What does it mean to understand a book?

The goal of teaching literature in the school is to develop aesthetic emotion in children (“I will imbibe harmony and be moved to tears by fiction”—Alexander Pushkin) and the special ability associated with it, the ability to understand books. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, what comprises this ability—what does it mean to understand a book?
The authors of the course adopted by the DI approach believe that an aesthetically developed reader is a reader capable of “understanding the position of a literary text’s author and making his or her own judgments about the work and the life phenomena reflected in it.”³ Kudina and Novlianskaia identify the philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin as the theoretical basis of their course. Why Bakhtin, and not, for example, Yuri Lotman or Hans-Georg Gadamer? The authors do not explain their choice, but it is possible to guess. In the DI approach, the purpose of school is to acquire the highest achievements of modern culture. One would assume that Kudina and Novlianskaia believe Bakhtin’s philosophy to be the last word in aesthetic theory, incorporating in sublated form everything essential that has been accumulated by thought in the realm of the humanities.
But at the same time, even in the above quotation we find concepts that modern thought views as a tangle of problems and objects of heated debate. As the scholar [of French literature] Antoine Compagnon argues in his recent book, modern reflection about literature cannot be summarized by or reduced to a single theory. Quite the contrary—it represents an irreconcilable argument among various schools and directions about the most basic and fundamental concepts of literary theory.⁴ Compagnon identifies five main nodes of problems associated with the interpretation of the five key concepts: “literature,” “author” (or “intention”), “the world” (or “reference”), the reader (or “reception”), and “style.” Correspondingly, modern theoretical-literary thought is organized as the debate of the five following questions:
What is literature?
How do literature and the author relate to one another? Literature and reality?
Literature and the reader? Literature and language?
The underlying concepts of literary studies become dialogic, as the Russian philosopher Vladimir Bibler defines them. In other words, these concepts themselves are an object of understanding. Furthermore, they can be understood only in dialogue among different ways of understanding them.
What does it mean to understand the meaning of a book? In Compagnon’s opinion, the most contentious question in literary studies is that of the relationship between the author and the text and whether or not, in determining the meaning of the text, the author’s intention (design, plan) should be considered. For traditional nineteenth- and twentieth-century philologists, a book’s meaning is equivalent to its author’s intention, and understanding a book means understanding what the author wanted to say, or, more precisely, seeing in a work what the author and his or her close contemporaries saw in it. From this perspective, injecting into books meanings that the author and his/her contemporaries could not have had in mind winds up being fruitless and nonsensical.⁵ Bakhtin’s aesthetic theory, which sees the interpretation of a book as a dialogue between the work and the reader, challenges this idea. New readers ask books new questions and receive different answers from them that could not have been foreseen by the authors and their original readers.⁶ Even more extreme, T.S. Eliot, “new criticism,” and then poststructuralism completely reject the significance of the author’s intention. The text exists on its own, outside the situation that gave birth to it. Understanding a text means finding what it says to today’s reader, independently of the author’s intention. A text has as many meanings as it does readers.⁷
What does a book tell us? Is literature a way to describe and make sense of extraliterary reality (recall the names of the famous books: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and Lydia Ginzburg’s Literature in Search of Reality [Literatura v poiskakh real’nosti], as well as the expression belonging to our DI discussants Kudina and Novianskaia, “life phenomena reflected in writing”), or do books talk only about books (as, for example, Umberto Eco and Julia Kristova believe)?⁸ What is the nature of relationships between the book and the reader? Are we capable of seeing the utterance of another consciousness in a work (Bakhtin)⁹ or is the writer’s work “merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself” (Proust)?¹⁰ Where are the boundaries of readers’ freedom in interpreting texts? Is it possible to make an objective statement about whether a text is good or bad? Whatever question we address, scholars of different schools and philosophies, critics and poets will all give us opposite answers. Furthermore, the arguments by adherents of different approaches sound very convincing and, most important, ways of working with texts suggested by scholars with different orientations lead to very interesting results.
So, what does it mean to understand a text? What theory should we turn to in education? What should we place at the center of our work with children: contemplation of a book’s meaning or how it was “made,” a search for authorial intention or readers’ senses of the text, detached analysis or probing empathy?
It is impossible to combine different theories or find some kind of compromise solution. “Theory of literature is a lesson in relativism, not pluralism; in other words, several responses are possible but not equally possible, acceptable but not compatible. Instead of adding up to a total and more complete vision, they are mutually exclusive since they do not call the same thing literature or qualify it as literary; they do not envisage different aspects of the same subject but different subjects. Ancient or modern, synchronic or diachronic, intrinsic or extrinsic: they are not all possible at once. Compagnon writes, “In literary research, ‘more is less’; and one must choose.”¹¹
If we were training literary specialists, we would have to make an unequivocal choice among theories—or explain all of the theories to the students so that they would themselves be able to chose among them. But we are training readers, not literary specialists. Good literary specialists immerse themselves in a single conception, developing and perfecting their own methodology (although at times they do need to rethink the very foundation of their conception and their methodology). A good reader is always focused on understanding a particular book. Obviously, different approaches to understanding a book will, to a greater or lesser degree, prove meaningful, since each of them allows something new and unexpected to be discovered in a book.
So we are able neither to combine different approaches nor to make an unequivocal choice in favor of any one of them. Vladimir S. Bibler’s philosophical logic of culture offers us an escape from this impasse. As Bibler demonstrated, this heterodiscoursia, the constant discussion of foundations, does not indicate a crisis of contemporary reason, but an essential feature of it. The understanding inherent to contemporary reason is dialogic, that is, it is realized as a dialogue of different types of understandings.¹² In accordance with Bibler, we believe that true understanding of literature can only come about in this way—as a dialogue of different theories and different discourses: of the theoretician, the critic, the commentator. And it must be realized specifically through dialogue, and not mechanical summarizing of diverse approaches because these means of understanding literature contradict and engage one another in argument, as they arise from different understandings of the essence of the subject. In this dialogue, different types and methods of understanding problematize one another, reveal their foundations and boundaries—and at the same time present opportunities for endless development. And engaging schoolchildren in contemporary culture can only happen in this way: not by having the children acquire one of the aesthetic theories, but by drawing them into debate about the foundations of verbal creation and having them engage in different ideas and ways of understanding books.
Let us imagine the “ideal reader.” Every time he starts to read a book he runs into difficulty understanding it. Every time he asks himself what it means to understand this book and how he can achieve this understanding. He is familiar with different ideas about what literature is and with different ways of understanding texts. Within his thinking, “a historian” and “a formalist,” a disciple of Lotman and an adherent of Bakhtin, a poet and an exacting scholar are all carrying on a dialogue.
The “ideal reader” of Hamlet is not in any hurry. He spends a long time reading and rereading the tragedy, trying to understand how it “is made,”^* what Shakespeare’s intention was, what the reader himself discovers in the tragedy, how Hamlet was read in the early seventeenth century, and how it is read in the twenty-first century. The reader identifies with the hero, immersing himself in the world of tragedy, but at the same time calmly analyzing the text, noticing the technical aspects of its construction, the motifs running through it, and its ambiguities. The reader always remembers that Hamlet was written in Elizabethan England and that its range of problems was generated specifically by that epoch. But at the same time, he reads this tragedy as if it were Shakespeare’s response to the plays of Becket or Sophocles.
The “ideal reader,” we repeat, has mastered the fundamentals of different theories and discourses, is able to bring them into the dialogue, and is constantly developing and improving this ability and applying it to new texts. Naturally, he is not just reading fiction, but also works of theoretical literary criticism, texts by literary scholars, critics, and poets that reflect about books. Furthermore, he is not just interested in the findings they enumerate, but in their reasoning. He is learning to reason in new ways.
It seems that this image of the “ideal reader” could be the horizon toward which classroom literature education must strive. The educational objective becomes teaching children to understand, while integrating different types of understanding in their thinking and enduring the strain of debate.¹³ In this case, literature education must not be simply the reading and discussion of a certain number of classical texts, but a coherent mastery and reflection of different ways of understanding books. Schoolchildren must learn to discover new ways, master them, and integrate them as they analyze books; they must learn to constantly return to thinking through the fundamentals, to seeking answers to the questions—what is literature, what does it mean to understand a book, how can I understand it?

