Publications

In the 1970s and 80s, Soviet sociology published a great deal about women's empowerment in the USSR. Researchers emphasized two sides of this phenomenon: on one hand the achievements of the state in equalizing the rights of women with those of men, along with the high levels of women's employment and participation in public life, and on the other hand the ensuing "double burden," resulting from the need to combine a career with the "traditional" duties of a spouse, mother and housewife

Previous studies of migrants from Central Asia living and working in Russia suggest that their life is characterized by limited resources and social exclusion. Heavy physical work, cramped living conditions, poor nutrition, lack of health insurance and scarce information about medical infrastructure are the barriers on migrants' way to timely and quality medical care. Moreover, limited access to healthcare is aggravated by negative attitudes and discriminatory practices that migrants face when visiting state hospitals and polyclinics of Moscow. In this study, we first aim to describe medical infrastructure available for the migrants in Moscow. Second, we have a goal to investigate how migrants use formal and informal strategies to overcome the barriers on their way to receiving medical care in the urban environment. The study is based on the analysis of qualitative interviews with 23 caregivers working in Moscow-based medical facilities such as state hospitals, polyclinics, and ambulance stations, private medical centers including the so called Kyrgyz clinics.

This article answers the question of how contemporary Russian TV series portray the police. The results derive from a single-case thematic and functionalist study of the popular Russian TV series Glukhar’ (which aired from 2008 to 2011). The show merits special attention because it was on air when the Russian police were undergo- ing a legitimacy crisis, which lead to the 2009 police reform. The series recognized the crisis and responded to it with a set of justifications. I analyze the show’s social and cultural contexts, its plot patterns, and the functions of its characters. I build a typology of justifications and claim that the show justifies the police through an open discussion about the reasons for and consequences of their lawlessness. The series shows that the legitimacy of the police is repeatedly questioned, but trust in the police is always restored because police officers are depicted as estranged from the state but not from the community. Thus, the show contains an interesting example of overcoming a legitimacy crisis through its recognition. The study opens the floor to further discussions about how popular culture resolves intense social debates about policing by symbolic means in a moment when police legitimacy is contested.

 

The article discusses the corpus of Dmtri Prigov's manifestoes, articles, and programmatic interviews as a manifestation of a coherent theoretical concept. The author of the article argues that Prigov's theoretical ideas are structured in accordance with his own central artistic category-for which, oddly enough, he did not have a common name. The author refers to this category as performativity, although Prigov himself did not use this word, preferring to discuss the behavioral level, operational modes, characters, images (imidzhi), and so on. Performativity, in this interpretation, permeates the totality of an artistic practice, without exception. Texts, paintings, installations, actual performances, and any public utterance-interviews, for example-become "traces" of performative behavior. It is along these lines that one can speak about the performative life of the contemporary author, about the "behavior that is to be found within a non-playful art form, in which the typical type of conventional professional language does not imply (or rather, until the relevant time period, did not imply) the appearance of the creator, who by his presence relativizes the very value, durability, uniqueness, and self-sufficiency of the language of the objects he made." It is from this perspective that the author discusses the overarching meaning of Prigov's oeuvre as the grandiose mockery of societal cultural practices rather than a collection of self-sufficient works. This approach also elucidates Prigov's programmatic self-modeling as the trickster who can only fulfill the performative as the central category of contemporary culture. © 2016 The Russian Review.

Dynastic Power And Name-Giving Principles In Kievan And Muscovite Rus’ (10th - 16th Centuries)

The book includes 459 phrases that will help Russian learners of English to succeed in job interviews and write effective CVs, cover letters, and follow-up letters.

In 1945 Europe was a vast graveyard. The diaspora of the dead was perhaps most prominent in Germany, where the fallen of the four occupying forces, as well as other nationals, were spread across the country. As the allies worked through the postwar settlement with Germany and its allies, they considered another pressing question: How to treat the dead? This presentation explores how the dead became a point of contact, conflict and contrast in Germany that provide a window into the dynamics of power sharing between the occupiers. The politics of the sacred demanded that each of the four allies enter into uneasy interactions and compromises, even as the lines in the Cold War hardened.

