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.

Wojciech Kalaga

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.

The guest-editor’s preface devoted to the key ideas for the contemporary literary theory in Russia, which introduces the debates foregrounded in this issue.

Applying a semantic perspective, the article revolves around the questions of mutual relationships between philosophy and literature, pointing to a whole range of often contradictory views which see literature as both inferior and superior to philosophy since the former is often accused of generating imaginary worlds while the latter is seemingly verifiable through logic and truth-value. Both however, inevitably undergo a process of historical verification, which exposes not only differences between literature and philosophy but also a number of similarities resulting from various ways of appropriating otherness and an irreducible narrative components permeating their very semantic structures.

Taking the differentiation between linguistic philosophy and philological philosophy, the article outlines the emergence of respective types of philosophers, whose self-awareness of the philosophical object is characterized as either textual or linguistic. This particular distinction is supported by the conviction of the evolving nature of 20th century philosophy precisely from linguistic to philological/textual. This distinction in turn redefines a number of traditional philosophical perspectives, the most important of which is the question of the object of philosophical contemplation.

Outlining a historical evolution of the 20th century Russian literary theory associated with the Philological Faculty of the Moscow University and often debating various Western approaches such as post-structuralism or deconstruction, the article attempts to identify the premises of Russian theory by highlighting its analytical preoccupation inspired by such theorists as Mikhail Bakhtin or Valery Tyupa. The analytical approach resulted in theories concerning communication strategies of the literary text, which in turn, resulted in the emergence of various narratologial and neo-rhetorical theories.

Identifying two vital aspects of narratology – poetics and rhetoric – the article then proceeds to highlight their nature and interpretive consequences some of which are embodied in the post-structuralist desire to reach beyond the internally structured text and reach the level of communicative intersubjectivity. Any narrative discourse is characterised by the combination of the referential event and the communicative event, which are both determined by three basic factors: the actant, the world-view and the point-of-view. Such a perspective, as the article suggests, opens up a series of new interpretive possibilities as they redefine the traditional and historical approach to literary studies.

Valery Tyupa
Russian State University for the Humanities

"Three Aesthetics of Addressing"

Examining 20th century art, the author looks at avangarde art movements which in their departure from classical models of artistic expression shifted their focus from the object to the reciever in order to influence his or her spiritual experience. The transition from creativity to receptivity in the process of artistic creation is represented as typical of non-classical aesthetics which favours work’s openness and fragmentariness and thus activates the “third partcipant in the game”—the reader/the receiver. Referring to Russian avantgarde artists, the author explores the rise of the significance of “the third” and places it in the context of political power and the rules of the market.

Natan Tamarchenko
Russian State University for the Humanities

"Functions of the Trickster in Classic Russian Novel 
(Questions of Methodology)"

Examining the prototype of the trickster and looking at the main directions of its evolution and its changing interpretations, the author identifies the figure of the trickster in the context of cannonical Russian novels, an attempt most original since the trickster has hardly ever attracted attention of Russian critics or literary theorists. Having identified two types of protagonists, the autor suggests that characters built in contrast to main types may be read as evolved forms of the ancient figure of the trickster.

Bogusław Żyłko
University of Gdańsk

"The Tartu-Moscow School Years Later"

The paper discusses the origins and contribution of the renowned Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics and its subsequent development and contributions to semiotics and to the study of culture in the West and East. Following a brief exposition of the leading role of Yuri Lotman, and the significance of other eminent members of the school, the growth of now independent centers in Moscow and Tallinn is discussed as well as the changes of the focus of interest of semioticians who continue the Tartu methodological tradition. Finally, a general assessment of the relevance and contribution of both the original school and its contemporary continuators is provided.

Peeter Torop
Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu

"The Tartu School as a School"

The paper addresses the question in what sense the Tartu school of semiotics constituted and still constitutes a coherent research community, and in what sense it can be called a school. The author discusses especially two aspects of this question: first, the Tartu school as a trend in semiotic research, and secondly, as a semiotic doctrine. The leading role of Yuri Lotman, the evolution of his thought, and his influence on the school during his lifetime and after his death are exposed as well as the contribution and impact of the school abroad.

Mihhail Lotman
Tallinn University, Estonia

"Beyond Text: Remarks on the Philosophical Background
of Tartu Semiotics"

The paper explores various approaches to the concept of text present in the work of Yuri Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics, which is considered here as primarily text oriented. The object of study, however, is not what has been explicitly formulated, but rather what has not been said or what has only been implicated in the work of Lotman and other exponents of the school. In this way the conceptual paradigm of Tartu-Moscow semiotics is placed in the context of (implied) philosophical perspectives.

