Boris Dubin: Culture as a challenge

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The significance of Boris Dubin for the domestic scientific environment is due to its unique double status - a prominent sociologist and a talented cultural researcher, literature in particular. Even if he add his merits to a thoughtful, sensitive and versatile translator of poetry, prose and essays (mainly the twentieth century), an approximate and one -sided “list of achievements” will still be released, which can not be reduced to its extensive bibliography. Why?

The thought is quite common: a person is more than his creations. And it is very easy to interpret the phenomenon of the club as “first of all” the personal phenomenon - after all, his huge human charm, participation and modesty were obvious even to those who were not lucky enough to know him close enough. Boris Vladimirovich himself was very restrained in exaggeration of the role of cultural authorities, Guru both on his own experience and the work of the authors important for him (like Borges) understood the value of the distance, “just” “just” book assimilation of cultural and human wealth - outside the situation of direct contact.

When we are talking about the human component of the “club of the club” - a matter is not only about students and followers, but in his method of social analysis of cultural phenomena. This method was also unconditionally copyright - and open for a variety of development, challenging, creative transfer to other “rows”. As a sociologist, he managed to preserve and analyze the artistic specificity and especially, for example, poems or music - without turning them into an illustration of social processes, as his student Boris Stepanov showed well in a recent article [1].

The departure of Boris Dubin also meant the cessation of a long -term and versatile research plan, which does not provide for any “summing up of the results”. Now, looking back, we can try to indicate the different, inconsistent guidelines of his activity and try to build - albeit conditional, open for challenging and revising, the trajectory and logic of the thought path of Boris Dubin. A generalized picture of the development of his ideas was reconstructed by himself in a number of interviews Lyubov Borusak or Gennady Batygin - they will be one of the important points of reference for us, and by no means a source of useful and important information.

As a student of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, in the mid-1960s, Dubin became a member of the semi-den-the phenomenon of dissidentism will appear soon, after the Sinyavsky-Daniel,-the poetic association was able (the youngest society of geniuses) [2].

In the second half of the 1970s, for the translator of the Spanish and Polish poets, it all began with a sign meeting with sociologists in the sector of the study of the then Lenin Library. And the work that has begun with sociological data, the study of the repertoire of provincial and rural libraries, business trips to the regions and processing quantitative information were not departure or acquiring the counterweight of initial cultural sophistication.

This work made it possible to look differently at the presumptions and inevitable restrictions, even the show, the initial philological worldview for “their midst”. And then the general theoretical provisions of Yuri Levada, the critical approach of Lev Gudkov to the foundations of “pure” literary analysis, of course, contributed to the clarification of the analytical work of Boris Dubin himself.

The most important then the preparation of the abstract, detailed, and thoughtfully built bibliographic reviewer-review “Book, Reading, Library. Foreign research on the sociology of literature ”(1982). Bibliography in the context of political and ideological censorship was one of the forms of independent analytical work. Boris Dubin and his co -author Lev Gudkov wrote for this reference book a large analytical preface “Literature as a Social Institute”. It saw light only in 1994, in the first book of the famous series “Scientific Library” of the publishing house “New Literary Review”.

The title and books and the “forbidden” article are revealed as follows: “Literature is defined as a social institution, the main functional significance of which we are entitled to maintain the cultural identity of society (respectively, in fixing the functionally specialized norms and mechanisms of personal, and thereby and social identity).”

The language of the functionalist sociology of the Talcota Parsons, which is generally significant and for the then Soviet science about society, made it possible to talk not only about the self -reproduction of society, but also about the complex, contradictory diversity of cultural guidelines, values ​​and languages ​​of groups, this society constitutes.

Already in this early work, you can see traces of the future anthropological turn, especially noticeable in the cultural essays of Boris Dubin in the 1990s. The word "essay" should not be understood in the sense of something inconsistent and almost doubtful in comparison with serious labors-on the contrary, we are talking about the possibilities of cultural work, which was brilliantly implemented by the club, necessary after decades of Soviet censorship prohibitions and ideological indocousment.

Later in an interview with Lyubov, Borusyak Dubin spoke about his interests as follows: “I began to translate intellectual essays quite a lot to develop in the language the ability to speak of various kinds of philosophical, metaphysical, historical, sociological subtleties, that is, to develop new opportunities for the intellectual Russian language. It was not strictly sociological work - I almost did not translate this. I was interested in in this sense work on the language of the educated community, its expansion and new forms. After all, essays were not very popular in Russia. Although the Russian novel breaks all the forms of the classical novel, there are quite few pure essays in Russia, since the principle of subjectivity is poor in Russia. Subjectivity has never been considered a major intellectual achievement in this sense, was not considered anything significant ... This was work to expand linguistic consciousness, the language skills of Russian intellectual, a Russian educated person ”[3].

The combination of systematicity and nuance made his work recognizable against the backdrop of the works of all the talented members of the Yuri Levada group, and the artistic observation of the translator and the poet did not interfere, but it was necessary to complement and even “sharply” if you use the well -known formalist concept, the analytical insight of the sociologist. Perhaps, in this capacity, the closest example from the history of sociology is the figure of George Zimmel as the author of original philosophical works and essays, where he interpreted various features and even the nuances of the modernist era and its unique culture. Moreover, the integrity of the research project Boris Dubin is not doubtful.

