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    Zlib - Pub The Legacy of Genghis Khan

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    735 029 185315 ‘THE LEGACY OF N. S. TRUBETZKOY Michigan Slavic Publications is a nonprofit organization associated with the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures of the University of Michigan. Its goal is to publish titles which may be of marginal interest from the commercial point of view but which substantially enrich the field of Slavic and East European studies. The present volume, number 33 in the series Michigan Slavic Materials, is the second selection of Trubetzkoy’s works in this series, the first being Three Philological Studies, 1963, long out of print. N. S. Trubetzkoy’s essays on culture, ethnology and politics—each appearing for the first time in English translation—shed light on themes that have preoccupied Russian intellectuals for centuries. On the hundredth anniversary of Trubetzkoy’s birth—coinciding with a new era of rapid change in Russia—the reader is sure to find these essays both challenging and controversial. Michigan Slavic Publications Editorial Board: Benjamin A. Stolz LR. Titunik Jindiich Toman Michigan Slavic Materials, No. 33 N.S. Trubetzkoy, Vienna 1930s Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetzkoy THE LEGACY OF GENGHIS KHAN and Other Essays on Russia’s Identity edited, and with a postscript, by Anatoly Liberman preface by Viacheslav V. Ivanov Michigan Slavic Publications Ann Arbor 1991 © copyright Michigan Slavic Publications 1991 Library of Congress Cataloguing.in-Publication Data hetskoi, Nikolai Sergeevich, kniaz, 1890-1938. , ; The Legacy of Genghis Khan and Other Essays on Russia's Identity / Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetzkoy ; edited, and with a postscript, by Anatoly Liberman ; preface by Viacheslav v. Ivanov. p. cm. ~ (Michigan Slavic Materials; no. 33) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-930042-70-0 1, Soviet Union—Ethnic relations. 2. Nationalism—Soviet Union. 3. Minorities—Soviet Union. 4. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1985- 5. East and West. 6. Eurasianism. L Tile. II. Series. PG13.M46 no. 38 [DK38] 491.8 s~de20 [305.8'00947] 91-27783 cIP ‘Translated by Kenneth Brostrom and Anatoly Liberman; see individual credits at the beginning of each article. Cover design and typography by Ross Teasley. Cover based on graphics made by Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957) for the Eurasian collection Jskhod k Vostoku, Sofia 1921. Michigan Slavic Publications Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275, USA phone (313) 763-4496 fax (313) 764-3521 Note on Transliteration Russian personal and place names are transliterated throughout in accordance with the modified Library of Congress system employed by Slavic Review. Exceptions are made for Russians whose names have become fixed in a different wansliteration (e.g., Gogol, Mirsky, Trotsky, Vernadsky). The surname Trubetzkoy is treated variously: N. §. Trubetzkoy is always transliterated thus, while other members of the family appear in a transliteration based on the history of their publication (or lack thereof) in languages other than Russian. This is not a completely satisfactory solution, but it seemed the simplest. The few Old Church Slavonic and Russian linguistic items that occur in the body of the text are transliterated according to the system long used by Slavic linguists in the U.S. and specified by the Slavic and East European Journal. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editorial board is particularly grateful to Ladislav Matejka, who initiated this project in his former capacity as managing editor of Michigan Slavic Publications, and to Anatoly Liberman for his inspiration and expert hand throughout the process of preparing these articles for publication, as well as for his highly insightful postscript. Our gratitude goes, in addition, to Kenneth Brostrom for his dedication and skill as primary translator, and to Susan Larson and Timothy Sergay, who participated in the translating during the initial stages of this project. Many thanks are due as well to Ann Podolski, who labored cheerfully and efficiently on the word processing of a very messy manuscript. Finally, it is our pleasant duty to acknowledge a generous publication grant from the Wheatland Foundation. Ultimate responsibility for any defiencies in the final shape of this volume, however, rests with the Editorial Board of Michigan Slavic Publications. For the Editorial Board Benjamin Stolz and Jindiich Toman CONTENTS Preface by V. V. Ivanov ne byN.S. Trubetzkoy Europe and Mankind (1920) ; On True and False Nationalism (1921) 3 The Upper and Lower Stories of Russian Culture (1921) 4 The Russian Problem (1922) 5 The Temptation of Religious Union (1923) 6 Atthe Door: Reaction? Revolution? (1923) 7 The Tower of Babel and the Confusion of Tongues (1923) 8 The Legacy of Genghis Khan: A Perspective on Russian History not from the West but from the East (1925) 9 Pan-Eurasian Nationalism (1927) 10 The Ukrainian Problem (1927) 1 On the Idea