The idea of historical poetics in the works of A. N. Veselovsky and its reflections in the Russian and German scientific discourse
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33910/2687-1262-2019-1-1-5-14Keywords:
world literature, historical poetics, metaphysics of unity, palimpsest, polyphony, syncretism, typology of genresAbstract
The paper is devoted to the formation and transformation of the idea of historical-literary synthesis, outlined in the works of Academician A. N. Veselovsky. The grandiose conception of the Russian scientist — the historical poetics of world literature — was, as it is well-known, only partially realised by its creator. However, the stage model of the culturalhistorical development of artistic consciousness, which he developed, has been represented in various forms of the 20th century scientific discourse and has not lost its significance. Contrary to popular belief regarding the positivist limitations of Veselovsky’s methodology, the author of the article emphasises the systemic nature of his thought, based on the tradition of the romantic philosophy of history. According to Veselovsky, world literature is not just a collection of single isolated or only partially related facts, but a kind of a complex system, a dynamic palimpsest, allowing an analogy with the model of the world process of unity in Russian metaphysics, from initial, “continuous” syncretism through differentiation and separation, to the polyphonic unity of the sets, according to a later definition by S. L. Frank, “the transrational unity of separateness and interpenetration”. Veselovsky’s research forms the problem field, in which various transformations of historical poetic principles established in Russian literary theory correlate and interfere with the methods and concepts of German philosophical literature on the level of both typological and contact links. Such are, firstly, the concept of three types of artistic consciousness that succeed each other, outlined by Veselovsky and established in the Russian literary science in the 1980 and 1990s under the influence of E. R. Curtius; secondly, the dichotomous model of culture substantiated in the 1990s in the works of Renate Lachmann; and thirdly, the analogy between the category of artistic modality in “Historical poetics” (2001) by S. N. Broitman and the transcendental typology of genres in “The Esthetics of the Modern Age” (2001) by S. Vietta.
References
SOURCES
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