Matenadaran, the Institute of Ancient Manuscripts (Yerevan, Armenia), together with the Institute of World Literature of Russian Academy of Sciences and the School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, RANEPA, is organizing a conference on “Text, Commentary and Interpretation: Problems of Commenting on Ancient and Medieval Texts.” The conference will be held at Matenadaran in October 31 – November 2, 2023, and will be dedicated to the memory of our friend and colleague, the Russian philologist and poet Grigory Dashevsky.
For a commentator, the main object of study is a text. He tries to explain its smallest details and at the same time interpret the text as a whole. To understand the text, to penetrate into the author’s intent is his main task. How does a philologist come to interpret a text? What methods does he use? How do the different disciplines, textual criticism and paleography, linguistics, history, literary criticism and philosophy, interact, each contributing to the interpretation of a text? What questions does a philologist face when interpreting an individual passage? How does he come to understand the intent of a work as a whole? How does the understanding of a particular passage affect the interpretation of the work as a whole, and to what extent is it dependent on it? Our meeting is going to discuss these and other questions related to the interpretation and commentary of ancient and medieval texts. We look forward to papers on all aspects of commentary on ancient and medieval texts – from the interpretation of individual passages to theoretical problems and the history of commentary in antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Please send titles and abstracts of papers by 15 September to Gohar Muradyan, [email protected], Boris Nikolsky, [email protected] or Nikolai Grintser, [email protected].