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13 Tropos Logikos: Gustav Shpet's Philosophy of History Peter Steiner Recollecting the heady atmosphere at the Moscow University before WWI when belonging to a particular camp of contemporary German philosophy was de rigueur, Boris Pasternak wrote: "The devotees of the Göttingen Husserlites found support in Shpet" (35). This cryptic remark (Shpet's name is not mentioned again in Safe Conduct) caught my attention for several reasons. The first is quite trivial: when writing his autobiographical novel, Pasternak could not have known that his thenseven -year-old son Evgenii—whimsically compared in the book to the philosopher Hermann Cohen—would once upon a time marry Shpet's granddaughter Elena. Two other reasons deserve a more detailed explication. As his life and violent death illustrate, Gustav Gustavovich Shpet (1879-1937) wasthesonofaturbulentera(seePolivanov;Martsinkovskaia).Hebecameenmeshed in politics rather early, after his freshman year at Kiev University, when he joined the Marxist Social Democratic Party. Arrested and exiled from the city for his radical activities, he nevertheless managed to return and graduated in 1905. After moving to Moscow two years later, his star rose fast on the Russian intellectual horizon: research trips abroad, articles and books on philosophy, historiography, psychology and, in 1918, a coveted professorship at Moscow University. Surviving the revolution and the civil war, Shpet apparently declined the opportunity to emigrate in 1922 and found a modus vivendi with the Soviet government. Until 1929 he served as Vice President of the State Academy for the Study of the Arts (GAKhN: Gosudarstvennaia akademiia khudozhestvennykh nauk), which became a well-known Moscow intellectual and cultural center during the post-Civil War era. There he continued his multifaceted research, focusing eventually on the study of language. The year 1929 marked the second intrusion of politics into Shpet's scholarly career. The hurricane of Stalinism blew away his protective academic shell: GAKhN was closed and he found himself relegated to the gray zone of a public quasi-existence: a six year long limbo preceding Siberian exile and eventual execution. During this time he earned his bread mainly as a translator but was prohibited from publishing his own writings. 14 Peter Steiner In 1929-30 he was subjected to a vicious press campaign that painted him as an undesirable remnant of reactionary ideology who insidiously misused his administrative position at GAKhN to publish (at the proletariat's expense) books clearly hostile to its cause. Safe Conduct—and this is my second reason for mentioning Pasternak's text—coming out as a book in 1931 might well have been the last publication in which Shpet could have still read his name unsullied by negative epithets. Finally, Pasternak's laconic remark cast Shpet in a very specific intellectual mold, as prime promoter of Husserlian phenomenology in Russia. This view, I would like to stress, was prevalent among Shpet's contemporaries. Thus, a fellow student from Kiev University, Vasilii Zen'kovskii (unlike Shpet, luckily emigrating from Russia in the 1920s) stated in his Istoriia russkoi filosofii (History of Russian Philosophy) that Shpet was "a most orthodox follower of Husserl" who "treated all those thinking differently with contempt and irritation" (369-72). Zen'kovskii's grudge, one might surmise, has something to do with an inhospitable review of his book on causality in psychology Shpet published some thirty-five years earlier (see Shpet, "Kriticheskie zametki"). In a more sympathetic manner, Roman Jakobson mentioned Shpet several times while reflecting about the roots of inter-War structuralist linguistics and poetics. He remembered him as the conduit through which that newly rising interdisciplinary paradigm became impregnated with fundamental phenomenological postulates: "In the Moscow Linguistic Circle of the early twenties, continuous and ardent debates led by Gustav Shpet—in Husserl's opinion, one of his most remarkable students—were concerned with the linguistic use of the Logische Untersuchungen and especially with Edmund Husserl's and Anton Marty's avowed and suggestive return to 'the thought of a universal grammar'" (Jakobson, "Retrospect " 713; "Toward the History" 281). There are good reasons why Shpet's coevals viewed him in this particular way. His stays at the University of Göttingen, where he encountered Edmund Husserl and became acquainted with his Ideas, is one of the most famous topoi of the Russian philosopher's biography. Furthermore, the correspondence between the two thinkers from 1913 to 1918 attests to their convivial relationship, just as Shpet's dedication of his first book, Appearance and Sense, to Husserl evinces a deep-seated respect. Yet scrutiny of...

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