-

Sheremetev’s Almshouse was the first private institution of social welfare in Russia which openly proclaimed that not all the poor deserved relief and exposed the applicants to inspections by the administrators. The study demonstrates that the recipients of the Almshouse relief did not belong to the lowest tiers of Moscow population but originated from its middle stratum. They were clerks and ranked officials, the military of middle ranks, and priests, or their families. Considerable number of them had additional sources of income before they obtained allowances from the Almshouse, only for a few of them the relief was crucial for survival. This paradox can be explained by examining the reports on the recipients written by an administrator of the Almshouse. The document reveals that the Almshouse supported those Moscow dwellers who were involved in the network of patronage or were connected by the relations of military or civil service with the administration of the Almshouse and with Moscow aristocracy. The support from the patrons served a better guarantee for the Almshouse’s administration than the evidences of the neighbours or relatives. On the basis of the unearthed archival documents, the study brings out that the Almshouse was an institution deeply rooted in the Moscow patronage and protective network which connected people of middle stratum and the aristocracy. Selecting recipients of relief, the administration of the Almshouse was guided by the logic of privilege and assertion of status opposed to economic definitions of poverty.

The policy of the Stalinist leadership in Georgia in the post-war period reflected both the general norms of the Stalinist ‘center-periphery’ system as well as certain specific informal political factors. This article examine the implementation in Georgia of a key principle of Stalinist regional policy: strict control over leading personnel, including the use of repression. The fullest expression of this principle was the so-called ‘Mingrelian Affair’. The emergence and course of the Mingrelian Affair was also closely linked to particular informal factors: the involvement of Stalin in Georgian affairs and the mechanisms of patronage (shevtsvo), and in the Georgian case, the patronage of Beria. The significance and concrete manifestations of these factors will also be analyzed. The ending of the mass terror following the death of Stalin could not help but have a certain effect on the regional and nomenklatura policies of the top Soviet leaders. The second half of this article consider the changes that took place in the practical interactions between the center and the Georgian leadership after the death of Stalin, and also after the arrest of the ‘boss’ of Georgia,  Beria. An important component part of the center’s policy towards Georgia was a focus on Georgian nationalism. The essence of this understanding under Stalin and its modification in the post-Stalin period, as well as an examination of available materials sent to Moscow about the manifestations of Georgian nationalism, are a constant theme running throughout the article.

The article is dedicated to the sensational discovery of five Gothic graffiti in the Mountainous Crimea where the use of the Gothic language was attested by the sources, but never in written form. The graffiti are scratched on two re-used fragments of early Byzantine cornice from the Mangup Basilica and dated to the 2nd half of the 9th – 10th  centuries. Two of them are typical Byzantine invocations, one is a commemoration (?) with a formula of modesty, one is barely survived, and one contains a quotation from Ps 76, 14-15 and a liturgical (probably Gothic poetic) text. The inscriptions are written in archaic variant of Wulfila’s alphabet. The discovered graffiti are of great importance not only for the history of the Crimean Goths and their language, but also for the history of Gothic writing and culture in general.The article is dedicated to the sensational discovery of five Gothic graffiti in the Mountainous Crimea where the use of the Gothic language was attested by the sources, but never in written form. The graffiti are scratched on two re-used fragments of early Byzantine cornice from the Mangup Basilica and dated to the 2nd half of the 9th – 10th  centuries. Two of them are typical Byzantine invocations, one is a commemoration (?) with a formula of modesty, one is barely survived, and one contains a quotation from Ps 76, 14-15 and a liturgical (probably Gothic poetic) text. The inscriptions are written in archaic variant of Wulfila’s alphabet. The discovered graffiti are of great importance not only for the history of the Crimean Goths and their language, but also for the history of Gothic writing and culture in general.

