Historicism vs. Dogmatism: оnce аgain аbout ‘out-of-school’ literary theory

Moskovskaya Daria S.,

DSc in Philology,

Director of Research

A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences

This article examines the philosophical genesis underpinning the works of A.A. Ukhtomsky, A.A. Zolotarev, and the kindred thinker N.P. Antsiferov, whose approach V.E. Khalizev defined as ‘out-of-school’ literary studies. The profound affinity between these biographically connected thinkers stems from the emerging ‘philosophy of life’ within late 19th and early 20th century European historical and philosophical thought, which served as a foundation for new cultural theory. Concurrently, sociology developed the concept of society as communication. Economic determinism was supplanted by the concept of tradition, understood as the historical experience of transmitting the mutable meaning embedded in the semiotic markers of social communication. Fundamentally, Ukhtomsky, Antsiferov, and Zolotarev explored the problem of comprehending another's inner life and methods of hermeneutic exegesis — concepts that found little traction in Soviet scholarship. This context explains the deliberate avoidance of rigid terminology within their conceptual frameworks. Nevertheless, they originated or adopted from like-minded thinkers a few significant concepts and theories introduced into academic discourse, such as ‘dominant focus on the face of the other’, ‘deserving interlocutor”, “real science”, “flaneur/observer”, and “farsightedness”. Methodologically interconnected, these concepts highlight the scholar's active personal engagement within their own cognitive processes. They were designed to reveal within a literary artifact the text's intrinsic connection to lived communication — that is, to history.

Keywords: genesis of ‘out-of-school’ literary theory, hermeneutics, cultural languages, flaneur, dominant, V.Е. Khalizev, N.P. Antsiferov, A.A. Zolotarev, A.A. Ukhtomsky, M.M. Bakhtin, A.V. Mikhailov

The research was financially supported by the Russian Science Foundation № 25-18-00196 “From Early Writers' Associations to the Organizing Committee of the Union of Soviet Writers: Genesis of Institutional Forms in the Cultural Construction of the RSFSR/SSR (Digital Archive of Documentary Data and Research)”. URL: https://rscf.ru/project/25-18-00196/

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