Philological sociology of culture: Mikhail Gasparov and Vladimir Toporov in the dispute about popular acmeism

The legacy of the poet and art critic Count Vasily Komarovsky attracted the attention of researchers as an example of a detached attitude to the cultural worlds, and demanded a conceptualization that did not reduce his work to the programs of symbolism and acmeism. Vladimir Toporov and Mikhail Gasparov enriched the philological analysis with the sociology of culture and of creativity, but without turning to the research apparatus of sociology. Toporov put Komarovsky on a par with the seekers of their land and soil, starting with Aeneas, explaining the uncanny and unusual in his poems as the effects of this dramatic way. Gasparov challenged this approach, which gave Komarovsky the privileged position of a cultural hero. For Gasparov he was one of the poets who adapted the achievements of Russian symbolism and acmeism for the mass taste. The controversy was tough, but hidden, since both prominent philologists claimed their works as pure hermeneutics, but some internal contradictions and failures of argumentation show that in fact we are dealing with a sociology of mass reading, mass perception and mass participation in culture, using the means of another discipline. It gave very interesting results, but each time in need of additional interpretation.