes literature [in the highest sense of the word], whereas the talent writes just normal books that people can read and even like. Belinsky was sick for most of the 1840s but it didn’t stop him from noticing that the young Dostoevsky was a genius, but then he realized – after reading “The Double” – that Dostoevsky was such a genius that this book made no sense and could probably only be understood about a hundred years later. Belinsky was right. Belinsky didn’t live to see a large part of the most talented young men in Russia’s capital sent to Siberia for trying to speak their minds on the issue of slavery in 1849 – he died in 1847.
In the 1850’s everyone in Europe were in love with nationalism and with the nation [their nation, that is] and decided to do what they had never done before – to gather different kinds of folklore: mainly fairytales and myths. So the Mythological School in literary theory was born in Europe. Suddenly people everywhere realized how everything in life and society was connected with each other. And so this was something that must be studied, and did they study in the middle of the 19th century! Oh boy! Everyone and their mom went around collecting folk literature and trying to find out which country had been first with which stories. This turned out to be more difficult a task then they had first imagined. In Russia the men with the curly beards were also on the train, but everything was – as is the general Russian rule – not as easy for them as for the rest of Europe. The Russians asked themselves – like they had done before and would always come to continue to do – how Russia was to progress further? Some said that Russia should try to keep up with Europe, that Europe’s the way to go, that Russia’s is after all a part of Europe, but all behind and must change everything to become more European and not so retarded and left behind. They called themselves ‘Westerners’. But there was another group of intellectual Russians that argued that this was nonsense, that Russia is not a part of Europe at all, Russia is her own country with her own road and we don’t need Europe to tell us what to do. This group called themselves ‘Slavophiles’. They continued to argue with each other until the revolution of 1917 put an end to such ‘frivolous behavior’ [‘because now it is clear that the way of the world is the way of Russia and the way of Russia is to the bright future of communism’]. The brothers Grimm in Germany founded the Mythological School once and for all, claiming that all myths have a divine source and that folklore is the product of the nation’s collective artistic efforts. This idea caught on in Russia very fast.
Buslaev stated that the source for myths is language, and that in the word one can find everything one needs to know about the people which uses this word. But, alas!, with time the people forgets the ‘real’ meaning of the words as they become usual and not so connected with mythological tradition. Orest Miller brought the mythological method even further by saying that one can learn things about the people by studying their myths even if these myths are also present in other nations and peoples, because ‘Russian myths carry information about Russian reality’. Later Miller corrected his views, but he never accepted the theory of ‘borrowing myths between peoples’ since he still wanted to believe that the Russian myths were just that – completely and only Russian. Also belonging to the mythological school of literary theory was Alexander Nikolayevich [the first of many ‘Alexanders Nikolayevichs’] Afanas’ev who listened to Buslaev’s lectures at the university and then got a job in a state archive where he could gather folklore. He collected different kinds of folklore in a three volume book and also interpreted them in his own very special style. Afanas’ev wanted to know where myths came from and that’s what he was focused on. He came to find that myths are tightly connected with the evolution of language. Later Afanas’ev reached the conclusion that all myths come from the ancient Aric people [!]. He said that the only way to study myths is to compare them with the myths of other people and times. He lived a short but difficult life and got his first bestseller the year before his death – he published Russian fairytales for children. Before Afanas’ev it wasn’t considered ‘cool’ to study fairytales in Russia, but after his death most people concluded that it was alright.
At the same time in France a French guy who also had a beard said that one must search for the objective reasons for why literature ‘occurs’. He said that literary theory must be like all other ‘real’ sciences and thus he introduced positivism in literary theory. The search for the source could then begin. In literature he saw only the society which had ‘given birth’ to it. The school he founded was – no big surprise – called The Cultural-historical School because he paid attention to just that: culture and history. He didn’t real care much for what was in the books, and that made many writers of the time pretty angry with him since he studied ‘second and third rate books’ but he said that was the correct thing to do because often the best books have very little of ‘society’ in them. In Russia Pypin embraced these ideas and brought the Cultural-historical School into the Russian university. Pypin was interested only in the historical meanings of literature and didn’t care for ‘pure art’ or esthetical pleasure at all. In Moscow University the professor Tikhonravov greeted Pypin’s idea with open arms and started to study literature from the point of view of how the cultural and historical life of the people was portrayed in it. Tikhonravov was so impressed with positivism that he studied huge amounts of literature before he drew any conclusion and this impressed both his students and other professors so much that the new school soon became very popular. Close to these men with extensive beards was Dmitry Ovsyanko-Kulokovsky [funniest name in Russian literary history] who had studied under Potebnya in Kharkov and came up with his own concept: the Social-psychological Concept. His foundation was the teachings of Potebnya about how everyday thoughts are tightly connected with artistic thoughts. He also has many other original ideas and in general he did a lot of good for the science. His main work was “The History of Russian Intellectuals” (1906-1911) in which he studied types of Russian intellectuals as portrayed in Russian literature. He said that in literature there are only two things: either experience or observance. All characters in literature come either from the writer’s experience or from his/hers observance.
