Academic CentreAnna Auzāne
Benjamin and Zweig: Chaos, collage, system?
Keywords: Benjamin, Zweig, fragments, collecting, chaos, collage, system.
The intention of the current paper is to explore Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin’s (1892–1940) essays, especially “Unpacking My Library” (1931), in which the theorist focuses on collections, and Stefan Zweig’s (1881–1942) story “Buchmendel” / “Mendel the Book-Dealer” (1929). W. B. S. Benjamin’s views on bibliophilia, the relationship of the narrative with the fragment and other similar questions linked to the philosophy of literature are as scattered as the rare items collected by the obsessed bookworm he mentions, however, it is possible to compare them with S. Zweig’s vivid story about the bookkeeper and librarian Mendel, who memorizes “every plant, every infusoria and every star in the ever-changing and restless cosmos of the world of books”.
Vladimir Nabokov’s (1899–1977) and John Robert Fowles’s (1926–2005) real and symbolic collections of butterflies, Umberto Eco’s (1932–2016) “The Infinity of Lists” and other examples serve as Ariadne’s thread that leads to the main motivation for collecting, which could be the owner’s or heir’s desire, but not solely that. Likewise, collecting can be prompted by apparent or real self-absorption, excitement, and also by old age (although children also tend to collect, of course). The hoarding individual often faces confusion, isolates himself/herself, and gradually becomes lonely. Most often, the psychological portrait of this person is, as follows: an eccentric man for the reasons mentioned above, often a typical bachelor, because he does not need to account to anyone for time and money spent outside the family. You can also notice that he has been collecting stamps, stickers, cards, tickets, different [fruit] labels, pins, magnets, comic books, vinyl records, toys or dolls, coins, rocks, seashells, herbaria (etc.) since childhood. Collecting also perfectly helps to cope with various memories or traumas; it can be compensation for failures in other spheres of life. When a collector passes away, his relatives can keep the collection intact or donate/sell it all.
The works of both authors – W. B. S. Benjamin and S. Zweig – and their fragments, viewed through the prism of literature and philosophy, allow us to get to know the world of collectors in German-speaking countries and create the image of a collector as a peculiar person whose fate is “drowning” in his/her books or at least a chance to “grow into them”.
Raivis Bičevskis
Philosopher’s Library – from the Temple of Artemis to the Internet
Keywords: The Earth Library, philosophy, J. g. Hamann, M. Heidegger, E. Jünger.
Being on the library premises, we are in a place of very old ideas and practices. The existence of libraries in human history dates back thousands of years, and many elements in modern libraries – despite innovations and techniques – are the same as in ancient times. However, the background of this ancient and venerable past cannot completely obscure the fact that the appearance of libraries of the ancient past, such as the Library of Alexandria or the Library of Pergamum, took place as seen by many contemporaries and later commentators. Where the library appears, the most important thing has already happened. The library is an attempt to deal with what happened, to explain it, to gather evidence of it. A library is a kind of therapeutic practice, the instruments of which are books, the qualitative collection of the collection and the interpretation spectrum of books. The teachers of the Alexandria school, who gathered in the walls of the Alexandria Museum (the Temple of the Muse) and in the aisles of the Great and Small Libraries, were, in this perspective, only the heirs of the great beginnings who stood on the shoulders of the giants. However, the library as a cultural practice can be relativized even more: the library as a form of cultural memory, in which it is preserved and passed on, is one of the most fragile form of human history against the background of Earth’s history, even if it is stretched to the era of the ancient Sumerian cities, is a short time lag. Philosophers’ libraries – home libraries, sometimes chaotic, sometimes carefully selected, work libraries for one particular stage, lost and donated libraries, valuable libraries and rarely used libraries – these are and will remain the libraries against the backdrop of the Earth’s Library – this library is the swamps, forests and deserts of the Earth, which holds evidence from Earth’s history; without this background, the philosopher is not a philosopher, and only then does what is read and read in human libraries gain the necessary proportions, acquiring the proper weight. Without the presence of the Earth’s Library, human libraries become a self-referential carnival, the enchanted infinite library of Borges’s Babel, from which the aisle mirrors reflecting an infinite number of shelves cannot be removed. And yet – there are those who are taught by libraries, can get to the Library of the Earth, get to the beginning, come to a word that is worth expressing and that is worth preserving for some relative period of time.
Raivis Bičevskis
“... just a fragment centered on the infinite”. German Romantic philosophy of fragment and today
Keywords: romanticism, fragment, the infinite, irony, reality.
