Lecture
Together with philosophy, history, art history, cultural studies, pedagogy, psychology and other sciences, philology forms part of the humanities. Within the humanities, philology is one of the branches. Philology includes a number of sciences and scholarly disciplines.
The philological sciences are linguistics (language study) and literary studies.
The philological scholarly disciplines include several groups of disciplines.
1) Disciplines existing at the intersection of linguistics and literary studies. The main ones are:
rhetoric (Anc. Gr. rhētorikē). The main task of modern rhetoric is the study of speech communication in its effect
on the reader/listener by means of a message. Modern rhetoric is an interdisciplinary philological science that exists at the intersection of linguistics, literary studies, argumentation theory, and philosophy;
poetics (Anc. Gr. poietike techne — creative art).
In modern philology poetics is the study of how a literary work is constructed, what constitutes a writer's creativity,
and a literary movement. The branch of poetics whose attention is focused on the language of a work constitutes linguistic poetics. However, modern poetics studies not only artistic-literary works but also others — journalistic, promotional, and so on;
stylistics (Fr. stylistique, from Lat. stilus, stylus — a pointed stick for writing, manner of writing). The term «stylistics» arose at the beginning of the 19th century in the works of the German scholar and writer Novalis (real name — Friedrich von Hardenberg).
Stylistics as a scholarly discipline took shape in the mid-19th century, in effect «on the ruins» of rhetoric, which ceased to exist by that time. In the study of language as a separate object of reality, stylistics has its own task — the study of language use. Its attention is focused on such questions as the stylistic means of language, the possibilities of their use in a text in general and in texts of various kinds, by different speakers/listeners.
Traditionally, a distinction is drawn between linguistic stylistics and literary stylistics. The latter focuses its attention on the speech of a literary work as a manifestation of the art of the word.
2) Auxiliary philological disciplines. The most important of them:
-textology (Lat. textus — connection, fabric and logos — word), which studies handwritten and printed texts of literary, literary-critical and journalistic works for their publication and interpretation. The term «textology» was introduced in the late 1920s by B.V. Tomashevsky. In the West the term «textual criticism» is predominantly used;
- source studies, which studies the methods of searching for and systematizing sources for further use by linguistics (linguistic source studies), literary studies (literary source studies);
- bibliography (Anc. Gr. biblion — books and graphō — I write), which deals with the recording of scholarly and printed output and information about it. Bibliography as a scholarly discipline includes linguistic, literary bibliography, and others.
Among the auxiliary disciplines are also those of historical-philological affiliation. They solve problems connected with the study of ancient texts; these are palaeography (from Gr. palaiós — ancient and graphō — I write) and archeography (from Gr. archaios — ancient and graphō — I write).
by S.S. Averintsev, among others (see the reading materials). At the turn of the 20th—21st centuries the problem of understanding became even more significant,
since modern man is becoming ever more complex and individualized; it is not for nothing that the expression exists:
«The 20th century — a century of objections».
3) Disciplines existing at the intersection of philology and other sciences. Let us name a few of them:
semiotics (Anc. Gr. sēmeiōtikē — the study of signs), which studies signs and sign systems. The central concept of semiotics is the sign;
hermeneutics (Anc. Gr. hermēneutikē (techne) — the art of interpretation), which studies the methods of interpreting meaning. The central concepts of hermeneutics: meaning, understanding;
text theory, which studies text in the semiotic sense. A text is not only a sequence of linguistic signs embodying meaning, but also, for example, a picture,
a city, a person, and other sequences created from non-linguistic signs or from a combination of linguistic and non-linguistic signs that embody meaning. Such, for example, are utterances like «It's flying!» combined with a gesture pointing, for instance, at a plane flying in the sky (meaning: «The plane is flying!»). The central concept of text theory is the text;
the philological theory of communication, which studies human activity in creating and understanding a text. The central concept is the communicative activity of homo loquens;
philological informatics, which studies the ways and means of creating, storing, processing, studying, transmitting, etc. philological information by means of information (computer) technologies.
In modern philology the traditional division of philology by language (group of languages) is also preserved. A distinction is drawn between Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Turkic and other philologies, and Russian, Ukrainian, Altaic, Buryat and other philologies. Each of the philologies studies the corresponding languages/the corresponding language and literature.
Each of the philological sciences and disciplines has a special internal structure, its own connections with other philological, humanities and natural sciences and disciplines.
