CARYL EMERSON

ON THE GENERATION THAT SQUANDERED ITS PHILOSOPHERS (LOSEV, BAKHTIN, AND CLASSICAL THOUGHT AS EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING)

ABSTRACT. The essay juxtaposes the intellectual preoccupations and fraught careers of two great 20th-century Russian philologist-philosophers, Aleksei Losev and Mikhail Bakhtin. Although Losev’s is the more crippling case, the external trajectory of their lives develops in rough parallel (bold, prolific productivity in the 1920s; arrest and deportation in the 1930s; slow reintegration in the post-Stalinist era; recent revivals, cults, booms, and scandals connected with their legacy). What is more, the subject matter that fascinated them often overlapped (the Classical world, the status of the Word, Dostoevsky). Still, differences overwhelm the similarities. The essay concludes with speculation about these two types of philosopher-king squandered, martyred, and elevated by their home culture. KEY WORDS: Bakhtin, carnival, dialectics, dialogue, Dostoevsky in the 20th century, Losev, Marxism-Leninism, polyphony, Russian philology, Socratic method, Stalinism

It has been noted by historians of Russian culture that a large number of enormously gifted thinkers and poets were born within a few years of each other, in the early 1890s. But of that brilliant generation, only a handful managed to live the twentieth century all the way through, on native soil, with an uninterrupted vision of the whole. Aleksej Losev and Mikhail Bakhtin are among that handful. When interviewed in the 1970s, these epic survivors thrilled the post-Stalinist generation by speaking of the 1920s as if it were part of a continuum, not some distant history. Writing about Losev, the culturologist Georgij Gachev remarks in his gallery of portraits Russkaja duma (Russian Thought) that Russia has always favored the categories of dolgo i mnogo (a long time and great amount) – quoting Kornej Chukovskij: “In Russia, one has to live a long time, only then will something turn out.” Gachev insists that Losev’s survival strategy had been positively Kutuzov-like, po-kutuzovski: “evading pitched battles, retreating, thereby preserving the army = Studies in East European Thought 56: 95–117, 2004. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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himself, his life, his creative mind” (Gachev, 1991: 259). The same could be said of the cautious, stubborn, resilient Bakhtin. The first love of both was the classical world. But when we consider what each man taught and valued of that legacy, there seems to be little common ground. Bakhtin’s heroes – Menippus, Diogenes, the carnival pranksters and hooligans at Trimalchio’s Feast – are a far cry from the personalities so lovingly researched in Losev’s verkhushka, the library that contained the most precious parts of his life in the 1920s, and in its successor, the “Academy on the Arbat.” In the Bakhtinian world, everything is thrust down and cracked open; it is a world that welcomes fragmentation, proliferation, decentering, endless chatter and laughter. In Losev’s sphere, by contrast, we thrust upward; there is sobriety, the rigorous moral discipline of Plotinus, the Neoplatonist hierarchy and a return to higher unity. The stark contrast between them is particularly evident in the famously ill-tempered pages in Estetika vozrozhdenija (Aesthetics of the Renaissance), where Losev refers to Bakhtin’s beloved, carnivalesque Rabelais as a decadent writer, a debaser of both matter and spirit, the carrier of a “vile and repellant aesthetics” that is all urine, excrement, economic fraud and “satanic laughter” – in fact, Losev declared outright, such “realism” is more correctly called Satanism. Clearly targeting the Bakhtinians, he concluded: “whoever is pleased to consider such realism progressive, go ahead” (Losev, 1978: 589, 592–593). Contemporary philosopher Mikhail Epstein has classified Losev as one of the founders of the Russian discipline of “culturology” (Epstein, 1990: 18). Culturologists come in two varieties, Epstein argues. There are the differentiators, who study a given time-andplace and find as much diversity in it as possible; and there are the integrators. These two poles of the discipline, diversity and integrity, are of course inseparable for a balanced picture. But, Epstein writes, “Russian culturology, as it formed in the 1960s, found great living proponents for each aspect of the discipline in Bakhtin and Losev, both of whom had already laid the groundwork for this methodology in their earlier works of the 1920s.” At stake here was the centrifugal versus the centripetal mind. If Bakhtin spins outward, everywhere hearing dialogue and detecting boundaries and non-identities, then Losev – so Epstein concludes – vortexes inward, more inclined to

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consider “cultural identity as a multifaceted manifestation of one basic, primordial intuition.” So how might a Bakhtin scholar offer anything to those interested in Losev? I was provided with some guidance in this task by Vladimir Marchenkov. It is necessary, he said, that Losev be introduced to non-Russians as a person, his “whole personality in its time, place, tragic circumstance, unending quest, passion for truth, its flight and grief. Whatever the differences between Bakhtin and Losev,” Marchenkov proposed, “there is something fundamentally identical in them – not just the two of them, but many of them. They are the kind of people . . .”1 On this Marchenkov’s advice to me broke off, and that is where I will start. It is worth recalling that Losev himself practiced a speculative, integrative “compression” on whole personalities and intellectual legacies as a matter of principle. He noted near the end of his life that he had “one constant methodological rule.” “Until I can express the most complex philosophical system in a single phrase,” he explained, “I consider my studies of a given system to be insufficient” (Losev, 1990: 34, 43). Losev could ask this daunting task of himself because he believed that all spheres of a given culture – and certainly all spheres of the ancient world – form an organic unity, an integral “organism,” whose parts fit together and whose uniqueness could be grasped intuitively. Further, Losev, who was a gifted pedagogue, had three principles for classroom lecturing: generalization, a popular exposition of the subject matter, and a conversational tone. With this in mind, I will attempt to do the following in a general, popular, conversational way: first, to place Losev within his remarkable generation of philosophers by noting the parallels between his life and Bakhtin’s; second, to look more closely at several areas where Losev and Bakhtin draw on similar material, but to different purpose – specifically, literary texts and genres from the classical period, musical metaphors, and Fedor Dostoevskij; and finally, to speculate (on analogy with Bakhtin) whether or not there could be a “Losev Boom.”

