History between literature and science: philosophical and methodological analysis of “war and peace” L.N. Tolstoy Bendersky Ilya Igorevich

What can historical works and works of fiction have in common? Is it just that both exist in the form of written texts, which have their own authors and readers. The fundamental difference lies in the tasks facing the historian and the author of a work of art. The historian's task is to create an objective picture of the past. He is forced to limit himself to surviving documentary sources. The most important thing for the author of a work of art is to successfully realize his creative idea and interest his reader in it. To do this, he does not have to follow in everything what is considered true or real.

This view of the relationship between history and literature is common. It can suit anyone who is accustomed to thinking that since the advent of written culture, humanity has had approximately the same ideas about how reality differs from fiction and, accordingly, how the tasks of historical description differ from the tasks of artistic presentation. However, this was not always the case. The conventional view we have cited corresponds only to that relatively short period in the development of scientific and humanitarian knowledge, which dates back to the second half of the 19th century. It was then that the idea of history as a science that reconstructs past events was established. The adherents of this science did not want to have anything to do with literature or, at best, recommended historians to write their works in a language that was clear and understandable to everyone.

At the beginning of the 20th century. There have been changes in understanding the nature of historical knowledge. The idea became more and more clear that in the reconstruction of the past one cannot rely only on documentary sources for everything. Their material is often not enough to present a complete picture of the era that interests the historian. So in many ways he has to act at his own peril and risk, trusting solely in his intuition. In addition, after what happened in humanitarian thought structuralist revolution (60s of the XX century) the realization came that the written text is the alpha and omega of historical research. This means that the study of the past begins with the interpretation of written texts of historical sources. The end product of such interpretation is also a written text - a historical article or monograph. In creating it, the researcher, like a writer, is forced to use the set of artistic means and rhetorical techniques that are available to his contemporary literary culture. From this point of view, a historical work can be considered as a literary work of a special kind, the specific purpose of which is to convince its readers of the actual nature of the events presented in it.

Thus, the relationship between history and literature much tighter than it might seem. Author of any prose work(especially a historical novel or a realistic short story) should not neglect knowledge of historical details. The historian, in turn, will not be able to give any holistic picture of the past if he fails to use contemporary literary techniques.

Since antiquity, it has been recognized that studying history requires serious literary skills. However, neither the ancient Greeks nor the Romans had the concept of fiction in its modern meaning. It was believed that all types of verbal creativity (oral or written, poetic or prosaic) represent different types mimesis(gr. mimesis– imitation). Therefore, the difference between a historian and a poet consisted mainly not in the fact that the former was obliged to tell the truth, but the latter was allowed to embellish this truth. From the very beginning they had to deal with different role models. As Aristotle said in Poetics, “the historian and the poet differ not in that one writes in verse, and the other in prose (after all, Herodotus can be translated into verse, but his writing will still remain history) - no, they differ in that one speaks of what was, and the other of what could have been... For poetry speaks more about the general, history - about the individual. The general is what, by necessity or probability, it is appropriate for such and such a character to say or do. this and that... And the individual is, for example, what Alcibiades did or suffered.”

Ancient historians paid great attention to the collection and verification of individual facts, believing that history is the keeper of examples collected to provide readers with moral and practical assistance. However, the tasks of history were not limited to this. The study of history was recognized as part of the art of rhetoric. The collection and verification of facts constituted only a preliminary stage in the work of a historian, but his art was tested by how he knew how to use these facts. Lucian, in his essay “How History Should Be Written,” said that the main concern of the historian should be to give expressiveness to the material. The historian must consider not what to say, but how to say it: his task is to correctly distribute events and visually present them.

In antiquity, there were no visible contradictions between the principles of a truthful description of the facts of the past and their coherent and visual presentation in the text historical essay. When they did arise, they were resolved in favor of clarity. An example of this is Cicero, who believed that the first law of history is not to experience lies under any circumstances, then - in no case to be afraid of the truth, and also not to allow partiality and malice. Nevertheless, when his friend, the historian Lucceus, wished to write the history of his consulate, Cicero, concerned about creating an expressive story, advised him to “neglect the laws of history.”

Before late XVIII V. history remained part of the art of rhetoric. When Voltaire, an outstanding historian of the Enlightenment, in one of his letters outlined the plan of his essay on the reign of Louis XIV, one might think that he followed the recommendations of Lucian: setting as his goal to create a great picture of events and hold the reader's attention, he, on the one hand, saw history as a tragedy that requires exposition, climax and denouement, and on the other hand, left room on its wide canvases for entertaining anecdotes.

Since the beginning of the 19th century. history, like literary creativity in general, they are no longer considered part of rhetoric. However, she has not lost her artistic qualities. Some visual techniques were replaced by others. The historian no longer tried to take a privileged external position in relation to the subject of his work and readers, and refrained from making a moral assessment of the heroes. Moreover, he sought to imagine himself as a participant in the events. Small details and insignificant facts, which the historians of the Enlightenment put up with as a “necessary evil,” became the primary objects of description in the works of historians of the Romantic era. In his work “The Reality Effect,” the French philosopher and literary critic of the second half of the 20th century. Roland Barthes gave an analysis of the visual means used by historians of the romantic school and realist writers of the 19th century, and proved the fact of interpenetration and mutual enrichment of historical and literary creativity.

The close connection between these types of creativity remained in subsequent times. It is difficult not to notice the stylistic similarity between the multi-volume works of positivist historians and epic novels in the spirit of O. de Balzac or L. Tolstoy. In the first half of the 20th century. historians of the “Annals school,” according to M. Blok, instead of positivist historiography that had “aged and vegetated in the embryonic form of narrative,” proposed their project of multi-layered analytical and structural history. Around the same time, modernist writers J. Joyce, F. Kafka, R. Musil created a new type of novel, the compositional features of which do not allow the reader to detect a single plot line in it. These novels do not have a clearly defined beginning, middle and end and “live” only in the process of endless rereading. But already in the second half of the 20th century. The problem of interaction between history and literature received its theoretical understanding in the works of “new intellectual historians.”

The natural desire of an educated person is to learn the past of his country, because without this it is impossible to understand himself. No less important is the desire to understand oneself, although sometimes it seems that a person knows everything about himself, in any case.

We want to know our origins, our roots, everything that came before us. The best way to tell about this is a history book. It will build chains of events, facts, provide historical comments and assessments; Figures from different eras will appear against the background of the most important events, transformations, battles, peace and temporary truces. The historical book began with the chronicle - one of the most important genres of ancient Russian literature.

However, both the writer and the reader are often interested not only in historical facts, but also in the lives of people, their thoughts, feelings and experiences in certain periods. So, A.S. Pushkin wrote a historical narrative - “The History of Pugachev” - and almost simultaneously created an artistic canvas - “ Captain's daughter" The language of history alone was not enough for a writer; The language of artistic prose was needed.

History tells about the external side of the life of famous figures: monarchs, generals, rebels, diplomats... Fiction also reveals the inner world of a person. A person strives for happiness, is sad, suffers and rejoices, cries and sings, builds, dreams, accomplishes moral choice... The fiction book talks about all this. Historical events are uniquely reflected in folklore, myth, and original literature.

Literature and history go side by side, powerfully interacting with each other. Often history gives literature a fact, food for thought; literature often predicts historical development society, state. It is no coincidence that a writer is sometimes called a soothsayer, a prophet, a harbinger.

History develops according to its own laws. Literature - in its own way, although these laws are interconnected. Certainly, literary development not ahistorical, but the influence of history is most often multifaceted and complex, it is not reducible to direct influence and dictate.

The basis of the natural evolution of literature is a change in ideas about beauty, that is, aesthetic systems.

Imagine: a lone musician plays a wonderful, bewitching melody on a pipe, flute or violin. And here is another picture: the same melody is performed by a large orchestra. The melody is the same, but not the same. Each instrument leads its own part, complementing and intertwining with others.

So it is in literature. In the beginning there were various myths and folklore. Its themes, very stable and constant, changed depending on the place of dissemination of oral folk art and the personalities of the performers who take up, like a baton, from generation to generation the collective gift of the people.

Then the works appeared ancient literature: lives, legends, stories and chronicles - the work of a few, mostly literate church ministers.

In the 17th-18th centuries, the authors of works of art were no longer only church ministers, but also secular people. Literary movements and aesthetic systems were born and passed into the past, literature developed - not only as the art of words, but also as a way of self-knowledge of an entire people. By turning to events and facts of the Russian past, literary literature preserves the connection between generations, helps to see the modern in the past, and the eternal in the momentary. Therefore, classical literary works do not age: they are addressed to the reader - that is, to the person. And what makes a person a Human is not subject to the laws of history...

In this book, the outstanding Italian literary critic Franco Moretti examines in detail the figure of the bourgeois in European literature of the modern era. Moretti's proposed gallery of individual portraits is interwoven with an analysis of keywords - "useful" and "serious", "efficiency", "influence", "comfort", "roba [goods, property]" and formal mutations of prose. Beginning with "The Toiling Master" in the first chapter, through the seriousness of nineteenth-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the national deformations of the southern and eastern periphery, and the radical self-criticism of Ibsen's plays, this book describes the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, examining the reasons for its historical weakness and gradual decline into the past. . The book is of interest to philologists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers.

Publisher: "Publishing House of the Gaidar Institute" (2014)

ISBN: 978-5-93255-394-7

annotation scientific article on history and historical sciences, author of the scientific work - Moretti Franco

F. Moretti's book “Bourgeois. Between History and Literature" is dedicated to the history of the bourgeoisie as a class in Western society. Its author is Professor of Humanities. Daniel and Laura Louise Bell of Stanford University and founder of the Center for Novel Studies and the Literary Laboratory (Center for the Study of the Novel and Literary Lab). The subject of the book is the bourgeoisie, viewed through the prism of literature. Turning to the works of Western European literature, F. Moretti tries to understand the reasons for the emergence and flourishing of bourgeois culture, as well as to identify the factors that led to its subsequent attenuation and disappearance. By focusing not on actual relations between social groups but on legitimate cultural forms, Moretti demonstrates distinctive features bourgeoisie and markers of the lines delimiting it from the working and ruling classes. The author of the book, in addition, tries to clarify the question of why the concept of “bourgeoisie” eventually replaced the concept of the middle class, and also why the bourgeoisie was unable to meet the political and cultural demands of modern Western society. The journal “Economic Sociology” publishes “Introduction: Concepts and Contradictions” to F. Moretti’s book “Bourgeois. Between history and literature." In it, the author poses the problem of his research, defines the main concepts and explains the methodology, demonstrating the advantages and disadvantages of formal analysis of literary prose for understanding social history. In the Introduction, Moretti also describes the structure of the book and points out the remaining gaps in the topic being studied, the solution of which requires additional research.

