Irina Surat. Averintsev died

Averintsev died
Photo by Irina

Publication date: February 25, 2004

At seventeen, a person needs guidelines. In the second half of the 70s, it was difficult to find landmarks at the philology department, but they helped. And here I am holding in my hands a library issue of the non-scientific magazine "Youth" (1969, # 1) with "A Word of Praise to Philology", a soft young face looks out from the first page, and I read with amazement that this young man received the Lenin Komsomol Prize for research about Plutarch. What does Lenin's Komsomol have to do with it? And “A word of praise...”, rewritten almost in its entirety, has remained for me since then the only clear justification for our strange, unnecessary business. Through him, philology was revealed as a “service of understanding,” philology to which “the entire human world belongs,” in other words, philology with a human face, with its soft, enlightened, almost blissful face. This face seemed out of place, incompatible with the general landscape of the 60s, and even our 70s, as incompatible as Plutarch with the Komsomol.

Philological fashion, which had captured the best minds of my generation and had not yet let go, called in a different direction. Averintsev didn’t invite anyone. But he was , and what he did was absolutely convincing and morally undeniable.

“The everyday ability to understand people is a form of knowledge that is quite alien in relation to what is usually called scientificity; the inevitability of this element from the composition of philosophy gives the latter (like all properly humanitarian types of analysis) a very unique and apparently archaic physiognomy. Exact methods (in the "mathematical" sense of the word) are possible, strictly speaking, only in purely peripheral areas of philosophy and do not affect its essence. Physics is unlikely to ever become an exact science - this is its weakness, can be once and for all eliminated from the path by a cunning methodological invention, but it has to be overcome again and again by the tension of the intellectual will; this is its strength and pride. There should be no question that the philologist supposedly has the “right to subjectivity", i.e. the right to admire one’s subjectivity, to cultivate subjectivity. But he cannot protect himself in advance from the danger of arbitrariness with a reliable wall of precise methods; he has to meet this danger face to face and overcome it again and again.”

I cited this long quotation from the encyclopedic article “Philology” (KLE. T. 7. M., 1972. Column 975) in order to say in Averintsev’s words: moral effort not only accompanies research, but is conceptualized as the basis of the method.

During our student years, we reprinted “other” literature as carbon copies (“Erica takes four copies”) and Averintsev’s lecture on Pico Della Mirandola, I wrote for him as a carbon copy. The character was completely unfamiliar to me, but from that lecture I firmly remembered: when extreme opinions collide, the truth is not in the middle, but in another place. This was the main discovery - another dimension of thought, I don’t know, the fourth or fifth, but different - and a “different” philology, unlike either Soviet literary criticism or the Moscow-Tartu structural school. This philology was "elsewhere" and dealt with Truth. And the more specific the subject of the statement was (“Towards an understanding of the meaning of the inscription above the conch of the central apse of St. Sophia of Kyiv,” 1972), the more tangible its spiritual meaning emerged.

Who could have known that 15 years later it would be so easy to talk to a celestial being, and not at all because the distance had shortened - it couldn’t have been shortened - but because he was a normal person, heatedly discussing politics, joking about a “hospital for idiots” (Central Clinical Hospital), where he was recently almost killed - he was a normal, but sick person, and all my life I will remember how, by retelling one report, I made him laugh until he had an asthma attack.

And all my life I will remember how in Sheremetyevo he and his wife walked away to the plane through the pipe - with one hand she rolled the chair where he was sitting almost disembodied, with the other she carried a suitcase. Then, in 1992, they gave him a week to live, and we, looking at their backs, only thought: will they make it in time? Then they managed to cure him. And 11 years later, on a May day in blessed Rome, we didn’t make it in time; we were 20 minutes late.

While Averintsev was alive, it was possible to speak in the present tense: our great philology. Now you can't say that anymore.