ABSTRACT
IRINA GRIGOREVNA NEUPOKOYEVA (1917-77) WAS a Russian scholar who mainly worked on Romantic literature. In her dissertation she dealt with the “principles” of Romanticism through an analysis of the work of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The choice of this poet within the context of Soviet literary scholarship was not unexpected, for Shelley-as opposed to Byron according to Marx and Engels-was a rebel “enshrined for homage in the political culture of Stalinism.” i One of the main studies on Shelley by Neupokoyeva was, therefore, aptly entitled P. B. Shelli: k voprosu ob esteticheskikh printsipakh revolyutsionnogo romantizma (1956; P. B. Shelley: On the Aesthetic Principles of Revolutionary Romanticism). The fact that Neupokoeyeva’s research was carried out during the late Stalin period should not be overlooked, for it explains her disagreements with both Western scholars (or scholars working in the Western academia) and comparative literature, a discipline which at that moment was considered a dangerous pursuit as a result of its so-called aesthetic-and bourgeoisoriented values (for her critique of Western comparative literature, see Neupokoyeva 1963). In Comparative Literature Today , René Wellek recalled how papers by Russian scholars-including Neupokoyeva’s-were “wholesale condemnations of all that we were doing” (1965: 331), whereas Harry Levin, in his presidential address at the ACLA meeting at Indiana University, described Neupokoyeva as a “polemical lady” who had not given up her “commitment to nationalism or, at any rate, to Pan-Slavism, anti-Westernism, and propaganda.” ii
Neupokoyeva became a member of the Communist Party in 1957. At the Gorki Institute of World Literature, her initial research on English Romanticism progressively expanded to European Romanticism by focusing on the problems of literary interactions and relationships. iii Her interest in methodological issues as derived from the empirical
research on Romanticism simultaneously led to one of the most ambitious projects at the Gorki Institute, namely, the multi-volume Istorii vsemirnoj literatury (1983-89; History of World Literature). Neupokoyeva’s contribution materialized in a series of preliminary publications on the problems posed by a history of world literature, a genre which she considered biased due to its zapadnoevropocentrizm (Western-Eurocentrism). A comprehensive synthesis of her main arguments on world literature may be found in her 1976 book, Istorija vsemirnoj literatury. Problemy sistemnogo i sravnitel’nogo analiza (History of World Literature: Problems of Systemic and Comparative Analysis), whereas in her 1969 article “The Comparative Aspects in the ’History of World Literature’,” she discussed the methodological principles of the Gorki Institute’s Istorii .
