Rāṅgey Rāghav’s Literary Biographies, Loī kā tānā and Ratnā kī bāt, in the 1950s and the Debates on the Status of Indian Women and Dalits

The article proposes to investigate the political and ideological uses of Hindi literary biography, with focus on two texts by Rāṅgey Rāghav, Loī kā tānā (“Loi’s Warp’’) and Ratnā kī bāt (“Ratna’s Speech”), based on lives of Kabir and Tulsīdās respectively. The relevance of Rāghav’s biographies goes beyond the merely literary and derives from the ideological and political functions played by these texts in the period they were written. Viewed by Rāghav as complementary works with a didactic and ideological value, they move away from the ‘brahmanical’ interpretations of the early modern Hindi poets by scholars of the 1920s and 1930s. To understand Rāghav’s motives and strategies, one needs to examine the ideological and political context in which he recast values linked to the main figures of the early modern devotional (bhakti) literature. As the 1950s witnessed debates on the status of Indian women and Dalit communities, the same becoming crucial to Hindi literary sphere, special attention needs to be paid to the representation, in Rāghav’s biographies, of Loī and Ratnā—Kabīr’s and Tulsīdās’ wives respectively—who embody some of the politically and ideologically progressive slogans which Rāghav projected on to these poets. The present work, based on recent studies on literary biography (Benton 2005, 2011, Middlebrook 2006, Miller 2001), is also an attempt to investigate some of the intellectual and ideological aporias which seem to have affected Hindi literary progressivism since the first decades of the postcolonial period.

Alexey Remizov and Boris Zaitsev: 1926 Anniversary Preparation

The article is dedicated to a story from the literary life of Russian emigration related to the anniversary of Boris Zaitsev of 1926. The article introduces hitherto unknown archival material that demonstrates how Alexey Remizov worked to cover this literary event in the pages of the European press. Archival documents (fragments of a hitherto unpublished emigrant period correspondence of Remizov and Zaitsev) and unknown print sources have allowed me to describe the nature of the relationship between two writers sharing similar literary biographies in the context of the literary situation of 1926. The anniversary celebration as a factor of public recognition for Remizov became an occasion for integrating significant phenomena of Russian literature into European literature and culture. The article contains obscure biographical information about Remizov’s correspondents.

After-Lives

This chapter explores biographical receptions of Greek and Roman poets in the twentieth century. Classical scholarship has now begun to recognize ancient biography as a creative mode of reception in Antiquity. In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, reading the texts of Greek and Roman poetry for the lives of their authors has been an especially rich and multifaceted mode of reception, providing for many readers a means of grappling with the ancient texts within the changing cultural landscape of modernity. Yet, unlike the medieval and early modern traditions of literary biography, in the twentieth century, academic and creative Lives have tended to part company. When it comes to Greek and Roman poets, though a few full-length literary biographies that still attempt to claim factual status have been produced, conventional narrative biographies that aim to set out the ‘facts’ are generally only found in isagogic contexts such as introductions to texts and translations, or textbooks of literary history. Moreover, partly because modern authors are acutely aware that there are few ‘facts’ beyond the poets’ works themselves on which to base their material, and partly as a broader consequence of modern preoccupations with fragmentation and the limits of knowledge, creative life-writing about the ancient poets in this period is found more frequently in ludic snapshots rather than full-blown narrative biographies.

Depicted Lives

This chapter investigates the types of biographies which could be written through material objects, and the dynamic uses to which prominent figures could put the visual arts in their efforts at self-representation, using the Imperial Greek sophists as a case study. To what extent can one conceptualize these sorts of representation and self-representation as biography? From the perspective of the historian, physical monuments along with the texts inscribed upon them often allow one to write the life-histories of individuals who would otherwise remain unknown, omitted from the literary tradition. Yet the analogy also goes deeper. Monuments often work within the same sorts of categories and agenda which can also be seen in literary biographies. As with Favorinus’ statue, statues and their inscriptions could present individuals as exempla of particular sorts of values, designed to have a didactic function for their wider audience. The imagery chosen for portrait statues also situates these individuals within particular categories—as scholar, philosopher, or powerful civic notable.