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (an excerpt)

The book “The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature” written by Franco Moretti, the professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and the founder of the Center for the Study of the Novel and Literary Lab, is devoted to the history of the bourgeois as a social class of the modern Western society. The bourgeois, refracted through the prism of literature, is the subject of “The Bourgeois”. Addressing to some pieces of the Western literature, the author tries to scrutinize the reasons of the bourgeois culture’s golden age and to reveal the causes of its further fall. Moretti focuses not on real relationships between social groups but on legitimate cultural forms, which demonstrate the peculiarities of the bourgeois and demarcate it from working and ruling classes. In addition, the author seeks an answer to the questions why the notion of bourgeois was being replaced with the concept of the middle class and why the bourgeois failed to resist political and cultural challenges of the modern Western society. The journal of Economic Sociology publications “Introduction: Concepts and Contradictions” from “The Bourgeois”. In the Introduction, Moretti formulates the problem of the study, defines key concepts and explains the applied methodology, demonstrating weaknesses and strengths of the formal analysis of literary prose for understanding the social history. In the Introduction, Moretti describes the book's structure and sheds lights on the dark corners, which require additional research.

Text of scientific work on the topic “Bourgeois. Between history and literature"

NEW TRANSLATIONS

F. Moretti

Bourgeois. Between history and literature1

Moretti, Franco -

Professor of Humanities named after. Daniel and Laura Louise Bell, Department of English, Stanford University. Address: USA, 943052087, California, Stanford, st. 450 Serra Mall.

Email: moretti@stanford. edu

Transl. from English Inna Kushnareva.

Published with permission from the Publishing House of the Institute. E. Gaidar.

The journal “Economic Sociology” publishes “Introduction: Concepts and Contradictions” to F. Moretti’s book “Bourgeois. Between history and literature." In it, the author poses the problem of his research, defines the main concepts and explains the methodology, demonstrating the advantages and disadvantages of formal analysis of literary prose for understanding social history. In the Introduction, Moretti also describes the structure of the book and points out the remaining gaps in the topic being studied, the solution of which requires additional research.

Key words: bourgeoisie; middle class; capitalism; culture; ideology; modern Western European fiction; social structure; socio-economic history.

Introduction: concepts and controversies

1. “I am a representative of the bourgeois class”

Bourgeois... Just recently this concept seemed indispensable for social analysis, but now for many years you may never hear it. Capitalism is stronger than ever, but the people who were its leaders

Source: Moretti F. 2014 (forthcoming). Bourgeois. Between history and literature. M.: Gaidar Institute. Transl. from English: Moretti F. 2013. The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. London: Verso Books.

ceremonies apparently disappeared. “I am a representative of the bourgeois class, I feel like one and was brought up on its opinions and ideals,” wrote Max Weber in 1895. Who can repeat these words today? Bourgeois “opinions and ideals” - what are they?

This changed atmosphere was reflected in academic works. Simmel and Weber, Sombart and Schumpeter, all saw capitalism and the bourgeoisie - economics and anthropology - as two sides of the same coin. “I don’t know of any serious historical interpretation modern world“in which we live,” wrote Emmanuel Wallerstein a quarter of a century ago, “in which the concept of the bourgeoisie... would be absent. And this is no coincidence. It's hard to tell a story without a main character." And yet today even those historians who most emphasize the role of “opinions and ideals” in the emergence of capitalism (Ellen Meiksins Wood, de Vries, Appleby, Mokyr) have little or no interest in the figure of the bourgeois. “There was capitalism in England,” writes Meiksins Wood in The Primordial Culture of Capitalism, “but it was not created by the bourgeoisie. There was a (more or less) triumphant bourgeoisie in France, but its revolutionary project had nothing to do with capitalism.” And finally: “It is not necessary to identify the bourgeois... with the capitalist.”

Everything is correct, it is not necessary to identify, but that is not the point. In “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Weber wrote that “the emergence of the Western bourgeoisie in all its originality” is a process that “is in close connection with the emergence of the capitalist organization of labor, but cannot be considered completely identical to it." part, was definitely masculine) as part of the structure of power, with which these structures, however, do not entirely coincide. But talking about bourgeois in the singular is in itself dubious. “The big bourgeoisie could not formally separate itself from people of lower status,” Hobsbawm wrote in The Age of Empire, “its structure had to remain open to newcomers - such was the nature of its existence.” This permeability, adds Perry Anderson, distinguishes the bourgeoisie from the nobility above it in the hierarchy, and from the working class below it, for, despite all the important differences within each of these opposing classes, they are structurally more homogeneous : The aristocracy is usually defined by legal status combined with civil titles and legal privileges, while the working class is characterized primarily by manual labor. The bourgeoisie as a social group does not have such internal unity.

Porous borders and weak internal unity - don't these traits devalue the very idea of the bourgeoisie as a class? According to its greatest living historian, Jürgen Koka, not at all, if we distinguish between what we might call the core of the concept and its outer periphery. This latter indeed varied greatly, both socially and historically: up until the 18th century, the outer periphery consisted mainly of "self-employed small entrepreneurs (craftsmen, retailers, inns and small proprietors)" of early urban Europe ; a hundred years later, a completely different population belonged to it - “medium and small clerks of civil servants.” However, during the 19th century, a syncretic figure of the "property educated bourgeoisie" emerged throughout Western Europe, providing a center of gravity for the class as a whole and reinforcing in the bourgeoisie the features of a possible new ruling class: this convergence found expression in the German conceptual pair Besitzs- and Bildungsbürgertum (properties bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie of culture), or, more prosaically, in that

Quote from: Weber M. 2013. Selected: Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism. M.; St. Petersburg: Center for Humanitarian Initiatives; 13. - Note. ed.

that the British tax system dispassionately puts profits (from capital) and fees (for professional services) “under one heading” .

The meeting of property and culture: Koki's ideal type will also be my ideal type, but with one important difference. As a literary historian, I will not be interested in the actual relationships between particular social groups - bankers and high-ranking civil servants, industrialists and doctors, and so on - but rather in the extent to which cultural forms"suitable" for new reality classes; for example, the way the word “comfort” outlines the contours of legitimate bourgeois consumption; or how the pace of the story adapts to a new measured existence. Bourgeois through the prism of literature is the subject of the book “Bourgeois”.

2. Dissonances

Bourgeois culture: is it united or not? “The banner of many colors... may serve as a [symbol] for the class that was under my microscope,” writes Peter Gay, completing the five volumes of his work The Bourgeois Experience. “Economic selfishness, religious agendas, intellectual convictions, social competition, the proper place of women became political issues over which some bourgeois fought with others,” he adds in a later review, and explains that the pronounced differences even lead to “the temptation to doubt is that the bourgeoisie could generally be defined as an entity.” For Gay, all these "striking differences" are the result of acceleration social change in the 19th century and therefore typical of the history of the bourgeoisie of the Victorian era. But the antimonies of bourgeois culture can be looked at from a more distant perspective. Abi Warburg, in an essay on the Sassetti Chapel in the Church of Santa Trinita, drawing on Machiavelli, who described Lorenzo de' Medici the Magnificent in the History of Florence as a man who simultaneously led a life both frivolous and full of affairs and worries (la vita leggera e la grave), in the most unimaginable way combining two different natures (quasi con impossibile congiunzione congiunte)3, notes that a resident of Florence during the Medici era combined completely different characters of an idealist (be it a Christian of the Middle Ages, a romantically inclined knight or a classical Neoplatonist) and a layman, a practical Etruscan merchant -pagan. Natural, but harmonious in its vitality, this mysterious creature joyfully responded to every psychic impulse as an expansion of its mental horizon, which can be developed and used for its pleasure 4.

A mysterious creature, idealistic and worldly. Turning to another golden age of the bourgeoisie, midway between the Medici dynasty and the Victorians, Simon Schama reflects on the unusual coexistence that allowed secular and ecclesiastical rulers to live with a value system that might otherwise seem highly contradictory, the centuries-old struggle between acquisitiveness and asceticism . The incorrigible habit of self-indulgence and the stimulation of risky enterprises, the craving for which was rooted in the Dutch commercial economy, evoked warning murmurs and solemn condemnation from the inveterate guardians of the old orthodoxy. The unusual coexistence of seemingly opposing value systems gave them room to maneuver between the holy and the profane, depending on the demands of need or conscience, without confronting them with a cruel choice between poverty and eternal torment.

See: Machiavelli N. 1987. History of Florence. M.: Science; 351. Transl. N. Ya. Rykova. - Note. ed.

A similar combination of incongruous things appears on the pages dedicated by Warburg to the portrait of the patron in “Flemish Art and the Early Florentine Renaissance” (1902): “The hands are still folded in a selfless gesture, seeking protection from heaven, but the gaze, either in dreams, or alert, directed towards the earthly."

Indulgence of material desires and the old orthodoxy: “The People of Delft” (original title “The Burgomaster of Delft and His Daughter”) by Jan Steen looks at us from the cover of Schama’s book (see Fig. 1). This is a sitting, overweight man in black, on one arm of whom is a daughter in clothes with gold and silver embroidery, and on the other is a beggar woman in faded rags. Everywhere, from Florence to Amsterdam, the open animation in the faces depicted in Santa Trinita disappeared. The joyless burgher sits in his chair, as if discouraged because he is doomed “to be the subject of moral prodding, pulling him in different directions” (Shama again); he is next to his daughter, but does not look at her, he turned towards the woman, but not towards her, he looks down, his gaze is distracted. What to do?

