Bakhtin reads Bryusov: salvation and creativity without a subject

Although Bryusov was not one of Bakhtin’s favorite writers, Bryusov’s reflection on the genre of the novel The Fiery Angel and general attention to the aesthetics of Russian Symbolism deepened the thought of early Bakhtin about the specificity of aesthetic experience, expressed in his Toward a Philosophy of the Act. For Bakhtin, Bryusov’s novel was an example of a winning rejection of the patterns of a historical and biographical novel in favor of a certain pose, and in contrast to the pose of Mayakovsky and other pop poets, which heightens attention to the middle state of the subject. In his work cited, Bakhtin puts the action as a value above the subject, while overcoming the theoretical implications of axiology and criticizing theoreticism, and here the description of the subject’s anomalies in the novel The Fiery Angel and a specific understanding of the suggestive word constructions in Bryusov’s article Keys of Secrets turned out to be in demand. Starting from the positions of Rickert and Simmel and changing the inner meaning of the key terms of these thinkers, Bakhtin took several terms from the works of Bryusov, which the commentators did not pay attention to. This was the term “cognitive activity” (uznanie), which meant participatory cognition, “obsession activity” (oderzhanie), meaning situational obsession, and some others, as a hidden dialogue with Bryusov. At the same time, Bakhtin disputed the concepts of obsession and the triumph of science promoted by Bryusov, covertly opposing the main concept of progress to the renewed Christology of Berdyaev and Rozanov. In this Christology, the subject in comparison with the deed may turn out to be completely useless, and here Bakhtin used Bryusov’s category of “uselessness of creativity” for interpretation of salvation not as useful, but as a necessary act.