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RUSSIA

Kenneth J. Knoespel

Although it is possible to identity a rich indigenous Slavic pre-science (Ryan 1999), this chapter directs the reader to a range of sources and themes that apply to Russia’s role in the emergence of natural philosophy and in shaping the development of technology closely related to the Russian state. From a Russian vantage point, “literature and science” has a particular Western stamp often associated with C.P. Snow’s commentary on the “two cultures.” Given the multifaceted force of both literature and science, Russia provides a rich setting from which to approach their conjunction.

The Imperial Academy of Sciences and Peter the Great

From a European perspective, the foundation of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg often appears as a departure point for “science” in Russia. While the formation of that institution in 1725 by Peter the Great (Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov) provides a convenient mark, Russians also had a range of contacts with emergent natural philosophy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. During the reign of Ivan the Terrible, for instance, Italians were employed to build the Diamond Palace in the Kremlin. Efforts by English traders, including Richard Chancellor, established contacts in Archangel as early as 1553. Such contacts affirm not only the geographical range but the continuous presence of trade in shaping the exchange of information.

The foundation of the Imperial Academy itself shows the vital importance of expanding communication dealing with natural philosophy and the rapidly expanding interest in natural resources (see Black 1986). While the European, and especially German, origins of the academy are often emphasized, European counsel also provoked a Russian interest in identifying what was unique about Russian “natural philosophy.” While Western history of science often gives special weight to “philosophy” in the discussion of “natural philosophy,” Russians were inclined to emphasize the “natural,” which underscored Russia’s geographical breadth and wealth of natural resources. The Siberian Expeditions undertaken in the eighteenth century offer a strong example of Russian interest in identifying their unique flora and fauna (Knoespel 2004). Another example is the translation of Christian Huygens’s Cosmotheoros of 1698 into Russian in 1717, which Peter the Great used to animate the study of navigation in the naval schools because it provoked students to think about the imagined uses of geometry (Boss 1972).

The work of Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov provides a strong example of an evolving Russian view of natural philosophy that also manifests itself in Russian literature. Lomonosov is recognized for his work in chemistry, but he also participated in translating classical European literary genres into Russian. His poems on the Arctic call attention to Northern phenomena and celebrate the wealth of learning inherent in the Russian landscape.

In vain does stern Nature
Hide from us the entrance
To the shores of the evening in the East.
I see with wise eyes:
A Russian Columbus speeding between the ice floes –
Defying the mystery of the ages.

(McCannon 1998: 93)

Lomonosov also became a leader in the codification of the Russian language and a powerful advocate for the use of Russian (Cracraft 2004: 220). He renounced German participation in the later Siberian Expeditions in order to advocate the Russian language and also to protect information on Russian natural resources from being translated out of Russia. The recognition of his knowledge led him to be ordered to provide information for Voltaire’s biography of Peter the Great. An anonymous French poem on Peter the Great is thought to be Lomonosov’s own ironic Russian response to the French appropriation of Peter (Cerny 1964).

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Pushkin remains the most recognized name in the formation of Russian culture because of the ways he exemplifies the language’s flexibility. While his work registered a range of natural philosophy practiced by the aristocracy, Pushkin participated in creating linguistic links between European and Russian culture (Lachmann 1996, 1997). Pushkin was part of an elite network of young Russian aristocrats developing intellectual exchanges pertaining to literature and science alike (Mikeshin 1997). The continuous celebration of Pushkin in Russian literature has often been compared with the place English literary history gives to Shakespeare. The comparison shows how both national cultures established practical but at the same time ideological measures. Recent work on Pushkin’s legacy has emphasized its manipulation for multiple purposes (Sinyavsky 1993). Pushkin could exemplify at the same time the accomplishments of the Soviet school system in Russia and the spirit of liberation for Russians who left after the Revolution.