Different natures, combined in the most unimaginable way, Machiavelli, Warburg’s “mysterious creature”, Schama’s “centuries-old struggle”: in comparison with these early contradictions of bourgeois culture, the essence of the Victorian era is revealed - a time of compromise in a much to a greater extent than contrast. Compromise is not uniformity, of course, and the Victorians may still be considered "multi-colored"; however, these colors are remnants of the past and they are losing their brightness. A gray, not multi-colored, banner is what flutters over the bourgeois age.

3. Bourgeoisie, middle class

“I find it difficult to understand why the bourgeoisie does not like to be called that,” writes Groothuisen in his outstanding study, The Origin of the Bourgeois Spirit in France. - Kings were called kings, priests - priests, knights - knights; but the bourgeoisie preferred to remain incognito." Garder l "incognito - to remain incognito. Inevitably, this ubiquitous and vague label comes to mind - “middle class.” Reinhart Koselleck writes that each concept “sets a special horizon of potential experience and possible theory,” and, choosing “middle class” instead of “bourgeoisie” , the English language certainly defined a very clear horizon of social perception. But why did the bourgeois arise “somewhere in the middle”; yes, he “was not a peasant or a serf, but he was also not noble,” as Wallerstein put it? , however, this middle ground was what he, in fact, wanted to overcome: born into the “middle class” of early modern England, Robinson Crusoe rejects his father’s idea that this is “the best class in the world” and devotes his whole life to what to go beyond it. Why then settle for a definition that returns this class to its indistinguishable origins, rather than recognizing its successes? What stakes were made in choosing the “middle class” instead of the “bourgeois”?

The word "bourgeois" first appeared in French in the 11th century as burgeis - to designate those inhabitants of medieval cities (bourgs) who enjoyed the right of "freedom and independence from feudal jurisdiction" (French dictionary "Le Grand Robert"). To the legal meaning of this term, from which the typically bourgeois idea of freedom as “freedom from something” came, was added around the end of the 17th century by an economic meaning, which referred through the already familiar series of negations to “one who did not belong either to the clergy or to nobility, did not work with his hands and had independent means” (“Le Grand Robert”). From this moment on, although

There is a more distant past behind Wallerstein's double negative, which is covered by Émile Benveniste in the chapter “The Craft Without a Name: Trade” in his Dictionary of Indo-European Social Terms. In short, Benveniste's thesis is that trade is one of the most early forms"bourgeois" activity and, "at least in antiquity, the pursuit of trade were not among those activities that were sanctified by tradition", therefore, such an activity could only be defined using negative expressions such as the Greek askholia and the Latin negotium ( nec-otium, “negation of leisure”), or general terms such as the Greek pragma, the French affaires (“the result of the substantivization of the expression à faire”) or the English busy (which “gave the abstract noun business”) (op. from: Benveniste E. 1995. Dictionary of Indo-European social terms. M.: Progress; 108-109 - Ed.

Rice. 1. Jan Steen. Residents of Delft (Burgomaster of Delft and his daughter). 1655 (Courtesy Bridgeman Art Library)

The nology and semantics may have been different in different countries,6 the word appears in all Western European languages, from Italian borghese to Spanish burgués, Portuguese burguês, German Burger and Dutch burger. Against the background of this group, the English word bourgeois stands out as the only example of a word that was not assimilated into the morphology of the national language, but remained as an unmistakably recognizable borrowing from French. Indeed, "(French) burgher or freeman" is the first definition of bourgeois as a noun in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED); “belonging to the French middle class” is an adjective definition, immediately supported by a series of quotations referring to France, Italy and Germany. The feminine noun bourgeoise is “a French woman belonging to the middle class,” while bourgeoisie (the first three dictionary entries mention France, continental Europe and Germany) according to all the above is “the body of free citizens of a French city; French middle class; also extends to the middle class in other countries” (also OED).

Bourgeois is marked as non-English. In Dinah Craik's best-selling John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), a fictional biography of a textile mill owner, the word appears only three times, always in italics to indicate that it is foreign, and used only pejoratively ("I mean the lower class , bourgeoisie"), to express contempt (“What? A bourgeoisie - a shopkeeper?”). As for the other novelists of Mrs. Craik's time, they remain completely silent. In the database of the publishing company Chadwyck Healey (Cambridge), in which 250 novels form a kind of expanded canon of the 19th century, the word bourgeois appears in the years 1850-1860. only once, while rich (rich) occurs 4600 times, wealthy (wealthy) - 613 times, and

The trajectory of the German Bürger - "from (Stadt-)Bürger (burger) around 1700 through (Staats-)Bürger (citizen) around 1800 to Bürger (bourgeois) as 'non-proletarian' around 1900" - is particularly striking. Cm.: .

prosperous (prosperous) - 449. And if we include the entire century in our study, approaching it from the point of view of the area of use rather than the frequency of the term, 3,500 novels from The Stanford Literary Lab give the following results: the adjective rich combines with 1060 different nouns, wealthy - with 215, prosperous - with 156, and bourgeois - with 8, including “family”, “doctor”, “virtues”, “appearance”, “affection”, “theater” and for some reason "heraldic shield"

Why such reluctance? In general, Coca writes, bourgeois groups separate themselves from the old power, the privileged hereditary nobility and the absolute monarchy. The opposite follows from this line of reasoning: to the extent that these dividing lines are absent or erased, talk of a Bürgertum (burghership), both large in scope and strictly limited, loses its real essence. This explains the international differences: where the tradition of aristocracy was weak or absent (as in Switzerland and the United States), where early de-feudalization and commercialization of agriculture gradually erased the distinction between nobility and bourgeoisie and even between town and country (as in England and Sweden ), we find powerful factors preventing the formation of a well-identified Bürgertum and a discourse about it.

The lack of a clear "line of demarcation" for the discourse on Bürgertum is what has made the English language so indifferent to the word "bourgeois". Conversely, the expression "middle class" gained support for the simple reason that many of those who observed early industrial Britain wanted a class in the middle. The industrial areas, wrote the Scottish historian James Mill (1773-1836) in an essay on government (1824), “especially suffered from a great lack of middle class, because the population there consisted almost entirely of rich manufacturers and poor laborers.”

Poor and rich: “There is no other city in the world,” noted Canon Parkinson in his famous description of Manchester, which was echoed by many of his contemporaries, “where the distance between the poor and the rich is so great, or the barriers between them so difficult to overcome.” As industrial growth led to the polarization of English society (the Communist Manifesto clearly stated that society should split into two classes: property owners and dispossessed workers), the need for mediation grew, and the class in the middle seemed the only one capable of " sympathize" with the "unhappy lot of the poor workers" (Mill again) and at the same time "guide" them with "your advice" and "set a good example to follow." They were “the link between the higher and lower orders,” added Lord Brougham, who described the class in his 1832 Reform speech entitled “The Intelligence of the Middle Class” as “the true bearers of sober, rational, sensible and honest English feeling."

If economics created a broad historical need for a class in the middle, policymakers added a crucial tactical twist. In the Google Books corpus, "middle class", "middle classes" and "bourgeois" appear with more or less equal frequency in 1800-1825; but in the years immediately preceding the Reform Bill of 1832, when the relationship between social structure and political representation came to the center of public life, the expressions "middle class" and "middle classes" suddenly came to be used two to three times more often than the word " bourgeois". Perhaps because the idea of a "middle class" was a way of ignoring the bourgeoisie as an independent group and instead looking down on it, entrusting it with the task of political containment.

7 “It was vital in 1830-1832, according to the Whig ministers, to destroy the radical alliance by driving a wedge between the middle class and the workers,” writes F. M. L. Thompson. Attempts

Then, after the “baptism” took place and the new term was approved, all sorts of consequences (and reversals) began: although the “middle class” and the “bourgeois” pointed to absolutely the same social reality, they, for example, created completely different associations, and, finding themselves “in the middle,” the bourgeoisie could seem like a group that was itself subordinate and unable to bear responsibility for what was happening in the world. Moreover, “lower,” “middle,” and “higher” formed a continuum within which mobility was much easier to imagine than in the case of incommensurable categories—“classes”—such as the peasantry, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, or the nobility. And thus the symbolic horizon created by the expression "middle class" ultimately worked exceptionally well for the English (and American) bourgeoisie: the initial defeat of 1832, which made "independent representation of the bourgeoisie" impossible, subsequently protected them from direct criticism , maintaining a euphemized version of social hierarchy. Groothuisen was right: the incognito tactic worked.

4. Between history and literature

The bourgeois between history and literature: in this book I will limit myself to only a handful of possible examples. And I’ll start with the bourgeoisie before the prise de pouvoir (coming to power) (see Chapter 1 of this book “A Working Master”), with a dialogue between Defoe and Weber about a man who finds himself on a desert island, cut off from the rest of humanity , who, however, begins to see patterns in his experience and find the right words to express them. In Chapter 2 (“Serious Century”) the island turns into half a continent: the bourgeoisie has spread throughout Western Europe and expanded its influence in many directions. This is the most “aesthetic” moment in this story: the invention of narrative devices, unity of style, masterpieces - great bourgeois literature if there ever was one. Chapter 3 (“Fog”) is dedicated to Victorian England and tells a different story: after decades incredible success the bourgeois can no longer simply be “himself”; his power over the rest of society - his "hegemony" - was in question; and it is at this moment that the bourgeois suddenly begins to be ashamed of himself; he gained power, but lost his clarity of vision - his “style”. This is the turning point of the narrative, as well as the moment of truth: the bourgeois turned out to be much better at dominating the economic sphere than at consolidating a political presence and formulating a common culture. Then the sun of the bourgeois age begins to set: in the southern and eastern regions described in Chapter 4 (“National Malformations”), one great figure after another suffers the collapse and becomes a universal laughing stock due to the continuation of the old regime; At the same time, from the tragic no-man's land (which, of course, is wider than Norway), a radical self-criticism of bourgeois existence is heard in Ibsen's dramaturgical cycle (Chapter 5, “Ibsen and the Spirit of Capitalism”).