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BIOGRAPHY

Bakhtin and Losev were born within two years of each other, in different regions of provincial Russia, precocious enthusiasts of classical thought, German philosophy, and the Symbolist religious Renaissance. Bakhtin moved to Petrograd and Losev moved to Moscow to study classical philology – both were inspired by the teachings of the classicist Tadeusz Zieli´nski during the War years – but by 1922, neither young man was famous enough to be deported on the “philosophers’ steamship.” Both remained at home and tried officially to become something else: Bakhtin turned toward literature, while Losev presented himself as an “historian of ancient aesthetics,” publishing eight volumes on his own while teaching at the Moscow Conservatory of Music. Both were arrested at the end of the decade and served terms. Upon release to civilian life, neither could publish his own work for decades. But each ended up working within the system, adjusting his ideology either essentially or cosmetically to the rhetoric of the era, and becoming beloved teachers at large pedagogical institutions for the second half of their very long lives. The morality of such accommodation has been a sore point with the Russian intelligentsia for over two centuries, but there are many who consider it absolutely heroic. For now, let me only quote, sympathetically, the concluding lines from James Scanlan’s early essay on “Losev and Soviet Aesthetics,” an account of the life and works written in 1984, when much about the life was still not known. “If I were forced to choose,” Scanlan wrote, “on grounds of more beneficent impact on contemporary Russian culture, between the anti-Marxism of an uncompromising Solzhenitsyn and the ‘Marxist positions’ of a compromising Losev, I should unhesitatingly choose the latter” (Scanlan, 1984: 234). Within these general contours there are many more striking parallels. Both scholars were intimately committed to the Russian Orthodox faith – in Losev’s case, as the monk Andronik from 1929 on. But although they were believing Christians, each man was careful to separate the tasks of philosophy from the very different mission of mystical experience. Bakhtin developed his “ethics of the novel” almost entirely as a function of horizontal, interpersonal exchanges among consciousnesses who were accessible to one another, as it were, “on the ground” (it is this “horizontality” that

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distinguishes his dialogism from, say, Martin Buber’s). And – here again Scanlan supplied the correct formulation – Losev taught, from his early essay on Scriabin to his late biography of Solov’ëv, that philosophy as a discipline existed in order to make experience intelligible, to mediate it logically and conceptually, and thus the task of philosophy cannot be equated with mystical insight, which is only one type of raw experiential material. In Losev’s view, according to Scanlan, very few thinkers could “operate successfully in both domains of the human mind or join the two appropriately” (Scanlan, 1994: 275). Losev, if we are to take him at his word, considered himself insufficiently experienced spiritually for pure mysticism. Instead he sought, in the Platonic dialogues and in the teachings of Plotinus, inspiration for the coordinated but distinct activities of Soul and Intellect. Bakhtin (who soon ceased being a classicist) was nudged toward secular-humanist expression by the very genre of the novel, which became the hero of his life in much the same way that Plato functioned for Losev. There are other parallels of a more brutal sort. Both men emerged from the travail of the 1930s severely crippled physically – Bakhtin lost a leg to chronic bone disease, Losev was discharged from the White Sea-Baltic Canal labor camp with drastically impaired vision, soon to be diagnosed as clinical blindness. The astonishing productivity of both these invalided scholars was made possible by devoted wives and a staff of disciple-assistants. Their households were run conservatively, immune to the pressures and promised comforts of modern consumer society. In deep old age, both Losev and Bakhtin, those miraculous survivors from the pre-Stalinist period, were polled about intellectual movements one-half century distant. Their balanced, mellowed response toward Formalism and Freudianism are in fact quite similar. Much like Bakhtin, Losev came to see the contributions of the Formalists in more generous cultural perspective. Whereas earlier he was “absolutely negative,” Losev recalls, now, sixty years later, he concedes that “they did useful work.” As regards Freudianism, Losev admitted that it excited him in the 1920s because “we were all too rational”; Freud discovered “the colossal role of the unconscious.” But then he registered the same disappointment that Bakhtin’s colleague Voloshinov expressed in Freudianism: A Critical Sketch (1927): “I

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never liked the reduction of the unconscious entirely to the sexual realm. That’s barbarism” (Losev, 1990: 50). Where Bakhtin and Losev differed in their assessment of competing Russian critical movements, however, was in the area of semiotics. Bakhtin, while appreciating the originality and energy of the Tartu School, to the end of his days specifically juxtaposed his dialogic approach to Lotman’s structuralist “re-coding of levels” (most famously in their respective analyses of Eugene Onegin). Losev, in contrast, identified with the symbolology of the semioticians and considered their work an extension of his own (Stolovich, 1994: 99–100). In this parallel glance at the two biographies, one fact leaps to the fore: that Losev’s case is everywhere the harsher fate. Longer, worse, more. Bakhtin and Losev were both arrested in the round-ups of 1929–1930, on vague charges of “idealism” and “counterrevolution” connected with teachings of the church. Bakhtin, fortunately, found some support: Lunacharskij reviewed his book on Dostoevskij favorably, Gor’kij’s wife intervened, and his sentence to the Solovki Islands (a certain sentence to death) was commuted to six years of exile in Kazakhstan. Losev’s sentencing, after four months in solitary confinement, was far more coordinated and vicious, a major publicized event. He was denounced from the highest party circles as a “blatant clerical reactionary.” The exiled Bakhtin managed to keep up his research but he fell silent; he had never been the letterwriting sort, and his indispensable other, his wife, never left his side. Losev, however, was forced to practice life-saving dialogue under the most desperate conditions. The criminalization of his “self-publishing” had marked the end of autonomous philosophy in the USSR. And yet Losev’s luminous letters from Belbaltlag to his wife Valentina Mikhajlovna, who was serving her term in Siblag, display the sort of courage, patience, and resilience that could only come from a naïve true believer or from a convict inspired by the ideal of Socrates himself. It was only upon learning of the loss of their library – which would, he believed, make a return to scholarly life impossible – that Losev’s spirit temporarily broke. “How could God allow such savage vengeance and spiritual outrage?” he wrote to his wife. “I cannot force myself to believe that scholarship is an evil, that books are evil, that the church is evil, that all this really deserves annihilation” (Losev, 1993: 376). During