Now that the men with wavy beards had come to the conclusion that not only is the people’s art important to literature, but things as history, society and psychology too, it was time for a new school to arrive on the scene – the Comparative-historical School. It was later to give birth to Comparativism in the 20th century, but during the 19th century it was only just getting started. The two most important figures in this school were Alexander Nikolaevich [told you so!] Veselovsky and his younger brother Alexey Veselovsky. Alexey did not become as famous as his older brother, but he did a lot for studying the influence of foreign literature on Russian literature. For this he was also widely criticized because Russians never want to hear that they’re not first with something. His big brother Alexander knew many, many languages and studied literature in direct connection with life of the society in which it had been written. He compared everything with everyone and their mom. He wasn’t too much into the idea of ‘borrowings’ between peoples, he insisted that people are very much the same everywhere on this planet of ours and that’s why most myths are the same on Iceland and in India. Alexander also did another great thing – he further developed the idea of ‘historical poetics’, and formed clear rules for the studying of different kinds of literary forms and how they’ve evolved over time. He also said that literary science should compare, compare and once again compare –comparing is the job of our science. Not enough comparing always lead to poor results. Alexander survived his time and is still the man in most literary theory circles.
At the same time in Ukraine there was a man with a short beard called Potebnya. Potebnya wasn’t aware of it at the time, but he would become a legend because he came up with many interesting and original ideas. His most famous idea is the one about ‘the inner form’ of the word. According to Potebnya, every word consists of three parts: the outer part (sound), the inner form (the etymological meaning) and the normal connotation of the word. The inner form is the most interesting, because by figuring it out we will learn how this word was created and what it meant to begin with. In the beginning, Potebnya argued, everything was simple and people were aware of the inner form of the words. Then time came along and people forgot about the inner form of the word. Yet the inner form is what gives birth to literature, and poetry especially. Potebnya stated that language is art and as such it is the source for poetry and science. Potebnya also had another idea – that people can never really understand each other. Everybody, he said, have different life experience and view everything differently and thus we can never really understand how something we say will be heard by other and we can never know what people really mean when they talk to us. This was the main point of his psycholical interpretation of literature. Then Potebnya died back in Ukraine and everyone with a beard started to discuss his ideas everywhere in Russia. Potebnya’s students published a journal in which they evolved the ideas of their teacher and everyone since then is still trying to find the ‘inner form’ in words up until this day. The Symbolists, like Andrei Bely, saw in Potebnya a friend and an ally, who had also spoken about the ‘magic of the word’ even though Potebnya had never uttered as much as a word in that direction. Also the Futurists used Potebnya’s ideas when they created their ‘new’ language, containing ‘more Russian than all of Pushkin’s poetry’. Bakhtin said Potebnya had got it all wrong because of course one cannot stare only on the inner form of the words when studying literature – what about the story, what about the characters, what about everything else? Bakhtin didn’t like Potebnya, even though he respected him greatly for starting such a productive discussion. Bakhtin was, as we all know, all about the dialogue. And with Potebnya he could indeed have a productive dialogue. It could be argued that all of Potebnya’s ideas were misinterpreted by everyone else since Potebnya’s major thought was that nobody can ever understand anybody else. And yet Potebnya’s ideas were and still are very popular. If they’re understood – now that’s a whole other chapter!
