Typology of misunderstanding of a realistic text and the tasks of commenting

Abstract

The article discusses some problems of the modern theory of commenting, in particular, the problem of the boundaries between interpretation and commentary. The author believes that the last should avoid introducing into the metatext additional meanings that are not obligatory for understanding, since such misreadings lead to poetic interpretation of the text-object. The scholarly validity of the commentary can be achieved, firstly, by applying the idea of total commentary proposed by Alexandre Chudakov, and secondly, by the classification of comments depending on the types of misunderstanding of the literary text, developed Yuri I. Levin. The commentary is dialogic, it contains replies to possible questions about the meaning of textual elements, and awareness of the degree and nature of interpreter’s own or someone else’s erroneous understanding allows him or her to formulate the tasks of commenting in a new way. Developing Levin’s system, the author of the article suggests two types of misunderstanding, which correspond to certain forms of commenting. Firstly, this is a pun misunderstanding — a special kind of factual errors that occur when a word or thing is transferred to a different (modern) context. An example of eliminating this kind of error in interpretation of Chekhov’s story Thick and Thin with the help of “total commentary” allows to offer a fundamentally different approach to the genre nature of the text and the main event of it: the story turns out to be a novella, and its main event is an incredible incident, possible only with the direct intervention of the supreme power. Second type of misunderstanding is a semantic ellipsis, which is the omission of some thing or its deliberately careless mention as unimportant, although filling of such a gap can change the perception of the text. The examples of Chekhov’s stories Trouble and Student demonstrate how useful may be attention to seemingly very small and even superfluous details.