Philology is one of the fields of training specialists with higher professional education.
A modern philologist is trained to work with languages (native and foreign), fiction (domestic and foreign) and oral folk art, various types of texts — written, oral and virtual (including hypertexts and text elements of multimedia objects), and oral and written communication. This is defined by the current Federal State Educational Standard for the field of study «Philology» (bachelor's degree). Within the system of professional disciplines of the bachelor's program in the field of study «Philology», two cycles are distinguished:
1) disciplines in which the basic concepts and terms of philological science and its internal stratification are studied; which develop in students an understanding of the essence and significance of information in the development of the modern information society (the general professional cycle);
2) disciplines in which the basic tenets and concepts in the field of theory and history of the primary language(s) and literature(s) studied are examined; the theory of communication and philological analysis of text; which provide an understanding of the history, current state and prospects for the development of philology (the professional cycle).
«Foundations of Philology» is one of the courses of the first cycle. The course in the foundations of philology has as its aim
The objectives of the course:
1) to present a picture of the emergence and main stages of the development of philology;
2) to examine the main objects of philology;
3) to outline the problem of the methodology of philology. Each of these objectives is realized in a separate section of the course.
Sergei Averintsev. In Praise of Philology
<...> What is philology and why does one pursue it? The word «philology» consists of two Greek roots. «Philein» means «to love».
«Logos» means «word», but also «meaning»: a meaning given in a word
and inseparable from the concreteness of the word. Philology deals with «meaning» — the meaning of the human word and human thought, the meaning
of culture — but not bare meaning, as philosophy does, but meaning living within the word and animating the word. Philology is the
art of understanding what is said and written. Therefore, within the sphere of its
direct concerns lie language and literature. But in a broader sense a person «speaks», «expresses himself», «calls out» to his
fellows in humanity with every act and gesture. And in
this aspect — as a being that creates and uses «speaking»
symbols — philology takes hold of man. Such is philology's approach to being, its special, inherent approach to the problem of the human.
It must not confuse itself with philosophy; its business is painstaking,
businesslike work on the word, on the text. The word and the text must be
more essential for true philology than the most brilliant
«conception».
Let us return to the word «philology». It is striking that in its name figures the root of the verb «philein» — «to love». This property
of its name philology shares only with philosophy («love of the word»
and «love of wisdom»). Philology demands of the person engaged in it some special degree, or special quality, or special mode
of love for one's material. It is clear that this concerns a very unsentimental kind of love, something akin to what Spinoza called
«intellectual love». But can one engage in mathematics or physics without «intellectual love», which very often grows into a genuine, all-consuming passion? It would be absurd to imagine that a mathematician loves number any less than a philologist loves the word, or, better said, that number requires less love than the word. Not less, but essentially different. That intellectual love which philology demands — by its very name! — is neither higher nor lower, neither stronger nor weaker than the intellectual love demanded by the so-called exact sciences, but differs from it qualitatively in some respect. To understand exactly how, we need to take a closer look not at the name of philology, but at philology itself. Moreover, we must distinguish it from its false likenesses.
There exist two, alas, quite widespread ways of lending philology an apparently topical, vital, «in tune with the present» appearance. These two paths are unlike one another. Moreover, they are opposite. But in both cases, in my deep conviction, what is at issue is an illusory topicality, an illusory vitality. Both paths remove philology from the fulfillment of its true tasks before life, before the present day, before people.
I would venture to call the first path methodological familiarity. Strict intellectual love is replaced by a more or
less sentimental and always superficial «sympathy», and the whole heritage of world culture becomes a storehouse of objects of such sympathy. It is so easy to extract from the context of historical connections a single word, a single saying, a single human «gesture» and triumphantly demonstrate to the public: look how close this is to us, how «in tune» it is with us! We all wrote school essays: «Why this is close and dear to us...»; well, it is important to understand that for genuine philology any human material is «dear» — in the sense of intellectual love — and no human material is «close» — in the sense of familiar «intimacy», in the sense of the loss of temporal distance.
