Averintsev/Bakhtin
Alexandra Smith
Alexandra.Smith at ED.AC.UK
Wed Sep 16 10:18:24 UTC 2009
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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