From the time around 1300 onward, historians can observe how a new funeral ceremony expanded quickly from one European princely court to another. None others than dead kings or princes themselves were now taking part in their own mourning processions – of course, symbolically, but at the same time in a very realistic way. The mourning feast culminated in the moment when a knight appeared covered with the full armor of the deceased, riding his horse and decorated with his coats of arms. Obviously in order to make the allusion to the dead prince even more expressive, the visor of the knight’s helmet remained often closed. The evidence of such knights representing dead kings and princes is strong: they were witnessed in Flanders (1299), Hungary (1342), the Holy Roman Empire (1349), Poland (1370), Bohemia (1378), Savoy (1383), Kingdom of France (1389), Foix-Béarn (1414) as well as at many other courts. The article aims to present the evidence of the sources that mention such dead-living funeral knights, to criticize interpretations of the custom that were proposed in earlier international research, and develop a new explanation of its appearance and diffusion in medieval Europe.

After examinating the text of the Golden Bull of 1356 the author proposes quite new points concerning the nature and aims of this document.

This study employs a unique database covering 2,293 cadets who graduated from the Noble Land Cadet Corps in St Petersburg from 1732 – 1762 to investigate the role of cultural capital in early modern Russia. Our analysis suggests that within this sample cultural capital was negatively correlated with wealth, but positively with father’s rank within the state service. At the corps itself, wealth and social status of families did not directly affect the success of their sons. The only significant factor of success at this school (promotion to a particular rank at graduation) was the family’s access to “Western” education and cultural skills. The results indicate the state was able to create an institutional framework where the possession of new “imported” knowledge and social skills gave the holder a measurable advantage over his peers. This could be considered one of the mechanisms which contributed to the sustainability of the cultural and social regime created by Peter I.

An abundance of variants devised according to the plot concerning the Contempt for Byzantine Gold can be identified as the Scandinavian background to the Russian and Byzantine examples. In Rus, we only encounter a particular variant in the story of Prince Sviatoslav and its interpretation in the story of his descendant and namesake – Prince Sviatoslav, son of Iaroslav the Wise. Thus, the assumption that the plot in the Rus chronicle, so rare in Rus, became popular in Scandinavia, remains tenable. Much more likely, however, is the view that in Scandinavia the description of the correct form of behaviour for the ruler during trials by foreign gift-giving had a long history in the form of oral stories. One of the variants of such a story, evidently, served as the basis for the story of Prince Sviatoslav’s meeting with the envoys of the Byzantine emperor.

The article analyzes the process of establishing phisical boundaries and legal status of land property in Russian Empire in the nineteenth century. The main topics include interaction of educated elite (landlords, government officials) with peasants, image of a land surveyor in public thought and fiction, difficulties with constructing private property regime in the countryside.

Reconstructed on the base of the lawsuit over the legacy, the history of the family and kinship relations of the retired State Councillor Avraam Stepanovich Sverchkov ( he was the key person in the legislative commissions in 1720s – early 1740s and in 1755 bequeathed a considerable part of his property to the newly established Moscow University ) suggests that only a nuclear family existed and had value for the category of bureaucrats he belonged to. Coming from unprivileged estates and not being members of chancellery service families these persons climbed the hierarchy ladder thanks to their professional skills, and independently built their careers, friendships, matrimonial and other strategies, advancing in their service due to personal contacts, knowledge and experience. Being involved in the actual implementation of authorities’ reformative initiatives in the first half of the eighteenth century, Sverchkov and clerks like him formed the higher level of office employees in a variety of central institutions and ensured undisturbed operation of all the units of the state machine. Acquiring hereditary nobility through their service, this kind of collegiate officials shaped the field of social and family interaction within a single nuclear family rather than on the basis of vertical kinship relations. Their social capital, career progress, material well-being and security were interrelated and depended on two generations (parents and children) having been integrated in a complex system of social contacts.