After such an interesting century it was high time for the 20th century to arrive, which for Russian literary theory this meant enormous changes in many different ways. It marked the return of the Mythological School with a little help from such symbolism theoretics like Vyacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Bely. They realized what was to come out of the 20th century while the rest of society felt like they were expecting the Doom’s Day any day now – the return of the myth. The symbolists said the symbol and the myth are one and the same and with this they felt pretty content with themselves. Then came the October Revolution of 1917 and everything changed again. Now people began to believe in a bright new day to be just around the corner and they started to build a new society. While building this new society it was soon obvious that such a new society demanded a new kind of human being and that was the biggest challenge of them all. Some people said ‘screw this, I’m heading for Europe’ and left the bright new Soviet Union. Other people wanted to hang on in there, but Lenin told them not to bother and sent the smartest people away on a boat since they would just have been bothering him with their higher education and smart ideas had they been allowed to stay. In all of this new things took place in literary theory. The Formalist School said ‘no more trying to figure out if Pushkin was a smoker or not because seriously that has nothing to do with his art’ and paid all their attention to the form of literary works. The Georgian academic Marr decided to quote Marx, Lenin and Engel in all of his articles on his new linguistic theory called ‘Yafetology’ which stated that languages had occurred as a result of class struggle. Franz-Kamenetsky studied the Bible in the Soviet Union in a brand new way and said, among many other things, that Jeremiah had been for the party and that his work as a prophet had also been an act of class struggle. Everything in the Bible was mythical, he said, Jesus and God are also mythological characters, and that was that.
Marr with his pseudo-science and Franz-Kamenetsky with his constant Bible bashing had a female friend – and enter the first literary theory worker without a beard! It was a true sensation! Her name was Olga Mikhailovna Freudenberg and she studied ancient Greek literature. Her theories were clear on many points: there is no genesis at all for literature, everything moves from facts into factors and then from factors into facts and start all over again. And literary process is a process of destroying the myth. She also said that the metaphor arrives in language when there is no difference between the myth and the words. At about the same time another very popular school in Russian literary theory was Psychoanalysis. It was popular around the whole world at this time – the beginning of the 20th century and some people still cling on to it to this very day. It was based on the theory of Freud. Freud said that people have a part of themselves about which they are not aware – this he called the ‘unconscious. There one can find all the things that people – because of society and culture and what not – are not allowed to show in everyday life. In the unconscious lay all of those things about which we rather not talk or confess to. Art, said Freud, is the result of sublimation – a defense reaction to all of the things hidden in the unconscious. Sublimation leads people with much trouble on their mind, of which they don’t like to talk, to do things like paint paintings, write books or do scientific research. This they do because society says these things are ‘okay’. Thus, according to Freud, art is always the result of mental disturbance, and the job for literary theory is to study prose and poetry in order to figure out exactly what the writer was trying to cover up for. Freud wrote in his very famous book “Dostoevsky and Parricide” that Dusty’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov” is the sole result of Dusty wanting to kill his father and marry his mother and also being afraid of being castrated and suffering from bisexuality. In Russia everybody loved Freud right away and Ermakov, for example, started the Psychoanalytical Institute in Russia and dedicated himself to finding out all of Pushkin’s hidden mental problems. Freud’s former student and close friend Carl Gustav Jung said: ‘This is madness!’ and was forced to come up with a theory of his own to counter Freud’s. Thus Jung stated that there is a collective subconscious, and that it is the same in all people, and because of it we all have the same archetypes. Literature is built on archetypes and so are myths and that’s why we in literature can find not only myths but also different archetypes. Jung was pretty mad at Freud because his theory made all artists mentally diseased and so he wanted to find another way to use psycholical theories that weren’t so off the wall. Because he still thought everything could be explained psychologically.
Это великолепно. Это - понятно!
Почему все эти Потебни-Лосевы не могли вот так нормально написать, что они имеют в виду?..
*Воздвигает алтарь для поклонения гению Джозефиночки*
Джозефина, ты рулишь!!!! *__________* Мои благодарность и восторг не знают границ!