Russian natural history involves the continuous rehearsal of the place and exploratory capacity of the Russian language. Russian offered an extraordinary means for creating an urban literature of social and psychological transformation (Berlin 1955). Hardly to be enclosed up by so-called literary history, the work of Gogol and Dostoevsky opened up mental landscapes associated with the growth of cities. Nineteenth-century Russian literature was at the intersection between literature and science in shaping the emergence of sociology, psychiatry, and the renewal of philosophy. Gogol and Dostoevsky were not simply authors but also inventors of a language that negotiated the normal and the abnormal. Their creation of case histories of abnormal behavior gave impetus to the development of early twentieth-century psychiatry.

In contrast to the case histories of abnormality found in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy recovered the epic as a counter to history. In their interweaving of minute idiosyncrasies of individual characters, his works comprise a vast symphonic array that falls together over time like a progression of chords. Just as we think of Dostoevsky’s abnormal case histories, Tolstoy worked as a moral diagnostician, assisting generations to discover in art and history means for rethinking or reworking social structures. The group of nineteenth-century Russian critics that includes Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov explored the ways literature serves above all as a modeling device. In his reception in Western literary studies, Chernyshevsky in particular has come to represent a poetic modeling (Wellek 1965), and the interest in modeling and remodeling found in nineteenth-century Russian literature also appeared in the work of scientists such as Dmitri Mendeleev, who worked out the periodic table of elements.

The presentation of models as roadmaps for social change and technological development became even more important in the period leading to the Revolution. While such modeling appeared in myriad political pamphlets, it also emerged in the early interest in science fiction. Works by Jules Verne featured prominently in the development of Russian authors who inspired a population to participate in the ongoing industrialization of Russian urban centers. The early work in radio transmission, such as that by Alexander Popov, also resonated with an ongoing attraction to spiritualism. Although not directly linked to Russian orthodoxy, spiritualism, especially when associated with invisible physical phenomena, became a vehicle for the popularization of science and technology, as in the representation of radio transmission in Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 film Aelita: Queen of Mars. Science fiction helped to integrate the multifaceted experience of Soviet science (McGuire 1977; Howell 1990). Even now, the development of pre-revolution science fiction remains relatively unexamined.

The Soviet era

We are also challenged to rethink the implications of “literature and science” when we turn to the 1917 Revolution and the Soviet era. Especially in the early phases of the Revolution, literature was regarded as an important vehicle for social transformation and for enhancing science and technology. A rich material experimentalism emerged from the symbolist and modernist work of early twentieth-century poets such as Alexander Blok and Osip Mandelstam. The major accomplishments of Russian modernism associated with the Revolution, however, became increasingly thwarted as the state apparatus came to view cultural endeavor narrowly as a tool for promoting advances in Soviet science and technology. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We of 1921 and Mikhail Bulgakov’s medical fantasy of 1924, Heart of a Dog, both deconstruct the concept of engineering the new Soviet citizen. The bureaucratic manipulation of literature resulted in a split between state literature and work regarded as “inappropriate” or subversive. The suppression of literature that challenged the state resulted in the growth of an émigré Russian literature often represented as the voice of humanism and thus in outright opposition to Soviet science. While a Marxist-Leninist view sought harmony between literature and science, Russian émigré work by figures such as Vladimir Nabakov, both as novelist and accomplished lepidopterist, could play with their intersection. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago of 1957 or Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward of 1967 offer dramatic examples of literature as an ideological weapon during the Cold War. The twentieth-century poetry of Marina Tvestaeva, Anna Akhmatova, and Joseph Brodsky has established itself within the canons of Russian and English literature alike, just as their lives have come to represent the decades of witness and struggle for survival in Soviet darkness. The vigorous cultural experimentation at the beginning of the last century associated with speed, urbanization, and mechanization continues to be a powerful global resource for early twenty-first-century cultural aspirations.

The works of Vladimir Tatlin, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Maykovsky, and Varvara Stepanova epitomize circles and movements that included many other artists (Lodder 1983). Art and design as a vehicle for cultural experimentation and social transformation contributed to the use of the theater as a micro-environment or laboratory for social experiment (Zhadova 1988). The work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, the visionary of Russian theater, prepared for the revolutionary filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. The Soviet experimentalism associated with Suprematism and Constructivism, to cite only two examples, cannot be isolated or contained in museums but continues to influence art in many forms.

