World Literature, Literary Ranks, and Their History

Abstract

For us these days, the history of literature is first and foremost the history of national literatures. The History of World Literature [Istoriia vsemirnoi literatury] published by the Institute of World Literature (IMLI) is above all a collection of concise studies of the more or less developed literatures of the world or, to be more precise, of the phenomena that are acknowledged as classic, as being closer to the classics or anticipating them in accordance with the standards of each national culture. A poet on the scale of Kheraskov is characterized in a more or less detailed manner by a historian of eighteenth-century Russian literature (and may not even be mentioned by a historian of nineteenth-century literature), [is characterized] in a more detailed manner by a Bulgarianist or specialist in Serbian literature, and is ignored by a historian of French or English literature. It stands to reason that no unity, no history of world literature as an integral phenomenon, is obtained in so doing. However, the abstraction "world literature," which goes back to Goethe, remains to a great degree an abstraction for the time being. No one knows all literatures, and it follows that the sum total of them could not function as such, let alone as a unity, albeit a relative one, even if we allow that certain very common regularities unify all the literatures of the five continents.