Philology can master the spiritual world of an alien age only after it has honestly taken into account the remoteness of that world, its internal laws, its being within itself. There is no denying it is always easy to «bring closer» any antiquity to modern perception, if one accepts the premise that in all ages «humanistic» thinkers had, in principle, the same understanding of all the cardinal questions of life and only sometimes, unfortunately, «paid tribute to their time», failed to fully grasp this or that, which, however, can be magnanimously overlooked... But this is a false premise. When the present cognizes another, bygone age, it must beware of projecting itself onto the historical material, so as not to turn the windows in its own house into mirrors that give it back, once again, its own already familiar image. The duty of philology consists, in the final analysis, in helping the present to know itself and to rise to the level of its own tasks;
but self-knowledge is not so simple a matter even in the life of a single individual. None of us will be able to find himself if he seeks himself, and only himself, in each of his interlocutors and companions in life, if he turns his existence into a monologue. In order to find oneself in the moral sense of the word, one must overcome oneself. In order to find oneself in the intellectual sense of the word, that is, to know oneself, one must be able to forget oneself and, in the deepest, most serious sense, to «look closely» and «listen closely» to others, freeing oneself from all ready-made notions about each of them and displaying
an honest will toward unbiased understanding. There is no other path to oneself. As the philosopher Heinrich Jacobi said, «without a «thou» there is no «I»» (compare the remark in Marx's «Capital» about «the man Peter», who is able to know his human essence only through looking
at «the man Paul»). But in exactly the same way an era will be able to attain full clarity in comprehending its own tasks only when it does not seek those situations and those tasks in bygone eras, but becomes aware, against the background of all that is not itself, of its own uniqueness. In this it must be helped by history, whose business is to establish «how it actually was» (an expression of the German historian Ranke). In this it must be helped by philology, which delves into another's word, into another's thought, striving to understand that thought as it was first «thought» (this can never be fully accomplished, but one must strive for this and only this). Impartiality is the conscience of philology. People far removed from philology tend to see the «romance» of the philologist's work in the emotional side of the matter («Ah, he is simply in love with his antiquity!..»). It is true that a philologist must love his material — we have seen that this requirement is attested by the very name of philology. It is true that in the face of the great spiritual achievements of the past, admiration is a more humanly worthy reaction than prosecutorial cleverness about what the unfortunate elders «failed to take into account». But not every love is suitable as an emotional basis for philological work. Each of us knows that in life, too, not every strong and sincere feeling can become the basis for genuine mutual understanding in marriage or in friendship. Only a love that includes a constant, tireless will to understand, confirming itself in each of the possible concrete situations, will do. Love as a responsible will to understand another — this is the very love that the ethics of philology demands.
Therefore the path of bringing the history of literature closer to current literary criticism, the path of a deliberate «actualization» of the material, the path of an immodestly subjective «empathizing» will not help but hinder philology in fulfilling its task before the present day. In approaching
cultures of the past, we must beware the temptation of false intelligibility. To truly sense an object, one must run up against it and feel its resistance. When the process of understanding proceeds too unimpeded, like a horse that has torn free of the traces
connecting it to the cart, there is every reason to distrust such understanding.
Every one of us knows from life experience that a person too readily willing to «empathize» with our existence is a poor conversation partner. This is all the more dangerous for scholarship. How often do we encounter «interpreters» who know how to listen only to themselves, for whom
their own «concepts» matter more than what they are interpreting! Yet it is worth recalling that the very word «interpreter» in its original meaning denotes a «translator», that is, a mediator in a certain dialogue, an expounder who is obliged, at every moment of his explanatory speech, to continue unfailingly listening to the speech being explained.
But alongside the temptation of subjectivism there exists another, opposite temptation, another false path. Like the first, it is bound up with
the need to present philology in the guise of modernity. As is well known, our time is constantly associated with the successes of technical reason. Slutsky's dictum about disgraced lyric poets and triumphant physicists is one of the most hackneyed of the catchphrases
of the past decade. The hero of the age is the engineer and the physicist, who calculates, who designs, who «builds models». The ideal
of the age is the precision of a mathematical formula. This leads to the notion that philology and the rest of the «humanities» can become modern
only on condition that they adopt forms of thought characteristic of the exact sciences. The philologist too is obliged to calculate and build models. This
tendency reveals itself in our time at the most various levels — from serious, almost heroic efforts to transform the deep structure
of scholarship down to a masquerade game of mathematical turns of phrase. I would like my doubts about the truth of this tendency to be correctly understood. I am far from intending to deny the merits of the school usually designated as «structuralism» in developing methods that certainly justify themselves when applied to certain levels of philological material. It would never occur to me to entertain the wild idea of ridiculing a verse scholar who replaces the dilettantish approximateness of describing verse with precise statistics. To verify harmony by algebra is not the invention of misanthropes from Salieri's company, but a law of scholarship.
