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Mikhail Epstein

09:06 / 22.11.02

http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET/Index.html
(there's also a good explanatory article in the online Chronicle of Higher Education, but it's already in the pay archives. I can forward the text to anyone who's interested).

Russian Writer and Philosopher Mikhail Epstein somewhat independently worked out cultural studies in the Soviet Union of the late 1970s and '80s, bringing a Russian sense of humility and subtle (and sometimes broad) humor, lacking in mainstream cultural studies and postmodernism. Now that the fires of 9/11 have consumed the Big Swinging Dicks (or Twin Towers) of Postmodernism (i.e., Virilio and Baudrillard), postmodernism and irony get a second chance. Epstein's approach is more optimistic and acknowledges life's absurdities in ways the French postmodernists did not. Since right now I'm reading Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (Grove Press, translated by Mirra Ginsburg), I'll read up on Epstein while I'm still in the mood. I recommend Bulgakov. The Devil comes to 1920s Moscow and upends the lives of proletariat writers and theater types. One of Satan's henchmen is a giant black cat who goes around beating people up.

13:28 / 22.11.02

I'm reading this bit now, and he seems like fun:

I was born in Moscow, in the very middle of the twentieth century, in 1950. My birthday, April 21, falls one day after Hitler's and one day before Lenin's. Thus I always felt compelled to follow the "happy" medium between two ominous extremes.
Mine was a very typical "middle-class" Jewish family which had already lost many of its ties to Jewish tradition. While two of my great-grandfathers were rabbis and Talmudic scholars, my parents and grandparents turned out to be ordinary Soviet white collar workers.It was typical, however, that both my mother and father were professional bookkeepers and preserved some traditional Jewish respect for the Book, even if only through financial ledgers. They wanted me to follow in their footsteps, but I deliberately reversed the trend and soon found myself studying not economics but philology at Moscow State University, connecting myself to words instead of numbers.

and

I wrote articles on literature, both Russian and Western, both classic and contemporary, and increasingly felt that there was no particular century or nation to which I would like to belong. Only existence on a crossroad of different cultures made me happy. My favorite genre became the essay which, in my opinion, combines the peculiarities of a frank diary, a fictional story, and a philosophical meditation. The same integrity was characteristic of ancient myths, but now I tried to revive this genre in such a way that it could oppose official Soviet mythology. It is not the authority of faith but an author's doubt that brings facts, fantasies, and generalizations together in the modern essay as a sort of experimental mythology.

13:33 / 22.11.02

Sorry to keep quoting, but reading this bit:
Together we tried to create integrated, "polyphonic" decriptions of certain cultural phenomena and to work out patterns of "translation" for different professional languages. Our activities drew an intellectual audience, in particular university students, into the process of collective intellectual creativity and writing. We conducted about 70 sessions on such various topics as "dreams,""birthdays," "silence," "limits of reason," "city and village," "punctuation marks," investigating these topics from multidisciplinary points of view (physics of dreams, lingustics of dreams, sociology of dreams, etc.). The materials of all these collective improvisations (they were always written since there was a period of silence and meditation within any discussion) are kept in my archive.

Our intellectual community, as I see it now, was a sort of pre-electronic Intelnet, and that is why I am so happy now to start the "real" Intelnet in it's much more mature, global form. I hope that what can make the Intelnet special among many intellectual sites on the Internet as the direct exposition of creative ideas. It is not like a conference or a newsgroup where discussion is led in a small and sometimes inconsistent impulses of opinions, remarks, objections. It is not like a professional journal treating some particular problems in a highly specialized language. What is crucial to the Intelnet is a specific genre of "a new idea," so pertinent to the receptiveness and responsiveness of a contemporary electronic network.

...makes him seem like a real theorist of the Message Board, in a way.