Papers in English by Igor Pilshchikov
Sign Systems Studies, 2016
This paper seeks to situate the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics of the 1960– 1980s within the la... more This paper seeks to situate the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics of the 1960– 1980s within the larger European intellectual-historical context from which it sprang, and in which it played a vital role. Analysing the school members' engagement with their peers throughout Europe, we outline an " entangled history " (histoire croisée) of multi-directional scientific and philosophical influence. In this perspective, we discuss the most productive concepts and methods of Tartu-Moscow semiotics in the fields of general verse theory, intertextual theory and cultural theory.
Current Trends in Metrical Analysis, 2011
This paper presents some results gained by the seminar for automated rhythmic and syntactic analy... more This paper presents some results gained by the seminar for automated rhythmic and syntactic analysis of poetic texts at Moscow State University’s Institute for World Culture, and, in particular, new developments in the field of the stochastic approach to the problem of automated meter recognition.
Studia Metrica et Poetica, 2016
This article is devoted to translations of poetry that are not equivalent to the original on the ... more This article is devoted to translations of poetry that are not equivalent to the original on the lexical level, but attempt to reproduce the sound, rhythm and syntax of the source text. The Russian formalist Yuri Tynianov was presumably the first scholar to discover this phenomenon, which was later referred to as " phonetic facsimile " (George Steiner) and " homophonic translation " (Lawrence Venuti). The present discussion of the linguistic, semiotic and cultural aspects of (homo)phonetic translation is exemplified by translations made by Russian poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Wiener Slawistischer Almanach. Sonderband, 2017
This article is devoted to the development of the ideas of Russian and German neo-Humboldtians in... more This article is devoted to the development of the ideas of Russian and German neo-Humboldtians in the theories of Petrograd and Moscow formalists. First and foremost, various interpretations of Aleksandr Potebnja’s concept of the “inner form of the word” are discussed. The scholars’ attempts to use this concept contributed to the formation of the formalist theory of poetic language, and led to the distinction between poetic semantics and verse semantics. At the same time, all branches of Russian formalism inherited and developed Potebnja’s relational concept of form in general and “inner form” in particular: this approach is characteristic of all Russian formalists, from Viktor Shklovsky to Grigorij Vinokur, and from Boris Jarcho to Gustav Shpet.
Central and Eastern European Literary Theory and the West, Dec 5, 2022
This paper focuses on the research agenda advanced by the scholars who belonged to the groups ass... more This paper focuses on the research agenda advanced by the scholars who belonged to the groups associated with the Russian Formalists: OPOIAZ and the Moscow Linguistic Circle. These groups were not, in fact, unified or consolidated, but their members shared similar concerns: they conceived of (verbal) art as a type of human activity governed by its own intrinsic laws rather than predetermined by ideological, social or psychological conditions. Formalism is understood here not as a unified theory but as a shared vocabulary of methods and approaches created by the intellectual efforts of the members of this community both individually and collectively. Their theoretical quest was driven by a common set of assumptions and anticipations, although they tended to give different answers to the questions they were all interested in, and propose different research programs. Therefore, Formalism is presented here more broadly than usual, to include not only the “hardcore” central figures, but also some of those scholars who were traditionally considered “Formalist fellow travelers” or “paraformalists,” and even their antagonists.
Studia Metrica et Poetica, 2018
Vyacheslav V. Ivanov was an outstanding scholar who excelled in almost all disciplines related to... more Vyacheslav V. Ivanov was an outstanding scholar who excelled in almost all disciplines related to linguistic and literary studies. This article analyses his accomplishments in the fields of prosody and poetics.
Slavic and East European Information Resources, 2005
This article provides an overview of The Fundamental Digital Library of Russian Literature and Fo... more This article provides an overview of The Fundamental Digital Library of Russian Literature and Folklore (FEB-web). The intersection of philology and information technologies at FEB-web is considered in the context of Russian culture and the Russian academy. Topics discussed include: the FEB-web process for creating digital scholarly editions, the structure of FEB-web, new developments in the FEB-web collections, plans for the future, copyright issues, digitization processes, inter-library cooperation, and the place of digital libraries in constructing civil society in Russia.
Studia Metrica et Poetica, 2024
This article examines definitions of verse and descriptions of the relationships between meter an... more This article examines definitions of verse and descriptions of the relationships between meter and rhythm as proposed by scholars of Russian poetry. Building on their observations, the author devises a constructive definition of "meter" as a system of permissions and prohibitions governing the distribution of word stresses and word boundaries in a verse line. Additionally, the article proposes constructive definitions for the versification systems employed in Russian poetry.
