The Reception of Byzantium in European Culture since 1500

Przemyslaw Marciniak, Dion C. Smythe, Przemyslaw Marciniak, Dion C. Smythe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134808380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Studies on the reception of the classical tradition are an indispensable part of classical studies. Understanding the importance of ancient civilization means also studying how it was used subsequently. This kind of approach is still relatively rare in the field of Byzantine Studies. This volume, which is the result of the range of interests in (mostly) non-English-speaking research communities, takes an important step to filling this gap by investigating the place and dimensions of 'Byzantium after Byzantium'. This collection of essays uses the idea of 'reception-theory' and expands it to show how European societies after Byzantium have responded to both the reality, and the idea of Byzantine Civilisation. The authors discuss various forms of Byzantine influence in the post-Byzantine world from architecture to literature to music to the place of Byzantium in modern political debates (e.g. in Russia). The intentional focus of the present volume is on those aspects of Byzantine reception less well-known to English-reading audiences, which accounts for the inclusion of Bulgarian, Czech, Polish and Russian perspectives. As a result this book shows that although so-called 'Byzantinism' is a pan-European phenomenon, it is made manifest in local/national versions. The volume brings together specialists from various countries, mainly Byzantinists, whose works focus not only on Byzantine Studies (that is history, literature and culture of the Byzantine Empire), but also on the influence of Byzantine culture on the world after the Fall of Constantinople.

PART I
Uses of Byzantium

Chapter 1
Whose Byzantinism – Ours or Theirs?
On the Issue of Byzantinism from a Cultural Semiotic Perspective

Helena Bodin

Modern European culture has shown a far-reaching engagement with Byzantium, the meaning of being Byzantine and the issue of Byzantinism. Writers have declared their preoccupation with Byzantium,¹ while certain critics and intellectuals have come out as dedicated Byzantines.² Byzantine qualities and Byzantinism have been characterised as neither Eastern nor Western,³ or – on the contrary – as being both Western and Eastern.⁴ Meanwhile ‘Byzantinisms’ signify conventionally lengthy, sophisticated and obscure discussions but may also in particular cases denote a positive aspect of the art of speaking indirectly.⁵ Though these various uses of Byzantium and its derivatives are unclear and often contradictory, a common denominator seems to be that Byzantium functions within modern and postmodern culture as a point of departure for assaults on the present.⁶

Studies of the reception of Byzantium in various epochs and cultural contexts are today an established branch of Byzantine Studies, and their results show the richness and complexity of the impact of the Byzantine legacy on later times.⁷ The premises of these studies are reflected, however, in the way in which the many different receptions of Byzantium are designated: are they described as Byzantine motifs or Byzantine influences, as references to Byzantium, as representations of Byzantium, or are they a matter of appropriation? These choices are not innocent but raise questions about how Byzantium is conceived. Does a certain study assume a historically defined Byzantium, confined within a particular time and space, or does it observe all kinds of uses of Byzantium and Byzantine epithets, however biased and coloured they might be by new and further new contexts? A special line of inquiry within this field comprises studies of the enigmatic and challenging notion of Byzantinism and its historical, geographical and cultural dissemination, and so these questions are also vital to the issue of Byzantinism.

The notion of Byzantinism would seem to encompass that broad range of meanings and topics that an ‘-ism’ might imply: it can signify a political vision, sometimes with nationalistic or imperialistic gestures, like other ideological ‘-isms’, such as feminism, liberalism, Marxism, cæsaropapism or terrorism, or their postcolonial cousin, Orientalism. It can also signify exaggerations of various kinds within the domains of rhetoric, bureaucracy or luxury, like ‘-isms’ that label a particular form of human behaviour, for example consumerism or populism. Furthermore, it can describe certain aesthetic and cultural characteristics, as for example in architecture, art and music, like ‘-isms’ that have broad artistic and cultural historical aims, such as naturalism, modernism or humanism. Byzantinisms, often appearing in the plural, can be a term used in comparative linguistics to describe certain expressions in Medieval Latin, Modern Greek and Slavic languages.⁸ It can also be used to articulate the supposed essence of Byzantium, and in this case, slightly different components and criteria are emphasised from one age to another. The notion of Byzantinism appears as the ‘floating signifier’ of semiotics and discourse analysis, able to take on whatever meaning and values a certain speaker or scholar requires.

The aim of this chapter is therefore to study the meanings and functions of Byzantinism from a cultural semiotic perspective. Is Byzantium conceived as a central or a peripheral cultural phenomenon, and how do these different conceptions affect the use, function and meaning of the notion of Byzantinism? The analyses are based on the Russian–Estonian literary scholar Yuri Lotman’s cultural semiotic theory and the idea of the semiosphere, i.e. the semiotic space that makes linguistic communication possible. It is combined with the Israeli literary scholar and semiotician Itamar Even-Zohar’s method of studying cultural polysystems, focussing on literature and issues of translation.

