From Antinomies to Frontiers: Poetics of Early Byzantine Literature and Beyond

The article offers an analysis of Sergei Sergeevich Averintsev's monograph “Poetics of Early Byzantine Literature” (1977) as a distinct conception of the frontier: not as a cultural borderland, but as a productive mode of articulating culture's inner experience. This book is examined as an autonomous theoretical object possessing its own poetics. The key thesis of the article is that Averintsev's work, anomalous for its time, achieved a double breakthrough: into the field of Byzantine studies, then marginal in Soviet scholarship, and at the methodological level by offering a perspective on the literary process that resonated both with Russian mystical symbolism, essential to Averintsev's project, and with the then-emerging poststructuralism and postcolonialism. The article emphasizes that Averintsev's approach, rooted in the antinomic tradition of Russian symbolism (Vyach. Ivanov, P. Florensky), anticipated many tenets of Western poststructuralism (Derrida's deconstruction of binary oppositions) and postcolonial studies (the mechanisms through which the “provincial” culturally asserts itself against the “metropolis”), long before these approaches gained widespread recognition. The transitional nature of early Byzantine culture is understood in the book, from a cultural-semiotic perspective, as a tense zone of demarcation and synthesis between the ancient and Christian worlds. At the same time, various cultural-semiotic phenomena, from institutional manifestations in early Byzantium to the specific structure of the poetic-rhetorical cosmos, are shown to participate in the configuration of an internal frontier, which transforms ancient and biblical norms into life-shaping paradigms. A close reading reveals the sophisticated ways in which Averintsev moves from the conceptual structures of Russian symbolism toward productive deconstruction, while retaining the concepts of antinomianism and the dialogic nature of culture. The article demonstrates that Averintsev's subsequent revision of his theses toward greater historical specificity does not negate the explosive force of the original project, which remains a manifesto of a personalist approach in which philological precision is coupled with philosophical boldness, and postcolonial and poststructuralist concerns are combined with an understanding of the internal structures of Christian mysticism and asceticism that cannot be reduced to Western models.