In the Great Terror of 1937–38 more than a million Soviet citizens were arrested or killed for political crimes they didn’t commit. What kind of people carried out this violent purge, and what motivated them? This book opens up the world of the Soviet perpetrator for the first time. Focusing on Kuntsevo, the Moscow suburb where Stalin had a dacha, Alexander Vatlin shows how Stalinism rewarded local officials for inventing enemies. Agents of Terror reveals stunning, detailed evidence from archives available for a limited time in the 1990s. Going beyond the central figures of the terror, Vatlin takes readers into the offices and interrogation rooms of secret police at the district level. Spurred at times by ambition, and at times by fear for their own lives, agents rushed to fulfill quotas for arresting “enemies of the people” —even when it meant fabricating the evidence. Vatlin pulls back the curtain on a Kafkaesque system, forcing readers to reassess notions of historical agency and moral responsibility in Stalin-era crimes.

The article discusses the overall interpretation of the War of 1812 and the heroization and deheroization of its key figures. Changing political circumstances, including the Tsars' orders concerning the representation of the Russian Empire's past and nationbuilding projects propagated by Russian elites constituted key variables. Between 1812 and 1914, preachers, artists, journalists, rulers, military officers, authors of memoirs, civil and military historians, writers and journalists participated in a dispute over the 'heroes' and 'villains' of the 1812 war. The present study draws on sources from the 19th and early 20th century such as the history of Aleksandr Michailovskii Danilevskii, the memoirs of Aleksei Er-molov, Nadezhda Durova and Denis Davydov, lyrics by Vasilii Zhukovskii, and Lev Tolstoi's novel War and Peace. It compares and contrasts these author's statements and ideas with the visual, poetic, journalistic and commemorative imagery of their time. Such an approach helps explain how heroic characters were designed and demonstrates the ambivalence of their positions: the frequently cyclical dynamic of appearance and disappearance from mainstream narratives of Russian history. This approach also allows for the attribution of individual narratives to specific discursive genres. Genetic source criticism was applied when analyzing War and Peace. Tolstoi's drafts and notes are examined to reveal the ways in which his concept of the novel changed over time, including gradual revisions in the shaping of characters and the use of the memories of war veterans to create a grand narrative. All this allows for an identification of the techniques Tolstoi applied when working with historical evidence, his recoding of the cultural and psychological profiles of certain characters, his retouching of contradictory elements, and his omission of a vast number of facts. The authors conclude that the heroization techniques applied in these narratives strongly depended upon the philosophy of history of their time. Thus, in the 1820-30's the trend towards romanticizing and nationalizing the Russian past manifested itself in a desacralization of Emperor Alexander I and a substitution of the idea of a "people's war" for that of a "holy war". By contrast, Lev Tolstoi's national project meant that the writer depersonalized war and heroized the Russian family and the Russian people. Later on, this discourse was reinforced through the sociologization of the writing of history, which meant that historians presented the war of 1812 as a clash of abstract interests, processes, and groups, to which the names of heroes served as accessories. © Franz Steiner Verlag GmbH, Stuttgart/Germany.

La finalité de  l’article est de  présenter et d’analyser certaines tendances dans la manière d’enseigner l’histoire et “l’immobile” du “religieux”, du Christianisme et de la culture orthodoxe aux elèves des classes terminales des lycées (sredniaïa chkola) de Russie. Les valeurs de la laicité, de la liberté religieuse et du sécularisme, auquel point restent-elle présentées comme valeurs et comment traite-t-on des rapports entre le religieux et le non-religieux, en expliquant aux élèves les grandes tendances de l’évolution de l’humanité au début du troisième millinaire ? quels traits et quelles spécificités de la tradition byzantino-orthodoxe sont mis en relief dans les manuels et quel rôle dans l’histoire de la Russie et de l’Europe attribute-t-on à l’Orthodoxie? comment sont présentées les traditions et les partcularités du Catholicisme et du Protestantisme dans les manuels scolaires russes? le système scolaire de Russie de l’an 2015, contribue-t-elle à la prétendue “cléricalisation” de la société russe, dont ont parle bien souvent dans les médias? Les lieux de “la mémoire orthodoxe”, dans le parcours scolaire, éloignent-ils la Russie de l’Europe?

