Perlina, Nina - A Dialogue on the Dialogue

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

A Dialogue on the Dialogue: The Baxtin-Vinogradov Exchange (1924-65)Author(s): Nina PerlinaReviewed work(s):Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1988), pp. 526-541Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/308767 .

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A DIALOGUE ON THE DIALOGUE: THE BAXTIN-VINOGRADOV EXCHANGE (1924-65)

Nina Perlina, Indiana University

The theme of the Second International Baxtin Congress (May 1985), "Baxtin as a Theorist of Dialogue," stimulated a thorough inquiry into the aesthetic, socio-linguistic, and philosophical spheres of discourse communications.' The participants in the Congress discussed epistemological problems such as "The Theory of Bakhtinian Dialogue and the Contemporary Scientific and Humanistic World" (S. Salvestroni), "The Relation of Otherness in Bakhtin" (A. Ponzio), and "Stage Dialogue Including a Possible World" (D. Suvin). They also traced the relation of Baxtinian dialogic principle to the modern multi-voiced narrative system (W. Krysinski) and to the system of classical rhetoric-a theme developed by Don Bialostosky in his paper "Dialogics as an Art of Discourse in Literary Criticism."

The purpose of Bialostosky's paper was the quest for the resolutions to two problems. "First, does Mixail Baxtin's account of dialogic discourse discover a discursive practice distinct from the practices that rhetoric and dialectics have rationalized?" Second, does "Baxtin's discovery have suffi- cient power to guide our reading and writing practices as the classical discursive arts have done?" (Bialostosky, 788). Bialostosky introduces Aristotle and Plato as Baxtin's hypothetical "interlocutors" and suggests contemporary parallels and polemical counterparts to Baxtin's discourse theory in the works of Tzvetan Todorov, Merle Brown, Richard Rorty, and Paul de Man (793-94).

The open-ended nature of Baxtin's aesthetics entices one to pair him with a great number of hypothetical speech-partners of all epochs and nations. In reality, however, a speech-partner did exist. For more than forty years, from 1924 to 1965, Baxtin carried on a powerful exchange with his contemporary Russian opponent Viktor Vladimirovi6 Vinogradov. It was as if life itself had carefully arranged the preconditions for these disputations. Baxtin and Vinogradov were both born in 1895. Both attended Petrograd University and graduated in 1918, one as a Classicist and Roman scholar, the other as a promising Slavist of ?axmatov's school. Both were well read

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A Dialogue on the Dialogue 527

in Russian and European philology and complemented their knowledge of literature and linguistics with readings of contemporary psychology and philosophical aesthetics. In the 1920s, surrounded by friends and academic confederates, they held independent positions but were wholly aware of each other's achievements. Knowingly and willingly, they challenged one another in the most uncompromising, yet highly respectful manner.

Both endured years of hardship. Baxtin was arrested and exiled in 1929, Vinogradov in 1934. Up until the end of the Second World War, both continued their work in ominous isolation from the academic world, or, as the Soviet editors of Vinogradov elegantly put it, "the author completed his seminal works of the 1930s while deprived of the usual academic and social surroundings, at first in the city of Gor'kij (from 8 February 1934), where his wife had sent him a volume of Pu'kin edited by Toma'evskij, and then in the town of Vjatka" (Vinogradov, O jazyke xudoi. prozy, 344). After the war, Vinogradov returned to Moscow and became an officially acknowledged scholar and a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.2 Baxtin remained in shadow until the 1960s, when his name and works were redis- covered in the USSR and in the West.

One finds the first polemical reference to Vinogradov in Baxtin's article of 1924, "Problema soderzanija, materiala i formy v slovesnom xudoiest- vennom tvorvestve" (Voprosy, 11). Baxtin's last and perhaps most powerful set of critical observations, in an article written in 1959-61, "The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology and the Human Sciences: An Experi- ment in Philosophical Analysis" (Speech Genres, 117, 119) was polemically inspired by Vinogradov's O jazyke xudoiestvennoj literatury (1959). In addi- tion, Baxtin refers to Vinogradov a number of times in Problems of Dostoev- sky's Poetics and in the articles "Discourse in the Novel" and "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" (Problems, 65, 67, 224-25; The Dialogic Imagination, 42, 268).

