Between poetics and ideology: Commentaries by Aleksandr Gabrichevsky on the anniversary edition of Goethe’s works (1932–1949)

This article considers the possibility for humanities scholars in the 1930s to maintain the balance between poetics and ideology while working with classical material, in particular, to interpret Goethe’s works on the edge between Marxism and bourgeois literary studies. The anniversary edition of Goethe’s works, scheduled for the 100th anniversary of the author’s death, illustrates the structure and composition of commentaries in academic publications of foreign classical writer’s collected works, developed by the curator of the project, Aleksandr Gabrichevsky. He was an art and literary critic and translator, who headed the committee for the study of Goethe’s works in the State Academy of Art Sciences, which was closed by that time. His main idea was based on three components: a conceptual commenting introduction, “factographic” notes, and commentaries explaining the principles of translation. The edition is prefaced by two conceptual articles, the essay “Wolfgang Goethe” by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the people’s commissar of education, and Gabrichevsky’s “Goethe’s Poetry”, which contains a latent controversy between social and aesthetic approaches to the interpretation of literary heritage. Quoting the essay “Karl Gran. About Goethe from the Human Point of View” by Friedrich Engels, Lunacharsky introduces into Soviet science a formula on the “internal duality”, “ugly obsequiousness” of the German classic (he was a great poet and an insignificant bourgeois). He emphasizes that the goal of the commentaries should be not an analysis of Goethe’s “pure” poetry and poetics. but a “living social portrait” and his “social ties” that can justify Goethe’s “betrayal” and that bring him closer to the “new humanity” - the proletariat. The key to Gabrichevsky’s interpretation was the concept “lyrical form”. Gabrichevsky integrated Goethe’s poetry into the “rhythm of European national literatures”, which also included Dante, Shakespeare, Pushkin. Gabrichevsky’s initial thesis was the idea of the absolute lyricism of Goethe’s works. After Goethe, lyrics could not remain rhetoric; now it was “rhythmic clots of the flow of prose speech”. The second conceptually significant concept for Gabrichevsky was connected with the idea of “young Goethe”. It was not just a designation of the chronological stage of the poet’s life, but a characteristic of the new “mood” of culture that was born with Goethe and that later, in the time of modernity, would be embodied in the cultural projects of “young Vienna” and “young Berlin”. A number of commentaries aimed to explain the features of the translations of poetry that where commissioned specifically for this edition. Gabrichevsky wanted to include translation into the range of problems linked to the scientific interpretation of the original and therefore he developed new guidelines for “synthetic translation”, believing that “the entire system of the original” should be translated, but not just one side of the work (idea, image, or phonetic structure). Gabrichevsky’s scholarly discourse sometimes displayed autobiographical allusions, indeed. Gabrichevsky turned the official version of the duality of Goethe, broken by the “miserable” atmosphere of princely Weimar, into the basis of the tragic conflict that had an absolute and insoluble nature precisely because “inertness” and human “vulgarity” exist in all epochs.

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