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Semantic palaeontology and the passage from myth to science and poetry: the work of Izrail′ Frank-Kamenetskij (1880–1937)

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Abstract

The life and career of the Soviet scholar of myth and religion Izrail′ Grigor′evič Frank-Kamenetskij is discussed, tracing his development from a scholar working exclusively on semitology to a theorist of myth and literature. The scholar’s relationship to German philosophy and Biblical scholarship is outlined, along with his relationship to Soviet scholarship of the 1920s and 1930s. The development of the scholar’s work is related to his encounter with N. Ja. Marr in the early 1920s, and the way in which Marr’s doctrine underwent considerable revisions when subjected to German philosophy and applied to narrative material is detailed. Finally the way in which attention increasingly turned to the genesis of literary plots and poetic metaphor is discussed, along with both the influence such work exerted and the enduring value of such work today.

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Notes

  1. See, for instance, Cherchi and Manning (2002). For a sustained discussion of Marr’s work as a contribution to a wider movement in late imperial and early Soviet orientalism see Tolz (forthcoming 2011).

  2. For a sustained assessment of the edition see Šhakhnovič (2006).

  3. See for Instance Moss (1984) and Perlina (2002).

  4. Meyer was a corresponding member of the Russian and Soviet Academy of Science and had considerable influence on the development of ancient history in Russia, although his reception in the 1930s was quite varied. For a positive assessment see Buzeskul (1931), and for a negative assessment see Sergeev (1931). Ideological interpretations continued much longer, see, for instance Bukhareva (1977), and Frolov (1995). For a more balanced recent assessment see Semenov (2003).

  5. On Veselovskij and Marr see Šhišmarev (1937).

  6. This information is given in the preface to the description of Frank-Kamenetskij’s fond in SPF ARAN: f.831.

  7. English translation: Wellhausen (1885). A Russian translation (Vel’gauzen 1909) was published by N. M Nikol′skij (1877–1959), perhaps the founder of critical Biblical scholarship in Russia. Among the appreciations of Wellhausen’s work see Irwin (1944); Wikgren (1944) and Momigliano (1982).

  8. It seems clear, however, that Wellhausen was actually a brilliant systematiser of the various German critical works on the Old Testament in the preceding period, and therefore holds a position analogous to that of Saussure in linguistics. On this see Rogerson (1984: 257–272).

  9. Here we see traces of the psychological universalism that emerged among opponents of the hegemony of Indo-European philologists in comparative mythology and formed the basis of much materialist anthropology of the end of the nineteenth century. For general discussions see Stocking (1987) and Jahoda (1993). For a contemporary expression of this in Soviet scholarship see Nikol′skij’s programmatic work (1923), which Frank-Kamenetskij also cites.

  10. Nikol′skij (1918) had already argued against the excessive identification of the figure of Christ and that of Egyptian gods.

  11. For a detailed account see Lüdermann and Schröder (1987).

  12. Among the central texts, which went through several editions, are Bousset (1970 [1913]); Seydel (1882); For an overview see Marchand (2009, pp. 267–321).

  13. See also Bunzl (2003: 68–70).

  14. The reference is to Weber (1921).

  15. See, for instance, Marr (1915).

  16. This account of Noiré’s argument in Noiré (1885) is indebted to the critical account in Cloeren (1988: 180–98, 253).

  17. Thus Noiré’s work was received very positively by, inter alia, Max Müller, Ernst Cassirer, Georgy Plexanov, Aleksandr Bogdanov and Nikolai Bukharin as well as Marr and his followers.

  18. For a still valuable overview see Kline (1952).

  19. On Schopenhauer’s recasting of Spinoza’s substance see Rappaport (1899) and Brann (1972).

  20. Linguistic palaeontology had been associated with the work of the Indo-Europeanist scholars Max Müller and especially Adolphe Pictet. For brief discussions see Olender (1992: 82–105) and, in connection with Marr, Tchougounnikov (2005). However, the idea had specifically been severed from Indo-Europeanism and applied to folk narratives by Andrew Lang in his famous polemics with Müller (Lang 1884), which influenced Veselovskij and through him, Marr. Marr was, however, the most prominent representative of the idea in the USSR at the time. Stadialism was connected both to the positivist theories of culture associated with figures such as Comte and Spencer, the latter of whom exerted a direct influence on Marr, and certain trends of Marxist thought which often borrowed from positivist narratives. Semantics, of course, has a protracted history that is impossible even to summarize here.

  21. Here the influence of Bücher (1896) is evident.

  22. On the work of the figures discussed see, inter alia, Pugach (2001), Hautala (1968), Stromback et al. (1971) and Wilson (1976).

  23. See Meščaninov’s (Meshchaninov 2010 [1927]: 178) summary: ‘Shifts in the meaning of a given word depend upon the changing role of the designated object in the society that uses it. Thus, a word acquires its meaning in the social milieu that surrounds it. When a function shifts from one object to another, the latter object acquires the designation of the former (functional semantics and semantic series)’.

  24. For the first systematic examination of semantic paleontology and its significance for Soviet literary studies in the 1930s, see Galin Tihanov's sections on semantic paleontology in Dobrenko and Tihanov (forthcoming 2011).

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    Craig Brandist

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C. Brandist indebted to Galin Tihanov for his comments on an earlier version of this article.

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Brandist, C. Semantic palaeontology and the passage from myth to science and poetry: the work of Izrail′ Frank-Kamenetskij (1880–1937). Stud East Eur Thought 63, 43–61 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-010-9132-9

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