Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics 9780823264872

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Persistent Forms

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Verbal Arts :: Studies in Poetics Lazar Fleishman and Haun Saussy, series editors

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Persistent Forms Explorations in Historical Poetics

Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov editors

Fordham University Press

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New York 2016

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Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Persistent forms : explorations in historical poetics / edited by Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov. — First edition. pages cm. — (Verbal arts: studies in poetics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-6485-8 (hardback) 1. Poetics—History. 2. Literature and history. I. Kliger, Ilya, editor. II. Maslov, Boris, 1982– editor. PN1035.P46 2015 808.1—dc23 2015015745 Printed in the United States of America 18

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First edition

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Contents

Foreword by Eric Hayot Acknowledgments

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Introducing Historical Poetics: History, Experience, Form

1

Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov

Part I: Questioning the Historical, Envisioning a Poetics 1. From the Introduction to Historical Poetics: Questions and Answers (1894)

39

Alexander Veselovsky

2. Alexander Veselovsky’s Historical Poetics vs. Cultural Poetics: Remembering the Future

65

Victoria Somoff

3. Historicist Hermeneutics and Contestatory Ritual Poetics: An Encounter Between Pindaric Epinikion and Attic Tragedy

90

Leslie Kurke

4. Metapragmatics, Toposforschung, Marxist Stylistics: Three Extensions of Veselovsky’s Historical Poetics

128

Boris Maslov

Part II: The Life of Forms: Tradition, Memory, Regeneration 5. The Oresteia in the Odyssey (1946)

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Olga Freidenberg

6. Innovation Disguised as Tradition: Commentary and the Genesis of Art Forms

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Nina V. Braginskaya

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Contents

7. A Remnant Poetics: Excavating the Chronotope of the Kurgan

209

Michael Kunichika

8. On “Genre Memory” in Bakhtin

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Ilya Kliger

Part III: Comparative Poetics and the Historicity of Experience 9. The Age of Sensibility (1904)

255

Alexander Veselovsky

10. Against Ornament: O. M. Freidenberg’s Concept of Metaphor in Ancient and Modern Contexts

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Richard P. Martin

11. Breakfast at Dawn: Alexander Veselovsky and the Poetics of Psychological Biography

314

Ilya Vinitsky

12. From the Prehistory of Russian Novel Theory: Alexander Veselovsky and Fyodor Dostoevsky on the Modern Novel’s Roots in Folklore and Legend

340

Kate Holland

Part IV: Literary Genres in the Longue Durée 13. Satire (1940), for the Literary Encyclopedia

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Mikhail Bakhtin

14. Columbus’s Egg, or the Structure of the Novella (1973)

392

Mikhail Gasparov

15. On the Eve of Epic: Did the Chryses Episode in Iliad 1 Begin Its Life as a Separate Homeric Hymn?

397

Christopher A. Faraone

16. Schematics and Models of Genre: Bakhtin and Soviet Satire

429

Robert Bird

Further Readings in Historical Poetics List of Contributors Index

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Foreword ERIC H AYOT

One day someone will look back at the last few decades of U.S. literary criticism and remark on the strange trajectory of the category of the “universal.” Beginning with the reaction against structuralism, that person will observe a strong conceptual and rhetorical preference for multiplicity, diversity, and smallness across the major categories of the field. Among the many examples of this trend we can include the antagonism toward “grand narratives,” the postcolonial emphasis on hybridity, the resistance to Marxist models of totality (synonymous, briefly, with totalization) or to masculine models of desire seen in French feminism and queer theory (sex is emphatically not one), the deconstructive emphasis on systemic instability, a shift from polar (binary) categorization to the frameworks involving fields or continuums, and a general preference for pluralization (modernisms, not modernism, and so on), all of which assert against the totalizing or the ideal ontological diversity of things. All this ferment enfolded and was enfolded in turn by a consistent emphasis on the minor or the small, in practices of reading and in the adjudication of evidence, which picked up on the history of new critical close reading (and came prior, then, to poststructuralism). The critique of the general or the large received one remarkably influential elaboration in Deleuze and Guattari’s book on Kafka, in which “minor” literature was the best literature of all; then and later, it was sustained through deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and the new historicism, each of which endowed small or seemingly inconvii

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sequential units of culture or meaning with immense cultural force, in a pattern that over and over again aimed to reduce or destroy the hierarchies of culture that would have otherwise relegated those units to irrelevance. All this together amounted to a revolution in the history of epistemology, at least in the American academy. It helps explain the especially American desuetude of methods like narratology or genre analysis, as well as the relative lack of long-term influence of the major syncretic works of twentieth-century literary criticism, including those of figures like Erich Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius, Georg Lukács, Lucien Goldmann, or Northrop Frye. The history of the reception of the most influential of these critics for that period, Mikhail Bakhtin, may serve to indicate its spirit: setting aside his broadest historical impulses, Bakhtin’s reception prized those concepts of his most congenial to the antiuniversalizing spirit of the age—dialogism, heteroglossia, and the carnivalesque laughter that destroys self-important categorization. That the categories needed to be destroyed, the grand narratives put under suspicion, that everywhere the small or the particular, in all its idiographic brilliance, needed to shine its odd light through the depths and hollows of normative common sense: this is undeniable. The question before us now is whether it is possible to return to the broad and the general with these lessons in mind; or whether those idiographic impulses are so absolute, so correct in their critique of the general, that any attempt to undo them will invite a tragic return of the Enlightenment’s worst, most phallic aggressions. In other words: Is large-scale literary historical criticism possible again today? And, if so, on what terms? The book in your hands is one attempt to answer those questions. It returns to a tradition that includes in its direct and indirect lineage figures like Bakhtin and Lukács, but goes back—at least here—to the work of the nineteenth-century Russian philologist and scholar Alexander Veselovsky (1838–1906), who called his method “historical poetics.” What historical poetics was for Veselovsky matters less throughout the book than what contemporary critics might do with the concept. For now, let us loosely describe it as an attempt to practice literary criticism in large historical scales, while not forgoing the necessity of a deep familiarity with individual works (and pieces of works) and their immediate contexts (and pieces of contexts). Please assume that, like all methods, historical poetics carries with it a theory of aesthetic becoming, of culture and its relation to social and economic history, of

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the historical ontology of the work of art, a refined understanding of the relationship between the universal and the particular, and an awareness of the recursions that mutually modify the act of interpretation and the identification of evidence. Those assumptions in hand, it becomes possible to read this collection of essays as an attempt to simultaneously imagine and exemplify a method whose principles and practices are still in formation. Whether or not “historical poetics” appeals to you will depend on whether you find the imagination compelling and the examples believable. First, will the descriptions of the ways in which “historical poetics” might finesse some of the critical problems that face us today strike you as having any intellectual potential? Second, will the readings, playing fairly and well with the evidence, teach you something that you didn’t already know (or wish you knew) about the material they consider? This book is not, then, a manifesto, but an experiment, or rather, a series of experiments. No single “historical poetics” emerges from its pages. The energy it emits testifies instead to a set of possibilities and openings, lines of consolidation and flight. Among other things this energy highlights three ongoing methodological problems for literary criticism, most easily invoked by their conventional binary formulations: freedom and necessity; universality and particularity; future and present.

Freedom and Necessity The recent critiques of the near-total dominance of idiographic or “close” methods of literary criticism, whose most obvious avatar has been Franco Moretti, have made us aware of the ways in which our practices of reading shape the kinds of claims we tend to make about literary objects. Someone who close reads, Moretti has suggested, will naturally tend to develop a practice of criticism focused on a relatively narrow canon of works whose density of signification lends itself well to that method—and will probably, then, also develop theories of literariness and literary history that follow from it. We may from this perspective recognize that the widely accepted belief that the smallest scales of the text best escape the formative power of culture—and thus point us to literature’s liberatory potential—is an ontology of literature appropriate to the method that such a belief develops (namely, then, close reading).

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If reading for the longue durée is not to return us to an ontology of literature as a necessary product of some other form of cultural power— as, in other words, something immune to the explosive historical freedoms of aporia, catachresis, or event—then we must find a way to square the nomothetic circle. Veselovsky at one point asserts: “Selfconsciousness does not rule out patterns that reveal regulating laws, just as statistical curves do not rule out consciousness of selfdetermination” (57). Why not? And: Is this equally true for all aspects of human culture? We need to consider the social and representational capacities and functions of literature, in both their specificity and their generality, and as they relate to other forces of social production, if we wish to make claims about things like centuries-long developmental arcs of the epic or tragic mode. Otherwise these general arcs will appear strangely immune to the particularity of the instances that exemplify them. In other words, we need to talk about what kind of data literature is, to recognize that it may in fact be multiple kinds of data, each of which operates differently in relation to different scales of historical determination (the moment, the event, the month, the century, the era). Coming to an ontology of the literary object—a description of what literature is—that would justify such a claim, and the method of the longue durée, would be one of the tasks of a renewed historical poetics.

Universality and Particularity Where do the categories come from? Consider what happens when one uses the term “epic.” Is there only one epic, appearing in different iterations (Greek epic, French epic) over the centuries? Or are there epics, none of which is identical enough to any other to justify its inclusion in the larger category? If they are truly nonidentical, then they each need singular names, in which case there is no epic at all. End of comparative criticism and, indeed, thought. We need, then, generalizing categories. But there is more than one way to make them. Literary criticism has tended to generate its historical categories from privileged examples of a type—allowing a certain subset of writers to determine what “modernism” is, or what “romanticism” is, then subjecting potential invitees to the category to an analysis of likeness and difference whose core principles derive from the privileged examples. Thus there can be no truly “new” modernism, though there can be new modernists, since we know them by the fact

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that they resemble, in ways that matter, Joyce, Woolf, or whoever else. This procedure, historicist at its core, will tend to reify cultural particularity as universality, leading to questions like, “do the Brazilians have modernism?,” whose ethnocentric biases are all too clear. Has classical studies done the same with its major aesthetic categories? Surely there is work out there whose basic definition of tragedy has extrapolated from a limited set of cultural instances, allowing a set of examples belonging properly to the categories of “Greek tragedy” or “the tragedy of Sophocles” to be substituted for by the word “tragedy” alone. The results of comparative criticism in such a situation are predictable. Their absurdity can be revealed by resubstituting the original descriptor back into the critical question. Do the Chinese have (the) tragedy (of Sophocles)? Inside the parentheses, obviously not. One solution to the problem of comparativity is, then, to make sure that one’s general categories draw from as broad a field of examples as possible. Tragedy, or modernism, would then be the name for something that a great many things have in common, but for which none of them serves as historically privileged, origin-making examples. If this has the effect of reducing the impact of, say, T.S. Eliot on what modernism is, and giving some of it to the Taiwanese modernists of the 1970s, well, so be it—the category is at least less tautological than it used to be (never fully non-tautological; we’re talking about asymptotes here). If you do this well, you end up with something like a model of Wittgensteinian family resemblances, or overlapping strands, in which a shared pool of characteristics, some common to many members, some to fewer, defines membership in a group. In such a system neither “epic” nor “modernism” is a question of timeless self-sameness; “genre” instead marks a set of affiliations with characteristics appearing in a wide variety of examples and configurations, and remains open to the possibility of future modifications. Another solution, and the one taken up by Veselovsky, involves splitting, as best as possible, the nature of the categories of comparison from the objects they compare. For him concepts like lyric, epic, or drama are transhistorical and logical, representing simply the set of possible relationships between a speaker and speech. “These forms are the natural expression of thought; they had no reason to await history in order to manifest themselves” (133). By treating these modes as “linguistic givens indifferent to the metaphysics of history,” as Boris Maslov has it, Veselovsky and other like-minded critics effectively clear the way for historical analysis by taking progress out of the

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picture (130). This structuralist map of narrative-diegetic possibility— whose various parts may emerge, to be sure, one-by-one in historical time—distances the ontology of literary production from historical appearance, placing it instead in a realm of possibility whose final arbiter is some combination of logic and species-being. Could such maps of “given” possibilities be historicized in turn? Surely so: somewhere we can find a group of people for whom the bare sociological possibilities of, say, yes and no, or parent and child, do not operate in the ways we are used to. But those new operations can, in turn, be folded into a (more complex) conceptual or logical system, recognized as a set of possibilities inherent in the limited nature of our specificity as human beings in this universe, on this planet. It is a matter of not reducing, as pure historicism does, being to history—of not taking as the ontology of human activity the activity of historical and social time, as though all there were to understand about existence were the demonstranda of things that happen. Not everything that is, happens. That conceiving of literary history this way has the advantage, in the modern period, of not mapping European dominance in the economic and military spheres directly onto the cultural one is—though I leave the full demonstration of this claim for elsewhere—one of the major claims in its favor.

Future and Pre sent The double commitment to deep and specific knowledge about the social and historical surroundings of a work, on one hand, and the making of large-scale, longue durée claims about it, on the other, presents us with two challenges that lie properly outside the immediate epistemological or methodological parameters of a re-imagined historical poetics. The first has to do with the capacity and training of individual scholars to master the fields of knowledge required for such work; the second with the mediatic aperture of their longest-lasting product, namely the codex book. Let us take the second first: there is a reason why the major documents of the kind of syncretic literary criticism that emerge from the impulses attributable to Veselovsky and historical poetics more generally—works by Auerbach, Curtius, Bakhtin, Lukács, or Jameson— tend to be long books. It takes a while to lay out the critical evidence at the smaller scale (where a certain level of detail is necessary) and

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then to make the larger developmental claims on its basis; minimally the process also requires the demonstration of a certain level of general erudition and scope of knowledge (the range of references in Nina Braginskaya’s essay in this volume offers one intimidating instance of such a requirement). This makes for large chunks of prose. And we live in an era of short books in which, as far as I can tell, the books have been getting shorter. (This volume stands athwart that tide, to be sure. But it’s on historical poetics: QED.) Whether the books are shorter because of the methods, or vice versa, makes no difference; probably the relationship is mutually constitutive. But among the challenges for a methodological approach like historical poetics will be to make itself intelligible and rhetorically powerful in the shorter, normative media of the age. This somewhat simple-minded point leads us to a refinement on the methods we might draw from the work of Veselovsky and others, who did not write in times so deeply engaged as ours with the force of “medium” (as a fact and a concept) on the development of literary history. For classicists, medium always overlaps with genre, which explains why essays here by Leslie Kurke and Christopher Faraone can now and later serve as guides toward a more general integration of the methods of historical poetics with a study of comparative media. Because media, like genre, operate as effects of and innovations in the social and cultural problems of their variegated presents, and retain, like genre, elements of the sedimented and residual pastness of the past in their later instantiations, they are ready-made objects for analysis of the mixture of long and instant time at the center of historical poetics as a method. As for the first challenge, that of training scholars to approach literature via the longue durée: here in the American context we face a number of institutional and temporal difficulties, including the relative unimportance of the philological tradition (and the training it assumes), the paucity of language learning, the increasing pressure to push PhD students through in five years, and so on. Not for nothing do many of the scholars held up as models here begin their lives as classicists (or philologists, but that comes close to the same thing), a grounding from which it is relatively easy to move forward into the modern period. Harder to imagine an enthusiastic student of contemporary literature working his or her way backward through the languages and ages, either during graduate school or afterward. We need models, going forward, for historical poetics on a smaller (institutional) scale: models, that is, for a method that would begin from the kinds of local engagement

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now common to graduates of PhD programs in literature, while moving outward and participating in the broader impulse to manage historicity at different scales. And this leads to a third challenge for any method seeking to emerge under the banner of historical poetics. Our imaginary student of the contemporary, with models for a “manageable” historical poetics firmly in hand, will face of necessity another problem, this one anticipated by Veselovsky himself: “The contemporary world is too confused, too exciting for us to be able to examine it holistically and calmly, searching for its laws. We are more composed in our attitude toward antiquity . . .” (42). True enough. A quick review of the various largescale syncretic approaches to the literary reveals how little they spoke of the present; on the occasions on which they did, they seem to me now to have mainly missed the mark. It is one thing to argue that the literary art of the late European medieval period can be understood as the product of a shift in the general relationship to the epic mode; another to make the same claim for the present, which resists generalizing propositions with all the force of a sullen teenager. Perhaps the problem is that we tend to imagine the present as the endpoint of whatever longue durée we study. As Kliger and Maslov note in their introduction, modernist conceptions of temporality (in Bergson, Benjamin, or Bloch) have taught us that the future belongs as much to the work as the past. Hence the deep difficulties we have in grasping the present before us: having no future at hand to work with, we cannot properly locate either the work or the era in the transhistorical web that would allow us to handle it with that calm attitude Veselovsky adopts toward antiquity. The present is, from a transhistorical perspective, not yet fully composed. It lacks a future; or rather, it has too many futures, and must be responsible to each of them. This is the source of the present’s great strength and excitement, as of its most serious epistemological difficulties. We have, in reading the contemporary, always too much to look at, and too much, accordingly, to say about it. Nonetheless historical poetics as a method must take on the task of thinking of, or attempting to think of, the present from the methodological perspective it proposes. This may seem at first glance impossible, since the method counts on its objects’ futures for clarification, seeing them composed from the perspective of our own composure in the face of what has already been said and done. But to abandon this insistence on futurity would return the study of the present to the di-

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saster of a pure historicism, since it would suggest that the only method we have to understand ourselves today is one that follows the historical timeline from then to now, and sees everything as progression or development. Historical poetics must try for more, bearing the present, that sedimenting cusp, that steady accretion of actuality from possibility, into the chamber of its syncretic ambition. Such a task guides us, also, toward an encounter with the particular Jetztzeit of the literary object, toward, that is, an understanding of the strange temporal fluxus that is the verbal work of art, which always enacts a becoming world, and so often represents one. At the intersection of these two difficulties—which are on some days the same difficulty, that of the anthropological understanding of this universe-specific human life— this book invites you to step forward.

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A c k n ow l e d g m e n t s

This volume is a result of an ongoing collective effort spearheaded by the members of the Historical Poetics Working Group and involving many colleagues who have brought their thoughts and reactions to bear on the development of a renovated Historical Poetics. Many of them have taken part in events organized by the HPWG. Beside the contributors to this volume, we would like to thank especially Siraj Ahmed, Arkady Bliumbaum, Joel Calahan, Dean Casale, Anke Hennig, Jennifer Flaherty, Luba Golburt, Yury Kagarlitskiy, Anne Lounsbery, Scott Mehl, Jessica Merrill, Richard Neer, Nina Perlina, Yopie Prince, René Nünlist, Haun Saussy, Joshua Scodel, Igor Shaitanov, Tatiana Smoliarova, Galin Tihanov, Gabriel Tropp, and Yuri Tsivian. We are grateful to Leon Wash for compiling the index for the volume. The initial impetus for Persistent Forms came from the conference “Historical Poetics: Past, Present, and Future,” held at the University of Chicago in May 2011. We would like to convey special thanks to Meredith Clason and Lina Steiner for their help in organizing that memorable event. We would also like to express our gratitude to Daniel HellerRoazen and an anonymous reviewer for Fordham University Press, who contributed their knowledge and insight to the process of revising this manuscript. The Humanities Initiative at NYU and NYU’s Jordan Family Center for the Advanced Study of Russia generously provided financial support for the publication. Finally, we would like to mention

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Acknowledgments

the kind support of the late Helen Tartar, who welcomed this volume to Fordham’s “Verbal Arts” series. Ilya Kliger Boris Maslov

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Introducing Historical Poetics History, Experience, Form ILYA KLIG ER A N D BO RIS M A S L OV

Theory vs. history; form vs. content; artistry vs. ideology; close reading vs. contextualization: these dichotomies are intrinsic to the way literary scholars have come to think of their subject, especially within the—now globally influential—U.S. academy. This volume explores a critical tradition, known as Historical Poetics, that offers a way of negotiating between these familiar oppositions, blending literary theory, history of poetic forms, cultural history, philosophy of history, and (often less overtly) philosophical aesthetics. In the following chapters, this exploration is undertaken on four different fronts—new translations that make available important theoretical work from the past, contributions to the history of literary theory, new critical-theoretical work, and literary-historical case studies that illustrate and take further the evolving paradigm of Historical Poetics. Originating with Alexander Veselovsky’s work from the 1860s to the 1900s and variously continued by Mikhail Bakhtin, Olga Freidenberg, and Mikhail Gasparov and many others in the twentieth century, Historical Poetics is, first and foremost, a Russian scholarly tradition that approaches literary form as a recursive and mediated response to historical processes.1 This tradition had a major and under-appreciated influence on the Russian Formalists, as well as on some members of the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, and one of the ambitions of this volume is to place Historical Poetics more squarely on the intellectualhistorical map, thus filling in significant gaps in Western engagement 1

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with “Russian theory.”2 More urgently, however, we hope to enrich and reinvigorate this tradition by confronting it with like-minded but independently developing understandings of both literature and history, and in the process, to set to work some of its fundamental categories and most productive insights in the context of contemporary humanistic studies. In this mode, Historical Poetics can be construed not only as a body of completed work or an established practice but also as a project, an active paradigm, which constantly realigns and expands its own inheritance. We envision it here, then, not so much as a separate line of thinking about literature developed by Russian and Soviet scholars but rather as a living contributor to the “great dialogue” (Bakhtin) of humanistic thought about history, experience and meaning, especially as it crystallizes around literary works. As such, what can Historical Poetics offer to us today? In broadest possible terms, three things. First, it offers a rich tradition of searching for a concept of history that would be adequate to the specific historicity of literature. This search brings Historical Poetics into contact with Marxist and other conceptions of universal history; with theories of subaltern nonsynchronicity; and with the self-consciously expansive notions of history (as “big history”) informing some recent work in world literature. In particular, it is incumbent on Historical Poetics, as we envision it, to challenge and supplement contemporary “historicism” with conceptions of cultural persistence and the historical longue durée.3 The first section of this introduction, dedicated to the exposition of this problematic, poses the question of the meaning of “history” in Historical Poetics. Second, Historical Poetics provides us with a way of understanding literary practice (or, more broadly, verbal art) as not only a response to, but also a constitutive factor in, history. In other words, Historical Poetics uncovers the ways in which the literary interpolates historical experience by perpetuating conceptual, affective, and behavioral schemata across space and time. This ambition opens the exploration of literary texts to cultural semiotics, to theorizations of affect as well as social and political theory and anthropology.4 Thus, the second section of this introduction concerns the question of “the relationship between literature and life.” Finally, the third major contribution of Historical Poetics that we would like to highlight here (section 3) concerns its tendency to link the notion of poetics to the specifically verbal dimension of the literary

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while at the same time conceiving of this verbal activity as neither merely technical nor reflexive or cognitive, but rather as essentially poetic, that is, creative or practical.5 In this sense “poetics” functions here as a third term, whose import is stabilized by—and can only be grasped after—the elaboration of the meaning of its predicate “historical” (section 1) and its relation to “life” (section 2).

1. Historicism, Nonsynchronicity, and the Longue Durée One of the foundational gestures of Historical Poetics involves a disentanglement of verbal art from philosophical aesthetics. “The poetry of the word,” writes Veselovsky, “cannot be defined with the help of the abstract concept of beauty, and it is always created in the sequential correlation of these forms with the systemically changing social ideals.”6 Literature, then, is best understood as a historical phenomenon. What history means, however, and precisely how it relates to verbal art, needs to be further specified. In fact, within the tradition of Historical Poetics, at least three prominent conceptions of history have been operative. These conceptions are distinct and themselves belong to different intellectual-historical conjunctures, but in Historical Poetics they overlap and enter into relations of complementarity and tension. Already in Veselovsky, traces of all three can be detected. Objecting to overhasty generalizations and a priori claims prevalent in contemporary thought on literature, Veselovsky argues that a sufficiently rigorous, scholarly endeavor requires painstaking attention to detail: “If you study an epoch and wish to develop your own, independent view of it, you must acquaint yourself not only with its major phenomena, but also with those everyday trivia which conditioned them; you will attempt to trace the relations of cause and effect between them; for the sake of convenience you will begin to approach the subject by parts—from only one point of view at a time; each time you will come to some conclusion or to a series of conclusions.”7 To grasp the meaning of a work, in other words, we need to reconstruct its historical context to the smallest possible detail. Veselovsky conceives this historical context as making up something like an “epoch,” at least in principle a delineable and distinctly characterized segment of world history. The epoch, in turn, is accessible to us through the inductive movement from part to whole, a movement that strives to avoid imaginative and

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deductive leaps. This is a positivist historicism that does not smuggle in assumptions about what constitutes the beautiful or, for that matter, how a given author expresses the “spirit” of his age. Historicism, however, does not exhaust the historiographic imagination informing the tradition here at issue. Rather, it is complemented by a competing historico-philosophical paradigm, that of universal history. In Veselovsky, this takes the form of a post-Hegelian or Spencerian assertion of the general movement toward human emancipation and individuation with concomitant changes on the level of forms and institutions of verbal art. Among other things, this conception of universal-historical development underpins Veselovsky’s poetics of plots. In a late and unfinished work on the subject, Veselovsky relies on the notion that societies pass through a number of stages as they evolve from primitive communality to individualistic modernity, generating certain poetic formulas, character types, and motifs in response to each stage of development. Thus, forms of poetic parallelism arise in the context of the primitive totemism of hunting societies; societies undergoing a transition from tribal to national life tend to respond by generating the type of an idealized hero, miraculously born and nearly invulnerable; the rise of historical consciousness within a single tribe is associated with the emergence of legends about encounters between representatives of distinct ages of the world, such as giants and humans, or older and younger warriors. It is this conception of history—which Viktor Zhirmunsky, a major proponent of Veselovsky’s work in the Soviet Union, calls the “unity and systematic nature of historical development as a whole”8—that underwrites the congeniality between Historical Poetics and certain forms of Soviet and Western Marxist literary scholarship.9 In particular, Zhirmunsky repeatedly pointed to the likelihood of similar motifs emerging in different cultures due to similar sociohistorical conditions rather than to “literary” borrowing.10 Blending Soviet internationalism and a stadial vision of universal history, Zhirmunsky also insisted that the study of comparative literature must reach beyond major (Euro-American) national literatures and include traditional and transitional literary cultures.11 As it makes its way into the twentieth century, the universal-historical paradigm, especially in its Marxist instantiation, undergoes an important modification with the emergence of the discourse of uneven development or “nonsynchronicity.” This tendency is detectable already in Veselovsky, whose notion of the persistence or survival of verbalartistic forms complicates the more straightforwardly linear narrative

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of evolution from primitive community to complex civilization. Thus, in a lecture published under the title “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics” (1894), Veselovsky writes: Popular memory has preserved sediments of images, plots, and types, which were once alive, evoked by a famous individual’s activity, by an event or an anecdote that excited interest and took possession of sentiment and fantasy. These plots and types were generalized, the notion of particular individuals and facts could fade, leaving behind only common schemas and outlines. These exist in a dark, hidden region of our consciousness, like much that we’ve undergone and experienced [perezhitoe], apparently forgotten, but then they suddenly overwhelm us as an inexplicable revelation, as a novelty that is, at the same time, an outmoded antique, something we cannot fully account for, because we are often unable to define the essence of the psychic act that unpredictably renewed in us these old memories. The same holds true in the life of literature, both popular and self-consciously artistic: old images, echoes of images, suddenly appear when a popular-poetic demand has arisen, in response to an urgent call of the times. In this way popular legends recur; in this way, in literature, we explain the renewal of some plots, whereas others are apparently forgotten.12 Employing Edward Tylor’s concept of the “survival” of rudiments of earlier social forms in later and even properly “modern” societies, Veselovsky argued that manifestations of verbal creativity do not disappear with the stage of social development that gave them life but persist and can be suddenly reanimated when the socio-psychological demand for it arises again.13 This notion presupposes a nonlinear model of history, traversed by traces of the past, with which we are ultimately never done.14 It is worth noting that the closest analogue to Veselovsky’s discovery of cultural nonsynchrony comes not from the domain of contemporary literary study but from that of art history, in the work of Aby Warburg a generation later. Warburg’s commitment to social history and the longue durée, his interest in noncanonical works and in aspects of art production that had been overlooked by traditional art history, and his attempts to trace the migration of classical traditional images and imagistic “formulas”—all find their counterparts in Veselovsky’s

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work. Perhaps most important, the two of them share the recognition, Tylorian in inspiration, of the nonlinear, nonsynchronous historicity of cultural phenomena.15 It is due to a set of historical contingencies that Veselovsky did not become for Western literary scholars the kind of founding figure that Aby Warburg represents for art historians.16 Regardless, Veselovsky’s perezhivanie, much like Warburg’s Nachleben, marks the point of nonconvergence between the recursive temporality of culture on the one hand and the progressive conceptions of historical time on the other. Veselovsky’s reflections on nonsynchrony date from the last period of his work and are thus roughly contemporary with Warburg’s. Moreover, these like-minded attempts to think the untimely resonate with a number of familiar early-twentieth-century figurations of memory as spontaneous, “pure,” or unconscious, grounding the narrative representation of time (Proust), metaphysics (Bergson), and the individual psyche (Freud). Within the domain of historiography in particular, Lev Trotsky proposes the notion of “combined development” (a combination of archaic and highly modern modes of production and ways of thinking) to account for the revolutionary situation in Russia in the early 1900s. Somewhat later but in a similar spirit, confronted by the rise of Nazism and the need to rethink history in terms that would still be Marxist but no longer straightforwardly progressive, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch suggest the concepts of the “now-time” (Jetztzeit) and “noncontemporaneity” (Ungleichzeitichkeit) respectively.17 Within the tradition of Historical Poetics itself, Veselovsky’s early hints receive their most striking development in Bakhtin’s hypothesis of “genre memory,” put forward in the second edition of his book on Dostoevsky (1963). Bakhtin’s contribution to Historical Poetics and, in particular, the concept of genre memory, is treated in greater detail in Chapter 8. For now, we might recall that something like this notion is also implicit in Fredric Jameson’s attempt to rehabilitate genre as a category of literary analysis in the 1980s by adopting a more sophisticated understanding of universal history as uneven: “In its emergent, strong form a genre is essentially a socio-symbolic message, or in other terms, that form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right. When such forms are reappropriated and refashioned in quite different social and cultural contexts, this message persists and must be functionally reckoned into the new form. [ . . . ] The ideology of the form itself, thus sedimented, persists into the later, more complex structure as a generic message which coexists—either as a contradiction or,

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on the other hand, as a mediatory or harmonizing mechanism—with elements from later stages.”18 At least in general outline, both Veselovsky and Bakhtin would agree (see Chapter 3). This historical vision of genre as a persistent form that manifests itself in texts whose design may carry a different intent invites an understanding of literary text that is at odds with the holistic presumptions of aestheticist literary criticism (see section  3). From this perspective, texts appear as intrinsically hybrid entities, whose semantic layers speak in different voices, which may be audible or silent at various moments in the text’s reception, entering into new or recurrent constellations that are largely outside authorial control. The recognition of the workings of cultural sedimentation, in effect, demands that we not only learn to stratify texts as we read, but also that we inquire into the ways in which textual hybridity is manifested, suppressed, or promoted within historically variable cultural spaces. Less broadly known than Bakhtin’s are the uses of a nonsynchronous conception of history in the work of Russian Formalists. In a joint statement, a kind of manifesto summarizing the theoretical achievements of the movement and outlining its future tasks, Roman Jakobson and Yuri Tynianov insist that “pure synchronism now proves to be an illusion: every synchronic system has its past and its future as inseparable structural elements of the system: (a) archaism as a fact of style, the linguistic and literary background recognized as the rejected, old-fashioned style; (b) the tendency toward innovation in language and literature recognized as a renewal of the system.”19 The late Formalist demand that both literature as a whole and individual works of literature be grasped in their dynamism, as a process, requires attention to residual and emergent tendencies within the present. Indeed, from this point of view, the present moment in literary history is simply incomprehensible without reference to the future and the past. But Jakobson and Tynianov go still further: “The concept of a synchronic literary system does not coincide with the naïvely envisaged concept of a chronological epoch, since the former embraces not only works of art which are close to each other in time but also works which are drawn into the orbit of the system from foreign literatures or previous epochs. An indifferent cataloguing of coexisting phenomena is not sufficient; what is important is their hierarchical significance for the given epoch.”20 It is not the immediate past alone that matters inasmuch as it helps to foreground what is innovative in a given work; it is rather any given past that could be reawakened by the work, entering into a relationship

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of productive tension with it. This dynamic of course significantly complicates not only the vision of stadial universal history but also one of the linchpin notions of historicism, the isolated, self-contained, separable “epoch” or “context.” Another member of the group, Boris Eikhenbaum, offers the most explicitly philosophical (most likely, Bergsonian) elaboration of literature’s nonsynchronous predicament: To study an event historically does not at all mean to describe it as an isolated instance which has meaning only in the conditions of its own time. This is naïve historicism which renders science sterile. It is not a matter of simple projection into the past, but of understanding the historical actuality of an event, of determining its role in the development of historical energy, which, in its very essence, is constant, does not appear and disappear and therefore operates outside of time. [ . . . ] Nothing repeats itself in history precisely because nothing vanishes but only mutates. Therefore, historical analogies are not only possible but even necessary; and the study of historical events outside the historical processes as individual, “unrepeatable” self-contained systems is impossible because it contradicts the very nature of these events.21 The anti-historicist pathos of this passage is evident. Historical energy is Eikhenbaum’s name for what allows forms to persist and have effects beyond their time. To progress, he opposes mutation; to unique and unrepeatable historical ages, analogies. Notably, some of the more recent attempts at conceptualizing the distinctive space/time of world literature similarly insist that even the most distant past does not go out of existence but is perpetually brought back in re-articulated form in the present; that it is not annihilated by the present, but in Formalist language, “deformed” by it. This insistence, along with the stress on the importance of analogies, is in evidence, for example in Wai Chee Dimock’s attempt to conceptualize American literature on a planetary spacio-temporal scale. Thus, she argues that “the continuum of historical life does not grant the privilege of autonomy to any spatial locale; it does not grant the privilege of autonomy to any temporal segment.”22 Dimock suggests, therefore, that we must transcend the categories of both nation and period and conceive a given moment in literary history as traversed by multiple pasts, the distance from each of which is

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not measurable in terms of homogeneous empty time. In one of Dimock’s examples, we have Thoreau influencing Gandhi and himself influenced by the Bhagavad Gita in a kind of “global civil society” that connects people and ideas across great expanses of space and time. “The map of the world that Thoreau lives in,” Dimock writes, “is probably not one that we recognize. As far as he is concerned, the Ganges River is in direct contact with Walden Pond; he owes his intellectual genesis to the mixing of the two. Concord, Massachusetts, might be an American locale, but it is irrigated by an ancient text from Asia. Swept by that text and its torrents of time, Walden in turn flows outward, circumnavigating the globe, gliding past Europe and Africa on its way back to India.”23 The danger of this approach, as Bruce Robbins warns in his essay on the “Uses of World Literature,” is that we succumb to an ahistoricist fallacy that sees sameness everywhere. “It seems likely,” he writes, “that world literature is going to breed more discussions of what we used to call ‘themes’ like beauty and death, which come to seem permissible, though they are dangerously close to the atemporal universals that they were understood to be a century ago, simply because they are too large to fit the nation-state.”24 Though its roots reach deep into the nineteenth century, Historical Poetics largely eschews this danger by emphasizing simultaneously the longue durée and the conjunctural in history. At its best, it remains firmly “historical” and “materialist,” in the sense of being committed to understanding literary works in the context of specific social-practical conditions within which they arise, while at the same time appreciating the expansive life span of genres, motifs, and character-types. It demands that we combine, in a single analytic effort, close reading of particular texts with “distant” reading that radically cross-cuts preconceived historical linkages. Bakhtin puts this clearly: “A literary genre, by its very nature, reflects the most stable, ‘eternal’ tendencies in literature’s development. Always preserved in a genre are undying elements of the archaic. True, these archaic elements are preserved in it only thanks to their constant renewal, which is to say their contemporization. A genre is always the same and yet not the same, always new and old simultaneously.”25 New and old simultaneously—this is the logic of history in Historical Poetics as we construe it. What it explicitly opposes is the sort of historicism that traps its object at a safe remove from us and pretends that it does not invade the very perspective from which it is being examined. Eikhenbaum suggests that we replace this historical

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objectification of a work, a genre, a device with a more dynamic conception of historical actuality (in the sense that its existence is not that of an object but that of an activity) or “energy,” something that cannot be confined to its location, something that can act at a spatial and temporal remove. Bakhtin pleads along similar lines: “If it is impossible to study literature apart from an epoch’s entire culture, it is even more fatal to encapsulate a literary phenomenon in the single epoch of its creation [ . . . ]. We are afraid to remove ourselves in time from the phenomenon under investigation. Yet the artwork extends its roots into the distant past. [ . . . ] Works break through the boundaries of their own time, they live in centuries, that is, in great time and frequently (with great works, always) their lives there are more intense and fuller than their lives within their own time.”26

2. Lit erature and/as Life In sum, Bakhtin and the Formalists agreed on this: that (literary) history needs to be understood as both radically continuous (in the sense of positing an unseverable connection between the experiences of the past and those of the present) and nonsynchronous (in the sense that the links cannot be organized in homogeneous progressive or teleological time, but must be conceived in time that is stratified with memories, analogical, and infinitely traversable). This insistence on the insufficiency of traditional historicism may very well have something to do with the peculiarities of the rise of modern literature in Russia and the role it quickly came to play as a repository of meanings for the public sphere.27 Literature was predominantly understood as something of “a textbook of life” or “a theory of life,” and the process of autonomization of the literary-aesthetic field from those of politics, society, and the broader culture that was in evidence in western Europe throughout the nineteenth century seems to have never—neither in the nineteenth nor in the twentieth century—quite gotten off the ground in Russia. As a result, whereas the evolution of form-oriented approaches to art and literature finds parallels in the West, the specific conditions of Russian historical development stimulated an understanding of literature as intricately woven into the fabric of sociopolitical life.28 Certainly Veselovsky did not think of himself as a literary critic whose purpose it was to explicate a given work in light of its relevance to his own time. But his theorization of literature’s relation to social life avoids not only aestheticism (the treatment of literary works as ob-

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jects of “disinterested pleasure”), but epistemologism (their treatment simply as evidence of the “worldviews” of particular epochs) as well. Instead, he understands literary phenomena (both individual works and genres) dynamically as responses to socio-psychological demands. For Veselovsky, whether he is writing about primitive verbal art or sentimentalist psychology, form is a reaction to need, an attempt at meaning in the face of its historically urgent lack. In short, form reenacts, in various contexts and on various levels of complexity, the originary syncretic ritual performed with the belief that “the symbolic recreation of what is desired influences its actualization.”29 Worldviews are thus encoded in works only as it were in action, not as passive reflections or “models” of the social sphere. Art and ritual are meaning-making activities that respond to an imperfect world, a dance over the abyss of desire and lack. The centrality that Veselovsky accords to (active) ritual in contradistinction to (reflective) myth anticipates the Cambridge Ritualists; both were inspired by British ethnography, epitomized in Frazer’s Golden Bough.30 Moreover, both were suggesting developments in their respective disciplines that went parallel with the continental philosophical movement of Lebensphilosophie. Just as philosophers from Nietzsche to Simmel demanded that cultural forms be understood as imbued with the urgency of life, so Veselovsky, in his late study of Russian Sentimentalism, deploys the term perezhivanie to refer both to a tradition that persists (“survives”) through texts and to everyday experience (often prompted by an emotional response to a text). The term serves to foreground the affective power with which cultural perceptions articulated in poetic texts can shape the experience of an individual.31 This approach to poetics and experience is continued in Zhirmunsky’s early work on German Romantic mysticism, in which an adherence to Veselovsky’s Historical Poetics goes alongside a direct influence of Lebensphilosophie.32 The impact of Lebensphilosophie can also be traced in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. In his very first publication from 1919, the short essay “Art and Answerability,” Bakhtin formulates the principle of connectedness between art and life that will guide much of his later work: “The Poet must remember that it is his poetry which bears the guilt for the vulgar prose of life, whereas the man of everyday life ought to know that the fruitlessness of art is due to his willingness to be unexacting and to the unseriousness of the concerns in his life.”33 Literature for Bakhtin is not an autonomous domain but a mode of authoring, of

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a meaningful organization of experience, an activity without which— in the Kantian spirit—experience itself is rendered inconceivable. As Bakhtin goes on to suggest in Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity (written in the early 1920s), literary works are part of the continuum of meaningful finalization, of which the “lowest,” most fundamental stage is the primitive choral ritual performance. Furthermore, for Bakhtin, those literary works are most precious, most properly literary, which display the greatest tension between the labor of finalization and the experience that is being finalized, thus reminding us of literature’s essential link to language and other sense-making mechanisms operating in the historical everyday. Bakhtin’s vision of the continuum of finalization finds an unexpected echo in the mature Formalist notion of deformation, which Yuri Tynianov understands as the major mechanism in the evolution of literary systems: “The uniqueness of the literary work lies in the way the constructive factor is applied to the material, in the ‘formation’ (i.e., in effect, ‘deformation’) of the material. [ . . . ] And it goes without saying that the ‘material’ is not at all opposed to the ‘form’; it too is ‘formal,’ because outside the constructive principle the material does not exist.”34 For our purposes it is crucial to observe that deformation occurs at every level, all the way down to the impossible limit of pure “material.” The literary genre or individual work is thus best understood by taking stock of its relation (“orientation”) to the proximate mode of the formation of experience (see Chapter 3). Thus, for example, in Tynianov’s own account of the eighteenth-century Russian ode, the literary genre is revealed as structured through and through by its relation to the act of courtly oratory, which is, in turn, an explicitly political act, making sense of (or “de-forming”) scenarios of royal power, which in turn, “de-form” political institutions, and so on.35 Even the Formalists, then, whose battle cry was the creation of an autonomous discipline of the study of literature and who felt themselves to be swimming against the current of the great Russian literarycritical tradition (from the radical critics of the 1840s and ’60s to Veselovsky himself, whose notion of socio-psychological demand they found inimical)—even they ultimately conceived of verbal art as possessing an intimate relation to “life.” Indeed, from the moment of its inception with Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Device” (1916), which posits for literature the goal of an ethical reanimation of the experience of life, and to its most systematic elaboration in the works of Tynianov in

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the late 1920s, Formalism offers an activist (rather than autonomous or reflective) vision of the literary process, one that is not so much an effect of historical change as a full-fledged participant in it. In On Psychological Prose, Lydia Ginzburg, one of the few students of the Formalists who were able to produce important theoretical work in the postwar Soviet period, proposed that the “aesthetic” finalizing principle can at times be extended beyond literary works proper to “human documents” such as diaries and letters and indeed to everyday behavior and individual psychology, whereby historical actors fashion their personalities as quasi-literary artifacts.36 A still more striking conceptualization and demonstration of literature’s participatory role in the historical process came out of the work of the semiotician, literary theorist, and historian Yuri Lotman. In his article “The Decembrist in Everyday Life,” Lotman proposed the category of “behavior-text” as a “completed chain of meaningful acts that runs between intention and result.”37 A behavior-text is Lotman’s term for the way in which one’s everyday actions may be guided and interpreted with reference to assimilated literary plots and topoi. When it comes to the Decembrist movement, Lotman argues, a dominant mode of literary emplotment came from the culture of Romanticism (Russian and western European alike), with its own accumulated cast of representative characters and plots. “Just as the gestures and acts of the nobleman revolutionary had meaning for himself and for those around him insofar as their significance was expressed in the word, so any series of acts would become a text (acquire significance) if it could be illuminated by association with a literary plot. The death of Caesar, the heroism of Cato, the preaching of a denunciatory prophet [ . . . ]—these were the plots which gave meaning to particular chains of everyday acts.”38 Thus, the literary dimension interpolates itself into the world of everydayness and raises mundane acts to the status of meaning-giving rituals. Literary models allow the Decembrists to feel like actors on the stage of world history, with the eyes of their descendants constantly on them. In this way, we are able to speak of the “poetics of everyday behavior”—a notion that proved influential in the conceptualization of New Historicist methodology.39 None of this is to deny fundamental divergences within the tradition of Historical Poetics. In their time, Bakhtin and the Formalists could not agree on very much. Nor did Bakhtin see eye to eye with Lotman (though Lotman did not conceal his debt to Bakhtin). As for

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Veselovsky, he was now and then respectfully invoked, but, with the exception of Zhirmunsky and Freidenberg, was approached as a founding figure rather than as an active interlocutor by the second- and third-generation theorists here at issue. Still, when we see their work as comprising an overarching paradigm, we are afforded a view of far greater continuity than is usually acknowledged. Particularly vivid is the dominant, though variously inflected, conviction that literature is a special form of transformative human activity, a response to the world’s insufficiency and an effective means of endowing individual and collective experience with sense. We may take it as a further indication of the convergence of Historical Poetics and contemporary Marxism that, in a recent work, Fredric Jameson has expressed a congenial understanding of literature as “something we do to reality, and its resultant transformation is no less real than the objects on which it is performed.”40

3. Philology into Theory: Folklore, Linguistics, Poetics “Poetics” as a field of knowledge is a notably incoherent entity. In English, the term usually refers either to normative, prescriptive texts— manuals and manifestoes—put forward by poets or critics, or to studies of a particular work of art crafted by the poet. Accordingly, American literary scholars, by and large, understand poetics to refer to either normative poetics or to what one may call authorial poetics, that is, to the principles of construction of a text that, although reconstructed ex post facto by the scholar, are taken to emanate from a poiêtês, the author-creator.41 In the Russian critical tradition, beginning with Veselovsky, poetics is construed more broadly, as a study of verbal art (encompassing both prose and poetry) that inquires into its constructive principles, while bracketing the individual author.42 There can thus exist a “poetics of the novel” and a “poetics of French medieval literature,” a “poetics of plot” and a “poetics of genre.” The banishment of the poet, combined with a rejection of the organic unity of the work of art in favor of a messier, stratified vision of the text, is one of the inaugural gestures of Historical Poetics. Yet here, the author as the primum movens of verbal art is not replaced by an abstract grammar of literature, analogous to Saussure’s langue or cultural discourse; establishing such a synchronic system was of course the ultimate aspiration of the Structuralist project. Historical Poetics,

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while sharing with Structuralism an orientation toward linguistics, is instead concerned with diachrony. It is thus committed to a quest for those constructive principles of literary discourse that have a historical (rather than cognitive or psychological) nature, while falling outside the individual author’s control. The category of genre, construed historically rather than normatively or idealistically, is essential to Historical Poetics precisely because it fulfills these requirements.43 Beyond genre, one may cite Veselovsky’s effort to construct a historical account of inherited plots, Bakhtin’s notion of chronotopes (space-time configurations) propagated by literature, or Mikhail Gasparov’s work on intricate thematic associations of stanzaic and metrical patterns in lyric.44 Poetics as inquiry into verbal art succeeds when it reaches phenomena that lie beyond authorial poetics. A historical poetics grasps these phenomena as having a history (participating in the history of forms), responsive to history (produced by a particular historical conjuncture), and formative of history (defining present and future historical experience and practice). Historical Poetics thus assigns to literature a qualified autonomy. Literature’s constructive principles evolve along with the society that generates, receives, and recycles them. It is therefore not surprising that many proponents of the methods of Historical Poetics studied folklore, which is traditionally denied properly “artistic” or high “literary” qualities.45 The wide cross-cultural dissemination of genres such as lyric, epic, or tale in a “preliterary” form that defies both individual authorship and aesthetic organicism crucially informed the basic premises of Veselovsky and his followers. Yet what does it mean to extend these premises beyond folklore? According to a definition given by Veselovsky in his last, unfinished work, The Poetics of Plots, the task of Historical Poetics is “to ascertain the role and boundaries of inherited tradition [predanie] in the process of individual creativity.”46 The question of what separates a popular song, in which genre reigns supreme, and an authorial lyric text, in which the poet claims utter originality, is central to the paradigm, and it clearly demands not only extensive reference to comparative history of verbal art, but also theoretical conceptualization (see Chapter 8). The problem of assessing the distance between oral tradition and authorial literature is perhaps nowhere as pressing as in the study of Greek literary history, epitomized by the so-called Homeric Question (see Chapter 15). Milman Parry’s study of South Slavic living epic traditions, inspired by the pioneering work on Turkic epic by the

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German-Russian scholar  F.  W. Radloff, helped to “personify” the anonymous composers of Homeric epics, while shifting the focus away from their literary characteristics. As Veselovsky remarked already in 1870, the pendulum between a popular and a literary Homer had been swinging since Herder; it will probably continue to swing in the future.47 The achievement of Parry and Lord, however, in part served to occlude the fact that other Greek genres of discourse (literary and philosophical) also originated in folklore.48 Olga Freidenberg’s work from the 1920s to the 1950s, discussed in Chapter 10, drew on Veselovsky’s legacy in attempting to elucidate the preliterary roots of ancient literatures. The close adherence of the Russian tradition of Historical Poetics to the study of language and folklore has itself a historical explanation: its origins in the discipline of philology. Philology is called forth by the opaqueness of the object of study, its impenetrability to the first reading, be it an ancient language, a medieval legend circulating in different manuscript redactions, or a popular song in a substandard dialect. Historicism—at least in its inductive variety—is essential for philology, whereas it is largely irrelevant to literary criticism or philosophically informed work on literature. While throughout Europe philology has originally been informed by an interest in classical or medieval antiquity, in the Russian scholarly tradition, a peculiar development took place: philology was extended to the study of modern literatures. One reason for this development was that literary criticism proper [literaturnaia kritika] has taken over the functions of social commentary, and, in the Soviet period, was seen as thoroughly ideological. This meant that literary scholars sought for a more complex synthesis of social and literary analysis within an ostensibly scholastic philological tradition. It is not a coincidence that the central figures in the Russian tradition of Historical Poetics have had extensive experience as philologists (Veselovsky started out as a medievalist and a Renaissance scholar; Freidenberg and Gasparov were Classicists; Propp and Zhirmunsky studied folklore as well as the Middle Ages). While in many ways a product of German philology, Historical Poetics, ironically, never had a true counterpart in Germany. In fact, the manner in which German influences were assimilated in Russia ultimately reveals the divergences between the two national critical traditions. Major components of the paradigm were imported at various moments from Germany to Russia, but evolved differently in the center

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and the periphery, in part because Russian scholars were more receptive to other influences (e.g., to British ethnographic comparativism), and in part because some borrowed features that were eventually neglected in Germany were conserved and entered into new syntheses in Russia. In the remainder of this section, we attempt to define the distinctive constitution of Russian poetics of verbal art by tracing some of these intellectual influences: a mild version of Hegelian universal history, the Herder-Grimm tradition of the study of folklore, Scherer’s call for a poetics founded on philology, and form-oriented approaches to art and literature in the early twentieth century. In 1862, two Russian students, Alexander Potebnya and Alexander Veselovsky, were sent to Berlin on a “study abroad” mission sponsored by the Russian Ministry of Education.49 Both adhered to a postHegelian idealist vision—mediated by their Berlin teacher Heymann Steinthal—that literary forms evolve in a way that is more or less uniform across cultures, thus making possible systematic comparative inquiry into literature. At the same time, both parted with received notions of idealist aesthetics. Aware of the keen interest German scholars were taking in Slavic oral traditions, Potebnya and Veselovsky followed the previous generation of Russian scholars (F. I. Buslaev, A. N. Afanas’ev) working in the tradition of Herder and Jacob Grimm, in making indigenous folklore a central resource for their work.50 Finally, both approached literature as a distinctly verbal art.51 In contrast to Potebnya, however, Veselovsky extended his interests beyond both the study of folklore and the study of poetry as an autonomous domain of discourse. Under the influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Potebnya focused on the constants of literary form, which he derived primarily from folklore and saw as products of the mythical phase of culture. Veselovsky, while similarly intent on the evolution of literary phenomena from “primitive” roots, strove for an account of literature’s incremental responses to historical change and privileged borrowing over cultural inheritance. The granting of the ultimate explanatory value to the mythical (mythopoetic) consciousness appeared unacceptable from this perspective.52 In this regard, Veselovsky’s difference from Potebnya also amounted to a departure from the dominant line of German thought on literature and myth represented by their common teacher Steinthal. Another feature of contemporary German scholarship that seemed unsatisfying to Veselovsky consisted in the privileging of the history of ideas—and of the high discourse of poetry as its putative vehicle—over

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concrete sociohistorical factors. For example, in a short essay entitled “From the History of Naturgefühl,” Veselovsky took issue with Alfred Biese’s book on the evolution of the views of nature among the Greeks.53 According to Veselovsky, historical periods when nature becomes an object of particular fascination, reflected in a variety of cultural phenomena including the rise of landscape painting and the contemplative individual trips to nature, are distinguished by “an extreme, sometimes morbid development of individual consciousness and a decline of the religious-social system.”54 This implies both that the difference between the modern and the mythical attitudes toward nature is a question “not of essence, but of degree” and that particular literary influences are secondary to developments in social consciousness. It is therefore incorrect to see Petrarch’s inauguration of “modern sentimentality, world grief, and disunity” as a matter of the influence of Roman poetry. By contrast with Biese’s “internalist” interpretation, Veselovsky “would opt for a historical-psychological explanation” of the slow evolution of sentimentality as a response to the conditions of modern life. Veselovsky’s distrust of mythologism was aided by his involvement in the burgeoning study of motif migrations pioneered by Theodor Benfey; this, along with the impact of British comparative ethnography, contributed to his movement away from Romantic ethnocentrism. Veselovsky’s vision of cultural and literary history stressed contact between cultures as an important impetus of a nation’s development, while allowing for the spontaneous generation of similar forms in societies in the same historical phase; the assimilation of foreign forms crucially depended on the receptivity of the importing culture (see Chapter 12). This dialogic approach to cultural development was continued by Yuri Lotman’s work from the 1970s to the 1980s on the interaction of center and periphery in the global cultural network.55 Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere, in fact, furnishes a notable alternative to some world-systems approaches to the study of world literature.56 Meanwhile, in twentieth-century Germany, the conflicted idealist and Romantic heritage of the study of literature was subjected to severe ideological testing. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) and Ernst Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), both rooted in the German tradition of Romance philology, represent the last flowering of German literary Geistesgeschichte. Whereas Auerbach’s opus magnum operates with a Hegelian, starkly teleological version of universal history that appears to stay immune to modernist notions of nonsynchronous time, Curtius’s emphasis on inherited forms

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is in some ways akin to Veselovsky’s (see Chapters 4 and 7).57 Curtius believed that his historical tropology effectively overcame the contemporary polemic between philology and idealism in Germany; however, his notion of a European cultural unity harbors an ahistorical, politically tendentious agenda.58 A different line of intellectual development in Germany, following Kant’s rather than Hegel’s lead, sought to consider poetic form as an aesthetic phenomenon. There is a further irony in the fact that while the Russian Formalists in some cases saw themselves as following on these form-centered methodologies, the intentions of contemporary German scholarship ultimately proved inimical to the task of constructing a specialized discipline of verbal art.59 In 1925, Boris Eikhenbaum noted in his diary: “An odd impression: it seems as if the Germans are behind us. They busy themselves with old, useless problems”; “How everything’s different among them! ‘An aesthetic direction’ (Walzel, Strich, Gundolf)—that is something we’ve outlived.”60 One of the greatest achievements of the “Formalist moment” in Russia was Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928), which inspired French structuralists to attempt to construct universal grammars of narrative.61 It is symptomatic, however, that Propp’s masterpiece, while gesturing back to Goethe’s morphology and stressing Veselovsky’s precedent, has no relation to contemporary German thinking on general aesthetics. Up until the arrival of Structuralism, aesthetics remained paramount in German thinking on literature, as the work of the Frankfurt school and Hans-Georg Gadamer and his followers demonstrates. It is notable that when Hans Robert Jauss put forward a historical “aesthetics of reception”—a paradigm that is in many ways congruent with Historical Poetics—he founded his critique of Gadamer’s normative aesthetics on the work of the Russian Formalists.62 There is an intriguing possibility that German literary studies already in the late nineteenth century could have taken a different course, one closer to the kind of historically-inflected aesthetics proposed by Jauss in the 1970s. In fact, an important impetus for Veselovsky’s thinking on Historical Poetics was provided by Wilhelm Scherer’s posthumously published Poetik (1888). Scherer’s work, in Veselovsky’s description, was “a formless fragment of an undertaking conceived both with talent and on a grand scale” as well as “with the same objectives” as Veselovsky’s own project, ongoing since the early 1860s.63 Both spoke of the need for a poetics that would sprout from philology, founded on a historical and comparative investigation of diverse phenomena of

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verbal art rather than on the preconceived notions of Western aesthetics.64 Following on a sympathetic discussion of Scherer’s work, Veselovsky points out that in the wake of Kant’s Third Critique it would be ludicrous to uphold an objectively given standard of beauty.65 The implication is that it may be possible to historicize Kant’s universalsubjective understanding of aesthetic experience by positing a historically and geographically changeable “subjectivity,” a culturally or epochally specific way of organizing experience through the faculty of the Imagination. We might say that the eventual Historical Poetics emerges as a synthesis of the philological tradition and this project of the historicization of the aesthetic realm. It is suggestive that the resuscitation of poetics as a term that has dominated twentieth-century literary theory dates back to Veselovsky’s engagement with Scherer’s Poetik. While Scherer’s work had no visible impact on German scholarship,66 Veselovsky’s adoption of the term “poetics” for his own works made it the proper term for the new specialized field of literary studies. This is how the word was used by the Russian Formalists, and Roman Jakobson, a member of this group, disseminated this usage beyond Russia. French and Soviet Structuralism, which saw the Russian Formalists as pioneers of their method, have aided in the further propagation of this term. The success of the Jakobsonian poetics marked the period when literary studies had the largest impact on neighboring fields, including the study of the other arts. As Haun Saussy points out, “Oddly, the moment in the history of comparative literature that saw it dwelling most insistently on the characteristics of its chosen object was also the moment at which it radiated outward, under the loose name of ‘theory,’ its strongest interdisciplinary energies.”67 The new poetics of verbal art, encompassing both folklore and literature, pledged absolute loyalty to the study of linguistics; Jakobson, in his later work, would even demand that poetics become a subfield of that discipline.68 In this sense, the analogy between literature and language played an important role in the provisional bracketing of the social, which allowed the development of literary studies as an autonomous discipline.69 On the other hand, as we mentioned earlier, Tynianov and Eikhenbaum insistently placed literature in the context of history and society; the inquiry into folklore also went alongside the study of society. In this light, the analogy between literature and language buttresses a view of literature as a system or praxis,

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affecting—and reciprocally affected by—other systems within culture, rather than as a self-contained, autonomous whole. It is perhaps a timely reminder that the original deployment of the modern term “poetics” occurred in the phrase “Historical Poetics” and that it was intended as a quintessentially comparative venture. Veselovsky understood poetics as a comparative and a historical discipline which, in addition to uncovering the “constructed-ness” of art, places its principles of construction within a historical series, i.e., relates it both to antecedent works and to changing social forms. The result was a new kind of literary history—one that focused not on authors or poetic schools, but on the evolution of literary forms—as well as a new kind of historicism that considers the literary domain within the unity of a historically specific culture, and beyond, within a global network of dialogically-interlinked cultures.

4. Practicing Historical Poetics Historical Poetics brings together the study of the historicity of artistic forms and theoretical reflection on cultural continuity and change. Maintaining the ties between philosophy, philology, and history established in nineteenth-century European academy, it has sought to construct a theory of verbal art that would be true both to the specificity of its medium and to the realities of its existence in the social world. In this volume, we privilege a particular aspect of Historical Poetics—its engagement with deep time, cultural memory, and of the longue durée of artistic forms. For this reason, this volume brings together Classicists, comparatists, and Russianists, who join forces to ask the following questions: What does it mean to study literary form as a historical phenomenon today? Can literary studies be reinvigorated by a closer rapprochement with history, without jettisoning literature’s specificity? What aid can different strands in the critical tradition of Historical Poetics provide to such an inquiry? Each of the four parts of the book juxtaposes classical works in Russian Historical Poetics that have never before appeared in translation (Chapters 1, 5, 9, 13, 14) with new studies, focusing on ancient (Chapter 3, 6, 10, 15) and modern (Chapters 4, 7, 12, 16) literatures. Furthermore, the contributions of Victoria Somoff, Ilya Vinitsky, and Robert Bird specifically comment on the theoretical import of the newly translated works, re-contextualizing them in contemporary scholarly

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discourses. The volume thus instantiates a dialogue between the ancients and the moderns, brought together on the theoretical common ground of Historical Poetics. The choice of national traditions and theoretical concerns by no means exhausts or delimits the possibilities opened by this paradigm. We anticipate further conversations about the method and its applications, which would draw scholars working in other fields and on other problems. Newly translated classics are prefaced by short introductions. In what follows, we provide a summary of the new studies included in the volume, and a clarification of its overall structure. The first part of the volume, “Questioning the Historical, Envisioning a Poetics,” comprises four chapters, which explore the various meanings of historically-minded inquiry into literature. The classic piece “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics” represents Veselovsky’s tentative attempt to theorize literary and cultural evolution, as he saw them in the 1890s. While Victoria Somoff’s and Leslie Kurke’s contributions place the tradition of Historical Poetics in dialogue with New Historicism, Boris Maslov relates Veselovsky’s historical vision to three non-contextualist approaches to verbal art. Whereas Kurke puts forward an inclusive historicist hermeneutics, both Somoff and Maslov pose the question of the inherent limits of historicization. In Chapter 2, Victoria Somoff confronts a paradox in Veselovsky’s theory of the persistence of forms, which appears to exclude the possibility of new forms arising. Juxtaposing Veselovsky’s “uncomfortably extreme view on artistic innovation” and Stephen Greenblatt’s approach to the processes of individual “self-fashioning” in the Renaissance, Somoff presents a critique of a presumption shared by the two critical paradigms that, inspired by linguistics, chose to prioritize system (or langue) over individual agency (parole). Contesting the primacy of the historical demand, Somoff argues for a need to theorize the phenomenon of “forgetting” the old form at the moment when a new form appears. From this perspective, she considers Veselovsky’s discussion of the emergence of rhyme from within syntactic parallelism and the rise of representation of consciousness as a quintessential non-referential element in Realist narration. In both cases, the oblivion of an old form and the rise of the new result from a fundamental shift in perception that occurs within the order of verbal creativity and does not lend itself to a historical-deterministic explanation. In Chapter 3, Leslie Kurke states the need to extend the (neo-)positivist hermeneutic paradigm in a way that would fruitfully combine the

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insights of New Historicism and Historical Poetics. Focusing on a specific philological problem (a possible intertextual link between Pindar’s Pythian 11 and Aeschylus’s Oresteia), Kurke reveals deep-seated divergences between the poetics of choral poetry (Pindar’s victory odes) and Attic tragedy. To achieve this major objective of a historical conceptualization of genre, she distinguishes between three kinds of historicist hermeneutics: one pertaining to the level of political histoire événementielle, the other (following Veselovsky and Jameson) considering genres as socio-symbolic forms, and the third (following Tynianov) considering these genres’ different “orientations” with respect to a proximate cultural system, that of religion. Concluding Part I, Boris Maslov’s contribution comments on three of Veselovsky’s theoretical insights (pertaining to genre theory, motif migration, and the socio-psychological nature of style), each time considering them in light of more recent theoretical developments. In particular, the perspective of Michael Silverstein’s linguistic anthropology helps to shed light on cross-culturally dispersed varieties of text (corresponding to the familiar division between epic, drama, and lyric), thus delimiting and adumbrating the domain of the properly historical consideration of genre. The second case study focuses on different theorizations of inherited elements of discourse (motif, topos) in Veselovsky and Curtius. Finally, the issue of a worldview’s formal correlates, important in Soviet Marxist stylistics, is tackled with reference to the use of free indirect discourse in Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. Part II, “The Life of Forms: Tradition, Memory, Regeneration,” is dedicated to theoretical problems central to Historical Poetics: cultural continuity and change, mechanisms of tradition and their historicity, and the role literature plays in rendering tradition possible, dynamic, and fraught with meaning. Adopting three different approaches, Nina Braginskaya, Michael Kunichika, and Ilya Kliger confront the theoretical task of re-conceptualizing literary history as history not of literature but one that is distinctive of literature’s intrinsic mechanisms. The short piece on the “The Oresteia in the Odyssey” by Olga Freidenberg encapsulates her vision of formal evolution of plots as dictated by semiotic mechanisms observed in ancient cultures. Extrapolating from Bakhtin, Kliger outlines a theory of the persistence of literary form under the conditions of modernity. Braginskaya describes a dynamic whereby new artistic forms can arise in traditional cultures. Finally, Kunichika discusses the ways in which memory, tradition, and oblivion are brought into a dialogue in the highly self-conscious

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medium of Russian Romantic lyric. These chapters employ different methodologies—meta-theoretical, typological-comparatist, and literaryhermeneutic—displaying different facets of Historical Poetics as a vital and evolving critical paradigm. In Chapter 6, Braginskaya turns to premodern traditional cultures to ask a question that was already raised, as a paradox, in Chapter 2: how can new forms arise within a self-consciously traditional culture? Tradition, as Braginskaya shows, has its own interior motor of innovation. It consists in the practices of commentary, often focused on sacred texts central to the given culture and ostensibly aimed at elucidating their true meaning. As the linguistic idiom of the “Scriptures” grows out of sync with the spoken language and their doctrinal import is increasingly subject to uncertainty and disputation, the task of interpreting them generates a variety of new kinds of discourse. To make sense of the genesis of artistic forms in a traditional society, we therefore need a historical poetics of commentary. Based on a broad survey of diverse kinds of ethnographic and literary evidence, Braginskaya demonstrates that commentary, in different cultural environments, can give rise to genres of dramatic performance, “philosophical” inquiry, and fictional storytelling. In particular, revisiting Veselovsky’s insights on the origins of theater, Braginskaya points to the crosscultural diffusion of the hybrid proto-dramatic form that combines an “archaic” and “obscure” core with a “colloquial” and “interpretive” supplement. In the case of philosophy and narrative, the canonical texts similarly tend to sprout “explanatory” satellites, which may develop into fictional narratives (in the case of Joseph and Aseneth, an apocryphos that anticipates the Hellenistic novel) or new conceptual syntheses (e.g., Neoplatonism as exegesis of the Platonic doctrine). Turning to modernity, Chapter 7 theorizes formal persistence as an aporia, a predicament, and the reality of (late) Romantic lyric. Focusing on the history of the image of the kurgan, Kunichika shows that it enters into a complex relation with the quintessential Romantic topos of the oak, allowing for various poetic figurations of the interpenetration of the historical past and the organic processes that obliterate it. Even as they participate in a closely-knit literary tradition, the poems by A. K. Tolstoy, Afanasy Fet, and Fyodor Tiutchev thematize oblivion as a paradoxically productive space within which an antiquity retains or assumes an ability to speak to the modern viewer. By drawing on contemporary visual representations emerging from archaeological work on medieval Russian burial mounds, Kunichika clarifies the his-

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torical meaning of these evocations of the past that, even as they stage their own inadequacy, reveal the urgency with which this past was being reclaimed from oblivion. In Kunichika’s reading, the kurgan emerges not only as a Bakhtinian chronotope that encodes a particular, historically specific configuration of time and space, but also as an archaeological metaphor for literature’s claim to persistence. Bakhtin’s enthusiastic reception in the West has occluded some aspects of his legacy and induced certain simplistic modes of reading his better-known works. In Chapter 8, Kliger adopts a holistic approach to Bakhtin that at the same time seeks to be attentive to the development and modifications of his thought. In particular, Kliger suggests that it may be fruitful to read Bakhtin’s early philosophical work, Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, as already in a sense a work in Historical Poetics. By tracing the evolution of Bakhtin’s thought from the early philosophical manuscript to the second edition of his book on Dostoevsky’s poetics and beyond, Kliger tries to show that the notions of “genre memory” and “great time” are a product of a decadeslong quest for a viable redefinition of “tradition”—usually associated with the stable order of the premodern societies—for the modern age. Kliger’s task is to understand what it might mean to speak of the persistence of forms in modern literatures. Part III, “Comparative Poetics and the Historicity of Experience,” makes a transition from art’s immanent dynamic to its effects on and correlates in the social world. In Veselovsky’s “The Age of Sensibility,” the self emerges as a true mediator between poetry and society. The historically variable ways of perceiving and making sense of the world are reflected in literary forms, which, as they are propagated or exported, come to mold human experience. Thus, a comparative poetics of metaphor, as Richard Martin shows, can shed light on differences between ancient and modern modes of perception. Ilya Vinitsky ponders how art forms help the social agent to craft a distinct biographical narrative. Finally, Kate Holland shows that, in Dostoevsky’s later work, forms of folk legend are seen to represent and enable genuine religious experience. While the major part of Olga Freidenberg’s oeuvre is still accessible only to a tiny fraction of scholars who read Russian, the English publication of her last work, Image and Concept, translated by Kevin Moss, made an intellectual encounter with her ideas a possibility.70 In a remarkable contrast with the eager reception of Bakhtin, however, Image and Concept turned out to be too historical for semioticians

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and too philosophical for Classicists. Published in 1997, in the heyday of cultural studies, it fell on deaf ears. Richard Martin reveals the interpretive potential and the pathbreaking quality of Freidenberg’s historical construal of metaphor as a mediating term between mythical image and philosophical concept. Martin considers Freidenberg’s theory in relation to Greek primary texts (focusing on Pindar), to the history of theorizing figurative language (including Quintilian, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke), and to modern cognitive and anthropological approaches to metaphor. In combining attention to the history of a formal element and the history of its theorization, as well as stressing the longue durée and a broadly comparative approach, Martin provides one productive model for how Historical Poetics can be practiced today. Chapter 11 takes a close look at Veselovsky’s 1904 work on Vasily Zhukovsky. Ilya Vinitsky shows that Veselovsky develops a rigorous “poetics of psychological biography,” in which the emotional world of an individual is approached as a product of a given cultural-historical moment, “the age of Sensibility” (or Sentimentalism). Imported literary texts emerge as crucial to these processes of self-formation, and the objective of Veselovsky’s psychological biography is to trace the ways in which a historical individual, existing within a close-knit community of friends, is able to fashion “alien” cultural goods into an authentic expression of his emotional life. As Vinitsky stresses, Veselovsky anticipates both Lotman’s semiotic approach to “poetics of behavior” and recent work on the history of emotions. Following Veselovsky’s lead, Vinitsky offers a close analysis of one formative moment of literary appropriation: a failed dramatic performance staged by an adolescent Zhukovsky, using a sentimentalist plot to reflect on, and possibly influence, his own position as a bastard son in a nobleman’s family. In the concluding chapter of Part III, Kate Holland locates Veselovsky’s and Dostoevsky’s contemporary work in the context of Alexander II’s “Great Reforms,” when the rupture dealt to Russian society by a series of radical government initiatives became perceived as a threat. As Holland shows, both Veselovsky and Dostoevsky turned to the origins of the novel in popular genres of storytelling, most of them linked to Christian (apocryphal) legendary lore. While both figures favored Byzantium as a center of propagation of popular lore, Veselovsky sought to foreground the cultural-historical ties that unite Eastern and Western traditions, whereas Dostoevsky, while making ample use of the publications of contemporary medievalists, pursued an exceptionalist, Slavophile agenda. Holland’s essay, in addition to

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illuminating a formative phase in the evolution of Veselovsky’s protodialogic theory of cultural and literary interaction, serves to historicize his Historical Poetics—and perhaps more broadly, the modern preoccupation with artistic traditions—as a response to the experience of cultural rupture. Part IV, “Literary Genres in the Longue Durée,” focuses on a problem that Mikhail Bakhtin’s work has elevated to the central place in twentieth-century literary theory: the persistence and mutation of genres. Bakhtin’s extended encyclopedia article on satire is followed by a classic definition of the novella by Mikhail Gasparov. There follow two original contributions, which set two different methodological tasks in the study of genre. Christopher Faraone seeks to extricate an earlier genre from within the founding document of Western literary history, Homer’s Iliad. Robert Bird discusses the afterlife of satire, a remarkably polymorphic genre with a classical pedigree, in the Soviet Union, pondering the limitations of a strictly genealogical account of literary forms. Whereas Kurke’s contribution complicates our perception of the poetics of Classical tragedy by setting it within what she calls “a contestatory dialogue of genre,” Christopher Faraone, in Chapter 15, undertakes a similarly defamiliarizing reading of the dominant Archaic genre, the Homeric epic. Taking his cue from Bakhtin’s theorization of the novel as a hybrid genre, Faraone points out that the Homeric poems analogously draw on and incorporate preexistent genres. In the case of the Iliad, a text that is to a great extent constituted within an oral tradition, the recognition of its multi-genred nature reveals divergent intents that a holistic reading (in the Neo-Unitarian paradigm of Homeric criticism) would seek to downplay or explain away. Faraone applies this approach to what is one of the best-known texts in European literature, the first book of the Iliad. Pointing to inconsistencies in characterization of Achilles and Agamemnon, as well as to a number of other textual clues, he proposes to regard a substantial segment of the book—the Chryses episode—as a cult hymn originally performed in a ritual context and then incorporated into the Panhellenic text of Homer. In Chapter 16, Robert Bird calls for a Historical Poetics that would construe and construct genre not as a schema, to which a given text may conform, but as a model of engaging with the reality, a model that would affect the audience. As Bird suggests, such a theory of genre would seek not only an empiricist description of literary-historical

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evolution but a forward-looking account that participates in the molding of the future. Such an approach, opposed to the Aristotelian or neoclassicist notion of genre as well as to the transhistorical theories of genre (e.g., Northrop Frye’s), is well established within Historical Poetics. Bird’s particular focus is on the mercurial and ill-defined genre of satire and on Bakhtin’s theorization of this genre in the Soviet late 1930s. In a historicist turn, Bird demonstrates that Bakhtin’s own interest in satire is part and parcel of a cultural obsession with satirical representation. The notion of genre that Bakhtin puts forward proved so powerful precisely because it was a response to the cultural politics of his day, an attempt, by a scholar, to meet a new sociocultural demand.

Notes 1. Besides these scholars and the members of the OPOYaZ (“Society for the Study of Poetic Language”) group, now known as the Russian Formalists, twentieth-century scholars who have contributed to this tradition include Lev Pumpiansky, Grigory Gukovsky, Lydia Ginzburg, Viktor Zhirmunsky, Vladimir Propp, Eleazar Meletinsky, Dmitry Likhachev, Sergei Averintsev, and Aron Gurevich. For a cursory survey of the Russian critical tradition, juxtaposed with parallel developments in Germany, see section 3 in the introduction in this volume. For a discussion stressing the unity of the Russian tradition of Historical Poetics, see Igor Shaitanov, “Aleksandr Veselovskii’s Historical Poetics: Genre in Historical Poetics,” New Literary History 32 (2001): 429–443. On Veselovsky and his influence, see René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950. The Later Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 278–79; Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), pp.  26–32; Dionýz Ďurišin, Theory of Literary Comparatistics (Bratislava: Veda, 1984), pp. 28–40; Boris Maslov, “Comparative Literature and Revolution, or the Many Arts of (Mis)reading Alexander Veselovsky,” Compar(a)ison 2008 [2013] 2: 101–29. 2. Addressing the current state of comparative literature, Haun Saussy calls for precisely such meta-theoretical reflection, asserting that the field “needs, as its manual of procedure, not a theory (a philosophy or an ideology) but a poetics (an elucidation of the art of the making, as applied to its own practices).” See his “Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares: Of Memes, Hives, and Selfish Genes,” in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 3–42, quotation on pp. 23–4. The interest in the notion of “world

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literature” has prompted inquiries into the history of the field; see e.g., David Damrosch, “Hugo Meltzl and the ‘The Principle of Polyglottism,’ ” in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir (Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 12–20 and Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig, “Changing Fields: The Directions of Goethe’s Weltliteratur,” in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 26–53. In the field of Russian theory, see the contributions to Evgeny Dobrenko and Galin Tihanov, eds., A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: the Soviet Age and Beyond (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2011). 3. For an engagement with Fredric Jameson’s work, see Chapter 3; Walter Benjamin is discussed in Chapter 8; the historicity of world literature, see pp. 8–9 in this introduction. For a discussion of New Historicism and its deficits, see Chapters 2 and 3. A juxtaposition of the attitudes to the longue durée within Historical Poetics with those of Ernst Curtius and Aby Warburg, see pp. 5–6, 18–19 of this introduction; on Curtius in particular, see Chapter 4, section 3. 4. See Chapters 4, 10, and 11. 5. See Chapters 6, 12, 15, and 16. In the wake of “cultural poetics,” Historical Poetics is a call back to a poetics of texts, but to a poetics enriched by history, rather than resistant to it. This is by contrast with such developments as “New Formalism” and “Surface Reading,” which tend to be polemically opposed to historicism, new as well as old; see Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 558–69, and Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108.1 (2009): 1–21. 6. A.  N. Veselovskii, Istoricheskaia poetika (Moscow: URSS, 2004), p. 317. 7. A. N. Veselovsky, “On the Methods and Aims of Literary History as a Science” (1870), trans. by Harry Weber, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 16 (1967): 33–42, quotation on p. 36. 8. A. N. Veselovskii, Istoricheskaia poetika (Moscow: URSS, 2004), p. 25. 9. The proximity between Lukács’s and Bakhtin’s discussions of the novel and the epic is one example of such rapprochement. See Galin Tihanov, “Culture, Form, Life: The Early Lukács and the Early Bakhtin,” in Materializing Bakhtin: The Bakhtin Circle and Social Theory, ed. C. Brandist and G. Tihanov (Basingstoke: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 43–69. While assuming a steady progress of culture and literature (e.g., from mythic collectivism to aesthetic individualism), Veselovsky was intent on finding nuanced correlations between literary forms and sociohistorical conditioning; see further discussion in Chapter 4, section 1, and the introductory note to Chapter 1. We should point out that economic analysis does not function as the ultimate explanatory horizon for Veselovsky.

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10. In this way Zhirmunsky analyzed, for example, the widely attested motifs of cannibalism (“the feast of Atreus” motif) and of the singer’s vocation (Fol’klor Zapada i Vostoka [Moscow: OGI, 2004] 358–70, 408–34); see Chapter  6 for a similar kind of argument against the diffusion of different genres of “picture-storytelling” from India. This attention to sociohistorical underpinning of plots is not in conflict, but rather coexists with, the study of motif migration; the limits of borrowing and the adaptability of cultural imports was, in fact, one of Veselovsky’s chief theoretical concerns (see Chapters 4 and 11). 11. See V. M. Zhirmunsky, “On the Study of Comparative Literature,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 13 (1967): 1–13; Victor Girmounsky, “Les courants littéraires en tant que phénomènes internationaux,” in Actes du Ve Congrès de l’Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée, ed. N. Banašević (Belgrade: University of Belgrade, 1969), pp. 3–21. 12. The English translation of this essay is included as Chapter 1 in this volume; quotation on p. 60. 13. Tylor, by contrast, operates with an inert notion of survival as relict: “On the strength of these survivals, it becomes possible to declare that the civilization of the people they are observed among must have been derived from an earlier state, in which the proper home and meaning of these things are to be found; and thus collections of such facts are to be worked as mines of historic knowledge” (The Collected Works of Edward Burnett Tylor. Vol. III: Primitive Culture. Vol. 1. [London: Routledge, 1994], p. 64). 14. Cf. Veselovsky’s assertion that, in spite of an ostensible separation from the contemporary world, antiquity is what we, in fact, “half inhabit”: “The contemporary world is too confused, too exciting for us to be able to examine it holistically and calmly, searching for its laws. We are more composed in our attitude toward antiquity and, whether we wish it or not, we seek lessons therein, which we do not follow, and generalizations, to which we are drawn by antiquity’s apparent finality, in spite of the fact that we ourselves half inhabit it. This is what gives us the right to voice an opinion and verify it.” See Chapter 1, p. 42. 15. For an illuminating discussion of nonsynchrony in Warburg and Tylor, see Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology,” Oxford Art Journal 25 (2002): 61–69. It is further intriguing to note that, like Warburg, Veselovsky began his work as a student of Italian Renaissance and spent the first several years of his individual research in Florence—thirty or so years before Warburg immersed himself in the Florentine archives to create his pioneering work on the interrelation of art and society in Renaissance Italy. Both Veselovsky and Warburg, while failing to deliver an explicit methodological summa, inspired generations of followers.

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16. Foremost among the most recent of these are Alexander Nagel’s Medieval Modern (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel’s Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2012), and Amy Knight Powell’s Depositions (New York, Zone Books, 2012). 17. See Lev Trotsky, Istoriia russkoi revoliutsii (Moscow: Respublika, 1997), 1:35; Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 37–184; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 253–64. 18. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 141. 19. The English translation of this essay by Herbert Eagle can be found in Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1987), pp. 47–49, quotation on p. 48. 20. Ibid., 48. 21. Boris Eikhenbaum, Lermontov: A Study in Literary-Historical Evaluation, trans. by Ray Parrott and Harry Weber (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981), p. 10. 22. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 4. 23. Dimock, Through Other Continents, p. 9. 24. The Routledge Companion to World Literature, pp. 383–92, quotation on p. 385. 25. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 106. 26. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 3–4. 27. In his essay on “The Ruse of the Russian Novel,” William Mills Todd III remarks: “Aside from a few romantic essayists, who treated fiction as an art form, most reviewers—to state this bluntly—would come to treat the novelist as a sort of research assistant, gathering material that they could then reorder into critiques of Russian culture and society.” (Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006], 1:401–23, quotation on p. 410). 28. For the reception of Heinrich Wölfflin’s theory of art, see Ekaterina Dmitrieva, “Genrikh Vel’flin v Rossii: otkrytie Italii, barokko ili formal’nogo metoda v gumanitarnykh naukakh?” in Evropeiskii kontekst russkogo formalizma (Moscow: IMLI, 2009), pp.  98–131. Alexandr Mikhailov suggests that Historical Poetics was successful in Russia because that country

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lacked a strong “classical” or normative rhetorical tradition which, in the West, resulted in the de-historicization of the aesthetic realm; see “Istoricheskaia poetika v kontekste zapadnogo literaturovedeniia,” in Istoricheskaia poetika: itogi i perspektivy izucheniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), pp. 53–71. 29. Veselovskii, Istoricheskaia poetika, p. 208. 30. For a juxtaposition of Veselovsky and the Cambridge ritualists, see E. M. Meletinskii, “ ‘Istoricheskaia poetika’ A. N. Veselovskogo i problema proiskhozhdeniia povestvovatel’noi literatury,” in Istoricheskaia poetika: itogi i perspektivy izucheniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), pp. 25–52, esp. pp. 30–31. 31. See the translation of Veselovsky’s “The Age of Sensibility” in Chapter 9. 32. Cf. Efim Etkind, “Istorizm  V.  M. Zhirmunskogo (1910–1920-e gody),” in Psikhopoetika (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPb, 2005), pp. 660– 676, esp. p. 664. Further discussion of Zhirmunsky’s intellectual links with Germany can be found in Michel Espagne, “Les sources allemandes des poétiques psychologiques en Russie du XIXe siècle: Veselovski, Buslaev, Jirmounski,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 21.2 (2009): 55–67, esp. 62–66. For a more detailed discussion of Zhirmunsky, see Espagne’s contribution to Evropeiskii kontekst russkogo formalizma. 33. Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. by Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 2. 34. Yuri Tynianov, “The Literary Fact,” trans. by Ann Shukman, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 29– 49, quotation on p. 37; translation amended. 35. Boris Eikhenbaum’s biography of young Tolstoy (1921) and his work on the “literary everyday,” i.e., the immediate context of reception and circulation of literary works, represents another attempt within the Formalist movement to theorize literature’s relation to its environment. Boris Eikhenbaum, The Young Tolstoi, translation ed. by Gary Kern (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1972); “The Literary Environment,” trans. I. R. Titunik, in Readings in Russian Poetics, ed. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1978), pp. 56–65. 36. Lydia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, trans. Judson Rosengrant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 8–24. 37. Jurij Lotman, “The Decembrist in Everyday Life: Everyday Behavior as a Historical-Psychological Category,” trans. C. R. Pike, in Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspenskij, The Semiotics of Russian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1984), pp. 71–123, quotation on p. 85. 38. Ibid., 86 (translation slightly adjusted). 39. Stephen Greenblatt acknowledges the borrowing of the term from Lotman in “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, ed.

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H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 10–14, 14 n.10. This linkage is further discussed in Chapter  2. The Ginzburg-Lotman line in the inquiry into literature’s effects on individual experience is continued by Irina Paperno in Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 40. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), p. 530. 41. Characteristically, Earl Miner in his Comparative Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), which eschews the influence of the Russian and Continental intellectual traditions, focuses on what he terms “explicit” poetics, i.e., on theories of poetry put forward by the poets themselves or by their contemporaries. 42. Veselovsky’s vision of author-less literary history proved to be an inspiration for a recent theory of “digital literary history”: “the Veselovskys provide nothing short of a call to arms for the modern, digitally equipped scholar. With big data and computation, we possess the ability to identify and track the ‘migratory formulae’ of literary history that the Veselovskys imagined.” See Matthew Jockers, “Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History” (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), p.  120. The mistake of confusing the methodologies of Alexander Veselovsky and his brother Alexei was already made in the 1940s during the anticosmopolitanism campaign. See Viktor Shklovsky, “Alexandr Veselovskii— istorik i teoretik,” Oktiabr’ (1947), no. 12, pp. 174–82 (on p. 175, Shklovsky unkindly refers to Alexei as Alexandr’s “microscopic brother”); Maslov, “Comparative Literature and Revolution,” p. 125. 43. Cf. Shaitanov, “Aleksandr Veselovskii’s Historical Poetics.” 44. Veselovsky’s Poetika siuzhetov (1897–1906) in Istoricheskaia poetika, pp. 493–596; M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1937–38), in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84–258; Mikhail Gasparov, Metr i smysl: ob odnom iz mekhanizmov kul’turnoi pamiati (Moscow: RGGU, 1999). Gasparov’s approach to semantic associations that meters develop in history is applied to English poetry by Marina Tarlinskaya; see, e.g., “Meter and Meaning: Semantic Associations of the English Verse Form,” Style 23 (1989): 238–60. 45. Interestingly, Historical Poetics has been well-received in cinema studies, perhaps because film prompts many of the same questions as the study of author-less folklore, due to both the significance of genre in nonauteur film and the salience of persistent formal elements. See, e.g., David Bordwell, “Historical Poetics of Cinema,” in The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches, ed. Barton Palmer (Atlanta: Georgia State University, 1988), pp. 369–98 and Henry Jenkens, “Historical Poetics,” in Approaches to Popular Film, ed. Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich (Manchester:

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Manchester University Press, 1995), pp.  100–22. We also note a recent development in media studies, which is in some respects congenial to Historical Poetics: Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 46. Istoricheskaia poetika, p. 537. 47. A. N. Veselovsky, “On the Methods and Aims,” p. 39. 48. This point is made in Meletinskii, “ ‘Istoricheskaia poetika,’ ” p. 39. 49. The muted polemical exchanges between the two scholars, as well as the meager evidence on their personal interaction, is discussed by A. L. Toporkov in Teoriia mifa v russkoi filologicheskoi nauke XIX veka (Moscow: Indrik, 1997), pp. 289–300. 50. One notes that this philological tradition, emerging from Romanticism, is at odds with Goethe’s conceptualization of world literature, which excluded folklore; cf. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 13. Further discussion of the Russian literary scholarship of the time can be found in  P.  A. Nikolaev, ed., Akademicheskie shkoly v russkom literaturovedenii (Moscow: Nauka, 1975). 51. Cf. Erlich, Russian Formalism, p. 45, who singles out Potebnya. The most balanced and informative account of Potebnya’s and Veselovsky’s influence on the Formalists is provided by Roman Jakobson in Formal’naia shkola i sovremennoe russkoe literaturovedenie (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2011), pp. 29–51. 52. As Meletinsky argues (“ ‘Istoricheskaia poetika,’ ” 33–45), Veselovsky systematically underplays myth, even to the occasional detriment of his particular analyses. In her work on Historical Poetics, Olga Freidenberg returned to the theory of myth. While heavily indebted to Hermann Usener’s work on myth and influenced by Ernst Cassirer’s notion of the mythical mode of ideation, Freidenberg relied on English and French studies of traditional societies. She also retained a Veselovskian focus on the transformation of preliterary, folkloric structures into literature. Whereas in the German tradition, going back to Romanticism, poetry is regarded a treasured remnant of the mythopoetic capacity, Veselovsky and Freidenberg stress the processes of gradual transformation of “mythical” legacy into literature. The evidence of literary history demonstrates that no clear divide between mythical and post-mythical (conceptual) thought exists; in fact, Freidenberg’s major thesis in Image and Concept is that literary figuration mediated between mythical image and philosophical concept. See Chapter 10 for further discussion. 53. Die Entwickelung des Naturgefühls bei den Griechen (Kiel, 1882). Veselovsky’s reaction dating to 1883 is reprinted in Izbrannoe: na puti

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k istoricheskoi poetike, ed.  I. Shaitanov (Moscow: Avtokniga, 2010), pp. 295–303. 54. Ibid., 295. 55. Lotman refers to Veselovsky in relation to his theory of cultural contact; see “Triedinaia model’ kul’tury” (1982), in Istoriia i tipologiia russkoi kul’tury (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPb, 2002), pp. 202–7 56. See Ilya Kliger, “World Literature Beyond Hegemony in Yuri Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics,” Comparative Critical Studies 7.2–3 (2010): 257–74. 57. Auerbach spoke of Mimesis as a “German” book that “would be inconceivable in any other tradition except for that of the German Romantics and Hegel”; see “Epilegomena zu ‘Mimesis,’ ” Romanische Forschungen 65.1–2 (1953): 1–18, quotation on p.  15. Directly relevant to the agenda of Historical Poetics, however, is Auerbach’s sociologically inflected work on literary “public,” including Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). 58. Peter Jehn, “Ernst Robert Curtius: Toposforschung als Restauration,” in Toposforschung: eine Dokumentation, ed. Peter Jehn (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1972), pp. vii–lxiv, esp. p. xv. 59. The largely polemical attitude of the Russian Formalists to German contemporary work is summarized by  E.  A. Toddes,  A.  P. Chudakov, and M. O. Chudakova in their notes to Jurii Tynianov, Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), pp. 515–16. 60. Quoted in the notes to Boris Eikhenbaum, O literature (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), p. 511. 61. As Propp emphasized, his Morphology was not a blueprint for universal theory of narrative or culture, but the first step on the way to a cultural-historical examination of a particular, well-defined subtype of narrative: Russian magical folk tale. For further discussion, see Maslov, “Comparative Literature and Revolution.” 62. See Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” New Literary History 2.1 (1970): 7–37. 63. “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics”; see Chapter 1. For an early formulation of Veselovsky’s approach, see A. N. Veselovsky, “Envisioning World Literature in 1863: From the Reports on a Mission Abroad,” trans. Jennifer Flaherty, PMLA 128.2 (2013): 439–51. 64. Izbrannoe: Istoricheskaia poetika, ed. I. Shaitanov (St. Petersburg: Universitetskaia kniga, 2011), pp. 89–90. 65. Ibid., 91. 66. G. Reiss, “Germanistik im Kaiserreich. Wilhelm Scherers “Poetik” als wissenschafts-geschichtliches Dokument,” in W. Scherer, Poetik: Mit

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einer Einleitung und Materialien zur Rezeptionsanalyse (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1977), p. xi. 67. “Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares,” p. 18. 68. Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Language in Literature, pp. 62–94. 69. Jessica Merill stresses the importance of folklore studies in the transfer of linguistic categories to literature that occurred in the Russian and (later) in the Czech critical traditions. See The Role of Folklore Study in the Rise of Russian Formalist and Czech Structuralist Literary Theory Ph.D. Thesis, UC Berkeley, 2012. 70. Olga Freidenberg, Image and Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature, edited and annotated by Nina Braginskaya and Kevin Moss, translated by Kevin Moss (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1997).

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Chapter 1

From the Introduction to Historical Poetics Questions and Answers (1894) A LEX A N D ER V ES ELOV S KY

This publication dates1 from the period when Alexander Veselovsky, following two decades of mostly empirical philological and historical work, returned to theoretical issues in literary history. It is one of his most wide-ranging and ambitious pieces. Committed to a vision of literature as a social phenomenon, and thus to a definition of literary scholarship as social science, Veselovsky poses questions, daring in their overt generality, about the history of culture and seeks to provide answers that appeal to a soft version of the scientific principle of law-like regularity. In place of unequivocal causal linkage, he indicates a set of preconditions; instead of regular recurrence, a suggestive pattern; and the argument’s validity is tested by cross-cultural and cross-historical comparison. Poised on the border of historical determinism, Veselovsky’s proposed correlations between social and literary history are marshaled to explain the rise and fall of particular literary forms in particular historical periods. In this essay, Veselovsky puts forward a new fundamental mechanism of cultural history: the encounter between an imported and a native cultural impetus, which is often manifested in collaboration or confrontation between the elite and the larger populace. This protodialogic encounter between the alien and the indigenous also instantiates a dynamic that Veselovsky appears to have regarded as a historical universal: the ever-present combat between old (perceived as conventional or constrained) and new (perceived as free) cultural elements. 39

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A cultural-historical analogue of dvoeverie (coexistence of the Christian and pagan religions) thus becomes constitutive of both cultural and literary history. In contrast to Veselovsky’s early methodological pronouncements, in which he effectively restricted cultural history to intercultural encounters, he gives more room here to the possibilities of a single people’s organic evolution.2 Some contrasts and connections that he draws—especially those that rely on organicist rhetoric—now appear irrevocably outdated (such as a value-laden comparison between a lucid Latin humanism and a fictitious northern European Romanticism), while others retain their force and freshness (such as the analysis of animal mock epic or the identification of a transitional period between communal and individual art as a precondition of national epic). More generally, what makes this essay a classic of Historical Poetics is the determination and insight with which Veselovsky pursues one of his major scholarly ambitions: to supplant philosophical and evolutionary-teleological accounts of the supra-genres of Western literary history—epic, drama, and the novel (lyric is conspicuously absent from this essay)—with a historical examination of the preconditions for their (re)emergence and social efficacy. The concluding section of the essay is particularly significant from a methodological point of view. Having presented several case studies of periodic renewal of forms, Veselovsky offers a far-reaching reflection on the nonsynchronous quality of cultural memory in which older elements are preserved in a passive state, ready to be reawakened in response to “an urgent call of the times.” Literary history is reminiscent of a geographical zone that international law has consecrated as res nullius, where the historian of culture and the aesthetician, the erudite antiquarian and the researcher of social ideas all come to hunt. Each carries away what he can, according to his abilities and views; the goods or the quarry display the same tag, but their contents are far from identical. There is no agreement about a common standard, for otherwise we would not return so insistently to the question: What is the history of literature?3 One of the views to which I am most sympathetic can be reduced more or less to the following definition: literary history is the history of social thought in its imagistic-poetic survival [perezhivanie]4 and in the forms that express this sedimentation. History of thought is a broader notion; literature is its partial manifestation. Such a specification presupposes a clear notion of what poetry is, what the evolution of poetic consciousness and

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its forms is, for otherwise we would not speak of history. Such a definition, however, also calls for a mode of analysis that would be adequate to the goals that have been set. My lectures at the University and at the Women’s Advanced Courses a few years ago, which concerned epic and lyric, drama and the novel in relation to the development of poetic style, had as their aim the collection of materials for a methodological inquiry into literary history, for an inductive poetics that would do away with speculative interpretations, for an elucidation of the essence of poetry derived from its history. My audience will recognize, in the generalizations that I shall propose, much that is old, but now formulated with less assurance, more doubts than affirmations, and even more queries: there is no harm in asking questions, whereas there is harm in arguments constructed on a weak factual basis. Since the time of my lectures, Scherer’s Poetik has been published, a formless fragment of an undertaking conceived both with talent and on a grand scale, as well as with the same objectives [as my undertaking]; the tendency of several German studies on particular issues in poetics is another indication of a lively interest in the same project. Evidently, there arose a demand for it, and along with it an attempt at systematization in the book by Brunetière, a classicist in his tastes, a neophyte of evolutionism, fanatical, as are all new converts, in whose consciousness, somewhere in a small corner, the old gods still tacitly reign—a book that reminds one of those sinners in Dante who walk forward with their faces turned behind.5 Such is the literature on the subject: there are more queries than axioms. Have we, for example, reached a consensus on how poetry is to be understood? Who will be satisfied with the vague formula that was recently proposed by Brunetière: poetry is “metaphysics, revealed in images and in this way made comprehensible to the heart” (une métaphysique manifestée par des images et rendue sensible au coeur)?6 Let us leave this general question open for the future; its solution depends on a whole series of systematic studies and solutions of particular problems that belong to the same field. It is on some of these problems that I would like to dwell. French journals on folk poetry7 and antiquities include an appealing section: “Les Pourquoi?” Why? Children pester us with such questions; humanity posed them at its simplest stages of development, posed them and gave extrinsic, sometimes fantastical answers that calmed by being definite: Why is the crow black? Why does the sun grow reddish

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before sunset and where does it disappear for the night? Or why does the bear have a short tail? Answers to such queries lie at the basis of ancient myths, which historical development has introduced into a system, into a genealogical linkage, and the result was mythology. The survival [perezhivanie] of such answers in contemporary popular religion shows that they were once an object of belief and imagined knowledge. In literary history there is a whole set of such les pourquoi, which at some time were posed, answered, and these answers still exist in survivals at the basis of certain literary-historical views. It would be useful to reconsider them, so as not to find ourselves in the position of a man of the common people who is convinced that the sun spins and plays on St. John’s Eve. It would be useful also to propose new “les pourquoi,” because there is much that is still unexplored, which often passes for something already solved and self-evident, as if we were already in agreement as to what, for example, Romanticism and Classicism, Naturalism and Realism are, what the Renaissance is, and so on. These are the questions I would like to engage. I will take my examples not from the contemporary world, although everything leads up to it. Antiquity, for us, has settled into a perspective in which many details are blurred and straight lines predominate, which we are prone to mistake for conclusions, for the simplest contours of evolution. And, in part, we are correct in doing so: historical memory overlooks minor facts and retains only those that are significant and contain the seeds of further development. Yet historical memory can also be mistaken; in such cases, that which is new and present to observation serves as a criterion for what is old and has been lived through outside our experience [perezhitomu vne nashego opyta]. Solid results in research on social—and that means, also on literary-historical—phenomena are obtained precisely in this way. The contemporary world is too confused, too exciting for us to be able to examine it holistically and calmly, searching for its laws. We are more composed in our attitude toward antiquity and, whether we wish it or not, we seek lessons therein, which we do not follow, and generalizations, to which we are drawn by antiquity’s apparent finality, in spite of the fact that we ourselves half inhabit it. This is what gives us the right to voice an opinion and verify it. Only recently, questions pertaining to the development of religious consciousness and language were discussed solely on the basis of ancient documents. We became fascinated with the Vedas and Sanskrit and constructed the edifice of comparative mythology and linguistics,

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relatively coherent systems in which everything was in its proper place and much was hypothetical. Without these systems, criticism, the practice of verifying the past against the present, would not have appeared. We were constructing the religious worldview of the primitive human without having cross-examined the experience that was close at hand, whose object is our common folk as well as ourselves; we were constructing phonetic laws for languages whose sounds had never reached us, while next to us dialects thrive and develop in accord with the same physiological and psychological laws that held in the times of our Aryan progenitors. Progress in the field of mythological and linguistic scholarship requires us to test systems that were constructed on the basis of facts from the historical past against observations about the reality of contemporary popular religion and dialects. The same applies to literary history: our views on its evolution have been founded on a historical perspective into which each generation has introduced corrections arising from its own experience and from accumulating parallels. We relinquished the notion of an individual— in our sense of the word—author of the Homeric poems because observations on the reality of folk poetry, which was superficially equated to the conditions that held for its most ancient manifestation, revealed the hitherto unknown processes of mass, non-individuated [bezlichnoe] creativity. We relinquished, in turn, the extreme aspects of these views that had been inspired by Romanticism, such as the imaginary nationpoet [narod-poet], because in folk poetry the individual aspect was revealed to be more prominent than we had previously thought. Homeric criticism has accordingly made a concession, and an individual author or authors of the Homeric poems once more step forward before us, albeit in a new setting. I brought up Romanticism, and I would like to demonstrate with reference to it how often old formulas are corrected and illumined by new ones, and vice versa. There are plenty of definitions of Romanticism, beginning with Goethe, for whom the classical was equal to the healthy, the romantic to the sick. The Romantics found their definitions of Romanticism in boundless subjectivism, in “the realization of beauty through the expression of character” (le réalisation de la beauté par l’expression du caractère); for Brunetière, Romanticism, individualism, and lyricism are essentially one and the same thing: if you start with one, you end with another, and so forth. A single shared trait can, nevertheless, be emphasized both in the phenomenon and the definition of northern European Romanticism: the striving of the individual to shed

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the oppressive bonds of social and literary conventions and forms; the yearning for other, freer forms, and the desire to found them on tradition [predanie]. Hence the idealization of national antiquity, or what seemed like nationality: a fascination with the Middle Ages, including a fantastically-colored Catholicism and chivalry, moeurs chevaleresques (Mme de Staël); a fondness for folk poetry, in which so much proves to be alien, and for nature, in which the individual could develop egoistically, in the pathos of self-sufficiency and naïve self-adoration, oblivious of social interests, sometimes in reaction to them. Do these shared tendencies not throw a light on some aspects of Italian humanism? The foundations of Latin culture and its worldview had long been buried in Italy under the alluvial soil of the medieval Church’s ideas and institutions, and were struggling to the surface, until they made themselves known openly, consciously, in response to the same kind of demand for renovation based on the bedrock of popular principles, in this instance not fictitious or fantastical. Humanism is the Romanticism of the purest Latin race; hence the clarity and the transparency of its formulas, compared to the vagueness of the Romantic ones. Yet in both cases there are similar formations [obrazovaniia] in the domain of individualism and the same retrospective stance in literature and in Weltanschauung [mirovozzrenie]. This is the kind of parallel that I will have in mind in the following exposition. Let us begin with epic. At a certain stage in a people’s development poetic production is expressed by songs of a half-lyrical and halfnarrative character, or songs that are purely epical.8 They are occasioned by remarkable events of the day, military exploits of the tribe or the clan, they celebrate heroes who are the bearers of its glory, and they cluster around several names. In some cases, creativity [tvorchestvo] went further, and there are epics [epopei], behind which one perceives collective folk songs; these poems, on the one hand, attest to a coherence resulting from individual design and composition, and, on the other, are not individual in their style, and bear no author’s name, or bear it only fictively. We have in mind the Homeric poems and the older French chansons de geste, represented by La Chanson de Roland; both have historical legends as their content. What provoked this peculiar poetic evolution and why did some peoples remain content with shorter, bylina-type songs [bylevye pesni]? First of all, individual impetus, in the absence of any explicit mention of it, indicates a stage of development, when the individual poetic act is already possible, but is not yet per-

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ceived as such, since it is not yet objectified in consciousness as an individuated [individual’nyi]9 process that separates the poet and the crowd. The gift of song comes not from him, but from without: one shares in it by partaking of a wondrous drink or else it is a delusion induced by the nymph-like Muses (from the viewpoint of the Greek language, nympholeptos, a poet and one possessed, seized by the nymphs, are one and the same thing10). This is the period of great anonymous undertakings in the domain of poetry and representational arts. National epics are anonymous like medieval cathedrals. There is an additional ethno-psychological issue. At the basis of the French chansons de geste one finds old bylina-type songs about Charlemagne and his contemporaries, which had superseded and engulfed more ancient sung legends of the Merovingian period. They existed, possibly in clusters, like our [Russian] byliny, subject to forgetting and generalization: this is the usual mechanical process of popular idealization. Two centuries later, chansons de geste will renovate these plots [siuzhety]: the same names and similar exploits, but the mood is new. We are in the heat of the feudal epoch, filled with the din of swords and of popular-heroic, uplifted self-consciousness, supported by a sense of a united political power: douce France is on everyone’s lips. An individual poet would have selected imagined character-types or contemporary historical actors modified to fit the style of the character-type in order to express this national self-consciousness. For the halfindividual poet of the old epic [epopeia], as we have characterized him earlier, this would have been psychically unthinkable; indeed, he would not even have been understood. Unconsciously, he latches onto material from the old legends and character-types contained in songs that generations of poets and audiences have gradually brought closer to their own notions, to the level of their own time. Charlemagne the emperor will become a popular ruler of France in the same way that Ilya of Murom became a peasant bogatyr’; the Saracens and the Saxons became the enemies of France conceived generically. The poet had only to master this idealization that had been accomplished without his participation, yet also within him—and there appeared French historical epic. It was historical not in the sense that it represented real historical personages, but that in forms of the past it expressed the popular sentiment of the present. Thus the conditions for the appearance of large national epics would appear to be the following: an individual poetic act without the consciousness of individual creativity; the rise of national-political

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self-consciousness, which demanded expression in poetry; continuity with a prior tradition of sung legend that included character-types capable of being transformed with respect to their content, in accord with the demands of society’s advancement. Wherever these conditions do not coincide for any reason, the production of national epic appears unthinkable. Let us imagine that the individual developed before national self-consciousness—a sense of a historical fatherland and pride in one’s people—had ripened. In this case, the evaluation of the present will differ from one person to another; their attitudes toward memories of the past will likewise vary; there will be no common ground of enthusiasms and idealities on which the poet’s intuition would have merged with the people’s sympathies. The history of German literature demonstrates such a phenomenon. Both the Germanic peoples and the Romanized Franks equally possessed historical memories of an epic quality; among both, Charlemagne left echoes in legend and song, but at the time when France was coming together as a state and its national objectives and vernacular literature were being defined, the politics of the Ottonians once again turned Germany to the non-national objectives of a world empire, and the first shoots of German literature were lost in the new rise of the Ottonian “Latin” Renaissance. The empire and its abstract ideals of peace and culture could fascinate the poets at Charlemagne’s table, as it would later fascinate theoreticians, but these ideals suggested nothing to the people. For them, the empire was the same kind of abstraction the church had once been, yet while the latter came to possess the people’s consciousness and similar forms [vstrechnymi formami] of its beliefs, the former always remained a mere formula. It was the empire, not the German nation, that undertook the Italian expeditions, and they did not sediment [otlozhilis’] in epic memory. The struggle with the Hungarians, it seemed, was a fact of national life, yet it was expressed only in historical song and did not raise sentiment to the height of epic idealization because the sense of political, self-determined [samoopredelennoi] nationality was undeveloped. Compared with the concentrated energy of the French kingdom, the German empire was a giant oppressed with sleep [Schultheiss]. The Minnesingers have patriotic motifs, the lyrical outcry, “Deutschland über Alles!” is audible, yet individual consciousness is not reflected in epic sentiment. Its bearers are Spielmans, wandering clerics, vagi, such as Lamprecht, Konrad, and so forth; their themes are borrowed from everywhere: French romances, and Oriental legends, permeated by the apocrypha’s fantastical poetry, and

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old legends of the Franks, the Lombards, and the Goths. Their geography exceeds Germany as a political entity: Italy and Bari, Constantinople and Palestine, including Jerusalem; this is not the geography of the Crusades that effectively united East and West, but a theoretical horizon of the empire, in which separate nationalities disappeared, as indeed the German nationality disappeared. In such an outstanding poem as the Nibelungen, historical memories of the Burgunds and the Huns, renewed with the appearance of the new Huns (the Magyars), and the mythological tale of Siegfried do not lead to the kind of militant consciousness that would answer to “sweet France” in the song of Roland. German epic is Romantic, not national-historical [narodno-istoricheskii]. We [in Russia] had neither one nor the other, although epic songs existed and even had time to group around the figure of Prince Vladimir. Why? An answer to this question is provided by the foregoing comparison. There was, that is to say, no consciousness of national-political unity, for which a consciousness of religious unity did not compensate. The Song of Igor’s Campaign is not a national-epic poem, but a superb lyrical lament on the fate of Orthodox Rus’. When the Tatar epoch passed and political unification came to support national consciousness, the time for epic had been missed, because individual consciousness had already come into its own, even if not yet in the domain of poetic creativity, as was the case in the West. The emergence of national epics composed with plots from a people’s history and expressive of the national consciousness sheds light on a different question: why did animal epic appear precisely in feudal France, since the German Reinhart is only a revision of a French original? At the basis of this epic are ubiquitous animal tales with their typical animal characters. Latin apologues and fables and the miracles of the Physiologos, which penetrated the medieval monk’s cell, acquainted the Northerners with unheard-of animals and the lion-king; they also, perhaps, supplied the first occasion to retell and recast native and imported tales, which up until that point had been irrelevant to literature. These animal tales form cycles, like bylina-type songs, around their heroes; one tale has another in view and seeks to complete it; the result is not a coherent whole, like the older Carolingian poems, but something tied together by unity of content and viewpoint. The socalled Roman du Renart is the heroic epic turned inside out, with the same character types, now captured from their negative sides, with a feudal suzerain, the lion king, with a savage and stupid wolf for a feudal lord, and the merry and malicious adventurer Renart, a bourgeois

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learned in law, who decomposes the unity of the heroic worldview. This unity that had already found an expression in song is exactly what animal epic presupposes: folk tales provide its material, literary fable served as its motivation [povod], whereas the heroic poem gave it a scheme; the aims of satire will arise only later. And here, by the way, is why no animal epic could arise among us, although we are no poorer, if not richer, than other peoples in our animal tales, and the most recent European scholars researching this issue have been turning to us for material and discussion. Animal epic needed to lean against heroic epic, which did not have time to emerge. Satirical tales with animals for actors, such as the tale of Ersh Ershovich, already stand outside the zone of epic’s development. I mentioned that literary fable could have constituted one of the first motivations to write down a popular animal tale. This thesis can be generalized in order to provide answers to a whole series of questions called forth by the development of European vernacular literatures. It is difficult to conceive theoretically how and under what conditions the process that we might designate as the manifestation in consciousness of the poetic act as an individual act came about. Ancient literatures shed no light on this: we do not know under what conditions they emerged, what foreign elements participated in their creation, and we are too poorly acquainted with the processes of popular psychology to draw inferences about the past from the phenomena of contemporary folk song. The most ancient songs of ritual or epic character belonged to common cult and tradition; every one of their words was preserved. We can imagine that intellectual and cultural evolution left them behind; that they were being repeated, half understood, and thus corrupted and transformed—in both cases, however, unconsciously, without attributing the changes to individual intent or merit, or perceiving the emergent self. Yet this is precisely where the question lies. With reference to European culture, with its characteristic twosidedness of cultural principles, this question finds an easier and more tangible solution. When the northern Viking saw on an Irish church a fanciful Romanesque depiction of a cross and the symbolic attributes that revealed behind themselves a legendary background, he confronted a tradition unknown to him, which—in contrast to his own—carried with it no obligation of faith, and was imperceptibly drawn to the free exercise of his fantasy. He interpreted and explained, engaging in idiosyncratic creativity. Thus a Russian spiritual verse imagines Egor the Brave alive, clad to his elbows in gold, as on an icon.

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European poetry developed precisely in this way: poetic intuition was incited to become conscious of individual creativity not by the immanent evolution of popular-poetic foundations, but by extrinsic literary models. In the twelfth century William of Malmesbury recounted a poetically dark legend, which Heine would incidentally recollect: a certain noble young Roman invited friends and acquaintances to his wedding; after the feast was over, everyone being a bit drunk, they went out into the meadow to dance and play ball. The young man was an accomplished ball player; preparing for the game, he removed his wedding ring and placed it on the finger of a bronze classical statue that was standing there. It happened to be a statue of Venus. When the game was over and he came to get his ring, he found that the finger with the ring was pressed against the statue’s palm. Following his futile attempts to reclaim the ring, the young man withdrew without saying a word to anyone else for fear that they might ridicule him or steal the ring in his absence. He returned with some servants during the night and was astonished to discover that the finger had straightened out, but was missing the ring. From that time on, some kind of spectral being, unseen, but sensed, always came between the young man and his wife: “You are betrothed to me,” a voice could be heard saying, “I am the goddess Venus, I have your ring, and will never relinquish it.” These torments lasted for a long time. They were forced to have recourse to the priest Palumbo’s magical formulas in order to be rid of the devilish delusion.11 The Western church likewise exorcised the charms of Classical poetry that beckoned medieval man, but the spells did not help, and their union was accomplished. Western literatures emerged from this coupling; so-called pseudo-Classicism is nothing but a one-sided development of one of its immanent elements, contradictory yet unified, at first, by the needs of literacy. The people sang their ancient songs, including cult songs with their pagan residue, love songs (winiliod), women’s songs (puellarum cantica), which it also naïvely brought into churches. It either inherited these songs or created them unconsciously on the model of earlier ones, without associating them with notions of creativity or individual worth; the Church, for its part, devalued them in the people’s eyes, pointing to their pagan content and sinful temptation. Yet the same Church spread literacy by using Latin books; for the sake of rhetorical exercises, it took a peek into the few classical poets whom it allowed to be read, taught its students to admire their beauties and bypass their temptations

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through allegorical interpretation. That was enough to excite curiosity; even poets who lacked the seal of approval for school use were clandestinely read. Thus, using alien models, readers were educated to the consciousness of what had not yet been elucidated along the paths of ethno-psychological development. They began to create by imitating. To achieve this, it was necessary to study the language, master the poetic vocabulary, penetrate the style, if not the spirit of the author— does this not amount to an individual’s exploit? In the ecclesiastical schools, the notion of dictare developed, first in the meaning of an exercise, composition in general, and only later contracted to mean poetic conceit: dichten. The notion of a labor for which only a few were fit passed into the notion of creativity, at first—and naturally so—in the language of the models, in meek imitation of their manner, with the gradual intrusion of personal and contemporary motifs. When popular speech had matured and turned out to be suitable for poetic expression, not without the influence of the Latin school, and when the development of individual consciousness came to seek such expression, an impulse had already been given. Chivalrous lyric, with its individual poets and tendencies, emerged only to express anew the blending of what was native and popular with what was imported and cultured. This blend accelerated the evolution of a people’s poetry and set serious tasks before it. That was the situation in the West, with its Latin school that imperceptibly cast the rays of classical culture, and with its Scripture that was obstinately guarded against vernacular intrusion. Christian thought perhaps gained little from it; the people were served by the priest’s catechesis, sermon, legend, and biblical commentaries; yet even as the people stagnated in double-belief [dvoeverie], a Latin school was created and maintained around the Latin Bible, which yielded weak, followed by bright revelations of ancient poetry. When, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, translations of Scripture into the vernacular languages appeared, the Latin school had already achieved its task. Why did the Slavic East not produce in the Middle Ages its own refined literature, its own individual poetry, and so failed to create a literary tradition? Much can be explained by the belated entry of Slavdom on the soil of cultural history, by its geographical position, obligating it to struggle with the alien East, and so forth.12 Let us focus on schooling, on the two-sidedness of educational elements, which also here, as in the West, determined the character of the new development (in contradistinction with the—apparent, at least—wholeness of the old). Here

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also there is, on the one hand, the folk, pagan, ritual, and bylina-type poetry, the wealth of which causes us to marvel to this day, especially in its Serbian and Russian examples, a poetry that was original both in its color [kolorit] and meter, unforgettable in the common chord of European songs; on the other hand—there is the Church, behind which stood the poetic as well as the philosophical tradition of Greek culture. The Church, however, had relinquished this tradition on Slavic soil; the objectives and the success of preaching called forth the principle of vernacular churches, popular with respect to both the language of exhortation and the Old Church Slavonic translation of Scripture, which believers could comprehend more easily than the Latin Bible. This was an advance in terms of the assimilation and the thriving of Church doctrine, even though the double-belief of Slavic folk poetry differs in no way from similar phenomena in the West, and is perhaps more overt. The Slavic Bible defined, to a certain extent, the character of the educational process: the impulse that compelled the Westerner to study Donatus in order to learn the language of the Bible and the mass, but at the same time the language of Virgil, did not exist. There were no models, no foreign exemplar that would have invited imitation or the attempt to bring to light the hidden treasure of native folk poetry. Whereas European literature can be regarded as a result of the blending of vernacular and classical Latin components, in the Slavic East such a blending took place in narrower confines, defined by the objectives of literacy and Church enlightenment. That is why there was also no poetry. How the development of European literature would have proceeded if left solely to the evolution of its own national foundations is a question that, while apparently fruitless, invites some theoretical observations which are met by actual facts. Obviously, organic evolution would have proceeded at a slower pace, without skipping stages, as often happens under the influence of an alien culture that compels, sometimes at the wrong time, the maturation of what is not yet mature, to the detriment of the internal progress. At the basis of Greek drama are ritual choral songs, comparable to our [Russian] springtime choruses [khorovody]; their rudimentary religious content was generalized and opened up to broader human ideas in the cult of Dionysus; artistic drama attached itself to this metamorphosis of the popular agrarian festival. Let us turn to the West. Here, too, popular choruses existed as the rudimentary bases of dramatic actions, yet we see no further development on this ground; if there were any seeds of a corresponding,

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generalizing cult, they died away without bearing fruit. The Church appeared and created out of the everyday reality of the mass a kind of religious stage: a mystery play; this, however, lacked a popular basis that would have nourished and transformed it, evolving alongside the dogma and going beyond it: the church basis came from without, unbreakable, not subject to development. The urban square setting, which this religious theater came to inhabit later on, could introduce into it some everyday scenes and comic types, but not psychological analysis or a notion of inner conflict. Even here the school education supplied its extra measure [lishek] of progress, having accustomed its students to figurative language [inoskazanie], to allegorizing Virgil, and to generalizations which it routinely tricked out as personifications: to the figures of Vices and Virtues, Philology and Humanity, “Every Man.”13 The junction of these generalizations with the epically-unchangeable figures from the mystery plays indicated the possibility of further development, a potential for dramatic life. In the meantime, already in medieval—even in women’s—monasteries, Terence’s comedies were being read and Seneca was remembered; along with him, the tradition of ancient drama returns to circulation. In the fourteenth century, there appears the first explicit imitation of Seneca; from the sixteenth century, drama was established as a legitimate literary genre, having already won sympathy all around: behind Shakespeare stands the English drama of the Senecan type. Whence this resurgence and popularity of drama? If literature reflects life’s demands, then it is permissible to postulate a certain correlation between these demands and particular poetic forms, even if both have not emerged at the same time: only that is assimilated for which there exists a premise in consciousness and in the immanent needs of the spirit. Drama, we infer, is the inner conflict of a personality that is not only defining itself, but also decomposing itself through analysis. This conflict can become manifest in external forms that objectify psychic powers and beliefs in living mythological personages or in divinities that determine a fate hostile to the person’s self-determination. This conflict can also, however, be represented as taking place inside the person, at a time when the belief in external ruling powers slackens or is transformed. That is the essence of Greek drama from Aeschylus to Euripides. Let us verify these theses by examining the vicissitudes of European drama in the period of its birth as an artistic form.