In the mid-1980s, Dubin became close to the circle of participants in Tynyanov readings conducted by Marietta Omarovna Chudakova in the homeland of Yuri Tynyanov, in the Latvian Resecne (regret). Unlike the Semiotics from the Tartu-Moscow school with their primacy of aesthetic self-sufficiency, the emphasis was on a wide trip to cultural phenomena, and among the participants were Lotman himself and yesterday's graduate students-the future prominent philologists of the 1990s, and the original cinema theorist and visuality Mikhail Yampolsky.

From formalists, probably, the interest of the Dubin in the phenomenon of “literature” (R. Jacobson) is also of interest; He was interested in how the mechanism of literary expressiveness was socially determined and mediated. Why do these or other forms, directions, “things” become interesting, significant for contemporaries and descendants, crossing the borders of their cultures and languages, or on the contrary - remaining “freezing” in them? One of the first Dubin (together with Lev Gudkov) writes on the pages of the “Tynyanov collections” of the period of perestroika about the phenomenon and “literary culture” and the ideology of literary centricity in Russia.

Since 1988, Dubin began to work closely in the projects of the VTsIOM under the leadership of Yuri Levada - it was already full -scale, without looking at censorship conditions on the analysis of changing public opinion. And since the beginning of the 1990s, the public degree of research of the club’s colleagues has been critical: despite the change of slogans and the arrival of new idols, both the structures of consciousness and values ​​(equalization, a request for a “strong hand”, suspicious attitude to strangers) remained largely the same.

This concerned both the “simple Soviet man” (the name of the 1993 Levadov team), and the installations of the intelligentsia of the early 1990s, and the worldview of representatives of the elite of the 2000s. In all these research projects, Dubin took a direct part. Almost in the spirit of “milestones” or even Chaadaev, but with important secular and sociological reorientation - it was about the need to deeply process the past, revising the intelligentsia of their role and cultural prerogatives, about the development, transfer of various Western ideas and practitioners to our context.

And here it is necessary to say again not only about the analytical, but also about the specific translation talent of Boris Dubin, who went beyond the transfer of texts, it was also talking about the introduction of new meanings, genres, and the combination of dissimilar languages, including scientific and artistic.

It was far from accidental attention to the club-translator to the work of the original French historian Michel de Certo (the Jesuit and at the same time ally of the Annals School of the School): “I was interested in the thoughts of what a story today, how it is possible, how historical discourse, historical narration, where the boundaries of this, where the historian becomes the writer. After all, he wants it or does not want it, but the historian is forced to resort to writer's means in order to build a historical story. How to put the limit to this, how to control these things, that is, to remain a historian, even if you resort to narrative forms ” (from an interview with L. Borusyak [3]) . The work of this plan (as well as a cycle of very interesting articles about Borges) entered an important collection of a club, which consists of about a third of such software translations “in border genres” [4].

Interest in cultural and literary anthropology, in the situation of “man on the verge” (by no means exhausted by romantics or existentialists) has become the new research plot of the club, which he consistently developed since the beginning of the 2010s already outside the work of the Levada Center.

The theme of a separate book was the plot about classics, literary canons and pantheons - and their anti -aggression. Mass literature and culture appear in the club quite different: not only part of the cultural industry (like Adorno) or a research call for “caste” philology, but sometimes the reservoir of updating “erased” art forms, a source of inspiration for the avant -garde. He managed to publish and submit to the public a collection of his poems and translations “Blood” (Publishing House of Ivan Lumbach, 2013). A separate analysis deserves the skills of the ideas of the club and the Italian-American sociologist of the literature Franco Moretti, whom he knew well and about which he wrote in the “new literary review” in 2014, which became the last for him.

And yet-the question remains: how was the sociologist-analyst and the “letter of writing”, a follower of Levada and the translator of Borges, combined in the hero of the article? Any of the connoisseurs of the texts of the club will probably easily indicate the mechanisms of mediation of these different poles, the extreme points of its extremely wide, as it may seem, interests. These combinations and “joints” themselves always occupied it: the symbolism of the identity and ideology of literary culture, slipping of modernization, the opinions of the elites and the expectations of the “masses”, finally and first of all - cultural innovations, breakthroughs of often forgotten, but resurrected in the word or music of loners. The fiction of the text and the public imaginary. Of course, there is no universal formula or preinstalled harmony here - but there is and remains an example that inspires us to go the road that would be completely different without a club.

Those who (possibly fairly) complain of timelessness can remind you of much more stuffy and hopeless eras and about the long -standing disappointments of old and recent years. And it is especially valuable in it that the unreasonable attachment to the people and plots of the nicepa, border territory - for example, to Eastern Europeans or Latin American. However, Boris Dubin wrote about the inhabitants of the capitals and metropolis with no less hunting and attention. The point is not the advantages of backwardness and not even in geography as such, but in the heightened sense of his place, contrary to this draw and thanks to it - with the flow of history and against him, alone, in the midst of near and distant.

Alexander Dmitriev,
Vedas. scientific. sore. Igity named A.V. Poletaev NIU HSE

1. Boris Dubin and the Russian project of the sociology of culture // Social Sciences and modernity. 2015. No. 6. S. 163–173.

2. Interview G.S. Batygin with B.V. Dubin. “If you can call it a career, let it be a career” // Sociological Journal. 2001. No. 2. S. 121.

3. Interview by L. Borusyak. Boris Dubin about the times of Borges and the beginning of sociology // Polit.ru. October 25, 2009.

4. Dubin B. in the sidelines of letters. Notes on the strategies of thought and words in the twentieth century. M.: Reserve Exit / Emergency Exit, 2005.