Mimesis: The Analytic Anthropology of Literature

by Valery Podoroga, Evgeni V. Pavlov (Translator)

Overview

Ground-breaking work of philosophy and Russian Literature: translated for the first time

Valery Podoroga was one of the most important thinkers of his generation. Here his most famous work is translated into English for the first time. In it he gives a panorama view of Russian writing, focusing in on the work of Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Andrei Bely. He identifies these authors as pioneers in creating an 'other literature'. This constituted a new form of mimesis or vision of the world, in opposition to the Imperial and national myths.

In Mimesis Podoroga develops and elaborates his analytic anthropological approach on these authors with startling effect, excavating the identities and forms of Russian literature, and society. He places an emphasis on how a literary work is a process of world building: both internally by creating a fictive world, but also how it reflects the wider world in which it was produced, and the power with which it changes the world.

Finally, the literary work’s ability to exist in a time that is other than its own time, a time where it does not have a contemporary reader and an author who exercises his will, but where it nonetheless continues to mean something.

Mimesis is rightly seen as the masterwork of one of the world's leading literary thinkers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786636676
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	08/09/2022
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.82(d)

About the Author

Valery Podoroga was born in Moscow in 1946 and was a leading figure at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Science until his death in 2020. With a particular focus on 19th century Russian literature he developed his thesis of Analytic Anthropology. The author of over 200 articles and ten monographs, he was award the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize for literature in 2001.

Table of Contents

Preface to the 2006 edition vii

Part I Nature Morte: The Order of Work and Nikolai Gogol's Literature

Introduction: What Is Nature Morte? 3

1 Attraction to Chaos 13

2 Little Words: Agrammatism, or the Invention of Language 49

3 Number and Rhythm 61

Part II The Birth of the Double: The Logic of Psychomimesis and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Literature

Introduction: The Dead Body of Christ 81

4 Plan and Work 99

5 The Blind 141

6 The Doubles 155

7 The Ideal Chronicler 173

Part III Literature as Self-consciousness: The Experience of Andrei Bely

Introduction: Making-strange 225

8 Explosion: A Sketch of Poetic Cosmology 243

9 Blink-of-an-Eye: Notes on a Theory of Time 271

10 Scissors: A Psychoanalytic Excursus into Fate 287

Index 301

Editorial Reviews

"Podoroga has long been heralded as a quasi-patron saint of post-Soviet philosophy. . . Podoroga liberates classics of Russian literature from questions of historicism or fidelity to an external reality."
—Marxism and Philosophy

From the Publisher