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As for the development of individual personality, in Italy, drawn along the national paths of humanism, it was expressed earlier and more brightly than anywhere else; it made itself known both in particular human actors and in new forms of political life, as well as in the flourishing of literature and art. Italian drama, however, was limited to external imitation of classical models and produced nothing independent that testified to the heights of individual elevation. Why is this? For reference we turn to Greece, to the conditions of the Athenian polity; we link the development of the individual personality with the demand for a free political constitution, and we transfer these conclusions onto the splendid period of the Elizabethan drama, in which both conditions were united, it would appear, to bring about the same outcome. Yet we are not able to reconcile this conclusion with the concurrent flourishing of Spanish drama, in a suffocating political atmosphere, under a religious oppression that bound the individual personality’s freedom and forced it into the narrow path of enthusiasms and falls. Clearly it was not the qualities of the social milieu that brought forth drama, but a sudden rise in national self-consciousness, nourished by recent—and confident in future—victories, broad historical and geographical vistas that had set new universal-human goals for the nation’s development, and new objectives for the individual personality’s energy. Behind Greek, English, and Spanish drama stand the victory of Hellenism over the Persian East, the triumph of popular Protestant consciousness that filled English society in the Elizabethan age with such vivacity, and the dream of the Spanish monarchy’s world dominion, on which the sun never set. In a milieu in which the individual disappeared without a trace into the undifferentiated mass, the joys of victory would be expressed in folk epic song, in which a common sentiment, a shared assessment of what had been experienced would be given voice by glorifying a typical hero. In a personality that is already individuated, a striking historical moment, the very incommensurability of events that surround it, will occasion a need for analysis, interrogation of the self and of life’s guiding principles, and—in view of the demand for action—will exacerbate the inner conflict that emerges as both a condition and a product of individuation. The dramatic form, as extrinsic performance [deistvo] and as scene-setting, already existed. Now, in response to the demand of the time, it emerges as drama. The following, as it appears to me, represent the conditions of drama’s emergence as a distinct artistic entity and of its popularity: the development of individual personality and

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resonant events of a national-historical character that open new paths and distant vistas to the people. If Italy failed to produce drama, it was because it did not experience precisely such events. The phenomenon of humanism, which it bestowed as a gift to Europe, is not an event, nor is it a revolution or a sudden revelation, but the slow advancement of forgotten national principles. It nourished in the educated part of society a consciousness of cultural unity that failed to blossom into national-political unity. Italy, as a totality, was an abstraction; there existed a mass of small republics and tyrannies, with their local interests and struggles, with their tragic court anecdotes, episodes of humanity and, at the same time, pettiness; they lacked a broad national background. The idealization of humanity in the abstract only became possible in our bourgeois times, not in the time when European artistic drama was born. Yet one may ask: Could it develop at all under the conditions of a small nationality that stands outside of broad universal-human tasks, and whose interests reach only as far as what can be surveyed from its bell tower? (This, of course, does not exclude bookish, armchair drama.) When I addressed drama’s origins, I distinguished between drama as action on the stage from drama as a certain mode of perceiving the world, as a demand for action and for conflict. This thesis brings us face-to-face with a series of further questions that have not yet been, and perhaps cannot be, solved. The history of Greek literature’s development offers us, tentatively, a picture of literary genres consecutively differentiated; we are drawn, in spite of ourselves, to generalize from this picture, descrying in each genre that enters the scene of history a reflection of certain social or artistic demands, which have sought and found adequate expression in epic, lyric, drama, and the novel. The literatures of modern Europe offer, apparently, the same sequence, but the question is whether or not that sequence was organic. We know already that our [European] literatures emerged under the impact of alien, classical literatures; that, for example, modern European drama had a popular basis but matured under the influence of ancient drama. There can be no firm conclusions here, the more so as the study of folk poetry opens new perspectives that cast doubt on possible conclusions. It turns out that in ritual poetry, the most ancient indicator of poetic development, all genres of poetry—to the extent that they are defined by extrinsic marks of form—are united in a naïve syncretism: there is drama in action, the dialogue of the chorus, epic storytelling, and lyrical song. Moreover,

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all of these are united with music, which will for a long time yet accompany the production of particular poetic forms that consecutively emerge out of the undifferentiated state of ritual poetry; both epic and lyric will continue to be sung, and there will also be a musical element in drama. The separation of music from the lyrical text and the latter’s one-sided development took place in Greece in the period postdating Alexander. We are not in a position to determine what principle guided this individuation; questions of genesis, always murky, are best left to a future poetics that will be based on a rational-historical basis. Let us turn to modern Europe, with the doubleness of its culturalformational and poetic elements. Here, epic and lyric had been present for a long time, beginning in the Middle Ages; drama had also developed, undergoing, from the fourteenth century, the influence of classical drama; from the fourteenth century the artistic novella, the prototype of our modern novel, settles in. From that time, we possess all the chief poetic forms, and historical experience again and again convinces us that there is a certain alternation among them, a sort of natural selection at the level of the content of consciousness. Perhaps this is a false impression, but it inevitably comes to mind. Why was drama the dominant poetic form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Why did the novelistic form make itself known beginning from the end of the fourteenth century to become modernity’s dominant literary expression? The last question has been posed repeatedly in expectation of an answer, which we also are unable to provide. I will limit myself to furnishing a parallel, which will perhaps explain to us not the origins of the novel, but the quality of the societal milieu capable of cultivating it. In Greece, drama still belongs to the zone of national historical development; the novel belongs to the period when Alexander the Great’s conquests disrupted it, when independent Greece had disappeared into a worldwide monarchy that mixed East and West, the traditions of political freedom had faded along with the ideal of the citizen, and the personality, which felt its loneliness in the wide spheres of cosmopolitanism, retired into itself, developing an interest in interior life for lack of social life and constructing utopias for lack of living tradition [predanie]. These are the chief themes of the Greek novel; there is nothing traditional in them. Instead, everything is intimately bourgeois. This is drama transferred from stage to hearth, into the conditions of domestic routine. It remains, nevertheless, a drama, an action; this was indeed the name of the Greek novel.14 Ancient Greeks spent their lives in

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public, more on the agora than at home; at a time when home life was simple and modest, temples were a miracle of art, while theater was a popular [narodnoe] institution. Medieval Florentines loved the splendor of public festivals and triumphantly carried Cimabue’s Madonna through the streets, because they saw in her the ideal of beauty. Back at home, the customs of the clan, sung by Dante, reigned: men rarely washed and had no use for forks at the table. We, by contrast, have replaced the artistically variegated clothing of old with a black frockcloak, and the grandeur of our public buildings is marked by an artisanal tinge. Art and poetry in miniature, for all that, have descended to domestic use, and we experience [perezhivaem] drama in the forms of the novel intended for reading in a setting of domestic comfort. This perhaps is not an answer to the question that was posed earlier regarding the correspondence between a particular literary form and the demand issuing from social ideals. This correspondence probably exists, although we are not able to identify the law that regulates the correlation. One thing is undoubtedly confirmed by observation: certain literary forms decline when others rise, sometimes, in turn, only to yield their places once more to the antecedent forms. Not only forms decline and arise, but also poetic plots and types. Germanic songs about Charlemagne were resurrected in the forms of feudal epic. In periods of national disaster or excitement, either democratic or mystical, the very same fears were perceived, and hopes were clothed in the same or similar images: the last hour was expected, or the last battle, when a redeemer would make his appearance, whoever he might be, a Byzantine emperor or Dante’s il Veltro,15 Friedrich Barbarossa or Napoleon III. In 1686, the summer promised a bountiful harvest, but the inhabitants of Graubünden still vividly remembered the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War; the religious politics of Louis XIV induced them to be apprehensive: something, surely, was about to happen. And lo and behold, two travelers along the road to Chur discover a swaddled baby in the hedge. They take pity on it and bid the servant take it along, but in spite of all their efforts, he could not, alone or with help, raise the child from the ground. “Touch me not,” the infant’s voice was heard to say, “it is not for you to lift me (recall the bag that cannot be lifted in our bylina), but I will tell you the following: this year there will be a great harvest and bliss, but not many will live to see it.” The year 1832 takes us to the time of the July Revolution, the Junges Deutschland, and the Bundestag. The plague is raging and the same troubling expectations are widespread in the populace. In the Hard-

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twald near Karlsruhe, a hunter encountered three white female figures in the evening after sunset. “Who will eat the bread that will be harvested this year?” said one of them. “Who will drink the wine that will be in abundance?” said the other. “Who will bury all the dead whom death will carry off?” finished the third. In 1848, the same sentiment prevails, and a similar legend arises in Anhalt: in the course of several nights a guard in Klein-Köthen saw a house with three lighted windows on a field where there were no buildings at all; disturbed by this vision, he communicated it to the priest, and they went together to find out what the issue was. In the house, a small man was sitting at a table and writing; he nodded to the priest at the window, and when the priest entered, silently led him to each of the three windows in turn. Looking out the first window, the priest saw a splendid field and heavy-eared wheat growing densely to the height of a man; the second window gave onto a different view: a field of battle filled with corpses, and a sea of blood; from the third, he saw the field he had seen at first, half-reaped, but with only one person visible in the field’s entire strip.16 I believe there are no theoretical considerations to hinder us from transferring this iterability of popular legend to the phenomena of selfconsciously artistic literature. Self-consciousness does not rule out patterns that reveal regulating laws, just as statistical curves do not rule out consciousness of self-determination. I will only sketch a few facts. The old Titanic legend about the knowledge of good and evil was reflected in medieval stories, and we encounter its poetic apotheosis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Calderon’s El magico prodigioso. In these works the tenor of the epoch is expressed, an epoch of hitherto unfathomed intellectual vistas, which it seeks to master in the youthfully self-confident awareness of its own powers. Faust is the type of thinking man in the Humanist age, who has entered the arena against the old worldview that bestowed on the individual the modest role of a mere executor moving according to a predetermined lot. Such people existed, and they either succeeded or perished without ceding ground; their achievement lies not in what they accomplished, but in the struggle’s objectives, in the inner need for liberation (“Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen”).17 Others at first embraced the new sentiments, became fascinated with them to the point of a downfall, succumbing to a sense of their own impotence and the futility of their hopes, and reverted back to their earlier beliefs and to its simple-heartedly bourgeois quietude. And that is why in the literature precisely of the sixteenth century,

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often reflecting the facts of personal life, the gospel legend of the prodigal son, who sought for something better but returned back under his paternal roof, was renewed. Everyone was seeking something: a better social organization, freer conditions for individual thriving, new ideals. An amusing fairy tale was known of old (already to Dion Chrysostom) about a fantastical land where everyone is happy, no one lacks anything, rivers flow with milk, shores are made of jelly, and roasted game flies by itself into one’s mouth. This realistic fantasy now serves to express the ideal needs of the spirit: social utopias appear, beginning with Rabelais’s Abbey of Thélème and Thomas More’s utopia, going on to Cyrano de Bergerac, the Robinsoniads of the eighteenth century, and well-intended dreams about what will happen so many thousands of years in the future. There follow the epochs of societal weariness, and the pastoral plots are renewed, the times when people are drawn to unmediated nature, to simplification (be it only in the style of “lady into lassie”18), to folk song and to popular antiquity. These are the epochs of narratives drawn from peasant life and of archaeological tastes. It appears that this alternating renewal of plots is not always a response to the organic demands of societal-poetic development. A talented poet may happen upon this or that motif accidentally, provoke imitation, and create a school that will follow in his tracks without responding to these demands, sometimes even going at cross-purposes to them. In this way, the feudal epic and Petrarchism outlived their time; likewise, there existed belated classicists and romantics. But if we look at these phenomena from a distance, in historical perspective, all the minor nuances, fashions, schools, and individual-initiated movements will become scarcely distinguishable in the broad alternation of societalpoetic demands and proposals. Plots are renewed, but subject to conditions that distinguish, for example,  A.  K. Tolstoy’s Don Juan from its many predecessors, an ascetic legend about a proud king from its reworking in Garshin;19 or the many instantiations of the theme of fathers and sons up until Turgenev’s novel. Let us take an example from the distant past: Apuleius overheard some Milesian folk tale and retold it for us in the charming tale of Cupid and Psyche, in which reality is rendered so poetic and spiritual that in Christianity’s early period, Psyche became a symbol of the soul that has parted with its divine source and is anxiously seeking to reunite with it. What that Milesian folk tale was, we do not know, but its plot

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is widespread among different peoples and contains details that indicate in what simple conditions of life it was composed. There used to be, and still are, exogamic races that derived their descent from a natural object, such as an animal or a plant. Every such tribe honored this progenitor as a sacred being, as its totem, and they prohibited marriage between those who worshipped the same totem and carried the same symbolic marker expressing it. Marriages of this kind were beset with hindrances and restricting conditions whose reflection we observe in the condition Cupid imposes on Psyche; transgressing them led to reversals of fortune.20 Such is the content of the exogamic folk tale; in Apuleius, it is impossible to recognize its everyday substratum. Or let us recall some further motifs: carrying-off a wife, capturing the bride, recognition or meeting—often hostile or transgressive—between close relatives, such as father and son, brother and sister. We encounter these motifs in medieval romance as interesting formulas, as material for poetic development, whereas in their basis they reflected real facts: marriage by capture, or the epochs of massive intermixing and migration of peoples, which separated kin over large distances; hence the element of recognition in the Greek novel, in the broad expanses of Alexander’s monarchy, and the universally familiar legends of the battle between father and son. Between these real formulas and their later poetic reproductions, between the Milesian folk tale and Apuleius’s narrative, centuries of development passed, enriching the content of societal and individual ideals; hence such a difference in the way they are presented. Is it not precisely the evolution of these ideals that conditions the recurrent demand for this or that literary plot and the renewal of old ones? We perceive this evolution as something organic and integral, sufficing the ends of human development, but we should not forget that it recycled a whole series of influences and international admixtures, with which, for example, our European culture is so well supplied. Into our notions of morality and family, beauty and duty, honor and heroism, a great number of elements have entered from alien sources. In our view of love, a layer of Christian spiritualism spread over the indigenous conditions of everyday life; when classical influences penetrated this mixture, the result was that idiosyncratic combination of concepts that provided norms not only to the emotional life, but also to entire domains of morality, a combination that we are able to trace from the chivalrous lyric and romance to the various imitations of Amadis21 and

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the seventeenth-century salon. Our notions of human and natural beauty are similarly liberal and their development was aided by racial and cultural intermingling perhaps no less than the development of literature. When the type that represents unmediated popular heroism—with its brute force and devious craftiness, ignorant of conscience’s accounting, such as we find in the figure of Ulysses—first encountered the type that represents Christian self-renouncing, suffering heroism, this presented a contrast comparable to that between Dante’s “spirit of love” and the naïve conception of uncultured peoples that the liver is the source of love. And yet these two understandings grew accustomed to each other, mutually penetrated one another, while the development of social consciousness set ever new objectives for the exploit of renunciation—in the service of an idea, a nation, or society. But let us leave behind the period of origins and intermixtures. Let us imagine that the evolution of societal and individual ideals proceeds evenly, that it contains moments of transition from the old to the new, when this novelty demands expression in the forms of scholarly reflection or poetic generalization—that is what interests us. Popular memory has preserved sediments of images, plots, and types, which were once alive, evoked by a famous individual’s activity, by an event or an anecdote that excited interest and took possession of sentiment and fantasy. These plots and types were generalized, the notion of particular individuals and facts could fade, leaving behind only common schemas and outlines. These exist in a dark, hidden region of our consciousness, like much that we have undergone and experienced [perezhitoe], apparently forgotten, but then they suddenly overwhelm us as an inexplicable revelation, as a novelty that is, at the same time, an outmoded antique— something we cannot fully account for, because we are often unable to define the essence of the psychic act that unpredictably renewed in us these old memories. The same holds true in the life of literature, both popular and self-consciously artistic: old images, echoes of images, suddenly appear when a popular-poetic demand has arisen, in response to an urgent call of the times. In this way popular legends recur; in this way, in literature, we explain the renewal of some plots, whereas others are apparently forgotten. What explains this demand, and also this oblivion? Perhaps it is not merely oblivion, but even extinction. Analogous phenomena in the history of our poetic style could have served as an answer, had such a history been written. In our poetic language, and not only in turns of phrase, but also in images, a gradual series of extinctions occur, even

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as much is being resurrected for new use; the fascination with popular and medieval poetry since the time of Herder and the Romantics testifies to such a forceful change in tastes. I will not speak of contemporary phenomena, more or less close to us, that we are already beginning to perceive as archaic, but we do not consider the Homeric comparison of a hero with an ass and the attacking enemies with obnoxious flies to be poetic, whereas other images and similes are still in circulation, hackneyed, but comprehensible; it appears that they bind us like the fragments of musical phrases that memory has made our own, or like a familiar rhyme, but at the same time they incessantly elicit new suggestions [podskazyvaniia] and intellectual work on our side. An erudite German has dedicated a special monograph to a single poetic formula, tracing it from popular song to new manifestations in refined literature: Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär! There are many formulas like this. Podskazyvanie is what English aesthetics has christened (unless I am mistaken) suggestiveness [suggestivnost’]. Those formulas, images, and plots that at a given time suggest nothing to us and fail to respond to our demand for imagistic idealization become extinct or are forgotten (until their turn comes); those, however, whose suggestiveness is fuller, more diverse, and longer-lasting are preserved in memory and renewed. The correspondence between our growing demands and the fullness of suggestiveness creates a habit, the assurance that precisely this and nothing else serves the actual expression of our tastes, our poetic desires, and so we deem these plots and images poetic. A metaphysician will respond to this historical-comparative definition with an abstract notion of beauty and will even attempt to generalize it, comparing it with the impressions that we carry away from the other arts. And he will convince us, provided that before these arts he poses the same questions of stability and suggestiveness that define the norms of the beautiful and their inner enrichment on the path to that science des rythmes supérieurs that distinguish our tastes from the tastes of the primitives (Jean Lahor). Until this work is done, those who seek to extract a notion of what is specifically poetic not only from the processes of poetry’s perception and reproduction, but also from an inquiry into those special means of which poetry disposes and which, as they accumulate in history, bind us, dictating norms to individual symbolism and impressionism, will have taken the correct approach. We said: processes of perception and reproduction, because these two are essentially the same thing, differing only in an intensity that creates the impression of creativity. We are all more or less open

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to the suggestiveness of images and impressions; a poet is more attuned to their minute nuances and combinations; he apperceives them more fully. And so he complements us and exposes us to ourselves, enlisting our understanding to renew old plots, enriching familiar words and images with a new intensity, and drawing us for a while into the same unity with ourselves in which the anonymous [bezlichnyi] poet lived during the unconsciously-poetic epoch. But we have experienced too much in separation, on our own; our demands for suggestiveness have grown and become more individuated and diverse. Moments of unification occur only in the epochs when a living synthesis has achieved tranquility and sedimented in common consciousness. If poets of great stature are indeed becoming rarer, we have here answered a question of the kind that we have repeatedly posed for ourselves: Why?

Notes Thanks to Robert Bird, Jennifer Flaherty, and Michael Kunichika for many improvements, and to Thomas Kitson for outstanding editorial work. 1. Translated and edited by Boris Maslov. The original publication appeared in Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 293 (1894, No 5), Otd. 2, pp.  21–42, with only one note: “A lecture delivered on February 6, 1893 in support of the Society of Aid to those who have completed their studies at St.  Petersburg Women’s Advanced Courses.” This translation is based on the text included in Sobranie sochinenii. Tom 1: Poetika (St.  Petersburg 1913), pp.  30–57, which added some footnotes based on Veselovsky’s marginalia (ix–x). In compiling further explanatory glosses, I have drawn on the commentaries by V. M. Zhirmunsky (Istoricheskaia poetika [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1940], pp. 617–18) and I. O. Shaitanov (Izbrannoe: Istoricheskaia poetika [St. Petersburg: Universitetskaya kniga, 2011], pp. 74–80). 2. See A. N. Veselovsky, “Envisioning World Literature in 1863: From the Reports on a Mission Abroad,” trans. Jennifer Flaherty, PMLA 128.2 (2013): 439–51. Footnotes belong to the translator, unless otherwise indicated. 3. [Note added in the 1913 edition.] Cf. Bernhard ten Brink, Über die Aufgabe der Litteraturgeschichte (Strassburg, 1890); Wilhelm Wetz, Über Litteraturgeschichte (Worms, 1891); Ernst Elster, Die Aufgaben der Litteraturgeschichte (Halle, Niemeyer, 1894); Louis P. Betz, “Essai de bibliographie des questions de littérature comparée,” Revue de philologie française et provençale 10 (1896): 247–74, 11 (1897): 22–61, 81–108, 241–74; Ernst Elster, Prinzipien der Litteraturwissenschaft, vol. 1 (Halle, Niemeyer,

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1897); Joseph Texte, “L’histoire comparée des littératures,” Revue de philologie française et provençale 10 (1896): 241–46; [Jules Huret], Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire ([Paris], 1891); Édouard Rod, De la littérature comparée (Geneva, 1886); Ernst Grosse, [Die Literatur-Wissenschaft: ihr Ziel und ihr Weg (Halle a. d. Saale, 1887)]; Ferdinand Brunetière, “La doctrine évolutive et l’histoire de la littérature,” Revue des deux mondes 145, (15 February 1898): 874–96; H. C. Muller, “L’état scientifique de la littérature comparée,” Revue internationale de l’enseignement 35 (1898): 8–17, 289–98; Ernst Elster, “Weltliteratur und Literaturvergleichung,” Archiv für das Studium Neueren Sprachen 107 (N. S. 7), no. 1–2 (1901) 33–47. 4. Perezhivanie is one of the key concepts in Veselovsky’s theory of literary form; it is indebted to the ethnographic notion of survival, as used by Tylor, which Veselovsky generalizes to a broader idea of cultural continuity as “survival” of previous social/cultural forms; at the same time, the verb perezhivat’ is used in this essay in its common meaning ‘to experience.’ This terminological nexus suggests a particular mode of historically anchored experience, understood as recycling—and perpetuation—of inherited cultural forms. Veselovsky also uses the metaphor of cultural “deposition” or “sedimentation” (otlozhenie) with a meaning similar to that of ‘survival.’ 5. Veselovsky is referring to the first volume of Ferdinand Brunetière’s L’évolution des genres dans l’histoire de la littérature (Paris, 1890). Wilhelm Scherer’s incomplete Poetik was published posthumously in 1888. 6. The quotation comes from Ferdinand Brunetière, “L’évolution de la poésie lyrique au XIXe siècle,” Revue bleue 51 (1893): 776. 7. Narodnyi is here usually translated as ‘popular,’ except in the collocations narodnaia poeziia ‘folk poetry,’ narodnaia epopeia ‘national epic,’ narodnye osnovy ‘national foundations,’ narodno-psikhologicheskie ‘ethno-psychological’ (keeping to the accepted English translation of Völkerpsychologie). Note that Veselovsky distinguishes between narodnoe soznanie ‘popular consciousness’ and natsional’noe samosoznanie ‘national self-consciousness.’ 8. [Note added in the 1913 edition.] An example of such lyrico-epical songs with local-historical content is presented by the Kartvelian songs (Sbornik materialov dlia opisaniia mestnostei i plemen Kavkaza. XIX. Otd. 21). 9. Here and elsewhere, lichnyi is rendered as ‘individual,’ individual’nyi as ‘individuated.’ 10. Based on Plato, Phaedrus 238d, yet Plato’s views should not be equated with the common perception of the poet in Archaic and Classical Greece. 11. [Note added in the 1913 edition.] Cf. the legend of a youth from Cnidus, who was in love with Praxiteles’s Aphrodite. Victor Cherbuliez, L’art et la nature, p. 11.

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12. [Note added in the 1913 edition.] I. I. Sreznevsky, Mysli ob istorii russkogo iazyka (St. Petersburg 1849), pp. 115–16, takes a different position: He believes that the lack of versification among the Slavs is explained by an exclusive demand for Byzantine literature, which lacked artistic versification. 13. Veselovsky refers to an English fifteenth-century allegorical drama which contains a disputation between the hero, his virtues, and his vices. 14. Gr. pragma. 15. Veselovsky interprets Virgil’s prophecy to Dante (Inferno 1) that he would be saved by il veltro (“a hound”) in the context of the legend of the emperor who returns to save his people; see his “Opyty po istorii khristianskoi legendy. I: Otkroveniia Mefodiia i vizantiisko-germanskaia imperatorskaia saga,” in Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 178 (1875), April, pp. 283–331. 16. [Note added in the 1913 edition.] Cf. similar legends from the areas around Smolensk and Ekaterinoslav [modern Dnepropetrovsk] in Etnograficheskoe obozrenie VI, 212; XIII-XIV, 250; XV, 189; XVI, criticism, 193 (from Kovenskie gubernskie vedomosti); XVII, 188. 17. Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act V. 18. The reference is to Pushkin’s novella Baryshnia-krest’ianka (1830). 19. Vsevolod Garshin’s “Skazanie o gordom Aggee” (1886) is based on a legend whose versions were published by Afanas’ev (Russkie narodnye legendy, 1860) and Veselovsky himself (Razyskaniia v oblasti russkogo dukhvnogo stikha, 1881, v. III-V, pp. 147–50). 20. For this interpretation of the myth, see Andrew Lang, Custom and Myth (London, 1884), pp. 62–84. 21. Veselovsky refers to imitations of Amadis de Gaula, a Spanish knight-errant romance whose first edition dates to 1508.

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Chapter 2

Alexander Veselovsky’s Historical Poetics vs. Cultural Poetics Remembering the Future V ICTO RIA S O M O F F

In a lecture entitled “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics,” Alexander Veselovsky makes an unusually casual reference, with no precise attribution, to a certain “erudite German [who] has dedicated a special monograph to a single poetic formula, tracing it from popular song to new manifestations in refined literature: Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär! There are many formulas like this.”1 Here the word “formula” stands for any preexisting pattern of verbal expression, from apparently dead metaphors of everyday language (e.g., the sun rises) to artistic topoi, motifs, and plots. Once created, formulas carry on and endure, albeit in a multitude of variants, the traversal of geographical boundaries and the come-and-go of historical cataclysms, cultural shifts, theories, and practices of authorship. Veselovsky’s own colossal erudition allowed him to recognize and trace these multidimensional itineraries across an astonishingly large number of literary traditions. The scholar’s lifelong interest and painstaking research into folklore can be seen as most immediately informed by oral tradition’s incontestable right of first-hood—its chronological precedence over written literature, and, therefore, its status as both the birthplace and “thesaurus” of artistic formulas; and as the privileged exploratory site for the practitioner of Historical Poetics.2 I chose to begin this discussion with the particular formula “Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär” because this folk trope palpably manifests a tension

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between the scholar’s task as defined by Veselovsky—to discern a poet’s necessary indebtedness to tradition—and the comparison itself: man’s longing for gravity-defying avian flight. The desire to become a “little bird” hardly indicates the wish to renounce one’s humanity; rather, it expresses the regret that human beings cannot fly. The comparison thus appeals to a state of existence that would exceed all available forms, whether human or nonhuman, rendering them deficient in relation to this desire. And yet, according to Veselovsky, the aspiration to achieve this unprecedentedly excessive state, instead of evoking some hitherto-unknown verbal expression, finds its fully adequate realization within the parameters of a time-honored traditional formula. This tension lies at the very foundation of Veselovsky’s Historical Poetics and his grand vision of literary history. According to this vision, continuity in verbal art is informed by the successive interchange and realignment of forms, which have been operative since, literally, time immemorial. At any given moment of artistic creation, these forms (the number of which is immense, though theoretically not unlimited) are revitalized, and some are selected: A person experiences a wealth of new feelings and aspirations, and seeks a release for them, a fitting form, not finding such among those that have typically served his artistic creation: they have become too accreted with the definite content he himself has imbued them with, inseparable from it, and they are not amenable to what is new. At this point he turns to the images and motifs in which his thoughts and feelings had been cast sometime long ago, images and motifs now frozen and not hindering him from putting his own new stamp on these old forms.3 Ultimately, Veselovsky’s vision of literary history rules out the emergence of a genuinely new artistic form: the necessity to accommodate the rise of powerful new “feelings and aspirations” culminates in the revival of patterns from a seemingly long-forgotten past. Modern discursive practices, with their individualized authorship, are no more exempt from the antecedent and persistent recurrence of artistic formulas than the collective and anonymous creation of folklore. With the proper perspective—and it is the scholar’s task to anticipate and preemptively adopt this vantage point—the overwhelming reliance on formula in modern art reveals itself:

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Modern narrative literature with its complex plotting and photographic reproduction of reality would seem to rule out the very possibility of such a question [of typical plot schemata—VS]; but when future generations see this literature as far-flung as antiquity, from the prehistoric to the medieval, appears to us; when the synthesis of time, the great simplifier, bypasses the complexity of phenomena, reducing them to the size of dots sticking out from the deep, their lines will merge with those revealed to us now, when we examine the distant poetic past—and the phenomena of schematism and repetition shall be established the whole way through.4 At first glance, this take on the history of verbal art seems a mere exaggeration of the undeniable significance of tradition in the creative process—an exaggeration we might gently qualify and perhaps respectfully excuse, given Veselovsky’s deep engagement with folkloric texts that indeed exist in a multiplicity of recurring variants. But I would suggest that Veselovsky’s uncomfortably extreme view on artistic innovation (or the theoretical impossibility thereof) brings into sharp relief an interpretive and methodological problem frequently diluted in more “balanced” scholarly accounts yet exceedingly relevant to the history and theory of literature. To demonstrate this relevance, I would juxtapose Veselovsky’s approach with one of the most notable frameworks in contemporary literary studies—namely, the set of critical practices known as New Historicism, or, to use the coinage of Stephen Greenblatt that (quite opportunely for the purposes of this discussion) makes the correlation with Historical Poetics explicit—cultural poetics.5 Placed side by side, these two approaches exhibit a definite—albeit inverse—congruity in their understanding of aesthetic activity. Let us recall Veselovsky’s snapshot, as it were, of the creative process, wherein the experience of excess, seeking fulfillment, finds itself running up against a preexisting verbal pattern (“A person experiences a wealth of new feelings and aspirations, and seeks a release for them. . . . At this point he turns to the images and motifs in which his thoughts and feelings had been cast sometime long ago . . . .”), and compare it to Stephen Greenblatt’s reflection upon his own encounter, in researching the Renaissance subject’s quest for autonomy from the institutions and practices of society, with this subject’s effacement by societal relationships of power:

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When I first conceived this book several years ago, I intended to explore the ways in which major English writers of the sixteenth century created their own performances . . . to understand the role of human autonomy in the construction of identity. . . . Whenever I focused sharply upon a moment of apparently autonomous self-fashioning, I found not an epiphany of identity freely chosen but a cultural artifact. If there remained traces of free choice, the choice was among possibilities whose range was strictly delineated by the social and ideological system in force.6 This is uncannily similar to Veselovsky’s depiction of the moment of artistic inspiration: in both instances, the creator, and the scholar examining the artistic experience, find themselves within a limited range of predetermined choices—whether a repertoire of artistic formulas or available paradigms of self-fashioning. Furthermore, each account delineates the same pattern in the relationship between the operative old and the aspiring new: at the very pinnacle of the striving for an unprecedented arrangement of things, the heretofore-dormant (or concealed) established order makes a powerful comeback, firmly reasserting its triumph behind the subject’s back. Earlier in the book, in his discussion of Marlowe’s protagonists, Greenblatt clarifies and supports his argument by invoking a famous passage from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past.7 Marx’s conception of the nightmarish burdensomeness of the “tradition of all the dead generations” could easily apply not only to Greenblatt’s analysis of the defining socio-ideological powers, but to Veselovsky’s “frozen” [zastyvshie] yet undying poetic formulas as well. What, then, prevents any artistic utterance from being doomed to redundancy or superfluity in relation to either a preceding literary tra-

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dition or some other discursive practice within a particular cultural field (e.g., that of sixteenth-century England)? How does Veselovsky account for the advance and historical development of poetic forms, and what are the terms in which New Historicism understands the specificity of aesthetic experience? I believe that here, again, an inverse correspondence between the two theories can be observed. In the quote cited previously, Veselovsky theorizes that literary developments are triggered by the emergence of “new feelings and aspirations.” The source of these new experiences lies squarely outside the aesthetic domain: a change in the sociohistorical environment, altering people’s perceptual and emotional demands, redeems long-standing formulas and charges them with new significance, so that a “new stamp” can be placed “upon old forms.” The formula expands its potential— thus moving literary history forward—by being imbued with new, expression-seeking content: [A] series of formulas and schemata came into existence, many of which were retained in later usage, provided that they responded to the conditions of their new application, as some words of primitive vocabulary expanded their concrete meaning to express abstract concepts. These [formulas and schemata] suggested, in accord with the modified emotional and cognitive content, much that, originally, they did not directly convey.8 New Historicism calls attention to the irrelevance of the content/form (or context/text, or social/aesthetic) dichotomy, insisting that the placement of history outside and beyond the bounds of discursivity involves a conceptual fallacy. According to New Historicists, art enters into a fair and reciprocal negotiation with a multiplicity of other discourses within a given society. And yet, in order to be a welcome participant in this process of exchange, art must possess its own unique currency. Greenblatt measures this currency in terms of the “pleasure and interest”9 stemming from the artist’s “will to play.”10 This will “flaunts society’s cherished orthodoxies, embraces what the culture finds loathsome and frightening, transforms the serious into the joke and then unsettles the category of the joke by taking it seriously, courts self-destruction in the interest of the anarchic discharge of its energy. This is play on the brink of the abyss, absolute play.”11 Per Greenblatt, in aesthetic activity, pre-given societal variables are arranged in unforeseen, destabilizing, and precarious configurations.

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To the question of the “surplus” possessed by an artistic utterance— in relation to preceding literary tradition or other societal discourses of the time—Veselovsky and Greenblatt provide answers that in effect cancel each other out. In Veselovsky’s view, frozen [zastyvshie] poetic formulas are unthawed, animatedly entering into new configurations due to the artist’s need to accommodate new sociohistorical experience; whereas for Greenblatt, it is the other way around: rigid sociohistorical structures become unsettled through “playful” artistic experimentation. Veselovsky’s artist does not produce a new form, but rather revives and realigns traditional formulas. For New Historicists, despite the artist’s intense and exuberant (“absolute”) experimentation, his/her activity remains, ultimately, a mere game or, in the words of Frank Lentricchia, one of the harshest and most consistent critics of New Historicism, “a holiday from reality, a safely sealed space reserved for the expression of aesthetic anarchy, a long weekend that defuses the radical implications of our unhappiness.”12 As distinct from Veselovsky’s artist, Greenblatt’s appears to be entirely uninhibited in formal innovation; however, he or she merely “plays with” pre-given and ultimately unyielding sociohistorical paradigms, failing to introduce any innovation to the dominant ideology, to produce any “emotional and cognitive” content that is genuinely new. I believe that such a concurrent reading of these two theories (one influential in Russia, the other in the West) might enable a productive re-articulation of a question perhaps central to any literary-historical inquiry, the question of what motivates nonutilitarian (artistic) discourse. Namely, in light of this juxtaposition of the two “poetics,” the question of how something “new” comes about—a new communicative format, genre, narrative strategy, and so forth—can be restated as the problem of how “old” (or pre-given) patterns, be they artistic or ideological, can be forgotten. The act of forgetting the “old” becomes the prerequisite for the emergence of the “new.” I suggest that the rich methodological potential of both Historical Poetics and New Historicism lie in their uncompromising insistence on the impossibility of forgetting, the impossibility of avoiding extant poetic formulas or escaping reigning ideological snares, respectively. Each conceptual framework envisions this mnemonic tenacity as exceeding the dimensions of subjectivity: the subject might as well (and does) maintain the illusion of artistic or political autonomy (and in the epilogue to his Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Greenblatt posits that this illusion is a psy-

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chological necessity). The depersonalized realm where the “thesaurus” of formulas is housed seems strikingly similar to the sphere where disciplinary paradigms are obtained: the rules that regulate the circulation of discourses in a given society are beyond the analytical reach of participants in these discourses, just as the principles by which poetic formulas go in and out of literary circulation remain unavailable to the artist. It is, indeed, non-forgetting that is conceptualized in Veselovsky’s usage of “tradition” [predanie], and in the New Historicists’ borrowing from social sciences of “ideology,” “power,” and “episteme.” The frameworks offered by Veselovsky’s Historical Poetics and New Historicism—especially considered, as mentioned earlier, side by side, such that they mutually annul one another’s analytical loopholes— militate against the inertial view of forgetting as a gradual, incremental process, occurring on its own with the mere passage of time, and open up the question of the mechanisms of forgetting with methodological clarity and precision. In what follows, I attempt to define a perspective from which to explore the answers to this question using two specific examples of literary-historical development. The first example comes from the oral tradition and draws upon Veselovsky’s analysis of a common folkloric trope known as “psychological parallelism”; the second example, a literary one, engages Catherine Gallagher’s New Historicist analysis of the rise and advance of the Realist novel in eighteenth-century England. Veselovsky’s article on psychological parallelism—a device that brings together natural scenery and human life—became a classic in the study of folk poetry. Veselovsky views psychological parallelism as a major law of lyric composition, defining it thus: “a picture of nature, and next to it the same sort of picture from human life; they echo one another amid the distinction in objective content; there is a consonance between them that elucidates what they have in common.”13 Veselovsky traces the development of psychological parallelism in a number of oral traditions worldwide. He argues that this development begins with a “substantive,” or “content-bearing” [soderzhatel’nyi] parallelism—one in which the basis for connecting human emotion with the surrounding physical world is obvious—and ends with a construction in which such a basis is utterly obscured, so that the constituents of such a parallelism, just like their mathematical prototypes, never meet. In the period of the substantive parallelism, an omission

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[umolchanie] often occurs, insofar as the connecting links, precisely because they are self-evident for a given folk group, are skipped in actual performance; nonetheless, the folklorist can restore the linkages with a fair degree of certainty. For instance: Два челнока едут pядом, То замедляя путь, то cкользя дальше. Кому милая невеpна, У того cеpдце иcтекает кpовью. [Two canoes go side-by-side, / Now slowing down, now sliding farther. / Whosoever’s sweetheart is unfaithful, / His heart bleeds.] Катитcя pучей, волна за волной, Вода утолила мою жажду. Твоя мать, ноcившая тебя в утpобе, Будет мне тещей.14 [A stream rolls along, wave by wave, / The water has quenched my thirst. / Your mother, who bore you in her womb, / Shall be my mother-in-law.] In his analysis, Veselovsky restores the omitted linkages thus: “One has to fill in . . . a lot in the above-cited examples: two canoes go side by side; whosoever’s sweetheart is unfaithful (does not go by his side), his heart bleeds. A stream rolls along, the water has quenched my thirst— and your mother shall be my mother-in-law, that is, you shall quench my thirst for love.”15 However, Veselovsky acknowledges that at a certain point in the development of parallelism, a convincing restoration is no longer possible, as in this example from German folklore: Dass im Tann Wald finster ist Das macht das Holz. Dass mein Schatz finster schaut Das macht der Stolz.16 [Why is it dark in the pine forest? / It is from the trees. / Why does my treasure look gloomy? / It is from pride.] It is indeed challenging, if not impossible, to recover the missing links in this parallelism. At the same time, the comparison exhibits an altogether different category of linkage: rhyme. Rhyme is also present in many other examples of “weakened” [oslablennyi] substantive

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parallelism—from Russian, Tatar, and Chuvash traditions, among others—as Veselovsky observes: Substantive parallelism becomes rhythmic, a musical moment prevails; the clarity of the relationship between details of the parallel is weakened. The result is not an alternation of internally connected images, but a series of rhythmic lines without conscious correspondence. . . . Sometimes parallelism is maintained only via the accord or consonance of the words in two parts of the parallel.17 According to Veselovsky, a gradual weakening of the substantive, “content-bearing” correlations eventually led to the dominance of vocal, or phonetic, ones: this is the history of psychological parallelism in folk poetry. A history thus delineated implies a stage where parallelism is sustained in the absence of either substantive or phonetic associations, with the combination of two images held together exclusively by memory. Veselovsky’s analysis is premised on the absolute impossibility of forgetting the formula; at the same time, the scholar easily grants the forgetting of the “emotional and cognitive” content the formula once bore. The unquestioning loyalty to a traditional formula (why were no-longer-meaningful comparisons not forgotten?) and nonchalance with regard to its substance—so that “the clarity of the relationship between details of the parallel is weakened”—simultaneously drive forward the development of parallelism. In his meticulous analysis of Veselovsky’s argument, Lithuanian scholar Vladislav Prostsevichus points out this logical and psychological inconsistency—“a minor issue in the grand scheme of this outstanding literary historian’s work”18—in Veselovsky’s view on the development of parallelism. Prostsevichus argues that any attempt to establish a causal relationship between the loss of substantive linkages in parallelism and the emergence of rhyme would be similarly unsustainable. This includes the inverse possibility, not considered by Veselovsky, that it was the discovery of vocal correspondences that led to the subsequent weakening of substantive ones. Prostsevichus convincingly argues that at the stage of content-bearing parallelism, vocal correspondences, even when occurring in the course of performance, would remain irrelevant for a folk group and, therefore, effectively inaudible. Instead, Prostsevichus suggests considering these events in the history of folk poetry—the forgetting of the old, the emergence of the new principle of parallelism—as occurring simultaneously:

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“Forgetting” and “remembering”—more precisely, “committing to memory”—are two reflexes of the same event. In our case, these two facts are the emergence of rhyme and the loss of the meaning-connection in parallelism. One cannot relate these facts by causality or entailment. . . . The discovery of rhyme is not that fact upon which (relying upon which) the consciousness reconsiders a connection in meaning. The “moment” a sound connection is established, the meaning connection disappears irrevocably; and no theorizing can lay hold of this “moment.”19 The emergence of rhyme coincides in time and space, so to speak, with the breakdown of the formerly unquestioned substantive connections on which content-bearing parallelism was based. In this light, rhyme appears, strangely enough, as a mechanism of forgetting rather than a mnemonic aid. The event that brought about an exemption from unforgettability (interpreted in the methodologies of Veselovskian Historical Poetics and New Historicism, as described previously, as the subject’s dependency on pre-given artistic and ideological paradigms, respectively) can most precisely be described as an event within the bounds of the poetic utterance, or an intra-verbal event. In the case of parallelism, this event involves the parallelism’s meaning and its sonic shape. Specifically, a reversal of the relationship between these two categories took place, resulting in a fundamentally new stage in the history of folk poetry. My second example has to do with histories and theories of the novel, specifically, with the “rise of the novel” paradigm that owes its prominence to the classic study by Ian Watt. Since the publication of The Rise of the Novel in 1957, Watt’s approach has been variously modified and challenged by subsequent historians of the novel. The principal direction of these critiques consists in the loosening, blurring, and crossing of various boundaries—national, sociopolitical, and linguistic, among others—within which, according to Watt, the genre of the novel first “rose” in world literature. As a consequence, the geographic scope of studies of the novel has been dramatically expanded, and scholarly attention to literary traditions that do not conform to the western European model has increased.20 At the same time, the conceptual core of Watt’s notion of “formal realism” has retained its validity in contemporary novel theory. Constructed verisimilitude—achieved through temporal, spatial, and linguistic particularity in the representation of both inner life and the

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external world—remains at the heart of post-Watt definitions, whether these construe the Realist aesthetic as an aspect of ideology, rhetoric, or the “reality effect.” Moreover, scholars who have dissociated the novel from the sociohistorical context of eighteenth-century Britain (or from Europe, or from “modernity” itself) in order to expand the boundaries of the genre’s origins continue to use the very parameters of Realism outlined by Watt.21 The consequences of this expansion are twofold: on the one hand, Realism, and therefore the genre of the Realist novel, becomes a ubiquitous literary phenomenon; on the other hand, the notion of “formal realism” is streamlined and delimited to such constituent features as detailed characterization, or adherence to rationally explicable causal relations; or even reductively categorized as “social problem” literature. Catherine Gallagher’s essay “The Rise of Fictionality” stands as a notable exception to this trend. Gallagher does not dispute Watt’s singling-out of eighteenth-century England as a privileged site for the emergence of novelistic discourse; she critiques, rather, Watt’s understanding of what exactly constitutes the essence of this “rise.” For Gallagher, the deficiency of Watt’s account of the “rise” of Realism is that it explains “not the discovery of fiction, but its subordination to the reality principle, assuming that fiction was already an established and recognized thing that only needed to be brought down to earth by middle-class cultural hegemony.”22 Gallagher points out that the emergent novel differentiated itself not only from explicitly incredible stories (romances, fables, fairy tales, and so forth), but also from the numerous credible narratives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that were meant to be read as either factual or allegorical accounts of contemporary events and people. In pre-novelistic prose, any plausible story would have been spontaneously perceived as referring to the world outside the text; it was only with the novel that “stories that were both plausible and received as narratives about purely imaginary individuals”23 came about. In the process of its development, the novel “discovered fiction,” since, as Gallagher cogently argues, fictionality as a concept “only became visible when it became credible.”24 In order for a new mode of narration to establish itself, according to Gallagher’s argument, certain conditions pertaining to the perception of a credible (“verisimilar”) story had to develop and become habitual; absent these conditions, a verisimilar story would automatically be attributed to reality. The essence of the novel’s “rise” should thus be understood as the emergence and maturation of writers’ and readers’

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capacity for non-referential perception of credible narration. To explicate these conditions, Gallagher, in accordance with the methodological imperatives of New Historicism, considers the literary developments of the eighteenth century alongside other practices of the time (e.g., marriage and commerce), arguing that all of them required from their participants a disposition toward ironic credulity enabled by optimistic incredulity; one is dissuaded from believing in the actual truth of representation so that one can instead admire its likelihood and extend enough credit to buy into the game. . . . Such flexible mental states were the sine qua non of modern subjectivity. . . . [A]lmost all developments that we associate with modernity—from greater religious toleration to scientific discovery—required the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction, a competence of investing contingent and temporary credit.25 Gallagher further claims that as the mental states of provisionality became habitual in the course of the eighteenth century, readers unlearned (“forgot”) a heretofore-mandatory perceptual association between the plausibility of events and their reality, and became willing and able to suspend judgment with regard to the literal truth of narrated events; willing and able to knowingly give themselves over to the omnipotent aesthetic illusion enabled by plausible narration. The reader “had the enjoyment of deep immersion in illusion because she was protected from delusion by the voluntary framework of disbelief.”26 Nonetheless, there is an aspect of novelistic narration regarding which suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis correspondence between narrated events and the “real world” appears superfluous. This aspect is the depiction of subjectivity, or consciousness, which Gallagher, drawing on several influential literary theorists (Käte Hamburger, Dorrit Cohn, and Ann Banfield, among others), posits as the hallmark of novelistic narration. Representation of consciousness is also an initiative that is absolutely unavailable in real life. As Cohn remarks: “the special life-likeness of narrative fiction—as compared to dramatic and cinematic fictions—depends on what writers and readers know least in life: how another mind thinks, another body feels. In depicting the inner life, the novelist is truly a fabricator.”27 Representation of consciousness thus becomes the most glaring and definitive evidence of novelistic non-referentiality.28

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With regard to the depiction of inner life, there appears to be no need for the reader to attempt to create a framework of disbelief, or apply some “mental habit” thereof, there being no criterion against which the representation of consciousness might be judged either credible or non-credible. The reader’s experience of the irrelevance of the plausibility factor in the novelistic representation of consciousness thus engenders an annulment of the parameter of (in)credibility as the index of fictionality. The novel’s reader “forgets” to judge the narrated events as either probable or improbable; her own consciousness (the instrument, after all, of such judgment) is fully engaged in a qualitatively different experience. This experience and its discursive source— novelistic narration—cannot, then, be adequately explained as stemming from the disposition for “cognitive provisionality” alongside and inspired by other “fictions” of modernity, but must be conceptualized on different analytical grounds. To probe these grounds, I suggest examining the annulment of the story’s attribution to reality, on the one hand, and the representation of consciousness, on the other, as two correlative and mutually interdependent constituents of the emergent novelistic discourse. Drawing on Gallagher’s assertion that the difference between the old (prenovelistic) and new kinds of fictionality are to be sought from the perspective of the utterance’s perception, I would argue that any utterance whose source can be (however provisionally) situated in time and space engenders, on the part of the perceiver, this utterance’s attribution to reality—with the result that the perceiver must evaluate the plausibility of such an attribution. The speaker’s spatio-temporal cohesion entails a similarly unified localization on the part of the perceiver; the resulting misalignment in space-time between speaker and perceiver necessitates the latter’s evaluation of the utterance in accordance with his/her assumptions and expectations. The utterance may be judged as being true, false, or anything in between; yet the very possibility (and obligation) of thus interrogating its veracity derives, not from its content, but from the structure of its perception—the utterance’s attribution to reality. The absolute unavailability of the representation of consciousness in real life blocks the perceiver’s inclination, inevitably realized in utilitarian discourse, to situate the source of narration within a coherent temporal and spatial context. The speaking subject who undertakes such an initiative (in Cohn’s formulation, “uniquely privileged and

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entirely unreal”29) cannot in principle be localized in time and space. Consequently, the reader loses the basis for his/her own localization and, with it, the compulsory anchoring of narrated events to reality. Whether the content of this representation corresponds to the reader’s expectations or contradicts them, at the moment of their perception (i.e., reading), the reader’s experience consists in that of the irrelevance of the utterance’s attribution to reality, the absence of any position from which to evaluate such a claim. At work here is a mechanism of forgetting similar to the one described in my first example, in which a folk group’s “forgetting” of substantive links between the constituents of psychological parallelism occurs simultaneously with the emergence of rhyme. Likewise, in the “moment” of the representation of consciousness, the hitherto-unavoidable commitment to verification becomes inoperative. As already noted, the novel’s reader “forgets” to judge the plausibility of narrated events; experiencing the irrelevance of this criterion in the novelistic representation of consciousness does away with the parameter of (in)credibility as the index of fictionality. I would further argue that it is the unmistakable experience of his/ her own release from spatio-temporal localization, achieved within the boundaries of novelistic utterance, that necessitated the disposition of “optimistic incredulity” that Gallagher posits as essential to modern man’s perceptual-emotional makeup. The subject’s own excess in relation to temporal and spatial configurations conceptually precedes the possibility of engaging in the “suppositional exercise” discussed by Gallagher, the envisaging of provisional alternative scenarios for oneself in courtship, commerce, science, religious practice, daily life, and so forth. In this light, the novelistic utterance appears not as some particular manifestation of modern humanity’s mindset of “cognitive provisionality,” but rather as the prime formative resource and enabling factor for this mindset or “mental habit.” It is, then, the emergence and consolidation of the narrative position that enabled representation of consciousness, and thus also the reader’s experience of the irrelevance of the credibility criterion, that should be understood as the essence of the “rise” of the Realist novel. Cohn, who places the representation of consciousness at the very heart of her inquiry into the definition of fictionality, also points out a literaryhistorical connection between the emergence of Realism and the transparency of characters’ minds. She observes that it was only through the establishment of Realism in narrative fiction that access to character consciousness was granted to the prose writer. Cohn envisions this

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chronological coincidence as paradoxical, deeming it “surprising . . . that the novelists most concerned with the exact representation of life are also those who place at the live centers of their works this invented entity whose verisimilitude it is impossible to verify.”30 Clearly, the common understanding of Realism that Cohn employs in referring to “exactness” and “verisimilitude” does not suffice to elucidate that characteristic—represented consciousness—that she herself pinpoints as central to narrative Realism. Transparency of minds cannot be conceptualized either as “naïve” or constructed attempts at verisimilitude (whatever the analytical remove at which we place/consider the notion of “reality”) since this transparency is absolutely unavailable in real life. Thus, the concept of Realism needs to be redefined such that a theoretical framework substantiates the transparency of the protagonists’ minds as a constitutive generic trait of the Realist novel. To establish this framework, we need to provisionally suspend any associations between Realism and “reality” (including probable, or provisional reality) and give our undivided attention to the emergence and development of the source of novelistic narration, that is, to the authorial position that engenders and sustains novelistic discourse. The term “omniscience,” routinely employed to describe the narrative perspective in the Realist novel, is in fact helpless to define such a position or elucidate the problem of the representation of consciousness in fiction. This word, truly ubiquitous in literary studies, obscures rather than highlights the historical and typological boundary between the position of external observation and the transparent rendition of characters’ hearts and minds—a boundary critical for regarding the representation of consciousness as a constitutive trait of the Realist novel. The difference between the stances of “omniscience” and external observation is only one of degree: the former expands, magnifies, or perhaps (to use D. A. Miller’s term) “pulverizes”31 external observation to a state of depersonalized ubiquity. However, access to a character’s consciousness calls for a narrative perspective qualitatively different from that of external observation, one that cannot be conceptualized as either the continuation or enhancement thereof.32 The critical requirement to dissociate the authorial voice in fictional discourse from any real-world speaking subjects forms the horizon of contemporary novel studies and is responsible for a number of analytical models that attempt to substantiate, one way or another, the non-referential status of the narrative agent in fictional texts. Some of

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the most pertinent and effective solutions to the authorial stance in the novel have been to account for the source of novelistic narration in apophatic terms. Thus Käte Hamburger builds a narrator-less model for third-person fiction, while Ann Banfield refers to the “unspeakable sentences” of free indirect discourse—those not occurring in spoken language, and therefore unattributable to any speaking subject—that came into being with the advent of the novel.33 At the same time, as Cohn acknowledges in her Distinction of Fiction, while the need to dissociate authorial voice in fictional narrative from any participants in reallife discourse stands as a postulate of contemporary literary theory, the application of this principle to literary analysis, especially with regard to third-person (heterodiegetic) fiction, remains a challenge.34 Cohn takes it to be a consensus among the most diverse theoretical approaches that “in fictional poetics, though the concept of reference has recently been reinstated, its qualification by such terms as fictive, non-ostensive, or pseudo- sufficiently indicates its nonfactual connotations, even when it denotes components of the fictional world taken directly from the world of reality.”35 On the literary-historical end of scholarly inquiry into fictionality, Catherine Gallagher argues that fiction only became “distinct” with the appearance and advance of the novel, since it was novelistic discourse that suspended the commitment to verifiable documentation, becoming thereby the first non-referential prose narrative form. At the same time, Gallagher’s notion of “cognitive provisionality” still anchors the novelistic utterance to reality— even if only to some plausible, conditional reality. It is fair to say that the consequences of fictional non-referentiality have not yet been adequately explored in critical practices. This article can be seen as an appeal for a more radical step in that direction. I believe that one important theoretical resource for the inquiry into the authorial stance in fictional narration can be found in a key concept of Mikhail Bakhtin’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience: the notion of “outsideness” [vnenakhodimost’], also translated as “being-beyond,” “extopy,” and “extra-location.” Bakhtin defines “outsideness” as the authorial exemption from the temporal and spatial—as well as the ethical and cognitive—constraints of the narrated world: “The author’s fundamental, aesthetically productive relationship to the hero . . . is a relationship in which the author occupies an intently maintained position outside the hero with respect to every constituent feature of the hero— . . . space, time, value, and meaning.”36 In other words, the authorial position that engenders and sustains novelistic experience can

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be described as unmindfulness of cognitive and ethical constraints: this definition makes a decisive break with any analytical configuration of authorial “omniscience,” which implies supreme cognitive and ethical aptitude, and concomitantly implies a relative rather than absolute polarity (the author’s knowledge in full vs. hero’s knowledge in part). According to Bakhtin, aesthetic activity consists in establishing and maintaining a boundary between two interdependent and mutually conditional activities, the author’s and the hero’s; the boundary is of an absolute nature. This places Bakhtin’s understanding of the authorhero relationship in fictional discourse at a critical distance from the currently dominant methodologies, which conceive the authorial position as one or another form of surplus or privilege (temporal, spatial, cognitive, ethical) in relation to the hero. Instead, drawing on Bakhtin’s phenomenology of the author-hero relationship, I would suggest that in the novel, the author’s unmindfulness of ethical and cognitive constraints (a narrative perspective that, in the history of literary prose, came about with the “rise” and development of the novel) has its counterpart in the novelistic hero who is excessively mindful of these constraints, that is, who experiences them entirely as the result of his/her own conscious choice. Since the prime authorial task consists in maintaining the absolute boundary between author and hero, the representation of figural (character) consciousness—the hallmark of novelistic narration—becomes the only adequate medium in which a decisive break between the activities of author and hero can be drawn. I would suggest, moreover, that the establishment of authorial exemption from temporal and spatial constraints is a crucial factor in the emergence of Realism. It is precisely due to the absence of such constraints that the element of the fantastic has no purchase within the Realist narrative. In the novel, the specific nature of narrated events space- and time-wise has its counterpart in the author’s independence from any possible space-time configuration. The “exactness” or “verisimilitude” of the Realist narrative is engendered on the level of discourse, and originates with an author who is exempt—removed, excised— from spatio-temporal restrictions. This correlation can be clarified further. The fantastic (the explicitly incredible, to use Gallagher’s formulation), in all its manifestations, is fully conditioned by temporal and spatial categories. The author of the novel gains his independence from narrated time and space by overcoming the resistance mustered by these categories; and in their essential absence, the fantastic simply has no “material” over which to

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triumph, and thus no grounds for occurrence within the narrated world. The novelistic author’s exemption from space-time, then, requires that narrated events themselves be “realistic,” that is, space- and time-bound. From this standpoint, Realism emerges as the result of a qualitatively new—new in its spatio-temporal organization—discursive perspective; that is, rather than considering it paradoxical, as does Cohn, that Realist aesthetics is bound up with the representation of figural consciousness, I would explain this correlation by asserting the congruence of these phenomena as two discursive effects of the novelistic author’s exemption from space-time and meaning-value. Bakhtin views the author’s release from the narrated world not as an aesthetic given but as the target of a uniquely oriented and diligently sustained activity. The position of outsideness is not simply surrendered, but must be won: “The author’s position of being situated outside the hero is gained by conquest, and the struggle for it is often a struggle for life.”37 From the perspective of literary-historical analysis, it is this “mortal combat” for the exclusive narrative stance that, I believe, constitutes the domain of meaningful critical inquiry into the development of the novel and the essence of its “rise.”38 In Gallagher’s interpretation, the emerging novel becomes, along with other cultural practices, a means to challenge the spatio-temporal constraints upon humanity’s vision of the future. By providing the modern reader with an opportunity to imaginatively sort through a variety of possible things to come, novelistic narration becomes a technique for participating in futurity; in other words, a form of prediction. Notably, Greenblatt’s notion of the “will to play” can also be seen as conceptualizing the artistic utterance as a kind of foretelling: the artist’s unexpected reconfigurations of ambient ideological material, then, appear as a means to “play out” the possible scenarios prompted by societal forces and to confront and, ultimately, eliminate the unknowability of the future—which is the thrill of any game’s strategy. In traditional Historical Poetics, it is remembrance or, rather, the inability to forget that serves as a decisive factor in the history of folklore and literature. Veselovsky’s remembrance (non-forgetting of “formulas”) and the New Historicists’ prediction (“cognitive provisionality”) can be seen as mirror activities, directed at overcoming the unknown in the past and future respectively: prediction resists the unknowability of the future; remembrance, of the past. Each activity is catalyzed by the discrepancy between the present and non-present, or,

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more precisely, by an intuition of the possibility of an other present— one informed by a fully retained past or foreseen future. The artistic utterance thereby functions as a means to compensate for humanity’s immanent temporal and spatial deficiency, manifested in two corresponding and equally unsustainable imperatives: to fully comprehend the past and to predict the future. From the perspective of the subject—since subjectivity itself can only be carried out through the implementation of choice—it is indeed a rupture in temporal and spatial dependency or, put another way, the opening of the formerly shut gates of choice, that can be defined as “change.” However, such an opening cannot occur through the faculties of remembrance and prediction; these activities are fully conditioned by spatio-temporal categories, entailing as they do a comparison between here-and-now and then-and-there (the latter situated either in the past or future). Both remembrance and prediction are fully grounded in the subject’s temporal and spatial deficiency and thereby sustain and reinforce the inability to choose. In general, all utilitarian (“referential”) utterances can be categorized as forms of either remembrance or prediction: the very notion of “reference” presupposes that the object of representation (whether factual, pseudo-factual, or non-factual as in lies or daydreams) precedes the event of its representation. The only situation to establish a perspective of utterance formation and perception that is radically different from the utilitarian perspective is that in which the utterance itself becomes an object of representation. In this uniquely oriented activity, both the initiator and the perceiver are placed in a position from which the object of representation and the representation itself concur in time and space: events do not preexist their representation but rather arise and develop with and within it. In the architectonics of discursive perspective thus configured, any textual action or “move” carries forward both events and their representation in such a way that, as a matter of principle, no boundary can be drawn between the two. Because of the simultaneity of representation with its object, a consciousness (whether that of the producer or perceiver of an utterance) engaged in this experience contains all “material” within itself and, therefore, has nothing to remember and nothing to predict—a condition that cannot be anchored to any state of reality. The two examples analyzed here can serve to support this statement. A folkloric text exists in the totality of variants of a non-extant original; the aesthetic

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experience of a folk poet (and his audience) can be described as differentiation between two variants of the same folk “item,” or, more precisely, as differentiation within one (non-extant) piece of folklore. In the novelistic utterance, the subjective activities of the author and the reader can be seen as two projections of the annulment of the criterion for differentiating between the represented and the means of representation. The authorial insusceptibility to the distinction between the external and internal manifests itself in the unmediated access to figural minds: the narrative mode of presenting consciousness that came into being with the emergence and advance of the realist novel. The word “access” well conveys the historical dynamics of “consciousness” presentation but, in fact, is imprecise; it would be more accurate to say that fictional minds become transparent not in the course of the novelistic author’s penetration (at long last) of the boundary between the character’s inner life and its external manifestations, but rather because of—and instantaneously with—the establishment of that authorial perspective within which the very distinction between the external and internal ceases to be operative and is thereby “forgotten.” In aesthetic activity, the provisional “otherness” of space-time, concomitant with remembrance and prediction, is annulled. In other words, formation and perception of the artistic utterance is carried out by a consciousness within which temporal and spatial constraints become irrelevant. The non-referential perception that Cohn posits as the most definitive “distinction of fiction” has its foundation in the simultaneity of events and their representation in the artistic utterance. The perceiver’s attribution of an utterance to reality (and the resulting evaluation of its plausibility) implies his/her capacity to distinguish the “content” of the utterance from the narration of this content. Yet when the utterance itself becomes the object of representation, this distinction is rendered extraneous; within the established simultaneity of story and discourse, events (be they historically accurate, credible, or explicitly improbable) no longer precede their narration. This experience, in the artistic utterance, of the annulment of spatio-temporal dependency enables the “forgetting” of heretoforeinescapable causalities, and opens up the possibility of choice where none had previously existed. In light of this, it would seem that a methodology of literary and cultural history should insist on the priority of aesthetic activity over any sociohistorical and, in a narrow sense, “formal” developments. The specific configurations of aesthetic activity (including the major shift from folklore to literature) examined in

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chronological and typological perspectives make up, I believe, a crucial domain for explorations in Historical (and Cultural) Poetics. This approach by no means advocates a separation of artistic practice from history and culture but advises, wherever we encounter an intricate network of social and artistic discourses, to seek out the distinctly aesthetic foundation of events in the life of consciousness, the locale of any true change.

Notes 1. “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics” (1894), Chapter 1 in this volume, p. 61. 2. “Thesaurus” [slovar’] is Veselovsky’s term for a repertoire of formulas. For instance, when discussing the principal distinction between plot and motif, Veselovsky states that, the difference notwithstanding, for a poet, whether of the folkloric or modern literary tradition, plots and motifs “feature the same commonalities and repetitions, from myth to epic, fairy tale, local saga, and novel; and here one may speak of a thesaurus of typical schemata and situations, a thesaurus the imagination is accustomed to resorting to in order to express this or that content. Attempts have been made to compile this thesaurus.” A. N. Veselovskii, Istoricheskaia poetika (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1940), p. 499. 3. Ibid., p. 496. 4. Ibid., p. 494; emphasis mine. Vladimir Propp cites these words of Veselovsky in concluding his pioneering study Morphology of the Folktale; Propp’s structural analysis of the Russian fairy tale was directly influenced by Veselovsky’s research on plots and motifs in folk narratives. For a comparative evaluation of Veselovsky’s and Propp’s theories, see  C. Segre, “From Motif to Function and Back Again,” in Thematics: New Approaches, ed. Claude Bremond, Joshua Landy, and Thomas Pavel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 21–32. 5. Greenblatt notes (“Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture [London: Routledge, 1990], p. 14) that he borrows the term “cultural poetics” from Yuri Lotman, the Russian literary scholar who founded the Moscow-Tartu school of cultural semiotics. For an incisive comparative analysis of Lotman’s and Greenblatt’s theories of culture, see  A. Schönle, “Social Power and Individual Agency: The Self in Greenblatt and Lotman,” The Slavic and East European Journal 45, no. 1 (spring 2001): 61–79. 6. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 256. 7. Cited in ibid., p. 210. For a criticism of Greenblatt’s deployment of this passage of Marx, see  F. Lentricchia, “Foucault’s Legacy: A New

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Historicism?” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 239–40. 8. A.  N. Veselovskii, Sobranie sochinenii (St.  Petersburg: Imp. Akademiia nauk, 1913), 2.1, pp. 1–2. Trans. Boris Maslov; emphasis mine. 9. Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” p. 213. 10. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 220. 11. Ibid. 12. Lentricchia, “Foucault’s Legacy,” p. 241. 13. A. N. Veselovskii, Istoricheskaia poetika (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1989), p. 113. 14. Ibid., p. 111. Veselovsky’s translation into Russian from Turkish folklore. 15. Ibid., p. 118. 16. Ibid., p. 111. 17. Ibid., p. 119; emphasis in original. 18. V. Prostsevichus, Priamoe znachenie (Donetsk: Nord-Press, 2002), p. 108. 19. Ibid., pp. 109–10. For a critique of Veselovsky’s argument from a different perspective—the lack of a clear demarcation between substantive and rhythmic parallelisms—see R. Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp.  173–74. In his “The Relation between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style” (in Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher [Elmwood Park, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991], pp. 15– 51), Viktor Shklovsky also polemicizes with Veselovsky’s approach. For a detailed discussion of this debate, see B. Maslov, “Comparative Literature and Revolution, or the Many Arts of (Mis)reading Alexander Veselovsky,” Compar(a)ison 2008 [2013] 2: 101–29; according to Maslov, “Shklovsky’s analysis of parallelism is a quintessential instance of ‘the form dictating the content’: the second member of the parallelism is adduced not because of its meaning, but for the sake of parallel structure itself, which serves to decelerate the narrative, thereby making the text’s constructedness more perceptible” (p. 108). Shklovsky’s argument is basically the same one Prostsevichus considers and then refutes as another (if reverse) example of a causal relationship between content and form in parallelism. 20. Examples of scholarly studies that assert the novel’s multiple and alternative “rises” at various points in time and space are too numerous to list with any exhaustiveness here. Recent scholarly publications that expand the geographic boundaries of the novel’s origins include Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, eds., The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Jenny Mander, ed., Remapping the Rise of the European Novel (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2007); and essays on novelistic traditions the world over in

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Franco Moretti’s anthology The Novel: History, Geography, and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 21. See, for instance, Hadfield, “When Was the First English Novel and What Does It Tell Us?” in Remapping the Rise of the European Novel, ed. Mander, pp. 23–34. Hadfield challenges the widespread association between modernity and novelistic discourse, arguing that “it is time to release the novel from the burden of expressing modernity” (p. 28). At the same time, in demonstrating the affinity between certain sixteenth-century English prose works and later novels, Hadfield states: “It is hard to deny that [William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat] makes an attempt to explore more general aspects of human behavior than are strictly required by religious allegory, that it does show an interest in the characters themselves or even that it demonstrates aspects of ‘formal realism’ in its descriptions” (p. 30). 22. Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Moretti, p. 345. 23. Ibid., p. 340. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., p. 346. 26. Ibid., p. 349; emphasis in original. 27. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 5–6. 28. I employ the term “representation of consciousness” exactly as does Cohn—as a portrayal of the “unspoken thoughts, feelings, perceptions of a person other than the speaker” (ibid., p. 7). When “consciousness” (or “inner life”) is construed as the object of representation regardless of the narrative position from which such representation is undertaken, the discussion can lose its focus. Thus, in a recent study of the representation of consciousness in the ancient Greek novel, Margaret Anne Doody dismisses the realist novel’s exclusive prerogative vis-à-vis the portrayal of inner life, arguing instead that “writers of novels—of all kinds and in all periods— give a major place to the workings of the mind itself.” (Margaret Anne Doody, “The Representation of Consciousness in the Ancient Novel,” in Remapping the Rise of the European Novel, ed. Mander, p. 36.) However, the examples from ancient Greek prose that Doody adduces to support her claim highlight precisely a discontinuity in the representation of inner life. That is, in each instance, the inner life of the character, however intense, complex, and dynamic, is expressed entirely in their own words—even when there is no one around to hear them. Doody’s conclusion that the earliest novel “gives voice to the voiceless” (ibid., p. 42) underscores how qualitatively different the narrative mode of representation of consciousness in the ancient Greek novel is from that of the Realist novel. The hallmark of the latter is the presentation of the invisible, inaudible, and often

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nonverbal workings of the characters’ hearts and minds, which are inaccessible to both external observation and first-person narration. 29. Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 165. 30. Cohn, Transparent Minds, pp. 5–6. 31. D.  A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. xiii. 32. In the ongoing debate among prominent students of the novel on the relationship between novelistic authority and societal power, Cohn fundamentally disagrees with D. A. Miller’s application of Foucault’s analyses of disciplinary institutions to the novel and his argument that novelistic discourse fulfills society’s ideal of an unseen but all-seeing (panoptical) and pervasive monitor. According to Miller, the novelistic author’s surfeit of power inconspicuously raises societal power structures to a level of efficiency that society itself is unable to attain through its officially designated enforcement agencies. This privileged narrative voice cannot be personified in any way, but rather “institutes a faceless and multilateral regard.” (Miller, The Novel and the Police, p. 24.) Disputing the methodological validity of Miller’s and other scholars’ panoptically inspired approaches to the novel, Cohn posits a qualitative difference between the author of the novel and all other kinds of power-wielders (whether ideological, political, penitentiary, or domestic) on the grounds that there is no plausible real-world somebody—whether individual or institutional—capable of directly accessing another human being’s thoughts and feelings. The debate (at times a quite heated one) has taken place, in particular, on the pages of New Literary History; see Dorrit Cohn, “Optics and Power in the Novel,” New Literary History 26, no. 1 (1995): 3–20; John Bender, “Making the World Safe for Narratology: A Reply to Dorrit Cohn,” New Literary History 26, no. 1 (1995): 29–33; and Dorrit Cohn, “Reply to John Bender and Mark Seltzer,” New Literary History 26, no. 1 (1995): 35–37. Another notable conceptualization of omniscience is that of Audrey Jaffe (Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991]), who defines the omniscience of the novelistic author as a fantasy of unlimited knowledge and mobility actualized through a set of narrative strategies employed in the novel to produce this effect. One of these strategies is the construction of characters (who are bereft of mobility and freedom) in relation to and at the expense of which the author defines himself/herself as omniscient. This “relative” omniscience still does not suffice to account for the qualitative difference in the authorial and figural (i.e., character-based) narrative perspectives in the novel. 33. See Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. Marilyn J. Rose (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993); Ann Banfield, Un-

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speakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982); and Ann Banfield, “Where Epistemology, Style, and Grammar Meet Literary History,” New Literary History 9, no. 3 (1978): 415–54. For an overview and concise critique of the author concept in contemporary literary theory, see the section “Signposts of Fictionality” in Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, pp. 123–31. 34. Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, pp. 125–26. 35. Ibid., p. 113. On the other hand, the problematics of narrative construction notwithstanding, “[t]he idea that history is committed to verifiable documentation and that this commitment is suspended in fiction has survived even the most radical dismantling of the history/fiction distinction” (ibid., pp. 112–13). 36. Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 14. 37. Ibid., 15. 38. For such an inquiry undertaken on the material of nineteenth-century Russian fiction, see my book-length study, The Imperative of Reliability: Russian Prose on the Eve of the Novel, 1820s–1850s (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015).

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Chapter 3

Historicist Hermeneutics and Contestatory Ritual Poetics An Encounter Between Pindaric Epinikion and Attic Tragedy LE S LIE KURKE

The challenge of this volume is to think about different models and methods for “literary history” or the historicist reading of literary forms. I contribute to this enterprise as a representative of “New Historicism” or “Cultural Poetics,” and in that capacity, I have been thinking about the similarities and differences between New Historicism and the Russian tradition of “Historical Poetics,” and the usefulness, for the material I work on, of the latter. Both methods reject aestheticism, old-fashioned psychologizing of the author, and literary biography. And both insist on starting from the linguistic structure of the text as a formal system—though even here, there are significant differences: American New Historicism emerges from—and builds into its method—New Criticism, with its close attention to the verbal structure of a text, and deconstruction, which reads for gaps, incoherences, or anomalies within texts. In contrast, the Russian method of Historical Poetics is predicated on a much more structuralist, linguistics-inspired analysis of literary system. Likewise, both methods are interested in getting beyond “the history of generals” (as Tynianov puts it), a literary history that simply strings together in chronological order the great authors of the canon—so both are committed to juxtaposing the canonical and the non-canonical, but they go about this in somewhat different ways. New Historicism likes the startling juxtaposition of the literary text with something entirely non-literary (but usually synchronous)—travel guides, cookbooks, language primers; even tattoos, graffiti, embroidery 90

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patterns, and of course anecdotes. The Russian critics in contrast seem more interested in using genre and the evolution of genre to explode the boundaries of the canon of “great authors.” Finally, in moving from formal literary analysis to “historicizing” reading, both methods assume that texts are themselves historical events, but in a somewhat different sense. New Historicism argues that texts are performances that act in the world, intervening ideologically to wield political influence and to alter the configuration of culture. Historical Poetics, more interested, as the volume editors put it, in the longue durée, sees texts as historical events in a different way—with Veselovsky (1870), as events within the long, slow evolution of literary forms and genres. Or perhaps we might follow Fredric Jameson, whose materialist dialectic inherits from and strikingly conforms to Veselovsky’s own vision of the inter-implication of literary and cultural history.1 In Jameson’s terms, we might think about the longue durée as the sedimentation or crystallization of the ideology or the specific “forms of life” of a whole era.2 In what follows, I will consider a specific example of a dialogue of two ancient Greek texts (Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Pindar’s Pythian 11) that seems to me to demand some kind of historicist reading to make sense of it. That is to say, this is a case where we must go beyond literary formalism—intertextuality as what we might call “a conversation of generals”—to come to grips with the data we have. In order to do that, I will consider several different kinds of historicist readings, which together represent different levels or scopes of historical framing. Hence the “historicist hermeneutics” of my title; I’m interested in exploring the different assumptions and argumentative dividends of different interpretive models of what constitutes “history” in relation to texts. Most briefly, I will touch upon the level of “event history” (histoire événementielle): this is the most familiar and comes closest to an “old historicist” reading of Pindar, but, I will argue, entirely fails to account for the literary/intertextual issues. I will then focus on two other levels of historical framing, for both of which the issue of genre and the contestatory dialogue of genres will be crucial (and this is where I will attempt something of a synthesis of New Historicism and Historical Poetics). First, at the level of the longue durée (Veselovsky/Jameson), I will consider a significant difference in the ideological poetics or poetic ideology of epinikion/enkomion and tragedy. Second, at the level of processes of structural change in history (so somewhere between “event history” and the longue durée), I will consider the “set” or “orientation” of the two genres tragedy and epinikion in relation to a specific

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“neighboring cultural system” (in Tynianov’s terms)—that of religion. And that consideration, in turn, will have two subparts: first, charting the choral contestation of tragedy and epinikion in their efforts to constitute different cult networks, and finally (and most tentatively) exploring what seems to me to be Pindar’s own metapoetic or meta-ritual critique of the genre of tragedy in its relation to cult locality.3

I The eleventh Pythian ode, composed for a Theban victor Thrasydaios, is given two possible dates by the scholiasts (presumably derived from Pythian victor lists): a Thrasydaios won, they tell us, in 474 and in 454  B.C.E.4 Scholarly debate has raged between these two dates, especially since the myth of the poem is (oddly) a miniOresteia: Orestes spirited away by his nurse Arsinoë from the murderous Clytemnestra; her killing of Agamemnon and Cassandra; Orestes’ eventual return and revenge on Clytemnestra and Aegisthus (P.11.17–37). As an issue for the unity and logic of the poem, the relevance of this grim myth to a Theban athletic victor has always been a critical problem. At the same time, at the intertextual level, the two possible dates (and striking dictional similarities between the two texts) have tantalizingly raised the possibility of some relation to Aeschylus’s Oresteia of 458  B.C.E.: was Aeschylus influenced by Pindar’s earlier lyric version, or does Pindar’s version show the distinctive imprint of Aeschylus’s tragic rendition?5 I will be less concerned here with the problem of the relevance of the poem’s myth, since I am basically in agreement with David Young’s argument that the myth offers a series of negative exempla of the evils and misfortunes of the “lot of tyrannies” that Pindar explicitly abjures in a “generic first-person” sequence later in the ode (P.11.50–58). Thus the poet endorses on behalf of the victor and his family middling status within the city as opposed to the precarious, violent, and muchresented heights so well illustrated by the saga of the House of Atreus.6 I want to focus here instead on the intertextual issue, because there seem to me to be two moments in the poem at least that reference or gesture toward tragedy in general or the Oresteia in particular— moments that are otherwise completely anomalous within epinikion and in fact gratuitous within the development of the poem itself.

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The first of these moments is the poet’s posing the question of Clytemnestra’s motivation for killing Agamemnon when he has already launched into the myth:7 . . . [Orestes], whom his nurse Arsinoë removed from grievous trickery, as his father was being slain under the mighty hands of Clytemnestra, when she conveyed with grey bronze the Dardanid daughter of Priam, Cassandra, together with the soul of Agamemnon, to the shadowy shore of Acheron, pitiless woman that she was (νηλὴς γυνά). Was it then Iphigeneia slaughtered upon the Euripos, far away from her fatherland, that stung her to rouse her anger, heavy in its execution? Or did the beddings by night lead her astray, mastered in another man’s couch? (P.11.17–25) Already in 1932 L. R. Farnell had noted that this narrative strategy, including the two unanswered questions about Clytemnestra’s motivation, was aberrant for Pindar: There is no parallel elsewhere in his works to this method of handling an epic tale. . . . In fact, ll.22–30 can be best explained if we assume that Pindar wrote them under the strong impression made on him by the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, where the Iphigeneia sacrifice is a prominent motive and is made the ground of this casuistic problem: whether it accounted for and extenuated the guilt of Klutaimnestra? (Farnell [1932] 224; cf. Bowra [1936] 140). Farnell’s intuition has more recently been picked up and developed by John Herington, who observes that the posing of searching questions that remain unanswered about the motivation for wrongdoing is unparalleled not just in Pindar but in all extant nondramatic lyric poetry through the end of the fifth century B.C.E., whereas this is precisely the stuff of tragedy. In addition, Herington points out that Pindar’s questions briefly resume and replicate in the order in which they are presented the structuring logic of the entire Agamemnon, where (as he notes) each of the two possible motives figures prominently in lyric and dialogue, and is then capped by a dramatic visual epiphany: first, what Herington calls the “Troy-sequence” by the triumphant entrance of Agamemnon, accompanied by Cassandra; second, the “Atreussequence” by the appearance of the gloating Aegisthus at the end of the play. Herington concludes:

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. . . in fact essentially the same pair of questions is asked about the motivation of the same individual, Clytaemnestra, in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon of 458 B.C. In that play the questions, so far from being posed in a brief and as it were detachable passage, dominate the structure of the entire work; and so far from being forgotten the moment they are uttered, they demand the remainder of a great trilogy for their solution. . . . On the evidence that we now possess . . . I would submit that the question of the relative priority of the Agamemnon and the Eleventh Pythian answers itself. The possibility that Aeschylus might have structured his greatest masterpiece around a couple of totally uncharacteristic lines thrown out for some inexplicable reason by Pindar in or shortly after 474 B.C. seems, to put it temperately, remote.8 Unlike this first moment of generic anomaly that seems to point toward tragedy, the second has (to my knowledge) gone completely unremarked by scholars, though it is, I think, also odd or unusual in context. This is Pindar’s break-off formula from the myth: Indeed, friends, have I been whirled along a path-shifting crossroads (κατ’ ἀμευσίπορον τρίοδον), though I was going a straight road before?9 Or has some wind cast me outside my sailing, like a seagoing skiff? Muse, it is your task, since you have contracted to furnish your voice silvered for a wage, to set [it] in motion at different times in different ways, but now, at any rate, either for his father Pythonikos or for Thrasydaios. (P.11.36–44) To be sure, a break-off through the imagery of traveling or sailing is quite characteristic of epinikion in its moment of transition back from mythic narrative to praise of the victor and his house. Thus scholars have cited as parallels for this passage Pythian 10.51, Nemean 3.26– 27, Nemean 4.69–72, Bacch. 5.176, and Bacch. 10.51–52.10 But what is in fact unparalleled in Pythian 11 is (1) the image of the crossroads (τρίοδον) and (2) the doubling of the break-off formula (since in this instance the poet actually offers us two different images—first the crossroads, then a skiff blown off course at sea). Every other Pindaric example offers sailing imagery in the break-off formula, where in each case it participates in a larger system of imagery within the poem as a whole. The Bacchylidean examples give us road imagery, but still no parallel for the crossroads.11 And, of course, we don’t need the cross-

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roads here at all; without it, the image of the ship blown off course would be entirely conventional.12 I would suggest that the image of the crossroads is another gesture toward tragedy. For it is worth noting the precise moment in the myth at which this highly emotional and abrupt break-off occurs: the poet has just mentioned Orestes’ killing of his mother and Aegisthus. It is almost as if the mention of a child’s murderous violence against a parent conjures up reflexively, inevitably that most famous crossroads of all—the τρίοδος somewhere in the neighborhood of Thebes or Delphi where Oedipus met and unknowingly slew his own father. And, of course, this story of the doomed Oedipus within the House of Laius was a staple of the Athenian tragic stage, so we need not suppose a specific allusion to any particular play that treated the Theban saga. Still, it is an intriguing fact that the only extant fragment of more than a single word likely to derive from one of the lost tragedies of Aeschylus’s Theban trilogy of 467 actually contains the word τρίοδος, in the context of a description of the place where Oedipus and Laius met: ἐπῇμεν τῆς ὁδοῦ τροχήλατον σχιστῆς κελεύθου τρίοδον, ἔνθα συμβολὰς τριῶν κελεύθων Ποτνιάδας ἠμείβομεν. (Aeschylus fr. 173 N2 = fr. 387a Radt)13

We were going along the wheel-driven crossroads of a split way, where we passed onto the Potnian meeting-places of three roads [i.e., the meeting-place of three roads in Potniai]. A possible allusion to tragedy in τρίοδος would also enrich our understanding of the striking adjective that modifies the “crossroads” in Pythian 11, the Pindaric hapax ἀμευσίπορος. The “path-shifting crossroads” where, it turns out, the poet’s persona may have taken a wrong turn even though he thought he was following “a straight road”—what better image for the fateful action of Oedipus, as for the quandary of hairesis of tragic characters in general? To have made a major life choice and to be pursuing its ramifications, entirely unaware of having done so—this is the very essence of the tragic dilemma.14 Thus we might say Pindar maps out a generic topography in which epinikion represents the “straight road” of praise, while tragedy is figured by the unstable and terrifying landscape of the “path-shifting crossroads.” I would finally note that both these moments that seem distinctly to allude to or conjure up tragedy are flagged by a phrase beginning a new

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antistrophe that scans as a self-contained iambic metron: νηλὴς γυνά at line 22 introduces the two unresolved questions of the queen’s motivation, while the exclamation ἦρ᾿, ὦ φίλοι at line 38 immediately precedes the image of the “path-shifting crossroads.” John Herington, who noted this metrical effect—“as it were an iambic metron clipped out of the choriambic dimeter which begins each strophe/antistrophe in this song”—also points out that it occurs only three times in the entire ode (the third being the poem’s opening invocation Κάδμου κόραι). That is to say, in both cases (P.11.22, 38), a passage I would identify as an allusion to tragedy based on its content or imagery is marked in performance by an isolated phrase that sounds a few notes of a tragic iambic trimeter.15 Indeed, once we recognize these two marked allusions, it is hard to resist the impression that Pindar’s entire complex lyric web of myth and gnome resonates with the poetry of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, especially that of the haunting and doom-laden choruses of the Agamemnon. We might consider in this respect the gnomic sequence embedded in the myth of Pythian 11, whose logic and connections have long troubled scholars: ἢ ἑτέρῳ λέχει δαμαζομέναν ἔννυχοι πάραγον κοῖται; τὸ δὲ νέαις ἀλόχοις ἔχθιστον ἀμπλάκιον καλύψαι τ’ ἀμάχανον ἀλλοτρίαισι γλώσσαις· κακολόγοι δὲ πολῖται. ἴσχει τε γὰρ ὄλβος οὐ μείονα φθόνον· ὁ δὲ χαμηλὰ πνέων ἄφαντον βρέμει. θάνεν μὲν αὐτὸς ἥρως Ἀτρεΐδας ἵκων χρόνῳ κλυταῖς ἐν Ἀμύκλαις,

25

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μάντιν τ’ ὄλεσσε κόραν, ἐπεὶ ἀμφ’ Ἑλένᾳ πυρωθέντας Τρώων ἔλυσε δόμους   ἁβρότατος. (P.11.24–34) Or did the beddings by night lead her astray, mastered in another man’s couch? But this straying [wrongdoing] is most hateful for young wives and impossible to conceal on account of other people’s tongues; for fellow-citizens speak evil. For blessedness/prosperity holds no less envy, and the one of lowly ambition roars invisibly. And so he died himself, the hero, son of Atreus, at glorious Amyklai, when he came there in time,

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and he caused the death of the maiden seer, when over Helen he had loosed the houses of the Trojans, burnt, of their luxury. The sequence of gnomes in lines 28–30 once drove W. J. Slater to resort to the claim that Pindaric gnomes are like “stepping stones” across a river; they serve simply to get the poet from point A to point B and otherwise leave no residue of significance or semantic function.16 This is an argument from desperation, but it is, I would contend, telling that it is precisely this gnomic sequence that inspired Slater’s extreme position. We are used to certain kinds of shifting or ambiguity within Pindaric gnomes in relation to their context, but this sequence feels different somehow.17 It is, I would suggest, modeled on the peculiar kind of ambiguity and referential complexity we associate with Aeschylean choruses—especially those of the simultaneously befuddled and visionary Argive elders of the Agamemnon. Thus notice that P.11.28, κακολόγοι δὲ πολῖται (“for fellow-citizens speak evil”), initially refers to Clytemnestra’s adultery, but then, over the next two lines (pivoting on the ideas of ὄλβος and φθόνος) the focus of civic hostility wavers and shifts, until with lines 31–34, the ominous patronymic Ἀτρεΐδας and the elaboration of the ruthless destruction of Troy for its wealth attach this weirdly free-floating citizen resentment to the conquering Agamemnon himself. In this sequence Pindar boldly and brilliantly reenacts in compacted form the whole lyric development of the first stasimon of the Agamemnon, which starts with the chorus’s victory cheer (Ag. 355–402), only to modulate through their lyric remembrance of Helen flitting off to Troy and the emptying of her “beautiful images” of erotic “grace” (χάρις), to the grim image of “Ares, gold-changer of corpses” and all that follows from that:18 ὁ χρυσαμοιβὸς δ’ Ἄρης σωμάτων καὶ ταλαντοῦχος ἐν μάχῃ δορὸς πυρωθὲν ἐξ Ἰλίου φίλοισι πέμπει βαρὺ ψῆγμα δυσδάκρυτον ἀντήνορος σποδοῦ γεμίζων λέβητας εὐθέτου. στένουσι δ’ εὖ λέγοντες ἄνδρα τὸν μὲν ὡς μάχης ἴδρις, τὸν δ’ ἐν φοναῖς καλῶς πεσόντ᾿, ἀλλοτρίας διαὶ γυναι-

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κός· τάδε σῖγά τις βαύζει, φθονερὸν δ’ ὑπ᾿ ἄλγος ἕρπει προδίκοις Ἀτρείδαις. οἱ δ’ αὐτοῦ περ τεῖχος θήκας Ἰλιάδος γᾶς εὔμορφοι κατέχουσιν, ἐχθρὰ δ’ ἔχοντας ἔκρυψεν. βαρεῖα δ’ ἀστῶν φάτις σὺν κότῳ, δημοκράντου δ’ ἀρᾶς τίνει χρέος· μένει δ’ ἀκοῦσαί τί μου μέριμνα νυκτηρεφές· τῶν πολυκτόνων γὰρ οὐκ ἄσκοποι θεοί· (Ag. 437–62) But Ares, gold-changer of corpses and the one who holds the scales of the spear balanced in battle, sends to their dear ones, fired from Ilion, dust heavy with tears in exchange for a man, cramming the containers with the ash easily packed. And they groan, praising a man—this one as skilled in battle; that one that he fell nobly amidst slaughters—for the sake of another man’s woman. These things someone shouts in silence, and envious pain creeps surreptitiously against the avenging sons of Atreus. But those beautiful [young men] hold graves of Iliadic earth, there around the city-wall, and enemy [land] has hidden those who possess it. But the utterance of the citizens is heavy with anger, and it pays the debt [owed] of a curse ratified by the people. And my anxious thought waits to hear something hidden in darkness, since the gods are not without regard for those who have killed many . . . Here we have burning and Troy, then the imperceptible shift from the citizens’ praise of their own men (εὖ λέγοντες) to hostile, envious (φθονερόν) muttering against the Atreidai for the terrible costs of war. This montage of civic resentment then leads to the chorus’s slow, dawning realization that “the gods are not without regard for those who have killed many” (Ag. 461–62), eventuating in turn in their panicked backpedaling and ultimate rejection of Clytemnestra’s proclaimed news of the successful capture of Troy (Ag. 475–87).19 In addition, it is worth noting the way in which the very general phrasing of lines 25–27—“But this straying is most hateful for new

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wives and impossible to conceal on account of other people’s tongues”— applies not just to Clytemnestra’s adultery with Aegisthus, but to Helen’s original “straying” with Paris (especially given the way in which the word ἀλλότριος attaches so damningly and so insistently to Helen in the powerful movement of the first stasimon of the Agamemnon). But, to be clear: within Pindar’s own mythic narrative, this weird double reference, conflating Helen and Clytemnestra, is entirely gratuitous—we might almost say subconscious or subterranean. It is perhaps only intertextually significant; for by this brief, shimmering evocation of Helen behind Clytemnestra, Pindar’s sequence reenacts even more closely the fateful and terrible balancing between Helen and the Argive dead Aeschylus’s first stasimon performs. Finally, it is worth noting that the collapse or conflation of Clytemnestra and her adulterous sister is itself an Aeschylean lyric topos that pervades the choruses of the Agamemnon.20 Thus, as with the unanswered questions of motivation posed at lines 22–25, the shifty, morphing gnomic sequence of lines 28–30 seems peculiarly Aeschylean. And both moments together, I would contend, rebut the scholarly resort to Stesichorus’s Oresteia as a “common source” for Pindar and Aeschylus.21 The positing of a lost source that would account for all commonalities between our texts, and thereby free scholars from the responsibility to read them in relation to each other, seems in general a dated and dubious methodology.22 And in this case in particular, this seems an especially dubious claim, since what Pindar seems to be alluding to is so distinctively Aeschylean. There is nothing like either of these moments in what we have of Stesichorus (and we have substantially more now than scholars writing before the 1970s). From what we have of it, Stesichorean narrative seems leisurely, discursive, and Homeric—nothing like the intense lyric density and ambiguity that Pindar and Aeschylus share.23

II But what are we to make of these powerful and pervasive echoes of tragedy? If explanation is offered, it is usually in terms of the overwhelming impact of Aeschylus’s masterpiece on Pindar. We have already seen Farnell’s formulation, “Pindar wrote . . . under the strong impression made on him by the Agamemnon of Aeschylus”; likewise Bowra (“Pindar, Pythian XI,” 140), imagining Pindar reading a text of the Oresteia,

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can only offer, “Pindar certainly felt the power of the Trilogy . . .” Herington, after presenting what I regard as the most compelling arguments for echoes of the Oresteia in Pythian 11, insists that “there is no knowing” why Pindar would have incorporated these echoes; perhaps, he suggests, as “a solemn valediction from a younger Panhellenic poet to an older . . . a salute from the older art to the new” (“Pindar’s Eleventh Pythian,” 146). These accounts, I would contend, reveal the inadequacy of a reading that assumes a narrowly literary system of intertextuality; that treats these texts as merely aesthetic objects evacuated of politics and social function in performance.24 I have thus far used the term “intertextuality,” but it is in fact misleading for the religious performance culture in which these texts participated. What we need instead is a different frame of analysis—a hermeneutic model in which such explicit references make some imaginable sense. I took up this question in Kurke (Cultural Impact), contending that we must combine literary/generic arguments with historical and political considerations if we are to understand the workings of both tragedy and epinikion in their performance context as civic poetry. I suggested that these two choral performances had in common the presentation of negative mythic exemplars to endorse the middling position within the city (whether in the democracy of Athens or in the oligarchic regime of Thebes). And while I still believe that this account helps explain many of the verbal and thematic correspondences between these two texts, I return to the topic because I now regard that analysis as inadequate in two important respects. First, if it really is simply a matter of shared negative political and economic exempla, then that in no way requires the specific allusions or “flags” gesturing toward tragedy in general and the Oresteia in particular that I have identified here. Pindar might just as well have drawn inspiration for theme and language from the Oresteia without any overt reference to tragedy. So, if we are not simply to assume the “powerful influence” of Aeschylus’s masterpiece on the weaker, impressionable Pindar, we must acknowledge that tragedy—as a genre and as a mode of choral performance—is itself somehow being thematized within Pindar’s epinikion.25 Second (and this applies to most intertextual readings of the poem), such an account does nothing to integrate these mythic references to tragedy with the rest of the poem, especially with its opening invocation of Theban heroines and its closing reference to Iolaos and the Dioskouroi. What, after all, does the ominous saga of the House of Atreus have to do with the elaborate opening summons to the heroines of Thebes?

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Daughters of Cadmus, Semele, neighbor of the Olympian goddesses, and Ino Leukothea who shares a bedchamber with the marine Nereids, come, together with the mother of Heracles, who bore the best child, to Melia, to the inner chamber of the temple, treasurehouse of golden tripods, which Loxias honored exceedingly and named the Ismenion, true seat of seers, O children of Harmonia, where also now (καί νυν) he summons the native throng of heroines to come together in assembly, in order to celebrate in song holy right, and Pytho, and the navel of the earth, straight in justice (ὀρθοδίκαν), together with the peak of evening, as a grace for seven-gated Thebes and the contest of Kirrha, in which Thrasydaios called to mind his paternal hearth by casting a third crown upon it . . . (P.11.1–14) As those scholars who have focused on the poem’s first triad have noted, these lines offer us one of the clearest instances within the epinikia of a victory song integrated into the context of a preexistent civic ritual; this is the force of καί νυν (“also now”) in line 7. We cannot be certain what the ritual was; but whatever the specific ritual frame, surely this cultic performance context makes some difference to our understanding of the poem.26 Scholars have likewise struggled to develop a reading that integrates Pindar’s closing reference to Iolaos and the Dioskouroi, ostensibly introduced as examples of those who left “the grace of a good name as the best of possessions to their sweetest offspring” (P.11.58): [Grace] which spreads abroad [the name of] Iolaos, son of Iphikles, celebrated in song, and mighty Kastor and you, lord Polydeukes, sons of gods, who dwell one day in the seats of Therapne and the next within Olympus. (P.11.59–64) Why end the poem with these particular mythic exempla? What connection do they have to the Theban heroines of the first triad and the poem’s grim central myth? Based especially on this final pairing of the Theban hero Iolaos and the Laconian Dioskouroi, some scholars have detected a strong “Spartan coloring” to this Theban ode; in fact, three of the poem’s four triads end with pointed mentions of Laconia, or significant cult places within it (P.11.16: Λάκωνος Ὀρέστα; 32: ἐν Ἀμύκλαις; 63: ἕδραισι Θεράπνας).27  C.  M. Bowra long ago argued that this sympathetic linkage between Thebes and Sparta militates for the later date for

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Pythian 11 (454); and this is my old historicist—“event history”— reading of the poem. As Bowra noted, the strong “Spartan coloring” of Pythian 11 makes little sense in 474 B.C.E., shortly after the end of the Persian Wars, when Sparta and Thebes were on opposing sides in that great struggle.28 On the other hand, a date of 454 would place the composition and performance of Pindar’s ode within the period sometimes referred to by modern scholars as the “First Peloponnesian War” (461–446 B.C.E.), when Athens was apparently aiming to establish a land empire in mainland Greece through domination of Boiotia and Phokis. According to Thucydides, when an Athenian army defeated a Boiotian force at Oinophyta in Boiotia in 457, “the Athenians became masters of all Boiotia and Phokis” (Thuc. 1.108.3). This Athenian domination of Boiotia only came to an end eleven years later, when resistance had developed and an army of “Boiotian exiles” and others defeated an Athenian force at the battle of Koroneia in 446. The Boiotians’ success in this battle achieved the “liberation of all Boiotia” (Thuc. 1.113) and essentially precipitated a series of events that put an end to Athens’ aspirations to a land empire on mainland Greece. In this period, between Oinophyta and Koroneia (as Bowra and others have noted), Theban elites might well look to Sparta for help in resisting Athenian domination. On its own terms, such an argument makes good, plausible historical sense, but from my perspective, the problem is that it’s a purely historical argument that never intersects with the literary facts of the poem. How, after all, are we to reconcile this kind of interstate politicking with Pindar’s pointed allusions to Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Athenian tragedy in general?29 I would contend that to get beyond this split between historical and literary explanations, we must focus on genre as a mediating term, especially since this is an element to which the poem itself seems to be calling our attention. But the term “genre” also has to be nuanced: in the Greek context, literary genre is not separable from performance occasion, and the occasions of both tragedy and epinikion are choral song and dance in a religious setting—what the Greeks called choreia. To put the issue in other terms: in Kurke (1998), I was interested in the sameness or similarity of choral forms and their social functions between Athens and Thebes; now, I want to think more about difference and distinctiveness in the forms of chorality within these two cities. In 1998, I was more concerned with the political and economic messages of choral song; now I would like to come to grips with the significant religious

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contexts of choreia. In order to do so, I would like to build on the important recent work of Barbara Kowalzig. For Kowalzig, Greek choreia is the “hinge” between aetiological myth and ritual, and the means to understand the relation of these complex categories in action. Throughout the ancient Greek world, chorality serves significant social functions—as a way for a community to forge and create a past, to claim a territory, and to constitute a set of ritual networks in an environment where everything is contested or up for grabs; this is especially true in a period of profound historical change like the first half of the fifth century B.C.E. So, in Kowalzig’s formulation, choruses make history.30 Kowalzig also emphasizes that we must conceive of Attic tragedy as a peculiar adaptation of chorality; for her, tragedy—especially the choruses of tragedy—just are ritual, and we must not lose sight of that fact.31 Within this frame, Kowalzig tracks in particular the ways in which different tragedies enact the appropriation of other cities’ cults (what we might call tragedy’s “cultic imperialism”), and she correlates those appropriations with Athens’ territorial aggression and expansion during the period of fifth-century Athenian empire.32 Finally, Kowalzig emphasizes that this kind of “choral history” cannot be pinpointed to a specific date or moment in time; her interest is more in processes of structural change enacted through chorality that take place over approximately the first half to the fifth century, the period from which all our texts of Pindar and Bacchylides derive.33 That is to say, choral history cannot be understood on the scale of “event history.” While I wholeheartedly agree with this position in general, I would contend that the Oresteia and Pythian 11 together offer us an exceptional case, where, if we can accept that Pythian 11 was composed “under the influence” of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, we have a precise temporal “snapshot” of what such contestation of and through different song performances looked like on the ground in Thebes and Athens. In addition, we may have—fascinatingly—Pindar’s own metapoetic (or meta-ritual?) commentary on what characterizes these different choral forms and competing choral histories. To state my argument in brief: Pindar carefully (and gratuitously) incorporated the questions of lines 22–25 and the unusual image of the τρίοδος to signal his engagement in a dialogue of genres (tragedy and epinikion), and of place and performance contexts (Athens vs. Thebes). I would emphasize that an ancient festival audience could understand this poem (to the extent that they could ever understand a Pindaric ode) without picking up these allusions to tragedy—the very gratuitousness

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of these moments in context guarantees that. But given the evidence we have for a Panhellenic audience in attendance at the City Dionysia during the period of Athens’ imperial rule, the supposition that an audience in the neighboring city of Thebes would have some familiarity with tragedy seems not implausible.34 For an audience familiar with Attic tragedy in general and Aeschylus’s Oresteia in particular, Pindar’s two allusions frame the whole myth as an excursion into the alien territory of tragedy, from which the poet has to call himself back to the “straight road” of epinikian praise. The domain of Athenian tragedy is pointedly contrasted with the Theban festival context of the first triad and the closing mention of Iolaos and the Dioskouroi as competing forms of choral and religious practice. Pythian 11 thus offers a kind of anti-tragic polemic from the point of view of traditional religious and choral systems. But if this is about competing forms of chorality, what differentiates tragedy and epinikion? What precisely are Pindar’s issues with tragedy? I would suggest that, at one level, epinikion resists certain aspects of tragic content. But in fact this critique is inseparable from a more general epinikian resistance to the religious strategies of tragedy— tragedy’s tendency to displace and deracinate for its own purposes cults that properly belong to other communities. Thus, to use Kowalzig’s terms, we might say that Pindar offers us a contestatory dialogue over different versions and modes of “choral history.” What follows, then, are three (more or less) speculative passes at the possible significance of this contest of choral forms. 1. Intrafamilial Violence vs. Continuity For the first approach in the analysis: the conscious evocation of tragedy at the moment of the poet’s break-off from the myth suggests that Pindar disapproves of tragedy’s foregrounding of intrafamilial violence. For, as I have already noted, what precipitates the abrupt turning-away from the myth is the mention of Orestes killing his mother and Aegisthus, while the imagery of the “path-shifting crossroads” itself conjures up that archetypal moment of tragic kin-murder—Oedipus’s killing of Laius. This pattern conforms to Pindar’s well-known aversion to certain kinds of mythic narrative. His famous rejection of the traditional Tantalos-Pelops myth in Olympian 1 (O.1.35–6, 52–3) is motivated not just by distaste for the tale of divine cannibalism, but also for the prior moment in the story in which a father is said to kill and dismember his own son. In like manner, his abrupt break-off from mythic narrative in

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Nemean 5 (N.5.14–16) occurs at the moment he touches on the murder of Phokos by his half-brothers Telamon and Peleus and their consequent exile from Aegina. In contrast, the poem’s opening invocation offers us an example of Pindar’s careful avoidance of (specifically Theban) narratives of intrafamilial violence which formed a staple of Attic tragedy. For here, by the apparently innocent syntactic inevitability of a μέν . . . δέ construction, the poet actually manages to gap or suppress all mention of one of the three “daughters of Cadmus” (P.11.1–2)—Agave, who ripped apart her own son Pentheus. Instead, the opening invocation highlights the now divine status of Semele (as mother of Dionysus) and of Ino (who was his nurse). The tragic history of Agave and Pentheus disappears, preempted by a sequence of local Theban heroines whose offspring forge positive links between divine and human realms— Semele, Alcmene, and Melia.35 In contrast to tragedy’s obsession with intrafamilial violence and the destruction of houses, epinikion in general and this poem in particular emphasize familial continuity and positive genealogical bonds; thus Pythian 11’s climactic message is the value of bequeathing “the grace of a good name as best of possessions to [one’s] sweetest offspring” (P.11.57–8). But I do not mean to suggest that this avoidance of scenes of intrafamilial violence is merely a symptom of Pindar’s “higher morality” (as it is often treated); we might instead think about this as the sedimentation of significantly different ideological structures or ideological priorities in tragedy and epinikion (à la Jameson). This is a familiar argument for classicists: tragedy foregrounds or plays up intrafamilial violence to promote the need for the polis (the city-state and its institutions) beyond the oikos (the individual house). Contrariwise, the ideology of epinikion crucially celebrates—and promotes—the positive continuity of noble houses and their hereditary quality through generations.36 But we should be clear here: the position of epinikion may be more “traditional,” but it is equally ideological, implicitly affirming the propriety of elite status based on inherited quality, even while (at times) assimilating the whole polis to the circuit of the kinship group. For this very tactic, we might note here the ambiguous reference of Pindar’s address ὦ φίλοι at the moment he breaks off from the horror of tragic matricide via the resonant image of the crossroads. Who, after all, does ὦ φίλοι at line 38 refer to? Some scholars have taken this to be Pindar’s patrons, Thrasydaios and his father Pythonikos.37 Based on parallels in other odes, we might be inclined to say ὦ φίλοι addresses

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the members of the citizen chorus, from whom the “I” of the poet stands apart briefly, speaking as if from the moment of composition of the ode.38 Still others take ὦ φίλοι to be the Theban audience; as Finglass puts it, “the poet, after all, is at home.”39 I would venture to suggest that ὦ φίλοι designates all three groups at once, drawing them into the circuit of “near and dear” ones, of “kith and kin”—for this is the root meaning of φίλ- words—and that this is precisely the work of ritual chorality linked to the festive occasion of the poem’s first triad.40 2. Competing Cultic Networks: Athens—Argos—Delphi vs. Thebes—Sparta—Delphi Another approach: it’s worth pausing for a moment to recognize that, if Pindar is politicking in this poem, he is doing so through the representations of cult and cult networks. We might say, à la Kowalzig, that this is how Greek history, identity, claims to territory, and interstate networks were forged via choral performance, and this applies equally to tragedy and epinikion as choral forms. So here, we have a snapshot of choral contestation between tragedy and epinikion, between Athens and Thebes. Or we might say, à la Tynianov, that we cannot understand the “social function” of Pindar’s poetry (= “pro-Sparta”) directly; instead, this function is necessarily mediated through the “set” or “orientation” of this poetry to “neighboring systems”—in this case, cult and religious practice through choral performance. We must then carefully study those interactions.41 Now, for this bundle of issues, let me return to the Spartan localization of Agamemnon and Orestes for a second speculative pass in the analysis. It has long been recognized that part of the topical background of the Oresteia was Athens’ military alliance with Argos, forged in the late 460s, after the Spartans had peremptorily dismissed an Athenian force sent to assist them against a Helot revolt (Thuc. 1.102).42 This alliance with Argos, probably just three years old at the time of Aeschylus’s trilogy in 458, is referred to and aetiologized three times in the Eumenides as the ancient gratitude of the mythic Orestes for the saving intervention of Athena and her newly-founded homicide court (Eum. 287–91, 667–73, 762–74). It is equally clear that the Eumenides represents this alliance of Athens and Argos as endorsed and supported by Delphi and Delphic Apollo himself. Thus, as J. H. Quincey noted already in 1964, the fact that the first explicit promise of a permanent alliance with Argos made in Athena’s presence (Eum. 667–73) comes

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not from Orestes, but from Apollo is unexpected and at least a little dramatically awkward (since, coming at the end of Apollo’s speech of defense, it sounds like a bribe to the jury). Quincey concludes: The Argive offer has been vested with the authority of the god of Delphi, being part of his master plan for Athens’ future greatness, and conveyed by him, as the representative of Argos, to the representative of Athens. The historical alliance has thus been given the impress of Delphic approval.43 At the same time, the third play of Aeschylus’s trilogy works hard to suggest important and intimate connections also between Delphi and Athens. This is clear first in the very structure of the play, which (highly unusually for tragedy), shifts the scene of action at line 235 directly from Apollo’s mantic shrine at Delphi to Athens. It is also worth noting that the Pythia’s opening speech, describing the friendly transfer of the Delphic oracle from the older gods Earth, Themis, and Phoebe to Phoebus, offers a markedly Athenian version of the young god’s original progress from Delos to Delphi to take possession of his mantic seat: But having left the lake and the rocky island of Delos and landed upon the shores of Pallas where ships go, [Apollo] came to this land and the seats of Parnassus. And they escort him and honor him greatly, the children of Hephaestus, makers of roads, causing the wild land to be tamed. (Eum. 9–14) In other preserved early accounts, Apollo first sets foot in mainland Greece in Boiotia (either near Mt. Messapion or in the territory of Tanagra).44 Aeschylus’s Pythia follows the Athenian version in shifting that landing to Attica, apparently referencing current Athenian cult practice.45 In fact, Aeschylus’s patriotic account manages to elide Thebes and Boiotia altogether. In Aeschylus’s lines Boiotia is not merely wilderness, as yet unsettled; it is apparently not even named, a non-place, so that the Aeschylean god is finessed directly from Attica to Delphi.46 Thus one thing Aeschylus’s Oresteia achieves as a complex form of religious song performance is the forging and retrojection back into mythic time of a dense cultic network of Athens, Argos, and Delphi. Read against this background, Pythian 11 seems to be working equally hard to assert a competing cult network of Thebes, Sparta, and Delphi.47 Scholars have long noted the “Spartan coloring” of Pindar’s

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Theban ode: it is worth emphasizing that that “Spartan coloring” derives mainly from the mention of particular cult places and links established between them. Thus the end of the poem links Thebes and Sparta together through its pairing of the hero cult of Iolaos in Thebes and that of Kastor and Polydeukes located at Therapne in Laconia. At the same time, Pindar’s ode insists on the intimate cult network of Thebes and Delphi. Note that in the opening triad, Apollo bears his oracular designation “Loxias” when he first appears, showing special honor to the Theban Ismenion with its golden tripods (P.11.5). Indeed, we know of strong cult links between the Theban Ismenion and the Delphic oracle.48 Within Pindar’s poem, this linkage is supported by the fact that Apollo summons the native band of Theban heroines to the Ismenion to sing first of Delphi: where also now [Apollo] summons the native throng of heroines to come together in assembly, in order to celebrate in song holy right, and Pytho, and the navel of the earth, straight in justice (ὀρθοδίκαν), together with the peak of evening, as a grace for seven-gated Thebes and the contest of Kirrha. (P.11.7–12) The poet’s sequence of “holy right, Pytho, and the navel of the earth” offers striking similarities in diction to Aeschylus’s genealogy of the Delphic shrine at the beginning of the Eumenides, while Pindar replaces the Athens-Delphi axis of the Eumenides prologue with a tight network of Theban and Delphic mantic shrines.49 In light of all this, it seems significant that Pindar assigns to the Delphic navel-stone the extremely rare adjective ὀρθοδίκαν, for a variant form of this epithet occurs at a highly charged moment in the dénouement of Aeschylus’s Eumenides.50 Toward the end of an intense lyric exchange with the newly converted Erinyes, singing their blessings for Attica, Athena responds by addressing her (audience of) Athenian citizens with solemn anapaests: From these fearful faces of theirs, I see great benefit for these citizens here; for you, by always greatly honoring these [females]—kindly disposed to those who are kindly disposed— and maintaining land and city straight in justice (ὀρθοδίκαιον), will be entirely glorious. Here the land and city of Athens will be “straight in justice” for all time, as long as the Athenians honor the (appropriated) cult of the Erinyes/

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Semnai Theai.51 Pindar on this reading polemically transfers this honorific epithet from Athens to Delphi; in the poetic tussle encoded within this single word, we can trace the contestation over cult, locality, and cult networks for which I have been arguing.52 3. Rootedness vs. Deracination of Cult Finally, I want to return to Kowalzig’s notion of the “cultic imperialism” of tragedy as a choral form for my third speculative pass. At this level (I want to suggest) we see Pindar not just engaging in such choral contestation of cult, but also offering a metapoetic (meta-ritual?) critique of the new “orientation” or relation to cult forms that the genre of tragedy represents. For this level, it is important to recall one other element of Kowalzig’s argument: in the pre- or non-tragic system, cult choruses frequently served to remember mythic acts of violence, but in these contexts, the periodic choral performance itself functioned to expiate or compensate for the original mythic transgression.53 But tragedy unmoored cults and choruses from their place, thus leaving the trouble or pollution elsewhere, while appropriating for Athens the cult that should have been its periodic propitiation. This, I think, points to Pindar’s broader issue with tragedy—its deracination and appropriation of cults that properly belonged to other localities in Greece. In approaching this issue, we might note in general that Pythian 11 is a poem obsessed with the specificities of place, especially with the geographic specificities of cult. Thus Semele is invoked as “neighbor” (ἀγυιᾶτι) of the Olympian goddesses (P.11.1); Ino as “sharer of a chamber” (ὁμοθάλαμε) with the Nereids (P.11.2); Apollo bestows exceptional honor on the Theban Ismenion (P.11.5–6); and Kastor and Polydeukes are very specifically said to dwell (οἰκέοντας) “for one day at the seats of Therapne and the next within Olympus” (P.11.63–4). Within this specific geography, the opening triad stands as a radiant affirmation of chorality as it functions to map out proper civic order and proper cosmic relations for Thebes and Boiotia through cult practice. Thus each of the heroines invoked has her own proper cult site—Semele on the Theban acropolis, Ino at Chaironeia, Alcmene above the Electran gates, Melia in the Ismenion—but they also converge at Apollo’s request on the Ismenion, whose treasure trove of golden tripods commemorates the city’s military and athletic glories.54 The heroines’ function of choral integration—dancing the city into good order—accounts for the poet’s easy shift in address from

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“daughters of Cadmus” (l. 1) to “children of Harmonia” (l. 7). By this I mean to highlight not just the shift from mortal father (Cadmus) to immortal mother (Harmonia), but also to draw attention to the musical resonance of their mother’s name. At the same time, Pindar emphatically affirms their local and proprietary status in Thebes with the phrase ἐπίνομον ἡρωΐδων στρατόν, whether we translate it, with the scholiasts, as “native,” or, as Farnell suggests, as “legal possessors of the land.”55 In like manner, the closing exempla of Iolaos and the Dioskouroi insist on the geographic specificity and community-building function of hero cult. The fame (or “grace of a good name”) of Iolaos in Thebes and the Dioskouroi in Sparta is maintained by the ongoing cult worship of their “descendants”—all the inhabitants of the land who are united, in turn, by their common descent from these heroes. In Thebes, Iolaos shared a tomb with Amphitryon near the Kadmeia, and, in Pausanias’s time, received worship in the stadium outside the Proitian Gates (Paus. 9.23.1). Pausanias (3.20.2) also informs us that Kastor and Polydeukes had a temple within the Phoibaion at Therapne, where “the ephebes sacrifice to Enyalios.” And in the poet’s closing account, choral performance plays an important part in the worship of heroes and in the proper passage from epichoric cult to Panhellenic reputation; thus it is “being hymned” (ὑμνητὸν ἐόντα,  P.11.61) that “spreads abroad” (διαφέρει, P.11.60) the name of Iolaos. The contrast between these proper forms of civic chorality rooted in place and the grim tragic montage of the poem’s central mythic narrative could not be more extreme. We should note first that the myth of the House of Atreus in Pindar’s rendering is all about destructive movements and displacements of people: Clytemnestra’s “conveying” Trojan Cassandra to the shores of Acheron, together with the soul of Agamemnon (19–21); “Iphigeneia slaughtered beside the Euripos, far from her fatherland” (22–23); Agamemnon’s own fateful return from Troy, burnt and destroyed over Helen (31–34); and finally, the myth itself as the poet’s own movement astray or wandering off course (38–40). In the same way, images of “straightness” surround the poem’s mini-Oresteia (ὀρθοδίκαν γᾶς ὀμφαλόν, 9–10; ὀρθὰν κέλευθον ἰὼν τὸ πρίν, 39), while the myth itself is permeated with the language of trickery, error, and deviation: ἐκ δόλου (18), πάραγον (25), ἀμπλάκιον (26). If we read all this as Pindar’s metapoetic commenatry on the ritual and generic features of epinikion vs. tragedy, we find the following pattern of oppositions between the poem’s first two sections: The first

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triad represents the epinikian present of Thebes, with an emphasis on the intimate connections of cult and place; the attendance and joyful commingling of local heroines, divinity (Apollo), and the Theban populace to forge a kind of choral harmonia, whose product is “grace” (χάρις), since Pindar’s chorus of heroines comes “in order to sing . . . grace for seven-gated Thebes and for the contest of Kirrha . . .” (10–12). In contrast, the world of tragedy represented in the poem’s dark central myth is all about geographic displacement; it is evacuated of divinity with the exception of “late Ares” at its end (36). And instead of the civic and cosmic harmony forged via ritual and choreia in Thebes, there are only the “evil-speaking fellow citizens” (28), a kind of discordant anti-chorus attendant on Clytemnestra’s illicit bedding.56 Finally, this is implicitly a world entirely devoid of the “grace” (χάρις) of proper choral song and positive kin-relations that figure in the radiant present of the first and last triads (12, 58). Within this context, Pindar’s emphatic location of the deaths of Agamemnon and Cassandra at Amyklai in Lakedaimon comes to look like a polemical correction of Aeschylus’s siting of these events in Argos: And so he died himself, the hero, son of Atreus, at glorious Amyklai, when he came there in time, and he caused the death of the maiden seer . . . (P.11.31–33) There’s a complicated politics here—a tussle between Sparta and Argos, those ancient contenders for hegemony in the Peloponnese, through the symbolic possession of the Atreid kings—that had been going on for hundreds of years by the fifth century B.C.E.57 But what I want to emphasize is that Aeschylus pointedly transfers the entire saga of the house of Atreus to Argos. As I’ve noted, scholars have always connected Aeschylus’s move with the fact that Athens and Argos forged a military alliance in the late 460s, just a few years before Aeschylus’s trilogy. So the Oresteia provides a mythic aetiology for that alliance in its third play, where Orestes, saved from the pursuing Furies and exonerated by the newly-founded homicide court in Athens, pledges eternal loyalty to Athena and her city. Pindar, in contrast, by setting the murders of Agamemnon and Cassandra specifically at Amyklai in the territory of Sparta (where we know both Agamemnon and Cassandra received cult worship) seems to want to reestablish an intimate linkage of place between the mythic violence

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and its compensating cult that Aeschylus’s version conspicuously ruptures. So, at one level, there’s a great deal at stake politically in the competing Argive and Spartan claims to these figures of myth and cult, endorsed and performed in the competing choral forms of tragedy and epinikion.58 But also at a meta- level, Pindar’s emphatic localization of the killing of Agamemnon and Cassandra at Amyklai resists Athenian and Argive strategies of appropriation of these figures of myth and cult. Let me end with some broader implications that take us back to (a different kind of?) longue durée (that of literary tradition, and the evolution of genres over time). On this reading, it is precisely tragedy’s appropriation of other people’s cults and unmooring of them from their local specificity that in the long term help make tragedy such an exportable commodity or transferable art form. As local, cult specificities fall away or are forgotten, tragedy becomes the universalizing, humanistic genre par excellence. This is ultimately what fosters the mirage of an idealist Hegelian progression in Greek literary history: first (objective) epic, then (subjective) lyric, then finally tragedy as the perfect synthesis of the two. As a historical progression, this is clearly false—even in fifth- and fourth-century Athens, we know that choral lyric continued to coexist with tragedy. And yet, the commitment of nondramatic choral lyric to cult specificity—its embedding in the world of cult ritual—eventually doomed this form to incomprehensibility, and therefore ultimately to oblivion.59 On this model, tragedy ultimately makes the transition to “literature” or “art” from something that is not yet a separable category by the process of its own disembedding from cultural and religious contexts.60 I am thus offering a kind of anti-Hegelian, materialist dialectic to account for the apparently neat progression from lyric to tragedy—a dialectic grounded in the imperialist politics of Athens and the contestation over ritual forms that took place between city-states within the highly factionalized world of fifth-century Greece.61 But in order to be able to trace this kind of materialist dialectic, it is essential that we respect and master the proximate historical context before moving to the level of comparison, typology, and the longue durée. In this, I draw inspiration from Veselovsky’s (1863) “Reports on a Mission Abroad,” where he insists on the need for specialization as an essential part of his vision of a new discipline of comparative or “world literature.” This historical level requires that we come to understand more than just the specifics of political history (histoire événementielle); it is rather an anthropological or ethnographic effort to familiarize ourselves as much

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as possible with the culture—or interacting, competing cultures—in a fifty- or hundred-year period around our texts. And here we get very close to a rapprochement or point of convergence between Historical Poetics and New Historicism, since the latter has always evinced an anthropological commitment to the particularity of the local in its own anti-idealist project, while Veselovsky, in one of his earliest formulations, insists on the identity of literary and cultural history.62 But by the same token, Historical Poetics challenges us to take a broader perspective—to consider typology and comparison across cultures and literary systems. In this respect, the Greek context I’ve been describing invites us to look for systems where the individual genres of an autonomous “literature” or “art” are emergent from embedded cultural forms. One example of this might be Stephen Greenblatt’s analysis of the emergence of the “literary” as an autonomous category from an older system of embedded genres and performances in the English Renaissance.63 So here, a particular set of New Historicist case studies may serve as the building blocks for a broader Historical Poetics comparative project.

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Appendix: Greek Text of Pythian 11 and Translation Α· Κάδμου κόραι, Σεμέλα μὲν Ὀλυμπιάδων ἀγυιᾶτι, Ἰνὼ δὲ Λευκοθέα ποντιᾶν ὁμοθάλαμε Νηρηίδων, ἴτε σὺν Ἡρακλέος ἀριστογόνῳ ματρὶ πὰρ Μελίαν χρυσέων ἐς ἄδυτον τριπόδων θησαυρόν, ὃν περίαλλ’ ἐτίμασε Λοξίας, Ἰσμήνιον δ’ ὀνύμαξεν, ἀλαθέα μαντίων θῶκον, ὦ παῖδες Ἁρμονίας, ἔνθα καί νυν ἐπίνομον ἡρωίδων στρατὸν ὁμαγερέα καλεῖ συνίμεν, ὄφρα θέμιν ἱερὰν Πυθῶνά τε καὶ ὀρθοδίκαν γᾶς ὀμφαλὸν κελαδήσετ’ ἄκρᾳ σὺν ἑσπέρᾳ

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ἑπταπύλοισι Θήβαις χάριν ἀγῶνί τε Κίρρας, ἐν τῷ Θρασυδᾷος ἔμνασεν ἑστίαν τρίτον ἔπι στέφανον πατρῴαν βαλών, ἐν ἀφνεαῖς ἀρούραισι Πυλάδα νικῶν ξένου Λάκωνος Ὀρέστα. 15

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Β· τὸν δὴ φονευομένου πατρὸς Ἀρσινόα Κλυταιμήστρας χειρῶν ὕπο κρατερᾶν ἐκ δόλου τροφὸς ἄνελε δυσπενθέος, ὁπότε Δαρδανίδα κόραν Πριάμου Κασσάνδραν πολιῷ χαλκῷ σὺν Ἀγαμεμνονίᾳ ψυχᾷ πόρευ’ Ἀχέροντος ἀκτὰν παρ’ εὔσκιον

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Daughters of Cadmus, Semele neighbor of the Olympian goddesses, and Ino Leukothea who shares a bedchamber with the sea-y Nereids, come, together with the mother of Herakles, who bore the best child, to Melia, to the innermost chamber, treasurehouse of golden tripods, which Loxias honored exceedingly and named the Ismenion, true seat of seers, O children of Harmonia, where also now he summons the native throng of heroines to come together in assembly, in order to celebrate in song holy right, and Pytho, and the navel of the earth, straight in justice, together with the edge of evening, as a grace for seven-gated Thebes and the contest of Kirrha, in which Thrasydaios caused men to remember his paternal hearth by casting a third crown upon it, when he won in the rich fields of Pylades, host of Lakonian Orestes.

Whom his nurse Arsinoë removed from grievous trickery, as his father was being slain under the mighty hands of Clytemnestra, when she conveyed with grey bronze the Dardanid daughter of Priam, Cassandra, together with the soul of Agamemnon, to the shadowy shore of Acheron, pitiless woman that she was. Was it then Iphigeneia slaughtered upon the Euripos, far from her

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νηλὴς γυνά. πότερόν νιν ἄρ’ Ἰφιγένει’ ἐπ’ Εὐρίπῳ σφαχθεῖσα τῆλε πάτρας ἔκνισεν βαρυπάλαμον ὄρσαι χόλον; ἢ ἑτέρῳ λέχει δαμαζομέναν ἔννυχοι πάραγον κοῖται; τὸ δὲ νέαις ἀλόχοις ἔχθιστον ἀμπλάκιον καλύψαι τ’ ἀμάχανον ἀλλοτρίαισι γλώσσαις· κακολόγοι δὲ πολῖται. ἴσχει τε γὰρ ὄλβος οὐ μείονα φθόνον· ὁ δὲ χαμηλὰ πνέων ἄφαντον βρέμει. θάνεν μὲν αὐτὸς ἥρως Ἀτρείδας ἵκων χρόνῳ κλυταῖς ἐν Ἀμύκλαις, Γ· μάντιν τ’ ὄλεσσε κόραν, ἐπεὶ ἀμφ’ Ἑλένᾳ πυρωθέντας Τρώων ἔλυσε δόμους ἁβρότατος. ὁ δ’ ἄρα γέροντα ξένον Στροφίον ἐξίκετο, νέα κεφαλά, Παρνασσοῦ πόδα ναίοντ’· ἀλλὰ χρονίῳ σὺν Ἄρει ἦρ’, ὦ φίλοι, κατ’ ἀμευσίπορον τρίοδον ἐδινάθην, ὀρθὰν κέλευθον ἰὼν τὸ πρίν; ἤ μέ τις ἄνεμος ἔξω πλόου ἔβαλεν, ὡς ὅτ’ ἄκατον ἐνναλίαν; Μοῖσα, τὸ δὲ τεόν, εἰ μισθοῖο συνέθευ παρέχειν φωνὰν ὑπάργυρον, ἄλλοτ’ ἄλλᾳ {χρὴ} ταρασσέμεν ἢ πατρὶ Πυθονίκῳ τό γέ νυν ἢ Θρασυδᾴῳ, τῶν εὐφροσύνα τε καὶ δόξ’ ἐπιφλέγει.

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fatherland, that stung her to rouse her anger, heavy in its execution? Or did the beddings by night lead her astray, mastered in another man’s couch? But this straying [wrongdoing] is most hateful for young wives and impossible to conceal on account of other people’s tongues; for fellow-citizens speak evil. For blessedness/prosperity holds no less envy, and the one of lowly ambition roars invisibly. And so he died himself, the hero, son of Atreus, at glorious Amyklai, when he came there in time,

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and he caused the death of the maiden seer, when over Helen he had loosed the houses of the Trojans, burnt, of their luxury. But he, [Orestes], young head, came to the old man Strophios, who inhabited the foot of Parnassus; but with late Ares he slew his mother and set Aigisthos amidst slaughters. Indeed, friends, have I been whirled along a path-shifting crossroads, though I was going a straight road before? Or has some wind cast me outside my sailing, like a seagoing skiff? Muse, it is your task, since you have contracted to furnish your voice silvered for a wage, to set [it] in motion at different times in different ways, but now, to be sure, either for his father Pythonikos or for Thrasydaios, whose festivity and glory blaze forth. On the one hand, they were victors with chariots of old, and at Olympia they got the swift beam from famous contests together with horses, (continued)

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Appendix: Greek Text of Pythian 11 and Translation (continued) τὰ μὲν ‹ἐν› ἅρμασι καλλίνικοι πάλαι Ὀλυμπίᾳ τ’ ἀγώνων πολυφάτων ἔσχον θοὰν ἀκτῖνα σὺν ἵπποις, Δ· Πυθοῖ τε γυμνὸν ἐπὶ στάδιον καταβάντες ἤλεγξαν Ἑλλανίδα στρατιὰν ὠκύτατι. θεόθεν ἐραίμαν καλῶν, δυνατὰ μαιόμενος ἐν ἁλικίᾳ. τῶν γὰρ ἀνὰ πόλιν εὑρίσκων τὰ μέσα μακροτέρῳ {σὺν} ὄλβῳ τεθαλότα, μέμφομ’ αἶσαν τυραννίδων· ξυναῖσι δ’ ἀμφ’ ἀρεταῖς τέταμαι· φθονεροὶ δ’ ἀμύνονται. ‹ἀλλ’› εἴ τις ἄκρον ἑλὼν ἡσυχᾷ τε νεμόμενος αἰνὰν ὕβριν ἀπέφυγεν, μέλανος {δ’} ἂν ἐσχατιὰν καλλίονα θανάτου ‹στείχοι› γλυκυτάτᾳ γενεᾷ εὐώνυμον κτεάνων κρατίσταν χάριν πορών· ἅ τε τὸν Ἰφικλείδαν διαφέρει Ἰόλαον ὑμνητὸν ἐόντα, καὶ Κάστορος βίαν, σέ τε, ἄναξ Πολύδευκες, υἱοὶ θεῶν, τὸ μὲν παρ’ ἆμαρ ἕδραισι Θεράπνας, τὸ δ’ οἰκέοντας ἔνδον Ὀλύμπου.