Studia Metrica et Poetica, Dec 2020
The name Kiril Taranovsky (1911–1993) has much less acclaim outside the Slavic world than it dese... more The name Kiril Taranovsky (1911–1993) has much less acclaim outside the Slavic world than it deserves. Even his book on Mandelshtam, which was published in English in 1976, mainly attracted the attention of Slavists as the first systematic description of the poetics of an author whose works are so famously difficult to understand. But the methods of contextual and subtextual analysis that Taranovsky developed, and his insights on literary theory, are no less significant. On the one hand, Taranovsky continues the traditions of Russian Formalism; on the other hand, he draws on his own research into the structure and semantics of Russian verse. By the time Taranovsky undertook his research on Mandelshtam’s poetics, he had not only done an enormous amount of work in describing poetic rhythm but he had also outlined a new field in Russian verse theory: the semantics of poetic meter and rhythm. His contribution to Slavic studies was testified by a collection of essays dedicated to him in honor of his 60th birthday, with items from 51 colleagues and former students. Taranovsky’s book "Russian Binary Meters" (1953), written in Serbian, was for a long time available only to the limited number of Slavists who could cope with language difficulties while reading it. This classic work was only published in Russian fairly recently (2010). The English translation by Walter Vickery and Lawrence Feinberg, to which this article serves as an introduction, was made much earlier but has only recently (and partially) seen the light of day.
The Companion to Juri Lotman, Feb 2022
The intellectual lineage of Juri Lotman's legacy can best be understood in a broader European and... more The intellectual lineage of Juri Lotman's legacy can best be understood in a broader European and global context. The methodological impetus gained from Baudouinian and Saussurean linguistics and the conceptual transfer of the paragons of fin-de-siècle German formal art criticism to Russia created the formalist breakthrough of the 1910s. The theory of literature and poetic language developed by Russian formalists in the 1920s revolutionized twentieth-century humanities. The Russian Formalist School did not possess internal methodological unity and did not manage to create a new scientific paradigm (in Thomas Kuhn's sense of this word). From the Kuhnian standpoint, formalism, as Peter Steiner pointed out, 'can be termed an "interparadigmatic stage" in the evolution of Slavic literary scholarship' (Steiner 1984: 269). In 1926, Roman Jakobson, ex-president of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and a former member of OPOIaZ (the two foremost formalist associations in Russia), co-founded a new linguistic circle in Prague. An innovative scientific paradigm was established by the Prague Linguistic Circle in the mid-1930s when its leaders, including Jakobson and Jan Mukařovský, proposed a programme that integrated structural linguistic and semiotic methods for the study of Slavic languages, literatures and cultures. Hence, formalism and its successor, structuralism, started to spread across Europe and America (after Jakobson's emigration to the United States). An encounter between Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss in the New York-based École Libre des Hautes Études (ELHE) in 1942 resulted in Lévi-Strauss's transfer of structuralist methods to anthropology. In New York, Jakobson collaborated with the Czechoslovak government in exile and positioned himself, in his own words, as a representative of 'the Prague school of linguistics and literary history' (Toman 1995: 247). On the other hand, ELHE was a sui generis French 'university in exile' supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and Charles de Gaulle's France Libre (Rutkoff and Scott 1983). ELHE employed prominent scholars who left France and Belgium under threat of persecutionsome of them, like Lévi-Strauss, due to their Jewish origin. Lévi-Strauss's subsequent return to France prompted the formation and development of French structuralism and semiotics. Jakobson was also a paternal figure for the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics (henceforward referred to as TMS), as is confirmed by interviews with the members of the School taken by
Studia Metrica et Poetica, 2019
In undertaking the statistical analysis of the rhythm of Russian syl-labic-accentual verse, one c... more In undertaking the statistical analysis of the rhythm of Russian syl-labic-accentual verse, one confronts a problem: how to accentuate words whose natural-language stress is weaker than that of fully-stressed words. Zhirmunsky called such words "ambiguous" and formulated a rule: they should be considered stressed in "strong" (ictic) positions and unstressed in "weak" (non-ictic) positions. Gasparov, who accepted and elaborated on Zhirmunsky's rule, pointed out that "this difference in the quality of stress in strong positions [...] has a significant impact on the rhythm of verse, especially that of ternary meters. " The main point of the present paper is that this ambiguity equally impacts Russian binary meters. In the case of iambic tetrameter , for example, fully-stressed lines that contain rhythmically ambiguous words are often isomorphic with the predominating rhythmical form. In the present paper, this phenomenon is explored in connection with Jakobson's hypothesis that rhythmically ambiguous words gravitate toward "weak" (i.e. less frequently stressed) ictuses. Although Jakobson's view of accentual ambiguity was different from Zhirmunsky's, and Jakobson's calculation was, in fact, methodologically inaccurate, a cross-pollination of their approaches may prove fruitful.