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those darkest months of despair and Job-like rebellion, in February– March 1932, Losev confessed to his wife that he “had never chosen this path and had always considered it fatal for him,” that he had “no calling or inclination for politics,” that the ideal of penance had lost its appeal amid all this depravity and filth, and that he could no longer force himself to hope or to pray (Losev, 1993: 392–393). Among Bakhtin’s surviving personal documents there is only one equivalently black moment, 1943, where he asserts that the Word – which he had served reverently all his life – had been conquered by the ubiquitous Lie. “The genuinely good, impartial, and loving person has not yet spoken,” Bakhtin wrote in his working notebooks. “He has not touched the official word, infected with violence and falsehood; he does not become a writer” (Bakhtin, 1992: 153–155). Before we leave these parallel biographies, there are two additional, highly sensitive issues that deserve mention. In the last five years, the legacies of both Bakhtin and Losev have come under scrutiny for their ethical and academic integrity. Bakhtin was shown to have lifted several key passages verbatim, and many paraphrased ideas, from Ernst Cassirer’s 1927 study, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, translating them into Russian and inserting them, without credit, into his book on Rabelais (Poole, 1998). The most egregious of these borrowings suggest on Bakhtin’s part an exceptionally casual attitude toward his scholarly sources and debts. Losev, for his part, has been accused of anti-Semitism in his “Addendum” to the Dialektika mifa (Dialectics of Myth), a charge based on documents flushed out of the secret-police files that were used to frame the case against Losev in 1930.2 That charge soon spread to include collaboration with the regime that had persecuted him. I will not discuss these late-breaking posthumous accusations, except to say that it is not for our untested generation to cast stones, or even – in my opinion – to assume that we can reconstitute, in any complete and just manner, the context within which these heroic thinkers and survivors were forced to live their lives. What I will remark upon is an earlier and in some ways equally stressful aspect of both biographies: the matter of their Marxism. In the 1970s and 80s, there were noisy turf wars fought over Bakhtin’s attitude toward the official ideology of his time. The dispute hinged on Bakhtin’s alleged authorship of several overtly

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Marxist texts in the 1920s (one against the Formal Method, one against Freudianism, and one arguing for a socially-based linguistics). These battles either ended in a draw, or defaulted to the level of an abstract Hegelianism that is (all parties now tend to agree) undeniably present in Bakhtin’s thought – and politically inoffensive. Bakhtin himself was silent on the issue. But his disciples, writing in the 1990s, recalled their mentor disavowing any sympathy for Marxist thought. With Losev, of course, the matter is completely different. Emerging from labor camp, he embraced not just Marxism but Marxism-Leninism, eventually devoting essays to such obediently party-minded topics as “Language as a Tool of Communication in Light of Lenin’s Theory of Reflection” (Losev, 1984a) and peppering his written work with praise for the theoretical prowess of the founding minds of the communist regime. Till the end of his life, Losev claimed publicly that these convictions were authentic, not cosmetic, and represented the natural evolution of his thought. That thought, as he told Viktor Erofeev in 1985, was based on three governing ideas: the dialectic, the wholeness or synthesis that obtains in any given culture, and the inevitable doom that awaits the bourgeois West. “Deeply and passionately experiencing these three ideas, I began from the 1930s onward to adopt, completely freely and easily, Marxist methods – of course, in my own special and specific interpretation” (Losev, 1990: 18). This free-and-easy voluntarism of Losev’s Marxist vocabulary has been hotly disputed. For how could an idealist and Neoplatonist, even one who insisted upon the concreteness of Platonic images and on the ancient world’s appetite for things, make his peace with so crude and violent a materialism? As Ljudmila Gogotishvili notes in her encyclopedia entry on Losev, scholarly opinion ranges from assuming that Marxism was simply an obligatory “code” to the possibility that Losev “felt full solidarity with Marxism as such” (Gogotishvili, 1995: 322). Representative of the first, “Aesopian” position is the interviewer Erofeev, who considers Losev’s Marxism a Potëmkin Village, one so compromising to Losev’s scholarship that Erofeev suspects a sort of masochism at work (Erofeev, 1990: 7). Aza Takho-Godi, at the other end, has insisted that Losev’s heroic survival, his “podvig voli” [exploit of the will], did not entail “any special assertiveness or inevitable adaptation to the rules of

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the ‘game,’ ” as was the case with so many other members of the Soviet intelligentsia (Erofeev, 1990: 7). Losev himself – if we are to believe all that Erofeev recalled and transcribed – was Sphinx-like on this issue and exceptionally shrewd. “Tolstoj was a member of the intelligentsia,” Losev told Erofeev, “Lenin was too. But I have my own way, the Losev way” (Erofeev, 1990: 5). The dispute over Losev’s “party-mindedness” leads to the more general question about how we manage to remain ourselves under supreme pressure to accommodate the ideology of others. Losev was most definitely persecuted by the Soviet regime. But he is not a vulnerable thinker. His “dialectical phenomenology,” in which eidos combines with energy so seamlessly that essence genuinely becomes without losing any of its authenticity, is so comprehensive a mechanism that no form or condition of reality falls outside its purview. The very breadth of Losev’s vision provides him with the refuge he needs. For there are, it would seem, two ways to appear obedient. The first and more craven route is to offer no resistance: you have the weapons, you make the rules, therefore I follow you. The second route is, of course, the crafty way of Socrates in his Dialogues, which so inspired and infuriated Athens. And that route is: modestly, stealthily, step by step, I make you part of my system. If you start out the stronger party, then I will placate you by praising you while I am swallowing you up. My method is big enough to incorporate into its world anything you might toss into it – although, of course, I will incorporate your truth (as Losev insisted to Erofeev) “in my own special and specific interpretation.” The questioner has all the time in the world; his style is plodding, persistent, hectoring, with lots of tricky questions, anticipating objections, playing on prejudices and gaps in the audience’s knowledge. This is all standard practice in the Socratic dialogues. This “Socratic” mode of argument seems to work for Losev with marvelous consistency, permitting him, over and over again, to preserve both the Many and the One. His basic discourse strategy is often apophatic. To define a thing, zero in on its categories, distinguish it from what it is not – or, in Losev’s characteristic gesture, show the reader how “all x might equal y, but not all y is x.” This strategy, repeated chapter by chapter, structures the argument throughout Dialektika mifa. But a more compact example of the

