Kevin M.F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania)
The October Revolution released the Russian people from an ancient bondage, only to reinstitute an even more complete subjugation of them in subsequent decades. Among those Russians who was thus emancipated and then returned to servitude was Ivan the Terrible. In the nineteenth century, Ivan, like other prominent figures of Russian history, was pressed into the explicit service of political thought in a variety of renditions of the national past, in which he primarily served in the role of despotic negative example of rulership, although at times he was alternately seen as a great hero of Russian political development. Then suddenly, following 1917, the “ideological imagination” all but abandoned Ivan, along with most other figures of Russian history: state-sponsored views of history of the 1920s, such as those of the dean of early Soviet historiography M.N. Pokrovskii, were uninterested in great individuals and in long-dead tsars; and all other visions of the Russian national past lacked political authority. However, this situation was itself not to last. In the middle 1930s, with the rising tide of Stalinist conservatism and hero-worship of all kinds, Soviet public discourse rediscovered the tsars and, in addition to retrofitting the myths of Peter the Great, Aleksandr Nevskii, and others, erected an unprecedentedly positive historical myth around Ivan. This presentation will take up representations of Ivan the Terrible from the anomalous period of the 1920s—I. Tarich’s film Wings of a Serf, the efforts of a popular archeologist, I. Ia. Stelletskii to discover Ivan’s lost “library,” and some key historiographical publications. These were “Gothic” representations of Ivan the Terrible, which revealed the fullest potential of this figure for spectacular pleasures. Investigation of this maximally frightful, yet horrifically pleasurable vision of the Russian past will allow, in conclusion, interrogation of the function of the “Gothic” potential of this figure and of Russian national history as a whole in other periods—in Stalin’s USSR and in Putin’s Russia.
Evgeny Kazartsev (Universiteit Gent)
De grondige cultuurhervorming van Peter de Grote gaf ook de impuls tot de ontwikkeling van de Russische poёzie. In die periode ontwikkelt zich de nieuwe versificatie waaraan het principe van de regelmatige afwisseling van sterke en zwakke metrische posities ten grondslag lag. Dit principe leidt tot het ontstaan van de syllabotonische versmaten, met name van jamben, zowel de korte met vier als de lange met zes heffingen. Het reguliere jambische vers ontwikkelt zich in Rusland sinds 1739. Een van de eerste dichters die regelmatige jambische verzen heeft geschreven, was Michail Lomonosov (1711–1765). Zijn eerste verzen ontstaan onder de invloed van de Duitse en waarschijnlijk ook Nederlandse poëzie. De Duitse en de Nederlandse traditie vormden een tamelijk streng model voor het gebruik van jamben. Dit model verandert snel en hevig tijdens de adoptie ervan in de Russische dichtkunst. Nog bij Lomonosov start de evolutie van dit model dat de jambische verzen tot de meest populaire vorm maakt in de Russische poёzie van alle tijden.
Rozita Dimova (Universiteit Gent)
My talk addresses the “baroque effect” and the material changes in central Skopje since 2008, where aesthetics, affect and politics converge to produce altered temporalities incorporating antiquity, erasing traces of socialism, or producing a future vision of shared European cultural legacy. Triggered by the political conflict with Greece over the name Macedonia, the style of the new buildings, monuments and rearrangements of public space have arguably effaced the earlier modernist outlook of Skopje’s city center designed after the 1963 earthquake. These changes have also initiated conflicting reactions among intellectuals, regular people, politicians and artists resulting in a civil social movement most strongly embodied in the so-called Archi-brigade, a self-organized group of architecture students who protested against the recent material changes in Skopje. By disentangling the theoretical complexity in this project, I analyze how affect, aesthetics and materiality turn into a powerful site of politics. I especially focus on the “baroque mechanism” conveyed through the size and grandeur of the buildings or monuments. This sublime effect in the contemporary aesthetic project in Skopje aims to evoke “subjective apprehension” where the subject lapses into a “state of dependence” signified by the affect of wonder and astonishment.
Ekaterina Velmezova (Université de Lausanne)
The presentation will focus on a particular episode in the (pre)history of semiotics in the USSR in the 1920s-1930s. Interpreting semiotics as a science concerned with signs and as a synthesis or a dialogue between various branches of knowledge permits to distinguish two trends in the (pre)history of Russian semiotics at that time. Representatives of both of them took a great interest in semantics. In particular, an attempt to create an “integral” science was made by linguists, among whom N.Ia. Marr was one of the best-known. Several semantic laws formulated by Marr could be either reformulated in order to be applied to other disciplines (literary studies, anthropology, archaeology, biology) or “proved” by the facts or discoveries drawn from them. Researchers who had never adhered completely to Marrism (R.O. Shor, V.N. Voloshinov, G.G. Shpet) were also interested in semantic studies. Some of them not only aspired to a synthesis of various disciplines, but also reflected upon signs. Both trends influenced the particular orientation of Russian semiotics in the second half of the past century.
