Studying the biography of the writer by foreign students: problems and solutions

Kozlov Aleksei Evgen'evich ORCID: 0000-0003-0016-9546 PhD in Philology Associate Professor; Institute of Philology and Media Communications; Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University 28 Vilyuyskaya str., Novosibirsk, Novosibirsk region, 630126, Russia alexey-kozlof@rambler.ru

Introduction

The study of a writer's biography plays a key role in humanitarian education, reminding of universal meanings and allowing to overcome the dichotomy of "writer" and "text". Despite the strict demarcation of the author and the hero, which has become the basic concept of philological science, one can state not only the implicit, but often also the explicit presence of personality in the studies of formalists and structuralists. The institutional turn to biography seems symptomatic, which indicates a gradual movement from abstract structures to anthropologically significant meanings ^[1-3]. In other words, literary theory constantly balances between two limits: the concept of language or discourse as an autonomous system of signs and meanings and speech associated with anthropological and ultimately aesthetic activities ^[4].

As Yang Rui notes in his research, a unified approach to understanding the phenomenon of biography has not yet been developed, and the methodology of teaching literature still lacks a variety of methods and approaches for studying this material ^[5].

According to A.L. Valevsky, "biography as a genre of literature is a "textual representation" in the language of this culture of the phenomenon of personal individuality" ^[6]. A similar approach is proposed by A.I. Reitblat, pointing out a common scientific error: "Often, not only in everyday life, but also in scientific literature, a biography refers to a person's life (at least a number of key events of this life), but the dictionary meaning of this word is "biography"" ^{[7, p. 178]}. This approach shifts the focus of view from factography to different types of narrative. At the same time, when talking about "textual representation," it is necessary to define the pragmatics and functional significance of a biography. According to Reitblat, biography involves the socialization of a person through his acquaintance with the narrative of the life of a real (existing) person. <...> The biography allows the reader to feel that individual life (and his too) has a meaning, and this meaning is social, in the connection of the individual with society" ^{[7, p. 178]}. In other words, paraphrasing B.V. Dubin's theses, we can assert that biography, along with the standards of interpretation of classical texts of world literature, allows "overcoming the erosion of the normative order" ^{[8, p. 18]}.

The main part

In methodological practice, the study of biography determines the presupposition of reading, influencing the perception of the actual work of art ^[9]. The "canonical" image, which is often fixed at the primary level of studying personality, helps to "standardize" the perception of personality, supports the existence of the so-called "myth of literature" (stable conventional ideas about the activities of writers). However, in the future, this image interferes with the reader's individual dialogue with the book, and must be replaced by an exceptional, but not ideal, personality image. Here we see a key discrepancy between the methodology of school education and the study of the writer's biography in the course "Russian literature" for foreign students ^{[10, 11]}. If school students master biographical material concentrically, moving from an extremely accurate factual image to a "sfumato portrait" ^[12], then international students are deprived of this opportunity. Thus, the purpose of this article is to describe methods and approaches aimed at studying the writer's biography in an audience of foreign readers. However, in order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to determine the specifics of working with biography in the general methodology of studying literature.

Despite the many successful examples where a conversation about the life of a writer, presented monographically or in the form of a talk-lecture, fascinated students and opened up new facets of interpretation, in some cases, biography classes follow a fairly stable pattern: students write down the years of life, key dates associated with the creation of works. Thus, students and teachers, with varying degrees of reflection, follow a centuries-old tradition, filling out the Curriculum Vitae with wonderful people in their own way ^[12]. "How often the biography of a writer in school studies is likened to a thoroughly filled out questionnaire in which the artist's life is traced from birth to death and the attention of schoolchildren is equally fixed on the main and secondary! But you can't see the forest behind the trees.… In a multitude of superficially illuminated facts, the artist's unique and multifaceted personality disappears" [13: 5], – these words, with which I.E. Kaplan opens his book, have in many ways not lost their relevance even today.

