I finally added Slawkenbergius’s Tales to the sidebar because there’s just too much interesting stuff and I get tired of looking through my bookmarks for it. Greg Afinogenov thinks and writes about all sorts of things, many of which intersect with my own interests, to the point that I’m willing to overlook his addiction to postmodernism. But, as he explains in this typically thought-provoking post, “Image without substance has been the defining feature of Russian life: we have ‘democracy’ without democracy, ‘communism’ without communism, ‘progress’ without progress. … The uncertain relationship between [reality and image] was the very prima materia of Soviet social existence.” And he links to a long and fascinating essay by Mikhail Epstein on “The Origins and Meaning of Russian Postmodernism”; in brief, his thesis is: “The development of Russian modernism was artificially halted in the thirties, while in the West it continued smoothly up to the sixties. This accounts for the existence of a single postmodernism in the West, while two separate postmodernisms arose in Soviet culture, one in the thirties and another in the seventies.” But the fun is in the details.
Thanks, I’m honored! My addiction to postmodernism is, to paraphrase Lenin, an infantile disorder; I’m sure I’ll be writing Bloomian rants in no time.
Well why has it taken you so long to add it, Language? Is it because of the po-mo? Conrad’s actually met Slawkenburgius. It was in Paris, where you would imagine such a meeting taking place. Conrad wrote about it.
Well, if they’d invited me to the café and bought me a drink, it wouldn’t have taken so long, would it?
It would have been a long trip for you, but well worth it for us. Next time. . .