The fragment as a genre of texts experienced a real boom in the era of Romanticism. The reason for this is the cumulative growth of knowledge, scientific discoveries and the development of philosophy in the age of Enlightenment: although Romanticism programmatically presents itself as an antithesis to the Enlightenment and its criticism, yet Romanticism itself is formed in the new opacity created by the Enlightenment – the diversity and vastness of the world can no longer be grasped by closed and complete mental constructions and systems of philosophy. Along with Romanticism, they are replaced by open systems, the search for new literary and philosophical means of description. Reality itself is an endless process that can only be matched by a “romantic text” – a text that is itself a work in progress, by its very nature multi-layered, containing contradictions and ambiguities, unfinished and reflexive like reality itself. A fragment is a genre of text corresponding to the infinity of reality: therein, the contradiction flashes for a moment as a single, bright thought illuminating the depths of reality, but never fully expressing and reaching them. Simultaneously, the fragment demonstrates the limitation of our cognitive ability, and yet – also its connection with the whole that asserts itself in the fragment and is only present in it for a moment.
Jana Dreimane
Pastor, librarian and bibliophile Gustavs Šaurums
Keywords: Gustavs Šaurums, bibliophile, religious and cultural history.
The article is dedicated to one of the most prominent and versatile personalities of the library sector in Latvia – the pastor and bibliophile Gustavs Šaurums (1883–1952). From 1934 to 1938, he managed the Riga City Library, the oldest library in Latvia (today – part of the Academic Library of the University of Latvia), during which time he started the identification and bibliography of Latvian ancient printed works stored at the foreign libraries. As a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia (for 38 years, from 1914 to 1952), he was also the editor of several religious press publications, an active researcher and populariser of Latvian religious and cultural history. In 1914, his first book “Iekšējā misija” (“Inner Mission”), was published in Riga, in which he explained the inner mission as voluntary Christian charity and education work to various groups of society and emphasized its importance in strengthening the church and Christian faith. Being the pastor of the Umurga and Ārciems parishes from 1920 to 1934, he also started publishing himself: he compiled and published not only parish calendars and reports, but also his own books (nine in total). The most notable among them is Šaurums’s monograph “Tērbatas Universitāte, 1632–1932” (University of Dorpat, 1632–1932), as it contains the first comprehensive overview of the university’s history over three hundred years. In 1933, Šaurums also begun the compilation, publication and distribution of the religious literature series “Rakstu Avots” (“Source of Writings”) in order to limit the spread of “harmful”, valueless literature. The series was financed by annual payments from subscribers, which ensured the publication of 12 small print works (books or pictures) per year. Although the series did not gain as much popularity as hoped, it nevertheless was a visible and stable segment in the literature of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia.
Šaurums continued his work as a pastor even during the years of Soviet and Nazi occupation. The study shows that his attitude towards non-democratic political regimes was conformist: loyalty was shown, apparently with the hope that it would provide better conditions for the church’s survival in difficult times.
Šaurums’s private library is considered particularly valuable, – he collected Latvian and Baltic German literature from his early youth, paying particular attention to obtaining periodicals. According to the testimonies of contemporaries, Šaurums’s library contained more than 20,000 books, calendars, sets of magazines and newspapers. After the owner’s demise, they ended up in the collections of the National Library of Latvia and the Academic Library of the University of Latvia.
Jana Dreimane
Philosopher and writer in the inner exile: Insight into Ženija Sūna-Peņģerote’s diary
Keywords: Ženija Sūna-Peņģerote, inner exile, writer, Soviet occupation.
The manuscript collection of the National Library of Latvia includes the personal collection of the philosopher, literate and librarian Ženija Sūna-Peņģerote (RXA 236). It contains 96 storage units: mainly plays (one-act plays), essays on notable Latvian and foreign cultural workers, drafts of works, correspondence and one diary written by the philosopher from 1 September 1952 to 26 October 1954. Having given up permanent work in the state institution of Soviet-occupied Latvia, she focused entirely on cultural history research and writing, clearly aware that it would not be possible to publish her works. The living conditions of Ž. Sūna-Peņģerote can be described as “inner exile”, – physically remaining in the homeland, she separated herself from the political, economic, social and cultural transformations taking place there. Analysing Ž. Sūna-Peņģerote’s diary entries, as well as her other documents, an answer is sought to the question – what were the gains and losses of philosopher, choosing the path of an independent writer during the first decade of Soviet occupation in Latvia? Her biography is a small, but bright fragment in a series of Latvian life stories, reflecting the efforts of individuals to preserve personal independence under the conditions of the communist regime.
