Yurii Borisov, Chair of the Department of Russian and World Literatures at the Institute of Philology and Journalism, Honuorary Worker of Education of the Russian Federation, has turned 75 years old.
He has been at SSU for more than half a century and considers the medal For special services to Saratov State University to be the most significant award for himself. He proudly wore it five years ago, and he does it now. His alma mater responds to him with mutual love and respect. For many people, Yurii Borisov is a reliable colleague, a wonderful literary researcher, an excellent university lecturer, a beloved teacher, as well as a worthy heir and follower of the traditions of the Saratov philological school.
And, today, he gave us an interview.
– Professor Borisov, have you ever regretted that you chose the path of a philologist? According to those who know you very well, you could have become an outstanding musician…
– All the “fateful” decisions that I have made in my life have never been based on a rational basis. The love of music was not only to try to fulfil myself and reach some heights, but also to critically assess the prospects. I was lucky, in Kiev, where I spent my teenage years, many world-class musicians gave concerts after the Iron Curtain. I even listened to a famous American pianist Van Cliburn. But the more I listened to them, the more I guessed that I could not do it, and I did not want to do it worse. I graduated from a music school and enjoyed playing the piano at home, sometimes in public. Once I even had to perform in the Great Hall of Kiev Conservatory, I was a participant in the contest and received 12 points out of 15. This turned out to be enough for me. At the back of my mind, I understood that I would be able to achieve more professionalism in working with the art of words.
But the music stayed with me. Literature is also a kind of music, and I have become more and more convinced of this over the years. While researching literature and teaching, I deeply felt the inner convergence of these two kinds of art and wrote several literary works on this topic. My friendship with musicians led to the fact that I was invited to teach at the conservatory. I wanted to be a student at the conservatory, but I became a teaching staff member. I was a professor for five years. My author's course, Music and Words, illustrates how poetic word lives inside music, and not only vocal, but music – in literary works. We are taking the course in research and interpretation of literary texts with musicology students. There are many examples when a particular piece of music is included in the plot of a literary work, and it can be very interesting to understand what feelings it awakens in the characters, how it is perceived by readers. By the way, on this research path, I myself had unexpected encounters with music in literary works – it would seem that Dostoevsky was certainly not a “musical” writer. In the classroom, we analyse the experiences of verbal music making, for example, in the novels Demons and The Adolescent, and it turns out that the writer not only follows the laws of the structure of the musical form, but also anticipates the “sound” of musical compositions of the 20th century.
So, not being a musician, I communicate with music on a professional level via the reflection of music in the “other reality” created by the words in literary works.
– Almost until the end of the 20th century, only outright ignoramuses (various kinds of Famusovs) questioned the role of books in human life. Do you agree that there are more such sceptics today? If so, what is the reason for this attitude and how should they be opposed?
– It is useless to argue with people who share such views, I am not an optimist in this regard. On the other hand, not everyone is so set up. The main thing is to continue communicating with the vast experience that humanity has already accumulated. There is a good idea by Yuri Lotman that literature gives us the opportunity to follow the routes of the roads we have not travelled. We live one life and, if we relied only on the experience of our own observations and trials, of course, we would learn a lot, but some secrets would forever remain that way. Sometimes a work of art provides an opportunity to experience even situations that, thank God, have never happened in our lives.
If a person wants to find out what is going on in the secret parts of our soul, there is no better source than art.
Literature gives a deep sense of life. If we are involved in it, then we have a different scale of perception of the world, ourselves, and the time in which we are living. Continuity of being is necessary. Otherwise, there is a grinding, fragmentation of life, the clip thinking wins, something important slips away. The book helps understand many of the problems that we are puzzled by today, now.
– There is a regular discussion whether schoolchildren should study such large-scale works as War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Fathers and Children, because all this is not written for children. How do you think classical texts can respond to the requests of young people from the era of TikTok and YouTube?
