Giorgio Ziffer (Università degli studi di Udine)
The Sermon on Law and Grace is one of the most celebrated literary works of Kievan literature and, more generally, of the Church Slavic literature of Slavia Christiana. Written in the first half of the 11th century, it is traditionally attributed to Metropolitan Hilarion, the first Kievan metropolitan of East Slavic origin.
Almost all scholarship devoted to this work has been limited to the study of only one textual witness, namely, the famous Synodal manuscript n° 591 (preserved in the Moscow Historical Museum), which is considered the sole representant of the first (or complete) redaction. In contrast with the aforementioned critical tendency, it will be argued that the rest of the manuscript tradition, which consists of no fewer than 54 mss., is of paramount importance for the history of the work’s tradition as well as for the puzzles of textual criticism. Two main features of the manuscript tradition will be discussed, i.e. contamination and interpolation; in addition a new stemmatic interpretation for the Synodal manuscript will be proposed.
The second part of this talk will focus on (1) the question of the work’s composition—which in the past several decades has often been defined as a cluster of originally separate and autonomous textual units that were later put together, perhaps by the author himself—and (2) the question of the work’s literary and spiritual meaning.
Andreas Schönle (Queen Mary University of London)
This talk will explore representations of ruins in the poetry of Alexander Kushner, the films of Kira Muratova, and the art of Komar and Melamid. It will highlight how within the context of a neo-modernist revival in the Soviet Union, these artists elaborated a kind of countercultural temporality through an exploration of transitional spaces and tropes of contingency, which all articulate the absence of any teleological transcendence. The ruin is here primarily deployed as a trope that disrupts the categorial differences that underpin the Soviet notion of progress. This alternative sense of history also underpins the articulation of a new disbelieving ethic that accepts contradictions.
Kris van Heuckelom (KU Leuven)
Op basis van een corpus van een zestigtal films wordt de representatie van Poolse emigrantenpersonages in de Europese cinema in kaart gebracht, van de vroege geluidsfilm tot de meest recente periode. Bijzondere aandacht gaat daarbij naar de verschillende stadia die deze beeldvorming doormaakt en de ambivalente wisselwerking tussen filmische representatie en (geo)politieke ontwikkelingen langs de Europese oost-westas (vóór, tijdens en na de Koude Oorlog). Terwijl filmproducties uit het interbellum veelal gekenmerkt worden door anachronistische, sterk in de 19de eeuw gewortelde voorstellingen (van, bijvoorbeeld, wereldvreemde en romantisch gestemde ballingen van aristocratische komaf), worden Poolse emigrantenpersonages na WO II meestal opgevoerd in een contextueel vacuüm (zonder de minste verwijzing naar het oost-westdualisme van de Koude Oorlog). Het is pas vanaf de “Poolse crisis” van begin jaren tachtig – de opkomst van Solidarność en de daaropvolgende invoering van de staat van beleg – dat de politieke actualiteit en de geopolitieke realiteit van een verdeeld Europa nadrukkelijk op de voorgrond treden en een significante weerslag hebben op de filmische representatie van Poolse emigrantenpersonages. De periode na 1989 laat op zijn beurt (naast een exponentiële toename van films over Poolse arbeidsmigratie) een markante kwalitatieve verschuiving zien in de instrumentalisering van deze Poolse karakters: van “impotente”, hopeloos gemarginaliseerde “Oostblokkers” evolueren ze nu tot viriele probleemoplossers die het fysiek en moreel gedegenereerde Westen uit het slop (moeten) komen halen. De films uit de meest recente periode (na Polens toetreding tot de Europese Unie) laten tenslotte een toenemende “normalisering” van Poolse emigrantenpersonages zien. Naast een chronologisch overzicht van het behandelde onderzoekscorpus worden in deze lezing tevens enkele concepten en narratieve procedés besproken die nader licht werpen op de aangehaalde verschuivingen, zoals oriëntalisering, (restoratieve) nostalgie en (r)emasculatie.
