Lecture
In literary studies, the term «interpretation» means the elucidation and comprehension of the integral meaning of a literary work, its idea, its conception. A distinction is drawn among reader's (primary) interpretation, scholarly interpretation, and creative-figurative interpretation. Primary interpretation is based on the general impression and understanding of a literary work that a reader gains upon reading it; primary interpretation is not always shaped in the reader's consciousness into logical constructs, often remaining in the form of an experience, a mood, a feeling. The literary scholar, proceeding from their own reader's impressions (primary interpretation), formulates them sufficiently clearly and then tests them through analysis, out of which scholarly interpretation is born — an interpretation that already claims the status of objective truth and therefore requires factual, logical, and emotional demonstrability. Creative-figurative interpretation is a «translation» of literary works into the language of other arts (film adaptation, stage production, and the like).
Because of the complexity, and sometimes the multivalence, inherent in the artistic image, many literary works can give rise to different, often directly opposite interpretations, which provokes literary-critical and scholarly debate. For this reason, the central problem of the theory and practice of interpretation has been and remains the problem of its correctness, its adequacy. Originally, a work was interpreted in order to correctly understand its meaning, to adequately grasp the content invested in it. The problems of the correctness and rightness of interpretation have always been at the center of interpreters' attention and have been the subject of critical debate. And the cognitive tasks of interpretation must not be substituted by any other aims — neither self-expression, nor the desire to display a conception to advantage, nor the wish to analyze a work's artistic distinctiveness, nor, finally, the drive to produce, at any cost, one's own original reading.
Here it is worth recalling that the most original interpretations are, as a rule, born not out of a striving for originality but thanks to a deep comprehension of the work.
The Problem of the Adequacy of Interpretation
The principal and most general problem facing the theory of interpretation can apparently be formulated as follows: is an adequate interpretation possible, even in theory? Here, adequacy presupposes objective and reliable knowledge of the object, possessing, moreover, a certain level of «explanatory power».
The main difficulty of adequate interpretation apparently lies in the fact that artistic meaning must be expressed by non-artistic (verbal-conceptual) means. From the standpoint of semiotics, this process represents one instance of extralinguistic translation, in which distortions are entirely unavoidable (not only, and not necessarily, losses, but also gains — yet distortions all the same, one way or another). It does not follow from this, of course, that we must abandon all attempts to give an adequate interpretation — after all, we do not abandon, say, literary translation from one language to another, even though distortions are unavoidable there too. Nor is this a reason to doubt the theoretical possibility of adequate interpretation. Distortions of a semiotic nature can hardly be of decisive significance. First, a conscientious, and all the more a talented, interpreter always strives to reduce these distortions to a minimum at which they practically cease to be felt. Often this is entirely achievable. Second — and this is more important — by knowing the nature and direction of the distortions that arise, we can take them into account and correct the interpretation accordingly. There are, theoretically, no insurmountable barriers to adequate interpretation. The concrete experience of interpretation, with its techniques, achievements, and errors, is, however, another matter.
There is one further complexity, another aspect linked to the preceding one. Interpretation is the comprehension of an artistic whole by the means of scholarship. Is such adequate comprehension possible? Is scholarship capable of achieving it without appreciable losses? An artistic image cannot be reduced to logical concepts, but it can be translated into the language of logical concepts.»
What is essentially being asserted here is a very important proposition, one that is often forgotten: adequacy of reflection is not identity. Yet establishing the fundamental possibility of adequate interpretation is not the end but the first link in a chain of interpretive problems, among which the principal one — and surely the sharpest — stands out: the problem of the adequacy of different interpretations of a literary work. It arises from an awareness of the heterogeneity of interpretations, from the fact of their multiplicity. If before us lies a series of different, sometimes mutually exclusive «readings» of one and the same literary work, it is natural to ask: which of them are correct, and which are false? How can the adequacy or inadequacy of a given interpretation be determined and proven?
Depending on the answers to these questions (or on evading them, which is itself a kind of answer), the understanding of interpretive activity changes, along with its meaning and its functions within the system of literary scholarship. With all the individual nuances and particularities, two points of view on these problems can be distinguished.
1. Potebnya proceeded from the premise that understanding (of an utterance or of a literary work) is not, properly speaking, the grasping of someone else's idea, but the generation of one's own, only approximately correlated with what was perceived. In Potebnya's view, the number of «meanings» of a literary work turns out to be infinite, and the work itself inexhaustible.
The notion of an infinitely broad range of admissible interpretations, of the fundamental equal validity of all (or most) interpretations of artistic meaning, and of the absurdity of comparing them on epistemological grounds, is also fairly widespread in contemporary literary scholarship. Representative of theories of this kind is, for example, M. Epstein's article «Interpretation», published in the ninth volume of the Concise Literary Encyclopedia. M. Epstein's conception is based on the notion of the semantic inexhaustibility of the artistic image, and its principal tenets accordingly at once raise a number of perplexing questions, which we pose in brackets within the following quotation. «Interpretation,» writes M. Epstein, «is grounded in the fundamental "openness" and multivalence of the artistic image (any image?), which requires an unlimited multitude of interpretations (including deliberately false ones?) in order to fully reveal its essence.»
2. Evidently, alongside the moment of historical variability of interpretations, one must also take into account the moment of their historical stability. It seems that any generation of readers perceives, and will continue to perceive, Radishchev's Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow as an angry protest against serfdom, Pushkin's Boris Godunov as a tragedy of conscience, Shchedrin's The History of a Town as a satire on autocratic despotism and the people's historical passivity, and so on.
Central to the scholar's conception is the following proposition: «A change in opinions about an artistic object indicates only that understanding, and the degree of depth of aesthetic comprehension, changes, is refined and grows more subtle, but the object itself, in its significance, nonetheless remains unchanged.»
The system of views on interpretation set out in Skaftymov's article logically leads to the idea of a single correct interpretation, which may not yet have been attained at this or that level of literary scholarship, but which stands before literary science as an ideal and as a task. As applied to scholarly interpretations, an orientation toward a single true comprehension of meaning seems, in principle, correct.
What can be advised to a practicing literary scholar setting out on the process of interpretation? First, it is evidently necessary to forget, as far as possible, all previous interpretive experiences known to them. Second — and this is the most important and practically necessary point — it is necessary to determine the work's substantive dominants, that is, those properties of the artistic content that unite all its concrete elements, the problem-and-meaning core that ensures the systemic, integral unity of the content.
And finally, third, to verify the correctness of an interpretation one should turn to an analysis of the given work's poetics, to the distinctiveness of its style, in search of stylistic dominants. The point is that semantic and formal dominants correspond very precisely to one another, which makes it possible to test an interpretation by the principles and methods of poetics.
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