Centre de recherches en histoire et épistémologie comparée de la linguistique d'Europe centrale et orientale (CRECLECO) / Université de Lausanne // Научно-исследовательский центр по истории и сравнительной эпистемологии языкознания центральной и восточной Европы

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-- ICHoLS XVI; Tbilisi (Georgia). August 29th, 2024. Panel: Marr's linguistic school in the Soviet and European contexts.

 

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– Placing the Caucasus on the map: the origin, influence, and function of geographical thinking in the work of N. Marr

Matthew Allen
University of Warwick

Nikolai Marr’s career coincided with what might be called a ‘spatial turn’ in linguistics and other fields in the humanities. Scholars from numerous disciplines accorded increased prominence to space, place, and geography when accounting for developments in human culture. Adopting a geographical perspective meant looking at how cultures changed in response to the movement of people and ideas across space, and how physical geography shaped these movements and the circumstances under which new ideas were adopted by the people receiving them. This perspective allowed for unforeseen and contingent factors overlooked by the earlier genetic paradigm, in which cultures were thought to evolve in conformity to laws set down at their mythical point of inception.
            Spatial concepts appear in Marr’s thought under different guises, beginning with his early anti-nationalist insistence that the Caucasus had historically comprised “a single integral world” , its geographical parameters defining a space in which the exchange of ideas across linguistic and confessional boundaries could occur. These concerns led him to formulate such sweeping spatial constructs as the ‘Japhetic Mediterranean’ and ‘Afro-Eurasia’, which afforded expansive vistas onto centuries of linguistic ‘crossing’ and ‘hybridization’. Crucially, Marr’s geographical lens allowed him to dispense with genealogy, the predilection of the Indo-European scholarship he so detested, as an explanatory paradigm for linguistic and cultural change. Geographical thinking accorded greater agency to indigenous peoples and peasants, whose bond to their locality was seemingly stronger than was the case for social elites. Marr’s spatial thought thus sometimes deviated into geographical determinism , a limitation observable in the work of others; at the same time, Marr was attracted, like many others, to the radical potential of the spatial turn to upend hierarchies.
            This presentation will situate Marr with respect to his intellectual sources and explore the parallels between his geographic thought and the work of later writers. His ideas on language mixing must be viewed in the context of earlier accounts of linguistic substrates and invite comparison with thinkers such as Hugo Schuchardt, who popularized the idea that language mixing could be productive rather than merely destructive. Moreover, the spatial elements of Marr’s thought can be compared with the work of later intellectuals who wrote from the ‘periphery’. Theories of contact and exchange born out of the scholarly treatment of linguistic creolization have proved powerful tools in dismantling normative views of culture. In the work of Edouard Glissant, for instance, we observe a spatialized approach to culture paired with a rejection of the eurocentric obsession with origin and lineage.

– How much Marxism(s) was possible in the linguistics of the 1920s and 1930s

Alexander Dmitriev
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

As is well known, in the USSR and abroad, there were several competing doctrines in the sciences of language, each claiming to be an authentic expression of the Marxist approach (along with Marr, Lev Yakubinsky, Evgeny Polivanov, Valentin Voloshinov, Yazykofront, and so on). Are there any criteria that, 100 years later, might justify or reject these claims? The focus will be on what made it possible to speak of the Marxist character of Marr’s ideas in the field of general linguistics. After all, the “japhetic doctrine”, the ideas of Marr in the 1910s is not itself Marxist.  But in formulating the “New doctrine of language” since the mid-1920s, Marxism has already been used both as an external entourage and as the main condition of legitimacy. The paper will examine attempts to challenge or justify Marr’s ideas from a Marxist perspective up to Stalin’s speech in the 1950s.

– Marr, a Futurist etymologist

Boris Gasparov
Columbia University

Marr’s seeping treatment of the lexical material disregarding any empirical laws of historical change has been universally acknowledged as one of the most notorious features of the “New teaching”, a point of embarrassment even for those who appreciated its philosophical approach. Moreover, Marr adamantly refused to acknowledge any deviations from phonetic laws as “accidents”, claiming all his etymologies, even manifestly fantastic ones, to be representations of the universal glottogonic process as it evolved from the four proto-elements.
This paper considers Marr’s etymological strategy and practices in the context of the universal theory of language developed by Russian Futurists, in particular by Velimir Xlebnikov, in the 1910s and early 1920s. According to Xlebnikov, all languages of the world evolved from the universal field of proto-meaning, each language representing it in a partial and fragmented way. It is the task of the poets of all nations, Xlebnikov declared, to unite their efforts on the task of retrieving those proto-meanings by comparing roots of all languages. To cite an example of Xlebnikov’s etymologies: Russian чашка ‘cup’, череп ‘skull’, чан ‘cauldron’, чулок ‘stocking’, etc. point to a proto-meaning of ч- as ‘something encapsulating something else’. Xlebnikov explains the chaotic way in which different words derived from their proto-foundation by the fact that word are material objects that are « produced » opportunely.
The Futurist philosophy of language left its traces in Jakobson’s phonology, in particular in his theory of prototypical distinct features. Considering Marr’s philosophy of language as another line of development of the Futurist heritage helps to understand its role in the intellectual landscape of the 1920s-1930s.

