Bakhtin and Intergeneric Shift: The Case of Boris Godunov

This essay draws on the historical and artistic image of Boris Godunov to illustrate Bakhtin\u27s concept of re-accentuation, or the transfer of literary images to new contexts. Russia of the 19th century was particularly well served by the Boris Tale. It inspired her first great popular historian, her greatest poet, and one of her greatest composers. Nikolai Karamzin\u27s History of the Russian State (1816-29) ended with the Time of Troubles, and Karamzin\u27s treatment of Boris Godunov became a model for biography in this new romantic-national type of history. Out of Karamzin\u27s portrait Alexander Pushkin created his romantic tragedy Boris Godunov (1825), intended as a specifically national, Russian response to imported neoclassical norms in drama. Modest Mussorgsky adapted both Pushkin\u27s and Karamzin\u27s texts for the libretto to his greatest opera Boris Godunov (1869-74), which he offered as a national alternative to western operatic models, the first step toward a Russian people\u27s musical drama. In its three greatest expressions, the Boris Tale was thus a vehicle for generic innovation. Each treatment asserted a specifically Russian concept of genre in opposition to the European models then reigning in the three disciplines: German historiography, French drama, and Italian opera. Such innovative re-accentuations, or intergeneric transpositions, are not easy to assess. They are vulnerable, as are translations, to charges of infidelity to earlier and more authoritative texts. This essay will argue, with Bakhtin\u27s help, that the dialogue among these three texts is both calculated and complex; at the end, some suggestions are offered for reading cultural history through transposed or re-accentuated themes

Music Services in a Medium-Sized Public Library in Richmond, California

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Maneiras criativas de não gostar de Bakhtin: Lydia Ginzburg e Mikhail Gasparov

Este artigo contribui para nossa compreensão de como os russos receberam os conceitos de Bakhtin, principalmente dois influentes estudiosos russos, críticos de Bakhtin, cada um a partir de uma perspectiva diferente. O estudo de tais críticas é valioso, uma vez que nos incentiva a reexaminar nossas próprias percepções, por vezes complacentes, das teorias de Bakhtin. Mikhail Gasparov (1937-2005), um importante classicista e preeminente erudito do verso, publicou críticas virulentas contra Bakhtin entre 1979 e 2004. Seu problema com Bakhtin era essencialmente metodológico. Lydia Ginzburg (1902-1990), conhecida por suas Notes of a Blockade Person, e por estudos sobre os gêneros do diário, das memórias, da carta pessoal e do caderno do escritor, questionou os pressupostos psicológicos por trás das teorias bakhtinianas de simpatia e amor. Ginzburg também tinha sérias dúvidas quanto à ideia bakhtiniana do romance polifônico e a respeito do uso que Bakhtin fazia da oposição entre o monológico e o dialógico para caracterizar os romances de Tolstoi e Dostoiévski. Um exame atento das posições de Bakhtin e Ginzburg sobre o amor revela paralelos e diferenças interessantes. O artigo termina com sugestões sobre como as críticas de Ginsburg e de Gasparov podem nos ajudar a ler Bakhtin de maneiras criativas

The Bakhtin of Boris Groys: Pro and Contra

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Boris Godunov Graduate Course

SLA 537: "BORIS GODUNOV