The “scaffolding” of literary criticism: А.V. Mikhailov on theory of literature and its terms as “special words”

This article is the first one to question the system of А.V. Mikhailov's concepts of literary theory based on his idea that literary criticism should originate from the history of a poetic word. For the author the starting point is the following thesis by А.V. Mikhailov: “in theory, the word is deeply related to the word of poetry itself”. The centre of the studies is thus occupied by the scholar's idea that literary theory emerged as a “break-off from the poetical word”, and now it aims at reconstructing the “poetical memory of the centuries” in the integrity of its historical development. The scholar draws the reader's attention to the imagery of the language of literature, insisting that “the studies of literature is evidently the continuation of the literature itself”. The author proves the relation between А.V. Mikhailov's thesis with one F. Schlegel's lectures “Philosophy of Language and Word”. While analyzing some of А.V. Mikhailov's works, we conclude that he marks the borderline between the moving material explored by science and its static terminological apparatus. In clarifying this discrepancy, he suggests to view terms as “scaffolding”: “the scaffolding is there, and the house is being built”. The academic value of А.V. Mikhailov's concept of the evolution and integrity of a “complicated working definition” is in the fact that it draws the reader, firstly, to S.S. Averintsev's ideas of the formation of Aristotle's theoretical word: “As a matter of fact, it is the existence of definitions that allows us to regard the terms of literary criticism in “Poetics” as terms”; and, secondly, to V.I.Tyupa's views on the communicative filling of the definition, its addresssee-orientedness.