"Studying is comparing": an anniversary as a reason for discussing the problems of contemporary literary studies and literary criticism. Book review: Noscere est comparare: Comparative studies in the context of historical poetics: For the anniversary of Igor Shaytanov. Coll. works. editor-in-chief and author of the introductory word O. I. Polovinkina. Moscow, Russian State University for the Humanities, 2017, 496 p.
The paper analyses the collection of works published for the anniversary of Russian literary scholar, Editor-in-Chief of “Voprosy literatury” and Head of the Comparative Literature Department at Russian State University for the Humanities Igor Olegovich Shaytanov. The book presents two large subjects. The first one includes the introductory articles for each of the sections (“Historical Poetics and Comparative Approach,” “English Studies: Shakespeare and Company,” “Literary Today”) and is a consistent description of problem areas of contemporary philology that attracted I. O. Shaytanov’s attention during his scholarly career. The second subject is a projection of Shaytanov’s ideas on particular scientific problems, with the range of the issues involved being rather wide. They include historical poetics and comparative studies, the contemporary state of Russian poetry, the rhetorical formulas of the Middle Ages and Shakespearian allusions to the archive history of Soviet Shakespeare studies of the 1930s and characteristics of the current state of “Life of Outstanding People.” Among the most remarkable papers of methodological nature are the works on comparative and historical poetics. Also, attention should be paid to the sections introducing archival documents and original Russian-language publications on the reception of Shakespeare’s work in Russia, the USA and Spain. The collected works present a significant contribution to the development of Russian literature study and suggest the necessity to combine the traditional historical poetics and comparative historical literary studies in general with new approaches.