The article contains reflections on the problem which has arised in Eugene Matusov's article on freedom of education, and considers the experience of Mikhail Bakhtin as an example of the way the right to the freedom can be fulfilled. Not only Bakhtin's life and ideas play a significant role in contemporary social and educational theories and practices, but they reveal how education becomes a result of selection of particular knowledge and one's conscious choice. The core of the article is a correlation of notions “Education-for-myself” and “Education-for-the other” which are taken by the authors as derivatives of the terms of Bakhtin’s early philosophy “I-for-myself” and “I-for-the other”. Thus ideas of “Education-for-an individual” and “Education-for-the society” result from the reflections and can be evidence of the need in mutual understanding and dialogue in order to achieve freedom of education.
This article reviews Svyatopolk-Mirsky, a book by M. V. Efimov and G. Smith published by Molodaya gvardiya in the Lives of Remarkable People series (2021). It was written by the oldest English specialist in Russian literature Professor G. S. Smith and a well-known Russian researcher of the literature and culture of Russia abroad M. V. Efimov. Both have studied the life and literary legacy of the character of their book for many years. For the first time in Russia, using the Russian and European tradition of biographical studies and historical-literary, cultural, and textual practices, the authors have carried out a full-scale reconstruction of the biography of one of the most striking and enigmatic figures of the first wave of the Russian emigration. The authors of the book introduce a significant scope of archival materials and memories of contemporaries, hard-to-access English and émigré periodicals, and other sources into scholarly circulation. It makes it possible to create a detailed account of the main events of prince D. P. Svyatopolk-Mirsky’s life – from his childhood to his tragic death in the Magadan camp, dramatic twists of fate and the reasons behind them, his close circle and distant environment, the political, historical, cultural, and literary context of the events described. The biographers’ interest in the inner world and the psychology of Svyatopolk-Mirsky’s actions is combined with a subtle philological analysis of his literary criticism and studies. According to the reviewers, the book is a major event in the Russian literary, political, and cultural history of the 1920s–1930s.
Tatiana Venediktova’s new book is devoted to the problem particularly relevant for contemporary philosophers, culturologists and philologists. In the situation of radical changes in the social and economic status of literature, the question of the reader’s role ceases to be an element of receptive aesthetics or the psychology of reading only and strongly requires new approaches for its research. In Venediktova’s interpretation, the reader is a real participant in the creative process and gets new experience through communication with the literary work creating new meanings, often different from those the author laid in the text. The figure of a bourgeois reader is presented through the intersection of literary history, cultural history and literary theory dimensions. This gave Venediktova the possibility to use the sociological poetics of Mikhail Bakhtin’s circle. At the same time, Venediktova’s research methods have little in common with the traditional sociology of reading and the new sociology of reader. The reference to Bakhtin is not only a tribute to today’s fashion in the humanities. Bakhtin as a reader and creator of new artistic and aesthetic meanings is a special and not yet explored part in the modern history of literary text interpretation. In the later fragments, Bakhtin offers his own understanding of the image of the reader opposing it to the structuralist image of the ideal reader. Venediktova chooses the 19th century as a field of her research. It is the historical period when the bourgeois class consciousness reaches its highest point and acquires a special sociality; one of its characteristic features is the wide-spread distribution of books and reading and the final democratisation of the readership. The author presents a transition from the theoretical description of the bourgeois reader to the historical interpretation of the possibilities and ways of gaining aesthetic experience as a consistent transfer from poetry to prose. The prosaisation of the lyrical vision of the world and man finds its continuation in the novel as a “bourgeois epic” (Hegel). The concept of the book is especially convincing due to the author’s reliance on the authoritative circle of the classics of the contemporary humanities as well as on the well-made and logical composition of the text. The literary-historical parts of the monograph become a natural continuation and development of theoretical ideas. In gaining new reader experience, the specific characteristics of its source, the changing position of the creator of the text are important. It equally works in relation to the poetry of William Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Charles Baudelaire and to the novels of Honoré de Balzac, Herman Melville, Gustave Flaubert, and George Eliot. Another important feature of the book is the prospects of the research. The problem of the bourgeois reader seems relevant for the sociocultural history of Russian literature and for the understanding of the role and interaction of the reader and writer in the space of today’s World Wide Web.
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