Russian, Stalinist and Soviet re-readings of Kierkegaard: Lev Shestov and Piama Gaidenko

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Mar-Jun 2002 by Anna Makolkin

First and foremost, Gaidenko alerts modern readers and historians of philosophy to the fact that the prolific Danish existentialist wrote under various pseudonyms. She arrives at a total of twelve, including Victor Eremita from Either/Or, Johannes de Silentio from Fear and Trembling, Nikolay Notabene from the Preface, Johannes Climacus, etc. Seeking a key to the interpretation of the Kierkergaardian system, Gaidenko does not limit her search to the categories within but examines the signs outside it, using the names of the imaginary authors or pseudonyms as her semiotic tools. Kierkegaard's choice of the formal devices is not new, Gaidenko observes. She pinpoints that this peculiar discursive play is not an original invention of the Danish early modernist but a borrowing from the ancient Greek performative tradition. Plato was known to have been rather fond of the polyphonic style of discourse, and skillful in introducing some famous speakers into his dialogues. The major difference, though, is that the Kierkegaardian interlocutors are not real historical figures, like Socrates, for instance, but imaginary protagonists, helping him to develop his complex position, which is frequently meant not to be easily revealed but to puzzle, entertain and envelop in mystery. In her definition of the Kierkegaardian style, Gaidenko relies on Martin Thust and Robert Heiss who attempted to deal with the artistic qualities of the Danish philosopher.28 What Thust and Heiss regard as an indirect discursive method of reviving the Biblical ancient texts in an innovative artistic manner, Gaidenko sees instead as a multilayered ironic text in the spirit of Socrates.

She traces the Kierkegaardian fascination with irony to his youth, to his student days and to his doctoral thesis on the "Concept of Irony with the Repeated Reference to Socrates." The author believes that Kierkegaard's interest in irony was not only his natural response to the Romantic ethos of his time, but had a much more profound meaning, beyond the more commonly accepted playfulness. Already in his doctoral thesis, as Gaidenko reports, Kierkegard had defined irony as a "specific negation," and had presented Socrates as a tragic figure, a victim of his own irony and negation. This recourse to the early Kierkegaard enables the reader not only to see the evolution of his thought but appreciate fully his profound insights into human existence and tragedy.

This glimpse of Socrates as the master of irony connects the ancient Greek past, the Romantic European present and the neo-Romantic future when Negation would become the state of mind and the new worldview, the new consciousness, another cognitive tool, an original stimulus to discourse and an inspiration to creativity in a largely uncreative universe.29 The Kierkegaardian recourse to irony stands in the shadow of Fichte, Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel. However, Kierkegaard distinguishes the tragic irony of Socrates from the playful irony of his romantic contemporaries and simultaneously from the tasteless irony of the future troubled, confused postmodernists. Analyzing the distinctive power of the irony of Socrates, Kierkegaard concludes that irony should be tamed. This early debate on irony is already a clear indication of his rift with the Romantics and Hegel. The Hegelian Socrates is a moral thinker while the Kierkegaardian Socrates is an individual without a moral principle or a moral goal in life. Unlike the Hegelian Socrates, Kierkegaard's Socrates dies-not as a hero, but as a failure, a confused master of Negation who had ruined the world around him with his own destructive irony. This analysis of irony and negation is perceptively treated by Gaidenko as the Kierkegaardian plunge into the abyss of a quasi postmodernist ironic mode, during which Kierkegaard himself evolves from an aesthetic playful Romantic into a demonic neoromantic figure, whom Kierkegaard discovered "long before its appearance in the neoromantic art of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century."30