Let's stop this retelling. However, let me add a few words about the relationship between the study of literature and the study of history as such. What kind of history—what kind of evidence—do literary works contain? Obviously, they are never direct: the industrialist Thornton in North and South (1855) or the entrepreneur Wokulski in The Doll (1890) say nothing about the bourgeoisie of Manchester or Warsaw. This kind of evidence belongs to a parallel historical series - to a kind of double helix, in which the convulsions of capitalist modernization correspond to the literary form-creation that transforms them. “Every form

the disunity of the middle class with the lower strata of society was complemented by promises of an alliance with the higher strata of society: “It is of the first importance,” said Lord Gray, “to keep the middle classes connected with the higher strata of society.” As Dror Warman, who has reconstructed the middle-class debate with exceptional clarity, points out, Brougham's famous praise also emphasized "political responsibility... rather than inflexibility, loyalty to the crown rather than the rights of the people, values as a bulwark against revolution, and not on an attempt on freedom" (Labman 1995: 308-309).

Ma is the resolution of the dissonances of existence,” wrote the young Lukács in “The Theory of the Novel” 8. And if so, then literature is strange world, in which all these “resolutions” are preserved intact or, more simply put, they are texts that we continue to read even when the dissonances themselves have gradually disappeared from sight: the fewer traces of them remain, the more successful their resolution turned out to be.

There is something ghostly about this story, in which the questions disappear but the answers remain. But if we accept the idea of literary form as the remains of what was once a living and problematic present, and work backward through "reverse engineering", we will understand the problem that this form was intended to solve. And if we do this, formal analysis can reveal - in principle, although not always in practice - a dimension of the past that would otherwise remain hidden. This is a possible contribution to historical knowledge: having understood Ibsen's opaque allusions to the past or the evasive semantics of Victorian verbs, even the role of the gerund is not at first glance a very fun task! - in Robinson Crusoe, we will enter the kingdom of shadows, where the past again finds its voice and continues to speak to us9.

5. Abstract hero

But time speaks to us only through form as a medium. Stories and styles: that's where I find bourgeois. Especially in styles, which in itself is surprising, especially considering how often they talk about narratives as the basis of social identity10 and identify the bourgeoisie with unrest and change; it is enough to recall some of the most famous examples from the “Phenomenology of Spirit” or “everything classed and stagnant disappears”11 in the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” and creative destruction in Schumpeter. I therefore expected that bourgeois literature would be characterized by new and unpredictable plots: “leaps into the dark,” as Elster wrote about capitalist innovation. Instead, as I argue in the chapter “The Serious Age,” the opposite happens:

Quote from: Lukács G. 1994. Theory of the novel. New Literary Review. 9:30. - Note. ed.

Aesthetic forms represent structured responses to social contradictions: given the relationship between literary history and social history, I suggested that the essay “The Serious Age,” although originally written for a literary anthology, would fit well into this book (after all, his The working title for a long time was “On bourgeois seriousness”). But when I re-read this essay, I immediately felt (by this word I mean an irrational and irresistible feeling) that I would have to part with a significant part of the original text and rewrite the rest. After editing, I realized that this affected mainly three sections (all of which were originally entitled “The Parting of the Roads”), which outlined a broader morphological landscape within which the forms of bourgeois seriousness took shape. In other words, I felt the need to remove the range of formal variations that were given historically, and leave the result of selection that occurred in the 19th century. In a book devoted to bourgeois culture, this seems a compelling choice, but it also highlights the difference between literary history as the history of literature, in which the pluralism and contingency of formal options is a key element of the picture, and literary history as (part of) the history of society, where the connections between specific form and social function.

A recent example from a book on the French bourgeoisie: “Here I put forward the thesis that the existence of social groups, although rooted in the material world, is determined by language, or rather by narrative: in order for a group to claim the role of actor in society and the political order, it must have a story or stories about itself.”

The English translation literally reads: “All that is solid melts into air.” - Note. lane

Schumpeter “praised capitalism not for its efficiency and rationality, but for its dynamic character...Rather than retouching the creative and unpredictable aspects of innovation, he makes them the cornerstone of his theory. Innovation is essentially a phenomenon of disequilibrium, a leap in the dark.”

balance, and orderliness was the main narrative invention of bourgeois Europe13. Everything that is solid hardens even more.

Why? The main reason, apparently, lies in the bourgeoisie himself. In the course of the 19th century, as soon as the shameful stigma of “new wealth” was washed away, this figure acquired several characteristic features: energy above all; self-restraint; clear mind; honesty in business dealings; determination. These are all “good” traits, but they are not good enough to fit the type of story hero that Western literature has relied on for centuries—the warrior, the knight, the conqueror, the adventurer. “The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail,” Schum-Peter wrote mockingly, and business life “in an office among columns with figures” is doomed to be “unheroic in essence”14. The point is the huge gap between the old and new ruling classes: while the aristocracy shamelessly idealized itself, creating a whole gallery of knights without fear or reproach, the bourgeoisie did not create a similar myth about itself. The great mechanism of adventure was gradually destroyed by bourgeois civilization, and without adventure the heroes lost the imprint of the uniqueness that comes from encountering the unknown15. Compared to the knight, the bourgeois seems inconspicuous and elusive, similar to any other bourgeois. At the beginning of the novel North and South, the heroine describes the mother of a Manchester industrialist:

"- ABOUT! “I barely know him,” said Margaret... “... about thirty... his face is not simple-minded

and not beautiful, nothing remarkable. not quite a gentleman, as one might expect.

Barely. near. not quite. nothing... Margaret's judgment, usually quite sharp, is lost in a whirlpool of reservations. The point is the abstractness of the bourgeois as a type: in its extreme form it is simply “personified capital” or even “a machine for transforming ... surplus value into additional capital,” to quote several passages from Capital 17. In Marx, as later in Weber , the methodical suppression of all sensual traits makes it difficult to imagine how this kind of character can even serve as the center of an interesting story, unless, of course, it is a story of his self-suppression, as in Mann’s portrait of Thomas Buddenbrook (which made a deep impression on Weber himself)18. The situation is different in the earlier period or on the periphery of capitalist Europe, where the weakness of capitalism as a system leaves more freedom to invent such powerful individual figures as Robinson Crusoe, Gesualdo Motta

13 A similar bourgeois resistance to narrative emerges from Richard Helgerson's exploration of the golden age of Dutch realism, a visual culture in which "women, children, servants, peasants, artisans and rakes act" while "male masters of the upper classes...exist" and which finds its favorite form in the genre of portraiture.

14 In the same vein, Weber recalls Carlyle’s definition of Cromwell’s century as “the last of our heroism [the last outbreak of our heroism]” (quoted in: Weber M. 2013. Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism. In the book: Weber M. Selected . M.; St. Petersburg: Center for Humanitarian Initiatives; 20. - Ed.

15 On the relationship between the adventurer mentality and the spirit of capitalism, see: ; see also the first two sections of Chapter 1 of this book.

16 Transl. from English V. Grigorieva, E. Pervushina. Quote from: Gaskell E. 2011. North and South. In 2 vols. M.: ABC-Atticus. URL: http://apropospage.ru/lib/gasckeU/gasckeU7.html - Note. ed.

17 Quoted. from: Marx K. 1960. Capital. In the ed.: Marx K., Engels F. Works: In 50 volumes. T. 23. M.: State Publishing House of Political Literature; 695, 609. - Note. ed.

18 On Mann and the bourgeoisie, in addition to numerous works by Lukács, see: . If there was a specific moment when the idea of a book about the bourgeois came to my mind, it happened more than 40 years ago, when I was reading Alberto Azor Rosa, and I began writing the book in 1999-2000, at which time I was in Berlin, where he spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg).

or Stanislav Vokulsky. But where capitalist structures harden, narratives and stylistic mechanisms displace individuals from the center of the text. This is another way of looking at the structure of this book: two chapters on bourgeois heroes and two on bourgeois language.

6. Prose and Keywords: Preliminary Notes

I wrote a little higher that the bourgeoisie is more clearly manifested in style than in plots, and style, in turn, manifests itself mainly in prose and is reflected in keywords. The rhetoric of prose will gradually move into the center of our attention, aspect by aspect (continuity, precision, productivity, neutrality...). In the first two chapters of the book, I trace genealogies through the 18th and 19th centuries. Bourgeois prose was a great achievement and extremely laborious. The absence in her world of any concept of "inspiration" - that gift of the gods in which idea and results magically merge into one in a unique moment of creation - shows the extent to which it was impossible to imagine prose without immediately recalling labor About language work, of course, but of a kind that embodies some of the typical features of bourgeois activity. If the book “Bourgeois” has a main character, then it is, of course, labor-intensive prose.

The prose I have now outlined is an ideal type, never fully realized in any particular text. Keywords are another matter; these are real words used by real writers, which can be easily traced in a particular book. In this case, the conceptual framework was laid down decades ago by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society and Keywords, and by Reinhart Koselleck in his work on the history of concepts (Begriffgeschichte). For Koselleck, who studies the political language of modern Europe, “a concept not only indicates the relations that it embraces; the concept is also a factor operating within them." More precisely, it is a factor that establishes a “tension” between language and reality and is often “deliberately used as a weapon.” Although this method is important for intellectual history, it may not be suitable for a social being who, as Groothuisen puts it, “acts but says little,” and when he speaks prefers simple and everyday expressions to intellectual clarity of concepts. "Weapon" is of course the wrong term for pragmatic and constructive keywords like useful, efficiency, serious, not to mention such great mediators as comfort or influence, which are much closer to Benveniste’s idea of language as “an instrument for the adaptation of the world and society”19 than to Koselleck’s “tension”. I believe it is no coincidence that many of my key words turned out to be adjectives: not occupying such a central position in the semantic system of culture as nouns, adjectives are unsystematic and indeed “adapted”; or, as Humpty Dumpty contemptuously says, “adjectives, you can do whatever you want with them.”

Prose and keywords: two parallel currents that will emerge to the surface of the argument in different levels- paragraphs, sentences or individual words. Through them, the features of bourgeois culture will appear, located in the hidden and sometimes deeply buried dimension of language: a “mentality” formed by unconscious grammatical patterns and semantic associations, rather than by clear and distinct ideas. The original plan for the book was different, and at times I myself am perplexed by the fact that pages devoted to Victorian adjectives may be the conceptual center of The Bourgeois. But if much attention has been paid to the ideas of the bourgeois, his mentality, with the exception of a few isolated attempts like Grothuisen's essay written almost a century ago, still remains little studied; then minutiae

(small details) of language reveal the secrets of great ideas: friction between new aspirations and old habits, false starts, hesitations, compromises; in a word, slow pace cultural history. For a book that treats bourgeois history as an unfinished project, this seems the right methodological choice.