Studia Metrica et Poetica, 2016
Boris Yarkho's "The Elementary Foundations of Formal Analysis" (1927). Translated from the Russia... more Boris Yarkho's "The Elementary Foundations of Formal Analysis" (1927). Translated from the Russian, with notes.
Religions, Jul 24, 2021
Focused on Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist tale, “The Nose” (1835), this article is an investigation in... more Focused on Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist tale, “The Nose” (1835), this article is an investigation into the concealed representation of suppressed and marginalized libertine and anti-religious discourses in nineteenth-century Russian literature. The author identifies overlooked idiomatic phraseology, forgotten specificities of the Imperial hierarchy (the Table of Ranks), and allusions to religious customs and Christian rituals that would have been apparent to Gogol’s readers and shows how some were camouflaged to escape censorship in successive drafts of the work. The research builds on the approaches to Gogol’s language, imagery and plot developed earlier by the Russian Formalists, Tartu-Moscow semioticians, and a few other scholars, who revealed the latent obscenity of Gogol’s “rhinology” and the sacrilegious meaning of the tale’s very specific chronotope. The previous scholars’ observations are substantially supplemented by original findings. An integrated analysis of these aspects in their mutual relationship is required to understand what the telling details of the story reveal about Gogol’s religious and psychological crisis of the mid-1830s and to demonstrate how he aggregated indecent Shandyism, social satire, and religious blasphemy into a single quasi-oneiric narrative.
Taboo Pushkin, 2012
This article discusses the ideologies of the scholars' responses to Pushkin's parodic bawdy balla... more This article discusses the ideologies of the scholars' responses to Pushkin's parodic bawdy ballad which was written in the Lyceum but remained unpublised for 175 years.
Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie, 2017
* * This article results from the research project based at Lomonosov MSU and supported by the Ru... more * * This article results from the research project based at Lomonosov MSU and supported by the Russian Science Foundation grant 17-18-01701. 1 "If the poetic work is understood as a 'human document,' as a diary entry, then it is interesting to the author, to his wife, his relatives, friends, and to maniacs such as those passionately seeking the answer to the question 'did Pushkin smoke?'-and to no one else." (Brik 1977, 90).
Pushkin Review, 2022
It is well known that Pushkin's "Ia pomniu chudnoe mgnoven´e…" ("I remember a wondrous moment…," ... more It is well known that Pushkin's "Ia pomniu chudnoe mgnoven´e…" ("I remember a wondrous moment…," 1825) exploits recognizable motifs from Zhukovsky's "Ia Muzu iunuiu, byvalo…" ("I used to meet the youthful Muse…," 1824). This article shows that the two poems share a lyrical plot that emerged in Zhukovsky's work twenty years earlier. Almost all the relevant elements are found in his "Lad´eiu legkoi upravliaia…" ("Steering a light boat…," 1804), one of the poems in his translation of Don Quixote, which he made from Florian's French version of Cervantes's novel. The key motif of the resurrection of the past, which forms the nucleus of "Ia pomniu…" and "Ia Muzu…," is not present in Don Luis's ballad from Don Quixote, "Marinero soy de amor…"-it resulted from a chain of step-by-step transformations of its final quatrain. Despite all the metamorphoses, the proto-source of Russia's best-known love elegy was a Spanish ballad (romance), even though the initial metaphor of sailing across the sea of love led by a guiding star was eventually lost.
Arts, Dec 14, 2022
This paper focuses on the Russian Golden Age author Konstantin Batiushkov’s involvement with fine... more This paper focuses on the Russian Golden Age author Konstantin Batiushkov’s involvement with fine arts. He is recognized as an exquisite elegist, an immediate predecessor of Alexander Pushkin in poetry, and “a pioneer of Russian Italomania.” Much less known is that Batiushkov was always deeply involved with painting, drawing, and sculpture—not only as a poet but as Russia’s first art critic, an ad-lib art manager, who worked on behalf of the President of the Russian Academy of Arts Aleksei Olenin, and an amateur artist. The paper offers addenda to the commentary on his essay “A Stroll to the Academy of Arts” (1814), commonly referred to as the earliest significant example of Russian art criticism. Many of Batiushkov’s extant paintings and drawings belong to the time when he was mentally insane. Since he was a self-taught artist, his visual works of this period can be categorized as early examples of art brut.
