In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter Three The Struggle with Byt as a Problem of the Relationship between Art and Life THE CULTURAL NOTION OF BYT A derivative of the verb "to be," going back to medieval times in its original meaning, the word byt was used to deSignate household belongings-utensils, furniture, and other quotidian material objects. Even though by the beginning of the nineteenth century the word came to mean more generally a combination of customs and mores manifest in the forms of everyday life characteristic of a given social milieu, this original material aspect of the word's etymology was preserved in cultural memory and was reactivated in the revolutionary period. Like poshlost' and meshchanstvo, with which the notion of byt became intrinsically connected in the revolutionary era, the ubiquitous word byt also became a capacious cultural concept that does not lend itself easily to translation; it encompasses what in English may be designated as both "everyday life" and "lifestyle," or in German as "Allstag" and "Lebensart."] This fact in itself points to a peculiarity of the Russian cultural conception of the sphere of everyday existence. This was noted initially by Roman Jakobson, who remarked that "[ilt is curious that the word and its derivatives have such a prominent place in the Russian language (from which it spread even to Komi), while Western European languages have no word that corresponds to it." Jakobson surmised that "perhaps the reason is that in the European collective consciousness there is no concept of such a force as might oppose and break down the established norms of life," while in Russia the characteristic sense of unstable foundations of social norms "has been present for a very long time."2 The absence of stable sociocultural norms as the distinctive feature of Russian culture is echoed in the model presented by Lotman and Uspenskii, who explain the peculiarity of the "dynamics of Russian culture" in terms of the absence in Russian cultural consciousness of a "neutral sphere." In the West, they point out, both the earthly life and the afterlife were traditionally conceived of in terms of a tripartite structure; that is, as the world beyond the grave is conceived of as divided into heaven, purgatory, and hell, so "earthly life is conceived as admitting three types of behavior: the unconditionally sinful, the unconditionally holy, and the neutral, which permits eternal salvation after some sort of purgative 81 The Cultural Origins ofthe Socialist Realist Aesthetic trial." The conceptual existence of this intermediate sphere allowed in real life for a wide area of neutral behavior as well as for "neutral societal institutions " and "led to the appearance of a certain subjective continuity between the negated present and the awaited future." In contrast, Russian culture is inherently binary in both its ecclesiastical and secular conceptions, either of the hereafter or of earthly life. Hence, in the value orientation of Russian culture "the most stable opposition has been between the 'old and the new."'3 It follows from this model that such a value system allows no place for a neutral sphere either in temporal terms (hence, the characteristically Russian negative view of the present) or in spatial ones (thus the disdain for the everyday, or hyt, since it is precisely everyday life where a neutral sphere is constituted). This model was construed as applicable, synchronically, to the medieval period in Russian history, in fact to the end of the eighteenth century. Its projection onto the nineteenth century has to be the subject of a muchneeded historically nuanced investigation, which is beyond the scope of our study. It can be observed, nevertheless, that in the cultural polemics of the 1830s and 1840s (prompted by Petr Chaadaev's "Philosophical Letter"), the search for the national destiny pivoted on a deep dissatisfaction with the existing reality among both the Slavophile and the Westernizer camps.4 The love-hate relationship with the West and the pull of anticapitalist sentiment had parallels in the ambivalent attitude that developed in Russian culture with regard to mundane reality, particularly because of its roots in the material world. When, in the transition from romanticism to realism, the poetics ofthe exotic, the exalted, and the ineffable gave way to prose fiction that embraced what Pushkin called "the motley rubbish of the Flemish school," or "the prose of life," the embrace was a reluctant one. The ambiguity toward the "prosaic" everyday is manifested particularly acutely in Gogol's surreal pictures of the mundane: Dead Souls, patterned, as it were, on...

Share