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And at Pytho, having descended for the bare course, they put to shame the Hellenic throng with their speed. I would desire noble things from the god, striving for the things that are possible for my age-class. For, finding the middle in the city flourishing with longer blessedness/prosperity, I blame the lot of tyrannies. And I am strained over common achievements, and the envious are fended off. But if someone, having taken the height and behaving himself in peace and quiet, has escaped dread hubris, he would go to a better end of black death, bestowing on his sweetest offspring the grace of a good name as the best of possessions. [Grace] which spreads abroad [the name of] Iolaos, son of Iphikles, celebrated in song, and mighty Kastor and you, lord Polydeukes, sons of gods, who dwell one day in the seats of Therapnai and the next within Olympus.

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Notes 1. See especially A. N. Veselovsky, “Envisioning World Literature in 1863: From the Reports on a Mission Abroad,” trans. J. Flaherty; ed. and with an introduction by  B. Maslov, PMLA 128.2 (2013): 439–51 and Veselovsky “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics: Questions and Answers” (1894), trans. B. Maslov (Chapter 1 in this volume). 2. Cf. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), esp. pp.  75–102, 140–45; for the congeniality of Jameson’s Marxism and Historical Poetics, see section 1 in the introduction in this volume. 3. So of course I’m still talking about “generals,” Pindar and Aeschylus— and this is almost unavoidable when we’re dealing with Greek texts, since all we have left is the canon—but (at least for my first two passes here) I’m trying to get at what their “armies” (genres?) may have been up to behind their backs, as it were—as they imagined they were leading. Admittedly, with my final (metapoetic) reading, I’m back to full-blown authorial intent, so I’m not sure this would be approved of by either card-carrying New Historicists or Historical Poeticists. But at least it’s still about genre, and I can’t help feeling that Pindar is incredibly self-conscious about genre in its interaction with the world. 4. For full discussion of the two dates, the confusion of the scholia, and scholarly arguments that have been proffered on either side, see Leslie Kurke, “Pindar’s Pythian 11 and the Oresteia: Contestatory Ritual Poetics in the Fifth Century B.C.E.,” Classical Antiquity 32 (2013): 150–63. My minimal assumption for the purposes of this discussion is that the internal evidence of Pythian11 and the (rather confused) scholia can be reconciled with either date, 474 or 454 B.C.E. I have provided the full text of Pythian 11, in Greek with my translation, in the appendix. 5. At the current time, the majority of scholars prefer the earlier date: thus Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Pindaros (Berlin: Weidmann, 1922), pp.  259–63;  B.  A. van Groningen, “De Pindari carmine Pythio XI,” Mnemosyne n.s. 59 (1931): 266–70; Peter von der Mühll, “Wurde die elfte Pythie Pindars 474 oder 454 gedichtet?” Museum Helveticum 15 (1958): 141–46;  R.  J. Burton, Pindar’s Pythian Odes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 61, 72–73; William J. Slater, “Pindar’s Myths: Two Pragmatic Explanations,” in Arktouros: Hellenic Studies Presented to Bernard M. W. Knox, ed. G. W. Bowersock, W. Burkert, and M. C. J. Putnam (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1979), p.  68; Glenn  W. Most, “Des verschieden gesinnten Sinnesverbindung: Zur poetischen Einheit der Alten,” in Einheit als Grundfrage der Philosophie, ed.  K. Gloy and  E. Rudolph (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), p. 15; A.J.N.W. Prag, The Oresteia: Iconographic and Narrative Tradition

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(Warminster, Wiltshire, UK: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1985), pp.  77–79; Stephen J. Instone, “Pythian 11: Did Pindar Err?” Classical Quarterly n.s. 36 (1986): 86; Emmet Robbins, “Pindar’s Oresteia and the Tragedians,” in Greek Tragedy and Its Legacy: Essays Presented to D. J. Conacher, ed. M. Cropp, E. Fantham, and S. E. Scully (Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 1986), pp.  1–11;  P.  J. Finglass, ed., Pindar: Pythian Eleven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 11–17. A substantial minority of scholars prefer the later date: thus L. R. Farnell, The Works of Pindar. Vol. II: Critical Commentary (London: MacMillan & Co., Limited, 1932), pp.  222–24; Ingemar Düring, “Klutaimestra—νηλὴς γυνά. A Study of the Development of a Literary Motif,” Eranos 41 (1943): 91–123; C. M. Bowra, “Pindar, Pythian XI,” Classical Quarterly 30 (1936): 129–41; Bowra, Pindar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 402–5; John H. Finley, Pindar and Aeschylus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 160–64; John Herington, “Pindar’s Eleventh Pythian Ode and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon,” in Greek Poetry and Philosophy: Studies in Honour of Leonard Woodbury, ed. D. E. Gerber (Chico, Ca.: Scholars Press, 1984), pp. 137–46; Thomas K. Hubbard, “Envy and the Invisible Roar,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 31 (1990): 343–51; Hubbard, “Pylades and Orestes in Pindar’s Eleventh Pythian: The Uses of Friendship,” in Allusion, Authority, and Truth: Critical Perspectives on Greek Poetic and Rhetorical Praxis, ed. P. Mitsis and  C. Tsagalis (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 187–200; Leslie Kurke, “The Cultural Impact of (on) Democracy: Decentering Tragedy,” in Democracy 2500? Questions and Challenges, ed. I. Morris and K. Raaflaub (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1998), pp. 155–69. Bowra’s arguments for the later date are mainly historical (see below); but he and all the other scholars listed also detect echoes of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in Pindar’s poem and therefore date it to 454 (Düring meticulously catalogues all the dictional parallels). 6. See D. C. Young, Three Odes of Pindar: A Literary Study of Pythian 11, Pythian 3, Olympian 7, Mnemosyne Supplement 9 (Leiden: Brill, 1968), pp. 1–26, an argument I have followed and elaborated in Leslie Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 214–18 and Kurke, “Cultural Impact,” pp. 162–63. For more recent attempts to rebut Young’s interpretation and read the myth positively, see Slater, “Pindar’s Myths,” pp. 63–68; Rory B. Egan, “On the Relevance of Orestes in Pindar’s Eleventh Pythian,” Phoenix 37 (1983): 189–200; Instone, “Did Pindar Err”; Robbins, “Pindar’s Oresteia”; Roberta Sevieri, “Un eroe in cerca d’identità: Oreste nella Pitica XI di Pindaro per Trasideo di Tebe,” Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 43 (1999): 77–110; and Finglass, Pythian Eleven, pp. 46–47.

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7. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Pindar follow Bruno Snell and Herwig Maehler, eds., Pindarus, Pars I: Epinicia (Stuttgart and Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1997); the text of Finglass, Pythian Eleven, pp. 64– 68 offers only very minor divergences from Snell-Maehler’s text. Here and throughout, all translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 8. Herington, “Pindar’s Eleventh Pythian,” pp. 140–45, quotation from p. 145. Finglass, Pythian Eleven, pp. 11–13 attempts to rebut Herington’s argument, but seems to me crucially to misunderstand Herington’s point about these unanswered questions: thus Finglass compares the two unanswered questions here to questions of fact like those at Bacch. 19.29–36; but what Herington is focusing on is the question of an individual’s motivation raised and left unresolved. 9. Here and throughout, I translate triodos as “crossroads,” although I am well aware that the English term is unsatisfactorily foursquare in contrast to the Greek. I acknowledge that “fork in the road” or “place where three roads meet” do a better job of capturing the image implicit in the Greek, but I will stick to “crossroads,” simply in order not to have to use a whole phrase each time. 10. Thus Young, Three Odes, p. 5 with n. 2, William H. Race, “Some Digressions and Returns in Greek Authors,” Classical Journal 76 (1980): 5–6, Egan, “Relevance,” p. 199 n. 32. 11. The closest parallel is Bacch. 10.51–2: Τί μακράν γλῶσσαν ἰθύσας ἐλαύνω/ ἐκτὸς ὁδοῦ; (“Why, having straightened a long tongue, do I drive outside of the road?”). But here, notice, the poet has driven “off the road”— there is still no suggestion of a choice of paths at a crossroads. It is also worth noting that the crossroads image does not occur in any of the rich array of parallel “return from digression” passages assembled by Race, “Some Digressions.” For the argument that the imagery of these break-off passages generally participates in a larger system of imagery within the poem as a whole (wherein the poet is imagined to be traveling to the myth and returning therefrom), see Kurke, Traffic, pp. 49–61. 12. The treatment of Race, “Some Digressions,” pp. 4–5 is very revealing in this regard, since he discusses only the ship image (for which there are very good parallels) and never mentions the image of the crossroads. He thereby makes clear how completely gratuitous the crossroads image is within this doubled break-off. 13. I reproduce the text of Stefan Radt, ed., Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta. Vol. 3: Aeschylus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985), who reads Ποτνιάδας in the last line instead of the mss’ Ποτνιάδων (printed by August Nauck, ed., Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta, 2nd ed. [Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1889]). 14. For the triodos as a symbol of tragedy in the Greek context, see Oliver Taplin, “Sophocles in His Theatre,” in Sophocle, ed. J. de Romilly,

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Entretiens sur L’Antiquité Classique. Vol. 29 (Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1982), p. 157: “The Greek stage is, in a sense, the place where three roads meet.” For Taplin, this is literally as well as figuratively true, because of the three entrances (eisodoi, literally “roads in”) to the ancient orchestra. See also the wonderful elaboration of this point by George Steiner, in the discussion after Taplin’s paper (in Taplin, “Sophocles,” p. 181): “Whereas Hercules’ choice between two roads is characteristic of the binary typology of choices between virtue and vice, light and dark, life and death etc., a triadic configuration, as we find it in the Oidipous myths and on the Greek stage, points to what is structurally, topologically and existentially undecidable. It almost defines the recursively ambiguous, perplexing and formally indefinite ending of certain great tragic conflicts and their representations. Hecate of the trivia, the burial of suicides at the junction of three-roads, intimate some almost archetypal association between triodoi and the tragic. The very fact that the ‘third road’ is the one which leads backward, is key to the Oidipous myth. As Vernant says, this is a myth of fatal homecoming” (italics in original). 15. Herington, “Pindar’s Eleventh Pythian,” p. 139 n. 6. Of these three instances, Herington wants to isolate and focus on just νηλὴς γυνά in l. 22, but his metrical observation can instead be used to link together the two phrases at l. 22 and l. 38 and argue for their common resonance of tragic meter. For the dramatically deferred νηλὴς γυνά enjambed to the first line of the antistrophe, cf. Aes. Cho. 46, δύσθεος γυνά, significantly deferred to the end of a three-line sentence and enjambed to a new line. 16. Slater, “Pindar’s Myths,” pp. 65–66. 17. For analysis of specific forms of Pindaric ambiguity in gnomic sequences, see Thomas K. Hubbard, The Pindaric Mind: A Study of Logical Structure in Early Greek Poetry, Mnemosyne Suppl. 85 (Leiden: Brill, 1985), pp. 143–45 (on the shifting from “subjective” to “objective” reference in gnomes, or vice versa). 18. Text follows Denys Page, ed., Aeschyli Septem Quae Supersunt Tragoediae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 19. Farnell, Works, p. 224 and Hubbard, “Invisible Roar,” pp. 348–51 connect this gnomic sequence in Pythian11 with the people’s envy and hostility as articulated in the first stasimon of the Agamemnon. 20. For the applicability of this gnome to Helen as well as Clytemnestra, see F. S. Newman, “The Relevance of the Myth in Pindar’s Eleventh Pythian,” Hellenika 31 (1979): 59 n. 1; Sevieri, “Un eroe,” p. 101; for the Aeschylean conflation of the two sisters, cf. Ag. 681–749, 788–804, 1448– 61. And note that the kind of ambiguity in this gnomic sequence in Pythian 11 is about the shifting or recalibrating of blame/responsibility as events unfold (or perhaps better, the layering of wrongdoing and blame over time)—what we might call a characteristically tragic form of ambi-

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guity vs. Pindaric ambiguity (e.g., the strategic shifting between laudator and laudandus). This is what I mean about this shifty gnomic sequence having a different feel from other ambiguous chains of gnomai in Pindar. 21. Thus von der Mühll, “Wurde,” p. 146; Prag, Oresteia, pp. 77–78; Instone, “Did Pindar Err,” pp. 87–89; Robbins, “Pindar’s Oresteia”; and more cautiously, Finglass, Pythian Eleven, p. 16. 22. After all, one might then feel obliged to ask why both Pindar and Aeschylus chose to allude so systematically (if that is what they did) to Stesichorus’s version, rather than invoking the “lost common source” to shut down further discussion. Or, to pose this question somewhat differently: why, given how much else seems to have been in Stesichorus’s 2,000-line Oresteia, should Aeschylus and Pindar have chosen to allude to almost exactly the same bits? The fact that, on this interpretation, they did so might suggest that the two texts have a significant relation to each other even if both borrow from Stesichorus. 23. Cf. Düring, “Klutaimestra,” pp. 106–8, 115; Herington, “Pindar’s Eleventh Pythian,” p. 145. This was already the ancient perception of Stesichorus, to judge from ps-Longinus’ characterization of him as “most Homeric” (On the Sublime 13.3). 24. Thus it is telling that Herington refers to Aeschylus’s trilogy as a great “poem” or “poem-play” (“Pindar’s Eleventh Pythian,” pp.  142–43). Even though, in contrast to Bowra’s explicit fantasy of Pindar reading Aeschylus, Herington imagines Pindar sitting in the audience of the first performance of the Oresteia at the City Dionysia in Athens in 458  B.C.E., the latter’s emphatic references to Aeschylus’s work as a “poem” expose the New Critical assumptions that inform his reading. For other, similar notions of the “powerful influence” of Aeschylus’s trilogy on Pindar, see Düring, “Klutaimestra,” p. 116; Finley, Pindar and Aeschylus, p. 162; and Hubbard, “Friendship,” p. 192: “Whatever his attitude toward Athenian policy at the time, Pindar was a brilliant enough poet to recognize sublime lyric storytelling in the work of a fellow poet, close to his own age, recently deceased.” 25. The objection that positing Aeschylean “influence” on Pindar denigrates the latter’s own artistry comes from Finglass, Pythian Eleven, pp. 14–16—and, to a great extent, he is right about the aestheticizing and evaluative tone of earlier (formalist/New Critical) discussions like Herington’s. On the other hand, I would contend, a reading that recognizes Pindar’s own thematization of genre/tragedy within epinikion can accommodate intertextuality without denigrating Pindar’s artistry. 26. On the first triad and its Theban cultic context, see Wilamowitz, Pindaros, p. 260; Farnell, Works, p. 225; Burton, Pythian Odes, p. 61; Paolo Vivante, “Pindar, Pythian XI, 1–11,” Teiresias Suppl. 1 (1972): 41–50; Paola Angeli Bernardini, “Il proemio della Pitica XI di Pindaro e culti tebani,” in BOIOTIKA: Vorträge vom 5. Internationalen Böotien-Kolloquium zu

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Ehren von Professor Dr. Siegfried Lauffer, ed. H. Beister and J. Buckler (University of Munich, 1989), pp. 39–47; Sevieri, “Un eroe,” pp. 105–9; Lucia Athanassaki, “Apollo and His Oracle in Pindar’s Epinicians: Poetic Representations, Politics, and Ideology,” in Apolline Politics and Poetics, ed.  L. Athanassaki, R. P. Martin, and J. F. Miller (Athens: The European Cultural Center of Delphi, 2009), pp. 445–49. 27. On the “strong Laconian flavor” of Pythian 11 (Egan’s phrase) and the linkage of Theban and Spartan cults at the end of the poem, see Farnell, Works, p. 225; Bowra, “Pythian XI,” pp. 132–34; Finley, Pindar and Aeschylus, p. 162; Burton, Pythian Odes, p. 65; Egan, “Relevance,” p. 191; Most, “Einheit,” pp. 21, 25; Prag, Oresteia, pp. 77–78; Bernardini, “Il proemio,” pp. 46–47; Sevieri, “Un eroe,” pp. 105–7; Hubbard, “Friendship,” pp. 192–200. 28. Bowra, “Pythian XI,” pp. 135–36. Cf. Hubbard, “Invisible Roar,” p. 350 n. 22, “Friendship,” pp. 191–92, noting that Bowra’s arguments have never been refuted. 29. Symptomatically, all scholars who favor a later date can do here is split the historical and literary facts. See (e.g.) Bowra, “Pythian XI,” pp. 140– 41, who shifts from his historical argument to the issue of intertextuality simply by inserting a final section set off by a roman numeral. Cf. also Hubbard, “Friendship,” arguing that the Spartan coloring is for the patron, Thrasydaios’s father, while the allusions to Aeschylus/tragedy are Pindar’s personal homage to his recently dead Athenian friend. On the other hand, those scholars who favor an early date are forced to claim that Pindar is simply following tradition by setting the myth in Sparta: thus Prag, Oresteia, pp. 77–78; Instone, “Did Pindar Err,” p. 87; Finglass, Pythian Eleven, p. 86. 30. For all this, see Barbara Kowalzig, “Changing Choral Worlds: SongDance and Society in Athens and Beyond” in Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City, ed. P. Murray and P. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 39–65; Kowalzig, “Mapping out Communitas: Performances of Theōria in their Sacred and Political Context,” in Seeing the Gods: Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman & Early Christian Antiquity, ed. J. Elsner and I. Rutherford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 41–72; and esp. Kowalzig, Singing for the Gods: Performances of Myth and Ritual in Archaic and Classical Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For important earlier treatments of the significant social and political functions of ritual choreia in ancient Greece, see Gregory Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 339–81; Steven H. Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Claude Calame, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious Role, and Social Function, trans. D. Collins (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); Eva Stehle,

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Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece: Nondramatic Poetry in Its Setting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Peter Wilson, The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, the City and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Wilson, “The Politics of Dance: Dithyrambic Contest and Social Order in Ancient Greece,” in Sport and Festival in the Ancient Greek World, ed. D. J. Phillips and D.  Pritchard (Swansea, Wales: The Classical Press of Wales, 2003), pp. 163–96. 31. Barbara Kowalzig, “ ‘And Now All the World Shall Dance’ (Eur. Bacch. 114): Dionysus Choroi between Drama and Ritual,” in The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama, ed. E. Csapo and  M. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 221–51; cf. Kowalzig, “Changing Choral Worlds.” 32. Barbara Kowalzig, “The Aetiology of Empire? Hero-Cult and Athenian Tragedy,” in Greek Drama III: Essays in Honour of Kevin Lee, ed. J. Davidson, F. Muecke, and P. Wilson, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Supplement 87 (London: University of London, Institute of Classical Studies, 2006), pp. 79–98, citing the examples of Sophocles Ajax, Oedipus at Colonus; Euripides Medea, Hippolytus, Iphigeneia in Tauris. 33. Kowalzig, Singing, p. 9. 34. For a Panhellenic audience at the City Dionysia, see Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2d ed., rev. by J. Gould and D. M. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 58– 59, citing Aristophanes Acharnians 505–6, Aeschines Against Ctesiphon 43, Demosthenes Against Meidias 74, Isocrates On the Peace 82; for more recent discussion, see Eric Csapo and William J. Slater, The Context of Ancient Drama (Ann Arbor, Mich..: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 108, 117–18; David Kawalko Roselli, Theater of the People: Spectators and Society in Ancient Athens (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), pp. 119–26, 135–41. 35. This might not seem significant, but note the opposite tactic of Aeschylus at Eum. 26—the gratuitous mention of the ripping apart of Pentheus by his own mother Agave as the sole reference to Theban myth in this play. 36. The recognition that tragedy thrives on intrafamilial/kin violence goes back to Aristotle, Poetics ch. 14, 1453b19–36; for modern discussions of the conflict of polis and oikos as an essential theme of Attic tragedy, see John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962); Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation,” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. R. Macksey and E. Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), pp. 273–95; Froma I. Zeitlin, Under the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes (Rome: Edizioni dell’ Ateneo, 1982); Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 1986), pp.  57–106; Richard Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), etc. For the contrasting positive oikos ideology of epinikion, see Peter W. Rose, “The Myth of Pindar’s First Nemean: Sportsmen, Poetry, and Paideia,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 78 (1974): 145–75; Kurke, Traffic, “Cultural Impact.” 37. Thus (e.g.) Instone, “Did Pindar Err,” p. 89. 38. Cf. N.2.24 (ὦ πολῖται), I.8.2 (ὦ νέοι). For moments of separation between the “professional” poet and the amateur, citizen chorus, see Kathryn Morgan, “Pindar the Professional and the Rhetoric of the Kōmos,” Classical Philology 88 (1993): 1–15; for the strange temporality of Pindaric epinikion that not infrequently locates the ego at the moment of composition rather than that of performance, see G. B. D’Alessio, “Past Future and Present Past: Time Deixis in Greek Archaic Lyric,” Arethusa 37 (2004): 267–94. 39. Finglass, Pythian Eleven, p. 110. 40. Cf. Stehle, Performance and Gender on the archaic Greek chorus in general as speaking both to and for the broader civic community. 41. Yuri Tynianov, “On Literary Evolution,” in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. L. Matejka and K. Pomrska (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978), pp. 72–75. In one respect, it must be acknowledged that Tynianov’s terms are slightly misleading, since religious practice through choral performance is not in fact a “neighboring system” to the texts of Greek lyric; this is instead a single complex cultural system in which the texts of choral lyric participate as scripts or libretti for performances. 42. See (e.g.) J. H. Quincey, “Orestes and the Argive Alliance,” Classical Quarterly n.s. 14 (1964): 190–206; Alan H. Sommerstein, ed., Aeschylus: Eumenides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 26–31. 43. Quincey, “Orestes,” p. 193. 44. The former version in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo ll. 222–24; the latter version in Pindar fr. 286 Snell-Maehler (as reported in the Scholia to Aes. Eum. 11). 45. Thus Ephorus tells us (presumably following Athenian tradition), Apollo “having set out from Athens to Delphi went by this road, by which the Athenians now send [their theōria] to the Pythian Festival” (Ephorus FGrH 70 F 31b). And the Aeschylean scholia to these lines add that they aetiologize an Athenian ritual practice: “whenever [the Athenians] send a theōria to Delphi, it is led by men carrying axes as if to make gentle the land” (Scholia to Aes. Eum. 12, 13 [Smith 1993]; see Sommerstein, Eumenides, p. 82). 46. Contrast the version of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo ll. 225–39, which makes a point of noting (twice!) that Thebes is still uncharted woodland, but thereby names Thebes and other sites in Boiotia several times.

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47. Egan, “Relevance,” pp. 191–93 argues for a cult network of Thebes, Sparta, and Delphi constructed in Pythian 11, but does not set it against the Aeschylean network of Athens, Argos, and Delphi. 48. For the close association of the Theban Ismenion and Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, see Albert Schachter, Cults of Boiotia. 4 vols. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Supplement 38.1–4 (London: University of London, Institute of Classical Studies, 1981–1994), 1:59–60, 80–85. 49. Egan, “Relevance,” pp. 192–93 notes a set of mantic figures who also link together Thebes and Sparta—Melia/Ismenion; Cassandra at Amyklai; and the Theban heroine Ino, who also had an oracular shrine in (or near) a place called Thalamai in Laconia (see Paus. 3.26.1, Plut. Agis 9). 50. ὀρθοδίκας, ὀρθοδίκαιος, and ὀρθοδίκος occur a total of four times in classical Greek; in addition to P.11.9 and Eum. 993, ὀρθοδίκος occurs twice in Bacchylides (Ode 11.9, of Styx as mother of Nika; Ode 14.23, just where the poem breaks off, so the specific reference is unknown; both these poems are undated). 51. See André Lardinois, “Greek Myths for Athenian Rituals: Religion and Politics in Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Sophocles’ Oedipus Coloneus,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 33 (1992): 313–27 on the Athenian appropriation of this cult. 52. Egan, “Relevance,” pp. 194–95 notes the occurrences of ὀρθοδίκαν/ ὀρθοδίκαιον at P.11.9 and Eum. 993, respectively, but uses the parallel in the service of a different argument. For Egan, Pindar significantly designates Delphi as ὀρθοδίκας right before the introduction of Orestes and the myth to signal the implicit support of Delphic Apollo for Orestes’ (just) vengeance on the slayers of his father; Wilamowitz, Pindaros, p. 261 had already suggested this associative link. The problem here is that there is no mention of Apollo or his oracles within the myth itself, though Pindar evinces no hesitation in other mythic narratives about telling us that a hero was led or guided in some endeavor by a god. Indeed, as many scholars have emphasized, the myth of Pythian 11 is strikingly bare of divinities or divine intervention, except for “late Ares” at its end; for this point, see Farnell, Works, p. 224; Burton, Pythian Odes, p. 63; Most, “Einheit,” pp. 23– 24; Finglass, Pythian Eleven, p. 46; Hubbard, “Friendship,” p. 194; and especially Athanassaki, “Apollo,” pp. 452–65. 53. Thus Kowalzig, “Changing Choral Worlds,” pp. 50–55. 54. For the cult locations of Thebes’ heroines, see Schachter, Cults of Boiotia, with full citation and discussion of ancient sources. For the civic, commemorative function of the tripods in the Ismenion, see Hdt. 5.57–61, Paus. 9.10.4 with discussion of Nassos Papalexandrou, “Boiotian Tripods: The Tenacity of a Panhellenic Symbol in a Regional Context,” Hesperia 77 (2008): 251–82.

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55. Scholia to P.11.12b Drachmann, glossing it as σύννομον. Otherwise: Farnell, Works, p. 226, citing a parallel usage in a Delphic inscription; Finglass, Pythian Eleven, pp. 81–82, “with adjoining pasture,” so “local.” 56. For the pointed contrast between the divine beddings of the Theban heroines of the first triad and Clytemnestra’s adulterous bedding in the second triad, cf. Finley, Pindar and Aeschylus, pp. 161–62, Newman, “Relevance,” pp. 52–57. 57. Thus a scholion to Euripides’ Orestes suggests that the tradition of Agamemnon as king of Sparta was a robust one in poetic texts of the sixth and fifth centuries; the scholiast notes, “it is clear that the scene of the drama is laid in Argos. And Homer says the kingship of Agamemnon [was] in Mycenae, but Stesichorus and Simonides [say] in Lakedaimon” (Scholia to Eur. Or. 46, 1.102 Schw. = Stesichorus fr. 39/216 PMG). For general treatments of the struggle between Sparta and Argos fought out through the heroes of myth and cult, see Robin Osborne, Greece in the Making: 1200– 479  B.C. (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp.  287–90; Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 89–107; Kowalzig, Singing, pp. 161–80. 58. Cf. Hubbard, “Friendship,” p. 193, who notes Pindar’s transfer of the mythic setting back to Sparta and likewise sets it in relation to the Athenian-Argive alliance of the early 460s and Aeschylus’s allusions thereto. 59. It is worth recalling that the only complete texts of Greek choral lyric we have preserved through direct manuscript transmission are the four books of Pindar’s epinikia. All the other choral lyric we currently possess comes to us from the indirect tradition (that is, usually brief snippets of quotation embedded in other ancient Greek texts), and through papyrus finds discovered and published since ca. 1900. 60. In a way, we can already see this happening in Aristotle’s Poetics (composed in the second half of the fourth century B.C.E.), which famously ignores the religious, festival, and performance contexts of tragedy. It is tempting to argue that there is something inherent in tragedy’s own processes of disembedding from the particulars that enables Aristotle’s approach, and with it, the invention of “poetics.” 61. In Leslie Kurke, Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) I have attempted a similar materialist, historicist account of the emergence of mimetic prose narrative as a written form in fifth- and fourth-century B.C.E. Greece, aiming to get beyond an idealist, triumphalist narrative that treats prose-writing as the natural and inevitable result of the emergence of rationality. 62. For the anthropological strain in New Historicism and its commitment to the local, note the influence of Geertz and Bourdieu, as well as Foucault, on New Historicists—all three often invoked as alternatives to

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the single “master-narrative” of Marxism. For Veselovsky’s assertion that literary history simply is cultural history, see Veselovsky, “Mission Abroad”; cf. Veselovsky, “Introduction,” Chapter 1 in this volume. 63. See (e.g.) Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

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Chapter 4

Metapragmatics, Toposforschung, Marxist Stylistics Three Extensions of Veselovsky’s Historical Poetics BO RIS M A S LOV

1. Making Sense of Veselovsky’s Legacy Alexander Veselovsky’s versatile body of work is notably hard to synthesize, and the method as well as the conceptual apparatus he refined over the years, yet never fully explicated, does not lend itself easily to either systematic summary or piecemeal extraction. It is in part for this reason that Veselovsky’s legacy proved of no direct use to the totalizing twentieth-century theories of literature, such as Structuralism of the French or Soviet varieties, or to the more recent transnational literarycritical practice, whose volatile methodological eclecticism favors the propagation of isolated conceptual moves and argumentative schemata. For Veselovsky’s is an approach that insistently tests the limits of literary history—whether understood as part of the history of culture, as continuation of preliterary verbal practices, or as self-contained history of forms. It is precisely the difficulty of reconciling these aspects of literary history—a difficulty that, arguably, is intrinsic to the phenomenon of literature—that accounts for the lack, in Veselovsky’s work, of a simple answer to the question “What is literature?”—an answer comparable to, for example, Croce’s emphasis on the expressive force of individual artistic genius or Shklovsky’s view of “defamiliarization” as the principal device of verbal art.1 In Veselovsky’s work, we can instead point to (1) a set of guiding principles that can be explained by his formation as a Medievalist in 128

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the late 1850s–early 1860s in Russia under Alexander II and across Europe (Berlin, Prague, Florence); these principles include the empiricist rejection of universal, classicizing aesthetics, a democratic commitment to the popular forms of art, and an internationalist view of crossfertilization of cultures as being essential to their subsistence; (2) a set of methodological assumptions that can be argued to derive from these principles, such as the need for thorough historical (and in particular, social-historical) contextualization; a commitment to an evolutionary literary-historical narrative that would correlate popular (“folk”) lore and literary phenomena; the resulting need to draw on a variety of disciplines (most important, ethnography and history); the view of individual “genius” as a product of the culture of the period; (3) a set of foci of attention, such as the history of tropes (epithet and parallelism), comparative poetics of genres, the history of “ideals” (dominant cultural concepts), and cross-cultural circulation of plots and motifs. In the wake of New Historicism—an approach that shunned explicit theorization—we are in a position to see Veselovsky’s multifaceted methodology in a new light. Veselovsky’s failure to complete a systematic exposition of his method—the series of works he anticipated would be entitled Historical Poetics—was perhaps a productive failure. While resistant to dogmatization, his work, in effect, created an intellectual space in which the generation of Russian scholars trained in the 1910s (including the Russian Formalists and Bakhtin) put forward a new, specialized discipline of literary theory. When viewed from within today’s heavily diversified field of literary and cultural studies, Veselovsky’s work offers an array of access points that permit us to explore his legacy from different theoretical perspectives. Like other contributions to Part I of this volume, this chapter places Historical Poetics in a dialogue with more recent meta-discourses on literature and verbal art. The layout of the chapter is unusual, but in a way that is inspired by the somewhat haphazard spirit of the Veselovskian project. In what follows, I present three analyses that build on Veselovsky’s particular insights on (1) theory of genres, (2) crosscultural borrowing of motifs, and (3) diagnosis of Weltanschauung based on minute stylistic particulars. At the same time, these analyses bring Historical Poetics into a conversation with methodologies that postdate Veselovsky’s work: (i) linguistic anthropology and narrative theory, (ii) history of ideas and the study of topoi, and (iii) Marxist literary history and stylistics.

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2. Genres or Pragmatic Operators? Delimiting Historical Poetics Theories of the three basic genera of literature gained a wide currency in the nineteenth century. It appears that the distinction between “lyric,” “epic” (or “narrative”), and “drama” indeed belongs to a more abstract level than the particular instantiations of these genera, such as the historically specific forms of canzone or sonnet (within “lyric”), heroic epic or a fairy tale (within “epic/narrative”), and comedy or tragedy (within “drama”).2 One question that Veselovsky sought to resolve in his work is whether the abstract genera of literature are historical productions of humanity’s evolution (as was widely believed) or linguistic givens indifferent to the metaphysics of history. By upholding the latter view, and thus limiting historical variation to particular instantiations of the three larger principles, Veselovsky placed social and cultural history, rather than humanity’s universal progress, in the focus of his vision of Historical Poetics. Veselovsky’s insights are corroborated by the more recent work in narrative theory and linguistic anthropology that speak of three modes of discourse or three kinds of pragmatic operation, which correspond to the three genera traditionally distinguished by literary critics. In this section, in particular, I propose that Michael Silverstein’s notion of metapragmatics provides a powerful tool for defining literary genre as a historically and socially variable entity, yet one that is anchored in a distinctive relation to everyday discourse. In a classic study of the history of this tripartite division, Gérard Genette argues that, while the opposition between the “epical” and the “dramatic” is rooted in the Platonic-Aristotelian poetics, the introduction of the “lyrical” into the schema is a modern innovation.3 The view that these three genres represent basic constituents of the literary field is attested in English Renaissance authors (including Milton and Dryden),4 is taken for granted by Baumgarten in Aesthetica (1735), and became a staple of genre criticism since the German Romantics. It was also the German Romantics who introduced the idea of their sequential evolution. In particular, the notion of a syncretistic primitive stage at which all genre forms were either confused or latently present, found in Hugh Blair and in Goethe, was reconsidered.5 Friedrich Schlegel held that the “lyrical” corresponds to the “subjective,” “dramatic” to the “objective,” and “epical” to the fruitfully synthetic “subjective-objective” (the

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MODES OF DISCOURSE enunciation reserved for the poet/narrator

Lyrical

enunciation alternating between the narrator and the characters

enunciation reserved for the characters

Epical

Dramatic

GENRES

Figure 4.1.

latter subsuming that quintessential modern genre, the novel). More popular were the sequences “epic > lyric > drama” (adhered to by August Wilhelm Schlegel and Hegel) and “lyric > epic > drama” (Schelling), with the dramatic posing as the consummating synthesis. While, as Genette shows, the Schellingian privileging of lyric as the primitive stage of all verbal art was widely accepted, the evidence of Greek literary history seemed to accord with the Hegelian version, which was indeed later canonized in Bruno Snell’s Entdeckung des Geistes.6 As Genette suggests, a transhistorical tripartite division of discourse modes can be legitimately defined in linguistic terms: “pure narration vs. mixed narration vs. dramatic imitation.”7 These valid distinctions that belong to the level of pragmatics, Genette argues, were uncritically projected onto historical categories of the three proto-genres (see Figure 4.1).8 A similar division into modes of discourse can be found in Plato’s theorization of mimesis in Book 3 of the Republic (394c; cf. Arist. Poet. 3). Plato distinguishes between a kind of “poetry and mythology” that proceed “entirely through mimesis, as tragedy and comedy,” another kind that is “of the poet/author speaking in his own person” (ποιήσεως . . . ἡ . . . δι’ ἀπαγγελίας αὐτοῦ τοῦ ποιητοῦ), and finally, the one that mixes the two, occurring “in epic and many other places.” As Genette contends, pointing to the lack of reference to the odes of Sappho or Pindar, Plato’s second category, epitomized by the dithyramb, is “purely narrative” and must be rejected as a generic equivalent of lyric.9 This allows Genette to claim “lyric” as a modern addition to the triad of genres. There are reasons, however, to think that the dithyramb—in fourthcentury Athens—was indeed a paradigmatic “lyrical” genre. The continued importance of dithyramb performances at the Panathenaea, and the eclipse of most genres of literary lyric prominent in the Archaic

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period, supply obvious reasons for the avoidance, in a programmatic work like the Republic, of discussion of the nine canonical Archaic poets: in contrast to epic and tragedy, the lyric of Sappho and Pindar was irrelevant to Athenian civic/ritual practice.10 In spite of a lack of sustained attention to lyric in the Republic, we may nevertheless conclude, pace Genette, that Plato, in fact, discerned the division into three “modes of discourse” and proposed a pragmatic criterion—the nature and the alternation of the speaker(s)—for distinguishing between them. The evolution of genres and their sociohistorical correlatives is an issue to which Veselovsky returned repeatedly. One may isolate three central propositions in his theory of genres. First, Veselovsky asserted a distinction between natural forms of discourse (equivalent to Genette’s “modes of discourse”) and historically specific genre formations. Second, in a polemic with universalizing accounts of genre evolution, he put an emphasis on a complex set of historical conditioning factors that explain the rise and fall of particular genres. Third, in his account of primitive poetics, Veselovsky proposed that the three natural discursive forms (subsequently made available to historical genres) are present at a syncretistic, preliterary stage of choral communal performance that merged poetry, music, and religious ritual. (In what follows, I will have the least to say about the third aspect of Veselovsky’s work on genre.11) In 1870, Veselovsky began his first lecture course at St. Petersburg University with a dismissal of the theory of genres popularized by the German Romantics: The transparency of Greek literary development, expressing itself in the succession from the epic to the lyric and then the drama, was accepted as the norm and even received philosophical elucidation, according to which the drama, for example, represented not only the necessary summation of the nation’s literary life, but also a mutual interpenetration of the objectivity of the epic and the subjectivity of the lyric, etc.12 Citing examples from popular (lyrical) song, medieval (dramatic) mysteries, and shorter lyrical cantilenas that often lie at the origin of longer epic narratives, Veselovsky points to the ubiquity of “natural forms” corresponding to lyric, epic, and drama. These forms are not distributed randomly: the rise in prominence of one or the other form is correlated with the history of consciousness (“worldview”). In particular, Veselovsky, while subscribing to a version of teleological narrative of progressive differentiation that encompasses “the development of

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personality,” insists that pre-given natural forms of discourse are selected for literary elaboration based on a variety of historical conditions, overlooked in mainstream aesthetics of his time: What we might call the epic, lyrical, and dramatic worldview in actuality had to occur in a certain succession, determined by the ever greater development of personality, although I dare think that this sequence was not correctly inferred by German aesthetics. As for the forms of the epic, the lyric, and the drama, which have given names to poetic genres and epochs of poetry, they were present long before the appearance in history of those peculiarities of the worldview to which we have transferred the definition of the epical, lyrical, etc. These forms are the natural expression of thought; they had no reason to await history in order to manifest themselves. The form of the drama is present already in the Vedas and in the conversations of the gods in the Older Edda. Between these forms and the changing content of the worldview there emerge relationships of natural selection, as it were, determined by the conditions of everyday life and by historical contingency. [my emphasis added]13 In an essay published in 1894, “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics,” Veselovsky rejects the quest for the genesis of epic, drama, and lyric—which he argues to have coincided with their emergence from the “naïve syncretism” of ritual poetry—as premature (see Chapter 1). Instead, he seeks to trace the effects of history on the prominence of particular genres. For example, Veselovsky argues that the rise of epic and drama as artistic forms calls for historical conditions of two kinds, one pertaining to the history of consciousness, the other to national self-consciousness. Semi-literary epic (to be distinguished from folk historical-lyrical epic songs), exemplified by Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and La Chanson de Roland, presupposes the synchronicity of (1) an individual author who is as yet unconscious of his individuality and (2) a rise of national self-consciousness. Drama, with its focus on the conflict-ridden individual, thrives at a time of intensified individual selfawareness, yet it too demands a foundation in national sentiment. To flourish, these forms of art necessitate a democratic basis that crosscuts class and regional differences (“national” or “popular” culture is Veselovsky’s term for a culture that unites the elite and the masses). In this way, Veselovsky seeks to explain the failure of Italian humanist drama,

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in contradistinction to the Elizabethan and Spanish Renaissance drama. The “idealization of humanity in the abstract” outside of the societal bounds (idealizatsiia bezotnositel’no-chelovecheskogo) only becomes possible in the modern bourgeois epoch.14 Veselovsky suggested that dilemmas of comparative literary history should be approached based on the study of modern literatures, for the simple reason that we know much more about them than about ancient literatures.15 By establishing a recurrent pattern of change we may infer that the dominance of a particular form, along with the worldview (the “content of consciousness”) of which it is a symptom, is indeed a response to history.16 For example, the rise of the novel in the Hellenistic period occurs at a time when “the individual felt his solitude in the broad spheres of cosmopolitanism”; accordingly, the Greek novel is “intimately bourgeois” in its thematics. A similar shift in balance between the public and the domestic spheres accounts for the ascendancy of the novel in the modern period when “the grandeur of our public buildings is marked by an artisanal tinge” whereas “[a]rt and poetry in miniature, on the other hand, have descended to domestic use, and we experience drama, in the setting of domestic comfort, in the forms of novels for reading.”17 Theoretical reflection on the longue durée of genre evolution, in particular as regards the rise of the novel, was later pursued by Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Fredric Jameson, among others. The extent to which Veselovsky’s analysis anticipates or is compatible with Marxist work on genre is an issue that calls for closer scrutiny.18 In the remainder of this section, I bring contemporary linguistic anthropology to bear on Veselovsky’s proposition that forms of discourse, which correspond to the categories of lyric, epic, and drama, have a transhistorical quality, being rooted in everyday linguistic usage as “natural expressions of thought.”19 This thesis, being fundamental to the recognition of the two-tiered nature of literary genres, is also crucial for defining the limits of the “historical” in the study of poetics. Once rigorously elucidated, transhistorical parameters of literary production can point to new ways of correlating contextualist, longue-duréebased, typological, and cognitive accounts of literary form. In 1993, Michael Silverstein published an article outlining a theory of metapragmatics, a term he uses to refer to the level of organization of discourse that regiments the meaning of pragmatic markers.20 While the meaning of deictics belongs to pragmatics, the choice of a particular pragmatic frame is determined at the level of metapragmatics. To give a simple example: in French and Russian, an official context of interaction

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makes available an additional meaning of vous or vy as a marker of politeness (as opposed to “you plural inclusive”) when addressing a colleague with whom the speaker, in other contexts, would use tu or ty. In light of Bakhtin’s analysis of literary genres as secondary speech genres,21 we may conceive of metapragmatics as a theory of genre. Each genre (whether literary genre or speech genre) implies a different pragmatics, and our ability to distinguish between and to participate in different genres is by its nature “metapragmatic”: a “you” is by default understood as referring to the “beloved” in an Elizabethan sonnet, but to “God” in devotional lyric descending from David’s Psalms; the hereand-now of a bucolic is not the same as the here-and-now of a graveyard elegy, and so forth. Literary genres not only exploit the pragmatic codes prominent in a particular historical period, but also perpetuate them beyond their original frame of operation. Within the literary system, some genres, such as most varieties of folk lyric, build directly on a particular pragmatic frame, while others synthesize several frames. Hybrid genres thus involve a distinctively literary metapragmatic operation.22 Translated into the language of art as mimesis, the object of simplex genres is a particular life event, controlled by a consistent metapragmatic regime, whereas the object of hybrid genres is life viewed as a concatenation of different pragmatic frames. Silverstein is not unaware of the fact that genre is a form of metapragmatic regimentation, as well as of the significance of literary texts in making explicit, or foregrounding, phenomena that belong to the “metapragmatic-pragmatic nexus.” Citing Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, as well as Bakhtin’s work on the novel, Silverstein points to the significance of “voicing,” understood to comprise non-trivial effects of participation in language use: In such aesthetically heightened textual form, we are concerned with how reported or evoked or even presupposed structures of participation in events of language use (events of making text) are immanent in the authoritativeness of stance, perspective, or “footing” (Goffman 1979)23 in verbal art, to a degree perhaps even greater than in everyday—or at least residually nongenred—language use. Success in reporting, evoking, presupposing, etc. such structures of participation in making text, seemingly perfectible accomplishments of literary artistry as inflected by (or, modulo) genre, determine a work’s evidentiary

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value along the lines of verisimilitude and fantasy, its appeals to/for identification with characters denoted and implied, and hence its overall evocation of a fictive universe locatable with respect to its audience’s.24 Toward the end of this quote, Silverstein lists the perceived specifica of literature, such as fictionality, realism, identification with characters, and a particular mode of authorial involvement. Of greater theoretical import is the distinction between “genred” and “(at least residually) nongenred” language use, the former corresponding to literary, and the latter to everyday, language use. The extent of genred-ness appears to correspond to the isolation of a set of texts, and of the mechanisms of producing such texts, from the domain of spontaneous language use; this isolation often entails a heightened degree of self-consciousness in the use of metapragmatic operations that regiment the genre in question. I would further suggest that the metapragmatic level is fundamental to distinguishing between historically variable genres. Other levels of language structure (syntax, lexicon/diction, less so morphology and phonology) are often cited in discussion of (i) genres, (ii) stylistic registers, which may be viewed as survivals of degraded or generalized genre distinctions, and (iii) different poetic/literary languages current in a culture, which represent a still deeper level of formal sedimentation. None of these levels, however, offer a sufficient criterion for differentiating between genres. I submit that such a criterion can be found in the metapragmatic-pragmatic relationship. Literary texts that are easily relatable to everyday pragmatics, such as epistle, devotional hymn, or funeral lament, gain their identity from their real (or diachronically recoverable) performance context; more complex, hybridized texts would call for a unique, “literary” set of (meta-)pragmatic operations. That such a correlation is indeed obtainable is confirmed by Bakhtin’s insight that one of the properties of literary genres is a chronotope: a distinctive notion of time and place, and a correspondent notion of the subject.25 This central role of metapragmatics in the operation of literary genres suggests a conceptualization of the literary field that departs from the traditional view of literary/poetic language as “marked” or “amplified,” that is, in one way or another, cordoned off from nonpoetic linguistic usage. Instead, literary discourse may be thought of as mirroring everyday discourse, not only in its use (as in an epistle substituting for a letter), but in its principles of organization. From this

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point of view, the putatively transhistorical tripartite division of genres may be expected to have a certain correlate in linguistic usage. In his 1935 article on Pasternak’s prose, Roman Jakobson aligned “lyric” with first-person utterance and “epic” with third-person utterance.26 This alignment, of course, goes back to the Romantics, in particular, to Schlegel’s association of the subjective and objective principles with lyric and epic, respectively. The use of the paradigm of person runs the danger of reductionism, in that epic/narrative hardly excludes the first person, nor is the first-person utterance always present in lyric; there is also the question of where drama might fit into this scheme.27 A more promising starting point is the tripartite schema derived from Plato, which Genette puts forward as the foundation of the lyric/epic/drama division. In this case, the criterion is narratological: it relates to the origin of discourse and the interaction of the narrator and characters. While the Platonic schema is exhaustive, and thus validates the tripartite division of genres as a universal property of literary fields, it is subject to a criticism that is made obvious in the uncertainty of assigning the dithyramb to lyric vs. narrative: a poet’s “lyric” enunciation and a narrative that does not use the discourse of the characters are collapsed into one category. (It should be acknowledged, however, that ancient epic, indeed, favors the use of characters’ direct speech, whereas primitive forms of lyric generally avoid introducing speaking characters.) As an elaboration on the Platonic-Genettian schema, I would propose a metapragmatic criterion that, while subsuming the three different kinds of relation to another’s discourse, goes beyond the narratological parameter. Silverstein distinguishes between three kinds of pragmatic “calibration”: reflexive, reportive, and nomic.28 Calibration pertains to the relationship between “the metapragmatic sign-event and the event of regimented pragmatics.”29 When reporting a previous speech event, the speaker regiments its pragmatics by means that are either explicit (such as “John said to him that . . .”) or implicit (such as the use of an intonation that would be recognized by the current interlocutors as mimicking John’s intonation). The speaker may also choose to abstain from marking his/her relationship to the reported speech event in any way (imagine a lecture that begins with a quotation whose provenance is initially left unspecified). In Silverstein’s terms, explicitly differentiated speech events use “reportive” calibration, “reflexive” calibration applies to “co-textual” coordination (that is, operating within the utterance, rather than through framing markers such as a verb of speaking), and “nomic” calibration obtains in cases of zero-differentiation.

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The reportive calibration is the property of narrative genres; it projects a notion of the speaker that exists on a plane different from the world of discourse; even in first-person narratives that purport to autobiographism, scholars have recognized the need for separating rigorously the “experiencing I” and the “narrating I” as two distinct functions.30 Epic (narrative) could thus be described as discourse that is founded on the principle of reportive calibration.31 As for the reflexive calibration, Silverstein links it to Jakobson’s definition of the poetic function,32 whereby discourse is organized internally (“co-textually,” as opposed to “contextually”), based on the paradigmatic principle: phenomena specific to poetic discourse, such as rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition of words, and echoes of images fall under this principle. In this case, the metapragmatic regimentation is implicit. Arguably, these phenomena, while also proper to many kinds of literary epic and dramatic genres, constitute a specificum of lyric. In a lyric poem, what separates the speaking I and the experiencing I is only the seemingly transparent boundary of poetic language, hence the likely confusion between the two (the “biographical fallacy”). In contrast to both reflexive and reportive modes, nomic calibration involves two “mutually disjoint ontic realms,” one of which is the realm of “mythic ordination, ancestral reanimation, Platonic generalization, or whatnot,” while the other is “the phenomenally available experience of signaling this other realm.”33 Cross-culturally, drama is based on precisely such a fundamental divide between the realms of action and performance (generated nonverbally, by the entourage of scenery, costumes, and so forth), with the former, as a rule, evoked without further reflexive or reportive inflection.34 A similar principle informs ritual use of language, confirming a historical link between ritual and dramatic metapragmatics. The metapragmatic specifica of the three literary genera can be observed most clearly in light of the ethnographic knowledge about their preliterary analogues. Defined as storytelling, epic maps on the reportive calibration more easily than spectacular, quasi-dramatic evocation of the characters, which we infer from Book 3 of Plato’s Republic to have been a staple of rhapsodic performance of Homer in fourth-century Athens. Lyric’s origin in song makes obvious the primacy of reflexive calibration, in that sung intonation functions as a principle of implicit metapragmatic differentiation. Finally, the nomic principle is clearly revealed in drama once the attention is focused not on the author (whose relation to the dramatic text is a case of reflexive cali-

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bration), but instead on the audience’s encounter with staged ritual performance. In summary, an approach that, in the spirit of Veselovsky’s “Three Chapters from the Historical Poetics” (1899), uses ethnographic evidence to uncover the deep structure of literary forms has much to contribute to any theory of genre, even one that foregrounds universal principles of language use.

3. Speaking of Tongues: Aesop Meets the New Testament ‘James’ In the early chapters of Poetics of the Plots (1897–1906), the only part of the book Veselovsky lived to complete, the issues of historical provenance and cross-cultural borrowing are at the center of attention. Veselovsky begins by stating the task of Historical Poetics: it is to “define the role and limits of tradition in the process of individual creation.”35 Formal elements, “formulas” or “schemata” (formuly, skhemy), originate as responses to socioeconomic conditions, yet are remarkably conservative and subject to adaptation and renewal in new cultural-historical environments. It is this conservatism of form that, in Veselovsky’s analysis, allows us to trace inherited elements back to prehistoric times.36 This explains the ethnographic slant of the early chapters of Poetics of the Plots in which totemism and animism are evoked to explain the genesis of some plots: In this way, a series of formulas and schemata came into existence, many of which were retained in later usage, provided that they responded to the conditions of their new application, as some words of primitive vocabulary expanded their concrete meaning to express abstract concepts. Crucial was the capacity [emkost’], the applicability of the formula: it was retained, as a word is retained, yet the notions and senses it evoked changed. It suggested, in accord with the modified emotional and cognitive content, much that, originally, it did not directly convey. It became, with respect to this content, a symbol, a generalization. But it could also change (and here the analogy with a word ends) to be adequate to [v uroven’ s] new demands, become complex, drawing material for the expression of this complexity in other formulas that have undergone a similar metamorphosis. New formation (novoobrazovanie) in this domain often amounts

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to a reiteration of an old survival37 (perezhivanie starogo), yet in new juxtapositions. As I have once put it elsewhere, our poetic language represents a detritus. Retaining this formulation, I would add to poetic language the basic forms of poetic artistry [e.g. plot elements—B.M.].38 Veselovsky draws a further distinction between motifs (basic plot elements) and plots (non-trivial combinations of motifs); whereas motifs arise independently in response to socioeconomic conditions (byt), plots represent complex combinations of motifs whose coincidence in different traditions betokens cross-cultural borrowing.39 Notably, motifs straddle the border between poetic imagery and plot construction. Thus, with regard to the history of poetic style, Veselovsky lists “typical images-symbols, motifs, turns of phrase, parallelisms and similes.”40 These comprise the “stylistic vocabulary” available to the poet in any given time period. Within the twentieth-century literary-critical discourse, it has become common to use the term topos to refer to inherited motif-like elements of poetic form. The most farreaching and influential theorization of topoi is advanced by Ernst Curtius in his magnum opus on medieval European literatures.41 The fundamental argument of Curtius’s work is the transnational unity of “European literature” defined, first and foremost, through the use of recurrent topoi. For Curtius, an insistently recycled topos is not only a chief constituent of literary tradition but also, in a sense, a token and a carrier of cultural (pan-European) identity. Curtius’s “tradition” approximates the notion of the “Classical tradition,” a self-consciously guarded canonical legacy. This meaning is very distant from Veselovsky’s notion of tradition (predanie), which comes closest to the English term oral tradition. Moreover, for Veselovsky, inherited formulas are subject to adaptation by individual participants in the tradition who seek a discursive correlate for their social and psychological experience.42 By virtue of this, particular inflections of persistent formal elements can be analyzed as expressions of historically relevant content. For Curtius, by contrast, topoi, inasmuch as they refer to symbolically charged codes, are valuable for their allusive significance. As a result, Curtius’s method fails to capture the effects of the borrowing of formal elements across cultural boundaries that render their ideological associations moot, and their allusiveness irrelevant.43 A further distinction between Veselovsky’s cosmopolitanism and Curtius’s pan-Europeanism has to do with the relative importance ac-

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corded to self-contained cultural development. In Poetics of the Plots, Veselovsky notes the purely theoretical nature of the presumption of isolated cultural development: “in fact, we know of no isolated tribe, that is, of a tribe about which we were in a position to assert positively that at no point it came into contact with another tribe.”44 Elsewhere, Veselovsky states the importance of “organic” national evolution for genres such as epic and drama, while nevertheless adhering to a Benfeyist vision of cultural history that foregrounds contact phenomena.45 Veselovsky’s compromise position, known as the theory of “confluent currents” (vstrechnye techeniia), stresses that a culture must develop inner conditions for effective reception of foreign elements.46 In this section, I put forward a Veselovskian variety of Toposforschung by considering the reception of the Greek philosophical paradox of the tongue. The afterlife of this motif is a story of sociopolitical contestation and cross-cultural transplantation, contradicting Curtius’s notion of a carefully guarded reservoir of time-honored topoi. Leslie Kurke comments on the philosophical provenance of the paradox of the tongue as follows: The saying that “the best and worst thing is the tongue” was often quoted in antiquity as the wisdom of one of the Seven Sages; we find it variously attributed to Thales, Bias, Pittacus, and Anacharsis in different sources. In particular, the story of this sage observation seems to be a special favorite of Plutarch’s [ . . . ] One of these renditions occurs at the beginning of Plutarch’s Banquet of the Seven Sages [ . . . ]: “The king,” said he, “sent to Bias an animal for sacrifice, with instructions to take out and send back to him the worst and the best portion of the meat. And our friend’s neat and clever solution was, to take out the tongue and send it to him, with the result that he is now manifestly in high repute and esteem.”47 Conforming to the ideal of the Archaic Greek sage as a “performer of wisdom”—an ideal nostalgically evoked by Plutarch—Bias’s display of high wisdom (sophia) consists in the enactment of the paradox of the tongue.48 Such performances cement the reputation of star-sages who aspire to sophia, a concept that bears “tremendous cultural and political prestige and authority.”49 In its Platonic-Aristotelian appropriation, which gave rise to what we still today call “philosophy,” sophia is given an epistemological slant. Yet the concern with knowledge, or revelation of the truth (or, better put, of multiple truths), is also part of the

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pre-philosophical “high wisdom.” According to a folk etymology, sophia in the Archaic period is “simply the ‘bringing to light’ (sapheia) of that which is normally hidden or invisible to human senses in any of a number of different domains.”50 In Plutarch, this motif—which probably originated as a folk gnomic saying—is thus put in the service of a particular ideal of elite wisdom.51 A different inflection of this motif is found in the Life of Aesop, a text based on centuries-old popular tradition and attested in a version dating to the Roman imperial period. The slave Aesop restages the paradox of the tongue, in a typically competitive context, in order to reveal the intellectual inferiority of his master Xanthus, a locally acclaimed philosopher. In response to Xanthus’s request to cook “whatever is good, whatever is useful in life,” Aesop cooks the tongues, in different sauces, inflicting nausea and diarrhea on his master’s students. On the next day, when Xanthus, as a preventive measure, demands that Aesop cook “anything rotten, anything bad,” Aesop simply repeats the same menu. Confronted with accusations, Aesop delivers first a eulogy of the tongue—“[T]hrough the tongue, cities are set upright, beliefs and laws defined. If then all life is constituted through the tongue, nothing is stronger than tongue”—and then a speech of blame, a psogos: “And what bad thing is there that is not through the tongue? Through the tongue enmities, through the tongue plots, ambushes, battles, animosities, quarrels, wars. Surely there is nothing worse than that most polluted tongue” (Kurke’s translation). Kurke’s analysis, which projects this episode back into the Archaic period, focuses on the implicit polemic with the wisdom of the Seven Sages. Taking a cue from Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of medieval popular culture, Kurke contrasts Aesop’s low, bodily form of popular wisdom with the elite mode of performative knowledge represented by the Seven Sages.52 Viewed in the longue durée, Aesop’s praxis-based sophia, rooted in the performative wisdom of the Archaic period and residually preserved in popular tradition, is pitted against the abstract (“Platonic-Aristotelian”) philosophy represented by the intellectual Xanthus, whose practical inadequacy is repeatedly ridiculed in the narrative of the Life. How did the adaptation of the paradox of the tongue to the needs of popular narrative proceed formally? In contrast to the singular gesture of Plutarch’s Bias, Aesop’s performance follows the principle of folk-tale repetition. This narrative pattern is in contradiction with the bipartite structure of the gnome: folk tale would call for three, not two, iterations of the same narrative situation. The Life of Aesop contra-

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venes this problem by multiplying the acts of serving the tongues: four times on the first day (three if we discount the tongue broth), the third time being stressed; and twice on the second day. In the rhetorical display delivered by Aesop, however, a bipartite schema is employed: refutation (anaskeuê) vs. confirmation (kataskeuê) of the same argument, taking the shape of an enkomium “speech of praise” and a psogos “speech of blame.” Here a contemporary rhetorical form is borrowed, but only to be parodied. A polemical renewal of an age-old motif thus has a somewhat surprising outcome: the low-class protagonist of the Life of Aesop, a text that uses elements of popular narration, combines the qualities of an Archaic sage with those of a Roman imperial rhetor. If we read this passage nonsynchronously, however, several aspects of this instantiation of the motif can be shown to have historical motivations that are distributed along different levels of formal sedimentation (patterns of folk-tale repetition, Archaic performative sophia, the rise of philosophy, imperial Roman rhetoric).53 In both readings, the treatment of the paradox of the tongue in the Life of Aesop yields only with difficulty to the approach commonly associated with the study of topoi: rather than upholding a single tradition, this text makes nonsense of it. I now turn to what I believe represents another inflection of the paradox of the tongue, roughly contemporaneous with our version of the Life of Aesop. In this case, we need to speak not of sociopolitical contestation with a single culture, but of cross-cultural (although not crosslinguistic) borrowing: a result of the reception of the Greek wisdom tradition in the environment of Hellenized Jewry. In Chapter  3 of James’s (Jakobos’s) Epistle, included in the canon of the New Testament, the speaker forewarns his addressees before they seek to become teachers (didaskaloi), lest they run the risk of greater penalty. The argument then proceeds according to a complex figurative logic: a synecdoche is first buttressed by two similes, then results in a paradox. “The man who does not sin in his tongue has achieved perfection” (εἴ τις ἐν λόγῳ οὐ πταίει, οὗτος τέλειος ἀνήρ), since the tongue is the guiding organ of the body—comparable to the bridle or a ship’s rudder. “Thus also the tongue is a small limb, yet it boasts great things” (οὕτως καὶ ἡ γλῶσσα μικρὸν μέλος ἐστὶν καὶ μεγάλα αὐχεῖ). Up to this point, the procedure is impeccable in its logic and decorum. James’s conclusion crowns logos—man’s rational capacity—with supreme attributes. There is only one step, it seems, to the pan-philosophical Logos embraced in John 1.

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Instead, the discourse veers violently into the opposite direction, as the speaker reveals the negative aspect of the tongue. Logic is abandoned in favor of direct quasi-oratorical engagement with the reader. As a modern commentator notes with apparent discomfort, “[m]ost readers will feel that the language now is becoming rhetorical rather than literal”54: See what a [small] flame sets ablaze what a [great] forest! And so the tongue is a flame, the adornment of injustice: the tongue is installed in our limbs, soiling the whole of our body and setting aflame the wheel of creation (? τὸν τροχὸν τῆς γενέσεως), being itself set aflame by Gehenna. All the nature of beasts, winged, creeping and inhabiting the sea, is being tamed and has been tamed by the nature of the human. The tongue, however, no human can tame: it is a restless evil, full of death-bringing poison. Having set the two contrasting aspects of the tongue against one another, the speaker proceeds to a paradoxical synthesis: In it we praise our lord and father and in it we curse humans who are [made] in the likeness of god; from the same mouth both praise/blessing and cursing emerge. It ought not, my brothers, be in this way. Does a spring send forth sweet and bitter water from the same source? My brothers, a fig tree cannot produce olives, nor the vine [produce] figs, nor salty water [produce] sweet water.55 There are several moves in this passage that are distinctive of the discourse of New Testament epistles, and more broadly of the biblical style, such as the use of binary oppositions, paradoxical juxtaposition, transition from individual case to generalization, and rhetorical questions. Typically, the exposition of an exemplum leads into an explicit, elaborate moral exhortation. The inherited form of the maxim (“the best and the worst thing is the tongue”), however, does not yield itself easily to a moralizing interpretation. We saw in the Life of Aesop how an enactment of this paradox is made to convey a social critique. James 3 pursues a different goal: the improvement of the morals within the framework of a universal, millenarian religion. The didactic conclusion, in effect, amounts to a call for an overhaul of the natural order of things. Following the assertion of the supreme, insurmountable power of the tongue, its ambivalence can only be exposed and lamented as a

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given that is rooted in human nature. For James, this very ambivalence is in contradiction with the moral order to which the community he addresses should aspire. The operation of this moral order is revealed through a different set of images drawn from the natural world (vegetation, spring). James’s conclusion is in keeping with the New Testament ethos: the natural world is to be reconstituted on a set of principles that would be univocal. The new world announced by the Gospels shall not be riddled by paradoxes such as the one reiterated throughout Greek intellectual history, and zestfully parodied in the Life of Aesop. The peregrinations and transformations of the paradox of the tongue indicate the validity of a Veselovskian approach to form as a sedimented, yet continuously revised expression of a cultural-historical meaning (“content”). Historical difference is manifested in modulations of inherited formal elements. My final case study extends this insight to the analysis of one of the major problems in the study of the nineteenth-century Realist style: the rise of free indirect discourse as a dominant form of narration.

4. The Birth of Free Indirect Discourse from the Spirit of Sentimentalism: A Note on Pushkin’s Bronze Horse man Modern European literary (and cultural) history poses the problem of transnational historical unities, such as Sentimentalism, Realism, or Postmodernism, which are sometimes discussed under the rubric of “movement,” “period style,” or simply literary “period.” In his 1870 lecture, Veselovsky discusses the inadequacy of considering such unities as being centered on particular writers or artists, pointing to the popularity, especially in France of the 1850s and ’60s, of books entitled Dante and His Time, Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, and so forth. That these “solitary actors” cannot legitimately be regarded as originators of shifts in Weltanschauung is too obvious to comment on today. Indeed, following the logic of Veselovsky’s argument, the manifest reality of such momentous shifts indicates the need to reverse the traditional view: the achievement of “great” individual authors consists in their ability to convey an ethos prevalent in society at a particular time period: Great personalities now appeared to be reflections of one or another movement generated by the masses, reflections which are

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more or less brilliant depending on the degree of consciousness with which these men related themselves to the movement, or the degree of energy with which they helped the movement to express itself.56 Once the link between style and worldview is established, the modulations of artistic form observed in canonical works of literature can be seen to provide principal evidence for studying the longue durée of the history of consciousness. As an illustration of the kinds of effects that worldview exerts on literary representation, Veselovsky compares Tennyson’s Idylls of the King to the romances of the Round Table cycle: Of course, you will refer to the nineteenth century that love of the Flemish side of life, which dwells on life’s details that are sometimes deprived of all interest, and to the eighteenth century you will refer that artificial relationship to nature which loves to frame every action in a landscape and to express one’s own empathy for human action in nature’s murky and allusive language. The Medieval poet might relate Erec’s feats of valor, but it would never occur to him to tell us how he rode into the courtyard of the castle of Yniol, how his horse pawed the prickly stars of the thistle which peeked out of the fissures of the stone, how he looked around and saw around him nothing but ruins.57 The contrast between a medieval romance and its resuscitation in the Romantic period is just one case where stylistic modulation of an apparently identical form can be seen to imply profound changes in worldview. By contrast, in the case of contiguous period styles, change in form and in Weltanschauung is incremental. In one of his last works, the study of Vasily Zhukovsky’s life and art (1904), Veselovsky returns to the method of using elements of style to diagnose paradigm shifts in the history of consciousness. In Veselovsky’s interpretation, Zhukovsky stands at the border between Sentimentalism, a movement that molded his poetics and psychology, and Romanticism, whose stylistic features he would come to adopt. Zhukovsky is a literary figure who exhibits—at the level of the history of style—the hysteresis effect, a term Pierre Bourdieu uses to describe an individual whose habitus is out of sync with the history of institutions:58

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Having grown up in the traditions of Sentimentalism, he not only came to own its form of thought and expression, but also deeply experienced the content of its ideals, in which nationality was overshadowed by the quest for [common] humanity. When the Romantic trends touched on him, they remained for him elements of style, which were subsumed by the mood that had already matured in him and from which he would never be able to extricate himself.59 According to Veselovsky, paradigm shifts are caused by an incremental change in worldview, or “psychic environment” (psikhicheskaia sreda); once the shift has occurred, the inherited forms become suffused with a new tenor or mood (nastroenie), and new stylistic “elements” come into existence.60 Sentimentalism is “preceded by the correspondent tenor of public psyche,” itself “a reflection of the effected social revolution”; this tenor included the valorization of the natural man and the “hypertrophy of emotion.” Seeking to provide a thick description of the sentimentalist psyche, Veselovsky draws on private diaries—a methodological move that anticipates the recent use of autobiographical documents to write the history of the self.61 In the Zhukovsky monograph, Veselovsky is interested in the transposition of a psycho-stylistic paradigm (to coin a term) to a cultural context lacking the social conditioning that originally gave rise to this paradigm. Thus, in Russia, initially “the contradictions of sentimentalism and classicism were perceived as literary, rather than inner, phenomena”; yet the impact of imported texts was such that the sentimentalist ethos entered the psychic lives of educated Russians.62 Zhukovsky presents a particularly challenging case, as his thorough identification with the sentimentalist mood even induced him to revise or resist, in his individual poetics, newly imported elements of Romanticism. A stylistic analysis that is not attentive to cultural history and the history of emotions might lead to superficial or mistaken conclusions on Zhukovsky’s stance toward Romantic poetry and his role in its mediation.63 The shift in psycho-stylistic paradigm is symptomatically reflected in diction. For example, Veselovsky speaks of the sentimentalist vogue for the epithet “silvery”—applied to light and sound, as well as nature and inner state (in “Mondschein im Herzen”)—as related to the melancholic cult of the moon; poets adhering to the classical taste were prone to extend similarly the meaning of the epithet “golden.” Linked to poetic topoi and chronotopes—the mysterious landscape, Ossianic

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vapors, and exotic apparitions—such dictional clues add up to “a system of representations and images that nourished the ballad”—which Veselovsky describes as a quintessential “Romantic” genre, but one rooted in “pre-Romanticism.”64 Romantic diction can similarly be seen as sedimented worldview; Veselovsky points to an obsession of the Romantics with the “wondrous” (German wunderbar, wundervoll, wundersam, wunderlich, seltsam) and the “unspeakable” (Russian nevyrazimoe, neizrechennoe).65 In what follows, I attempt to pinpoint a psycho-stylistic paradigm shift within two redactions of The Bronze Horseman (1833), a work that marks Pushkin’s move away from Romantic poetics toward a more “humble,” prosaic medium.66 A quest for new literary forms of expression, as so often, occasions a heightened attention to inherited elements of style. In particular, in The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin interrogates the historical longue durée through its stylistic correlates. The prologue juxtaposes the prophetic vision of Peter the Great, looking over the Finnish marshes, with its realization, “a hundred years” thence, in the splendor of the new imperial capital. Two basic stylistic resources are used to conjure the opposition between pre-colonized nature and triumphant civilization: the Romantic and the (neo)classical. The image of the tsar is that of a world-historical individual, caught in the Napoleonic contemplative pose67 on the very threshold between Myth and History. This type of representation has a Romantic pedigree, yet Peter does not display any contradictions that pit the Romantic subject against its other (the social environment, the metaphysical other-world). Instead, projected into the national past, Peter’s figure has all the attributes of a civilizing hero. L. V. Pumpiansky shows the extent of Pushkin’s dependence on the resources of the eighteenth-century neoclassical panegyrical (torzhestvennaia) ode in treating the figure of Peter and the Petersburg chronotope.68 To emphasize the deep reach of the poem’s genre memory, I would like to suggest two supplements to Pumpiansky’s exposition. First, when describing the wild landscape on which Peter plans to impose his new city, Pushkin uses the topos of “Nature as-yet-unknown/ unknowing” which goes back to Virgil’s description of an earth ignorant of either man or beast: iamque novum terrae stupeant lucescere solem altius, atque cadant submotis nubibus imbres;

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incipiant silvae cum primum surgere, cumque rara per ignaros69 errent animalia montes. (Ecl. 6.37–40) And now the earth is amazed to see the new sun beginning to shine as it rises higher; clouds removed, the rains fall; when woods begin to emerge for the first time and when infrequent animals wander through the mountains that do not know them. In the first thirty lines of The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin uses this topos three times.70 Another example of a Classical topos with an even deeper chronological reach is the image of the hostile elements seething underneath, and threatening to disrupt the civic or imperial order. This well-established motif of the European Pindaric ode, going back to the description of Aetna in Pindar’s Pythian 1, is employed by Pushkin to describe the vengeful element of the colonized “Finnish waves.”71 The oppositions between order and chaos, culture and nature, empire and the elements that are constructed in the neoclassical prologue are put to a severe test in the poem, which describes the 1824 deadly flooding of the capital. As Pumpiansky demonstrates, Pushkin builds on the precedent of Russian odic descriptions of flood, which, in turn, hearken back to the classical precedents, Horace’s Carmina 1.2 and Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1.98ff. A resolute stylistic change, nevertheless, is unmistakable. The use of realistic detail (as in the list of objects floating down the streets) and colloquial syntax contribute to the pathos-laden description of human suffering; Pumpiansky speaks of “profound seriousness” and the “humanism” of the description. The emphasis on the everyday tragedy of common people motivates the plot of the poem. The revenge of the untamed natural element is directed against an average inhabitant of the city founded by Peter: Evgenii, a character who—in accord with the unison chorus of Soviet literary critics—anticipates the “insignificant” Realist heroes of later Russian prose.72 The image of the immobile protagonist from the opening of the prologue is echoed twice, both times with an effect that emphasizes the disempowerment of the Romantic hero. First, Alexander I witnessing the flooding from the balcony of the Winter Palace acknowledges that “it is not in a tsar’s power to control the elements,” reversing the assertive stance of his dynastic predecessor. Second, the protagonist Evgenii, seated on a stone lion at the entrance of an aristocratic palazzo, in the midst of the flooding, travesties Falconet’s horseback statue

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of Peter the Great, erected by Alexander’s grandmother, Catherine the Great. The poem has always been a Paradebeispiel for Pushkin’s emergent Realist/novelistic style. Both Pumpiansky and Gukovsky point to the use of enjambment as a marker of simple, prosaic language in depicting Evgenii, contrasted with the coincidence between prosodic and syntactic units in the classicizing descriptions of Peter and the monument.73 I believe that the shift toward a Realist style can also be detected in Pushkin’s representation of the characters’ speech and thoughts. For an example of the Romantic solution to this problem, we may turn to the beginning of Pushkin’s Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1823): the Tatar khan is seated despondently, surrounded by a silent crowd of servants and underlings. In the first hundred lines the narrator and the reader try in vain to penetrate the khan’s thoughts and discover the reason for his sullenness: he does not speak, and the narrator claims no access to his consciousness. The prologue to The Bronze Horseman alludes to the mystique of the solitary sovereign, while adopting the classicizing mode of direct reportage of Peter’s prophecy, which, far from being his private matter, is eminently public in its intent and performative effect. Eugene Onegin (written in 1823–31), a novel centered on a deflated Romantic hero, has a very different kind of opening. The poem begins with a stanza of direct reportage of the protagonist’s thoughts, whose casual nature and down-to-earth motivations point decisively beyond the Romantic paradigm. The appearance of Evgenii, the protagonist of The Bronze Horseman, is preceded by a description of ominous weather and the social background of the hero, a degraded progeny of a once illustrious aristocratic family, now a petty clerk. We are presented with a human being constrained by the twofold environment of the natural and social worlds.74 Notably, the narrator claims immediate access to the mind of the character, in accord with the conventions proper—within the Russian literary tradition—to the Realist novel, rather than the Romantic novella.75 The question “What was he thinking of?” (О чем же думал он?) results not in the aporia of deciphering the facial expression of the solitary autonomous hero, but in a catalogue of his all-too-human concerns with poverty, difficulties of getting ahead socially, and the prospect of the weather causing a temporary separation from his fiancée. Significantly, the indirect reportage of Evgenii’s thoughts partakes of the character’s intonations, bordering on free indirect discourse, as in the sentence: “He was thinking [ . . . ] that there are all those vain suc-

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cesses, idlers of mediocre intellect, whose life is so very easy!” (Что ведь еcть / Такие пpаздные cчаcтливцы / Ума недальнего ленивцы / Котоpым жизнь куда легка!). This voicing, which unites the narrator and the protagonist, may be regarded as a distinctive metapragmatic device of The Bronze Horseman and is key to the empathetic characterization of Evgenii.76 The passage that testifies most eloquently to Pushkin’s experimentation in constructing a Realist hero is the one that immediately follows the indirect reportage of Evgenii’s thoughts. I give the text of the passage in two redactions,77 as shown in the accompanying table. Two Redactions of Evengii’s Thoughts Earlier Redaction [ . . . ] что pека Вcё пpибывала,78 что погода Не унималаcь, что едва ль Моcтов не cымут, что конечно Паpаше будет очень жаль . . . Тут он pазнежилcя cеpдечно И pазмечталcя как поэт: “А почему ж? за чем же нет? [Я небогат, в том нет cомненья И у Паpаши нет именья Ну что ж? какое дело нам Ужели только богачам] Женитьcя можно? я уcтpою Cебе cмиpенный уголок, Кpовать, два cтула; щей гоpшок Да cам большой . . . чего мне боле? Не будем пpихотей мы знать, По воcкpеcеньям летом в поле C Паpашей буду я гулять; Меcтечко выпpошу; Паpаше Пpепоpучу хозяйcтво наше И воcпитание pебят . . . И cтанем жить—и так до гpоба Рука c pукой дойдем мы оба И внуки наc похоpонят . . .”

[He was thinking . . . ] that the river kept rising, that the weather was not relenting, that chances are the bridges will be removed, that of course Parasha will be very sorry . . . At this point he grew mellow in his heart And gave himself to dreaming like a poet: “And why not? why not really? [I’m not rich, no doubts about it, and Parasha has no estate to her— So what? why should we care? Is it the case that only rich men May marry? I will arrange For a humble corner, A bed, two chairs, a pot of cabbage soup— A big one . . . what else do I need? We won’t care for any excess, On summer Sundays I will take Parasha for a walk in the fields. I’ll solicit for a position of sorts; hand over to Parasha our household and the upbringing of the kids. And we’ll go on living—and so, hand in hand, we’ll reach the hour of death, and our grandchildren will bury us. (continued)

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[ . . . ] что pека Вcё пpибывала; что едва ли C Невы моcтов уже не cняли И что c Паpашей будет он Дни на два, на тpи pазлучен. Евгений тут вздохнул cеpдечно И pазмечталcя, как поэт: Женитьcя? Ну . . . за чем же нет? Оно и тяжело, конечно, Но что ж, он молод и здоpов, Тpудитьcя день и ночь готов; Он кое-как cебе уcтpоит Пpиют cмиpенный и пpоcтой И в нем Паpашу уcпокоит. “Пpойдет,бытьможет,год-дpугой— Меcтечко получу—Паpаше Пpепоpучу хозяйcтво наше И воcпитание pебят . . . И cтанем жить—и так до гpоба, Рука c pукой дойдем мы оба, И внуки наc похоpонят . . .”

[He was thinking . . . ] that the river kept rising, that chances are the Neva bridges have already been removed and that he will be separated from Parasha for a couple of days. At this point he sighed in his heart And gave himself to dreaming like a poet: Get married? Well . . . why not? This is hard, of course, But then, he is young and healthy, Ready to work day and night, In one way or another he will arrange for himself A refuge humble and without pretense And there provide for Parasha’s peace. “A year or two will pass, perhaps, I will get a position of sorts, hand over to Parasha our household and the upbringing of the kids . . . And we’ll go on living—and so, hand in hand, we’ll reach the hour of death, and our grandchildren will bury us . . .”

A comparison of the two versions suggests the following hypothesis: the quest for a new poetics of the character, conceived of (originally) in opposition to the Romantic hero, leads Pushkin to experiment with sentimentalist language. A similar move can be observed in the formation of Lensky’s character in Eugene Onegin: whereas the title character is a deflated version of the Byronic hero, the dilettante poet Lensky, aligned with German Romanticism, is associated with the hackneyed language of Sentimentalism.79 An obvious parallel to the evocation of an unrealized “bourgeois” future of the hero is presented in stanza 38/39 of Book 6 of Eugene Onegin, which describes a life Lensky could have

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Stanza 38/39 from Eugene Onegin, Book 6 А может быть и то: поэта Обыкновенный ждал удел. Пpошли бы юношеcтва лета: В нем пыл души бы охладел. Во многом он бы изменилcя, Раccталcя б c музами, женилcя, В деpевне cчаcтлив и pогат Ноcил бы cтеганый халат; Узнал бы жизнь на cамом деле, Подагpу б в cоpок лет имел, Пил, ел, cкучал, толcтел, хиpел. И наконец в cвоей поcтеле Cкончалcя б поcpеди детей, Плакcивых баб и лекаpей.

Or maybe he was merely fated To live amid the common tide; And as his years of youth abated, The flame within him would have died. In time he might have changed profoundly, Have quit the Muses, married soundly; And in the country he’d have worn A quilted gown and cuckold’s horn, And happy, he’d have learned life truly; At forty he’d have had the gout, Have eaten, drunk, grown bored and stout, And so decayed, until he duly Passed on in bed . . . his children round, While women wept and doctors frowned (trans. by James Falen)

lived had he survived the duel. (This stanza is quoted in the accompanying table.) James Falen’s translation of this passage does away with some of the harshness of prosaic detail, especially the derogatory плакcивых баб “whiny dames,” which gives a dissonant conclusion to the stanza. In The Bronze Horseman, Evgenii’s autobiographical prolepsis (implicitly contrasted with Peter’s prophecy in the prologue) derives its poignant effect—ex post facto—from the fact that it would not be realized. And while in Lensky’s case the prospect of an average life stands in a bathetic contrast with a stanza that hypothetically conferred on him the glory of a great poet, no such grand alternative is present in Evgenii’s case. The humble self-contented existence he imagines marks his highest aspiration; this is the best life he could have had.80 Commenting on the draft version of Evgenii’s monologue, Grigory Gukovsky suggests that Pushkin abandoned the draft version “perhaps because the monologue created an ironic tone with regard to Evgenii . . . depreciated him . . . such a tone with respect to Evgenii could lower the tragic aspect of his later fate, the tragic aspect of his whole image and the very motivation of his madness.”81 I concur with Gukovsky’s general conclusions, but his analysis fails to uncover Pushkin’s work on literary form in this crucial passage.

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The earlier draft reveals that Pushkin is approaching the task of representing the “insignificant” proto-novelistic hero with a sentimentalist toolbox. It appears that the only way to represent a character engaged in contemplating a future life with his beloved is to cast him as a sentimentalist poet obeying his “heart.” Both the “heart” and the “poet” remain in the revised version of the passage, although Pushkin removes the obviously ironic “grow mellow” (pазнежилcя). The motivation for Evgenii’s rumination is also revised. In the earlier draft it is prompted by the thought that Parasha “would be very sorry” because of the separation. By contrast, the prospect of separation lasting “a couple of days,” presented as an objective fact that is not colored by an overt emotional reaction (and thus revealed as insignificant in the context of a life that—the hero hopes—lies ahead), occasions a detached, reasoned commentary on the future. The crucial stylistic change, however, lies in the technique of representing Evgenii’s consciousness. In contrast to the earlier version, the later redaction includes six lines that serve as a transition between indirect and direct reportage of Evgenii’s thoughts. These six lines—a perfect example of free indirect discourse—are also those that contain the major changes compared to the earlier draft. A characteristically novelistic form emerges as a solution to a stylistic challenge posed by a new worldview. Free indirect discourse is a zone where the discourse of the narrator mingles with the discourse of the character. In our case, colloquialisms such as “But then” or “In one way or another” stand next to religious idioms “a refuge humble and without pretense” and “provide for Parasha’s peace” that reflect the tenor of Evgenii’s thoughts, but cannot be plausibly ascribed to his inner discourse. It is the empathetic encounter between the narrator and the character, only possible within free indirect discourse, that enables what Auerbach, in Mimesis, saw as distinctive to nineteenth-century Realism: the combination of high (“serious”) style with mundane detail. A new metapragmatic regime had to be invented to speak of the common man and his fate.82 A sentimentalist substrate in Realism is, of course, not unique to Pushkin; it is quite overt, for example, in Dickens and early Dostoevsky. More broadly, the persistence of sentimentalist language, which was available for various poetic and political uses in the nineteenth century, is the main subject of Veselovsky’s book on Zhukovsky. The case of The Bronze Horseman is particularly instructive in that it shows how a slight formal modulation can convert a sentimentalist character into a Realist one. Ostensibly an inconsequential stylistic choice, the adop-

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tion of free indirect speech here inaugurates a new author-hero configuration. On one hand, the rise of the empathetic mode of representing speech and thought betokens the hero-centered aesthetics that Bakhtin saw as distinctive of the modern age.83 On the other hand, Sentimentalism’s resilience illustrates the persistence of seemingly outdated cultural and literary forms, against whose background emergent elements are more easily recognized. To complete a Veselovskian reading of The Bronze Horseman, we should ask what conditioned the rise of a Realist worldview and a Realist style in Pushkin. A key to the sociohistorical interpretation is not far to seek in the text of the poem. Evgenii, an atomized individual facing the elements of nature (and of history), is a scion of a degenerate aristocratic family.84 The reader—Pushkin adds—may perhaps find an account of Evgenii’s illustrious ancestors, about whom Evgenii himself “grieves little,” in Karamzin’s History of the Russian State; yet to speak of Evgenii (we infer), a new style is needed, one that is antithetical to historiographic encomium. The decline of the Russian nobility— brought in scandalously inappropriate relation to other social strata (in Dostoevsky), manifested in its internal discord (in Turgenev), lamented for its inadequacy (in Goncharov), or celebrated in a nostalgic vein (in Tolstoy)—will be a constant theme in later Russian Realism. The vision of history as nonsynchronous reveals the place of The Bronze Horseman in the Bakhtinian “great time” of Russian and European culture. As I suggested in section 2, a similar construal of historical time, combined with the recognition of the productively dialogic relation between cultures, opens a way for interpreting motifs as sedimented semantic aggregates. Finally, a two-tiered approach to genre suggested by Veselovsky—as, on the one hand, realization of linguistic parameters and, on the other, as mutating literary form—presents a viable solution to the dilemma of universalism vs. historicism in genre theory. These three case studies in methodology suggest the value of Veselovsky’s work in Historical Poetics for different modes of literary interpretation: close reading of a canonical text, history of an inherited formal element, and theoretical reflection on fundamental structures of verbal art.

Notes 1. On Veselovsky’s twentieth-century reception, see Boris Maslov, “Comparative Literature and Revolution, or the Many Arts of (Mis)Reading Alexander Veselovsky,” Compar(a)ison 2008 [2013] 2: 101–29. The

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entrenchment of istoricheskaia poetika in Russian scholarship has resulted in the creation of a systematic account intended for use as a college textbook: S. N. Broitman, Istoricheskaia poetika: uchebnoe posobie (Moscow: RGGU, 2001). Among Broitman’s works, which uphold a particular variety of Historical Poetics, this is perhaps the least compelling contribution. See the introduction in this volume for a more detailed discussion of the Russian tradition of Historical Poetics. 2. Veselovsky only rarely uses the word zhanr ‘genre,’ perhaps because of its association with French aestheticist criticism, preferring a broader term formy ‘forms.’ Cf. I. O. Shaitanov, “Klassicheskaia poetika neklassicheskoi epokhi” in Alexander Veselovskii. Izbrannoe: Istoricheskaia poetika (St. Petersburg: Universitetskaia kniga, 2011), pp. 5–50, at pp. 33–34. 3. Gérard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, trans. by J. E. Lewin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). See also: Claude Calame, “La poésie lyrique grecque, un genre inexistant?” Littérature 111 (1998): 87–110. 4. Genette, The Architext, p. 29; cf. also Earl Miner, Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 7–8. 5. Genette, The Architext, p. 39. 6. Bruno Snell, Entdeckung des Geistes: Studien zur Entstehung des europäischen Denkens bei den Griechen (Hamburg: Claaszen & Govets, 1946), translated into English by Thomas Rosenmeyer: Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1960). 7. Genette, The Architext, pp. 70, 76. 8. Basic to Genette’s definition of these transhistorical kinds of discourse is “the capacity for dispersion (among diverse cultures) and for spontaneous recurrence (without the stimulus of a tradition, revival, or ‘retro’ style)” (p. 69). Miner posits the triadic system of genres as a cross-cultural constant, but does not inquire into its linguistic foundation (Comparative Poetics, p. 8). 9. Genette, The Architext, pp. 6–7. 10. On the place of Archaic lyric in fourth-century Athens, see Gregory Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 382–413; Andrew Ford, The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 201–8. 11. While Veselovsky’s notion of choral syncretism remains useful for theorizing drama and lyric, comparative evidence shows that narrative prose storytelling often develops separately from musical ritual; see E. M. Meletinskii, “Pervobytnye istoki slovesnogo iskusstva,” in Rannie formy

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iskusstva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972), pp.  149–90 (available online at http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/meletinsky6.htm). 12. A. N. Veselovsky, “On the Methods and Aims of Literary History as a Science,” trans. Harry Weber, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 16 (1967): 33–42, at 39; translation amended. 13. Veselovsky, “On the Methods,” pp. 39–40; translation amended. 14. See Chapter 1, p. 54. 15. As an analogy, Veselovsky points to the oddity of historical grammar dwelling on the phonology of dead languages, instead of observing similar processes of sound change in living dialects (p. 43). 16. See Chapter 1, p. 55. 17. See Chapter 1, p. 56. 18. See section 1 in the introduction to this volume, and Chapters 3 and 8 for some pertinent observations. 19. See also Chapter 10 for another illustration of the relevance of recent work in anthropology to Historical Poetics. 20. Michael Silverstein, “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function,” in Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, ed. J. A. Lucy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 33–58. 21. M. M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. V. W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 60–102. 22. Different instantiations of genre hybridity are discussed in Chapter 8 (Bakhtin’s classic analysis of the novel based on the Menippean satire), Chapter 12 (Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov as a synthesis of different religious and legendary narratives), and Chapter 15 (cult hymn as a substratum of the Homeric epic). 23. The reference is to Erving Goffman, “Footing,” Semiotica 25 (1979): 1–29. 24. Silverstein, “Metapragmatic Discourse,” p. 35. 25. M.  M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84–258. 26. Roman Jakobson, “Randbemerkungen zur Prosa des Dichters Pasternak” (1935), in Selected Writings, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), 5:416–32, at 419, where Jakobson also correlates epic with the past, and lyric with the present tense. 27. E. S. Dallas in 1852, in fact, aligned drama with the second person; see Genette, The Architext, p.  48. Cf. Jakobson, “Randbemerkungen,” p. 424 for a hint at this alignment. 28. While the “reflexive” owes most to Jakobson’s “poetic function” (see below), Silverstein’s categories of the “nomic” and the “reportive” are

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inspired by Benjamin Whorf’s analysis of the three epistemic principles in Hopi. See Benjamin L. Whorf, “Some Verbal Categories of Hopi” (1938), in Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956), pp. 112– 24, at 113–15. 29. Silverstein, “Metapragmatic Discourse,” p. 40. 30. Philippe Lejeune speaks of “the gap between the subject of enunciation and that of the statement” in autobiography, which corresponds to “gaps in perspective between narrator and hero” (“Autobiography in the Third Person,” New Literary History 9.1 [1977]: 27–50, at 31). For an argument that a disjunction within the self is imperative for autobiographical discourse, see Robert Folkenflik, “The Self as Other,” in The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, ed. Folkenflik (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 215–34. 31. In written and often in oral medium, there is no necessary correlation of reportive calibration with the employment of indirect (rather than direct) discourse. For example, Homer, who almost never uses indirect discourse, would invariably use a quotative formula—an explicit means of metapragmatic regimentation—before a character’s speech. 32. R. Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics” (1958), in Style in Language, ed. T. A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press of MIT, 1960), pp. 350–77. 33. Silverstein, “Metapragmatic Discourse,” p. 52. 34. A dramatic actor does not usually use intonation to mark his attitude toward the character’s discourse—a rule that, as a matter of exception, is subverted in Brecht. 35. Alexandr Veselovskii, Istoricheskaia poetika (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1940), p. 493. 36. The problem of the conservatism of form in Veselovsky is discussed in Chapter 2. 37. Elsewhere in Poetics of the Plot, Veselovsky uses the English word survival alongside Russian perezhivanie to clarify the ethnographic import of this notion, introduced by Edward Burnett Tylor in Primitive Culture (1871). See section 1 in the introduction, introductory note to Chapter 1, and Chapter 7 for further discussion. 38. Veselovskii, Istoricheskaia poetika, pp. 493–94. 39. Shklovsky disputes this distinction in “On the relation of devices of emplotment to general devices of style,” included in his Theory of Prose (1925), pointing to the likelihood of similar plots developing independently, based on immanent principles of narrative construction. 40. Veselovskii, Istoricheskaia poetika, p. 498. 41. Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1948), translated into English by Williard R. Trask: European Literature

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and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). Parting with the rhetorical definition of topos, Curtius uses the term to refer to any traditional element of the text. Peter Jehn offers a thorough critique of Curtius, accusing him of fetishizing the philological method with the covert aims of idealist Geistesgeschichte; see Peter Jehn, “Ernst Robert Curtius: Toposforschung als Restauration,” in Idem, ed., Toposforschung: eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1972), pp. vii-lxiv, esp. p. xv. For a more generous recent assessment of Curtius’s theory of topoi, see Erkki Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Achaeology as Topos Study,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 27–47. 42. See A. E. Makhov, “Veselovskii—Curtius: Istoricheskaia poetika— istoricheskaia ritorika,” Voprosy literatury 2010, no. 3, pp. 182–202. 43. For alternative construals of tradition within Historical Poetics (particularly, in Bakhtin) see Chapter 8; for Toposforschung and Historical Poetics see also Chapter 7. 44. Veselovskii, Istoricheskaia poetika, p. 497. This position is already expressed in Veselovsky’s early methodological reflections, translated into English as “Envisioning World Literature in 1863: From the Reports on a Mission Abroad,” trans. Jennifer Flaherty, PMLA 128.2 (2013): 439–51, at 447–48. 45. See “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics” in Chapter 1; on Veselovsky’s cosmopolitan vision, see Chapter 12. 46. For a discussion of the evolution of Veselovsky’s theory of vstrechnye techeniia, see A. L. Toporkov in Teoriia mifa v russkoi filologicheskoi nauke XIX veka (Moscow: Indrik, 1997), pp. 355–70. 47. Plutarch, Banquet of the Seven Sages, ch. 2, 146f., trans. Frank Cole Babbitt. Leslie Kurke, Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 218–19. 48. See also Richard Martin, “The Seven Sages as Performers of Wisdom,” in Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics, ed. C. Dougherty and L. Kurke, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; reprinted by Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 108–28. 49. Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 120. For more on pre-philosophical sophia, see G. B. Kerferd, “The Image of the Wise Man in Greece in the Period Before Plato,” in Images of Man in Ancient and Medieval Thought: Studia Gerardo Verbeke ab amicis et collegis dicata, ed. F. Bossier et al. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1976), pp. 17–28. 50. Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, p. 101. 51. On the origin of this motif see Ioannis M. Konstantakos, “Trial by Riddle: The Testing of the Counsellor and the Contest of Kings in the

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Legend of Amasis and Bias,” Classica et Mediaevalia 55 (2004): 85–138, who notes that this gnome seems to be of Greek origin (p. 118), although it often occurs next to borrowed motifs. In the philosophical tradition, “the gnome is transformed into a real narrative, a small episode or anecdote” (p. 98), and it undergoes “further narrative expansion” in the Life of Aesop (p. 102). 52. Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, pp.  220–22; the reference is to Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984). The original work, published in 1965, goes back to Bakhtin’s doctoral dissertation on Rabelais (1940). 53. On nonsynchronicity in Historical Poetics, see section  1  in the introduction. 54. R. R. Williams, The Letters of John and James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 120–21. 55. μὴ δύναται, ἀδελφοί μου, συκῆ ἐλαίας ποιῆσαι ἢ ἄμπελος σῦκα; οὔτε ἁλυκὸν γλυκὺ ποιῆσαι ὕδωρ. Contrast the usual translation of the last phrase: “Thus no spring yields both salt water and fresh water.” 56. Veselovsky, “On the Methods,” p. 35. 57. Veselovsky, “On the Methods,” p. 40; translation amended. 58. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 62. 59. Alexandr Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii: poeziia chuvstva i “serdechnogo voobrazheniia” (Moscow: INTRADA, 1999), p. 31. 60. See Chapter 9 for the English translation of the first chapter of the book. 61. See Chapter 9, p. 263. 62. See Chapter 9, p. 265. 63. Ilya Vinitsky, in Chapter 11, discusses the relevance of Veselovsky’s study of Zhukovsky to the field of the history of emotions. 64. See Chapter 9, p. 262. 65. Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, pp. 375–78. 66. I am referring to Pushkin’s ironic assessment of this shift in Eugene Onegin, Book 3, stanza 13. 67. Such statuesque descriptions of mythical actors can be traced back to Pindar; see Paolo Vivante, “The Sculptural Moment in Pindar,” Arion, 3rd ser., 13.2 (2005): 1–20. Remotely relevant is the immobile Ossianic figure in Derzhavin’s “Vodopad,” which seems to have influenced the description of the statue; see L. V. Pumpianskii, “ ‘Mednyi vsadnik’ i poeticheskaia traditsiia XVIII veka” (1939), in Klassicheskaia traditsiia: sobranie trudov po istorii russkoi literatury (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), pp. 158–96, at pp. 185–86. 68. Pumpianskii, “ ‘Mednyi vsadnik’.” 69. The majority of MSS have ignotos ‘unknown.’

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70. Cf.: “woods, unknown to the rays / of the sun, hidden in the fog” (леc, неведомый лучам / В тумане cпpятанного cолнца ll. 9–10); “hither, on the waves new to them, all flags will be our guests” (cюда по новым им волнам / Вcе флаги будут в гоcти к нам ll. 18–19); “where in the times of old the Finnish fisherman . . . / Cast into unknown waters / His threadbare seine” (Где пpежде финcкий pыболов . . . Бpоcал в неведомые воды / Cвой ветхий невод ll. 25–29). The sublime topos of immensurable nature is a staple of Romantic poetry, cf. the beginning of Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo, whose similarity to the opening of Pushkin’s poem is striking and may even indicate an intertextual link. 71. Stella P. Revard, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700 (Tempe, Ariz.: Brepolis, 2009), pp. 10, 117, 158, 184, 192. 72. E.g.: Pumpianskii, “ ‘Mednyi vsadnik’,” p. 159; G. A. Gukovskii, Pushkin i problemy realisticheskogo stilia (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1957), pp. 396–9. On the “insignificant hero” in Western Realism, see also Viktor Zhirmunsky, “Problemy sravnitel’noistoricheskogo izucheniia literatur” (1960), in Fol’klor Zapada i Vostoka: sravnitel’no-istoricheskie ocherki (Moscow: OGI, 2004), pp. 74–75. 73. Pumpianskii, “‘Mednyi vsadnik’,” pp. 193–94; Gukovskii, Pushkin, pp. 408–9. 74. Adopting Ferenc Fehér’s Marxist terminology, these are the “first” and “acquired” nature of the novelistic hero, both subject to increased reification in the capitalist era. See Ferenc Fehér, “Is the Novel Problematic? A Contribution to the Theory of the Novel,” trans. Anne-Marie Dibon, Telos 15 (1973): 47–74, reprinted in A. Heller and F. Fehér, eds., Reconstructing Aesthetics: Writings of the Budapest School (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 23–59. 75. See Victoria Somoff, The Imperative of Reliability: Russian Prose on the Eve of the Novel, 1820–1850 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015). 76. This empathetic variety of free indirect discourse occurs in two pathos-laden moments in the poem: (1) Evgenii’s contemplation of the waves and the anticipation of the consequences that the flooding may have on the neighborhood where Parasha resides and (2) the moment of his arrival on the scene. Efim Etkind sees this discursive convergence of “the small man” and “the poet-prophet” as the chief device of the poem; see Psikhopoetika (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo SPb, 2005), pp. 45–51. On the use of a similar technique in Eugene Onegin, see Craig Cravens, “Lyric and Narrative Consciousness in Eugene Onegin,” Slavic and East European Journal 46.4 (2002): 683–709. Free indirect discourse need not be empathetic; cf. the reportage of Mazeppa’s words to Peter in Pushkin’s Poltava (1928), Book 1, discussed in V. N. Voloshinov [M. M. Bakhtin], Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), translated by Ladislav Matejka

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and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 155. 77. The text follows A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 17 tomakh (Moscow: Voskresen’e, 1994–1996), 5:489, 139. 78. Variant: Вcё пpибывает (Keeps rising). 79. This particular alignment is commented on by Veselovsky with reference to Andrei Turgenev in V. A. Zhukovskii, 77. 80. The disjecta membra of Evgenii’s imagined middle-class bliss are found in the final episode of the poem, when his dead body is found at the threshold of what appears to be the ruins of Parasha’s house, at a small island occasionally visited by clerks during their Sunday boat trips. 81. Gukovskii, Pushkin, 404. 82. While one may attribute a pathbreaking quality to Pushkin’s experiments with free indirect discourse, instances of free indirect discourse are quite common in eighteenth-century literature (especially in Britain), and attested in earlier periods. As Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1993), has argued, free indirect discourse can be generated spontaneously, even in spoken speech, and need not have a literary function. In Veselovsky’s terms, it is a “natural” form of discourse, but one that may acquire a special significance in particular historical periods. The role of free indirect discourse in nineteenth-century Realism, beginning with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and beyond is amply commented upon in criticism; see the classic studies by Ann Banfield, “Where Epistemology, Style, and Grammar Meet Literary History: The Development of Represented Speech and Thought,” New Literary History 9.3 (1978): 415–454 and Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 99–140. 83. See Chapter 8 on Bakhtin’s theorization of the author-hero nexus in relation to his understanding of modernity. 84. Cf.  B.  V. Tomashevskii, “Istorizm Pushkina” (1954), in Pushkin: Raboty raznykh let (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), pp. 175–77.

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Chapter 5

The Oresteia in the Odyssey (1946) O LG A F REID EN BERG

Olga Freidenberg (1890–1955) was a Classical scholar whose method— which she referred to as semantics or semantic paleontology—is often hailed as a precursor to Structuralism and semiotics. Its principal orientation was, however, historical. In her determination to uncover the deeply primitive, yet diachronically recoverable past of culture and literature, Freidenberg continues the line of inquiry of Alexander Veselovsky, some of whose arguments (such as his positing of a primeval synthetic unity of genres) she contests. More broadly, her work may also be compared, for example, to Walter Burkert’s later studies on the pre-cultural origins of ancient religions or to the genealogically oriented studies of Mikhail Bakhtin on the carnival and on genre memory. Interestingly, Bakhtin’s interest in genre postdates Freidenberg’s Poetics of Plot and Genre (1936), a book which he is known to have read attentively.1 Freidenberg’s other important works are Lectures on the Introduction to a Theory of Ancient Folklore (1939–1943) and Image and Concept (1954; English translation: 1997). The succinct and lucid analysis of the parallelism in the myths of Odysseus and the House of Atreus, translated here, illustrates one aspect of her diachronic approach to Greek mythology.2 According to Freidenberg, the proliferation of analogous mythical images at a primitive mythopoetic stage can be shown to be later replaced by a unitary plot—a transitional moment at which the representation of particular characters may become more complex and charged with ethical motivation.3 165

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The story of Agamemnon is told in the Odyssey twelve times. First it is recounted by Zeus (1.29). In spite of the prophecy, Aegisthus married the spouse of the Atrides, whom he then murdered upon his return home; Aegisthus neglected the gods’ advice and Orestes’ revenge—and had to pay for everything. Athena is more succinct (1.298). She only reminds [Telemachus] of the glory of Orestes, who killed the deceitful “father-slayer.” Nestor (3.197) at first only mentions the return of the Atrides, the murder, and Orestes’ revenge. In almost the same words, Athena again speaks about the same events (3.234). Telemachus questions Nestor about the murder of Agamemnon (3.248). Nestor gives a detailed response (3.255). Clytemnestra had no evil intent at all, while Aegisthus ensnared her with deceit. He did away with the singer who was her guardian, and, upon her spouse’s return, slew him as well. He reigned for seven years, and in the eighth year Orestes arrived and killed him along with his mother. Menelaus tells the same story from the perspective of Proteus (4.512). Agamemnon was carried by a sea storm to Aegisthus’s father, and then returned home. Aegisthus’s spy noticed him. Aegisthus concealed twenty men, went to meet Agamemnon and invited him, along with his companions, to a feast, where he killed them all. Proteus did not know whether Aegisthus was alive or had already died by Orestes’ hand. Odysseus (13.383) is very brief. He is sure that he was also destined to perish in his home, if not for Athena’s aid. Finally, Agamemnon’s shade tells the story three times (11.405; 24.95, 199). Odysseus reports on his meeting with the shade and the questions he posed to it regarding Agamemnon’s death (11.387). The shade provides the most detailed version. It places a special emphasis on the abominable role of the wife. It was along with her that Aegisthus killed the king and his companions at the feast. The wife slew Cassandra; she also failed to close the eyes and the lips of her husband. He was returning to his children, only to be murdered by the perfidious wife. The shade cautions Odysseus against trusting his wife and advises him to make his return in secret. Agamemnon’s second narrative in Hades contains a mention of being murdered by Aegisthus and betrayed by his wife. In his third narrative Agamemnon speaks of the crime of his wife and her evil memory in posterity. The twelve variations of the Oresteia that are included in the Odyssey cannot, of course, be considered merely epic inset narrative. The myth of Agamemnon’s return is not out of place in a poem about Odysseus’s return. Are the two stories indeed connected in Homer’s text? Very much so, as it turns out. As soon as Zeus speaks about Aegisthus,

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Athena begins to speak about Odysseus (1.45). Athena cites Orestes as an example for Telemachus, to whom he should assimilate himself (1.301). By referring to Orestes, Nestor incites Telemachus to become an avenging son (3.196): here an identification of Agamemnon and Odysseus, Aegisthus and the suitors, Orestes and Telemachus is implied. Telemachus responds to this by expressing a wish to take his revenge on the suitors in the same way as Orestes took his revenge (3.205). The identification is continued further, as Athena contrasts the fates of Odysseus and Agamemnon (3.232). Then Telemachus begins to ask Nestor about the death of Agamemnon, as if he traveled to him for that purpose. The entire narrative of Nestor is addressed to Telemachus, and in his advice he identifies the behavior of the two avenging sons. It is only in view of the identification of Telemachus and Orestes, and the intertwining of the nostoi of Odysseus and Agamemnon that Telemachus’s journey to Agamemnon’s brother becomes meaningful. Menelaus provides a detailed account of the Oresteia (4.512–549), and only speaks of Odysseus in passing and in a few words (555–560). Yet most illustrative is the Oresteia that is recounted by Odysseus himself. It is here that Odysseus identifies himself with Agamemnon, with the difference that in one case the death actually took place, and in the other it merely could have taken place. In Hades, Agamemnon addresses Odysseus directly; among the male shades, his is the first to appear. If we exclude Elpenor and Tiresias, who have special roles to play, this priority by itself betokens Agamemnon’s proximity to Odysseus; among the female shades, the first to appear to Odysseus is his mother. In Agamemnon’s story, the emphasis is on the parallelism between Clytemnestra and Penelope, Odysseus and Agamemnon. Having recounted the crime of his wife, Agamemnon turns to the wife of Odysseus and advises him to be on guard against her secret perfidy; having first acknowledged her virtuousness, he nevertheless calls on Odysseus to conceal his return so as to avoid the fate which befell him; speaking of Telemachus he shifts to Orestes. Immediately following on the conversation of Agamemnon and Achilles about Aegisthus, the shades of the suitors appear and tell how they were slain by Odysseus (24.99). Finally, Agamemnon contrasts Penelope and Clytemnestra; this passage on the fate of Odysseus is a direct continuation of those words of Agamemnon where he laments his fate and tells Achilles about his death. In sum, in all twelve instances the myth of Agamemnon is fused directly with the myth of Odysseus; husbands and sons are equated,

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wives are contrasted. The components of both myths are the same: a husband, an aspiring husband, a son, and a wife. The husband returns from a campaign; the wife is in the power of the aspirant; a conflict takes place; one of the parties perishes; avenging sons also return from afar. There is a similar commonality between the wives. Clytemnestra at first rejected Aegisthus’s disgraceful proposal and was filled with good intentions; Aegisthus put a spell on her with his words (3.264). Penelope preens herself before appearing to the suitors; she “gives hopes to all and promises herself to each, sending messages” (13.379). It is here that Odysseus says that he would have perished like Agamemnon, if not for Athena’s aid. And Athena comes to the rescue at the very moment when Penelope is already betraying her husband. Penelope fuses with Clytemnestra even more in Agamemnon’s narrative, when he cautions Odysseus to beware of the perfidy of his wife and return secretly. The suitors are represented as a plurality, but their leader, Antinoos, had the intention not only to marry Penelope but also to acquire the kingdom by killing Telemachus (22.49). This Antinoos, who in his role is a double of Aegisthus, is the first whom Odysseus slays at the feast. The actual (mass) murder at the feast figures in both myths; the difference is that in one case it is Agamemnon and his companions who are killed, in the other, Antinoos and his companions. As we see, the myth is built on both a direct and a reverse symmetry. Odysseus has his Telemachus, but also his Antinoos, as Agamemnon has Orestes (the “mother-slayer”) and Aegisthus (the “father-slayer”) (1.299; 3.197, etc.). Does there exist, however, a figure who stands in a reverse symmetrical relation to Telemachus and Orestes?4 Orestes’ companion and friend is Pylades, whose name represents an epithet of Death.5 Pylades as Orestes’ associate removes the need for a supplementary character, who would embody the death-dealing, negative traits of Orestes. Telemachus, for his part, carries nothing dark in him, and so his “reverse,” death-signifying mythical traits must be embodied in someone else. And they are, in fact, embodied in Antinoos. Much that has not survived from Greek mythology was preserved in Byzantine folklore. Here we find numerous tales (of the type of the tale of the wise Ahiqar) that include an evil son. He betrays his father and, while his father, a wise sufferer, is languishing in confinement, he arranges feasts in his father’s home, beats trusty slaves, forces the wife of the father to serve the guests, and so on. Finally, the father, thanks to his wisdom, regains his freedom and restores his rights, and the son dies. Antinoos stands at the head of the conspiracy against Telemachus and

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is the initiating party in the murder plot; in the Oresteia, Aegisthus is such a failed murderer of Orestes, and in post-Homeric folklore it is Electra who secretly rescues Orestes from the hand of Aegisthus. In the Odyssey, each actor has a whole series of duplicates along the axes of direct and reverse symmetry, and this plurality of the doublings betokens deeper archaism than in the Oresteia: there Aegisthus is alone, here there is a multitude of them, and it is easy to show how each slave, each slave girl duplicates, in their function, either Odysseus, or Telemachus, or Antinoos, or Penelope.6 Thus, the presence of the Oresteia in the Odyssey is explained by shared constructive laws of myth-making. Here we find two versions of one and the same myth from the cycle of nostoi, with the difference that in one case the return is cast in the metaphors of a new marriage, in the other, the metaphors of death. Where the myth adopts the marriage version, Odysseus slays the suitors of his wife and reclaims the husband’s rights; the son is with him. In the Oresteia, by contrast, we are given a “reverse” version—that of death. Here the husband is murdered, the aspirant is murdered, and the wife is murdered. Orestes alone remains. The myth’s further development would be out of place in the Odyssey. Yet it must be known in order that the presence of the Oresteia in the Odyssey may be appreciated. The tragedians show the entire myth to its end, because they are not constrained by the motif of return. And here we discover that by the time Orestes remains as the sole survivor, Electra and Pylades have already appeared on stage, and it is their marriage that concludes the Oresteia. Thus we have a tale of “the white bull-calf.”7 The story of the parents is in the past, and the myth begins anew with the same components, yet with names and functions interchanged. One character is entirely destined for death—that is Agamemnon with his wife and her friend; the other entirely for life—that is Odysseus with his wife and son, but also Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, with his sister and his friend, who is her husband. The myth operates with stationary images and has no way of characterizing anyone. In place of internal motion, it moves around and renames its figures. In this way, in dramatized myth, the characterization of the milieu is replaced by several rotating stage sceneries (periaktoi). In the epic [narrated] myth, this function is performed by a parallel group of figures, united by a motif that stands in a “reverse” relation to the central narrative. The Oresteia in the Odyssey represents a frontal method of narration, which as yet knows not how to describe or to

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characterize, but instead provides supplementary or new traits by way of direct demonstration of the sharply drawn reverse side of what is the same, yet is named and dramatized differently.

Notes 1. On Bakhtin and Freidenberg, see Chapter 10, pp. 310–11, n. 47. 2. Translated and edited by Boris Maslov. All footnotes belong to the editor. The piece was published as “Oresteiia v Odissee,” Nauchnyi biulleten’ LGU 1946, no. 6, pp. 18–21. I thank Nina Braginskaya for her advice on this translation. 3. Nina Perlina, Ol’ga Freidenberg’s Works and Days (Bloomington, 2002) provides the best introduction to Freidenberg’s intellectual background; on her pioneering work on the ancient novel, see Nina Braginskaia, “From the Marginals to the Center: Olga Freidenberg’s Works on the Greek Novel,” Ancient Narrative 2 (2002): 64–85. Freidenberg’s theory of metaphor is discussed by Richard Martin in this volume and Boris Maslov, “From (Theogonic) Mythos to (Poetic) Logos,” JANER 12 (2012) 49–77; the latter contains a brief summary in English of Freidenberg’s lectures on the Theory of Folklore. On Freidenberg as a precursor to structuralism and semiotics, see Yu. M. Lotman, “O. M. Freidenberg as a Student of Culture” (1973) in Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union, ed. and trans. H. Baran (White Plains, N.Y., 1974), 257–68. For further discussion of this piece, see Chapter 10, p. 287. 4. The implication is that Odysseus is parallel to Agamemnon, and Telemachus to Orestes (these figures are in a relationship of “direct symmetry”); both Odysseus and Agamemnon have their “dark” analogues, in Antinoos and Aegisthus (to which they stand in a “reverse symmetry”). Both female figures—Penelope and Clytemnestra—combine positive and negative traits. The question that Freidenberg poses here is whether Telemachus and Orestes have negative equivalents. For an elaboration of Freidenberg’s analysis of character doubles, see Jurij M. Lotman, “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology,” trans. Julian Graffy, Poetics Today 1.1/2 (1979): 161–84, esp. 164–67. 5. The metaphor is that of “the gates,” which, in Freidenberg’s semantic analysis, indicates a transition to the other-world as it is conceived of at an early mythopoetic stage. See Olga Freidenberg, Mif i literatura drevnosti (Ekaterinburg, 2007), p. 81. 6. The notion that primitive mythical consciousness generates multiple mirroring or doubling images is most fully discussed in From the Lectures on the History of Ancient Folklore (see Mif i literatura drevnosti [Ekaterinburg, 2007], pp. 75–85, 156–59 and passim). In her discussion of myths,

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Freidenberg uses the term metaphor to refer to these “sub-images” which all represent, or refer back to, a central mythological image; thus, as Freidenberg goes on to explain in the following paragraph, the central myth of return (nostos) can be instantiated by “metaphors” or sub-images of marriage or of death. 7. The tale of the white bull-calf is an instance of, and a proverbial name for, the Russian folk genre of a tiresome or tedious tale (dokuchnaya skazka), in which one of the elements is repeated ad nauseam.

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Chapter 6

Innovation Disguised as Tradition Commentary and the Genesis of Art Forms N IN A   V. BRAG IN S KAYA

1. Toward a Definition: Commentary as a Prob lem For millennia, in a wide variety of different cultures, connected or not, commentary has been an unquestioned and indeed the most respected form of studying a text. We might think of such traditions as Neoplatonism, Confucianism, Mishna and the Talmud, Christian exegesis, Indian, Arabic, and other traditions of commentary. It is only in recent years, however, that commentary has become a problem in and of itself. The European tradition of commentary has been reliant upon an unspoken consensus about what commentary is; this consensus has been passed down from teacher to student, based in a robust, albeit implicit understanding of how and why it is to be undertaken. It is only recently that this tradition has sought to transform these “unconscious” cultural skills into an object of reflection and public discussion. This effort took on an institutionalized form in Western countries at the end of the twentieth century and in Russia at the beginning of the twenty-first, when about ten different conferences devoted to commentary were held, and a corresponding number of volumes of conference proceedings were published.1 Nevertheless, we are still a long way from achieving the objectives laid out by the organizers of those scholarly undertakings. These objectives were: to elaborate the concept of commentary as a cultural-historical phenomenon, based on the comparative study of its various traditions; to propose a taxonomy and 172

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typology of commentary; and to write its history. At best, the existing taxonomies follow the classifications of the traditions to which the commentaries in question belong.2 Commentary is often classified thematically, according to its object. This may mean classifying it according to whether the subject matter is a religious text, Babylonian, ancient Hebrew, Greek, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist and Muslim, or a scientific, philosophical, or literary one. To this we may add commentaries that deal with paintings and sculptural works. The dominant paradigm of classification has left much about commentary itself unexplored; lacking a unitary basis, it is undertaken on a purely practical level, and the theoretical aspects are neglected. The broader the idea pursued by conference organizers, the less happy the picture they revealed.3 Even if one was to gather together all the specialists on all the traditions of commentary of different cultures, we would still fail to come up with a comparative history of commentary. The academic community is not ready to construct a history and typology of commentary.4 A comparative history of commentary, which remains a distant dream at the present moment, should juxtapose cultures and epochs, so as to distinguish, for example, between different cultures of commentary (or of commentary-oriented cultures), while at the same time construing commentary as encompassing all forms of intellectual activity—scientific, jurisprudential, philosophical, literary, and so forth. It should also identify periods when commentary predominates over other modes of mastering past culture, as well as periods when commentary moves to the background. This is necessary, in particular, in order to understand the period in which we live, when for the first time in thousands of years, after nearly a hundred generations of commentators have succeeded one another, publishers, professors, and high-ranking academics display a certain skepticism toward commentary as a form of scholarly work,5 and when commentators themselves discuss with alarm the status of their occupation and its loss of public prestige, debating the significance of book commentary in the age of the Internet. Postmodernism has already had its say on the subject of commentary, by turning to its predecessors who professed epigonism (i.e., the consciousness of being latecomers) and indeterminacy. The most engaged practitioners of commentary immediately put forward the idea of involving the commentator in a contemporary context, of including parallels with contemporary literature in commentaries on ancient authors,6 and of examining the commentary’s literary qualities and the

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right to subjectivity and open-endedness. The need to maintain the epigonism of any creative act is thus balanced by the demand for the artistic creativity and personal character of commentary. At the same time commentary allows and even demands the juxtaposition of multiple points of view. “Fill up your margins!” is Gumbrecht’s slogan,7 while Don Fowler’s is: “The task of commentary is the multiplication of problems rather than their solution.”8 A commentary with a range of perspectives creates the impression of an exercise in interpretation that is oriented toward exceeding the great commentators of the past in terms of the number of hypotheses, interpretations and emendations, rather than being focused on offering the reader a guide to understanding the text. The right to multiple, discrete hypotheses that are not correlated with one another is a promised land of ambiguity, indecision, and eternal inconclusiveness. Arguably, by adopting this conception of the commentary, even those philologists who do not necessarily see eye to eye with postmodernism seek to defend the idea of disinterested inquiry, within which the right to indecisive and hypothetical assertions is preserved, as opposed to the clear, singular meaning of student commentary. And along with this they seek to defend an entire value system, which lies under threat. Society traditionally recognizes the “objective” commentary of the schoolroom, while scholars defend the right to creative commentary generating something new. I will focus on this contradiction, which deserves a detailed study, in the second part of this chapter. I think that “commentariography” will occupy as central a place in the future curriculums in philological courses of study as historiography occupies in historical course of study. As of now, however, detailed, professional work occupies itself not with commentary but with commentaries. Such studies exist side by side with popular, superficial surveys of entire traditions, and the one has little to offer the other. In the past ten or fifteen years the necessity of such a discipline has been recognized, but as of today not even a widely recognized definition of commentary exists and therefore there is a widespread tendency to bestow the word “commentary” on all kinds of secondary phenomena, such as interpretation, allusion, paraphrase, borrowing, illustration, drawing, plans, maps, tables and diagrams, and scholarly research in general, as long as it is occupied with clarification and elucidation. Ballet, opera, or any other musical work with a literary basis, painting, dance, and any other artifact that orients itself in relation to a preexisting work have all been interpreted as commentary.9

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Russian Structuralism of the 1960s and 1970s did not neglect the problem of commentary. This certainly holds true for Y. M. Lotman and M. L. Gasparov, two pillars of Russian philology in the second half of the twentieth century. The former was a structuralist ex professo, and the latter was, himself, undoubtedly no stranger to Structuralism. There is a kind of riddle, of course, in the fact that theorists, whom one would expect to be interested in general laws and structures, choose to occupy themselves with such a practical endeavor as commentary. The answer to this riddle, it seems to me, can be found in the realm of sociology of science. In the ideologically controlled Soviet Union, commentary—by virtue of its subsidiary, pedagogical character and the lack of prestige associated with it—seemed to be a space where free thought could thrive, under the radar of the ideological authorities. In other words, commentary could provide an alternative way of interpreting a text to that of a monograph or an introduction to an edition, which were more susceptible to ideological control. Lotman and Gasparov wrote extensive and innovative commentaries, respectively, to Eugene Onegin and to Mandelstam’s poems.10 They also addressed the question of commentary more generally, treating it as a type of text, with Gasparov polemicizing with Lotman. I shall venture to disagree with both of my late senior colleagues, but my objections, I believe, are rooted in the same paradigm as theirs. Indeed, I am interested in two aspects of commentary: the internal structure of the text (which was also a concern for Lotman and Gasparov), and its cultural function. Moreover, I am interested in both these aspects of commentary not in relation to particular, historically specific works or a particular historical period, but with reference to general principles and patterns. In the introduction to his commentary to Eugene Onegin, Lotman draws a distinction between conceptual and textual elucidations of a text. Conceptual elucidations are “interpretations: literary-historical, stylistic, philosophical,” and they are provided in articles and monographs. Textual elucidations are those that relate “to the objects and phenomena of material . . . moral . . . and social life” as well as their artistic function in the text; these appear in line-by-line commentaries.11 I join Gasparov in disagreeing with Lotman,12 but in what follows I will also disagree with Gasparov. In Gasparov’s view, Lotman’s preamble to Eugene Onegin was also a commentary, although not of the line-by-line sort and, of course, “conceptual.” “There is no gap separating conceptual and textual elucidations of a text,” Gasparov writes, “but they do occupy opposite

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ends of a continuum, and the phases in this continuum correspond to different scales of commentary. Commentary can be multi-scaled: it can address its object on the level of the word, the excerpt, the work as a whole, the author’s oeuvre, or an entire literary epoch.”13 I think this is inaccurate. One could delineate commentary into even more classes according to scale, but commentaries on any scale can nevertheless be either reference-oriented or “interpretive.” For example, one may cite the meaning of a rare or foreign word from a dictionary, or one may write an entire essay—absolutely original and “conceptual”— about its semantics and role in a given text: so I believe that scale and conceptuality are essentially not connected. On the other hand, I do not consider articles and monographs that address a single work or an entire body of literature to be commentaries just because they elucidate something. What Gasparov calls “conceptual” or “summarizing” commentaries are also not commentary in my view, but rather prolegomena, a special type of text that differs from both commentary and problem-driven articles.14 This does not forestall the possibility of a commentary (rather than introductory prolegomena) that would address whole corpora, such as, for example, the entire oeuvre of an author, or even “all Elizabethan drama or all Russian Romantic narrative poetry.” Gasparov confesses to have never seen the latter, because they “issue in” monographs and thus “liberate themselves from the obligation to be exhaustively concrete.” I do not agree with this position. Commentary on a corpus represents a particular kind of reference text, with its own, purely formal, usually alphabetical, organizing principle. Various types of indices and concordances to one or to many texts (for example, to all the books of the Bible or to all of Pushkin’s poetry) have long existed and are not under-developed monographs, just as they are not excerpts from an encyclopedia based on a name index. Elucidation in them is oriented not toward a single context, but toward all contexts of the given name/ real-world entity within a given corpus.15 I think that the general, unifying content of all aspects of commentary is heteroglossia. The commentator speaks in the language of his or her own real or imagined audience. Even if the commentator addresses himself, he then functions as his own audience. A text subject to commentary is alien, foreign, strange, either in the most direct meaning of the word or figuratively, which is to say that it differs from the language of the commentator because it is ancient, complex, imagistic, or metrical, or because it uses nonverbal signs. I am thus prepared to expand the

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object of commentary so as to include the text in the semiotic sense: it is possible to provide commentary for a soccer game, any kind of work of art, any kind of cultural act, artifacts, and even natural phenomena, when and if they are presented as if (als ob) cultural. The commentary itself, on the other hand, is necessarily a verbal text, either written or oral. Structurally, commentary is subordinate to and follows what is being commented on, and all the deviations from this principle are highly significant as a disruption of the norm and a testing of the boundaries of the “genre,” which can, of course, be changed.16 Thus I disagree with Gasparov’s view that a “history of literature” is a commentary on this literature. The life of literature as a phenomenon is not an artifact; it can be studied and interpreted, but one cannot provide commentary for it. Here I propose a new definition for commentary: commentary is a coherent (but plotless) verbal text that elucidates another verbal or nonverbal text in a heteroglossic fashion17 (i.e., the elucidation occurs in a different language, in the broad semiotic sense of the term) and is lemmatized directly or indirectly (i.e., with or without the inclusion of elucidated elements). I provide commentary on this definition of commentary in the postscript.

