Olʹga Freidenberg's Works and Days by Nina PerlinaReview by: Amy MandelkerSlavic Review, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 443-444Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3185790 .

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Book Reviews Book Reviews

Nevertheless, Shevelenko's study will be appreciated by students of Russian mod- ernism, feminism, and all admirers of Tsvetaeva's poetry. It strikes the right balance be- tween western and Russian readings of Tsvetaeva's texts, making it a welcome addition to Tsvetaeva scholarship.

ALEXANDRA SMITH

University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Ol'ga Freidenberg's Works and Days. By Nina Perlina. Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica Publishers, 2002. vi, 288 pp. Notes. Index. Illustrations. $24.95, paper.

Students of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival, the semiotics of culture, and mythopoet- ics in general have long been fascinated by the scholarship of Ol'ga Freidenberg, an eerie figure who survived the purges of the 1930s, the seige, and the postwar Soviet dismantling of academe. Her own scholarly theories of ritual as the "potential form" of myth and nar- rative acquired an uncanny application during her observation of the recreation of a So- viet mythology and rhetoric under Iosif Stalin. Freidenberg's life story is as harrowing as any of her contemporaries', but her most articulate lament was for the life of the mind, as expressed in the epigraph she applied to her own last work: "I must begin with the same old thing: the prison-like conditions in which this book was written. I have no access to works of scholarship. I have to rely solely on my memory in writing this book. I am isolated from the ideas of contemporary scholars. Pupils and friends alike have turned away from me. I have been deprived of my University audience. Under the circumstances I have de- cided to synthesize my thirty-seven years of research and, having done so, to fall silent for- ever. Passer-by! Pause before this work and pray for scholarship!" (265-66).

Regrettably, Freidenberg's ingenious and extraordinary theories of mythopoesis and paleontological semantics-which emerged in parallel to the similar approaches of Ernst Cassirer, Johann Huizinga, Leo Spitzer, and which were as influential for Mikhail Bakhtin as for the development of folkloristics and the semiotic study of culture-were subse- quently obscured. Even in her own country, her work was, for several decades, a casualty of history. During the 1970s, the appearance of Iurii Lotman's judicious assessment of her ideas (Olga Freidenberg as a Student of Culture, 1973) and the translation into English of her seminal study, Three Plots or the Semantics of One (1978) reawakened interest in Freidenberg. Nina Perlina has been largely responsible for transforming the evanescent profile of this significant humanistic thinker into a substantive portrait, first through a series of highly readable translations, and now in this definitive scholarly biography.

As in any study of this kind, the biography of the person threatens at times to eclipse the work of the scholars. Perlina writes with sensitivity of the continual academic turbu- lence that perpetually undermined Freidenberg's ability to work: the lack of clear aca- demic structures and the political reshuffling of university departments during the 1920s, the terror of the 1930s, the horrors of the war and the seige, the final Stalinist attack on and destruction of her first mentor, the linguist, Nikolai Marr, and the accompanying evic- tion of Freidenberg herself from her department and from the university. ("Today there was a witchhunt and I was the witch" [216], she wrote wryly in her memoirs). Not a single student or former colleague dared appear at her funeral. She was apparently destined for complete obscurity, which would have been a severe loss to literary scholarship. Thanks to the correspondence between Freidenberg and her cousin, Boris Pasternak, as well as to Freidenberg's evocative unpublished memoir, "Probeg zhizni" (The race of life), and her diary accounts, Freidenberg's life and works were not extinguished. The biographer's task yields considerable insight into the challenges of scholarship in the pre-thaw Soviet Union. In particular, for a scholar who had been closely associated with Marr's unusual linguistic theories and who had created an interdisciplinary and cross-generic model for under- standing narrative, there could be no comfortable or secure corner even in academe.

In addition to writing the first in-depth biography of Ol'ga Freidenberg, Perlina has

Nevertheless, Shevelenko's study will be appreciated by students of Russian mod- ernism, feminism, and all admirers of Tsvetaeva's poetry. It strikes the right balance be- tween western and Russian readings of Tsvetaeva's texts, making it a welcome addition to Tsvetaeva scholarship.

ALEXANDRA SMITH

University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Ol'ga Freidenberg's Works and Days. By Nina Perlina. Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica Publishers, 2002. vi, 288 pp. Notes. Index. Illustrations. $24.95, paper.

Students of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival, the semiotics of culture, and mythopoet- ics in general have long been fascinated by the scholarship of Ol'ga Freidenberg, an eerie figure who survived the purges of the 1930s, the seige, and the postwar Soviet dismantling of academe. Her own scholarly theories of ritual as the "potential form" of myth and nar- rative acquired an uncanny application during her observation of the recreation of a So- viet mythology and rhetoric under Iosif Stalin. Freidenberg's life story is as harrowing as any of her contemporaries', but her most articulate lament was for the life of the mind, as expressed in the epigraph she applied to her own last work: "I must begin with the same old thing: the prison-like conditions in which this book was written. I have no access to works of scholarship. I have to rely solely on my memory in writing this book. I am isolated from the ideas of contemporary scholars. Pupils and friends alike have turned away from me. I have been deprived of my University audience. Under the circumstances I have de- cided to synthesize my thirty-seven years of research and, having done so, to fall silent for- ever. Passer-by! Pause before this work and pray for scholarship!" (265-66).