Governing the Ideocratic State (1935) 12 On Racism (1935) B The Decline in Creativity (1937) Postscript by Anatoly Liberman N.S. Trubetzkoy and His Works on History and Politics Index 81 101 17 137 147 161 233 245 269 277 295 391 Preface i prince Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetzkoy belonged to a generation. of Russian scholars, thinkers, and artists that was destined to make remarkable discoveries and to pass through much suffering. Since Trubetzkoy's biography is discussed in detail in the Postscript by Anatoly Liberman, I will limit myself to a few brief observations. Trubetzkoy began his scholarly activities at an amazingly early age. His close friend and collaborator Roman Jakobson told me about an unrealized meeting between Trubetzkoy and Bogoraz- Tan, the well-known Petersburg expert in Paleo-Siberian languages. Bogoraz knew Trubetzkoy through an exchange of scholarly letters. On a visit to Moscow, Bogoraz decided to seek out his correspondent, and set off for the home of the Trubetzkoys. After ringing the bell, he asked for Prince Nikolai Sergeevich. In answer to the call “Kolen’ka,” a little boy in short trousers came running to the door. Bogoraz (a member of the People’s Will who had been exiled to Siberia and there had studied the languages and customs of the local inhabitants) decided that this aristocratic family had played a cruel joke on him; he became incensed and left, and so did not speak with Trubetkoy, who had written him such mature scholarly letters. This altogether plausible anecdote could be expanded upon by relating the incredible range of the speculations contained in the articles published by Trubetzkoy during his youth. Just one of his short notes, “Caucasian Parallels to the Phrygian Myth about Birth from Stone (= Earth),” published when he was eighteen years old (his very first published works appeared Vv. V. IVANOV 2 5 ly fifteen!), would suffice to when ee OE “of his scholarly intuition. The convince one of the brilliance 0! i in this article were confirmed by the conjectures contained in this article pad cack discovery of ancient eastern texts, which were for ates? i ntary on the republished (for greater detail, see my comme! ry \Works'aa Pha version ofthis article in Trubetzkoy's Selected Works on Philology [[zbrannye trudy po filologii, Moscow: Progress, 1987]. Trubetzkoy was already in a hurry during his adolescence, as if he anticipated his early death. Trubetzkoy's first scholarly efforts concern the fields of ethnology (anthropology in the broad sense of the term) and folklore. From the age of thirteen he regularly attended the meetings of the Ethnographic Section of the Society of Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography at Moscow University. When Trubetzkoy was elected an honorary member of the Finno-Ugric Society at the end of his short life, he recalled that “when I was a gymnasium student in the fifth class, 1 was already fascinated by the Kalevala and Finno-Ugric ethnography” (LN, p. 455). He spoke of these pursuits as “his first scholarly love.” The study of prosody and music was also among Trubetzkoy’s early interests, He studied the folk music and songs of both the Finno-Ugric peoples and the Russians. He was not yet seventeen years old when he began to compare the vocabularies of Kamchadal and other “Arctic” (Paleo-Siberian) languages with the lexicons of the Samoyed languages. Later, as a university student, Trubetzkoy studied the languages of the Northern Caucasus; one of his major linguistic achievements was the compilation of a comparative historical grammar of these languages. From what has been said, it is apparent that Trubetzkoy was occupied with a wide range of anthropological problems and that while still very young he dealt with them on the basis of ese drawn from the languages and cultures of various urasian peoples. As time passed, the full range of anthropologica-humanistic studies continued to occupy him; wat Ta . i: if in order to utilize in his work techniques comparable to Preface wv those of the exact sciences, he decided to master classical comparative historical linguistics, He considered it the only humanistic discipline in possession of a scientific method, in contrast to other branches of the humanities that had not advanced beyond alchemy. Trubetzkoy mastered the tigors of Neogrammarian comparative historical linguistics, which was current at the time. He worked first in Moscow, in a recently established program in comparative linguistics reflecting the exacting standards of F. F. Fortunatov and taught by Professor Viktor Porzhezinskii; there was only one other student, Mikhail Nikolaevich Peterson (who—after overcoming unbelievable difficultiestaught me and my comrades comparative linguistics at Moscow University at the end of the forties, when it was forbidden). Trubetzkoy then studied at Leipzig, where he attended lectures with Leonard Bloomfield, who later founded American descriptive linguistics, and with Lucien Tesniére, one of the originators of modern structural grammar. Trubetzkoy very quickly abandoned the principles of the Neogrammarian scholarship