Based on a modern empirical base: data from school leavers' surveys, undergraduate interns' questionnaires, and the results of "entrance testing" ^[14], a number of problems can be identified when studying the writer's biography:

• The study of a writer's biography follows a monotonous pattern or pattern. The variety of life paths is reduced to a standardized list of dates and events.;

• there are no systemic connections in the study of literary figures (knowledge of literary history is limited by the nominal ability to identify a writer in accordance with a literary trend);
• there is no knowledge of the specifics of literary life; literary life is not considered as a generative environment;
• The figures of writers exist as if in an airless space (the study of figures lacks consistency, students do not correlate the texts under consideration with social, historical and ideological contexts, they do not perceive writers as a social environment).

Without reflection and the participation of analytics in the study of biography, one of the ineffective, although well-established methods of teaching literature is being implemented. In particular, T. Kurdyumova writes about this: "a dry and concise presentation of the facts is, of course, undesirable: after all, it is this meeting with the writer that should prepare the emotional perception of the literary text" ^{[15, p. 13]}. The researcher identifies peculiar phases of students' mastering of biographical material, showing that each of them involves the use of methodological techniques, without which the personality of the writer loses its individual features, dissolving into a number of other equally schematically or dotted silhouettes. The standard of studying a writer's biography, in our opinion, is the formation of such ideas about the personality of a writer, which are based on unique characterological patterns. At the same time, it remains important to present the writer as a witness of a particular historical and cultural epoch, a member of a salon, circle, or other literary or institutional association (often associated with a particular publication or publishing house).

Following V.G. Marantsman, we believe that the study of "the biography of a writer becomes a necessary element of the correct comprehension of a literary text" ^{[16, p. 5]}. A teacher or teacher is often likened to a biographer: by combining numerous, complementary sources, he introduces students to the sum of other people's experiences. V.N. Drobot wrote about this, in particular: "A literature teacher should be concerned not only with the detailed specification of schoolchildren's ideas about the personality of a writer, but also with reflections on a person's life, identifying ideological, moral and aesthetic overtones in the facts of biography, so studying it cannot be reduced to a chronologically ordered illustration" ^{[17, p. 15]}. The task of the addressees in this regard is to carefully "read" their proposed biography. Marantzman expresses a similar idea, pointing out that the story of life and work each time involves 1) searching for a certain narrative prism (or point of view); 2) choosing the material; 3) creating a "biographical key" ^{[16, p. 110]}. Since the concept of a "biographical key" is not specified in the methodological literature, we will focus on this in more detail.

By the biographical key, we mean such a matrix of ideas about a writer, which includes both typological personality traits (his behavior in a certain literary environment) and individual (gestures and actions that distinguish a particular writer from others). The main function of the biographical key is to help in reading and interpreting a work (not only by attracting biographical circumstances to the text, but also vice versa by rejecting, changing, and recombining them). From the point of view of the methodology of teaching literature, the "form" and "material" of this key can vary: "understanding the writer's attitude to the events of the time, to the people, to history, to the true value of the human personality..." ^{[16, p. 112]}.

The book "Theory and Methods of teaching literature" describes the main types of classes for studying the biography of a writer: lesson-lecture, independent reports by schoolchildren, textbook work, correspondence excursions, concert lessons, panorama lessons. As the authors of the manual note, in the study of biography, "... it is important to raise problematic issues, work on a plan, and use texts. To remove the textbook gloss, the idea of the infallibility of the writer's personality is no less important than to find an interesting aspect for students, to understand not only the greatness of the writer, but also the complexity of the formation of personality and talent" ^[5].

In our practice, we have come across the fact that mastering major monographic topics often achieves the greatest effect when certain facts from the writer's life begin to act as a trigger. The fire at sea experienced by Turgenev, the Omsk prison and the years of hard labor of Dostoevsky, the Caucasian and Sevastopol impressions of Tolstoy significantly bring the student reader closer to the studied figure: a unique, often traumatic experience is perceived as a constituent property of interpretation. "A conversation with a writer will be immeasurably deeper, more exciting and direct," writes V.G. Marantsman, "if the student gets acquainted with the inner world of the artist in the lessons, understands the uniqueness of his voice. It is difficult to talk to a complete stranger, so studying the biography and creative path of a writer turns out to be a natural and necessary support when analyzing a work of art" ^{[16, p. 55]}. A similar thought is expressed by V.N. Drobot: "students' understanding of the connection of the writer's personality with the work under study, its artistic concept, which is inevitably reflected in the choice of theme, ideological content, problematics, system of images, composition, style, visual and expressive means, helps them to see the author's attitude to the reality depicted by him in a system of large and to make small generalizations, to understand his value position, to consider the work in the context of the social, political, and aesthetic life of the epoch" ^{[17, p. 101]}.