Vinogradov's seminal works of the 1920s, as well as his large, cumulative study O jazyke xudolestvennoj literatury and his polemical and powerful Sti- listika, teorija poeticeskoj reci, poetika (1963), challenged Baxtin's and Volo- 'inov's theories of poetic utterance, dialogue, and literary genres. However, it was only up until 1929 to 1930 that Vinogradov felt comfortable referring to Baxtin directly. (His later reticence may have resulted from cautiousness or moral qualms-we do not really know which.) After Baxtin's arrest, Vinogradov shifted his polemic with Baxtinian ideas to the subtext and carefully camouflaged it. Yet his works of the late 1920s "On the Theory of Literary Styles," "On Literary Prose," and "Poetic and Rhetoric" (O jazyke xudolestvennojprozy, 240-50, 56-175), all contain numerous direct references to such complex Baxtinian ideas as "the author-hero in the work of art," as they run through the theory of polyphony and poetic discourse.3



528 Slavic and East European Journal

As Baxtin and Vinogradov were building their respective theories they both polemically reinterpreted the fundamental concepts of Potebnja (Mysl' ijazyk), Spet (Vnutrenjajaforma slova), Vossler, Spitzer, and Saussure. Such similarity of academic readings only amplified the glaring difference in epistemological positions taken by the two men in developing their ideas. From their respective vantage points Baxtin and Vinogradov were examin- ing one another, each experienced in the skill of projecting the antagonist's views agaist his own intellectual purview. These speculative projections of the opponent's views against the background of one's own intellectual purview constituted the core of the ongoing Baxtin-Vinogradov discussions.

The subjects of these discussions were the linguistic and communicative aspects of poetic awareness: the interpretation of the "poetic I," the figure and position of the author/narrator in different poetic genres, varieties of individual narrative manners in their relation to the standard literary language of the epoch, the relationships and balance between the monologue and the dialogue, the significance of poetics, linguisitics, stylistics, and psychology for the system of the Humanities, and last, but not least, philosophical attitudes toward language in its social and communicative function (Humboldt and Saussure, Saussure vs. Humboldt).4

While Baxtin saw the open-ended nonfinalizing power of language, energeia, as the main mediator in people's social contacts, Vinogradov based his immanent projective method on the duality between ergon (the solid body of literary language, language as a cultural-historical entirety) and energeia (the individual contributions of original authors, their poetic consciousness projected against the wide, yet clearly envisioned plane of the standard literary language of the epoch) (O jazyke

xudo.estvennoj prozy, 82-97).

Vinogradov suggests that the dynamics of a writer's individual development demonstrates how an author functions within the literary language of his epoch. The seminal features of the writer's personality-his style, his "parole"--are projected against a wider immanent plane-the national literary language. New works of the author, all original stylistic structures invented by him, become components of and find their place within the universal system of the literary language. As Vinogradov suggests in his interpretation of Social Linguistics, "parole" is projected upon the "langue." The key terms of Vinogradov's "discipline on the speech of literary works" have their origins in the linguistic theories of Potebnja, Spet, and Saussure. On this basis Vinogradov advances the following set of oppositions: "inter- nal form of the word," "stylistic structure," "parole" vs. word-lexeme, lexical system, "langue" (Stilistika, 14, 92-130, 146-81, 185).

Baxtin, whose penetrating readings of Potebnja, Spet, Saussure and, nat- urally, Vinogradov, are all well documented, had numerous reservations about the epistemological, philosophical, linguistic, and aesthetic correctness of the immanent, projective, functional (or "compositional-syntactical")




methods advanced by Vinogradov. In 1924 he formulated the core of his objections: "The aesthetic component-let us call it the 'image'-is neither the idea-conception, nor the word, nor is it a visual representation. It is rather an original aesthetic formation which is implemented through words in poetry, through visible tangible material in visual arts-the image is a formation which never concurs with the material substance, nor with any other material combination" (Voprosy, 55). Thus, the more intensively Potebnja, ?pet, and Vinogradov included standard linguistics in their theories of poetics, the less Baxtin was willing to agree with their ideas.

Baxtin's interpretation of Saussurian liguistics is well known from his "The Problem of Speech Genres" and from the apt commentaries given to this work by Western scholars (Speech Genres, 60-102; Clark and Holquist, 81, 221-25). 5 Referring to the Saussurian design Speaker-Listener, Baxtin observes that the most important component of any speech communication, the actual "event of existence," "sobytie bytija," takes place in some "interhuman space," between speech partners, "in dem Zwischenmenschlichen," as Martin Buber called it elsewhere (1:176-77, 280-86; Perlina, 17-18). In any dialogue, in any discourse act, the message generated by both speech partners contains information that exceeds the mere semantic sum of the two lexical compounds authored by the speakers.

