• A
  • A
  • A
  • ABC
  • ABC
  • ABC
  • А
  • А
  • А
  • А
  • А
Regular version of the site

'I Gulped down Ginzburg’s Article with Greedy, Insatiable Pleasure'

On 1st to 3rd June, the remarkable Italian historian and one of the founders of microhistory, Carlo Ginzburg will give a series of open lectures at the HSE. Professor Ginzburg has been invited to Moscow by the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI). His translator, Professor at the School of PhilosophySergey Kozlov spoke to the HSE News Service about how he was inspired to translate Ginzburg’s work into Russian which led to them becoming firm friends.  

Carlo Ginzburg is a great star of contemporary historical studies, one of the creators of microhistory — an approach which examines unique individual stories rather than large scale social processes.

His research encompasses questions of history, philology and art history. In the 1960s he was a key figure in the campaign to gain access for historians to the Vatican archives. He developed fundamentally new methods of working with archives including documents pertaining to the trials of non-conformists between the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. An example of this is Ginzburg’s bestseller The Cheese and The Worms, the Cosmos of a 16th century Miller, based on interrogation records of the miller Menocchio who was burned at the stake for heresy by the Inquisition. The book has been translated into 26 languages.

‘It’s a great honour for us to host an academic of Professor Ginzburg’s calibre at HSE. It’s thanks largely to the efforts of our colleagues, Professor Sergei Kozlov at the School of Philology and Mikhail Andreev, Leading Research Fellow at IGITI, that Carlo Ginzburg’s works are accessible to readers in Russian translation,’ says IGITI Director and HSE Professor Irina Savelieva.

Sergey Kozlov explains how his fruitful cooperation with Ginzburg came about.

My acquaintance with the writings of Carlo Ginzburg began in 1993 when I came across a collection of his essays, published in Italian under the title, ‘Miti, emblemi, spie’. I subsequently translated them for publication in Russian. I knew that Ginzburg was famous for his work on witchcraft trials and that he was recognised in the US as one of the most original European researchers in Early Modern popular culture.

I opened the contents page of the collection and an article called Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm attracted my attention instantly. I gulped down the article with greedy, insatiable pleasure - as hundreds of other readers had done before me and hundreds would after. The most precise way of describing it would be to say that it was exactly the article that I had always longed to read. As soon as I finished reading it I immediately sat down to translate it into Russian, although no one had commissioned it. Fortunately, I had somewhere to publish it. I offered it to Irina Prokhorova, the editor of Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye (New Literary Review). The next day she telephoned me in the same state of delight Clueshad put me in.The translation was published with my introduction in the 8th volume of of NLO. 

That was in 1994. Ginzburg was a professor at UCLA at the time and one of the participants of his seminar in Los Angeles was Mikhail Gronas, now Professor at Dartmouth University, author of Cognitives, Poetics and Cultural Memory and a visiting professor at the School of Linguistics at HSE. Gronas told Ginzburg about my translation. Ginzburg asked him to tell me to get in touch. That is how we began our correspondence which grew into a long term collaboration and genuine friendship.

I wrote two articles about Ginzburg for Russian readers. The first, Metolodicheskii manifest Carlo Ginzburga v tryokh kontekstakh (Carlo Ginzburg’s Methodological Manifesto in Three Contexts), set the stage for my translation of Clues.The second, Opredelyenny sposob zanimatsa naukoi: Carlo Ginzburg i traditsiya (A particular way of doing research; Carlo Ginzburg and tradition) was published as an afterword to the Russian edition of the collection Myths - Emblems - Clues. (The collection came out in Novoye Izdatelstvo in 2004. Mikhail Velizhev, the publishing editor, is now one of the leading teachers in the HSE School of Philology).

These articles examine Ginzburg’s work from two different perspectives. In the first article I wrote about Ginzburg as a philologist; I tried to explain why Clues is such an invaluable work for Russian philology.

In the second, I approached Ginzburg more as a historian, trying to understand the originality of his stance as a researcher in the context of historiography in general, and particularly in the Italian school. What turned out to be the main thing here were Ginzburg’s deep primary connections with the Italian tradition of the history of historiography. Ginzburg occupied a special place in Italian microhistory: Ginzburg is simultaneously one of the founders of this movement and a black sheep - standing out alone against the background of the general group tendencies of micro-historians .  Ginzburg wrote me a letter in which he supported my conclusions and formulated some limits for them. I quote this letter in my afterword.

