Kirill Kutalov-Postoll. Critics

Critics
Kirill Kutalov-Postoll

Publication date: May 17, 2000

To begin with, one general assumption-observation.

There is a strong feeling that everything that belongs to the genre of literary non-fiction on the Internet acquires some kind of special meaning and weight, and this phenomenon sometimes reaches the point that reading non-fiction is more interesting than literary texts. This is, at least, informative (at least informativeness is expected according to the laws of the genres included in non-fiction, in this case criticism, literary journalism and literary essays are primarily interesting). This feeling is indirectly confirmed by the recent increase in the number of “reviews of reviews”, a genre that, although somewhat narcissistic due to the attractiveness of the position “above the fray”, is at the same time again educational, at worst - informative (at times almost extremely ).

In addition, small in number in comparison with the mass of literary texts, modern online non-fiction, as a rule (at least in its best examples), instead of the usual task of following literature, rather serves as a tug for it, turning from an interpreter into a pioneer, fortunately there is For this purpose, the appropriate tools (more on that below).

These were observations. Now - to the point.

Online criticism can be divided with a high degree of accuracy into three large and unequal ones, either in terms of the properties of the target audience or in terms of the goals and objectives of the group. It must be emphasized that we are talking about: a) about network criticism, b) about (to avoid the tautology: “about criticism”) systematic and consistent projects.

We will conditionally call the first group traditional. It is characterized by an orientation toward a predominantly philological way of speaking about literature, an analytical approach, a certain amount of academicism, and persistent adherence to the rules of the game established by the participants themselves.

At the same time, it is not at all necessary that the form of the text created by the first group of critics corresponds to any canons (among the “canonical” ones, most often the least interesting works are found, often at the school level). Although such standard-work prevails quantitatively, a fundamentally different approach is possible, for example, an essay composed of letters on a given topic, as in the case of the text presented on “Limba” ( “One can imagine...”, Yuri Tsaplin and others ) . The point, however, is not in the form; the latter can be as sophisticated as desired; the point is in the position of the author (or, as in this case, the authors). Especially when the authors are widely known both online and offline. It would be, at the very least, short-sighted to try to impose on the participants in the conversation - the authors (Yuri Tsaplin, Dmitry Kuzmin, Ilya Kukulin, Ether dePagny, Philippe Minlos) this or that “position”, which can easily be interpreted as blinkeredness, and again that’s not the point. The point is in the direction of thought - from literature to literature, within literature and about literature, without the desire and even without the opportunity to leave such a mode of conversation. “Without” here is simply a statement of fact, in no way a negative definition; moreover, such a conversation, such an essay is completely hermetically sealed and, due to the presence of several authors (namely, non-scriptor authors), reads itself, does not need an outside view. It’s as if he doesn’t need to go anywhere, even though the conversation, which began with a completely modernist problem, rather unexpectedly turns to issues of postmodernism.

Another group, let's define it as performanceist, is characterized by a completely different approach. What is important here is the figure of the critic, his action, his posture; here, more than anywhere else, the word “project” is appropriate. A project that requires a viewer, and this demand is expressed, as a rule, in a clearly aggressive way. These are the reviews of Lev Pirogov . If the first group, being placed on the network, does not lose old and does not acquire new properties, being networked purely formally ("paper" is primary for it), then the second is focused on making maximum use of the phenomenon of interactivity and the possibilities of content design, which today only the Internet provides. This is a kind of “criticism of quick response”, an important role here is played by speed when building the links of the chain “events-criticism-reaction-response”, the last two links are very important, they are not typical for the first group, at least not defining. Moreover, if at a lower level the use of network opportunities means uncensorship and a demonstrative refusal to be academic, then at a higher level one can talk about a simulacrum, about the creation of an alternative to the “paper” approach, based on all kinds of playing on academic clichés, which the critic himself presents precisely as clichés, empty forms. Shocking here is only indirectly connected with pejorative vocabulary; the effect is mainly achieved precisely due to the obviousness of the simulacrum. In this sense, an important component of the figure of the same Lev Pirogov is the references made by both himself and Verbitsky to academic experience and mastery of the discursive practice of “serious” “paper” publications (in particular, “Literary Gazette”).