Thus, the chronicle-oriented presentation of the writer's biography, despite its thoroughness, cannot be called an alternative method.

In our opinion, the somewhat outdated repetition of the basics of the biography of prominent people should be replaced by the technique of literary portrait, which requires creative activity from the teacher. Philologist, referring to epistolary and memoir texts (it is best to use the books of the series "The Writer in the memoirs of contemporaries" and "The Life of wonderful people") He can create original lectures and conversations about years or decades, episodes and vivid events in the lives of the writers being studied, corresponding to the characteristics of the audience. Let us refer to the methodological experience of T. Kurdyumova: "Many genres of biographical narrative are familiar to us and are fixed by practice. The choice of each of them is determined by a host of circumstances: the possibilities of age, the level of preparation of students, and the time that can be devoted to the story of life and creativity" ^{[16, p. 7]}. In the audience of foreign students, an essay, a novel, a novella - all these artistic genres can be used as a basis for telling about the personality of a writer, special attention should be paid to the lexical organization of the fragments studied.

The technique of comparative descriptions or comparative literary portraits is no less productive. In generalizing, in our opinion, it would make sense to talk not only about some typological properties of the created works, but also about the typology in the behavior of the studied figures of the literary process. In some cases, analogies can be productive: Pushkin and Stendhal (models of role behavior); Gogol and Balzac (author's reflection, attitude to literary work, writer as Prometheus and as Sisyphus), Tolstoy and Flaubert (two antagonists of world literature), Whitman and Mayakovsky (poet-tribune, glorifying en masse). These parallels are especially productive when studying Russian literature in an audience of trainee students from European universities, but Chinese students often show interest in comparative studies of writers from different literatures. Of course, most of the analogies between Russian writers and authors of Chinese literature look far-fetched: Chinese culture has taken on too autonomous and peculiar a path of development in comparison with European culture. The most successful example is the comparison of Confucius and Tolstoy as the author of books for reading, with the errors that inevitably arise here ^[17].

Thus, the observations made on the material of school lessons can be extended to classes in Russian literature among foreign readers, especially since modern methods and approaches make it possible to significantly diversify this process.

We base our experience of teaching the biography of a writer on the author's methodology, which has been tested at various times in the classrooms of philology students. Initially, the methodology was designed for future teachers of Russian language and literature, and later it was modified for students and masters of the Philological department (2019-2023) to master. The implementation of the final phase of the project was related to the testing of the developed methods and approaches in the audience of foreign students at Xinjiang University (2023-2024). Let's present one of the possible trajectories of studying the biography of a writer in the aspect we are interested in, based on the movement from the general, represented by the global literary process, to the particular.

When starting to study the literature, we turn to big data and visualization tools – such capabilities are embedded in Google Ngram Viewer and Ruscorpora ^[18]. Ngram Viewer is a Google Books machine analysis system that allows you to build graphs based on the quantitative calculation of mentions of certain proper names, which makes it possible to tell about the writer in terms of reader demand ^[18]. For example, the query "Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov" in the Russian-language corpus (from 1890 to 1990) indicates that Pushkin enjoys the greatest citation in the Russian language environment, while the names of Dostoevsky and Chekhov are approximately at the same citation level. The same query, repeated in the English literature corpus, will convincingly show that Chekhov and Dostoevsky occupy the leading positions. The introduction of such an illustration will not take much time, but it will allow us to visually (quantitatively) show the interest of modern and historical readers in the writers of their time.

The timeline service (timetoast) has a similar representativeness. The intuitive interface allows you to place historical, cultural, and literary events on a common time axis, which allows you to demonstrate both the synchronicity of certain processes and their independence.