This adhesion of information, an understanding of another person, of the interlocutor, and the preparation of the answer-taking on an active responsive position in the dialogue-is indeed a phenomenon of a metalinguistic nature. Its smallest structural compound is not a unit of a linguistic order-word-lexeme or phrase-but an utterance, an ideologeme, charged with the individual's volitional intention. Baxtin's term "intention" has a qualitative, volitional connotation, whereas Vinogradov's use of this term implies a quantitative, psychological, and social interpretation along the lines of that of Christiansen in Philosophy of Arts.

Having introduced his understanding of the dialogue, Baxtin envisions all the possible directions an original theory of discourse might take and advances a strongly structuralized, yet open-ended idea of discourse genres. The entire edifice of his theory is built on the foundation of "interhuman" communication. The polemical edge of this concept is directed against Vinogradov, the prominent and erudite antipode among the experts in Social Linguistics, the history of literary language and literary taste, and Formalism.

Like Baxtin, Vinogradov found a strong methodological aid and creative inspiration in Saussure. Vinogradov proposed his theory of speech genres in the same time period as Baxtin, in the 1920s, yet he found a place for it within the body of standard linguistics and theory of styles. Vinogradov perceived language as the ergon, as the largest, widest, and ultimate space within which he located all individual speech manifestations (the works of




different authors, bits of energeia). The smallest structural element of his system of speech genres was not a word-utterance (Baxtin's ideologeme) but a word-lexeme, with all of its grammatical, semantic, and psychologically individualized properties. In opposition to the Baxtinian theory of discourse, Vinogradov introduced his theory of literary styles-a linguistic discipline whose aim was "to study the foundations and peculiarities of speech, its diverse forms and various functions" (O jazyke xudo6estvennoj prozy, 241).

Introducing this new discipline of the speech of literary works, Vino- gradov developed a combined usage of immanent, functional, and projectional methods (O jazyke xodolestvennoj prozy, 92-97). According to him there are two linguistic subcategories within which it is possible to build stylistics and the discipline on the speech of literary works:

1. Stylistics of colloquial and written speech/language, including all its various aims and types of expression.

2. Stylistics of poetic speech/language. While the former category provides the background and material forms for poetic speech/language, the latter organizes the entirety of literary writings into an aesthetic and socio-historical system.

According to Vinogradov, poetic speech is the result of purposeful, psychologically and aesthetically motivated selections from among the variety of linguistic forms provided by colloquial and written language. One can see that at this stage of his scholarly development Vinogradov has revised Gustav Spet's EstetiEceskie fragmenty (2:69, 3:34-36) and brought his revised theory of "multiplicity of structural levels within the system" closer to Saussure (Poetika, 369-77; O jazyke xudofestvennoj prozy, 288-90). Within the subcategory of poetic speech, Vinogradov distinguishes between the individual poetic style of an author and the style of a literary school. In his mind the combination of immanent, functional, and projective methods provides an approach to:

1. The study of the poetic styles of different authors in their historical succession by projecting individual stylistic/linguistic features against the background of the history of language, intellectual ideas, culture, and literary taste (a combination of immanent and projectional methods);

2. the grouping of individual styles into the style of a literary school by finding individual features and indicating centers of gravity for the styles of literary schools within the broader sphere of literary/poetic language (immanent-functional method);

3. the study of the disintegration of literary schools and the degeneration of their individual styles into verbal cliches by reassembling these remnants into components of newer stylistic formations (a combina-




tion of all three methods which together make possible an inquiry into specific styles of parodies and innovative narrative manners as well as their grouping into new genre units (O jazyke xudotestvennoj prozy, 3-7).

In opposition to Baxtin and his confederates, Vinogradov proposes an ongoing reciprocity and exchange between the elements of structure (energeia) and system (ergon). In contrast to the Baxtinian philosophical, ideational approach toward the poetics and theory of discursive styles, Vino- gradov's position can be characterized as an "abstract objectivism" (Vololi- nov, Marksizm, 49, 61; "O granicax", 206).6 For Vinogradov-and here he is an outspoken antipode of Baxtin-poetic language is not an ideological, but a linguistic achievement that is purposefully constructed, "manufac- tured," and given an aim different from that of natural social language.

Baxtin and Vinogradov consciously emphasized the difference in their theoretical positions by giving contrasting interpretations of the same theories, Saussure's General Linguistics and Spitzer's "aesthetic linguistics." Baxtin's observations about Spitzer's works were sporadic, yet apt (Prob- lems, 194; Dialogic Imagination, 42, 337; Speech Genres, 119). Baxtin partic- ularly valued Spitzer's Die Umschreibungen des Begriffes 'Hunger' in Italieni- schen (1920), Italienische Umgangssprache (1922), and Stilstudien (1928) for their advancement to the foreground of the metalinguistic aesthetic properties of individual discourse. Baxtin aptly noted that in Spitzer (as the latter once phrased it elsewhere), "the idea and the word are, at every moment of the reading, seen together" (Spitzer, Classical, 128). The Baxtinian "event of existence formula" found a homologous expression in the Spitzerian "law of continuous metamorphosis," according to which "nothing stands alone, individual, and separate; everything is fitted into the Whole-in fact, repre- sents the Whole, no one aspect is ever valid" (Classical, 129).

