Philology as an Experience of Reading

The article is an attempt to understand and evaluate Sergey Bocharov’s critical activities and heritage from the point of view of some contemporary problems in human and philological studies. What was and comparatively is quite original in Bocharov’s articles and books, it is, I believe, his approach to a literary text, beginning with his early little book about Tolstoy’s «War and Peace», where this scholar tried to combine his research with his concrete experience of a «common reader». This approach, it seems, allowed him to avoid the two extremes in recent literary studies, namely, abstract theoretism, on one hand, and abstract positivism, on the other. In this sense, Bocharov’s heritage may help us today to return to some «pre-scientific», but scholarly forms of textual analysis in philology based on the reading experience itself.