Ilze Garda
Vienesse librarian Robert Musil and the phenomenon of unread books
Keywords: Robert Musil, librarian, undread books.
Robert Musil (06.11.1880–15.04.1942) was an Austrian writer, playwright and essayist who spent the last 20 years of his life writing his best-known novel which was destined to remain unfinished, “The Man Without Qualities” (“Mann ohne Eigenschaften”). Few people know that Robert Musil was an intern and librarian at the Technical University of Vienna from 1911 to 1914. It is this experience that is referred to in one of the chapters of the novel “The Man Without Qualities”, describing the secret of a good librarian being able to navigate a collection of more than three million books, because he never reads anything more than the title and the table of contents, since the person who becomes immersed into the contents is lost as a librarian.
Linda Gediņa
Unity of the elements of the form in a work of art – topography of abstraction
Thesis:
Every work of art has a topography of temporality which, guiding perception, gives it a unity of elements. In this sense, the essence of a work of art is poetry (Dichtung (Heidegger)).
Keywords: work of art, temporality of perception, triangulation, form, abstraction.
The work of art is a triangulative, temporal process – not: either
(1) understood and analysed from the position of the creator, since the work of art itself, after all, has an intrinsic temporality and a topography guiding the gaze (perception), or (2) understood and analysed from the position of the observer, simply because the work and the artist are historical-temporal in the sense of plot, while the principles of the work’s construction and the idea of beauty are timeless.
The principles that can be found in a work of art are also temporal and “the work of art is a child of its time”. Attempts to revive the principles of a work of art, i.e., the notion of beauty in a foreign time, are like monkey imitations without any inner meaning.
Art is not static – a painting is also characterised by [perceptual] temporality, as is poetry. This means that a work of art is the whole of its pictorial elements in form, not the sum. What constitutes a work of art is a triangulative process. Triangulatively hermeneutical in the sense that a work of art is a work of art when the artist [imaginatively] knows that someone will look at it as a work of art, and at him as an artist, and therefore sees in the work a search for the ornamental-temporal ordering or the topography (art) that unifies the elements, rather than some other significance (such as pragmatics).
However, there is no universal understanding of beauty which, as an adapted standard, would determine the subordinate [universal] essence of a work of art – classical Greek beauty, for example. “The work of art is the child of its time and often the mother of our feelings. Thus, in every cultural epoch, a peculiar art arises which cannot be reproduced,” is how Kandinsky begins his collection of notes, “On the Spiritual in Art” (1911/1912) (Kandinsky, W. Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Insbesondere in der Malerei. München: R. Piper & Co., Verlag, 1912, S. 3).
Heidegger reiterates: the essence of a work of art is poetry (Dichtung). That is to say, a structure that allows something existing to appear [growing] out of itself by virtue of the order given to/seen in it. The Greek words used by the philosopher to describe this peculiarity of any work of art – painting, sculpture, poetry – are: poiēsis is physis is a-alētheia. Klee writes in his “confession of the artist”: “Art does not express the visible, but makes it visible. [...] The elements of form in printmaking are: dots, linear, planar and spatial energies. [...] A topographical plan makes it possible to imagine a little journey into a land of better understanding.” (Klee, P. “Schöpferische Konfession”. In: Schriften, Rezensionen und Aufsätze. Köln: DuMont Buchverlag, 1976). The work of the artist is similar to the work of God in creating the world.
Linda Gediņa
Library and Reading. Hermeneutic-phenomenological analisys of reading
Motto:
“Art does not express (wiedergeben) the visible, but makes it visible.” (Paul Klee “Creative Confession”)
“We know only what we perceive. Everything we experience is, in the end, only our perception of what has happened.” (Henry David Thoreau “Walden”)
“It is not what you look at that counts; it is what you see.” (Matt Haig “Midnight Library”)
Keywords: Arrangement of form (Gestaltung), topography, hermeneutics, logos as Sammlung = structured collections of something.
