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Questions of collective identity and nationhood dominate the memory debate in both the high and popular cultures of postsocialist Russia, Poland and Ukraine. Often the ‘Soviet’ and ‘Russian’ identity are reconstructed as identical; others remember the Soviet regime as an anonymous supranational ‘Empire’, in which both Russian and non-Russian national cultures were destroyed. At the heart of this ‘empire talk’ is a series of questions pivoting on the opposition between constructed ‘ethnic’ and ‘imperial’ identities. Did ethnic Russians constitute the core group who implemented the Soviet Terror, e.g. the mass murders of the Poles in Katyn and the Ukrainians in the Holodomor? Or were Russians themselves victims of a faceless totalitarianism? The papers in this volume explore the divergent and conflicting ways in which the Soviet regime is remembered and re-imagined in contemporary Russian, Polish and Ukrainian cinema and media.
Pp. 351-399, "The Jewish Question", deal with Solovyov's position vis-a-vis problems related to the presence of Jews in Russia, in particular his attitudes toward Judaism, the discussion on the rights of Jews in the Empire, and antisemitism. As a person who knew Hebrew and read the Jewish Scriptures and Talmud, thus being a specialist in Judaism unique in Russia at the time, Solovyov struggled against reductionist and pejorative views on Jews and Judaism, and defended the Talmud against slander by Rohling and other anti-Jewish scholars. Solovyov regarded the Jews as the key to the future world-unifying theocracy that he visualized. Although he shared some anti-Jewish cliches, Solovyov maintained that conflict with Jews resulted from a misunderstanding of their social role in Russia, and he was committed to improvement of their conditions. He claimed that the roots of the "Jewish question" lay in the Christian rather than the Jewish way of life and values.
From his earliest publications onwards Pushkin has been the source of inspiration, and imitation, for other writers, as well as composers, painters and, more recently, film-makers. This book seeks to explore the different relationship his followers have sought with the ‘founding father’ of modern Russian culture. Pushkin’s Secret: Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin takes a variety of approaches. Some contributors to the collection trace the way Pushkin’s works provided the template for the characters and stories which were produced in the first decades after his untimely death in 1837. Others reveal the impact the myths surrounding Pushkin’s tragic life were used (and abuse...
Contents: Keir ELAM: Catastrophic mistakes: Beckett, Havel, the end. Wouter OUDEMANS: En attendant. Mary BRYDEN: Balzac to Beckett via God(eau/ot). Catharina WULF: At the crossroads of desire and creativity: a critical approach of Samuel Beckett's Television Plays "Ghost Trio," ..".but the Clouds..." and "Nacht und Traume." Rod SHARKEY: Singing in the last ditch: Beckett's Irish Rebel Songs. Ralph HEYNDELS: Tenace trace toujours trop de sens deja la. Beckett, Adorno et la modernite. Giuseppina RESTIVO: The genesis of Beckett's "ENDGAME" traced in a 1950 holograph. Serge MEITINGER: La spirale de lecriture, D'"IGITUR" AU DERNIER BECKETT. Lance ST. JOHN BUTLER: Two darks: A Solution to the problem of Beckett's Bilingualism.
“[A] superb study of Russian cultural memory makes all too clear, ghosts of the unburied dead affect literature, art, public life and mental health too.” —The Economist After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Union dismantled the enormous system of terror and torture that he had created. But there has never been any Russian ban on former party functionaries, nor any external authority to dispense justice. Memorials to the Soviet victims are inadequate, and their families have received no significant compensation. This book’s premise is that late Soviet and post-Soviet culture, haunted by its past, has produced a unique set of memorial practices. More than twenty years after the co...
In this volume of SSLP the contributions of Dutch scholars working in the field of Slavic literature and culture to the 14th International Congress of Slavists (Ohrid, Macedonia, September 10–16, 2008) are brought together. All of them except one (on the Polish poet Cyprian Norwid’s story Stigma), deal with Russian literature from the end of the 18th century up to recent years. A variety of topics is treated, such as the feminization of Russian literature, the reflection of poetry in prose, anthropological and religious dimensions of literature, the specifics of theme and of plot, Russian modernism and postmodernism, and the status of language, from different methodological angles: gender studies, structural analysis, philosophical-contextual, postcolonial. Works of such Russian authors as Ippolit Bogdanovich, Ivan Turgenev, Pavel Mel’nikov-Pecherskii, Ignatii Potapenko, Iurii Trifonov, Timur Kibirov and Viktor Pelevin are discussed in detail. This volume is of interest for a scholarly audience interested in Russian literature of the last 250 years.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. Rather than accept society’s ‘preferred metaphors’ about beauty at face value, the authors in this volume question the fact that beauty can also surprise us in the least foreseeable setting, at the most unexpected moment and in the most surprising or unsettling ways. Their work underscores beauty’s ephemeral, transitory, fleeting and at times confounding nature. The way beauty reveals itself to us, they point out, may challenge or even contradict established conventions, norms and values about aesthetics. The emergence of unconventional metaphors and analogies about beauty in these chapters calls on us to pay attent...
Inspired by popular, feminist, subaltern, and ecocritical geopolitics, Geopolitics and Culture: Narrating Eastern European and Eurasian Worlds presents new research of culture in the Eastern European context. This volume highlights the symbolic production of power, which, although located outside political institutions, engenders geopolitical boundaries and defines cultural margins. Analyzing multilingual materials such as blockbuster films, digital visuals, blogs and discussion forums, print fiction and TV series, museum exhibitions, and everyday cultural practice, this book argues for the importance of studying the links between geopolitical narratives, global and regional hierarchies, and popular cultural production. The contributors advance a decolonizing methodology, which challenges the cultural and geopolitical hierarchies inside Eastern Europe and Eurasia while also casting a critical eye on the geopolitical hierarchies of global Anglophone media cultures.
This work is a critical evaluation of the concepts of convention and innovation as applied in the study of changing literary values, hierarchies and canons. Two approaches are analyzed: (1) the linking of convention and the subject's awareness of convention, and (2) systems theory. The merits of both approaches are discussed and an attempt is made to combine them and to regard systems of literary communication primarily as systems of conventions. Specific cases of changing conventions and innovation are illustrated with examples from the field of versification (Rimbaud), reception studies (Puskin, Goethe, George Eliot), the dichotomy of forgetting/remembering (Nietzsche, Proust), avant-garde, the American dream, and popular genres assimilated in Postmodernism.