Previous articleNext article FreeMikhail Gronas Cognitive Poetics and Cultural Memory: Russian Literary Mnemonics Cognitive Poetics and Cultural Memory: Russian Literary Mnemonics. Mikhail Gronas. New York: Routledge, 2011. Pp. xiii+174.Michael WachtelMichael WachtelPrinceton University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRarely does one recommend a work of scholarship as entertaining, but this is the case here. It is not clear where Mikhail Gronas, a native speaker of Russian, learned to write such an idiomatic, concise, even breezy English. More credit to him, for he has produced a work of literary scholarship that people will genuinely enjoy reading. Still more important: regardless of their area of specialization, they will learn a lot. Gronas has an enviable ability to write for a wide range of readers. He makes no assumptions about their prior knowledge, yet he has a way of covering basic material (be it the Russian poetic tradition, literary scholarship, or cognitive psychology) that will be illuminating for the novice, yet fresh—even amusing—for the specialist.In a mere 131 pages of text proper, Gronas makes a case for a “mnemonic poetics.” He steers a course between what he sees as the two dominant recent perspectives on literary tradition: either a belief in the absolute moral and aesthetic value of great books or a sociological relativism that defines “high art” as nothing more than an institutionalized means of creating reputations. Instead, Gronas contends that great poetry is determined by what can most easily be remembered. This claim, long invoked by folklorists, is applied by Gronas also to the written word of the last few centuries and even into the computer age.Logically enough, Gronas relies heavily on his native language and culture. The Russian literary tradition—which he often opposes to that of the United States—is firmly indebted to memory, from the poets who wrote memorable verse to the readers who committed reams of it to memory to the educational system—both tsarist and Soviet—that put a premium on learning by rote. (The fact that photocopiers were inaccessible to Soviet citizens as late as the 1980s is something that Gronas might have mentioned, as it adds a practical reason why Russians valued memory so highly.)Their titles notwithstanding, the four chapters (“Mnemonic Critics,” “Mnemonic Readers,” “Mnemonic Lines,” and “Mnemonic Poets”) are only loosely related, and they need not be read in order. The first, by far the longest, is the least compelling. A study of the age of Pushkin through the lens of “taste,” it catalogs various strategies used by poets in their evaluations of the relative standing of their peers. While containing some wonderful examples, the chapter lacks focus. Gronas never explains what is gained by such a typology or why this particular time and place is especially conducive to such study. Surely one could find similar passages in, say, American or German literature of the same era. The exception—and the strongest set of examples in the chapter—concerns the (often parodic) application of Peter the Great’s table of ranks to literary output.The second chapter is devoted to a cross-cultural analysis of the phrase pamiat’ serdtsa (memory of the heart, as opposed to “standard” memory, the “memory of reason”). In Russian poetry, this dyad is familiar from an elegy by Pushkin’s elder contemporary Konstantin Batiushkov. The French sources of the image have already been established, but Gronas examines them with particular attention. However, his real interest is not intertextual; he argues that Batiushkov’s poem (and this passage in particular) has become “canonical” because it formulates with admirable economy a fundamental distinction always intuited and more recently verified by cognitive science. This is why we find the identical phrase in American poetry, in a poem by Daniel Webster, which according to Gronas “is still being quoted today” (67)—though one wonders who besides Gronas is quoting it. Aided by a computer search, Gronas demonstrates how Batiushkov’s phrase became proverbial in the Soviet Union, where it appeared repeatedly in the memoir (and propaganda) literature.The third chapter covers the well-worn question of free verse—more specifically, why Russian poets rejected the development that so marked Western poetry of the twentieth century. Gronas’s decision to see this as a Soviet vs. Western dichotomy is not wholly justified, since Russian émigré poets were as tenacious as their Soviet counterparts in clinging to traditional verse forms, and since rhymed verse found a welcoming refuge in Western popular genres. Gronas’s most startling claim concerns educational systems; for him, the different attitudes toward memorization between America and the Soviet Union can be traced to John Dewey. To grant such influence to a single educator seems exaggerated. Since when have educational philosophies had such permanent and wholesale influence? Surely Dewey’s precepts fell on fertile ground, because the society was never so invested in