But harmony cannot be reduced to algebra. Exact methods — in the sense of the word «exact» in which mathematics is called an «exact science» —
are possible, strictly speaking, only in those auxiliary disciplines of philology which are not specific to it. Philology,
as it seems to me, will never become an «exact science»: therein lies its weakness, which cannot be eliminated once and for all by some clever methodological invention, but which must be overcome again and again through an effort of scholarly will; and therein too lies its strength and its pride. In our time one often hears disputes in which some demand of philology the objectivity of the exact sciences, while others speak of its «right to subjectivity». It seems to me that both sides are wrong. The philologist by no means has a «right to subjectivity», that is, a right to admire his own subjectivity, to cultivate subjectivity. But he cannot shield himself from arbitrariness behind a reliable wall of exact methods; he must meet this danger face to face and overcome it. The point is that every fact of the history of the human spirit is not only a fact like any fact of «natural history», with all the rights and properties of a fact, but is at the same time a kind of appeal to us, a silent hail, a question. The poet or
thinker of the past knows (let us recall Baratynsky's words):
And as I found a friend in my generation, I shall find a reader in posterity.
We are those readers, entering into communion with the author, analogous (though in no way similar) to communion between contemporaries («...And as I found a friend in my generation»). In studying the word of the poet and the thought of the thinker of a bygone era, we take apart, examine, dissect this word and this thought as an object of analysis; but at the same time we allow the one who thought this thought and spoke this word to appeal to us and to be not only an object but also a partner in our intellectual work. The subject matter of philology is composed not of things but of words, signs, symbols; but whereas a thing merely allows itself to be
looked at, the symbol, in its turn, itself «looks» at us. The great German poet Rilke thus addresses a museum visitor examining an antique torso of Apollo: «There is no place here that does not see you. — You must change your life» (the poem speaks of a headless, and therefore eyeless, torso: this deepens the metaphor, depriving it of surface obviousness).
Therefore philology is a «rigorous» science, but not an «exact» science.
Its rigor lies not in the artificial precision of a mathematized intellectual apparatus, but in a constant moral-intellectual effort that overcomes arbitrariness and liberates the possibilities of human understanding. One of the chief tasks of humankind on earth is to understand another person, without reducing him in thought either to a thing amenable to «calculation» or to a reflection of one's own emotions. This task confronts every individual person, but also the entire age, the whole of humanity. The higher the rigor of the science of philology, the more surely it will be able to help fulfill this task. Philology is a service of understanding.
This is why it is worth pursuing.
Now and again the question of the need to «return to philology» is raised anew.
There is a widespread notion that the sciences, as they develop,
differentiate. It therefore seems that the division of philology into
a number of sciences, the chief of which are linguistics and literary studies,–
is an inevitable and, in essence, good thing. This is a profound misconception.
The number of sciences is indeed increasing, but the emergence of new ones
proceeds not only through their differentiation and «specialization», but also
through the emergence of connecting disciplines. Physics and
chemistry merge, forming a series of intermediate disciplines; mathematics enters into connection with neighboring and non-neighboring sciences, and a «mathematization» of many sciences is taking place. And remarkably, the advance of our knowledge
of the world occurs precisely in the gaps between the «traditional» sciences.
The role of philology is precisely a connecting one, and therefore an especially important one. It connects historical source studies with linguistics and literary studies. It lends a broad aspect to the study of the history of the text. It unites literary studies and linguistics in
the study of the style of a work — the most complex area of
literary studies. By its very nature philology is anti-formalist, for it teaches how to correctly understand the meaning of a text, be it a historical source or a literary monument. It requires deep knowledge not only of the history of languages but also knowledge of the realia of a given era, the aesthetic conceptions of its time, the history of ideas, and so on.
Let me give examples of how important philological understanding of the meaning of words is. New meaning arises from the combination of words, and sometimes
from their simple repetition. Here are a few lines from the poem «Visiting» by a fine Soviet poet, and moreover a simple, accessible one — N. Rubtsov.
And everything sticks out
The neighbor sticks out in the doorway,
The roused aunties stick out behind him,
Words stick out,
A bottle of vodka sticks out,
A senseless dawn sticks out in the window!
Again the windowpane in the rain,
Again a fog draws on, and a chill.