Another Google Maps Engine service allows you to create routes using the geometrics system, which is necessary when talking about the travels of Russian writers ^[19]. It is enough to recreate the route of I.A. Goncharov to show how difficult and adventurous the journey that the author of the Pallas Frigate undertook was (emphasizing the writer's dissimilarity with his hero Oblomov) or to restore the toposes mentioned in M. Gorky's chronicle in order to see the "eternal passion" for travel.

At the first stage, the work should be completed by accessing a bio-bibliographic dictionary, which is organized according to the principle of identifying keywords in a large array of information texts. We suggest that students compare biobibliography with a kind of census, where the key issue is the selection of figures from the resource of literary and cultural memory by an abstract canon of values, which is a collection of names and texts associated with these names. Familiarization with this source allows foreign students to see how peculiar the "reading map" is. For example, tasks related to the search for women writers of the 19th century arouse a great response from the audience, since this material is not traditionally updated. Acquaintance with A.P. Bunina, N.D. Khvoshchinskaya, A.Ya. Panaeva, L.Ya. Charskaya fills this gap, allowing us to talk about female silhouettes in the history of literature and culture. At the next stage of the work, we can suggest reading the diary and autobiographical prose of A.Ya. Panaeva, S.V. Kovalevskaya, A.G. Dostoevskaya – demonstrating the diversity of literary and universal strategies.

So, we are starting to move from big data corpuses to texts and contexts. For example, as part of the development of a monographic topic on the biography of a writer, students can be invited to use a simple contextual search on websites. lit-info.ru or Google Books. A search by the writer's last name allows you to quickly collect a corpus of statements by contemporaries about him. Next, you can give the task to systematize this information by periods, topics, and finally, intonation and grades – students can do this work remotely, and the result will be a reconstruction of the writer's perception in the memoirs of critics and contemporaries. For example, when studying the works of N.V. Gogol, we offer students to work with fragments of the "Literary Memoirs" of I.I. Panaev and I.S. Turgenev, and when referring to the biography of F.M. Dostoevsky– the memoirs of his wife A.G. Dostoevskaya. In each specific case, we are not interested in factography or positivist reconstruction, but in the formation of a myth surrounding a particular personality.

Of course, working with students from China has its own specifics. This concerns the general horizon of knowledge about Russia and the USSR, formed, among other things, by textbooks in the Vostok series. It is no coincidence, therefore, that V.V. Mayakovsky, N.A. Ostrovsky, and M.A. Sholokhov become cult figures for the Chinese reader. The teacher's task is to show the diversity of assessments and the specifics of the lifetime and posthumous perception of these people. Thus, when talking about the work of V.V. Mayakovsky, students learn to perceive his personality through the prism of the rhetorical tropes "hyperbole", "oxymoron" and "occasionalism", which brings the personality and the text closer. Special attention is paid to Mayakovsky's essay "How to make poetry?", which combines an avant–garde attempt to create a new production discourse and the archaic need to "make a deal with death" - in the center of the essay is a poem on Yesenin's death, allegedly written as an antidote to his posthumous poems. In the light of Mayakovsky's own death, this essay takes on the opposite meaning.

Even more diverse may be the work with the biography of N.A. Ostrovsky, which, according to students, surpasses the content of his work. Turning to the personality of the author of the novel "How steel was Tempered", we emphasize that he, like Sholokhov, is an autodidact, self–taught, created by the modern era. At the same time, the genre of guided tours gives unusual results: when students see what is on Ostrovsky's bookshelves next to the novels of J. Verne and M. Twain are worth books by G. Flaubert, G. de Maupassant, M. Proust. It is no coincidence that, describing his visit to the USSR, A. Zhid implicitly compares Ostrovsky with the author of the intellectual novel In Search of Lost Time:

I can't talk about Ostrovsky without feeling the deepest respect. If we hadn't been in the USSR, I would have said, "This is a saint." Religion has not created a more beautiful face. Here is a clear proof that it is not only religion that gives birth to saints. A fervent conviction is enough, without any hope of future reward. Nothing but the satisfaction of having fulfilled a harsh duty.