2. Commentary as a Mechanism for Innovation I am going to present a tentative theory that encompasses various subjects and fields already well known and thoroughly explored within their separate specific historical and cultural contexts. My topic is commentary in general, rather than any individual commentary or any historical or cultural tradition. I place my conclusion in the beginning: in traditional culture, commentary on an authoritative and sometimes poorly understood text can turn out to be a mechanism that is not conservative but innovative. This is also the case with oral and improvised commentary. It generates new cultural forms, new verbal genres or even new art forms, in spite of the form’s secondary nature and the author’s sincere wish to stay loyal to tradition. After my own cultural-genetic conception of the problem of commentary had already formed, I came across an approach that is to some extent similar to the one presented here in the work of Sinologist John Henderson.18 Heeding Hans-Georg Gadamer’s call to construct a critical history of hermeneutics, Henderson compared the formation of authorial canons under the influence of commentators and studied how

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cultures of commentary reach their acme. Devoting one chapter of his book to the unconscious aims and assumptions of commentators and another to their deliberate strategies, he concludes with a description of the death and transfiguration of commentary as a worldview. According to Henderson, Christian biblical commentary, Homeric commentary beginning in antiquity, and to a lesser degree commentary on the Confucian canon, gradually led to a general intellectual shift in the Early Modern era, which radically changed these traditions of commentary. But the ancient traditions (as well as those now extant) associated with the Quran and the Vedānta changed over time without ever evolving beyond their limits. Henderson connects the unique fate of commentary in Hinduism and Islam with the fact that scribes in India and the Middle East rejected printed books up until the nineteenth century. The canon is created by commentary, and canonical texts are studied more deeply by each succeeding generation. Under this system, whereas canonical books from one canon, let alone from different ones, may lack resemblance to one another, commentaries on books even from different canons tend to display ever greater similarities, particularly as they move further in time from the commented text and accumulate more and more “layers.” All traditions of commentary eventually collide with the very canonicity that is their starting point. The essence of a canon lies in the fact that the books placed in it are presented as comprehensive, interconnected, sequential, containing nothing that is superfluous and all that is essential. In any event, questions concerning their coherence and wholeness, the presence of a deep meaning, authenticity or lack thereof, are suppressed or are put aside. Over time, given the great number of commentaries, a sense of competition arises, and in many cases commentary begins to undermine canonicity. Through intellectual revolutions in commentary, through the undermining of the canon, a general view of canonical texts emerges which can allow for mistakes, opacity, and contradictions (such as in biblical criticism, for example). I will venture to take a bird’s-eye view of commentary and offer my hypothesis concerning one of its functions. This function tends to be ignored by commentators and is touched upon only occasionally, and in part, in works about commentary. There is an intrinsic innovative function of commentary, which goes against the genre’s status as secondary, mechanical, less individual, less authoritative, and less creative in comparison to the text being commented on.19

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In traditional culture, with its goal of reproduction, commentary can emerge as a mechanism for innovation, precisely because it appears and is received as a text that serves as a traditional or sacred text, object, or action. As mentioned earlier, and as research on commentary in performance shows, oral commentaries are as important in this regard as written ones. The sayings of wise men are preserved in the oral tradition so that they eventually enter the Talmud; an oral conversation with a sage becomes the basis for several genres in Buddhism and Hinduism; Plutarch of Athens, Syrianus, and Ammonius all welcomed the publication of their lectures by their students, which consisted of discussions of Plato’s dialogues, and they sometimes added to the resulting text.20 Proceeding from this general line of reasoning, let us examine how this mechanism for innovation operates in various spheres of culture— theater, literature, and philosophy. Commentary and Theater Alexander Veselovsky offers a twofold definition of the genesis of drama. On the one hand, it resulted from a meeting of Greek ritual choruses with the semantic and imagistic program intrinsic to the cult of Dionysus. On the other hand, Veselovsky connects the emergence of this form of verbal art with a conflict within the personality. Appealing to the contemporary discourse of individual psychology, which sounds somewhat archaic to the modern taste (precisely because this discourse is modernizing), he, in fact, anticipates Victor Turner’s and Clifford Geertz’s ideas on the social functions of ritual and drama and their difference: This conflict can become manifest in external forms that objectify psychic powers and beliefs in living mythological personages or in divinities that determine a fate hostile to the person’s self-determination. This conflict can also, however, be represented as taking place inside the person, at a time when the belief in external ruling powers slackens or is transformed. That is the essence of Greek drama from Aeschylus to Euripides.21 In what follows, I would like to point to those conditions of the emergence of theater and literary drama that are revealed through cross-cultural comparison: they reveal the necessary conditions of an

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encounter between the low and the high, the codified and the improvisational, between elements that pertain to different phases or levels of civilization. Such divergence in an element’s potential arises due to differentiation within a society or as a result of cultural contacts, conquests, or migrations. These conditions are: 1. The institution of public recitation of narratives that have a general importance for the given tradition; 2. A tradition of cult performance that, in addition to a cult function, has assumed the function of an entertaining spectacle. For the emergence of drama in ancient India and Greece and of the medieval miracles and morality plays, such conditions were: (1) the custom of solemn recitation of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; the institution of the rhapsodes who performed the Iliad and the Odyssey; Christian liturgy and holiday mysteries; (2) the performance tradition of the Malabar Coast and the Dravidian South; cult performances in the ancient Peloponnese and Sicily; the tradition of popular ludi (histriones, acrobats, puppeteers, jesters) of medieval Europe. To use M. L. Andreev’s formula, “the encounter of the scenario with the text” must take place,22 or—taking this idea further—the encounter of the verbal with the nonverbal or (so to speak) with the “less-verbal” must be enacted.23 Such an encounter happens when a performer tells or sings a story while gesturing to a series of images, vertical or horizontal, on scrolls, or banners, or pictures made of all possible materials and known by many names around the world. There is evidence dating back to as early as the sixth century, concerning traveling storytellers in India who told stories about gods (Saubhikas) or about the afterlife (Yamapapaka). In Tibet this was called ma-ni-pa; in Japan etoki (or emaki), the hanging scrolls, were divided into separate panels, foreshadowing the popular Japanese comics (manga). The practice of storytelling based on pictures exists to this day under different names, in popular culture in India, Pakistan, Iran (par, pat pata, parda, parda-dari—all these terms denote “[pictures] on a cloth”), as well as in Malaysia. The folk genre of picture storytelling is widespread in Europe, and in Sicily, living tradition of cantastorie persists. Victor Mair has collected samples of the Oriental and Occidental performances of picture storytelling, placing at the center of his excellent study the idea of the Indian genesis of all these forms.24 In my view, influences and autoch-

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thonous developments converge in this domain of popular culture, forming an amalgam that in exceptional cases permits us to assert that a borrowing from one center to another took place.25 Mair does not take into account the fact that such performances are also attested in antiquity, which does not fit his schema of diffusion from India. In particular, the “stationary automata” (στατὰ αὐτόματα) described by Heron of Alexandria are very similar to wayang beber, although they are rarely mentioned in ancient texts since they belong to “vulgar” culture. The engineer Heron of Alexandria attests: on a low column stands a pinax (lit. a board) with small doors that open by themselves. Behind the doors painted figures are visible which are positioned in such a way as to illustrate a well-known mythical episode. Doors close and reopen, displaying figures in new configurations and continuing the mythical narrative. In this way, pictures serve to “bring to an end the underlying myth.” Parts of the painted figures are mobile; they can use hammers and axes, each time producing noise as if they were “real.” Other “movements” can occur “on a pinax”: a fire is lighted, figures appear and disappear. In sum, all kinds of tricks can be performed without anyone approaching the figures (Autom. 1, 3). Heron gives two examples of performances: one is “ancient” and simple, the kind that was common in the deep past. The doors of the pinax open and a painted “face,” i.e., “mask” (πρόσωπον), appears, which has mobile eyes that it often opens and closes. This is the prologue. Then several pictures are shown in sequence, illustrating a myth episode by episode. “In our times,” Heron continues, “refined (ἀστείους lit. urban) plots are enacted on the pinax, which use most diverse and dissimilar kinds of movement” (Autom. 22.1–2). As an example, he describes a performance based on the story of Nauplius from the Trojan cycle, with sound accompaniment and lighting effects; at its basis, however, is a moving reel and doors that close and reopen (Autom. 22, 3–6). Heron’s account of performances consisting of stationary and moving pictures is not the only indication that ancient civilization knew the “theater of representations.”26 There exist testimonies concerning a peculiar aretology of savior divinities: those who survived shipwrecks, attacks by wild animals, or other dangers thanks to what they interpret as the goodwill or aid of a god, tell the story while showing its representation on a picture. Such storytelling may be due to a votive promise, or it may be linked to the collection of alms. Beggars who have survived a shipwreck (or a pirate attack) and carry around a picture that represents their misfortune are common in Roman poetic satire.27

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Seneca has difficulty concentrating because of shouts coming from the street, particularly from those who, having settled in a crowded place next to a fountain, would shout instead of singing and play the flute while using a board (picture).28 Just like on the streets of European cities, when a picture was shown, it would be accompanied by a barrel organ, a violin, or singing. In his book, Victor Mair has gathered an extensive collection of illustrations of such performances dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Verbal commentary on image sequences, whether Chinese “transformation stories” (bianwen or pien), Javanese wayang beber, or the presentations of the Savoyards or Russian performers of raek, or commentary on scenes from an epic, puppet shows, dances or pantomimed scenes, entrances and presentations of mystery masks—all of these forms of proto-theater can, under the circumstances described earlier, give rise to either an actual theatrical form, shadow or puppet show, or else to various forms of comic books or Chinese genres of texts with pictures, such as tiba.29 In the course of the millennia-long history of Chinese culture, there emerged, alongside popular stories based on pictures, numerous refined genres of inscriptions on images. Those inscriptions could be in verse or prose, panegyrical or meditative; they could have been quotations from the Classics or improvisations by a particular author (outi). Each of those diverse genres had its own name. Of particular interest is the genre that combines a frame in prose with a middle section in verse, thus reproducing on the level of form the heteroglossic paradigm of the commentator and the actor-singer. This genre is the so-called inscription-theme (tihua huati). In its basic form, it is a variety of inscription called the “introduction” (yinshou), an opening inscription that uses large characters and is placed on the first strip of the horizontal roll, the strip that introduces the picture. An expanded “inscriptiontheme,” however, can include verses (tishi, tishihua) as its core section, and prose (tiji, ji, tihuaji) in its “preface” (xui), “closure” (ba), and “signature” (tihuan u tijikuan kuanshi). Moreover, the preface and the closure take up the most space and, most important, have the greatest significance in the imagistic structure of the inscription and of the work as a whole.30 I enumerated such an extensive repertoire of cultural forms, both folkloric and proto-theatrical, from various cultures and various time periods, in order to point out a common trait among them: the presence of a commentator. In my view, performances accompanied by ver-

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bal commentary lie at the origin of theatrical art, that which I would like to call the universal archaic stage of theater. I am not suggesting that this is the only way in which theater can develop. Nevertheless, there are many indications that ritual amoebaean song does not by itself transform itself into theater, nor does theater necessarily arise from ritual song. Choral songs do not contain with them a principle of development and can remain unchanged for millennia. Similarly, folkloric genres of laughter, such as invectives, chastushkas, wrangles, may serve as the basis of theatrical performances (comedy), or become incorporated in them as interludes (the Japanese kyogen) or additions (satyr plays), but they are not “bound” to evolve. Modern anthropological and sociological theories have altered our notion of theater and linked its emergence to the rise of complex societies or with historical moments of collision, conflict, encounter or otherness, and the need for mediation or reconciliation through the manifestation and elucidation of this difference or conflict. At an early stage in the development of theater we often observe the opposition of a “less-verbal” principle, such as a dance, a song, a picture, a material object, and a “more-verbal” one; we have the poetic, the mysterious, the ancient on the one side, and speech, reasoning, the prosaic, the accessible, the modern, on the other. The latter serves as a commentary on the former. Indeed, the majority of oriental theatrical systems that involve a live, human actor, are characterized by the preservation of the leading figure of the explicator, reciter, and presenter and the full or partial “dumbness” of the actor. This presenter is often the head of a troupe: a host, author, director, accompanist, teacher, or a narrator. He may even be called the head actor, but he also serves the function of addressing the audience, introducing the actors, and providing a didactic interpretation, sometimes a religious-didactic one, of all that happens in the show. He is an interpreter; that is, his past is that of the priest and his future is that of the critic or reviewer, if we imagine the critic as a participant in the spectacle. Veselovsky has already remarked that the more deeply we delve into the history of theater, the more prominent the role of the leader, the bearer of the text, turns out to be.31 The spectacle and the verbal commentary are distributed among different performers. Written drama as we know it is a later phenomenon. For many theatrical systems in India, it is characteristic to stage epic texts that cannot be mechanically divided into statements made by characters. The lead in such a case is essential—he is the functional descendant of the epic bard or rhapsode. The simplest and most archaic

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method of verbal accompaniment to a spectacle involves the lead having the only speaking role. Sometimes he even recites a fragment from an adapted epic, which the actors illustrate through dance and gestures. In kolam theater, practiced in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the entire verbal portion of the spectacle belonged to the lead, but in contemporary productions the lead retains the role of explicator: he introduces the actors and says the opening prayers. If the Homeric poems were to be acted out according to the roles, then the commentator would be left with relatively few words. For this reason, Homeric epic contains within it the potential of performance, of role acting; this is what prompted the rage of Plato, who, in The Republic, equated the performance of epic with dramatic (mimetic) performance. When working on a comparative study of exotic and ancient theater, I was quite surprised to discover that no one has noticed the ubiquity of heteroglossia. In endeavoring to learn about all specific instances of it, I had no starting point other than the works of theatrical historians, ethnographic descriptions, travel narratives, and reference books about the theater of the Orient. Specialists write of the phenomenon that I call heteroglossia in relation to the material they study, but though these facts have long been explored in isolation, scholars have not examined them in relation to one another. Researchers limit themselves to making local generalizations for the theatrical system of one region or another, without venturing beyond the material that lies within their own professional jurisdiction. In the theatrical systems of the Philippines and Malaysia the archaic poetic languages of monologues, sometimes consisting only of partially intelligible epic texts that have already lost their connection with the subject matter of the spectacle, are combined with the everyday, colloquial dialects of the dialogues. Sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that describe Javanese performances of wayang beber tell us that the performer speaks “in his own foreign language.”32 In many cases the distinction between singing and narrating, melos and iambos, is superimposed onto the distinction of “languages”—high, ancient, poetic, “foreign” and everyday, colloquial, local. The juxtaposition of fixed with improvised text is also common. Declamation accompanied by music can alternate with short, colloquial passages, a kind of “compèring” or commentary in the intervals between scenes that explains the scenes themselves and the portions of text that are difficult to comprehend. Of course, the explanatory function of a text that is spoken in everyday language can fade, resulting in comical, of-

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ten farcical interludes in common language, such as the Japanese kyogen that occur between the acts of a play in Noh theater.33 The gradation of language and style are dichotomous only in the simplest cases. The seventeenth chapter of the Nātyaśāstra theoretically discusses which dialect is most appropriate for which character. Sanskrit is reserved for a smaller group of character types, predominately those of high status: gods, kings, hermits, scholars, military leaders, Buddhist monks, court poets, and so forth. Women are expected to speak Prakrit; their attempts to speak Sanskrit invoke ridicule, unless the lady in question has proven herself highly learned or a severe ascetic. A courtesan, however, can use Sanskrit if she is the main character and a learned woman. And transitions from Prakrit to Sanskrit also occur, but they must be especially well motivated. In The Little Clay Cart (Mrcchakatika), theoretical principles are embodied by the play’s numerous characters, through their use of seven different local dialects that characterize them similarly to how makeup and costumes do.34 In Javanese Wayang Purwa theater, the dialogues also contain seven degrees of “civility,” from the language of the gods to the language of servants. In Bali, the dhalang accompanies all the noble characters’ speeches, which occur in an archaic literary language, while clowns paraphrase their statements in Balinese. From this perspective, the well-known linguistic differentiation of Greek drama, with its chorus in ancient, obscure poetic koine and the recitative in the colloquial Attic dialect, appears in a wholly new light. I think that Greek drama presents us with a more ancient stage in the development of heteroglossia, a stage before linguistic diversity had become a stylistic device, when the initial dichotomy between song and the commentator’s narrative still existed. After all, the archaic dialect and melos relate to the Attic dialect and recitative iambs as verse does to prose.35 Although it is often assumed that the chorus is commenting on actions on stage, it is in fact reacting emotionally, using a language that is imagistic, unwieldy, and alien to conceptual thought. With respect to the heteroglossia of commentary, there is no fundamental difference between the initial stages of Greek tragedy and Russian puppet theater (Petrushka), where the intentionally incomprehensible speech of the main character (a spirit, a corpse with a pipe) is, in one way or another, repeated and explained by a normal voice. Having developed some familiarity with the theatrical systems we lump under the name of “Oriental,” we can now look differently at what is referred to as “Classical.”

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The word hypokritēs, which in Attica designated an actor, signified either a “respondent,” in which case, in accord with the Lexicon of Pollux, the actor got his name because he “responded” to the chorus (Poll. IV, 123), or an “interpreter,” as Plato asserts (Plat. Tim. 72b).36 Leaving aside the unclear meaning of the word, hypokritēs may be likened to the lead in oriental theater, the explicator to the choral ode. Indeed, in theater with only one actor it is left to the hypokritēs to fulfill the role that would be played by the herald in dramas with two or three actors. The debate over whether the first and only actor in tragedy was the “interpreter” or the “respondent,” who led the dialogue with the chorus, spanned approximately one hundred years, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1960s.37 Like all protracted debates, this one left behind proponents of both arguments, although they no longer dispute one another. It seems to me that the debate can be decided on the basis of a typological consideration: the presence of the lead-interpreter in oriental theater. Thespis was called the hypokritēs, whose role, like that of the lead in oriental theater, consisted of providing commentary in the local Attic dialect on the chorus’s hymnic and epic song and narration. This is evidently true for drama antedating Aeschylus that involved only one actor who speaks in iambs, and a singing chorus. As soon as the second actor was introduced, the function of explicator, reciter, and presenter was no longer the exclusive privilege of the actor. From that moment on, messenger, coryphaeus, and even chorus began commenting, and the oppositions melos vs. iambos: archaic (and enigmatic) vs. everyday, clear and colloquial ceased to be isomorphic. As we know, the protagonist could not only be “deprived” of the role of commentator, but even acquire a nonverbal role, as in Roman pantomime. At this juncture I will explore the extraordinary case of the Roman pantomime in more detail, because it is necessary to distinguish in it the archaic type of theater that arises from commentary on a spectacle from a different, quite peculiar phenomenon that was widespread throughout the expanses of the Roman Empire. Livy describes the first Roman theatrical productions as dumb shows. They were produced in Rome in 364 B.C.E. by histriones invited from Etruria (7.2.4). The shows were mimetic dances accompanied by flute. Livy notes in particular that Roman youth later began to exchange comical remarks while imitating the Etrurian dances. Neglecting the evidence of oriental and world theater, students of ancient theater interpret this eloquent legend on the origins of Roman

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theatrical productions quite naïvely, never straying very far from the Roman historian’s understanding of historical processes. Titus Livius himself commented on the origin of the distinction between the functions of “showing” and “speaking” as follows: Livius Andronicus (a manumitted Greek slave who has contributed much to the development of culture among the Romans), who used to perform his cantica himself, just like everyone else at that time, as Livy adds, was asked to sing one encore after another. He grew hoarse and requested permission for a young slave to sing with his flutist instead. Thanks to the presence of a surrogate singer, he moved even more animatedly and expressively than before, as he no longer needed to worry about his voice. From then on, the custom of “singing by hand” (inde ad manum cantari histrionibus coeptum) is said to have begun among the histriones (actors): some sing, others make movements that correspond with the text of the song, and the actors’ own voices are used only to carry out dialogues. Later writers repeated this legend, sometimes in a generalized form, such as Lucian, who wrote that in antiquity the same actors would both declaim and gesture, but gesticulating made breathing laborious and interfered with pronunciation and singing (De salt. 30). Therefore, actors who staged such movements were supposedly granted helpers who read or sang the text. It stands to reason that these versions of the story are completely ahistorical, otherwise the formation of such a system in all the traditions of oriental theater would have to be ascribed to stories of someone’s hoarse voice. The differentiation between the functions of speaking and playing continued through to the last centuries of ancient Rome. But by then “singing by hand” was no longer the same archaic phenomenon: now the chorus performed the song, often a famous literary work while a soloist illustrated it through movements. In the nineteenth and for the most part of the twentieth century, historians of theater saw this as a sign of decline: if it takes two performers to depict one dramatic personage, the decomposition of the “verbal and plastic unity of the image” is disrupted. Even Adrian Piotrovsky, an expert in ancient Greek theater, where the norm was the chorus speaking in the first person singular, remained faithful to the idea of a decline in discussing the chorus that speaks for the pantomime dancer: “Such a distinction between audio and visual expressions, which was becoming one of the basic stylistic traits of theater of the empire, cannot be deduced from any principles of official theater of the previous epoch.”38 In my view, no insurmountable boundary exists between a situation in which many

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speak from the persona of a collective “I” and a situation in which this “I” is immediately represented by a single person, as it happens in the Roman pantomime. The coryphaeus may serve precisely as a solitary replacement for the chorus. Piotrovsky, however, sees the roots of this phenomenon in the art of virtuosos “in the time when the unified, integrated perception of theatrical action was lost.”39 Indeed, the appearance of “the Roman pantomime” in 22 B.C.E. is linked with the names of two famous dancers who traveled from Greece: the tragedian Pylades and the comic Bathyllos. However, pantomime was not invented by these actors who became famous in the period of the late republic. In Classical Greece Xenophon’s Symposium concluded with “Dionysus and Ariadne,” a production involving actors with no speaking roles. The lead (the “Syracusan”) provides a prologue, and the show itself is accompanied by female flutists. Xenophon mentions an ὀρχηστοδιδάσκαλος, “the teacher of dances,” and a producer; it is possible that actors pronounced separate lines and we can say with certainty that they used conventional poses and figures. Pantomime with elements of text, known under the Greek name ὄρχησις and the Roman name saltatio, was widely dispersed, beginning very early on. Discourse enters spectacle both directly, through the lead, and surreptitiously, cloaked as a conventional gesture, which is sometimes called χειρονομία, and resembles both the mudra (conventional gestures) of the contemporary Indian dance performances and the sign language of the deaf.40 Note, however, that ancient commentary on a performance is here adapted to a literary context, reversing the original distribution of roles: if the ancient soloist-hypokritēs commented on what was happening and what was being depicted, then in Roman pantomime and Greek Hellenistic ὄρχησις the text is codified and well known, and a change of emphasis takes place: dance without text is still incomprehensible, but now, paradoxically, the movements follow the text, rather than the text explaining the spectacle. When the virtuoso Telestes once danced Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes (Athen. I 21 f), he evidently drew the interest of the audience away from the tragedy’s poetic and dramatic qualities—the work had already come to be regarded as a school classic—and monopolized attention with his own virtuosic mastery. The dancer, who, according to Lucian, should know every “story that Homer and Hesiod told as well as the best stories of other poets, in particular the tragedians” (De salt. 61), finds gestural and dance images that correspond with the contents of the choral song. To read body

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movements as “commentary” would be a deviation from the definition given earlier, and I do not intend to flout my own definition. Transplanted to a different literary culture, the principle of archaic theater generates a new form—the art of orchestics, or “Roman pantomime,” which is formally identical to archaic spectacle, but is, in fact, quite different. Sophistication is the main feature of the productions Lucian so enthusiastically describes. He identifies the repertoire of orchestics, that is, pantomime dance, as inclusive of the entire corpus of Greek myth and legend. Mimetic dance can depict anything, from the creation of the world from chaos and the origins of the first principles of the universe to events from the times of Cleopatra the Egyptian (De salt. 36–37). The ability to translate significant poetic texts or philosophical teachings into the language of gestures is the essence of the pantomimesoloist’s art. Lucian (De salt. 35) suggests that orchestics should give precedence to philosophy over all other sciences, as it is most in need of it. Athenaeus tells of a dancer-philosopher by the nickname of “Memphis,” who “depicted” the philosophy of the Pythagoreans, “presenting everything in silence more clearly than others who posed as teachers of verbal art” (Athen. 1. 20c-e). It is possible that this is the same person as Agrippa, who was a slave of the emperor Lucius Verus, and in his dances could depict the reincarnation of the souls and even Pythagorean number theory (Jul. Capit. Vita Veri Imp. 8. 10). Plutarch tells us that even Plato’s dialogues were performed by pantomimes (Qu. Conv. 7, 711c). Tacitus writes with indignation about the collapse of the orator’s art into the theatrical, because the orators boasted that mimes could “dance out and sing their works” (laudis et gloriae et ingenii loco plerique iactant cantari saltarique commentarios suos: De orat. 26; cf. Cic. Brut. 61, 225). At the Dionysian festivals, dancers performed the “theology” and “epic” of Orpheus: one thing was performed by the Horai, another by the Nymphs, and a third represented in the person of the Bacchantes (Phil. V. Ap. 4.21). Nero intended to dance Turnus, not the legendary one, but the one that appears in Virgil (Suet. Nero 54). Often the libretto for a pantomime would be based on the story of Dido and Aeneas (Macr. Sat. 5.17.5; Luc. De salt. 46); in his Tristia, Ovid says that his poems were danced (5.7.25–26: carmina nostra saltari). Competition between verbal art and pantomime was not considered shameful or disgraceful. According to one legend, Cicero and the renowned actor Roscius competed to see which could convey the same

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idea in the greatest number of ways: the actor made various gestures, and Cicero used various words, drawing on the inexhaustible resources of his eloquence (Macr. Sat. 3.14.12).41 Thus, out of the coexistence of archaic commentary on the visual with literature came ballet with a literary libretto, the language of gestures,42 and pantomime in the modern meaning of the word. Having surveyed the archaic theatrical systems of the Occident and the Orient, and noted that at a particular stage of development, they are characterized by the figure of the explicator/reciter/lead, and even by the full or partial muteness of the actor, I came to the conclusion that commentary on an image is essentially a universal proto-theatrical form.43 But theater is not a universal phenomenon. The conditions under which it emerges are not easy to identify. One must speak of a level of social complexity that exceeds that of a tribe. We know that ritual serves to resolve the problems within a tribal society (Victor Turner), while theater resolves the contradictions between “little and great traditions” (Robert Redfield) in that it requires the presence of both the authoritative or even sacral text (presumably epic) and ritual games (often comic and admitting improvisation). If we briefly consider medieval European drama, we see how the recitation of Scripture together with popular, “histrionic,” culture produces mystery and miracle dramas with their mixture of Latin and the vernacular. This is not to say that commentary on an image automatically gives rise to theater. An excursion through a museum need not result in spectacle, and a commentary on pictures can produce a new but nontheatrical genre. For example, Philostratus the Elder’s commentary for the students and before the students on the images of the entire gallery created the genre of the ekphrastic book, or collection, or anthology, which continued with various modifications until the final years of Byzantium (the Icons of Ioannes Eugenicus), and lives on in Hans Christian Andersen’s picture books, which in turn served as a model for twentieth-century authors. Commentary and Narrative Fictional narrative could also be considered the offspring of commentary. Fictional storytelling conscious of its own fictionality is a cultural phenomenon possible only within the framework of particular conventions.44 And one of the most important conventions in ancient and traditional cultures is the justification of fictionality: it is not that it is

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absent, but rather that it is accorded a status different from the one it has in modern culture. Fiction should have a means of asserting its credibility. To show the difference between ancient fictionality and the fictionality that has long been established and familiar to us, it is enough to recall that Plato’s dialogues have the appearance of conversations among real historical figures. It goes without saying that no one in antiquity considered them to be stenographic transcripts of real conversations. But the contemporaries of Plato or Xenophon would sooner listen to speeches that were never actually delivered by historical characters than agree with the idea that these very characters never existed or had no “referent.” The conventions of modern culture are, in a sense, the opposite of this: distorting the expressions or actions of real people is condemned and may even be considered a crime. Utilizing actual facts, the modern author incants the disclaimer that all events and characters are fictional and any resemblance to real people or circumstances is coincidental. In traditional culture, narrative and fictional narrative very often arise as byproducts of the exegesis of a sacred text. In the Indian tradition the utterance of a wise man results in the story of his life, which serves as an explanation of the origins of the utterance. Is it not surprising to find fictional histories about people from the Bible in the genres of the Aggadic midrashim? After all, this is sacred Scripture, in which it is forbidden to change even a single letter, yet it is permissible to compose—we might say “off the top of one’s head”—multitudes of detail and entire, elaborate stories. The Bible also contains novelistic stories, created according to the same model, to explicate a more ancient and authoritative text. The canonical vs. apocryphal status of such books is a separate issue. In any event, the fictionality of a midrash or a parable does not enter into any kind of conflict with sacredness or “truth” and does not presuppose any kind of sanction. Daniel Boyarin discusses narrative midrash as commentary “in a world without logos,” comparing it with rational, “Greek” commentary that distinguishes the “body” of words from the spirit of meaning, as well as—for no apparent reason—with barter economics lacking in a common equivalent.45 The comparison with barter is a striking move, yet the time of the midrashim that Boyarin has in mind, the second to fifth centuries C.E., was the Roman period, and so it is odd to speak of the epoch of barter, even in the heads of the midrash authors. It is true, however, that parable makes a “hermeneutic leap” when

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it “explains” one story or biblical verse with another story. For the extraneous observer, this resembles an exchange of goats for boots. The apocryphal Joseph and Aseneth is constructed like the midrash. This Hellenistic work was created long before the appearance of the classical midrash, but it similarly expands the reference of a Jewish patriarch’s marriage to the daughter of an Egyptian priest (Gen 41: 45, 50) into an extensive narrative, correlating this reference with the various needs of the current historical situation. Every step of the narrative corresponds to: (1) the biblical text of Genesis, (2) the “text” of lived reality, and (3) the text of Isaiah’s prophecy on the worship of the Hebrew God in Egypt. This apocryphos conforms to the scheme of the Aggadic midrash, in that a question is addressed to a biblical text, and a certain narrative serves as the answer to this question. Thus commentary gives rise to storytelling. In order to give an answer to the question regarding the circumstances under which it was permissible to marry a foreign pagan woman, different narratives were composed, depending on the views of the author. One of the more famous of the Jewish midrashim casts Aseneth as the daughter of Dinah, raised by a Heliopolitean priest. Dinah is thus a granddaughter of Jacob, and Jewish by birth. The story tells of how an eagle brought the exposed child as an offering to the childless Heliopolitean priest. The apocryphos discussed earlier, written in Greek in the Diaspora, proposes an alternative solution: Aseneth is a pagan and an Egyptian, but having fallen in love with Joseph, she suddenly sees in him the Son of God and renounces her pagan beliefs. As a solution to the halachic problem, the first version affirms that one may only marry a Jewish woman, while the second proposes proselytism. The content of the apocryphos, however, is not limited to this idea. Those for whom the halachic problem is unimportant read it “simply” as an entertaining story. Having been written in Greek at the end of the second century B.C.E., when there appear to have been no written midrashim in circulation and the very idea of midrash had not yet been formulated, the apocryphos turns out to be a proto-novel, the first romance written in Greek. On Greek soil, stories of lovers who overcome obstacles to marriage lose any connection with the solution to problems of interpreting sacred books, and their own plot structure begins to live an independent life as artistic prose.46 One may thus assert that commentary can also give rise to fictional prose narrative, the core of what we call belles-lettres, literary prose storytelling.

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Commentary and Philosophical Prose The very word “philosophy” implies an adherence to its predecessor, sophia—wisdom, encompassing the oral wisdom of the first lawmakers47 and poets. A “philosopher,” as Pythagoras called himself, is not a wise man, but merely one who loves wisdom. So who is a wise man? Orpheus, Musaeus, Homer, the Seven Sages?48 The Greeks didn’t have a religious canon; their common property was the divine wisdom contained in the Homeric poems about the legendary past and in poems ascribed to the religious teachers Orpheus and Musaeus. Although the traditional account begins the history of philosophy with the Milesians, the philosophical prose of Greece begins simultaneously in another part of the Greek world with Theagenes of Rhegium and his prose commentaries to Homer, which carried the authority of ancient tradition.49 The interpretation of authoritative texts gives rise not only to philosophy, but also to a series of scholarly traditions—grammatical, stylistic, rhetorical, and literary-critical. Commentary’s connection with the study of language, style, rhetorical devices, and literary criticism lies so close to the surface that it seems unnecessary to say much about it. It is important, however, to take into account the fact that neither philology nor rhetoric concerned themselves with commentary of this kind, that there was a time when neither had existed, and that they inherited their craft from the rhapsodes and philosophers. In fact, Plato’s Ion demonstrates the rivalry between the philosopher or the sophist and the individual whose traditional responsibility was to elucidate the rhapsode’s performance of ancient songs for the viewer-listener. Ion calls himself an “interpreter” (ἑρμηνεύς) and claims that he interprets Homer better than the philosophers and sophists. We know very little about how a rhapsode might have interpreted Homer, and we can only hypothesize that he did so in a way we may observe in other cultures: elucidations of ancient poetic works were performed in a colloquial dialect that the audience could easily understand. The oral interpretations of rhapsodes like Ion have not, of course, come down to us, but when in Against Timarchus Aeschines profusely cites Homer and interprets him (141–153), he systematically replaces the Homeric words of the citation with words of the Attic dialect,50 and this allows us to think that similar interpretation was part of the activity of rhapsodes. As for the first written commentaries on Homer, they were naturally dedicated to glosses, such as Democritus’s work, known to us only through its title, On Homer, or

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on the Correctness of Words and Glosses (Περὶ Ὁμήρου ἢ Ὀρθοεπείης καὶ γλωσσέων—DK A33). According to Plato (Phaedr. 267c4–7 = 80A26 DK), either the teachings of ὀρθοέπεια or a work with the same name belonged to Protagoras. In light of what has been said, from among the multiple interpretations of Protagoras’s ὀρθοέπεια, we consider as the most probable the one that assumes that his linguistic observations derive from analysis and interpretation of particular contexts, first and foremost Homeric.51 One could take the episode where Protagoras and Socrates analyze a fragment of Simonides (Plat. Protag. 339a7–347a5) as an example of “orthoepic” interpretation, and then ἔπος within ὀρθοέπεια should be tied not to “words” in general, but to poetry and, above all, epic poetry, which is in keeping with classical usage.52 In the sixth century B.C.E., the aforementioned Theagenes of Rhegium, who was close to the Pythagoreans, discovered the allegorical method of interpreting Homer.53 Apparently, in the sixth century there also arose an Orphic-Pythagorean tradition of interpreting the epic pseudepigrapha of Orpheus and Musaeus. The so-called Derveni papyrus is a philosophical commentary on an Orphic theogony. Once epic texts become subject to commentary, the creation of a philosophical epic amounts to a kind of pretext for the appearance of commentary, and that implies a dispute within a circle of scholars, and thus a dialogue. Of course, the Platonic dialogues are not commentary. They imitate discussions with Socrates, and that, it stands to reason, is a completely different genre, the novelty of which is immediately obvious. This originality both of content and of form was due to Plato’s genius, and could not be attributed to a previous genre model such as, for example, Sophron’s mimes. Plato’s work can be considered pure innovation anchored down only by the image of Socrates. By this I mean to say that commentary is not the only mechanism for innovation, and it is not my intention to place all inventions and novelties into this category. Here we can place new traditions that arise, unwittingly, in a society averse to novelty and dedicated to tradition. Plato, by contrast, spoke a word so new and original that no one was ready to repeat it. Instead, Plato himself became the canon which is subject to commentary. For centuries philosophical commentaries on Plato and Aristotle were considered boring, secondary, and incapable of communicating anything other than quotations from lost texts. Richard Sorabji, editor of the 60-volume Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, compiled an anthology entitled The Philosophy of Commentators.54 Sorabji de-

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composed and reassembled the commentators’ texts in such a way that taken together they resembled a “systematic philosophy.” Nothing of this kind had been suspected in their texts before. Commentators themselves may not have wanted to express something new. In a famous passage (Simpl. Cat. 7.23–32), Simplicius demands that one writes so as not to contradict the teacher, as if one were enrolled in his school. Furthermore he insists that the differences between Plato and Aristotle must not be emphasized but, on the contrary, they should be placed in harmony with one another by any means possible. It is difficult to notice anything except a desire to maintain reverence for the teacher and not to question authorities in this passage. But how is this harmony to be achieved, if the authorities we read clearly disagree with one another? Iamblichus sharply disagrees with Porphyry and Plotinus, Damascius with Proclus, Simplicius reprimands Philoponus. It becomes necessary to think up something new so that these controversies disappear, that is, to find the spirit behind the letter. The demand for “harmony,” which may appear so limiting as to eliminate any kind of novelty, on the contrary, stimulates the philosophical imagination.55 Underscoring the independence of philosophical thought among the commentators, Sorabji calls them the inventors of many of the ideas that were much later (in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries) attributed to philosophers of the medieval Latin West, such as the idea of the initial impetus that Thomas Kuhn proclaimed as the revolutionary invention of the fourteenth century and without which there would not have been a scientific revolution. Finally, I would like to point out a widely known fact that the Neoplatonists, who occupied themselves with commentary and harmonization within Platonism as well as between Platonism and Aristotelianism, created something new and unexpectedly congenial to the Christian theologians who were hostile to them. Turning to India, we find the commentaries to Rig Veda verses that were the part of ritual sacrifice: the hymns were sung and acted. Brahmanic literature comments on both hymns and sacrifices in prose, detailing the proper performance of rituals. Next comes Upaniṣad prosaic literature that was attached to the domestic, rather than sacrificial, rituals of “teacher and disciple.” This literature thus acquires a dramatic dialogic structure and concentrates not on explaining how to perform the ritual and sacrifice, but on the abstract meaning of the actions described. The process takes hundreds of years and has its own sociocultural reasons, which I cannot discuss here, but it is very similar to what happened in Jewish culture after the emperor Titus destroyed the

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Temple. The rabbinic commentary on the Bible and on the prescriptions on how to sacrifice and perform temple service replaced both sacrifice and service. The Bible, the Rig Veda, and the Shatapatha Brahmana have little in common, but the history of commenting on them has many common features. To conclude: the origin of prose philosophical genres in Ancient India goes back to commentaries on the sacrificial practices. So the Upaniṣads directly continue the Brāhmaṇas.56 As I have argued, in traditional culture, commentary, including oral and improvised commentary, on an authoritative and sometimes poorly understood inherited text can turn out to be a mechanism that is not conservative but rather innovative, even radical. It gives birth to new cultural forms, which are by no means merely auxiliary, such as new verbal genres or even art forms. Some argue for the beginning of the biographical novel in Dante’s La vita nuova, which is the author’s commentary on his own poetry! Commentary on a traditional genre creates a genre that is not traditional. Commentary on a traditional genre is a means of unconsciously circumventing tradition: constructed on the basis of respect for authority, it turns out to be a practice field for innovation.

Post Scriptum: Commentary on the Definition of Commentary Why is commentary a “coherent” text? Lemmatized commentary is usually understood as a series of unconnected scholia whose syntagmatic structure is subordinate to the text being commented and devoid of any autonomy. I think that there exist laws governing the structure of commentary as a whole, although they are not as “strong” as the laws governing the structure of a novella. For example, in a commentary on a sufficiently large work, the number of elements subject to commentary diminishes from the beginning to the end. If the text is fragmentary, or is not a unified whole, then the rule does not apply or does not apply to the same extent. For collections of poetry by one author, this tendency will be expressed more strongly than in an anthology containing numerous poets. However, if the text of the commentary in question arises in the practice of oral, homiletic commentary among a circle of scholars with a definite level of knowledge, such as Augustine’s Exposition on the Psalms, then commentary reflects the students’ growing knowledge, becoming more detailed as the students progress.57

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The interconnectedness of commentary can be demonstrated by certain empirical manipulations. If it is necessary to publish part of a text on which a commentary has already been written, it turns out that it is not possible to simply extract the corresponding portion of commentary; the commentary must change. Furthermore, the commentator can, albeit in discrete moves rather than sequentially, defend and/or counter his author or enter into a discussion with him or other commentators or interpreters. This vision of the whole is not at all counter to the principle of following the text sequentially and rather calls for a system of cross-references, which may reach dizzying proportions, especially in commentaries on sacred texts such as the Bible, or intellectually saturated texts displaying a high degree of coherence, such as philosophical texts. Commentary is sewn together by these references, and in the case of the Talmudic tradition, for example, it is also sewn together by polemics, because the interpretation of one biblical verse involves wise men of various epochs arguing with one another across the centuries. Such polyphony in commentary is historically a trait of commentary on texts that are regarded as inexhaustible in their depth of meaning. The fact that commentary on the first volume of the collected works of Bakhtin, published in Moscow,58 preserves all the polyglossia of several Russian and American authors, who interpret one and the same passage differently, shows us that Bakhtin’s works are approaching the status of sacred texts. The old and widespread practice of copying information from dictionaries, encyclopedias, and earlier commentaries accounts for commentary’s reputation as a genre that lacks a coherence of its own. In such cases the authorial presence of the commentator is subdued or even muffled, and what would be plagiarism in other situation is not considered to be plagiarism, but the accumulation of the knowledge of many generations. Accordingly, “notes” are perceived as normative texts, free from mistakes, referential and not fully authorial: they explain things already well known to scholars for those who are unfamiliar with them—the years of the life of historical personae, geographic names, measurements of weight and monetary units,59 the names of mythological figures, and so on. But the notes, too, have interconnectedness. It is easier to see this in hindsight, from the perspective of a hundred years or more. Then the “orientation” (Einstellung) of the commentator becomes more clearly visible, and the commentator himself emerges distinctly against the background of the lemma he has drawn up both as a person of his own time and as an individual. Commentary completely changes its func-

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tion; it begins to tell us more about the author of the commentary than the author subject to commentary. Thus the humanists’ numerous commentaries promulgate a general attitude toward authors of antiquity as, first and foremost, useful sources of data about the Latin language. The structure of lemma and the principle of following the author’s verses are preserved, but the author himself doesn’t fall into the field of vision, and what becomes important is the various and extensive lexicographical material, which achieves an encyclopedic scope. It is not Cicero who is important, but good Latin. Student commentaries in foreign language books, supplied with a small dictionary, are similar in their attitude toward the author: above all he is exemplary of the language he uses. On the whole, Renaissance commentary forgets the work for the sake of the copious amount of information which it is possible to extract from the text, and adds information from other sources in passing. Between series of referential footnotes and commentaries that retain a holistic perspective and even have a defined research goal, there are also many gradations in the degree of interconnectedness. Schematically, one could place service to the reader at one pole and service to the author at the other. In the former case, commentary is a means of teaching; in the latter, it is a result of study. In the first case, explanations will be given for realia and glosses; in the second, the commentator tries to understand the author’s intended meaning. The assumed ignorance, which the commentary serves to rectify, is in this case the commentator’s own: it is a “pioneering” commentary in which there is no framework, no given audience, and only enigmas in the text and provocations to embark on a quest, which emanate from the text.60 Perhaps it would be worthwhile to call the interconnectedness or coherence of commentary a tendency, and sometimes even an index of its tendentiousness.61 For instance, in the moralizing, pastoral commentaries to the Holy Scripture, in which, obviously, there is no indifference to the text, its meaning is conceived of as clear; it is necessary simply to convey it to the reader. And in this aspect pastoral commentary does not differ from commentary in books for reading in a foreign language, but it differs from scholarly or theological commentary, which to some extent will speak of the enigmas or difficult passages.62 Even in the case of the most ordinary—formalistic and “boring”— commentary, the testimonia, the sources of quotations or parallels or references to scholarly literature, will communicate the orientation of the text (what does it quote?), of the commentator (whom does he

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cite?), of both one and the other (which parallels are deemed relevant?). A cursory glance at notes and/or a bibliography allows us in mere seconds to define the character of the entire publication, the level of the editor, and the value of the commentary. Thus commentary, whether scholarly, popular (educational) or self-referential (scholarly apparatus), presents itself as a complete and coherent but plotless text.

Notes This authorized translation, originally by Ivan S. Eubanks, was revised by Boris Maslov and Kate Holland. 1. Glenn  W. Most, ed., Commentaries = Kommentare, Aporemata 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999); Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, ed., Le Commentaire entre tradition et innovation. Actes du Colloque international de l’Institut des Traditions Textuelles (Paris et Villejuif, 22–25 Sept. 1999) (Paris: Vrin, 2000); Wilhelm Geerlings and Christian Schulze, eds., Der Kommentar in Antike und Mittelalter. Beiträge zu seiner Erforschung. Clavis Commentatoriorum Antiquitatis et Medii Aevi 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Roy Gibson and Christina Kraus, eds., The Classical Commentary: Histories, Practices, Theory, Mnemosyne Supplement 232 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Wilhelm Geerlings and Christian Schulze, eds., Der Kommentar in Antike und Mittelalter, Neue Beiträge zu seiner Erforschung (Leiden: Brill, 2004); “Kommentarii: blesk i nishcheta zhanra v sovremennuiu epokhu” (Transcript of the roundtable discussion at the 11th “Lotmanovskie chteniia,” 20 Dec. 2003); Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 66 (2004): 103–20; V. N. Toporov, ed., Tekst i kommentarii: kruglyi stol k 75-letiiu Viacheslava Vsevolodovicha Ivanova (Moscow: Nauka, 2006); Yu. V. Ivanova and A. M. Rutkevich, eds., Kul’tura interpretatsii do nachala Novogo vremeni (Moscow: GU VShE, 2009) (http://id.hse.ru/books/978-5-7598-0624-0.pdf). 2. In the tradition of antiquity, scholia, hypomnemata, and hypotheses are delineated, and in Christianity—patristic and homiletic (i.e., present in a sermon) commentary, and so forth. Dionysius Thrax’s theory includes six elements, or phases: (1) ἀνάγνωσις—faithful comprehension and articulation of a text; (2) ἐξήγησις—elucidation of poetic figures; (3) explanation of words and historical facts (γλωσσῶν τε καὶ ἱστοριῶν πρόχειρος ἀπόδοσις); (4) “etymological explanation” (εὕρησις); (5) explanation of grammatical rules (ἀναλογίας ἐκλογισμός); (6) evaluation or assessment of the literary work—κρίσις ποιημάτων. In the tradition of the Latin grammarians the elucidation of the text is broken down into lectio, emendatio, explicatio, iudicium. Despite these rich distinctions, the majority of the ancient commentators have focused on the third element, and the sixth element is practically never found in extant papyrus hypomnemata.

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3. Perhaps because of their narrower scope and the fact of their foundation in previous scholarship, collections of studies on Classical and Renaissance commentaries appear to have been more successful. The first conference on Humanist commentary was held in 1988: Gisèle MathieuCastellani et Michel Plaisance, eds., Les commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire: France/Italie (XIVe—XVIe siècles): actes du Colloque international sur le commentaire, Paris, mai 1988 (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1990). The authors of the volume published in 2005 (Marianne Pade, ed., On Renaissance Commentaries, Noctes Neolatinae 4 [Hildesheim: Olms, 2005]) take the next step: they understand commentary as reception, making the phenomenon itself and its cultural characteristics the subject of attention and focusing on questions such as what exactly Renaissance commentary is and how it differs from its medieval counterpart, and in which respects it continues, or departs from, the older tradition. 4. The Princeton historian of education and book culture, Antony Grafton, created a furor with: The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Grafton only takes European material into account, but even so his book is quite innovative. 5. See Glenn W. Most, “More on Commentaries,” The Classical Review NS 55.1 (2005): 169–71; [review of] Goulet-Cazé, Le Commentaire entre tradition et innovation. 6. As a matter of fact, Andrew Laird provides us with an exemplary model of such an approach in the figure of Juan Louis de la Cerda, a Jesuit who lived in the early seventeenth century. In his commentary to the Aeneid, de la Cerda responded to contemporary events, permitted himself hints and allusions, and introduced Virgil’s heroes in the context of his own time (Andrew Laird, “Juan Louis de la Cerda and the Predicament of Commentary,” in The Classical Commentary, pp. 205–34). 7. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Fill Up Your Margins! About Commentary and Copia,” in Commentaries = Kommentare, pp. 443–53. 8. Don P. Fowler, “Criticism as Commentary and Commentary as Criticism in the Age of Electronic Media,” in Commentaries = Kommentare, pp. 426–42. 9. The vagueness of the term “commentary” sometimes seems like a heuristically useful provocation. It is also possible, however, that this vagueness responds to a prolonged absence of reflection on this matter in the modern European tradition, which is in marked contrast to the Judaic tradition which delineated and named various forms of commentary, as did the medieval European tradition (commentaria, commenta, enarrationes, expositiones, quaestiones, apparatus, postilla, etc.). In antiquity, there were also more than a few words that correlated with the act of producing commentary, but these words (σχόλια, ὑπομνήματα, σύγγραμμα, ὑπόθεσις) did not represent well-defined terms.

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10. O. E. Mandel’shtam, Stikhotvoreniia. Proza, ed. M. L. Gasparov (Moscow: AST, 2001); Yu. M. Lotman, “Roman A. S. Pushkina ‘Evgenii Onegin’ Kommentarii,” in Idem, Pushkin. Evgenii Onegin (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB, 1995). 11. See Lotman, Pushkin, pp. 472–74. 12. M. L. Gasparov, “Yu. M. Lotman i problema kommentirovaniia,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 66 (2004): 70–74. 13. Ibid., p. 70. 14. The genre of introduction, εἰσαγωγή, existed in late antiquity: commentary on and interpretation of philosophical or medical texts was anticipated by the author’s introduction to his work and its general subject matter. These prolegomena were constructed according to their task of introducing, that is, according to an “eisagogic scheme.” See Marian Plezia, De commentariis isagogicis (Krakow: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 1949) and Jaap Mansfeld, Prolegomena. Questions to Be Settled Before the Study of an Author, or a Text, Philosophia Antiqua 61 (Leiden: Brill, 1994). 15. See, for example, Iakov Golosovker’s general annotated index to his anthology of classical lyric poetry in Russian translation: Lirika Ellady I-II (Moscow: Vodolei, 2004–2006) and Lirika Rima (Moscow: Vodolei, 2006). Within the framework of corpus linguistics, the Russian structuralist Sergei Iosifovich Gindin utilizes the concepts of “philological equipage” (osnashchenie) vs. “philological convoy” (soprovozhdenie) to distinguish commentary that directly addresses an entire corpus from commentary that only addresses a single context. Taken together with the corpus, they comprise “the system of philological support.” See a description of these categories in: S. I. Gindin et al., “Sistemy filologicheskogo obespecheniia kak osobaia raznovidnost’ obogashchennykh tekstovykh korpusov: priroda, zadachi, obshchee stroenie,” Moskovskii lingvisticheskii zhurnal. Vestnik RGGU 6 (2008): 171–78. 16. B. M. Eikhenbaum’s commentary on Lermontov’s lyric poetry can be placed in this category: Lermontov: Opyt istoriko-literaturnoi otsenki (Leningrad: Gosizdat RSFSR, 1924). Gasparov claims that this commentary had no followers although, obviously, he himself was such a follower. Moreover, whereas Eikhenbaum’s commentary turned into an article on all the poems discussed in the book, arranged in a certain logical sequence, Gasparov’s last commentary on Mandelstam’s poetry is constructed in such a way as to invert the relationship between text and commentary: one must first read the commentary while glancing at the text of the poems, and not the other way around. It is impossible to find the commentary to a particular locus but, in compensation, the reader is referred to various different poems. Thus, the secondariness or “parasitic nature” of commentary has disappeared and the vector of readerly movement, in defiance of tradition, is turned into the opposite direction. Meanwhile, should we wish to deprive

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this commentary of its eccentricity, it shall suffice to present it in electronic form, transforming references to Mandelstam’s poems into hyperlinks. 17. The term heteroglossia is generally used as a translation of Bakhtin’s term raznorechie (prozaicheskoe raznorechie), by which he means the inner battle of the discourses of the author and character(s) within one utterance. My use of heteroglossia is different, because when Bakhtin introduces raznorechie in his book on Dostoevsky (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984]) he is dealing with discourses rather than dialects. 18. John Henderson, Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 19. For an initial formulation of this idea, see:  N.  V. Braginskaya, “Kommentarii kak mekhanizm innovatsii,” in Tekst i kommentarii, pp. 133–43. 20. Richard Sorabji, ed., Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient Commentators and Their Influence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). 21. Alexander Veselovsky, “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics,” see Chapter 1 in this volume, p. 52. Turner and Geertz argued that the main function of ritual in traditional societies is the symbolic confirmation of the existing social order (which is also the cosmic order) that is sanctioned by myth. The distinction between the sacred and the secular is in this regard only marginally relevant. Rituals of transition and rituals of solidarity represent the social structure to the members of society and endow social institutions with legitimacy by placing them in a general cosmic order. In societies that haven’t reached a certain level of complexity, with widely shared beliefs and an oral culture, ritual suffices to perform the function of social control. Continuing ritual, theater allows for interclass communication and questions the existing order of things, which it then confirms. See Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974); From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982); The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986). In the state of Bali, which did not use violence, theater operated as a regulating mechanism in the purest form. The meaning of the existence of the state consisted in the production of magnificent mass ceremonials. The kings served as impresarios, the priests as stage directors, and populace as the supportive audience. The objective of these theatrical performances was not to buttress those in power; rather, they provided a pattern of behavior which in turn was constructed on the model of the supernatural world; see Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 11–17 and passim.

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22. M.  L. Andreev, Srednevekovaia evropeiskaia drama: proiskhozhdenie i stanovlenie (X-XIII vv.) (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1989). 23. By “more-verbal” and “less-verbal” I mean greater or lesser presence of a verbal component or its lesser role, as in song, opera, or cinema. These terms can also refer to a stronger or weaker level of articulation. For example, a song can contain few words and interjectional refrains, which are less strongly articulated (less verbal). Finally, what is “less-verbal” admits less of retelling: a painting on a historical subject is more narratable than a non-programmatic musical piece. 24. Victor H. Mair, Painting and Performance: Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988). 25. The map provided by Victor Mair (in which arrows indicate the spread of the Indic type of performance to Persia, and then through the Arabs to Egypt and Spain, as well as to Turkey, hence to Greece and central and western Europe, then to America, as well as the corresponding set of arrows pointing to central Asia, Indonesia, and China) proves the wide diffusion of the phenomenon, but not the paths of dispersal. Terms denoting these performances are unique to each culture, even in cases when the genre spread with the wandering Buddhist monks who used to carry with them several such didactic scrolls. The scheme of unidirectional diffusion is enriched by secondary influences; for example, Germany influenced not only Russia (lubochnye kartinki says the map), but also exerted a secondorder influence on the Persians and the Arabs, and Indonesia similarly influenced Cambodia. In the same way, a Buddhist monk with his scrolls in his peregrinations may have come upon analogous autochthonous traditions. 26. See also N. V. Braginskaya, “Teatr izobrazhenii: o neklassicheskikh zrelishchnykh formakh v antichnosti,” in Teatral’noe prostranstvo: materialy nauchnoi konferentsii (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1979), pp. 35–58. 27. See Pers. Sat. 1.88–91 and schol. ad loc.; 6.32–33; Juven. Sat. 14.301–2; Phaedr. 4.23.24–25; Mart. 12. 57.12; Ps.-Acro ad Hor. Ars poet. 19, see also G. Fougères, “Mendicatio, mendici,” Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaine, ed. Charles Daremberg and Edmond Saglio. T. III, 2 (Paris: Hachette, 1904), pp. 1713–14. 28. Sen. Epist. 56.4: qui ad Metam Sudantem tabulas experitur et tibias, nec cantat sed exclamat. The manuscript reading tabulas is justly restored, contra the modern editions that print tubulas (an unattested word), by V. V. Zel’chenko; see “Sen. Epist. 56, 4: Zabytoe reshenie,” Indoevropeiskoe iazykoznanie i klassicheskaia filologiia 9 (2005): 86–93. 29. Tiba (or ti ba, or ti-ba), lit. “title-epilogue” 㢗㊑. This combination of characters was used to denote contiguous, yet different phenomena: a bibliographic description, the title of the book or the prologue, colophons, as well as—and this is what is most important for us—impressions gathered

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from a picture, something akin to ekphrasis, or appreciative criticism, ideas or evaluations of a work of art added by the viewer at the end of a book or scrolls of calligraphy or painting. In China there existed collections of works in this genre by particular authors, for example, by Su Shi (Su Dongpo). In Japan, this genre was referred to as daibatsu 㢗㊑ (a general term that refers to the title or preface, dai 㢗, daiji 㢗㎙ and the postscript or colophon *okugaki ዚ᭡, bastubun ㊑ᩝ, atogaki ᚃ᭡, written on books *sasshibon ෇Ꮔᮇ or scrolls *kansubon ᕬᏄᮇ of calligraphy or painting). A similar kind of art was quite widespread, under the name of shigajiku “poem-painting scroll”; see E. S. Shteiner, “Stikhozhivopis’: vvedenie v formal’nyi analiz i opyt opisaniia zhanra sigadziku,” in Voprosy vostochnogo literaturovedeniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1982), pp.  252–78; Dzen’-zhizn’: Ikkiu i vokrug (St. Petersburg: Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 2006), pp. 164–82. While a few examples exist from China from the seventh to the tenth century, the practice rose in importance in Japan during the tenth to the thirteenth centuries along with the development of scholar-painting (*bunjinga ᩝெ⏤ or *nanga ༞⏤), which imitated calligraphy and painting practice of Chinese scholars (wenrenhua). See also: E. V. Zavadskaia, Esteticheskie problemy zhivopisi starogo Kitaia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975), pp. 230–34; P. Miklosha, “Dvoinoe soobshchenie v odnoi kartine,” in Semiotika i khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), pp. 293–307. 30. I thank Ilya Smirnov for consultation on the Chinese genres of inscribed pictures. 31. Veselovsky also noted the phenomenon of commentary within the epic tradition: a singer “from the impoverished castes of India,” when singing at festivities for his own relatives, “at one time imitates the Brahman swâng, at another lengthily retells a legend in a language that is understandable to his audience, borrowing it from a professional singer or selecting one that is appropriate to the subject of festivity or of the local cult”; see “Three Chapters from Historical Poetics,” in Istoricheskaia poetika, ed. V. Zhirmunskii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura; reprint: Moscow: URSS, 2004), p. 326. 32. The Chinese traveler Ma Huan in 1416 says this in his description of Java. Kung Chen (floruit 1430–1434) speaks about this in the section entitled “The Javanese Kingdom,” which appears in his book, Records of Foreign Countries in the Western Ocean. 33. Prior to the sixteenth century kyogens were not written down; farcical plots were standardized, whereas originally they allowed for improvisation. 34. Sylvain Lévi, Le Théâtre Indien (Paris: É. Bouillon, 1890), pp. 129–31.

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35. Note, however, that Shī Jīng (Shih Ching), The Chinese Book of Songs, is a verse commentary to the prose fortune-telling book, the “I Ching” (this example was suggested to me by A. I. Shmaina-Velikanova). The ancient fortune-telling book is so cryptic in its contents that the normal relationship of verse and prose is disrupted. There may also be other examples of this kind. 36. See, for example, Plat. Tim. 72a-b: “Wherefore also it is customary to set the tribe of prophets to pass judgment upon these inspired divinations; and they, indeed, themselves are named ‘diviners’ by certain who are wholly ignorant of the truth that they are not diviners but interpreters [hypokritai] of the mysterious voice and apparition, for whom the most fitting name would be ‘prophets of things divined’.” Translation by W. R. M. Lamb in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 9 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925). 37. The debate over hypokritēs and hypocrisis, over the origins of the term, its meaning and internal form, and, in connection with this, over the beginnings of Greek drama was initiated by Curtius and Sommerbrodt over one hundred fifty years ago, but it became especially pointed in the 1950s. See Georg Curtius, “Über zwei Kunstausdrücke der griechischen Litteraturgeschichte,” Berichte ü. d. Verhandl. d. k. Sächs. Ges. d. Wissensch. zu Leipzig. Philol.-Histor. Cl. 18 (1866) 141–54; Julius Sommerbrodt, “Über die Bedeutung des Wortes ὑποκριτής,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 22 (1867): 510–16;  K. Schneider, “ὑποκριτής,” RE Suppl. VIII (1956), cols. 187–233; Albin Lesky, “Hypokrites,” in Studi in onore di Ugo Enrico Paoli (Florence:  F. Le Monnier, 1956), pp.  469–76; Denys  L. Page, “ὑποκριτής,” Classical Review N.S. 6 (70) (1956): 191–92; Hermann Koller, “Hypokrisis und Hypokrites,” Museum Helveticum 14 (1957): 100–7; Gerald F. Else, “ΥΠΟΚΡΙΤΗΣ,” Wiener Studien 72 (1959): 75–107; B. Zucchelli, ΥΠΟΚΡΙΤΗΣ: Origine e storia del termine (Genova: Istituto di filologia classica, 1962); Paulette Chiron-Bistagne, Recherches sur les acteurs dans la Grèce antique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1976), pp. 115–19; T. V. Buttrey, “Υπό- in Aristophanes and ὑποκριτής,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 18.1 (1977): 5–23. 38. Adrian Piotrovskii and A. A. Gvozdev, Istoriia evropeiskogo teatra (Moscow: Academia, 1931), p. 283. 39. Piotrovskii and Gvozdev, Istoriia, p. 284. It is nevertheless necessary to give Adrian Piotrovsky credit for noticing the similarity of Roman pantomimes and Oriental theatrical systems, although he attributes it to professional differentiation of craftsmen-virtuosos. 40. In ancient sources we find mostly rather late references to the dancer’s speaking hands: “fingers that are tongues” (‘linguosi digiti’) and “the hand of meanings” (‘illa sensuum manus’) that, without writing, performs

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what writing has set forth (Cassiod. Variae 4.51.8–9); cf. Luc. De Salt. 63 and 69; Nonn. Dionys. 5.88. See Ludwig Friedländer, Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire. Authorized translation of the 7th ed. of the Sittengeschichte Roms. (London: G. Routledge & Sons Ltd., 1908–13), 2:100–17, esp.104. 41. Cf. Luc. De salt. 62: “the mime characteristically uses movements to depict that which is sung”; and Athen. 1.21 f.: “Telesis, or Telestēs, the teacher of dancing (ὁ ὀρχηστοδιδάσκαλος), invented numerous gestures, skillfully depicting that which was read (i.e., declaimed).” 42. The Governor of Pontus requested that Nero bestow on him a pantomime, who could serve as an interpreter (Luc. De salt. 64). 43. For a tentantive theory of archaic theater, see N. V. Braginskaya, “Demonstratsiia izobrazhenii—arkhaicheskii tip predstavleniia. K postanovke problemy,” in Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo i teatr: tema, obraz, metod, ed. A. V. Kamchatova (St. Petersburg: State Hermitage, 2006), pp. 3–10. 44. Storytelling is not a natural human faculty, but a cultural phenomenon, which evolves in time and has a historical origin. The cultural (rather than natural) character of narrative is confirmed by the existence of a large, although not unlimited, thesaurus of plot formulae that were used in ancient times and, in the opinion of many scholars (including Alexander Veselovsky and Umberto Eco), in modern literature as well. 45. Daniel Boyarin, “The Bartered Word: Midrash and Symbolic Economy,” in Commentaries = Kommentare, pp. 19–65. 46. See  N.  V. Braginskaya, “Iosif i Asenet: ‘midrash’ do midrasha i ‘roman’ do romana,” Vestnik drevnei istorii 2005, no. 3, pp. 73–96; 2007, no. 1, pp. 32–75; Nina Braginskaya, “A Position of ‘Joseph and Aseneth’ in Greek Literary History: The Case of the ‘First’ Novel,” in Marília P. Futre Pinheiro et al., eds., The Ancient Novel and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative: Fictional Intersections, Ancient Narrative Supplements 16 (Groningen: Groningen University Library, 2012), pp. 79–105. 47. Plut. Solon 3: “Some say that Solon even tried to set out the laws in verse, and that led to the beginning of his narrative poem: ‘First let us offer prayers to Zeus, son of Cronos, / That he may give these laws of ours success and fame.’ ” Translation by B. Perrin in Plutarch’s Lives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914). Plutarch mentions a special collegium of (a)mnemones in the Spartan colony of Knidos, whose duty was to preserve in their memory the corpus of unwritten laws (Qu. Gr. 292b). 48. See Richard Martin, “The Seven Sages as Performers of Wisdom,” in Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics, ed. Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 108–29. 49. The early Eleatics and Pythagoreans, if they wrote anything down, did so in verse. See Yu. A. Shichalin, “Vozniknovenie evropeiskoi kommen-

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tatorskoi traditsii,” in Istoriko-filosofskii ezhegodnik—89 (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), pp. 68–77. Idem, “Kommentarii k klassicheskomu proizvedeniiu kak vid uchebnogo teksta,” Problemy shkol’nogo uchebnika 19 (1990): 72–91. 50. Andrew Ford, “Reading Homer from the Rostrum: Poems and Laws in Aeschines’ Against Timarchus,” in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, ed. Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 231–56. 51. Nikolai Grintser is one of those who regard Protagoras as an interpreter of the Homeric language; see “Platonovskaia etimologiia i sofisticheskaia teoriia iazyka,” in Platonovskii sbornik, t. 2. (St. Petersburg: RGGU-RKhGA, 2013), pp. 64–66. 52. For the connection between ὀρθοέπεια and poetry, see also Andrew Ford, “Performance, Text and the History of Criticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, ed. George Boys-Stones et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 633–34. 53. Rudolph Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 12. 54. Richard Sorabji, The Philosophy of the Commentators 200–600: A Sourcebook, vols. 1–3 (London: Duckworth), 2004. 55. Sorabji, The Philosophy of the Commentators, vol. 3: Logic and Metaphysics, p. 43, and the whole chapter on Methodology: pp. 37–49. 56. For a more detailed discussion of the birth of philosophic dialogues and genres as a result of transformation of prose commentaries on the Vedas, see  V.  N. Romanov, “K zhanrovoi evoliutsii brakhmanicheskoi prozy,” in V. N. Romanov, ed., Shatapatkha-brakhmana: I, X (fragment) (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura RAN, 2009), pp. 1–110. 57. The rule is not without exceptions: philosophical commentary does not necessarily follow pedagogical or informational trajectories. 58. M. M. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii v 7 tomakh, vol. 1: Filosofskaia estetika 1920-kh godov (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 2003). 59. The explanation of monetary units often presents superb specimens of absurdist literature. In a Russian commentary on Josephus Flavius’ Jewish Antiquities, monetary units are translated into francs, francs into silver rubles and bank notes. Henkel’s original translation came out in 1900. One may suppose that he borrowed a statement on the buying power of the drachma and shekel from some older French sourcebook, where he found the francs as equivalent of shekels. By means unknown to us, Henkel then equated these francs with the silver rubles and Russian bank notes of his time, and the current publisher has without any trepidation reprinted these observations for the twenty-first century reader. 60. The quest, toward which the text provokes the commentator, can be quite unexpected. This sometimes baffles the reader of ancient scholia, but similarly confusing trajectories traverse modern commentaries. The

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notorious commentarial imperatives “confer [cf.]” and “see” adhere to the principle of an associative series, often hidden behind suggestions that the readers “compare,” in particular that they compare another locus (in a different book) and for reasons that are not clarified. In two hundred years from now, someone will rejoice upon having figured out the “comparative” intention of the twentieth-century commentator. In a similar way the incomprehensible associations of the ancient scholiasts turn out to be, at the very least, curious for us. 61. Richard Hunter traces how commentary to poetry is written depending on whether the commentator considers the work to be by Theocritus or an anonymous work attributed to Theocritus: Richard Hunter, “The Sense of an Author: Theocritus and [Theocritus],” in The Classical Commentary, pp. 89–108. The high quality of the work usually serves as the main argument for ascribing it to a famous poet, and low quality leads to its exclusion from the creations attributed to him and its classification as anonymous. Comparing commentaries on the same work, which are written from different positions, Hunter points out which unspoken assumptions drive the authors of commentary, their condescension or negligence in their treatment of anonymous texts and their thoroughness and acknowledgment of perfection when it comes to a poet with “a name.” 62. Tendentiousness, or one-sidedness, can be wholly non-ideological. Thus, commentary in a book for studying a foreign language will be onesided. The author of the text being commented did not plan to communicate to his readers just the meanings of the words or grammatical constructions that are new for the language students.

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Chapter 7

A Remnant Poetics Excavating the Chronotope of the Kurgan M ICH A EL KUN ICH IKA

One needed to know little about Vshchizh, a settlement located in the southeast of Russia. It was situated on the right bank of the Desna river; the nearest city was Briansk; it was razed by Mongols sometime in the thirteenth century; and not far from it was a complex of kurgans, or burial mounds, which archaeologists had begun excavating in the 1840s.1 These were some of the few facts recorded in the entry “Vshchizh” in the 1896 Brokgauz-Efron encyclopedia, which designated it an “insignificant settlement.”2 Although condemned to insignificance, Vshchizh does possess some value for Russian literary history because two years before Fedor Tiutchev’s death in 1873, the poet was inspired to write one of his finest late lyrics while traveling through the region: “Ot zhizni toi, chto bushevala zdes’ ” (“Of that life that raged here,” 1871), which is also referred to as “Po doroge vo Vshchizh” (“Along the Road to Vshchizh”).3 От жизни той, что бушевала здеcь, От кpови той, что здеcь pекой лилаcь, Что уцелело, что дошло до наc? Два-тpи куpгана, видимых поднеcь . . . Да два-тpи дуба выpоcли на них, Раcкинувшиcь и шиpоко и cмело. Кpаcуютcя, шумят,—и нет им дела, Чей пpах, чью память pоют коpни их. 209

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Пpиpода знать не знает о былом, Ей чужды наши пpизpачные годы, И пеpед ней мы cмутно cознаем Cебя cамих - лишь гpезою пpиpоды. Поочеpедно вcех cвоих детей, Cвеpшающих cвой подвиг беcполезный, Она pавно пpиветcтвует cвоей Вcепоглощающей и миpотвоpной бездной. [Of that life, which raged here, / Of that blood, which here streamed forth, / What has survived, what has come down to us? / Two or three kurgans, visible to this day . . . // And two or three oaks have grown upon them, / Having stretched out broadly and daringly. / They stand out, rustling—and are unconcerned / About into whose ashes, whose memory their roots dig. // Nature does not care about the past, / Our own spectral years are foreign to it, / And before her we darkly recognize // Our very selves only as a dream of nature. // One by one, all her children, / Each accomplishing their useless feats, / She greets, equally, with her / All-consuming and conciliatory depths] These lines hardly change the image of Vshchizh as an insignificant settlement. In fact, the image acquires an even greater degree of insignificance since everything in the landscape will ultimately be consigned to this “all-consuming” Nature, which not only devours the kurgans, but also destabilizes the ontology of man and consigns all human effort to oblivion. This is the central dynamic played out in the scene before the poet, from whose vantage point the landscape stratifies into multiple layers transected by this ultimate force that consigns all things to insignificance: there is the earth, upon which the two or three kurgans have been constructed, and, in turn, upon which two or three oaks have grown. The kurgans are the only human artifacts within the landscape; and they are framed between Nature above, in the form of the oaks, and in the form of the earth below. In this regard, the oaks are a particularly complex symbol as part of the framing of the kurgans: they are at once signs of natural eternity and the indices of time passing since their growth measures the time since the construction of the kurgans, while also prefiguring the eventual destruction of the kurgans by nature: as they grow upward and outward, their roots drive down into the kurgans. The encroachment of the roots into the kurgans is a par-

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ticularly striking image, since they penetrate the space of memory, which is to say, the inner grave containing the “memory” and “ashes” that are located within the mound. This downward movement of the roots and the upward movement of the oaks reveal that much of the poem’s drama is articulated vertically. Indeed, this verticality is chillingly paradigmatic, since the layers the poet perceives actually contain two kinds of graves: the first is the inner grave within the kurgan and the second, the true grave, that of Nature, is figured here as the “all-consuming and conciliatory depths.” They bring conciliatory force to a land marred by bloodshed, not only because no one will ultimately be exempt from oblivion, but also because Nature will erase all the remnants of memory in the landscape and the testaments of various deeds, martial or otherwise. Conciliation happens here by means of forgetting and erosion; and everything, in the end, will be Nature. The astonishing vision of the poem has bequeathed one of Tiutchev’s most memorable lines: “Пpиpода знать не знает о былом” (“Nature does not care about the past”). These lines, moreover, could hardly seem less congenial to Historical Poetics, given how much the method values the category and capacity of persistence—whether that of genres, topoi, plots, or types. At best, the poem’s idea that neither human memory, nor anything of human manufacture can avoid ultimate consignment to natural oblivion could form something of a negative epigraph to this volume. Still, we might ask, could Tiutchev’s poem, replete though it is with the themes of erasure and oblivion, still occasion a reconsideration of the theoretical and methodological concerns of Historical Poetics? And, in turn, could Historical Poetics help to illuminate the literary dynamics of the poem and the motifs and allusions contained within it? Here, we might recall that Alexander Veselovsky was just as concerned with the question of persistence as he was with its antithesis, oblivion. The latter was opposed to persistence, but it was not its sole antonym in Veselovsky’s thought: another was extinction. We find, in fact, all three terms emerging in the final passages of Veselovsky’s essay “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics” (1894), in which he describes a constellation of categories—perezhivaniia, which can be translated as “preserved sediments” or “survivals”; pamiat’ (“memory”); zabvenie (“oblivion”); and vymiranie (“extinction”)—that together form something of a counter-image of the Vshchizh poem: Popular memory has preserved sediments of images, plots, and types, which were once alive, evoked by a famous individual’s

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activity, by an event or an anecdote that excited interest and took possession of sentiment and fantasy. These plots and types were generalized, the notion of particular individuals and facts could fade, leaving behind only common schemas and outlines. These exist in a dark, hidden region of our consciousness, like much that we have undergone and experienced [perezhitoe], apparently forgotten, but then they suddenly overwhelm us as an inexplicable revelation, as a novelty that is, at the same time, an outmoded antique, something we cannot fully account for, because we are often unable to define the essence of the psychic act that unpredictably renewed in us these old memories. The same holds true in the life of literature, both popular and self-consciously artistic: old images, echoes of images, suddenly appear when a popular-poetic demand has arisen, in response to an urgent call of the times. In this way popular legends recur; in this way, in literature, we explain the renewal of some plots, whereas others are apparently forgotten. What explains this demand, and also this oblivion? Perhaps it is not merely oblivion, but even extinction.4 Nearly point for point, we can identify similarities between the poem and the passage differently evaluated and emplotted by Tiutchev and Veselovsky. Where Veselovsky locates his spaces of preservation in “popular memory” or in “the dark, hidden region of our consciousness,” the analogous space in Tiutchev is the grave within the kurgan, encroached by the roots of the oaks. What is only “apparently forgotten” in Veselovsky will be forgotten regardless in Tiutchev. Where Veselovsky traces the persistence, renewal, and indeed the resurrection of certain “images, plots, and types,” Tiutchev imagines the ultimate annulment of the sediments and survivals of a bygone time. The stark differences between the two is perhaps most forcefully seen in the status each accords “memory”: for Veselovsky, memory is the compensatory ability to wrest forms from oblivion through the activation of some demand (spros); while memory in Tiutchev is materialized, and, as such, rendered consumable by nature. For all these differences, however, we might point out their shared interest in oblivion, which is the inexorable fate of things in Tiutchev and which is a temporary state in Veselovsky. In the latter, oblivion is bounded by memory on one side and extinction on the other: as such, it is a state from which something can be resurrected or lost forever.

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Tiutchev’s poem similarly positions the kurgans. On one level, the poet encounters them at a moment prior to, but inexorably destined for, extinction. On another, the kurgans can also be read in the terms of the “life of literature,” that is, as a site introducing into the poem a range of “sediments” or poetic remnants. Uncovering these various sediments is the task of the coming pages. Scholarly criticism of the poem has uniformly appraised its high significance in Tiutchev’s oeuvre, but has differed as to its place therein. In multiple accounts of his poetic career, the poem is a common touchstone and a point of divergence on whether the poem indicates a break with, or continuation of the poet’s views on nature and history. Kirill Pigarev, for example, situates it “in the series of his meditations on the place of man in nature.”5 Pumpiansky found the poem to mark a nihilist turn in Tiutchev’s late period, since it offers no consolation for one’s mortality and consigns both monuments and memory to an abyss of Nature that is figured as radically indifferent to her children:6 the oaks “are unconcerned, into whose ashes, whose memory their roots dig.” This encroachment of the roots upon the space of the grave, and thereby into the preserve of memory, means that “memory” is rendered here as brute matter: this view has led other scholars to discern in the poem a significant change in Tiutchev’s views on memory, which had earlier maintained the “ontological border between nature and man.”7 It was this radical destabilization of such categories as memory, moreover, that lead Pumpiansky to find in the poem Tiutchev’s “entire system of the philosophy of nature and of history [ . . . ] destroyed to its very foundations.”8 The ruins in the poem, in short, were both archaeological and philosophical. Against this view of a radical break, however, other scholars have argued that Tiutchev recapitulated, rather than abandoned, his abiding concerns in the poem. Yuri Lotman has argued that the poem would be better construed within the “poetic ontology” Tiutchev had elaborated early on in his career; in, for example, his lyric “Sizhu, zadumchiv i odin” (“I sit, pensive and alone,” 1836), written nearly four decades earlier: Былое—было ли когда? Что ныне—будет ли вcегда? . . Оно пpойдет—Пpойдет оно, Kак вcё пpошло,

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И канет в темное жеpло За годом год. [The past, did it ever exist? / And that which is now, will it be forever? / It shall pass—and pass it shall / As everything has passed, / And, year after year will plunge into that dark orifice.] The image of nature in these lines—with the inexorable plunging of time passed (byloe) into the “dark orifice”—indicates Tiutchev’s persistent sense of time as tyranically ruling over the lives of men, and in face of which Tiutchev perceived his own “nothingness” (nichtozhestvo).9 Lotman, moreover, elaborates his claim for continuity in terms of a particular literary-historical dynamic for which the Vshchizh poem proved central: “In order to make it obvious that the oscillation and variation of this theme [. . . . ] cannot be ascribed to evolution but rather reflects an organic tendency of Tiutchev’s to consciously run from one pole of a structural opposition to another, it is well to remember that [ . . . ] ‘Of that life that raged here . . .’ is dated 1871, but the poem ‘I traveled through the Livonian fields’ was already written in 1830.”10 Instead of an evolutionary claim, the dynamics are those of oscillation (kolebanie) and variation, which are consistently organized around various motifs, formulae, and images coursing through Tiutchev’s work. Pigarev also observed similar literary dynamics underpinning Tiutchev’s oeuvre in an account of the poet in which we find a notable overlap with Veselovsky’s account of persistence and oblivion. Pigarev notes that the poem represents a “philosophical development and a deepening of an earlier theme [of depths (bezdna): MK],” and then proceeds to observe that “not only poems on similar themes repeat in Tiutchev’s works, and not only independent motifs vary over the course of many years, but also the same images (obrazy), epithets, word constructions, persistently (nastoichivo) move from one poem to the other.”11 Like Lotman, Pigarev singles out Tiutchev’s 1830 “Cherez livonskie ia proezzhal polia” (“I traveled through the Livonian fields”), in which we find the earlier configuration of images and themes related to nature and to the past: Но твой, пpиpода, миp о днях былых молчит C улыбкою двуcмыcленной и тайной,— [But, O Nature, your world remains silent of bygone days, / With an ambiguous and mysterious smile.]

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In Pigarev’s view, this passage furnishes evidence for the commonly held view of “self-repetition” (samopovtoreniia) in Tiutchev’s work:12 As a rule, the poems on homogenous themes are separated in Tiutchev by a more or less prolonged period of time. It is as if the poet experiences an impression anew (syznova perezhivaet vpechatlenie), which had struck and inspired him once before, and finds different words for the communication of this new impression.13 The kind of “self-repetition” recalls the passage from Veselovsky with which I began this essay: “These exist in a dark, hidden region of our consciousness, like much we’ve experienced and lived through [perezhitoe], that which is apparently forgotten and then strikes us as an inexplicable revelation, as novelty and antiquity at the same time, something for which we cannot fully give an account, because we are often unable to define the essence of the psychic act that has unexpectedly renewed in us an old memory.” Whether the poem is an instance of novelty or repetition, or whether it represents a radical break or a continuity of theme, one thing is new in the poem: it was the first time the word “kurgan” appears in his poetry. A new word, at least in his poetry, enables him to communicate his old or novel experiences.14 It is all the more ironic then that the majority of criticism about the poem passes over the kurgans in silence. In a sense, to do so reproduces the work of Nature in the poem, consigning them as much to a natural as to a literary-historical oblivion. Indeed, one particularly notable account of the poem that has addressed the kurgans is that of I. N. Sukhikh, who views the first two stanzas as establishing the “local character” of the poem: “The idea of the conclusive victory of nature in this undeclared battle with human history, which is prepared in the ‘empirical’ landscape section.”15 Sukhikh’s discussion of the kurgans, in fact, assimilates them to Nature: “From the past really nothing remains, nothing concrete, nothing of which the memory of modern man could catch hold.[ . . . ] Even the traces of the past in the present—the kurgans—are preserved only because they are of nature, and are natural (sokhranilis’ tol’ko potomu, chto oni prirodny, estestvenny).”16 Perhaps unwittingly, Sukhikh identifies the central predicament the kurgan has frequently posed in Russian letters: namely, that it can be so often mistaken for nature, for a mere hillock, rather than a burial mound. The kurgans, however, are not

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nature. They are graves. Or, as the drama of the poem’s image of nature’s all-consuming depths tells us, the kurgans are not nature yet. The kurgans, moreover, are not just artifacts of human manufacture, they are also sites with literary-historical value. Tiutchev is just one of many nineteenth-century writers to have addressed the kurgan in literature. Among the most notable of his predecessors are Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Lev Tolstoy. It falls well outside the purview of this essay to trace the literary history of the kurgan, but what that history tells us is that the first two stanzas are more than just “empirical” landscape details. Indeed, we can recuperate a range of literary allusions to delineate a context broader than that of Tiutchev’s oeuvre. The first two stanzas, I contend, constitute a site of a poetic dialogue between Tiutchev and his precursors, which encodes a plot for the kurgan from which the Vshchizh poem diverges. This allusive structure rests upon the emblem of the oak and grave, which, to take the tack of Historical Poetics, migrates from poem to poem, and, as we will see later, from literature into archaeology. Among the associations with the emblem most germane to the Vshchizh poem is its relation to the topos of “indifferent nature” (ravnodushnaia priroda), which was common throughout the nineteenth-century Russian lyric and indeed in Tiutchev’s own verse. The topos has too extensive a history in Russian letters to describe here,17 but we can take Alexander Pushkin’s “Brozhu li ia vdol’ ulits shumnykh” (“Whether I walk along the noisy streets,” 1830) as the seminal articulation of the topos and as an instructive counterpoint to Tiutchev’s poem.18 In Pushkin’s lyric, the pronounced sense of mortality and the ephemerality of human existence was coordinated with Nature’s eternal beauty and “equanimity” toward man in the poem’s last stanza: “И пуcть у гpобового входа / Младая будет жизнь игpать, / И pавнодушная пpиpода / Кpаcою вечною cиять. [And at the entrance to the grave, let / Young life play / And indifferent nature / Shine with eternal beauty].”19 We can measure the difference between Pushkin’s and Tiutchev’s rendition of the topos by noting how, in the former, the oaks and the grave remain two discrete spheres, the border between which is inhabited by the youthful life (mladaia zhizn’), a figure of generational change, as well as positioned between a shared indifference (since children are playing) and a future death (since it is at the cusp of a grave).

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Tiutchev’s “all-consuming nature” (vsepogloshchaiushchaia priroda) marks a radically different version of the topos of “indifferent nature,” and one which has appeared earlier in Tiutchev’s lyrics. In “Vesna,” (“Spring,” 1838), we find a possible link to Pushkin’s 1830 lyric and a robust explication of “indifferent nature” as predicated on nature’s divinity: Веcна . . . она о ваc не знает, О ваc, о гоpе и о зле; Беccмеpтьем взоp ее cияет И ни моpщины на челе. Cвоим законам лишь поcлушна, В уcловный чаc cлетает к вам, Cветла, блаженно-pавнодушна, Как подобает божеcтвам. [Spring. . . . She does not know of you, / Of you, of grief and of evil. / Her gaze radiates with immortality, / No wrinkles mar her brow. / She is obedient to her laws alone, / Flies down to you at the appointed hour, / Radiant, blessedly indifferent / As befits the gods.] (Tiutchev, Stikhotvoreniia, p. 137) Entirely without feeling or knowledge of man, nature’s “blessed indifference” is a notable precursor to the line in the Vshchizh poem: “Nature does not care about the past” (“Priroda znat’ ne znaet o bylom”). The image of spring we find in 1838, however, also represents an oscillation in the image of the season since Tiutchev, in an eponymous poem from 1821, did not envision nature as indifferent, but rather as a benevolent gift giver, one that both inspires man, and, as Boris Maslov has observed, gives access to the divine: “Nature grants a feast to Creation, [She] grants a feast of meeting to her sons” (Tiutchev, p. 40).20 In the Vshchizh poem, so many years later, Nature does not grant feasts to her sons, she consumes their bones. If the emblem of the oak and grave gestures on the one hand to the topos of “indifferent nature,” then, on the other, it also points us toward an intertextual relationship between the Vshchizh poem and another poem on the kurgan: Afanasy Fet’s “Kurgan” of 1847.21 If we compare both poems, we find a central difference in how they respectively understand the symbolism of the oak: where in Tiutchev, the poem consigns the kurgans to oblivion, in Fet it marks a form of commemoration:

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Дpуг веков, повеpенный пpеданий, Ты один cpедь бpатии cвоей Cохpанил cокpовищ и деяний Вековую тайну от людей: Что же дуб c кудpявой головою Не взpащен твой подвиг отмечать, И не cветит в cумpак над тобою Огонёк—избpания печать? Как на вcех, оpёл c неизмеpимой На тебя cлетает выcоты, И cpезает плуг неумолимый Bcех пpимет поcледние cледы . . . Что ж ты дpемлешь? Cилой чудотвоpной Возpаcти темно-кудpявый дуб! Cокpуши о камень непокоpный Злого плуга неотвязный зуб!.. —Оттого-то, cтpанник беcпpиметный, На cтепи я вечно здеcь молчу, Что навек в гpуди мой клад заветный Ото вcех я затаить хочу.22 [Friend of the ages, confidant of legends, / You alone amidst your brethren / Have preserved the ancient mystery / Of treasure and feats from men: // Why has the oak with curly head / Not been grown to note your deed, / Or a fire alight at dusk upon you, / As the mark of [your] election? // As upon all, an eagle from immeasurable / Heights descends upon you, / And the implacable plow cuts through / The final traces of all signs . . . . . // Why do you slumber? / Make a dark-curly haired oak grow / By some miraculous force! / Shatter upon unruly stone / The importunate tooth of an evil plow! //—That is why, unnoticed wanderer, / In the steppe I shall remain eternally silent, / That forever the hidden treasure in my heart / I want to keep hidden from all.] The metaphor for the kurgan in the opening stanza—“Friend of the Ages” (Drug vekov)—indicates the essential difference between Fet’s and Tiutchev’s accounts of the relationship of the kurgans to Nature. Fet’s poem imagines that the relationship between the kurgan, Time, and Nature are structured by camaraderie. And, moreover, what threatens the kurgan is not Nature, but rather the plow (“importunate tooth

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of an evil plow!”) and, implicitly, plunder (“the hidden treasure in my heart”). Perhaps the most telling difference between the two poems is the function of the oak, which in Fet belongs to the poem’s commemorative theme. The oak, along with the flame, would serve as a testament to glories past: “Why has the oak with curly head / Not been grown to note your deed (podvig)?” As such, Fet’s poem might be seen as the reverse of Tiutchev’s almost point for point, since the latter imagines the oak not as a symbol of memorialization but rather the agent of destruction. For all these differences, however, Fet’s poem also encodes a subtle account of oblivion that comes to the fore when we consider it in terms of Tiutchev’s poem. The last stanza discloses a central opposition between the themes of commemoration and concealment, both of which are related to the word “primeta” (“mark, sign, token”). The word first appears in stanza three—where the plow destroys “the last traces of all signs (vsekh primet)”—but the word is also affiliated with the theme of commemoration through the verb “otmechat’ ” (“to mark” or “to notice”), for which the oak and the flame would serve as symbols (“Why has the oak with curly head / Not been grown to note your deed, / Or a fire alight at dusk upon you”). The kurgan is at once a final sign of the past, while lacking other signs that commemorate that status. The problem of commemoration, however, is that those signs of the oak and the flame would also serve to call attention to the kurgan, and as such, potentially endanger it. Notably, Fet imputes to the kurgan a desire to remain silent (molchu) and to hide (zatait’) in order to preserve its hidden treasure. Indeed, this desire to protect what is located within the kurgan also turns on variations of usages of the word “primeta”: the kurgan is working to conceal itself from precisely the kind of recognition rendered in such phrases as “imet’ na primete,” “to have one’s eye on.” While the wanderer perceives the kurgan as lacking signs of commemoration, the kurgan’s emergence as a speaker in the last stanza inverts the structure of the commemoration. Unlike the wanderer, the kurgan wants to remain concealed. But what is this voice that speaks in the final stanza? Rhetoricians tell us that the ascription of voice to inanimate artifacts often entails the falling into silence of the poet. Paul de Man defined the trope of prosopopeia as “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s

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name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon).”23 One curious feature of the voice of the kurgan in Fet is that it sounds vaguely Tiutchevian. Fet’s kurgan echoes what were the basic terms of Tiutchev’s famous injunction in “Silentium” (1830)—“Be silent, lie concealed, and hide” (“Molchi, skryvaisia i tai”)—with its sense of the ineluctable falsity and inadequacy that is the fate of all expression. Two of the verbs are repeated by Fet: “molchat’ ” and “zatait’,” and the general theme of the poem points at least to a shared affinity between “Silentium” and Fet’s “Kurgan” inasmuch as both seek to remain silent or hidden. The injunction stands as a curious predecessor to the kurgan’s desire to protect the treasure in its heart. Indeed, Fet’s admiration for Tiutchev has been amply charted in the scholarship. He not only knew “Silentium,” but he also partially shared the poem’s worry about the limitations of linguistic expression. As Emily Klenin observes, Fet echoed “Tituchev’s exhortation to silence, but Tiutchev’s rhetoric only distantly illuminates Fet’s poetic practice. Fet’s poetry would be interesting, even if it lacked all its other distinctions, for its play of language against anti-language: language made into an object that represents, enables, and sometimes propagandizes escape from language into a world of pure beauty.” 24 One way to reconfigure this tropological view in terms of the drama of the speaking kurgan is to note how the question in the poem has less to do with voice than with the dilemma of signification proper, of being legible as a sign: the kurgan emerges as a speaker only to announce a desire contrary to that of the wanderer, namely to disavow the very visibility conferred upon it by the wanderer’s gaze in favor of an invisibility (or concealment) that it equates with safety. It was to be read as nature, rather than as an object of human manufacture. In this interplay of commemoration and concealment, of the desire to be noticed and the desire to go unnoticed, we also sense the significance of the kurgan’s reference to the wanderer himself as ultimately besprimetnyi (“inconspicuous”). If we follow the basic schema of prosopopeia, moreover, the very desire to commemorate the kurgan by either the oak or flame, this marks the wanderer’s ascription to the kurgan of his own desires, and, in particular, of his desire to be inscribed into the basic plot he knows the kurgan represents: namely, that it commemorates a feat of a bogatyr, which the wanderer has not yet achieved. The additional dimension of the lyric plot that emerges here is the simultaneous knowledge of the fate of such a feat, namely that all such accomplishment, even if commemorated by the kurgan, could

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meet with the same potential forgetting and ruination that was the fate of the kurgan’s “brothers.” It is unclear whether Tiutchev read Fet’s “Kurgan,” but given the repetition of particular images, it seems likely that the younger poet’s poem could have furnished the basic template of commemoration Tiutchev inverts in the Vshchizh poem. From this perspective, it would be a remarkable possibility inasmuch as it would allow us to read the Vshchizh poem as participating in an ongoing conversation between the two poets, one which now takes place at the site of the kurgan; and, moreover, a transhistorical conversation in which Tiutchev may not only be responding to Fet’s “Kurgan,” but also radicalizing the very Tiutchevean subtext of the self-abnegating signs contained within the Fet poem. Alternatively, we might read the relationship between the two poems as the no less powerful, but less author-based movement of particular topoi that migrate from poem to poem. From that perspective, what is significant from the constitution of the kurgan as a literary-historical site—capable, in other words, of generating comparisons between poets on the basis of their shared motifs—is that one of the dramas of Tiutchev’s poem not only relates to his own oeuvre, but also to the kurgan proper: for its contribution to the topos of the kurgan and oak is more like an anti-topos, invoking it and undoing it simultaneously. In this sense, Tiutchev is radicalizing its emblematic features. His oaks are not signs of commemoration, as they are in Fet, but agents of natural oblivion; his kurgans do not seek to be concealed, as in Fet, but will be destroyed, not by plow or plunder, but by nature. To excavate this topos of the kurgan—or, more precisely, Tiutchev’s conception of it—enables us to return to the question posed by Veselovsky with which I began this essay: “With reference to what should one explain this demand (spros) and this oblivion (zabven’ie)? Perhaps not merely oblivion, but also extinction (vymiranie)?” What might Tiutchev offer us in trying to answer the question of how oblivion functions in Veselovsky’s account of the persistence of forms? And how might this dialectic of demand and oblivion be thereby underscored as a central premise of Historical Poetics? Veselovsky locates “oblivion” on a gradient that runs from “demand” at one end and “extinction” at the other. It mediates these two states, and in that way, suggests that for him, the state of being forgotten is temporary and chimerical: what he emphasizes, in this passage, is something that is only “apparently forgotten” (vidimo zabytoe). Why might it be necessary for him that

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something is only seemingly forgotten, rather than actually consigned irrevocably to extinction? Veselovsky’s vision of Historical Poetics requires that the conceptual antonym of persistence be not oblivion but rather extinction. On the simplest level, this is because extinction marks the absolute limit beyond which the method’s recuperative impulse cannot go: indeed, Veselovsky seems to hedge back even here, when he goes on to write that what we had thought was extinct is also ultimately recuperable, not by remembrance but by resurrection: “In our poetic language, and not only in turns of phrase, but also in images, there occurs a slow series of extinctions, even as much is being resurrected for new use.” Can anything be barred entirely from persistence and resurrection? We could not even know what is extinct, since to know of something, from this view, means that it rests in a state of oblivion, awaiting reconstitution as an object of knowledge, of philology, of historical poetics. Turning back in this light to the Vshchizh poem, we might ask whether the literary-historical dimensions of the poem, its recapitulation of various topoi, and the poem’s subsequent critical history affirm some power of memory and recoverability that override the poem’s themes of the annihilation of all human effort. That is, is all this critical effort of turning to Tiutchev’s own oeuvre or to Fet done in order to mitigate the radical conception of oblivion the poem articulates? Indeed, the preceding pages seem to have done more to summon the work of memory, the persistence and migration of topoi, and the prospects of intertextuality, than to have charted the process of their extinction. Tiutchev’s effort to resist shoring up memory seems all the more paradoxical given the poem’s own allusiveness and its subsequent entrance into the Russian lyrical canon. Can one take the vision of nature elaborated in the Vshchizh poem with the radical seriousness in which it was written, and see the attempt to turn toward the literaryhistorical past or to other works by Tiutchev as merely compensatory acts aspiring to resist the vision Tiutchev elaborates at Vshchizh? Or, for that matter, does one just make a facile rejoinder to that vision and say that one can find solace from the poem’s own vision in the fact that the poem has itself survived, even as it serves as the continual reminder that all human deeds—including poetic ones—will be inexorably lost? In this regard, the poem places us at an interpretive impasse, similar to the way oblivion in Veselovsky forms a mediating figure between demand and extinction. As we excavate this topos and the range of al-

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lusions made in the poem, we create a story of persistence that is capable of serving as a counterforce to the poem’s supreme vision of the radical indifference of nature and the ephemerality of man. The allusions testify to what has endured, and to the significance of the kurgan as a literary site. Rather than seeing the allusion to Fet as consolidating a literary tradition, however, we might also see Tiutchev’s poem deploying the allusion to Fet’s text in order to amplify one’s sense of what is being consigned to the depths: namely, not just the kurgans are consigned into the oblivion of nature in Tiutchev, but also previous literary kurgans are consigned to literary-historical oblivion. These allusions and the migration of topoi such as “indifferent nature,” in other words, do not form a stable bulwark against Tiutchev’s radical vision. The central dynamic of the Vshchizh poem thereby seems to come close to what Veselovsky had in mind with his own account of oblivion, but here it is radicalized: one is called to remember only to better appreciate the amplitude of what will be forgotten.

Coda Let me take an image from 1881 as a way to conclude this essay (Figure 7.1).25 The emblem appears on the cover of Count A. S. Uvarov’s Archaeology of Russia: the Stone Age (1881), whose first volume marked a watershed publication in the study of the Stone Age in Russia. It roughly approximates what Tiutchev describes in the Vshchizh poem, but with some clear differences: first, it is unclear whether these are the roots of oaks and, second, the grave form depicted here is not that of a kurgan (there is no burial mound piled above an inner crypt). The Vshchizh poem, moreover, obliquely refers us to the medieval period (since that was when the town was razed, and presumably when the kurgans were constructed), while the emblem refers us to the Stone Age. The central difference of the emblem, however, is that it participates within a broader configuration of cultural practices that sought to systematically excavate and to preserve Stone Age artifacts. That is, it sought precisely to intervene into the very process that might have consigned these artifacts to oblivion. Encapsulating the archaeological project, the emblem articulates that sense of an awareness that various archaeological strata are present within the landscape. Indeed, the landscape itself cannot be seen as sheer nature, since the emblem also transforms a landscape into an archaeological zone, which is to say, it suggests the presence of objects worthy of archaeological study.

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We find the appearance of this emblem in other archaeological venues as well. Just a year after Tiutchev wrote the Vshchizh poem, one of Russia’s leading archaeologists of kurgans, D. A. Samokvasov, began his extensive excavation of the so-called Black Grave in Chernigov, or Chernaia mogila, which was located not far from Vshchizh. The excavations lasted from 1872 to 1874, during which time Samokvasov located the remains of the Chernigov princes. Today, the find is considered among the finest examples of a kurgan from the Russian tenth century. In a photo taken at some point during the excavation, we see a group of figures, standing in front of the excavated kurgan. The excavators seem to have cut along the central axis of the mound, and thereby revealed the various layers out of which it is composed (Figure 7.2). What might strike us in the photo is the tree that stands atop the kurgan: again, it is difficult to say what kind of tree it is, but the basic features of the emblem we had seen in the Vshchizh poem are present. We get a better view of this tree a decade later from an image from 1888, when the French geographer Élisée Reclus, the author of La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes traveled to Chernigov, where he sketched the “Black Grave,” and furnished us with another angle on the tree than the one we find in the earlier photo (Figure 7.3). These emblems, with their discerning of the archaeological layers present within the landscape, indicate a different function than what we find in Tiutchev. In these contexts, they compel an archaeological intervention into the processes of erosion and destruction Tiutchev had deemed inexorable. The poetic topos of the oak and the kurgan are thereby extended and transformed into a chronotope, suggesting either the covert or overt presence of an archaic past within the landscape. Archaeology wrests that archaic past from natural oblivion: the “demand,” as Veselovsky called it, belongs to archaeological preservation. In that regard, the work of the archaeologist’s spade intervenes into that process in Tiutchev whereby the kurgan is inexorably consigned to oblivion. At that moment, however, we might also note another form of loss since, as Fet imagines it, the kurgan hides to protect its inner treasure from the plow and plunder: it must also now do so from the very archaeological spade that would seek to preserve the memory the kurgan contains.

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Notes 1. For an assessment of the archaeological findings at Vshchizh, see B. A. Rybakov, “Stol’nyi gorod Chernigov i udel’nyi gorod Vshchizh,” in Po sledam drevnykh kul’tur: drevniaia Rus’ (Moskva: Goskul’tprosvetizdat, 1953), pp. 75–120. 2. Brokgauz-Efron, s.v. “Vshchizh.” Vadim Kozhinov, Tiutchev’s biographer, notes that “Vshchizh courses as if through the entire life of the poet,” beginning from his childhood through his last visit in 1871, when he wrote the poem. See Vadim Kozhinov, Tiutchev (Moskva: Molodaia gvardiia, 1988), p. 21. 3. F.  I. Tiutchev, Stikhotvoreniia. Pis’ma. (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1957), p. 291. The poem was not published until 1886. 4. Alexander Veselovsky, “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics: Questions and Answers” (1894); see Chapter  1  in this volume. On the concept of perezhivanie and affiliated terms in Veselovsky, such as “sedimentation” (otlozhenie), see Chapter 1, n. 4. 5. K. G. Pigarev, F. I. Tiutchev i ego vremia (Moskva: Sovremennik, 1978), p. 311; and I. N. Sukhikh, “F. Tiutchev ‘Ot zhizni toi, chto bushevala zdes’,” in Analiz odnogo stikhotvoreniia, (Leningrad: LGU, 1985), pp. 187–98, at p. 188. 6. L. V. Pumpianskii, “Poeziia F. I. Tiutcheva,” in F. I. Tiutchev: pro et contra: lichnost’ i tvorchestvo Tiutcheva v otsenke russkikh myslitelei i issledovatelei: antologiia (Sankt Peterburg: RKGA: 2005), p. 453. 7. K. G. Isupov, “F. I. Tiutchev: Poeticheskaia ontologiia i estetika istorii,” in F. I. Tiutchev: pro et contra, pp. 7–42. Indeed, as Sukhikh laconically puts it: “the loss of memory is, for Tiutchev, worse than death” (“F. Tiutchev,” p. 194). 8. Pumpianskii, “Poeziia,” p. 453. 9. Letter to E. F. Tiutcheva, 26 July 1850; cited in Lotman, “Poeticheskii mir Tiutcheva,” in F. I. Tiutchev: pro et contra, p. 842. 10. Lotman, “Poeticheskii mir,” p. 854. 11. Pigarev, F. I. Tiutchev, pp. 287–88. 12. Pigarev, F. I. Tiutchev, p. 285. 13. Pigarev, F. I. Tiutchev, p. 285. 14. See Borys Bilokur, A Concordance to the Russian Poetry of Fedor I. Tiutchev (Providence: Brown University Press, 1975), s.v. “kurgan.” 15. Sukhikh, “F. Tiutchev,” p. 194. 16. Sukhikh, “F. Tiutchev,” p. 193. 17. To my knowledge, there has not been a systematic examination of the topos of “indifferent nature” in the nineteenth-century lyric. Some of the examples most germane to Tiutchev would include Pushkin’s “Brozhu li ia vdol’ ulits shumnykh” (“I wander along noisy streets”) and Lermontov’s

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“Vykhozhu odin ia na dorogu” (“I set out alone upon the road”). One consistent sign that a poet activates the particular topos is the oak. Other notable examples would thus include the famous scene of the oak, contemplated by Pierre in War and Peace, although, to be sure, the oak forms a kind of mirror to Pierre’s own emotional state. Two notable returns of the topos in twentieth-century Russian literature include Varlam Shalamov’s devastating reversal of the topos in his story, “Detskie kartinki” (“Children’s Drawings”), wherein he writes, “Nature in the north is not indifferent, but in league with those who sent us here,” and Sergei Eisenstein’s extensive tract, “Non-indifferent Nature.” 18. K. Pigarev relates the two poems directly in Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo Tiutcheva, p. 270. 19. This poem is linked to a whole class of Pushkin’s lyrics in which, as Andrew Kahn observes, Pushkin discloses his “intimations of mortality.” “Romantic subjectivity,” Kahn notes, “with its potential for dissolving the ego into the non-ego of the natural world made it possible to contemplate a deathless afterlife” (Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008], p. 319; see, in particular, the section, “Poetic Mortality and Negative Capability,” pp. 316–326). 20. See Boris Maslov, “Pindaric Temporality, Goethe’s Augenblick and the Invariant Plot of Tiutchev’s Lyric,” Comparative Literature 64.4 (2012): 356–81, at p. 369. 21. I do so in my book, Our Native Antiquity: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (Forthcoming. Beacon, Mass.: Academic Studies Press). 22. The poem has been designated a ballad, in, for example, the collected works published in the 1912 Complete Works edition. “Iz tsikla ‘Ballady,’ ” Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii A. A. Feta (Sankt Peterburg: A.F. Marks, 1912), 2:20. 23. “Autobiography as De-facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 67–82. 24. Emily Klenin, The Poetics of Afanasy Fet (Köln: Böhlau, 2002), p. 174. 25. All figures can be found at https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/ historicalpoetics/recent-work/illustrations/.

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Chapter 8

On “Genre Memory” in Bakhtin ILYA KLIG ER

The concept of “genre memory,” proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in the second edition of his book on Dostoevsky from 1963, names one of the most vivid and enigmatic figurations of literary-historical continuity we have. It is of course not the first attempt to think such continuity within the Russian tradition. Almost one hundred years before Bakhtin coined the term, Alexander Veselovsky, the founder of Historical Poetics as a paradigm within literary scholarship, wondered whether “each new poetic epoch [does] not work on images bequeathed from antiquity, being of necessity constrained by their boundaries.”1 Veselovsky would go on to refine and build upon this basic insight for the next thirty years, convinced that much, if not all, of modern literature can be understood as “the new content of life” shaped by age-old formulas, images, and motifs.2 Another, and in many respects a competing, conception of literary-historical endurance arose in the work of the Russian Formalist School of literary criticism in the mid-1920s. By contrast with Veselovsky, the Formalists tended to emphasize discontinuity, or a kind of leaping movement whereby the overcoming of the exhausted forms of the recent past results in the recursion of the past that is more distant. Thus, says Yuri Tynianov, in struggling against the forms bequeathed to us by our “fathers” we come to resemble our “grandfathers.”3 These three conceptions of literary-historical persistence differ in important, consequential ways, and it would be difficult to do them all 227

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justice within the confines of a single chapter. I choose to focus on Bakhtin because I think that his conception of persistence is the most suggestive of the three and the most difficult to understand. Part of the difficulty, I would argue, stems from his taking very seriously something that both Veselovsky and the Formalists tend to smooth over: the boundary between modern and premodern forms of verbal creativity. Veselovsky insists again and again on the continuity between archaic and contemporary literary forms, appealing to time as “the great equalizer” and suggesting that were we to look back at the literary works written in the last two hundred years from the distance of, say, ten centuries, “the phenomenon of schematism and repetitiveness would become installed [for us] throughout [the entire span of literary history, including our own moment].”4 For Veselovsky, there is no radical rift within the continuum that might connect such a topical modern novel as Spielhagen’s In Reih’ und Glied (1866) to Aeschylus’s Prometheus and still further back, to the myth that grounds it.5 Meanwhile, the Formalists, thoroughly steeped in the culture of modernity, begin with the presumption that the truly aesthetic dimension of verbal art functions to revivify experience (or literary form) through the production of the new. As a result, the question of tradition is supplanted by the notion of struggle with the past. When the Formalists do speak of “traditional” literature, they tend to apply to it principles developed on the basis of their engagement with the literature of modernity. The outcome inverts the direction of Veselovsky’s analysis, treating mythological and even ritualistic verbal creation as if they were modern and autonomous.6 In contrast to these views, Bakhtin’s vision of literary continuity presupposes a conceptually robust historiological turning point from premodern to modern forms of verbal creativity. This obstacle or gap is nevertheless traversed by a paradoxical continuum, which can no longer be simply posited, but must be rigorously elaborated and justified. I would argue, in other words, that in order to appreciate the distinctiveness of the concept of “genre memory” among other ways of understanding the endurance of literary forms, we may want to reconstruct it as the outcome of an attempt to think the modern concept of tradition (meaningful cultural persistence) within a rigorously defined logic of modernity. In order to show how this is the case, however, it will be necessary to attempt a hermeneutics of the concept of “genre memory” with reference to the larger body of Bakhtin’s work. Of course what follows should not be taken to posit anything like a forty-year single-

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minded preoccupation on Bakhtin’s part with the question of tradition in modernity. No such preoccupation can exhaustively explain the directions his thought took in the years between the composition of the early philosophical manuscripts and the publication of the second edition of his book on Dostoevsky. Rather, this narrative arch through Bakhtin’s work is chosen as a heuristic framework, which seems to me to be best suited for elucidating the rich and wide-ranging stakes of the enigmatic concept of “genre memory.”

Genre Memory in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963) To begin with, what does Bakhtin actually say about genre memory? The evocative passages appear in Chapter 4 of the second edition of his book on Dostoevsky, entitled “Characteristics of Genre and Plot Construction in Dostoevsky’s Works,” the single most extended addition to the version of the book from 1929. Going through his characterizations of the “life of genre,” it is difficult to know precisely what he is after. He seems to strain for a proper formulation of his method, appealing now to one established conception of endurance, now to another, and sometimes hitting on a conception that seems to be altogether new, at least within the domain of literary history. Thus, early on in the chapter, Bakhtin makes the following observation: Always preserved in genre are undying elements of the archaic. [ . . . ] Genre is reborn and renewed at every new stage in the development of literature and in every individual work of a given genre. This constitutes the life of the genre. [ . . . ] A genre lives in the present but always remembers its past, its beginning. Genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development. Precisely for this reason genre is capable of guaranteeing the unity and uninterrupted continuity of this development.7 Here, in affirming continuity between Dostoevsky and the tradition of Menippean satire, Bakhtin sounds close to Veselovsky, implying that the new “realist” content of his novels—social disorder, the socially under-determined hero, philosophical and religious doubt—naturally fit into the forms, whose origins extend all the way back to the Hellenistic age, and perhaps still further back to ritual practices and myth.

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Later on in the chapter, a different conception of continuity emerges. Having listed some of the defining characteristics of Menippean satire, Bakhtin states: Essentially all of the defining features of the Menippea [ . . . ], we find also in Dostoevsky. This is in fact one and the same generic world, although present in the Menippea at the beginning of its development, in Dostoevsky at its peak. But we know that the beginning, that is the archaic stage of the genre, is preserved in renewed form at the highest stages of the genre’s development. Moreover, the higher a genre develops and the more complex its form, the better and more fully it remembers its past.8 The notion of memory implicit here is linked to development, an unfolding and elaboration of the essence that is there from the start. In this way, we might appeal to the organic analogy and say that a fullygrown tree “remembers” the acorn better than a mere sapling does. Less Veselovskian, this conception of continuity may perhaps resonate closer to Hegelian philosophy of history as the story of the progressively more nuanced and all-encompassing manifestation of freedom in the objective social world.9 Finally, when it comes to the question of how the tradition of Menippea makes its way into Dostoevsky’s work, we get the formulation of the category of “genre memory” itself: “Does this mean that Dostoevsky proceeded directly and consciously from the ancient Menippea? Of course not. [ . . . ] Speaking somewhat paradoxically, one could say that it was not Dostoevsky’s subjective memory, but the objective memory of the very genre in which he worked, that preserved the peculiar features of the ancient Menippea.”10 And again: “In order to attach himself to the carnivalistic generic tradition in literature, a writer need not know all the links and all the branchings of that tradition. A genre possesses its own organic logic which can, to a certain extent, be understood and creatively assimilated on the basis of a few generic models, even fragments.”11 Here, we seem to have yet another vision of generic persistence, one that tends neither to Veselovsky’s archaizing “eternalism” nor to Hegelian and Romantic (at root, Aristotelian) entelechy. Rather, with the notion of an organic logic of genre always accessible in its entirety and ready to flood into any work that touches upon it even tangentially, a

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radical and in certain respects unprecedented vision of literary-historical continuity emerges. It is to this vision that Bakhtin gravitates in numerous fragmentary passages from the time of his reworking of the book on Dostoevsky, and it is this vision as well that seems implicated in his more or less contemporaneous attempts to formulate a more adequate conception of historical time. But to appreciate the distinctive logic and implications of this particular notion of continuity and to see how it is linked to Bakhtin’s broader thinking about tradition in modernity, it will be necessary to situate these statements within a trajectory of his thought that leads from the phenomenological aesthetics of his early manuscripts to the first edition of his Dostoevsky study, and back to the question of genre memory as it emerges in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and in a number of unfinished fragmentary texts from around the time of its composition.

The Early Texts and the “Crisis of Authorship” The precise nature of Bakhtin’s interest in Dostoevsky and the entire arc of his engagement with the novelist are difficult to appreciate outside the framework of his early manuscript on phenomenology and aesthetics, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (“Avtor i geroi v estetichekoi deiatel’nosti”). This text, written in the early 1920s, is best understood within the tradition of post-Kantianism in the sense that it both adopts and critiques some of the central tenets of Kant’s epistemology and aesthetics. In brief, like so many post-Kantian philosophers (beginning perhaps with Schiller and Hegel), Bakhtin looks for a way to shift the transcendental field conditioning all human experience toward a greater embodiedness. If in Kant we owe our ability to make coherent experience of the sensory data with which we are constantly bombarded to the transcendental—that is, merely functional, nonembodied—subject of synthesis, in Bakhtin we might say that the subject of synthesis has one foot firmly in existence (what he calls “the open event of being”) and the other foot, at least relatively and provisionally, outside it.12 Bakhtin elucidates this dual synthesis in terms of the distinction between the experience of a self and that of an other. At the basis of the discussion is a simple phenomenological insight. “From within me myself, within the meaning-and-value context of my own life, an object stands over against me [not as a neutral object of disinterested cognition but] as the object of my own (cognitive-ethical and practical)

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directedness in living my life; in this context, the object is a constituent of the unitary and unique open event of being, in which I partake as a participant who has an urgent interest in the outcome of that event.”13 As selves, we are always, as it were, outside ourselves. We transcend the boundaries of our physical being: in space, toward objects of our meaning- and value-filled intentionality, and in time, toward the future of our desires and hopes. The experience of the self is the experience of openness and infinity. From within the categories of the self, says Bakhtin, no finality is given. Our experience of others is fundamentally different. The other-for-us is enclosed in space by solid boundaries, surrounded by a stable environment, and always already completed in time. “The other, all of him, is laid out before me in the exhaustive completeness as a thing among other things in the world external to me, and without in any way violating its visible, tangible plastic-pictorial unity.”14 Similarly, in time, the other is experienced as already complete; my experience of the other, in its purity, “is generated [ . . . ] from the emotional-volitional attitude assumed in commemorating the dead. For only this attitude in relation to the other provides a valuational approach to the temporal and already completed whole of a human being’s outer and inner life.”15 Unlike the self, which is, in principle and as self, immortal, the other is in a sense always already dead and memorialized. Now, for Bakhtin, each concrete subject is constituted as a ratio of self and other.16 In Kantian language, this means that the transcendental condition for the possibility of experience contains not one but two distinct syntheses: the formative work of self-transcending, future-directed and value-ridden comportment in the world, and, superimposed upon it, the totalizing perspective of finalization, the operation whereby one’s experience of the world as well as of one’s own self are rendered coherent and (if only provisionally) whole. Remaining entirely within the categories of the self, we would confront a dizzying openness without a firm foothold in identity, and meaningful experience would become impossible. Treating a self entirely as an other, on the other hand, would result in ethical calcification and the denial of life. It is upon this phenomenological foundation that Bakhtin constructs his aesthetics of narrative. He writes: “The author is the bearer and sustainer of the intently active unity of a consummated whole (the whole of the hero and the whole of a work) which is transgredient to each and every one of its particular moments or constituent features. As a

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whole which consummates the hero, this whole is in principle incapable of being given to us from within the hero, insofar as we ‘identify’ ourselves with the hero and experience his life from within him.”17 On this account, the hero can be understood as a self, forward-looking, project-directed and, within the parameters of his own consciousness, forever incomplete. It is only the external perspective of an other—the author, in possession of an essential “excess of seeing”—that endows the hero and his path with fate-like completeness and stable meaning. The author-contemplator of a narrative as an aesthetic act is thus called upon to project himself into the horizonal consciousness of the hero while simultaneously preserving the position of finalizing outsideness vis-à-vis him. “The author’s consciousness,” says Bakhtin, “is the consciousness of consciousness.”18 An aesthetics based on the author-hero duality, much like the epistemology (phenomenology) founded in the opposition between the categories of the self and those of the other, finds itself in an ambivalent position vis-à-vis Kant. If in Kant, the aesthetic experience of disinterested pleasure was paradigmatically conceived as a confrontation of a contemplative subject (author, producer of the coherent whole) with the object of contemplation, here, a third element is inserted between the two: the hero’s pre-formative activity, vivifying the contemplated word, rendering the object of contemplation dynamic. Stable, static knowing is supplemented by a kind of knowing-in-motion, a vision of the object world as it appears to a valuating, striving, self-transcendent self-consciousness. Concomitantly, narrative comes to occupy a privileged position in aesthetics, replacing the more traditional focus on sculpture, painting, poetry and, especially in Kant himself, nature.19 The dual synthesis of self-other that comes to replace Kant’s transcendental synthesis of apperception reappears, in the realm of aesthetics, as the two-headed author-hero, the subject of contemplation-empathy supplanting the unified subject of mere disinterested contemplation. A further divergence of Bakhtin’s model from Kant—a divergence related to the introduction of the embodied third element (the hero) into the discussion of experience—consists in its historicity. Indeed, for Bakhtin, ratios of self-other and author-hero turn out to be historically variable. This can be gathered from a discussion on “the value of the human body in history,” where Bakhtin shows that the significance and symbolic place of the body has varied from period to period and culture to culture and that the variation can be understood in terms of the shifting emphases on the experiential poles of self and other. Still

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more clearly, this historical variability of the ratio is evident from Bakhtin’s account of the different author-hero configurations that have arisen in history: from religious confession, where the maximally pure self is confronted with the author crystallized as God, to certain types of modern lyric in which the lyrical subject finds itself nearly deprived of authorial support. Most vividly of all, however, and most relevantly for the current discussion, the historicism of Bakhtin’s narratological aesthetics emerges in his analysis of the distinction between two types of character construction: the Classical and the Romantic. According to Bakhtin, the Classical character construction is based on the stability and legitimacy of the authorial figure, whose “cognitiveethical position [is] indisputable or, to be exact, is simply not brought up for discussion at all” (177). As a corollary of this authorial stance, the hero is here thoroughly embodied and in possession of a determinate fate, endowed with a “purely artistic logic which governs and directs the unity and inner necessity of the formed image” (175). Here, the hero cannot be represented as morally free or capable of reflection, for then “[he would] cease to coincide with himself, and the author [would lose] what is most essential in his position of being outside the hero (namely, the liberation of the other from guilt and responsibility, the contemplation of the other outside meaning)” (177). The Classical principle of character construction has its proper historical foundation in the kind of social world that is “constituted by the value of one’s kin, conceived as a category of the validating being of otherness” (178). Only in such a world is a robust conception of fate conceivable. Here, the subject is never the initiator of action but is instead interpolated into an immemorial sequence of events transcending his consciousness and will. Such a protagonist “is bound by an indissoluble relation of sonship to the fatherhood and motherhood of [his] kin and kind” (178). The bonds of kinship determine the hero, rendering action and responsibility dependent on where one happens to fit into the dense network of ancestral relations. The role of the author, meanwhile, appears to be limited to an aesthetic ventriloquy of tradition. No new content is invented as the author is allowed to apply “all [his] strength to the moments constituting aesthetic consummation and to the immanent deepening of life’s traditional directedness from within itself,” which is to say, to the accentuation of the forms and significations organizing the traditional society from within (202).

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The Romantic character construction relies on an altogether different author-hero configuration, accompanied by a different set of enabling historical conditions. The “Romantic” hero, for Bakhtin, is an uprooted subject, free to initiate action and bear sole responsibility for it, undetermined by kin or kind. “The value of fate, which presupposes kin and tradition, is useless here for accomplishing artistic consummation” (180). The authorial position vis-à-vis such a hero is significantly weakened by comparison with that of the Classical character type. “Romanticism,” writes Bakhtin, “is a form of the infinite hero: the author’s reflection upon the hero is introduced inside the hero and restructures him; the hero takes away from the author all of his transgredient determinations and uses them in his own self-development and self-determination, with the result that his self-determination becomes infinite” (180–81). This author-hero configuration arises most prominently in a secular world, or, in any case, within a world that is no longer immanently meaningful. Historiologically, we are dealing with cultural moments of heightened individuation when “there is an attempt [ . . . ] to do without God, without listeners, without an author” (181). In short, the Romantic character construction for Bakhtin is, as one might expect, associated with the specifically modern configuration of the dual synthesis, a configuration in which the categories of the self/hero predominate. Thus, Bakhtin’s phenomenological aesthetics is traversed by a historiological axis, in which the authorial pole of meaning-making, with its holism, its capacity for legitimate finalization and the production of redemptive meaningfulness, is ultimately linked to the “archaic” vision of the world and to tradition, while the heroic, with its open-ended horizons, its transcendence toward the future of a project, its eternal dissatisfaction with itself, is associated with the modern experience of atomization and autonomy. Toward the end of the manuscript, Bakhtin introduces the term “crisis of authorship” to signify “the deep distrust of any outsideness” that comes with the loss of legitimating tradition (203). “In life,” he writes, “the moment of transgredience is established and organized by a tradition (outward appearance, the exterior, manners of comportment, etc.; the communal way of everyday life, etiquette, etc.), and the collapse of the tradition exposes their meaninglessness; life breaks up all forms from within” (204). Another word for “life” in Bakhtin is the bare, unconsummated self, which, under the conditions of the “crisis of authorship” and the accompanying loss of trust in traditional external forms of finalization, is left to its own devices.20

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The Crisis of Authorship in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art (1929) Bakhtin mentions Dostoevsky on several occasions in the early manuscript, each time in connection with some form of disruption in the authorial domain. Indeed, as we turn to the Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art, we find ourselves in the midst of a familiar problematic. Here, Dostoevsky’s protagonist is characterized as a pure, disembodied consciousness, ceaselessly dissolving all positive determinations. This is a hero who “knows that all [external, finalizing] definitions [ . . . ] rest in his [own] hands and cannot finalize him precisely because he himself perceives them; he can go beyond their limits and can thus make them inadequate.”21 In other words, the hero appears to usurp the authorial privilege of finalization, to become his own author, or obsessively to anticipate and forestall other characters’ attempts to finalize him. Once authorial outsideness is transferred as it were “inside” the consciousness of the hero, it loses its stability, becomes open to the “event of being,” or, in short, is heroized. Correspondingly, the author in Dostoevsky renounces all “excess of seeing” vis-à-vis the hero, refuses to treat the hero as an object in an external world, and limits “himself” to the task of creating spaces and situations that would most effectively stimulate or provoke the expression of the hero’s own “particular point of view on the world and on [himself]” (47). We might say then that Dostoevsky’s work represents a classic case of the “crisis of authorship.” And this would surely be correct in the terms of “Author and Hero.” Yet it is precisely the meanings of the central categories of analysis that have, by an almost unnoticeable sleight of hand, changed. In fact, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art doesn’t so much elaborate upon the categories of “Author and Hero” as transpose them onto a different historiological plane. And it does so by shifting a crucial set of associations surrounding the category of the author in particular, divorcing the authorial function from transpersonal tradition and attaching it to the supremely modern figure of the solitary individual standing over and against the objective world to be mastered and possessed. Rather than casting the author as the redeeming and ultimately communal agent of finalizing grace, the 1929 book represents the standard modern authorial figure—by contrast with Dostoevsky’s revolutionary kind—as capable of depriving the protagonist of his or her humanity, of sneaking behind his or her back and attacking under the cover of darkness (278). This author’s stance vis-à-vis the

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hero is rigid and objectifying, and it ultimately serves as an instantiation, in the domain of narrative fiction, of the single unifying consciousness that has arisen in modernity as the dominant form of meaning-making. Bakhtin writes: All ideological creative acts are conceived and perceived [in modernity] as possible expressions of a single consciousness, a single spirit. Even when one is dealing with a collective, with a multiplicity of creating forces, unity is nevertheless illustrated through the image of a single consciousness: the spirit of a nation, the spirit of a people, the spirit of history, and so forth. Everything capable of meaning can be gathered together in one consciousness and subordinated to a unified accent. [ . . . ] This faith in the self-sufficiency of a single consciousness in all spheres of ideological life is not a theory created by some specific thinker; no, it is a profound structural characteristic of the creative ideological activity of modern times, determining all its external and internal forms. (82) Thus, a modern, monologic author objectifies for mastery rather than endows with redemptive meaning. Here finalization acquires violent overtones: it exhausts, delimits, degrades, and ultimately kills off.22 It is affiliated with manipulation, containment, and control. It refuses to acknowledge the other and presumes to have the final word (293). In short, we are dealing with the sort of author whose crisis is a welcome event. In refusing to exercise his authorial prerogative for finalization, in surrendering all excess of seeing to the hero himself and so deobjectifying him, Dostoevsky brushes against the grain of the dominant monologic culture of modern times. He manages to find such an artistic approach to the other as to allow his or her voice to resound with a high degree of independence. This is why Dostoevsky, as he emerges in the edition of 1929, is, for Bakhtin, not only a pathbreaker in the art of the novel but also one of the great moral philosophers for modern times. Bakhtin’s first book on Dostoevsky, then, effects a realignment of the author-hero configuration by translating it across the boundary separating traditional, collectively and ritually grounded literary forms from their modern, autonomous counterparts. As a result, the authorial function of communal and redemptive finalization, endowing the hero’s progress through life with immanent meaning, turns into a solitary

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mode of mastering objectification, a violence done to the other. In the face of this shift, the hero’s resistance to authorial consummation—the resistance on which Dostoevsky’s poetics is based—becomes necessary and legitimate. And so if, in the first monograph, Dostoevsky’s work emerges as something unprecedented and even revolutionary in the history of the novel, this is because he can be said to reckon more consistently than his predecessors and contemporaries with the disappearance of the grounding of the authorial function (and the function of form-giving “otherness” more broadly) in collectivity and tradition.

