“What do I look like from there?” Outsidedness and aesthetic seeing in Andrei Bitov’s early works
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the evolving practice of “outsidedness” and “aesthetic seeing” in Andrei Bitov’s early prose, reading the author alongside Mikhail Bakhtin’s works from the 1920s. In Pushkin House, Bitov’s best-known work, the author–hero relationship develops on a meta-literary plane, but in his first published works, the self-reflecting protagonists are denied separation from the figure of author and thus seek outside viewpoints within the texts themselves. Close readings of Bitov’s story “Penelope” and his second novella, Such a Long Childhood, detail the author’s changing strategies towards his heroes, culminating in a striking model of aesthetic seeing that the protagonist Leva performs in Pushkin House. While the majority of scholarship reading Bitov through Bakhtin focuses on Pushkin House, this article argues that the meta-literary play that characterizes the novel came about only after Bitov, in the first half-decade of his career, thoroughly worked through concepts central to Bakhtin’s aesthetic theory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".