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method can be found in Losev’s essay on the creative act (Losev, 1984: 3). It begins at a cosmic and ontological level: “Creativity,” Losev writes, “is a variety of becoming, but cannot be reduced to it.” These broad categories are then narrowed and brought down to earth, as each new refinement is pinned to its opposite. All becoming involves motion, but not all motion involves genuine change and development. Change and development entail movement, but creativity, in addition, entails a creative product – then a new product, and ultimately a self-sufficient product. The exhilaration we feel in the presence of such a precise funneling-in toward accurate definition might be a little formulaic, but it is nevertheless robust: by the end of such a dialectical progression we can count the steps, we know where we are. However, as Socrates himself was well aware, this method can begin to sound aggressive. If the person (or concept) being cross-examined is willful and stubborn, such a method can even feel like a trap. It can threaten and infuriate the establishment. This was not Losev’s luxury. Or, more fairly, Losev was not seventy years old when his rigged trial took place, and there was no one to register his Apology, no disciple like Phaedo to record for posterity his morally instructive death. Losev may or may not have acted po-kutuzovski, but he was conscious in himself of a huge continent, full of many living souls whom he desired to defend. Here is where his “honest espousal of Marxism” might come in. The advantage of the apophatic-Socratic method, which seems to inform so much of Losev’s dialectic, is that it is omnivorous. By which I mean: much courage and mental energy is required to apply it rigorously, but once set in motion, it can consume any subject-matter that is fed to it. So in cases where the philosopher is politically the more feeble party and spiritually the stronger one, it makes sense for the philosopher to feed indiscriminately, to turn everything into some sort of nourishment. For there is no thinker so crude or shallow that Losev cannot find in that thinker some blunt or commonsensical insight, congratulate its author on its wisdom, enter it into his system, refine it, and proceed to move forward along his own path. Take, for example, Vladimir Lenin as philosopher. This is not to suggest that Lenin was uncommonly crude or shallow, but he was certainly no match for Losev. And yet, in several of Losev’s essays from the 1970s – for example, “The Logic of the

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Symbol” – the Marxist-Leninist side comes out sounding so much smarter, so much more useful and less embarrassing, than before Losev took it on (Losev, 1984b: 110). What is the “logic of the symbol”? Losev opens that essay with a lament that the concept of symbol has become blurry and debased by imprecise usage. How might an application of the dialectic tighten it up? None other than Lenin provides the key. “According to Lenin,” Losev writes, “the process of cognition begins with an active contemplation of reality through the senses, moves to abstract thought, and ends with practical action.” That sequence is itself so vague, so unoriginal and unexceptional in epistemology that Lenin is hardly necessary to it – but neither does Lenin get fatally in the way. The essay itself then unfolds po-losevski, a broad road, meeting no obstacles, crediting Marx and Lenin for truisms as well as for banalities, paying the dominant system a compliment wherever possible (Losev selects, for instance, the omnipresent hammer and sickle on the Soviet landscape as an exemplary symbol that is both “sensible and abstract” [Losev, 1984b: 117]). Party hacks could only rejoice, for their side and their slogans have gained in intelligence. Losev could only be pleased that his method and conclusions, on matters so very important to the conscious life, are reaching more readers. And has anything essential been sacrificed? Is this being dishonest? Stepping on the throat of one’s own song? It would seem not. But the debate here has larger implications than the working vocabulary of a single accommodating philosopher. “Dialectics” (and especially Marxist-Leninist dialectics) has come under a great deal of just and unjust battering in recent decades. There is Mikhail Bakhtin’s famously succinct dismissal of the whole procedure in his personal notebooks from 1970– 1971: “Dialogue and dialectics,” Bakhtin jotted down. “Take a dialogue and remove the voices . . . remove the intonations . . . carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness – and that’s how you get dialectics.”3 More recently there have been various post-communist accountings, such as Mikhail Epstein’s witty, mournful post-mortem from the late-1990s, where Soviet dialectics is described as “an empty, madly spinning funnel,” a whirlwind in which, “for all practical purposes, not one positive

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concept remained that by one name or another wasn’t annihilated and disemboweled from the standpoint of a ‘higher dialectics’ ” (Epstein, 2000: 11). These debasements, by Bakhtin and others, were certainly justified in the sociopolitical realm. But they have little relevance, in my opinion, to Losev’s dialectical project, which works in quite the opposite direction. A positive, concretely embodied, personally “voiced” concept is precisely what Losev is seeking. Throughout his life, in addition to his scholarly editions, histories, and treatises, Losev produced a large number of essays for the “cultural middle class” on aesthetic themes – constructed, as were his ideal public lectures, according to the principles of populjarnost’ and razgovornost’ (popular and conversational style). To reach a maximum number of others, one must draw on the most available images, the most banal common denominators. Losev’s style in these “popular” pieces is highly personal, but displays a curious lack of ego, or better a lack of false pride, that paradoxically borders on arrogance. The dialectic is both a mechanism and an organism, both objective and subjective. Whatever you – that is, the Soviet system, its heroes and its symbols – can come up with, I will pull into my dialectic and use. And (this is a key point) you too will not end up the loser. For there is a difference between accommodation and collaboration. The system needed Losev’s intelligence; he did not especially need whatever it was that the system had to offer. But Losev was an ascetic and understood austerity. In a worldview such as his that values the “integral and integrated organism,” one good index of intelligence would be the ability to fit one’s gifts to the resources of the environment. There is in Bakhtin’s professional life a correspondingly delicate political moment. During the early 1950s, while serving as Chair of the Department of World Literature at Mordovia State Teachers’ College (later upgraded to the University of Saransk), Bakhtin was obliged to preface his formal speeches with formulaic praise of Lenin and Stalin. This is what chairpersons were obliged to do. The scrupulous Moscow editors of Bakhtin’s Collected Works considered whether it was necessary to include these “prefaces” in his textual production for those years. And as I understand their decision, these prefaces were dropped because they did not qualify as genuine utterances. There was no intended addressee and no

