Culture as transition / translation. Vera Pavlova’s “Heavenly animal” (“Nebesnoe zhivotnoe”, 1997)

Abstract

This paper confronts to each other two alternative concepts of the genesis of culture: (1) The model of an all-embracing creativity, which includes physical procreation as well as mental creation, suggested by Vasily Rozanov; and (2) the model of two alternative, either physical or mental creativities, developed by Siegmund Freud.

Furthermore, the paper distinguishes two processes of conversion in culture: transition (the change of the cultural active subject), and translation (the change of objects, with which the active subject is busy). An examination of the two models of culture reveals that in each of the two models transition and translation condition each other, even if they do so in different ways.

The title of Vera Pavlovas book of poems “The Heavenly Аnimal” (1997) suggests a position, which with regard to the genesis of culture is much closer to Rozanov’s than to Freud’s model of cultural genesis: It takes the human being as well as an animal (so in procreation), as a holy being in its religious activity. The paper considers different forms of transition of the producing institutions of the poems, so from one culture to others, from one gender to the other, one generation to the other as well as different ways of the translation of language forms and poetical structures, of themes and motifs, of persons and things.