1. From the history of the written word
The culture to which we belong shows a considerable interest in the preservation of the memories of the past. This interest had been stated directly for the first time by Herodotus. It should be noted that his “History” is the most voluminous unified text, created by the Greeks in the classical epoch. The beginning of it says explicitly:
“These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feuds.” (Herodotus, I, 1. Translated by G. Rawlinson)
Since then the Greeks and the inheritors of their culture had made considerable efforts in order to continue the deed of Herodotus. It could be said, that they had developed a whole technology of the reminiscence. In the beginning they had written down what had happened, but also what might happen, creating thus the forms of the word, which we nowadays call history and literature.
“It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen - what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to the personages. The particular is - for example - what Alcibiades did or suffered” (Aristotle, Poetics, 9. Translated by S.H. Butcher).
They had added to that the records of the circumstances and the conditions in which things could happen and even of “what are” these things, which had created the scientific and the philosophical genres of the word.
Later on simultaneously with the production of new and new records antiquity had guided its concerns to the preservation of the available texts (and thus appeared the libraries and the philology) and – what is even more respectable – antiquity had guided its cares to make the access to them easier. Thanks to that, in the first centuries CE the traditional scroll had been replaced by the codex, because the codex had a very important advantage – it had been most suitable to unfold. In the Middle Ages the large square letters /majusculus/ by and by had been replaced by the small rounded letters /minusculus/; so the lines in each page could be much more in number and the writing down – much faster. In the Renaissance the paper became thinner and the separate volumes gathered much more text. The publishing of books became mundane; the market dealing with books and the total prints had increased. However, all that had been no more than an approach to the ancient way of propagation of the written word. The main problem, connected with the prolonged handwork on each separate copy of the book remained unsolved. It is evident, that the discovery of the print press led really to a great change: suddenly it had appeared, that the books could be many in number and cheap. Nobody had to copy with months one and the same book; nobody had to dictate to copyists, but the books could be propagated in a few hours in an unseen total print. In the next 500 years nothing considerable had happened again: the development relied – as before – on a paper of greater quality and on smaller letters.
The invention of Gutenberg has led to an unknown and incredible by that time propagation of the documents of the past. The memories of the deeds and the thoughts of the ancestors begot much more and much richer libraries. In the private houses appeared special places for the books: that was something, which had been of a great rarity in the times before. The need of the inconvenient and expensive travelling of the individual to the educational center had vanished: not only because the centers increased in number, but also because man already had enough means for his association to the word inheritance. Then appeared another problem that had been familiar to the antiquity, but that became serious only in the 15-th century, when the book wealth suddenly increased. At once appeared enormous quantities of new texts of a very low value. These were books of less importance: books-ephemera, deprived of the spring of their own culture; books-weeds, that had grown up thanks to the deed of Gutenberg, but they had strived to replace the old valuable texts, because of which the printing press itself had been invented. Their existence became a hindrance to the good education, and it did not disappear. On the contrary, by and by it became much more difficult to overcome it. How to help the one, who wishes to get really acquainted with one’s own culture – that means, to be “reminded” of what is essential of it – and that’s why he relies on the accessibility of the written word, but precisely because of this accessibility he gets quite another thing? The market and the libraries had been full of very quickly made similarities of literature; of very superficial retellings and compilations of the good historical texts (very often these were retellings of other retellings and compilations); also, very prolonged references of strictly made but aimless collections of facts; also, writings, containing senseless statements and untested or simply fancied evidences; and at last, clumsy, short-witted or incomprehensible sequences of words which claimed to be philosophy. The memory of what really had happened never reached these people, lost in the book jungle: instead of that their brains had been overloaded by words without clear content, and from them remained only several phrases, used with an ease. The education got by these texts resembled to the furniture of a house, the owners of which can afford themselves only cheap furniture from the common shops. When these houses are new, they suppress with the lack of taste of their keepers and with their overburdeness; but the bad furniture is very soon worn out and a feeling of blunt, negligence and poverty appears at once.
Let see what happened after that. Now, 500 years after Gutenberg we possess another device of preservation of the word – it is the computer record. The first and the most obvious result of that is the sharp increase of the volume of the information which is in the physical space around us. The whole ancient Greek literature from Homer to Proclus could be gathered in one CD – this object with its package is smaller, compared with the smallest edition of Herodotus, that could be produced with the means of the traditional editing. Thanks to the CD records all of the well-known literary monuments, belonging to all earth civilizations, could be placed in a modest library shelf. But there is something more. The virtual library of Internet gives freedom to the reader and deprives him from the duty even to bye books, recorded on CD. Today everyone could read Herodotus in the original language, in which he had written or translations of it on the screen of one’s personal computer without possessing no record whatsoever of the text. All the reader needs is an Internet connection that could be acquired by everyone. The free access to the whole word inheritance of the world is already secured.
2. The problem of the erudition
All this happened very quickly and as if astonishing easily – from the point of view of the one who remembers how many efforts and means it has taken to get one or another book. It seems, that everyone, who today wishes to use the written monuments of the past is no longer in isolation. One even does not need the knowledge of different languages, which has been inevitable until late and took a lot of time, because today almost all important texts are translated into English. That’s the way in which the modern man is released from the fragmentary and ideological selection of the texts, forced by the milieu where one got one’s education before. At the same time, the problem of every free and mundane society, where the monopoly on the creation of the word does not exist, remains the same. Who will explain what is useful to be read or whether it is useful to read anything at all? Does it make no difference in what way exactly the people in the XXI century will get their education?
From the point of view of the philologist (I use this word in the broadest sense; something like “specialist in word education’) the advantage of the present-day situation is in the fact, that it secures good conditions for a conscious choice.
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