Hermeneutically-phenomenologically understanding the question “what is reading?” – the Author’s work is to be read and the Author provides the possibility of following the path shown by the Author in order to get to the [ontological] field of play chosen and created by the Author, where, in turn, not the Author’s statements, descriptions of beings appear, but the reader is given the possibility of understanding this world that the Author has created for him – he is provided with a space, a field of play for understanding, where to play with the possibilities of meanings offered by language – thinking his own thoughts, he does not yield so easily to games and play. The Author offers a new language, and a great deal of freedom and participatory choice – reading even allows one to escape the mundane, or in Hugo Ball’s words, “escape out of time”. In this new spatiality of the world: the trees grow out of the letters, at the same time someone asks for someone’s hand, and Mr. Schulze rides on the tram yawning (See: Dada’s Manifestoes, sound poems); but it [the Author’s work] must always be in harmony with the idea [of the Author], must fulfil the demands of the idea and must not want anything more, the Author must not impose his will – he may only show what he sees himself, creating a perspective, opening, or at least wanting to open a window on the same apparent view he sees.
The ability to read enables one to discover and understand the perspective [in the imagination] and experience of others, which are no less true than one’s own – even in everyday and colloquial language, even, for example, when one says that one “reads” a table of analysis results, “to read” means: to understand the intended meaning, to be able to do something with the language of meanings used by the Author.
Ineta Kivle
Fragment of life in the library: The interweaving of personality and fragments
Keywords: personality, fragment, structuralism, library, philosophy.
The introductory article of the book examines the personalities of libraries, the insights of the philosophy of personalism and the philosophical understanding of a fragment, trying to connect three concepts: personality, library, fragment.
Personality is an individuality that is always in constant internal change. At the beginning of the 20th century, the philosophers of personalism were connected by the principle of the action of substances and the active, and self-sufficient and willing beginning of man. The first Latvian academic philosopher Jēkabs Osis was influenced by the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. A personality, like a monad, is a living, functioning being that imagines itself, as well as the universe and the world from its own point of view. The views of Emmanuel Mounier, the founder of French personalism, were also influenced by Leibniz’s philosophy. Mounier developed ‘integral personalism’, which combines the three values of personality: being, thinking and acting. These characteristics also refer to library personalities in the world and in Latvia.
In opposition to philosophy of personalism, French postmodern philosophers (Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes) write about the structural man. A structural human divides reality into fragments and then puts them back together, but when the fragments are put back together, a completely different object is formed than it was originally. A new reality is a modelled reality in which the human sometimes even remains in the status of a fragment. A fragment is a part of a whole, and it can be an article in a volume, a book on a library shelf, and even a person’s life in the world scene.
Venta Kocere
Ojārs Zanders – Library Years (1968–2000)
Keywords: Ojārs Zanders, literary theory, library, research of publishing.
Ojārs Zanders commenced his career in the Fundamental Library of the Academy of Sciences of the Latvian SSR, the Latvian Academic Library (LAB, today – the University of Latvia Academic Library) in 1968. It was the initiative of the former head of the Misiņš Library, bibliographer Kārlis Egle, to entrust O. Zanders with the materials collected by the bibliophile Jānis Misiņš and himself.
O. Zanders worked as the head of the library’s Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books for 25 years, and his time of work in the library spanned 32 years. The first task was to organize the accumulated and uninventorized materials, to introduce into the collections the manuscripts of the writers who had been exiled to Siberia and whose works were inaccessible to readers for political reasons.
The great achievement, which must be particularly acknowledged, is that O. Zanders enriched the library collections with the manuscripts of literary scholar Alfrēds Goba, writer Kārlis Kraujiņš, poet Antons Bārda and other distinctive materials of cultural history. He was overseeing than 30 000 rare, ancient and unique books, starting with manuscript books dating back to the end of the 13th century, incunabula, paleotypes, the first printed works of Riga up to the latest publications. O. Zanders has created numerous exhibitions dedicated to the themes related to the history and culture of publishing, literature, history of sciences; he led tours and presented reports on publishing, Latvian and foreign literature, participated with reports on publishing and culture in Riga at international scientific conferences in Latvia, Germany, Poland, Russia, Estonia and Norway.
O. Zanders authored many publications and books. In 2000, his monograph dedicated to Riga’s 800th anniversary “Senās Rīgas grāmatniecība un kultūra Hanzas pilsētu kopsakarā (13.–17. gs.)” –“Book Publishing and Culture of Ancient Riga in Context of the Hanseatic Cities (13th–17th Centuries)” was published, and received the main prize in the book art competition.
Rihards Kūlis
Immanuel Kant, the library and Western rationalism
Keywords: Kant, library, western rationalism, culture form, universalism.
