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Abstract
The article analyzes a 2002 edition of Tuḥfat al-murīd ʿalā Jawharat al-tawḥīd, a supercommentary written by Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī (d. 1860) on Ibrāhīm al-Laqānī’s (d. 1632) base text in Ashʿarī theology. The edition was edited by the Muslim religious scholar and former grand mufti of Egypt, ʿAlī Jumʿa (b. 1952). The article shows that in Jumʿa’s edition taḥqīq is a practice of selecting a text that has been widely available, reframing its importance in the introduction and footnotes, and making the text understandable to contemporary readers. In his selection and framing of the text, Jumʿa situates al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya against Salafī opponents, while his explicit audience for the edition consists of Muslim students. The article argues that Jumʿa’s taḥqīq, which is both ideologically and pedagogically oriented, reflects his larger religiopolitical project of bolstering the authority and intellectual legacy of al-Azhar in the context of inter-Sunni rivalry in the late twentieth century.
Abstract
Information regarding the provenance of papyrological material that was acquired in the Egyptian antiquities market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is scarce and often unreliable. This article investigates the provenance of Hamburg’s Papyrus Bilinguis 1, famed for containing the apocryphal Acta Pauli. By researching archival files documenting the acquisition and the context of the find, the papyrus is shown to have been acquired in breach of the Egyptian antiquities law of 1912. The article reveals how Carl Schmidt (1868–1938), the collector who acquired the manuscript for the Hamburg library, by concealing information, tried to cover up his own criminal involvement in the smuggling of the manuscript. Through the investigation of a manuscript that was acquired by a public German institution in awareness of its illegality, the article hopes to contribute to current debates on the translocation of cultural heritage artefacts to Europe and the US in the age of European colonialism and imperialism.
Abstract
The chapter focuses on the reception of Brodsky after his death on 28 January 1996 by his Russian friends and fellow writers. It develops Pierre Nora’s conceptualization of memory that distinguishes between ‘dictatorial memory’ aiming at ceaselessly reinventing tradition in a mythologized manner and private memory comprising ‘sifted and sorted historical traces’. In Nora’s view, modern memory is usually archival and ‘relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image’. The chapter argues that several contemporaries of Brodsky, including Aleksandr Kushner and Sergei Gandlevskii, who have written essays on Brodsky can be defined as proponents of archival memory comprising traces of the past. They do not use their reminiscences for the construction of new metanarratives. Their images of Brodsky can be seen as part of the archival memory as described by Nora. The archival approach undermines the creation of historical metanarratives oriented towards the cult of heroes and the recycling of popular myths. The vision of Brodsky produced by Russian authors in the late 1990s–early 2000s looks different from the widespread post-Soviet nostalgia manifested in Russian media and visual culture. It can be described as part of counter-memory that favours subjectivized accounts of the past.
Abstract
We are now approaching three decades since Joseph Brodsky’s death, and certain contours of literary history have taken on a sharper, more high-resolution focus. To express what seems by now beyond dispute, with Pushkin the notion of romantic biography was born for Russian poetry, and with Brodsky that notion died. The patterns that inhere in organic life also inhere in the cultural products that are an expression of that life. And if post-Darwinian biology teaches us anything, it is that any species can disappear, but not before change and adaptation have produced something different. The same holds true of cultural traditions, including poetic traditions. As Tynianov was the first to tell us with his theory of parody as it applies to literary evolution, these traditions are born, they live for a time within their cultural niche, they go into decline, and finally they lose the reason for their original contours and they morph into something else. With regard to the idea of romantic biography in modern Russian poetry, this means several things at once: 1) that Pushkin and Brodsky asked, whether explicitly or implicitly, consciously or subconsciously, that their lives as poets be read in a certain way; 2) that the relation between life and art embodied in these two poets’ creative biographies can now be seen, in retrospect, as deeply formative for the tradition (opposing ‘bookends’, if you will); and 3) that, more specifically, it is what Jakobson called the ‘sculptural myth’ – the notion of the statue coming to life in Pushkin’s case and the notion of life hardening into statue and inanimate ‘thing’ in Brodsky’s – that became, in their mature work, the explanatory metaphor of their ‘created lives’. In the first (‘Looking Backwards’) section of this chapter I identify a series of correspondences between Pushkin’s and Brodsky’s lives and works (correspondences the tradition-conscious Brodsky was almost certainly aware of), after which I revisit the contrasting deployment of the sculptural myth in both poets (the theme has been treated elsewhere). Then, using Plato’s logic in the Ion, Republic (books II, III, X), Gordias, and Phaedrus regarding philosophical truth versus poetic truth, I make the case in the second section (‘Looking Forward’) that Brodsky’s post-Mandelstamian dicta regarding Russia’s ties to Islam and the ‘East’ do damage to his reputation as man of letters in the current climate. His far-reaching historiosophical assertions are actually ‘poetic’ truths backed up by ‘poetic’ truths that, according to Plato, have nothing outside of themselves to which to compare them, and that, when translated into poetry, here On the Independence of Ukraine and On the Talks in Kabul, cannot be proven and get mired in politics and bad taste. In the end the ‘truth’ of Brodsky’s rhymes, an undiminished skill based in aesthetic appeal, cannot overcome the philosophical truth of democratic first principles, principles which the poet claims he believes in elsewhere but which he gainsays in his poems about the demise of the empire that was his original home and that, despite everything, he feels compelled to defend.
Abstract
This chapter follows the story of my personal acquaintance with Valentina Polukhina and my involvement with analyzing, cataloguing and transporting her vast archive dedicated to Joseph Из не забывших меня to The Foundation for Establishing the Joseph Brodsky Literary Museum in St Petersburg. It is a narrative of my four visits to Valentina’s home intertwined with the history of her archive and the bilingual, legal, confidential, cross-cultural and other nuances I faced working with a private archive under a strict deadline. Here I touch upon some strategies that may help colleagues work with private archives should they face such a challenge themselves. But the main focus of the article is the lifetime project of Professor Polukhina as seen through her archive and perceived by me as I spent more than three months sorting out her archive together with her. Through this journey, I hope to shed some light on the scope of her tremendous work and her wonderful personality.