Alexander Zholkovsky: From the Life of Meaning to the Meaning of Life

Abstract

anthologies of Russian Formalism, Boris Tomashevskii singled out two types of writers. Some of them only have a “life biography” that is merely of interest to the writer him or herself, while others write “in the hope that their life will be a constant canvas for their works”; the life of a “writer with a biography” is “not a curriculum vitae or an investigative case,” but “an author’s legend of his life.”1 In this case the author becomes the protagonist of his own biographical legend. The same thing can apparently be said about scholars: there are those “with a biography” and those without. Alexander Zholkovsky is an intellectual figure with biographies, both scholarly and literary, which, moreover, have in turn themselves become an object of his own study. Rather than summarizing the thirty-nine essays comprising this tribute to Zholkovsky, we shall instead attempt here to draw connections between his scholarly, literary, and personal biographies. One of our honoree’s most significant scholarly contributions was the “Meaning ↔ Text”