Khanins' book review

[nina perlina]

Frankly it is because of my technological backwardness and insufficient
use of the website publications that I join the discussion of Professor
Khanin's review of Caryl Emerson's The First Hundred Years of Mikhail
Bakhtin  so late. As a good old friend and colleague of Caryl, a reviwer
of her last book (the volume Khanin believes he had "trashed"),  a Slavist
familiar with many of Professor Khanin's academic writings (I was asked to
examine his tenure materials and supported his candidacy with enthusiasm),
and, finally, as an emigre+ from Soviet Russia, I should have add my voice
to the ongoing exchange much earlier. But surprisingly, my belated
response wins me a position that can be described as "better later,"  for
from my standpoint I can see clearly what the entire struggle is about,
how should one characterize Professor Khanin's position in this battle,
and what stimulates his ferocious attempt at "epate les academicien"
        The battle is not about the ability/inability of  Russian scholars
to acknowledge the fact that American Slavists can "really understand or
know Russian culture well or deeply enough to write about it
legitimately," as our colleague Andrew Wachtel believes. Here, one should
admit, Professor Khanin has made his transition from the Russian to the
American shore successfully. He is familiar with the language of
postmodern pluralism and relativism. And if Caryl Emerson, in her turn,
were not to demonstrate her non-relativizing approach to Bakhtin theory,
Khanin would, probably, hesitate to "trash" her study. What Khanin renders
as invalid or "apostatic" in Emerson's book is her unwillingness to move
her research in the direction of the postmodernist simulacrum.
Paradoxically, Khanin fails to notice that his assault on Emerson's
non-relativist view of plurality makes him divert from his own pluralism.
As an old Bakhtin scholar, I can see how much stress does Khanin add to
his assured knowledge of what has become well grounded in the newest
postmodernist interpretations of Bakhtin. Khanin disagrees with Emerson
because both the bounds and the goals of her study do not fit the
parameters he has chosen as a model for his  "Bakhtin today." He fails to
see that "Emerson's 'hero' is not M. M. Bakhtin but rather his creative
answerable "I" which takes part both in the Russian and the American
contexts, yet does not dissolve in any of them" (I borrow this explanation
from my own review of her book). Emerson's reliance on the main principles
of reception theory makes her book into an interesting discussion of the
dynamic processes that are developed in the recent Bakhtin studies; with
the help of reception theory she accumulates and systematizes outside
contexts through which competent readers read and interpret Bakhtin's
works as cultural phenomena, and when Khanin charges Emersaon's
systematization with  opportunism, he bespeaks his unwillingness to read
her study within its genuine context. In a way, Khanin charges not an
individual interpretation, but the entire theoretical creed with lack of
principiality.
        True, "the first hundred years of Mikhail Bakhtin" cannot be
limited to the reception of Bakhtin's theories in the post-Soviet human
sciences of 1980's-90's, and if Khanin were to express his reservations
about the exceedingly ambitious and somewhat misleading title of Emerson's
study, I would  agree with him. To this I would add that the fundamental
reasons for Emerson's selections and omissions of individual Bakhtin
scholars and their theoretical views need more clarification. But rather
than claiming several partial reservations about Emerson's study, Khanin
boasts of "trashing" her entire work. "Trashing" (like recycling) is an
ideologically bound activity, and the utterance chosen by Khanin brings to
my mind a remnant from an old, nearly "trashed" context about trashing and
recycling: shortly before his arrest, Isaak Babel took Ilya Ehrenburg on a
stroll and showed him a factory that was built to trash books written by
"enemies of the Soviet people" and to make this "cultural recycling" of
the old worldviews useful for the spirit of the day. True, Caryl Emerson
is just a Bakhtin scholar, not a reincarnation of his spirit, but we
should not forget that many enigmatic aspects of Bakhtin studies owe their
origin to the pernicious practice of "trashing" books and their creators
in the 1930's.
Nina Perlina, Indiana University