Regrettably, Freidenberg's ingenious and extraordinary theories of mythopoesis and paleontological semantics-which emerged in parallel to the similar approaches of Ernst Cassirer, Johann Huizinga, Leo Spitzer, and which were as influential for Mikhail Bakhtin as for the development of folkloristics and the semiotic study of culture-were subse- quently obscured. Even in her own country, her work was, for several decades, a casualty of history. During the 1970s, the appearance of Iurii Lotman's judicious assessment of her ideas (Olga Freidenberg as a Student of Culture, 1973) and the translation into English of her seminal study, Three Plots or the Semantics of One (1978) reawakened interest in Freidenberg. Nina Perlina has been largely responsible for transforming the evanescent profile of this significant humanistic thinker into a substantive portrait, first through a series of highly readable translations, and now in this definitive scholarly biography.

As in any study of this kind, the biography of the person threatens at times to eclipse the work of the scholars. Perlina writes with sensitivity of the continual academic turbu- lence that perpetually undermined Freidenberg's ability to work: the lack of clear aca- demic structures and the political reshuffling of university departments during the 1920s, the terror of the 1930s, the horrors of the war and the seige, the final Stalinist attack on and destruction of her first mentor, the linguist, Nikolai Marr, and the accompanying evic- tion of Freidenberg herself from her department and from the university. ("Today there was a witchhunt and I was the witch" [216], she wrote wryly in her memoirs). Not a single student or former colleague dared appear at her funeral. She was apparently destined for complete obscurity, which would have been a severe loss to literary scholarship. Thanks to the correspondence between Freidenberg and her cousin, Boris Pasternak, as well as to Freidenberg's evocative unpublished memoir, "Probeg zhizni" (The race of life), and her diary accounts, Freidenberg's life and works were not extinguished. The biographer's task yields considerable insight into the challenges of scholarship in the pre-thaw Soviet Union. In particular, for a scholar who had been closely associated with Marr's unusual linguistic theories and who had created an interdisciplinary and cross-generic model for under- standing narrative, there could be no comfortable or secure corner even in academe.

In addition to writing the first in-depth biography of Ol'ga Freidenberg, Perlina has

443 443

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444 Slavic Review

provided the first probing discussion of her major works, Poetika siuzheta i zhanra (Poetics of subject and genre, 1997) and Obraz i poniatie (Image and concept, 1998). In addition, Perlina provides the desirable parallels between Freidenberg and her compatriot theorists of folklore, culture, and narrative form-the formalists, Bakhtin, and the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics. She also compares Freidenberg's ideas to parallels in western thought.

The book is organized into six parts, alternating details of Freidenberg's difficult life with the account of her emerging ideas and their reception in the academic community of her time. The first part explores the life-long friendship between Freidenberg and Pasternak; their shared recollections and experiences, refracted separately in poetry, prose, and memoir, serve as a preface to what follows. In part 2, Perlina presents the dy- namic picture of Freidenberg as a graduate student. Already possessed of impeccable scholarship, inerrant intuition, and a highly flexible and creative approach to her topic, she drew the attention of Nikolai Marr, without whose sponsorship she probably would not have succeeded in obtaining her master's degree or an academic appointment. At the time she completed her dissertation, it was impossible to schedule a defense (all defenses had been cancelled), much less obtain an academic position. Even after she had been ap- pointed, two years would elapse before she actually began receiving a salary. Yet, the very unstructured and chaotic condition of the university department may have enabled Frei- denberg to enunciate her rather unorthodox ideas and to work in a cross-disciplinary fashion.

In part 3, Perlina describes Freidenberg coming into her own as a scholar and thinker, working past her neo-Kantian formation and Marr's tutelage to apprehend and assimilate Cassirer's ideas and to head up the mythological working group in Marr's institute. Perlina compares Freidenberg's idea of semantic paleontology and the structures of folkoric and mythic narrative with Vladimir Propp's schema of characterological and plot functions in The Morphology of the Folktale (2d ed., 1968). Freidenberg's magnum opus, Poetika siuzheta i zhanra, long suppressed, finally sees the light of day in Perlina's intensive summary in

part 4. Parts 5 and 6 recount the years of seige and its aftermath. In its understated account of the seige experience, the chapter entitled, "The Seige of a Human Being and the Tech-

nique of Modern Political Myths" may well be the most dramatic in this biography, and not

only because of the imposition of a relentlessly constructed rhetoric of Soviet heroism

upon the beseiged city. At the center of that experience, Freidenberg, who is forced to ne-

glect scholarship in the day-to-day struggle for survival, is unexpectedly spurred by an ar-

gument with her mother to reconsider her former theoretical ideas. As a result, she dis- covers an entirely new approach that sustains her in the years following her mother's death and her own eviction from the university.

Freidenberg's last decade, in which she worked out the ontological ramifications of her ideas, in particular the antinomy of the real and the apparent (revealing the per- sisting importance of neo-Kantianism in her work) is covered in part 6. The concluding part 7 offers an invaluable assessment of Freidenberg's theories with relation to the ideas of Bakhtin (who read her work with great interest while working on his book on Rabelais) and concepts of laughter, ritual, and the comic.

This is a moving and important biography of a major figure in twentieth-century mythopoetic studies. As Perlina successfully argues, Freidenberg's work is not, as many have assumed, eclipsed by similar projects in archetype and myth studies that achieved wider recognition in her lifetime. Perlina brilliantly achieves her stated goal of providing the humanistic university audience and intellectual community Freidenberg lacked dur-

ing her life. Readers of the biography will happily assume this role and engage in dialogue with Freidenberg's conception of myth, narrative, and the semantics of plots as well as em-

pathizing with her life experiences. This volume, a welcome and invaluable explication of

Freidenberg's ideas and a compassionate account of her life, will serve the specialist and

nonspecialist alike as an important reference and incisive analysis of Ol'ga Freidenberg's works and days.

AMY MANDELKER

City University of New York Graduate Center

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