7. “The burgher will disappear...”

Benjamin Guggenheim, the younger brother of Solomon Guggenheim, found himself aboard the Titanic on April 14, 1912, and when the ship began to sink, he was one of those who helped put women and children on lifeboats, despite the excitement and sometimes rudeness from the sides of other male passengers. And then, when the steward was asked to take a place at the oars in one of the boats, Guggenheim dismissed him and asked him to tell his wife that “not a single woman was left on board because Ben Guggenheim was cowardly.” And this was indeed the case. Perhaps he did not utter such pathetic words, but that really doesn’t matter; he did the right thing, a very difficult thing. When a pre-production researcher for Cameron's Titanic (1997) unearthed this story, he immediately showed it to the writers: what a scene! But his idea was immediately rejected: too unrealistic. The rich don't die for abstract principles like cowardice and the like. And in the film, a character vaguely reminiscent of Guggenheim breaks through to the lifeboat, waving a pistol.

“The burgher will perish,” wrote Thomas Mann in his 1932 essay “Goethe as a Representative of the Burgher Age.” Two episodes related to the Titanic that occurred at the beginning and end of the 20th century confirm this. It will disappear not because capitalism is leaving: it is stronger than ever (although mainly, like the Golem, it is strong in destruction). The sense of legitimacy of the bourgeoisie has disappeared, the idea of a ruling class that not only rules, but does it deservedly, has disappeared. It was this conviction that lay behind Guggenheim's words on the Titanic: what was at stake was the "prestige (and therefore credibility)" of his class, to use Gramsci's words on hegemony. To retreat meant losing the right to power.

We are talking about power justified by values. But just at the moment when the question of political rule by the bourgeoisie arose, three important innovations appeared in rapid succession and changed the picture forever. First there was a political collapse. When the Belle Epoque (Belle Epoque) came to its vulgar end, like the operetta in which it so loved to look, as if in a mirror, the bourgeoisie, united with the old elite, dragged Europe into a bloody massacre, after which it hid with its interests behind the backs of the brown and the Blackshirts, opening the way to even bloodier carnage. As the old regime waned, the new people were unable to act as a true ruling class: in 1942, Schumpeter wrote with cold contempt that “the bourgeois class... needs a master,” and there was no need to explain what it had in mind.

A second transformation, almost the opposite in nature, began after the Second World War with the increasingly widespread establishment of democratic regimes. “The peculiarity of the historical approval received from the masses within modern capitalist formations,” writes Perry Anderson, “lies in the conviction of the masses that they exercise final self-determination within the existing social order ... in the belief in the democratic equality of all citizens in the government of the country - in other words, in disbelief in the existence of any ruling class."

20 Having become “the first class in history to achieve economic supremacy without seeking political power,” writes Hannah Arendt, the bourgeoisie achieved “political liberation” during the “period of imperialism (1886-1914).”

Once hidden behind ranks of uniformed men, the bourgeoisie now escaped justice by taking advantage of a political myth that demanded that it disappear as a class. This act of camouflage has been greatly facilitated by the ubiquity of the “middle class” discourse. And finally, the final touch. As capitalism brought relative prosperity to the broad working masses of the West, commodities became the new principle of legitimation: consensus was built on things, not people, much less principles. This was the dawn of the present era: the triumph of capitalism and the death of bourgeois culture.

There is a lot missing from this book. I have already written about something in other works and felt that I could not add anything new: this is the case with Balzac’s parvenus or the middle class in Dickens, in W. Congreve’s comedy “This is the Way of the World.” the World"), and this is important for me in the Atlas of the European Novel21. American authors of the late 19th century - Noris, Howells, Dreiser - it seemed to me that they could add little to big picture; Moreover, "Bourgeois" is a biased essay, devoid of encyclopedic ambitions. However, there is one topic that I would actually like to include here if it did not threaten to become a book in its own right: the parallel between Victorian Britain and the post-1945 United States, revealing the paradox of these two capitalist hegemonic cultures (before still the only ones of its kind), based mainly on anti-bourgeois values22. I am referring, of course, to the ubiquity of religious sentiment in public discourse, which is on the rise, sharply reversing earlier trends toward secularization. The same thing happens with the great technological advances of the 19th century and the second half of the 20th century: instead of supporting a rationalist mentality, the industrial revolution and then the digital revolution produced a mixture of incredible scientific illiteracy and religious prejudice - even worse now than then. In this respect, today's United States radicalizes the central thesis of the Victorian chapter: the defeat of Weber's Entzauberung (the disenchantment of the world) at the heart of the capitalist system and its replacement by new sentimental enchantments that obscure social relations. In both cases, the key component was the radical infantilization of national culture (the sanctimonious idea of “family reading”, which led to censorship of obscenity in Victorian literature, and its saccharine counterpart - the family smiling from the television screen that has put the American entertainment industry to sleep)23. And this parallel can be continued in almost all directions - from the anti-intellectualism of "useful" knowledge and most educational policy (starting with obsessive passion for sports) to the ubiquity of words like earnest (serious) before and fun (fun) now, in of whom there is a barely veiled contempt for intellectual and emotional seriousness.

The "American way of life" is the equivalent of today's Victorianism: tempting as the idea was, I was only too aware of my ignorance of contemporary issues and this is why

21 See: Moretti F. 199S. Atlas of the European Novel: 1800-1900. London; New York: Verso. - Note. lane

22 In everyday usage, the term “hegemony” covers two historically and logically different areas: the hegemony of a capitalist state over other capitalist states and the hegemony of one social class over others social classes, or, in short, international and national hegemony. Britain and the United States have so far been the only examples of international hegemony, but of course there are many examples of national bourgeois classes exercising their hegemony at home. My thesis in this paragraph and in the chapter "The Fog" relates to the specific values that I associate with British and American national hegemony. How these values relate to those that have become the basis of international hegemony is a very interesting question, but it is not addressed here.

23 It is significant that the most representative storytellers in the two cultures - Dickens and Spielberg - specialize in appealing to children and adults alike.

mu decided not to include it here. This was a correct but difficult decision, because it was tantamount to admitting that "Bourgeois" is an exclusively historical study, essentially not connected with the present. Professors of history, Dr. Cornelius reflects in “Unrest and Early Woe,” do not like history as soon as it happens, but gravitate towards that which has already happened... Their hearts belong to a coherent and tamed historical past... the past is unshakable through the centuries, which means it is dead” 24. Like Cornelius, I am also a history professor, but I would like to think that tamed lifelessness is not all that I am capable of. In this regard, the dedication of The Bourgeois to Perry Anderson and Paolo Flores Arcaiz is not just a sign of my friendship and admiration for them, it is an expression of the hope that one day I will learn from them to use the mind of the past to criticize the present. This book failed to live up to my expectations. But maybe the next one can.

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NEW TRANSLATIONS

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature

MORETTI, Franco -

the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor in the Humanities, Department of English, Stanford University. Address: Building 460, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305-2087, USA.

The book "The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature" written by Franco Moretti, the professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and the founder of the Center for the Study of the Novel and Literary Lab, is dedicated to the history of the bourgeois as a social class of the modern Western society. The bourgeois, refracted through the prism of literature, is the subject of "The Bourgeois". Addressing to some pieces of the Western literature, the author tries to scrutinize the reasons of the bourgeois culture's golden age and to reveal causes of its further fall. Moretti focuses not on real relationships between social groups but on legitimate cultural forms, which demonstrate peculiarities of the bourgeois and demarcate it from working and ruling classes. In addition, the author seeks an answer to the questions why the notion of bourgeois was being replaced with the concept of the middle class and why the bourgeois failed to resist political and cultural challenges of the modern Western society.

Email: [email protected]

The journal of Economic Sociology publications "Introduction: Concepts and Contradictions" from "The Bourgeois". In the Introduction, Moretti formulates the problem of the study, defines key concepts and explains the applied methodology, demonstrating weaknesses and strengths of the formal analysis of literary prose for understanding the social history. In the Introduction, Moretti describes the book's structure and sheds lights on the dark corners, which require additional research.

Key words: bourgeois; middle class; capitalism; culture; ideology; modern European literature; social structure; social and economic history.

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Anderson P. (1992a) The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution. English Questions, London: Verso, pp. 105120.

Anderson P. (1992b) The Figures of Descent. English Questions, London: Verso, pp. 121-192.

Arendt H. (1994) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Penguin Books.

Asor Rosa A. (1968) Thomas Mann o dell "ambiguità Borghese. Contropiano, vol. 2, pp. 319-376; vol. 3, pp. 527-576.

Benveniste E. (1971) Remarks on the Function of Language in Freudian Theory. Problems in General Linguistics, Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, pp. 65-75.

Benveniste E. (1973) Indo-European Language and Society. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press.

Brougham H. (1837) Opinions of Lord Brougham on Politics, Theology, Law, Science, Education, Literature, &c. &c.: As Exhibited in His Parliamentary and Legal Speeches, and Miscellaneous Writings, London: H. Colburn.

Carroll L. (1998) Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Harmondsworth: Puffin.

Davis J. H. (1988) The Guggenheims, 1848-1988: An American Epic, New York: Shapolsky Publishers.

Elster J. (1983) Explaining Technical Change: A Case Study in the Philosophy of Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gaskell E. (2005) North and South, New York; London: Norton.

Gay P. (1984) The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. I. Education of the Senses, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gay P. (1999) The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. V. Pleasure Wars, New York: Norton.

Gay P. (2002) Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914, New York: Norton.

Gramsci A. (1975) Quaderni del carcere, Torino: Giulio Einaudi (in Italian).

Groethuysen B. (1927) Origines de l'esprit bourgeois en France. I: L'Eglise et la Bourgeoisie, Paris: Gallimard (in French).

