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9
литературоведческие исследования
УДК 82.09
исследования в области культурного трансфера в аспекте немецкого литературоведения
Дирк КЕМПЕР.
Ph. D., доктор филологии и культурологии, профессор, заведующий кафедрой германской филологии Института филологии и истории Российского государственного гуманитарного университета (Германия - Россия), e-mail: [email protected]
В настоящей статье автор интерпретирует понятие культурного трансфера, подробно анализирует взаимодействие русской и немецкой литературной традиции на материале произведений Ф. М. Достоевского.
Ключевые слова: культурный трансфер, немецкая литература, русская литература, сравнительное литературоведение, межкультурные контакты.
1.
There is an academic saying in Germany that does not bode well: "There is no genius without theory!" ("OhneTheoriekein Genie!") This is the reason why doctoral candidates tend to write 200 pages of theoretical introduction before arriving at the substance of their work. I wish to present myself in an un-German manner and promise to make do with a single page of general preamble and background thoughts.
German studies have long developed beyond solely addressing Goethe>s poetry and Thomas Mann>s novels. The "cultural turn" has considerably broadened the scope of our subject matter.
German studies abroad also profit from this development, having always conducted research into other fields and topics. One particular focus is the process of exchange between German literature and the native literature of the country in question: "Goethe in Russia", "Goethe in America", "Goethe in China" are some examples of fields of research that have been explored in the respective countries. Abroad, this is a topic of major interest, whilst in Germany it is barely perceptible.
In German studies in Germany, the focus is more likely to be "Goethe and Russia", "Goethe and America", or "Goethe and China". Here, the interest lies in which, if any, elements Goethe adopted from the literature and culture of the respective countries.
Both of these paths of research - "Goethe in America" and "Goethe and America" - proved to be more or less one-way roads.
2.
Now, however, we are perfectly positioned to overcome the restraints of these one-way roads. I will mention only three reasons for this development:
- Literary systems cannot be described within the solid boundaries of a given national literature. A glimpse into history demonstrates that, from Greek and Roman Classicism until well into the 18th century, Europe was dominated by one single literary system in which, from the Renaissance on, one could participate in various
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different languages. We know that the invention of national literatures with solid boundaries was an invention of the late 19thcentury. Today, we move between theoretical horizons such as post-colonial studies and other fields that subvert the concept of national literature.
- Traditionally, comparative literary studies tended to describe transnational literary relationships as the influence of a given German author A on a non-German author B (or the other way around). Influence was thus seen as a dialogue between literary minds. Today, we speak of cultural transfer and mean a dialogue that takes place between entire literary systems and cultures. I will explicate this point further in a moment.
- Research into cultural transfer, then, addresses the exchange between literatures and cultures from diverse countries and regions. Cultural formations undergo experiences in this process which enable them to differentiate themselves from others, to see where they can be enriched by others and to define what they definitely cannot or will not accept from the outside. "Foreign cultural experiences", as we describe them, are important to understanding oneself, and to constructing an own cultural identity. It is precisely this series of interactions and reciprocal effects that we have been exploring in Moscow and Freiburg within the framework of our institute for doctoral candidates that has been active for over nine years. In so doing, we are also absolutely sure that the work we do does in fact fall under literary studies too.
Our interpretation of the term "research into cultural transfer" is primarily inspired by the French German Studies academic Michel Espagne, who made the term popular in the mid 1980s.
Two concepts are central to his theory: transfer and transformation. I intend to work with these concepts now and to explain them using a specific example.
3.
First I would like to introduce you to the heroes of the piece: the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the German Hermann Hesse.
Dostoyevsky not only wrote great novels that were read all over the world, but also composed numerous political, literary and autobiographical essays. In Russian, they are usually collected under the title "A Writer's Diary" (1873-1881). The first German translations started to appear in 1907 in the context of the publication of Dostoyevsky's collected works. The "Diary" was split into three editions, though: "PolitischeSchriften (Political Writings)" (1907), "LiterarischeSchriften (Literary Writings)" (1913) and "AutobiographischeSchriften (Autobiographical Writings)" (1919) [6, p. 502-510]. The "Political Writings" were particularly influential in Germany [3; 4; 5; 6 ].
