Tchougounnikov, Serguei and Trautmann-Waller, C�line (eds). Ptr Bogatyrv et les débuts du Cercle de Prague (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 340 of the major players in the cultural life in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, is conspicuously lacking. Save for sporadic reference to the status of Ruthenian, Dini neglects the presence of Ruthenian authors in the cultural Baltic landschaft, such as De bello Ostrogiano ad Piantcos cum nisoviis libri quattuor a Simone Pecalidis Artium Baccalaureo conscripti (1600) or the polemical treaties by Xristofor Filalet (1597–99) and other Ruthenian writers. All these works would widen the author’s perspective on the beginnings of the Baltic linguistic ideas in Litvorosija, a term used in a charter issued by the Patriarch of Constantinople to Jagailo in 1397. Dini mentions en passant the works of Nur al-Din Muhammad Aufi (1228) and Ibn Battūta (1332) (p. 464), but would have benefited from consulting al-Idrīsī’s Kitāb Rujār (Liber Rogerii, ca 1153) and works by Georg Jacob (1887), Ephraim Kupfer and Tadeusz Lewicki (1956), who explored attestations of the Balts in the writings of Muslim and Jewish geographers. Despite its size, the volume is meticulously edited, although some references are not included in the bibliography, e.g. Georg., VII (p. 573), and has no indices (a deplorable absence that is surprsingly repeated in the shorter Englishlanguage version, Prelude to Baltic Linguistics, published by Rodopi in 2014). Despite these shortcomings, the Italian-language redactio longa under review will serve as the major source of information on early Baltic linguistics for many years to come. Pace University, New York Andrii Danylenko Tchougounnikov, Serguei and Trautmann-Waller, Céline (eds). Pëtr Bogatyrëv et les débuts du Cercle de Prague. Recherchés ethnographique et théatrales. Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, 2012. 275 pp. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. €26.00 (paperback). This book consists of papers from a conference on the Russian ethnographer Petr Grigor´evich Bogatyrev (1893–1971) held at the New Sorbonne University in 2009, accompanied by a selection of Bogatyrev’s articles. Bogatyrev was educatedatMoscowUniversity,wherehewasafoundingmemberoftheMoscow Linguistic Circle, but he spent much of the interwar period in Czechoslovakia (1922–38), before returning to the USSR. After a period of persecution, Bogatyrev resumed academic positions in Moscow in the late 1950s, and was influential in the development of Soviet folkloristics and structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s. Bogatyrev’s interwar writings are considered to represent the peak of his intellectual career. In them, Bogatyrev combined his training in ethnographic fieldwork and the ethos of early Russian formalism with new REVIEWS 341 developments in structuralist linguistics. The articles in the book focus on this period, and are divided into three categories: linguistic theory, ethnography and theatre studies. The book’s most original contribution is its effort to more thoroughly analyse the relationship between Bogatyrev’s ethnographic method and linguistic theory in the early twentieth century. The difficulty of this task is foregrounded in contributions of Céline Trautmann-Waller and Serguei Tchougounnikov, the two editors of the volume. As Trautmann-Waller illustrates in a useful list format, during this period Bogatyrev regularly published in twenty-seven journals in five primary languages. His writings moreover combined key concepts adapted from Russian, German, Czech, French and English scholarship in ethnography, folkloristics, literary and theatre studies, linguistics and anthropology. Tchougounnikov provides a wide-ranging survey of the linguistic theory which informed Bogatyrev’s concept of the ‘ethnographic fact’. He calls attention in particular to the critique of the German Neogrammarian school, and the influence of Italian Neolinguistics and French linguistic cartography. A highlight is Ekaterina Velmezova’s essay, which clarifies the concept of ‘synchrony’ — a key term for Bogatyrev adapted from Ferdinand de Saussure. She illustrates that this could mean either a short segment of diachronic time or panchrony, and that Bogatyrev wavered between the two interpretations in his writings. The collection includes papers by leading specialists on Bogatyrev — Svetlana Sorokina and Klaas-Hinrich Ehlers. Their excellent contributions draw on extensivearchivalresearchandprovidenewinsightsintoBogatyrev’sintellectual biography. Ehlers’s introductory essay focuses on Bogatyrev’s institutional affiliations during his Czechoslovak period. It is an excerpt from a longer article published in Petr G. Bogatyrev. Funktional-strukturale Ethnographie in Europa (Heidelberg, 2011), which is worth reading in full. Sorokina provides details regarding Bogatyrev...