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response to them was expected. A voice uttered them, but they were not really “voiced.” The words were doing no one any good or any harm; they were simply phatic sounds. It is true, of course, that when measured against Bakhtin’s practice, Losev had an intimate and creative relationship with the approved methodological rubrics of his era. He openly worked through Marxism-Leninism, not only to the side of it. What is more, since his impulse was everywhere to synthesize, integrate, “purify,” Losev could sense a similarity as naturally as Bakhtin could sense a difference. There are some moving moments in Losev’s drama of accommodation. In 1968, for example, the Tartu School scholar Leonid Stolovich sent Losev several early publications from Lotman’s circle of semioticians (Stolovich, 1994: 99– 100). Losev replied graciously to Stolovich that he had heard of this pioneering movement from his students, but that its accomplishments had surpassed all his expectations. He then added: “I too published some logically worked-out books on the aesthetics of time-space” and “struggled constantly with Kantian dualism.” He was surprised that the Tartu scholars had not made reference to his works, both those of the 1920s and his more recent publications – since, he wrote, after 1953 “I continued without change my earlier approaches to scholarship, although, it is true, orienting them on completely different soil.” “On a completely different soil . . . ,” “though in a different form . . . ,” “of course, with my own understanding . . .”: such phrases abound in Losev, as he strives to be part of everything and to pull us all in. Some items fit better than others. Sergej Khoruzhij, for example, has argued that Losev’s “rear-guard battle” for the correct, Russian–Christian understanding of myth and culture cannot fairly be called semiotic, for semiotics as a system is far too rationalistic and secular; Losev’s roots are elsewhere, in Solov’ëv, in Florenskij, with perhaps some resonances of Ernst Cassirer and of the less psychologized portions of Carl Jung (Khoruzhij, 1992). And those thinkers were quite distinct, in temperament and in inspiration, from the cyber-smart information theorists of Tartu. Still, one feels in Losev a striving to turn even the slightest likeness in task into a dialectical sequence moving toward an eventual new unity. As Sergej Averincev wrote in his tribute to his mentor, it was not

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some “biographical trauma” that had turned Losev against liberalism and dualism. The aged Losev’s rage against the Renaissance (and against Bakhtin’s delighted defense of it) was of one piece with the youthful Losev’s rage against Skrjabin. “Losev’s thought,” Averincev wrote, “precisely as thought, outside all external circumstances, was possessed by the imperative of a harsh, implacable unity” (Averincev, 1993: 21, 22). Losev was as passionate about the all-embracing dialectic that would return All to the One as Bakhtin was about all-embracing dialogue, which scattered everything and eventually would bestow an individualized personality on even the tiniest unit of consciousness.

THREE JUXTAPOSITIONS

There are three areas where Bakhtin and Losev draw on similar imagery or bodies of texts, but to very different purpose. For there are many deceptively look-alike moments in the writings of these two thinkers. Consider, for example, one almost-synonymous pair of communication genres that has its starting-point in Classical thought: beseda [conversation] and dialog [dialogue]. For Losev, the Socratic dialogue is an ideal beseda. It is spoken by specific, passionately engaged personalities, to be sure, but it is run by an extra-personal logic, in the service of the higher idea. This Idea retraces its steps to its source as it is being tested. Thus the “life of the Idea” resembles the discourse of Greek tragedy, where – as Losev never tires of reminding us – heroism and fatalism were still gloriously joined; a Greek hero was not passive before his fate, but neither was he free in the face of it.4 The end-point of this “conversation” between personality and idea was usually tragic: Oedipus, Cassandra, Lear, Hamlet, all courageous heroes returning to an originary truth that could not be evaded. At the end, nothing fundamentally new has come about. What of Bakhtinian dialogue? It takes various forms – Menippean satire, the body-talk of carnival, the polyphonic word – but in all cases, the “idea” plays a different role than it does for Losev. There is no absolute, panoptic point of view to which it might return and from which it might be contemplated. The most vital components of Bakhtin’s world are unfinalized as well

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as unresolved. To test an unfinalized thing is difficult. As Dmitrij Nikulin has explicated this point, at any given moment a person is recognizably whole in the present, completely “there,” but also, unpredictably or under pressure from others, that person could easily become some other thing.5 We are neither predetermined, nor are we accidental. And that unique quality which keeps me from being accidental, that is, the consistency in my reactions over time, Bakhtin would call my “idea.” I do not “carry” or “hold” this idea; I am the idea. Since dialogue understood in this way is fundamentally accretive and forward-looking, more fertile than punitive, the primary dialogic genres turn out to be comedic. One could even say – following Losev’s pedagogy and reducing each of these two tendencies to a single memorable phrase – that although both our thinkers use a double-voiced discursive genre with a Classical pedigree (beseda or dialog) in order to combine German Romantic aesthetics with the spiritual discipline of the Russian Religious Renaissance, Losev, in the tradition of Nietzsche, is moved most powerfully by beginnings and ends; Bakhtin, who showed almost no interest in Nietzsche, does only middles. Tragic Losev, comedic Bakhtin: this contrast will now be further refined in our next comparison, the use each thinker makes of Fëdor Dostoevskij. Both love Dostoevskij deeply – balancing this love, as did so many of their Symbolist-era contemporaries, with an intuitive dislike for Leo Tolstoj. Bakhtin’s lack of sympathy for the Tolstojan position is well-known. Losev dismisses him in a brief paragraph: “Dostoevskij is not a member of the intelligentsia and not a classic Russian writer, but Tolstoj is an intelligent and a classic Russian writer. Thus Tolstoj, of course, is alien to me. Why should I eat those rice cutlets that Leo Tolstoj recommends? What is this, some mysticism of rice cutlets?”6 But their reasons for loving Dostoevskij are not the same. Bakhtin’s monograph on Dostoevskij is remarkable for its almost exclusive focus on that novelist’s sophisticated verbal and stylistic devices – such categories as active double-voiced discourse, novelistic polyphony, and the notion just now discussed of an “ideja-chelovek” or “idea-person.” Bakhtin elevated these devices to the level of moral philosophy and thereby challenged, against the grain of his time, the truism that Dostoevskij thought profoundly but wrote carelessly and without craft. In the process of