Hermann Hesse also read this volume - as did many in Germany at the time - and he was profoundly impressed by Dostoyevsky's ideas pertaining to European history, culture and politics. His reading gave way to three essays that he published in 1920 in a book titled "Blickins Chaos / In sight of chaos".
This is the example with which I propose to work.
4.
Older research into cultural influence regarded the aforementioned process of exchange between Dosto-yevsky and Hesse as an exchange of ideas and as an act of Hermann Hesse's individual reception. I admit that I am simplifying the situation to an extreme! In this scenario, ideas fly, as it were, from Dostoyevsky's head - via the process of reading - into Hesse's - from mind to mind. Propagators of the field of research into cultural influence were aware of the fact that Hesse received these ideas individually, which is to say that he also transformed them in the process, but essentially, according to this view, it was he alone who completed the transformation.
Research into cultural transfer proceeds on the basis that the situation is in fact much more complicated than it might have seemed. According to this approach, reception and transformation do not just start with the reader but also with the mediating actors who make the reading process possible in the first place. In our example there are at least three such actors, namely the translator Elisabeth Kaerrick, the editor Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and the publisher Reinhard Piper.
Kaerrick, Moeller van den Bruck and Piper are "mediators" because they not only make the process of being able to read Dostoyevsky's writing in German possible in a technical sense, but also, furthermore, intervene in an intellectual sense, thus themselves participating actively in the transformation. That a translator can influence the reception of a foreign text in the target culture and the way in which he or she can do this is sufficiently well known. I will therefore concentrate on the other two mediators: the editor and the publisher.
The genesis of the German edition of Dostoyevsky's work, which was published by Piper in Munich in 22 volumes that appeared between 1906 and 1919, is quite remarkable. Neither the editor nor the publisher spoke Russian, nor were they in any way experts on Russian literature [8; 9; 10; 11; 12; 13 ].
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck might be familiar to you as a theorist in the context of the "Conservative Revolution", a conservative nationalist group that was established at the outer right perimeter of the political spectrum in the Weimar Republic. The autodidact with no school certificate, and therefore no university education, had left Berlin in 1902 because he was in great debt and wanted to avoid conscription into the Prussian army. These motivations to leave were probably enhanced by private reasons; at any rate he left his pregnant wife behind in Berlin and went to Paris. Moeller tried to live as a publicist and designed massive concepts for editions, projects and cultural activities, most of which remained at best, however, only partially realized.
In the Parisian émigré scene, he met the sisters Lucy and Elisabeth ("Less") Kaerrick from the German-speaking region of the Baltics; Lucy became his second wife in 1908 and Elisabeth translated the entire Dostoyevsky edition. The Baltics were still a part of the Russian Tsardom at the time; the sisters had therefore grown up with two languages in two cultures.
It must have been Elisabeth Kaerrick who explained Dostoyevsky's massive significance to Moeller. In Russia at the time there were already five editions of the complete works, whilst in Germany only the great novels had been translated. Moeller van den Bruck saw, completely correctly, a great opportunity in this and developed a plan for a first comprehensive edition of Dostoyevsky's collected works.
The project landed in the hands of Reinhard Piper, a young publisher who had founded his own publishing house in 1904. Piper had originally specialized in the field of art literature; Dostoyevsky was to be his first major publishing project in the field of literature. On the 14th April 1906, a contract was signed between Piper and Moeller.
This contract bears witness to two things: on the one hand, the young publisher's lack of experience and on the other the self-assessment, indeed over-assessment, of the young editor. Möller alone was empowered to arrange the planning of the edition, he alone was responsible for the procurement of the translations and he alone was entitled to make decisions regarding forewords and introductions. The publisher had no possibility at all to take control, make corrections or intervene in the development of the edition.