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M. Brown's article “Rethinking the Scope of Literary History” begins with the following quote from L. Lipking: “Writing literary history used to be impossible, but recently it has become much more difficult” (Brown 2002: 116). This phrase opened the 1995 collection The Purposes of Literary History, and Brown's article is included in the 2002 collection Rethinking Literary History. The purpose of these and many other publications is to find ways out of the methodological impasse that threatens the existence of literary history as a discipline. The topic has long become traditional - the crisis of literary history as a scientific genre has been going on for at least three decades. In many ways, this crisis is part of the general crisis of historiography. Although literary history was previously an extremely unreliable area of historical knowledge, it could not help but be affected by the problematization of the truth claims of historiographical discourse in general. When structural analysis historiographic texts, done by H. White and his followers, revealed their irreducible dependence on fixed narrative modes, the realization that “the structure of discourse is not part of the subject of discourse” (Lang 1997: 429), called into question the referentiality of historiography as such.

The results of structuralist criticism were then used for political purposes. The demonstration of the dependence of history on the form of historiographical narrative, together with the idea that narrative is “an activity in which politics, tradition, history and interpretation are combined” (Said 1979: 221), became a powerful argument in favor of the fragmentation of Big History into many competing stories , written from the point of view of a particular social or national group. The pragmatic logic behind this fragmentation is quite clear: since, as K. Jenkins wrote, “all modern historiographic ensemble, including history with both a capital and a small letter, appears to be closed in on itself, reflecting certain interests with an ideological-interpretative discourse, deprived of any access to the past as such” (Jenkins 1997: 6), then there are no reasons not to write history so that it reflects your ideological interests. Of course, these alternative histories often claim that by addressing previously ignored topics and allowing traditionally repressed voices to be heard, they speak some hitherto unknown truth, but from the point of view of a consistently structuralist analysis they are only variations on the old historiographical rhetoric with its claim to disinterested realism.

In the field of literary history, the process of fragmentation of a single history undermines, first of all, the national historical and literary model. As L. Hutcheon writes in the above-mentioned 2002 collection, this model was originally based “on the idealistic philosophy of history of the Romantics, with its emphasis on the importance of origins and the idea of continuous organic development,” and “aimed at drawing an implicit parallel between the inevitable progress of the nation and literature ” (Hutcheon 2002: 5). “Just as national literature was perceived [within the framework of romantic historical thought - A.Shch.] as developing over time, continually improving, increasing its strength and influence, so the nation itself had to grow and reach maturity from its foundation to telos political apotheosis” (ibid.: 7). Naturally, such a model is unacceptable for Hutcheon, just as it turns out to be unacceptable for numerous national groups striving for self-determination and rejecting traditional historical and literary narratives, which did not sufficiently reflect their national and cultural identity. Hutcheon, however, notes with some alarm the “persistent persistence of (national) evolutionary models of literary history” (ibid.: 9) - new histories of literature are structurally little different from the works of romantic historical thought, although they now feature other nations. Literature in these histories is still seen as an instrument for the creation and maintenance of national identity, and its history, through its very structure, makes “a direct contribution to the definition of what Lauren Berlant in another context calls the “national symbolic” through which “the historical nation seeks to achieve inevitability, the status of natural law” (ibid.).

Example of creating alternative national stories literature quite clearly exposes the general problem: criticism of traditional forms of historiographical narratives does not offer them any alternative. We either abandon writing history entirely or, out of necessity, use one of the discredited narrative modes. It is not surprising that the traditional model of literary history “persistently persists not so much in the form of a simple explanatory or causal narrative (though that too) but in the form of a teleological narrative of successive evolution” (Hutcheon 2002: 5). In this regard, the article Art. Greenblatt's “Racial Memory and Literary History,” immediately following Hutcheon's article. While the latter, albeit with reservations, welcomes the old histories of new literatures as a necessary stage of national development, Greenblatt's article is imbued with a spirit of sad warnings. He draws attention to the fact that the totalizing impact of literary fictions, one of which is the history of literature, is fraught with serious ethical problems and often leads to the impoverishment of a polymorphous historical picture. “Literary history, like any form of history, must be subject to some in and the pursuit of truth, even if temporary, cautious and epistemologically modest. If assumptions about an original, basic culture, or a stable, progressively evolving linguistic identity, or ethnic, racial, or sexual identity are misleading, they should not be greeted, even with a secret wink and a whispered assurance that this greeting is all only ironic and performative” (Greenblatt 2002: 58). However, Greenblatt, alas, does not dwell on the problem of epistemological distinction between “misleading” stories and more “true” stories.

In constructive terms, the collection “Rethinking the History of Literature” is dedicated to the search for alternatives to the “teleological narrative of sequential evolution.” At the same time, despite the difference in approaches, the general direction of the search is set quite rigidly. “The way the essays collected here construct themselves differently is a kind of ongoing cyclical process figurations(to use Paul Ricoeur’s term) between literary expression and the society that creates it” (Hutcheon, Valdes 2002: xi). The premise of this construction is also clearly stated in the preface: “...the history of literature can, in fact, be more accurately defined as multiple histories of its production and reception. ...What has come to be called the “institution of literature” - the field in which literary experience is carried out - is today as much a part of the history of literature as the development of genres or thematic motifs” (ibid.: X).

Thus, even more than the “teleological narrative,” the project of rethinking the history of literature excludes the option of considering literature as an autonomous or at least specific series. If we compare these attitudes with what happened in literary criticism 30 years ago, the contrast will be striking. In 1970, J. Hartman wrote that “we have not yet found a theory that connects the form of literary mediation with the form of the artist’s historical consciousness” (Hartman 1970: 366). It is rather difficult to argue that such a theory has since been found - rather, largely thanks to the rise of cultural studies and a general reluctance to read literature as anything other than a source of data about ideological, gender, political and other extraliterary structures, the problem has ceased to be felt as such. Now the history of literature turns out to be simply isomorphic to the history of communities - “it is also a history of fluctuations between good and hard times, told from the privileged point of view of the literary historian,” and “the narrativization of these fluctuations must lie at the very heart of any history of literary culture” (Hutcheon, Valdes 2002: XI). The political implications of the implied “privileged point of view” in this case are also quite definite: for example, more than ten years of German history and seventy years of Russian history. We, however, can well imagine a completely different privileged point of view - and we get, for example, the Soviet Marxist history of literature, which, in essence, also represents the history of “literary culture”, isomorphic to the history of political-economics. Although the Soviet history of literature localized the “hard times” that were detrimental to the prosperity of art somewhat differently, this does not change the essence of the matter.

On the other hand, the crisis in the history of literature, regardless of the state of historiography in general, is associated precisely with the specifics of literature. Although this topic is rarely heard by those who believe that “the history of the production and reception of complex figurations of life can only be written as part of the history of the cultural forces of a society” (Valdes 2002: 67), it has often been stated as a major one in earlier studies. Thus, for H. Miller, the phrase “literary history” has always been “a kind of oxymoron” (Miller 1999: 383). While literary history is considered literary history by historians, literary scholars often view it as too primitive for serious research and useful only for introductory course reading. Hutcheon's position, in this sense, is that of a historian who seeks to normalize the literary field, to transform it into a field of “literary culture” to which the usual historiographical procedures will be applicable. The extreme “literary criticism” position, on the contrary, rejects the historical approach itself in the name of preserving the spirit of literature. It is assumed that in order to fit a literary text into a historical and literary narrative, it must be fairly rigidly structured and made identical to itself. If we assume that the literariness of a text presupposes its irreducibility, fundamental incompleteness, semantic openness, etc., then such historical and literary structuring should be perceived as an unacceptable reduction.

Thus, within the framework of the oppositions articulated above, it is not possible to formulate an intelligible theory of literary history. The only way out is to try to go beyond these limits. One of the attempts to do this was made by P. de Man, who made the statement that structuralism, which considers literature only as literature, makes the same mistake as positivist historiography, which reduces literature to “non-literature”: in both cases it is not the fundamental property of literature to transcend any (self-)definition is taken into account (de Man 1983: 164). Literature understood in this way is no longer so clearly opposed to the traditional historiographical narrative, but at the same time it does not merge with the public “institute of literature” - its relationship with them turns out to be much less clear-cut. To date, the traumatic impact of deconstruction has been largely crowded out of literary consciousness - literary studies of the 1990s, being unable to conduct reasoned polemics with it, chose to forget about its existence. The lack of a coherent critique of poststructuralism made it impossible to fit the deconstruction of the 1970s and 1980s into a “teleological narrative of progressive evolution.” literary theory, and therefore reflection on deconstructionist criticism often comes down to a set of ritual phrases designed not so much to assimilate past experience, but to outline the zone into which it is not recommended for researchers who want to continue moving science to new horizons.

This neglect is unfortunate, not least because, contrary to popular belief, history has always been at the center of the deconstructionist project. In his interview about literature, J. Derrida, for example, said that “deconstruction requires a highly “historical”<“historian’s”>relationship... even if we should be suspicious of the metaphysical concept of history” (Derrida 1992: 54). A deconstructionist critique of historiography certainly includes White's structuralist critique, but it is also capable of rejecting the metaphysical premises of structural analysis itself. The latter, in particular, is characterized by the idea that “the dialectical tension that characterizes the work of every eminent historian” is possible only “in the context of a coherent vision or controlling image of the form of the entire historical field” (White 1973: 29-30). The narrative mode that determines the historiographical narrative is also subordinated to this “image of form.” In other words, White postulates the unity of the rhetoric of interpretation of the historical field and the rhetoric of the historical plot within the historiographical text, and this unity is understood as subordination to identical tropological structures. At the same time, a “rhetorically informed” (the term belongs to de Man) reading of historical and literary texts demonstrates their internal irreducibility: it is not difficult to show that within the historical literary text Fundamentally different and even opposing rhetorical modes coexist, and the contradiction is often localized precisely between the rhetoric of interpretation and the rhetoric of historical narrative. In other words, the rhetoric of a historical-literary text turns out to be fundamentally similar to the irreducible rhetoric of the literary text itself in its poststructuralist understanding.