A similar approach, though not from an explicitly cultural semiotic perspective, can be found in more general studies on the reception of Byzantium, such as Averil Cameron’s seminal essay ‘The Use & Abuse of Byzantium’.⁹ A valuable anthology exploring a Byzantine cultural centre and its peripheries mainly from a historical perspective, together with issues of identity, was edited by Paolo Odorico.¹⁰ Close connections are also evident with studies of other ‘-isms’ or aspects of them, for example Hellenism and Modernism, such as Artemis Leontis’s Topographies of Hellenism (1995), as well as recent studies on issues of identity, such as Anthony Kaldellis’s Hellenism in Byzantium (2007).¹¹ But for now these works will be left aside so that this chapter can focus more precisely on the notion of Byzantinism itself. My aim is to consider examples from modern times, and to discuss often unstable and ambiguous relations to norms and cultural centres, rather than to consider preconceived identities. The focus of this chapter will therefore be dynamic situations rather than stable positions.

To this end, some cases regarding the use of the phrase ‘our Byzantinism’ from the late nineteenth- and the early twentieth century will be discussed. This idea was originally articulated in Russian by the intellectual and later Orthodox Christian monk Konstantin Leontiev, in French in an avant-garde context by the writers Paul Radiot and Jean Schopfer and the famous intellectual Julien Benda, and in Modern Greek by the modernist poet Constantine Cavafy, living in Alexandria. With regard to Cavafy’s use of the phrase ‘our Byzantinism’, a large number of interpretations and translations of his poem ‘Στην Eκκλησία’ [‘In the Church’] will be discussed as cases of transfer between different cultural systems. The chosen texts span a wide range of text types and represent essays, polemical articles, poetry and literary translations together with their commentaries, as well as literary criticism and analyses. The latter-mentioned will be studied in this case on a meta-level.

But first, an introduction is required to the cultural semiotic theories and methods of Lotman and Even-Zohar, together with a mapping of the Western and Byzantine semiospheres, as well as a short survey of earlier studies on the notion of Byzantinism from a cultural semiotic perspective.

Cultural Centres and Peripheries

According to Yuri Lotman’s theory and concept of the semiosphere, presented in Universe of the Mind (1990), there cannot be any semiosis at all outside the semiosphere, which provides both the condition and result of the development of a culture. The relation between the centre and periphery of a semiosphere, as well as the relation between different semiospheres, is characterised by dynamic and dialogic conditions, in the sense that they are mutable, shifting and interchanging.¹² Lotman bases his cultural theory on a binary model, deriving from the difference between the own and the alien. The boundary of the semiosphere is marked by the use of the first person – by saying ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘my’, ‘our’. Inside the boundary is everything we call ‘ours’ or ‘my own’; there is a feeling of safety and of a culture regarded as being in order. Outside are ‘they’ and ‘the others’, phenomena regarded as hostile and dangerous, and a culture viewed as confused and chaotic, thus not really worth consideration as a culture.¹³

Itamar Even-Zohar’s method of studying cultural polysystems, presented in Papers in Culture Research (2005; 2010) and in his earlier Polysystem Studies (1990),¹⁴ has much in common with Lotman’s cultural semiotic perspective and his concept of the semiosphere. According to Even-Zohar, a system is a network of relationships, rather than a conglomerate of various single elements. A cultural polysystem is thus a multiple system, a system of systems, comprising more than one cultural centre and several peripheries.¹⁵ Like Lotman’s semiosphere it is characterised as open, dynamic and heterogeneous. It follows that any cultural phenomenon and artefact can be used and evaluated in different ways, depending on which cultural centre it is related to. It might be regarded as central, worthy of cultural interest and canon-founding, or – on the contrary – as peripheral, uninteresting and incomprehensible. A basic premise of Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory is that a periphery is always judged according to the norms of the centre.¹⁶ At the core of Even-Zohar’s work are translation studies, as well as his illuminating discussions of possible interferences and transfers between cultural systems.¹⁷

Because of the basic similarities between Lotman’s and Even-Zohar’s cultural semiotic views, no distinction between the notion of semiosphere and the notion of a cultural system will be made in this chapter. They share the important point that linguistic meanings are the result of dynamic relations between the norms of cultural centres and their peripheries, of never-ending negotiations between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between perceptions of the high value of the own and perceptions of a worthless and chaotic otherness. As Lotman puts it, boundaries of semiospheres do not function like limiting borderlines but as filtering membranes, transforming external phenomena into internal ones. These boundaries can be compared to mechanisms for translating activities, as they are basically ambivale...