Genre Memory and the Prob lem of “Great Time” By contrast with the first monograph on Dostoevsky, where the novelist is presented as something of a solitary pathfinder, the second edition endows him with a rich legacy. Bakhtin dedicated much of the time separating the two versions of the book to the study of the genre of the novel and of its prehistory in the serio-comic genres of late antiquity and in carnival practices of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the course of his inquiry into the genre of the novel, the historicist concern with Dostoevsky’s modernity yields to a typological approach in which particular types of discourse are viewed as in some sense primordial modes of relating to the world. One of them—dominant in official myth, tragedy, the epic, the lyric and a certain kind of didactic, philosophical novel—can be characterized as authorial, disembodied, and monologic. It presupposes the view of language as capable of producing the kind of speech that occludes in principle the possibility of disagreement or contradiction. The other—to which genuine novelistic discourse predominantly belongs—is language in self-conscious motion, relativized, multiple, embodied, dialogic. In the terms of the early manuscript, the former can be designated as authorial and the latter as heroic. Even here, though, in the domain of discursive typology—perhaps even in the domain of transcendental aesthetics (which is concerned with nonhistorical universal modes of perceiving the world)— sociohistorical markers continue to reemerge. The first, authorial or authoritative, type of language is associated with small and isolated social worlds (the Greek polis being the prime example), while the second, “heroic” type rises to dominance in times of cosmopolitan mixing, exemplified by the Hellenistic world. In other words, this is a typology that is also historical, a theory of discursive modes that is also, though

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in an attenuated form, a history of genres. Particularly noteworthy is the association—launched into prominence by Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—of the Hellenistic age with post-Enlightenment modernity. If in Hegel both of these historical moments can be characterized by the ascent of “the negative,” in Bakhtin, they witness the triumph of the “hero-self.” In fact, this curious mixture of generic-historical and transcendental-typological paradigms in Bakhtin’s thought about the novel can be understood as an attempt at a non-teleological resolution to the same problem to which Hegel’s Absolute is intended as a response: the problem of whether it is possible to have a philosophy of history at all. It is here as well, at the contradictory locus of transcendental history or historical transcendence, that the master term “genre memory” will finally be located. In Bakhtin’s account of the Hellenistic strain in Dostoevsky, the serio-comic impulses of Menippea reach the nineteenth century in “the social-adventure novels” of Paul de Kock and Eugène Sue and in the romantic-realist works of Balzac, Hugo, and George Sand (158). The still deeper roots of Dostoevsky’s work extend to folk carnival practices, which have, over the centuries, seeped into the literary genres most proximately related to the novel. “Carnival was, as it were, reincarnated in literature,” writes Bakhtin, “and precisely into one specific and vigorous line of its development” (157). It is as a culmination of this line of development—which has over the years accumulated its own characteristic set of images, plots, stylistic features, its own favored spaces and shapes of time—that we eventually find Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel.23 The precise mechanism whereby Dostoevsky links up to that vast tradition, however, is far from obvious. We have seen that according to Bakhtin “genre memory” does not presuppose conscious knowledge of all or even the most prominent works of the tradition. Rather, even tangential contact with late or minor instances of a genre can allow an author to intuit the most essential elements of the genre as a whole. In his notes toward the revision of the book on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin strives for images to express this. For example, he writes: Cultural-historical ‘telepathy’, i.e. the transmission and recreation of very complicated thoughts and artistic complexes (organic unities of philosophical and/or artistic thought) across spaces and times without any traceable real contact. The very corner, the thinnest edge of such an organic unity can suffice for the

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unfolding and recreation of the complex organic whole, because in this insignificant shred are preserved the potentialities of the whole and the loopholes of a structure (a piece of a hydra from which the entire hydra develops, etc.).24 This reference to historical telepathy as a figure for genre memory should alert us to the fact that, though tradition is once again at stake, we have not come back full circle to the terms of the early manuscript. Indeed, it appears that in the second book on Dostoevsky, and in the many fragmentary notes accompanying its composition, Bakhtin’s concept of tradition has undergone a significant re-articulation. It would be instructive in this regard to compare Bakhtin’s views on memory during his work on the 1963 book to those we find in “Author and Hero.” In the earlier text, we find memory as a crucial element in the meaningful organization of the hero in time. It is a powerful consummating device in the hands of the author: “Memory is an approach to the other from the standpoint of his axiological consummatedness. In a certain sense, memory is hopeless; but on the other hand, only memory knows how to value—independently of purpose and meaning—an already finished life, a life that is totally present-on-hand.”25 Later on, as we have seen, finalization and the gift of absolute value are divorced from each other, and finalization is increasingly associated with reification (oveshchestvlenie), mastery, and manipulation. Accordingly, memory, too, acquires a degraded aspect. In a fragment from 1943, in connection apparently with Dostoevsky’s tendency to privilege the hero’s speech over his image, Bakhtin writes: In what consists the death-dealing power of the artistic image: to circum-retrospect the object (oboiti predmet so storony budushchego), to display it in its exhaustiveness and thus to deprive it of an open future, to supply all of its boundaries, both inner and outer, without its being able to transcend this delimitedness— here it is, all of it, and nowhere else is it to be found: if it is, in its entirety and to the end, here, then it is dead and can be swallowed up, it is taken out of unfinished life and becomes an object for possible consumption; it stops being an independent participant of the event of life [ . . . ], it has already said its last word; no inner, open nucleus, no inner infinity is left within it.26 The key term here is “circum-retrospection”—that is, the preemptive occlusion of the hero’s open future, the premature memorialization of

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the other, which delimits and consumes him, finishes him off. The authorial position of retrospective finalization thus emerges as suspect and with it the kind of memory that is aligned with the authorial perspective. It is against this vision of objectification through temporal enclosure that Bakhtin advances the following defense of the untimely: “The present day’s constant threat to everything that wants to transcend its boundaries: such and such is untimely, not needed, is not adequate to the tasks . . . That which is most untimely tends to be the freest, the most truthful, the most unselfish.”27 Indeed, the untimely, that which transcends the boundaries of the delimited present, is linked in Bakhtin’s thought to an attempt at reconceptualizing time, at thinking rigorously in terms of becoming. We might say, at least provisionally, that what takes place here is an attempt to think of time not in authorial but in heroic categories: not in terms of the finished, stable present-as-past but in terms of the openended present-as-future. Bakhtin appeals to this distinction between two conceptions of the present in a lecture given at the Institute of World Literature in Moscow (IMLI) in 1941. The presentation entitled “Roman, kak literaturnyi zhanr” (later published as “Epos i roman” and translated into English as “Epic and Novel”) treats the two genres as historico-philosophical categories. As we see, this modal juxtaposition invokes two poles of language—the authorial (monologic) and the heroic (dialogic). Correspondingly, it presupposes two distinct experiences of time. Following Goethe and Schiller, Bakhtin defines the epic as the genre of the absolute past, where the past is understood as a “temporally valorized hierarchical category.”28 The epic has no place for any open-endedness or indeterminacy; it is like a closed circle, selfsufficient and complete.29 This self-confidence and completeness of the epic are founded upon authoritative tradition. At stake is not so much the content of the epic, which does of course rely on traditional accounts of the past. Rather, epic discourse is the discourse of tradition itself; tradition is immanent to it as a heightening and legitimating force determining its form no less than its content. “The epic past [of tradition],” writes Bakhtin, “is locked into itself and walled off from all subsequent times by an impenetrable boundary, isolated [ . . . ] from that eternal present of children and descendants in which the epic singer and his listeners are located.”30 The present of the epic is the present-aspast: it is entirely located in the order of stable being. The novel, by contrast, is located in the zone of familiar contact with the open-ended present of becoming. As such, it represents human beings in their

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incompleteness, with a perpetual residue of unrealized potential. When it comes to the novel, “the future exists, and this future ineluctably touches upon the individual, has its roots in him.”31 Unlike the present-as-past of the epic, the present of the novel forever shades into the future; it is the present not of being but of becoming. In the terms familiar to us from the early essay on “Author and Hero,” we might say that here the Classical and the Romantic character construction principles clash again: the temporality of the epic privileges authorial finalization, while the novel operates predominantly in accordance with the open, potentially infinite time of the “hero.” One way to formulate our question then is this: how do we rigorously conceive of a tradition within the parameters not of stable being but of becoming toward an open future? How are we to understand, in other words, a specifically modern, “heroic” tradition? In order to begin responding to this question, we may adduce a number of terms coined by Bakhtin in the 1940s. The best known among these terms has come to be translated as “great time” (bol’shoe vremia). But alongside it we find “great experience” (bol’shoi opyt), “great memory” (bol’shaia pamiat’), “great body” (bol’shoe telo), and simply “the great” (bol’shoe). Perhaps “great” is the best way to translate “bol’shoi” in these contexts, but it is important to keep in mind that only a very small proportion (if any) of the connotations the word is intended to invoke pertains to some kind of canonized artistic or culturally elite greatness. Instead, temporal vastness and social inclusiveness are invoked; a participation in the longue durée of historical processes as well as a rootedness in the age-old creative practices of the common people: non-official myth, ritual, carnival, folklore. Here is one fragmentary but particularly rich passage from the early 1940s, centering on the notions of “great experience” and “great memory”: The model of the ultimate whole, the model of the world, lying at the basis of every artistic image [ . . . ] is reconstructed over the course of centuries (or radically, of millennia). The spatial and temporal notions lying at the basis of this model, its semantic and axiological dimensions and gradations. The intellectual coziness of a world lived in by thought that is thousands of years old. The system of folkloric symbols that were composed over thousands of years and that depicted a model of the ultimate whole. They contain the great experience of humanity.

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The symbols of official culture contain only the small experience of a specific section of humanity (and at a given moment in time to boot, a section with an interest in that moment’s stability). These small models, created on the basis of small and partial experience, are characterized by a specific pragmatism and utilitarianism. They serve as a scheme for an individual’s practically interested action, in them practice does indeed determine cognition. Therefore they contain deliberate concealment, lies, salutary illusions of every sort, simplicity and mechanicality of scheme, monosemy and one-sidedness of evaluation, uniplanarity and logicality (linear logicality). They have an interest least of all in the truth [istina] of the allembracing whole (this truth of the whole is non-practical and disinterested, it is indifferent toward the passing fortunes of the particular). Great experience has an interest in the succession of great epochs (in great becoming) and in the immobility of eternity, small experience in changes in the limits of the epoch (in small becoming) and in temporary, relative stability. Small experience is constructed on deliberate forgetting and on deliberate non-plenitude. In great experience the world does not coincide with itself (it is not what it is), it is not closed and not finalized. In it there is memory that does not have borders, memory that descends and disappears into the pre-human depths of matter and inorganic life, the experience of the life of worlds and atoms. And for this memory the history of the individual person begins long before the awakening of his consciousness (his conscious I). [ . . . ] This great memory is not memory of the past (in the abstract temporal sense); time is relative in it. That which returns eternally and is at the same time irrevocable. Here time is not a line, but a complex form of a rotating body. [ . . . ] At the same time openness and unfinalizedness [nezavershennost’], memory of that which does not coincide with itself. Small experience, practically meaningful and consuming, strives to deaden and reify everything, great experience to animate everything (to see in everything unfinalizedness and freedom, miracle and revelation). In small experience there is one cognizer (everything else is an object of cognition), one free subject (everything else is dead things), one who is living and unclosed (everything else is dead and closed), one who speaks (everything else is unresponsively

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silent). In great experience everything is alive, everything speaks, this experience is profoundly and essentially dialogic.32 It would of course be difficult here to do justice to the many issues raised in this passage and the many directions in which it points. It may be impossible, furthermore, to know precisely what Bakhtin means at each stage of the fragmentary exposition, which was of course not intended for publication. However, the central opposition between the respective temporalities of great and small experiential domains stands out with sufficient clarity. Thus, we can say that “small experience”— that is, experience in the service of practical utility—presupposes a certain amount of tactical forgetting. Here, only the relevant elements of the past, those that are needed for the task at hand (techniques, habits, methods, facts), are remembered. Everything else is suppressed by our concern for the equally small, calculable, prematurely finalized future. “Great experience,” by contrast, is the sort of experience in which absolutely nothing is forgotten. “Great memory,” which presumably contains everything that ever was in the domains of nature and culture both, allows us to break out of the confines of the present with its practical exigencies and linearly ordered time and to experience the past as nonidentical, forever open to re-articulation. This openness does not consist in our ability to retell history again and again in light of the demands of the present. Rather, insofar as temporality is to be rethought in “heroic” categories, the past that does not coincide with itself has to be conceived as in perpetual becoming, constantly changing, growing and acquiring new dimensions. From this point of view, tradition needs to be understood not in its capacity for containing the experience of the new within a meaningful framework passed down from generation to generation but as a way to liberate the past from its temporal delimitation, to connect it to the open-ended historical process and so to ensure its perpetual effectivity, what Bakhtin calls its “life.” In 1970, in “A Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff,” Bakhtin writes: “The author is a captive of his epoch, of his own present. Subsequent times liberate him from his captivity, and literary scholarship is called upon to assist in this liberation.”33 A still more general statement of this principle, in conjunction now with Bakhtin’s meditation on “great time,” appears in his working notes from the 1960s and ’70s: “Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its festival of rebirth.”34 Thus the genre memory of Dostoevsky’s fiction brings back to life a vast “Menippean” prehistory, including all sorts of images and mean-

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ings that seem oddly out of place in his own time. This reanimation and liberation are reciprocal, however: just as Dostoevsky redeems the carnival practices and serio-comic writing of the past, so those practices in turn liberate him from the confines of his era. On this conception of literary history, it is precisely this mutual volatilization of the present and the past that produces the open future. “Only memory, and not oblivion, can move forward,” says Bakhtin.35 The innovative future, in other words, is the effect of a specific re-articulation of the past. Implicit here is an understanding of time that resists anything like a sequential arrangement of moments or periods along an imaginary line. Linearity, we recall, is the work of authorial finalization, of the author’s biographical “excess of seeing” vis-à-vis the hero, capable of arranging his life as a coherent sequence of events. With the concepts of great experience, great memory, and genre time this model has been displaced in favor of a vision of embodied, “heroic” becoming, a vision in which every new moment both expresses and redraws the outlines of the past. It is in this sense then that we should understand Bakhtin’s insistence that when it comes to “great memory,” the “future” and the past, the “before” and the “after,” are relative terms. Rather, at stake is “the living, paradoxical nature of movement, explored and interpreted in various ways in philosophy (from the Eleatics to Bergson).”36 The invocation of Bergson is perhaps another clue here, referring to a conception of time in which past, present, and future are inextricably entangled, a duration that is best compared to a musical phrase that changes in its entirety with the addition of every new note.37 Every note rearranges what came before it, which is to say, it makes what came before it appear once again, each time anew. And in the same way, in Bakhtin, the past refuses to stay still, to coincide with itself, like some object delimited in space, like a “historical period” understood in traditionally historicist terms. Rather, the “past” is itself entangled in multiple transcendences toward its own “futures” and “pasts,” and with every new moment it is invoked anew, it appears in a different shape. Conversely, then, the present is itself part of the past, entwined with it, incapable of decisively separating itself from it, or acquiring vis-à-vis it a stable position of authorial outsideness.38 Traditional historicism, of course, presupposes just such a position, transferring to historiography the Kantian assumption that a certain disembodied synthesis (a place outside history) must obtain as a necessary condition for cognizing object-like, delimited, and coherent historical periods. By contrast, the embodied synthesis to which Bakhtin gives the double name of

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author-hero demands that we envision the consummating “agent” as inextricable from the consummated process. A useful analogy may perhaps be drawn here with Bakhtin’s account, in both editions of his book on Dostoevsky, of the “active” variety of double-voiced discourse. Here, a character’s speech about a situation or an object is represented as intensely aware of someone else’s possible or actual speech about the same matter. This awareness gives the other’s discourse access to one’s own, allows the words of another to influence one’s own words. In such speech, Bakhtin writes, “a decrease in objectification [of the other’s word] and a corresponding heightening of activity on the part of the aspirations of the other discourse lead inevitably to an internal dialogization of discourse. In such discourse, the author’s thought no longer oppressively dominates the other’s thought, discourse loses its composure and confidence, becomes agitated, internally undecided and two-faced” (198). This “internal dialogization” testifies to the undermining of one person’s stable position of outsideness vis-à-vis another. The other’s voice (the “hero” in the language of the early manuscript) is here allowed access to the very core of the self working to “author” or finalize that other. Paradoxically, the very voice being finalized influences the work of finalization from within the position from which such finalization is bestowed. It is easy to recognize in this model Bakhtin’s understanding of what happens to author-hero relations in Dostoevsky. He writes: “[Dostoevsky] doesn’t fear the most extreme activization of vari-directional accents in double-voiced discourse; on the contrary, such activization is precisely what he needs to achieve his purpose. A plurality of voices, after all, is not meant to be eliminated from his works but in fact is meant to triumph” (204). We might say then that by the second edition of the book on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin develops an understanding of (literary) history adequate to the vision of active double-voiced discourse that stands at the center of Dostoevsky’s poetics. Just as language in Dostoevsky stages the intrusion of the heroic categories into the authorial domain, so the dynamics of genre memory reveal the present moment as lacking “composure and confidence” vis-à-vis the still active past-in-becoming. Like the speaker granting “activity” to the intentions of the voices she incorporates in her speech, the historical present is permeated by the “intentions” of the active past. Or still better perhaps, the present and the past are linked in the process of becoming that constantly rearranges their dispositions vis-à-vis each other, so that—in accordance with Bakhtin’s statement that time is relative in “great memory”—a more

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distant past may suddenly appear closer to us than the past that is more proximate according to an “objective” chronology.

Conclusion Something striking happens as Bakhtin grapples with Dostoevsky’s place in (literary) history. In isolating the novelist from the past, in emphasizing the unprecedented nature of his discovery, Bakhtin posits a notion of tradition that is itself rather “traditional.” Conversely, in endowing the radical Dostoevsky with a deep past, Bakhtin radicalizes the concept of tradition itself to make its dynamics correspond to the hero-centric, modernizing principles of that author’s poetics. When it is conceived alongside parallel concepts that attempt to rethink time and persistence (great experience, great memory, great time, and so forth), genre memory names the paradoxical figure of tradition as something that volatilizes and unsettles rather than finalizes and anchors. It is a conception of tradition that relies on the metaphysics of open-ended becoming and the historiology of the modern, with its emphasis on the reflexive present without “composure and confidence,” surging toward an uncharted future.39 In this regard, Bakhtin’s take on the very modern notion of tradition diverges from the standard attempt to position it as modernity’s stabilizing counterpart. He does not, conservatively, seek to reign in modernity through tradition, but, radically, reimagines tradition in modernist terms. As a result, Bakhtin confronts us with a vision of innovation that is starkly distinct from those of his major forebears within the field of Historical Poetics. Veselovsky conceives literary history as a process, whereby stable old forms repeatedly shape “the new content of life.” A number of conceptions of innovation emerge out of the Formalist movement, frequently emphasizing the deformative, estranging work the author must perform upon preexisting, ossified forms.40 By contrast with these visions—one emphasizing the powers of continuous tradition, the other stressing the individual artist’s capacity to transcend it—Bakhtin envisions the individual author as limited and conservative and the dynamic past as genuinely innovative and liberating. Furthermore, he posits an unconscious (“heroic”) genre memory that invariably intrudes—the more forcefully, the greater and “newer” the outcome—between the author and his or her material. Like the words of the others that always insinuate themselves between the speaking subject and the referent of the speech, so the memory of genre ensures

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that the author is never one-on-one with the contemporary world. And it is this very intrusion that ensures the escape from the “small” of individual mastery and the opening out onto the “great” of collective, universal-historical experience. On this account, innovation is not strictly speaking the production of something new (some new object, content, or form) but an event of de-individuation, a flooding of the author-object relation with a dynamic tradition, an open-ended, “heroic” past.

Notes I am very grateful to Boris Maslov and Galin Tihanov for their detailed comments and criticisms. This chapter was greatly improved thanks to them. 1. A. N. Veselovsky, Istoricheskaia poetika, (Moscow: URSS, 2004), p. 51. Translation by Harry Weber is available as “On the Methods and Aims of Literary History as a Science,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 16 (1967): 33–42. 2. Ibid., p. 52. 3. Yuri Tynianov, Arkhaisty i novatory, (Moscow: Priboi, 1929), pp. 558–59. 4. Veselovsky, Istoricheskaia poetika, p. 494. 5. Ibid., p. 51. 6. See, for example, the chapter “The Relationship Between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style,” in Viktor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose, trans. Gerald  L. Bruns (Normal, Ill.: Dalky Archive Press, 1990), pp. 15–51. 7. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 106. Unless otherwise indicated, all italics from this edition are Bakhtin’s. 8. Ibid., 121. 9. The most comprehensive account of Bakhtin’s Hegelianism can be found in Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin and the Ideas of Their Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 10. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 121. 11. Ibid., 157. 12. For Kant’s discussion of the “transcendental unity of apperception” as the condition for meaningful experience see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, (New York: St.  Martin’s Press), pp. 155–59. 13. Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 97.

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14. Ibid., 36. 15. Ibid., 107. 16. This is not something Bakhtin states explicitly, but the formula can be easily extrapolated from the rest of the essay, as has been done by a number of scholars. See, for example, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 67 as well as Caryl Emerson and Gary Saul Morson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 91. 17. Ibid., 12. 18. Ibid. For a lucid book-length discussion of the philosophical implications of Bakhtin’s early manuscript, see Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject (Stanford: Stanford University Press: 2013). 19. See Kant’s distinction between free and accessory beauty in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pp. 76–78. 20. Bakhtin makes a parallel point during his discussion of authorship in lyric. Here, he distinguishes between the lyrical voice that feels the support of an actual or possible chorus and one that is deprived of such support. The latter emerges in the form of the sort of lyric that registers “breaks or failures of a voice that suddenly feels itself to be outside any chorus” (Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, p. 171). This modern “lack of trust” in the chorus tends toward “a scream, which startles and frightens itself and finds itself hard to bear” (Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, p. 170). 21. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 53. In the rest of the chapter, references to this edition are provided in parenthetical citations in the body of the text. 22. Mikhail Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1996), 5:65. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from this and other Russian editions of Bakhtin are mine. 23. For a concise and illuminating account of Bakhtin’s engagement with the genre of the novel throughout his life, see Katerina Clark and Galin Tihanov, “Soviet Literary Theory in the 1930s: Battles Over Genre and the Boundaries of Modernity” in A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond, ed. by Evgeny Dobrenko and Galin Tihanov (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), pp. 121–27. 24. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Russkie slovari, Iazyki slovianskoi kul’tury, 2002), 6:323. 25. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, p. 107 26. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 65. 27. Ibid. Tim Beasley-Murray comments on Bakhtin’s changing attitudes to memory: “[Later in his career,] Bakhtin’s fear of false totalization

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grows to such an extent that even the apparently benign totalizing of [ . . . ] aesthetic memory represents a danger.” He does not go on to discuss, however, how a new notion of memory emerges as a result of an attempt to conceptualize the kind of totalization that would not be false. See Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin: Experience and Form (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), p. 149. 28. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 18. 29. Ibid., p. 16. 30. Ibid., p. 17. 31. Ibid., p. 37. 32. Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, pp. 77–79. Here I use David Shepherd’s translation of this passage from his essay, “A Feeling for History? Bakhtin and ‘The Problem of Great Time’,” The Slavonic and Eastern European Review 84, no. 1 (2006): 40–42. 33. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 5. 34. Ibid., p. 170. I slightly modified the translation, opting for the more literal rendering of “prazdnik vozrozhdeniia” as “festival of rebirth.” 35. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Rable i Gogol’ ” in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), p. 492. 36. Ibid. 37. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Cosmo Classics, 2008), p. 106. 38. In fact, in an article from 1894, “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics,” Veselovsky himself makes a similar suggestion to the effect that, even as scholars of the past, we are unable to separate ourselves from the object of our investigation. We, too, still partly live in the past. See Chapter 1, p. 42 (Veselovsky, Istoricheskaia poetika, p. 55). On the whole, however, Veselovsky’s method and its theorization is more self-confidently historicist. 39. My emphasis here has been not so much on exploring, let alone verifying, the genetic link between Dostoevsky’s novels and Menippean satire but only on extrapolating the philosophical underpinnings of Bakhtin’s particular approach to Historical Poetics. Other deep-historical genealogies of Dostoevsky’s novelistic work are of course possible and plausible. See, for example, Kate Holland’s “Novelizing Religious Experience: The Generic Landscape of The Brothers Karamazov,” Slavic Review, 66, no. 1 (2007): 63–81, as well as her contribution to this volume (see Chapter 12).

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40. Both Veselovsky and the Formalists deserve more detailed accounts of their respective conceptions of persistence. For the Formalists in particular, the symbiotic relationship between the old and the new is a constant preoccupation. The brief characterization of their positions above is correct only in tendency.

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Chapter 9

The Age of Sensibility (1904) A LEX A N D ER V ES ELOV S KY

This chapter is part of Veselovsky’s last major work, his study of Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852), subtitled The Poetry of Sentiment and of the “Heart’s Imagination” (1904).1 This somewhat cryptic subtitle points to a psychological dynamic that Veselovsky shows to have been a distinctive property of the “age of Sensibility,” whereby an emotion elicited by experience (“sentiment”) is supplemented by the capacity to produce and nourish feeling through imagination. Techniques of the “heart’s imagination”2 range from recollection (personal or shared among friends) to scripted encounters with natural scenery. The most powerful method for producing emotion, however, is constituted by the sentimentalist practices of reading, writing, citing, and reciting poetic texts. When Veselovsky describes the ways in which literary texts give form to emotional experience, he is far from merely exposing or celebrating literature’s impact on life. In fact, his painstakingly researched study— which, in part due to its massive use of archival evidence, remains an essential source for students of nineteenth-century Russian literature— is one of the most compelling elucidations of a historically specific coordination of literary praxis, individual biography, and political (or civic) engagement. Whereas the preceding generation of Russian poets only “played at” Sentimentalism, a sentimentalist worldview came to dominate and structure Zhukovsky’s emotional life. This occurred because of a 255

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complex dialectic between “poetic cliché” and actual experience: while a set of tragic occurrences in Zhukovsky’s early life was articulated in the language of Sentimentalism, a cult of melancholic recollection validated this conventional language, ex post facto, as a genuine correlate of his psychic life. In the Romantic period, Zhukovsky no longer represented a prevalent historical psychology, but had become a rather unique figure, even a maverick, among his closest friends. Indeed, although he never attained in his writings the poetic greatness that his contemporaries expected of him, by letting his life be molded by poetry— and thus allowing the two meanings of perezhivanie (persistence of poetic form and personal experience), one of Veselovsky’s key concepts, to coincide—Zhukovsky became Russia’s only “true” sentimentalist poet. The chapter here translated, a notably self-contained piece, provides a broadly comparative background to Zhukovsky’s poetic and emotional formation. On the one hand, it presents an overview of European Sentimentalism, foregrounding the ways in which the poetic language of sensibility came to buttress a particular kind of subjectivity. On the other hand, Veselovsky points out that the rise of the sentimentalizers is a product of the political reaction.3 The preservation of a sentimentalist sensibility clearly correlates with Zhukovsky’s support for the throne. Zhukovsky’s “sentimentalization” of the life at court, for example, provoked criticism among his friends already in the late 1810s; yet those efforts on Zhukovsky’s part, as Veselovsky shows, inaugurate an ideology that would inform the work of Gogol, the Slavophiles, and Dostoevsky4 and that explains, to a significant extent, the intellectual viability of the Russian monarchy throughout the nineteenth century. It is hardly an accident that Veselovsky’s book was written at a time of unprecedented social ferment, on the eve of the 1905 Revolution. By adopting an ostensibly objectivist, ironic as well as generally empathetic approach to a figure who was seen as an emblem of sincere, heartfelt conservatism, Veselovsky offers a profound commentary on how culture and tradition are perpetuated in and through the lives of individual historical agents. From the first third of the eighteenth century, a new style begins to install itself in European literatures. Wherever it was engendered, it was preceded by a corresponding mood [nastroenie] of the social psyche, a reflection of the recently accomplished social revolution. This is what happened in England, which explains England’s leading role in the ensuing currents of European thought, the influence of its didactic

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comedy and its comédie larmoyante, its novelists, whom Diderot and Rousseau indulged in reading. This influence had an uneven impact, depending on how well prepared, in a given society, the soil was to receive the new seeds: in France, it came to buttress a social movement, in Germany, it settled into literary schools. The essence of the newly dominant mood amounted to a reappraisal of reason and sentiment and their significance for individual and social life. Reason had created an artificial culture, with its laws, moral foundations, and salon etiquette; it bridled sentiment with the demands of ritualistic decorum, and fantasy with restrictive literary forms. It trusted in its own infallibility, in the enlightening force of its logic and science, whose law “altereth not.”5 All this bound the individual’s freedom, and so protest grew. An ideal of the human being newly emerged from the hands of the Creator—a humanity kind by nature, unspoiled by civilization—was opposed to the conventions of the culture of reason. This ideal had already been formulated in the seventeenth century (Aphra Behn 1640–89) and was further developed by Rousseau. Sentiment was placed above reason. “Reason is, half of it, sense,” Sterne declared;6 “Humble love, / And not proud reason, keeps the door of heaven; / Love finds admission, where proud science fails,” wrote Young.7 For Hamann, sentiment represented the unmediated, first-hand revelation of truth, the beginning of human consciousness, whence an all-embracing knowledge should develop; for Jacobi, the unmediated understanding achieved by sentiment and faith transcends the science discovered by reason. To know one’s own heart is the sole wisdom; to follow one’s heart without impeding any of its inclinations and desires, the sole virtue. One must trust one’s inner feeling, believe one’s heart; in this course of action, humanity would find its freedom. Similarly, Mercier would say: in the heart of each human being lies concealed a sacred fire of sensibility; one must keep watch so that the fire is not put out, for it illumines our moral life. The power of reason is negative, constrained by unbelief, failure to understand—Madame de Staël repeated again and again in the beginning of her German “Romanticism”: one needs a philosophy of faith and enthusiasm, a philosophy that would use reason to confirm the revelations of sense;8 Saint-Simon would call these enthusiasts of sentiment les passionés. “The philosophy of sentiment” appeared, along with literary representatives of sentiment and of sensibility; they were reading Richardson and Fielding, Young and Sterne. Rousseau systematized for them the scattered and imprecise traits of the emergent doctrine of sentiment and the heart; of nature

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and the natural; of nature as the teacher of the good, mercy, and morality; of the freedom of passions and the ideal of democracy. This program was adopted and put into practice in various ways. Psychologically, two groups of practitioners may be distinguished; they blended, however, and transitions from the “sentimentalizers” to the “stormy geniuses” were possible, as K. F. Moritz’s autobiographical novel Anton Reiser demonstrates. One group is characterized most luminously by the actors of the German Sturm und Drang of the 1760–’80s. They made a distinction between science and the illumination of a genius, an enthusiasm that is inborn. A genius may slumber in every one of us—so Young suggested to them—one has only to learn how to reveal and educate it, and genius will flutter up, a “rank enthusiast.”9 Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition was an indicator of the times. His teaching about the inborn genius, supported by Sterne’s and Fielding’s cultivation of a human nature that is spontaneous, healthy and entirely given over to sentiment’s impulse, created the character of the German Kraftgenies, geniuses of might, with a calling for heroic action and struggle. They saw themselves as free of all superstitions of reason, which up until that time had been regarded as the norm of existence. They were drawn away from bourgeois dissipated artificial culture to nature, to the people and their songs, to an idealized folk antiquity, to the vistas of world poetry, to a renewal of literary forms. England’s influence in all of this is beyond doubt; the English at that time had rediscovered a Promethean Shakespeare, whose popularity spread to France (Mercier) and Germany. The demand for the freedom of sentiments extended to moral issues: new solutions were put forward, any dogmatism being abhorrent to “geniuses.” They yearned for breadth, brimmed with selfconsciousness, and sought to claim life fully and to love in a way that was real. “We are gods, we are free,” said Lenz. Heinse’s Ardinghello is a “genius” just like Karl Moor.10 Young Schiller was fascinated with virtuous, majestic criminals, who in due time would descend to the lowly type of Rinaldo Rinaldini and of the Räuberromane. Next in line were the figures of Prometheus, Faust, and Muhammad; “Kerl” became a typical word for a man of tempestuous aspirations. Another group existed alongside these people of “passionate sentiment”: tranquil enthusiasts of sensibility, limited by the enclosure of their own hearts, who lulled themselves into quiet transports and into tears by analyzing their sensations that made it possible emotionally to anticipate heaven beyond life’s futility. They adored Klopstock;

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pietists and mystics, they could adapt to any sort of ecclesiastical-religious reaction, even get on with political reaction, since they had withdrawn from the public into the world of their miniscule “ego,” into an abstraction of humanity and inner “freedom,” into solitude and a nature that proclaimed the gentleness of the Creator. They looked on nature as an object of—a pretext for—sentimental and religious outpourings; emotional excess did not sharpen the eye, sentimentalists were no visuels; everything hinged on the mood. For this reason, they were so fond of music; self-analysis reached a pathological delicacy. In this way, they nourished “virtue” as their “humanness” matured—their schöne Seele, Rousseau’s belle âme, Karamzin’s dusha [soul]. Kraftgenies and Schöne Seelen (Schlegel’s “le genre furibond et le genre lamentable”11) shared the same psychological substrate: a hypertrophy of the sentiment. The sentimentalists, for their part, were fascinated with the heart, nursed it—the “weak,” “delicate,” “sick” one (Don Carlos), the one that, “suffused with despair, had its fill of tears” (Stella). “Ah! everyone can know what I know, but my heart belongs to me alone!” says Werther.12 There appeared Werthers, Siegwarts,13 René’s14 and Valérie’s,15 along with demonic egotists of the sentiment like Allwill, representatives of irreparable Schwermut like Woldemar,16 or flaccid sentimentalists like the hero of Mackenzie’s novel (The Man of Feeling), who dies of consumption—and under the strain of a confession of love for which he had braced himself only on his deathbed. In such a milieu, love took on a peculiar overtone: it was full of pity, sorrowful, gloomy, ignorant of laughter; Saint-Preux17 is fond of touching paleness, love’s true pledge, and abhors importunate salubrity. Hence a penchant for contrasts: between morning and evening, spring and autumn. Spring in particular often incited feelings of sorrow; one was nourished by sights of bleak, wild nature, by half-tints and twilight. A setting sun, a gloaming that induces sadness, a moon concealed by clouds that are filled with tears. The poetic vocabulary responded to this mood: to breathe, to flutter, to murmur, the divine, the heavenly; one spoke of a glimmering moon—and of a glimmering (dämmernde) soul, glimmering thoughts. This was a love that abutted the idea of death, the idea of love beyond the grave, where souls that yearned for each other would meet, souls in whose sentiment the healthy real impulse had been lost in a new generalization, in what later would be called amitié amoureuse. It was an attachment that vacillated between passion and amicability, failing to satisfy either; Mme Roland, however, apparently knew what the issue was, and did not vacillate.

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“Quiet, sacred friendship has a fulcrum where it always keeps its balance (un point d’appui où tient toujours le balancier),” she wrote to [Louis Augustin] Bosc, whose friendly feeling for her threatened to transform itself into a passion. “Sweet, yet cruel passions drive us beyond ourselves only to abandon us later; but the honesty of one’s soul and one’s actions, the trust of a straightforward and sensible heart, the moderation of a character that is established by reason in good principles—this is what confirms a union, whatever cooling it may suffer. This is my pledge, my friend, that you will always find me to be the same.”18 Alongside amitié amoureuse, another peculiar sentiment that also mixed love and amicability developed, which involuntarily suggests a comparison with a similar psychological phenomenon in the Renaissance. We need a friend in order to become appealing to ourselves and to enjoy ourselves, said Young;19 German sentimentalists, beginning with Klopstock, fostered this jealous, anxious, and exacting sentiment as if a beloved woman were at issue. In literature, Posas and Don Carloses, Xavers and Kronhelms ([representing Johann] Miller and F[riedrich] Stolberg in Miller’s novel Siegwart) appeared; in life, the friendship between Neuffer and Hölderlin and, in the Romantic period, between Tieck and Wackenroder, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, and so forth; exempla were drawn from antiquity, such as David and Jonathan, Orestes and Pylades, Nisus and Euryalus, Achilles and Patroclus. Sir Charles Grandison undertakes to construct a temple dedicated to Friendship on the spot where Miss Harriet, who was in love with him, embraced her antagonist, his wife. The capacity to shed tears indicated a sensible, well-equipped heart. Sterne spoke of the joy of grief, and would himself cry over a donkey he encountered or over a captive birdie; Young discovered a “philosophy of tears”20 and a smooth path for the sentimentalists: tears began to pour down, a gift of griefless tears was revealed. Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) is inundated with such tears: Emily, the novel’s protagonist, cannot bear the sight of the moon, the sound of a guitar, an organ, and the rustling of pines without tears. Thackeray knew of no novel in which more tears are shed than in Thaddeus of Warsaw. Heinrich Stilling’s mother had that precious ability: in the spring, when everything was in bloom, she did not feel quite herself, as if she were from a different world, but as soon as she saw a withered flower, a dry blade of grass, she began to cry, and felt so well, so well it surpasses words, but she was not joyous. Werther and Lotte admire

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a departing thunderstorm; her eyes are filled with tears; “Klopstock!” she says, putting her hand on Werther’s; he recalls Klopstock’s wonderful ode and kisses the girl’s hand, blissful tears in his eyes. This scene was copied by Miller in his Siegwart: Therese lowers her head over the Messias, and Kronhelm hears the girl’s tears falling on the pages; he takes her by the hand, but she instead places his hand on the book, and he feels that the page is wet. Then he swears in his heart to be always loyal to Therese, and the thunder and wind grow stronger. “A holy, solemn night!” says Kronhelm. In the same novel, Siegwart and Marianne listen to a grasshopper sing and weep. In Wilhelm Meister, the singer sings “Kennst du das Land,” and the audience is aflutter: women fall on one another’s necks, men are embracing one another, and the moon is a witness to tears most noble and chaste. Parting friends would take turns drinking from a glass into which each had dropped a few tears; the play of a moonbeam on an emerging tear was regarded as a poetic effect, one familiar to Count Shalikov.21 The sentimental sphere fostered its own Muse: the thoughtful Melancholy who haunts ruins, ancient cells, and mirthless shades. Its charms were sung by the seventeen-year-old Warton (The Pleasures of Melancholy, 1745): he is fond of sitting beneath a “ruin’d abbey’s moss-grown piles . . . at twilight hour of eve, where through some western window the pale moon pours her long-levell’d rule of streaming light, while sullen sacred silence reigns around, save the lone screech-owl’s note who builds his bower amid the mould’ring caverns dark and damp, or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green invests some wasted tower”; “far remote from Mirth’s mad shouts” he listens to “the lowly cricket’s drowsy dirge,” in the evening, in a “brindly-glimmering gleam” of smoldering embers. In his last poem [“Ode for Music”] (1769), Gray placed the “soft-eyed Melancholy” near Freedom, in the same despondent landscape, but he also enriched this landscape, in his well-known “Elegy” (1751), with the images of the graveyard, as Young enriched it with his vision of the night and with the idea of the life hereafter. This idea infused the latter’s Night Thoughts, poems elicited by a real and grievous bereavement. Young is overcome by this idea and revels in it. Death reigns in the world, it is inescapable, but in death there is consolation: death is “the crown of life”; it gives human beings wings that allow them to be transported to the ethereal heights, where they will receive “more than was in Eden lost.”22 This is an apotheosis of death, illuminated by a pale CynthiaMoon, in the midst of night’s silence that “proclaims eternal day” and

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immortality. Until then, the moon rarely appeared as an expression of a sorrowful or mysterious mood. A certain seventeenth-century secentista even dared to call it a “celestial fried egg.” Young reinvented it, MacPherson’s Ossian buttressed its future popularity, and Klopstock put it into wide circulation. Virgil’s amica silentia lunae became the rallying-cry of the new poetic mood in Zachariae, Gessner, Cronegk, Wieland, and from young Goethe to Longfellow and beyond: the Moon is “the divinity of chaste souls,” pale like timorous, rejected love; one spoke of a melancholic moon, of a moon that spreads over the woods the great mystery of melancholy, which it is fond of whispering in the ears of ancient oaks (Chateaubriand), of a moon shining in one’s heart (“Mondschein im Herzen”). In this context, the fashion of using the epithet “silvery” of light and sound emerged among the poets of the Göttingen circle: a silvery voice and even a “silbernes Klavier.” The poets of pseudo-classical tastes, for example, Pope and his school, have similarly generalized the epithet “golden”: they, however, were fascinated by the sun, which by now had set. Carducci finds in the moon the symbol of Romantic poetry, in contradistinction to the Classical sun;23 we are replacing Romanticism with Sentimentalism. Let us also add to the mysterious setting we have endeavored to depict Ossian’s vapors and the world of exotic apparitions—now we have before us the full system of conceptions and images that nourished the ballad, regarded as a product of Romantic fantasy. In fact, this is not Romanticism, which rested on an explicitly theoretical basis, but pre-Romanticism (called preromantismo by the Italians) rooted in sensibility. In this way, a literary movement was created that conjured into existence heaps of skulls and skeletons, hosts of apparitions and sepulchral meditations, all of them enveloped by night or illumined by a pensive moon. Ladies, unlucky in love, made pilgrimages to tombs and took to drawing sepulchral mounds upon which they would inscribe their own names. Tears and thoughts about death, uncontrolled resignation, were now a literary manner, and one would play at melancholy (Chateaubriand’s “morose pleasures of the melancholic heart”). The adherents of tender feeling [chuvstvitel’niki] developed an etiquette of their own; the enjoyment of one’s heart was regimented by reason, and under the new flag the desires of the old sentimental eclogue were often concealed. This mood gripped not only the young generation in France and Italy, but also the veterans: the gallant Arcadia ceased from billing and cooing and tuned to tears. Such an eclectic as [Vincenzo] Monti

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composes Entusiasmo malinconico; Pindemonte is sentimental in his Poesie campestri; an Italian journalist, a Jesuit, gives us a tour of CampoSanto in Bergamo in the company of Young—the piece is entitled Il bello sepolcrare. The recently found diary fragments written by the sixteen-year-old [Friedrich von] Matthisson, whose sentimental poetry fascinated Zhukovsky and the young Turgenevs,24 give us a notion of the moral atmosphere in which the poet’s worldview was formed. The diary’s cover was painted by the author: below and above are wavy strips, colored blue against a white background; in the middle, against a red background, garlands of flowers. This is a diary of self-observation, a secret confession addressed to oneself (geheimes Tagebuch); the author, still a schoolboy, is happy that he decided to return to his diary, a serious undertaking indeed, and reproaches himself bitterly for having somehow neglected it, enticed away by an interesting book: “May God forgive my trespassing.” Not a single day passes without a note: This day has passed in an interchange of joy and grief, yet I have never felt such a gracious, quiet calm in my soul: a sweet, wistful melancholy (wehmütiger Schwermut), which tuned me to pleasant and serious sentiments, was for me a source of reflections about my future fate, and they all led to one conclusion, that without virtue and fear of God I should not be happy.25 He prays to God that he may receive strength for struggling against sensuality, excited temperament, idleness, light-mindedness; he vigilantly observes himself; he is jubilant when a day has passed of which he is not ashamed, and laments when once on the king’s birthday he drank several glasses of wine, on the eve of the communion. All of this is interlaced with prayerful entreaties and moral self-incriminations. The pietist boy quotes from a spiritual hymn of [Christoph] Sturm— with whose mystical works Zhukovsky became acquainted in the Moscow University Boarding School for Noblemen—but he also read Siegwart, identified with its protagonist, and wanted to meet another celestial being like Marianne.26 He converses with his companions about the ennobling influence of pure, chaste love, and involves them in something like a scholarly society of friends. Ripping himself from the embraces of a “most tender friend,” he sheds sweet tears and sinks into

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melancholy for the entire day.27 “A quiet, calm life, removed from all turmoil, among tender friends, and a blameless conscience to boot—that is what harbors secret joys for the human being” [105]. And then there is Nature. The author wants to become her apprentice; she would be an appropriate guide for him [106]. How often today I looked at the moon! A sense of awe came to possess me; thoughts about death and eternity illumined my soul; the souls of deceased friends seemed to hover around me. All was so sad, so solemn that I forgot about the world and in this holy hour of meditation I would have rushed to meet death with open arms. Let it come soon, [ . . . ] and then my soul, transfigured, would soar up to the Almighty. I will know neither want nor grief, and my dear ones shall soon follow me. [Ibid.] He admires the setting sun, and the reflection of the crimson sky in a pond [108]. On his travels, he desires to take along his Kleist and Virgil, so that he is able to experience more fully what those great ones have described [Ibid]. He feels himself to be a Gessnerian shepherd [114]. The only thing he lacks is love, which would have added charm to the spring, compelled him to love the Creator even more, seeing him in every flower (an a propos picture: a tilted urn, whence there pours ash, and a flower) [110]. The heart is beating somehow too strongly, the author seeks to calm it down, enters into a conversation with it. He is in love with an angel, a God’s angel; from afar he watches the village where his dear one lives; the evening star for him is the star of love [111]. He gives himself a promise to look at the moon, which she is perhaps also admiring while thinking of him [112]. In stormy weather, he incises her name on the bark of a beech [Ibid]. But why is he thinking only of her? “If that be a sin, forgive me, Lord! Yet where is she, the holy one, where is she?” [112]. He saw her; she will remain his forever. “And, whenever I think of parting, bitter tears wet my visage” [113].28 Goethe, Schiller, Jean-Paul Richter have had in their youth a sentimentalist period before each set out on his own path. In Schiller, this mood resonated for a longer period; Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, experienced through “the heart’s imagination,”29 echo with his reading of Young’s [Night] Thoughts. The difference between these works lies in poetry, and in a new stylistics; we are now on the ground of Romanticism. The mania of tears and sorrow produced not only poets, but also types of unmotivated melancholics, a variety of “problematic

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characters”; like the stormy geniuses, they also entered the currents of Romanticism and Byronism.

The sentimentalist currents also came to light in Russia, superseding the influence of the Enlightenment, cerebral eighteenth-century literature. Because of historical conditions, we could not avoid imitating, yet we did so without having lived through the socio-psychic process that makes such influences viable. We had not been so sick with reason as to seek rescue in sentiment; in the West, the protest in the name of sentiment was a matter of principle; in our case, it was directed against ugly manifestations of our Enlightenment, with its simplistic materialism, naïve play at unbelief, and passion for the Western salon culture. Discourses on “the misuse of reason among certain recent writers” (Lopukhin) emerged; Kheraskov wrote that “evil was born of intellectualism,” and Sumarokov could assert that, with the development of the sciences, “natural simplicity perished and along with her, purity of heart.” The age of the heart had arrived. While it was serious in Novikov’s pietistic circle, it was manifested as an overflow of sensibility in light literature. The contradictions between Classicism and Sentimentalism were perceived as literary, not intrinsic; the sentimentalist literature, failing to appeal to actual feelings, only opened new sources of sensibility; it inculcated a particular standard of poetic clichés, but did not open readers’ eyes to Russian nature and Russian reality. Young and Ossian had already made an impact on Derzhavin; Bolotov was reading [Johann Georg] Sulzer (Moralische Betrachtungen über die Werke der Natur, 1745) when his eyes opened for the first time to see nature as a source of “blameless merriments” and pietist ecstasies. For Karamzin, Young is “a friend of the wretched, a solace for the wretched,” whereas Ossian’s songs “pour into one’s languid spirit a most tender anguish, and tune us to sad fancies, yet this grief is slight and sweet for the soul” (“Poeziia” [“Poesy”], 1787). In Karamzin’s library, we find Rousseau, Bernardin de Sainte-Pierre, Richardson, Thomson, Sterne and his French imitators, and the German sentimentalists. Karamzin was the organizer of our literary Sentimentalism. The scheme of this worldview is well known: Nature that glorifies the Creator; a sentimental heart (“God, the father of sentimental hearts” in “Pesn’ Bozhestvu” [“Song to the Divinity”], 1793); holy poesy is “the god of sentimental

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hearts” in “Darovaniia” [“Gifts”], 1795); the celebration of virtue and friendship; the social ideal is a man . . . who, Content with what he has attained, His spirit free, senses unchained, His soul as upright as his spine; He seeks no fortunes from far lands, For sea-borne ships he does not pine, Against loud winds he firmly stands, Owns his abode under the sun, Lives out his life’s days one by one, Nor peeks beyond one day’s frontier; Who keeps his honest eyes fixed straight At other faces, nor whose plate Is poisoned by a pauper’s tear; Pleased with his share, he will not shirk Light rambles or demanding work; Who likes to take his rest at noon, Who to his neighbors would as soon Aid with his hand as with his mind, Who can be a congenial friend, A loving spouse until the end, A kindly father to his child; Who in his idleness embraces The Muses and the tender Graces, Who on his kith and kin bestows Delight with poetry and prose, Who lets his purest heart release His laughter—for there is no harm In laughing at what has some charm— His life will be lived out in peace. (“Poslanie k Aleksandru Alekseevichu Pleshcheevu” [Epistle to Alexander Alexeevich Pleshcheev], 1794) Such a man, “whose spirit and conscience are immaculate” (“Poslanie k Dmitrievu” [Epistle to Dmitriev], 1793; cf. “Pis’mo Filareta k Melodoru” [Letter from Philaretos to Melidoros], 1794), is not afraid of death; it is a

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“quiet haven” where those who have parted shall unite again (“Bereg” [“The Shore”], 1803) and, for those who knew how to love, “love will be perennial” (“Mysli o liubvi” [“Thoughts About Love”], 1797); the “Graveyard” (“Kladbishche,” 1793) is an “abode of eternal peace.” All this creates an atmosphere of melancholy; it is “sullen”; not even spring’s smile can dispel it (“Vesenniaia pesn’ melankholika” [“A Spring Song of a Melancholic”], 1788), but it contains a peculiar pleasure: “most tenderly You flow from pain and grief to cheerfulness; No joy is come, but there is no distress; Despair is gone . . . but, having dried your tears, You dare not contemplate the world, and tremble, And your dear mother, sorrow, you resemble. (“Melankholiia, podrazhanie Deliliu” [Melancholy, in Imitation of Delille], 1800) Or else a “gauze” is invoked, “a transparent cover of sensibility,” through which the hero’s eyes blaze (“Rytsar’ nashego vremeni” [The Knight of Our Time]). A school developed around Karamzin; he himself was following in another’s tracks, but his school best reveals the deficiencies of craftsmanship. The journals Time Spent Pleasantly and Usefully [Priiatnoe i poleznoe preprovozhdenie vremeni] and Hippocrene [Ippokrena] are filled with Youngian and Ossianic motifs, excerptions, and imitations. This was where F. G. Pokrovsky (the philosopher of the Alaun Mount30), who happened to have been Zhukovsky’s boyhood teacher, practiced; his melancholy is sometimes tuned, in a real-life-altruistic mode, to the topic of “human sufferings and beneficence.”31 Count Sibirsky, for his part, was a well-fed sentimentalist, whose surrounding landscapes in Moscow reminded him of descriptions in one of Radcliffe’s novels;32 he likes to “occupy himself” with melancholy, when sitting by a “bright red fire and reminiscing about absent friends and his dear one.”33 He plays at melancholy. Imagining himself to be one of the progeny of Ossian’s fantasy, he sinks into sullen pensiveness, but then thinks better of it: what use is there for tears and sadness if a man of pure soul, after the vale of life’s lamentations, shall come upon Eden’s blooming plains and angels’ songs? This contradiction is resolved—by sleep, as the author “has perceived the weight of Morpheus’s leaden scepter.”34 Count Shalikov is especially illustrative of this playful Sentimentalism; “he has something warmish in him,” wrote Karamzin, defending

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him from Dmitriev’s attacks.35 The spring brings upon him melancholy and tears; in the eye’s crystal, the sun’s ray plays, but “often the moon’s gentle radiance replaces it (crystal? ray?) on a turquoise heaven before my eyes.” The poem “Graveyard” turns into a hymn to “gentle, holy melancholy”; in his epistle to “the Philosopher of the Alaun Mount,” the poet reminisces about how they both philosophized over the graves underneath an old spreading oak while “the melancholic moonlight increased the melancholy of the place and the objects”; on their way back, their attention was arrested by a mournful Gothic castle; it was a prison house. “The Moscow River” and “Dnieper” evoke sorrowful thoughts— for a reason that we don’t see. The actual object disappears, but across the Dnieper are “small groves, the havens of love and bliss,” and so forth. “O nature! O sensibility!” The Russian landscape and local impressions are valued inasmuch as they are suggested by Western impressions and readings. When traveling, Karamzin always has a Western “poet . . . in his thoughts and hands”—or in his pocket, for easy reference: he admires the views and sentimentalizes in places where von Haller, Gessner, and Rousseau had come before him, adopting their style. Shalikov transplants this device to the Russian landscape. “The Spring, in my eyes, would not have been so beautiful had not Thomson and Kleist described all of its beauties for me,” Karamzin confesses (Works, II, 71): Reading James Thompson and Lambert, To their unreal world I compare The true world, which I think the best; The grove is fresher for its shade, The rill more tender on the glade; I watch with joy within my breast What Jacques Delille and Kleist depict, Keeping their verse in memory; I pick the trails that they have picked; And their trace gives delight to me. (“Derevnia” [Village], 1785) In the garden of Lopukhin’s estate near Moscow, Zhukovsky saw a “Young Island” and, on this island, an urn dedicated to Fénelon’s memory, which included a depiction of Madame Guyon and Rousseau. “This place involuntarily induces a certain doleful, pleasant meditation.”36 For Count Shalikov, it is memory that suggests something of this sort: his poem “A May Morning” [“Maiskoe utro”] evokes images of

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Werther and Héloïse, “Cloister” [“Monastyr”] recalls “the mysteries of the Druid rites” and “stern oracles”—and the author wishes to penetrate the secret interior of the monk’s heart, for the history of each of them is a chain of griefs. Somewhere in the Ukraine he discovered a Swiss tinge: “Is it possible for one who has a little imaginative verve and a sentimental heart not to know Switzerland and, having never been there, not to know its nature, the most beautiful in the world? Who has not read the New Héloïse, or The Letters of a Russian Traveler?”37 Passing on to the landscape that extended before his gaze, he asks himself: “Is this not a small Jura? A small Clarens?” He attempts to imitate Russian folk songs (“Dolgo li mne, molodoi, kruchinit’sia” [For how long shall I, the young one, grieve?]; “Nynche byl ya na pochtovom na dvore” [Today I visited a village post office]), but, when translating Tableau slave (Paris, 1824) by Countess Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia (“Slavianskaia kartina piatogo veka” [“The Slavic Tableau of the Fifth Century”]), he did not notice that a marriage song included there is a rendition of a Russian folk song, and translated it back from French, but not in the folk style (“A young pine stood in the yard near a shack”).38 His description of a “village festivity” begins with a confession: “For a friend of humanity and nature there is an unspeakable pleasure in the pure merriment of pure-hearted villagers.” And here is a description of St. John’s Eve [Kupala]: In the evening, following the sunset, on a green meadow and on the small islands of a clear river, by a pine grove and in its interior, tar barrels blazed up . . . Impatient villagers flocked from all sides to the site of merriment; country Dietzes39 struck with their fiddle-bows. Here tender flutes rang out, there loud songs; young peasants and peasant girls joined in lively dances; the elderly sat at the tables where from large vessels spread the fragrant scent of their nectar and ambrosia—cheap vodka and fresh bread; some rushed to the swings . . . others dispersed over the grove and the meadow. We walked around, and made merry with the happy villagers. The goodly landowner was sincerely happy for their bliss which he shared with us in his sentimental heart. All that Virgil, Gessner, Florian, Delille sang on their immortal flutes became alive in my memory, in my soul . . . I love the fields, I love virtue, and I also love you, Delille. Youngian melancholy in a graveyard—and folk life, seen from the windows of a landowner’s villa, with pure-hearted happy villagers, tender

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flutes, lively dances on a green meadow, by a clear river, and with vodka for ambrosia: reality might have suggested something different, but it was impossible to get rid of Young and Delille, and not recall “the deceits of both Richardson and Rousseau” (Eugene Onegin).40 This is Sentimentalism for pleasure, permitting even a measure of lustfulness. When Zhukovsky entered its atmosphere, Russian society was going through a reaction; the word society [obshchestvo] itself was removed from literary circulation. Yet it was not forbidden to sentimentalize. Karamzin’s mother displayed a remarkable propensity for melancholy, and spent whole days in deep pensiveness; sentimental novels were her favorite reading.41 Ekaterina Afanas’evna Protasova,42 who would later become a stern rigorist, in her youth indulged in reading La Nouvelle Héloïse and a sentimental book about education, Adèle et Théodore.43 Gogol’s father was fond of designing gardens and would give an individual name to every valley; in a neighboring wood, he instituted a “Valley of Quiet”: it was forbidden to use axes and even to do laundry on the pond by beating linen—lest the nightingales be scared away.44 In the summer of 1810, Gnedich found Batiushkov ill, “apparently, due to Moscow’s air, infected with sensibility, moist with tears shed by authors, and thick with their heavy sighs.”45 For his part, Batiushkov makes fun of “fashionable writers who spend their whole nights on coffins and frighten poor humanity with apparitions, ghosts, the Last Judgment, but most of all with their style,” as they give themselves up to “sullen reflections on the futility of things, which everyone is permitted to engage in in this age of melancholy” (“Progulka po Moskve” [“A Walk Through Moscow”], 1810). Zhukovsky also began to sentimentalize—the only true poet of our age of sensibility and the only one who experienced its mood not only in a literary manner [literaturno], but through life’s grief, at a time when the heart demands love’s care, and later, when it looks for reciprocity. This experience left deep traces in the man and gave a particular direction to his sentiment, binding him forever with “recollections”; the motifs of sentimental poetry supported his mood, but it had stamped them with sincerity, an elegant pensiveness, which interrupts convention with the voice of the heart. This poetic cliché, the echo of what had been experienced and won through suffering, had a binding force on him: new times had arrived, there was a glimpse of late happiness, yet the doleful cliché recurs amid the jests of Arzamas46 and new passions, amid the “Reports on the Moon”47 and an epitaph for a “squirrel.” Like a Leitmotiv, which the poet cannot rid himself of.

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Notes Thanks are due to Jennifer Flaherty and Gabriel Tropp for their help in preparing the translation, and to Thomas Kitson for his editorial work. 1. Chapter 1 of A. N. Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii: Poeziia chuvstva i “serdechnogo voobrazheniia” (V. A. Zhukovsky: The Poetry of Sentiment and of the “Heart’s Imagination”); first published in 1904. This translation, by Boris Maslov and Lev Blumenfeld (metrical translations of Karamzin’s verse), is based on the edition by A. E. Makhov (Moscow: Intrada, 1999). Annotations by Boris Maslov. For further discussion of this work by Veselovsky, see Chapters 4 and 11. 2. The phrase is used by Alexander Turgenev in a letter; see Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, p. 223. See n. 29 on Novalis’s “herzliche Phantasie.” 3. The argument that individualism and a cult of nature coincide with periods of disengagement from society recurs from Veselovsky’s earlier work; cf. “From the History of Naturgefühl” (1883), discussed in section 3 in the introduction to this volume. 4. Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, pp. 304–5. 5. Veselovsky is making use of an idiom deriving from Dan. 7:8. All footnotes belong to the editor, except if marked otherwise. 6. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 7, 13. 7. The reference is to Young’s Night Thoughts, IX. 8. Veselovsky appears to be freely summarizing the thrust of de Staël’s De L’Allemagne (1810); religion and enthusiasm are discussed in Part IV of the work. 9. Night Thoughts, VI. 10. Ardinghello is the protagonist of Heinse’s Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln (1787). Karl Moor is a character in Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781). 11. [Veselovsky’s note:]  A.  W. Schlegel, Sur le triomphe de la sentimentalité. 12. “Ach, was ich weiß, kann jeder wissen—mein Herz habe ich allein.” Letter from May 9 (Book 2). 13. Siegwart, eine Klostergeschichte (Siegwart, a Tale of the Cloister, 1776) by Johann Martin Miller. 14. René is a short novella by François-René de Chateaubriand, which first appeared in 1802. 15. Julie de Krudener, Valérie ou Lettres de Gustave de Linar à Ernest de G. (1803) 16. The reference is to two novels by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: Edward Allwill’s Briefsammlung and Woldemar. 17. Character in Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761).

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18. Cf. the French original: “La tranquille et sainte amitié a un point d’appui où tient toujours le balancier. Les passions, délicieuses et cruelles, nous emportent de nous-mêmes et nous laissent enfin; mais l’honnêteté de l’âme et des procédés, la confiance d’un coeur droit et sensible, la modération d’un caractère sage et fixé par de bons principes, voilà ce qui assure une liaison, tel refroidissement qu’elle paroisse souffrir. Voilà, mon ami, ce qui vous promet de me retrouver toujours la même [ . . . ]” cited in Charles-Aimé Dauban, Étude sur Madame Roland et son temps (Paris: H. Plon, 1864), p. lxxxi. 19. Night Thoughts, II: “Needful auxiliars are our friends, to give / To social man true relish of himself. / Full on ourselves, descending in a line, / Pleasure’s bright beam is feeble in delight: / Delight intense, is taken by rebound; / Reverberated pleasures fire the breast.” 20. Night Thoughts, V. 21. Count Pyotr Ivanovich Shalikov (1768–1852) was a minor Russian sentimentalist poet. 22. Night Thoughts, III. 23. Veselovsky is referring to Carducci’s poem “Classicismo e Romanticismo.” 24. [Veselovsky’s note:] A. I. Turgenev’s letters to N. I. Turgenev, pp. 86, 147. 25. P. 86. See n. 27 for full bibliographic reference. Further references to page numbers of the publication of Matthison’s diary are given in brackets. 26. “O! wie selig würde ich sein, ein solches Mädchen wie Marianne nur einmahl zu sehn—doch dies ist ein phantastischer Wunsch!” etc. (p. 105) 27. This is a summary of the following entry: “Der Verlust meines besten zärtlichsten Freundes (ich sage nicht zu viel) der sich heute aus meinen Umarmungen wand; machte mich den ganzen Tag schwermüthug, die süssesten Thränen so wie sie die wärmste reinste Freundschaft weinen heisst, hab ich seinem Andenken geheiligt—die genauste Übereinstimmung fesselte Herz an Herz: O! wie empfand ich seinen Verlust so hart, wie umwölkte er meine ganze Seele mit düstrer Schwermuth!” (p. 101). 28. [Veselovsky’s note:] Karl Helm, “Ein Tagebuch aus Matthisons Jugend.” Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher 10.1 (1900): 81–114. The diary dates from Jan. 13 to Apr. 19, 1777. 29. Veselovsky provides a fuller discussion of Novalis and his construction of emotional life based on “the heart’s imagination” (Novalis’s own term is “herzliche Phantasie”) in V. A. Zhukovskii, pp. 234–39. 30. Feofilakt Pokrovsky’s nomme de plume. 31. [Veselovsky’s note:] Priiatnoe i poleznoe preprovozhdenie vremeni XII, 1796, pp. 3 ff.: Темный леc или чувcтво бедcтвий человечеcких и

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благотвоpения [Dark woods, or the sentiment of human sufferings and beneficence]. 32. [Veselovsky’s note:] Мои желания пpи наcтупающей веcне [My wishes at the spring’s arrival], Ippokrena, 1799, part 2, p. 260. 33. [Veselovsky’s note:] Ibid., part  4, pp.  255–56: Меланхолия [Melancholy]. 34. [Veselovsky’s note:] Ibid., part 3, p. 202 ff.: Подpажание Оccиану [An Imitation of Ossian]. 35. [Veselovsky’s note:] Dmitriev M. A. Melochi iz zapasa moei pamiati, 1869, p. 93. 36. [Veselovsky’s note:] “About Fenelon,” 1809. Voeikov has put this note into verse; see “Opisanie russkikh sadov” [Description of Russian gardens], Vestnik Evropy 1813, no. 7 and 8, p. 194. 37. The latter is a work by Karamzin. 38. [Veselovsky’s note:] This is the beginning of the song in Tableau slave: “Un jeune pin s’élevait sur les monts auprès d’une chaumière”; In Olga, by the same author, one also finds renditions of folk songs: (1) Assise dans un donjon élevé j’entends la voix du faucon; (2) O fleuve, fleuve cheri; (3) Bon feyer échauffe toi; (4) Dans la prairie est une joli tilleul. 39. A reference to the virtuoso violinist Ferdinand Dietz (1742–1798), who worked in Russia from 1771 and taught music to the future emperor Alexander I. 40. Bk. 2, 29. 41. [Veselovsky’s note:] Karamzin, Sochineniia, III, pp. 242, 253–55. 42. E. A. Protasova was Zhukovsky’s blood sister, who rejected his proposition to her daughter Maria, Zhukovsky’s long-time pupil, on the ground of their close kinship. See Chapter 11, n. 74. 43. [Veselovsky’s note:] Zeidlits, Zhizn’ i poeziia V. A. Zhukovskogo, p. 13, fn.1 44. [Veselovsky’s note:] Shchegolev, Istoricheskii vestnik, 1902, February, p. 661. 45. [Veselovsky’s note:] Tikhanov, Nik. Iv. Gnedich, p. 40. 46. A progressively-minded literary group (1815–1818), of which Zhukovsky was a member; its meetings were dominated by a jocular, parodic spirit. 47. Addressed to the empress Maria Fedorovna (1820), one of Zhukovsky’s attempts to apply sentimentalist language to court life (see Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, pp. 244–45).

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Chapter 10

Against Ornament O. M. Freidenberg’s Concept of Metaphor in Ancient and Modern Contexts RICH A RD   P. M A RTIN

Alice cannot be in the poem, she says, because She’s only a metaphor for childhood And a poem is a metaphor already So we’d only have a metaphor Inside a metaphor. Do you see? They all nod. They see. Except for the girl With her head in the rabbit hole. —From “And as in Alice,” by Mary Jo Bang

This essay on historical poetics will comprise two parts: historical and poetic. To put it another way, I will attempt to offer a theoretical examination and then a practical explication, the former dealing with the concept of metaphor as developed and employed by the sadly neglected Soviet-era philologist and theoretician Olga Mikhailovna Freidenberg, the latter centered on the poetry of Pindar. The goal is to see how Freidenberg’s work might still be of relevance and usefulness, not just in relation to more recent theories of metaphor, but also as a heuristic device in the study of archaic Greek poetry, one of the areas on which her voluminous work centered. Attention to “historical poetics” demands a willingness to revisit every category of literary device. For the purposes of this paper, however, I will not undertake a more general survey of the concept of metaphor, other than as a backgrounding technique to highlight some of Freidenberg’s more interesting claims. At the same time, it bears saying that the study of metaphor in Classical poetry could benefit from further alignment with general theories of metaphor. The fairly recent collection by Boys-Stones goes part of the way toward meeting this desideratum, but is constrained by its focus on the philosophical rather than the literary and philological, and also by what I would call an “etic” 274

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reliance on concepts developed by critics rather than an investigation into “emic” systems that might be discovered in early Greek culture.1 By bringing to the discussion some recent ethnographic work, I hope to open up our hermeneutic procedures in a way that Freidenberg herself might have found appealing, though mine is perhaps a somewhat messier attempt than her own tidy schemata would countenance. That metaphors should not count—that they just get in the way of rational discourse—is a sentiment that for a long time hobbled the study of this trope.2 Although in Image and Concept, and in general, Freidenberg does not single out earlier writers with whom to disagree, it is clear that much of the force of her chapter on metaphor derives from an enthusiastic and liberating reaction against the dismissive or reduced treatments of metaphor that had resulted from the ossification of rhetoric, on the one hand, and on the other, from positivist thought. (More immediate influences on her direction will be mentioned a bit further on.) Among the “enemies of poetry” in this regard we might include the nascent scientism of Hobbes, who famously asserted in Leviathan (1651) “the Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the benefit of man-kind, the end. And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senslesse and ambiguous words are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention and sedition, or contempt” (I.5).3 Of course, it does not take much reflection for anyone to deconstruct this obstreperous call for “pure” analytical language, and one gets the feeling that Hobbes himself is slyly showing off rhetorical skill at the employment of metaphor even as he decries it: definitions are to be “snuffed and purged” like candlewicks or gutters; the progress of reason is likened to walking on a path to a goal; and the “senslesse” words are (in simile, near kin of metaphor) a kind of swamp fire.4 Later in the same century, John Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) acknowledges that some genres of discourse can use metaphor—just not the serious ones. “Since wit and fancy find easier entertainment in the world than dry truth and real knowledge, figurative speeches and allusion in language will hardly be admitted as an imperfection or abuse of it. I confess, in discourses where we seek rather pleasure and delight than information and improvement, such ornaments as are borrowed from them can scarce pass for faults. But yet if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness; all the artificial and figurative

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application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats: and therefore, however laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or person that makes use of them” (3.x.34).5 I underline the terms that undergird his latent structural opposition: on the one side we have: truth, judgment, reality, improvement through instruction, “things as they are”; on the other: fancy, passions, deceptive entertainment that brings pleasure. “Art” and the “artificial” are dangerously close; the figurative is the invented, what is “applied”—almost physically, like a needlework appliqué—in short, “ornaments.” The basic suspicion about imagination (fancy, invention) as we know, persists stubbornly into the modern world, so that the emblematic musician conjured by Wallace Stevens still faces a similar interrogation about values (and would today): They said, ‘You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.’ The man replied, ‘Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.’6 The rift between reason and the imagination was not so wide in premodern thought. Yet the seventeenth-century critics may have thought they found support in a strain of ancient thinking concerning tropes, especially metaphor. The Spaniard Quintilian, training would-be rhetoricians at Rome in the first century C.E., says “The name of trope is applied to the transference of expressions from their natural and principal signification to another, with a view to the embellishment of style (ornandae orationis gratia) or, as the majority of grammarians define it, the transference of words and phrases from the place which is strictly theirs to another to which they do not properly belong (in quo propria non est)” (Quintilian Inst. Orat. 9.1.4).7 As in Locke, notions of “borrowing” and “ornament” rub shoulders. But it is important to be more precise about the differences between these. The “borrowing” in ancient terms is not from another type of discourse (imagination-based vs. scientific) but, within the range of natural language, from one area of application, conceived of as “natural,” to another in quo propria non

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est. “Propriety” of speech (another controverted literary-critical term) turns out to be important in judging the stylistic suitability of a given figurative expression (something already evident in Aristotle), but that is not the same thing as seriousness of purpose, or as any Lockean distinction between (easy, entertaining) dulce and (improving) utile. For Quintilian as for Horace, the two should commingle.8 Cicero, too, thinks in terms of adornment and borrowing, in his extended and simile-rich account of metaphor at De oratore (3.155–56):9 The third mode, that of using words in a metaphorical sense [transferendi verbi], is widely prevalent, a mode of which necessity was the parent, compelled by the sterility [inopia] and narrowness of language; but afterwards delight and pleasure made it frequent; for as dress [vestis] was first adopted for the sake of keeping off the cold, but in process of time began to be made an ornament of the body and an emblem of dignity [ad ornatum etiam corporis et dignitatem], so the metaphorical use of words was originally invented on account of their paucity, but became common from the delight which it afforded. For even the countrymen say, gemmare vites, that “the vines are budding”; luxuriem esse in herbis, that “there is a luxuriancy in the grass”; and laetas segetes, that “there is a bountiful crop”; for when that which can scarcely be signified by its proper word [verbo proprio] is expressed by one used in a metaphorical sense, the similitude taken from that which we indicate by a foreign term [alieno verbo] gives clearness to that which we wish to be understood. These metaphors, therefore, are a species of borrowing [quasi mutuationes sunt], as you take from something else that which you have not of your own. Those have a greater degree of boldness which do not show poverty [inopiam], but bring some accession of splendor to our language. (translation by J. S. Watson) Cicero’s account represents an evolutionary approach to the development of tropes, as they arise out of a process in natural language that comes into play when there just is not a “right” word for some concept, thus compelling or allowing a “foreign” word to fill the semantic gap. In spirit, his view comes very close to a historical poetics, on this point at least. The decorative value of metaphor is, in this version, an outgrowth but not a replacement for the originating solution. The

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growth of MacMansions does not abolish the need for housing, any more than molecular gastronomy does for food. Synchronically, one will find both sorts of metaphor coexisting in the linguistic landscape. (Later analysts will worry more about “dead” metaphors.) A treatise most likely from the time of Cicero’s youth, the Rhetorica ad Herennium (circa 82 B.C.E.) lists metaphor as just one of ten exornationes verborum (4.31.42) to be explained and illustrated. It has no particular claim, however, to be any more apt for “ornamentation,” compared with other tropes. The Rhetorica in its brief treatment (4.34.45)—the first in any Latin handbook—lists a number of uses for metaphor, among which ornamentation is merely one, alongside the creation of vivid mental images (rei ante oculos ponendae causa e.g., “insurrection woke up Italy” and obscenitatis vitandae causa e.g., “whose mother delights in daily marriages”).10 Although the author of the Rhetorica does not resort to a Ciceronian clothing metaphor to describe metaphor, the abiding concern with propriety, with which the brief treatment ends, fits with a notion of style as comportment, a matter of gesture and movement: They say that a metaphor ought to be restrained (pudentem), so as to be a transition with good reason (ratione) to a kindred thing, and not seem an indiscriminate, reckless, and precipitate (temere et cupide) leap to an unlike thing.” This emphasis on restraint and proportion in one’s troping style is a good reminder, were one needed, that the extant ancient analyses of metaphor after Aristotle come almost exclusively from rhetorical treatises, and even from practicing orators, like Cicero. On the Greek side, there is a somewhat wider range of toleration for extremes in style— especially as poetry is included along with oratory—but critics like Longinus and Demetrius focus on the frequency, audacity, or appropriateness of metaphors. One should tone down the more dangerous ones by converting them to similes (Demetrius On Style 80), but if you need to act as if swept along by emotion, raise the floodgate: true sublimity and high emotion will counterbalance a rush of many metaphors (Longinus On the Sublime 32.4). These emotions “sweep everything along in the forward surge of their current” (τῷ ῥοθίῳ τῆς φορᾶς ταυτὶ πέφυκεν ἅπαντα τἆλλα παρασύρειν καὶ προωθεῖν). In other words, Longinus favors an occasional literalization of the “carrying” (phora) that lurks in metaphora. Thus writer or speaker, in his interpretation and style, enacts the trope. This brings us to Aristotle, whose more complex thinking will turn out to offer us the best framework within which to place Freidenberg’s

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thoughts on metaphor. Like the later rhetoricians, Aristotle seems to have been hard pressed to describe metaphors without resort to metaphor. As Innes points out, “the word metaphora, found first in this meaning in Aristotle and his contemporaries, is itself a metaphor: it means ‘carrying across’ or transference (cf. Latin transferre, translatio), and vocabulary of movement, change/exchange, and place/domain is frequent, reflecting the basic idea that a term is transferred from its original context to another.”11 Instead of stylistic clothing or ornamentation, the metaphor for Aristotle represents something deeper, dwelling in the bones of language rather than protecting its skin. His is a much subtler view of metaphor than that found in the rhetoricians, for whom it represents a species of “ornament.” The kernel of later developments—the clothing and ornament metaphors—can be found if one knits portions of the Rhetoric and Poetics together, but it is certainly not Aristotle’s primary view. Thus, in Chapter 22 of the Poetics (1458a18–31), his concentration is mostly on appropriate level of style, and not unlike Longinus, although of course he favors the mean rather than the sublime extreme. If one composes only with “standard” terms (kuria onomata), which generally is the way to obtain the most clarity (saphestatê), the result, says Aristotle, is banal (tapeinê)—whereas excellence of diction (lexeôs . . . aretê) lies in being clear without banality. The solution is to use “exotic” terms (xenikon—literally “foreign”), including metaphors. Not too much— that would produce either riddles (if one uses all metaphors) or barbarisms (if one uses only loan-words). The right mix (kekrasthai) is what should be aimed at. Comparing this with Rhetoric 3.2.2, we find Aristotle using, for the opposite of tapeinê, the participle kekosmêmenê (“adorned”), describing the effect of figured language. At 3.2.10, he uses the verb kosmein (“to ornament”) in his recommendation that those who employ metaphor use better species (from the same genus) to carry out what is essentially praise of the subject (the opposed procedure being “to depreciate” the subject: psegein). The adornment of praise is kept at arm’s length from an explicit clothing metaphor, however, as that comparison comes, just before the passage cited, at 3.2.9, nested within a comment on propriety. One must avoid to aprepes (“the improper”) through close attention to proportion in choosing metaphors that “fit” (harmottousas). “We must consider, as a red cloak suits a young man, what suits an old one: for the same garment is not suitable for both.” Aristotle, then, uses when convenient a notion of ornamentation, but the clothing metaphor-for-metaphor, as we have seen, is anchored by

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deeper ideas of propriety—one can’t just wear anything. It should be emphasized that in the Poetics, metaphora is explicitly kept distinct from kosmos (“ornament”). In Chapter 21, Aristotle lists metaphor alongside “standard term,” loan word (glôtta), ornament (kosmos), neologism, and various modifications to normal words (lengthening etc.: 1457b 1–4). He then goes on to discuss each in turn. Unfortunately, the discussion about kosmos seems to have slipped out of the Poetics at 1458b33, as was noted by Robortello as early as 1548, and the few later mentions of the term in the Poetics do not elucidate it. Schenkeveld has argued persuasively, on the basis of a similarly structured list in a late third-century B.C.E. papyrus preserving parts of a Hellenistic handbook (tekhnê) on rhetoric or poetics, that kosmos designated the poetic epithet.12 I shall return later to the larger issue of the meanings of kosmos, but note for now that such a potential significance for the Aristotelian term already undercuts the notion that kosmos denoted mere adornment. Of course, the status of the “ornamental” epithet in poetry, especially Homeric epic, has itself for centuries been a point of debate among critics, only intensified by the findings of Parry and Lord regarding the usefulness of the formula for verse composition-inperformance.13 Put another way, it is conceivable that kosmos was far more than cosmetic. In the view of Paul Ricoeur, it was Aristotle’s failure to lodge metaphor at the level of discourse (speech-acts and utterances) rather than of the single word (a semiotic rather than discourse-semantic level), and his insistence on starting from a notion of “proper” meanings for single words, that eventually triggered the degraded treatment of metaphor and made it simply decorative.14 Be that as it may, it is equally important to stress (with Ricoeur) the value of another aspect of Aristotle’s approach to metaphor: his treatment of it as a cognitive tool, an aid to instruction.15 “Easy learning is naturally pleasant to all, and words mean something, so that all words which make us learn something are most pleasant . . . It is metaphor that above all produces this effect; for when Homer calls old age stubble [Od.14.213], he teaches and informs us (epoiêse mathêsin kai gnôsin) through the genus” (1410b10–15 = Rhet.3.10.2 translation by J. H. Freese). To this the Poetics again provides a useful supplement: “much the greatest asset is a capacity for metaphor. This alone cannot be acquired from another, and is a sign of natural gifts (euphuia): because to use metaphor well is to discern (theôrein) similarities” (1459a5–7, translation by S. Halliwell). Halliwell remarks that the latter passage shows “some awareness of

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the special potency of metaphor” not unlike that of the Romantic poets but “this attitude towards metaphor remains in the Poetics an intriguingly suggestive one” and metaphor is a sort of exception: the only thing “one can never learn from another.”16 The fuller value of this skill for discerning similarities can be found described in Aristotle’s Topica (1.18, 108b7–14): it is useful for making definitions, for inductive arguments, and for hypothetical deductions—in short, not only for dialectic but for any sort of reasoning about the world.17 After Aristotle, with the exception of Vico in the mid-eighteenth century, the recognition that metaphor has a cognitive value has not been given much if any attention.18 Only in the later twentieth century has the tide turned. While the rhetorical uses of metaphor continue to be investigated, and in a much more rigorous way thanks to text linguistics, another result of the post-1960s revolution in linguistic thought has been the growth of the related areas of psycholinguistics, cognitive science, and semantics. As Boys-Stones notes in the preface to his recently edited collection, “there is now general agreement at least that an account of metaphor which makes it merely an ornament to language, verbal wrapping-paper brought in only after the serious business of meaning has taken place, simply does not hold up to the realities of metaphorical usage. Metaphor (or whatever should stand in its place) belongs, we now believe, at the heart of thinking about language use in all its aspects—not sidelined as a form of ‘deviant’ usage of primary interest only to students of literature.”19 Linguists, philosophers, psychologists, even economists, have joined in efforts to recover the ways in which metaphors work, as a phenomenon tied to specific utterances, but furthermore how metaphors work to focus the mind on certain features of reality, and even to generate widely shared belief.20 The latter might be seen as a product of “rhetoric” but one without rhetoricians; in other words, languages themselves, by embedding and naturalizing what analysts might recognize (from the outside) as metaphors, can produce an unconscious acceptance of certain processes as analogous, even though there is no rational basis for such beliefs. The headlinegrabbing work in this area, of course, has been that of George Lakoff, who has dared to bring his findings into the public print in relation to presidential elections and progressive politics. In various single-authored and collaborative publications reaching back to 1980, Lakoff has sought to show that metaphors structure human experience through dense networks of basic analogies connecting widely diverse forms of social life with images derived from other, often more tactile, spheres.

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One of his elementary examples (conventionally put in capital letters), argument is war, can be said to underlie such utterances about verbal debate as “he attacked my point,” or “her position is indefensible” or “that was right on target” or “he shot down what I had to say.”21 Once persuaded to look at the dynamics of ordinary language in this way, we can soon find very little that can not be taken, somehow, as metaphor—time is money; life is a journey; seeing is understanding; business (or marriage) is a zero-sum game—and so on. Attempts to group such root metaphors under higher headings lead to all-purpose super-metaphors (“containers”; “force”; “balance”). Such essential base metaphors strike one as abstractions that, it could be argued, have more to do with the structure of human spatial environments and with linguistic deixis.22 There are other concerns. Raymond Gibbs of UC Santa Cruz, one of the founding figures of this sort of study, calls the field “real-world metaphor” analysis.23 But whose world? How languagespecific or culture-driven are the models? Debate still rages (metaphor!) about the universality of Lakoff-inspired schemata. Cultural anthropologists have tried, if not to dislodge, at least to add nuance to the picture.24 It is time, finally, to turn to Freidenberg’s ideas about metaphor as one can find them developed in several publications, especially Image and Concept. I will be attempting to fit her view into the framework of ancient ideas, knowing that Freidenberg was well aware of these in both Greek and Latin, while seeing how they might relate to the contemporary cognitive approach.25 The fit, as it will emerge, is far from perfect, but the gaps are potentially productive; the still exciting aspects of Freidenberg’s work in this area are her attempt, first, to explore a diachronic dimension to the figure—even to discover a place and time “before” metaphor; and, second, her determination to bring together a cognitive with a rhetorical function, or rather, to see the rhetorical function of metaphor, in archaic Greek literature in particular, as continuing an earlier cognitive function. As I will suggest, her work in this regard is still unique and deserves comparison with yet other contemporary trends. In one of her posthumous publications, “The Origin of the Greek Lyric,” Freidenberg has articulated the kernel of her more extended notion of metaphor.26 She will even use the same example—Homer’s “iron sky”—some years later in Image and Concept. But here she concentrates on lyric as the primary locus for metaphorical expression. In this she comes close to tacit agreement with Aristotle, who in the Poet-

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ics [1459a9–12] apportioned, as being most suitable for the respective genres, compound words to dithyramb, loan words (glôttai) to epic, and metaphors to iambic verse—whether that of iambos genre or of dramatic speeches is unclear.27 Unlike Aristotle, she peers beyond the existing structures of language, in which we can categorize the various strategies of metaphor use (proportional analogies, genus-to-species transfers, and so forth) and detect them in everyday rhetorical usage. Yet she does retain something of an Aristotelian interest in the genesis of genres. Lyric, she asserts, arises from the process of metaphorization “at a stage when the image takes on the function of a concept for the first time.”28 This densely packed pronouncement is central to the entire structure of her notion and so requires more extended comment. Vital to the notion is the evolutionary sense—something we saw in Cicero’s idea that metaphor arises from “natural” use in language, where it has been invented to cover lexical gaps (and then takes on an aesthetic life of its own). But Freidenberg’s evolutionary scheme takes us, it seems, into deeper antiquity, to a stage when “metaphor” as such could not exist because there were, in effect, no gaps to be spanned. Still beholden to a late nineteenth century developmental view of Greek genres (in which epic precedes lyric), she upholds the “later” genre as more involved in the process of metaphorization, while relying on the “older” genre for examples of “images.” Put another way, an “image”—her word for the basic (even pre-verbal) apperception of a natural phenomenon—does not allow or require metaphorical treatment, because the perceiver/speaker is not conscious that s/he is making a transfer (meta-phora) between one genus or species and another. To take her example: the “iron sky” mentioned in Homeric verse (Od.15.329), for example, as the latter Eumaeus speaks to Odysseus when he contemplates going amongst the suitors “whose hubris reaches the iron sky” (τῶν ὕβρις τε βίη τε σιδήρεον οὐρανὸν ἵκει). Freidenberg claims that this is not a metaphorical expression as Greeks of the Homeric age thought the sky was in fact made of iron. Now, we can dispute this point on several grounds. First, how do we know what they believed? To assume that because they have the expression it must have been a possible belief merely begs the question. Second, the archaeology tells against us: the Iron Age, as the Hesiodic paradigm of the Ages and the evidence from the ground concur, came late—so any belief in an “iron” sky must be similarly late, if the poet(s) of the Odyssey are using a term from their own environment, or else such a belief is a relic of a time when iron was only a magical element, not used in weaponry or

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agriculture. In her favor, commentators on Homer do make the suggestion that belief in an “iron sky” could have been prompted by the ancient observation of meteorites.29 And there is the parallel idea of a “firmament” in the heavens, cited from Genesis; and Lucretius’s expression (6.954) caeli lorica, “shield of the heaven”—or is that a metaphor, too? Clearly, accepting the notion of “image” in Freidenberg’s terms means going along with the notion that once upon a time all predication indicated belief: the sky is iron. Obviously, tangled as we are in the web of language, we can only hypothesize such a golden age. It may make for a useful thought experiment; in a way, it is the obverse of the Lockean search for language without figuration, an age of belief rather than science, but at least one transparent in its beliefs, without the bawds and cheats of metaphor. Freidenberg might have done better to start from the related metaphor (or belief?) of a brazen sky, for in this case, one can connect the expression to a more specific image, in an archaic formula, the bronze-thresholded home of the gods (khalkobates dô).30 But, such quibbles aside, the attempt by the philologist to bring to bear theories of primitive mind on an evolutionary stance on metaphor (going beyond Urdummheit) is invigorating and admirable. It merits the attention of those interested in historical poetics (and prehistorical) as opposed to synchronic and rhetorical analysis. Wrapped up in Freidenberg’s approach, of course, is a parallel story, of equal interest, about the evolution of authorship. For such relics of primitive thought as are represented by the “images” embedded in Homeric formulae are assumed, in Freidenberg’s version, to be “cultural survivals” (perezhivaniia) of a collective belief. Metaphors, by contrast, have their origin in lyric, which arises (in the conventional narrative) with the “individual voice.”31 This makes for some tricky argumentation, which Freidenberg does not have time for in her short article on lyric origins. If a poet like Sappho or Pindar were to use the expression “iron heart” for example (neither does, nor does any other lyric writer, to my knowledge), it presumably would represent a metaphor. Yet the expression is used in Homer (Il. 24.205; cf. Od.4.293). So this means that epic has metaphors, as much perhaps as does lyric. Such an erosion of the standard developmental scheme (epic-lyric-drama) might be uncomfortable but can be contained, if one does further statistical study (as no one yet has) on metaphors per line in the two corpora (epic vs. lyric). What is more disturbing and harder to get around is the contingency of usage: since we are not dealing with native informants of a pre-poetic, pre-metaphor age, but with texts (albeit of oral origin) our

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interpretations have to be based on the utterance use of metaphors within discourse. Thus, at Il.24.205, when Hecuba chides her husband Priam for wishing to visit Achilles, killer of his sons, she exclaims: “you have an iron heart!” (sidêreion nu toi êtôr). If it had ever been an article of belief among archaic Greeks that the heart actually was iron, then certainly that time has passed by the era in which this Homeric line was composed. Its entire force depends on the notion that hearts are not iron but (metaphorically, in the rush of impassioned rhetoric— Longinus would approve) can be said to be. This is an artistic “deviation” from the linguistic norm, an aesthetic and stylistic innovation for which the Formalists rather than the Marrists have the more plausible explanatory apparatus.32 In her 1946 article on the “Origin of the Epic Simile,” Freidenberg further develops the basic idea expressed in nuce in the short piece on lyric.33 Her strategy is to read the Iliad in intertextual relation to the Theogony of Hesiod. Not only does this anticipate more modern ways of exploring the mythopoetic workings of both texts—I think especially of Leonard Muellner’s brilliant reading of Achilles’ mênis through backgrounding it with theogonic and cosmic themes in other hexameter poetry—but it also enables readers to compare actual textual evidence (in contrast to the rather untethered style of Freidenberg’s less mature analyses).34 Thus, Il.2.780–85: Οἳ δ’ ἄρ’ ἴσαν ὡς εἴ τε πυρὶ χθὼν πᾶσα νέμοιτο· γαῖα δ’ ὑπεστενάχιζε Διὶ ὣς τερπικεραύνῳ χωομένῳ ὅτε τ’ ἀμφὶ Τυφωέϊ γαῖαν ἱμάσσῃ εἰν Ἀρίμοις, ὅθι φασὶ Τυφωέος ἔμμεναι εὐνάς· ὣς ἄρα τῶν ὑπὸ ποσσὶ μέγα στεναχίζετο γαῖα ἐρχομένων· μάλα δ’ ὦκα διέπρησσον πεδίοιο. So marched they then as though all the land were swept with fire; and the earth groaned beneath them, as beneath Zeus that hurleth the thunderbolt in his wrath, when he scourgeth the land about Typhoeus in the country of the Arimi, where men say is the couch of Typhoeus. Even so the earth groaned greatly beneath their tread as they went; and full swiftly did they speed across the plain. (translation by A. T. Murray) Freidenberg’s comparison of this great simile with Theogony 665–820, the account of an “actual” battle between Zeus, blazing with thunder and lightning, and his enemies the Titans, brings to a point the

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methodological and interpretive issues raised by metaphor (and, in a crystallized form, simile). “Actual” is of course the key, and brings us back to the essential prerequisite of audience or cultural belief in mythological narrative. Freidenberg rightly sees that there is a connection between Iliadic poetic fantasy (in the way of simile) and Hesiodic description. Just as the phrase “iron sky” is not a metaphor for those who think the sky really is iron, so a simile comparing human battle to a divine cosmogonic precedent—in which the audience “believes”—is something both less and more than a simile, as conceived in modern poetic or rhetorical terms. Rather than providing decoration or adornment, the comparison makes a mythopoetic assertion: this is like that, hic et nunc equals illud tempus. (Freidenberg does not put it exactly this way, but I am extending her interpretation by paraphrase.) This is a useful provocation to further thinking about the texture and impact of the poetry, whether or not we want to imagine that the “mythic” image preceded the “poetic” (a point Freidenberg does not push here so much). Two other interesting investigations are sketched out by her at this point. First, her further remarks on “tautological similes” (pp. 29ff.) brings up some curious examples in the Iliad where the tenor and vehicle are, to our eyes, identical, differing only in the matter of scale. The river that nearly overtakes Achilles at  Iliad 21.257–64 is compared to an irrigation stream propelling stones ahead of it and nearly overtaking the gardener who cleaned it out. In other words, rushing water is compared to rushing water, one on the cosmic level, the other on the horticultural. A bit later in the scene, water in a boiling cauldron is the comparison chosen to represent boiling water in the river (Il.21.362–65). Freidenberg’s point seems to be that this represents a sort of simile degree-zero, and can be a key to an earlier kind of thinking in which what matters is not the semantic transfer among genera or species, but a deeper identification of two phenomena; if we see this as evidence of mythopoetic thinking, we can imagine archaic people having the perception that these are not two phenomena at all. This point—and once more we have to tease out the argument more than Freidenberg actually articulates it—relates finally to an extremely productive obsession for her criticism in this era, the notion of the “double.” If more archaic images involve binarism, the acceptance of a sort of shadow behind every image, what is the equivalent on the level of motif and plot? One of Freidenberg’s answers, when she comes to speak of Homeric epic, is the friend. Patroclus and Achilles, that is to

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say, instantiate at the level of the narrative the very mechanism that operates at the level of the trope. Or, if you like, the double is the master trope, not because the poets consciously think in such terms but because originally neither metaphor, nor simile, nor plot-doubles were “tropes” at all: they are categories of belief. Freidenberg’s range of reference here, typically, blossoms out to include the medieval literature and modern folk beliefs, the motif of the twin, the doppelgänger, and so forth, building on her 1935 piece “Pre-Homeric Semantics,” in which she explored the complex relations of the motifs of twins, brothers, friends, comrades, and royal ritual substitutes.35 A more developed illustration of the power of the “double,” this time focused on the difference between mythic consciousness and epic expression, comes in Freidenberg’s 1946 essay on the Oresteia in the Odyssey.36 Here, she starts from the interesting observation that the epic’s central figures—Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus—are matched not just by equivalents in the story of the house of Atreus (respectively, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Orestes) but also by “reverse” narrative agents, such as Aegisthus and Antinoos, the “bad” mirror-images of the helping figures Orestes and Telemachus. The method reminds one of the sort of analyses to be associated later with the names of Propp and Greimas. Unlike some practitioners of a structuralist approach, however, Freidenberg is careful to point out not just the smooth symmetries but also the gaps and redundancies in the system. These, in turn, lead us to telling indications at the level of narrative: for instance, compared to Orestes, who can rely on Pylades as his companion and Electra as his earlier rescuer, Telemachus seems to lack figures who might represent either function. Antinoos, on the other hand, does double duty as antagonist of both Odysseus and his son. A further insight in this concise and rich essay centers on the contrasts in focus between two versions of the “return” (nostos) story—that of Agamemnon and that of Odysseus. Whereas the latter concludes with a symbolic re-marriage, and the former—if we stop at the murders in the house—with its horrid opposite, as Freidenberg points out the longer-term arc of the myth (not represented in any extant drama) does indeed lead to a marriage—that of Electra with Pylades.37 In short, Freidenberg’s bold determination to range so freely among the categories of myth and narrative, rhetoric and the traces of pre-historical consciousness, offers an exhilarating heuristic journey, still rewarding for our interpretations of Homer. The most extended discussion of metaphor by Freidenberg comes in the first full chapter of Image and Concept, the book which she

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worked on in the early 1950s until a year before her death. The placement is significant; it symbolizes the key place that metaphor has in the whole edifice of her theorizing about epic, lyric, and drama (with drama taking up most of the book). For Freidenberg “the structure of the metaphor acts as basic model for all Classical art” (Image 69). Her ideas about “binomial” construction are what have led some critics to see her as a forerunner of various modes of structuralist analysis.38 It is important, therefore, to map out carefully how the binomial character inherent in the metaphor works, in her view. Beyond this, we can look at some possible sources for her particular idea of “metaphorization” and then compare the notion with some contemporary analogues. What strikes one first is how Freidenberg has clearly reacted against the mainstream “rhetorical” evaluation of metaphor, which I have been associating with ornament, while not ever overtly naming this traditional view as her intellectual nemesis. Objecting to the habit of Classicists to read ancient metaphor in exactly the same way as they interpret modern European poetry, she rejects the notion that it is merely a trope and juxtaposes this with a further rejection of what she calls the modern habit of dividing image from concept, assigning the former to poetry and the latter to prose (Image 31). It is clear, in other words, that Freidenberg is dealing with the fallout of the “scientific” marginalization of poetry, and the Lockean call for purified, nonfigurative language. Her own method will attempt to heal the rift; we should note especially the adornment metaphor in her formulation of this: “image and concept in Greek literature are not two pieces of clothing, inner and outer, but a single semantic whole that can be dissected only by science” (Image 35). The role of “science” is here ambivalent—moderns can only get inside ancient metaphor by its aid, but at the same time that means that the archaic “whole” is “dissected” (anatomiruetsia)—in what is not quite Wordsworthian murder but nevertheless a regrettable dissolution. The long tradition of talking about METAPHOR is DRESS, which we have seen going back to Cicero, is here given a new twist: the deeper pre-metaphoric components of expression are organically related like parts of a body (before we even get to clothe it), separable only by the scalpel. How does “metaphorization” work, once we anatomize it? We can detect several strands in Freidenberg’s account, not all of them compatible; or, rather, strands that we might now see emerging, askew, from different levels of analysis. First, one must postulate that in the pre-

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metaphorical stage, “concrete” images hold sway. This is not a prelogical phase. It seems, instead, that Freidenberg means to say that the hypothetical speakers in this era have no need to express or perhaps think about predicates—at least that is one way of understanding her stress on the irreducible individuality of every image. In other words (mine not hers), one need not require a concept “hardness” if you just pay attention to every stone and do not think about the qualities that unite all stones. This golden age is “mythological” as well, which accords with notions she may have held (taken from nineteenth-century myth study) about ancient animism (e.g., every rock and tree is different, having its own genius, and so forth).39 She alludes to something like this idea in asserting that Arrogance (hubris) “was an agrarian divinity” (Image 47—the reference is to Aeschylus’s Persians 821–22), and therefore the tragic poet’s verse saying “hubris bloomed and brought forth Destruction’s fruit” is based in a concrete “image” reality; it is not a poetic fancy so much as a working out of the original semantics of the tenor. Yet not every metaphor, it must be said, can be traced to a personified divine essence. The evolution out of this phase is both the most intriguing and the most difficult to pin down. We must notice that “overcoming the concrete-image element” is an ongoing process, started in Greece and not finalized until the Romans (Image 38). One can still observe the process going on in Homeric epic; the poet does not yet “have conceptually” forces of nature, like water or fire, but instead “Poseidons, Hephaestuses” (Image 41, an obscure allusion on Freidenberg’s part, perhaps stemming from her awareness of the Homeric use of the god’s name to mean simply fire as at Il.2.426: σπλάγχνα δ’ ἄρ’ ἀμπείραντες ὑπείρεχον Ἡφαίστοιο, “skewering the innards they held them above Hephaestus”). On the other hand, Freidenberg notes, Homer has distinguished the original binomial Achilles/Patroclus pair into separate characters (a good illustration of her easy slide between tropes and plot elements). From other comments in this difficult chapter, it seems that Freidenberg relies on analogies from linguistic phenomena to make the case of a gradual de-mythologization and new move toward the “concept.” Particularly telling are her examples of an “image” of concrete, daily life—labor pains (ôdines)—being used to indicate “pains” generally, an image turning into a concept while retaining its concreteness; and of the expression she purports to find in Sophocles, “he walks around” (khodit vokrug) that means in context not literal walking but “confusing the issue” by skirting it (Image 45–6).40 It emerges

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from these that, at least on one level, Freidenberg is talking about semantic extension and the bleaching of original “concrete” images. This may, in her mind, be related to loss of mythic/concrete image as it makes its way to concept, but it is a commonplace phenomenon in the development of the lexicon. Aristotle and Quintilian, as we have seen, acknowledge that similar extensions of linguistic resources relate to metaphor.41 Current debates over how “dead” metaphors may or may not be in a given lexicon seem to favor the Lakoff school view, that many are in fact working to structure thought, if not always consciously activated in the mind of a given speaker.42 What Freidenberg, then, apparently points to is the coexistence of “concrete” qualities— we might paraphrase this as “live” images—alongside “dead” metaphors. Common verbs can themselves depend on such underlying metaphors. She is right to stress that archaic Greek most likely had a greater proportion of the former, but as with the problem of “iron sky” we are stuck once more with the impossibility of knowing what the individual speaker perceived or believed. If any sample of contemporary American or European perception of metaphoricity comes up with totally mixed results, why do we suppose a sampling of ancient Greeks would not do the same? The data set, of course, with which we try to reach the latter, is problematic to begin with, comprising poems. It certainly seems that (in poetry) there are complex interactions of “dead” and “live” metaphors as well as traditional shared metaphors made new by individual creative acts. The last strand in the presentation by Freidenberg has to do with how the shift takes place. While we may know the result—a “conceptual” language—the motives and actors are opaque. She at several points describes the event without mentioning overt agency: “Metaphor appeared on its own (voznikala sama soboi) as a form of the image in the function of concept” (Image 46). But the condition for this emergence, she states a few paragraphs earlier, is the appearance of “artistic thinking” which enabled people to have an “image” of the visible world. Art then became more abstract as it moved away from representing visible objects, until in tragedy what counts is the revelation of the hidden (Image 45). “Epic” or “tragedy” as genres are said to carry out the metaphorization process; but Sophocles and Aeschylus are mentioned only in connection with the way in which they work along the archaic thought-lines, spinning out metaphors from the skein of image-material. In sum, the processes that Freidenberg hypothesizes are anonymous, collective, co-opting the individual artist but not directed by him or her.

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As has been recognized by several critics, this simply echoes the main disjunction between aesthetic criticism and historical poetics. It is an interesting question to what extent such an approach, the evocation of diachronic depths and pre-metaphorical stages, ultimately comes to resemble the apparently synchronic focus of the Formalists. Both, after all, deal with the perdurance of structure, and both seem at first glance to undervalue the individual innovating artist. Yet a Jakobsonian style of reading lyric, in which langue and parole, system and performance, tradition and spontaneity all tango dizzyingly (and authors count), is hard to imagine coming from historical poeticians. Lotman’s critique may come closest to the truth, when he observes how the “semantic paleontology” of Freidenberg and others influenced by Nikolai Marr never managed to take into account the synchronic structure of the past cultural eras it was investigating.43 Instead, random “relict” forms are chased down, without reference to their interconnection; the result as seen in Marr’s own linguistics would not bode well for the method. It must be said in Freidenberg’s defense that her Image and Concept does manage to focus on one genre, and on whole plots, as she investigates the mythopoetic roots of individual dramas. Her most interesting readings are those that are the least Marrist. But this takes us beyond the immediate topic of metaphor. On that feature, Freidenberg can be seen as redirecting and invigorating the study of a key feature, taking it far away from the moribund rhetorical tropology that had already begun to degrade in late antiquity. Her most promising moves, within the chapter, are those that connect metaphor to riddles, to ekphrasis, and to the illusions of mimesis. “Imitation” and metaphor is a fruitful topic for further investigation still. One wishes she had worked these out more fully, for they anticipate to some extent Tzvetan Todorov’s approach to “genres of discourse” as well as the work of genre-oriented folklorists such as Dan Ben-Amos and Richard Bauman.44 On a broader front, Freidenberg’s appreciation for the time-depths underneath Greek literature—her assertion, for example, that its imagery had a millennium worth of preliterary development— show her well ahead of most of her contemporaries, not just in Russia but Europe generally. Few other Classicists for at least another generation took seriously the importance of collective “folk” material for every stage of Greek literature, up to the present.45 Her work on lyric shows a prescient distancing from the Romantic school of finding emotion-laden individual biographies beneath each verse. Her remarks, in the short piece on lyric origins, concerning the idealized melding of

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the figure of the human poet and a god, and the cultic connections of singers with divinities, are well ahead of their time, an area that is not seriously looked at again until Gregory Nagy’s Best of the Achaeans (1979). Coming back to metaphor, we can say that her greatest achievement, in retrospect, was to take it so seriously. Greeks, for her, invented figurative speech, and this in turn marked its cultural acceleration, as that speech “paved the way for the future, for a new kind of thinking, for multiple levels, for linking unexpected phenomena and for their mutual transition, for the free and universal generalization of individual phenomena, free of any conditions or dependence on space or conceptual discursiveness” (Image 68). The Greek miracle, in short, grew from this “trope” that was in reality a cognitive revolution. We need not totally reject such a view; after all, the work of G.E.R. Lloyd has shown how contestation and agonistic debate shaped Greek thinking; and Lloyd himself notes that debate specifically over the nature of metaphor—as reflected in Aristotle and others—was part of that broader sharpening of the mind. Even now reading the Pre-Socratics (for example), we have to pause, as Lloyd points out: “When the theologians speak of everything coming from Night, say, or Empedocles invokes a cosmic principle of Love, how exactly are we to understand this? Is this literally night, literally love? In which case, how are we to relate what is said to what we ordinarily mean by those terms? But if not literally intended, what are the metaphors metaphors for?”46 That realization makes us appreciate all the more Freidenberg’s pioneering formulation of the problematic. Was it really hers? I leave it to others to comment on the affiliations of this view on metaphor as they might be found in the Formalists or in Freidenberg’s predecessors. Nina Braginskaya has written cogently on the connections to the theories of Potebnya, Veselovsky, and Marr, as well as the important ties to the theories of Usener, to Lévy-Bruhl, and especially to the theorist of culture Cassirer, the latter by way of the work of Freidenberg’s friend and co-worker Frank-Kamenetsky.47 His extended article “K voprosu o razvitii poeticheskoi metafory” first published in 1935, tries, within the limits of Marrist semantics and Veselovsky’s work on parallelism, to distinguish the mythological roots of metaphor from what we might call “literary” developments, drawing on Sanskrit poetry and poetics.48 But in contrast to Freidenberg, he seems not to have explored the dynamics of the metaphor itself, as a “binomial” linguistic phenomenon. She, at least, believed that her own approach to the semantics of metaphor outpaced his, writing in

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her recollections that her “simple theory” that “all the metaphors of one and the same image are identical in meaning” was immediately appreciated by Frank-Kamenetsky (“Khona”) and “resolved all the difficulties of the formation of primary metaphors.”49 I have attempted to point out how Freidenberg’s deep interest in metaphor is first of all noticeable for taking metaphor seriously as something much more than trope; she is as far against its treatment as ornament as one might get. She reminds me of the Alice figure in my epigraph, from Mary Jo Bang’s poem, who, while others make disquisitions at a distance about the limits of fictional metaphor, proves a point by plunging herself deeply into a very real rabbit hole. Freidenberg’s enthusiastic approach to metaphor appears, compared with others that might be seen to share the same early twentieth-century cultural evolutionist roots, completely dynamic. Myth-born metaphors may be relicts, but in her version they are constantly working, changing, and making changes on other parts of the language and thoughtworld of archaic Greece. Like the culture, its prime metaphors are always in process, shifting gradually from objective image to ideational concept—she might assert, causing that very process. In this, I stress, she comes quite close to contemporary students of cognitive semantics. But, to my mind, Freidenberg bears an even closer resemblance to a less celebrated but perhaps more powerful contemporary approach— that associated with interpretive anthropology. Both the Lakoff cognitive direction and the ethnographic cultural direction blossomed in the early 1980s (both with a nod to Vico), but the latter has made fewer headlines.50 In part, it stands as a challenge to the more visible “universalist” theorizing of the cognitivists, as the anthropologists question whether there even exist non-culture-specific metaphors. A Chicago symposium in November 1987 gave a boost to this field of ethnographic metaphor study, resulting in the wide-ranging volume Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology.51 All of the pieces therein are helpful in shaping questions about Greek poetics, but I will return to one in particular, as it bears on the questions that Freidenberg has challenged us to formulate and ask. But now it is time to turn to Pindar, for a test of “metaphor” between “image” and “concept.”

We have only to glance at a few of the many family-relationship words in Pindar to realize how his poetic system follows and extrapolates

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from the anthropomorphic representations of Greek myth and religion regarding divinity.52 It is largely indisputable, in Greek myth, that certain figures descend from certain parents (though there are some ambiguous cases: Aphrodite and Persephone for example). This seems to be a matter of “belief” in the way, at least, that “myth” is believed—it is not dogma. I wish to approach Freidenberg’s notions of metaphor and image by focusing on just one relationship trope in the poetry, that of “daughter.” Of the twenty-seven interpretable occurrences in Pindar’s extant work of the Greek for daughter (thugatêr), many are just of this mythic-identifying sort.53 In Freidenberg’s terms these would be the equivalent of pre-metaphoric “images”; it is not metaphorical or “conceptual” to say, for instance, that Artemis is daughter of Leto. This subset comprises the following: 1. “Real” daughters of divinities or heroes (14x): Nem. 3.10: ἄρχε δ’ οὐρανοῦ πολυνεφέλα κρέοντι, θύγατερ (Muse, of Zeus) Pyth. 2.39: θυγατέρι Κρόνου (Hera, of Kronos) Ol. 3.26: Λατοῦς ἱπποσόα θυγάτηρ (Artemis, of Leto) Pyth. 3.8: Φλεγύα θυγάτηρ (Koronis, of Phleguas) Pyth. 4.46: Εὐρώπα Τιτυοῦ θυγάτηρ (Europa, of Tityos) Isth. 8.42: Νηρέος θυγάτηρ (cf. Nem. 3.57: Νηρέος θύγατρα) (Thetis, of Nereus) Ol. 9.58: θύγατρ’ ἀπὸ γᾶς Ἐπειῶν Ὀπόεντος (daughter of Opous) Ol. 6.95: Δάματρα λευκίππου τε θυγατρὸς (Persephone, of Demeter) Pyth. 9.17: Κρέοισ’ ἔτικτεν Γαίας θυγάτηρ (Creusa, of Gaia) Fr. 52h44=52m13: Κοίου θυγάτηρ (Asteria, of Koios the Titan) Pyth. 3.97 θύγατρες ἐρήμωσαν πάθαις (daughters of Kadmos) Paean 52h15: Οὐρανοῦ τ’ εὐπέπλῳ θυγατρὶ Μναμ[ο]σύ[ν]ᾳ (Memory, of Ouranos) Isth. 8.17: δίδυμαι γένοντο θύγατρες Ἀσωπίδων (Thebe and Aigina, of Asopos) Ol. 1.81: ἀναβάλλεται γάμον θυγατρός (Hippodameia, of Oinomaos) In these instances, we are not knowingly dealing with metaphor; the closest one that comes to it is in the case of Thetis, whose mercurial nature, as a goddess of the sea and daughter of the Old Man of the Sea, Nereus, may be genetic. The others are familiar from Hesiod and

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other theogonic testimonia. No one would argue for these being the individual inventions of Pindar. The second subset is different in effect but identical in morphology and syntax with the first. Furthermore, in the poetics of Pindar (and probably of archaic poetry generally) they are identical in deployment— that is, they are most frequently evoked or invoked in proemial portions of the poetry, whether epinician, or other genres. No doubt this is a relic of hymnic usage. To express it more formally: the poetic feature “+ daughter” can be further marked as “+ framing” in compositional terms. Here are the “metaphorical” daughter sets: 2. Metaphor-like Pyth. 8.2: Φιλόφρον Ἡσυχία, Δίκας ὦ μεγιστόπολι θύγατερ (Calm, of Justice) Fr. 78.1 Κλῦθ’ Ἀλαλά, Πολέμου θύγατερ (battle-cry, of War) Pyth. 5.28: Ἐπιμαθέος ἄγων ὀψινόου θυγατέρα Πρόφασιν (Excuse, of Hindsight) Ol. 10.3: θυγάτηρ Ἀλάθεια Διός (Truth, of Zeus—named alongside Muse) Ol. 8.81: Ἑρμᾶ δὲ θυγατρὸς ἀκούσαις . . . Ἀγγελίας (Report, of Hermes) Ol. 9.15: Θέμις θυγάτηρ τέ οἱ σώτειρα . . . Εὐνομία (Order, of Themis/Custom) The impossibility of distinguishing set #1 from set #2 is key to the point I would like to make, extrapolating specifically from Freidenberg and approving of her principle: the existence of a “real” predicate (like “iron” sky) in image systems (or, in the case at hand, we can think of descendants as “predicates” or implicatures) is what enables the creation of new concepts—yet there is nothing new about the template into which these are slotted. It is worth observing that exactly this trope of genealogical connection is still common in discourse of all types, but especially literary. It is unlikely that the modern use of all derives from ancient precedent, though some instances clearly do. In a fascinating study, Death Is the Mother of Beauty (inspired and introduced by Lakoff), Mark Turner has attempted to trace the ten “basic metaphoric inference patterns about kinship” as seen in poetry of the last few centuries.54 The range of “concepts” implied by saying “X is son/daughter of Y” includes such things as causation and succession, similarity, occupying same place/time, and inheritance—or semantically pregnant mixings of

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these.55 War-cry comes from Battle and is instantly co-present. Report is like her father Hermes, and also the product of his actions. Daughter imagery, according to Turner, can indicate a relation of submission or even inactivity—hence, Peace daughter of Justice? Note that some of these equations are already present in Hesiod’s Theogony (Themis/ Eunomia); others are unfamiliar but sound perfectly plausible, because they make a certain sense (if Zeus controls his daughters the Muses, why not also Truth?). The accident that abstract nouns in Greek are often feminine in gender certainly eases this creation of new daughter figures. Given that the Muses are already daughters (of Zeus by Memory) and Truth (Pindar’s constant purpose) is also a daughter, we are led mytho-logically to “believe” the (clearly metaphorical) final extension of the daughter-trope when Pindar says, with reference to the healing power of epinician verse: “Songs, wise daughters of the Muses, enchanted them” (Nemean 4.3: αἱ δὲ σοφαί Μοισᾶν θύγατρες ἀοιδαὶ θέλξαν νιν). In Freidenberg’s terms, we have watched, within the imagination of one author, as “image” (mythical genealogy) produces “concept.” A rich new mythology is thereby brought into being, forcing us, among other things, to cast our minds back to epic song and its relationship to Muses and poets (is it submissive? inactive?). A further point might be made in aid of understanding the mid-stages of this process of “metaphorization.” Within the “real” mythic genealogical system, there are already subfields where innovative and creative myth-tellers (poets or others) can exercise their skill at analogical extensions. (In fact, every speaker of a language does the same at some level in learning to handle speech: the process of analogy has been recognized since antiquity as a primary force in language development). In the case of myth, the belief in animistic presences in epichoric landscape features, in Greek and other systems, enables—one might say, requires—a constant extension of the “descendant” or “daughter” trope. As the genealogical template already exists, and a basic element can be said to unite “parent” and “daughter,” the mythopoetic imagination undertakes its bricolage so easily and deftly that we are never quite sure whether the “mythic” affiliation is new or archaic. In Pindar, we see two examples that bring to mind Freidenberg’s “tautological” similes—the cases of daughters of water divinities, namely Delos and Camarina. 3. halfway points Fr.33c.3: πόντου θύγατερ (Delos, of Sea) Ol.5.2: Ὠκεανοῦ θύγατερ (Camarina—nymph of lake)

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In this small set, parent and daughter share some quality (wateriness, e.g.) and are apparently connected by that alone. Yet there is no “concept” articulated out of the imagery (unlike the case of Excuse daughter of Hindsight). Instead, as in the aforementioned aquatic similes of the Iliad, one body is a smaller version of another (a lake, daughter of Okeanos); Delos is a slight extension of the method—she drifts around (like water) until pinned down (like land). She is daughter of open sea. This first collection of test data, then—genealogical “metaphors”— indicates that Freidenberg’s insights into metaphorization might fit the ways in which Pindar engages the tradition and pushes its poetic envelope. Genealogy, of course, is the easiest and most obvious way of naturalizing concepts. If any image system is essential, it is that of kinship, along with related image systems of bloom and growth.56 But what if we were to choose the least essential? Within the corpus of Pindaric images, would not pure “metaphors” outweigh any of the semi-metaphorical halfway points between “image” and “concept”? And would not images of decoration be the least organic, by their very nature and content? After all, if the notion of metaphor could evolve (or degrade) even within antiquity to become a matter of “ornament” versus essence, “adornment” and clothing versus the naked truth, might we not catch Pindar already participating in this employment of metaphor? Are there signs of the inorganic nature of metaphor usage in his own frequent mentions of adornment, such as the elaborate conceit at Nemean 7.77–79: “The Muse . . . binds together gold and white ivory with the lily flower she has taken from under the dew of the sea.” Is his art form, in fact (as one wag put it in relation to this image), just “coral” poetry? I propose to approach the question—though not resolve it—through a study of the word for “adornment”—kosmos. This is my second and final test collection. The noun kosmos (“order, arrangement, adornment”) and forms of the derived verb kosmeô occur a total of fourteen times in Pindar. We can start small. When Hermes and Artemis are said to harness Hieron’s chariot horses, the poet phrases the act as a placement of kosmos (αἰγλάεντα τίθησι κόσμον, Olympian 2.10). The horses have just been described two lines earlier as having “embroidered reins” (poikilanious), so we may think of the decorative or cosmetic valence. But the fact remains—chariot horses do not race without reins. This is far from useless ornamentation; or, if you like, the utile in this case has been crafted to be something also aesthetically dulce, without destroying its utility. At Olympian 3.13 the crown of olive won at the games is called “greycolored kosmos” (γλαυκόχροα κόσμον ἐλαίας), which would seem simple

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enough to pass over as “ornament” or “adornment” (Race chooses the latter translation). What we need to remember, however, is the deep mythic past of this symbolic crown, and Pindar obliges, characterizing the olive first as the “memorial” (μνᾶμα) of the games which Heracles intended when he brought to Olympia the olive trees. Synecdochically, the crown represents Heracles’s care for human welfare, as the story Pindar next tells pivots on how the hero saw that the participants in the games needed shade and hence brought the trees from the land of the Hyperboreans (16–34). The winners’ crown thus shares in the thauma of the tree (cf. line 32), even more marvelous given the reminiscence of its distant origins. Thus a particular kosmos is, paradoxically, an essential adornment, a reminder of more cosmic activity and structures.57 The crown as kosmos, emblem of victory, is a visual cue and trigger for Pindaric song, as expressed at Olympian 11.13–15: ἴσθι νῦν, Ἀρχεστράτου/παῖ, τεᾶς, Ἁγησίδαμε, πυγμαχίας ἕνεκεν κόσμον ἐπὶ στεφάνῳ χρυσέας ἐλαίας ἁδυμελῆ κελαδήσω . . . For the present rest assured, Hagesidamus son of Archestratus: for the sake of your boxing victory, I shall loudly sing a sweet song, an adornment for your garland of golden olive. As the lines suggest, the “crown of song” is an adornment to the adornment, a musical offering atop the athletic symbol. But I would argue it is no more a superimposed nicety than is the kosmos of the crown itself. What may appear decorative is in fact organic and at the core of the laudandus-laudator exchange.58 Through the inextricable combination of Pindaric praise and athletic success, the laudandus himself becomes an “adornment” to the city-state, as Timodemus of Acharnai does for Athens (Nemean 2.8). The ideology of heroes, living and dead, as Kurke and Currie have explained, guarantees that this sort of kosmos is also the farthest from dispensible ornamentation.59 Given the rippling outward circles of victory—from ceremony and crown at the site, to song (on or offsite), to fame in the city, we can wonder whether at Isthmian 6.66–69 the father of the victor is celebrated simply for a rather vague civic-mindedness: Lampon, ‘taking care with his work,’ honors these words of Hesiod, and he advises his sons with them too, thus bringing a shared adornment (xunon . . . kosmon) to his city.