Thomas Grob (University of Basel)
The last years’ literary discourses in Russia witness the re-emergence of interest in political issues, reflected in various creative forms fluctuating between fiction and essays. The ensuing effects include, apart from reconditioning and diversification of inter-genre relations, the increasingly complicated, if not disturbing blurring of traditional political categories such as ‘right‘ or ‘left‘ as well as of notions such as ‘national‘ and ‘imperial‘ in the respective literary texts. These latter political stances are sometimes manifested by their advocates in a very emphatic or polemic way, and often come close together. The talk intends to review this ostensibly new nationalist-imperialist tendency in the perspective of recent imperial studies and space models presented in the texts of this ‘movement‘ which is far more heterogeneous than it might seem at a glance. The stress will be made on the representations of Chechnya as a highly relevant literary topos of the last decade.
Tanja Petrović (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana)
In this lecture, Tanja Petrović analyzes parodic texts from the Serbian fake news portal Njuz.net, shedding light on the dynamics of their production, consumption, and appropriations of parody in the post-socialist, pre-EU-accession society of Serbia. The increasing presence and importance of parodic media genres and the embracement of parody as a viable way to interpret and deal with social and political reality are explained in terms of both Serbia’s historical trajectory and its media landscape, as well as of the global neoliberal condition. Njuz.net’s parody is capable of shedding critical light simultaneously on various subjects of political, public, and social life. These parodic texts communicate with multiple audiences and enable identifications and detachments on several levels – a fact that makes the effects of parody difficult to judge. Dilemmas that Njuz.net’s authors face concerning their social activism are, Petrović argues, a symptom of wider social anxieties and structural adversities caused by the fact that “the enemy” is difficult to identify and to detach clearly from in the modern societies. Because of the ways labor, consumption, and everyday practices are organized, we all inevitably contribute to the maintenance and well-being of that enemy. Seen in this light, parody is not only a form of social criticism, but also a self-reflective practice.
Vladimir Feshchenko (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow)
This paper analyzes the transfer trajectories of the concept of ‘concept’ in 20th century arts and humanities.
Russian philosophy of language introduced the term ‘concept’ in the 1920s, differentiating it from the more logical ‘notion’ and the more vague ‘image’. Sergej Askol’dov, the pioneer of concept studies in Russia, on the one hand built further on the critique of German Begriffstudien (mainly E. Husserl and G. Frege) and on the other hand drew largely on Medieval conceptualism represented by D. Scott’s and P. Abelard’s philosophy. However, Askol’dov’s studies were put into oblivion in Russia for almost 70 years (for ideological reasons mainly). It is only in the 1990s that Russian linguistics saw the rebirth of conceptual studies, which is now the most dominant trend in Russian philology.
In the meantime, the ‘concept’ as an analytical instrument and art object emerged in Moscow conceptualism of the 1960-1980s. What were the different ways of intracultural transfer of the concept of ‘concept’ in 20th century Soviet and Russian arts and humanities? How was it transferred culturally across the German-French-English-Russian terminological traditions? Some of the answers to these questions will be presented in this paper.
Boris Chersonskij
Boris Chersonskij (1950) is afkomstig uit een Russisch-joodse artsenfamilie uit Odessa. Net als zijn moeder, vader en grootvader studeerde hij er geneeskunde. Hij specialiseerde zich in psychiatrie en psychologie. Sinds 1999 is hij voorzitter van de vakgroep klinische psychologie van de Nationale Universiteit van Odessa. Hij begon al vroeg gedichten te schrijven, publiceerde in de jaren ’80 in de emigrantenpers, maar pas na de val van het communisme en de onafhankelijkheid van Oekraïne konden zijn werken in eigen land verschijnen. Inmiddels zijn er van Chersonski zo’n twintig bundels gepubliceerd, waaronder ook vertalingen van Bijbelteksten.
