Caryl Emerson

Boris Godunov : transpositions of a Russian theme

The tale of Boris Godunov - tsar, usurper, tsarecide - dating from the early seventeenth-century Time of Troubles, inspired three major nineteenth-century Russian cultural expressions: in history by Nikolai Karamzin, in drama by Alexander Pushkin, and in opera by Modest Musorgsky. Each of these famous creations was a vehicle for generic innovation, in which a specifically Russian concept of genre was asserted in opposition to the reigning European models: German historiography, French melodrama, and Italian opera. Within a Bakhtinian framework, Caryl Emerson explores these three versions of the Boris Tale, the context of their genesis, and their complex interrelationships.

The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin

THE JUXTAPOSITION of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is one of the most familiar and time-honored practices in Russian literary criticism. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Mikhail Bakhtin contributed to the great debate over these two novelists; he was a master at exploiting the polemical frameworks of his time, the better to speak his own unconventional word. To be sure, he left no monograph on Tolstoy comparable to the masterwork Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics (1929, 1963). There are only numerous scattered references, prefaces to two volumes of Tolstoys collected works, and several ideological constructs in which Tolstoy plays a crucial part. Despite this low profile, the Tolstoyversus-Dostoevsky opposition was exceptionally congenial to Bakhtin. In fact, his presentation of the dialogue, explicit and implicit, between these two great nineteenth-century writers can provide a fruitful organizing principle for understanding his work as a whole-both its power and its limitations. It tells us much about the two novelists as well.

The Rise of the Russian Novel: Carnivalization, Stylization, and Mockery of the West

Overturning the view of early Russian prose fiction as a pale imitation of European models, this discussion locates the origins of the Russian novel in 18th century indigenous writing. Tracing the novels development, it analyzes the prose of Fedor Emin, Mikhail Chulkov and Matvei Komarov.

New Words, New Epochs, Old Thoughts

When studying it, linguistics must collide with poetics, with the presence of everyday speech genres. Only three genres-the official report [doklad], the feuilleton, and the song-were in de facto use among the people, supplementing one another and at times overlapping each other in a strange way; popular mass songs appeared that developed and often simply repeated some thesis from a routine doklad. . . . From the very first years of the Revolution, the bureaucracy and the common people spoke different languages. One need only read around in the paragraphs of Pravda to see it: the purely informational language of an official communication, of a micro-doklad, swallowing up living human speech; then utopia swallowing up reality, grinding it to bits.... You look, and suddenly its no longer utopia that seems absurd, but rather some Karasik or Maldeev who is trying to summon people back to reality. Here we have not only different thoughts but different means of thinking, different languages.

The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays

Acknowledgments A Note on Translation Introduction Epic and Novel From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel Discourse in the Novel Glossary Index

Beyond the Cutting Edge: Bakhtin at 107

Book reviewed in this article Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd, (eds.), Bakhtin and Cultural Theory

Bakhtin after the boom: pro and contra

defended after the Second World War, and a trunk of manuscripts stretching over fifty years. Suddenly translations proliferated, intermediaries emerged to explain them, a biography was heroically pieced together and Bakhtin’s categories spread like wildfire through the academies of the world, encouraging literary critics and cultural theorists to rethink familiar terrain in terms of dialogue, carnival, chronotope. None of those concepts were completely new, nor were any of them especially precise. But to a much greater extent than the earlier booms in structuralism, deconstruction and poststructuralism, Bakhtin was accessible and palpable. Although his writing style could not be called elegant, it swarmed with living, moving consciousnesses. Bakhtin did resemble the structuralist thinkers in his love for overarching binaries, categorical generalizations, and the clever diagram, yet readers did not feel especially oppressed or depersonalized by these geometries. At times it even seemed that Bakhtin purposely set up a binary so that it would not stand, so that he could reveal both sides as equally, fatally deficient. His best arguments were made or broken not on abstract metaphysics but on bodies and voices. Most importantly, it was clear that Bakhtin had no interest in