During the Soviet period a weaving of the natural and human sciences emerged in the work of Vladimir Vernadsky. His extension of the idea of the biosphere, envisioning life as a force that shapes the Earth, belongs to an early Soviet contribution to the history of science. Vernadsky’s biosphere influenced Teilhard de Chardin and contributed to Yuri Lotman’s work on what he called the semiosphere. Science fiction also provided a powerful exploration of the natural and human sciences, as in the novels of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which were published in Russia and in the West. In many ways science fiction offered a zone in which ideological discussions could be rendered through the proto-allegorical structure of the genre. See, for example, Chingiz Aitmatov’s The Day Lasts Longer than One Hundred Years of 1980, which brings together space travel, nuclear arms, and the erasure of memory that includes tradition as well as local ethnicities. The race to the moon or, more to the point, the Cold War effort to demonstrate the capacity of long-range missiles, certainly nurtured the dissemination of Soviet science fiction as well as the Russian interest in Western science fiction. For example, when visiting Sergey Korolyov’s library in his Moscow home and now museum, I was struck by the number of Ray Bradbury novels.

The matter of Russian literature and science is found repeatedly in the significant work on linguistics and literature. With its roots in the multilingualism of the Continent, well before the Revolution, Russian linguistics sought to develop programs to study the multiple languages of the Empire. During the Soviet period, interest in linguistic study shifted to the means for assuring the unification of the Soviet Union through the use of Russian. Lev Vygotsky, Roman Jakobson, M.M. Bakhtin, Yuri Lotman, and others demonstrate how linguistics could approach literature and science through research in communication. Each of these figures informed and inspired literary and scientific research in linguistics that became highly influential in academic discourse during the latter half of the twentieth century (Jameson 1972). While Soviet interest in cybernetics in the 1950s certainly emerged through a practical interest in relations between human and machine language, it was also shaped by an interest in material accounts found in research on linguistics. Soviet linguists, for instance, debated the work of Norbert Wiener on cybernetics (Gerovitch 2002). Soviet linguistics must also be regarded as part of a national project of language education and communication. While the Russian language went through stages of standardization, beginning in the eighteenth century, the function of Soviet linguistics as an instrument of nationalization and state propaganda substantially contributed to its identification as a cultural science.

While the Soviet era came to an end in 1991, its history and legacy continue to occupy researches in science and literature, for which so much remains to be studied within Russian archives. It will not do to ignore Soviet science and literature before 1991 and to create a Soviet mythology only from the vantage point of émigrés or Western researchers. The frequently cited resurgence of Russian nationalism at least in part comes as a consequence of facile attempts to “read” Russia only from the Western perspective. The essays assembled by Daniel A. Alexandrov (1993) provide an important insight into the reception of Bakhtin by historians of science in the early 1990s (Emerson 1997: 280). An interview with established philosophers Anatoly Akhutin and Vladimir Bibler focused on the radical implications inherent in dialogic communities such as “backstreet circles” and “kitchen seminars.” Is it not the case that what is truly dialogical is our own “inner speech” that we carry with us and that allows us to live in the “the great time of culture” (Alexandrov 1993: 384)? Perhaps “in the solitude and silence of a closed society, one can hear the voices of a universal cultural community better than in the midst of an open society” (Alexandrov 1993: 325). Also in the early 1990s Vladimir Admoni – distinguished Russian linguist, translator of Ibsen, friend of Anna Akhmatovoa, and defender of Joseph Brodsky at his Leningrad trial of 1964 – projected an era of “New Humanism” that would transform the totalitarian era of Soviet techoscience. The transformation of “kitchen seminars” into the fragmentation associated with postmodernism and of “New Humanism” into a new cultural nationalism partly describes the Russian intellectual terrain since 1991.

