Faculty of Humanities

Publications

• Book

  Samadi M.

  Women and Martyrdom in Stalinist War Cinema: Russia's Eternal Quest for Messianism

  This monograph examines representations of women and martyrdom in Soviet war cinema of the Stalin era through an analysis of eight fictional films made between 1941 and 1953, that is from the German invasion of the USSR to the end of Stalin’s regime. It challenges the narrative maintaining that traditional gender differences were radically undone within Stalinist political culture, by demonstrating the extent to which cinematic gender roles were deeply rooted in the Russian Orthodox religious tradition.

  The findings of this monograph contribute to the key discourses on Soviet modernity which concur that Stalinist policies were not coherently shaped by Marxist-Leninist ideology, but rather by particularistic traits, above all, traditional Russian Orthodox values. This book examines the female and martyrdom theme as mediator between, on the one hand, ideal female heroism and patriotic duty, and on the other hand, the everyday responsibilities of Soviet women as citizens and as family members. This study sheds new light on the impact of Russian cultural heritage on the Stalinist Ideological State Apparatuses, revealing strong connections between Russian particularism and Soviet universalism.

  Mozhgan Samadi is Associate Professor at the HSE University, Moscow. She received her PhD from the University of Manchester, UK. Her main research interests include state-nation relations, women studies, religious studies, and cinema studies in Russia and the Middle East.

  Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024.

• Article

  Knyazeva H.

  The relevance of Uexküll’s Umwelt concept for the modern ecological discourse

  The article substantiates the worldview significance of the Umwelt concept introduced by Jakob von Uexküll for the development of strategic imperatives of ecological thinking and of environmental policies. The study lies
  at the crossroads of four areas: ecological philosophy, ethics, complex systems theory, and futures studies. Modern futures studies are largely based on a complex system approach demonstrating the multiplicity of images of the
  future and possibilities of choosing co-evolutionary paths of man and nature that do not violate the natural balance. Exploring the intersection of these different disciplinary fields provides an interdisciplinary platform for
  demonstrating the relevancy of the Umwelt concept for the development of environmental theory, for elaborating a reasonable position in discussions on sustainable development and sustainable futures, as well as on the role of
  environmental policy to ensure sustainable development and education reform to inculcate the principles and strategies of ecological ethics (Umwelt ethics).

  
  
  
  
  

  International Journal of Global Environmental Issues. 2024. Vol. 23. No. 2/3. P. 305-318.

• Book chapter

  Pavlovets M.

  The Lianozovo School

  The Lianozovo school–group was one of the first creative groups of the underground, arising in the second half of the 1940s and lasting until the beginning of the 1970s, a time when personal relationships and related outlooks on art were enough for practitioners of unofficial art to constitute membership in a common circle without, however, attempting at the same time to demonstrate uniformity. If we are speaking of the “school,” then it developed around the figure of the poet and artist Evgeny Leonidovich Kropivnitsky, who lived in a barracks at the Dolgoprudnaia railway station near Moscow and literally brought up his students, the poets Igor’ Kholin and Genrikh Sapgir and the artist Oskar Rabin. With regard to the Lianozovo “group”: it was located in the nearby barracks settlement of Lianozovo, where the artists Oskar Rabin and his wife Valentina Kropivnitskaia, the daughter of Evgeny Kropivnitsky, and also Kropivnitsky’s son, Lev, settled at the start of the 1950s. The Rabin apartment, like the Kropivnitsky room before it, became a place that attracted both unofficial poets (Vsevolod Nekrasov, Ian Satunovsky, and others) and artists (Nikolai Vechtomov, Vladimir Nemukhin, Lidiia Masterkova), a place for the holding of underground openings and for the formation of an “artistic circle” (Il’ia Kabakov) that not only facilitated professional communication but also the meeting of artists and of their audiences and admirers.

  In bk.: The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture. NY: Oxford University Press, 2024. Ch. 29. P. 673-696.

• Working paper

  Konstantin Zaitsev.

  Exploring the Effectiveness of Methods for Persona Extraction

  The paper presents a study of methods for extracting information about dialogue participants and evaluating their performance in Russian. To train models for this task, the Multi-Session Chat dataset was translated into Russian using multiple translation models, resulting in improved data quality. A metric based on the F-score concept is presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the extraction models. The metric uses a trained classifier to identify the dialogue participant to whom the persona belongs. Experiments were conducted on MBart, FRED-T5, Starling-7B, which is based on the Mistral, and Encoder2Encoder models. The results demonstrated that all models exhibited an insufficient level of recall in the persona extraction task. The incorporation of the NCE Loss improved the model's precision at the expense of its recall. Furthermore, increasing the model's size led to enhanced extraction of personas.

  arxiv.org. Computer Science. Cornell University, 2024