the miraculous could restore hope to the desperate in spirit. But one has no right to
In closing this chapter, we might expand on some implications of Lotman’s models. Vis-a`-vis Russia, defenders of Western liberal democracy habitually feel rational, secular, “advanced,” progressive, law-abiding, tolerant of others’ rights – in a word, politically mature. But in the eyes of a Russian believer with the worldview Lotman has described, that bundle of liberal-political virtues is simply archaic or pagan magic, at a lower level of civilization and spiritual sophistication. Pagan Rome, together with the principles of pagan Roman law, was “magical”: compulsive, contractual, enforceable, imperial, and inevitably violent. The logic of magic tends to standardize all parties and variables, to remove the irreducibly individual human face. It is no accident that the Devil, a master at demanding the written contract, believes in conventional signs.
But miracle itself has no logic. Nor is it dialogic. It is an unconditional gift, an orientation of myself to the world regardless of how the world treats me back.
Lotman’s two essays suggest a final lesson to be learned from model biography, useful for the watershed of the eighteenth century: that moral guidance can be provided by a culture in two valid but fundamentally opposed ways. Each aspires to a different ideal. The first way is guidance through a relatively fixed and impersonal system of law. This law is codified, “blind,” and legitimized to the extent that it applies to all, precedes the individual case, and follows its own rules. The second way is guidance through an integrated human personality. This personality – or face,
Western eyes on Russian realities: the eighteenth century
The Russian eighteenth century left little trace on any literary canon beyond Russia’s borders. It is remembered as a century that borrowed its forms, themes, and expertisefrom the West, first from Protestant Europeand then from France. To borrow, translate, codify or imitate an alien cultural canon was not considered inappropriate, however; quite the contrary. “Originality” was neither a value nor a virtue. Reason and human nature were presumed to be universals. The poetics of neoclassicism, which ruled the European continent, relied on an idealized imitation of ancient models. What
Russia’s special path began in religious history. The Catholic and Protestant countries of Europe shared a lingua franca in Latin. “Underneath” that largely
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static foreign tongue, vigorous local vernaculars developed that were sophisticated enough by the sixteenth century to produce literary masterpieces. In contrast, Russian Orthodox Christianity had always conducted its liturgy – and communicated its texts – in an archaic Old Church Slavonic. Its writing system (called “Cyrillic” after the ninth-century Thessalonican missionary Cyril and his brother Methodius) had been adapted from the Byzantine Greek alphabet, supplemented with new letters devised for uniquely Slavic sounds.1 This abstract, ecclesiastical language, vaguely comprehensible to its dispersed congregations but native to none, suited the needs of a borderless continent with migrating populations and contiguous, shifting dialects. But it increased Russia’s isolation from the West. With Church Slavonic as their linguistic “binder,” there was little impetus among the Orthodox Slavs to master Latin or Greek, the portals to pan-European culture. When language reform began in earnest under Peter the Great, as part of his ambitious attempt to order and rationalize all aspects of Russian life, the initial tactic of the reformers was to work with this chaotic but familiar “Old Slavonic mass”: cleansing it, simplifying it, and defining high, middle, and low styles according to the proportion of archaic words that each layer contained.
In 1700, the Russian language, both spoken and written, was porous, receptive, shapeless, and lacked fixed norms for orthography or pronunciation. Polonisms, Latinisms, and Germanisms abounded. Tsar Peter – a regimenting mentality in all things – staffed his Foreign Office with corps of regulators and translators. Dictionaries, glossaries, and lexical commentaries became the rage at court. But no number of tsarist decrees could create a linguistic equivalent when the concept was lacking in the Russian language or in native Russian culture, which was the case for most technical terms and many abstract words. Even the forward-driving impetus of linear narrative, with its values of novelty and suspense, lacked a dignified literary container. More common for written texts in the Russian pre-modern era was “word-weaving” [
