- Alexander Veselovsky
Alexander Nikolayevich Veselovsky ( _ru. Александр Николаевич Веселовский;
16 February 1838 ,Moscow -23 October 1906 ,St. Petersburg ) was a leading literary theorist ofImperial Russia who laid the groundwork for comparative literary studies.Life and work
A general's son, Veselovsky studied privately with
Fyodor Buslaev and attended theMoscow University from 1854 to 1858. After a brief stint inSpain as a tutor to the Russian ambassador's son, Veselovsky continued his education withHeymann Steinthal inBerlin andPrague and spent three years working in the libraries ofItaly . Upon his return to Russia, he delivered lectures in Moscow and St. Petersburg and was elected a Member of theSt. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1876.Veselovsky's early studies of medieval
Italian literature led him to believe that many plots and literary devices were imported to Europe from theOrient throughByzantium . Looking at literature primarily from a genetic point of view, Alexander Veselovsky and his brother Aleksey (1843-1918) attempted to construct a comprehensive theory of the origin and development of poetry. In 1899, the elder brother famously argued that "the font and syncretic root of poetic genres" may be traced to ritualized popular games and folk incantations. [Eleazar Meletinsky . "The Poetics of Myth". Routledge, 1998. Page 139.]Influence
In the
Soviet Union , Veselovsky and his followers were criticized for their "ethnographism", which allowed "source study to grow to a hypertrophied degree, thus dissolving the specific character of the literary work into a collection of "influences". [Rachel Polonsky ("English Literature and the Russian Aesthetic Renaissance". Cambridge University Press, 1998. Page 17) quoting: Jauss, Hans Robert. "Toward an Aesthetic of Reception." University of Minnesota Press, 1982.] OnAugust 14 1946 theCentral Committee of the Communist Party adopted a resolution specifically condemning "kowtowing" to the bourgeois West by the so-called Veselovskyists. [Mikhail Bakhtin , "Rabelais and His World". Indiana University Press, 1984. Page XX.] TheRussian Formalists largely shared a critical view of Veselovsky's theory, although it has been suggested that Veselovsky's doctrine was actually a point from which they evolved "in a linear, if polemical, way". [Dragan Kujundzic. "The Returns of History: Russian Nietzscheans After Modernity". SUNY Press, 1997. Page 8.]Although his work has been largely forgotten by Western scholarship (probably due to lack of translations), Veselovsky has been called "one of the most erudite and original scholars Russia has produced" ["Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays", ed. Robert A. Maguire. Princeton University Press, 1974. Pages 39-40.] and "the most remarkable representative of comparative literary study in Russian and European scholarship of the nineteenth century". [Rachel Polonsky ("English Literature and the Russian Aesthetic Renaissance". Cambridge University Press, 1998. Page 17) quoting Zhirmunsky's "Sravnitelnoe literaturovedenie", p. 84.]
References
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