Had this stanza lacked its last two lines, the repetitions of «sticks out», «stick out» would not have been full of meaning. But only a philologist can explain this
magic of words.
The point is that literature is not only the art of the word — it is
the art of overcoming the word, of giving the word a special «lightness» depending on the combinations into which words enter. Above all the meanings of individual words in a text, above the text itself there hovers yet another super-meaning, which
transforms the text from a mere sign system into an artistic system. Combinations of words — and only they — give rise in the text to associations,
bring out the necessary nuances of meaning in a word, and create the emotionality of the text. Just as in dance the weight
of the human body is overcome, in painting the univocality of color is overcome
through combinations of colors, in sculpture the inertness
of stone, bronze, wood is overcome,– so too in literature the ordinary
dictionary meanings of a word are overcome. A word in combinations acquires nuances that cannot be found in even the best historical dictionaries
of the Russian language.
Poetry and good prose are associative by nature. And philology interprets not only the meanings of words, but also the artistic meaning
of the whole text. It is perfectly clear that one cannot engage with literature without
being at least somewhat of a linguist, one cannot be a textologist without delving into the hidden meaning of the text, of the whole text, and not only of the individual words
of the text.
Words in poetry mean more than what they name, more than the «signs»
of what they are. These words are always present in poetry — whether
they enter into a metaphor, into a symbol, or are themselves such,
whether they are connected with realia requiring certain knowledge from readers, or whether they are bound up with historical associations.
<...>
Therefore one must not imagine that philology is bound up
predominantly with a linguistic understanding of the text. Understanding a text is understanding the whole life of its era standing behind the text. Therefore philology is the connection of all connections. It is needed
by textologists, source scholars, historians of literature and historians
of science; it is needed by art historians, for at the basis of each of the arts, in its most «profound depths», lie the word and the connection of words.
It is needed by everyone who uses language, the word; the word is connected with
all forms of being, with all knowledge of being: the word, or more
precisely, combinations of words. From this it is clear that philology lies at the basis
not only of scholarship, but of all human culture. Knowledge and creativity take shape through the word, and through overcoming the inertness of the word
culture is born.
3. The evolution of the concept ‘Word’ was most closely bound up with the formation of the cycle of word-sciences (of course, calling them «sciences» is possible only with a large degree of convention). Since word-logoi may be not only true but also false, the need was felt for a science of true reasoning penetrating through the shell of words — and logic became that science. In accordance with the fact that words serve not only cognition but also the expression of individual and group emotions, desires, aspirations, and so on, two sciences of reasoning arose that received no common name —
dialectic and rhetoric. Rhetoric was originally conceived as the art of oratorical speech, dialectic as the art of establishing truth by uncovering contradictions in the statements of opponents, that is, as the art of conversation leading to correct cognition.
Aristotle, a universal genius, produced «parallel» works in each of these spheres: to logic were devoted the «Categories», «On Interpretation», and the «Analytics»; to the sciences of speech — dialectic and rhetoric — the treatises «On Sophistical Refutations» and «Rhetoric».
At the same time a third science was taking shape, philology — the science of the «pure» word, of the word as such. Already around the 4th century B.C., in the Greek
language there appeared the verb φιλολογέω ‘to love learning, to strive toward study’ and the corresponding nouns: the noun φιλολογία ‘love of
scholarly reasoning, of scholarly dispute, of learned conversation’ (cf. above the division into logic and dialectic) and the adjective φιλόλογος ‘loving
scholarly reasoning, scholarly dispute’. At first these words functioned as antonyms of μισολογέω ‘not to love sciences and scholarly disputes’: «<...> my attitude to arguments», says Laches in Plato, «<...> is twofold: for I may seem at once both a lover of words (φιλόλογος) and
a hater of them (μισόλογος)» («Laches», 188 c.; translated by S.Ya. Sheinman-Topstein). Later, in Plotinus, Porphyry (3rd century), Proclus (5th century), the notion «philologos» acquired the meaning ‘attentive to words, one who studies words’. The shift in stress — φιλολόγος — emphasized the distinction from the previously
established φιλόλογος, which meant an educated person in general. In turn, both words were contrasted with the word φιλόσοφος
‘loving knowledge, wisdom, sophia’ (thereby knowledge was incidentally detached from words and appeared as an independent essence).