Katarzyna Syska
Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland

"Poststructuralism in Russian Literary Theory after 1991"

Against the background of the constraints of Soviet legacy, the paper concentrates on contemporary, post-Soviet tendencies in literary studies in Russia, and especially on poststructuralism. Four dominant trends within post-Soviet literary theory are distinguished: semiotics, traditional literary studies (including historical and theoretical poetics, textual studies drawing from structuralism, narratology, comparative studies and Bakhtin’s theory), “new religiosity” and, finally, poststructuralism and cultural studies inspired by Western influences, but adapted to the Russian context. The latter developments are discussed in the paper in greater detail.

Maksim Shapir
Moscow State University/Russian Academy of Science

"The Aesthetic Experience of the 20th century: Avant-garde and Post-modernism"

Drawing from various attempts to define the avant-garde, from syntactic-semiotic relationships to pragmatics, the article approaches the notion in question in terms of the reactions it provokes and inspires. Seeing the avant-garde as a peculiar form of rhetoric which challenges pre-established assumptions concerning the whole variety of artistic practices, the articles identifies a number of both parallel and contrasting qualities between the internal mechanisms of the avant-garde and those of postmodernist cultural production, some of which run along the line of originality: just as the avant-garde highlighted the uniqueness of its own expression, post-modernism celebrates repetition and intertextuality.

Mark Lipowiecki
the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA.

"An Explosive Aporia"

The article traces and analyses the origin of Russian postmodernism, seeing it as a reaction to soviet meta-narratives and the official attempts to control the avant-garde movements. But the particular shape which post-modernism adopted in Russia is also reflecting deeper cultural dominants, notably the lack of a middle ground between various cultural extremes, which in turn appear to constitute the foundations of Russian culture. Russian post-modernism, the article argues, is thus characterised by a constant internal struggle between opposing discourses rather than by a consistent opposition to social and political traditions of modernity.

Mikhail Epstein
Emory University, USA/Durham University, UK.

"The Century’s Zero Cycle. The Explosive Style of the 2000s"

Ogłaszając koniec tradycyjnie rozumianego post-modernizmu, rozumianego jako pozornie wyzbyta znaczenia gra znaków oraz nieskończone przemieszczenia intertekstualne, artykuł ten jest próbą krytycznego przejęcia kultury po World Trade Center za pomocą metaforycznych eksplozji kulturowych, opisujących koniec kondycji ponowoczesnej. Poddane w wątpliwość ekslopzje są związane zarówno z rzeczywistymi zagrożeniami terroryzmem oraz "wybuchowym" wzrostem właściwym dla rozwoju technologii i nauki, które - w dalszej perspektywie - mogą doprowadzić do redefinicji podstawowych kategorii społecznych pod wpływem transkulturalizmu.

Inspired by the structure of the titular vegetables – one having an essence after having been stripped of the outer layers, the other deprived of it – the article proposes a re-reading of Russian literature from the opposing perspectives of the “cabbage paradigm” and the “onion paradigm.” The former is located in the realm of soviet metaphysics, while the latter reverberates with deeper philosophical inspirations in which the meaning is produced by void and chaos. Both paradigms are used as distinct interpretative perspectives and illustrated with relevant literary examples.

The article contemplates social and cultural consequences of the fall of communism as the dominating socio-political ideology and some attempts to fill up the ideological void left by the withering dogmas of the previous regime. One of the discourses, whose premises seem applicable to the post-soviet reality, is post-colonial theory. However, its immediate application does not seem possible for the variety of geo-political reasons which result in a sense of ideological disappointment turning Russians into new subalterns, devoid of their former imperialist pride and uncertain of their status in the globalized and still globalizing world.

Treating the imperial experience as its departure point, the article identifies a parallel relationship between the empire and the people reflected by the relationship between a man and a woman, the former presented as a noble savage the latter as a victim of the imperialist situation. The space outlined between them is however further complicated by the counter-character of the “man of culture” who interrupts the purity of the idyllic environment and contaminates it with historical and ideological dilemmas illustrated, among other works, in Dostoyevsky’s novels.

Bartosz Stopel's critical review of:  Ewa Bińczyk, Technonauka w społeczeństwie ryzyka. Filozofia wobec niepożądanych następstw praktycznego sukcesu nauki, Toruń, Wydawnictwo Naukowego Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika 2012, s. 450.

Critical notes on books:

Michał Kisiel's critical note on:
Jacques Derrida, Cinders, przeł. Ned Lukacher, Minneapolis, London, University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Anna Maraś's critical note on: 
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

English summaries of research articles included in the present issue.

Information concerning the Er(r)go submission policy and stylesheet.

The colophon to the issue.