M.L. Gasparov: The Philosophy of a Scholar

Abstract

The aim of this article is to reflect on the philosophical positions of the out­standing scholar-philologist Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov (1935–2005). He re­ferred to himself as a neo-formalist and an “epigone” of the original literary scholar Boris Isaakovich Yarkho (1889–1942). However, as the author’s personal experience of interacting and working with him shows, Gasparov undoubtedly went beyond these conventional methodological self-definitions. Just as Gas­parov reintroduced Yarkho’s foundational methodological works on the theory of literary studies into domestic philology in the 1960s, so too do we now return to Gasparov’s historical legacy in order to reflect on current issues in the human­ities. For Gasparov, it was significant that Yarkho defined “scientific character” as the logical presentation of what is known and, drawing on the achievements of biology, developed a method for transferring epistemological standards from the natural sciences into literary studies. Substantiating this thesis, the author refers not only to Gasparov’s academic works, but also to his personal letters ad­dressed to her, as well as to his epistolary dialogue with Nina Vladimirovna Bra­ginskaya and Irina Yuryevna Podgaetskaya, in which the scholar’s methodologi­cal principles are expressed in a concentrated form. In particular, the conceptual dichotomies proposed by Gasparov – such as “philosophy-philology”, “science-creativity”, “art-science”, and others – allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of his proposed demarcation between science and non-science in the context of contemporary interdisciplinary research programs.