Краткий забойный пересказ нескольких сотен страниц маразмаA brief summary of the history of Russian literary theory:
As with everything else in Russia’s history, literary theory started its long and winding road to becoming an independent, and thus also ‘real’, science much later here than in the rest of Europe. As with everything else in history, this is a story of scholarly men with long beards and their theories which resulted in or out of hard practical work, 90% out of which – because of a strange twist of fate – were called Alexander Nikolayevich. Sometime in the 18th century, while classicism and romanticism were fighting it off with each other out west, a young, poor country boy walked from Arkhangelsk by foot to Moscow in order to receive higher education. This kid’s name was not Alexander, but Mikhail – Mikhail Lomonosov. Lomonosov grew up to be what his friends but not family liked to call ‘a walking Russian university’ because he had his fingers in all scientific cookie yars of the time. Incidentally, the first Russian university in Moscow still bears his name to this day. Lomonosov wrote a book about ‘the three styles of Russian language’ which was pretty good for teaching his fellow Russians how to speak and write properly, but his work was not a real ‘literary theory’. This was because the change of epistemical systems had not yet taken place in history before Lomonosov died. Then it happened and instead of just one norm being considered to be ‘the norm’ there was a revelation in society that opened people’s eyes on the fact that the strict rules of classicism had been retarded and that romanticism – with its sharp interest toward the human personality and the individual’s freedom and all the mystical, magical ways this could be portrayed in literature – was really the way to go.
In the year 1800 something really awesome happened in Russia and after that people went crazy with romantic nationalism and the specifics of different national literatures for a whole century. The very, very old Russian epic novel “The Word of Igor’s Battle” was published for the first time and Russians were liked: ‘Wow! We have works of our own to draw inspiration from! Who needs France and ancient Greek epics anyway?’ [Since then academically oriented Russians have discussed whether or not this historical piece of fiction really is as ancient as the guys who discovered it claimed it to be for over two hundred years; the last word on this has yet to be said, but it is likely that yes, it really is THAT old.] After this everything went extremely fast – speaking in 19th century terms – and many men with long beards started to ponder on the idea of literature and how to best write a history of Russian literature. The problem of the terms ‘poetic’ and ‘rhetoric’ were obvious right from the start. ‘Poetic’ had been the term for science about poetry: about different kinds and styles and rhyme in general, whereas ‘rhetoric’ had been used in connection with prose. For the longest time prose suffered badly in Russian literary thought because romanticism refused to let go and allow for realisms to enter the scene, and everybody knows that romantics thought prose to be a ‘lower’ kind of literature, whereas poetry was the real stuff. Things looked pretty hopeless there for a while – with all this newfound and newborn love for everything ‘truly’ Russian in their hearts, and a burning wish to classify and study Russian literature, they didn’t know where to start. But things are, as is the general rule, always darkest right before the sunset. Eureka! Let’s not waste our time with all these old-fashioned poetic and rhetoric nonsense but let’s pay attention to the esthetic value of literature instead! The question on everybody’s lips was: ‘how is the idea of beauty portrayed in poetry and prose?’ And so it was decided and the men with the fluffy beards started writing books about this. The break from classicism had been finalized; now there was indeed no going back.
Merzlyakov wrote the first book on the history of Russian literature in 1811 and managed to fixate a whole bunch of names and information on authors that would’ve otherwise been lost to the cruelty of time. In 1814 Grech wrote a book about literature in which he explained that literature is a social phenomena, a product of the historical life of the nation [he didn’t know it back then, of course, but this idea of his was going to be everyone’s favorite in the 19th century]. Then Pushkin’s old schoolmate and future Decembrist Kyukhelbeker also decided to get a piece of the cake and wrote a book in which he – for the first time ever – stated that there are different directions in literature, and the success of literature depends on these directions. This was in 1824, the year before he stood up with the rest of the Decembrists against the tsar and was sent to Siberian exile for speaking his mind. Classic Russian move – get rid of the smart, free-thinking people…
It might have seemed like everything was fixed for literary science now, but – alas! – this was not the case because by the 1830’s it became obvious that the esthetic values praised before proved helpless when it came to dealing with works of literature that were not made according to the standard. The esthetic values were fixed and thus incapable of adapting to the new Russian literature with people like Pushkin, Gogol and Lermontov spinning their pens in new, unexpected directions. Thus Koshansky decided that there was a need for a ‘university-based science’ when it came to literature that would study not just simply ‘beauty’ but originality in literature. At the university many new, progressive ideas on originality flowed freely – Polevoy wrote about ‘the fight between directions in literature’ [Marxists will thank him for this a century later], thus shedding the first light on the idea of a ‘historical aspect’ when studying literature, and Kireevsky wrote a couple of works that later become the foundation for historical poetics.