As a result of the accident, Ostrovsky became blind and completely paralyzed. Deprived of contact with the outside world and mundanity, Ostrovsky's soul seemed to have developed upward.

<…>

But he asks me to stay, I feel like he wants to talk more. He will continue to talk after we leave; for him, talking means dictating. This was the way he could write a book about his life. He's dictating another one now. He works from morning to evening, long after midnight, dictating endlessly ^{[20, p. 103]}.

The fragment that we offer students can significantly correct the initial idea of the relationship between the author and the hero, contrast the brutal fanatic of the revolutionary idea Pavel Korchagin with his terminally ill creator. All this should change the idea of Ostrovsky and the meaning of his words: "Life must be lived in such a way that it does not excruciatingly hurt for years spent aimlessly" ^{[21, p. 202]}, to see the tragedy of a single human existence behind the slogan.

Finally, we include the study of the Sholokhov phenomenon in the broader context of the struggle for real and symbolic capital. As part of the lesson on the writer's biography, we turn to the discussion about the authorship of The Quiet Don, consider existing arguments from biographical contradictions to factography (the acquisition of the writer's manuscripts), from stylistic analysis to stylometry (a visual demonstration of stylistic correlations ^[22]). Next, we study Sholokhov's Nobel Speech with its specific metaphor and discuss the reasons for the writer's "lull".

The conversation about Sholokhov becomes a kind of bridge to the history of other Nobel laureates. Speaking about the tragedy of Boris Pasternak, we focus on the events of the persecution of the 1950s and on the poem of the same name, showing the proximity of the lyrical hero to the author. The next step is to consider the novel "Doctor Zhivago", which exists in the range from "The Student Years of Wilhelm Meister" to the writings of L.Ya. Charskaya – students conclude how the biography of an "ordinary man" becomes a hagiography in which the key role is played not by his fate, but by the "notebook of St. George's writings" ^[23].

The end of the conversation about the biography of the writer in the XX century is an appeal to the Nobel Lecture by I. Brodsky. Students get acquainted with fragments of this vivid rhetorical statement and its paradoxes. On the one hand, Brodsky's lecture on politics, about the tragedy in which "the choir is dying" ^{[24, p. 201]}. The poet himself speaks on behalf of his deceased contemporaries. On the other hand, the lecture is devoted to discourse, the matter of language, "a thing more ancient, inevitable, and durable than any form of social organization" ^{[24, p. 209]}. Thus, the Nobel Lecture touches on both sides of the interpretation and study of the writer's biography, simultaneously becoming a manifesto of "speech disappearance" and a work of fiction existing between Auden's verlibre and Brodsky himself and a philosophical essay.

Conclusions

So, the study of the writer's biography forms the presupposition of the reader's perception. The main sources used by the teacher in preparation for the lesson on the biography of a writer are close to the sources of a professional biographer: letters, memoirs, diaries, etc. The combination of traditional text analysis with digital methods of analyzing the literary process and cultural life of the era is productive in modern methodology. Along with the monographic study of the writer's personality, it is methodologically justified to study individual stages or episodes, the story of which can be presented in a lively and direct form of a literary portrait. Studying the biography of a writer presupposes a constant expansion of the context, it is necessary to talk about the contemporaries of writers and poets, to describe the literary environment and literary life in order to create the impression of a continuous process, rather than an airless environment. In addition, it must be remembered that any biography of a writer is the biography of all his readers. Thus, when talking about Mayakovsky, Kharms, Chukovsky, Zamyatin, Platonov, Sholokhov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov and Brodsky, readers become involved in the lives of these people, who are united not by geography or political views, but by language as the main instrument of culture.

Many students who come to Russia for internships are dominated by persistent stereotypes associated with both Modern and Modern times. The teacher's goal is to develop critical thinking skills during one semester or academic year. At the final stage of mastering the biography within the framework of the literature course, we invite students to write an essay, and the leitmotif of these final works is a statement about the diversity, greatness and tragedy of the fate of an artist who, even against his will, cannot sing in unison and walk in a common formation.