Russian Culturology
Discussion
Corinna Lotz:
"One of the most illuminating sections of this book is the discussion on ‘culturology’ and its exponents. Epstein describes it as a ‘metadiscipline’ which embraces a host of humanistic disciplines, tracing it back to the German intellectual tradition. This approach was a way of investigating the diversity of cultures and their modes of interaction.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Aleksei Losev, Vladimir Bibler, Sergei Averintsev and Georgi Gachev are gathered under this umbrella. We also meet the amazing Olga Freidenberg, whose project ‘encompassed the whole nexus of literature, mythology, folklore, ritual, primitive thinking, language, religion and theatre’ (193). (Freidenberg was better known for her correspondence with her cousin Boris Pasternak.) She came under fire in 1936 for her book The Poetics of Plot and Genre: The Period of Ancient Literature and was persecuted as a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ and fired from Petrograd University."