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analyzing these morally-inflected elements of style, Bakhtin tends to lighten Dostoevskij up, dissolve the sado-masochistic dimension of his plots, downplay perversion, terror, and guilt. In fact, Bakhtin states outright that “plot” as such, with all its sensational details, did not matter much to Dostoevskij: plot was only a matrix on which to hang all those brilliant polyphonic dialogues. Where other readers see dead-ended tragedy or vicious, “underground” psychology, Bakhtin detects open-endedness, no final words, multivalent exchanges, sideways glances and second chances. When people are tormented and die, their words live on, entering the Great Dialogue and eventually finding a home in Great Time. But Bakhtin also insists that Dostoevskij, in addition to not caring about plot, does not care much about torture or death. What is important is not the specific fate of bodies, but how these bodies, in the brief time allotted to them, exhibit and juxtapose the ideas they make manifest. The resolution of these ideas matters less than the fact that they are brought up to the surface and interrogated. Dostoevskij’s little graveyard farce “Bobok,” a drunken menippean satire for the nineteenth century, gets more attention from Bakhtin than does the Grand Inquisitor. In contrast, Losev’s use of Dostoevskij is conventional, mainstream, and apocalyptic. The two enduring inspirations of Losev’s youth, which remained “a revelation for his entire life,” were Dostoevskij and Wagner (Losev, 1990: 16–17). For Losev, Dostoevskij’s heroes were seekers, but above all sufferers. An exemplary document here is Losev’s semi-autobiographical story Zhizn’, “Life,” written during the winter of 1941, when a bomb destroyed Losev’s Moscow apartment (and library archive) – the third time he sustained such a loss. Part One of “Life” reads like a pastiche of themes from The Brothers Karamazov (Losev, 1993: 3–52). Indeed, the entire tale “Life” – and Losev’s other philosophical fiction – is Dostoevskian in its structure and focus. Our lives are a witnessing of good and evil. Having witnessed, we gather around a table to debate ultimate questions. Only at the final step do Losev’s stories come to resemble more Socrates or Plotinus than they do the Elder Zosima: when Losev cautions us to be guided neither by active love nor by universal answerability, but by knowledge. Even with the Socratic pursuit of knowledge factored in, however, Losev’s passion

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for Dostoevskij is grounded in dark, Romantic-Dionysian rebellion, familiar to the point of cliché. That rebellion is deliberately laid aside by the more formalist, sanguine, trusting Bakhtin. My third and final node of comparison is music and musical metaphor. In his essay “Author and Hero” from the early 1920s, Bakhtin talks briefly about “pure music” as a type of aesthetic act (Bakhtin, 1990: 201). He is making the case that aesthetic activity, even the most formal, can never be reduced to mere mechanical devices and proportionalities; that even in an art form as objectless and plotless as music we feel “the resistance [and] persistent presence of a possible consciousness . . . a consciousness incapable of being consummated from within itself.” Musical friends of mine are not persuaded by Bakhtin’s peopling of melody and harmony with human personalities – and needy, non-autonomous ones at that. But this early tendency of Bakhtin’s to see and hear a “human face” even behind a stretch of pure untexted music is characteristic. At the end of the decade Bakhtin would be evoking the term polyphony in his book on Dostoevskij and, in his later essays on the theory of the novel, the phrase novelistic orchestration. The terms are suggestive, but hardly precise. Technically, polyphony is “a texture where two or more melodies are played or sung simultaneously” (Nikulin, 1998: 382–383). Bakhtin must have intended only non-imitative polyphony (in which the melodies are different and irreducible to one another). Clearly, what fascinated him in this musical genre was the possibility of spatial interaction, the “co-sounding of a number of voices” that was nevertheless not static but that moved, as music always must, through time. Beyond these general space-and-time truisms, however, the actual musical content in polyphony didn’t seem to matter that much to Bakhtin. He took musical terms and employed them for his own literary purposes, making polyphony identical to a multiplicity of speech centers and orchestration equal to a nuanced distribution of personalities by the activity of a polyphonic author, all the while retaining in the metaphor the suggestive idea of “overtones” and even the vague possibility of a chorus. Although passionate about rhythm, Bakhtin didn’t really need the other nit and grit of music: melody, pitch, precise tonal relationships. He was interested in polifonichnost’ (polyphonic quality) largely as it related to the aural and oral aspect of the voiced, uttered word.

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Losev could never have approved of so imprecise an analytical method. First, of course, because he was a musician himself, a violinist, a respected lecturer on Wagner and Skrjabin, a theorist and philosopher of music. He was not a philosopher in the usual Russian-Tolstojan sense of “What is Music/What is Art?”: the traditional nineteenth-century approach to the arts that concentrated on music’s moral effects rather than on its ontological essence. Losev’s writings on musical time, which are now being revived and restudied, are technical philosophical exercises that are careful to exclude morality and anthropomorphizing consciousness. Rather, in the spirit of Pythagoras, Losev investigates music as an “expression of the life of numbers” arising from the primeval chaos.7 It is significant that even in Losev’s philosophical prose – in, for example, his untitled camp story from 1933 that goes by the name of “Vstrecha,” “Meeting” – the three Belomor Canal convicts who gather one evening to talk about music appear honor-bound to be technically correct, not merely metaphorically effusive, about a given scientific term.8 Indeed, Nikolaj Vladimirovich, the autobiographical figure, wearies his two colleagues with a long, impassioned, possibly ironic but still reasonably accurate exposition of the history of “polyphonism” in West European music, its source in Protestant individualism, which necessitates its absence from the unified Communist utopia of the future. Of course, Losev’s thumbnail sketch of polyphony in the history of European music, inserted into a piece of prose fiction, is of a very different order than Bakhtin’s loose use of musical metaphors in his Dostoevskij book. But there is a principle at stake which would seem to distinguish Losev’s critical mind from Bakhtin’s. Till the end of his life, Losev insisted on a purity of procedure when applying a metaphor or symbol in its proper place. In his 1968 letter to Leonid Stolovich, after remarking that his own work had always attended closely to “structures, symbols, and signs,” Losev observed: “Generally speaking, I differ sharply from the researchers of your university [Tartu] in one thing only: I consider it completely superfluous to pile up all sorts of pseudo-mathematical formulas in those instances where such formulas do not speak directly to the mathematical side of the subject, but are only some sort of external stenography.” With his talk of polyphony and orchestration in the