memory in the first place. The fact that the chapter degenerates into anecdotes (albeit good ones) hardly makes the argument more convincing.In the final chapter, Gronas examines a single poem by Osip Mandel’shtam through the lens of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of anagrams. In the most basic sense, Mandel’shtam’s poem is about trying to remember a lost word. Scholars have generally given great weight to this word, understanding it as “Logos,” but Gronas argues that the poem describes a much more mundane phenomenon: the familiar “tip-of-the-tongue” experience, when one searches for a word but cannot find it. Cognitive science teaches us that the attempt to recover a lost word relies on either sense (whether metonymic or metaphoric is an old battle that does not interest Gronas) or sound, and Mandel’shtam’s poem appears to use both. Gronas’s reading may not be persuasive in all its details, but it is novel and thought-provoking.Gronas is a scholar of our time, perhaps even a scholar of the future. Clever, imaginative, and witty, he does not take himself too seriously. He unapologetically does research on the Internet, he uses “word count” and “word search” when reviewing his own (and others’) writing. When an empirical or statistical approach would be difficult, he cheerfully substitutes an anecdote. The result is engaging and wide-ranging but not without its problems. For one thing, Gronas has a tendency to aver rather than to prove. For another, his quick dashes through forests of prior secondary literature can lead to oversights or sloppiness. The great scholar of poetics M. L. Gasparov wrote at length on numerous subjects treated in this book (e.g., cultural memory, free verse), but Gronas seems unaware of this. One could argue that, when surveying such a breadth of subjects as Gronas here attempts, it is impossible to keep abreast of all prior scholarship; and even if he did, frequent references to previous work would mean sacrificing many of the book’s attractive qualities. Perhaps so, but Gronas sometimes has not read things directly relevant to his arguments. For example, he finds the key to his exemplary Mandel’shtam poem (in chap. 4) in the word Aid (Hades)—a word never used but found encrypted in numerous similar words, for example Aonid (muses, in the genitive case). In memoirs published in the first Blokovskii sbornik (Tartu, 1964) and cited not infrequently thereafter, N. A. Pavlovich recalled hearing Mandel’shtam repeatedly mutter a poetic phrase ending with the word Aonid, then suddenly asking her what the Aonidy were (492). In other words, the memoir passage beautifully supports Gronas’s contention that the sound of the word was more important to Mandel’shtam than its signification. One can only assume that Gronas, who otherwise cites memoirs with alacrity, did not know this passage. Other surprises concern Pushkin, whose work is at the center of this book. It is inexplicable how Gronas can identify one of Pushkin’s last poems as an “early” work (41); even if its poetic devices seem akin to his early verse, its theme is explicitly linked to one of Pushkin’s late works, History of the Pugachev Rebellion (1834). Admittedly, Gronas does not quote the line where the Pugachev reference appears, but one would hope that even a scholar of the fast-paced internet age reads all the lines of a lyric poem, not just the ones he cites. Elsewhere Gronas bases an extremely questionable (even he calls it “risky”) interpretation of a different Pushkin poem on “the fact that the Russian word vozhdelennyi…has almost exclusively sexual connotations” (139). Alas, being a native speaker gets you only so far. Had Gronas consulted a dictionary of eighteenth-century Russian, he would have learned that this word used to mean “desirable” in a very broad sense. And the Pushkin poem in question is so obviously stylized (from the classical meter to the mythological allusions to the subtext in Edward Gibbon) that Gronas’s interpretation can only be anachronistic. There is plenty of sex in Pushkin already; we do not need to add it to poems where it is absent.Such errors (of fact or judgment) are regrettable, but they are more than offset by numerous insights and pithy formulations (e.g., memorizing Eugene Onegin is a type of “national sport” in Russia [7]). Whether one accepts the larger arguments or not, the book shows considerable imagination and admirable intellectual curiosity. Moreover, Gronas has a terrific sense of humor—his berry digression (135 n. 9) has little scholarly merit but should not be missed. His recognition that the search for anagrams may be nothing more than misplaced philological zeal is demonstrated brilliantly—by showing that “M. Gronas” is an almost complete anagram for “anagram” (123). In conclusion I offer a compliment that the author would surely appreciate: his book is memorable. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 2November 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/671940 Views: 568Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.