As long as I can remember myself in this field, I have always focused on the search for text. Why did I start looking for text? I was not satisfied with the volume of texts and the quality of the school curriculum, I was not satisfied with the text that came to me in the form of newspapers and magazines that came into my hands, the text that somehow sounded around me. I needed the text to be more correct, like the whole text, global text, very early on; more truthful than the one that came to me on its own, without effort. Distrust of the text surrounding me is easy to portray as a mistrust of Soviet ideology, and that would not be completely wrong. But it's not about ideology: I missed the fullness of the text that hugged me, the inadequacy of my daily life and what was behind it.
The main value in the field in which I found myself is the critical text. The text is proven, tested to be true to itself, that is, to its essence. And this is more than distrust of the surrounding world. I also do not believe, as I did not believe in the Soviet text, in today's Russian text, or in the world text - American, Italian, or any other text that I come across in one way or another. Any news makes me feel like, "Is it true? We should check it out. I live in a state of total disbelief in the words and pictures that I see as a reflection of life.
At the same time, "checking" in the sense that I am using the word now means not just putting the text on the table and seeing if it contains the right commas, or if it is in the hands of Blok or Pushkin, but, above all, if it is the correct size of the text. After all, many texts are before us without beginning or end, with holes in the middle. Or in isolation from other works of the author, that is, as fragments. For one thing - "Pushkin's poem "Poltava", and another - a much more complex subject "the work of Alexander Pushkin.
I consider my teacher a wonderful Italian scientist D'Arco Silvio Avalle. During my university years, I became interested in Provencalism and his book "The Handwritten Traditions of Provencal Literature" defined everything in my professional world. In my diploma, under the influence of a distant Italian professor, I formulated for myself something that Avalle himself did not write in the book. In the most primitive statement: lyrical works of this or that Provençal troubadour, collected in the manuscript, were a single and complete text. The totality of the texts, united by the author's name, is higher in content and meaning than any single play (only in the complete collection of works the author is quite pronounced, synonymous with "Leo Tolstoy" and "Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy", but not "Leo Tolstoy" and "War and Peace"). In Provençal manuscripts, the author's texts were preceded by his vida ("life", "life"), and the vida was perfect, completed: "he wrote about love and died in such a way. These vidas are usually brief (no more than five to ten lines) and are often invented.
The same thing, although not directly related to the subject of the diploma, I saw in the "Golden Legend", where the saint's biography is preceded by a symbolic disclosure of the essence of his life, his holy face, and only then - details of the biography. I learned all this from reading D'Arko Silvio Avalle. Although he wasn't doing it himself, his approach to manuscripts brought me to these positions, and I consider him to be my main, and perhaps the only, teacher from the rest of the world by thread, then more or less, but all in addition. I never knew Avalle, although he died in the 21st century.
About Thomas Aquinas and Pugacheva
Jose Risueno. St. Thomas Aquinas. The last third of the XVII century - the first quarter of the XVIII century
Museo Nacional del Prado
The point of humanities science is that it teaches life like history. When we were young, we didn't realize that our field of study in a mature bourgeois society could be at best a golden cage, a gilded ghetto: "Well, you're there to do Dante or Molière, you have good salaries, but that has little to do with what society lives in. It turned out that this is exactly what perestroika led to. In addition, the quantitative growth of works and workers in our field lowers the status of the general state of the region and turns it into something no different from journalism or show business. It seemed to me that Thomas Aquinas' occupation should have made the phenomenon of Pugacheva insignificant.
The point of humanities science is that it teaches life like history. When we were young, we didn't realize that our field of study in a mature bourgeois society could be at best a golden cage, a gilded ghetto: "Well, you're there to do Dante or Molière, you have good salaries, but that has little to do with what society lives in. It turned out that this is exactly what perestroika led to. In addition, the quantitative growth of works and workers in our field lowers the status of the general state of the region and turns it into something no different from journalism or show business. It seemed to me that Thomas Aquinas' occupation should have made the phenomenon of Pugacheva insignificant.