Averintsev/Bakhtin

[Alexandra Smith]

Dear William,

I think that your point is very valid from the technical point of view  
if one chooses to have a purely formal view of language.
Yet all the examples provided in your e-mail are taken from  
post-Soviet sources, and therefore are not exactly representative of  
the generation of Russian intellectuals, including Averintsev,  
Likhachev, Panchenko and Rozhdestvenskaya who were discussed in  
relation to the film on Arkady Severny that I've mentioned in my  
original e-mail.
It seems to me that there is a certian subcultural type of behaviour  
that was  visible in the 1970s that enabled many Russian intellectuals  
to sing Odessa-like criminal songs and use slang as part of their  
subversive and/or escapist behaviour. One can view it as a  
manifestation of carnivalesque behaviour or estrangement. It depends  
upon individual cases, I think.
Curiously enough, when I talked to Marietta Chudakova in 1999 about  
the use of laughter in Petrushevskaya's fiction she has suggested that  
Petrushevskaya's use of laughter stretched too far and  covered the  
areas that shouldn't be laughed upon. Chudakova seemed to be  
advocating the  notion of self-censorship that should be observed by  
post-Soviet writers and was a bit scornful of the way how Tsvetaeva's  
words "ia slishkom sama liubila smeiat'sia, kogda nel'zia" could be  
taken as an invitation to destabilise some sacred ethical principles.  
She was in full agreement with Averintsev's article, too.
I think that Olga Meerson's e-mail regarding her parents, friends and  
Khvostenko's songs also point to the existence of a certian type of  
escapist and/or subversive behaviour of many intellectuals inside and  
outside the Soviet Union that is difficult to define in an overaching  
manner. In her article on Shklovsky and Brodsky Svetlana Boym talks  
about Brodsky's behaviour as a form of estrangement comparable to  
Shklovsky's notion. It might be worth considering Brodsky's early  
poetry in this context, too, i.e. Severny's, Volokhonky's,  
Khvostenko's  and Vysotsky's songs.
Just  a thought.

All best,
Sasha Smith



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