Vinogradov referred to Spitzer not infrequently. His early knowledge and appreciation of Spitzer's writings are documented in "Naturalistideskij gro- tesk" (completed 1920, published 1921; see Poetika, 23, 482-85) and "Pro- blema skaza v stilistike" (written 1925, published 1926; see O jazyke xudofestvennoj prozy, 45, 325, 334). In the 1920s Vinogradov was attracted to Spitzer's inquiries into language, literature, and the evolution of cultural speech patterns (a broad approach to language studies known as "individual stylistics" or "aesthetic linguistics"). Vinogradov implied that this original approach to language provided a parallel to his own "discipline on the speech of literary works." His reservations expressed in the 1960s about Stilstudien-the work in which Spitzer applied the unified literary-linguistic method to the history of verbal art and intellectual culture-signaled a shift in Vinogradov's methodologies, from his earlier immanent methods based on empirical projectional inquiries into individual styles, to a chronological, historical approach to language and literature (Stilistika, 160; 168-69).




However, even in the mid-sixties, while restoring the history of style studies in Russia, Vinogradov acknowledged that "our native concept of poetics has provided an autonomous analogy to the Western concepts introduced by Karl Vossler, Leo Spitzer, and Oskar Walzel" (Stilistika, 176).

Spitzer's Italienische Umgangssprache and Die Umschreibungen des Begriffes 'Hunger' attracted the attention of both Baxtin and Vinogradov at the same time, when they were both at very important stages of their academic development: Baxtin was forming his interpretation of discourse genres, and Vinogradov his interpretation of speech genres. The content of Spitzer's Umschreibungen des Begriffes 'Hunger' is easy to summarize. During the First World War Spitzer, an expert in the Italian language, was assigned to the German military censorship bureau to keep control over the correspondence of Italian prisoners of war. Studious philologist that he was, Spitzer used this appointment as a unique opportunity to collect source material for his academic research on the affinities and differentiations between vernacular and normative Italian and on the varieties of individual discursive styles manifested in the correspondence between the Italian prisoners of war and their families.

In his book Spitzer analyzed various circumlocutions invented by the Italian prisoners of war to describe the starvation, despair, and misery they experienced in the military prison camps. The prisoners attempted to hide their feelings and thoughts from the censors, yet to make the secret messages understandable to their actual addressees by using periphrastic forms. As a linguist, Spitzer advanced two types of problems in his study:

1. How did the authors of the letters succeed in hiding the messages from the censors (the undesirable, imposed readers), while making the obfuscated meaning clear to their friends and families (the true partners in the dialogues)?

2. How was it that different authors and addressers, isolated from one another and unaware of one another's techniques, resorted to similar linguistic and stylistic devices to code their messages?

For Spitzer, the texts of the letters revealed the core of "individual stylistics," and he discussed this linguistic phenomenon by relating individual periphrastic forms to the standard language and literary norms of oral speech. Both Baxtin and Vinogradov noticed his approach to normative language and individual discourse manifestations. Baxtin, with his interest in individual discourse, found Spitzer's most astonishing observations to be on the internally bivalent nature of human speech. Spitzer had observed that the same message expressed in an utterance perceived as insignificant or undecipherable by a reader (the censor) who was not conceptualized as the addressee, could be understood immediately by another reader (a rela- tive or a friend) who was the real speech partner. Thus Baxtin recognized in




the source material collected by Spitzer an ideal manifestation of his "intentional effort," "ustanovka," found at the root of any discourse communication.

Examples provided by Spitzer pointed to the adhesion of information that characterizes the ultimate goals of reply-exchange and the final results of understanding. As Baxtin insisted, no understanding is possible if a true speech partner is withdrawn from the communication. Without the interlocutor "the actual event of existence" cannot take place. Circumlocutions and periphrastic forms gain additional meaning through the metalinguistic connection-through the understanding by another person who is actively involved in the dialogue at the emotional, intellectual, and ideological levels.