The role of empirical methods in investigating readers’ constructions of authorial creativity in literary reading

The popularity of literary biographies and the importance publishers place on author publicity materials suggest the concept of an author’s creative intentions is important to readers’ appreciation of literary works. However, the question of how this kind of contextual information informs literary interpretation is contentious. One area of dispute concerns the extent to which readers’ constructions of an author’s creative intentions are text-centred and therefore can adequately be understood by linguistic evidence alone. The current study shows how the relationship between linguistic and contextual factors in readers’ constructions of an author’s creative intentions may be investigated empirically. We use eye-tracking to determine whether readers’ responses to textual features (changes to lexis and punctuation) are affected by prior, extra-textual prompts concerning information about an author’s creative intentions. We showed participants pairs of sentences from Oscar Wilde and Henry James while monitoring their eye movements. The first sentence was followed by a prompt denoting a different attribution (Authorial, Editorial/Publisher and Typographic) for the change that, if present, would appear in the second sentence. After reading the second sentence, participants were asked whether they had detected a change and, if so, to describe it. If the concept of an author’s creative intentions is implicated in literary reading this should influence participants’ reading behaviour and ability to accurately report a change based on the prompt. The findings showed that readers’ noticing of textual variants was sensitive to the prior prompt about its authorship, in the sense of producing an effect on attention and re-reading times. But they also showed that these effects did not follow the pattern predicted of them, based on prior assumptions about readers’ cultures. This last finding points to the importance, as well as the challenges, of further investigating the role of contextual information in readers’ constructions of an author’s creative intentions.

In Memory of Herzen. On the Margins of the Magazine “Russkoye Bogatstvo”

The paper examines the history of the phrase “in memory of Herzen”, which became the title of a number of journalistic and poetic works. The origin of this formula and the reasons for its transfer from the days of memory (anniversaries of death) to the birthdays of A.I. Herzen are found out. The study of this story allows determining the historical significance of the article by the founder of this tradition, A.G. Gornfeld, whose legacy has not yet received an adequate assessment in the literary history. In the course of the study, the author clarifies and refines the literary biographies of other authors who also used this formula: the practically unknown “populist” poet S. Ivanov-Raikov and the “social democratic” publicist N.N. Kuzmin. The reconstruction allows seeing the real role of the article “In Memory of Herzen” by V.I. Ulyanov-Lenin, the value of which in the 1940 –1970s was unlawfully exaggerated, as a result of which the historical perspective in the study of many literary phenomena and, first of all, the assessment of A.I. Herzen’s activities were distorted. All this leads to an adequate interpretation of N. Korzhavin's poem dedicated to the topic, which for many generations has been the ideological key to describing the place of A.I. Herzen in the social and literary movement of the 19th century. At the end of the paper, it is concluded that the historical, cultural and literary heritage acquires significance only in the context of modernity, but politics and journalism seek to unfold the legacy of the past in their specific pragmatic interests, and even history seeks to see a lesson in the past, although addressing it not to a particular group of people, but to the modernity as a whole. Literature does not have such pragmatic interests, but it attracts modern human with the charm of the personality of past centuries, and that’s what makes its irreplaceable significance.

Fictional Truth, i.e. the Biographies of Literary Heroines. Book Review: Katarzyna Szumlewicz (2017). "Miłość i ekonomia w literackich biografiach kobiet". Warszawa: IBL PAN

Fictional Truth, i.e. the Biographies of Literary Heroines. Book Review: Katarzyna Szumlewicz (2017). Miłość i ekonomia w literackich biografiach kobiet. Warszawa: IBL PANThis review of Love and Economics in Women's Literary Biographies by Katarzyna Szumlewicz focuses on the major issues and social functions of the theses presented in the book. Fikcyjna prawda, czyli o biografiach bohaterek literackich. Recenzja książki: Katarzyna Szumlewicz (2017). Miłość i ekonomia w literackich biografiach kobiet. Warszawa: IBL PANArtykuł jest recenzją książki Miłość i ekonomia w literackich biografiach kobiet Katarzyny Szumlewicz, w którym skupiono się na głównych założeniach oraz funkcjach społecznych zaprezentowanych twierdzeń w publikacji.