“A conversation from two corners”: towards a history of M.L. Gasparov’s failed book project

Abstract

The article is an unpretentious story of “how we worked together”. Mikhail Gasparov called our joint work on a wide variety of topics from Marshak’s translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets to OBERIU poets and then on a book on philosophy and philology a “conversation from two corners”. The “two corners” stood roughly for his domain, philology, and mine, philosophy: although we shared the same basic ideas about the humanities and their scientific status, the material we worked with and the disciplinary languages we used were so different that talking about concepts was not an easy task. This article presents the main topics of our joint work and the proposed structure of our might-have-been joint book (designed for the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities’ Yellow Series , approximately 200 pages), describing its individual sections and issues. Gasparov’s plan was to make it an experimental book that would bring together things that he himself made a point of separating in his own work (scholarly articles, fragments from his Notes and Excerpts , letters, answers to questions, etc.). It was planned to present each author’s reflections on the contemporary interactions between philosophy and philology, on the general and the specific in the humanities as opposed to other disciplines, on the changing of the Soviet mental frame of reference to the post-Soviet one and on the conceptual implications of these changes. Also, fragments of joint work on different topics concerning Lotman’s and Bakhtin’s work were to be presented.