V. Markovich’s special seminar “Classics and Avant-garde”. Methodological grounds

Abstract

In order to delineate the methodological grounds of Vladimir Markovich’s “Classic and Avantgarde” seminar and his scholarly approach as a whole, we analyse one literary theme that is connected to studying Gogol. In Yuri Lotman’s “The Issue of Artistic Space in Gogol’s Prose” (1968) we find structuralism generally tends to describe a particular text as a manifestation of the more general principles of a literary work per se. Yuri Mann’s “Gogol’s Poetics” (1978) is a classical typological description of forms performed on Gogol’s prosaic works. The chosen principles are strictly adhered to: focusing on a certain aesthetic category, the scholar follows its transformation within the boundaries of the studied system. In the preface to his monograph “Gogol’s Petersburg Tales” (1989), published twelve years after Mann’s work, Vladimir Markovich obviously follows the tradition of the formalist-structuralist literary theory, while defining the peculiarities of the analysed text. But granting equal rights to analysis, intuition and reader’s sensitivity in encompassing the fullness of text’s meaning, he allows practices characteristic to the opposing hermeneutics school. The author records the “oddities” of Gogol’s poetics and juxtaposes them with a broad literary context. Markovich constantly “checks” the obtained results against the readers’ reception, appealing both to the mentality of an implicit reader, reconstructed from Gogol’s texts, and to real readers — Gogol’s contemporaries, whose perceptive abilities are shaped by a certain cultural and historical period. Thus, the practices of receptive aesthetics enter the field of research methods. Against the background of Yuri Lotman’s and Yuri Mann’s studies it is possible to outline the unique attitude of Markovich, which integrates structural analysis, principles of receptive aesthetics and hermeneutical divination. Such methodological openness provides for greater internal dynamic, while aspiration to comprehension turns every research into a hermeneutic reading of the text, not exhaustive but discovering new layers of meaning in Russian classic literature.