– The introductions to Marr’s Izbrannye raboty: an exploratory study

Sébastien Moret
University of Lausanne

What we generally read in selected works or complete works are the texts of the author or scholar whose work has been brought together. In this presentation centred on the 5 volumes of Nikolaj Marr’s Izbrannye raboty, I propose to leave aside the Marrist content and focus on the introductory texts that accompany the various volumes.
The 5 volumes of Marr’s selected works were published between 1933 and 1937, and each volume offers a thematic unity. All the volumes except the fourth open with an introduction. The Marrist linguist Valerian Aptekar’ wrote the introductions to volumes 1 (1933), 3 (1934) and 5 (1935). The introduction to volume 2, published in 1936, was written by linguist Levon Bašindžagjan.
Based on these introductory texts, a number of points will be raised relating to the history of Marrist linguistics, the history of Soviet linguistics and the history of Marr’s Izbrannye raboty. The aim is to see what these introductions have to tell us about the intellectual atmosphere of the USSR in the 1930s. Do these introductions relate to the thematic content of the various volumes? What do they say about Marr and his theories? Have there been any developments or contradictions over the years and between volumes? Do the tone and approach change in the introductions written after Marr’s death in 1934?
An analysis of these introductions will also provide a history of the persecutions and purges of the 1930s, since Aptekar’ and Bašindžagjan were shot in 1937 and 1938 respectively.

– Marr and the language-and-thought connection: an episode of Western philosophy of language?

Patrick Sériot
University of Lausanne

Studying N. Marr’s philosophy of language is more than a significant step in the intellectual history of Russia, if only, instead of describing it as an isolated and marginal phenomenon, we compare it with Western linguistics. The “New Theory of language” presents itself as “diametrically opposed to European bourgeois science”. But an epistemological close reading enables us to detect and reveal striking common features with different trends in the history of the European philosophy of language. Marr shares G.-B. Vico’s anti-Cartesianism, and thus parallels the interest that some Soviet Marxist thinkers show for Vico (M. Lifshitz). His theory of a sign-language which anticipated the emergence of oral language has a great deal in common with E. de Condillac (le langage d’action) and W. Wundt (die Gebärdensprache). His three-stage evolution theory is nearer A. Comte’s “loi des trois états” than Engels-Morgan’s evolutionism. Marr relies heavily on L. Lévy-Bruhl, but E. Cassirer is a more important implicit source of inspiration.
A second point of comparison is a semiotic approach of the indissoluble link between language and thought, word and idea, sign and referent, despite Stalin’s reproach of separating language and thought. This is one of the many variants of W. von Humboldt’s reception in Russia.
In spite of his denial, Marr fits perfectly into the history of Western thought, which would benefit greatly from taking him into consideration.
Nicolas Marr’s calamitous reputation masks a teeming intellectual world in a time and place that are still fascinating: the Soviet Union of the 1920s-1940s, a distorting mirror of the “Western” world.

– Palaeontological seduction in the Russian-Soviet context: “genetic formalism”, N. Marr’s unexpected interlocutor

Serguei Tchougounnikov
University of Burgundy

N. Marr’s palaeontological perspective is far from being an extravagant isolated case in the Russian-Soviet context. On the contrary, it can be said that the palaeontological perspective has become an important source of theoretical inspiration for various currents which, on the face of it, have little to do with Marrism, particularly in the formalist current and in the current often referred to as the “Bakhtin circle”. Thus, the Marrist approach constitutes a profound epistemological trend in the national human sciences and determines their evolution.
In our study, we shall seek to show the palaeontological substratum in the formalist corpus (the OPOIAZ circle, the Moscow linguistic circle). Ultimately, the formalist approach hesitates between a genetic or palaeontological definition and a functional definition of its object of research. It is this methodological dualism that explains, for example, the Marrist conversion of the formalist Lev Jakubinskij. In this way, the Russian formalist approach remains profoundly ambiguous and reflects the genetic-functional dualism of this movement.
It is significant that the same dualist project in the formalist approach to the folk object can be seen in the work of Vladimir Propp and that of Pëtr Bogatyrëv. Formalist ethnography seeks to combine the systematic description of folklore facts with the historical reconstruction of these facts. To understand these paradoxes of “genetic formalism” in Russia, we need to take account of the singular context of the late 1920s in Soviet Russia. It would be futile to consider the Russian formalist approach from a purely structuralist point of view, attributing distributionalist and oppositional properties to their methods (as was the case in the French reception of the 1960s). Indeed, these models, which can be described as “genetic formalism” (or genetic structuralism), are rooted in the Russian-German intellectual context, which gives pride of place to genetic explanations of synchronic or systemic events. This effort at congruence between the object of research and the method developed for its analysis is characteristic of the research programme developed within “germanic formalism” (Austrian and German formalism: A. Riegl, O. Walzel). Our aim is also to show this filiation.

– Marr’s varied worlds: disciplinary paradoxes of an undisciplined person

Vittorio S. Tomelleri
University of Turin 

N. Ja. Marr was a multifaceted scholar and somewhat enigmatic person, and this is probably what makes him attractive and repulsive at the same time. The present paper strives to analyze some moments of his scientific and personal biography in order to disentangle the vagaries of his reception at home (firstly in the Russian Empire and then in the Soviet Union) and above. The main idea is that Marr was so to speak an active victim of his extremely ambitious character and of not less aggressive external political circumstances, which determined, and at the same time threatened, the general scientific development in the former multinational empire then ruled by the Bolsheviks. To do this, we shall use first-hand and contemporary sources, which require a critical and serious analysis “without anger and passion”.