Studia Metrica et Poetica, vol. 2.1. pp. 58–80, 2015
Th is paper develops some of the ideas that were expressed at the meeting of the Translators' Sec... more Th is paper develops some of the ideas that were expressed at the meeting of the Translators' Section of the Soviet Writers' Union (28 December 1934) where Osip Brik's talk on new Russian translations from Heinrich Heine was presented and discussed. Brik argued for equirhythmical translations of Heine's dolniks and maintained that equimetrical translations are impossible due to the diff erences between the Russian and the German systems of verse. His opponents, on the contrary, argued for equimetrical translations and maintained that equirhythmical translations are impossible due to the diff erences between the accentual systems of the Russian and the German languages. Boris Jarcho, who presided the meeting, developed a theory, according to which every versifi cation system is characterised by primary and secondary features. Th e primary features represent a determinist norm and should be reproduced in translation to the full extent, while the secondary features represent a statistical norm: they may be reproduced in a proportion that the language and the poetic tradition can aff ord and that is at the same time similar to the proportion found in the original text. Th e authors of the present paper discuss three Russian poetic translations of Heine's celebrated "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam... " from the point of view of their equimetricity/equirhythmicity, and compare their metrical and rhythmical structures with various rhythmic types of the Russian dolnik.
Russian Literature, Jan 1, 2011
AJCN, 2006
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how Alexander Pushkin and Evgueny Baratynsky’s use of par... more The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how Alexander Pushkin and Evgueny Baratynsky’s use of particular quotations and hints on proper names divides the audience of their poems into two categories: the circle of close friends who understand the hint perfectly, and wider audience who realize that the poet hints on something but are unable to appreciate all the details. I would also like to show how this split is linked to different types of poetics. Another point is that this communication strategy is not specific to the above mentioned poets, but is characteristic of ‘aristocratic’ literature of Pushkin’s age in general — or, at least, to the Lyceum and post-Lyceum circle poetics.
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Papers in English by Igor Pilshchikov
et la genèse des théories prosodiques de Osip Brik, Boris Tomaševskij et Roman Jakobson
Les comptes rendus des séances du Cercle linguistique de Moscou (CLM) sont conservés à l’Institut Vinogradov de la Langue Russe. Une dispute des plus fructueuses eut lieu le 1 juin 1919, autour de l’exposé d’Osip Brik « Sur le rythme poétique ». La réunion fut présidée par Roman Jakobson, premier président du CLM, et enregistrée par le secrétaire du Cercle Grigorij Vinokur. Y participaient Boris Tomaševskij, Mixail Peterson, Ivan Rozanov et les autres personnes.
Cet article est composé d’une introduction, du procès-verbal de la réunion, et de notes explicatives. L’introduction établit le lien entre le dispute et les problèmes de la théorie moderne du vers, comme la question des relations entre les aspects métro-rythmiques et léxico-grammaticaux du vers, le problème de la sémantique du mètre, et la question des limites dans lesquelles le rythme d’un poème peut diverger de son schéma métrique. Les notes commentent différents aspects du contexte historique et intellectuel de cette dispute.
Comparative verse studies in Russia and globally
Abstract: This survey discusses the place of comparative verse studies among contemporary linguistic and philological disciplines. Its purpose is to give an outline of the history of comparative prosody, present the current trends in comparative research of verse in Russia and abroad, and conceptualize comparative verse studies as an autonomous field at the crossroads of verse theory, history of versification, linguistics, translation studies, and comparative literature. We focus on what is similar and what is different between the statistical-stochastic study of verse, generative metrics, and descriptive translation studies in their attitudes toward a comparative analysis of verse forms. Our survey traces the common roots and the logic of the development of various research trajectories of this discipline and out-lines prospects for further studies.
Keywords: metrics, poetry, rhythmics, survey, translation, verse
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В статье проанализированы различные стратегии, которые русские переводчики «Божественной комедии» вырабатывали для того, чтобы передать присутствие Вергилия в тексте Данте. Примеры взяты из первого полного русского перевода «Комедии», выполненного Д. Мином (1853–1885), из стандартного на сегодняшний день перевода М. Лозинского (1939–1945) и из экспериментального перевода А. Илюшина (1995). Переводчики XX века выбирают альтернативные подходы, которые могут быть описаны как «доместикация» и «форенизация». Ситуация усугубляется тем обстоятельством, что русская культура так и не создала образцовой версии «Энеиды», в то время как «Комедия» наполнена цитатами и аллюзиями из поэмы Вергилия. Как переводить Данте, не переведя сперва Вергилия?
