The category of taste, central for European aesthetics and
criticism in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries had been half
forgotten in modern literary theory until not long ago. The
characteristic attitude is expressed in Northrop Frye's influential
This sort of thing cannot be
part of any systematic study &ellipsis;. The history of taste is no
more a part of the structure of criticism than the Huxley-Wilberforce
debate is a part of the structure of biological science.
The
revival of the interest in taste was initiated by the works of
F. Haskell and P. Bourdieu. The latter, particularly in his
The proposed paper is a part of an ongoing project centered around
the idea of a systematic reconstruction of an individual's taste (and
not of a group taste as in Bourdieu). In the first part of my paper I
will outline tentative theoretical notions for the approach I am
trying to develop. The analysis presupposes that there exist
underlying (deep
) taste structures which determine the
surface manifestation of the taste: particular aesthethic reactions,
choices, preferences and hierarchies. As with the language, it is
necessary to separate between the individual and collective taste
utterances, between taste synchrony and taste diachrony of an
individual or a community. It is also possible to introduce a typology
of tastes: inclusive and exclusive tastes, more or less hierarchized
tastes, etc.
The second part of the paper is an attempt to describe a
particular fragment of Pu&shachek;kin's taste: the system of literary
evaluative judgments as represented in Pu&shachek;kin's marginalia to
Batju&shachek;kov's intertaste
for this phenomenon). Thus,
Pu&shachek;kin's notes on margins of Batju&shachek;kov's