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literary realm, Bakhtin was piling up pseudo-musical formulas, and – I make bold to speak here for Losev as a philosopher of literature and of music – two potentially precise fields of study are more, not less, confused by the cross-fertilization.9 And now my closing question: Is there likely to be a Losev Boom? Is Losev globalizable? I am inclined to think not. There can be a cult of his person10 and a passionate revival of his work – not uncommon events around vital thinkers in a culture – but a boom is another matter. I have two reasons for thinking that Losev might not qualify. First, Losev is too authoritative and too sly. His dialectical-Socratic method sucks the outside world in so effectively that once inside, there are few places to move on your own. I hasten to say that neither Bakhtin nor Losev strike me as especially dialogic personalities; both inspired awe, not debate, disciples, not valued opponents, and the dialogues they admired were better studied fixed in place as literary texts. As Losev’s research assistant V.V. Bibikhin remarked in his Centennial memoirs: “If, at that time, someone had suggested to me that it was possible to argue with Losev, I would have positively taken fright. If he wasn’t right, then who was?” (Bibikhin, 1992: 139). Bibikhin’s outburst could have been uttered by Bakhtin’s devoted followers as well. But Bakhtin, whether or not he was right, is messier and more porous than Losev. Bakhtin is full of loopholes and his ideas tend to vector outward. It is easy to assimilate Bakhtin in small pieces because his thought shifts, breaks off, makes no pretense to completeness, and there are long tentative stretches in it (Wall, 1998). His terms are highly suggestive, but many potentials are left undeveloped. This means that Bakhtin leaves more for the secondary or derivative critic to do. One can read Bakhtin and immediately see how to make him your own. In fact, you don’t need to have read any of the books he read in order to grasp the blunt, brilliant outlines of his theory of the novel, or carnival, or chronotope. And then you can begin to apply him to your own work. In a word, Bakhtin is more democratic; he demands less of his readers, his managers, and his appliers. Which leads me to the second reason why Losev most likely won’t boom: he’s too scholarly. To “make him your own” takes a huge amount of work. As Gachev noted in Russkaja duma, Losev is

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that rather unusual figure on Russian soil, a thinker who combines two contrary tendencies in philosophy: a seeker after the Unified Whole, Divine Sophia, the Cosmic picture, but at the same time a passionate empiricist, an encyclopedist, a factologist, a lover of all the separate “parts of existence” (Gachev, 1991: 257). And what this means, alas, is that in order to appreciate Losev you have to know a lot of what he knows. His ancient languages, his cultures, the specifics of his music and mathematics. Before you can argue with it or apply it, you simply have to learn it. As Averincev remarked, Losev combined a “Russian impetuousness” – urgent, palpable, at times irritable – with a “Greek ordering of thought” (Averincev, 1990: 4). This “Greek ordering of thought” is what the academic world recognizes as the traditional, time-honored, now somewhat musty profession of classical philology. For a long time the Classics establishment resisted the onslaught of Bakhtin’s trend-setting generalizations, which were everywhere in the air and threatened to destabilize their careful work. (Only very recently, in 2002, did an anthology appear on Bakhtin and the Classics that takes his influence seriously and respectfully, if often critically [Branham, 2002].) From the start, Losev was such a philological professional. In no sense is this meant as a reproach to Bakhtin. It is simply to say that it was not part of Bakhtin’s practice to provide a scholarly edition, translation, or extended academic commentary on someone else. He was a strong critic, a deeply original philosopher, who took from other thinkers what he needed to develop his own powerful insights. But – I think we can safely say – Bakhtin did not serve in a disinterested manner the authors and philosophers upon whom he drew and whom he revered. And how many such scholarly editions Losev prepared, lost, re-prepared and finally saw through to the light of day! I am afraid that in today’s restless and impatient climate, such heroes will not boom. I end on a thought about deaths. Bakhtin in the early 1970s made it clear that he felt his personal survival had been arbitrary and miraculous, proof of the comedic plenitude in the world. When one of his students, who happened to be Jurij Andropov’s daughter, arranged for him to be lodged in the Moscow Kremlin hospital, Bakhtin is rumored to have said, gratefully, “Why, my life has turned

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out like complete carnival!” One is tempted to choose another genre for Losev, albeit no less grateful. “The god has commanded me to be a philosopher,” Socrates said in his Apology to the citizens of Athens. “And there is no greater good for you in the city than my service to the god.” NOTES 1