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Or is it instead the concrete song-and-dance chorus that his son’s victory has brought to the city that qualifies as the kosmos? Most plausibly, the social package as a whole is summed up in the one term: fame, family repute, and visible, performative “adornment” carefully “shared” in the democratic discourse practiced by aristocrats. Lampon has given his polis all this.60 In Nemean 6, Pindar associates the notion of kosmos with praise of an island polity, Aegina (lines 45–54): πλατεῖαι πάντοθεν λογίοισιν ἐντὶ πρόσοδοι νᾶσον εὐκλέα τάνδε κοσμεῖν· ἐπεί σφιν Αἰακίδαι ἔπορον ἔξοχον αἶσαν ἀρετὰς ἀποδεικνύμενοι μεγάλας, πέταται δ’ ἐπί τε χθόνα καὶ διὰ θαλάσσας τηλόθεν ὄνυμ’ αὐτῶν· καὶ ἐς Αἰθίοπας Μέμνονος οὐκ {ἂν} ἀπονοστήσαντος ἔπαλτο· βαρὺ δέ σφιν νεῖκος Ἀχιλεύς ἔμπεσε χαμαὶ καταβαὶς ἀφ’ ἁρμάτων, φαεννᾶς υἱὸν εὖτ’ ἐνάριξεν Ἀόος ἀκμᾷ ἔγχεος ζακότοιο. καὶ ταῦτα μὲν παλαιότεροι ὁδὸν ἀμαξιτὸν εὗρον· ἕπομαι δὲ καὶ αὐτὸς ἔχων μελέταν· There are broad avenues open on every side for storytellers to adorn this glorious island, since the Aeacids provided them by example with an outstanding share of great excellence. Their name flies far, over the land and across the sea. It even reached the Ethiopians, when Memnon did not return to his home; Achilles descended from his chariot and fell upon them, a grievous antagonist, when he slew the son of the shining Dawn with the edge of his raging sword. Poets of former times found this highway, and I myself am following them; this is my concern.61 In a typically complex Pindaric interaction, not one but two metaphors with the same semantic weight are used to frame a third. Thus metaphor #1 “access to tradition” as a general concept is embodied twice: in the initial image of roads of “song” (prosodoi) that allow the poet to praise/adorn (kosmein) the home of the Aeacids (Achilles and kin), the conceit is that these extend from or into every direction

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(pantothen—cf. the proem of the Odyssey, where the poet calls on the Muse to sing hamothen—“from whatever point”). The second evocation of metaphor #1 has to do with a contrasting linear route, Pindar’s unidirectional following along the path that others have blazed in time (literally they “discovered the wagon trail”—hodon amaxiton). Pindar’s art (meletan implying both “resolution” or “concern” and “poetic preoccupation” cf. Slater Lexicon to Pindar [1969] 320) is thus poised between spontaneity and tradition: there are many roads (the figure-family of “abundance”), but in fact there is one road (the figurefamily of “tradition”). Although Pindar does not here dramatize the Robert Frost moment of choosing the road “less traveled by,” one wonders whether the particular amaxiton is colored here—positively—by its further implication of being an old road as opposed to a (semantically) unmarked approach via prosodoi (a coloration that is instead used to negative effect in another Pindaric passage, the proto-Callimachean Paean 7.b.11 with its rejection of the “worn wagon-road”).62 At any rate, the poet here does not turn his epinician choice into a self-regarding career track, in contrast with Frost, who coyly stages, in our presence, his preference for what, as it turns out, only appears to be marginal, as he picks the old route “having perhaps the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear; / Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same”). At the same time, as the ancient poet stalks along the song-lines, his subject is flying above him, as it were, by way of metaphor #2 (petatai). We should compare for the image, that of another poet, Theognis, who gave “wings” to his beloved and praise-object, Kurnos (lines 236–37): Σοὶ μὲν ἐγὼ πτέρ’ ἔδωκα, σὺν οἷσ’ ἐπ’ ἀπείρονα πόντον πωτήσηι, κατὰ γῆν πᾶσαν ἀειρόμενος Wings I have given you, with which you will fly, lifted above the whole earth, over the boundless sea. A familiar time warp allows Pindar to praise the island in the hic et nunc, as he makes fresh approaches to this concern of adornment, while its praises are in fact already aloft and widespread (like the roads: compare pantothen with the merismus “land and sea”), and it is already “famous” (euklea). For that matter, the amaxiton that he is following was “discovered”—not made, cut, blazed—by the “older” poets, another case of an always-already. Pindar, as always, consciously sings in an echo-chamber. But the main point we should draw from this

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passage is how unmarginal Pindar considers his poetic task: he is no Frost, wandering to muse in the yellow wood. Pindar’s epinician practice conspicuously keeps in use the ancestral pathways of praise, on which the fame of Aegina, the island and its ruling clan, depends. Let us at this stage apply Freidenberg’s “iron sky” test to this Pindaric metaphor system. If “iron sky” is not a metaphor because the predicate is in fact not conceptual but an essential part of the image itself—that is, if one believes the sky is iron, there is no metaphorical invention—then what can we say about the latent equation “song is adornment”? In other words, is there a way we can understand archaic Greeks to have perceived song “really” as adornment? Can we take this seriously—that is to say, the “metaphor” is not in Freidenberg’s terms actually metaphorical because there is no semantic slide from one term to the other. Or is the equation itself (merely) figurative “adornment”? It seems counterintuitive—that “adornment” is not just adornment. In this case, there are indeed a number of arguments against adornment, or perhaps we should say against the “merely” ornamental in favor of the absolute centrality of the very notion of adornment, a centrality that most academic cultures (excepting perhaps the French) find puzzling if not embarrassingly superficial. I will conclude with a bare suggestion, that internally and externally to archaic Greek culture, one can find “adornment” to be an essential cultural value—perhaps the essential value—if one looks in the right places. First, we should remember that there is a sociopolitical sense of the very word, as attested in some of the earliest Greek written laws in which kosmos means a regulator or legislator, one of a body of kosmoi (see LSJ s.v. III).63 This accords with the “cosmological” sense of kosmos attested in later literature, starting in the fifth century B.C.E., but that seems to be physical rather than a personification of the human “regulator.” Second, a semantic pivot can be seen in the use of the verb to mean both “regulate” by giving “orders” and “make a pleasing order.” We can examine a curious double marriage at the end of Pythian 9.114–20:  ἔστασεν γὰρ ἅπαντα χορόν ἐν τέρμασιν αὐτίκ’ ἀγῶνος· σὺν δ’ ἀέθλοις ἐκέλευσεν διακρῖναι ποδῶν, ἅντινα σχήσοι τις ἡρώων, ὅσοι γαμβροί σφιν ἦλθον. οὕτω δ’ ἐδίδου Λίβυς ἁρμόζων κόρᾳ

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νυμφίον ἄνδρα· ποτὶ γραμμᾷ μὲν αὐτὰν  στᾶσε κοσμήσαις, τέλος ἔμμεν ἄκρον, εἶπε δ’ ἐν μέσσοις ἀπάγεσθαι, ὃς ἂν πρῶτος θορών ἀμφί οἱ ψαύσειε πέπλοις. For right away he stood the whole throng at the end of a course, and told them to decide with a footrace which of the heroes, who came to be bridegrooms, would take which bride. The Libyan too made such an offer in joining his daughter with a husband. He placed her at the goal, when he had arrayed her as the crowning prize, and in their midst he announced that that man should lead her to his home, whoever was the first to leap forward and touch her robes.64 Micah Myers has shown how the image matches a mythical “chorus of young women” (the Danaids) to the single figure of the eligible maiden who will be the prize for a footrace in the later marriage contest, thus evoking the important genre of maidens’ choral song (partheneion) within that of male-oriented Pindaric epinician.65 Taking a cue from Freidenberg, we might in addition read this pairing of old and new bride-races through the sort of binomial logic she applied to the metaphor and its predecessor form. In this case, the originating paradigm (the khoros set up by Danaos, comprising his 48 daughters) is the real event (in the mind of the later Libyan imitator), but his own awarding of the daughter is no less real. Paradigm is thus like premetaphor, the alignment of two equally performative events, in which the force of belief (Antaios “had heard” how Danaos operated in Argos and therefore followed suit) holds sway. In the Pindaric passage, kosmêsais “having arrayed/adorned” applies overtly to the secondorder marriage event (we imagine the bride herself as adorned object— think of the beautifully decorated “original” bride, Pandora); but the verb can apply equally well on a latent level to the first-order marriage prize, the khoros of Danaids, for kosmos is the essence of the concept of choral cohesion, propriety, and display, as we can see elsewhere in Plato, but also in a range of surviving choral songs.66 In this connection, it is perhaps useful to cite a late convert to the social utility of chorality, the philosopher Plato. Still playing the role of the analytic outside observer, however, at Laws 655a4–8, Plato insists on a more careful distinction in descriptive terms, having his Athenian stranger say that “music is a matter of rhythm and harmony, and involves tunes and movements of the body; this means that, while it is

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legitimate to speak of a ‘rhythmical’ or a ‘harmonious’ movement or  tune, we cannot properly apply to either of them the chorusmasters’ own metaphor ‘brilliantly-coloured’ (εὔχρων δὲ μέλος ἢ σχῆμα οὐκ ἔστιν ἀπεικάσαντα, ὥσπερ οἱ χοροδιδάσκαλοι ἀπεικάζουσιν, ὀρθῶς φθέγγεσθαι).”67 From this offhand remark it can be gleaned that the very practitioners themselves, the experts on ancient chorality, used synaesthetically a visual term eukhrôn to capture the aural and kinetic features of the art-form. This glimpse of an emic system of performers’ own metaphorical terminology, in addition, makes us realize how the notion of kosmos could well apply to—indeed, could be the summation of—the Gesamtkunstwerk that was the archaic khoros. The activity of choreia was, in turn, all important for the organization of the city-state, as can be seen even in such late survivals as Athenian theater and dithyramb. So kosmos, in this view, is a crucial ordering device as well as an attractive mode of self-representation in a social group. This essay has tried to understand a small element of historical poetics in the immediate context of Freidenberg’s work and within the much broader context of the history of thinking about metaphor. It has attempted also to see what remains that can be vital and of use as a hermeneutic guide. I found that Freidenberg’s work on metaphor, while in a few regards outdated and slightly uncontrolled, is, in its obsessive attention to the actual dynamics of metaphor, a quite good guide to the poetry of Pindar and by extension to Greek archaic poetics more generally. But what has marked all her work is the refusal to isolate the “poetic” feature—plot, metaphor, simile, character—from the social pragmatics of particular performances—drama, in the case of Image and Concept, but in other parts of her scholarly work, the novel, hagiography, proverbs, sagas, epics, even puppet theater. This and her constant search for ethnographic parallels embolden me to adduce an external analogy that may help reinforce the argument advanced here about the power of adornment—or, more precisely, suggest that adornment, explicitly and intimately related to metaphor, is of the essence. The ethnographer Terence Turner, in an article “We Are Parrots; Twins Are Birds,” attempts to unpack the titular proverbial sayings by asking what role metaphor plays in the lives of the cultures that say these things (the Bororo and Nuer, respectively).68 Do these traditional people really think that they, or some of them, are birds? Rejecting some of the more positivist elucidations (that for instance birds are soulcarriers and so this is a proleptic expression for “we are mortal”), Turner instead looks at what roles birds play in Bororo and Kayapo

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cultures (the latter a people whose songs often assert an identity between the human singers and birds). It is much more complicated than a mere metaphor, for synecdoche enters in—birds, especially parrots, are prized for feathers, which in turn are essential to regalia and in particular headdresses. (One thinks of Pindaric crowning.) These in turn are associated with dance. Donning the feathered regalia metonymically, says Turner, means that the wearers have acquired the spirit power of the birds that once used them in powerful, beautiful flight. The lightness of the original owners is conveyed to the human “birds.” And it is through the ordering of dance-groups and their artistically shaped social messages that village life is ultimately expressed, negotiated, and formed. Crucial transformations of social relations are put into effect by the songs and dances, so that from a feather and a bird metaphor, in fact, there come solid sociopolitical facts. This is the power of ornament, as more than “ornament.” For a mirror epigraph to Alice and her rabbit hole, I quote Turner on birds, while having in mind the Greek kosmos that I have argued is “real,” as real as an iron sky. Kosmos and its kindred concepts make Pindaric “metaphors” less and more than metaphorical . . . less “poetic,” perhaps, if we insist on using that term to connote individual originality in expression, but more culturally rooted, more “real,” and able to set in motion real cultural effects. To become a flying being metaphorically means acquiring the power to separate oneself from one’s normal terrestrial mode of social existence, in which one acts within the received framework of social and cultural forms, and to assume an external attitude toward that framework as a whole, a bird’s-eye view of it, as it were. To don feathered regalia metaphorically figures the power to generate form (in this case, social and cultural form). The generative spirit power to create form which the Bororo believe to be embodied in the feathers is thus metaphorically enacted by both Kayapo and Bororo dancers as they metonymically transform their own forms by donning the culturally elaborated feathered forms of headdresses and other ritual regalia.69

Notes I am grateful to the organizers of the Historical Poetics conference for the opportunity to revive a personal interest from years past in the work of O. M. Freidenberg. As I most likely will never revisit my youthful plan

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of translating her book Poetika siuzheta i zhanra: period antichnoi literatury, this would be the right moment to thank all those who once long ago generously took the time to advise me regarding her life and work: Kevin Moss, Elliott Mossman, Ann Shukman, Ann Pasternak Slater, and Efim Etkind. More recently, I have benefited from conversation with Freidenberg experts Nina Perlina and Nina Braginskaya. 1. G. R. Boys-Stones, ed., Metaphor, Allegory and the Classical Tradition: Ancient Thought and Modern Revisions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), the outgrowth of a 1997 conference at Corpus Christi College, Oxford; to be read in conjunction with the insightful review by R. Lamberton in The Classical Review 54 (2004): 427–30. 2. See G. Patten, Pindar’s Metaphors: A Study in Rhetoric and Meaning (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009), pp. 7–35 for a good overview of the “scandal of catachresis” represented by rhetoric and its major figures, as seen from the side of philosophy. 3. Leviathan, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904 [orig. 1651]). 4. M. Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation in Hobbes: Aesthetics, Theatre, Law, and Theology in the Construction of Hobbes’s Theory of the State (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 54–58, within a comprehensive study of Hobbesian thought on metaphor, distinguishes his appreciation for rhetorical use of striking metaphors from his quest for a philosophically purified language. 5. W. Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 131–56 analyzes Locke’s apparently contradictory views and practices, in the course of his full-scale critique of Paul de Man’s classic 1978 essay on Lockean metaphor. 6. “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” D. Steiner, The Crown of Song: Metaphor in Pindar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 15, as I now find, cites this to a rather different effect in her useful overview of ancient metaphor. On Stevens’s views about metaphor and his poetic use of images of ornament, jewels, and artifice, see J. Bowie, “Wallace Stevens and the Idea of Ornament,” The Cambridge Quarterly 37 (2008): 387– 406. His practice, I would argue, is relevant to similar uses in Greek lyric. 7. Translation by H. E. Butler, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, Vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1922), p. 351. Ramus had already in the mid-sixteenth century made a vigorous and clarifying attack on Quintilian’s definition: see Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian: Translation and Text of Peter Ramus’s Rhetoricae Distinctiones in Quintilianum (1549), trans. Carole Newlands (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), pp. 131–42. Of this Hobbes was doubtless aware. On the counter-reformation against Ramism in the development of Hobbesian rhetoric and metaphor, see J. P. Zappen,

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“Aristotelian and Ramist Rhetoric in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: Pathos versus Ethos and Logos,” Rhetorica 1 (1983): 65–91. 8. A favorable opinion of the injunction miscere utile dulci makes a surprising appearance in the work of another critic dealing with “improvement,” Nikolai Bukharin (Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the U.S.S.R., available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works /1934/poetry/1.htm#4b). In the context of contrasting art and science, Bukharin corrects Potebnya as being insufficiently “dialectical” about the interplay of the two terms, which Potebnya (likely a source for Freidenberg) aligns with image and concept, respectively. It is furthermore interesting that Bukharin refers to the Marrist concept of cultural “paleontology” in the course of his observations, while not citing Marr explicitly: “Examine a word, and you discover the paleontology of language. Words are the depository of the whole previous life of mankind, which has passed through various socialeconomic structures . . .”. More work is needed on the relation of Bukharin to both Formalists and Marrists in the 1930s. 9. At Brutus 262, a cognate simile is applied to Caesar’s commentaries: “stripped of all ornamental clothing of style” (ornatu orationis tamquam veste detracta), in contrast to Caesar’s oral style, described at 261 as making good use of oratoria ornamenta dicendi. On the passage see D. Innes, “Metaphor, Simile, and Allegory as Ornaments of Style,” in Boys-Stones, Metaphor, pp. 7–27. 10. On the Rhetorica see G. Calboli, “The Metaphor After Aristotle,” in Influences on Peripatetic Rhetoric: Essays in Honor of William  W. Fortenbaugh, ed. D. C. Mirhady (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 123–50, who sees its doctrine of exornationes as arising from retooling of Peripatetic doctrine by scholars active in Rhodes (Athenaeus of Naucratis and Apollonius Molon). 11. Innes, “Metaphor, Simile, and Allegory,” p. 7. Cf. P. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 17. 12. On the problem and earlier suggested solutions regarding the lacuna, see D. M. Schenkeveld, “The Lacuna at Aristotle’s Poetics 1457b33,” American Journal of Philology 114 (1993): 85–89. The papyrus (Pap. Hamburg. 128) was published in 1954 by Snell, who attributed the fragment to the lost Peri lexeôs of Theophrastus. Further on the papyrus:  D.  M. Schenkeveld “Pap. Hamburg. 128: A Hellenistic Ars Poetica,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 97 (1993): 67–80. 13. M. Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, ed.  A. Parry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) provides a useful starting place, J. M. Foley,

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The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988) a good summary. 14. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, p. 46. 15. Ibid., pp. 33–34. 16. S. Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle (London: Duckworth, 1987), p. 162. 17. On this passage, see J. Kirby, “Aristotle on Metaphor,” American Journal of Philology 118 (1997): 517–54, who usefully outlines a semiotic theory of metaphor in Aristotle. 18. On the role of metaphor in the glottogenetic theorizing of Vico, see M. Danesi, Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993). For a brief overview of metaphor theories from antiquity to Vico, see M. Taverniers, Metaphor and Metaphorology: A Selective Genealogy of Linguistic and Philosophical Conceptions of Metaphor from Aristotle to the 1980s (Ghent, Academia Press, 2002), pp. 11–19 and Steiner, Crown, pp. 1–17. 19. Boys-Stones, Metaphor, p 1. 20. See, for a start, the essays in A. Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1993) and the survey in Taverniers, Metaphor and Metaphorology. 21. See G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 22. See on the super-metaphors Taverniers, Metaphor and Metaphorology, pp.  112–15 and p.  126. The point on deixis is my own interpretation. 23. A rapid up-to-date survey in R. Gibbs, “The wonderful chaotic, creative heroic, challenging world of researching and applying metaphor,” in Researching and Applying Metaphor in the Real World, ed. G. Low et al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010), pp. 1–19. 24. On “cultural” vs. “cognitive” approaches and tentative affiliations, see Taverniers, Metaphor and Metaphorology, pp. 82–93. On the limits of universality in cross-cultural metaphor use, see Z. Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 183–98. 25. Regarding her expertise in ancient rhetoric and poetics, it is worth noting that one of her publications, Antichnye teorii iazyka i stilia (Moscow: Gos. sotsial´no-ekon. izd-vo, 1936) was an edited anthology on precisely such topics. 26. O. M. Freidenberg, “The Origin of the Greek Lyric,” in N. Perlina, ed., Soviet Studies in Literature Special Issue on Olga Freidenberg 27.3 (1991): 3–19 from the version published in 1973 in Voprosy literatury 11: 101–23. The publication is based on a talk delivered in 1946. For further

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explication of the ideas in this article, see N. Perlina, Ol’ga Freidenberg’s Works and Days (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 31–32 and 203–5. 27. Most critics take it to be iambic speech, since Aristotle elsewhere refers to this as the meter most like natural speech, and metaphors, as he too recognizes well before Lakoff, are also a part of everyday discourse. But one could make the case that he refers to a genre of iambos (not just part of the dramatic genre), which, in the hands of Archilochus and, even more clearly, Semonides (fr. 7—women as sows, vixens, dogs, etc.), specializes in making metaphorical, denigratory expressions. Cf. the party-game of eikasmos, alluded to in Aristophanes Wasps 1209–14. 28. Freidenberg, “Greek Lyric,” p.  6. For a detailed account of Freidenberg’s “pre-Aristotelian” concept of metaphor, which relates it to her earlier work on Greek lyric and similes, see the important discussion in Perlina, Works and Days, pp. 226–34. 29. See W. B. Stanford, The Odyssey of Homer. Commentary, 2nd edition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958), p. 253. 30. On this image see the discussion at  M. Edwards, The Iliad: A Commentary, Volume V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 104. 31. Freidenberg, “Greek Lyric,” pp. 15–19. 32. A middle stage between firmly and widely held belief, on the one hand, and metaphor on the other (the latter dependent on the recognition of a gap between tenor and vehicle), is provided, for Freidenberg, by myth. She notes that Homeric poetry can say “iron sky,” “iron heart” because these objects were represented in myth as iron: see O. M. Freidenberg, Image and Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature, edited and annotated by Nina Braginskaya and Kevin Moss, translated by K. Moss (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press, 1997), p. 47. 33. O. M. Freidenberg, “The Origin of the Epic Simile: On Material from the Iliad,” in N. Perlina, ed., Soviet Studies in Literature 27.3: Special Issue on Olga Freidenberg (1991): 20–37. 34. L. Muellner, The Anger of Achilles: Mênis in Greek Epic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). 35. O. M. Freidenberg, “Pre-Homeric Semantics,” in N. Perlina, ed., Soviet Studies in Literature Special Issue on Olga Freidenberg 27.3 (1991): 38–49. 36. See Chapter 5. 37. Working from a different set of approaches, Lowell Edmunds was led to a similar conclusion concerning the Oedipus story, which appears tragic when the focus is the dramatic instantiation (as in Oedipus the King), but joyously redemptive when we take into account the synthesized range of the mythic narrative, over and above its individual segments, and com-

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pare this with multiforms from international folklore. See L. Edmunds, Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 38. See Moss in his introduction to Freidenberg, Image and Concept, pp. 17–20. 39. C. Stewart “Anthropology, Social,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece, ed. N. G. Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 53–56 gives an overview of such approaches. 40. There seems to be some confusion of passages in her mind, as Creon does not say this to the guard in the Antigone (pace Freidenberg); it is the guard who recalls “circling myself for a return” at line 226; the line cited ad loc. in the notes to the second Russian edition of Obraz (O. M. Freidenberg, Mif i literatura drevnosti, 2nd edition, ed. N. Braginskaya [Moscow: Nauka, 1998], p. 696 n.11) refers to Antigone 241–42, which does fit what Freidenberg alludes to (Creon’s remark to the guard) but does not fit the phrase she wants, instead reading “you have fenced yourself around” (apophragnusai kuklôi). 41. See Innes, “Metaphor, Simile, and Allegory,” p. 11, who cites in addition Demetrius (On Style 86: ‘Almost every expression in common use involves a metaphor but we do not notice because they are safe metaphors, such as “clear voice,” “keen man,” “rough character,” “lengthy speaker,” and all the other instances where the metaphor is applied so aptly that it seems the proper term’) and continues “All this reflects a natural wrestling with the fact that metaphor is part of ordinary speech (Aristotle, Rhetoric 1404b34–35: ‘we all use them’; Cicero, De Oratore 3.155; Quintilian 8.6.5), and that extended meanings of a word are frequent and often part of normal usage.” 42. C. Müller, Metaphors Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Waking: A Dynamic View (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) concludes that the degree of perceived “life” in a metaphor may vary from one to another hearer in the same community. 43. Yu. M. Lotman, “O. M. Freidenberg as a Student of Culture,” in Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union, ed. Henryk Baran (White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976), pp. 257–265, a translation of “O. M. Freidenberg kak issledovatel’ kul’tury” in Trudy po znakovym sistemam 6 (1973): 482–86. 44. T. Todorov, Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);  D. Ben-Amos, “Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres,” Genre 2 (1969): 275–301; R. Bauman, Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 45. Paradigmatic studies of the interaction of folk traditions with Classical and post-Classical Greek literature can be found in two books by

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Margaret Alexiou: The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 2nd edition (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) and After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000). 46. N. Braginskaya, ed., Olga Freidenberg. Mif i literatura drevnosti, 2nd edition (Moscow: Nauka), p. 693 cites Lloyd’s Polarity and Analogy. 47. Braginskaya, ed., Mif, pp. 693–94, 739–40, 754–56. Cf. N. Braginskaya “Problemy fol’kloristiki i mifologii v trudakh O. M. Freidenberg,” VDI 3 (1975): 181–89. As Alan Cardew points out (“Ernst Cassirer: The Myth of Language,” in The Persistence of Myth as Symbolic Form, ed. P. Bishop and R. Stephenson [Leeds: Maney, 2008], pp. 84–99), Cassirer begins with a notion of “mimetic cultures” where signifier and signified are interfused (as in onomatopoeia); the road to abstraction, for him, goes by way of metaphor and analogy; Freidenberg’s notions are close to this in some ways. This may be the place to clarify the resemblance between Freidenberg and Bakhtin, noted by some (e.g., Lotman, “Student of Culture”). Kevin Moss, who has carefully calibrated their publications and careers, concludes that they never interacted in person: see his “Response to Nina Perlina, ‘Ol’ga Freidenberg on Myth, Folklore, and Literature’,” Slavic Review 50 (1991): 383–84 (and fuller version at http://community.middlebury .edu/~moss/CV.html). Bakhtin mentions Freidenberg, with praise, in a footnote to the Rabelais book. He also cites her Poetika and adheres closely to its formulations in his (unpublished) essay on satire (see Chapter 13 in this volume). Freidenberg, on the other hand, (though she identifies him as “Blokhin”) seems to have been apprised of his authorship of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (attributed to Voloshinov). More recently on this reference to Blokhin, see  N. Braginskaya, “Mezhdu svideteliami i sud’iami: replika po povodu kn. V. M. Alpatova ‘Voloshinov, Bakhtin i lingvistika’ ” available online at: http://ivgi.rsuh.ru/article.html?id=207419. Moss documents fundamental oppositions in the respective approaches of the two writers, from their views on parody to their notions of cultural wholeness (found, for Bakhtin, in dialogue, but for Freidenberg in the “mythological” concept that requires paleontological analysis). As Moss points out, “Bakhtin’s whole is found on the level of syntagm—the actual putting together of two opposites in a concrete dialogue. Freidenberg’s whole is paradigmatic—she compares each of the opposites to a third unit that is in fact absent, but which shows their semantic identity.” Nevertheless, their shared interest in parody and in ancient festival culture is so close as to invite speculation about deeper influence. Bakhtin’s highlighted copy of Freidenberg’s Poetika reveals his specific interest in her notions of popular festival culture, the origins of the novel, and parody—topics that are, soon after the publication of her work, taken up by him in his own book on Rabelais. On the annotations, see O. E. Osovskii, “M. M. Bakhtin chitaet Ol’gu Frejdenberg: o kharaktere i smysle bakhtinskikh marginalii na

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stranitsakh Poetiki syuzheta i zhanra,” in O. E. Osovskii, ed., Bakhtin v Saranske: Materialy, dokumenty, issledovaniia. Vol. 1 (Saransk: Krasnyi Oktiabr’, 2002), pp. 24–35. On the clear links between Freidenberg’s ideas and those of Bakhtin (whether derived directly from her or independently from Marr and Cassirer), see K. Clark and G. Tihanov, “Soviet Literary Theory in the 1930’s: Battles Over Genre and the Boundaries of Modernity,” in A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), pp. 109–43, and C. Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 125, 134–35. 48. I. G. Frank-Kamenetskii, “K voprosu o razvitii poeticheskoi metafory” (original 1935), reprinted in Ot slova k smyslu (Moscow: URSS, 2001), pp. 28–80. 49. Quoted in Perlina, Works and Days, p. 178. 50. On their shared roots, see Taverniers, Metaphor and Metaphorology, pp. 82–93. 51. J. Fernandez, ed., Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 52. Cf. Boris Maslov’s explication of such metaphors in terms of cosmogony: “From (Theogonic) Mythos to (Poetic) Logos: Reading Pindar’s Genealogical Metaphors after Freidenberg,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012): 49–77. His contrastive analysis of genealogical metaphor in Hesiod, Pindar, and Plato provides an extensive and convincing examination of Pindaric strategies in the deployment of such figures, framed within Freidenberg’s approach to myth and metaphor and its roots in nineteenth-century intellectual history. We find ourselves in agreement on the cognitive and conceptual role of Pindar’s metaphors. Maslov also provides close readings of the ideological import of such metaphors taken in context, particularly in Olympian 13, with attention to relevant bibliography. My own section on the odes is woefully under-annotated, compared to what Pindarists might desire, since debates about individual passages are not my main concern in this essay. In general, I have found helpful as a lexical guide to the range of Pindaric images N. Grinbaum, Khudozhestvennyi mir antichnoi poezii: Tvorcheskii poisk Pindara (Moscow: Nauka, 1990). 53. For the record, only two instances refer to human non-mythic daughters: Pythian 9.111 and Partheneion 2.68. I have not checked possible denotations of kora “girl, daughter.” 54. M. Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 15. 55. Ibid., pp. 26–29. 56. On the latter see Steiner, Crown, pp. 28–39. 57. On the significance in this passage of landscape in its connection with Heracles, see further Steiner, Crown, pp. 91, 114. Olympian 8.83

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(shining kosmos) likewise alludes to the Olympic crown, this time as a gift of Zeus to the victor: on the importance of the connection made in the passage, see  C. Lattmann, Das Gleiche im Verschiedenen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), p. 114. 58. Steiner, Crown, seems not to discuss the term kosmos in relation to the metaphor of the “crown of song” (title of her book), but does discuss wreathing: see esp. pp. 36–37. Another example of the kosmos of Pindaric song itself is fr.194.2–3, where the poet urges his chorus to build, upon a foundation of songs, “an elaborate adornment that speaks words” (translation by Race of ποικίλον κόσμον αὐδάεντα λόγων). Three remaining passages, not discussed above, feature the verb kosmeô twice in specific reference to concrete “adornment” related to the games (Isthmian 1.19: tripods and other vessels the results of being crowned; Partheneion 2.49: the family has won cosmos of crowns). A third (Nemean 1.22) completes the circle of praise by punning reference to the “fitting” dinner (harmodion deipnon) set out in good order (kekosmêtai) for the poet who has come to praise the victor. In view of these uses, kosmos might be considered a delimited term of art for the effects, causes, and appurtenances of Pindaric choral poetry. 59. L. Kurke, “The Economy of Kudos,” in Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics, ed. C. Dougherty and L. Kurke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 131–63; also B. Currie, Pindar and the Cult of Heroes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For victors as living kosmos and object of song, see also Nemean 3.31–2 (where reference is intentionally blurred between the immediate laudandus Aristokleidas and all the Aeacid heroes). 60. L. Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991). 61. All Pindar translations are by D. Svarlien via the Perseus website unless otherwise stated. Greek text of Pindar is from Snell and Maehler’s Teubner edition. On the way in which this complex road image ties together hero, poet, and athlete, see Steiner, Crown, pp. 79–80. 62. On the heritage of the trope see R. Hunter and M. Fantuzzi, Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 68–71. 63. For details and bibliography of laws from Dreros (seventh century  B.C.E.) and Gortyn, see  M. Gagarin and  D. Cohen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 54, 310–11. Interestingly, there is a verbal component to this office, reminiscent of Pindaric usage: the archaic Cretan kosmos “regulator” can have his own sub-official “mnâmon” “remembrancer”—perhaps a scribe or expert in oral legal lore. Cf. Olympian 3.13ff, discussed above, with its kosmos of the olive represented as the mnâma of the games.

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64. Translation by Svarlien with modification. 65. M. Myers, “Footrace, Dance, and Desire: The χορός of Danaids in Pindar’s Pythian 9,” Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica 5 (2007): 230–47. The only other Pindaric passage that seems to associate kosmos with a garment is Pythian 3.82, contrasting fools, who cannot bear troubles “with propriety,” in opposition to the good, who “turn the fine side outward” (τὰ μὲν ὦν οὐ δύνανται νήπιοι κόσμῳ φέρειν, ἀλλ’ ἀγαθοί, τὰ καλὰ τρέψαντες ἔξω.). 66. For kosmos as a key descriptive term in the ideology of choral selfpresentation and representation of its formation, see A.-E. Peponi, “Choral Anti-Aesthetics,” in A.-E. Peponi, ed., Performance and Culture in Plato’s Laws (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 212–39. 67. Translation by T. J. Saunders, Plato: The Laws (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). E. Pender, “Plato on Metaphors and Models,” in BoysStones, Metaphor, pp. 55–81, cites this passage (p. 58) in support of his effort to show that Plato is highly conscious of the insufficiency of metaphor for philosophical discourse. 68. T. Turner, “ ‘We Are Parrots; Twins Are Birds’: Play of Tropes as Operational Structure,” in Fernandez, Beyond Metaphor, pp. 121–58. 69. T. Turner, “We Are Parrots,” pp. 147–48.

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Chapter 11

Breakfast at Dawn Alexander Veselovsky and the Poetics of Psychological Biography ILYA V IN IT S KY

The biography of his heart [as evidenced] in his diaries, letters, and poetry will reveal [to] us how this emotional disposition was shaped, but it is curious to ask oneself a question right now: which initial literary impressions had nourished and preserved this mood? — A. N. Veselovsky 1 . . . [they] ate their morning meals and slept till late, finding the winter season far sweeter than the summer, fall, or spring . . . — Longus, Daphnis and Chloe 2

As the authors of the introduction to this volume observe, one of the goals of Veselovsky’s historical poetics dealt with uncovering “the ways in which literary practices constitute[d] historical experience by perpetuating conceptual, emotional, and behavioral schemata across space and time.”3 In this context, the ill-famed “age of Sensibility” in Russia4 presented a special interest for Veselovsky. In his classical book on Vasily Zhukovsky’s life and work, eloquently subtitled The Poetry of Sentiment and of the “Heart’s Imagination” (1903; published in 1904), the scholar posed an intriguing question of how the Western literary modes of sentimentality were absorbed by a small cohort of Russian authors and a tiny educated society. Simply put, how did Russian writers learn to feel “properly” and how did they educate their audience to feel and express emotions culturally? The historical “poetics of feeling,” as put forward/construed by Veselovsky, describes the process of emotional emancipation (with all its limitations and comic paradoxes) of the Russian nobility, rather than a simple set of rules and words borrowed from Western cultural tradition. It was a true discovery of a deeper cultural meaning of the formative age in the history of Russian literature. 314

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This chapter, inspired by Veselovsky’s book and approach, is a fragment of a “psychological biography” of Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky (1783–1852), “the only true poet of our age of sensibility,” an outstanding writer and translator, the creator of the first aesthetic philosophy in Russian literature, which influenced several generations of Russian authors from Pushkin to Vladimir Solov’ev and Alexander Blok.5 Following Veselovsky, by psychological biography I mean not a fictionalized “history of the soul,” not a narrative of an individual’s creative, emotional or ideological evolution6 and, even less, a medical “psychography,” but a reconstruction of his emotional life in the cultural-historical context of the “long” Romantic Age (approx. 1790– 1840s)—a period in which psychological experience was interpreted as a fundamental ideological category.7 I depart from Veselovsky, however, in that I am interested not in the literary sources of Zhukovsky’s “poetry of feeling,” but rather in the poet’s interpretation of the track of his “feelings” as a narrative depicting the story of his inner life. Indeed, the sequence of “special, meaningful emotions” (osobennye chuvstva, in Zhukovsky’s own terminology), carefully selected by the poet in his lyrical works, diaries, and epistolary, form a particular biographical text or myth—the very “fantastical description” of life “without living details,”8 which he considered plain and uninteresting for his descendants and which, I suppose, are of special interest to scholars of the history of emotions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the words of George Florovsky, it was none other than Zhukovsky who succeeded “with his ingenious spectrum of sympathetic and creative transfigurations, with his intense sensibility and responsiveness, with his free and unmediated language” in expressing the “spiritual life” of his generation.9

Approach Basing his study on thorough archival research, Veselovsky presented the authorial personality of Zhukovsky as the point of intersection of different kinds of literary and ideological trends in the “age of Sensibility,” “a socio-psychological type to which [a biographer/critic] can relate more abstractly, free of sympathies and repudiations” that so easily lead to biased conclusions.10 This approach led the scholar to the radical conclusion that the cultural personality of Zhukovsky (his “socio-psychological type”) represents a successful adaptation of sentimentalist and early-Romantic formulae, characteristic of the Western

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(above all, French and German) literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Zhukovsky’s poetic worldview, according to Veselovsky, there is no place for Romantic experiments (that is, invention and originality), but there is what the scholar metaphorically calls an unwavering “truth of mood”: the world changed around the poet, but he always remained the same—a sentimental dreamer and proponent of virtue.11 In the investigation of Zhukovsky’s psychological biography, Veselovsky, however, limits himself to the identification of its literary models and sources and does not ask how such borrowings actually became part of his artistic consciousness, that is, how the “foreign” text (formula, cliché, motif, expression) became infused with what, for the poet, was “his own” content and how that content differed from the original. It is this process that interests me in my project. The reconstruction of this process will allow us not only to trace the assimilation of Western literary forms of Sentimentalism in Russian culture of this period, but also to follow almost in the style of a daily journal the formation of a specific personality type, new for Russian culture and not reducible to its varied Western sources, and of a philosophy of emotion that expresses this personality type.12 Paraphrasing the title of Veselovsky’s book, I am concerned with the hermeneutics of “feeling and imagination” in the psychological biography of Zhukovsky. In my approach, I complement Veselovsky’s views with the recent semiotic, phenomenological, and the literary-anthropological studies which focus on the problems of cultural appropriation or cultural borrowings. The works of two scholars are particularly important for this discussion. In his articles of the 1970s and early 1980s, Vladimir Toporov demonstrated that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russian authors (Zhukovsky, Andrei Turgenev, and, later, Konstantin Batiushkov) felt the assimilation of “alien” texts to be a path leading to the creation of one’s own personality, a kind of poetic initiation: “the alien” modeled “our own.”13 Taking as his starting point the semiotic conception of literary behavior developed by Yuri Lotman in the 1960s–1980s along with contemporary cultural-anthropological theories dedicated to the history of emotions,14 Andrei Zorin rather recently interrogated the role of “canonic” literary texts in the formation of the psychological reactions and behavior of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century readers. Zorin aptly calls these texts emotional patterns or matrices:

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Each culturally significant part of everyday life had its own European classic that set the mode of emotional reaction and subsequent behavior. The European public learned how to fall in love while reading La Nouvelle Heloise and Werther, how to go to the countryside with Thomson and Rousseau, how to visit cemeteries with Young and Gray, how to escape from the world with Zimmermann.15 This vision of emotional formation of the man of the age of Sensibility allows us to approach in a new way the problem of psychological biography—“the study of the emotional world of the person in its historical development.”16 Zorin considers one of the main (and, in my opinion, most complex) tasks of such research to be the elucidation of the “logic of selection” of the emotional matrices and their “adaptation by individual personalities and mini-groups.”17 As Veselovsky’s illuminating discussion of the age of Sensibility suggests,18 the sentimental culture, in which Zhukovsky was formed, offered an entire assortment of emotional models attached to particular situations: special “handbooks of sensibility,” such as Études de la Nature by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre or James Hervey’s Meditations Among the Tombs, were making the rounds, regulating the expression of emotions in concrete situations.19 At the same time, several authors might turn to one and the same literary matrix which, having entered the cultural repertoire of the age, could elicit variable emotional and behavioral responses. Thus the emotional reaction of the Russian “Stürmer” Andrei Turgenev, provoked by Goethe’s Werther, the arch-model of the sentimental youth of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, fundamentally differed from the reaction of his friend, the Karamzinist Zhukovsky, whose reaction in turn contrasts with that of the Voltairianist Mikhail Sushkov, author of the “Russian Werther” (who eventually mimicked Goethe’s novel in taking his own life20). It is logical to suppose that the individual emotional reactions of these authors were mediated not only by the literary matrices, but, on a deeper level of this cultural-psychological process, by different models of emotional-ethical attitudes, presented in the “philosophy of feeling” of the age.21 I presume that an investigation of the psychological biography of a historical personality is impossible without a close analysis of the repertoire of worldviews of a given cultural period. In turn, the “logic of selection” of this or that worldview model is, to a great extent, determined by the

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specifics of the “emotional community” within which the tastes and convictions of a given author are formed.22 Correspondingly, the starting point for Zhukovsky’s psychological biography should be the reconstruction of the sociocultural environment in which the poet spent his childhood and adolescence—the period which Veselovsky completely ignores in his book.23 In my discussion of this initial, or formative, stage in the poet’s emotional Bildung, I will focus on one of his earliest literary projects, which lies at the foundation of his poetic ideology and about which we know very little. The close examination of social, literary, and cultural contexts of this work give us an opportunity not only to reconstruct its plot, thematic range, and place within the author’s biography, but also to trace how a “foreign” literary text helped to shape the literary personality of one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth century, how “biography” communicated with “literature” at the dawn of the Romantic era in Russia.

Family Legend The main source of information about the early years of Zhukovsky’s life are the memoirs of his niece, the children’s writer Anna Petrovna Zontag (née Yushkova; 1786–1864),24 which were first published in the 1849 issue of the journal Moskovitianin [The Muscovite], and then—in an expanded version—in the 1883 issue of Russkaia mysl’ [The Russian Thought].25 These memoirs were to a great degree inspired by the poet himself, who saw in Zontag not only his closest childhood friend, but also a talented and observant storyteller, capable of resurrecting the lost Eden of the “sweet Past.”26 It seemed symbolic for Zhukovsky that Zontag would write her memoirs in the place where they spent the first years of their life—the village of Mishenskoe, which belonged to the poet’s father and to the grandfather of the memoirist Afanasii Ivanovich Bunin (approx. 1716– 1791). By the 1840s there remained only the ruins of the family home,27 but the memory of the narrator, according to Zhukovsky, was capable of populating this deserted world with family ghosts. Zontag begins her narrative with the story of the poet’s ancestry. According to family legend, the most honorable and noble, although not the most strictly moral landowner, Bunin, master of the picturesque and rich estate of Mishenskoe, jokingly asked his peasant, who had volunteered for the Russian-Turkish war of 1768–74 as a civilian servant, to

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bring him back from the campaign a “pretty little Turkish girl.” “My wife has become completely aged,” he complained.28 The peasant brought him two Turkish sisters: the 16-year-old Sal’kha, whose husband was killed during the storming of Bender, and the 11-year-old Fatima. Fatima soon died, but Sal’kha—beautiful, dexterous, meek, and modest—survived. She considered herself Bunin’s concubine and second wife and submitted to Mariia Grigorievna, the wife of her master, as her own mistress. The latter did not blame her, taking into account her Mohammedan beliefs. Once she lost hope of returning home in a prisoner exchange, Sal’kha converted to Orthodoxy. In baptism she received the name Elizaveta Dementievna Turchaninova.29 She was much loved in the Bunin household. Over the various years she performed the duties of nanny, housekeeper, and household manager. On January 29, 1783, Elizaveta Dementievna gave birth to a son, who was given the name Vasily. A poor nobleman named Andrei Zhukovsky, a dependent of Bunin’s, agreed to serve as godfather. Zontag writes that this Zhukovsky adopted the boy, who thus got his last name. For her part, Mariia Grigorievna blessed the boy and “adopted [him] in her heart” because she “thought of her own, only son,” a student at the University of Leipzig, who had “died two years earlier.”30 When Elizaveta Dementievna laid the boy at the feet of the mistress, the latter, deeply moved, took him in her arms, “kissed him, blessed him, and wept.” “From that time,” writes Zontag, “little Vasily was the favorite of the entire family”: “For the elders he was a favorite son, for the younger ones, a beloved brother. In our family there were many girls, but he was the only boy.”31 Zhukovsky’s biographers established long ago that the story of the poet’s birth, which Zontag based on the words of her grandmother and Zhukovsky’s mother Elizaveta Dementievna, was very far from the truth. It was not his peasant who brought the two Turkish girls to Bunin, but rather a neighboring landowner, Johann Karl Mufel’, a participant in the storming of Bender. Mufel’ “turned them over for education,” according to the official document, but more likely simply sold them.32 The relationship between the Bunin spouses was far from the idyllic picture painted by the memoirist, and the position of the boy, the son of a servant, was ambiguous and insecure.33 Adopting a godson was against the laws of the time, and children born out of wedlock to landowners were registered, in accordance with the legislation of the time, as peasants under their own parents of “noble birth.”34 To obtain the dignity of gentry status for the boy meant getting around the law,

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and the Bunin family, influential in the Tula Province [guberniia], had to use of all their connections and carry out very complex and timeconsuming schemes, despite which Zhukovsky’s nobility remained in dispute until the end of the 1830s.35 The literary-mythological foundation of Zontag’s story, however, is of greatest interest. It resembles a starting point for a sentimental family novel: the idyllic, secluded, provincial little spot in which only the faroff sounds of war are heard; a good but sinful landowner; his virtuous wife, who forgives her husband’s exotic, noble concubine; the concubine, who adores her mistress; the illegitimate boy, sent by God to the magnanimous mistress in exchange for the son who had perished in a foreign land. For practically every thematic element of this story it is possible to find a prototype in the sentimental literature of the late eighteenth century, in whose crucible Zhukovsky’s family myth was formed. Thus, the touching unity of the wife and concubine refers to the utopian project of the Church of Friendship, in which, according to Sir Grandison, his wife and lover ought to embrace.36 In turn, the figure of the humble, selfless Sal’kha corresponds to the model of the noble Turkish woman, popular in the literature of the end of the eighteenth century (see, for example, a novel published in 1780, eloquently entitled “Example of firm and true love, or The Adventures of the Beautiful Turkish Kseminda, christened Elisaveta, rejecting the marriage offered to her with the royal-born persons for the carrying out of the spousal promise given to a lover”37). Also traditional for the sentimental romance is the motif of the illegitimate child raised by a virtuous lady.38 This kind of literariness not only camouflages or idealizes the facts, but also “smoothes over” the rough places of real-life situations and aestheticizes personal traumas.39 A story typical of the stormy and immoral (according to the views of the feminine circle around Zhukovsky) eighteenth century is translated into the language of the Age of Sensibility.40 As we will see, the poeticization and mythologization of one’s own biography using the framework of the literary models becomes a key principle of the poet’s own creative consciousness. In her literary reminiscences, Zontag creates a group of “beautiful souls” living in the Russian provinces at the beginning of a “coarse [eighteenth] century.” At the head of this mostly female “kingdom” is the grandmother.41 Next are her respectful daughters, sweet granddaughters, and the faithful servant-friend. The hero is a marvelous boy (the only one in the family!), the son of the servant and the future great poet. “About Vasily Andreevich,” concludes Zontag, “one can say in

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his own words, that he was beloved by the gods before his very birth; he was also the favorite of his own family and was happy by his very nature, and his family luxuriated in the pleasure of his presence.”42 Raised in the women’s realm of the Bunin family, Zhukovsky was the product and, perhaps, the best expression of the female sentimental culture that formed in Russia at the end of the eighteenth century. If Nikolai Karamzin, as Yuri Lotman so convincingly showed in his works, created Russian literature for educated and sentimental women, then the educated and sentimental women “created” Zhukovsky—their own poet.

First Drama The tale of Zhukovsky’s first literary attempts holds an important position in Zontag’s memoirs. Events take place in the home of the parents of Anna Petrovna in Tula—a cultural oasis of Russian provincial life in the 1790s. The lady of the house—Zhukovsky’s half-sister and godmother, Varvara Afanas’evna Yushkova (1768–1797)—was an intelligent, enlightened, and talented woman. At her home—“the best and most pleasant in all of Tula”43—she hosted literary readings, musical concerts, and children’s celebrations and shows. Yushkova actively occupied herself with the affairs of the Tula theater. In her home she opened a small pension in which her four daughters, Zhukovsky, and twelve other children studied.44 The influence of her personality on the formation of the future poet was, by her account, significant. “She was a gifted person . . .” he wrote at the end of his life to A. P. Zontag upon reading her recollections of her mother. “She had a very poetic nature. Everything transcending a lower order of life engaged her interest. Many hidden talents remained undeveloped. This struck me clearly even then, with my lack of education. And now I still remember how appealingly she could tell stories.”45 The first literary works of the future poet, according to Zontag’s recollections, date to the winter of 1794–1795. They were of a dramatic nature. In that winter the Yushkov family was expecting a visit from their grandmother, Mariia Grigorievna, and Zhukovsky’s mother, Elizaveta Dementievna. For their arrival, Zhukovsky wrote and staged, with the help of a small troupe of Yushkov’s pupils, the historical tragedy “Camillus, or the Liberation of Rome.” Zontag preserved in her memory many details of this work, which has not survived. In the finale Camillus (played by Zhukovsky, of course) saved the city from the

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Gauls and mourned the Aurelian queen Olympia, who sacrificed herself to Rome.46 The play enjoyed thunderous success and inspired the twelve-year-old author to compose yet another drama, this time in the sentimental vein. The boy derived the theme of this new production from the famous sentimental novel of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737– 1814) Paul et Virginie (178747; in Russian translation by Aleksandra Podshivalova in 1793—“Pavel and Virginiia”),48 the story of two families on the faraway Ile de France (Mauritius)—the aristocratic Madame de la Tour and her daughter Virginia and the peasant woman Margarita and her illegitimate son Paul.49 According to Zontag, Zhukovsky’s title comes from the name of the mother of the heroine of the novel—“Madame de la Tour.” The memoirist writes very little about this play, but as we will see, it suffices as a basis for some conclusions regarding the sources of Zhukovsky’s poetic ideology. “Here, in the first scene,” recalls Zontag, “breakfast is brought out. Madame Yushkova, wishing to comfort the author and the entire troupe, ordered, instead of breakfast, a beautiful dessert. What happened? Everyone forgot their roles, all the actors suddenly spilled out from behind the curtains and threw themselves at the dessert. Everyone was talking and eating, not listening to the director who, in sadness, took to eating together with the rest. This surprise pleased the audience more than the drama itself. The play proceeded no further.”50 These few lines from Zontag’s memoirs have elicited the attention of Zhukovsky biographers and scholars. According to Karl Seidlitz, the failure Zontag describes influenced the poet: a passionate lover of theater, he preferred not to try himself in the dramatic genre. V. I. Rezanov, a scholar of Zhukovsky’s early creative works, noted that in the Saint-Pierre novel Zhukovsky might have been interested by the description of children’s pantomime theater, put on in the surroundings of the majestic natural scenery of Paul and Virginia: “To be distracted by this example was all the easier because the passion for the theater was apparently a trait of his since birth.”51 The modern biographer of the poet, Victor Afans’ev, notes that it was the melodramatic nature of the novel that attracted the young author: The misadventure of two families, trying to live outside of society on one of the distant islands, the love of a youth and maiden—Paul and Virginia, the fight against civilization’s attempt to intervene in their lives—all this touched the heart

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of the readers. No one was bothered by the far-fetched plot, no one looked for verisimilitude in the episodes. It was all about feelings. “It comes as a complete surprise,” concludes the biographer, “that already on his second attempt Zhukovsky found a theme in harmony with his future literary efforts. No less surprising is the originality of the play’s focus—at the foundation of the drama lay the tragedy of a mother, rather than the story of two lovers’ demise.”52 This twist in the plot, the scholar suggests, was provided to Zhukovsky “by the fate of his own mother.”53 Attempts to link this no longer extant play with the life of the young author are completely justified, but Afanas’ev’s reading is not quite convincing. In a reconstruction of the idea of “Madame de la Tour” we ought to turn our attention to the only comment of the memoirist and, apparently, participant in the unsuccessful production: the description of how breakfast was served during the first scene. It is quite obvious that the breakfast episode, with which the young author began his play, was the climactic scene for the development of the action of the story. At this breakfast, prepared by Virginia, the Governor of the island, Monsieur de la Bourdonnais, arrives. He brings Madame de la Tour a letter from her aunt, a rich French lady, who directs that Virginia be sent to her to be educated. If the girl justifies the aunt’s expectations, then she will become her heiress. The governor was pleasantly surprised by the simple and healthy food of the poor but happy inhabitants of this little spot so far from civilization.54 He was charmed by the order and cleanliness of the small hut and the harmonious relations between the two “interesting families,” as well as those between the landowners and the servants. “Here,” he exclaims, “I discern only wooden furniture; but I find serene countenances and hearts of gold.”55 His visit also marks the beginning of this idyll’s end. The invasion of civilization, represented by a figure of colonial power, into the life of the people, which had heretofore followed its natural laws, destroys that life. (It is telling that the governor brings a sack of money intended for Virginia’s trip.56) Madame de la Tour reluctantly agrees to send her daughter to France. There follows a series of tense dialogues laying bare the hidden conflicts of the idyllic novel and of the conversation between Madame de la Tour and Virginia, as if ready-made for dramatic reproduction,57 their discussion with their confessor, and the dialogues between Paul and his mother, the

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peasant woman Margarita, and finally, Paul and Virginia. At the end of this structurally concluded part of the novel, which began with an idyllic breakfast,58 Bernardin depicts the sufferings of Paul, who has learned that Virginia was forced to depart without his knowledge. I contend that Zhukovsky’s play followed (at least, in the most general aspects) this very scheme.

The Saved Idyll This is, apparently, Zhukovsky’s first attempt to use a “foreign” text as the model for the expression of his own experiences and manifestation of his own life situation (and, perhaps, first love), addressed to a “kindred” public. License to the biographical assimilation of the text was given by the very author of the novel. In the preface to the novel, SaintPierre writes: J’ai désiré réunir à la beauté de la nature entre les tropiques, la beauté morale d’une petite société. Je me suis proposé aussi d’y mettre en évidence plusieurs, entre autres celle-ci, que notre bonheur consiste à vivre suivant la nature et la vertu. Cependant il ne m’a point fallu imaginer de roman pour peindre des familles heureuses. Je puis assurer que celles dont je vais parler ont vraiment existé, et que leur histoire est vraie dans ses principaux événements.59 It was my desire to blend with the beauty of Nature between the Tropics, the moral beauty of a small Society. It was likewise my purpose, to place in a striking light certain truths of high moment, and this one in particular: That human happiness consists in living conformably to Nature and Virtue. It was not necessary for me however to compose a romance, in order to exhibit a representation of happy families. I declare in the most solemn manner, that those which I am going to display have actually existed.60 The play, written by Zhukovsky to mark the arrival of two mothers, Mariia Grigorievna and Elizaveta Dementievna, was full of allusions. The title referred, of course, not to Zhukovsky’s mother, but to her noble friend, who raised Anna Yushkova together with Zhukovsky in her home at Mishenskoe. In the figure of the commoner Margarita, the

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mother of Paul, one could see the mother of the young author. Paul and Virginia grew up together as brother and sister. They were christened in the same baptismal font, they slept in the same cradle. In her memoirs of Zhukovsky, Zontag wrote of their common childhood: [Vasen’ka] loved me very much, and he often came to me in my chamber and, when they rocked me . . . , he asked them to lay him down with me in my cradle, and he would fall asleep next to me. In the mornings they carried me to his chamber in order to wake him, and so laid me down in his bed. Naturally, I cannot remember this, but he remembered and called me his cradlemate, even shortly before his death he wrote to me, recalling how we were rocked in the same cradle.61 In an early edition of her memoirs, whether consciously or unconsciously, Zontag stylizes her portrait of the twelve-year-old Zhukovsky according to the description of the youthful Paul: He was well-built and graceful; large brown eyes shone with intelligence from under long black lashes; black eyebrows were as if drawn onto elevated eyebrows, his white face was enlivened with fresh red cheeks, his thick, long, black hair gracefully curled around his shoulders; his smile was pleasant, the expression of his face was bright and kind; in his gaze could be seen, even in childhood, a kind of dreaminess. He was beautiful and no one could refuse to love him at first sight.62 Zontag in her old age not only described with enthusiasm the physical appearance of her “cradlemate” in adolescence, but also his elevated chivalric attitude toward her, then a five-year-old girl. We shall linger a bit on the key moments of this day, fatal for the family idyll, which likely drew the attention of the young dramatist.63 After breakfast (the last communal meal of the novel’s heroes), Madame de la Tour reveals to Virginia that Paul is not her brother and says that, once she gains her fortune, she might return and marry him: I have no other motive than your happiness, and of marrying you at some future time to Paul, who is not your brother. Think, therefore, that his fortune depends on you.64 Virginia is touched and admits her feelings to her mother, but the latter asks her daughter to say nothing to Paul of her love. In her turn, Paul’s

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mother, wishing to disillusion her son of vain hopes, reveals to him the truth of his birth: I will no longer delay to disclose to you the secret of your life, and of mine. Madame de la Tour belongs to a high and noble family; whilst you, my dear son, are only the offspring of a poor peasant, and what is worse—you are a natural child [bâtard]65 Paul, hearing this word for the first time, asks his mother to explain its meaning to him. “Oh unhappy child!” she exclaims, “you have no one in the world other than me!” These words motivate Paul’s sorrowful monologue, certainly relevant to the experiences of the young Zhukovsky: My dearest mother! since I have no other in his world but you to care for me, how much more ought I to love you! But what is the secret you have revealed to me! I now see why Mademoiselle de la Tour has, for these last two months, kept herself so distant. Ah! I see with what disdain she looks upon me.66 Finally, after the supper, which passes in silent grief, comes the parting dialogue of Paul and Virginia. The girl says that she should submit to her mother and depart. Paul reproaches her for this decision. In reply, Virginia reveals that she is sacrificing herself for Paul’s sake: Paul, it is for you that I go; it is for you, whom I have seen everywhere, almost overpowered by fatigue, in supporting two infirm families. If I have accepted this opportunity of becoming rich, it is only to return you a thousand-fold the good which you have done us. Is there any fortune worthy of your friendship? Why do you talk to me of your birth? Ah! if it was again possible to give me a brother, should I make a choice of any other than you? Oh, Paul! Paul! you are far dearer to me than a brother! How much it has cost me to avoid you!67 Paul is prepared to travel to France with Virginia, but Madame de la Tour explains to him that, without him, both families would perish. In despair, Paul turns to the mother of his beloved: Oh! my mother, you wish to separate me from an affectionate sister; you have brought us up together; you have taught us to love each other from infancy. Would you now tear her from me and send her to Europe, that barbarous country which refused

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an asylum to you and to those cruel relatives, who once discarded and abandoned you? I know what your reply will be; you will say “She is not your sister and you have no control over her.” She is all to me—my fortune, my family, my birth, all unite to render her my sole good. I know none but her. We have had but one habitation, one cradle and we shall have but one grave. If she leaves this isle, I must leave with her. . . . Since I cannot exist here without her, I cast myself into the water and die before her eyes at a distance from you. Brutal mother! unfeeling and unnatural woman! May this ocean, to which you would expose her, restore her to you no more!68 The novel, apparently, resonated with Zhukovsky’s situation and mood. But what was the young author’s immediate motive? Zontag dates the production of his play to the winter of 1794–1795. It is quite probable that at this time in the Bunin-Yushkov family the decision had already been made to send the young Zhukovsky to the regiment that was forming in November of the following year. Turning to the theme of Paul and Virginia could have been linked to Zhukovsky’s reluctance to part with his “sister” and his family. In this case the play could have served as a kind of literary appeal to Zontag’s grandmother not to make the same mistake as Madame de la Tour and to remain the guarantor of that marvelous status quo that inheres in any idyll. Bernardin’s novel not only gave the young author the language to express his own experiences,69 but also served as a kind of “syncretic” Ur-text for his creative work. It is safe to call the novel the birthplace of the poet’s poetic and biographical mythology, which is characterized by the following attributes70: the dream of a quiet family life “in an isolated feminine utopia,” far from corrupt civilization;71 the selfless love of a brother and sister;72 the protection of Divine Providence; the ideal of a melancholy blue-eyed “young maiden, simple and unaffected in her perfection”;73 the figure of a loving mother, making a fateful choice according to the laws of society rather than of nature;74 the notion that happiness comes from following “nature and virtue” and from the elegiac experience of the transitory nature of earthly happiness; the memory of childhood as of a golden age of life and the hope of its rebirth on the other side of earthly existence.

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The ideological roots of Zhukovsky’s poetic myth is not in the passionate preaching of the natural economy of life à la Rousseau (the social utopia of Clarens),75 but in the “quiet” philosophy of his skeptical imitator, Bernardin.76 Of course, Zhukovsky’s play could not reproduce all of its author’s selections from the novel, particularly those relating to Paul’s despair. But the members of his audience—Maria Grigorievna and the Yushkovs—knew this novel by heart. Zhukovsky’s biographer, Zagarin, supposed that the action of the play was interrupted “due to the carelessness of Madame Yushkova.” Instead, it would seem that this “carelessness” was deliberate. The tactful hostess enacted a quickwitted coup de théâtre to avoid the unwanted demonstration of the young author’s feelings (however softened they were with respect to the original). Instead of the simple Creole meal, Yushkova presented a “beautiful desert,” which easily tempted the young actors: “Everyone was talking and eating, not listening to the director who, in sadness, took to eating together with the rest of them. This surprise pleased the audience more than the drama itself.” Breakfast dragged on. The fall of the idyll did not take place.77 Or, to be more precise, it was delayed.

Conclusion At the end of his book on Zhukovsky, Veselovsky melancholically observes that what remains of the poet’s legacy by the early twentieth century are not his artistic discoveries (he did not make any, according to the scholar), but merely the “truth of mood” (“пpавда пcихологичеcкого наcтpоения”). In his enthusiastic review of Veselovsky’s book, Alexander Blok corrected the scholar. Zhukovsky, he insisted, is “our own, kindred-spirit [pодной]”; he is the poet for the few.78 Blok’s poetry convincingly proves this thesis: Zhukovsky provided the Symbolist with literary and emotional patterns, which the latter populated with and transformed by his own sentiments and mystical insights.79 This, in turn, allows us to formulate what we think constitutes Zhukovsky’s cultural legacy: he established a certain exegetical principle which would become central to the formation of the Russian lyrical tradition—the discovery of one’s identity and creation of an idealized biography through emotional appropriation and personalization of “alien” texts. From the very dawn of his literary career, the poet, as Veselovsky wittingly formulates, “offered in what was alien not only what was his own, but his entire self” (“давал в чужом не

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только cвое, но и вcего cебя”).80 And it is Zhukovsky’s pioneering example of the creation of the “entire self” out of the foreign cultural material that served as a model for nineteenth-century readers’ and poets’ psychological Bildung.

Notes 1. A. N. Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii . . . (St. Petersburg, Tipografiia Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1904), p. 20. 2. Longus, The Story of Daphnis and Chloe: A Greek Pastoral, ed. with text, introduction, translation and notes by W. D. Lowe (Cambridge: Deighton Bell and Co., 1908), p. 111 [Book III, 4]. 3. See the introduction in this volume, p. 2. 4. As a witty Russian playwright commented in one of his antisentimentalist comedies, this sensibility “had been born in England, spoiled in France, ballooned in Germany, and was imported to us in a pathetic shape enough to make a horse laugh.” A. A. Shakhovskoi, Komedii, stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1961), p. 745. 5. The fuller exposition of Zhukovsky’s psychological biography can be found in Ilya Vinitsky, Heavenly Sisters: Vasily Zhukovsky and the Romantic Religion of Love (under contract with Northwestern University Press). The quotation comes from Veselovsky, “The Age of Sensibility” (See Chapter 9, p. 270). Although the scholarship on Zhukovsky in Russia is extensive, his name is almost unknown to Anglophone readers and his rich poetic and emotional world is still terra incognita for Western scholars of Russia. In fact, the only book on Zhukovsky’s poetry in English was published in 1976—a Twayne translation of Irina Semenko’s remarkable, yet already outdated book. One other slim monograph by Annette Pein, Schiller and Zhukovsky: Aesthetic Theory in Poetic Translation (Mainz: Liber Verlag, 1991) and a few fine chapters by Lauren Leighton, Michael Wachtel, Stephanie Sandler, Olga Glagoleva, and David Cooper cannot do justice to the significance of the poet for the development of Russian letters. For without Zhukovsky, Russian literature as an entity would be as unthinkable as English literature without Wordsworth. 6. On the genre of intellectual biography, see Gerald N. Izenberg, “Text, Context, and Psychology in Intellectual History,” in Developments in Modern Historiography, ed. Henry Kozicki (New York: St.  Martin’s Press), pp.  40–62; Richard Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” Philosophy in History, ed. Richard Rorty et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 49–76. On the semiotic conception of authorial biography, developed by the Russian historian of culture Yuri M.

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Lotman and employed in his biographies of Pushkin and Karamzin, see: David Bethea, “Lotman, The Code and Its Relation to Literary Biography,” Realizing Metaphors (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), pp. 118–33. From the phenomenological point of view the problem of “emotional biography” is considered in the book of Norman K. Denzin, On Understanding the Emotion (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1984). Denzin distinguishes two types of emotional consciousness: “reflective” and “unreflective.” In the first case “the person is completely contained within emotional experience,” while in the second case he “situates himself biographically in the emotional experience and reflects the emotion onto himself . . . [h]e attempts to guide, direct, and interpret the emotion as he is experiencing it.” Denzin calls this process of experience and interpretation of experience the “emotional situation,” which enters into the person’s “emotional biography” (p. 104). 7. On the “philosophy of feeling” in the Age of Sensibility see: V. A. Kozhevnikov, Filosofiia chuvstva i very v ee otnosheniiakh k literature i ratzionalizmu XVIII veka i k kriticheskoi filosofii (S. l.: G. Lissner i A. Geshel’, 1897); Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii; F. de La Barthe, Shatobrian i poetika mirovoi skorbi vo Frantsii (1905). 8. “My memoirs and those of men similar to me can only be psychological, that is, they can only be the history of the soul,” admitted Zhukovsky to his friend. “I would describe the present reality in a fantastical way; there would be faces without forms, and truly 9/10 of the details are lost to my memory; and what is a life history without details? A dead skeleton or an indistinct ghost.” From Zhukovsky’s letter to P. A. Pletnev of March 6, 1850. Quoted in: V.A. Zhukovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Nauka, 1999), p. 16. Indeed, as compared with the romantic biographies of some of his contemporaries, Zhukovsky’s life was not rich in events: he did not perform feats of heroism on the battlefield, he did not rebel against society, he experienced neither exile nor imprisonment, he fought no duels, he did not lose his fortune in a card game, nor did he seduce other men’s wives. Despite these deficiencies, however, the story of his life and love, refracted in his poetry, can serve to illustrate the psychological history of Russian culture of the Romantic Age. 9. Georgii Florovskii, Puti russkogo bogosloviia (Paris: YMCA Press, 1988), p. 129. 10. Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii, p. xii. 11. Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii, p. 546. 12. The creation of a “psychological biography” of Zhukovsky is possible thanks to the voluminous studies of his work by earlier scholars. The biographical and cultural-historical context of his oeuvre has been thoroughly researched in the works of N. S. Tikhonravov, A. E. Gruzinsky, A. N. Veselovsky, P. N. Sakulin, Yu. M. Lotman, V. N. Toporov, L. N. Kiseleva,

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T. Stepanishcheva [Fraiman], and O. E. Glagoleva. Zhukovsky’s “psychological” poetics have been treated in works of B. M. Eikhenbaum, G. A. Gukovsky, I. M. Semenko, and A. S. Ianushkevich. Zhukovsky’s poetic ideology and its reflection in the work of his contemporaries have been studied in articles by A. S. Nemzer, A. L. Zorin, and O. A. Proskurin. Of great significance for the study of Zhukovsky’s psychological biography are the studies of a group of scholars from Tomsk devoted to the analysis of the many marginal writings in the books in Zhukovsky’s library (in 1879 the Siberian patron A. M. Sibiriakov bought the poet’s book collection from his son and donated it to the only just opened University of Siberia). At this point, a significant part of the poet’s correspondence with his “co-sentimentalists” (sochuvstvenniki) has been published and annotated. Slowly but surely the “complete” collection of his works is appearing in print under the editorship of A. S. Ianushkevich. Fuller bibliographic information on Russian scholarship on Zhukovsky can be found in Vinitsky, Dom tolkovatelia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006). 13. V. N. Toporov, “ ‘Sel’skoe kladbishche’ Zhukovskogo: k istokam russkoi poezii,” Russian Literature 10.3 (1981): 246. 14. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 81–82. 15. Andrei Zorin, “Leaving Your Family in 1797: Two Identities of Mikhail Murav’ev,” in Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe, ed. Mark D. Steinberg and Valeria Sobol (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), p. 46. 16. A. L. Zorin, “Poniatie ‘literaturnogo perezhivaniia’,” in Istoriia i povestvovanie, ed. G. B. Obatnin and P. Pesonen (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), p. 25. 17. Ibid. 18. Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii, pp. 31–46; see the English translation in Chapter 9. 19. On the late-eighteenth-century classifications of emotions, see Ilya Vinitsky, “ ‘The Queen of Lofty Thoughts.’ The Cult of Melancholy in Russian Sentimentalism,” Interpreting Emotions, pp. 30–37. 20. For the illuminating discussion of the literary models for Sushkov’s suicide, see Martin Fraanje, “Proshchal’nye pis’ma M.S. Sushkova (o probleme samoubiistva v russkoi kul’ture kontsa XVIII veka),” XVIII vek (1995), vol. 19, pp. 166–67. 21. Kozhevnikov, Filosofiia chuvstva i very; Vinitsky, “The Queen of Lofty Thoughts.” 22. Barbara  H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 2. 23. This remarkable omission might be explained by Veselovsky’s programmatic intention to reconstruct the social-psychological type of the Age

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of Sensibility rather than to write a “traditional” biography of the poet. Thus, instead of focusing on Zhukovsky’s formative years, he presents an insightful discussion of the cultural environment in which the poet was formed (“The Age of Sensibility”). However, this broad picture has a limited hermeneutic value, since it cannot explain the peculiarities of Zhukovsky’s personality and poetic worldview. On the ethos of the Russian provincial household in the end of the eighteenth century, see Yuri Lotman, Sotvorenie Karamzina (Moscow: Kniga, 1987); John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca,  N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 19–47; Tom Newlin, The Voice in the Garden: Andrei Bolotov and the Anxieties of Russian Pastoral, 1738–1833 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001). 24. In 1817, Anna Yushkova married an American George Sonntag (1786–1841), who had joined the Russian navy and commanded a regiment against Napoleon. 25. The basis for this publication is the letter that Zontag wrote to Prince P. A. Viazemskii in 1854. 26. In a letter dated 6/18 March 1849, Zhukovsky encouraged Zontag to become “our family biographer”: “What an occupation it would be, full, life-giving, reviving the past, vivid for the present, and preparatory for our earthly and heavenly future . . . !” Utkinskii sbornik (Moscow, 1904), pp. 124, 127. However the poet was unhappy that the memoirs were published: he considered them to be a text addressed only to the “initiated,” the members of the family. Utkinskii sbornik, p. 80. On the life and work of A. P. Zontag, see O. B. Lebedeva, “Zontag Anna Petrovna,” Russkie pisateli, 1800–1917, vol. 2, pp.  351–53;  O.  E. Glagoleva, Russkaia provintsial’naia starina (Tula: IRI Ritm, 1993), pp. 98–100. 27. Zontag’s sister, A. P. Kireevskaia (née Iushkova; since 1817, Elagina), wrote to Zhukovsky in the summer of 1836: “In Mishenskoe vile desolation reigns in abundance, nothing remains of the past. The grove by the house is being cut up. And in place of a stroll I must traverse logs and brush . . . There is not a trace of the flowerbed. In the basements and cellars I could not find a single engraving.” Perepiska V.A. Zhukovskogo s A.P. Elaginoi (Moscow: Znak, 2009), p. 433. 28. It must be said that at the time such requests were quite common. For example, in December 1770, Count Ivan Orlov turned to Field Marshall P. A. Rumiantsev, who was living “in recompense for his labors[ . . . ] like a Sultan among the beauties.” He made inquiries about the fate of two “beautiful Turkish girls” that had been promised to him. “I regret that the designated Turkish girls have died,” wrote Orlov having learned of the sad fate of his “gift.” “I hope that Your Highness will search at the battlefield sites because I hope that there will be many of them there in abun-

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dance.” Starina i novizna 1 (1897): 270, 272. Field Marshall Suvorov had his own Turkish girl. Admiral Kreig sent a captive Turkish woman to his brother from Ochakovo, and she “raised several small girls being held captive together with her.” In the house of Field Marshall Kamenskii there lived “Turkish girls given as gifts upon return from the Army to our military acquaintances, women, baptized by them in Russian Orthodox faith and somehow or other raised.” M. I. Pyliaev, Staraia Moskva (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Suvorina, 1891), p. 363. There was no lack of “trophy” women in the years of the successful wars against the Porte. Thus, upon the taking of Izmail in 1790, the “soldiers were permitted to rob as promised for three days straight” and “they received as booty more than a million rubles and many beautiful Turkish women” (138). 29. Her surname derives from the word “Turkish” in Russian. 30. There remains little historical evidence regarding Bunin’s only son, Ivan, who studied, according to family legend, at the University of Leipzig and passed away in 1781 at the age of 20. Karl Seidlitz called him “the pride and joy of his mother” [“der Stolz und die Freude der Mutter”]. Seidlitz, Wasily Andrejewitsch Joukoffsky: Ein russisches Dichterleben (Mitau: E. Behre’s Verlag, 1870), s. 7. A. I. Bunin’s great granddaughter, A. I. Elagina, wrote that the young man was “very educated, loved painting and possessed expert knowledge of it,” ordered icons for the stone church in Mishenskoe and “traveled into distant lands.” According to one legend, Ivan died in Leipzig from an illness, according to another, he died upon his return to Russia from Germany of an unhappy love for a certain lady Lutovinova, whom he was unable to marry since his father had at some time in the past given his word to his friend, Count Grigorii Orlov, that their children would be married. “On the day of their betrothal,” tells A. I. Bunin’s great granddaughter, A. I. Elagina, “when they began to drink to the health of the bride and groom, he burst a vein and died a sudden death” (290–91). 31. V. A. Zhukovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, p. 96. 32. According to the traditional version, the girls were both taken from the Pasha’s harem. In the age of Catherine, imprisoned Turkish girls were often “relocated among the inhabitants” [pазмещалиcь по обывателям]. Apparently, Sal’kha lived with Bunin for several years without any legal documents. She was granted a free residence permit for Russia only after the birth of their son. I. I. Nekrasov, “Taina dvorianstva V.A. Zhukovskogo,” Belevskie chteniia 3 (2004): 79–90. There is confusion regarding the year of Zhukovsky’s mother’s birth. From the “confessional records” [иcповедальные pоcпиcи] it follows that she was born in 1736; but according to family legends, she was born in 1748. P. Viskovatyi, “Stoletnii iubilei V.A. Zhukovskogo,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 226 (1883): 12.

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33. The poet’s biographer Pyotr Bartenev noted that in the Bunin family everyone treated the little Zhukovsky “with familial warmth,” which explains why he did not develop those unhealthy qualities “which are seen with some frequency in illegitimate children”—“either arrogance, or exaggerated self-deprecation, and almost always a mercurial character.” To Zhukovsky, claims Bartenev, “it was almost imperceptible that he was not a full member of the family into which he had been included along with his mother, the meek and universally loved Elizaveta Dementievna.” Russkii arkhiv 1 (1877): 485–86. However, this is a significant “almost”: the lack of belonging to the family of his benefactors was painfully perceived by the sensitive boy. So, in his journal entry of August 26, 1805, written in a moment of sadness, Zhukovsky recalled: “Not having my own family, in which I would have meant something, I saw around me people only briefly acquainted, because I had been raised in front of them, but I did not see relatives who belonged to me by right; I was used to separating myself from everyone, because no one took any particular interest in me and because every interest taken in me seemed to me to be charity. I was left, abandoned, and had my corner, but was loved by no one, I did not feel anyone’s love” (XIII, p. 26). 34. Glagoleva, “Nezakonnorozhdennye deti v XVIII v.: Novye materialy o poluchenii V.A. Zhukovskim dvorianskogo statusa,” Otechestvennaia istoriia 4–6 (2002): 220. 35. As the scholar writes, “the basis for the issuance of a certificate of nobility to Zhukovsky was a falsified paper drawn up by the civil servants of the Tula local noble deputy body with the participation of Tula and Kaluga governor-general, General-in-Chief M. N. Krechetnikov,” the lover of the half-sister of the future poet, Natal’ia Vel’iaminova, see Glagoleva, “Nezakonnorozhdennye deti,” p. 163. 36. “ ‘Sweet sisters! Lovely friends!’ said he, when come up to us, taking a hand of each, and joining them, bowing on both: ‘let me mark this blessed spot with my eye’; looking round him; then on me.—‘A tear on my Harriet’s cheek!’—He dried it off with my own handkerchief— ‘Friendship, dearest creatures, will make at pleasure a safe bridge over the narrow seas; it will cut an easy passage through rocks and mountains, and make England and Italy one country. Kindred souls are always near’,” etc. Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Letter CCCXV. The Novels of Samuel Richardson (1824), vol. 3, p. 783. 37. “Oh how much I love [ . . . ] my tormentor!” says the beautiful Kseminda in this long novel. “My heart, weak for him, prefers him to everyone on Earth . . . I am prepared to bear all persecution from you, expect only your toleration, do not pile up my henceforth growing love for you, and do not deny me your gaze” (p. 182). A noble-hearted Turkish woman,

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selflessly in love with a Russian officer, is portrayed in the musical drama of Ivan Kozlovskii with a text by P. Potemkin “Zel’mira and Smelon, or The Capture of Izmail.” 38. See Lisa Zunshine, Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). 39. From the psychoanalytic point of view, Zhukovksy’s family utopia is a dreamer’s naïve (pre-Oedipal) fantasy, a dreamer who relies completely on his relatives and benefactors (the type of the Foundling novel in the classification of the family novel offered by the French scholar Marthe Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman [Paris: Grasset, 1972]). 40. See Veselovskii, V.A. Zhukovskii, pp. 31–46. 41. The family patriarch, Afanasii Ivanovich Bunin, died in 1791. 42. For her description of Zhukovsky, Zontag uses lines from his poem of 1809, “Shchast’e. Iz Shillera” [Happiness. From Schiller]. 43. Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia Andreia Bolotova (1872), vol. 3, p. 1179. 44. Glagoleva, “Nezakonnorozhdennye deti,” p. 63. 45. Utkinskii sbornik, p. 130–31. 46. The tragedy is based on Plutarch’s biography of Camillus. Rezanov also indicates as a possible source Messner’s drama about Scipio, published in the journal “Priiatnoe i poleznoe preprovozhdenie vremeni” in the spring of 1795. V. I. Rezanov, Iz razyskanii o sochineniiakh V.A. Zhukovskogo (1906), part 1, p. 101. However, according to the recollections of Zontag, Zhukovsky’s play was performed in the winter of 1794–95 and we have no basis for shifting the chronology. An immediate historical impulse, leading the boy to create such a heroic drama, could have been the recent victory of Field Marshall Rumiantsev and Suvorov in the Polish campaign of 1794. G. R. Derzhavin called Rumiantsev the “Glorious Camillus” in the poem “Vel’mozha” (November 1794; pub. 1798). 47. The novel first appeared in the fourth volume of the third edition of Bernardin’s Etudes de la nature (1787). The first separate edition was published in 1789. 48. Podshivalova’s translation was first published in her husband’s journal Chteniia dlia vkusa, razuma i chuvstvovanii IX (1793): 3–256. The separate edition of the novel appeared the same year. A. N. Neustroev, Istoricheskoe rozyskanie o russkikh povremennykh izdaniiakh (1875), pp. 692, 696. 49. On the exceptional popularity of the novel of Saint-Pierre in Russia, especially in the provinces, see A. Belova, “Domashnee vospitanie russkoi provintsial’noi dvorianki kontsa XVIII—pervoi poloviny XIX vekov,” Zhenskie i gendernye issledovaniia v Tverskom gosudarstvennom universitete (Tver’, 2000), pp. 32–44.

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50. Zhukovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, p. 106. 51. It is likely that Favières’s play Paul et Virginie, tremendously successful in France in the early 1790s, served as a model for the young playwright. Zhukovsky, apparently, was familiar with Karamzin’s review of this play, published in the 1791 volume of his Moskovskii zhurnal, to which the Bunin family subscribed. Karamzin noted a number of flaws in the dramatic version of the novel, but in general he considered it to be fine and touching. He especially liked the third act of the play, in which Virginia’s lover “magnanimously decides to offer up his life for her salvation.” Quoted in: XVIII vek 3 (1958): 273. Edmond de Favières abandoned the tragic end of the Saint-Pierre version of the novel. In the finale, Paul carried out his beloved in his arms and the final chorus (to music by Rodolphe Kreutzer) sang that the grief and tears of the heroes remained in the past and their tender hearts would now be forever united in the bounds of love. 52. Viktor Afanas’ev, Zhukovsky (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1986), p. 16. 53. Viktor Afanas’ev, “Rodnogo neba milyi tsvet” (Moscow: Detskaia literature, 1981), p. 9. 54. “Virginia had prepared, according to the custom of the country, rice and coffee boiled with spring water to which were added hot yams and young fresh cocoas. They had no table linen but its place was supplied by leaves of the plaintain tree, and the utensils they made use of were calbassia shells, split” Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia, from the French of Bernardin Saint-Pierre (1840), p. 52. 55. Paul & Virginia, with a memoir (1880), p. 99. 56. The visit of the Governor to the hut of Madame de la Tour symbolizes the fragility of the sentimental utopia of the novel: “[T]he continuation of the idyllic life of the valley depends on the tolerance—or protection—of an external power aligned with the authority of history, not nature.” Renata Wasserman, Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brazil, 1830–1930 (Ithaca,  N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 108. 57. In his 1789 introduction, Bernardin himself suggested the possibility of a theatrical adaptation of the novel (Paul et Virginie [1789], p. 30). On the theatrical theme in Paul et Virginie (Virginie and Paul perform a pantomime “in the manner of the negroes”) see Rezanov, p. 101. Theatricality of the novel is discussed in Litvinenko, “Poetika teatral’nosti v romane Bernardena de Sen-P’era Paul i Virginie,” Vestnik Universiteta Rossiiskoi akademii obrazovaniia 3 (2006): 53–60. On French theatrical “transformations” of the pastoral novel, see Mark Darlow, “Apprendre aux hommes à mourir’: The theatrical adaptations of Paul et Virginie,” European Studies: A Journal of European Culture, History and Politics

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17.1 (2001): 129–42. Bibliographical index of the plays and opera librettos derived from the novel see: Paul Toinet, Paul et Virginie: répertoire bibliographique et iconographique (Paris:  G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1963). 58. The generic model for the breakfast in the hut of Madame de la Tour is the description of a morning repast in “Daphne and Chloe.” See Richard F. Hardin, Love in a Green Shade: Idyllic Romances Ancient to Modern (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 36, 89–93. On the role of the communal meal in the chronotope of the idyll, see Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. M. Holquist and  C. Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 227. 59. Paul et Virginie (Londres 1789), p. 2. 60. Studies of Nature 3 (1808): 451. “Я желал cоединить кpаcоту пpиpоды между тpопиками c нpавcтвенною кpаcотою небольшого общеcтва, а cвеpх того пpедположил изобpазить многия и великия иcтинны и между пpочим ту, что наше cчаcтие cоcтоит в том, чтобы cледовать пpиpоде и добpодетели. Мне однако ж не надобно было выдумывать pомана для опиcания cчаcтливых cемейcтв. Я могу увеpить, что те, о котоpых говоpить буду, дейcтвительно cущеcтвовали.” Pavel i Virginiia (1793), p. 8. Translated by Aleksandra Podshivalova. Cited in Sipovskii, Iz istorii russkogo romana i povesti (St. Petersburg, 1903), part 1, p. 202. 61. Zhukovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, p. 96. 62. Ibid. Cf.: “His eyes, which were black, would have been too piercing, if the long eye-lashes with which they were rayed around, as by the finest touches of the pencil, had not tempered them with the most expressive softness.” Paul and Virginia: Translated from the French of J.H. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1818), p. 15. 63. On the doom facing the idyllic world of the heroes of Saint-Pierre’s novel, see the excellent article by Clifton Cherpack, “Paul et Virginie and the Myths of Death,” PMLA, 90 (1975): 247–55. 64. Paul and Virginia (1880), p. 55. 65. Ibid., p. 58. 66. Ibid., p. 58. 67. Ibid., p. 61. 68. Ibid., p. 61. 69. Apparently, until the middle of the 1800s Zhukovsky perceived the French writer as a superior master of the literary style. In his unpublished work of 1804 entitled “Examples of style, chosen from the best French prose writers and translated into Russian by Vasily Zhukovsky” [Пpимеpы cлога, выбpанные из лучших фpанцузcких пpозаичеcких пиcателей и пеpеведенные на pуccкий язык Ваcилием Жуковcким], the poet introduces

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several fragments from the works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, among which was also “Paul et Virginie.” Rezanov, pp. 513–61. 70. On the mythological basis of Saint-Pierre’s novel, see Cherpak, “Paul et Virginie.” 71. Charlotte Daniels, Subverting the Family Romance: Women Writers, Kinship Structures, and the Early French Novel (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000), p. 136. 72. The story of his love for a niece Maria Protasova (1793–1823) lies at the center of Zhukovsky’s Romantic biography. Between 1806 and 1811 Zhukovsky dedicated a cycle of lyric poems and tales to Maria and in 1812 proposed marriage. But her mother refused (Zhukovsky was, after all, their close relative, though not on paper). Unrequited and chaste love would become the main theme of Zhukovsky’s poetry for years to come and the correspondence between the lovers and their close friends and confidants would create a unique literary and cultural document, a Russian “Nouvelle Héloïse.” 73. These are the words of Charles Nodier on the archetype of Virginia. See further: “Innocent simplicity and pure-heartedness made their faces appear to be of the people, although, by elevated origin, angelic charms, it could sooner be related to the inspiration of the divine rather than the fabrication of the poet,” “On the types or originals in literature.” Cited in Sipovskii, Iz istorii russkogo romana i povesti, p. 307. 74. Maria’s mother and Zhukovsky’s stepsister, Ekaterina Protasova (1771–1848) did not give her daughter permission to marry the poet. Zhukovsky did all he could to prove to his sister that her religious fears and anxieties were nothing but dark prejudices and blasphemous obstacles to the happiness of two innocent loving beings. By the mid-1810s, this process of persuasion of the “Mother” turned into an intense public ideological campaign which involved Zhukovsky’s friends and relatives, as well as prominent religious figures, statesmen, and members of the Imperial family. 75. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 86–87. 76. See Cherpak, “Paul et Virginie,” pp. 250–251; Kurt Wiedermeier, La religion de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (Fribourg, Suisse: Editions universitaires, 1986). 77. Zhukovsky’s family, of course, understood the boy’s situation well. As the scholar justifiably indicates, the issue of his registration in the gentry register became a “family affair of the Bunin family.” I. I. Nekrasov, pp. 79–90. Already in June 1795, the future poet, before thanking the Yushkovs for their efforts, receives his certificate of nobility. In 1797, he receives his first property (a house, given to him by his other half-sister) and a pair of serf servants.

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78. A. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v 8 tomakh, vol. V, pp. 568–76. 79. See Toporov’s article on “Zhukovsky’s substrate” in Blok’s oeuvre “K retseptsii poezii Zhukovskogo v nachale XX veka. Blok i Zhukovskii: problema reministsentsii,” Russian Literature 4 (1977): 339–72. 80. Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, p. 401.

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Chapter 12

From the Prehistory of Russian Novel Theory Alexander Veselovsky and Fyodor Dostoevsky on the Modern Novel’s Roots in Folklore and Legend KATE H O LLA N D

Scholarly work on the subject of Alexander Veselovsky rarely, if ever, deals with the fact that the philologist and folklorist was an exact contemporary of the great Russian novelists Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, and that most of his philological work was done in the period of the generic hegemony of the Russian novel. At first sight this omission seems understandable; in his own scholarly work Veselovsky was more interested in examining archaic drama and medieval legends than the works of his own contemporaries. Yet like his more internationally renowned successor, Mikhail Bakhtin, Veselovsky used the medium of genre as a lens through which to discern similarities between his own literary and historical moment and those of the texts he studied, no matter how far removed they might be in time and space. In his own time, narrative fiction, and the novel in particular, stood at the very center of the generic panorama which he surveyed. Like Bakhtin in his “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” and “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” Veselovsky was interested in tracing the history of long narrative forms and their connection to the societies which created, adapted, borrowed, and stole them.1 Though the novel does not get much attention in Veselovsky’s Historical Poetics, it is the centerpiece of his 1886–1888 work, “From the History of the Novel and the Tale [Povest’],” in which he addressed the question of the novel’s history explicitly; that work is the culmination of detailed philological research undertaken during the previous fifteen years of 340

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research.2 My focus here will be on some of Veselovsky’s scholarship from the 1870s and early 1880s which forms the backdrop to “From the History of the Novel and the Tale [Povest’],” work which exactly coincides temporally with the period of the novel’s generic domination of the Russian literary scene. Having started out as a scholar of comparative folklore working on common motifs and topoi in medieval Jewish, Muslim, and Christian tales and legends, Veselovsky spent much of this middle part of his career examining the broader implications of these common narrative units. He traced the roots of Russian and European contemporary folk tales back not only to the apocrypha and religious legends of Byzantium and sagas and poetic cycles of medieval northern Europe, but also to stories and legends from Asia and the Middle East. How can we think about Veselovsky’s relationship to the Russian novel? Does the dominance of the novel as a genre play any role in shaping Veselovsky’s interests and preoccupations? Though the subjects of Veselovsky’s philological inquiry often seem arcane, very far from the pressing existential concerns of Russian modernity which motivate the novels of his famous contemporaries, his work on the history of narrative forms, in fact, raises many of the same questions and ideas which can be found in nineteenth-century Russian novels. Such questions include the relationship between folklore and literary works, the significance of Russia’s distinctive religious heritage for the history of Russian literature, and the extent to which Russian history was defined by continuity or rupture all emerge in Veselovsky’s writings on ancient and medieval legend, apocrypha, and oral folk epic. There are many intriguing parallels between Veselovsky’s scholarship and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novelistic philosophy as they both developed in the 1870s. The former’s studies on the afterlife of Christian legend within vernacular genres and popular religion appeared shortly before Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and find novelistic reflection within that work. A novel which takes the form of a trial of genres within which different narratives are “tested” for their ability to truthfully convey both the events surrounding the murder of Fyodor Karamazov and the complex nature of human morality itself, The Brothers Karamazov looks back to earlier Christian genres and popular and noncanonical religious narratives in its attempts to incorporate religious experience into the novelistic form. I am not concerned here with direct influence, though the work which Veselovsky published in The Messenger of Europe (Vestnik

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Evropy) in the 1870s must have been familiar to Dostoevsky, since from 1872 until his death in 1881 he was an active participant in the journalistic sphere, first editing a conservative journal called The Citizen (Grazhdanin) and then writing his own journal, A Writer’s Diary (Dnevnik Pisatelia). During this period he subscribed to most of the major literary journals, including The Messenger of Europe, and there are references in his letters to his familiarity with the Journal of the Ministry of National Enlightenment, where Veselovsky published most of his materials on Christian legend.3 He was familiar with the work of both of Veselovsky’s academic mentors, Alexander Pypin and Nikolai Tikhonravov, and viewed the former as his political adversary.4 I am interested rather in the connections between Veselovsky’s and Dostoevsky’s parallel concerns and their own literary-historical moment, the turbulent decade of the 1870s, a period of crisis when even the Russian novel itself began to be perceived as in decline. Dostoevsky’s creative responses to Russian modernity will here serve as a refracting lens through which Veselovsky’s works can be historicized. Looking at how those same historical circumstances shaped Dostoevsky’s creative vision will help to reveal their centrality for Veselovsky’s philological worldview. Working in two different disciplines, Dostoevsky and Veselovsky are revealed as men of very different political temperaments. Though they share a set of common concerns and preoccupations, these concerns are motivated by very different visions of Russia’s past and future roles in Europe and in the wider world. I will argue that Veselovsky’s urge to see continuity everywhere, whether that be in motifs found in early Christian apocryphal texts which recur in oral legends about defeated emperors, or plots of Byzantine novellas which return in nineteenth-century novels, finds a much more dogmatic parallel in Dostoevsky’s attempts to elide Russian modernity and return the nation to a pre-Petrine sense of totality. I will examine the significance for Veselovsky and Dostoevsky of Russia’s particular historical and religious circumstances, in particular the country’s appropriation of Byzantine religious and cultural legacy. This legacy carries a powerful sense of continuity which can provide the possibility of escaping the sense of fragmentation and rupture. I will examine Veselovsky’s and Dostoevsky’s analyses of the role played by vernacular literature and the oral tradition in the circulation of Byzantine plots and motifs. Finally, I will analyze some of the parallels between Veselovsky’s work on the prehistory of the novel as a genre and Dostoevsky’s incorporation of premodern, folk, and vernacular genres into his last novel, The

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Brothers Karamazov. These reveal his understanding of genre to be more historically grounded than Bakhtin allows in his analysis of the “genre memory” of Dostoevsky’s novels.5 Where Bakhtin connects his novels to Menippean satire, a tradition distant in time and space, about which Dostoevsky himself can have known nothing, I suggest here that his use of folk and vernacular genres reflects his generation’s broad interest in the cultural beliefs and narrative traditions of the narod.

From Comparative My thol ogy to the Study of Christian Legend Veselovsky began his studies under the guidance of Fyodor Buslaev, the philologist and folklorist who was Russia’s most famous representative of the so-called mythological school of Comparative Folklore, much influenced by the German scholars Jakob Grimm and Theodor Benfey.6 He then spent time in Germany and Italy and spent most of the 1860s devoting himself to the study of many different aspects of the Italian Renaissance, publishing on Boccaccio, Dante, Alberti, and Giordano Bruno.7 In the 1870s and early 1880s he returned to the field of comparative mythology and folklore, now studying the transmission and diffusion of a set of diverse narratives across a huge swath of Eurasia in the aftermath of the breakup of the Roman Empire, and the transformation and recapitulation of these narratives in far-flung corners of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East during the thousand-year history of the Byzantine Empire. In a series of works beginning with his 1872 doctoral dissertation, “From the History of the Literary Communication between East and West: Slavonic Legends of Solomon and Kitovras and Western Legends of Morolf and Merlin,” he brought some of the methodological assumptions which would later underlie his work on Historical Poetics to an obscure set of texts and problems which might at first sight seem to belong to the realm of comparative mythology.8 In the introduction to his dissertation, Veselovsky contextualizes his project within the remarkable scholarly insights about the correspondences between disparate national narrative traditions which have emerged in the last few decades, explaining that his own work builds on the insights of his illustrious predecessors, the philologists Grimm and Benfey; yet he emphasizes the new consideration given to historical factors in his own approach; he describes his work as a return to realism, after the Romantic excesses of his predecessors.9 Instead of resorting to the far-fetched speculations of his predecessors such as Max

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Müller, he will explore the historical phenomena which allowed for the transmission and diffusion of legends from as far east as India all the way through Asia, the Middle East, and Europe to Scandinavia and the Celtic fringe. These historical factors included such moments as Alexander the Great’s India campaign, which, he suggests, may explain the profusion of western legends, stories, tales, and myths into India as well as the other way round.10 Another important historical factor behind the flow of legends and stories from east to west, he asserts, was the Mongol invasion. Such periods of communication between East and West, which frequently took place at moments of historical transition and set in motion processes of dramatic social dislocation were, for Veselovsky, the ideal conditions for the migration and diffusion of narrative forms. Benfey had studied the migration patterns of the Sanskrit tale collection known as the Panchatantra.11 In his dissertation Veselovsky sought to apply this method to a series of European tales about the wisdom of King Solomon. He examined how elements of tales which had their origin in ancient Buddhist and Iranian literatures became attached to the name of King Solomon and to the apocryphal Jewish texts dealing with Solomon. He explored how these tales were inherited and transformed by heretical dualistic sects such as the South Slavic Bogomils, giving rise to new Christian apocrypha which proliferated in Byzantium and found their way into lists of forbidden books in the medieval period in both eastern and western Europe. Over the subsequent centuries, plots and motifs from these apocrypha filtered down to the people and found their way into popular legends and folk tales which persisted even into the middle of the nineteenth century. Veselovsky’s work on the Solomon tales helped to shape his scholarly interests for the rest of the 1870s and the beginning of the 1880s. He published a number of articles on comparative mythology and its method, fleshing out the theoretical basis which underlay his philological work, with much greater attention to the concrete historical conditions which allowed for processes of literary borrowing between East and West.12 In 1875–1877 he wrote a series of articles for the Journal of the Ministry of National Enlightenment entitled “Studies in the History of the Development of Christian Legend,” in which he explored the diffusion of Christian legends in the Byzantine period and their afterlife in contemporary European folklore.13 Using similar methodological assumptions as in his dissertation, he traced the circulation of such motifs and themes as the “legend of the returning Emperor,” the narrative of a long-dead Emperor returning to a people in their moment

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of greatest need to unify and unite them under a common cause.14 In “Studies in the History of the Development of Christian Legend,” as well as in an 1875 article, “Legends about Constantine,” he showed the origins of this legend in stories of the return of Constantine the Great, and he explored how it was recapitulated in the popular imagination in relation to such figures as Charlemagne, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon.15 He showed its connections to its obverse narrative, that of an Emperor who is suspected of being, or turns out to be, the Antichrist, a legend written down in the tenth century by Abbot Adso of Cluny, but with roots in the pre-Christian Sybilline Oracles.16 This legend became associated with various dualistic heresies, flourishing first within early Christian Gnostic sects, then being circulated in the early Middle Ages by dualistic sects in southeastern Europe, and finally becoming popular amongst sectarians in Russia after epochs of church and state modernization.17 This legend also continued to circulate well into the nineteenth century, becoming attached to such figures as Napoleon, his grandson, Napoleon III, Ivan the Terrible, and Peter the Great. Veselovsky explored the importance of the “Returning Emperor” narrative as part of the translatio imperii, the transfer of imperial, religious, and symbolic authority from Rome to Constantinople, and then to Moscow and other cities in the Russian lands (he took a particular interest in the narrative tradition associated with the claims to religious and imperial authority of the Russian city of Novgorod, and its instantiation in the so-called Legend of the White Cowl).18 These works by Veselovsky take in an awe-inspiring quantity of diverse material from a myriad of different historical contexts and narrative traditions. What they have in common is the search for narrative continuity reaching back almost two thousand years and a historicist commitment to the search for origins. Veselovsky’s philological motivations and assumptions, no less than his theory of Historical Poetics, can be seen as having been shaped by the unique circumstances of his own historical and literary-historical moment, the era of dramatic social, political, cultural, and hermeneutic change set into motion by the modernizing reforms carried out in the 1860s by Tsar Alexander II. Directing all his attention at the grand social and political changes of other epochs, whether the period of turbulence following the breakup of the Roman Empire or the fall of Constantinople, Veselovsky never comments directly on the seismic historical changes affecting his own society. We may, however, probe Veselovsky’s elusive historical motivations through an examination of the more explicit historical concerns

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of his contemporaries, particularly Dostoevsky, whose letters and notebooks provide perhaps the most comprehensive commentary on the decade of the 1870s and its cultural and intellectual reverberations of any Russian literary figure.19

Searching for Continuity in a Time of Rupture The 1870s was a crucial period in Russia’s experience of modernity. It was the decade in which the transformation of society as a result of the sustained modernization brought by the reforms of Tsar Alexander II in the 1860s and early 1870s really began to be felt. The reforms, which began with the Emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and included the large-scale restructuring of the realms of the judiciary, local government, army, education and censorship, taken together constitute the most significant sustained period of social and political transformation in nineteenth-century Russia.20 The Emancipation, which liberated those who had been enserfed as part of Peter the Great’s vision of a grand service state, was widely interpreted as a rupture in Russian history; Dostoevsky described it as the end of the so-called Petersburg period of Russian history, the era of westernization and Europeanization which had been set in motion by the Reforms of Peter the Great.21 Though the liberation of the serfs was welcomed by many, conservative critics of Alexander’s reforms saw them as instigating the same processes of social and moral atomization, fragmentation, and individuation which they saw afflicting the West. By the 1870s views on the reforms had hardened. It was not only extreme reactionaries and conservatives who associated the reforms with a sense of disintegration and decline. Dostoevsky’s notes for an 1872 article for The Citizen detail the problems he saw as besetting contemporary Russia: the social and spiritual collapse of the gentry and the cultural forms and values they represented; the moral degradation of the intelligentsia; the loss of any common beliefs and values; the loss of respect for institutions such as the gentry and the church; and perhaps most important, the loss of a common understanding or language amongst the citizens of the country.22 In the notebooks to his 1875 novel The Adolescent, he wrote, “The foundations of society are cracking under the pressure of the revolution brought about by the reforms.”23 In the writings of Slavophiles and conservatives such as Dostoevsky, Alexander’s reforms became associated with the two other significant

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moments of rupture in modern Russian history: Peter the Great’s reforms of the Russian state at the turn of the eighteenth century, which caused some to view the tsar as the Antichrist, and the seventeenthcentury church reforms of Patriarch Nikon, rejected by a large number of the faithful, especially peasants, who preferred to remain with the old beliefs. These three sets of reforms became inscribed into a lapsarian grand narrative of Russian history. The Petrine reforms, which had reshaped Russian institutions according to western European models, had created a deep division between the educated classes, who had followed the Westernizing path of Peter and his reformers, and the Russian people, or narod. This division had defined Russian life for the hundred and fifty years following the Petrine reforms, as the two halves of Russian society developed in isolation from each other, each evolving its own cultural and philosophical models, growing gradually further apart and rendering any hope of reintegration ever more improbable. While the educated classes developed an ever greater dependency on western European models, becoming estranged from Russian national life and values, the Russian people became involved with heretical cults and sects and developed misshapen and superstitious ideologies which bore little relation to church teachings. Yet this lapsarian narrative gave rise to an opposing interpretation of Alexander II’s reforms. Because they brought to an end the Petrine tendency of Europeanization, the reforms also brought hope to Slavophiles such as Dostoevsky, suggesting the promise of the return of an epoch of lost unity before the reforms of Peter the Great, when the Russian people had maintained a common identity and sense of community.24 In the early 1860s Dostoevsky viewed the reforms as heralding the final erasure of the Petrine schism between the educated classes and the narod, which would make possible the coming together of the aristocracy and the people through the Word of the Orthodox God. His hopes gradually became eroded during the subsequent years as events in Russian social and political life conspired to demonstrate that the values and beliefs of the Westernized intelligentsia and the narod were becoming, if anything, more estranged from one another. Dostoevsky’s own journals, Time and Epoch, chronicled the intelligentsia’s increasing radicalization and instances of social breakdown amongst the peasantry. In response, Dostoevsky began to develop a utopian historiographical vision which held that the West’s social and spiritual bankruptcy would soon result in its decline and destruction, while the

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Russian intelligentsia and nobility would eventually relinquish their obsession with western European ideas and values and embrace the Orthodox collective consciousness of the narod, making possible the social and spiritual reintegration of the Russian people. He continued to believe that the Reforms represented the possibility of bringing to an end the “Petersburg period” of Russian history, but now deliverance was envisioned not as the reconciliation of two different sets of traditions but as the triumph of the Christian ideal preserved in the religious worldview of the Russian people, which would bring about national salvation and spiritual renewal. It would eventually come to save even western Europe from the processes of social disintegration and atomization. He came to envision the disintegration of the contemporary moment as a necessary precondition for the spiritual redemption, social regeneration, and national reintegration which would result from the wholehearted embrace of the image of the Russian Christ. This salvatory vision can be seen as an attempt to bypass and deny modernity itself; it sees in premodern Russia a unique spiritual and cultural organic entity which can inspire a new path for the country in the post-reform era. When contrasted with Dostoevsky’s resistance to Russian modernity, the longing for continuity and the sense of security provided by narrative recapitulations throughout the longue durée that permeates Veselovsky’s work can be seen as an alternative and far more benign response to the discourse of historical rupture which proliferated in Russian cultural life in the 1870s and 1880s. It offers a gradualist model of the history of narrative forms which stands in stark contrast to traditional accounts of Russian literary development which saw the tradition as emerging fully formed in the Petrine period of Russian history. Veselovsky’s tracing of motifs and legends over the longue durée appeals to an understanding of the deep structure of the past akin to Bakhtin’s “great time” (bol’shoe vremia), a sense of a shared historical experience embodied in the narrative forms of the narod.25 It offers a respite from the familiar patterns and endless iterations of Russian exceptionalism which Dostoevsky ventriloquizes, allowing Russia’s literary and historical past to be fully integrated with that of Europe and Asia. It is a philological extension of the liberal Westernism that was the generally accepted “tendency” of The Messenger of Europe, a “tendency” to which Dostoevsky could not have been more opposed.

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The Rus sian Novel and the Modern Age This widespread sense of historical rupture could not but affect the dominant genre of the age of reform, the novel. The Russian novel of course came into being in a social landscape very different from that of its French and German counterparts. Where the continental European novel had emerged out of the historical rupture of the French Revolution, its formal dynamism shaped by the sense of social fragmentation that came with the beginnings of the transition to capitalism, the Russian novel had come of age in a period of relative historical stability, shaped exclusively by the social and cultural activity of one estate, the nobility. Where in the West the novel articulated the desires and fears of the newly emerging bourgeoisie, in Russia the nobility provided the genre with its themes and preoccupations. The different circumstances of their rise created very different generic trajectories for these two novelistic traditions. Having emerged in an era of rapid social transition, the continental European novel was forced from the very beginning to respond to the challenges of modernity. Its socially mobile hero was poised on the boundary of old and new worlds, his ambitions shaped by the new possibilities brought into play by the French Revolution, but his achievements curbed by the remnants of the old world still in place. In the tension between social constraints and individual aspirations the genre formally embodied the longing for a world before social disintegration, differentiation, and dynamism, and the simultaneous awareness that such a world was lost forever. It was, in Lukács’s words, “the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.”26 By contrast, the Russian novel was shaped from birth by a century’s alienation of a social estate which knew little of the cultural traditions and social practices of their compatriots, whose social values and political beliefs were largely inherited from the West. It articulated the political and social aspirations of the alienated nobility and intelligentsia, and represented the displacement of these aspirations onto the closed world of the domestic sphere. Rooted in the patriarchal society of the country estate, or in city salons frequented by the cosmopolitan gentry and the deracinated intelligentsia, the Russian novel in its mid-nineteenth-century incarnation knew nothing of the social mobility that came with mass migrations from the countryside to the city. Yet early in the period of its generic ascendency, it was called upon

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to respond to a period of intense social change unparalleled in modern Russian history. At the same time the Russian novel has also been inscribed into the familiar eschatological narrative which so dominates analyses of Russian history and culture. It is characterized as a genre which arose suddenly, emerging fully formed at the beginning of the nineteenth century from the pen of Alexander Pushkin. Traditional accounts follow Apollon Grigor’ev in suggesting that modern Russian literature began with Pushkin, that it has no past before the nineteenth century.27 Neither Dostoevsky nor Veselovsky was willing to accept this point of view. Each was, for very different reasons, invested in searching out the novel’s history and prehistory beyond its normal limits. Dostoevsky was keenly aware of the Russian novel’s particular history. At the end of the 1860s, when he had already written Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, and was becoming known for the dark and misshapen protagonists who would inspire the nickname given to him by critics, “the poet of the underground,” he began to criticize his fellow novelists Tolstoy and Turgenev for their Westernized aristocratic heroes who were alienated from their Russian identity.28 He came to associate the Russian novelistic tradition with the worldview of the Westernized Russian nobility who had dominated the period of Russian cultural and social life up to the 1860s, but whose outlook and style of life had now become increasingly outmoded and irrelevant for the new society coming into existence in the wake of the reforms. Neither his vision of social disintegration and spiritual collapse nor his hopes for a society redeemed and unified by the religious faith of the people offered any room for the alienated Russian aristocrats of the traditional Russian novel. His own novels focused on a society in transition, on moments of struggle, flux, development and change, in the shortfall between the ideal and the reality, in the hero’s failure to achieve his dream, yet in the continuing potential of that dream to fire up the hero’s imagination and ambition. While The Adolescent and many other works of the 1870s reflect Dostoevsky’s understanding of how the novel as a genre might respond to rapid historical change, several of his works reflect the opposing formal impulse: the desire to recover the novel’s lost prehistory, redeem its fallen form, and remake it into a vehicle for representing his utopian vision of messianic nationalism and of the salvatory faith of the Russian people. This act of generic redemption is enabled by the infusion of popular and vernacular genres into the novel, thus opening up

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the form to the voices, ideas, and beliefs of the narod. This tendency first made itself felt in his unfinished projects of 1868–1871, Atheism and The Life of a Great Sinner, in which Dostoevsky proposes melding generic conventions from hagiography onto the structure of the Bildungsroman, opening up the possibility of a new kind of national epic which could threaten the novel’s generic dominance. It achieved fruition in The Brothers Karamazov.

Channels of Continuity: The Byzantine Legacy in the Oral Tradition Both Dostoevsky and Veselovsky searched for evidence of the novel’s prehistory in a most unexpected place: in the narrative and religious forms bequeathed to Russia by Byzantium and passed down amongst the narod through the oral tradition. Both locate continuities and connections within the deep time of Russian social and cultural life, seeing a living link to the distant past in the distinctive role played by the literary, cultural, and religious legacy of Byzantium in Russia’s historical development. One of the central tenets underlying many of Veselovsky’s works of the 1870s and 1880s is the significance of Byzantium as the cultural crossroads linking Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In his work on the Solomon tales and in his “Studies in the History of the Development of Christian Legend,” he examined the importance of the Byzantine apocryphal tradition in shaping a whole set of diverse narratives, from apocryphal gospel motifs which subsequently entered folk tradition by way of dualistic heresies, to the symbolic translation of imperial power from Rome to Constantinople. He also wrote a number of articles in the 1870s on Byzantine epic and, foreshadowing Bakhtin, on the Greek Novel.29 He argued that Byzantine works had profoundly influenced later literature not only in Russia, where religious and historical ties to the Byzantine Empire lived on in popular narrative traditions as well as in the translatio imperii, the doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome after the fall of Constantinople, but also in western Europe, where writers such as Boccaccio unconsciously borrowed from the Greek novel and the Eastern frame tale.30 Veselovsky argued that Byzantium played a crucial role as the transitional zone between East and West, as a central cultural corridor through which narratives flowed in both directions. Where the Byzantine legacy unites East and West in Veselovsky’s cosmopolitan vision, for Dostoevsky it is proof of Russia’s cultural and

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historical distinctiveness and part of a nationalist messianic argument demonstrating Russia’s ability to transcend the social and political disintegration of the West. In the late 1860s he became much interested in the ideas of the Pan-Slavist thinker and theorist, Nikolai Danilevsky, which helped give concrete political shape to his somewhat indistinct Slavophile vision of Russian cultural and spiritual superiority. Danilevsky’s 1869 work Russia and Europe argued that the phase of European domination of the world historical stage was over and that the Slavic civilization, with Russia at its head, was soon to begin its own phase of preeminence.31 Danilevsky took the logic of Slavophile historiography to its ultimate conclusion, arguing that Constantinople must be invaded by a Slavic army and made into the capital of a new Slavic Empire. In this way the translatio imperii could finally be fulfilled; Constantinople would fall under Russian influence, conferring on Russia the sacred authority of Rome by way of Byzantium. Dostoevsky’s nationalist principles were even more unshakeable than those of his mentor, Danilevsky; where the latter conceived of a rejuvenated Constantinople as a free city belonging to the inhabitants of the world, Dostoevsky expressed the view in a piece in his 1876 Writer’s Diary entitled “A Utopian Conception of History,” that it should belong to Russia alone, thus allowing the Russian Empire to claim the mantle of Byzantium.32 Pan-Slavist grandstanding notwithstanding, it is Dostoevsky’s revelation of the continuing role played by Byzantine cultural and religious heritage in the life and imagination of the Russian people which is most important for his own artistic development. In a letter of May 1869, which he wrote to his friend the poet Apollon Maikov, Dostoevsky sketched out a project (to be realized by Maikov) for a series of byliny or folk epics depicting significant moments in Russian history.33 He envisages such moments as instances of an almost cosmic insight, points at which Russia’s destiny appears “to be concentrated and expressed wholly, suddenly, in its entirety.”34 These points provide a panoramic view of Russia’s historical and spiritual mission, serving as hermeneutic keys opening up an epic vision of Russian history. Perhaps the most important of these historical episodes is the fall of Constantinople to the Turks and the corresponding transfer of the power and significance of Orthodoxy over to the Russia of Grand Prince (later Tsar) Ivan III. The centrality of this episode reveals Dostoevsky’s vision as based within the Third Rome doctrine. He even invokes one of the central images of the translatio imperii, the icon of the Blachernitissa virgin,

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the intercessory protectress of Constantinople, which reappeared centuries after the city’s fall and was taken to Moscow and later enshrined in the Dormition Cathedral. Dostoevsky imagined that the Grand Prince would be depicted in a wooden hut, rather than a palace, “and the great idea of Russia’s significance for all of Orthodoxy is transferred to this wooden hut and the first stone of its leadership in the East is laid.”35 He then predicts the regeneration of Christianity with the PanSlav Orthodox idea after the triumph first of Catholicism and then of atheism has precipitated the West’s decline. This vision of simplicity pregnant with messianic promise would be counterposed to a ballad representing the artistic splendor of western Europe during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which would carry dark intimations of the social and spiritual degeneration that lay ahead for the West. Having originally planned the series to end with a depiction of Peter the Great, Dostoevsky decided instead that it should continue on to the Emancipation of the serfs, to the self-imposed European exile of the Russian nobility and the infection of western Europe with the ideas of socialism and atheism. Taken together, these scenes are supposed to demonstrate the divine intentionality that Dostoevsky was beginning to believe governed the unfolding of world history. The fact that this projected work was to take the form of folk poetry is far from accidental. Along with his fellow Slavophiles, Dostoevsky believed that the religious and aesthetic traditions of medieval Rus’, which had been inherited in large part from Byzantium, were preserved in the cultural memory of the narod. The idea that the narod represents an unbroken religious tradition dating back to Byzantium is present in Dostoevsky’s writings from at least 1860, when he emphasized in the opening manifesto to his journal Time the importance of the role played in the coming process of national reconciliation by the Old Believers, those who had resisted Nikon’s Church reforms in the seventeenth century.36 In his writings of the 1870s there is an increasing awareness of the unbroken narrative traditions of the narod. Folk narratives find their way into the series of articles he wrote for The Citizen, “A Writer’s Diary.” In his article “Vlas,” Dostoevsky recounts a story he claims to have heard from a monastery elder, one peasant’s confession of his participation in a contest with another to commit the most shocking act. The other peasant proposes that he should shoot the Eucharist. On the point of committing the sacrilegious act the peasant has a vision of Christ on the cross, falls into a dead faint, and comes to the elder to confess, sure of his own damnation.

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Dostoevsky uses this story both as the basis for a meditation on the Russian people’s capacity for redemption and as the pretext for an excursion into the fictional mode as he imagines the peasants’ psychological motivations. He emphasizes the unpredictability and potentiality of the narod, characterizing the Russian peasant as a bogatyr, a half-mythical character from the bylina or oral epic: “Our contemporary Vlas is quickly changing. The same seething ferment is going on in the depths where he lives as it is higher up, where we dwell, as it has since February 19. Our bogatyr has awakened and is stretching his arms; perhaps he will have the urge to go on a spree, to dash off somewhere beyond the limit. People say that he’s already gone on a spree.”37 Revealed as a bogatyr, the Russian peasant offers a fallen Russia not just spiritual salvation through Orthodoxy, but also narrative salvation through a return to epic totality. Oral epic offers an alternative generic model for the Russian novel itself, a heroic vision of Russian nationality which can reintegrate a fragmented world. At various moments in A Writer’s Diary, Dostoevsky seems to be attempting to conceive of a literary form which might take its inspiration from the Russian peasantry, their beliefs, and their religious and cultural history. However, it was not until The Brothers Karamazov that this embryonic project would finally take shape. The bylina, the genre with which the figure of the bogatyr is most closely associated, was becoming a popular object of study for Russian folklorists and philologists in the 1870s and 1880s. It was only in 1860s that folklorists had discovered that the oral epic tradition continued to exist in isolated areas on the fringes of the Russian Empire.38 They found plots and characters from medieval historical and literary texts recurring in bylinas still being sung in their own time. Veselovsky himself began to study byliny in earnest at the beginning of the 1880s and brought many of his earlier areas of expertise to bear on the oral epics, explaining their recycling of plots and motifs from Eastern tales and legends as following the routes of traders and invading forces, as well as revealing the important role played by religious dissenters and heretics in their diffusion.39 Beginning in 1879, Veselovsky published a series of articles on a genre which overlapped with the bylina: oral folk poetry on religious themes, “Research in the Area of Russian Religious Verse.”40 This broad generic category included stories on biblical, apocryphal and hagiographic themes, as well as medieval religious legends, which often included folk or popular elements and often contained echoes of syncretistic beliefs. In these verses Saint Georgii became the

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folk hero Yegor the Brave, Saint Nikolai became Nikolai the Wonderworker, who was often depicted accompanying Christ on pilgrimages through Russia, and the prophet Elijah became Ilya, who rode in a chariot across the sky sending thunderbolts down to earth.41 This generic tradition exemplified Veselovsky’s ideas about the migrations of plots and motifs from written texts into the oral tradition, from high religious texts into the vernacular. In his articles he examined the transition of these motifs from apocrypha to the oral tradition and the importance of syncretism and heresies in effecting these migrations. Veselovsky’s work on folk poetry and Christian legend finds remarkable echoes in The Brothers Karamazov. In his last novel, Dostoevsky made extensive use of folk and vernacular genres, particularly popular stories and legends associated with the oral tradition. Rejecting the western European model of the Bildungsroman with its alienated hero, he created a work which incorporates religious experience and religious narratives into the novelistic form. The Brothers Karamazov is an attempt to reveal, transform, and extend the novel’s own genre possibilities by engaging with, and borrowing from, the rich generic heritage of Christian legend. Dostoevsky uses some of the same genres examined by Veselovsky in his “Studies in the History of the Development of Christian Legend,” and his “Research in the Area of Russian Religious Verse,” exploring several different strands of Christian legend including apocrypha, hagiography, and folk legends.42 He even structures these genres into the novel. Fyodor’s three sons, Dmitry, Ivan and Alyosha, each give voice to three different belief systems, three different interpretations of the moral makeup of man, couched in three different generic forms: folk legend, apocrypha, and hagiography respectively. Alyosha experiences a moment of transfiguration modeled according to the conventions of hagiographic legend, and hagiographic discourse flows into the novel itself in the chapter “Cana of Galilee.” Ivan borrows from the diverse forms of apocryphal legend for the ideological and aesthetic underpinnings of his “Rebellion” and “Grand Inquisitor.” And after his arrest and during his incarceration Dmitry takes on the ambivalent moral dimensions of the hero of folk legend. Interrogation of these different kinds of legends and worldviews opens up a new perspective not only onto the relationships between the Karamazovs, but also onto the genre assumptions of the novel itself and its own representation of religious experience. One of the central narratives framing Ivan Karamazov’s “Rebellion” and “Grand Inquisitor” is the apocryphon called The Mother of God

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Visits the Torments.43 Byzantine in origin, the apocryphon was transmitted to the Russian lands in a South Slavic translation in the early medieval period, and was included in two collections of apocryphal texts edited by Veselovsky’s teachers Tikhonravov and Pypin.44 The legend recounts how the Mother of God is led through hell by the Archangel Michael. Touched by the fate of the sinners, especially those who have been consigned to a burning lake and “forgotten by God,” she asks pardon from God for all those whose suffering she has witnessed. God refuses to release them, pointing to Christ’s wounds and asking how he can forgive what has been done to his Son. The Mother of God then asks all the Saints and Apostles to pray with her for their absolution, and God agrees to a cessation of their torments once a year for the period from Good Friday to Pentecost. The legend helps to frame Ivan’s narration of his anecdotes on the suffering of children as a symbolic representation of the apocryphal subgenre, the tour of hell.45 With his graphic description of the children’s suffering, Ivan leads Alyosha through the circles of hell just as the Archangel Michael leads the Mother of God in the apocryphon. The Mother of God Visits the Torments then serves Ivan as a kind of biblical thematic motif before his “poem,” “Grand Inquisitor,” implying that both in its ethical and in its generic foundations the Mother of God prefigures his own work.46 With its presentation of the sufferings of sinners in hell, the apocryphon provides an interesting segue from Ivan’s refusal to accept the sufferings of the innocent and his denial of the necessity of suffering as atonement for original sin in “Rebellion,” to the Grand Inquisitor’s complete negation of suffering, and his subsequent inversion of the Christian moral paradigm. Framed within Ivan’s narrative, it is God’s intransigence which is stressed, his merciless insistence on the continued sufferings of the sinners in hell as atonement for their persecution of Christ, which finds both its mirror and its antagonist in the obduracy of the Grand Inquisitor. As he paraphrases the plot of the apocryphon for Alyosha, he dwells on those forgotten by God. God’s plea, “How can I forgive his tormentors,” echoes the plea Ivan himself makes to Alyosha on behalf of the tortured children. The legend illustrates a suffering which will no longer exist under the rule of the Grand Inquisitor. Framed within the novel as a whole, however, the legend carries altogether different resonances. When we read it alongside the novel’s other narratives of sin, expiation and redemption, then the meaning of the apocryphon is transformed. It functions as an illustration of the infinite mercy of God, and of the continuing possibility of moral regen-

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eration, even after the last possible moment, and even from within the flames of hellfire itself. The clash of these two framings of the apocryphon immediately throws into question the ethical and narrative implications of Ivan’s own apocryphal legend. The apocryphon is closely related to another legend which seems to have its roots in apocryphal tradition, but which was frequently recounted in both prose and verse forms amongst the Russian peasants over the course of several centuries and became a staple of Russian folklore, sometimes even used as a charm. That is “The Dream of the Most Holy Mother of God,” and it is the subject of one of Veselovsky’s articles on Christian legend.47 Veselovsky argues that the legend has its source in the apocryphal Gospel of Mary and he connects it with other western European variants. Here again we find Veselovsky reintegrating Russian peasant culture into the European mainstream, bridging the gulf between Russia and its Western neighbors which Dostoevsky was so eager to emphasize. For Veselovsky, the study of narrative forms allows for the possibility of building connections, of returning to a common origin. Like his predecessors Müller and Grimm, he was motivated by the desire to unite disparate cultures and languages, to use narrative forms as a way of overcoming differences between traditions. For Dostoevsky narratives circulating amongst the Russian peasantry were proof of their uniqueness, superiority, and difference from the alienated masses who could be found on the barricades of western European cities. “Grand Inquisitor” is scattered with references to apocryphal narratives, as well as to the Revelation of John, which, though it is canonical, retains more affinity with apocrypha than it does to the rest of the New Testament. The Grand Inquisitor himself identifies with the “great prophet” John, intoxicated by the wisdom and insight of his own revelation. Though its central metaphor, the devil’s three temptations of Christ in the wilderness, is taken from the synoptic Gospels, “Grand Inquisitor” locates itself outside of the biblical canon. The Grand Inquisitor’s retelling and analysis of the temptation narrative is structured as an apocryphal Gospel in its own right, a restructuring of the meaning of the temptations in the light of the subsequent history of man and his suffering, a retrospective revisiting of the biblical events.48 With its vision of a world where the church has thrown in its lot with the devil, “Grand Inquisitor” evokes one of the most revolutionary of the medieval heresies, that of the bogomils, which itself played a significant role in the shaping of many medieval Russian apocrypha. Here again

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Dostoevsky is reflecting some of the same preoccupations as Veselovsky, whose interest in the bogomils has already been recounted. Many of the apocrypha, which Dostoevsky makes reference to in The Brothers Karamazov, were the sources for plots and motifs that entered the oral tradition amongst the peasantry and were reconceived as folk legends. This process of narrative recycling, an important object of study for Veselovsky, takes place even within the novel itself. Dmitry Karamazov is associated with the genre of folk legend, but this association only becomes clear in the second half of the novel, following the murder of Fyodor, when he becomes a suspect. Having narrowly avoided giving in to temptation and killing his father, Dmitry sets off to look for Grushenka in the nearby village of Mokroye. He travels in a troika driven by the coachman Andrei. He asks the coachmen whether he believes he will go to hell. Andrei replies by telling him the following folk legend: “You see sir, when the Son of God was crucified on the cross and died, he went straight from the cross to hell and freed all the sinners suffering there. And hell groaned because it thought it wouldn’t have any more sinners coming. And the Lord said to hell: “Do not groan, O hell, for all kinds of mighty ones, rulers, great judges and rich men will come to you from all parts, and you will be as full as ever, unto ages of ages, till the time when I come again.”49 The editors of the Academy Edition reference the legend first of all in terms of the “harrowing of hell” apocrypha where, following the crucifixion but before the resurrection, Christ frees sinners from hell.50 They go on to suggest that the source may be a piece of religious folk poetry, a variation of the “Dream of the Most Holy Mother of God,” studied by Veselovsky.51 The motif of a newly resurrected Christ setting the sinners free from hell can also be found in one of the folk legends in Alexander Afanas’ev’s collection, no. 15, “Solomon the Wise.”52 Solomon the Wise is a common character in the folk legends, primarily because of his presence in so many apocrypha.53 In Afanas’ev’s legend, Christ releases all the other sinners from hell, but leaves Solomon there, since he is wise enough to get out on his own initiative. Asked by a devil why he is measuring hell, Solomon replies that he is intending to build a monastery and a church right there in hell. The frightened devil runs to tell Satan, who releases Solomon forthwith.