he had mastered. In a discussion of a work published in 1915 in the area of comparative historical phonetics by the great Neogrammarian Shakhmatov, young Trubetzkoy subjected the methods of the linguists of the preceding generation to devastating criticism. From this time forward, his efforts were directed toward the elaboration of more exact methods, at first in historical and later in descriptive linguistics. One of Trubetzkoy’s characteristics as a scholar was his persistent striving toward the creation of whole new areas of knowledge. During the Sturm und Drang period of the Prague Linguistic Circle, of which Trubetzkoy was to become one of the preeminent members after the middle twenties (he had settled in Vienna but traveled to Prague for meetings with Roman Jakobson and other members of the Circle), he established and developed a series of areas in linguistics that were either nonexistent or altogether different in nature before his appearance on the scene. Besides phonology, cd V. V.IVANOV whose development during the Prague period he summed up in his magisterial book Grundziige der Phonologie, one can mention morphophonemics, the Sprachbund theory, which on its most inclusive level dealt not only wit cultures of diverse ethnic groups linked to one another geographically—a theory illuminated by articles included in this book—and the history of literary languages, which is also discussed in the present volume. Trubetzkoy left nothing that he came to understand unchanged. I will attempt to demonstrate this using the example of comparative historical Indo-European linguistics, the discipline that Trubetzkoy mastered in his youth in order to acquire methodological rigor. He subjected the fundamental principles of this discipline to a radical reexamination in a paper which he read at the end of 1936 at a session of the Prague Linguistic Circle. His paper “Thoughts on the Indo-European Problem” emphasized the purely linguistic nature of the problem. Trubetzkoy's utilization of the existing body of knowledge about the typology not only of phonological but of grammatical systems allowed him to specify the place of Indo-European among the other Eurasian linguistic types. The subsequent development of linguistics and associated disciplines has shown to what a significant degree Trubetzkoy was here once again ahead of his time. The alliances between the Indo-European languages and other contiguous languages, which are examined on the most inclusive level in Trubetzkoy's paper, remain to this day the center of attention for scholars who study them both on the level of the typological connections among languages and from the perspective of their historical kinship (more problematical for Trubetzkoy). For Trubetzkoy (and it is here that the principal distinction between him and earlier comparative linguists can be seen), the important thing was not establishing the kinship between languages but clarifying how contiguous languages partially assimilate to one another. While proceeding in this direction he also tried to solve the riddle of. Indo-European unity, anticipating in this effort much that h the languages but with the Preface ait would be said subsequently on this question by linguists such as Vittore Pisani. A geographical (that is, an essentially spatial) approach— behind which one can glimpse a spatial-temporal approach close in the final analysis to that of the exact sciences—initially played an essential role in the formation of Trubetzkoy's Eurasian views, as it did in the views of his allies in the Eurasian movement. He based his arguments first of all on linguistic and cultural alliances established through this approach over the entire territory of the Eurasian continent. A basic position in all his linguistic and culturological research was his rejection of national “egocentricity.” With regard to a trilogy first conceived in 1909-1910, parts of which were published beginning in 1920 (some of these parts are included in the present volume), Trubetzkoy said: “The first part was to have the title ‘On Egocentricity’ and was dedicated to the memory of Copernicus; the second part was called ‘On True and False Nationalism,’ with a dedication to Socrates; finally, the third part, entitled ‘The Russian Element,’ was to be dedicated to the memory of Emelian Pugachév” (LN, p. 12). The essential purpose of the first part (appearing ten years after the formulation of this basic conception with the “more striking” title Europe and Mankind (Evropa i chelovechestvo] and without the dedication to Copernicus, which the more mature author considered pretentious) was, in Trubetzkoy’s words, to compel readers “to understand that neither ‘I’ nor anyone else is the salt of the earth, that all peoples and cultures are equal in value, that there are no ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’” (LN, p- 13). Insofar as Trubetzkoy insisted on the necessity of a special path for Russia (understood as a part of Eurasia) that was distinct from the “Romano-Germanic” (i.c., the Western) path, his idea can be associated with the idea of a new generation of Slavophiles. In the never-ending