This contribution consists of three parts. The first section is dedicated to a description of the complementizer system in Russian, whereas the second and the third section describe the same aspects of Polish and Bulgarian – though not in the same detail as for Russian. In the Russian part, the set of Russian complementizers is considered, each of them is described in short, and, finally, some problematic cases of multifunctional units are also mentioned.

 

ninteresting feature of Russian is its rich system of composed markers (those with the correlative to or with the subjunctive marker by) which in fact can be analyzed either as complex complementizers (this is more plausible for by-variants) or as combinations of markers (this seems to be plausible for to-variants).

Interestingly, Russian has no specialized complementizers, such as Polish że having only a complementizer use. All of the Russian markers analyzed also have other uses. Sometimes, as with polysemous adverbial clause markers kogda ‘when’, esli ‘if’ and the purpose marker čtoby ‘(in order) to’, the word order can serve as a distinctive feature: in the complementizer use, these units (and, correspondingly, the embedded clause itself) have a fixed position after the main clause, which is not true for adverbial uses. This fact confirms (at least for kogda and esli) the tendency observed for many languages: if a marker is used as a complementizer and as another type of subordinator, the complementizer use is often secondary, a result of grammaticalization.

 

Anniversary collection of articles in honor of L.I.Sobolev includes works by his disciples and colleagues covering a broad range of the phililogical issues: the problems of Russian literature, European literature of the Middle Ages and of the 19 -20 centures, corpus linguistics, linguistic analysis of the literary texts, the questions of teaching of Russian literature at school.

The book consists of the three parts: scientific study, works on pedagogy and bibliografy of L. Sobolev prepared by A. Sobolev.

The book contains works of famous Russian critics and linguists, professors of leading Russian universities as well as articles by well-known teachers of Moscow schools, especially the gymnasium 1567.

This book explores developments in the three major societies of the South Caucasus – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia – focusing especially on religion, historical traditions, national consciousness, and political culture, and on how these factors interact. It outlines how, despite close geographical interlacement, common historical memories and inherited structures, the three countries have deep differences; and it discusses how development in all three nations has differed significantly from the countries’ declared commitments to democratic orientation and European norms and values. The book also considers how external factors and international relations continue to impact on the three countries.

Hegel’s anthropology is not just a doctrine of the human soul, feeling, and the subconscious, and not just the foundational section of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit as it took its final shape in the philosopher’s Berlin years. It is also, among many other things, a tale of resistance – of how the natural and the bodily resist their ‘idealization’ by Geist but ultimately become an ‘assimilated’ part of Geist (both ‘idealization’ and ‘assimilation’, as well as occasionally ‘resistance’, being Hegel’s own terms), although not without generating multiple moments of smaller, and more subtle, resistances and counter-resistances along the way. The goal of this chapter is not to address or question this assimilatory narrative of Hegel’s anthropological idealism as such, but to elucidate the more important of those moments and to introduce the anthropological logic of resistance as it permeates and runs through Hegel’s anthropology. To that end, I first turn to the inaugurative event of the anthropology in    Hegel, that of the birth of Geist in its distinction from Natur, considered as a moment of resistance (against the natural) and transformation (of the natural). Next, I analyze the logic of anthropological subjectivity as it is developed further by Hegel through individuation and subjectivation, and argue that idealization is closely tied to resistance via the logic of the body and "self-feeling." Finally, I provide a reading of two of the anthropology’s culminating moments, madness and habit, which I take to be resisting each other within the two-center structure of subjectivity that Hegel puts forward. Taken together, these moments help uncover a motif of resistance running through the entire logic of Hegel's anthropology.