Derrida's historical project is most clearly laid out in his 1967 book On Grammatology, where the movement towards history is carried out through the specific practice of “critical reading”. According to Derrida, critical reading must, on the one hand, be aware of “the conscious, desired, intentional relationship that the author establishes in his exchange with history,” and, on the other, take into account that “the author writes in such a language and within the framework of such logic, his own system, laws and life of which his discourse, by definition, cannot completely subjugate. And reading should always be aimed at certain attitude, not perceived by the author, between what he controls and what he does not control in the language he uses. This relation is not a specific quantitative distribution of shadow and light, weakness or strength, but a signifying structure that critical reading must produce” (Derrida 1976: 158). At the same time, the refusal to subordinate the language and internal logic of the text to the author’s intention does not lead to the dissolution of the text in the isotropic ahistorical element of intertextuality. “If it seems to us impossible in principle to separate, through interpretation or commentary, the signified from the signifier... we nevertheless believe that this impossibility is historically articulated. ...Even if there is never a pure signified, there are different relationships to what, on the part of the signifier, is presented as an irreducible layer of the signified. ...The whole history of texts, and within it the history of literary forms in the West, must be studied from this point of view” (ibid.: 159-160).

In the quotations given here, literature, with all the reservations, still appears as an object of historical knowledge. The subject of this knowledge, however, is problematic: it is neither the writer at the level of his intentional relationship with history, nor, as subsequent criticism of “On Grammatology” shows, Derrida himself. The role of such a subject can, paradoxically, only be the literary text itself. It seems that “rhetorically informed” or “critical” reading makes it possible to reveal the implicit literary history in literary texts, and this process is inseparable from the parallel reading of literary works devoted to these texts. Just as the texts of various writers imply different stories literature, in the research traditions formed around various writers, their own, also implicit, models of literary history are formed. In fact, thanks to the tradition of perceiving the history of literature from the point of view of “one’s” writer, the history of literature is divided into many divergent stories, and the idea of its unity can only be preserved due to the lack of clarity of the latter.

In order not to be unfounded, we will consider here the “Czech history” of Russian literature as an example of how the rhetoric of literary and literary texts can be connected with the rhetoric of literary history. Chekhov is usually perceived as a writer who draws on the 19th-century tradition and at the same time completes it, so the history of literature is narrativized in this case as a movement from classical realism of the Tolstoyan type towards 20th-century modernism. (It is interesting to note that although there are a number of fundamental works devoted to Chekhov’s poetics and one way or another defining its innovation and place in the history of literature, works directly comparing Chekhov and, for example, Tolstoy are mainly limited to a set of isolated observations. If in the actual Chekhov studies works Since a stable image of pre-Chekhov’s prose has emerged, from which the writer’s innovation is based, it turns out that it is not at all so easy for researchers directly involved with Tolstoy’s texts to contrast them with Chekhov’s. This may serve as an additional argument in favor of the idea that in research paradigms emerging around different ones. writers, different versions of literary history are formed. As a result, researchers seeking to take an intermediate position between, in this case, Czech studies and Tolstoy studies, are faced with the incommensurability of the historical and literary rhetoric that has developed in these fields.) One way or another, in the actual works of Czech studies, historical and literary The transition from Tolstoy to Chekhov is most often described as the movement of literature towards “life.” The “new forms of writing” discovered by Chekhov, which Tolstoy spoke about, are understood in this perspective as the destruction of artificial models (ideological, philosophical, psychological, plot), through the prism of which “Tolstoy’s” literature depicted reality. Comparing Chekhov with Tolstoy, B. Eikhenbaum wrote: “...Chekhov’s method removed the differences and contradictions between the social and personal, historical and intimate, general and private, large and small - the very contradictions over which the Russians struggled so painfully and so fruitlessly literature in search of renewal of life” (Eikhenbaum 1986: 227). Chekhov's intention to destroy traditional oppositions both at the thematic level, where the traditional hierarchy is destroyed, and at the plot level, where the “eventlessness” of Chekhov's stories is affirmed, was subsequently repeatedly described in works by Chekhov studies. We will examine this prevailing concept in detail using the work of A. P. Chudakov, who were chosen by us due to their systematicity, radicalism and influence.

Chudakov discovers relativism in Chekhov at all textual levels. At the level of objective description, we are faced with the “lack of traditional artistic purposiveness of every detail,” which, according to Chudakov, means “freedom of the author’s consciousness from the power of... a rationalistically ordered idea of the world” (Chudakov 1971: 173). At the plot level, it turns out that Chekhov’s events are ineffective and are not capable of changing the course of life. The flow of existence is continuous and has no end. “Both the plot and the plot demonstrate a picture of the new in And of the world - the accidental - and the accidental, in all its unselected multiplicity, its image” (ibid.: 228). Therefore, Chekhov's works should not be finished. The openness of Chekhov's endings - a common place in contemporary criticism of Chekhov - must be consistent with Chudakov's concept. Ideological structures are also destroyed in Chekhov’s works - Chekhov’s idea “cannot be removed from the empirical existence in which it is immersed” (ibid.: 261). In general, according to Chudakov, Chekhov’s world is as close as possible to a chaotic, meaningless, random, adogmatic existence.

The specificity of such poetics is difficult to overestimate. In the traditional structuralist understanding, a literary text always imposes paradigmatic connections on the moments described. Thus, from the point of view of Yu. Lotman, the deployment of the mythical paradigm in literary plot accompanied by the transformation of myth into a linear narrative, due to which archaic structures became the unconscious grammar of plot texts (Lotman 1973). Linear storytelling in this perspective inevitably implies cause-and-effect relationships between events. Color Todorov distinguishes two types of causality within a literary text: causality through the combination of things with each other and causality through a general law (Todorov 1985). Proclaiming the randomness and adogmatic nature of Chekhov's world, Chudakov abolishes both.

However, to what extent can the statement of the “randomness” of the text be transferred from the declarative level to the level of direct analysis? At one time, F. Kermode, speaking about the existentialist novel, noted that a text expressing pure chance would be impossible to read as such, since its creation “is an achievement of readers, as well as writers, and readers would constantly strive to complement the novel the very connections that the author’s intention excludes” (Kermode 1966: 138). In this regard, it seems natural that in “Chekhov’s Poetics” Chudakov limits himself to a general description of Chekhov’s artistic system, without analyzing any of the works as a separate, independent text. Chudakov points out that “the objective world of Chekhov’s artistic system appears before the reader in his random integrity”(Chudakov 1971: 187), but this is limited to this; integrity for Chudakov seems to lie in the unity of poetics at different levels. It is no coincidence that specific interpretations of Chekhov's stories, although they contradict each other, as a rule, refute Chudakov's main provisions - it seems that this is simply a precondition for the possibility of analysis.

Thus, Chudakov's concept destroys traditional models of literary interpretation, just as Chekhov's texts destroy the conventions of pre-Chekhov literature. The history of literature created by Chudakov in “The Poetics of Chekhov” and subsequent works is the history of the destruction of the internal closure of the text, the history of the opening of literature to the world by violating the traditional literary models that structure pre-Chekhov’s literary works and thereby ensure their separation from reality. “Chekhov’s world seems to strive to merge with the surrounding world, to look like a part of it” (Chudakov 1986: 48). In this sense, Chudakov, with all his innovation, not only does not go beyond the traditional historical and literary scheme of increasing realism from Tolstoy (and other classical Russian realists) to Chekhov, but brings its implicit premises to its logical conclusion. Since the basis for this movement is the increase in isomorphism between the chaotic “adogmatic” world and the disordered structure of the literary text, Chudakov’s works are in line with the “popular in the 30s, 40s and 50s” theory of realism as “an artistic recreation of the truth of life” in “the forms of life itself” (Markovich 1997: 117).

At the same time, Chudakov’s concept is quite specific, and its specificity is inextricably linked with the specificity of Chekhov’s poetics itself. This becomes especially noticeable if we compare it with another authoritative concept of the realism of details - the article “The Reality Effect” by R. Barth (Barth 1994), written almost simultaneously with “Chekhov’s Poetics”, in 1969. Barthes writes about such description details that fall outside the structure of a realistic text, the only function of which is to designate reality, to say “I am reality.” These details are not associated with any semantic connotations, and they are not subject to the rhetorical canons of a self-sufficient aesthetic description. Their only function is a reference to reality. In this case, the signified, the independence of which is not supported by the structure of the text, merges with the denotation, as a result of which the very absence of the signified becomes a sign - a designation of reality as a general category, effect reality.

Despite the external similarity, the eccentric concept differs significantly from Bart’s. Barthes remains a consistent structuralist in this work, and the detail that falls out of the structure of the literary description actually fits perfectly into this structure as a minus device, consisting in the significant absence of this detail of structural connections with other elements of the structure. That is why Barth's concept does not conflict with traditional models of interpretation of a literary work - Kermode, for example, does not deny the possibility of the existence of individual random fragments within larger forms. However, in contrast to the Flaubertian detail in Barthes, the Chekhovian detail in Chudakov does not simply fall out of the structure of the work, its loss is associated with the destruction of the structure itself at all levels, due to which the “integrity” of the Chekhov text remains only a declaration: there are simply no structures left in the Chekhov text capable of maintaining its unity. Nevertheless, this declaration is fundamentally important for Chudakov. The researcher does not go so far as to proclaim the fundamental impossibility of interpreting Chekhov’s texts: while demonstrating the collapse of the structure at all levels, he nevertheless constantly declares its existence. This duality is especially noticeable in his later book, Chekhov's World. Like Barthes, an accidental, internally unmotivated Chekhovian detail in Chudakov “colors” the entire description, creates an “untouched” field of being around the situation and personality” (Chudakov 1986: 188, 186). However, unlike Barthes, Chudakov refuses to completely exclude these details from the structure of the work. “The idea of a real object that has fallen into the sphere of action of the powerful forces of the artistic system cannot preserve its pre-artistic essence. ...The artistic subject of great literature is different and separated from the empirical” (ibid.: 5).

