Inna Bulkina. To understand the epigraphs

M.L. Gasparov. Records and extracts. - M.: New Literary Review, 2000.

Soviet literary criticism was based on Marxism. In Marxism, method and ideology coexisted.
M. Gasparov. Lotman and Marxism

Modern literature is built on something that has no name (for it is impossible to use the single word “postmodernism” to describe everything that is called it) and that has neither a method nor an ideology. In modern literary criticism, poststructuralism and destructivism are represented, in other words, the destruction of previous methods and ideologies, or rather, their initial rational foundations: “There is a change in the meaning of the word knowledge itself. Science does not produce knowledge, but the unknown” 1 .

In literature, genre becomes an indicator of destabilization of foundations. The most popular genre of recent years is some kind of amorphous collection of newspaper articles and letters, “premature memoirs” or something passed off as memoirs; something on the border between literature and non-literature, “ends of quotes” and “trepanation of skulls.” It is remarkable that the best examples of “non-genre” (really the best!) are awarded literary prizes: Andrei Sergeev’s Omnibus received the novel Booker, which testified to the decline (one might say otherwise: irrelevance) of traditional genres and the rise to the forefront of intermediate, fragmentary genres: notes, anecdotes , table-talk. “Tiny”, finally, it is characteristic that the last Great Writer of the Russian Land (VPZR) chose the genre invented in his time by Vasily Lvovich.

Nevertheless, a catastrophe is not happening, nor is the end of the world either: all this has already happened, and more than once, for example, when, against the backdrop of a shaky classicist hierarchy, magazines and collections turned into one large section “Mixture” and Senkovsky was born. And what? Then the “age of the novel” came and Tolstoy’s multi-volume novel appeared. Then there was Rozanov. And also nothing. And then Tynyanov came and explained everything.

Gasparov’s book would most accurately be called a collection of epigraphs. What is an epigraph in a dry terminological sense? "Framework" element. “Someone else’s word”, in a known way correcting and commenting on the author’s own words. It can be “alien” and quite conventional: old authors composed epigraphs when it was possible to detach themselves from themselves - the author of the text, to look at their own text “through someone else’s eyes.” The poet has enough of himself to replace (create) the whole world, not to mention the epigraph. (A textbook example is the French phrase invented by Lermontov for the epigraph to the dialogue “Journalist, Reader and Writer”, where everyone speaks on their own behalf, but to the same extent on behalf of the author, and the epigraph sounds like this: “Poets are like bears, well-fed by sucking a paw.")

If we ignore philology, the epigraph is a Berkeleyan category, in its own way a cure for solipsism. That obligatory view from above (or from the side) that certifies the existence of the text as such; so the frame, highlighting something from space in general, makes this something the subject of consideration. In the case of Gaspar’s “Records and Extracts” we actually have a frame(s); There should probably be a portrait of the academician inside. A portrait collected from questionnaires, letters and translations, memoirs and dreams, our own and others.

There are several cross-cutting motives here. Probably the first and most important: who am I? “I don’t know what I am? The way I am? The way I was long ago? How I imagine myself in my fantasies? And because I don’t know this, I slowly disappear and cease to exist...” “Every person is a bunch of quotes ", and I just frayed the thread on which they are strung. In Marxist terms, this is called: the point of intersection of social relations." “I used to call myself a crossing of social relations, now I call myself a coincidence.” “The commentary on Ausonius, of course, is all compilative, but I myself am all compilative <...> my job as a philologist is to understand my sources.” The quotes here probably play the role of proper names, by which the world after the cataclysms is identified (Lotman’s favorite quote is from Hemingway).

Gaspar's well-known (and quite understandable) rejection of Bakhtin stems, among other things, from this positivist skepticism about the possibility of a full understanding of the Other, the total absolutization of dialogue, all this talk about the Self and the Other, which is not-I - what other "not-I" “, if I don’t know who I am. Compare: “ Dialogue : V. Schmid called Bakhtin’s “dialogical relationships” a patient metaphor.” Elsewhere, Gasparov, by the way, does what is called the implementation of a metaphor: he presents a dialogue between Bakhtin and Derrida - a meeting of two egocentrisms.

The second constant and key motive: “Because I’m not a writer.” Any writer tells himself in one way or another, but for a “non-writer” the words of others are enough for this. Or questionnaires and forced discussions. That is, you need an objective reason, a question asked, in order to pronounce the answer. (The same dialogue that Gasparov elsewhere compares to an interrogation: question and answer, just like that, and not two intertwined monologues.) Gasparov could have said differently: “Because I’m not a writer.” This old word is professionally more precise, the writer is the one who composes, creates another world and another reality. And the “non-writer,” accordingly, is the one who needs “objective reality given to us in sensation” and rational grounds. The epigraph to this review is the opening words of Gasparov’s article about Lotman, to which he often returns. It is about the fact that rational reasons are always better than irrational ones. Rational reasons mean the ability to give oneself an account, and this is their ethics - it is impossible to be responsible for what cannot be explained.

Having never been a member of the “Soviet academicians,” Gasparov has lately given the strange impression of a man who persistently justifies himself for his commitment to materialism: “There is a Marxist position: the individual is the point of intersection of social relations. When I said out loud that I feel exactly like this, then Even in the most dogmatic times, my interlocutors looked at me as if I was abnormal. But I told the truth. I visibly see the black night sky, along which, like searchlight rays, the bright spokes of social relations move. Here are several rays crossed - this is the emergence of a personality, maybe - I. So they separated - and I am no more."

But let's return to the "frame", that is, to the conversation about the genre and PM. The genre (or method?) of Gasparov’s book is in obvious contradiction with its “ideology”. “Records and extracts” easily fit into the series of endlessly compiled PM encyclopedias nowadays. With the only caveat that their authors define anything, but Gasparov explains only himself. Another inevitable contradiction - between addressing and the real addressee - appears already in the "Preface": Gasparov asks for forgiveness from those few (fur wenige) who "already know this." It is assumed that the book is not actually addressed to them, but to those “busy and lazy” who rest their eyes on small genres and hardly took the trouble to read (and now also will not) academic articles and monographs by Mikhail Leonovich.

In short, the real addressee of the book is the habitual reader of the loose non-genre. What is taken into account in the so-called design and is peculiarly stipulated in the same “Preface”: “I have not disclosed the abbreviations here: those involved in history understand them, others are indifferent.”

If you say it less politely, it will turn out: “The smart ones have known for a long time, but the stupid ones are not interested.” Well, what if the “rest” are still, although lazy, curious?

Note:

1 From Lyotard's treatise "The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge", op. by: Lipovetsky M. Paralogy of Russian postmodernism // UFO #30. - P.285.