The library and book trade as a field of work and a space of intellectual existence occupy a prominent place in Kant’s life. In addition to his teaching work at the University of Königsberg, Kant worked for several years as assistant librarian at Königsberg Palace. For a time, Kant lived in the house of the book publisher I. F. Kanter, which had become a prominent gathering place for intellectuals and at the same time a kind of book repository with library features. Here, one listened to the latest ideas, learned about the latest books and exchanged them. For Kant, as for most Western intellectuals, the library was an integral part of life and work.
However, if we perceive the library as a specifically developed and sustained form of Western culture, Kant’s relationship to the library can be seen in a much broader and more fundamental sense. In this case, the features of librarism permeate the whole of Kant’s philosophy.
Kant’s philosophy can be seen as a library that is as orderly and rational as possible, in which every shelf or drawer has its own and essentially indispensable place. Kant’s philosophy is not a burst of aphorisms or a repository of clever thoughts, but a collection of carefully worked out and argued insights. Kant, on the basis of Western rationality, builds a grand philosophical system in which, like a well-organised and centuries-old library, one could search for and find answers to questions of human relevance.
One might think that, in the course of historical development, a relationship (a mutual influence) has been realised between the library as a specific and universal form of Western cultural organisation and Western philosophy as a whole. Similar structures can be seen in the organisation of intellectual life, philosophy and the library.
A defining feature of Western rationalism: to see the principles of the world’s structure and existence from the origins, the first principles. The world can only be understood and interpreted by grasping it as a whole. The world as a whole is a grand universal library. Kant’s philosophy, too, in its very essence, claims to be such a grand and infinitely expandable universal library. It is founded, as Kant intended, on unchanging fundamental principles.
In this article, the author tries to outline essentially only two themes:
1) Kant, Western rationalism and the attempt of classical philosophy and the library to grasp the world comprehensively and as a whole. In this vision, the author talks about Kant’s librarism. It would not be impossible to speak of the librarism of Hegel or Schelling, for example. But certainly not Pascal’s librarianship;
2) The infinity of the library (universal library) and the finitude of human life; the thing-in-itself as the limit mark of the human world and the longing for the infinite in Kant’s philosophy.
Biblioteca universalis as a spiritual phenomenon has collapsed. Its place has been taken by vast repositories of information, which, of course, play an outstanding role in the development of technical civilisation.
However, I would like to think that modern society would also benefit, if it were able to combine the idea of Kantian universalism, Biblioteca universalis, and information repositories in its vision and understanding of the world.
Inta Līsmane
From Part to Whole, from Whole to Part
Keywords: term as a functional unit, dictionaries, modules, medical terms, language acquisition and use.
Medical terminology is the terminology and vocabulary used in the medical science. Not only the formation of the term using various resources and methods, models, formants, but also the understanding of the functional meaning becomes essential, because the principle of purposeful communication is important for the terminology itself and in the field of its use.
To make the decision, it is crucial for the clinician and student-resident to define the clinical problem accurately, and he/she must be aware that the clinical problem could be comprehensive, complex, as it includes not only the general knowledge, but also specific issues about the clinical decision making and actions.
Terms have a more complex semantic structure than resources of the general language, as they are built using specific methods and models (appellativization, separation, formation of metaphors and abbreviations). Identification of the all necessary terms and multi-word terms in medical databases is not always successful.
Beata Paškeviča
Livonian pastor Friedrich Bernhard Blaufuß, his private library, reading experience and engagement as a book provider
Keywords: Friedrich Bernhard Blaufuß, private libraries of the 18th century, pietism, St. James church in Riga, Moravian church.
Friedrich Bernhard Blaufuß (1697–1756) is the author of the first history of the Latvian people, written in Latvian and intended for the Latvian reader, with the short title Livonian Histories. Recently, several more of his essays have been found, enabling us to learn more both about the personality of Blaufuß and his literary heritage. The rediscovered texts include a poem, whose title, translated into English, would read, as follows: “Livonian Monument to the glory of God’s work which resonated in the year of 1738 among Latvian and Estonian peasants in the Duchy of Livonia when they truly converted and changed their soulful hearts and lives and it became known to all across the entire world, due to deceitful untruth and false reports an un-partisan eyewitness reveals the truth in verse in the year of 1753”. The poem is dedicated to the awakening that occurred in Vidzeme under the influence of Herrnhut missionaries. He is also the translator of several hymns and possibly the author or translator of other essays stored in memory institutions. The Rarities Department of the University of Latvia Academic Library holds the only surviving copy of the printed auction catalogue for Blaufuß’ Library, which serves as one of the testimonies to the dissemination of early Enlightenment and Pietism literature in Europe, its presence in Vidzeme, as well as the horizon of Vidzeme literary figures’ religious interests and the body of knowledge available to educated Vidzeme readers in the first half of the 18th century. The catalogue lists 749 items, which implies a relatively large private library in Riga. The catalogue represents a very wide range of Pietism literature, from the works of Johann Arndt and Philipp Jacob Spener to representatives of radical Pietism, such as, for example, Gottfried Arnold. The catalogue also includes reference books and periodicals. Friedrich Bernhard Blaufuß was also a book distributor for the Unity of Brethren in Vidzeme. This fact was one of the main points of the accusation levelled against him in the 1742 and 1743 trials of the Herrnhutians.
