SEELECTS – seizoen 2023-2024

Shamil Khairov (Glasgow University)

Abstract

What is a polithematic dictionary? How to dissect real life in a dictionary 'for all occasions'? What is 'a communicative fragment' and why is it so important when learning a foreign language? These are the main questions discussed in the lecture.

Admitting that for effective communication one should possess a repertoire of ready-to-use collocations and phrases the authors found a theoretical support in Boris Gasparov's concept of 'communicative fragment' - a linguistic unit which speakers are able to reproduce spontaneously as part of the process of language production, and which at the same time, can undergo an infinite variety of modifications and fusions.

The second part discusses treating expressivity and contractions like мухосранск or старпёры (старые пердуны) in Russian for All Occasions.

The ways the dictionary can be used in class, in independent language learning or in translation practices are considered in the conclusion

Biografie

Dr Shamil Khairov is Slavist by training (Ph.D. from St. Petersburg State University) and has taught Russian, Polish and Slovak languages in Britain, Ireland, Slovakia and other parts of Europe. He also speaks Bulgarian, Czech, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Slovene.

From 2005 he works as lecturer in Russian at the University of Glasgow. He is a designer and convener of the Russian for Social Scientists postgraduate programme. Shamil Khairov is a co-author (with J. Dunn) of Modern Russian Grammar (Routledge, 2009) and Russian For All Occasions. A Russian-English Dictionary of Collocations and Expressions (Routledge, 2019). His other publications deal with Slavonic lexicography, phraseology, and inter-cultural reception of different strata of Slavonic languages.

One of his most popular courses for undergraduate students is Russian 20^th Century Visual Culture: he delivered it as guest lecturer, partly or in full, in several European universities.

Shamil Khairov is a keen black-and-white photographer and has had solo exhibitions in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Belgium, Scotland and Russia.

Christian Voss (Humboldt University, Berlin)

Abstract

The lecture discusses the cultural contribution of the Albanian-speaking population in Tito’s Yugoslavia under the condition of its highly contradictory political treatment, oscillating between repression and discrimination in the periods 1944-1961 and 1981-1998, and overt promotion between 1966 and 1981. The biographies of “cultural defectors” like the poet Esad Mekuli, famous actors Behim Fehmiu and Faruk Begolli or sportsmen Fadil Vokrri clearly indicate that the riots in Kosovo in 1981 triggered the loss of Yugoslav loyalty among the Albanians. The limits of Yugoslav nation-building can also be shown in the representation of Albanians in Miroslav Krleža’s Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia, where Serbian nationalist intervention in 1981 insisted on the rewriting of the articles on Albania(ns) to reinstall the traditional hegemonic and paternalistic discourse.

Biografie

Christian Voss has been Head of the Department for South Slavic Studies at Humboldt University Berlin since 2006. He finished his PhD on Church Slavonic in 1996 and his habilitation on Slavic minorities in Greece in 2004 in Freiburg/Br. He has extensively published in the fields of sociolinguistics, contact linguistics and language policy in the Balkans. He is the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Center “Crossing Borders” in Berlin, editor of the series “Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe” and co-editor of several journals.

Petar Grubišić (Ghent University)

Abstract

The end of the Second World War was a catalyst for massive population transfers, which resulted in an unmixing of people on an unprecedented scale. This activity primarily targeted the numerous German populations that had settled in the border regions of Central and Eastern Europe. They were replaced with appropriate ethnic groups who were supposed to bring stability and the necessary workforce for regional development. Postwar population shifts thus combined ethnopolitical and socio-economic motives. The precise policies, practices and responses to the multiple population shifts taking place in post-war Europe, however, differed from case to case.

This talk will situate internal migration in Socialist Yugoslavia within the broader context of population transfers in Europe after the Second World War. It will particularly draw parallels with the cases of Poland (Recovered Territories) and Czechoslovakia (Former Sudetenland). The talk will discuss a number of Yugoslav particularities. It will address the interconnection of internal migration with agrarian reform, its primarily voluntary character, and how government classification of people on the move paid attention to previous political and migration processes.

Biografie

Petar Grubišić is a Ph.D. Researcher at Ghent University (Department of Languages and Cultures) since September 2021. He earned an MA in History (2013-2017) as well as an MA in Archaeology (2013-2018) at the University of Zagreb. His Ph.D. project is tentatively titled: “Internal Migration and Regional Development in Socialist Yugoslavia: Settlement from Dalmatia to Slavonia and Vojvodina Compared”. This research focuses on the state-guided colonisation from the region of Dalmatia to similarly multicultural regions of Slavonia and Vojvodina. It particularly looks into the policies of internal migration and its impact on the communities involved through a micro-historical comparative analysis of colonist settlements in Vojvodina and Slavonia.

Alexander Maxwell (Victoria University, Wellington)

Abstract

As the era of nationalism began, Slavs in the Habsburg Empire espoused Panslavism, which they imagined as a linguistic community arising because all Slavs spoke the same “Slavic language.” Efforts to promote this language, and the distinct literary traditions it encompassed, rested on the unstated assumption that a single “language” may contain multiple literary traditions, imagined as “dialectical” yet written in distinct orthographies. This paper examines this literary Panslavism as a form of nationalist politics. It suggests that literary Panslavism affected subsequent Czechoslovak and Yugoslav nationalism, both of which similarly posited a single language with multiple literary traditions.