intellectual struggle between the adherents of an orientation toward the West and those who urge looking toward the East, Trubetzkoy unquestionably is in the camp of the latter. It seemed to him that Russia could find wei V. V. IVANOV her own true path only after she had been reunited with the Eurasian cultural tradition from which she had been torn away in recent centuries, especially after the reforms of Emperor Peter the Great. . In practice, the point of view which the young Trubetzkoy compared with the Copernican also boiled down to a search for cultural principles distinct from the Romano-Germanic (West European). It is obvious that one could ask why the union between the Eurasian, Genghis-Khanian element and the Orthodox element (Byzantine in origin), which Trubetzkoy uncovered—with considerable evidence—in Russia’s history, was more organic than the subsequent merger of these same elements with the Western European. But we leave it to the readers themselves to ponder the many questions that Trubetzkoy’s perceptiveness opened up for us. There is much in his ideas that is paradoxically contra- dictory. It was the undemocratic nature of the consequences of the Pugachév rebellion that attracted Prince Trubetzkoy. This is why he reacted to the “ideocracy,” whose creation he was witnessing in his native land, with much greater interest than others among his contemporaries who shared with him the hardships of emigration. But if we look closely at the intellectual landscape of Europe at the beginning of the thirties, we discover that Trubetzkoy’s social ideals were not so different from the aspirations of many of the foremost minds of that time. No matter how different Ezra Pound was, let us say, from George Bernard Shaw or Thomas Mann, all of them (and many others) marked out a path that for a time brought them into the orbit of authoritarian thinking. The failures of the democracies of that time are all too obvious, and some of the judgments rendered upon them (and evident in Trubetzkoy’s work as well) are true to the point of being banal. But from this it certainly does not follow that it was necessary to proceed as far along the path toward the development of ideocracy as Trubetzkoy proposed. Preface xi Rather than quarreling with these ideas that clash so dissonantly with the current arguments of the intelligentsia against totalitarianism, it is possible to agree with Trubetzkoy’s ideas about personalism as the basis for the emergence of human individuality in every society. Many of his ideas that relate to new areas of scholarship (in particular, those relating to personality) are original and up-to-date. Everyone who thinks about the next century of humanistic studies needs to become acquainted with Trubetzkoy. Viacheslav V. Ivanov Jlerut, nerut cTenHaa KoObLIMUa Hi muét Kopbiip The mare of the steppe flies on and on, and tramples the feather-grass . . - —Alexander Blok. “On Kulikovo Field,” 1908 N. S. Trubetzkoy Essays EE 1 Europe and Mankind’ eS I bring the present work to public attention not without some apprehension. The ideas expressed in it took shape in my mi ind more than ten years ago. Since then I have often discussed them with various people, wishing either to verify my own opinions or to convince others. Many of these discussions and debates were quite useful to me, because they forced me to rethink my ideas and arguments in greater detail and to give them added depth. But my basic positions have remained unchanged. Quite clearly, 1 could not limit myself to chance discussions, and to test the correctness of my theses I had to submit them to a much broader audience, that is, to publish them. I did not do so, because—especially in the beginning-I came away from numerous conversations with the impression that most of my listeners simply did not understand me. And they failed to understand me not because I expressed myself awkwardly, but because, for most educated Europeans, ideas like mine are almost viscerally unacceptable; they contradict certain immovable psychological principles that underlie European thought. They considered me a lover of paradoxes and viewed my arguments as trickery. In such circumstances discussion lost all meaning and purpose for me: discussion can be productive only when each side understands the other and when both speak the same language. Since I was meeting with almost total lack of understanding, I did not consider it the appropriate time to publish my ideas, and I waited for a more propitious “Originally as Evropa i chelovechestoo, Sofia: Rossiisko-Bolgarskoe knigoizdatel'stvo, 1920, Translated by Kenneth Brostrom. N. S. TRUBETZKOY a i ar in print, it is _ And if I now make bold to appear | aes — been encountering with increasing frequency basic positions. Man: ding and even sympathy for my ; y Ee el at the same conclusions as L Obviously a shift has occurred in the thinking of a substantial number of d people. . . ; img War and especially the subsequent "peace (which n now must be written in quotation marks) shook our faith in* d opened the eyes of many people. We

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