Maya Petrova-Taneva (Bălgarska akademija na naukite, Institut za literatura, Sofia)
The Bdinski Sbornik (Ghent University library, cod. 408) is the only Slavic manuscript kept in Belgian archives. Its significance as a representative of the medieval South Slavic literary traditions is partly due to the fact that it belongs to a very rare genre – the so-called Meterika collections. These are books containing exclusively women saints’ Lives and sayings of holy women excerpted from the Reading Menaia and various monastic miscellanies (such as John Moschos’ Spiritual Meadow, the Lausiac History of Palladios, etc.). In this form the Meterika collections are designed as a female counterpart to the Paterika or “Books About the Holy Fathers” and were often commissioned or possessed by private women or by female religious convents. As such the Meterika of exemplary stories could be examined as a unique source for elucidating the models of pious behaviour proposed to the Orthodox nuns and noble women, at the same time providing them with a wide range of interesting and exciting readings.
This study deals with a number of little-known Greek and Slavic (Bulgarian, Serbian and Russian) Meterika dating from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries and tries to situate the Bdinski Sbornik among them.
Andrej Toporkov (Rossijskij gosudarstvennyj gumanitarnyj universitet, Moscow)
The tradition of Russian Orthodox iconography has a subject of ‘Archangel Michael defeating seven (or twelve) fevers’. Our forthcoming article deals with this subject in Russian art, its origins, history and social functioning. This seems to be the only case in Russian tradition where a charm’s influence upon an icon can be immediately seen. One may wonder what the mechanism of such influence was. The emergence of this particular image type was rooted in a combination of three factors: 1. the narrative and thrilling nature of the text, not unlike apocryphal narration; 2. widespread perception of such texts as seemingly proper prayers and even parts of a church ordinary against fever; 3. matches between the charms’ imagery and that of popular beliefs about fevers.
Robert Hodel (University of Hamburg)
The present contribution is dedicated to the influence of L.N. Tolstoy’s late work on the philosophy of L. Wittgenstein. The problem is analyzed on three levels:
1. on the basis of the Diaries: in these notes Wittgenstein explicitly deals with Tolstoy’s Kratkoe izlozhenie Evangeliia (Gospel in Brief);
2. on the basis of the Tractatus: Wittgenstein wrote this early work at the same time at which he read the Gospel in Brief. This fact made many investigators trace the thoughts of Gospel in Brief in the Tractatus, even though there are few direct indication:
3. on the level of the Philosophical Investigations; on this level the influence becomes even more abstract as there are hardly any explicit indications for an intellectual dialogue with Tolstoy. The argument is therefore based mainly on the affinity of ideas.
Chris Hann (Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung, Halle an der Saale)
As is well known, the USSR implemented a new ritual calendar imbued by the principles of scientific atheism and socialist internationalism. After the Second World War, state rituals were similarly transformed in other socialist countries in Eastern Europe.
In this lecture, from the baseline of my own observations and a few other studies of the late socialist period, I shall explore the changes which have taken place in the last two decades. The salience of religion and national identity is well illustrated in “Victory Day” celebrations as presently performed in the Russian Federation (9th May). More generally, I am interested in how rituals reflect and help to “make” the social and political order. Is this relationship the same under capitalism as it was under socialism? Do the main participants and their audiences have different attitudes today, compared to those of the socialist era? Have activists as well as the great majority of citizens abandoned “futurist” mobilization in favor of commemoration and Erinnerungskultur? Are the major spectacles always inherently conservative, such that although both form and content may show changes, the function always remains the same, namely the legitimation of power holders? Were these rituals efficacious under socialism? Do they succeed in spreading enchantment today?
Evgeniy Dobrenko (University of Sheffield)
One of the most striking features of Soviet culture during WWII (and especially of the first phase of it) was a clear departure from ideological and visual sterility of pre-war culture in which any depiction of violence, suffering, death or victimization was practically tabooed. The disastrous beginning of the war for the Soviet Union and German atrocities brought about major changes to Soviet ideology. The focus of this lecture will be the retuning of Soviet art according to this new ideological doctrine. This “translation” of ideology into literature (first of all, poetry and journalism) and music was followed by visual arts such as poster, painting and film, completely changing their narrative, style and tune.
Petja Asenova (Sofia University)