Biografie

Alexander Maxwell is associate professor of history at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2003. He previously taught at the University of Wales Swansea, and the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of Choosing Slovakia, Patriots Against Fashion, and Everyday Nationalism in Hungary. He has published widely on nationalism theory and nationalism in East-Central Europe. He has guest edited themed issues of Nationalities Papers, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, the Journal of Nationalism, Memory, and Language Politics, German Studies Review, and Central Europe. He is currently working on Habsburg Panslavism.

Otto Boele (Universiteit Leiden)

Abstract

This paper explores the figure of the dissident-writer in recent Russian cinema and TV drama, specifically the way in which these productions appropriate and (de-)construct mythologies of the shestidesiatniki (men/women of the 1960s) making them subservient to current narratives on protest and political dissent in late-Putinist Russia (post 2012). The purpose is to show that by “domesticating” some of these former dissidents or otherwise ostracized authors (while excluding others), these films and TV series reimagine the 1960s as a seemingly romantic, but essentially anomalous time in which the literary forces of the Russian heartland (Aleksandr Vampilov, Nikolai Rubtsov) were undeservedly marginalized by the noisy avant-gardists in the capitals (Akhmadulina, Yevtushnko, Voznesensky). Focusing primarily on  Tainstvennaia strast’ (Furman, 2016), a Channel One production based on Vasily  Aksenov’s last novel, and Oblepikhovoe leto (Alfiorov, 2018), a biopic on the career of Aleksandr Vampilov, I hope to demonstrate how one of the most liberal periods of Russia’s twentieth-century history is being cinematically exploited for the purpose of alerting the viewer about “similar” phenomena in the present (“latte-sipping hipsters” in Moscow vs. the “glubinnyi  narod”, “Gayropa vs. “traditional values”etc.).

Biografie

Otto Boele obtained his MA degree in Russian at the University of Amsterdam and his PhD at the University of Groningen. He is now Associate Professor of Russian literature at the University of Leiden. He is the author of The North in Russian Romantic Literature (1996), Erotic Nihilism in Late Imperial Russia. The Case of Mikhail Artsybashev’s “Sanin” (2009) and a co-editor of Post-Soviet Nostalgia. Confronting the Empire’s Legacies (2019). Recently, he has published a number of articles on glasnost cinema and the collective memory of the 1990s.

Oleksandr Zabirko (Regensburg University)

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the war in Donbas in 2014, this border region has garnered global attention both in news coverage and on the battlefield. This spotlight has brought a wide array of issues concerning the Donbas's place on the cultural maps of Ukraine and Russia, which are ranging from the region’s entangled history to the complex relations between regional and national identity within its borders. The image of the Donbas as a contested, unsettled region has gained even more significance with the escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian war in February 2022.

In my presentation, I will delve into the construction of the Donbas's image in culture, literature, and cinema since the early 20th century, tracing its evolution and the narratives it has generated over time. However, my primary objective is to examine the Donbas within the context of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. In this conflict, the region serves as both a Russian casus belli and a central element of contemporary Russian imperial imagery, where the Donbas plays a prominent role as the heartland of "Novorossiya" or "New Russia" – a territorial concept that lays claim to southeastern Ukraine as part of the Russian state. Ultimately, I will investigate the strategies employed by contemporary Ukrainian authors to counter Russian imperial claims and reimagine the Donbas as both a Ukrainian and European region.

Biografie

Oleksandr Zabirko completed his studies in Literature and Linguistics at the University of Luhansk (Ukraine) and the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). He earned his PhD in Slavic Literatures and Cultures from the University of Münster and is currently affiliated with the Slavic Department at the University of Regensburg. His primary research interests encompass literary models of spatial and political order, contemporary literatures from Russia and Ukraine, and fantastic literature as a whole. Notable among his recent publications are "Literary Forms of Geopolitics: The Modeling of Spatial and Political Order in Contemporary Russian and Ukrainian Literature" (in German, 2021) and "Figurations of the East" (in German, co-edited, 2022).

Florian Wandl (University of Zürich)

Abstract

Research on the system of pronominal clitics so far has mostly focused on the major Slavic languages. Studies addressing issues regarding these clitics in minor Slavic languages or dialects are rare. In this talk, I will discuss the system of pronominal clitics in the Slovenian dialect spoken in in the Resia valley in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northern Italy. This dialect has been in intense language contact with Romance (mostly Friulian and standard Italian) for several centuries which has left an imprint also on pronominal clitics. After having introduced the inventory of pronominal clitics in Resian, the place of these clitics in the clause is established. The emerging system of Resian pronominal clitics is then discussed against the background of Slavic and Romance clitic systems.

Biografie

Florian Wandl is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Zürich. He has a background in historical linguistics and philology, and is also interested in linguistic typology. His main research focus boils down to the question of how the Slavic languages came to be the way they are.