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The legend demonstrates an unexpectedly dualistic attitude toward miracles. Hell is anthropomorphized, groaning as it is emptied of sinners. God here is forced to sympathize with hell, to promise it recompense in the form of the authority figures that will be sent there in their stead. On the one hand, the emptying of hell is testament to the infinite compassion of Christ, who, even during the Passion, before his resurrection, redeems sinning humanity. On the other it demonstrates the enduring existence of hell itself, of the continuation of sin, and of the unchanging nature of the occupants of the earth, and thus offers a profoundly ambivalent model of sin, expiation, and redemption. The sinners are not released because they have repented, but because of Christ’s compassion. The miracle of the “harrowing of hell” in its folk legend incarnation is built on novelistic rather than doctrinal foundations. The genre of the folk legend fuses the earthly with the divine; though inspired by apocryphal motifs and biblical images it is grounded in the earth, and projects an image of man as greedy and generous, wily and naïve, selfish and selfless: as broad as the Karamazovs. Despite its spatial and temporal configurations, its frequent representations of heaven and hell, the folk legend is concerned not with beginnings and ends, but with the essentially unchanging cycle of life. It thus provides a way to narrate religious experience within the generic terms of the novel, without impinging upon the novelistic hero’s ability to carry on the endless process of self-definition through narrative. The folk legend provides the model for Dmitry Karamazov’s subsequent moral and spiritual development within the novel. The vision of hell instantiated in the folk legend here permeates the novelistic structure. Identifying with the worldview expressed in Andrei’s legend, Dmitry enters into his own process of redemption. His cross-examination is played out against the background of the model of hell instantiated in the legend. The three chapters that recount his interrogation are entitled “The Soul’s Journey through the Torments” after the forty days of torments which the soul was forced to endure after death according to popular Orthodox belief. As Dostoevsky himself points out in a letter to his editor, He experiences a purification of the heart and conscience under the storm of misfortune and false accusation. He accepts with his soul punishment not for what he did, but for the fact that he was so hideous that he could and did want to commit

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the crime of which he will be falsely accused through a judicial error.54 He then goes on to explain this behavior within the terms of a Russian folk proverb: It’s a thoroughly Russian personality: if the thunder doesn’t rumble, the peasant won’t cross himself.55 Just like the forty days of torments, the interrogation serves as a moral test for Dmitry, forcing him to undergo diverse kinds of suffering and humiliation, from insults to Grushenka, to being forced to take off all his clothes, to being forced to disclose his “great secret.” Incorporating oral narratives into his novel allows Dostoevsky to open the genre up to the narrative and religious experience of the narod, to free it from the burden of expressing the alienation of a Westernized noble estate and transform it into a redeemed genre appropriate for the unified, transfigured new Russian society which he hoped would soon come into existence. With the aid of its incorporated narratives, The Brothers Karamazov proposes a model of human moral potentiality which can be set against the Grand Inquisitor’s view of man as weak and incapable of living up to the gift of freedom. As alienated, rootless characters such as Dmitry Karamazov and Grushenka become aware of the possibilities of their own moral spirituality as expressed within the formal contours of genres such as the folk legend, they become able to liberate themselves from their own tragic trajectories and voluntarily embrace an open future. Here genre becomes the arena within which Dostoevsky can finally bring to bear his utopian messianic vision. Ironically, and counter to his own intentions, the effect of Dostoevsky’s use of folk and vernacular genres in The Brothers Karamazov is to create a narrative universe which could have been taken straight out of the pages of one of Veselovsky’s studies of narrative forms. In its use of the diverse genres of the legend, The Brothers Karamazov achieves the status of a work of religious polyphony that navigates the normally tense spaces between doctrinal/canonical Orthodoxy and popular religion. It celebrates Orthodox Christianity not as canon law, as an established set of moral laws which must be followed, but as a rich repository of narrative forms. This is a vision to which Veselovsky himself could have subscribed. Both Veselovsky’s articles and Dostoevsky’s novel show how legend epitomizes the creativity and literary

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potentiality contained in religious narrative. Both Veselovsky and Dostoevsky demonstrate and glory in its ability to continually generate new variants. Taking its building blocks from the canonical models of narrative forms in the Scriptures, Christian legend fills in the gaps in the biblical accounts, explores the narrative reverberations that result from the transposition of Scripture into an idiomatic key. Whether through the Byzantine lives of saints which made sacred virtue tangible through its instantiation within the life of an individual, the medieval apocrypha which sought to illuminate the darker corners of the Christian doctrines, or the nineteenth-century folk legends which recast the values of the biblical accounts in the light of the social values of the peasantry, legend has always provided the narrative means by which Christianity has become intelligible to the majority of its followers. It is precisely in this way that legend is revealed as the original ancestor of the modern novel, an encyclopedic, multilayered, heterogeneric, heterodox form which mixes together high and low registers, written and oral traditions, sacred and profane subjects. If Dostoevsky’s grand account of the prehistory of the novel as a genre is expressed in The Brothers Karamazov, then Veselovsky’s is articulated in his 1886–1888 magnum opus, “From the History of the Novel and the Tale.” In this study, Veselovsky framed the work he had done during the previous decade on the Byzantine tale as part of a broad attempt to trace the history of the modern novel. The introduction of this work, “A History or Theory of the Novel,” points toward an understanding of the generic peculiarities of the novel in terms of its heterodox ancestry, the complex interplay between the written and oral genres of the Middle Ages.56 Veselovsky’s works of the 1870s are devoted to the narratives produced in that period by the tensions between the strict doctrines of the church and the heterogeneous beliefs of the people. This is also the space in which Dostoevsky takes part in contemporary genre debates within the novelistic form, and in that process, structures into his own novel the prehistory of its genre, its first tentative steps through the richly heterogeneric verbal culture of medieval Russia. For Dostoevsky, the legacy of the modernization of the socalled Great Reforms of the 1860s in Russia was an overwhelming sense of social fragmentation and dislocation which could only be resisted by means of a radical rethinking of the problem of literary form and particularly of novelistic form. Looking back at the novel’s prehistory was, for him, a way of eliding the lapsarian tendencies of the genre in which he worked and a way of elaborating a myth of origins which

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could bring the Russian novel out of its historical impasse and open it up to the experiences of the Russian peasantry. Though the stakes for Veselovsky are academic, he too seeks an escape from the fragmentary and dislocated experiences of Russian modernity through the reassurances of the long history of the narrative forms he studies.

Notes 1. M. M. Bakhtin, “Iz predystorii romannogo slova,” “Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane,” in Sobranie sochinenii, ed. S. G. Bocharov et al., 6 vols. (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1996–), 3:513–51, 340–512. See the English translations in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed.  M. Holquist, trans.  C. Emerson and  M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 2. A. N. Veselovskii, Iz istorii romana i povesti, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, Tip. Akademii Nauk, 1886). It should be acknowledged of course that Historical Poetics was never completed, and Veselovsky may have ultimately wished to include the novel in his grand scheme. See Veselovskii, Izbrannoe. Istoricheskaia Poetika, ed.  I.  O. Shaitanov (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006). 3. F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, ed. V. G. Bazanov et al. 30 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1990), 28:2:270– 74. This will be abbreviated subsequently as PSS. 4. During his 1873 editorship of The Citizen, Dostoevsky engaged in a journalistic polemic with Alexander Pypin over the latter’s criticism of the Slavophiles in the pages of The Messenger of Europe. Pypin criticized the Slavophiles, particularly Konstantin Aksakov and Ivan Kireevsky, for their idealization of the supposed unity of Russian spiritual and social life in the pre-Petrine period. Dostoevsky, as will become clear, shared this Slavophile vision. Dostoevskii, PSS, 21:258, 438. 5. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). For a discussion of Bakhtin’s concept of genre memory in relation to Veselovsky, see Chapter 8. 6. On Veselovsky’s studies, see V. F. Shishmarev, Aleksandr Veselovskii i russkaia literatura (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo LGU, 1946), pp. 17–24. 7. See Shishmarev, Aleksandr Veselovskii, pp. 24–27. For a complete list of Veselovskii’s works from 1859–1895, see Ukazatel’ k nauchnym trudam Aleksandra Nikolaevicha Veselovskago, 1859–1895 (St. Petersburg, 1896). 8. A. N. Veselovskii, Slavianskie skazaniia o Solomone i Kitovrase i zapadnye legendy o Morol’fe i Merline (St. Petersburg: Demankov, 1872). 9. A. N. Veselovskii, Slavianskie skazaniia, pp. I-II.

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10. Veselovsky was particularly interested in Buddhist influences on Western culture, especially the incorporation of the story of the Buddha himself into hagiographic compilations such as the Western Golden Legend, and the Orthodox collections of the Prolog and the Chet’i Minei, through the story of Barlaam and Josaphat. See Veselovskii, “Vizantiiskiia povesti i Varlaam i Iosaph,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia 192 (July 1877): 122–54. 11. Pantschatantra: fünf Bücher indischer Fabeln, Märchen und Erzählungen, ed. and trans. Theodor Benfey (Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1859). 12. A. N. Veselovskii, “Sravnitel’naia mifologiia i eia mefod,” Vestnik Evropy 8:7 (October 1873): 637–80; “Melusine, revue de mythologie etc, dirigee par  H. Galdoz i  E. Rolland: Retsenziia,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia 189 (January 1877): 151–86; “Indeiskie skazki,” Vestnik Evropy (March 1877): 222–95; “Novaia kniga o mifologii,” Vestnik Evropy (April 1882): 757–76. 13. A. N. Veselovskii, “Opyty po istorii razvitiia khristianskoi legendy,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia 178 (April 1875, otd. 2): 283–331; 179 (May 1875, otd. 2): 48–130; 183 (February 1876) 241–88; 184 (March 1876, otd. 2): 50–116; 184 (April 1876) 341–63; 185 (June 1876, otd. 2): 327–67; 189 (February 1877, otd. 2): 186–252; 191 (May 1877, otd. 2): 76–125. 14. A.  N. Veselovskii, “Opyty po istorii razvitiia khristianskoi legendy,” “Otkroveniia Mefodiia i vizantiisko-germanskaia imperatorskaiia saga,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia 178 (April 1875, otd. 2): 283–331; “Legenda o vozvrashchaiushchemsia imperatore,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia 179 (May 1875, otd. 2): 48–130. 15. A.  N. Veselovskii, “Konstantinische Sagen,” Russische Revue IV (1872): 178–207; “Le dit de l’empereur Constant,” Romania 22 (1877): 162–98. 16. “Opyty po istorii razvitiia khristianskoi legendy,” “Otkroveniia Mefodiia i vizantiisko-germanskaia imperatorskaiia saga,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia 178 (April 1875, otd. 2): 283–331. 17. See also Veselovskii, “Kaliki perekhozhie i Bogomil’skie stranniki,” Vestnik Evropy 7:4 (April 1872): 682–722. 18. “Istoriko-literaturniya zametki. I. Parallely k skazaniiu o Novgorodskom rae.” Filologicheskie zapiski (1875) III: 1–7; (1876) VI:1–12; “Otryvki vizantiiskogo eposa v russkom: Povest’ o vavilonskom tsarstve,” Slavianskii sbornik (1876) t. II, 122–65; “Die Sage vom babylonischen Reich. Ein Bruchstück des byzantinischen Epos in russischer Übersetzung,” Archiv für slavische Philologie 2 (1877): 129–43, 308–33. 19. For a complete survey of Dostoevsky’s creative trajectory as a response to the decade of the 1870s, see Kate Holland, The Novel in the Age

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of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2013). 20. On the reforms of Alexander II, sometimes called the “Great Reforms,” see W. B. Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Bureaucracy and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990). For a recent study of the cultural significance of the Reforms, see Olga Maiorova, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology, 1855–1870 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). 21. In the entry entitled “Vlas” of his 1873 newspaper column, “A Writer’s Diary,” Dostoevsky wrote, “The Petrine period of Russian history was truly ended by the 19th February,” and in his notebooks for 1873 he wrote, “All reforms of the present reign are the direct antithesis (in essence) of the reforms of Peter the Great and the nullification of them in all respects.” F. M. Dostoevskii, PSS, 21: 41, 268. 22. F. M. Dostoevskii, “Zapisnaia Tetrad’ (1872–1875),” Neizdannyi Dostoevskii: Zapisnye knizhki i tetrad’ 1860–1881 gg. Literaturnoe Nasledstvo 83 (Moscow: Nauka, 1971), p. 290. 23. Dostoevskii, PSS, 16:7 24. See Sarah Hudspith, Dostoevsky and the Idea of Russianness (London: Routledge-Curzon, 2004). 25. M. M. Bakhtin, “K metodologii gumanitarnykh nauk,” in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, ed. S. S. Averintsev and S. G. Bocharov, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1986), pp.  361–73. For the English translation, see  M.  M. Bakhtin, “Toward a Methodology of the Human Sciences,” in Bakhtin, Speech Genres, and Other Late Essays, ed. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, trans. V. W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 159–180. On “great time,” see David Shepherd, “A Feeling for History? Bakhtin and ‘The Problem of Great Time’,” The Slavonic and Eastern European Review 84.1 (2006): 32–51. For a discussion of the concept of Bakhtinian “great time” in relation to Veselovsky’s understanding of temporal processes, see Chapter 8. 26. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), p. 56. 27. A. Grigor’ev, “Vzgliad na russkuiu literaturu so smerti Pushkina: Stat’ia pervaia: Pushkin-Griboedov-Gogol’-Lermontov,” Literaturnaia kritika (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965), pp. 166–67. 28. Dostoevskii, PSS, 16: 330; 29:I: 16–17; 109; 114; 214–17. 29. “Otryvki vizantiiskogo eposa v russkom: Poema o Digenise,” Vestnik Evropy (April 1875): 750–75; “Otryvki vizantiiskogo eposa v russkom: Povest’ o vavilonskom tsarstve,” “Grecheskii roman,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia 188 (November 1875): 99–151;

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“Vizantiiskiia povesti i Varlaam i Josaph,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia 192 (July 1877): 122–54, “Die Sage vom babylonischen Reich. Ein Bruchstück des byzantinischen Epos in russischer Übersetzung.” 30. A.  N. Veselovskii, Bokkachcho, ego sreda i sverstniki, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tip. Akademii Nauk 1893–94). 31. N. Ia. Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa (Saint Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1871). 32. Dostoevskii, PSS, “Utopicheskoe ponimanie istorii,” 24: 173. For further discussion, see Andrzej de Lazari, V krugu Fedora Dostoevskogo: Pochvennichestvo, translated by M. V. Leskinen (Moscow: Nauka, 2004), pp. 93–100. 33. Dostoevskii, PSS, 29: I: 38–46. 34. Dostoevskii, PSS, 29: I: 38–46. 35. Dostoevskii, PSS, 29: I: 40. 36. Dostoevskii, PSS, 18:35–40. See also his defense of the Old Believers in his discussion of Nikolai Leskov’s short story in the entry for “A Writer’s Diary” from 1873 entitled, “A Troubled Countenance.” Dostoevsky argued that Leskov’s depiction of a mass conversion to Orthodoxy by a group of Old Believers underestimated the strength of the dissenters’ faith and the moral authority of their position. Dostoevskii, PSS, 21: 54–60. 37. F. M. Dostoevskii, PSS, 21: 41. 38. James Bailey and Tatyana Ivanovna, eds., An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. xv–xlix. 39. A. N. Veselovskii, “Iuzhno-russkie byliny,” Sbornik otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti 22: 2 (1881); 36:3 (1884), and “Melkie zametki k bylinam,” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 242 (December 1885): 166–98; 255 (May 1888): 74–90; 263 (June 1889): 32–46; 268 (March  1890): 1–55; 269 (May 1890): 56–73; 306 (August 1890): 235–77. 40. A.  N. Veselovskii, Razyskaniia v oblasti russkogo dukhovnogo stikha (St. Petersburg: Tip. Akademii nauk); Sbornik otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti, 20: 6 (1879): 1–22; 21:2 (1880): 1–160; 32:4 (1883): 293–353; 46:6 (1889): 1–116, 173–289; 53:6 (1891): 105–36 and 147–213. 41. See Linda Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (Armonk,  N.Y.: Sharpe, 1989). See the discussion of the appropriation and reworking of Christian legend in folkloric contexts in E. V. Anichkov, “Khristianskiie legendy v narodnoi peredache,” Istoriia russkoi literatury, 2 vols., ed. Anichkov et al. (Moscow: Mir, 1908). 42. For a more detailed analysis of the generic structure of The Brothers Karamazov, see Kate Holland, “Novelizing Religious Experience: The

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Generic Landscape of The Brothers Karamazov,” Slavic Review 66.1 (2007): 63–81. 43. Dostoevskii, PSS, 14:225. 44. Pamiatniki otrechennoi literatury, 2 vols., ed. N. Tikhonravov (Moscow, 1863) II:23; Pamiatniki starinnoi russkoi literatury, 4 vols., published by Count Kushelev-Bezborodko. Volumes 1, 2, and 4 edited by N. Kostomarov, volume 3 edited by A. Pypin (St. Petersburg, 1860–1863). A. Pypin, “Lozhnye i otrechennye knigi russkoi starinnoi,” p. 18. 45. Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 139–40. Also see A. Pypin, “Drevniaia russkaia literatura: I: Starinnye apokrify. II: Skazanie o khozhdenii bogoroditsy po mukam.” Otechestvennye zapiski 115: II (1857): 335–60. 46. See  V.  E. Vetlovskaia, “Apokrif ‘Khozhdenie bogoroditsy po mukam’ v ‘Brat’iakh Karamazovykh’ Dostoevskogo,” Dostoevsky i mirovaia kul’tura 11 (1998): 35–47. 47. Veselovskii, “Opyty po istorii razvitiia khristianskoi legendy,” “Son bogoroditsy i svodnyia redaktsii epistolia,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia 184 (April 1876, otd. 2): 341–63. 48. In fact Tikhonravov includes two apocryphal accounts of the temptation narrative in his collection entitled, “God’s Debate with the Devil,” and several other apocrypha make references to the same events. Tikhonravov, ed., Pamiatniki, p. 282. 49. Dostoevskii, PSS, 14:372 50. Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:575. 51. For the apocrypha, see Pamiatniki starinnoi russkoi literatury, volume 3. 52. A.  N. Afanas’ev, Narodnye russkie legendy, sobrannye Afananas’evym (Moscow: Tipografia V. Gracheva i Komp., 1859), p. 53. 53. Pypin, ed., “Lozhnye i otrechennye knigi russkoi starinnoi,” pp. 51– 71; Tikhonravov, ed., Pamiatniki, pp.  254–272. The inclusion of motifs from many different types of apocrypha in folk legends is very characteristic. Old and New Testament apocrypha provided the inspiration for a significant number of the legends recorded by Afanas’ev. 54. Dostoevskii, PSS, 30:I:130. 55. The use of this proverb is hardly accidental; like the folk legend, it suggests the duality of Russian popular Christianity, the continuing coexistence of Christian codes and folk superstitions which reflect a belief in the primeval power of nature. 56. Veselovskii, Iz istorii romana i povesti, pp. 1–27.

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Chapter 13

Satire (1940), for the Literary Encyclopedia M IKH A IL BA KH T IN

Mikhail Bakhtin’s encyclopedia essay on satire, the only known text he wrote in the genre, was intended for the Soviet Literary Encyclopedia, the first nine volumes of which were published from 1929 to 1939. The tenth and final volume was delayed, allegedly because of difficulties over the articles on Stalin and Socialist Realism, and ultimately fell to the wayside with the onset of World War II. In the surviving proofs to the volume, which were published in 1991, the article on satire is signed by Sof’ia Nel’s (1899–1978). Surviving correspondence between Bakhtin and the editors of the Literary Encyclopedia indicates that for unspecified reasons Bakhtin’s article was commissioned to replace Nel’s submission in late 1940. Bakhtin’s text went through two major revisions before being approved in early 1941. Unfortunately none of the submitted manuscripts have survived; the editors of Bakhtin’s Collected Works have published the essay from a handwritten draft that lacks a section toward its end.1 The article follows the structure requested by the editors of the Literary Encyclopedia: (1) the definition of satire; (2) a brief historiography of the question; (3) analysis of the most important kinds of satire; (4) a brief overview of the most important phenomena of satire in the development of world literature (satire in folk art, in ancient literature, in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, etc.); special attention should be paid to satire in Russian literature, including Soviet. The historical overview should not strive for exhaustive completeness; 369

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it is necessary to show the distinctive qualities and function of satire at the major stages of historical development, and the satirical genres proposed by the most important artistic movements.2 Into this structure Bakhtin weaves some of his most characteristic ideas, for instance dialogism, heteroglossia, carnival, “popular-festive laughter,” and the Menippean satire as a source of the modern novel. These concepts dominate Bakhtin’s other writings from the late 1930s and early 1940s, most notably his dissertation on Rabelais, and were developed further in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963). Evidently Bakhtin went a bit further in his earlier drafts; the final letter from his editor B. Mikhailovskii asks, “Aren’t you stressing a bit too much the terms ‘deformation’ and ‘experimentation with reality’?”3 Though Bakhtin revised the essay extensively (for one thing these problematic terms are absent in the version we have), it gives a relatively concise and complete example of Bakhtin’s historical method and its relation to his ethical, political, and metaphysical commitments. 1. The word “satire” denotes three phenomena: 1) a specific, small-scale lyrico-epic genre that formed and developed on Roman soil (Naevius, Ennius, Lucilius, Horace, Persius, Juvenal) and was resurrected in modern times by the neoclassicists (the satires of Mathurin Régnier, Boileau, Kantemir et al.). 2) another, less well-defined, mixed (mainly prose), purely dialogical genre that appeared in the Hellenistic epoch in the form of the philosophical diatribe (Bion [of Borysthenes], Teles [of Megala]) was reformed and standardized by the Cynic Menippus (third century B.C.E.), and was named in his honor “Menippean satire.” We find later exemplars of it in Greek in the work of Lucian (second century B.C.E.), while in Latin there have survived fragments of satires by Varro (Saturae Menippeae), Seneca’s satire Apocolocyntosis (“Pumpkinization”), and, finally, the satirical novel of Petronius (Satyricon). This form of satire was a direct precursor of the main variety of the European novel, represented on ancient soil by Petronius’s Satyricon and, in part, by Apuleius’s Golden Ass, while in modern times [it is represented by] the novels of Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel) and Cervantes (Don Quixote). Moreover, the form of “Menippean satire” is represented in modern times by the remarkable political satire Satire Ménippée (1594) and the famous comic dialogue of Béroalde de Verville (“Le Moyen de parvenir”).

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3) a specific (mainly negative) attitude of the artist to the object of representation (i.e., to the reality being represented), which determines the selection of means of artistic representation and the general character of the images. In this sense satire is not limited to the aforementioned two specific genres and can use any genre—epic, dramatic, or lyrical. We find the satirical representation of reality and its various phenomena in small-scale genres of folklore: in sayings and proverbs (there exists an entire vast group of satirical sayings and proverbs); in popular ethological epithets,4 i.e., in brief satirical characterizations of the inhabitants of various lands, provinces or cities (e.g., the old French “blasons”: “the best drunks are in England” or “the most stupid people are in Brittany”); in popular anecdotes; in popular comic dialogues (which were especially abundant in Greece); in the small-scale improvisational comic genres of the court and popular (urban) jesters and clowns; in mimes, comedies, farces, intermezzi; in fairy tales, both popular and literary (e.g., the satirical tales of Tieck, Hoffmann, SaltykovShchedrin, and Tolstoy); in epic poems (the oldest Greek satirical epic consists of the songs about the fool Margites; there is a significant satirical element also in Hesiod’s Works and Days); in song lyrics, both popular (e.g., the satirical street songs of France) and literary (the satirical songs of Béranger, Barbier, and Nekrasov); in the lyric as such (the lyric poetry of Heine, Nekrasov, and Mayakovsky); in novellas, tales, and novels; in essayistic genres; in this ocean of satirical art, both popular and literary, which uses various genres and forms, the particular genres of Roman and Menippean satire appear merely as small islands (although their historical role is quite significant). Thus are the three meanings of the word “satire.” 2. The history and theory of satire has been developed very weakly. Essentially, only the genre of Roman satire has been subjected to systematic and rigorous study. Even the Menippean satire, its folkloric roots and its historical role in the creation of the European novel have been studied to a far from satisfactory degree. As far as intergeneric satire is concerned, that is, the satirical attitude to reality that is manifested in the most heterogeneous genres (the third meaning of the word “satire”), its systematic study is in a very poor state. The history of satire is not the history of a specific genre; it concerns all genres, moreover, in the most critical moment of their development. The satirical attitude to reality, manifested in any genre, possesses the ability to transform and renew the given genre. The satirical moment corrects any genre in the light of contemporary reality, of living actuality, and of political

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and ideological relevance. The satirical element, which is usually tied closely to parody and travesty, cleanses the genre of dead convention and of elements of tradition that have lost meaning and outlived themselves. In this way it renews genre and prevents it from freezing in dogmatic canonicity, preventing it from turning into mere convention. Satire played the same role of renewal in the history of literary languages: it refreshed these languages on account of everyday heteroglossia, ridiculing obsolete linguistic and stylistic forms. We know the role played by satirical works (novellas, sotie, farces, political and religious pamphlets, and novels like Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel) in the history of the creation of modern literary languages and in the history of their renewal in the latter half of the eighteenth century (satirical journals, satirical and satirico-comic novels, pamphlets). It is only possible to understand and assess the role of satire in renewing literary languages and genres only if one correctly appreciates the link between satire and parody. Historically one should not separate them: any significant parody is always satirical, while any significant satire is always linked to the parody and travesty of obsolete genres, styles, and languages (it suffices to name the Menippean satire, which is usually saturated with parodies and travesties, “The Letters of Ignorant Men,” and the novels of Rabelais and Cervantes). In this way the history of satire is composed of the most important (most “critical”) pages of the history of all the other genres, especially the novel (it was prepared by satire and has subsequently been renewed with the help of the satirical and parodic element). Let us note also for example the renewing role of the Commedia dell’arte. It was defined by popular-satirical masks and small-scale comic genres: anecdotes, comic agons (disputes), popular-ethological teasing of dialects, and so forth. This comedy exerted a huge renewing influence on the entire dramatic art of modernity (and not only dramatic art; we should note for example the influence of its form on the romantic satire, in particular on Hoffmann, or its indirect influence on Gogol). It is particularly necessary to underscore the exclusively important role of satire in the history of realism. All of these questions of the history of satire have been very poorly studied. Historians of literature have been more occupied with the abstract ideology of one or another satirist or naïvely realistic conclusions from the work regarding the historical reality of its day. Matters stand no better with the theory of satire. The special intergeneric position of satire has greatly hindered theoretical investigations

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of it. In theories of literature and poetics, satire has usually figured in the section of lyrical genres, that is, only the Roman satirical genre and its neoclassical imitations have been considered. This classification of satire as a form of the lyric is a quite common occurrence. [A. G.] Gornfel’d, for instance, defines it thus: “Satire in its true form is pure lyric, the lyric of indignation.”5 Other researchers, orienting themselves toward modern satire and particularly the satirical novel, have been inclined to regard it as a purely epic phenomenon. Some regard the satirical moment as such to be an extra-artistic, polemical admixture in imaginative literature. The relation of satire to humor is likewise defined in various ways: some strictly differentiate between them, seeing them even as something opposite, while others see humor as merely a softened, so to speak, “benevolent” variant of satire. Neither the role nor the character of laughter in satire has been defined. The theoretical study of satire must bear a systematically historical character; moreover, it is particularly important to uncover the folkloric roots of satire and to define the particular character of satirical images in oral folk art. 3. One of the best definitions of satire—not as a genre, but as a particular attitude of the artist to the reality he represents—was given by Schiller. Let us take him as our point of departure. Here it is: “In der Satire wird die Wirklichkeit als Mangel dem Ideale als der höchsten Realität gegenübergestellt . . . Die Wirklichkeit ist also hier ein notwendiges Objekt der Abneigung.”6 This definition correctly underscores two moments: the moment of the satire’s attitude to reality and the moment of the negation of this reality as insufficient (als Mangel). This insufficiency is revealed, according to Schiller, in the light of the ideal “as the higher reality.” One senses here the idealistic limitation of Schiller’s definition: the “ideal” is understood as something static, eternal and abstract, and not as the historical necessity of the advent of the new and the better (the future, as it is promised by the negated present). It is necessary to underscore particularly (as Schiller does not do) the image-based character of satirical negation that distinguishes satire as an artistic phenomenon from various forms of polemics. Thus, satire is the image-based negation of contemporary reality in its various moments, which necessarily includes—in one form or another, with one or another degree of concreteness and clarity—a positive moment of affirming a better reality. This preliminary and general definition of satire, like all definitions of its kind, is inevitably abstract and pale. Only a historical review of the rich variety of satirical forms will allow us to concretize and enrich this definition.

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4. The oldest folkloric forms of image-based negation, i.e., of satire, are the forms of popular-festive ridicule and profanity. These forms originally bore a cultic character. This was ritual laughter (“rire rituel,” in S. Reinach’s terminology).7 But this original ritual-magic meaning of ridicule and profanity can only be reconstructed by scholarship (with more or less verisimilitude); all the forms of popular-festive laughter, known to us from ancient sources, have already been artistically reformed and ideologically reinterpreted: they are already mature forms of image-based negation that include in them the moment of affirmation. This is the folkloric core of satire. Let us cite the most important facts. During the thesmophoria, Haloa, and other Greek festivals, women drowned each other in ridicule with obscene insults, accompanying the shouted words with obscene gestures; such laughter-based arguments were called aischrologia (i.e., profanity). Plutarch tells of the Boeotian festival “Daedala” (Plutarch’s text has not survived, but is related by Eusebius), during which a fictive wedding rite was performed, accompanied by laughter and ending in the immolation of a wooden statue. Pausanias tells of an analogous festival. This is a typical festival of the return to life of the god of vegetation; laughter here is linked to images of death and rebirth of the generative power of nature. Particular interest and importance accrue to Herodotus’s story (5.83) about the festival of Demeter, during which female choruses ridiculed each other; here this ridicule, of course, was also linked to the motifs of the death and rebirth of the generative force. There also survives evidence of ridicule during Greek wedding rites. There exists an interesting explicative legend that explains the link between laughter and profanity, on the one hand, and laughter and rebirth on the other. This legend is reflected in the Homeric hymn to Demeter. After the abduction of Persephone to the underworld, the grieving Demeter refuses to drink and eat until the Iambs ridicule her, making an obscene gesture in front of her.8 We also find popular-festive shaming and ridiculing on Roman soil. In one of his epistles (Epist. 2.1.145) Horace depicts the harvest festival, during which licentious acts of ridicule and shaming are performed in dialogical form (fescennina licentia). Ovid speaks of an analogous festival (Fastes, 3.675–676). We know also Roman triumphal ridicule (carmina triumphalia) which also had a dialogical form. I will mention, finally, the Saturnalia with their legislated freedom of laughter and organized ridicule and shaming of the jester king (the old king, the old year). All of these festivals of ridicule, both Greek and Roman, are essentially linked with time, with the change of seasons and of agricultural

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cycles. Laughter fixes, as it were, the very moment of this change, the moment that the old dies and the new is born simultaneously. Therefore the festive laughter is at once both mocking, cursing, and shaming laughter (shaming death as it departs, winter, the old year) and joyful, exuberant, and welcoming (rebirth, spring, fresh vegetation, the new year). This is not mere ridicule; the negation of the old is tightly linked to the affirmation of the new and the better. This negation in jesting images therefore had a spontaneously dialectical character. According to the ancients themselves, these popular-festive forms of ridicule and profanity were the roots out of which literary satirical forms grew. Aristotle (Poetics 4.1448b.32) sees the roots of comedy in iambic song curses (“iambizein”); moreover, he notes the dialogical character of these shamings (“iambizon allêlous”). In his work concerning the origin of drama (De scaenicis originibus) M. Terentius Varro finds its embryo in various festivals: in the compitalia, in the lupercalia, and so forth. Finally, Livy (7.2.4) informs about the existence of a popular dramatic “satura” growing out of the fescennina. It is, of course, necessary to take a critical view of all these testimonies of the ancients (especially that of Livy). But there is no doubt about the deep inner connection between the ancient literary-satirical image-based negation and popular-festive laughter and shaming. Even in its subsequent development, ancient satire remained linked to living forms of popular-festive laughter (for instance, there is a significant link between the Saturnalia and Martial’s epigrammatic art and Petronius’s novel-satura). We observe six main features of the popular-festive ridicule and shaming that are subsequently repeated in all more or less significant phenomena of ancient satirical art (and in all later epochs of the development of European satire): (1) the dialogical character of ridicule and shaming (the mutual ridicule of the choruses); (2) the moment of parody and teasing that is inherent to this ridicule; (3) the universal character of ridicule (the ridicule of gods, of the old king, of the entire reigning order [Saturnalia]); (4) the link between laughter and the material-corporeal generative principle (profanity); (5) the essential relation of ridicule to time and to temporal change, to rebirth, to the death of the old and the birth of the new; (6) the spontaneous dialectical nature of ridicule, its combination of ridicule (the old) and merrymaking (the new). In images of the ridiculed old, the populace ridiculed the reigning order with its forms of oppression, while in images of the new it made incarnate its highest hopes and aspirations.

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5. Classical Greece knew no special genre of satire. The satirical attitude to the object of representation (image-based negation) is manifested here in the most heterogeneous genres. Early on there arose the popular comic-satirical epic: songs about the fool Margites (which the ancients attributed to Homer, while Aristotle derived comedy from them); “Margites” is the first European exemplar of “fool’s satire” (“Narrensatir”), one of the most widespread forms of satire in the Middle Ages and in the epoch of the Renaissance. In the majority of cases in this form of satire the fool performs a threefold function: (1) he is ridiculed; (2) he ridicules; (3) he serves as a means of ridiculing reality around him, as the mirror in which the foolish features of this reality are reflected. The fool usually combines features of the rascal with features of a naïve simpleton incapable of understanding the stupid or false conventions of social reality: its customs, laws, and beliefs (which is especially important for fulfilling the third function, as an unmasking of reality). Such, evidently, was Margites, insofar as one can judge from the most spare testimonies and fragments that have reached us. Early on there also appeared a remarkable parody of the heroic epic, namely The War of Mice and Frogs. This work testifies to the fact that in the seventh–sixth centuries B.C.E. the Greeks already possessed a sophisticated culture of parody. The subject of ridicule in The War of Mice and Frogs is epic discourse itself, that is, the genre and style of the archaizing heroic poem. This parody is, therefore, a satire (an imagebased negation) of the reigning but already dying style of the epoch (such is any genuine parody and travesty). This ridicule was not pure mocking, and therefore the Greeks were able to attribute this parody to Homer himself. Finally, there is a strong satirical element in Hesiod’s poem Work and Days (a satirical representation of the courts, the authorities, village hardships, the inserted satirical fable, and so forth). It is typical that this is where we find the legend of the four ages, which reflects a deeply satirical sense of time, of the change of ages and generations (as value-laden worlds), and a profoundly satirical condemnation of the present (the famous characterization of the “age of iron”). Here one finds a clear expression of the transfer of the “ideal,” of the utopian kingdom of good, justice and plenty, from the future into the past (“the golden age”), a transfer that is typical of mythological consciousness as such and of all ancient satire. In the area of the lyric, the satirical element (image-based negation) defined Greek iambic poetry (Archilochus, Hipponax). The iamb arises

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directly out of popular-festive ridicule and shaming. It combines dialogic address, crude cursing, laughter, profanity, death-wishes, and images of old age and decrepitude. The iamb responds to contemporary reality and to issues of the day; it gives details of everyday life and images of people being ridiculed, even the ironic image of the author himself (in Archilochus). In this respect the iamb is sharply distinct from all other genres of the Greek lyric, with their conventionality and their lofty style, which is detached from contemporary reality. But the satirical element is manifested most strongly in the forms of Greek comedy and mime. (Unfortunately the rich comic heritage of the Greeks is almost completely lost to us; for the classical epoch we possess only Aristophanes’s comedy.) The comic art of Sicily and southern Italy was particularly rich in satirical forms. At the time of Phrynichus and Aeschylus, when Attic comedy bore the form of iambic songs, in Syracuse comedy was being created with a developed dialogue and significant satirical content. Its creator was Epicharmus of Kos. At its base there lay popular-festive laughter and developed forms of Sicilian popular jester humor. The same popular satirical basis gave rise to literary mime created by Epicharmus’s younger contemporary Sophron. In both Epicharmus’s comedy and Sophron’s mime the plot and intrigue take second place before the pure satirical sketches and before the satirical dialogues of a popular festive type. Epicharmus also created (or rather, reworked) typical popular-festive agons: “Dispute of the Earth and Sea,” “The Dispute of Logos and Logeina.” In Epicharmus’s art the travesties of high-style myth are linked to satirical scenes; the ancients relate that he was the first to put on stage the image of the parasite and the image of the drunk. Analogous combinations of images of reality with parodies and travesties, with profanities and cursing in the forms of improvised dialogue or semi-dialogue existed also in the shows which the Deikeliktai and Phallophoroi presented across all of Greece (which we know of from Athenaeus [14,621d-f]). Aristophanes’s comedy is an already fully matured, powerful sociopolitical satire. But it also grew up from the same roots of popular-festive ridicule and profanity. Its traditional structure includes a comic popular-festive agon and satirico-polemical invective (parabasis); the comedy itself on the whole is, to a certain degree, a parody of the tragic genre; moreover, its content brims with travesties and parodies (mostly of Euripides); it is full of cursing and profanities (linked to the

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material-corporeal generative principle). The object of ridicule and shaming is the present, contemporaneity, with all its current and polemical questions (social, political, ideological, and literary); the imagebased negation of this present (of contemporaneity) bears a sharply defined grotesque character: lethal mocking is combined with cheerful motifs of the generative force, of material-corporeal plenitude, renewal and rebirth; everything old that is dying away and being expelled is pregnant with the new, but this new is not shown in concrete images of reality. It is present only in the cheerful hue of laughter and in images of the material-corporeal principle and the generative force (obscenities). 6. Rome is usually considered the homeland of satire. Quintilian famously asserted (Inst. 10.1.93): “Satira tota nostra est.” This is true only with respect to the specific and self-contained genre of literary satire; the satirical element in folklore and in various widespread literary genres was sufficiently developed in Greece and had a significant influence on the development of the Roman satirical genre. The very name of satire is derived from the Latin word “satura,” which originally denoted a dish filled with all sorts of sacrificial offerings, and later pâté, minced meat, and ultimately “miscellany” (in this sense it was also applied to headings that concerned multiple topics). The word was transferred to the literary genre, evidently because it was also of a mixed character; however one cannot exclude the influence of the Greek word “satyri” (as is allowed by Mommsen, [Martin von] Schanz, [Albrecht] Dieterich, and others). If Livy is to be believed, there existed a dramatic satura linked to the fescennina (although many scholars doubt its existence). The first to write satires was [Cn.] Naevius (the beginning of his literary activity was evidently around 235 B.C.E.). His satires evidently bore a dialogical form and reflected political contemporaneity; they also included personal invectives (against the Metelli). Satires were also written by [Q.] Ennius (born 239, died 169 B.C.E.). They also contained a dialogical element; this is evident from several fragments and from mentions of a dispute between life and death (i.e., a typical popular-festive agon) among his satires. But the genuine creator of the genre of Roman satire was Lucilius. The numerous fragments and testimonies that have survived to our day (including Horace: Sat. 1.4; 1.10; 2.1) allow us to form a rather complete notion of his satires’ defining features. These defining features are: (1) the basis of the satire is dialogical; the type of the dialogue is neither plot-based and dramatic nor philosophical and speculative, but based

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in colloquy and conversation; the author converses himself, makes his characters converse (e.g., in book 14 Scipio the Younger appears as a speaker), and depicts dialogical scenes (e.g., two meetings of the gods in book 1, the trial in the second book); (2) the satires include elements of literary parody (e.g., of hackneyed tragic heroization), literary polemics (on questions of style, grammar, and orthography, questions to which book 10 is dedicated); (3) the satires include an autobiographical, memoiristic element (thus, the third book depicts the author’s journey from Rome to the Sicilian bay); (4) the main content of the satires is the image-based negation of contemporaneity in its various manifestations (political degradation and corruption, the power of gold, empty pride, luxury and pampering, plebeian nouveaux riches, Grecomania, religious superstitions, and so forth); the satirist is acutely aware of his “age,” of the present, contemporaneity (he deals not with a unified idealized time, as other genres do), in all its limitation and transience (what should depart and die off, as something decrepit and spoiled); (5) the positive principle of satire, its “ideal,” are given in the form of ideal past: this is old-Roman virtue (virtus). Thus the genre of Roman satire became defined in Lucilius. The genre of the Roman satire was raised to its highest degree of formal artistic perfection by Horace. However, compared to Lucilius, under the conditions of the Augustan age the critique of contemporaneity was weakened and softened. The satire of Horace is an artful system of mutually-interlocking conversations: from one conversation we pass or are immersed in another; one conversation interlocks with another; one interlocutor is replaced by another. For instance, in the sixth satire of the first book the author has first spoken with Maecenas, but now Tillius interferes in the conversation, Maecenas once again begins to speak, and then Tillius again; in the interim we find ourselves once again at the forum and hear the excited speeches of unnamed characters. In another satire (1, 4) first Crispinus9 speaks, and then unnamed characters, and then the poet’s father. From this unbroken element of free conversation there constantly arise (only to disappear again) individual images of speaking people, characteristic or typical, characterized more or less clearly. This conversational dialogue, freed of any connection to action (as in a drama) and from the constraints of a rigorously philosophical analysis (as in the classical philosophical dialogue of the Greeks), bears in Horace characterological, cognitive, and representative functions; sometimes it is given a slightly parodic character. In this system of in-

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terlocking conversations discourse bears direct representational and expressive functions, i.e., it represents, cogitates, and is at the same time represented and shown as characteristic, typical, and humorous discourse. In general the freely conversational discourse of Horace’s satire (this relates also to discourse in the epodes and epistles) is in its character maximally close to novelistic discourse. Horace himself called his satires (like his epistles) “sermons,” i.e., “conversations” (Epist. 1.4.1, 2.1.250, 2.2.60). The autobiographical or memoiristic element in Horace is even stronger than in Lucilius. The author’s relationship to Maecenas is represented in detail. Satire 5 of the first book provides a diary of his journey with Maecenas to Brundisium. Satire 6 of the same book conveys the image of the author’s father and his instructions. An acute sense of contemporaneity—and, therefore, a differentiated sense of time as such—is innate to Horace’s satires. It is time, my time, my contemporaries, customs, everyday life, events, and literature that are the true hero of Horace’s satires. If this hero (my time, contemporaneity, the present) is not ridiculed in the full sense of the word, then it is spoken about with a smile; it is not heroicized, not glorified, not sung (as in odes); it is spoken about; spoken about freely, cheerfully, and mockingly. Contemporaneity in Horace’s satires is the subject of freely mocking conversations. The Saturnalian free laughter with respect to the existing social structure and the reigning truth is softened to a smile. But the popular-festive basis of this satirical perception of contemporary reality is absolutely evident. The final major stage of the development of the genre of Roman satire is Juvenal (the weak and abstract satire of the youth Persius introduced nothing of significance). From the formal-artistic point of view Juvenal’s satire represents a degradation. But at the same time it demonstrates even more sharply than that of his predecessors the popularfestive (folkloric) basis of Roman satire. With Juvenal there appears a new tone with respect to the reality that is being negated (i.e., contemporaneity): indignation (indignatio). He himself admits indignation as the motive force of his satire, its organizer (“facit indignatio versum”). Indignation replaces, as it were, satirical laughter. Therefore, his satire is often called “lashing.” However, in actual fact indignation in no way replaces laughter. Indignation is rather the rhetorical appendage of Juvenal’s laughter: its formal structure and images are organized by laughter, although outwardly laughter does not resonate and is sometimes replaced by the emotional

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display of indignation. In general Juvenal’s satires see the declaimer’s rhetorical display do battle with the satirical tradition of popular laughter. [Otto] Ribbeck’s attempt to distinguish the genuine, satirical Juvenal from the rhetor finds support in this duality. (Ribbeck admitted the authenticity only of the first nine and the eleventh satire, but found even in these authentic satires distortions introduced by the foreign hand of the rhetor.) Juvenal’s satire preserves the conversational-dialogical character, although it is somewhat more rhetorical. The sense of contemporaneity, of the age, is made markedly acute. He cannot understand how one might write long narrative poems with conventional mythological motifs. The spoiled nature of the age is such that “it is difficult not to write satire” (satire 1[.30]). The image-based negation of contemporary reality extends from the emperor’s palace (i.e., Domitian; see satire 4) to the minor details of everyday Roman life (for example, the morning activities of the Roman matron in satire 6). Juvenal ends his first satire with a characteristic assertion: “Let me try what is acceptable against those whose ashes are covered on the Flaminian or Latin roads.” This means that he attacks only the dead, i.e., the past, or the age of Domitian (he was writing under Trajan). This assertion has a dual meaning: (1) under the conditions of imperial Rome (even under the soft regime of Trajan) this excuse was necessary; (2) the popular-festive ridicule and profanity directed against everything that is dying, departing, or old (winter, the old year, the old emperor) and their traditional freedom are used here by Juvenal. Juvenal’s obscenities must also be understood in connection to the popular-festive forms of laughter (the traditional connection of laughter and cursing with death, on the one hand, and with the generative force of fertility and the materialcorporeal principle, on the other). Such was the genre of the Roman satire. This satire absorbed into itself everything that failed to find itself a place in the strict and constrained high genres: the conversational dialogue, the epistle, the memoiristic or autobiographical moment, the direct impression from life itself, and most of all—and most important of all—living current contemporaneity. The satire was free of myth and convention, of the lofty tone and the system of official evaluations, of everything that was obligatory for all remaining genres. Satire was free of the depersonalized conventional time of lofty genres. This freedom of the satirical genre, along with its innate sense of real time, is determined by its connection to folkloric laughter and shaming. Let us recall, incidentally, the link to the saturnalia of Martial’s satirical epigrams.

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7. The Hellenistic and Roman-Hellenistic “Menippean satire” was also determined by the popular-festive laughter. At its base lay the unique combination of Cynic philosophy with the ancient dialogic mutual ridicule and mutual shaming and the ancient comic “dispute” (agon), such as the “dispute of life and death,” of “winter and summer,” of “old age and youth” and so forth. Moreover, comedy and mime exerted a significant influence on the development of Menippean satire (especially on its later forms). Finally, into this satire there penetrated a significant plot-based element thanks to its combination with the genre of fantastic journeys to utopian lands (the utopia had always been drawn to popular-festive forms) and with parodies of the descent into the underworld and ascents to heaven. The radical popular ridicule of the dominant social structure and the dominant truth, as transient, aging, and dying; utopia; images of the material-corporeal principle and obscenities (the generative force and rebirth); fantastic journeys and adventures; philosophical ideas and erudition; parodies and travesties (of myths, tragedies, epics, or philosophical and rhetorical genres); the conflation of genres and styles, of verse (mainly parodic) and prose; the combination of the most diverse types of dialogue with narrative and epistles: all of this determines the composition of Menippean satire on the entire extent of its development—in Menippus, Varro, Seneca, Petronius, and Lucian. Moreover, we find all of this in Rabelais’s novel and, in part, in Don Quixote. Particularly important significance accrues to the broad reflection of ideological reality in the Menippean satire. The formation and change of ideas, of the dominant truth, of morality and of beliefs could not be reflected in the strict genres. These genres presupposed a maximum of certainty and stability; they had no room for the display of the historical relativity of “truth.” Therefore, the Menippean satire was able to prepare the most important variety of the European novel. But under the conditions of the ancient slaveholding social structure, which lacked prospects [for change], not all of the potentialities inherent to this satire could develop in full. 8. Medieval satire. The roots of medieval satire lay in local folklore. However the influence of the Roman culture of laughter—mime and saturnalia (the tradition of which continued to live in various forms throughout the entire Middle Ages)—also had a quite significant meaning. With greater or lesser caveats, the Middle Ages respected the freedom of the fool’s cap and allowed popular-festive laughter broad privileges. The “holidays of the fools” and the “holiday of the ass” were arranged by the lower clergy right in the churches. One very charac-

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teristic phenomenon was the so-called risus paschalis—that is, paschal laughter: during Easter, tradition permitted laughter in church, which was understood as a cheerful rebirth after a long fast and sorrow. In order to summon forth this laughter, the preacher allowed himself liberal jokes and anecdotes from the church pulpit. “Risus paschalis” was a Christianized (adjusted to Christian beliefs) form of folkloric laughter and, perhaps, the laughter of the saturnalia. Many parodic and satirical works of the Middle Ages arose under the cover of this legalized laughter. Yuletide laughter also possessed significant satirical productivity. Unlike paschal laughter, it was achieved not through stories but in songs. An enormous output of yuletide songs was created, in which the religious themes of the nativity were intertwined with popular motifs of the cheerful death of the old and the birth of the new. The satirical ridicule of the old frequently dominated these songs, especially in France, where the nativity song (“Noël”) became one of the most popular genres of revolutionary street song. Laughter and ridicule were to a certain extent legalized and tolerated on other holidays as well. The rich parodic literature of the Middle Ages (both Latin and vernacular) was connected to the holidays and vacations. Of particularly important significance for its influence were (in the later periods of the Middle Ages) the carnival and laughter-based forms connected to it (the novels of Rabelais and Cervantes bear a distinct carnival character). The satirical writing of the Middle Ages was extremely diverse. Apart from the rich parodic literature (which had undoubted satirical significance) the satirical element was displayed in the following main forms: (1) the fool satire, (2) the rascal satire, (3) the satire of greediness and drunkenness, (4) the estate satire in the narrow sense, (5) satirical sirventes. The satirical element also found expression in other genres of medieval literature: in church drama, in the epic of Spielleute and street performers of cantastoria, in the diableries of the mysteries, in the second part of the Roman de la Rose (by Jean de Muen), in the moralité, sotie, and farces. The image of the fool of medieval satire (and of the satire of the Renaissance) is of folkloric origin. Negation is here combined with affirmation: his stupidity (simplicity, naïvety, generosity, and misunderstanding of pernicious social convention) turns out to be unofficial wisdom that unmasks the dominant truth (the dominant intelligence). But alongside this the fool is a purely negative incarnation of stupidity. But in this, too, it is not he who is the ultimate object of ridicule, but the entire reality that surrounds him. For instance, in one narrative

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poem of the twelfth century “The Mirror of Fools” (“Speculum stultorum” by Nigellus), its hero, the ass Brunellus (the usual animal image of the fool) escapes from its master, undergoes treatment in Salerno, studies theology in Paris (the Sorbonne), and founds its own monastic order. In every place the ass is right at home. The result is ridicule for Salerno’s medical pedantry, the Sorbonne’s ignorance, and the monastics’ nonsense. The dual image of the fool also played a major satirical role in the sotie of the late Middle Ages. The rascal satire of the Middle Ages cannot always be cleanly separated from the fool satire. The image of the rascal and the fool often merge. The rascal also is not so much ridiculed and unmasked as he is a means of serving as a touchstone for the surrounding world, that is, for the organizations and estates of the medieval world to which he tries to gain entrance or with which he comes into contact. Such is his role in “The Priest Amis,” in the animal epic about the fox (“Reynard the Fox”), and in rascal fabliau and Schwank. Like the fool, the rascal is not an everyday mocker, but a folkloric image, a kind of realistic symbol of dual significance and a satirical mirror for the negation of the rascally world. The rascal would become an everyday image only in the later forms of the picaresque novel. Greediness and drunkenness bear the same distinct character of a realistic symbol in medieval satire. In the folkloric, popular-festive system of images food and drink were linked to fertility, rebirth, universal excess (the image of the fat belly was also linked to this positive motif). Under the conditions of class reality, these images attain new significance: with their help the greed and sloth of the clergy are ridiculed; the abundance of food and drink become greed and drunkenness. The ancient positive hyperbolism of antiquity attains a negative significance. But this process could not be fully completed: images of food and drink preserve their dual significance; the mocking of greed and idleness are combined with a positive (joyful) accentuation of the very material-corporeal principle. Such is the satire “The Day of an Abbot,” where the abbot’s activities are represented as consisting solely of endless food, drink, and the purging of the stomach by various means (this is how he begins his day). Another wonderful satire “Tractatus Garsiae Tholetani” (eleventh century) depicts the constant and endless drunkenness of the entire Roman Curia together with the Pope. Images of this type of satire bear a grotesque character: they are exaggerated to an extreme; moreover, this exaggeration has at once a negative

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character (the greed and excessive eating of idlers) and a positive character (the spirit of material abundance and surfeit). The mutual mocking of the estates plays an enormous role in medieval satirical art. The satirical images of the priest, monk, knight, and peasant are somewhat schematized: beyond the estate-based features there is no individual characteristic face (these images come truly alive only in the satire of the Renaissance). All four listed types of satire are linked to folklore. Therefore, the images of negation are here organized by laughter; they are concrete, ambivalent (they combine negation with affirmation, mocking with merrymaking), universalist, and capable of obscenity; here satire is interwoven with parody. These types of satire found their culmination in the epoch of the late Middle Ages in such popular books as Eulenspiegel, Brant’s Ship of Fools, in the later versions of “Reynard the Fox,” in sotie, farces, and novellas. By contrast, the satirical sirventes were not linked to popular laughter; at its basis there lies an abstract-political or moral tendency (such as, for instance, the sirventes of Walter von der Vogelweyde, which boast great artistic merits; this is a genuine lyric of indignation). 9. The epoch of the Renaissance was an epoch of the unprecedented flourishing of satire and created unsurpassed exemplars of it. The acute and conscious sense of time and the change of epochs of world history that characterized the Renaissance made satire the most important genre of the epoch. Ridicule and profanity against the old and the joyful welcoming of the new—the ancient popular-festive basis of satire— were in the epoch of the Renaissance, filled with concrete and conscious historical content and meaning. The epoch of the Renaissance used all forms of the medieval satire and parody, forms of the ancient satire (especially the Menippean satires of Lucian, Petronius, and Seneca), and drew directly from the inexhaustible source of popular-festive humorous forms: the carnival, base popular comedy, and minor speech genres. Rabelais’s novel is a remarkable synthesis of all the satirical forms of antiquity and the Middle Ages on the basis of the carnival forms of its own time. With the aid of these forms it was able—with exclusive clarity and profundity—to show the death of the old world (the “Gothic age”) and the birth of the new in the world contemporary to it. All of its images are spontaneously dialectical: they reveal the unity of the historical process of becoming, in which the new is directly born from the death of the old. Its laughter is at once mercilessly mocking and

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exulting; its style inextricably combines praise and cursing (cursing becomes praise and praise becomes cursing). The Renaissance is characterized by the organic combination of satire and parody. “The Letters of Ignorant Men” is pure parody, and at the same time it is a remarkable satirical image of the dying Middle Ages. Just such an organic element is the parody in the novel by Cervantes. The satire of the Renaissance, like any major and genuine satire, gives voice to the very world that is being ridiculed. The dying world—the old government, the old social structure, the old truth— continues to play its role in the person of its representatives and in a subjectively serious way, but objectively it is already in the position of a fool; its ambitions elicit only laughter. The satire of the Renaissance makes use of this carnival situation. Rabelais used it in a series of episodes in his novel; it was also used by Cervantes and by the authors of “The Letters of Ignorant Men.” Political and Protestant pamphleteers also used it. For instance, one of the most remarkable Protestant pamphlets, Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde’s “On Differences in Religions,” was written in the form of a theological tract (of giant dimensions) from the point of view of an orthodox Catholic, the enemy of the Protestants. In total naïvety the supposed author logically and completely unmasks his religion, defending all its ridiculous and superstitious beliefs; he makes it the object of laughter. Thanks to such a means of composition, Marnix’s theological pamphlet attained significance as an artistic satire (for instance, it exerted a definitive influence on Charles de Coster). The remarkable political satire of the time of the League “Satire Ménippée” is constructed on the same principle. It is directed against the League. At its beginning, a county-fair charlatan advertises a miracle-working elixir “vertu catholicon,” and then depicts a meeting of the members of the League, who in their direct and frank speeches unmask themselves and their politics. The fool’s satire found its consummation at the highest step of humanistic culture in Erasmus’s “Praise of Folly” and in some Shrovetide games of Hans Sachs. The rascal satire found its consummation in the early Spanish picaresque novel and in the picaresque novellas of Cervantes and Grimmelshausen (although the rascal does not yet become a purely everyday character in any of these phenomena). The satire of greed and drunkenness is consummated in the German “Grobians” (Kaspar Scheidt, [Johann] Fischart). In all of these phenomena of the Renaissance the popular-festive laughter and the related images of the fool and rascal, of drinking and eating, and of the generative force

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are raised to the highest level of ideological consciouness, filled with historical content, and used for the incarnation of the new historical consciousness of the epoch. 10. In the seventeenth century satirical writing becomes drastically impoverished. The stabilization of the new state structure and of new dominant social groups who determined literary demands and tastes; the composition of the neoclassical canon: all of this pushed satire to the background of literature and changed its character. Laughter lost its radical status and its universality; it was limited to phenomena of an individual order, that is, to individual vices and social outcasts. Laughter and history (historical figures and events) or laughter and philosophical thought (worldview) became incompatible. The main object of imitation became the genre of the Roman satire (Horace and Juvenal). Such were the satires of Régnier and Boileau. Elements of Renaissance satire (the influence of Rabelais and Cervantes) exist only in the novels of this period: in Sorel and Scarron. Only comedy, fertilized by the powerful and beneficial influence of the Commedia dell’arte, which arose from popular-festive roots, achieved the height of its satirical development in the art of Molière. The epoch of the Enlightenment once again created the most suitable soil for the development of satire. Satire once again becomes radical and universal; the influence of Horace and Juvenal is replaced by the new influence of Petronius and Lucian. Certain forms of the great Renaissance satire are resurrected. Thus are the satirical novels of Voltaire (especially Candide): the misapprehension of a simpleton or a man from another culture is used to unmask and mock the meaningless and dying forms—social, political, ideological—of contemporary reality. Voltaire’s Micromegas and, especially, Swift’s writings resurrect forms of the grotesque satire (excessive exaggerations, fantasy), but they undergo significant changes: they lose their positive pole (a cheerful and regenerative tone of laughter, the spirit of the material-corporeal generative principle). The enlighteners’ rationalism and mechanism, the ahistoricity of their worldview and their lack of any more or less significant connections to popular laughter-based art did not allow the satire of the Enlightenment to rise to the height of Renaissance satire. Significant meaning accrued to the pamphlets of the epoch of the Enlightenment (especially English, e.g. those of Swift, Defoe and so forth), which lay on the border between image-based negation and political commentary. English satirical journals of the eighteenth century (Spectator, Tatler) played a significant role in the history of modern satirical art. They

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created and consolidated the genres of the small-scale magazine satire: dialogical, essayistic, and parodic. This journalistic satirical form of depicting and mocking contemporaneity repeats to a significant degree— under new conditions—the forms of Horace’s satire (conversational dialogue, a mass of images of speaking characters who arise only to disappear again, teasing social manners of speech, semi-dialogues, letters, and a mix of joking and serious thoughts). The minor forms of journalistic satire created in the eighteenth century continued to live, with insignificant changes, throughout the nineteenth century (and even, in essence, to our own day). The Romantics did not create a large-scale satire. Nonetheless, they contributed a series of significant and new features to satirical art. Their satire is directed predominantly against the cultural and literary phenomena of contemporaneity. Such are the literary-satirical (and parodic) plays of Tieck, the satirical tales and stories of Brentano, Chamisso, Fouqué, and in part Hoffmann. The negated reality— predominantly of a cultural and literary order—is thickest for the Romantics in the image of the “Philistine”; Romantic satire is full of diverse variations of this image. The mocking of the Philistine frequently includes forms and images of popular-festive laughter. The most original and profound form of satire in the Romantics is the satirical fairy tale. The mocking of reality here surpasses the limits of cultural and literary phenomena and rises to the level of an extremely deep and principled satire of capitalism. Such is Hoffmann’s exquisite fairy tale “Little Zaches” (in other fantastic and grotesque works by Hoffmann, we also find elements of a deeply anticapitalist satire). French Romanticism developed the lyrical satire of Juvenal’s kind (the best exemplar of this is Victor Hugo’s Les Châtiments—Castigations). Heinrich Heine was also an heir of the Romantic satire, but in the area of satirical lyric poetry he almost succeeded in making the transition from Romanticism to Realism (he overcame the superficial tendentiousness of Young Germany), thanks to his orientation toward the radicalism of the epoch’s democratic movement and to popular art. Romantic irony, the Gothic parody of debunking, the tradition of the French revolution and of the martial street song, forms of the minor journalistic and satirical (conversational) genres, and Shrovetide language were uniquely combined in Heine’s remarkable poetic satire. In France the popular sung satirical tradition fertilized the satirical lyric poetry of Béranger. The same tradition of the satirical street song

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defined the satirical lyric poetry of Barbier (cf. his “Iambs” and “Satires”), but in combination with the heritage of Roman satire. The further fate of satire in the nineteenth century is as follows. Pure satire lived predominantly in the forms of minor journalistic satirical genres. The nineteenth century did not create new large-scale forms of satire. Satire played its creative role in the process of preparing and creating the European novel, which became the main genre representing contemporary reality. Elements of the image-based negation of this reality played a greater or lesser role in the nineteenth-century novel. Sometimes they take the form of humor (e.g., in Thackerey or Dickens); this humor is nothing other than a softened and subjectivized popular-festive laughter (at once mockingly destructive and joyfully regenerative), which had lost its elemental dialectical quality and its radicality. The twentieth century has not written any significant and new pages into the history of satire. We can mention the attempts to resurrect Romantic satire (Hoffmann’s and that of Tieck’s dramas) in German Expressionism (Sternheim, Werfel, et  al.), and the interesting use of popular-festive [ . . . ] [ . . . Nikolai Nekrasov] frequently utilizes a satirical means of showing how the negated reality unmasks itself (as early as his satires of the 1840s, e.g., “The Moneylender” and “A Moral Man”). Remarkable from the viewpoint of satirical technique are the plot and composition of the poem Who Lives Well in Rus’?: the fantasy and the fairy tale that frame the plots; the traditionally satirical “dispute” of peasants; the peasants’ journey that is determined by the plot of the story of those who aspire to happiness; and so forth. As a result [one finds] a picture of Russian reality, of its old dying parts and embryonic new future (cf. the young sorrowful and cursing praise in Grisha’s song), which is astonishing in its variety and fullness. Saltykov-Shchedrin was also an heir of the best traditions of the development of world satire. It is telling that his first satirical essay, “Provincial Essays,” ends with the vision of a strange funeral procession, in which the heroes of the “Essays” participate. It turns out that “[t]he old times are being buried” (it is not important that Shchedrin had already lost his faith in the finality of this funeral). Saltykov himself gave a wonderful formula of a genuinely satirical representation of reality: he said that in any fact “the past and future, though they be hidden to the unaided eye, yet are just as real as the present.” For

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the satirist, the present wholly decomposes into the past and future; no neutral and self-sufficient present remains. Contemporary reality is a process of the death of the past and the birth of the future, but in Shchedrin’s epoch the future was only just being conceived; therefore the picture of the death and decomposition of the economic, social, and political structure of Russia and its dominant ideology (both class and liberal) dominates Shchedrin’s art. In Shchedrin universalism, historicity, the grotesque and fantasy, the fairy tale, the selfunmasking of reality, and satirical dialogues achieve the peak of their development. 12. Ambassadors of the future (“ideals”) are always present in satire in one form or another, in one degree or another; therefore the future is inevitably characterized by utopian features. Only Marxism-Leninism has uncovered this future in a scientific way, as necessity. In the USSR this future has become a growing reality. It has been born and is growing in our contemporary reality. Therefore, the depiction of our contemporary reality can least of all be an image that negates it. The dying away of the old in our reality is weak and occupies an insignificant place. But it still exists and, therefore, there is and must be a Soviet satire. A most important satirical task remains for Soviet literature, of course, in relation to our pre-revolutionary past and in relation to the capitalist world as the encirclement of the USSR.

[Lit erature] Reinach, S. “Le Rire rituel.” In: Reinach, S. Cultes, Mythes et Religions. Vol. 4. Paris, 1912. P. 109–129. Hoffmann,  E. “Die Fescenninen.” Rheinisches Museum. No. 51. 1896: 320–325. Lezius, J. “Zur Bedeutung von Satire.” Wochenschrift für klassische Philologie. 1891. No. 8. P. 1131–1133. Flögel, K.-Fr. Geschichte des Grotesk-Komischen. Leipzig, 1788. Revised edition: Dr. Fr.-W. Ebeling. Flögel’s Geschichte des Grotesk-Komischen. Leipzig, 1862. Most recent revised edition: Max Bauer, 1914. Schneegans, H. Geschichte der grotesken Satire. Strassburg, 1894. Freidenberg, O. M. Poetika siuzheta i zhanra. Leningrad, 1936. Glass, M. Klassische und romantische Satire. Stuttgart, 1905. Alferov, A. D. Petrushka i ego predki (Ocherk iz istorii narodnoi kukol’noi komedii). Moscow, 1895.

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Sumtsov,  N.  F. “Razyskaniia v oblasti anekdoticheskoi literatury. Anekdoty o gluptsakh.” Sbornik Khar’kovskigo istoriko-filologicheskogo obshchestva. Vol. 11. Khar’kov, 1899. P. 118–315. Pel’ttser, A. P. “Proiskhozhdenie anekdotov v russkoi narodnoi slovesnosti.” Ibid., P. 57–117. Dobroliubov, N. A. “Russkaia satira Ekaterininskogo vremeni.” Sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 1. Lenient, C. La Satire en France ou la littérature militante au XVIe s. Paris, 1866. Birt, Th. Zwei politische Satiren des alten Rom. Marburg, 1888. —Edited and translated by Robert Bird

Notes The translator is grateful to Boris Maslov for his comments on earlier drafts. 1. M.  M. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1996–), 5:11–34. The editors of the volume, S. G. Bocharov and L. A. Gogotishvili, also print some addenda to the article, which are omitted from the translation for reasons of space. Footnotes regarding Bakhtin’s sources are borrowed from Bocharov and Gogotishvili’s edition. Other explanatory footnotes to the translation belong to the translator; references to ancient texts have been revised to accord with the current bibliographic conventions. The editors thank Sergei Bocharov for permission to publish this translation. 2. Letter from E. Mikhailova from 26 October 1940; Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 404. 3. Letter from B. Mikhailovskii from 6 January 1941; Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 406. 4. By “ethology” Bakhtin apparently means something akin to “the science of character formation” (the third definition of the word in the OED). 5. A. G. Gornfel’d, “Satira,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, izdannyi F. Brokgauzom i I. Efronom 28 (St. Petersburg, 1900), p. 461. 6. F. Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” in Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 1993), p. 206. 7. S. Reinach, “Le Rire rituel,” in Cultes, mythes et religions (Paris, 1912), 4:109–29. 8. Bakhtin is misremembering. In fact, it is the woman Iambe who is able to improve Demeter’s mood by her jokes (Homeric Hymn to Demeter, ll. 202–4). 9. Bakhtin has: Krisipp (Chrysippus).

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Chapter 14

Columbus’s Egg, or the Structure of the Novella (1973) M IKH A IL G A S PA ROV

Mikhail Gasparov (1935–2005) is a major authority on the history of Russian and European verse, whose work is exemplary of the “Russian method” of metrical analysis. A proponent of an objectivist vision of literary studies as a science of verbal art, Gasparov applied statistical analysis to large corpora of verse and explored the interface between linguistics and metrics. In the tradition of Historical Poetics, Gasparov places the evolution of forms at the center of his literary-historical work, particularly in A History of European Versification (English translation: Oxford, 1999); he has also worked extensively on the semantic and stylistic associations of different metrical and stanzaic forms. The classic short essay translated here stems from the early period of Gasparov’s work, attesting to a dialogue with the Tartu school of semiotics led by Yuri Lotman.1 This pithy and insightful analysis of the novella combines the structuralist commitment to synchronic analysis of narrative logic with an interest in the poetics of genre and in the basis of elaborate literary forms in popular traditions. This article is thus an example of a productive encounter between Historical Poetics and a methodology that, by and large, downplays the evidence of history. Gasparov distinguishes between plots typical of fable and of the novella; the former (exemplified by Anna Karenina) stress the status quo and teach a lesson to the individual who attempts to improve his or her situation; the latter foreground the agency of an individual who 392

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succeeds in his strategy. Interestingly, in his earlier work on ancient fable, Gasparov gives a Marxist interpretation of its basic plotline: Ancient fable is an ideologically conservative genre. Its basic assumption: “the evil reigns in the world and cannot be eradicated, all changes only lead to the worse.” Its main moral thesis: “Be content with your fate and do not strive for more.” Its usual plotline: “someone desired to change the status quo to gain something for himself, but ended up in a worse situation.” Petty practicality, individualism, pessimism are the ingredients of its ideology. It would be a gross mistake to consider this a revolutionary ideology. Yet there was one episode in the history of the fable when it became a weapon in the hands of progressive strata engaged in social struggle. This happened in the period of the great turn in the seventh–sixth centuries B.C.E., when the demos first confronted the aristocratic ideology of the traditional social and ethical values with its own ideology of common sense and clearheaded practicality. It was in this period that fable entered ancient literature (in Hesiod, Archilochus, lyricists); the tradition assigns Aesop’s ‘invention’ of the genre of fable to the same period. Yet once the epoch of change was over, the revolutionary pathos of the early fable became a thing of the past, whereas the Philistine ideology of the common man did not die off, but flourished. It is at this moment of juncture that the image of Aesop and the Weltanschauung of the fable were separated: the memory of the activist spirit of the early fable survived in the image of Aesop as sage and jester, whereas the ideology of the Philistines found its expression in the moralizing of the Aesopic fables, carefully filtered through the grammatical and rhetorical school.2 In contrast to the conservatism of the fabular plot, Gasparov speaks of the subversive qualities of the novella in a language redolent of Bakhtin’s celebration of the Renaissance popular culture and certainly intended as a covert commentary on the Soviet officialdom. Furthermore, he distinguishes between two varieties of the novelistic plot, one of which involves an unexpected move within the plot, and the other a major discursive shift, a “yoking together” of distinct experiential domains. Whereas the first plot type predominates in premodern narratives (cf. the picaresque novel with its enterprising hero), the second one is widespread in modern narratives (cf. Joyce’s Ulysses). What

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appears, at a first glance, to be an essay in structural analysis of narrative thus leads to an insight that pertains to the principal concern of Historical Poetics, the longue durée of literary forms. Article 25. All that is not indicated in these rules as being allowed is thereby assigned to the class of the forbidden. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Modern idyll3 The story of Columbus’s egg (the degree of its unreliability does not concern us here) is usually told as follows. At a dinner table Columbus challenges his esteemed companions to make an egg stand on its sharp end. They make an attempt at this, rotating the egg in this and that way, all to no avail. Then Columbus takes the egg, gently taps its sharp end against the table, and makes the egg stand. “What, was it allowed to break the egg?” asked the disappointed onlookers. “Who said it wasn’t allowed?” Columbus replied. The structure of this ruse is clear. In any sphere of human action, from among an endless number of conceivable acts, only few are marked as either officially allowed or officially forbidden. The rest remain unmarked and can be placed in opposition to either one of the two categories. For Columbus, all that is not forbidden is allowed; for his audience, all that is not allowed is forbidden. We may propose the following definition: a ruse is a type of action that construes an act that is not officially forbidden as one that is allowed. (By “act” here is understood a transition between two states, for example, between “the stationing of a whole egg” and “the stationing of a deformed egg.”) A joke is at the level of discourse what a ruse is at the level of action. Here is an analogous definition: a joke is a judgment in which a thought that is not officially forbidden is construed as allowed. (By “thought” I understand a linkage of two notions; examples follow.) Ruses and jokes, as is well known, are the most important elements in the plot of the novella, usually marking the action’s culmination. For this reason a classification of kinds of ruses and jokes based on the definition proposed here might be important for the typology of novellas. What would need to be classified are “actions” and “thoughts” that are being transferred from the category of “not forbidden” to that of “allowed.” Following are three simplest examples, taken from among the first few novellas in Franco Sacchetti’s collection (fourteenth century): a) The involvement of unusual elements (novella 9). An evil man invites a jester to a feast and demands: “Entertain us with a joke!”—

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“As you please. Would you prefer to crap into your hat yourself, or shall I do it for you?” The guests are amused; the host is put to shame.—In the proposition of the task, it was assumed that the joke would be directed at no one in particular, the guests and the host representing an outside audience. Inasmuch as there was no such “official” condition set, the jester considers it possible to involve the host in his joke (this is analogous to the breaching of the dramatic illusion). Compare novella 6, in which the jester introduces himself into the joke. The story of Columbus’s egg also represents a soft version of this type. b) The juxtaposition of elements that are usually not juxtaposed (novella 10). Two signors, accompanied by a jester, travel by the Valley of Josaphat. One of them says: “Hither the entire humanity shall assemble on the Day of Judgment.” The other replies: “Indeed, all will be packed.” The jester dashes to a hummock, defecates there, and says: “Well then, here I am, I am booking this place for myself.” In the proposition of the task, it was assumed that the thought of the Day of Judgment would be linked to religious and lofty thoughts, yet since that was not stipulated, the companion considers it permissible to connect it to an everyday thought, and the jester even to an indecent one. Compare novella 7, where a banner with a crucifix on it is discussed. The importance of such “yoking together of quite distant concepts” on other levels of literary structure is well known.4 c) The inversion of the relation between habitual elements (novella 8). An ugly lover is rejected by a lady and asks Dante’s advice. Dante says: “Try to get her pregnant; pregnant women develop all kinds of whims, so perhaps, due to one such whim, she might fall in love with you.” The proposition assumes that pregnancy is a result of falling in love; but since that is not stipulated, the joke assumes an inverse relation between these concepts: love is a result of pregnancy. Examples of this type appear to be quite rare. All the aforementioned examples are tinged with the comic, indeed a quite crude variety of the comic. That does not have to be the case. In essence, the tragic denouements in which the hero salvages his honor by committing suicide and suchlike closely resemble type (a), whereas literary works, frequent in the last century, in which trivial everyday situations set off a whole train of “universal issues” closely resemble type (b). In principle, when it comes to the comic or the tragic, plot actions are always ambivalent. In a different venue, I endeavored to demonstrate that the typical plot of the fable may be reduced to the formula: “someone wished to

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improve the state of affairs in such a way that he would fare better, yet thereby made things worse for himself.” A typical novella plot may analogously be described by the same formula, yet with a different conclusion: “someone wished to improve the state of affairs in such a way that he would fare better—and succeeded.” The schema of both plots comprises four parts: exposition, conception of a plan, action, result. The most convenient classification of fable plots would be based on “plan,” for which the hero pays with a failure. The most convenient classification of novella plots would be based on “action” (ruse, joke), through which the hero achieves his objective. Plots of the fabular type are more typical for some cultures (these do not have to belong to the genre of fable; Anna Karenina is constructed based on such a plot); for others, plots of the novelistic type. Some display the worldview of a Columbus, others that of [Saltykov’s] Modern idyll.5

Notes 1. Translation and notes by Boris Maslov. Originally published in Σημειωτική: Sbornik statei po vtorichnym modeliruiushchim sistemam (Tartu: Tartuskii gos. universitet, 1973), pp. 130–132. 2. “Dve traditsii v legende ob Ezope,” Vestnik drevnei istorii, 1967, no. 2, pp.  158–67 (quotation on p.  165). This analysis of the ideology of the Aesopic fable was echoed in Western scholarship; see the bibliography in Leslie Kurke, Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 45. For a polemic with Gasparov’s theorization of the genre of fable, see Victoria Somoff (Nesterenko), “Proizvedenie morali: analiz basni,” Voprosy literatury 2 (1998): 97–120. 3. The epigraph stems from Sovremennaia idilliia (1877–1883), a satirical work by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. 4. The phrase goes back to a recommendation in Lomonosov’s Rhetoric (1748), paragraph 27; Yuri Tynianov applies it to Lomonosov’s own poetics in his classic article “Ode as an Oratorical Genre” (New Literary History 34.3 [2003] 576; trans. Ann Shukman). 5. The latter statement should probably be construed as a veiled reference to the Soviet political regime, rather than a valid cross-cultural generalization: there are cultures (like that of Italian Renaissance) that allow all that is officially not forbidden, and those (like the one represented by Saltykov and experienced by Gasparov) that forbid all that is not officially allowed. Fittingly for a study of the ruse-centered plot of the novella, Gasparov concludes with a joke.

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Chapter 15

On the Eve of Epic Did the Chryses Episode in Iliad 1 Begin Its Life as a Separate Homeric Hymn? CH RIS TO PH ER  A . FA RAO N E

Bakhtin famously argued that in his day the novel was a young “genrein-the-making” that easily absorbed other genres, both the literary (e.g., epic and tragedy) and the mundane (e.g., epistle and legal transcript). In the larger project from which this essay is excerpted, I examine how orally composed Homeric epic (as we find it inscribed in the Iliad and Odyssey) likewise absorbed both the form and content of other, shorter hexametrical genres, especially those performed in clearly defined ritual contexts, as, for example, hymns, oracles and incantations. In what follows I argue that a good deal of the first book of the Iliad was originally composed as a separate hexametrical hymn to Apollo. This is not as far-fetched as one might first think. Scholars have, in fact, long suggested that the Chryses episode in the first book of the Iliad constitutes a distinct unit, especially the first fifty or so lines, where the compressed narrative, short speeches, and rapid changes of scene are unparalleled elsewhere in the poem.1 In addition, the formulae, language, and lack of similes in the episode often seemed to an earlier generation of scholars to reflect a “later” stratum of composition, one connected with the poet who shaped the monumental Iliad.2 There are other oddities regarding the coherence of the proem (lines 1–9), which introduce the wrath (mênis) of Achilles as the central theme of the poem, but then switches without warning to another tale about the anger of Apollo. The tension or confusion between the two angers seems to have been an old one; ancient scholars report the existence of 397

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two other, shorter versions of the proem, which introduce the anger of both Achilles and Apollo as the twinned foci of the Iliad or that of Apollo alone. There are discontinuities as well in characterization. Achilles, for example, appears in the episode first as the protector of Apollo’s seer Calchas and then as the first of the Greeks to insist on the return of the daughter of Apollo’s priest Chryses; but elsewhere in the poem he seems to be an implacable enemy of the god. The poet also puts words of such impiety into the mouth of Agamemnon that some ancient editors felt obliged to athetize them as inappropriate, in part because this characterization of the Greek commander is generally inconsistent with the presentation of him in the rest of the poem. The Chryses episode ends, moreover, on an enigmatic note with the singing of paean at the god’s temple at Chryse (430–87), a song that is not mentioned earlier in Calchas’s prophecy, in Agamemnon’s commands to the Achaeans, or in Odysseus’s greeting to the old priest. I argue that nearly all of these difficulties vanish, or are at least more easily explicable, once we realize that the Chryses episode was probably composed originally as a separate “introductory piece” (prooimion) or “Homeric hymn” for a festival at the sanctuary of Apollo Smintheus in Chryse. Such hymns usually invoked the local deity, often narrated an important myth about the birth or some deed of the god connected with the sanctuary, and offered explanations for traditional rituals performed there. My argument for the hymnic origins of the Chryses episode proceeds along three different routes. I begin with a close analysis of the variant prologues to the Iliad, suggesting that they show traces of an original hymnic invocation to Apollo focused on his anger alone or first. I then discuss the discontinuities of characterization between Book 1 and the rest of the poem, especially that of Agamemnon, whom I compare with the royal theomachoi in hymnic narratives—for example, Prince Erysichthon, who bodily threatens Demeter in her Callimachean hymn, or the various other kings who harass Dionysus and his followers. Finally, I argue that the detailed descriptions of the hecatomb sacrifice and the (unanticipated) paean-singing at Chryse recall hymnic scenes like the one at the end of the Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo, where the god’s newly appointed priests likewise perform a sacrifice at an altar and then sing a processional paean. I close with the suggestion that, like the so-called Hymn to the Muses at the start of the Hesiodic Theogony or the opening Delian section of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the Chryses episode began its life as a

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free-standing hexametrical hymn that was subsequently adapted by the poet of the monumental Iliad.3 We see that the poet, by choosing a familiar type of hymnic narrative as a stepping-off point for the Iliad, is able at the very start to distinguish its most important characters in the context of traditional religion: Agamemnon as a selfish, arrogant, and impious monarch and Achilles as an essentially good and pious young warrior, who sides with priest and seer alike and continually looks to the greater good of the Greek army. These first impressions are, of course, mitigated and compromised in the course of the long poem, but they persist, I argue, as first impressions so often do, in our appreciation and comprehension of these two complicated and divisive characters.

Starting Out: The Variant Versions of the Proem (1–9) I begin with the evidence that two alternate versions of the proem to the Iliad introduced more directly the tale of Apollo’s anger alone or a doubled plot of two very different angers: the mênis of Apollo and the cholos of Achilles. The Anecdotum Romanorum cites Nicanor and Crates for the information that the Roman bibliophile Apellicon owned a copy of the Iliad that began:4 Μούσας ἀείδω καὶ Ἀπόλλωνα κλυτότοξον Λητοῦς καὶ Διὸς υἱόν· ὁ γὰρ βασιλῆι χολωθείς . . . The Muses I sing, and Apollo famed for his bow, the son of Leto and Zeus, for when he got angry with the king . . . That another poet might introduce Apollo alone as the plague-dealing archer god at the very start of the Iliad is not surprising, of course, but why are the Muses here? With the exception of the Hesiodic Theogony (and a short Homeric hymn dependent upon it) the Muses are never named in the first line of a heroic narrative or hymn as the subject of song, but only as the facilitators or the sources of it.5 Such a combination might be easier if Apollo were identified by one of his “musical” epithets or were described holding a lyre, as for instance when we see him leading the Muses in song on Olympus at the end of Iliad 1 or in the Pythian section of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo.6 But Apellicon’s line incongruously puts the peaceful Muses side by side with

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Apollo the killer god. Perhaps this verse did introduce such a scene, but an easier explanation is surely that the first line has gotten muddled in the processes of excerption and copying and that in the original the Muses were themselves invoked to sing about Apollo the bowman. For the argument at hand, however, the presence of the Muses is far less significant than the complete absence of Achilles. Aristoxenus apparently knew other versions of the Iliad that began with these three verses: ἔσπετε νῦν μοι, Μοῦσαι, Ὀλύμπια δώματ’ ἔχουσαι ὅππως δὴ μῆνίς τε χόλος θ’ ἕλε Πηλείωνα Λητούς τ’ ἀγλαὸν υἱόν· ὁ γὰρ βασιλῆι χολωθείς . . . Tell me now, o Muses, who have Olympian homes, how indeed rage and anger seized the son of Peleus and the gleaming son of Leto. For when he got angry with the king . . . Scholars usually treat this version of the proem as a clumsy abbreviation7 of the first nine lines of the vulgate Iliad, since both end with nearly the same verse:8 μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ’ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε δαῖτα, Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή, ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. τίς τ’ ἄρ σφωε θεῶν ἔριδι ξυνέηκε μάχεσθαι; Λητοῦς καὶ Διὸς υἱός· ὁ γὰρ βασιλῆϊ χολωθείς . . . The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus’ son Achilles, the murderous wrath, which set myriad sufferings for the Achaeans, and sent many strong spirits to Hades before their time, spirits of warriors and their bodies prepared as spoils for dogs and a feast for birds. And the plan of Zeus was being accomplished, from that time when the two of them first stood apart quarreling, the son of Atreus, lord of men, and gleaming Achilles.

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Which of the gods, then, thrust the two of them together to battle in strife? —The son of Leto and Zeus, for when he got angry with the king . . . (Iliad 1.1–9) Commentators have long noted that the question in line 8 (“Which of the gods . . .”) sets the initial narrative of the poem in motion, but the precise logic of the preceding seven verses eludes us.9 When the poet asserts in lines 8–9, for example, that Apollo is the god who “thrust the two of them together to battle in strife” we are puzzled, because in the subsequent narrative there is no evidence that Apollo ever aimed to create strife in the Greek camp, although as a Trojan partisan this would not be unexpected. But as the story unfolds in Iliad 1, the god desires simply to punish Agamemnon’s impiety by sending a plague, a common pattern in myths about Apollo, especially in western Anatolia.10 The poet underscores Apollo’s rather simple goal later in Book 1, when, after the sacrifice and paean at his temple, Apollo quickly relents from his anger against the Greeks and even sends Odysseus’s ship back to Troy with a favoring wind (lines 470–79). Apollo, in short, seems to forget about the ongoing war at Troy and reacts purely as a local deity.11 When viewed from the perspective of the two shorter variants, then, the longer vulgate proem seems to struggle a bit to combine the two angers and the two stories into a single narrative. Or to put it another way: all three proems end with the same verse, which identifies Apollo as the son of Leto or of both Leto and Zeus and describes how Apollo got angry with a king. Apellicon’s proem gets us to that point in a single line, by ignoring Achilles entirely; this may seem too abrupt to modern readers, but it is a typical introduction for a short Homeric hymn.12 The text quoted by Aristoxenus gets us there in two lines by mentioning the anger of both individuals, but then choosing to tell the story of Apollo’s wrath. The vulgate takes eight lines to get there in an accumulative manner that expands the focus of the proem, but in a nonlinear and somewhat confusing manner, at least for modern expectations.13 Although some scholars dismiss the three-verse variant as an inept condensation of the vulgate, we might say more charitably that it deals much more economically and gracefully with the compositional problem of narrating the angers of both Achilles and Apollo. It nicely interweaves, for example, the two stories into a single sentence: “how indeed rage and anger seized the son of Peleus and the gleaming son of

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Leto” (ὅππως δὴ μῆνίς τε χόλος θ’ ἕλε Πηλείωνα Λητούς τ’ ἀγλαὸν υἱόν).14 The doubling of the words for anger, moreover, creates a neat chiasmos, in which mênis appropriately seizes Apollo first and then cholos Achilles, and which nonetheless allows the poet to launch directly into the story of Apollo’s anger with Agamemnon. Aristoxenus’s proem, in short, observes the traditional distinction between mênis, the supernatural rage that is proper to the gods, and cholos, the anger that both gods and mortals experience.15 This formulation also preserves the proper sequence of events narrated in the poem: first mênis (the god gets enraged at the outrageous behavior toward his priest) and then cholos (the hero becomes angry at the outrageous seizure of his war booty). I am not arguing, of course, that the composer of the first line of the vulgate proem made a mistake when he attributes mênis to Achilles; indeed, this decision adds enormous complexity to the characterization of the “half-breed” Achilles, who from the very beginning of the poem seems tragically caught between the world of the immortal gods and that of mortal men. I am only suggesting that the poet who created Aristoxenus’s proem did not necessarily dismember and shorten the vulgate version—indeed we have no evidence that he knew the vulgate at all and he may have aimed, in fact, at a more straightforward solution to the problem of the twin angers of Iliad 1. And in fact we find evidence for this simpler kind of proem in the vulgate itself in the reluctant report of the seer Calchas to the Greek assembly, which begins as follows: ὦ Ἀχιλλεῦ, κέλεαί με, διίφιλε, μυθήσασθαι μῆνιν Ἀπόλλωνος, ἑκατηβελέταο ἄνακτος. O Achilles, you bid me, beloved of Zeus, to tell about the mênis of Apollo, the far-shooting lord. (74–75) The second line, with its verse-initial placement of the word μῆνις followed by the name and traditional epithet of the plague-sending god, sounds, in fact, like yet another good way to begin the Iliad. And indeed Calchas then goes on to explain the cause of the god’s mênis (93–96)—something that up to this point is known only to the omniscient poet—and he uses much of the poet’s own language to do so.16 It has not been noticed, moreover, that Calchas begins his prophetic report in a hymnic register, for if we replace Apollo’s name in line 75 with the apostrophe to the Muse from the initial verse of the vulgate proem, we have an opening line worthy of a Homeric Hymn to Apollo:

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“Sing, Goddess, the mênis of the far-shooting lord” (μῆνιν [ἄειδε, θεά,] ἑκατηβελέταο ἄνακτος). And he sums up his narrative by saying: “It is on account of this, therefore, that the far-shooter gave pains (ἄλγε’ ἔδωκεν) and will give them still . . .” (96). Calchas makes clear in the next line, of course, that these “pains” afflicted the Greeks (97: Δαναοῖσιν). Here again the seer echoes the words of the omniscient poet, who in the second line of the vulgate proem describes how the anger of Achilles “set myriad sufferings for the Achaeans” (2: μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε). And when Agamemnon gives a resumé of Calchas’s words a bit later in the poem, he, too, says that Apollo, not Achilles, was the source of the ἄλγεα (110: ἑκήβολος ἄλγεα τεύχει). In fact, aside from line 2 of the traditional proem and one other verse in the Iliad (22.422, where Achilles is again the source), the giver or sender of “pains” (algea) in extant epic narrative is always a god or a curse.17 Here again one wonders whether the opening verse of the vulgate Iliad once referred to the anger of Apollo rather than of Achilles.18 Indeed, if we, as a thought experiment, combine the second half of the first line of Calchas’s prophecy with the beginning of the vulgate proem, we can see how a traditional poet might have introduced a Homeric Hymn to the Sminthean Apollo: μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, [ἑκατηβελέταο ἄνακτος] οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ’ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προίαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε δαῖτα· ὁ γὰρ βασιλῆι χολωθείς . . . The wrath sing, goddess, of the far-shooting lord, the murderous wrath, which set myriad sufferings for the Achaeans, and sent many strong spirits of warriors to Hades before their time, spirits of warriors and their bodies prepared as spoils for dogs and a feast for birds. For when he got angry with the king . . . This hypothetical proem, then, requires only the substitution of the name and epithet in the first line and the excision of the three and a half verses (5b-8) that mention the boulê of Zeus, the dispute of Achilles and Agamemnon, and the question to the Muses about which of the gods set them to arguing. What remains, however, is perfectly cogent and prepares us for the first part of the Chryses episode, just as the proem of Aristoxenus apparently did.

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The two alternate versions of the Iliad proem, then, along with the wording and content of Calchas’s prophecy later in the episode, suggest that some poets began their performances of the Iliad with the anger of Apollo alone (Apellicon’s book) or with the chiastically entwined angers of both Apollo and Achilles (the versions by Aristoxenus). The first four verses of the vulgate proem itself, moreover, use words and phrases traditionally associated with the gods (e.g., mênis and the giving or sending of algea), and thereby prepare us much better for Apollo’s immediate assault on the Greek camp than the carnage that subsequently plays out on the battlefield of Troy as a result of Achilles’ wrath and withdrawal. I am not suggesting, of course, that the poet of the vulgate botched his proem, but rather that, while singing in the same tradition that produced the variant proems, he came up with a radical and interesting idea: the human anger (cholos) of Achilles was not simply a theme chiastically parallel to that of the divine rage (mênis) of Apollo, but rather Achilles himself, although half-mortal, was capable of this same divine rage and equally able to send “pains” (algea) onto mortals, just as Apollo did.

The Impiety of Agamemnon and Other Hymnic Characterizations Discontinuities of characterization provide a second set of clues to the hymnic origins of the Chryses episode. First and foremost is the nearly complete absence in Iliad 1 of individual Trojan characters such as Hector, Paris and Priam, although this can be explained by the poet’s initial focus on the Greek camp.19 Even more surprisingly, we see or hear almost nothing of other important Greek characters, such as Menelaus or Patroclus, except the latter’s brief role in the scene where the heralds come for Briseis.20 But even the Greeks who do play a role in Iliad 1 differ in important ways from their later appearances in the poem. The poet, for instance, briefly but finely draws Calchas the seer as a character of interest and integrity, raising the expectation that we will see more of him in the long narrative that follows; but in fact he disappears almost entirely from the rest of the poem.21 Even more puzzling is the fact that in the Chryses episode Achilles piously supports Apollo’s seer Calchas and then presses for ransoming the daughter of Apollo’s priest; but elsewhere in the poem this same god is depicted as the staunch defender of Troy and Achilles’ enemy.22

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It is, however, the characterization in Iliad 1 of Agamemnon as an impious and selfish king that points most clearly to the hymnic source of the Chryses episode. We first hear him speak after Apollo’s priest arrives at the Greek camp dressed in full priestly garb and offers to ransom his daughter Chryseis: ἔνθ’ ἄλλοι μὲν πάντες ἐπευφήμησαν Ἀχαιοὶ αἰδεῖσθαί θ’ ἱερῆα καὶ ἀγλαὰ δέχθαι ἄποινα: ἀλλ’ οὐκ Ἀτρεΐδῃ Ἀγαμέμνονι ἥνδανε θυμῷ, ἀλλὰ κακῶς ἀφίει, κρατερὸν δ’ ἐπὶ μῦθον ἔτελλε: μή σε γέρον κοίλῃσιν ἐγὼ παρὰ νηυσὶ κιχείω ἢ νῦν δηθύνοντ᾽ ἢ ὕστερον αὖτις ἰόντα, μή νύ τοι οὐ χραίσμῃ σκῆπτρον καὶ στέμμα θεοῖο: τὴν δ’ ἐγὼ οὐ λύσω: πρίν μιν καὶ γῆρας ἔπεισιν ἡμετέρῳ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ ἐν Ἄργεϊ τηλόθι πάτρης ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένην καὶ ἐμὸν λέχος ἀντιόωσαν: ἀλλ’ ἴθι, μή μ᾽ ἐρέθιζε, σαώτερος ὥς κε νέηαι. And all of the other Achaeans shouted their approval for showing reverence to the priest and accepting the ransom, but he did not please Agamemnon in his heart and he sent him off basely and added a strong speech: “Don’t let me find you, old man, by the hollow ships, either dallying now or coming again a second time, lest then, indeed, the scepter and fillet of the god do you no good. I will not free the girl. Before that even old age will come to her in our house in Argos far away from her fatherland plying the loom and coming to my bed. But go! Don’t aggravate me, so you may return home more safely.” (22–32) The cruel description of the priest’s daughter in Agamemnon’s bed at Argos (29–31) has created the most uproar among commentators, both ancient and modern.23 The poet himself notes how Agamemnon brushes the priest off basely (25: κακῶς ἀφίει), and lines 29–31 were so offensive to Aristarchus that he athetized them on the grounds that it was “unseemly” (ἀπρεπές) for Agamemnon to speak publicly before the army about his home and bed.24 I suggest, in fact, that the perceived impropriety of his words is more a problem of poetic genre than internal audience: Agamemnon’s words here and elsewhere in the Chryses episode are generically inappropriate for a heroic war narrative,

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because they cast him in the role of an impious and selfish king of the type that frequently plays the role of a theomachos in Greek hymns.25 Indeed, despite the deep empathy that modern readers feel for Chryses as a father, the most astonishing feature of Agamemnon’s speech is his gross impiety toward Chryses as Apollo’s priest (11: ἀρητήρ), a role which was immediately apparent to all in the Greek camp because he was “holding in his hands the fillets of far-shooting Apollo along his golden scepter” (14–15: στέμματ᾽ ἔχων ἐν χερσὶν ἑκηβόλου Ἀπόλλωνος / χρυσέῳ ἀνὰ σκήπτρῳ).26 Chryses’ special status is, in fact, underscored by the instinctive and pious reaction of all of the other Greeks “to reverence the priest” (22: αἰδεῖσθαί θ᾽ ἱερῆα). Agamemnon, on the other hand, threatens the priest twice with bodily harm (28 and 32), calling attention in the first instance to these same two symbols of his priestly office: “Don’t let me find you . . . by the hollow ships, lest . . . the scepter and fillet of the god (σκῆπτρον καὶ στέμμα θεοῖο) do you no good” (26–28).27 Chryses’ initial speech, moreover, ends with the natural expectation that the Greeks (and Agamemnon) will accept the ransom “out of awe for the son of Zeus, Apollo who shoots from afar” (21: ἁζόμενοι Διὸς υἱὸν ἑκηβόλον Ἀπόλλωνα), an emphatically ponderous line that is almost entirely taken up with naming Apollo as both the son of Zeus and a killer god.28 This scene of an impious and selfish king threatening priests or other votaries is common enough fare in Greek hymns. The best example is the scene of Erysichthon’s rash impiety in Callimachus’s Hymn to Demeter.29 When she becomes aware that Erysichthon and his men are cutting down a tree in her sacred grove, Demeter appears to the young prince disguised as her own priestess (42: ἀρατείρα), Nicippe, who wears all of the signs of her office (43–44): the fillets (στέμματα, like Chryses);30 the poppy; and the temple key dangling from her shoulder. There is, in short, no way that Erysichthon could have mistaken her priestly status. And like Chryses, Demeter implores him with a dignified and sensible speech, warning him to refrain from cutting down the tall poplar tree dedicated to the goddess (46–49). Erysichthon’s fierce response rivals Agamemnon’s in its violence and selfishness31: χάζευ, ἔφα, μή τοι πέλεκυν μέγαν ἐν χροὶ πάξω. ταῦτα δ’ἐμὸν θησεῖ στεγανὸν δόμον, ᾧ ἔνι δαῖτας αἰὲν ἐμοῖς ἑτάροισιν ἅδαν θυμαρέας ἀξῶ.

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Be off with you, he said, lest I stick my great axe in your hide! These trees will roof over my hall where I shall sate my comrades constantly with delicious banquets. (52–55) Here, too, the narrator explicitly introduces the prince as an evil and shameless man (45: κακὸν καὶ ἀναιδέα φῶτα) and later tells us that Nemesis herself has noted down his evil speech (56: κακὰν φωνάν). The parallels between the Callimachean hymn and Iliad 1 are clear enough and can be summarized easily: Title Insignia

Narrator’s assessment

Iliad 1 11: ἀρητήρ 22: ἱερῆα 14: στέμματ᾽ 15: χρυσέῳ ἀνὰ σκήπτρῳ 28: σκῆπτρον καὶ στέμμα 25: κακῶς ἀφίει

Hymn to Demeter 42: ἀρατείρα 43–44: στέμματα, poppy, temple key 45: κακὸν καὶ ἀναιδέα φῶτα 56: κακὰν φωνάν

In both poems impious royals speak cruelly and basely to persons explicitly marked by priestly insignia and threaten their lives personally if they do not depart. Another obvious parallel is with the “triumphant egoism” of Agamemnon’s speech, which contains five emphatic references to himself and focuses on his private desires:32 he wants the girl for his house and for his bed (30–31: ἡμετέρῳ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ . . . καὶ ἐμὸν λέχος), just as Erysichthon wants the tree to build his lodge (54: ἐμὸν . . . δόμον) to feast his companions (55: ἐμοῖς ἑτάροισιν). A similar speech, albeit less crass and violent, is uttered by the captain of the pirates who seize and bind the young Dionysus in the seventh Homeric Hymn;33 after the bindings fall from the god’s hands and feet and the pious helmsman points out to the others the signs of divinity in the boy (20: εἴκελος . . . θεοῖς), the captain chides him with what the poet describes as a loathsome speech (25: στυγερῷ ἠνίπαπε μύθῳ) and tells him to get back to work, predicting (with a hint of violence) that the boy will eventually tell them the names of relatives who can pay his ransom (29–30: ἐς δὲ τελευτὴν . . . ἐρεῖ). Bulloch in his outline of these kinds of hymnic narratives calls the helmsman’s comment the “warning,” that is, the natural response of a pious person to signs of obvious divinity.34 The story in Iliad 1 is different, of course, because it involves the mistreatment of the god’s representative, rather than the

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god himself, but the Greek army as a whole seems to play the pious role of the “warner” when they spontaneously and in unison shout approval for “respecting the priest and accepting the ransom” (22–23). The army, it seems, can easily read the signs and make the correct inference, just as the helmsman does in the Hymn to Dionysus. A papyrus fragment of a hexameter hymn of late-Roman date narrates the similar story of Dionysus’s punishment of king Lycurgus, who personally threatens and attacks the god and his nurses with an oxgoad (20).35 The text ends, moreover, with fragmentary instructions for libations and sacrifice, suggesting that the hymn was destined for use in some kind of cultic setting. The hymn has, unfortunately, lost its beginning, so we lack the scene of Lycurgus’s impiety and any speech he may have uttered: we are repeatedly told, however, of Dionysus’s wrath (14: mênima and 26 and 48: mênithmos), and we are in a good position to reconstruct Lycurgus’s sacrilege, thanks to a brief description of it in Iliad 6.130–37: οὐδὲ γὰρ οὐδὲ Δρύαντος υἱὸς κρατερὸς Λυκόοργος δὴν ἦν, ὅς ῥα θεοῖσιν ἐπουρανίοισιν ἔριζεν· ὅς ποτε μαινομένοιο Διωνύσοιο τιθήνας σεῦε κατ’ ἠγάθεον Νυσήϊον· αἳ δ’ ἅμα πᾶσαι θύσθλα χαμαὶ κατέχευαν ὑπ’ ἀνδροφόνοιο Λυκούργου θεινόμεναι βουπλῆγι· Διώνυσος δὲ φοβηθεὶς δύσεθ’ ἁλὸς κατὰ κῦμα, Θέτις δ’ ὑπεδέξατο κόλπῳ δειδιότα· κρατερὸς γὰρ ἔχε τρόμος ἀνδρὸς ὁμοκλῇ. No, for not even the son of Dryas, mighty Lycurgus, lived long, he who strove with the heavenly gods; for he once drove the wet-nurses of raving Dionysus headlong down the slope of sacred Mt. Nyseia and all of them at the same time let their wands fall to the ground, stricken by the ox-goad of man-slaying Lycurgus, while Dionysus in terror dove into the wave of the sea and Thetis took him in her bosom, frightened because a powerful trembling held him at the man’s rebuke. From this, the earliest extant version of the story, it seems that Lycurgus struck Dionysus’s nurses with an ox-goad while they were performing some kind of a maenadic dance, for they were carrying their thysthla, a rare word usually interpreted as thyrsoi.36 The Homeric summary ends, moreover, by mentioning Lycurgus’s ὁμοκλή (6.137), a word that designates a verbal threat, reproof, or rebuke.37 Thus here,

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again, the theomachos reveals himself in both his verbal abuse of and his personal violence against individuals who are marked as the votaries of a deity. Similarly outrageous behavior and speeches appear in Greek tragedy and they, too, probably derive from hymnic traditions. The best known example is in Euripides’s Bacchae,38 where Pentheus mocks the god Dionysus, who is disguised, but clearly marked as some kind of religious votary; for example, he grows his hair long for the god and carries a thyrsus (493–495).39 Here Dionysus, by impersonating his own cult official like Demeter in Callimachus’s hymn, heightens the impiety of the theomachos Pentheus, who threatens him bodily in a manner that calls attention (as did Agamemnon) to these same two insignia, his thyrsus and long hair: “if I catch him within this palace, I will stop him from pounding the thyrsus and tossing his locks by severing his head from his body” (239–41).40 Soon thereafter he commands his men to track the Stranger down and to bring him bound to the palace in order that he may be stoned to death (355–57). In this case the seer Teiresias plays the role of the “warner,” when he—dressed in Dionysiac regalia and holding a thyrsus (248–51)—tries unsuccessfully to persuade Pentheus to recognize Dionysus as a god (266–327), Pentheus again responds rashly and impiously by commanding his men to destroy the holy spot from which Teiresias takes his omens and to “throw his fillets (350: στέμματα) to the winds and storms.” Pentheus, in short, knows all too well the garb and implements of worshippers and seers, and he indeed makes them the special focus of his fury, rather than recognizing them as a warning of his own limitations as a mortal. We have seen, then, how in the Chryses episode Agamemnon appears as an impious king, who, like Erysichthon and other famous theomachoi, puts his private desires first, and, despite obvious signs of Chryses’ priestly status, threatens him with corporal harm. This characterization, I have argued, clearly seems to be shaped more by the conventions of hymnic narratives, rather than those of heroic tales. And like Pentheus, Agamemnon displays his violence and impiety a second time when he rebukes the seer Calchas later in the episode.41 And although elsewhere in the Iliad Agamemnon clearly acts violently and outrageously on the field of battle (as do most of the greatest Homeric heroes) he never again threatens an attack on a priest or seer nor overtly places his own personal pleasures above the appropriate piety of a mortal. Hymnic convention might also explain Achilles’ initially puzzling role in Iliad 1 as the protector of Apollo’s seer and a supporter of his

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priest, or the importance of Calchas in the action of Book 1. And in each case these same characters act differently when they appear (or fail to appear) in the later books of the poem. Agamemnon is generally a serious and decent general; Achilles is a fierce opponent of Apollo and performs a number of impious acts, including the killing of a suppliant and the refusal to bury the dead; Calchas, on the other hand, vanishes almost entirely into thin air.42

The Final Scene at Apollo’s Temple in Chryse The third and final part of my argument involves the very last scene of the episode at the sanctuary of Apollo Smintheus in Chryse. The poet describes a series of rituals: the participants offer a hecatomb at the altar of the god; they feast on the meat made available by the sacrifice; and then they drink wine and sing a special song to Apollo called a paean (lines 447–74). This is, in fact, the second round of ritual activity in response to the plague, because, soon after the ship leaves for Chryse, the Greeks who remain behind at Troy perform ritual ablutions, throw the polluted water into the sea, and then offer Apollo a hecatomb of bulls and goats (314–17). We are given no explanation for this parallel offering of the hecatomb, and we clearly have evidence here of two versions of the sacrifice. Earlier commentators like Lachmann and Leaf wanted, in fact, to athetize the entire expedition to Chryse (lines 430–87) because of this redundancy and because of the high frequency of “Odyssean” language in the scenes at the harbor and temple.43 The vulgate Iliad cannot, of course, do without the expedition to Apollo’s sanctuary, because according to the seer Apollo demanded that they “lead a hecatomb to Chryse” (99–100), but the doubling of the hecatomb suggests that the ritual scenes at the temple do indeed sit uncomfortably in the compositional tradition of the poem. But more puzzling—and as far as I can tell hitherto unremarked by scholars—is the singing of the paean, because the poet does not prepare us for it at all, although he had at least three opportunities to do so. Calchas tells the Achaeans that Apollo will continue the plague until they give back the girl to her father (98) and offer a hecatomb to the god (99); Agamemnon commands his men to prepare a ship for the daughter’s return (143) and the hecatomb (142 and 147); and upon his arrival at Chryse, Odysseus explains to the old priest that Agamemnon sent him to bring the girl back and offer a hecatomb (443–44).44 None of these speeches mentions the paean, and in fact all three itera-

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tions stress the desire to please the god with the girl and the sacrifice (100: ἱλασσάμενοι; 145: ἱλάσσεαι; and 445: ἱλασόμεσθα). In the description of the actual scene at Chryse, however, only the song is said to please the god, and emphatically so: “all day long they sought to appease the god with song-and-dance (μολπῇ θεὸν ἱλάσκοντο) by singing the paean (ἀείδοντες παιήονα)45 . . . singing-and-dancing (μέλποντες) the far-shooter and, as he (i.e., Apollo) heard it, he was glad in his heart (ὁ δὲ φρένα τέρπετ’ ἀκούων)” (472–74).46 We are, then, entirely unprepared for the crucial importance of the paean at Chryse. One might claim, of course, that the paean was a standard part of a sacrificial-type scene in epic, but in fact the verses that describe the singing are unique in extant epic, and indeed the scene at Chryse is, with the exception of the narrative of Nestor’s elaborate sacrifice to Athena in the Odyssey, the longest and most detailed description in extant epic.47 The poet, moreover, introduces a second and equally unexpected element into the scene: the young age of the ritual performers. Earlier in the poem, when Agamemnon orders his men to prepare the ship, we hear only that twenty men are chosen as “oarsmen” (142 and 309: ἐρέτας) and that Odysseus will serve as captain. We expect, of course, that Odysseus and these oarsmen will perform the sacrifice when they get to the sanctuary, because both Agamemnon and Odysseus say so (147: ἱέρα ῥέξας and 443–44: ἑκατόμβην ῥέξαι), and indeed, after the Greeks arrive, the poet falls into a standard typescene for sacrifice and we presume that Odysseus and his sailors are the agents throughout.48 Lines 462–63, however, appear nowhere else in extant epic49 and seem to introduce new participants, or at least distinguish them amongst the worshippers: καῖε δ’ ἐπὶ σχίζῃς ὁ γέρων, ἐπὶ δ’ αἴθοπα οἶνον λεῖβε: νέοι δὲ παρ᾽ αὐτὸν ἔχον πεμπώβολα χερσίν. The old man burnt the offering on skewers, and over it sparkling wine he poured; the young men next to him were holding five-pronged forks in their hands. The poet seems to insert these unique lines into the standard typescene to differentiate some of the ritual participants by age:50 Chryses, called “the old man” (462: ὁ γέρων), burns the offering and pours a libation of wine, while the “young men” (463: νέοι) stand by his side holding five-pronged instruments. Ten lines later we are told that

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“youths” (473: κοῦροι), presumably these same young men, sing a paean (469–74): αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ πόσιος καὶ ἐδητύος ἐξ ἔρον ἕντο, κοῦροι μὲν κρητῆρας ἐπεστέψαντο ποτοῖο, νώμησαν δ’ ἄρα πᾶσιν ἐπαρξάμενοι δεπάεσσιν: οἳ δὲ πανημέριοι μολπῇ θεὸν ἱλάσκοντο καλὸν ἀείδοντες παιήονα κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶν μέλποντες ἑκάεργον: ὃ δὲ φρένα τέρπετ᾽ ἀκούων. But when they had put from them the desire for drink and food, the youths filled the mixing bowls to the brim with drink and distributed it to all, after placing a few drops as first offerings in the cups. And all day long they tried to appease the god with song-and-dance as they sang the beautiful paean, the youths of the Achaeans celebrating the Far-worker in song and dance; hearing it he rejoiced in his heart. Who are these youths? The poet, it seems, wishes to equate them to the twenty Greek oarsmen from the camp at Troy, for he ends the scene by asserting that the κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶν are singing the hymn (473). Since the phrase κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶν (473) is sometimes used generically for the Achaeans,51 we need not perhaps rush to the conclusion that the paean singers are literally “young men,” but coming in quick succession here after neoi (463) and kouroi by itself (470) it is difficult to resist the conclusion that these “youths of the Achaeans” are in fact young Achaeans at Chryse who assist in the sacrifice and sing the paean.52 Their young age and the rites they perform are, however (like those of the neoi), unique, for lines 472–74 appear nowhere else in archaic hexameters. The ritual scenes performed by the youths at Chryse, in short, like the mean characterization of Agamemnon, do not sit comfortably within the frame of the Iliad.53 They are neither motivated by the ongoing plot of the poem (Calchas, Agamemnon, and Odysseus fail to mention them), nor can they be defended as a formal feature of a Homeric type-scene, since they appear in unique lines. The singing of the paean does, however, have one parallel in hexametrical poetry—at the end of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo:

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αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ πόσιος καὶ ἐδητύος ἐξ ἔρον ἕντο, βάν ῥ’ ἴμεν· ἦρχε δ’ ἄρά σφιν ἄναξ Διὸς υἱὸς Ἀπόλλων φόρμιγγ’ ἐν χείρεσσιν ἔχων, ἐρατὸν κιθαρίζων, καλὰ καὶ ὕψι βιβάς· οἳ δὲ ῥήσσοντες ἕποντο Κρῆτες πρὸς Πυθὼ καὶ ἰηπαιήον’ ἄειδον οἷοί τε Κρητῶν παιήονες, οἷσί τε Μοῦσα ἐν στήθεσσιν ἔθηκε θεὰ μελίγηρυν ἀοιδήν. And when they had satisfied their appetite for eating and drinking, they went on their way. And Lord Apollo, the son of Zeus, led them with a lyre in his hands playing a lovely strain, stepping high and gracefully. And they, stamping their feet, followed him to Pytho; Cretans they were and they sang ie paean after the manner of Cretan paean-singers for whom the divine Muse placed honey-sweet song in their breasts. (513–19) As in the case of the paean singing at Chryse, the Cretans start to sing and dance after the post-sacrificial “eating and drinking,” but here there is no confusion about their age and no surprise about their song. When Apollo (and we) first catch sight of them in their ship, they are described as “men” (392: ἄνδρες), as we would expect of sailors, and both the sacrifice and the song-and-dance they perform had been demanded a little earlier by Apollo himself (490–501). This Cretan-style paean is, however, quite different from the one performed at Chryse: at Delphi full-grown men sing it as they stamp their feet and process from a seaside altar to the oracular sanctuary of Apollo.54 At Chryse, on the other hand, young men sing it while dancing in the sanctuary after pouring libations from their individual cups and drinking wine. In both poems, however, the paean is sung at or near the end of the hymn or episode. At Delphi, moreover, Apollo marks these rituals emphatically as etiological: they explain the existence of a sacred landmark—an altar to “Apollo the Dolphin” (495–96)—and they also presumably explain the origins of the sacrifice on that altar and the processional paean from there up the steep slope to the temple.55 These rituals at Delphi raise intriguing questions about the Chrysesepisode: could the unexpected ritual scenes at the very end of that episode likewise point to a foundation story for the stationary paean sung

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and danced by youths for Apollo Smintheus at Chryse? The sanctuary probably stood on or near the west coast of the Troad, an important detail that we discover at the start of the first prayer of Chryses: “Hear me, you of the silver bow, who straddle Chryse and holy Killa and who rule powerfully over Tenedos, Smintheus . . .” (37–39). His second prayer (451–52) begins in nearly identical fashion, lacking only the final epithet “Smintheus.” The “local color” in these prayers is extraordinary: the priest mentions three sanctuaries of Apollo in the Troad and then addresses him as “lord of the silver bow” (an epithet that as we saw earlier focuses on his destructive capabilities) and as “Smintheus,” an epithet that means something like “Mouse-god.”56 Modern scholars agree that this second epithet also refers to Apollo as the sender of the plague, although the explicit connection between the god and the rodent is still unclear.57 Chryses invokes Apollo, therefore, as an epichoric deity who protects his local priest, and although the god is said to come “from the peaks of Olympus” (44), we see very little of the elaborate divine machinery that is typical of such interventions in epic narrative. When Athena, for example, prevents Achilles from killing Agamemnon later in Book 1, she comes down from Olympus at the behest of Hera, who (we presume) is watching the events of the poem unfold just as we do. When her work is done, she returns to Olympus. Chryses’ Apollo, on the other hand, is a god of local cult: he comes as soon as his priest summons him with the proper prayer and he is at hand to receive the hecatomb and be pleased by the paean. He seems for the moment, at least, to be quite distant from the Panhellenic gods of Olympus and unconnected to the lyre-playing Apollo, who appears with the antiphonal Muses at the end of Iliad 1 (603–4). It turns out, finally, that in historical times Apollo was still being worshipped along the western coast of Anatolia by young men, who sang the paean around his altar and asked him to spare the young men of the community. The best evidence comes from an early fourthcentury lex sacra from Erythrae,58 a city on the Turkish coast about a hundred miles south of Troy; the inscription orders worshippers to stand around the altar of Apollo (περὶ τὸν βωμὸν τοῦ Ἀπόλλωνος) and sing a short paean that ends with the request “Ie Paian, O Lord Apollo, spare the youths!” (ἱὴ Παιάν, [ὦ] ἄναξ Ἄπολλον, φείδεο κούρων).59 On the same stone we find the so-called Erythraean Paean, which begins: “Sing, youths, of Paian, famed for his cleverness, the son of Leto who shoots from afar, ie Paian!” (Παιᾶνα κλυτόμητιν ἀείσατε, κοῦροι, Λατοΐδαν ἕκατον, ἰὲ Παιάν).60 The Paean of Macedonicus (first century B.C.E.)

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imagines a similar performance by Athenian youths holding suppliant branches:61 With heart well-disposed and a propitious tongue, sing of the Delian god with his beautiful quiver (Δήλιον εὐφαρέτραν), the son of Zeus, of the silver bow (Ζηνὸς γόνον ὑμνεῖτ’ ἀργυρότ[οξον]), ie Paian! Take up in your palms, o Athenian lads (κοῦροι Ἀθηναίων), the suppliant bough of beautiful olive-wood and the gleaming branch of laurel, ie Paian! O lads ([κο]ῦρ[οι]), would that a blameless hymn might sing of the far-shooting son of Leto (Λητοΐδην ἕκατον). The poet identifies the performers as generic “youths” in the final section, but as “Athenian youths” in the second, the same variation we find in the Homeric description. In both paeans, moreover, Apollo is identified as the dangerous archer-god who must be appeased, just as he was at Chryse. It would seem, in short, that in the Ionian-Attic cultural realm, at least, local youths were called upon to sing paeans to Apollo, asking that the god spare the young men of the city in times of crisis.62 I would suggest, then, that the paean at the end of the Chryses episode is more appropriately sung by native youths at Chryse, who, like the youths at Erythrae and Athens, sing and dance and ask Apollo to spare them from death, presumably using the same words and gestures as their fathers and older brothers before them. In Iliad 1, however, the poet has adapted this paean scene to the hecatomb sacrifice of the Greek visitors at Chryse, by equating the youths at the last moment with the Achaean kouroi.63 He does this, of course, because paean singing is an appropriate response to plague. The ritual scenes at the end of the Chryses episode may have originally provided an etiological story for hecatombs and paeans at the Sminthean god’s Anatolian sanctuary, after the impiety of some local king. Such detailed epichoric etiologies are typically not part of the repertoire of heroic narrative, of course, but they are common stock in Greek hymns, even in some of the oldest of the Homeric ones. We have already seen how the rituals that Apollo at the end of his Pythian hymn teaches his Cretan priests are part of a sequence of etiologies designed to explain local monuments like the altar of Apollo Delphinios, as well as sacrifices and processions to the Delphic sanctuary, and indeed the author of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter does the same when he

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describes how the disguised goddess sits by the “Maiden’s Well” at Eleusis (99) and then later in the palace sits again on a stool in silence with covered head, refuses wine, and then drinks the kykeôn (192–211)—divine actions which likewise seem to provide an explanation for the ritual actions of worshippers at Eleusis.64 And there is similar evidence in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, in which the god performs a sacrifice near the Alpheios River that seems to be the model for the sacrifices to the twelve gods at Olympia.65 The poet of the Iliad does not suggest, of course, that the youths who sacrifice and sing to the “Mouse God” at Chryse provide an explanation for contemporary rituals there. But, since the description of the paean singing at Chryse is so detailed and unique, we can say that, as in the case of the seaside sacrifice to Apollo Delphinios by Cretan priests at Crisa and their subsequent marching paean at the end of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, these rituals would probably have been recognizable to a local Anatolian audience as prototypes of the types of ritual performed in or near the sanctuary where the song was being performed.

Conclusion I have argued that the Chryse episode in the first book of the Iliad contains some generic features usually associated with hymns rather than heroic war narratives and that these features were, in fact, probably drawn from a traditional hexametrical hymn composed originally for performance at a local sanctuary—a Homeric Hymn to the Sminthean Apollo if you will. My argument has been threefold. We first saw a number of signs that the vulgate proem and its variants originally concerned the mênis of Apollo alone, a theme more appropriate to a hymn than an epic war-poem. The discontinuous treatment of the characters provided more clues—especially the selfish and impious character of Agamemnon, which is far better suited to the traditional role of the theomachos in a hymn than to an epic general. And finally I discussed the unexpected and detailed description of the paean performed around the altar of Apollo at Chryse by the equally unexpected youths, a description that makes much more sense as an etiological story at the end of a local hymn to Apollo than as an episode in the ninth year of the war at Troy. In all three of these inquiries I focused on the content of Book 1, so it is appropriate at this point to ask briefly whether there are any clues that might also signal elements of poetic form more appropriate to hymns than to heroic tales. There are, in fact, some signs,

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but unfortunately they are few and inextricably caught up in the fraught question of the “lateness” of the Chryses episode. Some scholars have argued, for example (see note 3), that the formulae and language of the first 500 lines of the book show a higher density of late forms, a feature that Shipp explains by invoking the mature master poet who crafted the final Iliad, whose “late” fingerprints appear on the dramatically most important sections of the monumental poem, e.g., Books 1, 9, and 24.66 But these late features in Iliad 1 might, in fact, arise from its hymnic origin, for there are parallels in the Homeric Hymns for some of these odd forms. Shipp, for example, noted that the contracted form Λατοῦς in line 9 of the Iliad proem also appears in the Homeric hymns to Apollo and Hermes, and that elsewhere the poet of Iliad 1 adopts the formulae of the hymns.67 Such a relationship between the language of the hymns and the Chryses episode might also explain the appearance in an early Homeric papyrus of extra lines in its version of the return of the sailors from Chryse, lines that also appear in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo; scholars usually explain these lines as evidence that a later performer of the Iliad has borrowed lines from the Hymn to Apollo,68 but I wonder whether, in fact, these verses might point once again to a hymnic source for many of the details of the Chryses episode. Another formal argument in favor of the hymnic origin of the episode is its position at the very beginning of the extant text of the Iliad, since we know that some of the Homeric hymns probably served as “introductory pieces” (prooimia) composed for performance in specific sanctuaries and added to longer hexametrical poems of a more Panhellenic appeal.69 One might cautiously suggest, then, that a prefatory hymn once designed for recitation in the sanctuary of Apollo Smintheus was somehow taken up by a poet and recast (somewhat radically) as the initial episode of the Iliad itself, and as a result the originally detachable and locally focused introduction to the poem became its indispensable and Panhellenic introduction. There are, in fact, some good archaic parallels for this process of adapting independent songs to a larger narrative frame. First off, the composer of the monumental version of the Iliad seems to have done just this with the so-called Doloneia (Book 10), which scholars agree was originally composed as an independent poem, but was later reworked as an episode that fits snugly within the narrative of the Iliad.70 Like the Chryses episode, a variety of oddities support this conclusion, such as “late” morphological forms, the use of the article, shorter speeches, and much diction shared with

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the Odyssey.71 The same can be said for the “Song of Ares and Aphrodite” sung in Alcinoos’s court (Od. 8.266–369).72 There are, moreover, even closer parallels: two cases in which local and independent hymns seem to have been affixed to the beginning of older narratives. The “Hymn to the Muses” at the start of Hesiod’s Theogony (1–103), for instance, seems to be a prooimion that originally was probably not necessary for comprehension or enjoyment of the long theogonic poem that follows.73 The initial part of it (1–8), moreover, is highly marked—like the Chryses episode—as a local production by the mention of specific landmarks (e.g., the “Horses Fountain” or the local stream and river mentioned in lines 5–6) and may have been composed for performance near Mt. Helicon in Boeotia.74 A second good example is the adaptation of the originally separate Delian Hymn to Apollo to the beginning of the much older and longer Pythian Hymn; whether or not one believes in the story that the poet Cynaethus joined the two poems in 523 B.C.E. for a special Delian festival organized by the tyrant Polycrates,75 it is clear from linguistic and other criteria that at some point an enterprising poet adapted the Delian hymn to a permanent introductory role and produced a lengthy Panhellenic poem with a coherent overall structure.76 The bodies of these two hymns nonetheless seem so different from one another that one eminent scholar has even supposed that they were cut-and-pasted together after they had already been written down.77 But I see no reason why poets or rhapsodes could not have accomplished the same effect in an ad hoc oral performance or (re)performance. The short length of both of these introductory hymns is also quite telling: the Hesiodic “Hymn to the Muses” is about a hundred lines long and the Hymn to the Delian Apollo, one hundred and seventy-eight. If we ignore lines 118–430a (the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles and Achilles’ later conversation with his mother), the Chryses episode is roughly one hundred and seventy-six verses. Finally, we might ask: what dramatic or poetic benefit did the poet derive by beginning the monumental Iliad in a hymnic key? Although the adaptation of the epichoric hymn to the Mouse God injected some confusion in a few places in Iliad 1, the characterization of Agamemnon as theomachos does create a strong and interesting bias against the king from the very start of the poem, as well as initial sympathy for Achilles, who in his defense of Calchas and his eagerness to assuage Apollo appears as a pious man and a kouros extraordinaire in a poem that famously explores the tragic problems of his mixed divine

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and human heredity. He is, in short, a half-divine version of Apollo himself. These strong first impressions do not last, of course. Agamemnon loses much of his viciousness and impiety, and Achilles, especially in his rage after the death of Patroclus, notoriously fights with the gods, kills suppliants, and refuses burial to his enemies. Nonetheless, the poet, by pitching the opening scenes of the Iliad in a hymnic register, sets up the ensuing conflict between the theomachos Agamemnon and the helper Achilles in such black-and-white terms that the audience is irrevocably partisan to the latter despite his subsequent monstrous behavior. The Chryses episode in Iliad 1, then, provides an interesting case study of how Panhellenic epic poetry—a “genre-in-the-making,” to reiterate Bakhtin’s description of the novel—can absorb an epichoric cult hymn with its local etiologies and epithets and use specific features of its style and content to manipulate and intrigue its audience, because it already knows the hymnic genre so well.