In the 1920s Baxtin found in Spitzer a unique linguistic scholar who transformed linguistics into metalinguistics. In his notes "The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences" (1959-61), Baxtin addressed Spitzer's last publication, Linguistics and Literary History: The elements of language within the language system or within the 'text' (in the strictly linguistic sense) cannot enter into dialogic relations. Can languages and dialects (territorial, social jargons), language (functional) styles (say, familiar daily speech, and scientific language and so forth), enter into these relationships, that is, can they speak with one another and so forth? Only if a nonlinguistic approach is taken toward them, that is, if they are transformed into a 'world view' (or some language or speech sense of the world), into a 'viewpoint,' into 'social voices,' and so forth .... Aesthetic linguistics (the Vossler school, and especially, apparently, Spitzer's latest work) makes such a transformation. (Speech Genres, 119)

Vinogradov saw in Spitzer's Italienische Umgangssprache and Umschrei- bungen prolegomena to a new boundary discipline between linguistic stylistics and poetics. For Vinogradov, the merits of Spitzer's works were in the methods Spitzer applied to the lexicology, stylistics, and rhetoric of vernacular language and circumlocutions. Vinogradov believed that Spitzer had demonstrated how an undeciphered text becomes comprehensible and had suggested individual methods that made an interpretive reading true to the actual message. To understand the hidden message of an individual periph- rase meant to fix the projection of this phrase in the wide space of the lexicon and to define the prompt ordinates of the new phraseological or lexical unit.

Vinogradov appreciated the systematization of lexical and stylistical categories within which Spitzer grouped all the cited circumlocutions invented by the prisoners. As Vinogradov realized from his readings of Spitzer, one can identify a new form of speech as an invariant, as a lexical substandard, as a glossa, as a synecdoche, as a borrowing from the local or professional dialect, as a carrier of an idiolect, or as a hybrid formed by contiguous semantic meanings. In all of these cases, understanding is an identification process implemented in agreement with or by contrast to the normative semasiology, syntax, and the special requirements of rhetoric. Vinogradov's discipline on the language of literary works of art ("nauka o




jazyke xudo'estvennoj literatury") is a hybrid formation whose components are Spitzer's "aesthetic linguistics" and the achievements of Russian Formalism.

In his early works of the 1920s, Vinogradov, a genuine Formalist, inspired by Spitzer, understood individual stylistics and poetic language to be a linguistic superstructure that grows above the entirety of natural language and social speech. As late as 1963, six years before his death, Vinogradov emphatically quoted Vinokur, his old confederate from the camp of For- malism: "In the poetic language the form is the content. The content of the national, social language, which finds its expression in the acoustic form, provides a form for another content that does not possess its own acoustic expression" (Stilistika, 113). Contrary to Baxtin and his school, who believed that poetic language is but an inaccurate metaphor and that poetic discourse and poetics belong among ideological superstructures, Vinogradov accentuated the linguistic and psychological aspects of poetics and restored to rhetoric its inalienable rights to provide authoritative rules and recommendations for all socially persuasive speech manifestations and speech genres. For Vinogradov, rhetoric is "a normative theory which defines genres of prose, suggests principles of genre construction," and builds the basis of prose genres (O jazyke xudozestvennoj prozy, 98).

Within Vinogradov's system, the novel, the pre-eminent genre of modern prose, is a hybrid of two different intentions of the author, one rhetorical and the other moral. Following the recommendations of rhetoric, the author selects the most persuasive figures of speech from the rough material of the normative language. By means of rhetoric he also finds an adequate expresssion for his moral intention, and for the social, ideological, and aesthetic stance of his works. In Vinogradov, carefully selected poetic form takes precedence over ideological content. In Baxtin, poetic form and poetic content are ideologemes; form and content are both components of discipline on ideologies.

Vinogradov was fully aware of the greatest achievements of Baxtin and his school, and he aimed the edge of his polemics against the seminal works of the group-Baxtin's book on Dostoevskij and Vologinov's Marksizm. The chapter "Pobtika i ritorika" of O xudolestvennoj proze (1930; O jazyke xudolestvennoj prozy, 98-175) attacked Baxtinian theories of discourse and literary genres. It also defied the Baxtinian interpretation of dialogue, dialogicality, and the philosophy of language. Vinogradov's polemic with the Baxtinists with respect to dialogue was perhaps the only exception where in fact he involved himself in the philosophical debates. After the first edition of Problems of Dostoevskij's Creation,7 Vinogradov realized that Baxtin was not advocating a mere shift of balance between monologic and dialogic units within the work of art, but rather introducing a new epistemological perspective, within which monologic discourse was absorbed by and redis-




tributed among different subcategories of dialogic communicative awareness. In the book O xudoestvennoj proze Vinogradov enthusiastically accepted all Baxtin's observations that provided poetic interpretation of Dostoevskij's works, yet challenged the fundamental principle of Baxtinian study-his philosophical aesthetics and dialogic discouse theory (O jazyke xudolestvennoj prozy, 56-175).

