Image in Mikhail Gershenzon’s Theory of Reading

Abstract

The work is devoted to the theory of reading by Mikhail Gershenzon in a double reflection – on the one hand, ideas about myth-creatin specific to the period at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, on the other hand, critical statements on interpretation strategy, suggested by the scholar. The article discusses the principles of constructing Mikhail Gershenzon’s theoretical ideas in the double focusing view. Considering slow reading not as a method, but as the art of revealing the poet’s vision, Mikhail Gershenzon drew the myth-making potential of poetry (in a broad sense) in the process of interpretation to the interpreted work itself. The art of reading is akin to the art of poetry (artistic creativity), designed to find in the word its living source – myth – to revive the “mystery of the word”. Thus, the poetic image becomes at the same time a way of thinking, merging with it, influencing the very form of thought. Mikhail Gershenzon developed, on the one hand, the theory of the poetic word of Alexander Potebnja, on the other hand, relies on Henri-Louis Bergson’s concept of médiatrice image. Poetic image becomes the dominant feature of Mikhail Gershenzon's reading theory. The criticism of the principles of slow reading reflected the transition to a formalists view on of evolution of artistic creativity as erasure of metaphor and obsolescence of technique.