Then it was time for Belinsky to enter the stage with his critical articles on literature. Belinsky was born in Finland, and grew up in a small town and later moved to the capital to receive higher education and lived a short life in outright poverty in Russia while he wrote his endless critical essays on Russian literature and made literature a communicative scene in Russia. Early in his short but fruitful career Belinsky argued that literature is only literature if it serves NO OTHER PURPOSE but literary ones; thus he considered Griboedov’s “Woe from Wit” to not be literature at all since its purpose was to make fun of current society. Later he changed his views a little bit and stopped being so categorical. Yet even when he was trying to not be categorical his friends still called him ‘furious Vissarion’ because of his outrageous manners in public. Belinsky divided writers in two groups: ‘geniuses’ and ‘talents’. The genius catches the ideas and feelings that are ‘in the air of the time’, but it’s the talent that brings them to the broad masses. The genius writes literature [in the highest sense of the word], whereas the talent writes just normal books that people can read and even like. Belinsky was sick for most of the 1840s but it didn’t stop him from noticing that the young Dostoevsky was a genius, but then he realized – after reading “The Double” – that Dostoevsky was such a genius that this book made no sense and could probably only be understood about a hundred years later. Belinsky was right. Belinsky didn’t live to see a large part of the most talented young men in Russia’s capital sent to Siberia for trying to speak their minds on the issue of slavery in 1849 – he died in 1847.
In the 1850’s everyone in Europe were in love with nationalism and with the nation [their nation, that is] and decided to do what they had never done before – to gather different kinds of folklore: mainly fairytales and myths. So the Mythological School in literary theory was born in Europe. Suddenly people everywhere realized how everything in life and society was connected with each other. And so this was something that must be studied, and did they study in the middle of the 19th century! Oh boy! Everyone and their mom went around collecting folk literature and trying to find out which country had been first with which stories. This turned out to be more difficult a task then they had first imagined. In Russia the men with the curly beards were also on the train, but everything was – as is the general Russian rule – not as easy for them as for the rest of Europe. The Russians asked themselves – like they had done before and would always come to continue to do – how Russia was to progress further? Some said that Russia should try to keep up with Europe, that Europe’s the way to go, that Russia’s is after all a part of Europe, but all behind and must change everything to become more European and not so retarded and left behind. They called themselves ‘Westerners’. But there was another group of intellectual Russians that argued that this was nonsense, that Russia is not a part of Europe at all, Russia is her own country with her own road and we don’t need Europe to tell us what to do. This group called themselves ‘Slavophiles’. They continued to argue with each other until the revolution of 1917 put an end to such ‘frivolous behavior’ [‘because now it is clear that the way of the world is the way of Russia and the way of Russia is to the bright future of communism’]. The brothers Grimm in Germany founded the Mythological School once and for all, claiming that all myths have a divine source and that folklore is the product of the nation’s collective artistic efforts. This idea caught on in Russia very fast.
Buslaev stated that the source for myths is language, and that in the word one can find everything one needs to know about the people which uses this word. But, alas!, with time the people forgets the ‘real’ meaning of the words as they become usual and not so connected with mythological tradition. Orest Miller brought the mythological method even further by saying that one can learn things about the people by studying their myths even if these myths are also present in other nations and peoples, because ‘Russian myths carry information about Russian reality’. Later Miller corrected his views, but he never accepted the theory of ‘borrowing myths between peoples’ since he still wanted to believe that the Russian myths were just that – completely and only Russian. Also belonging to the mythological school of literary theory was Alexander Nikolayevich [the first of many ‘Alexanders Nikolayevichs’] Afanas’ev who listened to Buslaev’s lectures at the university and then got a job in a state archive where he could gather folklore. He collected different kinds of folklore in a three volume book and also interpreted them in his own very special style. Afanas’ev wanted to know where myths came from and that’s what he was focused on. He came to find that myths are tightly connected with the evolution of language. Later Afanas’ev reached the conclusion that all myths come from the ancient Aric people [!]. He said that the only way to study myths is to compare them with the myths of other people and times. He lived a short but difficult life and got his first bestseller the year before his death – he published Russian fairytales for children. Before Afanas’ev it wasn’t considered ‘cool’ to study fairytales in Russia, but after his death most people concluded that it was alright.