– Firstly, do not underestimate the possibilities of teenagers' perception of complex literary texts during adolescence. After all, the works of the series you have outlined accompany constantly reading people all their lives and open up to us gradually. And the point, I think, is not only what to teach in literature lessons, but also how to teach. This is a very sensitive issue. I have been teaching for more than half a century. Literature is a special subject, and it cannot be made the object of a test exam. This subject requires teachers to be responsive to the questioning looks of their students after reading a text. So that they care not only about the factual side – when all this was written, what you think about the characters, what ideas they have…
A person aged 14-18 has yet to understand what love and betrayal are, and these works provide an opportunity to enrich a growing soul.
Young people are just entering life. Remember Pushkin's lines about Tatyana, ‘It is time – she has fallen in love.’ Where else will we find so many different love stories and everything related to the experiences of this wonderful and at the same time dramatic gift, if not in literary (and musical, and picturesque, and theatrical) plots? My advice – look for the most reliable ones from the classics. No research by psychologists will reveal these secrets of our inner life so simply, convincingly, and clearly. And now we can see many predictions about the distant future in Pushkin and Dostoevsky’s works, which surprisingly have come true – in today's life, we sometimes observe coincidences up to plot situations.
All the modern debates about the possibilities of artificial intelligence, the desire to introduce more techniques related to the use of various techniques and technologies into teaching, do not solve the main task. When there is no warmth, human sympathy, empathy, interest in order to understand something together, take care of their students, then the living human is emasculated. This is important, and we need to argue about it! Yes, some people want to simplify the task, to remove Pushkin and Tolstoy from the school curriculum. But... it is going to get worse.
– Your first book was published before your PhD thesis was successfully presented. How did it happen? It seems that since then Griboyedov has become the most studied author for you. What, in your opinion, are the reasons for the immortality of the comedy Woe from Wit?
– After all, I studied at Saratov State University, and it was considered normal for us when a completed work was submitted to the dissertation council for discussion in a large professional audience. My supervisor Evgraf Pokusayev taught me this way. When I give lectures today in Room 301, Bldg. 11 XI, where his portrait hangs, I feel his gaze – I am always under supervision!
The book is not only about Woe from Wit, but also about the comedy of the 18th century, where I searched for the origins of this work. And my "Woe from wit" has remained with me until today. Why did this work become great? One colleague with whom I had the good fortune to be acquainted with, Andrei Grishunin, put it well on this occasion, ‘Woe from Wit as a formula of life (that is the name of one of his articles). Not only the famous Griboyedov’s aphorisms that filled our colloquial speech (Griboyedov probably has only one rival in the saturation of our speech with capacious aphoristic phrases and judgments – this is Ivan Krylov), but also the semantic depth of the conflict, individual dramatic situations of the play have acquired the meaning of generalising formulas of our national being and the ups and downs of an individual's life.
– But you are also the author of research papers devoted to the works of Pushkin, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Chekhov, and Bulgakov.
– For me, Griboyedov opened a research path into the world of Russian literature throughout its development – from Pushkin's contemporaries to Pelevin. As they say, wherever you look…
How did Bulgakov appear in the scope of my scientific interests? I was a student when the novel The Master and Margarita was published. When I re-read it later, I drew attention to the fifth chapter, There was a case in Griboyedov. Why did Bulgakov need Griboyedov? I tried to explain, even made a report at Pushkin House in St. Petersburg. Then I began to study Bulgakov inside and out and found references to Griboyedov in his newspaper publications when he was still engaged in journalism and was just conquering Moscow.
In general, I was accompanied in this sense by amazing coincidences. Bulgakov wrote his first play, The Days of the Turbins, based on the novel The White Guard, and took it to the Art Theatre. Just in 1925, Konstantin Stanislavsky accepted his entire final studio course into the Moscow Art Theatre troupe and introduced yesterday's students to the renewed 1906 play Woe from Wit. At the same time, they began staging a play by a modern author, Mikhail Bulgakov… And here new research plots are born.