Post-1991

Russian literature and science since 1991 has shaped a zone of interaction marked by efforts to archive and understand the Soviet era as well as by a strong impulse to cultural experimentalism (I am pleased to acknowledge my use of Epstein, Genis, and Vladiv-Glover (1999) for the following paragraphs; see as well Sinyavsky 1997). The Khrushchev thaw of the mid-1950s resulted in Russian versions of Hemingway found in Aksyonov, Nagibin, Kazakov, and Gladilin. This was the time when Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, and Rozhdestvensky were heavily monitored, and Andrei Sinyavsky attempted to break away from established canons of literary criticism. In the 1970s writers such as Andrei Bitov, Viktor Erofeev, and Evgeny Popov formed what became referred to as a Russian new wave. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, articles in established journals such as Novy mir and Soviet Literature even referred to these “new wave” writers as the post-avant-garde. The work of Vladimir Sorokin purposely imitated a panoply of different Russian and non-Western styles in order to disfigure and scramble socialist-realistic models.

While Sorokin’s work draws on the Futurist notion of zaum or trans-meaning, it is even more closely connected to the work the Russian Conceptualists such as Ilya Kabakov. Here the decades-long Soviet effort to shape an aesthetic based on a materialist philosophy, manifest in a controlled social realism, is dismantled in what might be thought of as a new experimental ontology. Rubbish becomes a departure point for an investigation into the juxtaposition of objects that provoke chance meaning, for example, in Ilya Kabakov’s artwork, his 16-volume Rubbish Novel, or his Man of Rubbish. Works by other Russian postmodernists amplify the idea of a junk world through violence and sexual spectacle. Viktor Erofeev, Leonid Gabyshev, and Alexander Kabakov, for example, invite comparisons with Sade. Their work repeatedly explores strategies for breaking apart normative ways of creating meaning and may certainly be viewed as an anti-scientific force, especially if one has in mind the bureaucratic expression of Russian science and engineering.

The experimentalism that appears in what may be regarded as a new ontology of objects is also found in the exploration of new forms of spirituality and religion. While this work may be read as a reaction against the approved atheism of the Soviet era, it is certainly far more complicated than a simple recovery of Orthodox Christianity. While the renewed interest in religion may draw on the cultural resources of Russian orthodoxy, with its deep-set practice of negative theology, its expression also appears in the recovery of a spiritualism that may be experienced in common objects and experience. Simple silence and the epiphanic experience of mystery or the discovery of the divine appears in a kind of experimental spiritual phenomenology. Literary work that gives expression to an experimental religiosity includes writers such as Andrei Bitov, Yuz Alexshkovsky, Yuri Trifonov, Vasily Aksyonov, Bella Akhmadulina, and Venedikt Erofeev.

Mikhail Epstein (in Epstein, Genis, and Vladiv-Glover 1999: 146–49) has compiled a taxonomy of late twentieth-century Russian cultural movements, providing a useful orientation to complex clusters of thinking that cannot be easily translated into movements with origins in Western critical theory of philosophy. Epstein’s list includes ten groupings: 1. Conceptualism –“a system of linguistic gestures, drawing on the material of Soviet ideology and the mass consciousness of socialist society.” 2. Postconceptualism –“an experiment in resuscitating ‘fallen,’ dead languages with a renewed pathos of love, sentimentality, and enthusiasm, as if to overcome alienation.” 3. Zero style “is the reproduction of ready-made language models, such as, for example, those of the Russian classics of the nineteenth century or the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, through a verbal medium of maximum transparency.” 4. Neoprimitivism “uses a childish and philistine consciousness of its games with the most stable, familiar, and surface layers of reality.” 5. Ironic and grotesque –“unlike conceptualism, which works with language models, ironic poetry works with reality itself at the level of concrete utterances and ideolects, not at the more abstract level of their grammatical description. It is designed to provoke laughter rather than the feeling of metaphysical absurdity and emptiness.” 6. Metarealism “is a poetry embracing the higher levels of reality, the universal images of the European cultural heritage.” 7. Presentism “is correlated with futurism but without being directed toward the future. Instead, it is a ‘technical aesthetics’ of objects, focused on the present, on the magic of the object’s visual and material presence in human life.” 8. Polystylistics “is a multicoded poetry, uniting various discourses using the principle of collage.” 9. Continualism “is the poetry of fuzzy semantic fields, voiding the meaning of individual worlds. This poetry is designed to make meaning dissolve and disappear.” 10. The lyrical archive “is the most traditional of all the new poetries, having retained a psychological center in the form of a lyrical ‘I’.”