Moeller used his rights cleverly, but he also abused them. It was clever to obtain a Russian star from the Parisian émigré scene, the poet and religious philosopher Dmitry Merezhkovsky for a number of introductions. That enhanced the market value of the edition.
The way in which Moeller wrote his own introductions to the 22 volumes was, however, an abuse of his contractual powers. He was only partially familiar with Dostoyevsky's work, most of which he only got to know in the process of the development of the edition. He was not at all perturbed by this lack of expertise, though, and he used his forewords as a medium through which to propagate his own cultural philosophy and his own German nationalist views. The first world war happened during the long period over which the edition was published between 1906 and 1919; the political situation in Europe underwent profound changes, as did Moeller's own views. He then simply swapped older forewords for newer ones as soon as a given volume went into its second or third edition.
5.
How did that look in practice?
The volume containing the novel "RodionRaskolnikoff / Crime and Punishment" appeared in 1908. Itcont-ains "Die Voraussetzungen Dostojewskis. Zur Einführung in die Ausgabe (Dostoyevsky'spremises. By way of introduction to the edition.) by Moeller van den Bruck [3; 4; 5; 6].
In 15 pages of print, Moeller talks about all sorts of things, but not about Dostoyevsky. His opening thesis reads as follows:
"The Slavs are the first and at the same time the last to arrive, the oldest and at the same time the youngest amongst the Arian races." (V) Racial theory, clearly. From this starting point, Moeller tries to define the "fundamental Slavic essence" (VII). He maintains that there is something inherently "passive, concentrated, conservative" in the Slavic nature (VIII) that is characteristic of "a people imbued with immense non-individualist thought, with an exceedingly weakly developed spiritual activity of the will, initiative, and energy" (XIII). He uses this to explain, with recourse to racial history, why the Slavs are utterly unequipped with any war-like
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capabilities and also why the Slavs are "the most religious people in Europe", "a mystical nation" (XV), with specific reference to the renewal of Slavdom in Siberia, which would then orientate itself eastwards, moving towards towards Constantinople and on to India. The "conclusion" or completion of Slavdom signifies above all the realization of "Russian genius" as a "spiritual genius" (XVII), as had already been testified in Russian poetry, "the most patriarchal and at the same time most modern poetry" (XIX). For this reason, one must read Dostoyevsky, the "central genius" (XIX). After 15 pages of considerations on racial theory, the name appears only once, as the last word of the text. Moeller probably felt that this was a particularly clever rhetorical effect.
6.
Moeller wrote such forewords to 17 of the 22 volumes. Only some of them refer to the works of Dosto-yevsky that they are meant to be introducing. Otherwise, he writes about politics, culture, history, and philosophy, and not as a literary critic concerned with Dostoyevsky but as an independent thinker who wants to propagate his own views. In brief: Moeller uses Dostoyevsky as a screen on which to project his own views, and his 17 forewords taken together can be seen as the first manifesto for the "Conservative Revolution".
The impact was immense: whilst in France Dostoyevsky was seen, like Zola, as a left-wing hero, in Germany, he was politicized and transformed into a hero of the conservative nationalist right-wing. This is evidenced, amongst other works, in Thomas Mann's "BetrachtungeneinesUnpolitischen / Reflections of a nonpolitical man".
This politicisation was by no means intended by Piper, the publisher. Moeller van den Bruck took control in his role as mediator and introduced German readers to "his" Dostoyevsky, not to the literary figure and only to a very minor extent to the Russian figure Dostoyevsky actually embodied.
Our provisional findings can be summarized as follows: Dostoyevsky's transformation at the hands of the editor as mediator was enormous. Without Moeller, Hermann Hesse would most likely never have been inspired by his essays.
7.
Rainhard Piper soon realized that Moeller was presenting a Dostoyevsky edition that he, as publishes, would not have wanted in that form. He himself was no expert. He had read the novel "Crime and Punishment" but apparently nothing else. In his autobiography, he later admitted that he only arrived at a profounder understanding of Dostoyevsky in the 1920s, which is to say, after the edition was completed.
