Антропология революции

Mikhail Iampolsky (New York University). «Revolution as an Event of Meaning». Revolution (for people involved in it) is usually a combination of a meaningless chaos and of new aggressive significations. Some theoreticians — Alain Badiou and Henri Lefebvre among them — have applied to revolution a model of a momentary transformation of chaos into a meaningful Gestalt. In his essay lampolski critically analyses this model and suggests that a better approach is possible. He claims that the model of expressivity developed by Spinoza is more adequate for the description of a dramatically changing reality. Reality expresses itself but doesn’t offer to the gaze of a distant observer any unifiable image.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University). «How Anthropological is Time? (About „Effects of Revolution“ in Different Chronotopes)». Revolutions, thus the main and deliberately anti-Marxist thesis of this essay, cannot belong to the ontologically «objective» dimension of «real» historical events — but are a type of experience/perception shaped by the historically specific «chronotope» that we are (or rather: we used to be) living in. There is nothing unusual — let alone disrespectful — in this observation: all of our experiences/perceptions of the past depend upon a configuration of chronotopes, i.e. an interference between the past chronotope and the present chronotope, under which they emerge — with «chronotope» being a phenomenological interpretation of the concept Bakhtin was referring to with this predicate. If «Revolution» was a type of experience due to and typical of the «historicist» chronotope as it had emerged in the early 19th century (Darwinian Evolutionism and Hegelian Philosophy of History being its most salient products), we may today no longer see and shape historical discontinuities in the same way — because, thus the second most important hypothesis of this essay, the historicist chronotope may have imploded and vanished, somehow «while our backs were turned,» during the third quarter of the 20th century.

Igor Dmitriev (St. Petersburg State University). «Pierre Simon Laplace — little emperor of great science». This article offers a general description of social, political and cultural aspects of the operation of French science between the Thermidorian revolt and the abdication of Napoleon. It pays special attention to the personality and some peculiarities of scientific creative work of Pierre Laplace (1749–1827), who was not only the most prominent scientist of his time but also the man who (partly thanks to his talent and reputation and partly thanks to his close relationshp with autorities) had noticeable influence on the formation of the French post-revolutionary (or, to be precise, post-Thermidore) scientific community.

Alexander Semyonov (St. Petersburg, Smolny College of Liberal Artand Sciences). «The Revolution of 1905: The Elusive Liberal Alternative». The article seeks to situate the liberal political program in the context of the 1905 revolution in the Russian Empire. It presents an argument against taking the liberal alternative in early twentieth-century Russia as a structurally given offspring of the development of liberal ideas from the nineteenth century or a function of the social position of zemstvo-constitutionalists, intellectuals, and modern professions. The author highlights paradoxes in the debates about modernity and its historical determination among the ideologues of Russian liberalism of the early twentieth century and therefore suggests that the historically formed phenomenon of the liberal alternative should be given back its dimension of political imagination and volition.

Oleg Lekmanov (Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow State University, and Alexey M. Gorky World Literature Institute). «Fifteen notes made by Aleksandr Tinyakov on Zinaida Gippius’ book „Last poems“ (1918) (On constructing the readers’ history of literature)». This article analyses the notes made by a poet and literary critic Aleksandr Tinyakov (1886–1934) on the margins of a copy of Zinaida Gippius’ poetry collection held in the Russian State Library (Moscow) that were dicovered by the author. These notes, as the article demonstrates, represented preparatory work for Tinyakov’s review of the «Last poems» — that essay was published in the «Orlovskie izvestiya» newspaper. The poems in the «Last poems» collection were extremely critical of the Russian October communist revolution, and Tinyakov in his review declares Gippius’ book to be a socially dangerous act. Paradoxically, Tinyakov’s poetics was very close to that of Gippius, especially to the poetics of the «Last poems». Therefore Tinyakov’s criticism was waging war not on something «alien» but rather on something recognised as one’s own, something that was culturally close to the author of the review.