Notes Different versions of this paper were presented in 2011–12 at the University of Lausanne, University of Chicago, and at the “Orality and Literacy” conference, University of Michigan. I am thankful to my hosts and for the comments that I received at all three locations. Even more gratitude is due to Mary Bachvarova, Mark Edwards, Margolit Finkelberg, Jim Marks, Boris Maslov, James Redfield and Ben Sammons, who read various drafts of this paper and gave me various criticisms; the mistakes that remain are mine alone, especially in those cases where I ignored their advice. All translations are my own except where noted. 1. On the entire Chryses episode, see, e.g., S.E. Bassett, “The Proems of the Iliad and the Odyssey,” AJP 44 (1923): 339–48, at pp.  339–40, and E. A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1963), p. 65: “economy of treatment and a degree of dramatic power and controlled patterns of shifting moods and scenes.” For the first part of the story, see J. Griffith and M. Hammond, “Critical Appreciations VI: Homer, Iliad 1, 1–52,” G&R 29 (1982): 126–42, at p. 128: “. . . the narrative from line 8 to 52 is developed in a way, and above all at a speed, which marks it off as preliminary; the compression of the speeches and the swift changes of place—Chryses in the Achaean camp, Chryses alone by the loud-roaring sea, Apollo on Olympus, Apollo coming down like night—produce a rapidity highly unusual in Homer, from which we emerge into a more typically Homeric pace when the quarrel begins between Achilles and Agamemnon.” M. W. Edwards, “Convention and Individuality in Iliad 1,”

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HSCP 84 (1980): 1–28, at p. 11, notes how the poet composed 1.44–53 (Apollo’s attack) as a short, powerful scene and how in the next scene “the poet is still moving swiftly.” S. Pulleyn, Homer: Iliad I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 116, agrees: “The first fifty-two lines constitute a distinct unit, differentiated from what follows by the extraordinary pace and compression of the narrative and speeches . . . . not typical of Homeric style in general.” 2. Griffith and Hammond, “Critical Appreciations,” p. 134, note that Iliad 1 is remarkable for the absence of developed similes of the Homeric type, an absence they attribute to the speed of events. For formulae and language, see P. Chantraine, “Remarques sur l’emploi des formulas dans le premier chant de l’Iliade,” REG 45 (1932): 121–54, and G. P. Shipp, Studies in the Language of Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 226–31, who argues that lines 1–420 are generally “late,” with the exception of Athena’s intervention (193–222) and Nestor’s story about the Lapiths (260–74); Shipp was especially struck by nine instances of the use of the article in the first two hundred lines. More recently see G. P. Goold, “The Nature of Homeric Composition,” Illinois Classical Studies 2 (1977): 1–34, at p. 33: “. . . I cannot think of our present Iliad 1 as anything but a very late book.” 3. For clarity’s sake I state my thesis here in an overly analytic manner that grants agency to “the poet,” but in my conclusion I allow for other more complicated and more nuanced ways to explain how what I call hymnic conventions end up playing a large role in shaping the Chryses episode. In the end I find it syntactically easier to speak of a “poet” who composes a poem or adapts a hymn, rather than a “tradition” that evolves communally through the efforts of many. The bottom line is this: at some point in the evolving tradition that eventually led to our monumental Iliad a single poet had the insight to make use of a local Anatolian tradition of hymns to Apollo to frame the beginning of his narrative. 4. For the Greek text and discussion of the two variants, see B. A. van Groningen, “The Proems of the Iliad and the Odyssey,” Meded. Ned. Akad. Van Wetensch. AF.  D. Letterkunde 8 (1946): 279–94, at p.  282 n. 10; M.H.A.L.H. van der Valk, Researches on the Text and Scholia of the Iliad I-II (Leiden: Brill, 1963–64), 2:365–66; and G. Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary. Vol. I: Books 1–4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 52–53. 5. Theogony 1 (“I begin to sing from the Heliconian Muses, who . . .”) and Homeric Hymn 25.1 (“I begin from the Muses, Apollo and Zeus”). The latter goes on to quote lines 94–7 and 963 of the Theogony. G. Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca,  N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 55–56, suggests that the Theogony itself is an expansion of the minimal information contained in the hymn.

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6. Iliad 1.603–4 and Homeric Hymn to Apollo 182–206; in both cases the poet first describes Apollo playing the lyre and then the Muses singing. There is one other place in archaic poetry where we find the Muses linked with an unmusical Apollo, Theogony 94–7, which begins “For from the Muses and far-shooting Apollo mortal singers and lyre-players come . . .” Here the discrepancy is even greater, because the archer Apollo is said to be the source/patron of the lyre player. 7. See, e.g., Kirk, The Iliad, p. 52 (“the first of these verses is Iliadic . . . , but the others show signs of inept condensation, and in particular the linking of Akhilleus’s and Apollo’s wrath does justice to neither.”) or Pulleyn, Homer: Iliad I, p. 116: “wholly pedestrian and . . . to be rejected as the work of an inferior hand.” In the same vein: M. L. West, The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and Analytical Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 81. 8. I give Zenodotus’s δαῖτα in line 5 in preference to the Vulgate’s πᾶσι. See A. Pagliaro, “Il proemio dell’ Iliade,” in idem, Nuovi saggi di critica semantica (Messina-Florence: G. d’Anna, 1963): 3–46, at pp. 35–37; J. M. Redfield, “The Proem of the Iliad: Homer’s Art,” CP 74 (1979): 95–110, at p. 96 and pp. 103–4; and Pulleyn, Homer: Iliad I, p. 121, for a good defense of the reading. Zenodotus athetized lines 4–5 and thereby took away the despoliation of the corpses by birds and dogs and “the plan of Zeus”; no modern editors, to my knowledge, have followed suit. 9. For difficulties and ambiguities with the vulgate proem, see R. Böhme, Das Prooimion: Eine Form sakraler Dichtung der Griechen (Baden: Konkordia, 1937), pp. 28–31; for a full summary with abundant bibliography see J. Marks, “The Junction between the Kypria and the Iliad,” Phoenix 56 (2002): 1–24, at pp. 12–19. 10. C. A. Faraone, Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Ancient Greek Myth and Ritual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 57–66. 11. Note, also, that Chryses, despite his location close to Troy, is never said to be a Trojan ally and that he mentions Apollo’s worship in Chryse, Killa, and Tenedos (37) but not in Troy, which according to the wider war narrative was the most powerful city in the region. 12. B. Maslov, Pindaric Epinikion and the Evolution of Poetic Genres in Archaic Greece (Diss. UC Berkeley, 2009), p. 222. 13. van Groningen, “Proems.” 14. R. J. Rabel, “Apollo as a Model for Achilles in the Iliad,” AJP 111 (1990): 429–40, at p. 431 n. 7, comments: “However inept as a substitute for the more common prologue, these verses nicely isolate and connect the wraths of Apollo and Achilles.” 15. This general pattern is clear with regard to the nominal forms mênis and cholos; see, e.g., C. Watkins, “A propos de ΜΗΝΙΣ,” Bull. Soc. Ling.

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de Paris 72 (1977): 187–209; Redfield, “Proem,” pp.  97–8; or Rabel, “Apollo,” p. 431. P. Considine, “Some Homeric Terms for Anger,” Acta Classica 9 (1966): 15–25, points out, however, that there are exceptions and that the pattern is difficult to trace in the usage of the cognate verbal manifestation of these nouns. 16. Pulleyn, Homer: Iliad I, ad loc.: “Calchas repeats the poet virtually word for word . . . [which] reinforces our impression that Calchas as seer shares Homer’s all-seeing perspective.” 17. Redfield, “Proem,” p. 101; in Iliad 22 Priam complains that Achilles has set more pains for him personally than all the other Greek fighters, because he has killed so many of his sons. 18. H. Koller, “Das kitharodische Prooimion. Eine formgeschichtliche Untersuchung.” Philologus 100 (1956): 159–206, at pp. 200–1, proposed long ago that the formula μῆνιν ἄειδε originally arose in a cultic setting and that it always referred to the anger of a god, a hypothesis that he defended by adducing the opening line of a lost “Orphic hymn” to Demeter quoted by a late source (Ps.-Justinus, Cohortatio ad gentiles 17c 1 Morel: Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Δημήτερος ἀγλαοκάρπου). See Maslov, Pindaric Epinikion, p. 222 n. 79 for further discussion. 19. There are three references to the city in Book 1—“the city of Priam” (19), Ilium (69), “the city of the Trojans” (164)—and six to the Trojans en masse (152, 160, 256, 408, 509, 521). Individual Trojans are mentioned only twice: first when Achilles predicts the deaths of many Greeks “at the hands of man-slaughtering Hector” (242) and a little later when Nestor suggests hypothetically that “Priam, the sons of Priam and the other Trojans” (255–56) would rejoice if they heard about the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles. 20. Menelaus is mentioned once by Achilles (159), but appears nowhere in the narrative. In 307 Patroclus is mentioned by patronymic in the company of Achilles and the other Myrmidons. In the scene with the heralds Achilles tells Patroclus to get the girl (337), which he does in lines 345–47. 21. Calchas appears only one other time (and indirectly) in 2.300–32, when Odysseus describes the portent at Aulis and quotes verbatim Calchas’s interpretation. At 13.43–65 Poseidon appears briefly in Calchas’s form to encourage the two Aiantes on the battlefield. 22. Rabel, “Apollo,” pp. 429–30. Achilles himself rightly boasts to have been the first to say that the Greeks should propitiate Apollo (1.386). 23. See J. T. Sheppard, The Pattern of the Iliad (London: Methuen, 1922), pp. 11–12 and R. J. Rabel, “Chryses and the Opening of the Iliad,” AJP 109 (1988): 473–81, at p. 476 for the important point that when Achilles reports to his mother the fateful events in the Greek assembly the only lines the poet repeats verbatim are 372–79 (= 13–16 and 22–25) and that Achilles or the poet does so in order “to emphasize the importance of

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Agamemnon’s cruelty to the old suppliant.” Griffith and Hammond, “Critical Appreciations,” p.  128, on the other hand, see Achilles’ version as calmer and more detached because he omits entirely any direct speech. They call Agamemnon’s performance “the speech of a bully”; W. Donlan, “Homer’s Agamemnon,” CW 65 (1971): 109–15, at p. 110, notes that it leaves a lasting impression of stubbornness, anger, and violence. 24. Kirk, The Iliad, ad loc. quotes and discusses the passage from the A Scholia. 25. Some modern commentators find these words to be typical of Agamemnon’s speaking style throughout the poem, but beyond the Chryses episode they are only able to come up with a single example of such nastiness, at 6.58–60 (where he rebukes Menelaus for wanting to spare a Trojan and encourages him instead to let no Trojan male live, “not even the boy whom his mother carries in the womb”). But these are private words spoken to his brother in the heat of battle and involve no gross impiety. Indeed Aristarchus’s comment (quoted above) on the unseemliness of Agamemnon’s words focuses on the public setting of his speech before the assembled army. B. Sammons, “Agamemnon and His Audiences,” GRBS 49 (2009): 159–85, at pp. 175–78, suggests that Agamemnon gives this speech in such a way that the army can overhear it and be rhetorically manipulated by it. 26. J. T. Kakridis, “The First Scene with Chryses in the Iliad,” in idem, Homer Revisited (Lund: Gleerup, 1971): 115–37, at pp. 125–26, points out how the poet emphasizes the importance of Chryses’ priestly role here, by making the participial phrase translated here the last of three rising tricola that describe the priest, who comes (i) to free his daughter; (ii) bearing ransom; and (iii) holding the stemmata and scepter of his priestly office. 27. See Havelock, Preface, p. 72; and Kakridis, “First Scene,” p. 128 for the importance of this repetition. 28. Kakridis, “First Scene,” pp. 128–9. 29. A. W. Bulloch, “Callimachus’ Erysichthon: Homer and Apollonius Rhodius,” AJP 98 (1977): 97–123, at pp.  102–4, following Hermann Gundert. 30. Bulloch, “Callimachus’ Erysichthon,” p. 102 notes the verbal reminiscence between Iliad 1.14 and Callimachus Hymn to Demeter 43–44 and that the plural form στέμματα appears only twice in Homer, both in the Chryses episode (Iliad 1.14 and the line repeated in Achilles’ resumé to his mother at 1.373). 31. Text and translation (except for my emphases) by N. Hopkinson, Callimachus: Hymn to Demeter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) ad loc. 32. Kakridis, “First Scene,” p. 130; and Griffith and Hammond, “Critical Appreciations,” pp. 132–33 (quote from p. 133).

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33. Bulloch, “Callimachus’ Erysichthon,” pp. 99–101. 34. Bulloch, “Callimachus’ Erysichthon,” p. 100; the full sequence is “the Prize—the Offenders—the Attempt—the Warning—the Rejection— the Epiphany and Punishment.” For a more elaborate scheme and a discussion of the Hymn to Dionysus, see J. F. García, “Symbolic Action in the Homeric Hymns: The Theme of Recognition,” CA 21 (2002): 5–39, at pp. 14–19. 35. D. L. Page, Literary Papyri (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), 1:520–25 no.129; D. F. Sutton, “P. Ross Georg. 1.11: A Hymn to Dionysus,” in idem, Papyrological Studies in Dionysiac Literature (Oak Park, Ill.: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1987) gives a commentary and thorough discussion of the different versions of the story. I cite the text from Sutton’s edition. 36. The papyrus hymn describes (line 20) how the nurses attack Lycurgus with their thysthla, a rare word that the scholiasts to the Iliadic passage interpret as either “branches,” “grapevines,” or “thyrsoi,” the well-known Bacchic staff made of ivy leaves. 37. J. C. Kamerbeek, “On the Conception of ΘΕΟΜΑΧΟΣ in Relation with Greek Tragedy,” Mnemosyne 1 (1948): 271–83, at pp. 281–82, suggests that Lycurgus’s verbal abuse seems to have been a feature of Aeschylus’s Lycurgeia, if we can trust Sophocles’ mention of him as a mythological exemplum, who provoked the gods with “mockeries” (Antigone 962: κερτομίοις γλώσσαις). Kamerbeek also adduces Cadmus’s description of Pentheus (Euripides Bacchae 1293), according to which Pentheus wanted to mock (ἐκερτόμει) the god and his bacchanals. 38. This play is the first to use the verb theomachein (“to fight with a god”) (lines 45, 325, and 1255); see Kamerbeek, “On the Conception,” pp. 278–79. 39. R. Seaford, Euripides Bacchae (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1996) ad loc., suggests that Pentheus is unaware of the religious role of the stranger’s hair, but this seems unlikely, because earlier in the play (lines 239–41, which are discussed below) he once again pairs the long hair and thyrsus in a manner that suggests both have to do with religion. He makes a parallel demand upon his grandfather Cadmus (253–54): “Will you not shake off the ivy (i.e., from your hair)? Will you not let your hand go free of the thyrsus?” 40. Beheading was probably regarded as an especially gruesome or barbarian punishment; see Seaford, Euripides Bacchae, ad loc., who cites a scholiast at Iliad 13.2, who describes decapitation as “savage and non-Greek.” 41. See lines 106–22, where Agamemnon glares evilly at the seer (105: κάκ’ ὀσσόμενος), accuses him of being a “prophet of evil” (apparently a ref-

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erence to the notorious oracle at Aulis about Iphigeneia), and then reiterates his selfish desire to keep the girl in his home, because he prefers her to Clytemnestra in shape, stature, wits, and handiworks (106–8). 42. See note 17. 43. For the rejection of the scene by earlier commentators, see Kakridis, “First Scene,” pp. 128–9. For more recent supporters, see Goold, “The Nature,” p. 33. For a detailed discussion of the “Odyssean” language, see Goold, ibid., and Kirk, The Iliad, ad loc. 44. Achilles in his plaintive resumé to his mother of the events at the Greek camp is a bit vaguer, but even here there is no evidence for any preparations for or knowledge of the singing of paeans: he, too, mentions only the girl and “gifts” (390: δῶρα) for the “lord” (i.e., Apollo). 45. The syntax of these lines is ambiguous and can refer either to the god (Paean) or the song (paean); see I. C. Rutherford, Pindar’s Paeans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 13–14. 46. Rabel, “Apollo,” pp. 434–35 stresses how the song-and-dance pleases Apollo, but insists that “Apollo’s delight in the Achaeans will only be temporary; he remains their enemy throughout the Iliad.” 47. Edwards, “Convention,” p. 21; Rabel, “Apollo,” p. 434; and F. Graf, Apollo (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 10. 48. Lines 458–69, for example, recur nearly verbatim in the description of Agamemnon’s sacrifice before the feast of the chieftains in the next book (2.421–32). 49. D. M. Gunn, “Thematic Composition and Homeric Authorship,” HSCP 75 (1971): 1–31, at pp. 23–24. 50. Kirk, The Iliad, p. 102 notes that by referring to Chryses as the “old man” leading the sacrifice, the poet shows how he has carefully adjusted the formulaic scene to the particular circumstances at Chryse; he does not explain, however, why the poet takes equal care to describe the other central participants as “young men.” 51. Seven times in the Iliad, e.g., 2.562, 3.183, etc. 52. Line 473 has, moreover, been suspected. Edwards, “Convention,” p. 22 n. 53 points out that it is obelized in one of the papyri and that the κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶν is “oddly placed after the subject οἱ in the preceding verse.” Aristarchus, on the other hand, athetized 474; see Kirk, The Iliad, ad loc. 53. Havelock, Preface, p. 77, for example, describes the events at Chryse as follows: “the whole forms a little idyll, a tableau of religious but also social usage, hardened and preserved in epic verse.” 54. Rutherford, Pindar’s Paeans, pp. 24–25. 55. There is no independent evidence for these rituals at Krisa and Delphi, but recent archaeological discoveries at Miletus suggest a similar arrangement for processional singing and dancing for Apollo: after sacrificing

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at an altar of “Apollo Delphinius” originally erected on the beach of the oldest harbor of the city, the young men processed their way to Apollo’s prophetic shrine in nearby Didyma. Literary claims of a Minoan or Cretan foundation for Miletus have also been confirmed by recent discoveries. 56. According to the D-Scholia, the epithet Smintheus is derived from sminthos, a word that means “mouse” in the local Mysian dialect. 57. Faraone, Talismans, pp. 128–32; Pulleyn, Homer: Iliad I, ad loc. 58. For text and earlier bibliography, see H. Englemann and R. Merkelbach, Die Inschriften von Erythrai und Klazomenai 2 (Bonn: R. Habelt, 1973), no. 205. 59. A. Fairbanks, A Study of the Greek Paean, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 12 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1900), pp. 48– 49; and E. Stehle, Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 26–7. 60. The Erythraean text is lacunose at the start but is certain thanks to three other, later versions on stone; see  W.  D. Furley and  J.  M. Bremer, Greek Hymns: Vol. II. Greek Texts and Commentary, Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 10 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), pp. 161–67. This tradition of paean is heavily dactylic; see C. A. Faraone, “An Athenian Tradition of Dactylic Paeans to Apollo and Asclepius: Choral Degeneration or a Flexible System of Non-Strophic Dactyls?” Mnemosyne 64 (2011): 206–31. 61. Furley and Bremer, Greek Hymns, pp. 228–32. 62. Macedonicus’s poem seems to have been composed in a time of real crisis—it ends with a plea: “. . . may you always come close and keep Attica, the Cecropian city, safe (σώιζοις δ’ Ἀτθίδα Κεκροπίαν πόλιν), ie Paian! Be gentle, o blessed one, and keep away hateful diseases (στυγερὰς δ’ ἀπέρυκε νόσου[ς]), ie ô ie Paian!” On the other hand, we know that paeans were also sung annually as a kind of preventive measure; see Faraone, “An Athenian Tradition.” 63. Most notable is the contradiction within the standard sacrifice scene, which ends “But when they had put from them the desire for drink and food” (469) but then continues with the “youths” setting mixing bowls of drink and pouring libations (470–71). 64. N. J. Richardson, ed., The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 20–30 and 211–26; J. S. Clay, The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric Hymns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 233–36; and M. L. West, Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 8–9. 65. M. L. West, Homeric Hymns, p. 14; and Clay, Politics, pp. 116–17.

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66. See note 3. 67. Shipp, Studies, pp. 188–89 (for a discussion of the formula Λητοῦς καὶ Διὸς υἱός in line 8) and p. 229 (the use of the epithet ἑκάεργον in line 474—in the paean-singing section—without Apollo’s name is “reminiscent of the hymns”). 68. S. West, The Ptolemaic Papyri of Homer, Papyrologica Coloniensia 3 (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1967), pp. 32–33, following the reconstruction of Hefermehl’s. 69. G. Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 353–60. The idea that the word prooimion originally meant “prelude to an epic poem” is no longer valid; see B. Maslov, “The Real Life of the Genre of the Prooimion,” CP 107.3 (2012): 191–205. 70. J. B. Hainsworth, The Iliad: A Commentary. Vol. III: Books 9–12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 155, however, follows G. Danek, Studien zur Dolonie, Wiener Studien Beiheft 12 (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1988), pp. 230–34 in thinking that: “The Rhesus story was adapted for this place in the Iliad not long after the epic’s composition by a poet familiar with the traditional art of ἀοιδή, but not the poet of the Iliad.” This cannot of course be true for the Chryses episode, which was adapted by the poet of the Iliad or one of his predecessors. 71. For a summary of earlier work, see Hainsworth, The Iliad, pp. 151– 53, who concludes (p. 153): “Taken separately . . . these points are of little weight; taken together they make up a body of evidence that the majority of critics have found persuasive, if not conclusive.” 72. See Hainsworth’s summary in  A. Heubeck,  S. West, and  J.  B. Hainsworth, A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey. Vol. 1: Introduction and Books i–viii (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 363–64, where he comments on the uncommon content, formulae, forms and usages and suggests that they show “the traditional style in a highly evolved form.” 73. Böhme, Das Prooimion, pp. 44–61. Boris Maslov points out to me that Koller, “Das kitharodische Prooimion,” p. 179 n. 2 agrees in part with Böhme when he refers to the “hymns” to the Muses as two separate prooimia, but then parts company with him in claiming that the hymn to the Muses was “eine Abwandlung des wirklich alten Prooimions, nicht, wie B[öhme p.] 61 meint, die Normalform des Prooimions der alten Zeit.” Nagy, Greek Mythology, pp. 54–58 argues that the entire Theogony was a prooimion for the catalogue of women. 74. See M. L. West, Hesiod: Theogony (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), ad loc.

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75. M. L. West, “Cynaethus’ Hymn to Apollo,” CQ 25 (1975): 161– 70, and idem, “The Invention of Homer,” CQ 49 (1999): 364–82, at pp. 369–72. 76. M. L. West, Homeric Hymns, pp. 9–12. 77. M. L. West, Homeric Hymns, p. 12: “Because these changes were not made by oral recomposition in performance, but by cutting and splicing written texts, the joints and discontinuities remain plainly visible and it is easy to analyze the composite hymn into its constituent parts.”

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Chapter 16

Schematics and Models of Genre Bakhtin and Soviet Satire RO BERT BIRD

I can’t understand how there can appear fantastic worlds with their own precise laws which bear no similarity to real life. For instance, meetings. Or, so to speak, the novel. — Alexander Vvedensky 1 Models have become co-producers of reality. — Olafur Eliasson 2

Alexander Veselovsky, one of the earliest proponents of Historical Poetics, once shared an alarmingly pessimistic view of the kind and quality of knowledge produced by the literary scholarship of his day: The history of literature is reminiscent of a geographical strip which international legislation has sanctioned [osviatilo] as res nullius, where the historian of culture and aesthetician, the erudite and the researcher of social ideas, all venture to hunt. Each bears forth from it what he can, according to his capabilities and views, with the same label on the goods or kill [dobycha], although it be far from uniform in content. They have not agreed on a norm; otherwise they would not return so insistently to the question: what is the history of literature?3 On Veselovsky’s view, the history of literature has been a kind of closed game reserve to which scholars alone have had safe conduct. Scholars have not only been prevented from claiming ownership of the territory and of their catch; even their power to name has been strictly constrained by the very same international convention that preserves the neutrality and openness of the space. Unable to claim or to name, historians of literature were left to quibble over definitions without resolving—or even clarifying—the underlying questions of their undertaking. The freedom of the territory could never be appropriated, its contents never possessed. The hunter could never become lawgiver. 429

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Veselovsky was eager to renegotiate these conventions, but it remains a point of contention to what extent he was able to reconcile the empiricism of the literary historian with the theorist’s desire for a universally (or at least suprahistorically) valid taxonomy of the phenomena being studied. This abiding tension might mean that Historical Poetics can only ever be a method of literary research, but never a theory of literature. Though it necessarily affects other key terms in historical poetics, such as epithet, the tension between history and theory in Historical Poetics is particularly palpable with respect to genre. It is not just that “genre” is employed indiscriminately to denote classes of vastly different magnitude, such as poetry, the lyric, the sonnet, the Shakespearian sonnet, the love sonnet, and so forth . Some of this confusion can be easily avoided by introducing additional terms, like “mode” to denote large classes like lyric and “species” for specific historical forms like the (Shakespearean) sonnet.4 The greater problem on my submission is that our use of the term “genre” masks vastly different “goods” that practitioners of Historical Poetics ferry forth from their respective territories: an abstract ahistorical category of uncertain status that shapes discourse; an empirical historical category that conducts and reveals vectors of tradition and influence through shared formal characteristics; and a schema of convenience to the scholar that makes no claim for the real existence of genre outside of the res nullius of the history of literature. With its empirical method, Historical Poetics lacks the ability even to pose the ontological questions implied by the very name of genre. Not that it hasn’t tried. Despite his skepticism, even Veselovsky ventured essentializing theories of genre, positing the basic “forms” of epic, lyric, and drama as innate categories of discourse: If one examines the forms of the epic, lyric and drama, from which were derived the names of the known poetic genres [rody] and epochs of poetry, then they were given long before the appearance in history of those features of worldview to which we transferred the definition “epic,” “lyric,” etc. These forms are the natural expression of thought; in order to appear, they had no need to wait for history.5 Thus a seed of confusion was sown. The Formalists conceived of genre both as an ontological category (for instance in the notions of “poetic language,” a stable category that could be recognized even in visual me-

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dia like the cinema) and as a dynamic and contingent historical configuration that becomes visible only in the breach, as a pattern of shifts and rifts. The latter tendency became dominant as the Formalists turned to questions of genealogy and evolution in the mid-1920s. As Yuri Tynianov wrote in his 1924 essay “The Literary Fact” (incidentally continuing the violent imagery pervading historical-poetic interventions): “You can’t judge a bullet by its color, taste, or smell. It is judgeable only from the standpoint of its dynamics.”6 With such an unclear status, however, genre is less reminiscent of ammunition or quarry than of  a subatomic particle whose very presence remains a matter of speculation—and perhaps also of perspective. In his review of the situation, Joel Relihan has concluded that “any attempt to reduce the strange phenomena of this world to rule and theory can only lead to the embarrassment of the theorist.”7 In short, though we continue to use the term, can we as theorists of literature really believe that such a thing as genre actually exists? Theories of satire and parody are especially susceptible to disruption, since these generic categories are defined by their ability to respond to historical stimuli, whether in political life (satire) or in the discourses it generates and sanctions (parody). Satire and parody also depend on the culturally variable and therefore profoundly unstable (and destabilizing) category of humor. For these reasons the aspiration of delineating a suprahistorical satirical mode risks especially vast and vacuous generalizations, while a reliance on the empirical data of individual works or historical formations risks the atomization of evidence and the arbitrary privileging of convenient exemplars. Nowhere are these contradictions within Historical Poetics as evident as in Mikhail Bakhtin’s strangely influential studies of the Menippean satire and the polyphonic novel, which continue to define many of the conversations in this field despite their flimsy schematism and their tenuous grasp on history.8 Indeed, it was Bakhtin’s theory of Menippean satire that inspired Relihan’s skepticism about the definability of genre and which has led Howard Weinbrot to caution: “When one has a hammer, everything becomes a nail.”9 It would be difficult—and probably quite pointless—to try to salvage Bakhtin’s inflationary theory of the Menippean satire either as a genealogy of empirical literary forms or as a suprahistorical theory of discourse. As I shall argue in this essay, however, it is worth considering the possibility that Bakhtin’s theory of satire should be read neither as empirical generalization based on select data nor as essentializing description of a historical quarry, but as an

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active intervention in the historical field; that is to say, not as a schema, but as a model. At issue, then, is the very status of the literary-historical concept. Both empirical and essentializing approaches to genre rely on concepts which describe their quarry mimetically, that is, by an enumeration of parts or a comparison of forms. This theoretical mimesis presupposes a stable relation between the artwork and its world, usually one of mimetic similarity. By emphasizing the ever-shifting relation of satire to its world, by contrast, Bakhtin not only forces us to read satire nonmimetically, but also constructs a non-mimetic theory of satire. Since satire models its world (as opposed to representing it through description), Bakhtin models satire (as opposed to defining it through empirical description or essentializing prescription). By reading Bakhtin’s theory of satirical modeling as a theoretical model, I argue, we gain a richer and more balanced notion of how the scholar of Historical Poetics intervenes in the very field she studies: neither as hunter nor as marksman or lawgiver, but as the artificer of scaled-down representations which at once capture and produce material forms of cultural imagination. Ultimately, this re-reading of Bakhtin means breaking his theory of genre down to the concrete aesthetic criteria on which it depends: scale, dimension, and perspective.

1. Bakhtin’s Schematics of Satire Bakhtin’s controversial appropriation of the obscure label “Menippean satire” to denote a major literary tradition culminating in the novel illustrates the limitations of Historical Poetics not only as a method, but also as a theory of literature. Does Bakhtin’s theory of Menippean satire describe mimetically a phenomenon objectively existing in the world, or is it more like a tracer-bullet that allows Bakhtin to observe paths of real historical influence across a broad temporal and geographical territory? Is it rather an essential construct that fits into an ontological account of human discourse? Or is it merely a contingent label that Bakhtin attached to a set of disparate phenomena which he chose to assemble for reasons of elegance, economy, or plain convenience? The ambivalence of Bakhtin’s position is on full display in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963), where he frequently seems interested in making historical claims concerning the paths taken by specific formal configurations, most notably the Menippean satire, in support of

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a suprahistorical, ontological argument about genre as a category endowed with a peculiar kind of agency: A literary genre, by its very nature, reflects the most stable, “eternal” tendencies in literature’s development. Always preserved in a genre are undying elements of the archaic. True, these archaic elements are preserved in it only thanks to their constant renewal, which is to say, their contemporization. A genre is always the same and yet not the same, always old and new simultaneously. [ . . . ] A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning.10 Bakhtin’s paradoxical definition of satire, which he developed from his dissertation on Rabelais (1938–1940) through Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963), rests on a metaphysics of laughter, which he posits as an ambivalent force that, through a dialectic of negation and affirmation, renews human consciousness and human society. Satire acts negatively by exposing shortcomings within reality, but it also acts positively (i.e., productively) by representing examples of what Erik Gunderson has called “bad bodies misbehaving”: excessive pleasure, pornography, hyperbole, and so forth.11 These characteristics allow Bakhtin to trace the genealogy of the novel—and Dostoevsky’s dialogical novel in particular—to Menippean satire, in a “unity and uninterrupted continuity,” albeit one defined by its constant diversification.12 However, Bakhtin appears apprehensive about the force of this “continuity.” The formal diversity within the tradition leads Bakhtin to call it an “anti-genre”; H. K. Riikonen has proposed to call it a “supergenre.”13 Both equivocations acknowledge that what unites the various species of the satirical-novelistic tradition is no formal feature or configuration, not even a single mode of discourse, but rather their common involvement in the far less tangible feature of all-consuming laughter, which itself is endowed with suprahistorical agency. Bakhtin’s attempts to engage with rival theories of laughter, from Kant to Bergson, are most notable for the ways in which the apparently subjective and contingent notion of laughter is deployed as an objective criterion, which he most frequently calls “popular-festive laughter.” It is here that the theory most baldly reveals its programmatic intent. In his dissertation on Rabelais, Bakhtin sharply distinguishes between the dialectical nature of “popular-festive laughter” and “the purely satirical laughter of modernity,” which “knows only negative laughter, places

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itself outside of the phenomenon being ridiculed, and opposes itself to it.”14 Thus Bakhtin’s historical observations yield quite breezy metaphysical generalizations. In a 1940 encyclopedia article, written after the first draft of his dissertation on Rabelais, Bakhtin provides three definitions of satire: a specific verse form predominant in Roman letters; the dialogic genre of the philosophical diatribe or Menippean satire originating in Hellenistic times; and “a specific (generally negative) attitude of the artist to the object of representation.” “In this sense,” Bakhtin notes, satire is not limited by the two specific genres noted above and can utilize any genre—epic, dramatic, or lyric; we find satirical representations of reality and its various phenomena in minor folkloric genres such as proverbs and sayings [ . . . ], in popular ethological epithets [ . . . ], in epic poems [ . . . ], in song lyrics, both popular [ . . . ] and literary [ . . . ], in the lyric as such [ . . . ], in novellas, tales, novels, documentary sketches. In this ocean of satirical creativity, both popular and literary, the specific genres of Roman and Menippean satire appear as two small islands (although their historical role is quite significant).15 How does one recognize a satirical representation? Satire not only infects various literary species virally, “it possesses the ability to transform and renew the given genre. The satirical moment corrects any genre in the light of contemporary reality, of living actuality, and of political and ideological relevance.”16 If placed next to Bakhtin’s definition of genre quoted previously from Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, it would seem that satire is in fact less a genre than the very life of genre itself, the mechanism by which genre reasserts and renews itself. In crucial respects Bakhtin’s globalizing definition of satire reaches back via Russian symbolism to the Nietzschean dichotomy of Apollo and Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy. In Russia this dichotomy was adapted most influentially by symbolist poet and theorist Viacheslav Ivanov, for whom Dionysus represented a chaotic, elemental force that, by escaping human categories and definitions, renewed them in existential catharsis. In a 1925 essay, “Gogol’s Inspector General and the Comedy of Aristophanes,” occasioned by Vsevolod Meyerhold’s staging of Gogol’s classic, Ivanov broadened his theory to include comic laughter as a force capable of a similar renewal. Ivanov quotes Gogol’s

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wish that “everything be shaken from low to high, turning into a single feeling, a single instant, and a single person, so that all people meet as brothers in a single movement.”17 Concluding that “[u]niversal Laughter is the healing, cathartic force of ‘high comedy,’ ” Ivanov links Gogol to a lost ancient tradition of which Aristophanes was the last representative, and which Aristotle no longer knew well enough to include in his Poetics: “Attic comedy developed out of a carnival custom [ . . . ] affirmed and ordered by the republic’s legislation in the form of public contests arranged by the state.”18 Underscoring the links between comedy and tragedy, Ivanov claims that “ ‘[h]igh comedy, serving the needs of the civil commune, needed the chorus as an artistic expression of the communal idea, as a symbol of the nation, which peers into its comedic reflection; therefore high comedy rested wholly on a choral basis.”19 The choral nature of the laughter ensures the universal appeal of Aristophanes’ and Gogol’s comedies: The masks on the stage are we ourselves, dressed up, in the form of a representative group. And at the same time we are different: we, the viewers, rise above our masks and overcome them insofar as we become conscious of our identity with them and, through them, laugh at ourselves.20 Thus Ivanov comes to attribute the distinctive formal traits of ancient tragedy (i.e., chorus) and its affect (i.e., catharsis) not only to drama and the novel (Dostoevsky’s “novel-tragedy”), but even to modern comedy with its distinct affect of laughter. Despite its mystical hue, Ivanov’s historiography remained influential among leftist theorists concerned with art’s engagement with political reality, most notably Adrian Piotrovsky. The illegitimate son of Thadeusz Zieliński, who was one of Bakhtin’s teachers and another important link in the tradition of Historical Poetics, Piotrovsky adapted Silver Age ideas for the age of revolution and then of socialist reconstruction. In the introduction to his translation of Aristophanes, Piotrovsky underscores the origin of his “choral comedy” in ritual celebrations: Aristophanes’ style, a profoundly organic and integrated style in its own way, is thoroughly adapted to the agitational-satirical tasks it performs, but at the same time it reveals in extreme relief a basis of surviving ritual ceremony, and the style itself is nothing other than a complex, virtuoso transformation of this ancient ritual.21

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In a passage Bakhtin acknowledges but brushes aside, Piotrovsky explicitly links Aristophanes’ comedy to carnival celebrations: A certain reversal of natural relations, in which animals replace people, youth replaces old age, and women replace men; this fantastic reversal forms the basis of carnival celebrations throughout the East. [ . . . ] Having given rise to choral comedy, this reversal determined its fairy-tale quality, the fantastic nature of its plots and the hyperbolic nature of its perspective [ustanovka]. [ . . . ] Out of the “reversal of natural relations” arises the “shift” that lends the carnival a powerful force of life-affirmation, a spirit of victory over the everyday, an ease and sparkle.22 Moreover, Piotrovsky links this tradition to Renaissance comedy, including Rabelais, and to the Soviet comedy of Mayakovsky. Viewed in its modernist lineage, then, Bakhtin’s notion of ambivalent laughter appears to be just one more ahistorical schema of literary history, where satire occupies the pole held previously by choral tragedy, as a destabilizing force in systems of genre, custom, and law. Bakhtin’s indifference regarding the motive principle—the tragic, popular-festive laughter, dialogue, polyphony—testifies to the lack of historical purchase achieved by any such schematics of genre. At best, as the Russian Formalists recognized, these labels allow us to trace the movement of some unit of cultural energy through history, but neither to describe it nor even to name its nature, its ultimate origin, or its precise destination.

2. Bakhtin and Soviet Satire To read Bakhtin’s arguments only in this manner, only as a schematics of genre, would be to ignore the ability and the obligation of Historical Poetics to historicize not only literary form, but also literary theory, for instance by viewing it in the light of the cultural politics of its day. It is not sufficient to rest on over-simplified notions of these cultural politics, according to which Bakhtin is “a hostage to Stalin” while “Menippean satire is a dissident genre” and “a vibrantly political symbol for dissent and revolution.”23 After all, Bakhtin’s theory of satire can just as easily be read as an apology for the festive rhetoric of Stalinism. In order to achieve a more nuanced contextualization—and, perhaps more important, in order to understand the stakes in doing so—we

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first need to take stock of the Soviet discursive system in the 1930s, where satire occupied a lowly, but crucial rung on the ladder of literary genres. Within the rigid hierarchy of socialist realism, reminiscent at times of neoclassicism, each genre required separate study, theorization, and organization. The authoritative definition of satire was provided by Maxim Gorky: Class hatred must be inculcated through organic disgust with the enemy as a being of a lower type, not through arousing fear at the strength of his cynicism or his cruelty [ . . . ] I am completely convinced that the enemy is in fact a being of a lower type, that he is a degenerate both physically and “morally.”24 Satire can only be negative, that is, only ever a condemnation of vice; in this sense it had little real need to be funny. This was a satire without irony, so immediately legible that it often risked undermining its point. The notion of satirizing excessive pleasure (as was common in Roman satire, for instance25) was particularly abhorrent to the Soviet sensibility, which resisted graphic representations of vice. In addenda written for his encyclopedia article “Satire,” Bakhtin recognizes only two successful examples of Soviet satire (beyond a dutiful, if odd, acknowledgment of “the remarkable satirical elements in Gorky’s novels and plays”26): Mayakovsky’s lyrics and the prose of Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov. Mayakovsky was able to subordinate the best traditions of expertise in world satire (the conversational dialogue, grotesque and fantasy, cursing, the self-debunking of reality, etc.) to specifically Soviet tasks and gave them an exclusively martial and effective character. Our satire in general is directly linked to action and prepares the ground for it; it can be and must be a signal to action.27 But the time for such direct action seems to have passed, Mayakovsky having died in 1930 and Il’f and Petrov directing their gaze outward, for example on America, ever since their novel Golden Calf (also 1930). In closing his article Bakhtin pays lip service to the official view, admitting that “the representation of our [i.e., Soviet] reality can least of all be an image that negates it,” (i.e., a purely satirical image). Only with respect to vestiges of the past does satire retain its relevance vis-à-vis

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Soviet reality. Satire’s ‘most important task’ relates to “our prerevolutionary past and the capitalist world that encircles us.”28 This limitation of satire to the flogging of dead horses not only contradicts Bakhtin’s premise about the pervasiveness of carnivalistic laughter throughout literature; it also belies his insistence on the productive nature of satire and other literary genres vis-à-vis the social worlds in which they appear. In short, Bakhtin defines satire not only in terms of the objects of its mimetic representation, but also in terms of its means of representation, which allow it to be both historically dated but also constantly renewed. The mechanism by which it achieves this renewal is “spontaneously [stikhiino] elementally dialectical”29: “satire is the image-based negation of contemporary reality in its various moments, but it necessarily includes within itself—in one form or another, to one degree or another of concreteness and clarity—a positive moment of affirming a better reality.”30 As Duncan Kennedy has commented on Bakhtin, “Each genre, rather than being viewed as the reflection of prior reality, is seen as creating the conditions for the production or construction of a consequent reality and of a lived experience of the world. Thus lived experience, no less than literature, emerges as a recursive mimesis, as tropes are enacted and reenacted.”31 In this light, satire is crucial to the human freedom to reinvent oneself and one’s world. Polemicizing with Kant’s and Bergson’s theories of laughter, Bakhtin appears to dispute the very possibility of laughter remaining only critical: “laughter by its very nature is deeply unofficial: it creates an intimate [famil’iarnyi] festive collective beyond any official life seriousness. [ . . . ] [T]he negative and positive are inexorably fused in phenomena of the comic; it is impossible to draw a clear border between them.”32 One reason for this is the unfailingly corporeal basis of humor: the space in which clowns leap, fall and fight, in which the little devil dances on a spring, on which a cardboard dancer moves and the snowball accumulates, is a topographical space where up and down (and other directions) have absolute meaning; you can’t understand all these phenomena outside the arena, the area, where they are performed, outside their corporealcosmic coordinates.33 Humor always reinscribes ideological significations into material existence; any discussion of satire’s “effect” requires accounting for its affect.

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In notes on Vladimir Mayakovsky, roughly contemporaneous to the article on satire, Bakhtin elaborated on how the poet’s hyperbolism created a specifically Soviet satire with both negative and positive dimensions, at the same time underscoring how its efficacy depends on its use of scale, dimension, and perspective. Like early-modern satire, Mayakovsky was concerned with the “destruction of the old borders between separate bodies and between bodies and things.”34 To do so, however, meant to fit the “cosmic or universal scales” of the new in “a very limited, [ . . . ] more or less room-sized world.”35 The search for a  perspective capable of holding the cosmic within the intimate led Mayakovsky to banish middle distance, which Bakhtin associates with nineteenth-century realism and with bourgeois culture as such: The ages and masses require another distance, both very distant and very close, only not middling, room-sized distance [ . . . ] The task is to find a visual, image-based, historical space for representation; a space with new scales; with a new distribution of things and people. [ . . . ] Here was found a new combination of space and time in the image, a new chronotope.36 Here there is no use for a strategic map or a tabletop globe, nor even of a cinematic alternation between long shots and close-ups: “here is achieved the fusion [of the large and small scales] in a single new scale, in a single new panorama. The generalization and the small-scale scene [stsenka] are fused and shown simultaneously from a single point of view.”37 This technique of a radical fusion of perspectives Bakhtin calls “corporealization” (otelesnivanie), which is a formal link to the grotesqueries of folklore and Menippean satire. Seeing in Mayakovsky’s satire the “[s]pecific curvature of images” of his historical moment,38 Bakhtin finds in him not only a belittling of what is dying out, but also a portent of the grand world that is coming to be: “The large scale [bol’shoe] is not a statistical, eternal, unchanging large scale. It is a becoming, historical, growing large scale. It is necessary to sense a concrete historical space for showing-representing this large scale.”39 For Mayakovsky this hyperbolism is also a means of growing out of the lyric and into an epic subjecthood: “From the grotesque to monumentalism. In ‘crude’ history, where the old fights the new, such a lyrical soul can only be on the side of the finished and obsolete old.”40 Mayakovsky understood that “it is necessary to rebuild the poetic image in the sphere of new scales and dimensions”: “It is necessary for the image, built outside of the frame of the normal panorama, to paint a picture, and not

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a map of the world. It is necessary for things to come into real and persuasive contact, and for them to create living (and not constructivistically dead) groups of people and things. The fullness of time in a new image of the large scale.”41 Thus satire comes to coincide with socialist realism, as simultaneously mimetic and projective, present and future, imaginary and haptic. The specific purview of satire within the socialist-realist aesthetic is the revision of visual and corporeal scale. Bakhtin’s notes on Mayakovsky not only provide a helpful supplement to his encyclopedia article on satire and his other discussions of Menippean satire; they also point to a specific satirical text that happened to be the subject of intense interest in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, namely Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726/1735). Although Gulliver’s Travels fits what Bakhtin identified as a combination of Menippean satire with “the genre of fantastic journeys to utopian lands,”42 Bakhtin dismissed the work along with other Enlightenmentera satires as pervaded with “rationalism and mechanism” and therefore lacking a “positive pole (the merry, vivifying shade of laughter, the spirit of the material-corporeal generative principle).”43 However, we have already seen how Bakhtin elsewhere denied that satire could ever really lack positivity. Not only does Bakhtin’s theory of satire provide us with a means of understanding the fascination with Gulliver in the literature of Bakhtin’s time; the Gulliverian context enables us to unpack the historical efficacy—the positivity—of Bakhtin’s construct of satire. Bakhtin helps us to read Swift’s novel not as an exemplar of “satire,” but as a model that aims to change the worlds it describes by unsettling customary scales, dimensions, and perspectives. Gulliver’s Travels was a singularly popular text in the USSR, attracting the attention of many notable authors. The 1928 edition of Boris Engel’gardt’s translation by the prestigious publishing house Academia was republished in 1930 and 1932. The story penetrated deep into Soviet satire, emerging in details like the name of Ostap Bender’s car (“The Antelope”) in Il’f and Petrov’s novel The Golden Calf. Indeed, Il’f and Petrov’s recourse to Swiftian motifs is itself an index of the gradual retreat of Soviet satirists to the safer shores of academism and children’s literature. Part One of Swift’s novel—“A Voyage to Lilliput”— was known to children in an adaptation by Tamara Gabbe and Zoia Zadunaiskaia; Part Two—“A Voyage to Brobdingnag”—was disseminated in a 1937 retelling by the innovative poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, which at one point Osip Mandel’shtam was planning to dramatize for

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the radio.44 Gabbe and Zadunaiskaia’s version was widely translated (including into German), and in the 1940s Gabbe produced an adaptation of the entire Gulliver’s Travels that continues to be republished today, in Russian and in other languages (including Hungarian). Soviet adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels in the 1930s frequently reinterpreted Gulliver as an agent of revolution, most often in a land of reactionary or benighted Lilliputians. In accordance with Gorky’s prescription for satire, the Lilliputians are literally “lower types,” as surveyed from the Soviet Gulliver’s vantage point, which is superior in both the physical and moral senses. The displaced temporality characteristic of satire is resolved as a simpler opposition between an archaic bourgeois-fascist past and a radiant Soviet future. A 1936 novel Gulliver among the Aryans by Georg Born imagined the visit of a Gulliver to an island ruled by a Wagnerian sect of leftover Nazis some 500 years in the future.45 In the same year writer Mikhail Kozyrev (1892–1942) wrote Gulliver’s Fifth Voyage, in which the hero travels to the land of Überallia, a national-socialist land riven by racism.46 The trend spread to Western radical literature, most notably in Hugo Gellert’s Comrade Gulliver. An Illustrated Account of Travel to That Strange Country the United States (1935), where Gulliver is a Soviet citizen viewing Depression-era America with astonishment and incredulity.47 In his 1939 book on Swift, Mikhail Levidov described the current international situation as a global struggle for “the destruction of the disgusting Yahoos who denigrate the name of man, those Yahoos against whom Swift’s dagger word is now directed and whom furious satire now whips.”48 Swift’s humanistic satire is contrasted to that of Louis Ferdinand Celine, whose alliance with the Fascists underscored for Levidov his “literary sadism.” “But Gulliver’s Travels is nothing like Journey to the End of the Night,” Levidov concludes.49 In this way, as Andrei Bitov has noted, Gulliver became a functional equivalent of Robinson Crusoe in Soviet cultural consciousness, a solitary agent spreading the new model of civilization far and wide.50 In the process the dramatic reversals of scale experienced by Gulliver are frequently reduced to a pervasive gigantomania that was not uncommon in Soviet culture in the 1930s, while the confusing mix of temporalities is reduced to unalloyed futurism. As Bitov comments, “To become conscious of one’s size, one’s reality means to enter into civilization”51; to become Soviet, it would seem, meant to become conscious of oneself as a Brobdingnagian in a world of Grildrigs. Instead of satire, Gulliver’s Travels became read as a Bildungsroman.

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Despite this simplistic instrumentalization of Swift’s book, it was unsettling enough to merit prophylactic warnings from vigilant ideological watchdogs. In his introduction to the Academia edition of Gulliver’s Travels P. S. Kogan, a prominent critic and Soviet government functionary, summarized both the point and the danger of Swift’s novel: Everything depends on how you look at it, from below or above. Beauty becomes ugliness and ugliness—beauty, virtue becomes vice while crime becomes heroism: it all depends on the point of view. Who can distinguish unfailingly the miniscule [nichtozhnoe] from the great, or what is called a trifle [meloch’] and what is called significant. [ . . . ] And it is difficult to decide whether the author is laughing at the reader or whether is really filled with serious intentions. What a strange book! Everything in it is in flux; the contradictions conflict, intertwine and gain a new outline, spreading and merging.52 Evidently, insofar as it continued to disrupt fixed notions of what Bakhtin called “corporeal-cosmic coordinates,” Gulliver’s Travels could not be safely consigned to a stable position in the history of literature, as a negative view of specific historical formations. Even if the genre of satire had become moribund, works of satire were found to retain their positive political efficacy in ever new social and political situations. Bakhtin’s turn to the history of satire can be seen as motivated by a desire not only to describe, but also to reactivate this potentiality.

3. Perspective and Scale Throughout the discussion of satire in Soviet theory, from Kogan to Bakhtin, one is struck by the prevalence of visual terminology. As if taking literal heed of Bakhtin’s definition of satire as “image-based negation,” almost all of the editions of Gulliver’s Travels mentioned thus far were accompanied by illustrations, many of which pick up on the novel’s telescopic perspective.53 Many of Hugo Gellert’s expressionist illustrations play with scale and proportion: a giant plow decimates a farm, illustrating “illogical” policies favoring corporate agriculture, or a miniaturized Capitol rests in the lap of J. P. Morgan, as shown in Figure 16.1. Not all of Gellert’s illustrations are phantasmagoric; some of them use dramatic framings of more realistic scenes of modern American life: a giant worker on a crane looking down on the minia-

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ture city below; a foregrounded pitchfork dominating a barren farm. It would seem that literary satire begs visualization no less than visual caricature sought complementary poetic captions. Perhaps the affinity goes further back; Gellert’s recognition of the surrealistic potential of Swift’s narrative hearkens back to the well-known woodcut illustrations by Jean-Jacques Grandville, first published in 1834, which grace the Academia editions and Zabolotsky’s adaptation and remain popular in Russia today. The tension between this surrealistic visuality and the ideological repurposing of Swift’s narrative is palpable in Tamara Gabbe and Zoia Zadunaiskaia’s retelling of Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput, published in 1931 with eleven illustrations by Aleksei Pakhomov (in later editions Pakhomov’s illustrations were replaced by Grandville’s woodcuts). Gabbe and Zadunaiskaia’s adaptation of Swift is quite drastic, turning Gulliver’s first-person narration into a third-person narrative and freely omitting his less savory episodes. Those that remain are recast to emphasize convenient ideological points, as is illustrated by Gulliver’s observations at the Lilliputs’ celebrations. The passage in Swift’s work reads: The emperor had a mind one day to entertain me with several of the country shows; wherein they exceed all nations I have known, both for dexterity and magnificence. I was diverted with none so much as that of the rope-dancers, performed upon a slender white thread, extended about two foot, and twelve inches from the ground. [ . . . ] This diversion is only practised by those persons, who are candidates for great employments, and high favour, and are not always of noble birth, or liberal eduction. When a great office is vacant, either by death or disgrace, (which often happens) five or six of those candidates petition the emperor to entertain his Majesty and the court with a dance on the rope; and whoever jumps the highest without falling, succeeds in the office.54 Gabbe and Zadunaiskaia’s adaptation turns the episode into an example of the arbitrary and anti-democratic nature of monarchic rule and of Gulliver’s democratic instincts: There was a holiday at court, and the king invited Gulliver to look in the window. Cables no thicker than our threads were stretched across the entire hall. Courtiers took turns dancing

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Figure 16.1. Illustration from Hugo Gellert, Comrade Gulliver. An Illustrated Account of Travel to That Strange Country the United States (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935).

and jumping on these cables. Whoever jumped higher than the rest received the post of minister or a medal. Thus the king selected his ministers, and the inhabitants of Lilliput were forced to obey cable-jumpers. Gulliver found this very funny. He laughed loudly and went home. The king took offense but chose not to argue with Gulliver.55 Aleksei Pakhomov’s illustrations depict Gulliver as a doll-like blond boy who, once he wakes up, treats the Lilliputians with marvel and tenderness. When invited to look inside a dwelling, we see the giant boy peering inside a doll’s house (see Figure 16.2). When asked to help defend Lilliput against the Blefuscudians, he looks like a boy with

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Figure 16.2. Aleksei Pakhomov’s illustration to T. Gabbe and  Z. Zadunaiskaia, eds., Gulliver u lilliputov (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1931).

his model ships. The effect is less Robinson Crusoe than Alice in Wonderland. Both conflicting tendencies—the ideological and the surreal—are evident in the first Soviet stop-action animation film Novyi Gulliver (The New Gulliver, 1935), directed by Aleksandr Ptushko, who subsequently became the foremost Soviet animator. At the famous Young Pioneer camp Artek, Petia Konstantinov proves himself as a shockworker on the construction of a sailboat out of driftwood and receives for his efforts a commendation and a copy of his favorite book, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (in the Academia edition). He is shown admiring Grandville’s illustrations (see Figure 16.3). The young sailors decide to read the book out loud, but Petia falls asleep and dreams his own adaptation, with himself in the role of Gulliver. Seeing the injustices of Lilliput, which is ruled by an idiotic tyrant and a cabal of sycophants, Petia helps the Lilliputian proletariat to organize a revolt. The film includes some jazzy musical numbers by composer Lev Shvarts which,

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Figure 16.3. Petia reads Gulliver’s Travels. Still from New Gulliver (dir. Aleksandr Ptushko, 1935).

unusually for the time, depict Lilliput through ironic excess, allowing viewers to enjoy the corruption even as they join in its condemnation.56 One song, “Moia liliputochka” (“My Little Lilliputian Girl”) reportedly became a genuine hit in the Soviet Union. However, there would appear to be little doubt about the film’s priorities. The Soviet child is not only a giant compared to other races, attaining a global perspective like the protagonist of one of Lucian’s Menippean dialogues; so also is the non-Soviet world (a mélange of various times and places) something like a scale-model—and history a game—in which he can freely exercise his imagination and his power. This interpretation of the film is supported by the response of a participant in the international brigade in Spain, reported by a schoolgirl named Remmether from the German city of Pankow: When we saw this film for the first time we felt not only our right, but also our power. What we saw in Spain was so similar to the situation in the kingdom of the Lilliputians that we see in these dwarves our enemies, miniaturized in size. For us this was

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not only an interesting film in the artistic sense, but mostly a martial film, a call to arms.57 The Soviet press tended to agree. Lev Kassil’ felt the film succeeded in “bringing the sting [of Swift’s book] to contemporary life abroad,” while Boris Brodiansky recognized it as “one of the links in the satirical chain in which we find Radek’s and Mikhail Kol’tsov’s pamphlets, [Boris] Efimov’s political caricatures, Kukryniksy’s biting sketches, and [Dmitrii] Moor’s merciless ridicule.”58 The crucial scene comes when Petia is being distracted by the chief of police at a banquet held in honor of the decrepit idiot-king, a scene that echoes the entertainment in Gabbe and Zadunaiskaia’s adaptation. The Lilliputian jazz ensemble’s performance of “My Little Lilliputian Girl” is followed by a dance of mistreated Lilliputian dwarves, who are significantly smaller even than the Lilliputians themselves (see Figures 16.4 and 16.5). It is at this moment, seeing the injustices of Lilliput against the dwarves, that Petia begins to help the workers to resist (Figure 16.6). It turns out that size is not only a sign of strength, but can also become a source of oppression. As Kogan suggested, distortions of perspective are easily reversed; the telescope always has two ends. Some of the credit for the instability of the satire in The New Gulliver belongs with Grandville’s illustrations, which inspire Petia to dream his own surrealistic version of the story, instead of following more faithfully along Swift’s text. Bakhtin helps us to recognize that the sudden reversals of physical scale and of political power are triggered by the carnivalesque atmosphere of jazz ensemble and dwarf ballet, which inscribes the allegory in physicality while reversing the established corporeal-cosmic coordinates. It is not a simple coming-to-power, however; once reversed, the relations of scale remain unstable. The dance of the Lilliputian dwarves is thus a choral dance, which for Plato captures the paradoxical promise of lyrical freedom within the orders of an oppressive world. In the lyric, according to the Athenian in Plato’s Laws, humans attain power by becoming miniaturized “playthings of God”: “they are puppets for the most part, but share occasionally in truth.”59 As Leslie Kurke has shown, Plato’s language echoes Homer’s description of choral scenes on Achilles’ shield in the Iliad.60 If The New Gulliver performs the task of initiating Soviet viewers into the grand scale of their civilization, it does so in part by dwarfing them before the infinite horizon of genuine justice.

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Figure 16.4. The song “My Little Lilliputian Girl.” Still from New Gulliver (dir. Aleksandr Ptushko, 1935).

Figure 16.5. The dance of the Lilliputians’ Lilliputians. Still from New Gulliver (dir. Aleksandr Ptushko, 1935).

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Figure 16.6. The three scales of revolutionary satire. Still from New Gulliver (dir. Aleksandr Ptushko, 1935).

That the proximity of socialist realism to surrealism in The New Gulliver was sensed from the very beginning is indicated by the mystery of its authorship. Though the screenplay was credited to Ptushko and Grigorii Roshal’, historical rumor has persistently linked it also to the name of writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.61 Indeed, in a discussion of the screenplay from 10 September 1933 Ptushko confirms that Krzhizhanovsky made a “series of refinements to the screenplay [stsenarnye dorabotki],” but what exactly Krzhizhanovsky contributed remains unknown. Krzhizhanovsky’s involvement is consistent with the author’s avid self-identification with the Gulliver story.62 When dedicating a poem to Krzhizhanovsky in 1929, the poet Pavel Antokol’sky gave it the title “Gulliver.” The difficulty of attribution is not limited to the film. Krzhizhanovsky has also been credited with a travel guide to Moscow that was published in English in 1934 under the name of Mikhail Levidov, who was not only Krzhizhanovsky’s friend, but was also the author of an acclaimed study of Swift that was published in 1939. Krzhizhanovsky’s detached position is certainly compatible with a phrase from the Moscow guidebook, allegedly quoted from a municipal conference of the Communist Party: “We are equally opposed

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to any belittlement of Moscow and any city gigantomania.”63 If one assumes Krzhizhanovsky’s participation in Levidov’s travel guide and in Ptushko’s The New Gulliver, one sees how the problem of finding a proper scale for new socialist culture continued to structure artistic experiment even after the advent of socialist realism, which in this light can be interpreted as an attempt to legislate canonical scales and perspectives of representation. Gulliver features in two of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories from the 1930s.64 In “Gulliver Seeks Employment” (from 1933) Gulliver tries to ease the burden on the Lilliputians by going to work as captain and surgeon on a ship, but his vessel sinks under his weight and he mutilates his first patient with a giant scalpel. Saddened, he sits down outside the town and ends up as a literal man-mountain, on which Lilliputian children now gambol. In “My Chess Game with the King of the Giants” (also ca. 1933) Gulliver relates an episode from his sojourn among the giants, when he played a game of chess with the king and, after winning, ended up locked in the case with the massive chess pieces, as in a common grave. Both stories are illumined by Krzhizhanovsky’s comment in his work “Countries Which Are Not”: [A]s a true artist, Jonathan Swift allows himself to violate measure only once: to miniaturize or magnify the bodies of the people among whom his hero lives. Beyond this he is extremely precise and never departs from a realistic manner of writing.65 For Krzhizhanovsky this initial displacement of scale and perspective (perhaps also of time) is a constitutive element of fiction, which is no longer an initiation into the scale of civilization, but an investigation into the incommensurability between consciousness and world. It is this fictive remodeling, not some schematic generic category like satire or lyric, that ensures the continual historical efficacy of literary works. Its theorization requires the construction of a model that respects—even participates in—the phenomenon’s historical and material contingency.

Conclusion: Bakhtin’s Model of Satire In Plato’s Laws the Athenian recommends that the lawgiver produce as complete a model as he can for the society he rules, “as though he were telling his dreams or fashioning a city and its inhabitants out of wax.”66 Thus miniaturization is a useful, perhaps even crucial condi-

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tion for the promulgation of reasonable law: “For self-consistency, you know, must be aimed at in everything, even by the artificer of the paltriest object, if he is to be of any account.”67 Even if full-scale implementation of the model involves hazard (kairos), through miniaturized modeling one can approach the divine not only in freedom, but also in reason (logos and nomos). Many Soviet adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels dwell on the negative formulation of this rule, placing miniaturized versions of existing society under a critical scope in order to discern the degree to which it diverges from the ideal in justice and freedom. As I have suggested, however, in Bakhtin’s conception satire always retains its positive potential for reasonable and free lawgiving, and that it does so precisely in the degree that it remains playful in its remodeling of the world. This might be called Bakhtin’s law of satire; my argument has been that Bakhtin’s promulgation of his law rests on the construction of a scale model of literary history. To what degree this model counts as Historical Poetics depends on how willing the latter proves to respect the contingent histories and materialities of each quarry it retrieves from the res nullius of cultural history. The question becomes to what degree Bakhtin was serious in his model-making, and to what degree he was engaged in simple play, seeking an inward self-consistency among the parts of the models he built, while remaining mindful of being a plaything of the gods. In his various literary-historical texts on satire Bakhtin insists that, although it might temporarily have been diminished in its scope and efficacy under the conditions of Soviet society, in his day satire remained dependent upon relationships of scale that could easily be reversed or otherwise unsettled. Thus, I have argued, Bakhtin’s theory is not a descriptive schema or a metaphysical construct, but a discursive machine aimed at producing satirical readings—or, more often, satirical viewings—of the futuristic gigantomania of the Soviet 1930s; in other words, for producing satirical Gullivers (and surrealistic Alices) out of socialist realist Robinsons. Transgressing the accepted borders between engaged writing and impartial scholarship (whether in full consciousness of the transgression or simply out of playful clumsiness), Bakhtin’s theory of satire re-scales the history of literature and, at the same time, destabilizes the scales regnant within Soviet literary representation. Bakhtin’s theory of satire is itself executed in a satirical vein. Thus, in Bakhtin, Historical Poetics transforms the res nullius of speculative scholarly description into a highly-charged arena of political agency. As Henri Lefebvre describes it:

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The success of all such “model-building,” “simulation” and “systemic” analysis reposes upon an unstated postulate—that of a space underlying both the isolation of variables and the construction of systems. This space validates the models in question precisely because the models make the space functional.68 The secret to the unlikely success of Bakhtin’s theory of satire lay not in its mimetic accuracy, but in its very functionality in creating a cultural space called “satire,” which was endowed with specific means for modeling the world and which allowed for the creation of specific kinds of theoretical models. This, I would argue, is a crucial aspect of Bakhtin’s legacy in Soviet theory, most notably in the semiotics that blossomed in Moscow and Tartu, which described its object of study as “modeling systems” and adopted Bakhtin’s notion of culture as a “world-model.” Despite its scientistic trappings, Soviet semiotics never concealed its desire to transform the world it described; as James Scanlan has observed: Although for some purposes the term [model] is used to mean a copy or reflection, so that “modeling the world” means depicting or portraying an external reality, the term is increasingly used rather to signify a reconstruction of reality, so that “modeling the world” means molding or shaping it [ . . . ] Furthermore, the primacy of active modeling is enhanced by the persistent suggestion that artistic signs not only reconstitute reality but mold the consciousness of those human agents who use them.69 Insofar as Bakhtin’s theory of satire, like the satire it describes, aspires to produce effects in addition to describing phenomena, it calls attention to the question of temporality in the theory of Historical Poetics. Bakhtin’s model is marked by what Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood have called anachrony, “The ability of the work of art to hold incompatible models in suspension without deciding [ . . . ] its ability really to ‘fetch’ a past, create a past, perhaps even fetch the future.”70 The key to its historical agency is that this model is able to respond, like Gulliver, to the pressures caused by its own incommensurability to history, turning description into refashioning. I would venture that, with respect to satire and even to genre, the production of such a functional working model might well be the most that Historical

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Poetics can aspire. As the example of Bakhtin shows, however, this is no small thing.

Notes I would like to express my gratitude to Petr Bagrov, Caryl Emerson, Paola Iovene, Christina Kiaer, Ilya Kliger, Leslie Kurke, Boris Maslov, and Elena Obatnina for their generous help with aspects of this essay. Thanks are also due to the audiences at the venues at which I have presented parts of it: the conference on historical poetics at the University of Chicago, the 2012 AATSEEL convention in Bellevue, Washington, and the Russian Department at the University of St. Andrews. I dedicate the essay to the memory of Oliver Smith. 1. Quoted from Leonid Lipavskii, “Iz razgovorov ‘chinarei,’ ” Avrora no. 6 (1989), p. 130. 2. Emily Abruzzo, Eric Ellingsen, and Jonathan D. Solomon, eds., Models, vol. 11 of 306090 Books (2007), p. 19. 3. Aleksandr Veselovskii, Istoricheskaia poetika (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1940), p. 53. This quotation comes from an essay “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics: Questions and Answers,” an English translation of which is published in this volume as Chapter 1. 4. For a proposal along these lines see: Gérard Genette, The Architext, trans. Jane  E. Lewin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 70–79. Russian terminology in the nineteenth century generally recognized “genuses” (rody) and “species” (vidy); Veselovsky also speaks of “forms,” which are apparently akin to “species.” 5. Aleksandr Veselovskii, Izbrannoe: Na puti k istoricheskoi poetike (Moscow: Avtokniga, 2010), p. 17. 6. Iurii Tynianov, Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), p. 258. 7. Joel C. Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. xi. 8. “For all Bakhtin’s ‘body-talk,’ he is a principled and consistent idealist”; Craig Brandist, “ ‘Scientific Parody’ in Early Soviet Russia,” Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture, ed. Lesley Milne (London: Anthem Press, 2004), p. 154; cf. Genette, The Architext, p. 4. For an authoritative critique of Bakhtin’s notion of Menippean satire see: M. L. Gasparov, “Literary History as a Creative and Scholarly Task: The Case of Bakhtin,” trans. Michael Wachtel, PMLA 130.1 (2015): 131– 136 (originally published in Russian in 2004); Caryl Emerson, “In Honor of Mikhail Gasparov’s Quarter-Century of Not Liking Bakhtin: Pro and

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Contra,” in Poetics. Self. Place. Essays in Honor of Anna Lisa Crone, ed. Catherine O’Neil, Nicole Boudreau, Sarah Krive (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2007), pp. 42–45. 9. Howard D. Weinbrot, “Bakhtin and Menippean Satire: Soviet Whiggery, Bion, Varro, Horace, and the Eighteenth Century,” Classical and Modern Literature 22/2 (2002), p. 34. 10. M. M. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Russkie slovari; Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 1996–), 6:120; Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, introduction by Wayne  C. Booth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 106. 11. Erik Gunderson, “The Libidinal Rhetoric of Satire,” in Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, ed. Kirk Freudenburg (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 225. 12. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, p. 120; Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 106. 13. H. K. Riikonen, Menippean Satire as a Literary Genre with Special Reference to Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1987), p. 51. 14. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4/2, p. 21. 15. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 11–12. For an English translation of this essay, see Chapter 13. 16. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 12. 17. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, p. 390. 18. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, p. 392. 19. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, p. 393 20. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, p. 394. 21. Aristofan, Komedii, trans. Adr. Piotrovskii, 2 vols. (Moscow, Leningrad: Academia, 1934), p. 25–26. Cf. also Piotrovskii’s earlier edition: Aristofan, Kniga komedii (Moscow, Leningrad: Academia, 1930). 22. A. A. Gvozdev, A. I. Piotrovskii, Istoriia evropeiskogo teatra: Antichnyi teatr; Teatr epokhi feodalizma (Moscow, Leningrad: Academia, 1931), pp. 72, 76. The editors of Bakhtin’s Collected Works refute any possibility of Piotrovsky having influenced Bakhtin (Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4/2, p. 560). 23. Victoria Rimell, “Petronius, Satire, and the Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, ed. Kirk Freudenburg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 168. 24. Maksim Gor’kii, Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1949–1955), 25:174. 25. Kirk Freudenberg, introduction to Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, p. 9. 26. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 37.

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27. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 38. 28. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 34. 29. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 16. 30. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 15. 31. Duncan Kennedy, “Modern Receptions and Their Implications,” in Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, p. 305. 32. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 50. 33. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 50. 34. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 54–55. 35. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 55. 36. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 55. 37. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 56. Bakhtin seems specifically to have in mind Eisenstein’s October; cf. also his comment (apropos of Mayakovsky’s Vladimir Il’ich Lenin): “Lenin appears in the corridor at Smolny, and then he is again dispersed in collectives, things and spaces” (Ibid., p. 55). 38. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 53. 39. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 59. 40. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 62. 41. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 59, 60. 42. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 25. 43. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 31. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin includes Swift more confidently among the “special type of experimental fantasticality” within the Menippea and even (in his notes) among the “dialogical line” of carnival; Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, pp. 131, 346; Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 116. 44. “O. E. Mandel’shtam v pis’makh S. B. Rudakova k zhene (1935– 1936),” Ezhegodnik rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 1993 god (St. Petersburg: 1997), p. 87. Zabolotskii also produced an adaptation of Rabelais in 1934 and a screenplay based on Baron Munchhausen in the genre of “fantastic realism”; see Nikolai Zabolotskii, “Rable—detiam,” Literaturnyi Leningrad, 14 October 1935, p. 3; Ibid., “Prikliucheniia Barona Miunkhgauzena: Stsenarii zvukovogo fil’ma,” ed. Igor’ Loshchilov and Petr Bagrov, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 84 (2007) 228–33. 45. Georg Born, Gulliver u ariitsev (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1936). Born’s Gulliver is no larger or smaller than the Nazis he discovers; proportion is invoked only in the case of the “microcephalic” natives of the island, who recall Swift’s Yahoos. 46. Mikhail Kozyrev, Piatoe puteshestvie Gullivera i drugie povesti i rasskazy (Moscow: Tekst, 1991). 47. Hugo Gellert, Comrade Gulliver. An Illustrated Account of Travel to That Strange Country the United States (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935).

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48. Mikhail Levidov, Puteshestvie v nekotorye otdalennye strany mysli i chuvstva Dzhonatana Svifta, snachala issledovatelia a potom voina v neskol’kikh srazheniiakh (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1939), p. 397. 49. Ibid., p. 46. 50. Andrei Bitov, Novyi Gulliver (Aine kliaine arifmetika russkoi literatury) (Tenafly, N.J.: Hermitage Publishers, 1997), p. 22. 51. Ibid. 52. Puteshestviia v nekotorye otdalennye strany sveta Lemiuelia Gullivera, snachala khirurga i potom kapitana nekol’kikh korablei, introduction by E. L. Radlov, preface by P. S. Kogan (Leningrad: Academia, 1928), pp. vii–viii. 53. This is least true of Georg Born’s Gulliver u ariitsev, which is illustrated with cartoon-like drawings by L. Kun, K. Sobolevskii, and V. Elkin. 54. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 35. 55. T. Gabbe and Z. Zadunaiskaia, eds., Gulliver u lilliputov (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1931), p. 24. 56. It has been suggested to me that the singer is a parody of Leonid Utesov, star of Grigorii Aleksandrov’s jazz-influenced musical film Veselye rebiata (1934). 57. File 1527 (Novyi Gulliver), Archive of Gosfilmofond (Moscow, Russia). 58. Lev Kassil’, “Privetstvie Novogo Gullivera,” 22 February 1935. The quotation from Brodianskii is taken from an unidentified press clipping dated 10 April 1935, held in: File 1527 (Novyi Gulliver), Archive of Gosfilmofond (Moscow, Russia). 59. Plato, Laws 803d–804b; translation from: Plato, Laws. Books VII– XII, translated by  R.  G. Bury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926), p. 53–55. I am indebted to Leslie Kurke for calling my attention to this reference and its pertinence to New Gulliver. 60. Leslie Kurke, “Imagining Chorality: Wonder, Plato’s Puppets, and Moving Statues,” in Performance and Culture in Plato’s Laws, ed. Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 123–170. 61. Most recently see Vadim Perel’muter, “Posle katastrofy,” in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (St. Petersburg: Simpozium, 2001–2010), p. 59. The archives do not support Perel’muter’s story of Krzhizhanovskii “working day and night to write a screenplay in record time instead of someone else’s failed screenplay, which had driven the shooting into a dead end”; Perel’muter cites no source. However this version of events has enjoyed broad credibility. 62. State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino), “Stenogram of Discussion of Animated Film,” 10 September 1933; RGALI 2456.1.64 l.146.

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63. M. Levidov, Moscow: Past. Present. Future (Moscow and Leningrad: Vneshtorgisdat [sic], 1934), p. 60. 64. Krzhizhanovskii, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg: Simpozium, 2001–2010). 65. Krzhizhanovskii, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, p. 137. 66. Plato, Laws 746a; adapted from translation by A. E. Taylor in: Plato, The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 1330. 67. Plato, Laws 746cd; translation by A. E. Taylor, cited from: Plato, The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, p. 1330. 68. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 312. 69. James P. Scanlan, Marxism in the USSR: A Critical Survey of Current Soviet Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 315. 70. Alexander Nagel, Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), p. 18.

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Further Readings in Historical Poetics

The following bibliography comprises translations of theoretical works that are of particular importance to the authors of this volume, as well as more recent publications that contribute to the evolving paradigm of Historical Poetics. The list is limited to works in English, and hence not intended to be representative. This is not a canon, but rather a list of recommendations for further reading that might easily have been extended. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. ———. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. ———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Banfield, Ann. “Where Epistemology, Style, and Grammar Meet Literary History.” New Literary History 9, no. 3 (1978): 415–54. Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1966. Bird, Robert. “Lyric Ritual and Narrative Myth in Russian Modernism: The Case of Viacheslav Ivanov.” Genre v. 36 (spring-summer 2003): 83–108. Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.

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Further Readings in Historical Poetics

Bogatyrev, Pyotr and Roman Jakobson. “Folklore as a Special Form of Creativity.” In Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929–1946, translated by Manfred Jacobson, 32–46. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Burkert, Walter. Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Faraone, Christopher A. The Stanzaic Architecture of Early Greek Elegy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Freidenberg, Olga. Image and Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature. Edited by Nina Braginskaia. Translated by Kevin Moss. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press, 1997 Gasparov, Mikhail. A History of European Versification. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Ginzburg, Lydia. On Psychological Prose. Translated by Judson Rosengrant. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Godzich, Wlad and Jeffrey Kittay. The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981. Jauss, Hans Robert. “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory.” New Literary History 2.1 (1970): 7–37. Holland, Kate. The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Kliger, Ilya. “Dostoevsky and the Novel-Tragedy: Genre and Modernity in Ivanov, Pumpyansky, and Bakhtin.” PMLA 126.1 (2011): 73–87. ———. “Resurgent Forms in Ivan Goncharov and Alexander Veselovsky: Toward a Historical Poetics of Tragic Realism.” Russian Review 71.4 (2012): 655–72. Kunichika, Michael. “ ‘The Ecstasy of Breadth’: The Odic and the Whitmanesque in Dziga Vertov’s One Sixth of the World (1926).” Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema 6.1 (2012): 53–74. ———. “ ‘The Scythians Were Here . . .’ On Nomadic Archaeology, Modernist Form, and Early Soviet Modernity.” Ab Imperio 2012, no. 2, 229–57. Kurke, Leslie. Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Lord, Albert. The Singer of Tales, 2nd ed. Edited by Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. First edition published in 1960.

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Lotman, Yuri. Culture and Explosion. Edited by Marina Grishakova. Translated by Wilma Clark. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2009. ———. “The Origin of the Plot in the Light of Typology.” Translated by Julian Graffy. Poetics Today 1.1–2 (1979): 161–84. Martin, Richard  P. “Words Alone Are Certain Good(s): Philology and Greek Material Culture.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 138.2 (2008): 313–49. Maslov, Boris. “Pindaric Temporality, Goethe’s Augenblick, and the Invariant Plot of Tiutchev’s Lyric.” Comparative Literature 64.4 (2012): 356–81. ———. “The Semantics of ἀοιδός and Related Compounds: Towards a Historical Poetics of Solo Performance in Archaic Greece.” Classical Antiquity 28.1 (2009): 1–38. Medvedev, Pavel. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Translated by Albert Wehrle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Nagy, Gregory. Greek Mythology and Poetics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Parry, Milman. “The Traditional Metaphor in Homer.” In The Making of Homeric Verse, 365–75. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Radlov, Wilhelm. Preface from Proben der Volksliteratur der nördlichen türkischen Stämme 5 (St. Petersburg, 1885). Translated by G. B. Sherman and A. B. Davis. Oral tradition 5 (1990): 73–90. Somoff, Victoria. “No Need for Dogs or Women: Muteness in Turgenev’s ‘Mumu’.” Russian Literature 68:3–4 (2010): 501–20. ———. “On the Metahistorical Roots of the Fairytale.” Western Folklore 61 (2002): 277–94. Tarlinskaja, Marina. “Meter and Meaning: Semantic Associations of the English Verse Form.” Style 23 (1989): 238–60. Toporov, V. N. “Toward the Problem of Genres in Folklore.” In Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union, edited by Henryk Baran. White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1974. Tynianov, Yuri. “The Literary Fact.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff and translated by Ann Shukman. Harlow: Longman, 2000 ———. “On Literary Evolution.” In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, translated by by C. A. Luplow. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002. ———. “The Ode as an Oratorical Genre.” Translated by Ann Shukman. New Literary History 34.3 (2003): 565–96.

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Veselovsky, A. N. “Envisioning World Literature in 1863: From the Reports on a Mission Abroad.” Translated by Jennifer Flaherty. PMLA 128.2 (2013): 439–51. ———. “On the Methods and Aims of Literary History as a Science.” Translated by Harry Weber. Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 16 (1967): 33–42. Voloshinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Translated by L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973. Zhirmunsky, Viktor M. “Introduction to Rhyme: Its History and Theory.” Translated by John Hoffman. Chicago Review 57, no. 3/4 (Winter 2013): 119–27 ———. “On the Study of Comparative Literature,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 13 (1967): 1–13.

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Contributors

Robert Bird is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His main area of interest is the aesthetic practice and theory of Russian modernism. His first full-length book The Russian Prospero (2006) is a comprehensive study of the poetry and thought of Russian poet and theorist Viacheslav Ivanov. He is the author of two books on the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky: Andrei Rublev (2004) and Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (2008). His translations of Russian religious thought include On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader (1998) and Viacheslav Ivanov’s Selected Essays (2001). His biography of Dostoevsky was published in 2012. Recent publications include essays on Soviet wartime poetry and the work in film of Aleksandr Sokurov and Olga Chernysheva. Nina Braginskaya is Professor of Classics at the Russian State University for the Humanities, specializing in mythology, ancient theater, historical poetics, late classical, Judeo-Hellenistic and Christian narrative, and the apocrypha. She is the author of circa three hundred publications and editor of Olga Freidenberg’s and Iakov Golosovker’s works. Christopher A. Faraone is the Frank C. and Gertrude M. Springer Professor of the College and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His work is primarily concerned with ancient Greek religion and poetry. 463

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Contributors

He is co-editor (with D. Dodd) of Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives: New Critical Perspectives (2003); (with L. McClure) Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World (2005); (with F. Naiden) Ancient Victims, Modern Observers: Reflections on Greek and Roman Sacrifice (2011); and (with D. Obbink) The Getty Hexameters: Poetry, Magic, and Mystery in Ancient Selinous (Oxford 2013). Faraone is also the author of Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Ancient Greek Myth and Ritual (1992), Ancient Greek Love Magic (1999), The Stanzaic Architecture of Early Greek Elegiac Poetry (2008), and numerous articles on ancient Greek magic, poetry, and religion. He is currently working on a book on ancient Greek amulets. Eric Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Chinese Dreams (Michigan, 2004), The Hypothetical Mandarin (Oxford, 2009), On Literary Worlds (Oxford, 2012), and The Elements of Academic Style (Columbia, 2014). Kate Holland is Associate Professor of Russian Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s (Northwestern University Press, 2013) and articles on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Herzen, and Saltykov-Shchedrin. Ilya Kliger is Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. He is the author of The Narrative Shape of Truth: Veridiction in Modern European Literature (Penn State University Press, 2011), as well as articles dealing with the history and theory of the novel in Russia and France, literary theory, and narratology. Currently, he is working on a book on the tragic social imaginary in the age of Russian Realism. Michael Kunichika teaches at New York University. He is the author of Our Native Antiquity: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (forthcoming from Academic Studies Press, 2015). Leslie Kurke is a specialist in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, with emphasis on archaic Greek poetry in its sociopolitical con-

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text, Herodotus and early prose, and the constitution of ideology through material practices. She has taught in the Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1990. She is the author of The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (1991); Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece (1999); and Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (2011). Richard P. Martin is Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor of Classics at Stanford University. His books on archaic Greek poetry, culture, and myth include Healing, Sacrifice, and Battle (1983); The Language of Heroes (1989); and Myths of the Ancient Greeks (2003). In addition, he has edited Bulfinch’s Mythology (1991) and provided extensive notes and introductions for translations of Homer’s Iliad by Richmond Lattimore (2011) and the Odyssey by Edward McCrorie (2005). His other interests include ethnopoetics, medieval Irish literature, and Modern Greek folk traditions. Boris Maslov is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He has published articles on Homer and Archaic Greek lyric, the reception of the Pindaric ode, history of comparative literature, and historical semantics of Greek and Russian. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pindar and the Emergence of Literature. Victoria Somoff is an Assistant Professor of Russian at Dartmouth College. She was born in Ukraine and received her undergraduate degree from Donetsk State University. She holds an M.A. in Folklore (2002) and a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures (2007) from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include the history of prose genres, theory of the novel, and the issues of orality and literacy. She is the author of The Imperative of Reliability: Russian Prose on the Eve of the Novel, 1820s–1850s (Northwestern University Press, 2015). Ilya Vinitsky is Professor of Russian at the University of Pennsylvania. His main fields of expertise are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature, Russian poetry, the history of emotions, and nineteenth-century intellectual and spiritual history. His publications include Interpreter’s

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Contributors

House: Poetic Semantics and Historical Imagination of Vasily Zhukovsky (2006, in Russian), A Cultural History of Russian Literature (2009; together with Andrew Baruch Wachtel), Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (2007; co-edited with Angela Brintlinger) and Ghostly Paradoxes: Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture in the Age of Realism (2009). His new book Heavenly Sisters: Vasily Zhukovsky and the Romantic Religion of Love is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in 2015.

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Index

abstract, 430; beauty, 61; genera, 130; humanity in the, 54, 259; movement from concrete to, 69, 139, 282, 290; nouns and personification, 296 Adso, Abbot of Cluny, 345 Aeschines, 193; Against Ctesiphon 43, 123n34 Aeschylus, 23, 52, 91–112, 117n3, 121nn22,24, 122n29, 126n58, 179, 186, 188, 228, 287, 289, 290, 377; Agamemnon, 93–94, 96–99: 355–402, 97; 437–62, 97–98; 461–62, 98; 475–87, 98; 681–749, 120n20; 788–804, 120n20; 1448–61, 120n20; Eumenides, 108: 9–14, 107; 26, 123n35; 287–91, 106; 667–73, 106; 762–74, 106; 993, 125nn50,52; Lycurgeia, 424; Persians: 821–22, 289; Prometheus Bound, 228; Seven against Thebes, 188: fr. 173 N2, 95 Aesop, 142–45, 393, 396n2 aestheticism, 7, 10 aesthetics, 1, 3, 17, 19–20, 82, 129, 133, 155, 231–35, 238 Afanas’ev, A. N., 17, 64n19, 358 Afanas’ev, V., 322, 336nn52,53 Agrippa, a slave of Lucius Verus, 189 Alberti, Leon Battista, 343 Alexander II, 26, 129, 345–47

Alexander the Great, 55, 344 allegory, 50, 52, 64n13, 75, 87n21, 194 Amadis, a hero of Spanish romances, 59 Ammonius, 179 Andersen, Hans Christian, 190 Andreev, M. L., 180, 203n22 animism, 139, 289, 296 Antichrist, 345, 347 Antokol’sky, Pavel, 449 Apellicon, a Roman bibliophile, 399, 401, 404 apocrypha, 26, 46, 341–42, 344, 351, 354–59, 361; Joseph and Aseneth 26, 192 apophaticism, 80 Apuleius, 58–59, 370 Archilochus, 308n27, 377, 393 Aristarchus, 405, 423n25, 425n52 Aristophanes, 377, 434–36; Acharnians: 505–6, 123n34; Wasps: 1209–14, 308n27 Aristotle, 28, 130–31, 194–95, 230, 277–83, 290, 292, 307n17, 308n27, 375; Poetics, 126n60, 435: 3, 131; 4, 375; 14, 123n36; 21, 280; 22, 279; Rhetoric: 3.2, 279, 309n41; 3.10, 280; Topica: 1.18, 281; 1.21, 282 Aristoxenus, 400–4 Aryans, 43; Gulliver among the Aryans, 441

467

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468 Arzamas, a Russian literary group, 270 Athenaeus, 189, 206n41, 377 audience, 136, 139, 176, 198, 286, 314 Auerbach, Erich, viii, xii, 18, 35n37, 154 Augustine, 196 authorship, 50, 65, 133, 136, 138, 145, 155, 237–48, 284, 318, 449; agency of, 290; authorial control, 7; authorial position of the novel, 79–82, 84; authorial presence of commentator, 197–98; of Homeric epic, 43–44; individualized author, 66; poiêtês, 14 autonomy, 8, 67–68, 70, 235; autonomous hero, 150; commentary’s, 196; literature’s, 10–13, 15, 17, 20, 21, 113, 228, 237 Bacchylides, 94, 103, 119nn8,11, 125n50 Bakhtin, Mikhail, viii, xii, 1–2, 6, 7, 9–13, 15, 23, 25, 27–28, 29n9, 80–82, 129, 134–36, 155, 159n43, 162n83, 165, 170n1, 197, 227–47, 248n9, 249–50, 310n47, 340, 343, 348, 351, 364n25, 369–70, 393, 397, 419, 431–42, 447, 451–53; “Art and Answerability,” 11; Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, 12, 25, 32n33, 81, 89n36, 231–36, 240, 242; “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” 33n44, 157n25, 337n58, 340; Notes on Mayakovsky, 439–40; “The Problem of Speech Genres,” 157n21; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 6, 31n25, 202n17, 229–31, 362n5, 370, 432–34, 455n43; Rabelais and His World (and Bakhtin’s 1940 thesis), 142, 160n52, 236–38, 310n47, 370, 393; “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff,” 31n26, 244; “Satire,” 369–91, 434, 437–38. See also carnival; chronotope; dialogism; genre memory; great time; heteroglossia; monologism; outsideness; polyphony; satire: Menippean Banfield, Ann, 76, 80, 88n33, 162n82 Bang, Mary Jo, 274, 293

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Index Barbier, Henri, 371, 389 Bathyllos, 188 Batiushkov, Konstantin, 270, 316 Bauman, Richard, 291, 309n44 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 130 Ben-Amos, Dan, 291, 309n44 Benfey, Theodor, 18, 141, 343–44, 363n11 Benjamin, Walter, xiv, 6, 29n3, 31n17 Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 371, 388 Bergerac, Cyrano de, 58 Bergson, Henri, xiv, 6, 8, 245, 250n37, 433, 438 Bhagavad Gita, 9 Bible, The, 50–51, 176, 191–92, 196, 198, 284, 354, 356–57, 359, 361: Gen 41:45,50, 192; Jam 3, 143–45 Biese, Alfred, 18 Bildung, 318, 329 Bildungsroman, 351, 355, 441 Bion of Borysthenes, 370 Bitov, Andrei, 441, 456nn50,51 Blair, Hugh, 130 Bloch, Ernst, xiv, 6, 31n17 Blok, Alexander, 315, 328, 339n78 ‘Blokhin’, a distorted version of ‘Bakhtin,’ 310–11 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 343, 351 bogatyr, 45, 220, 354 Bogomilism, 357–58 Boileau, Nicolas, 370, 387 Bolotov, Andrei, 265 Born, Georg, 441, 455n45, 456n53 borrowing, 4, 17, 139–45, 314–16, 344, 351, 355, 417; metaphor as, 275–77 Bosc, Louis Augustin, 260 Bourdieu, Pierre, 126n62, 146, 160n58 bourgeoisie, 54–55, 57, 134, 152, 258, 349, 439, 441 Bowra, C. M., 93, 99, 101–2, 117n5, 121n24, 122nn27,28,29 Boyarin, Daniel, 191, 206n45 Boys-Stones, George, 207n52, 274, 281, 305n1, 306n9, 307n19, 313n67 Braginskaya, Nina, 292, 308n32, 309n40, 310nn46,47 Brant, Sebastian, 385 Brentano, Franz, 388 Brodiansky, Boris, 447 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 41, 43, 63nn3,5,6

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Index Bruno, Giordano, 343 Buddhism, 173, 179, 185, 344 Bulloch, A. W., 407, 423nn29,30, 424nn33,34 Bunin, A. I., 318–19, 333nn30,32, 335n41 Burkert, Walter, 117n5, 165 Buslaev, F. I., 17, 32n32, 343 bylina, 44–45, 47, 51, 56, 352, 354 Byron, George Gordon Lord, 152, 265 Byzantium, 26, 168, 190, 341–44, 351–53, 356, 361 Caesar, 13, 306n9 Calderón, Pedro, 57 Callimachus, 300, 398, 406–7, 409, 423n30 Cambridge Ritualists, 11 Carducci, G. A. G., 262 carnival, viii, 165, 230, 238–39, 242, 245, 370, 383, 385–86, 435–36, 447 Carroll, Lewis (Alice in Wonderland), 445, 451 Cassirer, Ernst, 34n52, 292, 310n47 catharsis, 434–35 Cato, 13 causality, 3, 39, 73–75, 84, 147, 295, 452 Celine, Louis Ferdinand, 441 Cervantes, 370, 372, 382–83, 386–87 Chamisso, Adelbert von, 388 Chanson de Roland, La, 44, 133 chansons de geste, 44–45 character, 43, 191, 234–36, 242, 258; characterization, 27, 75, 151, 169–70; characters’ enunciation, 131, 136–38, 154, 158nn31,34, 183, 185, 202n17, 246; character-types, 4, 9, 45–47, 185; consciousness, 78–79, 81, 84, 87n21,28; 88n32, 150–52; and plot, 13, 165–70; tragic characters, 95 Charlemagne, 45–46, 56, 345 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 262, 271n14 China, 182, 204 chorality, 12, 51, 92, 100–6, 109–12, 179, 185–88, 435–36, 447 choreia, 102–3, 111, 303 Christianity, 26, 40, 44, 50, 58–60, 172, 178, 180, 195, 341–62, 383

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469 chronotope, 15, 25, 136, 147–48, 224, 340, 439 Chrysostom, Dion, 58 Cicero, 26, 189–90, 198, 277–78, 283, 288, 309n41 Cleopatra, 189 Cohn, Dorrit, 76–80, 82, 84, 87nn27,28, 88nn29,30,32,33, 89n34, 162n82 Columbus, Christopher, 394–96 Commedia dell’arte, 372, 387 commentary, 24, 172–208; covert, 393; metapoetic, 103; political, 387; social, 16, 346 Confucius, 172, 178 consciousness, 52, 55, 74, 83, 233, 236–39, 257, 330, 433, 450, 452; historical, 4, 47, 54, 385, 387; history of, 132–33, 146; individual, 18, 45–46, 50, 435, 441; mythical, 17, 170n6, 287, 376; of the poetic act, 48, 62, 85, 146, 283, 287, 300, 316, 320; religious, 42, 53; representation of, 22, 76–84, 87n28, 150, 154, 161n76; Veselovsky on dark, hidden region of, 5, 60, 212 Constantine the Great, 345 contextualization, 1, 21,129, 134, 436 cosmopolitanism, 55, 134, 140, 238, 349, 351 Coster, Charles de, 386 Crates, 399 creativity, 5, 15, 22, 43–50, 61, 67, 174, 228–30, 237, 242, 251, 290, 320, 360, 389, 434 Croce, Benedetto, 128 Cronegk, J. F. von, 262 Currie, Bruno, 298, 312n59 Curtius, Ernst Robert, viii, xii, 18–19, 23, 29n3, 140–41, 159n41 Damascius, 195 Danilevsky, Nikolai, 352 Dante Alighieri, 41, 56, 60, 64n15, 145, 196, 343, 395 defamiliarization, 128 Defoe, Daniel, 387; Robinson Crusoe, 441, 445, 451 deformation, 8, 12, 247–48, 370 Deleuze, Gilles, vii Delille, Jacques, 268–70 de Man, Paul, 219, 305n5

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470 Demetrius, 278, 309n41 Democritus, 193 Derveni papyrus, the, 194 Derzhavin, Gavrila, 160n67, 265, 335n46 diachrony, 15, 136, 165, 282, 291 dialogism, viii, 238, 241, 244, 246, 370 Dickens, Charles, 154, 389 Diderot, Denis, 257 Dieterich, Albrecht, 378 Dimock, Wai Chee, 8–9, 31nn22,23 dithyramb, 131, 137, 283, 303 Dmitriev, M. A., 268, 273n35 Domitian, 381 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 6, 25–26, 154–55, 202, 227, 229–31, 236–40, 250n39, 256, 340–62, 362n4, 363n19, 364n21, 365n36, 370, 432–35; Brothers Karamazov, 157n22, 341–43, 351, 354–62, 365n42 double, the, 286–87 drama, xi, 23–24, 40–41, 51–56, 130–34, 137–39, 141, 176, 179–80, 183–88, 190, 284, 288, 303, 371–73, 379, 430, 434–35; archaic, 340; bookish, armchair, 54 Dryden, John, 130 dvoeverie, 40, 50 Efimov, Boris, 447 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 8–9, 19–20, 31n21, 32n35, 35n60, 201n16, 331n12 ekphrasis, 190, 204, 291 Eleatics, the, 206n49, 245 Eliasson, Olafur, 429 Eliot, T. S., xi Empedocles, 292 empiricism, 39, 129, 430–32 Engel’gardt, Boris, 440 Ennius, 370 epic, x–xi, 15–16, 44–48, 53–58, 112, 130–34, 137–38, 141, 165–71, 183–84, 194, 241–42, 283–90, 354, 370, 376, 397–419. See also bylina Epicharmus of Kos, 377 epigonism, 173–74 Erasmus, Desiderius, 386 Euripides, 123n32, 52, 179, 378; Bacchae, 409, 424n37,39,40; Orestes, a scholion to, 126n57 Eusebius, 374

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Index Falen, James, 153 Farnell, L. R., 93, 99, 110 Fénelon, François, 268, 273n36 Fet, Afanasy, 24, 217–24 Fielding, Henry, 257–58 finalization, 12, 235–37, 241–42, 245–46 Fischart, Johann, 386 Florian, Jean-Pierre Claris de, 269 Florovsky, George, 315, 330n9 folklore, 14–17, 20, 34n50, 36n69, 65–67, 71–72, 83–85, 168–69, 182–83, 291, 340–44, 357, 371, 373–74, 378, 380, 382–85, 439 forgetting, 22, 45, 70–71, 73–74, 78, 84, 211, 243–44 Formalism, 1, 129, 227–28, 247, 285, 291–92, 430–31, 436 Fouqué, Friedrich Heinrich, Baron, 388 Fowler, Don, 174, 200n8 Frankfurt school, the, 19 Frank-Kamenetsky, I. G., 292–93, 311n48 Frazer, Sir James George, 11 Frederick the Great, 345 free indirect discourse, 23, 80, 145–55 Freidenberg, O. M., 1, 14, 16, 34n52, 36n70, 165–71, 274–304, 306–11 Freud, Sigmund, 6 Frost, Robert, 300–1 Frye, Northrop, viii, 28 Gabbe, Tamara, 440–41, 443, 445, 447, 456n55 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 19, 177 Gallagher, Catherine, 71, 75–82 Gandhi, Mahatma, 9 Garshin, Vsevelod, 58, 64n19 Gasparov, Mikhail, 1, 15–16, 156, 175–77, 201nn10,12,16, 392–96, 396nn2,5, 453n8 Geertz, Clifford, 126n62, 179, 202n21, 331n14 Geistesgeschichte, 18 Gellert, Hugo, 441–43, 455n47 Georgii, Saint, 354 Genette, Gérard, 130–32, 156, 453nn4,8 genre memory, 6, 25, 148, 165, 227–51, 343, 362n5 Gessner, Solomon, 262, 264

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Index Gibbs, Raymond, 282, 307n23 Ginzburg, Lydia, 12, 28n1, 32n36, 33n39 Gnedich, Nikolai, 270 gnome, 96–97, 142 Gnosticism, 345 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19, 34n50, 43, 64n17, 130, 241, 259–62, 264, 269, 317 Gogol, Nikolai, 256, 270, 372, 434–35 Goldmann, Lucien, viii Goncharov, Ivan, 155 Gorky, Maxim, 437, 441 Gornfel’d, A. G., 373, 391n5 Grandison, Sir Charles, 260, 320 Grandville, Jean-Jacques, 443, 447 Gray, Thomas, 261 great time (bol’shoe vremia), 10, 25, 155, 238–47, 348 Greenblatt, Stephen, 22, 32n39, 67–70, 82, 85nn5,6, 86nn9,10,11, 113, 127n63 Greimas, Algirdas, 287 Grigor’ev, Apollon, 350, 364n27 Grimm, Jacob, 17, 343, 357 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel von, 386 Guattari, Félix, vii Gukovsky, Grigory, 28, 153 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 174, 200n7 Gunderson, Erik, 433, 454n11 Gundolf, Friedrich, 19 Guyon, Mme., 268 hagiography, 303, 351, 361 Haller, Albrecht von, 268 Halliwell, Stephen, 280, 307n16 Hamann, Johann Georg, 257 Hamburger, Käte, 76, 80, 88n33 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, 17–19, 35n57, 112, 131, 230–31, 239, 248n9 Heine, Heinrich, 49, 371, 388 Heinse, Johann Jakob Wilhelm, 258, 271n10 Henderson, John, 177–78, 202n18 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 16–17, 61 Herington, John, 93, 118n5, 119n8, 120n15, 121nn23,24,25 Herodotus, 125n54, 374 Heron of Alexandria, 181 Hervey, James, 317

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471 Hesiod, 188, 283, 285–86, 294, 296, 298, 311n52, 371, 376, 393, 398–99, 418; Catalogue of Women, 427n73; Theogony, 285, 427n73: 1, 420n5; 1–103, 418; 94–97, 421n6; 665–820, 285–86; Works and Days, 371 heteroglossia, viii, 176–77, 182, 184–85, 202n17, 370, 372 Hipponax, 377 histoire événementielle, 91, 112 Hobbes, Thomas, 26, 275 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 371–72, 388 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 260 Homer, 15, 27, 99, 121n23, 157n22, 158n31, 178, 184, 188, 193–94, 207n51, 280, 282–89, 308n22, 371, 374, 376, 397–419, 419n1, 420n2; Hymn XXV, 420n3; Hymn to Apollo, 124nn44,46, 398–99, 402–3, 412, 416–17, 418, 421n6; Hymn to Demeter, 374, 391n8, 406–7, 415, 423n30; Hymn to Dionysus, 408, 424; Hymn to Hermes, 416; Iliad, 27, 133, 180, 285–86, 297, 397–419, 427n70, 447: 1.1–9, 399–404; 1.22–32, 52–55, 405–8; 1.74–75, 402; 1.314–17, 430–87, 410–14; 1.603–4, 421n6; 2.426, 289; 2.780–85, 285; 6.130–37, 408; 21.257–64, 286; 21.362–65, 286; 22.422, 403; 24.205, 285; Odyssey, 133, 180, 287, 299, 397, 411: 1.29, 1.298,3.197,3.234,3.248, 3.255, 3.264, 4.512–60,13.379, 22.49, 24.99, 165–71; 4.293, 284; 8.266– 369, 418; 14.213, 280; 15.329, 283 Horace, 149, 277, 370, 374, 378–80, 387–88 hubris, 116, 283, 289 Hugo, Victor, 239, 388 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 17 hybridity, vii, 7, 24, 135–36 hysteresis effect, 146 Iamblichus, 195 iambos, 184, 186, 283 Il’f, Il’ia, 437, 440 imagination, 4, 20, 195, 255, 264, 276, 296, 314, 316, 343, 432, 446

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472 impressionism, 61 India, 9, 172, 178, 180–81, 183, 188, 191, 195–96 Innes, Doreen, 279, 306n11, 309n41 intertexuality, 91, 99–100 Ioannes Eugenicus, 190 irony, 388, 437 Islam, 173, 178, 341 Ivan III, 352 Ivan the Terrible, 345 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 434–35 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 257, 271n16 Jakobson, Roman, 7, 20, 31n19, 34n51, 36n68, 86n19, 137–38, 157nn26–28, 158n32, 291 Jameson, Fredric, xii, 6, 14, 23, 29n3, 31n18, 33n40, 91, 105, 117n2, 134 Japan, 180, 183, 185, 204n29 Jauss, Hans Robert, 19, 35n62 Java, 182, 184–85 Jetztzeit, xv, 6 Joyce, James, xi, 393 Judaism, 143, 192, 195, 341, 344 Juvenal, 203n27, 370, 380–81, 387–88 Kafka, Franz, vii Kant, Immanuel, 12, 19–20, 231–33, 245, 248n12, 249n19, 433, 438 Kantemir, Antiokh, 370 Karamzin, Nikolai, 155, 259, 265–70, 271n1, 273nn37,41, 317, 321, 336n51 Kassil’, Lev, 447, 456n58 Kennedy, Duncan, 438, 455n31 Kheraskov, Mikhail, 265 Kleist, Heinrich von, 264, 268 Klenin, Emily, 220, 226n24 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 258, 260–62 Kock, Paul de, 239 Kogan, P. S., 442, 447, 456n52 Kol’tsov, Mikhail, 447 Konrad (German Medieval poet), 46 Kowalzig, Barbara, 103–4, 106, 109, 122n30, 123nn31–33, 125n53, 126n57 Kozyrev, Mikhail, 441 Krzhizhanovsky, Sigizmund, 449–50 Kuhn, Thomas, 195

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Index Kukryniksy, a group of Soviet artists, 447 Kurke, Leslie, 141–42, 159nn47–50, 160n52, 206n48, 298, 312nn59,60, 447 Lachmann, Karl, 410 Lahor, Jean, 61 Lakoff, George, 281–82, 290, 293, 295, 307n21, 308n27 [Saint-]Lambert, Jean François de, 268 Lamprecht (German Medieval poet), 46 landscape, 18, 95, 146–48, 210–11, 216, 223–34, 261, 267–69, 296, 349 langue, 14, 22, 291 laughter, 183, 370, 373–78, 380–89, 433–40 Leaf, Walter, 410 Lebensphilosophie, 11 Lefebvre, Henri, 451, 457n68 legend, 4–5, 44–50, 57–60, 318–21, 340–62 Lentricchia, Frank, 70, 85n7, 86n12 Lenz, J. M. R., 258 Lermontov, Mikhail, 201n16, 216, 225n17 Levidov, Mikhail, 441, 449–50, 456n48, 457n63 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 292 Livy (Titus Livius), 186–87, 375, 378 Lloyd, G. E. R., 292, 310n46 Locke, John, 26, 275–77, 284, 288, 305n5 logos, 143, 191, 451 Longfellow, Henry, 262 Longinus, 121n23, 278–79, 285 longue durée, x, xii–xiv, 2–9, 21, 26, 29n3, 91, 112, 134, 142, 146, 148, 242, 348, 394 Longus, 314, 329n2 Lopukhin, I. V., 265, 268 Lord, Albert, 16, 280 Lotman, Yuri, 13, 18, 26, 32nn37,39, 35n55, 85n5, 170nn3,4, 175, 201nn10,11, 213–14, 225n9, 291, 309n43, 310n47, 316, 321, 330nn6,12, 332n23, 392 Lucian, 187–89, 206nn40–42, 370, 382, 385, 387, 446 Lucilius, 370, 378–80

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Index Lukàcs, Georg, viii, xii, 29n9, 134, 349, 364n26 lyric, 54–55, 71, 112, 130–38, 282–91, 370–89 Macedonicus, 414 Mackenzie, Henry, 259 MacPherson, James, 262. See Ossian Maikov, Apollon, 352 Mair, Victor, 180–82, 203nn24,25 Mandelstam (Mandel’shtam), Osip, 175, 201nn10,16, 440 Marlowe, Christopher, 57, 68 Marr, N. Ia., 285, 291–92, 306n8, 311n47 Martial, 203n27, 375, 382 Marx, Karl, 68, 85n7 Marxism, vii, 2, 4, 6, 14, 23, 117n12, 127n62, 129, 134–35, 161n76, 390n12, 393 Maslov, Boris, 217, 226n20, 311n52, 421n12, 422n18, 427nn69,73 Matthisson, Friedrich von, 263, 272n25 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 371, 436–37, 439–40, 455n37 melos, 184–86 Menippus, 370, 382. See also satire: Menippean Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 257–58 metaphor, 65, 169, 274–304 metapragmatics, 130, 134–38, 151, 154 meter, 15, 51, 96, 176, 392 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 434 Middle East, 178, 341, 343–44, 351 midrash, 191–92 Mikhailovskii, B. V., 370 Miller, D. A., 79, 88nn31,32 Miller, Johann Martin, 260–61, 271n13 Milton, John, 130 mimesis, 131, 135, 184, 186, 291, 432, 438, 440, 452 modernism, vii, x–xi, xiv, 18, 247 Molière, 387 Mommsen, Theodor, 378 monologism, 237–38, 241 Monti, Vincenzo, 262 Moor, Dmitrii, 447 More, Thomas, 58 Moretti, Franco, ix, 31n27, 87nn20, 22

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473 Morgan, J. P., 442 Moritz, Karl Phillip, 258 Moscow-Tartu semiotics, 1, 392, 452 motif, 4, 18, 23, 65–67, 129, 140, 155, 211, 214, 221, 286–87, 341–59, 374–84 Muellner, Leonard, 285, 308n34 Muen, Jean de, 383 Mufel’, Johann Karl (Russian landowner), 319 Müller, Max, 343–44, 357 Musaeus, 193–94 Myers, Micah, 302, 313n65 myth, 11, 17–18, 26, 34n52, 42–43, 52, 92–96, 99–104, 109–12, 131, 148, 165–71, 181, 228–29, 285–96, 302, 320, 328, 343–44, 376–77, 381–82, 401 Naevius, 370, 378 Nagel, Alexander, 31n16, 452, 457n70 Nagy, Gregory, 156n10, 292, 420n5, 427nn69,73 Napoleon, 148, 345 Napoleon III, 56, 345 narod, 343, 347–54, 324, 360; narod-poet, 43 nature, 44, 58–60, 146–47, 210–24, 233, 289; evolution of views on, 18; human, 145, 359; natural discursive forms, 132–34, 430; natural language, 276–77; in sentimentalism, 257–59, 264–69, 324; topos of immensurable nature, 161n70; topos of “indifferent nature,” 216–17, 223, 225n17; topos of “Nature as yet unknown/unknowing,” 148–49 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 371, 389 Nel’s, Sof’ia, 369 neoclassicism, 28, 148–49, 370, 373, 387, 437 Neoplatonism, 24, 172, 195 Nero, 189, 206n42 Neuffer, Christian Ludwig, 260 New Historicism, vii, 22–23, 29n3, 67–76, 90–91, 113, 126n62, 129. See also poetics: “cultural poetics” Nicanor, 399 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 434 Nigellus (author of Speculum stultorum), 384 Nikolai, Saint, 355

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474 Nikon, Patriarch, 347, 353 nobility, 13, 185, 314, 326, 348–49, 360; decline of, 155, 350; and oikos, 105; Zhukovsky’s nobility disputed, 319–20 nonsynchronicity, 2–8, 10, 30n15, 40, 143, 155 Novalis, 260, 264, 271n2, 272n29 novel, 40–41, 54–56, 74–84, 134–35, 150, 154, 191–92, 228–42, 340–62, 370–89, 431–35 novella, 55, 371–72, 386, 392–96 Novikov, N. I., 265 Orpheus, 189, 193–94 Ossian, 147, 160n67, 262, 265, 267, 273n34 outsideness (vnenakhodimost’), 80–82, 233, 235–36, 245–46 Ovid, 149, 189, 374 Pakhomov, Aleksei, 443–44 parole, 22, 291 Parry, Milman, 15–16, 280, 306n13 Pasternak, Boris, 137 Pausanias, 110, 125nn49,54, 374 perezhivanie, 6, 11, 40, 211, 256, 284 Persius, 203n27, 370, 380 personification, 52, 261, 296 Peter the Great, 148, 150, 345–47, 353 Petrarch, 18, 58 Petronius, 370, 375, 382, 385, 387 Petrov, Evgenii, 437, 440 philology, 21, 52, 175, 193, 222; as a foundation for poetics, 14–19; Philoponus, 195 Philostratus the Elder, 189–90 Phrynichus, 377 Physiologos, 47 Pigarev, K. G., 213–15, 225nn5,11,13, 226n18 Pindar, 91–116, 117n3, 121nn22,24,25, 122n29, 125n52, 126n58, 131–32, 149, 160n67, 274, 284, 293–304, 311n52, 312n58; Isthmian: 1, 312n58; 6, 298; 8, 294; Nemean: 2, 298; 3, 94, 294; 4, 94, 296; 5, 105; 6, 299; 7, 297; Olympian: 1, 104, 294; 2, 297; 3, 294, 297–98, 312n63; 5, 296; 6, 294; 8, 295, 311n57; 9, 294–95; 10, 295; 11, 298; 13, 311n52; Paean: 7,

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Index 300; Partheneion: 2, 311n53, 312n58; fr. 33c, 296; fr. 52h, 294; fr. 78, 295; fr. 286, 124n44; Pythian: 2, 294; 3, 294, 313n65; 4, 294; 5, 295; 8, 295; 9, 294, 301–2, 311n53; 10: 94; 11: 91–116 Pindemonte, Ippolito, 263 Piotrovsky, Adrian, 187–88, 435–36 Plato, 130–32, 137–38, 141–42, 179, 184, 186, 189, 191, 193–95, 302, 311n52, 313n67; Ion, 113; Laws: 655a, 302; 746a–d, 450, 457nn66,67; 803d–804d, 447, 456n59; Phaedrus: 238d, 63n10; 267c, 194; 203n27; Protagoras: 339a7–47a5 194; The Republic, 138, 184: 394c, 131–32; Timaeus: 72a–b 186, 205n36 plot, 4–5, 13–15, 56–67, 139–42, 165, 211–12, 286–87, 292–96, 355, 382 Plotinus, 195 Plutarch, 141–42, 159n47, 179, 184, 206n47, 335n46, 374 Podshivalova, Aleksandra, 322, 335n48, 337n60 poet, the, 14–15, 43–50, 62, 219, 287, 291–92, 296. See also authorship poetics, passim; construed as creative or practical, 3; “cultural poetics,” 85n5, 90; “poetics of everyday behavior,” 13; Pokrovsky, F. G., 267, 272n30; term for the study of verbal art, 14, 20 Pollux (lexicographer), 186 polyphony, 197, 239, 360, 431, 436 Pope, Alexander, 262 Porphyry, 195 postmodernism, 145, 173–74 Potebnya, Alexander, 17, 34n51, 292, 306n8 predanie (“inherited tradition”), 15, 44, 55, 71, 140 Pre-Socratics, 292 Proclus, 195 Propp, Vladimir, 16, 19, 35n61, 85n4, 287 prosopopeia, 219–20 Prostsevichus, Vladislav, 73, 86nn18,19 Protagoras, 194, 207n51 Protasova, E. A., 270, 273n42, 338n72 Proust, Marcel, 6

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Index Ptushko, Aleksandr, 445, 449–50 Pumpiansky, L. V. 28n1, 160n67, 161nn72,73, 225nn6,8, 148–150, 213 Pushkin, Alexander, 148, 216, 162n82, 176, 226n19, 315, 330n6, 350; Baryshnia-krest’ianka, 64n18; The Bronze Horseman, 23, 148–55, 161n70; “Brozhu li ia vdol’ ulits shumnykh,” 216, 225n17; Eugene Onegin, 150, 152–53, 160n66, 161n76, 175, 270; Fountain of Bakhchisaray, 150; Poltava, 161n76 Pylades (tragedian), 188 Pypin, Alexander, 342, 356 Pythagoras, 189, 193–94 Quincey, J. H., 106–7 Quintilian, 26, 276–77, 290, 305n7, 309n41, 378 Quran, 178 Rabelais, 58, 370, 372, 382–83, 385–87, 433–34, 436, 455n44. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail Race, W. H., 119nn10–12, 298 Radcliffe, Ann, 260, 267 Radek, Karl, 447 Radloff, Friedrich Wilhelm, 16 realism, 22, 42, 74, 78–79, 81–82, 136, 145, 154–55, 343, 369, 372, 388, 437, 439–40, 449–50 Redfield, Robert, 190 Régnier, Mathurin, 370, 387 Reinach, Salomon, 374, 391n7 Relihan, Joel, 431, 453n7 Remmether, (schoolgirl from Pankow), 446 Rezanov, V. I., 322, 335n46, 336n57, 338n69 Ribbeck, Otto, 381 Richardson, Samuel, 257, 265, 270 Richter, Johann Paul, 264 Ricoeur, Paul, 280, 306n11, 307n14 riddle, 279, 291 Riikonen, H. K., 433, 454n13 Robbins, Bruce, 9 Robortello, Francesco, 280 Roland, Mme., 259 romanticism, x, 13, 40, 42–44, 146–48, 152, 235, 257, 262, 264–65, 388

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475 Roscius, (Roman actor), 189 Roshal’, Grigorii, 449 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 257, 259, 265, 268, 270, 271n17, 317, 328, 338n75 Sacchetti, Franco, 394 Sachs, Hans, 386 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 257 Sainte-Aldegonde, Marnix de, 386 Sainte-Pierre, Bernardin de, 265, 317, 322, 324, 327–28 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 371, 389–90, 394, 396 Sand, George, 239 Sanskrit, 42, 185, 292 Sappho, 131–32, 284 satire, 48, 181, 369–90, 431–52; Menippean, 229, 230, 343, 370–72, 382, 385, 431–34, 436, 439–40 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 14 Saussy, Haun, 20, 28n2 Scanlan, James, 452, 457n69 Scarron, Paul, 387 Schanz, Martin von, 378 Scheidt, Kaspar, 386 Schelling, Friedrich, 131 Schenkeveld, D. M., 280, 306n12 Scherer, Wilhelm, 17, 19–20, 41, 63n5 Schiller, Friedrich, 231, 258, 271n10, 373 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 131, 137, 259, 271n11 Schlegel, Friedrich, 130, 260 Seidlitz, Karl, 322, 333n30 self, 48, 61; self-adoration, 44; self-analysis, 53, 259; selfconsciousness, x, 2, 5, 45–46, 53, 57, 60, 133, 136, 140; self-consistency, 451; self-debunking of reality, 437; self-determination, x, 46, 52, 57, 179, 235; self-fashioning, 68, 70; self and other in Bakhtin, 231–35, 246; self-repetition (samopovtoreniia), 215. See also consciousness semantic paleontology, 165, 291 Seneca, 52, 182, 203n28, 370, 382, 385 sentimentalism, 11, 26, 145–47, 152, 154–55, 255–56, 259–61, 264–65, 267, 270, 315–16 Shakespeare, William, 52, 145, 258, 430

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476 Shalikov, Count P. I., 261, 267–69, 272n21 Shipp, G. P., 417, 420n2, 427n67 Shklovsky, Viktor, 12, 33n42, 86n19, 128, 158n39, 248n6 Shvarts, Lev, 445 Sibirsky, Count F. V., 267 Silverstein, Michael, 23, 130, 134–38, 157nn20,24,28, 158nn29,33 simile, 61, 140, 275, 277–78, 285–87, 296–97, 303, 397 Simmel, Georg, 11 Simonides, 126n57, 194 Simplicius, 195 Slater, W. J., 97, 300 Snell, Bruno, 119n7, 131, 306n12, 312n61 Socrates, 194 Solov’ev, Vladimir, 315 Song of Igor’s Campaign, The, 47 Sophia, 141–43, 193 Sophocles, xi, 119n14, 123n32, 125n51, 289–90, 308n37, 309n40, 424n37 Sophron, 194, 377 Sorabji, Richard, 194–95 Sorel, Charles, 387 Spencer, Herbert, 4 Spielhagen, Friedrich, 228 Staël, Mme. de, 44, 257, 126n57 Stalin, I. V., 369, 436 Steinthal, Heymann, 17 Sterne, Laurence, 257–58, 260, 265 Sternheim, Carl, 389 Stesichorus, 99, 121, 126n57 Stevens, Wallace, 276 Stilling, Heinrich, 260 Strich, Fritz, 19 structuralism, vii, xii, 14–15, 19–20, 128, 165, 175, 287–88, 392 Sturm, Christoph, 263 Sturm und Drang, 258 style, 41, 50, 129, 136, 140, 145–55, 185, 277–79, 372, 435 Sue, Eugène, 239 suggestiveness (podskazyvanie), 61–62 Sukhikh, I. N., 215, 225nn5,7,15,16 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 265 Sumarokov, Alexander, 265 surrealism, 443, 447, 449, 451 survival. See perezhivanie Sushkov, Mikhail, 317, 331n20

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Index Swift, Jonathan, 387, 440–50, 455nn43,45, 456n54 symbolism, 61, 328, 434 Syrianus, 179 Tacitus, 189 Teles of Megala, 370 Telestes (virtuoso dancer), 188 Tennyson, Alfred, 146 Terence, 52 Thackeray, William, 260, 389 Theagenes of Rhegium, 193–94 Theognis, 300 Thomson, James, 265, 268, 317 Thoreau, Henry, 9 Thucydides, 102, 106 Tieck, Johann Ludwig, 260, 371, 388–89 Tikhonravov, Nikolai, 330n12, 366nn44,48,53, 342, 356 Tiutchev, Fyodor, 24, 209–26 Todorov, Tzvetan, 291, 309n44 Tolstoy, A. K., 24, 58 Tolstoy, Lev, 32n35, 155, 216, 340, 350, 371, 392, 396 Toporov, Vladimir, 199n1, 316, 330n12, 331n13, 339n79 topoi, 65, 140–49, 211, 216–17, 221–23. See also nature totemism, 4, 139 tragedy, 11, 91–112, 130–32, 186, 188, 290, 377–79, 395, 409, 435–36 Trajan, 381 Trotsky, Lev, 6, 31n17 Turgenev, Alexander, 263, 271n2, 272n24 Turgenev, Andrei, 162n79, 263, 271n2, 316–17 Turgenev, Ivan, 58, 155, 340, 350 Turner, Mark, 295–96, 311n54 Turner, Terence, 303–4, 313nn68,69 Turner, Victor, 179, 190, 202n21 Tylor, Edward, 5–6, 63n4, 158n37, 30nn13,15 Tynianov, Yuri, 7, 12, 20, 23, 32n34, 35n59, 90, 92, 106, 124n41, 227, 248n3, 396n4, 431, 453n6 Usener, Hermann, 292, 34n52 Varro, 370, 375, 382 Vedānta, 178

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Index Vedas, 42, 133, 195–96 Verville, F. B. de, 370 Veselovsky, Alexander, viii, x–xiv, 1, 39–40; “The Age of Sensibility” (and the Zhukovsky monograph), 25–26, 146–48, 154, 255–73, 314–29; contrasted with Curtius, Ernst Robert, 140–41; formation, 17–18, 30n15, 128–29, 343–45; From the History of the Literary Communication between East and West, 343, 351; “From the History of Naturgefühl,” 18; “From the History of the Novel and the Tale,” 341, 361; “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics,” 5, 22, 30n14, 39–64, 65, 117n1, 127n62, 133–34, 179, 211–12; 250n38, 429–30; on the genesis of drama, 179–80, 183; on genre, 130–34; and Jameson, Fredric, 91, 134; on narrative forms, 340–45; and New Historicism, 62–85, 112–13, 129; on oblivion versus extinction of forms, 212–15, 221–24; “On the Methods and Aims of Literary History,” 16, 91, 132–33, 145–46, 227–28; Poetics of the Plots, 15, 139–41, 206n44; on psychological biography, 314–17; “Psychological Parallelism and Its Forms,” 71–74, 292; “Reports on a Mission Abroad,” 35n63, 62n2, 112, 117n1, 127n62; Studies in the Area of Russian Religious Verse, 64n19, 354–55; “Studies in the History of the Development of Christian Legend,” 344–45, 351, 355, 357; theory of history 3–7, 230, 247; Three Chapters from the Historical Poetics, 139, 204n31. See also perezhivanie; poetics; predanie; suggestiveness; vstrechnye techeniia Veselovsky, Alexei, 33n42 Vico, Giambattista, 281, 293, 307n18 Virgil, 51–52, 64n15, 148, 189, 200n6, 262, 264, 269 Vogelweyde, Walter von der, 385

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477 Volkonskaia, Z. A., 269 Voltaire, 317 vstrechnye techeniia (“confluent currents”), 141, 159n46 Vvedensky, Alexander, 429 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 260 Walzel, Oskar, 19 Warburg, Aby, 5–6, 29n3, 30n15 Warton, Thomas, 261 Watt, Ian, 74–75 Weinbrot, Howard, 431, 454n9 Werfel, Franz, 389 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 262 William of Malmesbury, 49 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xi Wood, Christopher, 452 Woolf, Virginia, xi Wordsworth, William, 288, 329n5 world literature, 2, 8–9, 18, 34n50, 112, 369 Xenophon, 188, 191 Young, David, 92, 118n6, 119n10 Young, Edward, 257–58, 260–70, 271n7, 317 Yushkova, V. A., 321 Zabolotsky, Nikolai, 440, 443 Zachariae, Justus Friedrich Wilhelm, 262 Zadunaiskaia, Zoia, 440–41, 443, 445, 447, 456n55 Zagarin, P. (Zhukovsky’s biographer), 328 Zhirmunsky, Viktor, 4, 11, 14, 16, 28n1, 30nn10,11, 32n32, 62n1, 161n72 Zhukovsky, Vasily, 26, 146, 255–56, 263, 267–70, 314–39, 466 Zieliński, Tadeusz, 435 Zimmermann, Johann Georg, 317 Zontag, A. P., 318–27, 332nn25, 26, 335nn42, 46 Zorin, Andrei, 316–17, 331nn12,15,16

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Verbal Arts :: Studies in Poetics Lazar Fleishman and Haun Saussy, series editors

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace Jacob Edmond, A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry Marc Shell, Talking the Walk & Walking the Talk: A Rhetoric of Rhythm Ryan Netzley, Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov (eds.), Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics. Foreword by Eric Hayot Ross Chambers, An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise

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