And as to why I see Ginzburg’s work as being particularly relevant for the humanities as they are today, that’s something I will talk about briefly in my introduction to the first of Carlo Ginzburg’s series of lectures at HSE on Monday 1st June….

Tolstoy, War and Peace and Microhistory

On hearing about the impending lecture series in Moscow, News Editor of HSE English Language News Anna Chernyakhovskaya also wrote to Professor Ginzburg asking him about his connections with Russia and Russian literature which go back a generation to his father Leone Ginzburg. Here is their exchange:

— Professor Ginzburg, we are delighted that you are coming to Moscow for the lecture series. Your father, Leone Ginzburg was teaching Russian literature at the University of Turin before he lost his position in 1934 having refused to swear an oath of allegiance imposed by the Fascist regime. Have you inherited his interest in Russian? Have you been to Russia before? Were you inspired by any Russian novels or stories?

— You may find a biography of father in Wikipedia (the entry exists  both in Italian and French). As soon as he was compelled to leave the University he was arrested for antifascist conspiracy; he spent two years in jail.  In 1940, when  Italy entered the war on the side of Germany, my father was sent into internal exile to a village in the Abruzzi, where he spent three years with my mother and three children (including myself). During the German occupation my father went to Rome and became the director of an underground newspaper, L'Italia libera. He was arrested in November 1943, with false papers; having been identified, he was sent to the German controlled section of Regina Coeli, the Roman prison. He died in prison in February  1944.

Russian literature (especially Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, read in translation) has been a crucial  experience in my intellectual and emotional development.

My father translated Pushkin (The Queen of Spades) and Tolstoy (Anna Karenina and The Kreutzer Sonata); he also provided a new, revised translation of Tolstoy's "War and Peace". He wrote several essays on Russian literature which were republished after his death. He was the co-founder of the Einaudi publishing house.

Russian literature  (especially Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, read in translation) has been a crucial  experience in my intellectual and emotional development. I commented on the impact of War and Peace on my historical writing in an essay entitled Microhistory: Two or Three Things I know about it:

I have been in Russia several times.

— You are known as a 'hunter' or 'detective' in historical studies. The term 'microhistory' was introduced by you and it gives a personal and a subjective touch to the historical science. What's now on your research plate? Have you ever looked into Italian-Russian relationship?

— In recent years I have been working on many (possibly too many) projects. The most recent one deals with Pascal's Provinciales (I recently gave the Tanner Lectures at Harvard University on this topic). Regretfully, having no Russian, I never worked on the Italian-Russian relationship. But I wrote an essay on "ostranienie" (estrangement), in which I tried to reconstruct the prehistory of Viktor Shklovsky’s notion.

Regretfully, having no Russian, I never worked on the Italian-Russian relationship. But I wrote an essay on 'ostranienie' (estrangement), in which I tried to reconstruct the prehistory of Viktor Shklovsky’s notion. 

— Your classical book The Cheese and the Worms talks about the forgotten individuals of history. It brings your hero back into the light after four centuries in obscurity. Can you comment on the social influence of your book?

— You are right, The Cheese and the Worms has been widely read (it has been translated into 26 languages). In my view, it was a success because of the extraordinary personality of its hero, Menocchio on the one hand and on the other, the cross-cultural appeal of the topics which are at the center of the book: challenging authority, both political and religious; approaching written culture from a perspective rooted in oral culture.

— How did your partnership with HSE come about?

— My connection with HSE has been provided by my dear friend, Sergei Kozlov (we have been involved in a close  intellectual conversation for many years). 

You can see the timetable for the Carlo Ginzburg lectures at the webpage.

Entry to the lectures is free but registration is essential. Email natalia.petrova@gmail.com. For additional information about the lectures write to Alexei Pleshkov sheginoid@gmail.com or Sergei Matveev SMatveev@hse.ru.

  

See also:

‘We Cannot Understand the Modern Ideological Confrontation without the Accusations that Emerged during the Lausanne Process’

Rainer Matos Franco, from Mexico, defended his PhD thesis with honours at HSE University this June. In his dissertation, Rainer Matos Franco examines the history of anticommunism in Europe during the 1920s. The HSE News Service spoke with Rainer and his academic supervisor, Tatiana Borisova, about the significance of the Lausanne Process for the Cold War and contemporary history, the opportunities provided by HSE University for international PhD candidates, and the challenges of working with a vast database of historical sources.

