Galina Zykova. Circle formula

Circle formula
Galina Zykova

Publication date: April 28, 2000

Collection of articles for the anniversary of Professor O.G. Revzina. M., House-Museum of Marina Tsvetaeva. 1999 (circulation not specified; book purchased at the Russian Language Institute).

The book was compiled by the students of Olga Grigorievna Revzina, a professor at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, not only as a gift to the teacher, but also as a manifestation of a scientific school, the existence of which suddenly became obvious. “We must admit, when planning this collection, we did not imagine that the intellectual connection between its authors would be so clearly defined... We... want to indicate our place among other schools... First of all... the authors proceed from the presumption of the existence of the enigmatic code in language..." (from the preface by O.V. Evtushenko, pp. 5-6).

Although most of the authors are related to the Department of Russian Language of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University and the Institute of the Russian Language, the book is not specifically linguistic, but of general interest. The linguistic version of a unified humanitarian field is more attractive than others: unity is determined not by the dictates of any of the humanitarian disciplines, but by the almost Schellingian pathos of searching for similar manifestations of the important properties of our consciousness in language, poetry, etc. The collection is characterized by A.D. Plisetskaya’s article “ Biological metaphor in Russian linguistics of the twentieth century”: this pathos of searching for “identity”, common principles of the structure of the world is simultaneously recognized as a distinctive feature of the Russian linguistic tradition and becomes an object of reflection. E.I. Revzin recalls Lacan, “who rewrote psychoanalysis in linguistic terms” (p. 160), and continues his analogies, extending them to art: “When Lacan tries to communicate Freudian meanings to the linguistic structure, he notes that the initial splitting of the real human of the subject and his Ego is projected in language onto the splitting of the "I" - the subject of the utterance and the "I" - the speaker, the subject of the real act of utterance. From the point of view of the researcher, the same split applies to literature. If in traditional (realistic, positivist, pre-modern) literature What is important is the meaning of the text, the content, then in modernist literature - the way this text is made, the “meaning” of the content <and among the romantics? and in “Eugene Onegin”? - G.Z.> Moreover, the very meaning of the text becomes secondary a product of its signifier" ( "Literature without consciousness", p.165). O.V. Evtushenko ’s article “On the reflection of a psychological phenomenon in natural and poetic language” is based on analogies between the semantic structure of some words reflecting the archaic “undifferentiated consciousness” (p. 128) and the semantic structure of twentieth-century poetry. And everywhere the connection between linguistics and poetics is understood as fundamental, and not optional: the point is not that a poetic text, like any other, can become the subject of description in linguistic categories, but that poetry reveals the basic properties of language.

The desire for the unity of the humanitarian field is manifested among the authors of the collection even at the level of figures of speech: the title of the section “The Language of Poetry” is an expressive case of linguistic metaphor in Russian philology of the twentieth century. The word “language” here means, first of all, a way of constructing a text, poetics. Poetics, and not linguistic at all, is most obviously devoted in this section to P. Deutschmann’s article “Vladimir Mayakovsky” - a textual image of the tragic.” The author, analyzing the graphic features of the first edition of the text and its paronymic structure, shows a special dismemberment of Mayakovsky’s text, a more detailed than division into words, and the special nature of the connections that permeate the text - leitmotif quasi-words. Partitioned in a special way and connected in a special way, the text turns out to be an image of the tragic, which is understood, following Nietzsche, as dismemberment and subsequent synthesis. (The section also includes articles by L. G. Panova "Spanish copla: between sayings and book poetry" and O.I. Severskaya “The language of the poetic school as a “sociolect”. Social dialect and the relationship between the poet and the reader”). The collection also contains works that describe the “language of poetry” in the literal sense: articles by I.Yu. Belyakova “On the concepts of soul, fate and longing in the poetic universe of M. Tsvetaeva”, I.B. Levontina “The dawn will not catch up with the dawn” (section "Lexicology and lexicography").

Another feature that unites many of the authors of the collection is a keenly reflective attitude towards their time. Now, perhaps, this cannot even be called a virtue; rather, it is a natural position for a person of Russian culture after he has finally, as Maxim Sokolov accurately noted, returned to history. First of all, the interest in the irrational in language and poetry is recognized as historically determined, which determines the scientific position of the “Revzina school”: in the works of G.I. and E.I. Revzin, psychoanalysis is discussed as a modern worldview, at the same time historically inevitable and subject to skeptical reflection, historical localization (E.I. Revzin, uch.; G.I. Revzin, “Christians and algae. On the question of the meaning of analogy ") . Modernity can be a direct material, a theme ( Severskaya, uk.soch.; Bulatova A.P. Art criticism discourse of the late 90s and trends in its development; Tonkopiy Zh.V. On the evolution of political slogans; Zhdanova L.G. Structure and dynamic potential of political vocabulary) . But modernity also openly defines the point of view, for example, in the works of Yevtushenko or Plisetskaya (who describes the history of biological metaphor in linguistics, because she sees how now in science there is a “return of mythological concepts” (p. 80)).

Of course, the boundaries drawn by the authors of the collection may sometimes seem extremely unexpected, sometimes inaccurate. Let's say, extremely unexpected, although this makes it even more curious, the interpretation of Tyutchev's poetry as a manifestation of the consciousness of the positivist era ( G.I. Revzin ). O.I. Severskaya, trying to distinguish conceptualism from, say, ironic poetry, writes that the alien word among conceptualists is exclusively a “social idiom,” while among ironists it is “the voice of the Universe.” But what about, for example, V.N. Nekrasov:

erase random features
three four
erase random features
Look
accidentally
just don't wipe it
holes

Are Blok’s words a “social idiom”? But this is also conceptualism.

But such excessive rigidity, apparently, is generally characteristic of all attempts at historical self-determination.