I would never write about Pushkin, because our Pushkin studies have been elevated to an unattainable height by the works of the great pushkinists. But I could not stand it – after all, both Woe from Wit and Eugene Onegin implement a certain compositional principle which is a characteristic of a romantic poem and a novel in verse. I tried to write about it.
Saltykov-Shchedrin himself marked his place in this “development”: in 1874, he wrote the book The Molchalins, which revealed the formulaic character of Griboyedov's play from a historical perspective.
I came across several short stories from Chekhov in the mid-1880s, when Antosha Chekhonte was just turning into a Master. They also included quotes from Woe from Wit. It became interesting how the energy of this transplanted matter of Griboyedov’s text works for another writer. In the end, it seems to me, a kind of “feeling” of the innovative principles of Chekhov's drama, which opened new artistic horizons for the world of drama, was revealed in the dramatic structure of Woe from Wit.
Woe from Wit is one of the fundamental works of the Moscow text of Russian literature and national culture. It is no coincidence that in our century, only in Moscow, about two dozen plays of Woe from Wit are staged in a variety of genre variations, up to a musical. And Griboyedov's comedy has been on in the Maly Theatre since 1831. In 2000, another, updated, already the eighth staging was released on this famous stage. The roles of comedy characters were “inherited” by further generations – one of the great Maly actors Mikhail Tsaryov, who played young Chatsky for several decades, appeared on the stage in 1974 as Famusov, handing over his favourite role to young Vitalii Solomin…
– Do you know Woe from Wit by heart?
– I did not think about it, but, when necessary, the corresponding fragment of the text speaks by itself, so to speak, just in time.
– Which books can you always re-read?
– Reading is the basis of my profession. I re-read what I tell students about every year. There was a time when I wrote about Shakespeare, Kuprin, Ilf and Petrov, as well as Anna Akhmatova for Volga Book Publishing House. I knew their works well and loved them, but, solving professional problems, I had to read them again with pleasure.
My conservatory course, Music and Words, is addressed to many works by foreign authors (Hoffmann, Rolland, Thomas Mann...). It is important for me to show students historically, starting from the Romantic era, how music can be reflected in literary works.
I re-read Dostoevsky, especially when there is a need to compare his predictions in the Writer's Diary with the present day.
Unfortunately, now I cannot afford to read something just like that. I read slowly, I cannot read fast. I thought it was my fault, now I am sure – thank God!
Our undergraduates have a practical course in slow reading experiences, we read together. For example, Pushkin's poem Winter Morning – what is it about? ‘This is a landscape lyric, this is a poem about the beauty of Russian nature,’ future and current teachers answer in one voice. Yes, of course, nobody argues… But let's look deeper into these stanzas – each of them is designed in a different stylistic key, which corresponds to a change in the worldview of the lyrical character. From the enthusiastic youthful transformation of the world according to the laws of beauty – through the discovery of anxieties and frightening unpredictability in the swirling space of existence – a living acceptance of objective self-sufficient beauty and unchanging harmony of the picture of God's creation – comprehension of the poetry of everyday life – to feeling oneself in the indomitable flight of time and wise humility before the inevitability of loss… The whole life of a person in the key links of its existential plot appears in five stanzas of this brilliant poem.
– Does this interpretation impress the audience, do they see it? And is not it all explained by the fact that an experienced philologist reads genius?
– No, you just need to read honestly, as taught by Alexander Skaftymov. He derived the most important principle – a work of art in itself carries a way of interpretation, reading. It is only necessary to approach it not with ready-made standards, but to look for such a principle of interpretation that is organic for this particular work. After all, ethics is also involved here – understand the other, trust him, do not impose your own. This is what we are trying to convey to students from generation to generation.
– Among modern students, philologists and journalists, do you come across those who have this special hearing?
– Of course there are, I call them “responders”. They make me especially happy. There are young people who offer extremely interesting observations marked with the stamp of individuality. There are those who think traditionally. I put five first, four second (joking).
Interview by Tamara Korneva, photos by Victoria Victorova
Translated by Lyudmila Yefremova
