Abstract

Er(r)go… ,
contemporary Russia—but only in its literary-theoretical aspect—from the inside and from the outside. Internal perspectives, but also those from Tartu, Tallinn, and the West.
If a literary-theoretical Russia, then, naturally, Bakhtin, and that which follows. A scientific description of reality? Impulses against poststructuralist skepticism? Algorithms and pattern analyses of the main literary genres? Paradigms of artistic value? Narratology: actants, world pictures, points of view, singularity, fractals, variants, stages, etc., and neo-rhetoric against the postmodernist “chaotisation” of culture. But also the aesthetic object clad in silence, the aesthetics of address and the increasing importance of the Third, the discourse of responsibility, the long term, great time, great dialogue, genre memory and other Bakhtinian traces.
Moreover, as usual, disputes over the nature of discourses: is philosophy the Other of literature or does the Other transform into non-Other; philosophy as a protective zone for dialectics, literature as a kingdom of ambiguity; the secret of literature as cannon fodder for readers. Philology of philosophy and the textual hunger of a philological philosopher; philology as a text about a text, philosophy as a text on thinking as a non-text. Do not texts think, however? The hypothesis of a trickster and his original image, also doctor Zhivago, Myshkin, Raskolnikov, Strelnikov, Bezukhov, Bolkonsky in various configurations. Hegel and Kant in the deep structures of Russian thought, Bakhtin and Lotman on the surface; the philosopher as an eater of spices, the artist as a torero.
Intimations of poststructuralism and symptoms of academic anti-foundationalism: deconstruction, cultural and intertextual studies, feminist and gender criticism, new historicism, postcolonialism. Postcolonial methodology and the post-Soviet subaltern; the postcolonial without the colonial; people of the trans-diaspora and internal Others; and the imperative: the decolonisation of postcolonialism —de-Sovietization of the post-Soviet. The avant-garde and pragmatics, and their contextual corrida, the temporal nonsense of postmodernity, Russian postmodernism as a paralogical compromise of a dyad and a triad and as an omelette made without breaking the eggs. Deconstruction and authorial infamy, the inevitable dumbness of the reader, one’s own word experienced as another’s, the aesthetics of militant passivity, and the strength of the postmodernist found in female logic. The boundaries of the postmodernist play as a perforated tape of explosions; 9.11—the revenge of the real, of authenticity, of irreproducibility; ground zero. Signs blow up signification. Cultural explosions: transculturalism instead of multiculturalism; suicidal explosions of cultures. Explosive aporia and the paralogy of presenting the unpresentable, the life-after-death of trash, trash as a zone between memory and forgetting, the modeling of chaos and chaos put in order. The search for the heart: the paradigm of cabbage and the paradigm of onion. Life and excrements, the outhouse as home. The bankruptcy of sovietology. And, of course, motifs of martyrdom.
Also Russia, yet already non-Russia. Estonian semiotics in Tartu and Tallinn still drawing on Lotman’s genius and continuing (in Tartu) its struggles in the sphere of semiotic systems. Its influence in the East and the West and its dilemmas after Lotman’s departure.
The present issue is guest edited by professor Piotr Fast from the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland.