The birth of the "authorial commentary". The history of the concept from the word form to critical reception (1921-1935)

Deikun Il'ya Dmitrievich ORCID: 0009-0002-9809-1010 Independent researcher Office 405, Miusskaya pl., 6, Moscow, 125047, Russia iliariy@mail.ru

Introduction

The concept of "author's commentary" acquired its actual verbal form in the 20s of the twentieth century, or rather in 1921 in the collective work "Dostoevsky's Work. 1821-1881-1921", at the moment when the disciplinary image of Soviet literary criticism was being formed, the ratio of technical, historical and theoretical disciplines in it was determined. This concept immediately denotes not so much a comment in the form of a note, a system of notes, a special part of an edition or a separate study, as a commentating connection between different texts by the same author. In other words, this concept immediately becomes synthetic, the result of an association of the meanings of auto-criticism as an author's self-exploration and self-assessment (the meaning was fixed in 1861) and commentary as an oral, rather than written, interpretation of something (the meaning was fixed in 1917). Historically, the term "author's comment" does not denote the type of comment on subjective attribution, as it became perceived later. Another problem is that attribution in the concept of "author's commentary" to the author, which was clear to scientists in the 20s of the twentieth century, now does not have a clear link to a specific subject. The subject of an author's commentary in a work of fiction can equally be fictitious and concrete historical subjects of speech, which, from the standpoint of modern narratology, we would differentiate into a narrator, an explicit author, a fictitious commentator, a concrete historical author, etc. Therefore, the concept of "author's commentary" in current literary criticism merges either with the modern concept of "metatext" as a critical, commenting connection of texts or fragments of text without emphasis on the subject ^{[1, p. 4.]}. Or with an author's note, a typographic form of commentary under the page or behind the text, where the subject seems obvious. Both of these extremes of interpretation of the concept of "author's commentary" are now in great demand both in literary criticism and in literary criticism, as evidenced by the use of the concepts of "autometatext", "autometaparatext", "autocommendation", "author's note" as analogues of each other. Therefore, it is important not only to clarify the specifics of the concept in the system of disciplines of modern literary criticism and to give its possible theoretical and literary definition, as we did in a separate article ^[2]. But also, in view of the historical variability of meaning, to give its historical and conceptual analysis, pointing out the dynamics of semantic shifts in its use, its contextual interaction with and dependence on a specific stage of literary self-awareness and the system of socio-cultural views of a particular historical epoch. This will make it possible to point out possible "forks" in the semantics of the concept and historicize modern alternative interpretations of it, as well as to distinguish and classify different interpretations of the concept of "author's commentary" in order, if necessary, to introduce additional word forms or consolidate alternative interpretations for different word forms.

Research methods

The object of this research is the concept of "author's commentary", the subject is the complex of its word forms and denotations in a literary and artistic text, formed in the central period for its historical development from 1921 to 1935.

In the study, we will use a number of methods. Basically, our approach will be based on the principles of historical semantics as a discipline "involving the study of changes in the meanings of words", which traces the "transformation of cultural paradigms, discourses and epistemes" ^{[3, p. 27]}. In the light of our problem, this method consists in comparing the diachronic series of uses of a concept in a specific literary, literary-critical or dictionary text in connection with the general cultural context of this usage. At the same time, we will define the pragmatic intention to use the concept according to the heuristically averaged differentiation of scientific knowledge into five stages: "fixation, systematization, identification, explanation and interpretation" ^{[4, p. 9]}. We define the word "concept" according to the dictionary "Linguistics" (1998) as "a thought reflecting in a generalized form the objects and phenomena of reality by fixing their properties and relationships" ^{[5, pp. 383-384]}. In the spirit of the history of concepts, we distinguish it from a word, the meaning of which can be determined "empirically" ^{[6, p. 286]}, and from a term, the meaning of which is fixed, enclosed in a definition.

We rely on the epistemology of the humanities to clarify the nature of the literary concept, namely, the concept of the "basic word" in literary studies, as outlined by A.V. Mikhailov, as a word that holds the researcher "in its own and in its own sense," and which is both the "continuation" of the "life" of culture and the moment of its self-realization, "the language of culture." talking about herself" ^{[7, p. 500]}. We also rely on the sketch of literary terminology presented by V.V. Kurilov, in that the concepts of literature differ in the accuracy of their definitions and that this difference correlates with the principles of the discipline in which they are mainly used ^[8].

Results and discussion.

During the analysis of the historical semantics of the concept of "author's commentary", we found out that its relevance, rapid development both in terms of the formation of word forms and in terms of naming facts of a literary and artistic text, falls on the years 1921-1935. Such clear boundaries, up to a year, are due to the fact that it is possible to accurately record the moment of the first use of the word form "author's comment", as well as the moment when a new normative definition of the term "comment" appeared. Let us briefly outline the context of the word form. But first, let's make a reservation that, of course, the expression "author's note" means the author's commentary and appears as early as 1755 in the work "On Ancient, Middle and New Poetry" by V.K. Trediakovsky, which refers to A. Cantemir's "author's own notes" to his satires ^{[9, p. 438]}, and that The word "note" in the second half of the 18th century is obviously a Russian word for a foreign word "comment" or part of a comment. The meaning of the word "commentary" is recorded in 1803 in N.M. Yanovsky's "New Word Interpreter" as "an explanation or interpretation of a particular passage (my italics) by some writer, for a better understanding of it" ^{[10, p. 311]}, that is, as a note or system of notes. Later, bypassing a significant evolution and several contextual changes, the concept of "commentary" retains, at least until 1910, the meaning of "an explanation or interpretation, a series of remarks made to clarify a work" ^{[11, p. 1025]}. Then, starting in 1911, and especially clearly in 1917, there was an expansion of the field of phenomena denoted by him, and consequently, according to a logical law, the adoption of a more general formulation of his content. Thus, in a number of political dictionaries of 1917, the word "comment" disappears, but the action of "comment" is defined as "making remarks, explaining, interpreting the ambiguity of something" ^{[12, p. 21]}. On the other hand, such an expansion coincided with the birth and popularity of psychological criticism in art and literature (Gornfeld, Ovsyanniko-Kulikovsky), then intensified with the Freudian influence in Soviet criticism of the 1920s ^{[13, p. 259]}. The author's commentary before the age of 17 forms a separate stage of existence. It is important for us here that during this period a number of prerequisites were formed for the formation of his actual word form and for a bolder denotation of the facts of literary creativity determined by him. These prerequisites resulted in the following factors of the existence of the concept of "author's commentary" in the 20s of the twentieth century: a) the absence of a normative definition of the concept of "commentary", b) its abstraction by previous normative definitions from the written form, c) the formation of a new disciplinary structure of the sciences of literature and a variety of competing methods, mainly formal, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, influencing Marxist methodology, d) the general atmosphere of social and cultural experiment. In this, namely, in the spontaneity and intuitiveness of use, this stage is related to the modern state of the concept of "author's commentary", which began, in fact, in the 1970s, when the category of the concept and the generic phenomenon to which the author's commentary belongs ceased to be understood. So, let's move on to a specific consideration of this period in the history of the concept.

The phrase "author's commentary" was first used in 1921 in the collective work "Dostoevsky's Work. 1821-1881-1921", and is given in it intuitively and "in passing". It is used once in the part "Chronicle. (New editions and literature about Dostoevsky)" in the Appendix section. The author's commentary refers to the cover letters of F.M. Dostoevsky to the editorial board of the journal "Russian Bulletin", published by B.L. Modzalevsky in the periodical "Byloye" No. 14 for 1919. The fact that the letters, according to the compiler of the chronicle, comment on the writer's novels determines their scientific significance. B.L. Modzalevsky writes about this, also clarifying the value of sources: "our curiosity leads us to search for, to collect as many materials as possible concerning the biography of such a great man..." and further: "the letters of every writer in this sense represent the most important, valuable and reliable material" ^{[14, p. 30]}. The pragmatics of using the concept is to fix and concretize this value of letters, which has not yet been theoretically substantiated, since the science of textology is just emerging, although the process of publishing classics is already underway. This required fixing the value of letters as sources and characterizing this type of source as a kind of "commentary". But, most likely, since the "Chronicle" is intended to review literature, and not to study the subject, the expression "direct author's commentary on famous novels" ^{[15, p. 123]} is an accidental, but indicative variation of the cliché of the scientific style of that time. Thus, the theater critic N.E. Efros in his work "V.I. Kachalov" (1919) finds: "I portrayed Kachalov's Hamlet as I perceived it from performance, through stage commentary. And here is the direct (italics are my I.D.) comment made by Kachalov in one of the conversations with me.: – I was most concerned about Hamlet's global grief, which his contempt for life gave him" ^{[16, p. 86]}. It is noteworthy here that in the usage of the late 10s and early 20s, phrases with the predicate "immediate" are the place where different versions of the connection that the author of the Chronicle means by "commentary" are tested. Another example. In the article "auto criticism" in the Dictionary of Literary Terms (1925), we read that auto criticism is "the author's judgment of his own work," and further: "the most significant are the occasional and sporadic moments of the author's judgments about himself, contained in letters, notes, conversations – as direct (my italics, etc.) and pure expressions of the author's opinions" ^{[17, pp. 17-18]}. The following transformation is also indicative. The same N.E. Efros in the work "M.S. Shchepkin: (the experience of characterization)" (1920) in the sense of the "direct comment" of the actor already uses the concept of "auto criticism": "This is colored by some of his auto critics regarding the performance of the role of Famusov or Dravnik-Dmukhonovsky" ^{[18, p. 82]}. Finally, apparently under the influence of the increasing use of the word commentary as "personal explanations" and oral remarks by the author, for example, in A.G. Gornfeld's The Ways of Creativity: "the critic A.A. Izmailov told how he turned to Fyodor Sologub for personal (my italics, I.D.) comments on what was unclear to the critic in Sologub's book" ^{[19, p. 95]} – In 1924, N.E. Efros invented the word form "autocommentary" to denote that earlier, and literally in the same context, he called it a "direct commentary": "And so is Hamlet in Kachalov's auto-commentary" (a link is given to the aforementioned book about the actor Kachalov, on the same 86 page) ^{[20, p. 360]}.

Thus, using the example of normative definitions and intuitive conceptual fixations, we see that the complex of word forms "auto-criticism", "auto-commentary", "author's commentary" serves to denote a certain "direct" appeal of writers to their own work. At the same time, lexically and in terms of denotation, the formation and use of concepts at first glance seems chaotic. Thus, the term "author's commentary" in the word form also refers to personal letters in relation to an artistic text, and, as V.E. Evgeniev-Maksimov (1925) does in the book "I.A. Goncharov: life, personality, creativity", quite critical articles, for example, the article by I.A. Goncharov "Better late than never" (1879). The term "auto-commentary" in the word form refers to oral remarks by writers and actors, but also, however, a little later, autobiographical writings, as in the notes by G.R. Gukovsky in the collection of works by G.R. Derzhavin (1933): "valuable material in the sense of auto-commentary on Derzhavin's poems is provided by his "Notes"" ^{[21, p. 427]}. At the same time, in the work "Drawings of the poet" A.M. Efros speaks of drawings as having the significance of "creative auto-commentary" ^{[22, p. 320]}, and in the same work a little earlier, regarding Pushkin's caricature of Shakhovsky, he says: "the addition was made only in donkey ears – the author's comments on the depicted personality" ^{[22, p. 217]}. That is, two word forms are used as equivalent. Finally, in his work "Three Centuries: From the History of Russian Poetry of the XVIII, XIX and XX centuries", D.D. Blagoy speaks about the "sociological auto-commentary" used by articles in relation to Tyutchev's political poems. Here, the relationship between texts by the same author, which are obviously not a comment and the one being commented on, is also marked with the word "comment", but with the word "as if" indicating the convention. It seems that D.D. Blagoy is indicating that "commentary" is a scientific metaphor. But there is reason to believe that the conditional particle exposes the metaphorical predicate "sociological", and not the concept of "commentary", namely, it says that Tyutchev's "direct response to modern European events", expressed in the poem "The Sea and the Cliff" by "political poems and articles" is commented on in the sense that they indicate "sociological" ^{[23, p. 220]}, that is, the impulse to creativity caused by social events.

And then we find in all the uses of the word forms "auto-commentary" and "author's commentary" an amazing unity: the author's comment does not mean an intentional interpretation, not necessarily written, but necessarily related to the kind of psychological response, an emotional reaction to the stimulus that gave rise to creativity. Drawings, speech, personal writing are a direct, "direct" response, the writer's autobiography is "direct" in a different sense, as it does not have a direct intention to analyze his own work, but betrays his life and everyday context, and finally, the author's own criticism, or, as V.E. Evgeniev calls it in another way.-Maximov, "the author's confession" ^{[24, p. 116]} – the response is indirect, undoubtedly intentional, but in I.A. Goncharov, confirming the rule of spontaneity of creative impulse shared by literary critics of that era, literally thematizing it.