At the same time in France a French guy who also had a beard said that one must search for the objective reasons for why literature ‘occurs’. He said that literary theory must be like all other ‘real’ sciences and thus he introduced positivism in literary theory. The search for the source could then begin. In literature he saw only the society which had ‘given birth’ to it. The school he founded was – no big surprise – called The Cultural-historical School because he paid attention to just that: culture and history. He didn’t real care much for what was in the books, and that made many writers of the time pretty angry with him since he studied ‘second and third rate books’ but he said that was the correct thing to do because often the best books have very little of ‘society’ in them. In Russia Pypin embraced these ideas and brought the Cultural-historical School into the Russian university. Pypin was interested only in the historical meanings of literature and didn’t care for ‘pure art’ or esthetical pleasure at all. In Moscow University the professor Tikhonravov greeted Pypin’s idea with open arms and started to study literature from the point of view of how the cultural and historical life of the people was portrayed in it. Tikhonravov was so impressed with positivism that he studied huge amounts of literature before he drew any conclusion and this impressed both his students and other professors so much that the new school soon became very popular. Close to these men with extensive beards was Dmitry Ovsyanko-Kulokovsky [funniest name in Russian literary history] who had studied under Potebnya in Kharkov and came up with his own concept: the Social-psychological Concept. His foundation was the teachings of Potebnya about how everyday thoughts are tightly connected with artistic thoughts. He also has many other original ideas and in general he did a lot of good for the science. His main work was “The History of Russian Intellectuals” (1906-1911) in which he studied types of Russian intellectuals as portrayed in Russian literature. He said that in literature there are only two things: either experience or observance. All characters in literature come either from the writer’s experience or from his/hers observance.
Now that the men with wavy beards had come to the conclusion that not only is the people’s art important to literature, but things as history, society and psychology too, it was time for a new school to arrive on the scene – the Comparative-historical School. It was later to give birth to Comparativism in the 20th century, but during the 19th century it was only just getting started. The two most important figures in this school were Alexander Nikolaevich [told you so!] Veselovsky and his younger brother Alexey Veselovsky. Alexey did not become as famous as his older brother, but he did a lot for studying the influence of foreign literature on Russian literature. For this he was also widely criticized because Russians never want to hear that they’re not first with something. His big brother Alexander knew many, many languages and studied literature in direct connection with life of the society in which it had been written. He compared everything with everyone and their mom. He wasn’t too much into the idea of ‘borrowings’ between peoples, he insisted that people are very much the same everywhere on this planet of ours and that’s why most myths are the same on Iceland and in India. Alexander also did another great thing – he further developed the idea of ‘historical poetics’, and formed clear rules for the studying of different kinds of literary forms and how they’ve evolved over time. He also said that literary science should compare, compare and once again compare –comparing is the job of our science. Not enough comparing always lead to poor results. Alexander survived his time and is still the man in most literary theory circles.
At the same time in Ukraine there was a man with a short beard called Potebnya. Potebnya wasn’t aware of it at the time, but he would become a legend because he came up with many interesting and original ideas. His most famous idea is the one about ‘the inner form’ of the word. According to Potebnya, every word consists of three parts: the outer part (sound), the inner form (the etymological meaning) and the normal connotation of the word. The inner form is the most interesting, because by figuring it out we will learn how this word was created and what it meant to begin with. In the beginning, Potebnya argued, everything was simple and people were aware of the inner form of the words. Then time came along and people forgot about the inner form of the word. Yet the inner form is what gives birth to literature, and poetry especially. Potebnya stated that language is art and as such it is the source for poetry and science. Potebnya also had another idea – that people can never really understand each other. Everybody, he said, have different life experience and view everything differently and thus we can never really understand how something we say will be heard by other and we can never know what people really mean when they talk to us. This was the main point of his psycholical interpretation of literature. Then Potebnya died back in Ukraine and everyone with a beard started to discuss his ideas everywhere in Russia. Potebnya’s students published a journal in which they evolved the ideas of their teacher and everyone since then is still trying to find the ‘inner form’ in words up until this day. The Symbolists, like Andrei Bely, saw in Potebnya a friend and an ally, who had also spoken about the ‘magic of the word’ even though Potebnya had never uttered as much as a word in that direction. Also the Futurists used Potebnya’s ideas when they created their ‘new’ language, containing ‘more Russian than all of Pushkin’s poetry’. Bakhtin said Potebnya had got it all wrong because of course one cannot stare only on the inner form of the words when studying literature – what about the story, what about the characters, what about everything else? Bakhtin didn’t like Potebnya, even though he respected him greatly for starting such a productive discussion. Bakhtin was, as we all know, all about the dialogue. And with Potebnya he could indeed have a productive dialogue. It could be argued that all of Potebnya’s ideas were misinterpreted by everyone else since Potebnya’s major thought was that nobody can ever understand anybody else. And yet Potebnya’s ideas were and still are very popular. If they’re understood – now that’s a whole other chapter!