Gennadij Ajgi and Sergei Zavyalov offer important examples of work nurtured by indigenous languages. Born in Chuvasia and encouraged to write in Russian by Pasternak, Ajgi (2004) became a recognized voice before his death in 2006. Zavyalov (2009) has explored his own Mordovian heritage in poems and essays in the past ten years. The rediscovery of landscape as a vehicle for a new anthropology of cultural space serves as another aspect of current research that remains concealed. The emphasis on the Russian city and urban culture often renders invisible a renewed attention to nature and environmentalism, a commitment to nature that extends well beyond the romantic appreciation well documented in Russian literature and painting. This appears in environmental journals and projects that work as an ongoing exploration of the country itself. One recalls that contemporary roadmaps of Russia really were not widely available until the early 1990s. What we may think of as a new spatial anthropology also appears in the detailed studies of urban landscape brought to Western scholars through the research of the German historian Karl Schlögel (1984, 2009). The monumental work of Schlögel draws together the fragmentary archives of local histories that accompanied the development of the innumerable small Soviet museums such as the Korolyov home-museum and the “kitchen discussions” noted above.

Due to the focus of such work on an established idea of science often shaped by Western experience, less attention has been given to questions involving the participation of cultural settings in shaping both the idea and practice of science in Russia. However, the study of contemporary Russian science and literature places special attention on culture (kul’turologija) and civilization (civiliografija), with a strong interest in affirming the qualities of Russian and Slavic experience (Scherrer 2009). While such research is hardly surprising, given a post-1991 impulse to engage traditions that were often contorted by Soviet institutions, it must also be viewed as an effort to counter the powerful influence of Western cultural identity. An extreme example is the work of Anatoly Fomenko, a mathematician who formed a movement known as the New Chronology, which seeks to situate Slavic Russian culture in the center of civilization (Fomenko 2000, 2005). The celebration of a particular Slavic and Russian identity that can be juxtaposed to the Euro-American Roman-Christian identity manifest in the eclectic titles in Russian bookstores, and even more so in mandatory courses in kul’turologija within Russian higher education. After 1991 the new discipline was envisioned to take the place of the obligatory study of Marxism-Leninism and related disciplines within the curriculum. A new Russian dictionary defines kul’turologija as a “scientific discipline that studies the spiritual culture of people and nation and the general laws (zakonomernosti) of the evolution of culture” (Efremova 2006). Recent national congresses devoted to kul’turologija in Petersburg included many papers devoted to a search for identity and meaning in Russian culture.

While I cannot make a detailed comparison of kul’turologija with the Euro-American discipline of cultural studies or with German Kulturwissenschaften in this chapter, there are significant differences. In contrast to the work of cultural studies on areas of class, race, and gender, Russian practice, directed by the State Ministry of Education, serves to celebrate and shape national identity. The effort to seek out a particular Slavic spiritual identity that also coincides with the resurgence of Russian orthodoxy resonates with the Slavophilism of th e nineteenth century. I have emphasized the scholarly naiveté of a blanket negation of science in the Soviet era. The assumption that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 marks the superiority of so-called Western science would also be a mistake. Instead of erasing the Soviet era, it is important to explore the ways in which Soviet science continues to shape the organization of science in Russia today. The extensive work of Loren R. Graham over the past decades serves as an important resource in this work. I would draw special attention to his recent work with Irina Dezhina (Graham and Dezhina 2008), together with Krige (2006). Many have observed how events in Russia and the West – especially the United States – are accompanied by mutual reflection and distortion (Deutscher 1967: 24). The rebuilding of Russian science deserves to be compared as well with the significant reorientation of science in the West, particularly in regard to the biological and medical sciences.

As Russia reshapes herself, the human and natural sciences will participate in her transformation.

Dedication

In memory of Frida Avrunina and Vladimir Admoni.

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