In the 1920s and 30s, we will not find a normative definition of the concepts of "author's commentary" or even just "commentary". But the Dictionary of Literary Terms (1925), and immediately after that the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1926), contain unprecedentedly voluminous definitions of the concept of "auto criticism" as "an author's judgments about his own work" (17, p. 17), in particular, containing such points: "Pure auto criticism arises when a poet or prose writer, who is sometimes unconsciously interested in the problem of the psychology of creativity, tries to reveal it for himself" (25, p. 324), or, an example of an image of self-criticism: "remembering and realizing what experiences and features of ideas accompanied the work of a particular creation, and giving in his letters, diaries and other kinds sometimes accurate reproductions, or even deep, accurate characteristics of one's creative state ...", and further on the value of documents: "the most significant are the random and sporadic moments of the author's judgments about himself contained in letters, notes, conversations ..." (17, pp. 17-18).

Here we see a number of common points: an interest in author's letters, the designation of the value of which gave rise to the word form "author's comment", as well as an emphasis on spontaneity as naturalness, on chance as sincerity. This allows us to see that in the literary consciousness of the 1920s and 30s, "author's commentary" is an essentially psychological concept. Of the two words in his word form, the key is "authorial" as related to the psychology of creative self–awareness, and "commentary" is used in the general sense of "interpretation".

In order to fully understand how researchers who use this concept before the age of 35 see commentativeness in the denoted phenomenon, it is necessary to look at the practical description of the concept given by V.L. Komarovich in the article "On the question of the genre of "Travels to Arzrum" (1936), where he uses it critically. He begins his research quite in the spirit of the psychological doctrine of autocriticism, but at the same time establishes a methodological distance from it: "Inspiration, says Pushkin, "must find it by itself." The inspiration that "found" the poet, that is, the impressions that naturally aroused inspiration in him – this is the main, though still insufficiently appreciated content of Pushkin's "Journey to Arzrum." Indeed, "Journey to Arzrum" is usually compared with the following poems by Pushkin...". The following is a list of Caucasian poems by the poet. The researcher then proceeds to criticize: "However, the fact that the author's commentary extracted in this way from The Journey often turns out to be not a commentary proper, but a straight prose version of the corresponding poetic play has not been sufficiently noticed until now" ^{[26, p. 326]}. V.L. Komarovich speaks of a "comparison" and about the "extraction" of the author's comment in the course of this comparison, that is, he emphasizes the element of theoretical speculation, discretion, the nature of which he wants to clarify. To do this, he conducts a proper textual analysis of "Journey to Arzrum", isolates the "prose versions" of the mentioned poems from the text, and indicates that they were written synchronously. This is an essential point, since for a psychologically understood author's comment, it is necessary that the comment and the commented be separated by a significant time distance, no matter whether the first is written before or after the second. But V.L. Komarovich's article belongs to another era, the boundary of which we note by the appearance of the normative definition of the concept of "commentary" in the Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language edited by D.N. Ushakov (1935) with a meaning restoring its traditional meaning: "interpretation, explanation of some text, exposition… Explanatory notes to the text of some author (phil.)"^{[27, pp. 1422-1423]}.

Conclusion

So, the very concept of author's commentary is not a "big" word in literary criticism of the 20s and mid-30s. Rather, it is one of the service concepts, but it plays an essential role over a long distance. As we have shown, it is formulated in two similar word forms, "author's comment" and "auto-comment". It is not given a normative definition, but it is perceived as a form of auto-criticism, understood from the point of view of the psychology of creativity. Its actualization is connected with the need to fix an intuitively grasped explanatory relationship between the author's work of art and his other works, and then characterize the value of this relationship. The concept is born on the eve of the formation of textual criticism as a discipline, at the junction of auxiliary and theoretical approaches in the young Soviet science of literature. Hence its twofold nature: as a commentary, it seems self-evident and capable of being terminologized, acquiring final meaning and a single definition within a specific discipline of literary sciences, for example, within the framework of textual criticism. But at the same time, from the very beginning of acquiring an actual word form, it is used only in relation to fiction, that is, it is a concept related to the conceptual system used to analyze the poetics of a work. As a result, it is constantly speculatively "extracted" and metaphorically transferred. The reference register of these speculative transfers in Russian literary criticism was given precisely by the 20s of the twentieth century. Being the "word", though not the "main", of the science of literature, the author's commentary carries this content as a conceptual charge and a tradition of use to this day.