Alexander A. Potebnja's psycholinguistic theory of literature : a metacritical inquiry

The work of Alexander A. Potebnja, a leading Ukrainian linguist of the nineteenth century, has significantly influenced modern literary criticism, particularly Russian formalism and structuralism. Potebnjas theory, known as potebnjanstvo (Potebnjanism), flourished in the Russian Empire and in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. It attracted scores of adherents and gave rise to an influential literary journal and a formal critical school at Kharkiv. Yet despite his remarkable achievements in linguistics and literary theory, Potebnjas work was officially renounced in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and in the West he remains virtually unknown. In his study, John Fizer carefully reconstructs Potebnjas theory of literature from the psycholinguistic formulations found in his works on language, mythology, and folklore. Elaborating Potebnjas concept of internal form, energeia, polysemy, and the semiosis of poetic discourse, Fizer develops the central tenets of Potebnjas theory with regard to their philosophical, psychological, and linguistic bases. Largely influenced by Kant and by Humboldts philosophy of language, Potebnja conceived of language and the verbal arts as coterminous phenomena. He identified the internal form with the etymon of the word, which he considered the preeminent locus in the structure of poetic art. He insisted on the dynamic role of the Self in poetic creation and perception but, unlike many of his contemporaries, he believed that the diachronic depth of the signifiers was ethnic and had measureable limits. According to Potebnja, this depth (or internal form) reveals itself as a semantically multivalent image that induces self-knowledge and transforms the primary data of consciousness into syntagmatic wholes. A great deal of Potebnjas theory shares similarities with the work of Benedetto Croce, Leo Spitzer, and Charles S. Pierce. It anticipated modern literary criticism, and, as the author convincingly argues, retains existential and epistemological cogency even today. Fizers volume offers the first thorough study of Potebnjas literary theory, and his insightful analysis restores Potebnja to his rightful place in the history of literary criticism.

Maneiras criativas de não gostar de Bakhtin: Lydia Ginzburg e Mikhail Gasparov

ABSTRACT This article contributes to our understanding of how Russians received Bakhtin’s concepts, primarily two influential Russian scholars critical of Bakhtin, each from a different perspective. The study of such criticisms is valuable, as it encourages us to re-examine our own sometimes complacent perceptions of Bakhtin’s theories. Mikhail Gasparov (1937-2005), an important classicist and preeminent scholar of verse, published virulent criticisms of Bakhtin between 1979 and 2004. His problem with Bakhtin was essentially methodological. Lydia Ginzburg (1902-1990), known for her Notes of a Blockade Person and for scholarship on the genres of diary, memoir, personal letter, and writer’s notebook, questioned the psychological presuppositions behind Bakhtin’s theories of sympathy and love. Ginzburg also had serious doubts about Bakhtin’s idea of the polyphonic novel, and his use of the opposition between the monological and the dialogical to characterize the novels of Tolstoi and Dostoevsky. A close examination of the positions of Bakhtin and Ginzburg on love reveals interesting parallels and differences. The article concludes with suggestions about how Gasparov’s and Ginsburg’s criticisms can help us read Bakhtin in creative ways. KEYWORDS: Reception; Criticism; Methodology; Love; Polyphonic Novel

Untranslatable Pushkin and the infectious stage (Boris Godunov and Eugene Onegin by American undergraduates)

In 2007 and again in 2012, Princeton University undergraduates brought to the stage in English two works by Alexander Pushkin (one play and one adapted novel in verse). Sergei Prokofiev provided incidental music for both in 1936, at two different Moscow theaters (Meyerholds company and Tairovs Moscow Chamber Theater). Neither production survived the rising tensions of the Terror in the arts and each was abandoned before opening night. This essay describes the recuperation of these Pushkin “Stalinist Jubilee” projects on an American campus by one of their co-managers, with special attention to the type of humanities education available through such performance activities. Eleven images and eight short video-clips are embedded in the discussion.