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306 Paradigmatic Shifts In the 1990s, three fundamental shifts took place in Russian academic and intellectual cultures, contributing to formations that were at the same time disruptive and newly determinate of one another. The first of these shifts concerned the forum for scholarship. As argued in the preceding chapter, journal culture for the academic, metropolitan intelligentsia in the decade following 1991 gradually ceased to be positioned at the very center of intellectual debates. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of the period is this: the moment when the ideological and logistical conditions permitted the launch of independent periodicals, responsive to the increasing diversity of readership , was historically the same moment when journal culture—for infrastructural reasons, but also in the realm of ideas—ceased to hold the same centripetal power to pull together ongoing debates. Yet it cannot be argued that the era of “thick” journals had passed. As Andrei Dmitriev remarked, “Russian thick journals are a familiar, organic, cultural idiosyncrasy . . . like the monarchy in England,” and no major writer, with the exception of Vladimir Sorokin, had moved into cultural visibility without passing through the crucible of journal debates.1 A key counterweight was the activity of new publishing houses—Vagrius, Ad Marginem, and (later) NLO2 —as well as older publish-  post-soviet literary studies the rebirth of academism nancy condee and eugeniia kupsan 15 post-soviet literary studies  307 ing companies, such as Molodaia gvardiia, which were able in the 1990s to produce monographs and edited volumes with greater alacrity than in the Soviet period. An unintended consequence of this speed and flexibility, however, was an infrastructural glitch: the book-publishing industry had no corresponding rate of response for announcements, discussion, and review on the pages of the major “thick” journals. As Lev Gudkov points out, if in the 1970s most major publications could expect some critical assessment in the periodical press—by Gudkov’s estimate, a relatively high 12 percent of all publications received reviews—then by the end of the 1990s a mere 0.02 to 0.05 percent of published books received reviews.3 Through the 1990s, the interdependency of journal and book publication at each stage of circulation —production, distribution, consumption, review—would undergo profound changes vis-à-vis each other, as well as with respect to Internet publishing.4 A second shift of the immediate post-Soviet period concerned the profile of participants in contemporary debates. The end of Soviet cultural restrictions permitted a freer circulation of texts by émigré scholars, as well as their tighter integration into Russian intellectual life (in seminars, conferences, collaborative research projects), even as Russian-based scholars began to appear more frequently in Western scholarly journals and symposia. Losing its ideological character, the “Russian scholar” thereby became a more loosely defined participant in the intellectual economy, a bearer of linguistic and cultural markers untethered to geography or ethnicity. It is an open question whether the term Russian scholar is not already an empty category. A third shift in the 1990s concerned the diversity of ideological positions, promising greater cohesion within intellectual subcultures, even as it eroded professional cohesion, except as marketplace. While the Soviet century had been marked by a strong tendency to understand culture as a set of eternally bifurcating practices (liberal and conservative; urban and village prose; unofficial and official, and subdistinctions , such as dissident culture and parallel culture), the late twentieth century and the early years of this century saw the emergence of intellectual clusters with only attenuated concern for the research assumptions of other groups. If, for example, Andrei Zorin sought a common theoretical substratum in Iurii Lotman and Clifford Geertz (in, for example, his 2001 Kormia dvuglavogo orla [Feeding the Two-Headed Eagle]), that effort need have little reverberation for Mikhail Epshtein, seeking common ground in dialogue with both Nikolai Berdyaev and Carl Jung. Similarly, the discursive universe established by Mikhail Zolotonosov, engaging in analysis of literary texts informed by Freudian psychoanalysis (Slovo i telo [Word and Body, 1999]), need not share any metacoordinates whatsoever with Mikhail Berg’s Literaturokratiia (Literaturocracy, 2000), engaged with the sociological categories of Michel Bourdieu : different theoretical abstractions coexisted in parallel debates. These three structuring elements (forum, participants, and ideological diversity) will inform this effort to make sense of the scholarly universe after 1991. Our interests are less about who’s who than some preliminary remarks about the functionality of new knowledge systems, their emergent rules of inclusion and exclusion, and the ways in which material culture, including the changing fate...

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