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^* This is an indirect reference to Boris Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made.”—Eds.

Is the image of the “ideal reader” we propose utopian? Is it possible to imagine that a modern adult, educated, but not a literary scholar, will find the desire, strength, and time for such reading? Perhaps the only cultural setting in which “dialogic reading” is possible is the school (the School of the Dialogue of Cultures). In this sense, pupils who go through the SDC and are taught to read books (not just fiction) in this way, will always retain within themselves school age. As Irina Berlyand put it so well, in a sense, literature is the key subject for the SDC. This school could be said to specialize in philology, since it first and foremost prepares readers, and not just readers of literary fiction, but of philosophical treatises, scholarly articles, and the like. exactly as readers of artwork.¹⁴
School should work not to reproduce society in its current state but to develop it. If the majority of our contemporaries do not feel the need to read the humanities and do not understand why this is necessary, it becomes the objective of school to form this motivation. Even the simple realization that something can be looked at from different perspectives and that different logics can be applied to understanding a subject is important in and of itself to achieve the kind of thinking that Bibler called “dialogic” and that he considered vital for a twenty-first century person.
The goal of this article is to demonstrate one way of moving in this direction, the beginning of a potential movement.
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³ G.N. Kudina and Z.N. Novlianskaia, Literatura kak predmet esteticheskogo tsikla: metodicheskie razrabotki: 1 klass (Moscow: Tsentr al’ternativnoi pedagogiki iskusstva, 1990), p. 3.
⁴ Antoine Compagnon, Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
⁵ For a convincing argument on this idea, see M. Gasparov, “Kritika kak samotsel,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1994, no. 6.
⁶ See M.M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986).
⁷ See T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber 1964); R. Bart [Barthes], Izbrannye raboty. Semiotika. Poetika (Moscow: Progress, 1989).
⁸ In the words of Kristeva, “Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980], p. 66). Similar thoughts are expressed by Umberto Eco in Postcript to The Name of Rose. In Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Eco examines the relationship to “reality” as a complex game, as the subject of a unique agreement, different every time, between author and reader—but absolutely not as a “reflection” (Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge, MA, 1994).
⁹ See Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva.
¹⁰ Compagnon, Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, p. 106.
¹¹ Ibid., p. 13.
¹² V.S. Bibler, Ot naukoucheniia–k logike kul’tury: dva filosofskhikh vvedeniia v XXI vek (Moscow: Politizdat, 1991)
¹³ See. I.E. Berliand, “Uchebnaia deiatel’nost’ v shkole razvivaiushchego obucheniia.”
¹⁴ Ibid., p. 134.