How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Ten: 'Number, Please?'

The history of the invention of telephony reads like a captivating detective novel, but even more intriguing are the events that contributed to the worldwide adoption of this technology. In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The final episode of the series recounts how men were unable to cope with telephone operator jobs and were replaced by tall and polite young women. However, as telephone networks expanded, the role of the intermediary became unproductive, eventually rendering the switchboard operator profession obsolete due to automation—not the first nor the last time such a thing has happened. As for Alexander Graham Bell, he used the earnings from inventing the telephone to promote science, educate people about the world around us, and pursue new inventions.

How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Nine: Big Connections

The history of the invention of telephony reads like a captivating detective novel, but even more intriguing are the events that contributed to the worldwide adoption of this technology. In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The ninth episode of the series explores the development of the first long-distance, interstate, and transatlantic telephone lines, which suddenly made people thousands of kilometres away feel as close as if they were in the same room together.

How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Eight: The Russian Field of Experiments

The history of the invention of telephony reads like a captivating detective novel, but even more intriguing are the events that contributed to the worldwide adoption of this technology. In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The eighth episode of the series recounts how Russia first adapted the telephone for military and logistical purposes, created a shell company headed by a nominal executive for reselling the rights to Western competitors, and intensively developed communication infrastructure in the country's two capitals, making such progress that Vladimir Lenin insisted on capturing and maintaining control of telephone exchanges at all costs.

How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Seven: German Efficiency

The history of the invention of telephony reads like a captivating detective novel, but even more intriguing are the events that contributed to the worldwide adoption of this technology. In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The seventh episode in the series recounts the story of German bureaucrats, who proved to be the most astute in Europe by ensuring effective telephony first for themselves and subsequently for all major cities in Germany. However, even there, the government's dominant role over the free market slowed down the adoption of the new technology.

How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Six: The Telephone's Misadventures in France

The history of the invention of telephony reads like a captivating detective novel, but even more intriguing are the events that contributed to the worldwide adoption of this technology. In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The sixth episode of the series recounts events in France when the private owner of the telephone network was compelled to sell it to the government at a knockdown price, and the impact it had on the development of communications in the country. Spoiler alert: the impact, naturally, was detrimental.

How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Five: From the US Free Market to Conservative Britain

In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The fifth episode of the series chronicles the early experiences of the telegraph and telephone in Great Britain, shedding light on the challenges they faced, and explores the adverse impact of excessive government regulation and nationalisation on the evolution of telecommunications.

Peacocks, Pepper, and Petrol: The Early History of Imports from Asia

Petroleum for equine care, wood oil for lighting, sandalwood for Easter celebrations, and lemons and olives for entertaining unexpected guests. Russian monasteries often used these and other eastern goods in the period leading up to and during the reign of Peter the Great. Analysing their account books leads to a revision of the traditional assumptions about the primary consumers of oriental goods in Russia. These consumers, in addition to the royal and aristocratic circles, included monastery estates, as discussed in the paper ‘“Three altyns worth of petroleum…”: Oriental goods in Russia at the second half of the 17th and early 18th century’ by historian Arthur Mustafin of HSE University. Based on his paper, IQ.HSE explores the types of goods that were shipped from the East to Russia in the latter half of the 17th to the early 18th century, including the routes and purposes of these shipments.

How the Telephone Conquered the World. Episode Four: David the Start-up Versus the Corporate Goliath

The history of the invention of telephony reads like a captivating detective novel, but even more intriguing are the events that contributed to the worldwide adoption of this technology. In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The fourth episode of the series recounts the story of the fledgling start-up's confrontation with hordes of patent trolls and its subsequent victory in a full-blown corporate war against the largest telecommunications company of the late 19th century.

‘In Search of the Key to the Past’: Students of HSE Art and Design School in Nizhny Novgorod Develop Collection of Souvenirs

The HSE Art and Design School in Nizhny Novgorod, together with the ‘Protected Quarters’ project to revive Nizhny Novgorod’s historical territories, have carried out the ‘Timeless’ creative project, which included a design laboratory and an educational programme. As a result of the creative workshop, students made concepts for souvenir products based on the local identity.