(Развернутое резюме см.: http://rvb.ru/philologica/series_rus/series03rus.htm .)
guages: from very ancient versifications (Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittie; Ancient Greek), through medieval (Old English, Old Icelandic, Old Saxon) and Renaissance verse to modern experiments (free verse, concrete poetry); from English and Russian through Spanish and German to Portuguese and Catalan. Not only written, but also spoken poetry has been analyzed.
Оглавление книги и список рецензий см.: http://rvb.ru/philologica/series_rus/series05rus.htm
In English: http://rvb.ru/philologica/series_eng/series05eng.htm
Содержание и отзывы см.: http://www.rvb.ru/philologica/series_rus/series02rus.htm
In English: http://www.rvb.ru/philologica/series_eng/series02eng.htm
A special “obscene cluster” published by the "Matica Srpska Journal of Slavic Studies" devoted to “Mat” (Russian taboo language).
Электронная версия подготовлена в imwerden.de.
in methodology—has long been humanizing
semiotics in both the Russian and American
academy, giving it a face, a sense of humor,
a stake in the real worlds we live by, but
never losing its structuralist bedrock. The
essays collected here, which range from
Pushkin to Fyodor Karamazov, Okudzhava
and Sedakova, from Peter the Great’s
scandals abroad to Russian literary
theory and filmmaking at home, are
a goldmine by leading Slavists in
North America, Europe, and Russia.
A huge book of brilliant nuggets,
it lights up the contours of
our field today while paying
perfect vignette-like tribute
to Alik’s long non-conformist
career, as fascinating and
inscrutably flexible as it
was often perilous.” (By Caryl Emerson).
***
“This book is a wonderful gift not only for the 'jubilee
celebrant' (for AZ it is impossible to imagine this
phrase without quotes), but for all of us. The
variety of topics, genres and authors might seem
surprising were it not for the fact that this variety
reflects the character of the book’s addressee.
Its content, better than any manifesto or
theoretical treatise, brings us good news:
that a lack of intellectual inhibition,
an unrestricted field of vision, and an
enthusiasm that does not cloy are all so
becoming to scholarship that, in essence,
has as its sole palpable subject the
infinity of creative choices.
I have always liked Mayakovsky’s
neologism: 'Do not jubilee!'
(He himself, though, was very
much concerned with his own
anniversaries.) A / Z is completely
devoid of the sedate smoothness
of octogenaric jubilees, but
it has a lot of panache and
a spirit of intellectual
adventure, and most
importantly, fun. In this,
the book bears a striking
resemblance to its
addressee.” (By Boris Gasparov).
This bilingual collection in honor of the great scholar and writer Alexander Zholkovsky brings together new work from forty-four leading scholars in nine countries. Like Zholkovsky's oeuvre, this volume covers a broad range of subjects and employs an array of approaches.
Редакционная коллегия сборника: М. В. Акимова, С. Г. Болотов, С. Ю. Бочавер, К. А. Головастиков, М. А. Дзюбенко, А. А. Добрицын, Дж. Пешио, В. С. Полилова
Редакционная коллегия серии POES: Raymond Detrez, Wim Honselaar, Thomas Langerak, Willem Weststeijn
(continua na p. 1)
This article addresses the epistemological status of terms such as the “French”, “Russian”, “Czech”, etc. theories in the humanities. The schools that develop such theories can be described as specific geographically located “crystallizations” (Steiner) or “condensations” (Tamm and Kull) of wider methodologies favoured in particular cultures and societies. The concept of “Estonian theory” proposed by Marek Tamm and Kalevi Kull belongs to this category.
Emigration, exile or retreat function as “a contact zone” (Pratt) where important transfers and encounters happen (Greenblatt). The regime of displacement and academic mobility — either voluntary or forced — was also relevant for the birth of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics. After Juri Lotman moved to Estonia from Leningrad due to the anti-Semitic campaign (1950) and semiotics was suppressed in Moscow (1962), the center of semiotic research was transferred to Tartu (1964).
The “travelling theory” is constantly reterritorialized and recontextualized: it strengthens (or dissipates) in changing contexts, when its presumptions cease to be taken as granted by the new intellectual milieu, when it has to defend, justify and assert itself — and eventually transform itself thanks to the acquired awareness of what was irrelevant before but becomes a sine qua non in the new circumstances.
The geographical and diachronic concept of “Estonian theory” (the theory’s spatial unity in its temporal evolution) should therefore be supplemented with a extraterritorial and synchronic concept (the theory’s simultaneous presence in various geocultural contexts).
Существующим поэтическим корпусам не хватает, как минимум, трех вещей: 1. корректной хронологической идентификации различных вариантов произведения; 2. инструментария для работы с ритмикой; 3. инструментария для изучения звукового строения стиха.