According to Vinogradov, the methods advanced by Baxtin broadened to the maximum the field of discussion, yet did not guarantee nonambival- ent conclusions. Vinogradov argued that Baxtin and Volosinov did not resolve the problem of the poetics of dialogic utterance; rather they trans- posed it from linguistics to gnoseology. This philosophical contest between the Baxtinists and Vinogradov made their verbal duels and cascades of sharp lunges truly spectacular:

The Baxtinists, attacking: What, poetics holds on to the apron of linguistics! ... Horace was right: "When a pretty young thing becomes ripe for a man, it's time she let go of her mother!"

(Voprosy, 11; Vologinov, "O granicax," 240). Vinogradov, parrying the blow: I have the temerity to assign the entire field of poetic stylistics, as I conceive of it, to the domain of linguistics! (O jazyke xudofestvennoj prozy, 294)

The duel went on. When Baxtin stated that any individual discourse act is internally a nonfinalized, open-ended rejoinder, Vinogradov demonstrated that even a real-life dialogue is built by a set of clear-cut monologic pro- nouncements. Where Baxtin found dialogic reaccentuation of another person's utterance, the hidden multi-voicedness, or the polyphonic "word with a loophole," Vinogradov discovered the speaker's attempt to muffle the voice of the opponent, to discredit his speech-manifestations, and to advance his own monologic pronouncement over the dialogic reply of another person. Vinogradov's dialogist was designed to shift the expecta- tions of the listener from dialogue to monologue. Within the framework of Baxtinian poetics, a speech partner was the protagonist of the idea. Within the framework of Vinogradov's poetic system, a speech partner was a rhet- orician whose main intention was to make his oratory the only effective and authoritative speech manifestation. For Baxtin, the individual utterance was born between the speech partners, in the immediacy of discourse; for Vinogradov, a dialogic rejoinder was generated by and belonged to its absolute owner. Each speech partner was a conjuror of his own inimitable monologic pronouncement. Vinogradov's theory of dialogue was substantiated by his binary formula-purposeful, psychologically grounded selection of the semantic and syntactic forms of literary language, in agreement with the rules of rhetoric.'

Baxtin's and Vinogradov's treatment of parody and skaz are just as irre- concilably different. What Baxtin explains as the writer's dialogic orientation toward a specific type of dialogic awareness, Vinogradov introduces as




a shifting of psychological interests and a change in the types of linguistic selection that eventually bring to life new speech genres, idiolects of fictional characters/narrators, and individual dialects of writers themselves.

Vinogradov's poetics, his discipline on the language of literary works of art, is psychologically motivated and linguistically substantiated. His immanent-projectional method suggests a series of linguistic selections on semantic and syntactic levels. Vinogradov calls them "symbolic" and "compositional" selections. It is not difficult to find the closest parallel to this approach in modern poetic theories: Roman Jakobson's Poezija grammatiki i grammat- ika podzii (Poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry; 3-7, 63-86, 751-56) a similarity which did not go unnoticed by the experts. In treating a literary work as a volitional act of the writer's creativity that finds its expression in a series of intentional selections and in grafting poetics onto psychology, Vinogradov is a follower of pet and a forerunner of Roman Ingarden's psychoaesthetics (Das literarische Kunstwerk, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks).

From the 1940s through the 1960s, Vinogradov revamped his discipline on the language of literary works by including in it several aspects of the theory of literature. The most important of these were the concept of the poet's I in different literary genres and the author's/narrator's relationship to fictional characters within his works. "The Author and Hero in Poetic Activity" (Estetika, 7-180) is the title of Baxtin's seminal, yet unfinished, project of the 1920s. According to Vinogradov, the author's I, his pose, is a polynomial formula whose elements are:

1. individual psychology implemented through the poet's intention to manifest his style and to project his individual speech patterns against the language of a contemporary/historical epoch;

2. the intentional association/dissociation of his stylistic manner with the requirements of the dominant speech genres of his time; that is, the orientation of the poet's I toward the stylistic matrix of the ora- tor, of the great bard, penetrating confessor, frenzied Romantic, idle chronicler, etc.;

3. the psychologically and emotionally marked individual treatment of fictional characters within the limits of the author's own poetic creation: objective, subjective, intimate, distanced treatment of the per- sonages (O jazyke xudotestvennoj prozy, 167-258).