This paper argues that Wittgenstein opposed theories of meaning, and did so for good reason. Theories of meaning, in the sense discussed here, are attempts to explain what makes it the case that certain sounds, shapes, or movements are meaningful linguistic expressions. It is widely believed that Wittgenstein made fundamental contributions to this explanatory project. I argue, by contrast, that in both his early and later work, Wittgenstein endorsed a disjunctivist conception of language which rejects the assumption underlying the question that such theories seek to answer—namely, the assumption that the notion of a meaningful linguistic expression admits of non-circular analysis. Moreover, I give two arguments in favor of the view I ascribe to Wittgenstein: one based on later Wittgenstein’s discussion of meaning skepticism, and one based on considerations concerning the identity of linguistic expressions.

I investigate the idea of a necessary determination of categories, which are both objectively valid and able to be developed. I claim that this idea is realised in the search for a dynamic account of categories, where Kant’s “deduction” is considered as problematic, and a constructive enquiry is pursued instead. In this framework, I discuss Kant’s deduction in the light of the substantial reforms brought about in Hegel’s logic and Herbart’s psychologico-realist approach. As a result, I prove the theoretical relevance of Nineteenth-century functionalist solutions to the demand for critique and universality in philosophy as well as to the justification of genetic, yet objective processes of constitution.

Acting rationally and consistently with the demands of biological instincts seems to be the overall norm for humans. Still, there are thinkers who have shown that in a deeper sense, this is not an absolute norm at all and there are exclusions that should be taken into account if we wish to understand the true nature of a human. These thinkers, in particular, are Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and Max Scheler (1874 - 1928). In this article, I depict the peculiarities of each of the authors’ views on freedom of will and action, and, at the same time, I will show that their ideas are implicitly similar. Dostoevsky did not know Scheler, of course; it is likely that Scheler read some of Dostoevsky’s work, although Scheler does not cite him.

The article considers a fundamental contradiction between a hypertrophied desire to freely pursue one's goals and the insuperability of fate that is inherent in Mikhail Lermontov's novel Hero of Our Time [Geroi nashego vremeni] in which the drive for “freedom” precipitates meaningless rebellion. The collision between thought (awareness contradiction) and the vital impulse (élan vital) causes the identity of the hero to split: thought turns out to be fruitless and life hopeless. This contradiction is symptomatic of cultural degeneration, and of the transformation of cultural values into “simulacra”—the “superfluous man” is a simulacrum of identity.

This review article is the analysis of recent historiography on the issue of military efficiency of the Russian officer corps in 1800–1914. The author reviews three monographs published not long ago (Gudrun Persson's book on Russian military thinking of the second part of the 19th century, John W. Steinberg's research on Russian General Staff in late 19th – early 20th century and Dmitrii Kopelev's study of the German party in the Russian Navy and Fleet) and gives an interpretation of academic research of the theme, approaches applied and findings presented.

The article investigates how Leo Tolstoy’s economic ideas are embodied in the plot of his short-story “Polikushka” (1863). Research shows that the fluctuation in the name of a sum of money the protagonist Polikey loses can be explained by the “double exchange rate“ of the ruble, i.e the lag between the rate of the silver ruble and assignation ruble (1:3.5) which existed in Russia from 1839 to 1851. As the main character loses the paper (called “devilish” in the drafts) money, “Polikushka” fits into the ramified European literary mythology of banknotes as the tricks of the devil. In addition to European parallels, the article discusses possible Russian plot sources dating back to Nekrasov’s poetry and the prose of Pogodin, Potekhin and Dostoevsky. In the second section, the article explores the narrative patterns of the story and demonstrates that it is impossible to see the reason for Polikey’s death only as his mistress’ desire to test and rehabilitate him. The narration is organized as a network of mutually exclusive viewpoints, correlation of which develops an ugly portrait of both the old landlady and Polikey, equally guilty in the tragic ending of the story. In the last two sections, the article reveals the ideological underpinnings of such a skeptical Tolstoy’s view on communication between peasants and the educated elite in his pedagogical writings of 1861-62. Here Tolstoy wrote how harmful philanthropy, wrong education, false ideology and unreasonable circulation of money could be for peasants. In conclusion, the article offers a possible source for Tolstoy’s viewpoint in the political and economic ideas of P.-J. Proudhon, with whom Tolstoy communicated in Brussels when writing “Polikushka”.

