Vladimir M. Markovich: Poetics of thought

Abstract

It is no accident that Markovich’s interest in poetics was combined with the problems of the history of literature: it was the dynamic component of the work that was utterly important for him. His view of the artistic structure implied the possibility of different viewing angles embedded in it, resisting its reduction to unambiguous certainty. Markovich was gifted with vigilance to “muted”, semantically complicated hints, to the potential, subtextual reality, to the hidden paradoxicality of the text  — to everything that did not allow the subject of examination to appear as a static system of conditional forms. That is why he did not follow any specific methodology in his work which  — already by virtue of its certainty  — aggressively forms a closed and unfree world. Markovich perceived the artistic text as an ontological rather than a conditional reality and believed that the reader always needs to perceive the text as a full-blooded equivalent of reality. In his opinion, such an effect could be achieved only when the text is as open as the reality itself. He also interpreted the problems of realism from this perspective. He believed that only second-line literature corresponds to the traditional concept of realism as a system striving to capture and exhaust the empirical reality in its entirety, while classical realism builds the system to be “multidimensional, internally mobile and therefore fundamentally non-closed”. Highly valued by Markovich, paradoxicality lies in his own works: built on a keen attention to semitones, to a dynamic and not frozen meaning, they offer the reader the certainty and clarity of the researcher’s thought, undoubtedly purposeful in its movement. But it is no coincidence that many of his articles, impeccably aligned and verified, seem to resist this certainty and completeness of thought, by ending with an indication of the issues that still need to be resolved.

Keywords:

V. M. Markovich, poetics, literary-historical process, irony, paradox, closure