Personal e-mail communication, Vladimir Marchenkov to Caryl Emerson, 20 April 2001. 2 For a compassionate, evenhanded account of this controversy, see Vladimir Marchenkov, “Aleksei Losev and His Theory of Myth,” in A.F. Losev (ed.), The Dialectics of Myth, V.L. Marchenkov (trans.), Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 3– 65. Of the discussions in the Russian press, the most disinterested seems to be Leonid Stolovich’s article “Antisemitizm Loseva: istina ili vymysel? (Losev’s Anti-Semitism: Truth or Fiction?),” Russkij evrej 3 (1997). 3 Bakhtin, 1986, p. 147. It is often forgotten that this phrase, so often invoked authoritatively, was jotted down in a private notebook and is not part of any larger argument that Bakhtin ever prepared for print. 4 Losev, 1990, p. 63. See also Vasil’ev, 1993, pp. 105–118. 5 For a lucid discussion of this relationship between person and idea, see Nikulin, 1998, pp. 385–386. 6 Losev, 1990, p. 47. For an excellent exegesis of this hate-love relationship see Rosenthal, 1994. 7 Zenkin, 1999, pp. 66–75, esp. p. 73. See also Haardt, 1994, pp. 197–205. 8 A.F. Losev, “Vstrecha,” in Losev, 1993, pp. 52–149, esp. pp. 72–74. 9 Attempts to reattach Bakhtin’s literary terms to actual music have not been especially productive; see Levaja, 2000. 10 So claims Naftali Prat, with somewhat ungenerous overtones; see Prat, 2001, p. 82. REFERENCES Averincev, S.S. “ ‘Mirovozzrencheskij stil’: podstupy k javleniju Loseva,” Voprosy filosofii 9 (1993), pp. 16–22. Averincev, S.S. “Pamjati uchitelja,” Kontekst, Nauka, Moscow, 1990. Bakhtin, M.M. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (eds.), Vadim Liapunov (trans.), University of Texas Press, Austin, 1990. Bakhtin, M.M. “Iz chernovykh tetradej,” Literaturnaia ucheba 5 (1992), pp. 153– 166. Bakhtin, M.M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Vern W. McGee (trans.), University of Tex as Press, Austin, 1986.

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Bibikhin, V.V. “Iz rasskazov A.F. Loseva,” Voprosy filosofii 10 (1992), pp. 139– 146. Branham, R. Bracht (ed.). Bakhtin and the Classics, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2002. Epstein, M. “From Culturology to Transculture,” in Ellen E. Berry and Mikhail N. Epstein (eds.), Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1990, pp. 15–30. Epstein, M. “Postmodernism, Communism, and Sots-Art,” in Marina Balina, Nancy Condee and Evgeny Dobrenko (eds.), John Meredig (trans.), Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2000, pp. 3–31. Erofeev, V. “Poslednij klassicheskij myslitel’,” in A.F. Losev (ed.), Strast’ k dialektike: Literaturnye razmyshlenija filosofa, Sovetskij pisatel’, Moscow, 1990, pp. 3–13. Gachev, G. Russkaja duma: Portrety russkikh myslitelei, Novosti, Moscow, 1991. Gogotishvili, L. “LOSEV Aleksej Fëdorovich,” Ruskaja filosofija: Malyj enciklopedicheskji slovar’, Nauka, Moscow, 1995, pp. 321–327. Haardt, A. “Aleksei Losev and the Phenomenology of Music,” in James P. Scanlan (ed.), Russian Thought after Communism, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, pp. 197–205. Khoruzhij, S.S. “Ar’ergardnyj boj. Mysl’ i mif Alekseja Loseva,” Voprosy filosofii 10 (1992), pp. 112–138. Levaja, T.N. “D.D. Shostakovich i M.M. Bakhtin (Nekotorye paralleli),” Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop 3–4(32–33) (2000), pp. 17–27. Losev, A.F. Estetika vozrozhdenija, Mysl’, Moscow, 1978. Losev, A.F. “The Dialectic of the Creative Act (A Brief Essay),” Soviet Studies in Literature XX(2–3) (1984), pp. 3–34. Losev, A.F. “Language as a Tool of Communication in Light of Lenin’s Theory of Reflection,” Soviet Studies in Literature XX(2–3) (1984a), pp. 85–107. Losev, A.F. “The Logic of the Symbol,” Soviet Studies in Literature XX(2–3) (1984b), pp. 108–144. Losev, A.F. Strast’ k dialektike: Literaturnye razmyshlenija filosofa, Sovetskij pisatel’, Moscow, 1990. Losev, A.F. Zhizn’, Komplekt, St. Petersburg, 1993. Marchenkov, V. “Aleksej Losev and his Theory of Myth,” in A.F. Losev (ed.), V.L. Marchenkov (trans.), The Dialectics of Myth, Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 3–65. Nikulin, D. “Mikhail Bakhtin: A Theory of Dialogue,” Constellations 5(3) (1998), pp. 381–402. Poole, B. “Bakhtin and Cassirer: The Philosophical Origins of Bakhtin’s Carnival Messianism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 97(3/4) (1998), pp. 537–578. Prat, N. “Losev i totalitarizm,” Voprosy filosofii 5 (2001), pp. 78–84. Rosenthal, B.G. “Merezhkovskii’s Readings of Tolstoi: Their Contemporary Relevance,” in James P. Scanlan (ed.), Russian Thought after Communism, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, 1994, pp. 121–146.

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Scanlan, J.P. “A.F. Losev and Mysticism in Russian Philosophy,” Studies in East European Thought 46 (1994), pp. 263–286. Scanlan, J.P. “A.F. Losev and the Rebirth of Soviet Aesthetics after Stalin,” in James J. O’Rourke, Thomas J. Blakeley and Friedrich J. Rapp (eds.), Contemporary Marxism: Essays in Honor of J.M. Bochenski, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster. Stolovich, L.N. “Ne nado darit’ Loseva chernosotencam!” Russkij evrej 3 (1997), pp. 22–23. Stolovich, L.N. “A.F. Losev o semiotike v Tartu,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 8 (1994), pp. 99–104. Takho-Godi, A.A. “Filosofskaja proza A.F. Loseva,” in A.F. Losev (ed.), Zhizn’, Komplekt, St. Petersburg, 1993, pp. 516–532. Vasil’ev, D.Ju. “Ideja sud’by u A.F. Loseva,” in Mysl’ i zhizn’: k stoletiju so dnja rozhdenija A.F. Loseva, Bashkirskij gosudarstvennyj universitet, Ufa, 1993, pp. 105–118. Wall, A. “A Broken Thinker,” South Atlantic Quarterly 97(3/4) (1998), pp. 669– 698. Zenkin, K.V. “Muzyka v kontekste ‘vysshego sinteza’ A.F. Loseva,” Voprosy filosofii 9 (1999), pp. 66–75.

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