Finally, the third criticism is in many ways similar to the model that existed in France in the late 60s and 70s, the model of the emergence of the so-called “new philosophers” or media philosophers. In time, the emergence of media philosophy coincided with Barth's "new criticism", and due to this coincidence, confusion often arises, either the effect of a child thrown out, or omnivorousness. This phenomenon began, as researchers (Louis Panto) note, with the publication of the Nouvelle Observataire, which cultivated a rather strange figure for those times - a philosopher-journalist, in a certain sense, exploiting the “new” in philosophy and “playing” on the strongly fueled mass media opposition “progressive - university” (the last term here is synonymous with the definitions “reactionary”, “academic”). There could be no talk of a neutral tone, of positioning the final product for a more or less narrow circle of specialist philosophers; on the contrary, the embodied ideal was some rather vague intellectual “progressiveness”, the author being a hybrid of an intellectual and a journalist. Very simply, in this context one can pronounce the word “popularization”, which has strong negative connotations, but it was precisely this, along with the introduction of fashion for philosophy, that was the basis for, paradoxically, the strengthening of academicism. If only because the most responsible resources have to be attracted as “popularized”.

But that's history. Old and distant, too. Returning home, among the critics belonging to the third group, first of all one should name Vyacheslav Kuritsyn of the mid-nineties, but it seems that now this means little to anyone. There is, however, in RuNet almost a whole corporation of authors who are clearly correlated with the figure of the media philosopher. In “Tenet” they are usually nominated by one person - Misha Verbitsky.

A very typical work belonging to the third group is Julia Friedman’s critical essay “The cannibals of Temeria, Redania, Aedirn and Kaedwen love male flesh” about the series by Andrzej Sapkowski. In it one can observe many distinctive features of media philosophizing. Firstly, there is a tendency towards interdisciplinarity. The essay is not a strictly literary-critical article (in general, the principles of nomination in “Tenet” are a separate topic, a clear indication, among other things, of the exhaustion of school genre categories), since discussions about the directly literary part of the book under review occupy a very modest place, giving way to general sociological research and consideration issues related to the topic of literary success, that is, in other words, there is precisely an intellectualist-progressive approach characteristic of the French press of the 70s. This text is also characterized by freedom from academic neutrality, an abundance of value judgments, thesis, even a certain sloganeering nature of statements: “The body of old literature is tired of life, it is disintegrating. It is overcome by cruel parasites. If it were allowed to die in peace, a useful grave worm would process it body, and fresh sprouts of grassroots folklore, perhaps, would sanctify his memory (cf., for example, anecdotes about Natasha Rostova and Lieutenant Rzhevsky). And here they are hiding from the tyrannical time in artificial provinces, rinsing bandages, cultivating parsnips." This is just as provocative as the texts of the second group, but the provocativeness here is different, arising precisely on the basis of contiguity, mixing of discourses, in some cases, downright juggling with them. Publishing on the network here is not a fundamentally necessary condition for existence (as in the case of the previous group), but rather most closely corresponds to the principles of such criticism - the network is dynamic, the network is modern, the network is in a certain sense optional, online texts are difficult to follow (and more often - they simply do not need) verification, which eliminates many academic requirements that are necessary in the “paper” world. One of the analogies that comes to mind in this regard is philosophical (media-philosophical) articles in Playboy magazine.

It is noteworthy that Verbitsky himself cultivates both the third and second types of criticism. The second is by acting as a cultural nominator and reviewing the works presented in “Teneta” (http://www.teneta.ru/) (to be convinced of this, just read almost any of his posts in the guest competition .

What stands apart is such a rather rare phenomenon as criticism in the form of a literary text. Due to some misunderstanding, the “Humor” category included the text “Reading a Women’s Novel,” which in fact fully corresponds to the seriousness of the title. A short and clear example of deconstructionist writing, not only provoked by reading, but parallel to reading, beyond reading the impossible. A lot has been written about serial literature in general and women's novels in particular, from different angles - from the purely technological, in terms of how it is done, to marketing research, but I find it difficult to remember a work (translated or not) that would focus on attention to a certain common component of these texts, which I would call the complex of preserved chastity. We are talking about a kind of “setup” that is being prepared for any reader of formulaic literature: about the break in suspense, about the principle of dissatisfaction, and dissatisfaction of a very strange nature - one that makes you return again and again to the “worn to holes page forty-eighth of the women’s novel “Love” in the thorn bush" , where as before nothing happens. This short story is good at least because it takes the question out of the already annoying scheme of Cavelti , in the center of which is the opposition "formular literature - mimetic literature" and reader hedonism. In general, I advise you to read .

There is another group not described here, represented in small numbers, but of considerable interest as a phenomenon. It can be called fictional essayism; at first glance, it is in many ways similar to performanceist texts, but it has an important difference from them. Academic discourse (cliché) here is deconstructed not in the plane of a gesture, which one way or another needs a real phenomenon “about” which this gesture is made, but in the field of the discourse itself, self-sufficient and hermetic (criticism of the first group), capable of fully existing without a referent . In short, reviews of non-existent books and non-fiction presented as a literary text. More about this next time.