This paper is devoted to the influence of Chodasevič’s poetic technique on Mandel´štam’s poetry. In this work we make an attempt to analyze Mandel´štam’s late Novye stichi (“Ne govori nikomu…”, “Kuda kak strašno nam s toboj…” and “My s toboj na kuchne posidim…”), which are connected to each other through the theme of fear. From the point of view of the poetic technique, these texts are also connected to each other through the literary device of the unexpected twist of meaning, which was associated with Chodasevič’s lyrics in Mandel´štam’s consciousness.

Leskov researchers have often and justifiably focussed on the influence of Old Russian literature and folklore in his prose. However, 19th century Russian literature is equally essential to his work. Leskov often borrowed plot devices, images, and names from his contemporaries; these aspects of his work, namely his 'intertextuality' and literature-centrism are under-appreciated. This paper demonstrates this aspect of his poetics using his play The Spendthrift, showing that The Spendthirft presents a combination of allusions to 19th century works including A.S. Griboedov's Woe From Wit, N.V. Gogol's The Inspector General, A.N. Ostrovsky's Krechinsky's Wedding and A.V. Sukovo-Kobylin's The Case. Using the terminology of postmodernism, the term "pastiche" may be rightfully applied to Leskov's play. Whereas in postmodern art, pastiche is the result of the author's frustration with everything already having been written, Leskov uses others' texts for polemical purposes with the intention of formulating his own literary position.

The paper traces the very different contours of Soviet discourses of Arctic in the Stalinists 1930s with their narrative transformation of Arctic space into integral part of national Soviet space. The goal is to see how the Arctic narrative developed and evolved throughout the last 30/40 years of the Soviet era. The research is based on analysis of 3000 literary texts, articles, memoirs and letters, published and archived. The results confirm the presence of ‘Arctic discourse’ in the Soviet society and is supported by various sources. The Arctic issue became per- manent in cultural and political practices of the time in the late 1920s and had a series of cli- maxes in the 1930s–1940s. Its popularity peaked in the mid-1950s and then dropped dramatical- ly. The cultural and literary background of such change is explored through the narrative definitions. 

This article revisits Joseph Stalin’s infamous 1950 critique of Nikolai Marr’s controversial linguistic theory as a “linguistic turn,” to borrow a modern concept. The authors argue that this was literally a shift in the language describing social diversity, rather than a purely ideological campaign as earlier studies suggested. Stalin explicitly insisted on the academic nature of his intervention, which was quite banal in terms of its theoretical input, reproducing standard theses of classic linguistic theory from prerevolutionary textbooks. One aspect, however, was both theoretical and original: the elaborate attack on the concept of “crossing” (skreshchenie) of languages as the driving force of linguistic processes, the central and most stable element of the evolving theory of Nikolai Marr and his disciples. By reviewing the intellectual context of the forming of Marr’s theory during the first two decades of the twentieth century (including cases of physical anthropology, archaeology, and nonclassical linguistics), the article claims that Nikolai Marr’s scholarly pursuits were but a specific case of rethinking and constructing the language of hybridity. Modern social sciences in Russia have produced a distinct metalanguage to describe and analyze the complex diversity of imperial situation. “Hybridity” was the central trope of this metalanguage, or rather its equivalents at the time – “mixing” (smeshenie) and “crossing” (skreshchenie) – insofar as “hybridity” had not yet entered the Russian vocabulary. It is in this sense that “hybridity” is discussed in this article: as a language of self-description in the imperial situation (category of practice) and as an element of the analytical language of the project of modern imperial social sciences, rather than a direct importation of the concept of hybridity from contemporary postcolonial scholarship (as used by Homi Bhabha and others). The emergence of scholarly models that explicitly used the trope of hybridity and perceived hybridity as a foundation of the norm (rather than a marginal condition of deviation from pure forms) is characterized here as the late imperial epistemological revolution. This epistemological revolution became possible and had potential in the context of the imperial situation and in the ideologically pluralistic regime of the late empire. It was already exhausted by the late 1920s, having received support from neither the hegemonic Soviet discourse nor from the subaltern Eurasianist or Soviet national and anticolonial projects. Methodological constructivism and hybridity as a whole became obsolete as survivals of the unstable and limited pluralism of the New Economic Policy era. Their final marginalization in the USSR was just a question of time, given the consolidation of the Stalinist regime throughout the 1930s and the stake on the Russian nation as the official Staatsvolk. The upheaval of World War II delayed the official correction of the metalanguage of social hybridity based on the controversial Marrist linguistic theory of “crossing,” until Stalin’s “linguistic turn” of 1950 formally established the foundations of the literally “counterrevolutionary” episteme of “simple things” and the project of the ideological state based on that episteme.