After such an interesting century it was high time for the 20th century to arrive, which for Russian literary theory this meant enormous changes in many different ways. It marked the return of the Mythological School with a little help from such symbolism theoretics like Vyacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Bely. They realized what was to come out of the 20th century while the rest of society felt like they were expecting the Doom’s Day any day now – the return of the myth. The symbolists said the symbol and the myth are one and the same and with this they felt pretty content with themselves. Then came the October Revolution of 1917 and everything changed again. Now people began to believe in a bright new day to be just around the corner and they started to build a new society. While building this new society it was soon obvious that such a new society demanded a new kind of human being and that was the biggest challenge of them all. Some people said ‘screw this, I’m heading for Europe’ and left the bright new Soviet Union. Other people wanted to hang on in there, but Lenin told them not to bother and sent the smartest people away on a boat since they would just have been bothering him with their higher education and smart ideas had they been allowed to stay. In all of this new things took place in literary theory. The Formalist School said ‘no more trying to figure out if Pushkin was a smoker or not because seriously that has nothing to do with his art’ and paid all their attention to the form of literary works. The Georgian academic Marr decided to quote Marx, Lenin and Engel in all of his articles on his new linguistic theory called ‘Yafetology’ which stated that languages had occurred as a result of class struggle. Franz-Kamenetsky studied the Bible in the Soviet Union in a brand new way and said, among many other things, that Jeremiah had been for the party and that his work as a prophet had also been an act of class struggle. Everything in the Bible was mythical, he said, Jesus and God are also mythological characters, and that was that.
Marr with his pseudo-science and Franz-Kamenetsky with his constant Bible bashing had a female friend – and enter the first literary theory worker without a beard! It was a true sensation! Her name was Olga Mikhailovna Freudenberg and she studied ancient Greek literature. Her theories were clear on many points: there is no genesis at all for literature, everything moves from facts into factors and then from factors into facts and start all over again. And literary process is a process of destroying the myth. She also said that the metaphor arrives in language when there is no difference between the myth and the words. At about the same time another very popular school in Russian literary theory was Psychoanalysis. It was popular around the whole world at this time – the beginning of the 20th century and some people still cling on to it to this very day. It was based on the theory of Freud. Freud said that people have a part of themselves about which they are not aware – this he called the ‘unconscious. There one can find all the things that people – because of society and culture and what not – are not allowed to show in everyday life. In the unconscious lay all of those things about which we rather not talk or confess to. Art, said Freud, is the result of sublimation – a defense reaction to all of the things hidden in the unconscious. Sublimation leads people with much trouble on their mind, of which they don’t like to talk, to do things like paint paintings, write books or do scientific research. This they do because society says these things are ‘okay’. Thus, according to Freud, art is always the result of mental disturbance, and the job for literary theory is to study prose and poetry in order to figure out exactly what the writer was trying to cover up for. Freud wrote in his very famous book “Dostoevsky and Parricide” that Dusty’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov” is the sole result of Dusty wanting to kill his father and marry his mother and also being afraid of being castrated and suffering from bisexuality. In Russia everybody loved Freud right away and Ermakov, for example, started the Psychoanalytical Institute in Russia and dedicated himself to finding out all of Pushkin’s hidden mental problems. Freud’s former student and close friend Carl Gustav Jung said: ‘This is madness!’ and was forced to come up with a theory of his own to counter Freud’s. Thus Jung stated that there is a collective subconscious, and that it is the same in all people, and because of it we all have the same archetypes. Literature is built on archetypes and so are myths and that’s why we in literature can find not only myths but also different archetypes. Jung was pretty mad at Freud because his theory made all artists mentally diseased and so he wanted to find another way to use psycholical theories that weren’t so off the wall. Because he still thought everything could be explained psychologically.
Копирайты, копирайты, Джозефинины копирайты.
Это великолепно. Это - понятно!
Почему все эти Потебни-Лосевы не могли вот так нормально написать, что они имеют в виду?..
*Воздвигает алтарь для поклонения гению Джозефиночки*
@темы: ахтунг, sono pazzo, sono scemo, литературоведение, Джозефина
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14.06.2009 в 22:55Дайте, я хочу посмотреть на этого святого человека!