Daina Šulca
Fragments of text on the device screen
Keywords: internet, text, device, screen, fragment, writing style, language.
In Latvia, 84% of the population of Latvia use the Internet – all you need is a connection, a phone, a tablet or a computer. New information is available 24 hours a day, anywhere in the world. Searching and obtaining information in the Internet environment is becoming decisive, it has “moved” from printed information sources to electronic ones.
Text appears on the device’s screen only as fragments of something larger and more comprehensive. How important is a text fragment, so that a user of a lot of information continues to get acquainted with everything that follows, which is also readable only in fragments?
On the screen, the eyes scan the text – first images, if there are any, then headings, subheadings, conclusion. The text on the Internet is not read in one go – unlike in a book. It rather resembles skimming for keywords, title, terms.
From fragment to fragment.
The peculiarity of Internet reading has also determined changes in the writing style and language of texts in the electronic environment – sentences have become shorter, more attention is paid to the inclusion of graphic elements in the text – diagrams, tables, numbers, pictures. One of the most interesting features of the Internet language is that when searching for information, the results can be found in several languages, and it is possible to understand what it is about in any of them. The language of the Internet is a language in which the whole world participates.
This new language of fragments is characterized by a precise message and simplicity. After reading the first lines, everything seems to be clear, what is the story about?
The language of the Internet is, by its nature, a digital form of
the literary language – the language of fragments. It is a new communicative environment that offers different possibilities of communication and perception. A fragment of text on the screen acts as a permanent whole, and when creating texts that will be read on devices, the language has become different. Bad is everything that cannot be understood,
can be understood only with difficulty, or can be understood incorrectly.
What are the laws of Internet language, how does it differ from literary language? How to build a language passage and why should reading time be taken into account? What is the one-comma-one-paragraph rule? What are the essential elements that make up a piece of language? Why is the jagged edge so important and what is an anchor in web text? These questions have arisen in the development of the language of the Internet, and we cannot ignore them.
The Internet has already changed the world and altered us, but the big transformations are yet to come.
Velga Vēvere
Outworks – prefaces as philosophical fragments: S. Kierkegaard and F. W. Nietzsche
Keywords: prefaces, outworks, paratexts, S. Kierkegaard. F. W. Nietzsche.
The role of prefaces is significant – they introduce a theme of the work, explain authorial intentions, orientate potential readers, or, on the contrary, they do not introduce, rather – confuse and disorientate the prospective readers. In philosophy and literary criticism, the prefaces and their theoretical (or non-theoretical) framework has been tackled by such thinkers as G. W. F. Hegel, S. Kierkegaard, W. F. Nietzsche, G. Genette, and J. Derrida. Although the prefaces in most cases act as a hermeneutical instrument for the text interpretation, there are cases when the prefaces do not relate to the text either thematically, or conceptually, as it can be seen in the S. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings. In this case, a tension between the preface and the text is being created, it makes the reader to re-evaluate his/her reading habits and contemplate his/her personal existential situation in the world and ask questions: Where to start – with the text or the preface? To read the text or the preface alone as an independent fragment that is situated outside the basic narration? G. Genette names that kind of prefaces the paratexts, whereas J. Derrida – the outworks. Moreover – the gap between the preface and the text can create a feeling of an existential shock. However, a special attention has to be paid to prefaces that have been published independently, that is, collections of prefaces without subsequent texts. These texts are uninvolved and unattached philosophical fragments. This article analyses two such collections of free-standing prefaces: S. Kierkegaard’s “Prefaces. Light reading for people in various estates according to time and opportunity” (published under a pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene), and F. W. Nietzsche’s “Five prefaces to unwritten works”. The questions being answered in the article are the following: “Is it possible to view these prefaces just as unrealized authorial plans?” “Do these prefaces, by any chance, illuminate different (fragmented) narrative strategies that enable a fresh look at the respective authors’ works, in general?”