Editor as a phenomenon of Soviet art culture

The article is devoted to understanding the image of the Soviet editor in Russian art (using examples of fiction and cinema). The author examines the personal qualities that contributed to the entry of a person into the profession («editorial character») and provides a chronological observation of the «editorial evolution» – in publishing and film production-throughout the Soviet period and the first years of Russia in the 1990s. An important aspect that has been updated since the early 1920s is the active inclusion of women in editorial work. The characteristics of editors of different Soviet periods are analyzed using examples from the prose of M. Bulgakov, V. Shishkov, L. Rakhmanov, A. Tobolyak, V. Astafyev. Portraits of Soviet film editors are considered in the works of J. Gausner, N. Bogoslovsky, V. Makanin, D. Rubina and M. Kuraev. Representatives of the editorial profession are also represented in the films of A. Tarkovsky, V. Zheregy, K. Shakhnazarov and A. Benckendorf. There are two main types in the artistic depiction of editors and their activities: satirical (in a pointed form ridiculing personal and professional shortcomings) and dramatic (reflecting the complexity of editorial characters in their inseparability with the influence of society, historical era). In the final part of the article, the vectors of professional diffusions in the film-editing corps are outlined with the end of the Soviet era and the need to adapt to the new, post-Soviet realities.

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Peter Szondi famously claimed that after Aristotle there was a “poetics of tragedy,” but after Schelling there was a “philosophy of the tragic.” Lacoue-Labarthe argues that this is only half correct, in that this philosophy of the tragic is still and also a poetics of tragedy, insofar as this philosophy is based on Aristotle and on the question of the tragic effect. In a commentary on letter 10 of Schelling’s Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (written in 1795), Lacoue-Labarthe shows that Schelling articulates in its most pointed form the historical dialectic played out in the struggles of Greek tragedy, a struggle in which mimesis reaches into a kind of sublime terror, an unsublatable mimesis that links catharsis with death. The chapter ends with a reminder that a thinking of dialectics and death is at the core of Hegel’s thought and with a quotation from Georges Bataille, who exclaimed, in “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” that the deathly scene of sacrifice “is a comedy!”

VII.—The Fourteenth-century Glass at Wells

The earliest painted glass preserved in the cathedral church of Wells— with the exception of the ten small tracery lights on the staircase leading to the chapter-house–belongs to the opening years of the fourteenth century. The reason for this is to be found in the history of the building. Begun under Bishop Reginald about the year 1186, it represents the period of transition between the Norman and the Early English styles. The thick walls with their straight buttresses are of the Norman type: the stout piers of the nave would betray the Norman heaviness, if each were not surrounded by four and twenty slender shafts. But, on the other hand, this is the first great church in England to banish wholly the round arch, which was still being used at Glastonbury for ornament where the structure did not require the new pointed form. In this transitional style Bishop Reginald's church was carried through to the end of the nave under Bishop Jocelin (1205-42), until the western wall was reached; and then, in the latter half of that great builder's time, we get quite suddenly the full perfection of the Early English in the elaborate splendour of the great west front.