According to Baxtin, the dichotomy of dialogic relations between author and hero fixes and settles the position of a literary work in the world of literature. As Baxtin insists, the author, in order to be aesthetically persuasive, has to put himself in the place of "another person," in the place of his fictional character. Thus, the author's I finds its place within the artistic limits of his creation. Yet at the same time, the author is the creator of the




entire artistic work, and therefore is transgredient to all forms of his poetic emanations. That is to say, the author finds himself outside the world which has been created by him from within. The aesthetic horizon of the author embraces the ideational purviews of his heroes; yet being enveloped by the author's poetic horizon, the individualities of the characters and their volitional and discursive activities remain unbound and unrestrained.

This antinomy of Baxtinian aesthetics finds its resolution in the neo- Kantian religious, philosophical, and aesthetic ideas of Hermann Cohen. According to Cohen, every individual I, (one's own self as well as the I of any other person) is designed in the image of God, whose entire unfathom- able nature is nevertheless transgredient to the world created by Him (Judische Schriften, 1:22-28; Der Begriff der Religion, 98-107). Baxtin's open- ended universe of artistic creation is isomorphous to the infinity of God's created universe. In Baxtin, the position of the author is conceptualized by analogy to the figure of the Creator, and by analogy to the Book of Genesis. The artistic creation is built by the words or discourse-units that possess the quality of incessant adhesion. Baxtin's poetic utterance dwells in the interhuman space, where no one has the privilege of absolute authorship. One's ideological statement is uttered by oneself, yet it is brought to life by some other protagonist, and it will continue its life in someone else's awareness.9

In this sense, the obscure story of disputed texts is but a carnivalesque and lugubrious justification of Baxtin's theory, because in Baxtin even pla- giarism reveals dialogicality, although in a shameful, pragmatic, and bas- tardized form. "Authorship" as the individual's legal privilege (the copy- right) or as an academic issue of textual divination and attribution (Who wrote this text?) never interested Baxtin, and he readily switched his attention to "authoring"-an ideational concept which defines the teleology of culture. In Baxtin's terms, "authorship" can be best defined as a homology to the ergon. Authorship legalizes the master's ownership over the product of his activity. Authoring, to the contrary, is an energeia, an open-ended process of generating and developing ideas, their comprehending and further dialogic replicating. Authoring is genuinely characterized by the adhesion of the comprehending understanding of another person's views; it is a homoform of people's social and ideational contacts in the sphere of the "interhuman."

According to Vinogradov, a literary text is an element of a rigid linguistic system that has insurmountable limits. Every text has been created by someone; even an anonymous or plagiarized work preserves the unmistak- able psychological and stylistic hallmarks of its author. The problem of authorship can be resolved by a textological approach that combines linguistic, cultural-historical, logical, and psychological strategies. Vinogradov, rather than Baxtin, helped to attribute several vexed polemical publications to the pen of Dostoevskij. Vinogradov's merits in advancing and forming




textology into a wholly-weighted linguistic discipline are unsurpassable. And it is here, within the area of the discipline created by him, that the dialogue of the two men comes to its final conclusion: using Vinogradov's textology as an aid, one can answer the question, who is who in the Baxtin school, and attribute the ownership of the vexed texts to the undisputable authors. Titunik's borrowing of Vinogradov's textological strategies for a careful analysis of the works written by Baxtin and/or Vologinov and/or Medvedev is an honorable contribution to the memory of both Russian scholars.

NOTES

1 An earlier version of this paper was read there. For a brief report on the Congress, see Shukman. See also Tagliagambe and Maxia, a collection of the papers presented at the Congress. Since several contributors to this collection substituted new papers for their original presentations in Italy (or published their Congress papers elsewhere), I refer to the type-written copy of the Congress proceedings.

2 For biographical data and an overall inquiry into Vinogradov's theory of language and literature see tudakov's afterword and commentary to Vinogradov's Selected Works (Poetika, 465-508; O jazyke xudolestvennoj prozy, 285-358). These volumes include the seminal works of the 1920s and 1930s, whose topic is the immanent features and evolution of individual poetic styles. Vinogradov's works written from the late 1950s through the 1960s provide a socio-historical, rather than an immanent, approach to the subject. Compare, in particular, Poetika and O jazyke xudolestvennoj literatury.