The researcher calls the best definition of Chekhov’s artistic principle “oxymoron: selection of something random.” Describing random Chekhov details, the researcher constantly emphasizes their incorporation into the whole of the work. In fact, “accidental integrity” again establishes a boundary between the text and the world, the existence of which Chudakov explicitly denies. The external world, according to Chudakov, is random and adogmatic, and in this radically differs, for example, from the world of Bakhtin, in whom “aesthetic significance embraces not emptiness, but the persistent self-legitimate semantic orientation of life” (Bakhtin 1975: 36). However, Chudakov’s artistic object, like Bakhtin’s, ultimately represents an aesthetic individuality that belongs to the architectonics of the work of art. Thanks to this hidden architectonics, Chudakov’s artistic subject in its final limit is non-verbal: like Bakhtin, Chudakov’s language is immanently overcome in the text. As a result, the “adogmatic picture of the world”, which, according to Chudakov, corresponds to Chekhov’s texts, turns out to be not so adogmatic, which is clearly manifested at the macro level, when the problem of the textual boundary is considered directly.

On the one hand, like a quasi-unselected detail, Chekhov’s text, according to Chudakov, is inscribed in reality due to the absence of boundaries. “The unexpectedness of the beginnings” and the “openness of the endings,” writes Chudakov, “demonstrate the connection of his plots with the flow of life, their “not being taken out” of it” (Chudakov 1986: 112). However, the “manifestation” operation itself is by no means harmless. The manifestation of the connection between Chekhov's plots and the flow of life, like the “selection of the random,” simultaneously excludes the text from this flow. Time in the space of the text gathers at the point where the past unites with the future in a kind of Chekhovian present. “The past has not gone away forever, has not melted away like smoke, it is there, and one has only to freely surrender to the imagination, as it appears here, in this very place, replaces current realities and is seen through them” (ibid.: 324). The time of the text functions here in the same way as an accidental detail: being presented as a part of reality, it is at the same time a rich semiotic time of the text, whose heterogeneity of the time of the “flow of life” ensures the closure of the open structure of Chekhov’s story. The duality of Chudakov’s concept prevents the transformation of reality into Barthes’ “referential illusion.” On the contrary, reality appears in Chudakov as a total presence, independent of language, at a given point in space and time: it is “here and now” that “a random Chekhovian detail - a continuous present, an objective praesens” fulfills “its main task - creating the impression of the unselected integrity of the world” ( ibid: 152).

So, Chudakov’s Chekhov’s text is full of “appearances”, its structure creates only a “sensation of a quasi-complete picture”, its details are “pseudo-random”, it creates the “effect of randomness” - but it In fact corresponds to reality and this differs from Flaubert’s text in Barthes, in which reality is present only as an “effect”. By transforming Barthes’s real “structural redundancy” into a “randomness effect,” Chudakov thereby turns Barthes’ “reality effect” into reality itself. Chudakov's texts, thus, abandon their original position - Chekhov's destruction of all structures of signification that make any interpretation impossible - for the sake of affirming the historical scheme of literature's movement towards reality. As a result, Chekhov's poetics turns out to be oxymoronic, but the historical scheme is distinguished by its impeccable consistency. If Flaubert in Barthes's logically consistent article is excluded from any history, then Chudakov's Chekhov is historical. The destruction of the logical structure of Chekhov's poetics turns out to be the price - or condition - of a coherent literary history.

The above should not be regarded as a negative assessment of the “oxymoronic” nature of the eccentric concept or a call to remove its contradictions in some dialectical synthesis. On the contrary, if we turn to Chekhov’s texts themselves, we can show that they contain a duality that is in many ways similar to Chudakov’s. Let's give just one example. To illustrate his thesis about the direct inscription of Chekhov’s texts into the flow of time, about the direct presence of the past “here, in this very place,” Chudakov cites the metaphor of a chain from the story “Student.” Let us recall that the hero of this story, theological seminary student Ivan Velikopolsky, returning home from hunting on Good Friday, meets two widows, to whom he retells the Gospel episode of the abdication of the Apostle Peter. Widows react emotionally to the hero's story. After this, Ivan moves on and ponders the meaning of their reaction. “The past, he thought, is connected with the present by a continuous chain of events that flow one from the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of this chain: he touched one end, and the other trembled” (Chekhov 1976: 309). Chudakov cites this metaphor as confirmation of his thesis about the direct connection between the past and the present: “the events of the past seem to exist continuously - only in another reality, at the beginning of a continuous historical chain, and if you touch one end, the other will tremble” (Chudakov 1986: 325). At the same time, it is easy to notice that Chekhov’s metaphor is not at all so unambiguous. In the context of the entire story, where the opposition of direct and mediated is articulated in detail, the central position of the chain metaphor is due precisely to its ambivalence: its figurative meaning, based on an indirect cause-and-effect relationship between events, collides in the text with a literal meaning that provides the possibility of direct physical contact.

In this case, Chudakov reduces Chekhov's ambivalence, which allows him to affirm the fusion of Chekhov's text with extra-textual reality. This reduction seems inevitable: Chekhov’s rhetoric of constant deferral of meaning makes the boundary between the text and the world unattainable, and therefore, only by forcibly stopping this process, for example by closing the text to a substantial insight into the essence of the universe, can literary criticism enter it into the history of literature, understood as a movement towards reality. This historical plot, however, does not arise by chance in Chekhov studies - the problem of direct contact with reality on the other side of textual mediation is truly central to Chekhov’s poetics. Chekhov’s rhetoric does not remove this problematic, but systematically deconstructs the possibility of such contact from within the “realistic” discourse that postulates it. ▒Chekhovian literary history, striving for an explicit and consistent historiographical narrative, is forced to ignore this deconstruction. Nevertheless, literary works turn out to be sensitive to Chekhov’s rhetoric: the internal inconsistency of Chudakov’s concept can be seen as a reflection of the irreducibility of Chekhov’s textuality. As de Man wrote in Blindness and Insight, a literary text “can be systematically used to show where and how the critic deviates from it, but in the process of demonstrating this our understanding of the work is changed and the erroneous vision becomes productive” (de Man 1983: 109).

What Chekhov's texts say about history is expressed not at the level of explicit judgments expressed by the characters, but at the level of speech independent of any subject and rhetoric that is not reducible to conceptual statements. In the same “Student”, neither the progressivist idea of the progressive course of history, nor the pessimistic concept of meaningless repetition adequately reflects the ambivalent meaning contained in the central metaphor of the chain of times. The historical-literary model, which describes the historical movement of Russian literature towards Chekhov as a movement towards reality, originates from Gorky’s letter to Chekhov, in which Gorky utters the now textbook formula about the murder of realism. “Do you know what you are doing? You're killing realism. And you will kill him soon - to death, for a long time” (Chekhov 1996: 445). This statement is usually understood in the sense that Chekhov in his works takes realism to the highest degree, destroying the boundaries between text and reality, after which realistic literature will have nowhere to develop. However, the rhetorical depth of Gorky’s formula lies in the fact that it can be interpreted in another way - Chekhov kills realism not because he completely identifies the text with reality, but because he destroys all the mechanisms that allowed literature to claim direct contact with outside world. In fact, a largely similar duality is characteristic of Chudakov’s rhetoric, oscillating between the openness and closedness of Chekhov’s texts, and of the rhetoric of other historical and literary works belonging to the same tradition. The second meaning, of course, was never consciously intended by their authors, but its presence from within undermines the dominant historical-literary plot, destroying its claim to directly comprehend literary history, and at the same time gives this plot a time-tested effectiveness. In this, the rhetoric of this literary history turns out to be adequate to Chekhov’s.

Speaking of the “historical solidarity” between literature and the history of metaphysics, Derrida once noted that the necessity of historicity “does not mean that all reading or all writing is historicized, belongs to historians, still less that it is ▒historicist.” ...A writer may be ignorant or naive of the historical tradition that dominates him or her, or that he or she transforms, invents, displaces. But I would like to know whether he or she does not “interpret” history, even in the absence of historical awareness or knowledge, in accordance with an experience that is more meaningful, more living, more necessary, so to speak, than the experience of some professional “historians”, naively engaged in “ objectification of the “content of science” (Derrida 1992: 54-55). Although there seem to be few explicit proponents of naive objectification among literary historians today, the idea of the epistemological value of the “interpretation” of history in a literary text is quite otherworldly to the minds of those who believe that the history of literature cannot be anything other than the history of its production and perception. In fact, the replacement of literature by the “institute of literature” inevitably historicizes writing, subordinating it to historians with their predetermined, albeit consciously arbitrary, historiographical narratives.

Brown calls the historical project of deconstruction in De Man's version “historicity without history” (Brown 2002: 118). The meaning of this formulation is rather vague, but the historicization of de Man’s position itself in the next sentence, where Brown recalls the scientist’s notorious collaborationist publications, suggests that the word “history” here is free from unnecessary problematics. Without pretending to resolve the question of whether there is a real “history” in de Man’s project, we will conclude this article by quoting the ending of his work “The History of Literature and literary modernity”, which is what Brown is talking about. “The need to revise the foundations of literary history may seem like a hopelessly vast undertaking... The task, however, may well turn out to be less extensive than it seems at first glance. All those rules which we have formulated as a guide to literary history more or less take themselves for granted when we are engaged in the much more modest task of reading and understanding a literary text. To become good literary historians, we must remember that what we usually call literary history has little or nothing to do with literature, and that what we call literary interpretation is in fact literary history . If we extend this concept beyond literature, it only confirms that the basis for historical knowledge is not empirical facts, but written texts, even if these texts are dressed up in the costume of wars and revolutions” (de Man 1983: 165).

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1) See, for example, comments on the contrast between historical and literary approaches in (Wortman 1986).

2) As H. Kellner concludes, speaking of both traditional and non-traditional, “synchronistic” and “structural” types of historiography, “in fact, all histories are based on narrativity, which guarantees that what is represented will “contain” meaning” (Kellner 1987: 29).

3) See about this: Shcherbenok A.V. Rhetoric of the history of literature (towards the formulation of the problem) // Russian text. 2001. No. 6.

4) See the article “The Rhetoric of Blindness” in (de Man 1983).

5) For a detailed analysis of Chekhov’s rhetoric, see: Shcherbenok A.V.“The chain of times and the rhetoric of insight” // Paradigms. Tver, 2000; Shcherbenok A.V. Chekhov's story “The Bishop”: a post-structuralist perspective of meaning // Young Chekhov Researchers - III. M., 1998.

History between literature and science: philosophical and methodological analysis of “war and peace” L.N. Tolstoy Bendersky Ilya Igorevich

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