With love…

A festschrift, a collection in honor of someone, reflects the respect and gratitude of its authors to a colleague, friend, ally, and therefore, by definition, is always “a collection of motley chapters.” The purpose of such a book as a whole is its very existence; If the Festschrift is also interesting to read not only for its participants and recipients, then this is already an event and a special success. One such book will be discussed.

The collection “Con amore” (M., O.G.I., 2010) was published as a birthday gift (for the 60th birthday) of Lyubov Nikolaevna Kiseleva, head of the department of Russian literature in Tartu - exactly the same department that was once headed by Yu.M. Lotman. Published efficiently and truly with love. Its authors are comrades, colleagues, students and admirers of L.N., the core of which can be conditionally called the circle of the Ruthenia project - most of them are well-known philologists, but young scientists are also represented.

And the readers of this truly interesting book are not necessarily philologists, but in general people who have not lost interest in Russian classical culture. More precisely, those who are accustomed to reading classics and about them, just as they get used to their environment. It would be typical for Lyubov Nikolaevna’s peers, and even mine, when they came to visit, to ask “where is Baratynsky?”, and not “do you have Baratynsky?” There were no professional philologists or book “collectors” in my family, but when I finally managed to move the books of my late parents into my apartment, my husband and I ended up with five complete works of Pushkin...

L. N. Kiseleva was born in Tartu and entered TSU in 1967. The fate of the Department of Russian Literature at the University of Tartu is also Kiseleva’s personal fate, starting in 1970, when while still a student L. N. became a laboratory assistant at Lotman’s department. Subsequently, L.N. headed this department, preserving for us the atmosphere of the famous “Department of Lotman and Mints.”

With Lotman, Lyubov Nikolaevna wrote her diploma and candidate’s thesis, very early on feeling for “her” heroes and developing research angles that were interesting to her. As R. Leibov and A. Nemzer noted in the introductory essay “Heiress - Mentor”, in the history of culture L.N. was attracted not by breaks and leaps, but by whimsical and difficult-to-grasp connections - both in a synchronous section and in diachrony. A special place among L.N.’s works is occupied by Zhukovsky, the central figure of her scientific world. Dorpat Zhukovsky is a city where the poet was looking for a place for himself near “someone else’s happiness,” where Masha Protasova lived, died and was buried.

Next, I will mention only two articles from the book under discussion, choosing those that I think will be of interest to many.

M. B. Plyukhanova, a famous researcher of Russian culture, author of many articles and the book “Plots and Symbols of the Moscow Kingdom” (St. Petersburg, 1995), published a letter from her father Boris Vladimirovich Plyukhanov (1911-1993) to B. L. Pasternak, a response letter poet, as well as correspondence between B.V. Plyukhanov and O.V. Ivinskaya. The letters are accompanied by memoirs by Boris Vladimirovich. The publication is preceded by a short story by M. B. Plyukhanova about her father; There is also a photo of him.

One and a half pages is enough to think about how little and selectively we know about the history of our culture of the twentieth century, a special type of which, undoubtedly, was the Baltic, or Riga, culture: “B. V. was neither a writer, nor a publisher, nor a collector, but, having grown into the soil of Riga, he turned out to be a kind of pillar to which materials of Russian culture flocked.” Let me note: they didn’t just flock. The book is known: Plyukhanov B.V. RSHD in Latvia and Estonia: Materials on the history of the Russian Student Christian Movement (Paris: Imka-Press, 1993). Back in the 30s, Mother Maria gave B.V. Plyukhanov a notebook of her unpublished poems.

L. N. Kiseleva was the last publisher and publisher of B. V. Plyukhanov. His archive is kept in Rome, at the Roman Archives of Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Masha Plyukhanova, whom we once knew as a student of Yu. M. Lotman and a specialist in Russian culture of the 17th century, has been living in Rome and Perugia for twenty years.

And I would like to draw your attention to one more article: this is the work of D. Khitrova and Y. Tsivyan “Illustration as a commentary - “The Queen of Spades” by Alexander Benois.”

The first sentence of the article is: “Tynyanov was against illustrations.” Let me note that this was said by Tynyanov in 1923 - at a time when the library shelves were still full of books illustrated by the “Mir Iskusstiki”, and at the same time the famous Academia publications began to appear, including those with stamps by Lyubarsky and engravings by Favorsky. The positions that are opposed on the pages of this article are broader than the correspondence “dispute” between Benoit and Tynyanov.

It is a pity that the nature of the publication did not allow all 17 of Benoit’s illustrations to be presented in a larger format - one has to guess a lot. But basically it is possible to understand a very subtle and often unexpected analysis of illustrations, so reading the article by Khitrova and Tsivyan is a rare pleasure. Because the topic of conversation, of course, is much broader than a discussion of the possibility of illustrating this particular text or interpretation of the given pictures.

And at the end of this article, before the bibliography, it is also printed: “To be continued”...

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We join in the congratulations and wish Lyubov Nikolaevna Kiseleva joy, hope and new discoveries.