A Giant's Passing

On November 7, 2005, scholar, educator, translator and author Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov died in Moscow at the age of 70, following an extended illness.

It is very difficult to explain in a limited space how important Gasparov’s impact was on Russian culture and scholarship. The feeling of acute bereavement has shaken the country’s humanities community.

Gasparov set an unparalleled standard for intellectual honesty, clarity and brilliance of style, unfathomable knowledge and unrelenting industry (his Western colleagues once enviously dubbed him “the tireless Gasparov”). He was not an active classroom teacher, but countless students, scholars and others benefited from his advice and his example. His presence at conferences and gatherings always created a strong force field – a tall, stooping man with a huge dome of a head, thick spectacles, ever busy writing in his tattered notebook, yet always alert to everything being said around him, never failing to answer a question. Gasparov knew, it seemed, everything. And yet he invariably declined to comment on anything he felt was beyond his competence. Power and restraint are qualities that seldom combine in a thinker. Gasparov was unique, and there is no one to firmly go in his stead, let alone replace him.

Writing since the early 1960’s, Gasparov produced hundreds of articles, books, essays and translations. His first field of expertise was classical philology. Even though he wrote many in-depth academic treatises on the subject, his most important achievements in this field were educational. He wrote several accounts of the life and works of great Greek and Roman authors, combining academic precision with accessibility, humor and brio. He translated some of the most difficult and glorious ancient texts, including such masterpieces as Ovid’s Ars Amandi, and, despite being almost a literal translation, it was beautiful Russian poetry. But his tour de force in this area was Занимательная Греция (Amazing Greece), essentially a children’s book which spoke about classical culture (in all senses of the word), history, life and death with an intensity unrivaled in nonfiction of recent decades either in Russia or in the West.

Gasparov was a scientist. His primary area of research was verse study, and, over the years, he covered all aspects of Russian verse and wrote a unique history of European versification (his only major work available in English) – something no one else could have done. His efforts help clarify the elusive relationship between form and meaning and provided us with deeper insights into the workings of a creative brain.

Gasparov was a writer. He always waved off such claims, but his book Записи и Выписки (Notes and Fragments), published in 2000, proved the point. It is a unique collection of thoughts, interviews, extracts from archives, countless books he’s read, snippets of translations, essays, memoirs, dialogues and jokes. Its genre defies any strict definition, but its publication made clear that Gasparov was the best living author writing in Russian. That he was the best thinker had been evident for some time.

We conclude with a translated excerpt from Notes and Fragments, illustrating the boundary which Gasparov drew between scholarship and creativity.

It is reported that King Ptolemy found Euclid’s many-volume opus too hard, and he asked whether there was a simpler textbook. Euclid answered: “There is no royal road to geometry.” But in philology there is a royal road, and it is called criticism. Not criticism understood broadly as “any study of literature,” but narrowly: the field which does not bother itself with “whats,” “hows” and “whys,” but deals in evaluating: “good” and “bad.” That is, establishes literary reputations. It is not scholarship about literature, it is literature about literature. B. I. Yarkho wrote: “We could classify flowers into beautiful and ugly, but what is the use for botany?” Of course, there is no use for botany, but it could mean a lot for poems and prose about flowers. It’s a form of self-assertion and self-expression: [19th-century critic] Belinsky’s essays on Pushkin and Baratynsky tell us very little about Pushkin and Baratynsky, but a lot about Belinsky and his followers. Perhaps it’s the same here: conversation about literary reputations should be a tool of self-study rather than study.

A critic justly reminds the scholar that some things are inaccessible to the mind, only available to intuition. However, he forgets to mention that the reverse is also true: intuition only works within the limits of its own culture. Let’s try to apply the methods of French post-structuralists at least to Horace (not to mention Li Bai). They will prove to be impotent or delirious. They start with a premise – if I’m reading this poem, it’s written for me. Actually, nothing is written for me except verses in today’s newspaper. To understand Horace, one has to learn his poetic language. Poetic language, just as Chinese or English, is not learned by intuition – it is learned by textbooks (only there are none).

I’ve grown up with the thought that philology is a communication service. Such communication is extremely difficult. The fashionable metaphor of a dialogue between reader and text (and between everything at large) seems unjustifiably optimistic to me. When two people talk, we often hear two interlaced monologues instead of a dialogue. Every talker reconstructs a comfortable image of his interlocutor on the fly. He could have talked to a stone with equal success and imagined the stone’s answers to his questions. Few people talk to stones these days – at least in public – but anyone talks to Baudelaire or Racine exactly as with a stone and receives answers he wants to hear. What is a dialogue? An interrogation. How does the interlocutor behave? Admits everything the interrogator wants from him. And the latter takes it seriously and imagines he has understood someone (or something). The utmost we can achieve is to learn the interlocutor’s language. But it is just as difficult as Horace’s or Chinese.