Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions

11. Eccentricity and Cultural Semiotics in Imperial Russia

The eccentric is that which by consensus is unique. In spite of eccentricity ’s tendency to stand out, its natural and cultural manifestations nevertheless prove elusive objects of study. The opening chapter of Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, offers a vivid figure for eccentricity as ephemera, evoking the impressions of its narrator from his position on the street: One splendid house is all alight, Its countless lampions burning bright; 299 11 Eccentricity and Cultural Semiotics in Imperial Russia  .  Planets move all one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, while Comets move all manner of ways in Orbs very excentrick. Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er, Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb. John Milton, Paradise Lost Eccentricities of genius. Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers So would I bridle thy eccentric soul In reason’s sober orbit bid it roll. Whitehead on Churchill While past its glassed-in windows flitter In quick succession silhouettes [ profili golov] Of ladies and their modish pets [modnykh chudakov].1 (stanza 27) The concluding word, chudakov, translated as “pets” to form the second element of a rhyming pair, would be better rendered as “eccentrics,” or, as Vladimir Nabokov phrases it, “[E]ccentric men of fashion, hommes à la mode.”2 Trying to “read” eccentric behavior as a cultural text from the past is like looking through a window at shadows flitting by. Even the most energetic researcher can study historical eccentricities only at a muffled remove, divorced from their original cultural context. The fashionable English-style dandy evoked by Pushkin was an eccentric type that caught on among the Russian aristocracy during the early nineteenth century. This new model for Russian gentlemen’s selfpresentation acquired cultural currency in sharp contrast to earlier behavioral norms imported from France. The English manner emphasized bold and direct expression rather than French subtlety and wit and asserted a style not previously associated with high society. This bit of cultural history illuminates the tension between the individual and contextual properties of eccentric behaviors. Eccentricities refer to their individual subject’s peculiar and particular behavior but also manifest themselves in response to a specific historical context, such as aristocratic Russians’ worship of French culture from the reign of Catherine the Great until the Napoleonic wars. The English dandy cultivated a deliberately eccentric manner in the style of the convention-flouting Romantic hero. Yuri Lotman notes that the French model of comportment compelled members of society to submit themselves to general norms, whereas dandified English practices required their bearer to act strangely (“Roman A. S. Pushkina Evgenii Onegin,” 124–25; see also “Russkii dendizm”). In other words, eccentric individualism itself became fashionable at this particular cultural moment. If eccentric behavior itself acquires a fashionable cachet, can such behavior still be considered eccentric? The dandy is certainly not the sole example of eccentricity as a cultural trend in imperial Russia. Lotman examined eccentric behaviors produced by specific cultural circumstances in his article “Concerning Khlestakov,” for example, documenting real-life counterparts to Nikolai Gogol’s feckless literary antihero. This article articulates the connection 300   :    between eccentricity and semiosis, with reference to Lotman’s diverse body of work on cultural history, a hybrid discipline that examines unusual phenomena and provides unexpected perspectives on familiar features of the cultural landscape.3 In fact, nineteenth-century cultural history was often written with reference to eccentrics and eccentricities, a Western trend that also reached Russia. Lotman’s more contemporary work provides the basic tools for treating eccentricity as a cultural construct and demonstrates that eccentric behavior—that is, behavior that might seem to lie beyond the boundaries of a particular social context—can in fact be theorized as part of a larger cultural system. Lotman’s frequent recourse to spatial metaphors provides an illuminating perspective on behavior that demonstratively places itself at the margins of cultural life, while his interest in historical contexts underscores the unstable and necessarily relative location of the eccentric as a cultural outpost. Etymological Eccentricities Eccentricity (literally, “out of the center,” from Greek, ekkentros) indicates a deviation from the norm. The opposite of eccentric is “concentric ,” an attribute of figures or trajectories that share a common center. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology stresses eccentricity’s rejection of such a common center with definitions such as “not concentric” and “not central or referable to a centre.” The Oxford English Dictionary makes eccentricity figurative, referring to an entity...