3 Vinogradov's unwillingness to polemicize with the Baxtin school after the arrest of the leader can be seen from the fact that he left unanswered the militant attack on his theories-Vologinov's long paper "O granicax pottiki i lingvistiki" (1930), whose aim was to denounce his entire approach to verbal art. Vologinov's polemics with Vinogradov are also known from Marksizm ifilosofijajazyka (1929), in which all of Vologinov's reservations about Vinogradov's emphasis on linguistics in developing the theory of poetic styles support the Baxtinian dialogic principle of discourse communication. In "O granicax," however, Vologinov leaves the ranks of the Baxtinists to follow a new leader-N. Ja. Marr and his "novoe utenie o jazyke" (new study of language). Thus in 1930 Vologinov advances the sociological interpretation of language to the foreground and plays down the dialogic properties of discourse. Following Marr, he now relates the evolution of language to the historical development of productive forces and the relations of produc- tion, rather than to the history of individual comprehensive awareness (as it was in 1929). The fact that Marr's teaching on speech and language is hardly compatible with the Baxtinian discourse theory does not seem to bother Vologinov, and while reproaching Vinogradov with relativism, he feels comfortable with his own eclecticism.

4 In the 1920s Wilhelm von Humboldt had an immensely strong influence on Russian linguistic theories. Baxtin's idea of the utterance can be interpreted as an intentional objecti- fying of Humboldt's "inner form of the word." Vologinov's "The Latest Trends in Linguistic Thought in the West," published in 1928, and Marksizm ifilosofijajazyka, were based on Humboldt's linguistic and philosophical postulates: "Language is an energeia," "Language is a system." Vinogradov's interpretation, along with the psychological emphasis added to Humboldtian ideas by Potebnja and ?pet, virtually transformed "the inner form of the word" into a component of Symbolist and, later, Formalist poetic linguistics. For a general discussion of Humboldt's philosophy of language within the cultural framework of the twentieth century see Postovalova, 13-35, 80-87, 93-96, 176-205.




5 The term "speech genres" (recevye tanry) was introduced by Vinogradov, ostensibly, by analogy to the Saussurian and Jakobsonian discourse acts. Baxtin and his friends adapted this wording from the Formalists, yet they changed the semantics of the formalist key- phrase and transferred this terminologically hybrid formula to a meta-linguistic perspective. Within the Baxtinian framework, the power of the dialogic discursive awareness dominated over the linguistic process of selections and combinations (Saussure, Jakobson, Vinogradov). Hence, for papers of the Baxtin school, discourse genres, rather than speech genres, seems to be a more appropriate equivalent. Here I use the demarcation discourse genres vs. speech genres wherever possible.

6 For an unbiased and very interesting synopsis of the polemics on the dialogue, skaz, and the author's orientation toward the narrative between Vinogradov and the Baxtin group, see Cudakov's afterword to Vinogradov, O jazyke xudolestvennojprozy, 300-306, 314-15.

7 By naming the first edition of the book The Problems ofDostoevskij's Creation-"problemy tvorcestva," rather than "poetiki"-Baxtin wanted to avoid any confluence with the For- malist terminology that put a heavy emphasis on poetic styles and stylistics. The idea of creation, "tvoriestvo," corresponded to his philosophical and aesthetic understanding of the author as the creator of the specific and inimitable artistic universe-the artistic world of the novel.

8 In the chapter "Poetika i ritorika" from the 1930-edition of O xudolestvennoj proze (0 jazyke xudolestvennoj prozy, 98-176), the Aristotelian connection is very strong, and it reads as a theoretical manifesto of Vinogradov and his confederates B. Kazanskij, B. Tomagevskij, and G. Vinokur (O jazyke xudolestvennoj prozy, 336-38). In the intro- ductory chapter to this work Vinogradov traces the evolution of Aristotle's Rhetoric in Russian thought from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries (from Lomonosov to ?pet). In the main body of the work he analyzes three individual interpretations given by the famous social activists of the 1870s to the same social event of their time-the lawsuit against K. Kroneberg charging him with cruelty to his daughter. Vinogradov uses the heated polemics around the Kroneberg case (the participants were the defense attorney V. Spasovi6, Dostoevskij in The Diary of a Writer, and Saltykov-?6edrin in essays in the liberal press) as ultimate proof of his notion of the internally monologic structure of real-life dialogues as well as expanded dialogic forms in art and public oration.

9 Augusto Ponzio ("Dialogue and Alterity in Bachtin," "Semiotics between Peirce and Bach- tin," "The Symbol, Alterity and Abduction") discusses an implied third partner in Baxtin- ian discourse communication theory and thus introduces the dialectical tirade into the dialogic dichotomy. Ponzio also interprets the metalinguistic features of Baxtin's discourse theory as categories of contemporary semiotic studies.

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Perlina, Nina - A Dialogue on the Dialogue

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