Moeller's politicisation of Dostoyevsky was, then, in stark opposition to Piper's ideas, and Piper could not have predicted this at the signing of the contract. In 1906, he must have proceeded on the assumption that Dostoyevsky, who was by no means unknown in Germany at the time, would continue to be presented as he had been up to then: either as a great naturalist or as an ingenious psychologist, perhaps, even, as a psycho-pathological writer.
He was not allowed to intervene in Moeller's work, on the legal basis of the contract. What he then did can not have happened very often in the entire history of publishing: he used the publishing house's advertising channels in an attempt to communicate an entirely different image of Dostoyevsky to German readers, completely opposed to Moeller van der Bruck's portrayal in his introductions. In other words, he was advertising not against his own edition as such, but certainly against his own editor.
In 1909, he read an article about Dostoyevsky by Otto Julius Bierbaum that was published in the journal "Die Zukunft" ("The Future"). Bierbaum enjoyed some degree of celebrity as a journalist and the text was perfect from the very first sentence. I quote:
"It is impossible for us to love Dostoyevsky, whose ideals have nothing to do with ours. [...] This world is not ours, indeed it is inimical and threatening to ours, but that is the reason why we must know it and learn to understand it."
According to Bierbaum, Dostoyevsky emanated a fundamental fascination with foreignness, with cultural difference; the very essence of new literature waiting to be discovered. It was worth acquainting oneself with him because he was a "warlock" of psychology, a mystical prophet of a very different Christianity that was neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor indeed German in any way. Bierbaum praised the Piper edition but barely mentioned any political aspects pertaining to Dostoyevsky. Moeller van den Brucks name is not even mentioned.
Piper printed the essay as a pamphlet [2; 7 ]and gifted many thousand copies to book sellers and interested readers.
Four years later, in 1914, he repeated this expensive advertising strategy and combined Bierbaum's essay with texts by two much better know authors, Hermann Bahr and Dmitry Merezhkovsky. These were turned into a small volume, which nonetheless had 105 pages, and that Piper once again gave away [2 ]. Again: Dostoyevsky was described as the Other, as foreign or as familiar in the context of European modernity, or as a religious prophet, but never as a political thinker. In this volume, too, the edition is praised and Moeller van der Brucks name is never mentioned.
8.
Let us summarize in conclusion:
From the perspective of research into cultural transfer, the image of transnational literary relationships that emerges is entirely different to that seen through the lens of research into cultural influence. From the viewpoint of cultural transfer, the profound influence of mediating figures such as the editor or publisher becomes visible. It was not the recipient reader Hermann Hesse, whom we have not even discussed in further detail, who transformed the foreign text in the light of his own horizons of comprehension, but also the mediating figures I have introduced here.
Of course the processes of transfer and transformation are far more complex than I have described them in my somewhat positivistic overview here. Here is just one further perspective: what made Dostoyevsky the political thinker so fascinating for Moeller van der Bruck or Thomas Mann was his "slavophile" worldview. The Russian "slavophile" tradition was in fact significantly influenced by German Romanticism, for example in the focus on empathetic concepts such as "the People" and "the Nation". Thus the German reader found familiar elements, which had originally developed in the German cultural realm, in the German Dostoyevsky edition, whereby these concepts themselves had been translated into a Russian version, or in other words, had undergone a process of transformation. It is in the analysis of such spiral motion and cultural exchange that research into cultural transfer really comes into its own.
The political thinker so fascinating for Moeller van der Bruck or Thomas Mann was his "slavophile" worl-dview. The Russian "slavophile" tradition was in fact significantly influenced by German Romanticism, for example in the focus on empathetic concepts such as "the People" and "the Nation". Thus the German reader found familiar elements, which had originally developed in the German cultural realm, in the German Dosto-yevsky edition, whereby these concepts themselves had been translated into a Russian version, or in other words, had undergone a process of transformation. It is in the analysis of such spiral motion and cultural exchange that research into cultural transfer really comes into its own.