Already in the Hellenistic era (3rd–1st centuries B.C.), before the separation of the two meanings of the word (φιλόλογος and φιλολόγος), that is, before the emergence of a distinct discipline,
scholars were already engaged in philology, without, it is true, distinguishing it from grammar, and were called γραμματικοί ‘grammarians, grammatikoi’. In Alexandria
the Μουσειον (sanctuary of the Muses) was founded, a state institution
under the special patronage of the king, and the famous library,
for which manuscripts were acquired from every corner of the Greek world.
For the publication of works of Greek classical literature, and above all Homer, the Alexandrian scholar-grammarians (in essence — philologists)
carried out enormous work: they examined and selected manuscripts, collated
variant readings of the text, separated the genuine from the attributed, established the most authoritative text, accentuated it, commented on obscure passages, obsolete and incomprehensible words, and so on. The renowned
philologist-grammarian Aristophanes of Byzantium (257—180 B.C.)
may be considered the founder of scholarly lexicography.
In the Christian era, the chief object of attention of the lovers of the word, philologists, becomes the divine word: liturgical, prayer-related, and so on. Gradually the interpretations of Holy Scripture («the word about the word»)
become very subtle, philologically and theologically refined, and alongside the word φιλολόγος (in its new, philological meaning) another term appears — φιλολογεύς ‘learned commentator,
scholiast’ [this term is first attested in Origen (c. 185—253 or 254)]. Thus one of the fundamental disciplines in the study of the word was laid down — the criticism of the biblical text, which in the 19th and
20th centuries grew into hermeneutics and merged with philosophy.
<...>
The present-day state of the concept ‘Word’ is connected, above all, with philology as a distinct branch of human knowledge. In Russian philology there are two towering definitions of it: one belongs to F.F. Zelinsky, the other — to G.O. Vinokur. Zelinsky's definition states: historical-philological science is «a science whose content is the study of the creations of the human spirit in their sequence, that is, in their development» (1902, 811). This requires a rather delicate demarcation of the «spheres of influence» of its two domains — philology and history. Since «a material demarcation of the two domains is impossible» (1902, 811—812), Zelinsky attempts to draw a boundary between them, relying on the ideas of German science studies of the end of the previous century: in the author's own words, his article «is <...> the first attempt to construct a system of Ph<ilology> (more precisely — historical-philological science) on the basic idea borrowed from Wundt», according to which «Ph<ilology> is the side of historical-philological science turned toward monuments, history — the side turned toward general laws of development; history and Ph<ilology> are not two different sciences, but two different aspects of one and the same field of knowledge» (1902, 816, 812).
Warmly endorsing this assertion of Zelinsky's, G.O. Vinokur categorically declared: «It must first of all be established with full resolve that philology is not a science, or more precisely — that there is no such science as can, unlike others, be designated by the word «philology». <...> The empirical content of everything that philology deals with is entirely covered by the subject matter of the corresponding special sciences that study individual aspects of historical reality» (1981, 36). This thesis requires a purely terminological clarification connected with attempts in science studies to differentiate the object of a science from its subject matter. Unlike the object, the subject matter of a study is determined by the chosen method, and therefore philological research does have its own subject matter. Vinokur himself, incidentally, names it: this is the message,
understood in the broadest possible sense (1981, 36—37). «A message is not only a word, a document, but also various kinds of things», if
only we do not confine ourselves to their practical application. Such, for example, is furniture placed in a museum. We can, of course, «take it in our hands» as well, but in our hands in this case there will be «only a piece of wood, and not the very style of its workmanship, nor its artistic-historical meaning. The latter cannot be «taken in one's hands», it can only be understood» (1981, 37). Vinokur's point of view is remarkably modern: for the «philological semiotics» of our day, both series of words
and series of things are equally carriers of information. But the universal (invariant, archetypal) accumulator of meaning is precisely the word, and above all the written word: as Vinokur rightly observes, «a written text represents an ideal message» (1981, 37—38).
Thus, philology is a field of the humanities whose immediate subject of study is the principal embodiment of
the human word and spirit — the message, and its most perfect form — the verbal written text. At the same time, philology deals exclusively with texts addressed to a reader, even if an indeterminate one. A text that is, in principle, devoid of an addressee has no relation whatsoever to philology — it is impossible to understand it.
Notes 1 The title of the forthcoming book — «Constants: A Dictionary of Russian Culture».
Of course, the «constancy» of concepts does not mean their immutability, but only their constant presence in cultural consciousness.
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