Zijn bekendste boek is Familiearchief (eerste uitgave 2003), een cyclus van verhalende gedichten die de geschiedenis vertelt van leden van een Joods-Russische familie in het uiterste zuidoosten van Europa, in de driehoek met als punten de stad L’vov in het noordwesten, de stad Černovcy in het zuidwesten en Odessa in het zuidoosten.
Anissava Miltenova & Ivan Iliev (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia)
Тhe Old Church Slavonic translation of Hippolytus’ Commentary on the Book of Daniel – one of the oldest and most comprehensive commentaries on parts of the Old Testament – is a landmark in the early period of Slavic literature. The Commentary was translated in the 10th century in Bulgaria, but its transmission has been fragmentary: it has survived in five codices with different chronology – one from the 12th century and the other four from around the 15th-16th centuries. The Old Church Slavonic translation of Comentarii in Danielem still raises a lot of questions in palaeoslavic studies. This presentation aims to illustrate some preliminary results of the linguotextological analysis of the Old Church Slavonic translation (Ivan Iliev).
A second interesting problem are the intertextualities between the Old Church Slavonic translation of Hippolytus’ Commentary on the Book of Daniel and the apocryphal Vision and Interpretations of Daniel (11th c.) and other Bulgarian versions of Visions of Prophet Daniel (13th–14th centuries) . Also the Pseudo-commentary of Hippolytus of Rome and of Hypatius of Ephesus, which are both compiled on the basis of Hippolytus’ Commentary on the Book of Daniel, will be scrutinized. Special attention will be paid to the transformation of Old Testament topoi into historical and apocalyptical modi. (Anissava Miltenova).
Lien Verpoest (KU Leuven)
Op een jaar tijd is de situatie in Oekraïne gedegenereerd van een dreigend handelsconflict tot een oorlog die tot nu toe meer dan drieduizend slachtoffers eiste. Enerzijds is het markant hoe snel het conflict ontaardde in geweld; daarnaast blijkt ook dat de internationale diplomatie de grootste moeite heeft om een passend antwoord te bieden op dit hybride conflict. In deze lezing wordt er op zoek gegaan naar verschillende factoren en determinanten die bepalend geweest zijn voor het ontstaan van het conflict, evenals aandachtspunten voor de toekomst van de regio.
Marko Juvan (Znanstvenoraziskovalni center Slovenske akademije znanosti in umetnosti, Ljubljana)
In the wake of its late capitalist renaissance, the Goethean idea of world literature is interpreted either in terms of intercultural dialogism or hegemony embodied in the asymmetrical structure of the world literary system. Launching the concept of Weltliteratur during the emergence of the early industrial globalization, Goethe initiated a long-lasting transnational meta-discourse that autopoietically influenced the development of transnational literary practices. In his aristocratic, cosmopolitan humanism, Goethe expected world literature to open up an equal dialogue between civilizations and languages, encouraging cross-national networking of the educated elite. But his notion of dialogue is marked by the hegemony of Western aesthetic and humanistic discourse, based on the ancient canon of Europeanism. Marx and Engels exposed aesthetic and humanist cosmopolitanism as the ideology masking European bourgeoisie’s global economic hegemony and the world-wide expansion of Western geoculture.
It is within this ambivalence of dialogism and hegemony that the process of “worlding” (Kadir) and nationalizing European literatures has taken place since the early 19th century. To weaker and peripheral literatures such as the Slovenian, the idea of world literature tended to represent a law-giving Other. The lecture will outline the process of worlding and imagining literature in Slovenian language as national. The utopian envisioning and the institutional and medial emergence of a “Slovenised” literary system was intertwined with the unification, purification, and standardization of Slovenian literary language. With self-referential intertextual links to the topoi of Parnassus and Elysium (as epitomes of “classicalness”), Slovenian poetry of the Enlightenment marked the distinction between its ethno-lingual and cultural singularity and the norms derived from ancient classics. Beginning with Prešeren’s romantic universalism, self-reference and intertextuality became more intensely involved in comparing Slovenian verbal art with other modern European literatures, with the intention to be integrated into the emerging system of world literature.