Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
1104116 Russian Literature 2011 20 Pages PDF
Abstract

This article compares Belyiʼs Istoriia stanovleniia samosoznaiushchei dushi (ISSD) – his personalized scheme for the evolving self-consciousness of culture – with Bakhtinʼs concept of the “event”. It criticizes the contemporary neurological negation of notions such as “mind”, “consciousness” and “soul”, and explores the concept of self-consciousness in Belyiʼs poem ‘Samosoznanie’. It argues that, by implying knowledge of the world and the self, Belyiʼs understanding of “(samo-)soznanie” aims at a certain verbal and semantic completeness, or even integrity, which is considered an analogue of Bakhtinʼs term “so-bytie”, meaning the “being-together” of Self and Other in the event. Bakhtinʼs concept rejects the romantic philosophical idea of an all-embracing autonomous subject from the viewpoint of philosophical pragmatism in an avant-garde world. Belyiʼs axiological model of an evolving self-consciousness of culture in the Self repudiates Cartesian philosophy as “culturosophy” together with its positivist model of the world (which implies a Self separated from the world). In this way, the modes of thinking observed in Belyi and Bakhtin are complementary to each other.

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Social Sciences and Humanities Arts and Humanities Language and Linguistics