Book review

This article contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms and functions of imaginary world-building in contemporary popular culture, introducing the perspective of active transformative reception, which is the perspective of fan fiction writers and readers. The author argues that contemporary fan fiction as a postmodern literary field and ‘fictional anthropology’ is much broader in its transformative capabilities than it is believed even in fan studies, in particular in relation to world-building. She takes as an example Russian Harry Potter fan fiction and pays special attention to the production and reception of such fan fiction genre as crossover. Analysis of texts of this genre and a survey conducted in the Russian Harry Potter online community let her come to the conclusion that this transformative activity of contemporary fandoms in virtual worlds blurs all the lines between different types of sub-creators and undermines the traditional preconceptions of how imaginary worlds can be built, inhabited and developed.

This article focuses on fan fiction as a literary experience and especially on fan fiction readers’ receptive strategies. Methodologically, its approach is at the intersection of literary theory, theory of popular culture, and qualitative research into practices of communication within online communities. It characterizes fan fiction as a type of contemporary reading and writing. Taking as an example the Russian Harry Potter fan fiction community, the article poses a set of questions about the meanings and contexts of immersive reading and affective reading. The emotional reading of fan fiction communities is put into historical and theoretical context, with reference to researchers who analysed and criticized the dichotomy of rational and affective reading, or ‘enchantment’, in literary culture as one of the symptoms of modernity. The metaphor of ‘emotional landscapes of reading’ is used to theorize the reading strategies of fan fiction readers, and discussed through parallels with phenomenological theories of landscape. Among the ‘assemblage points of reading’ of fan fiction, specific elements are described, such as ‘selective reading’, ‘kink reading’, ‘first encounter with fan fiction texts’ and ‘unpredictability’.

Everett C. Hughes (1897–1983) was one of the first exchange professors, teaching sociology in Frankfurt. During his stay in the spring of 1948 he wrote field notes and after his return to Chicago he submitted a book proposal to the University of Chicago Press. Its director rejected the proposed book and Hughes stopped working on it. This paper describes what Hughes wanted to write and discusses then the only published article on the topic, Hughes’ “Good People and Dirty Work”, which appeared in 1962. © 2015, Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.

Created by a group Leningrad and Moskow dissident the samizdat historical publication collection Pamiat' ("Memory") is one of the best-knowln editions in the history of Soviet dissident movement. The main of the feature of this collection is that unlike the informational, publicistic or literary dissident editions of the time, it was a distinctively academic, historic publcation. The first volume of the Pamiat' collection was put  together in 1976. The initiator of the project is Arseny Roginsky, who was joinad by Larisa Bogoraz, Alexsandr Daniel, Sergey Deduln, Alexsandr Dobkin, Felix Perchonok, Dmitry Zubarev, Alexey Korotaev to work of the project. According to the initiator of the publication, its goal was to confront "the lies of official historiography" and to try and make the first steps towards recreating a "true history" of Soviet society.   

This article focuses on Ockham`s analysis of the truth conditions of past-tense, future-tense propositions and modal propositions. The main goal of this paper is to show the main similarities between them. In both cases Ockham distinguishes two ‘senses’ and suggests to create new type of propositions.

This essay deal with history of postwar patterns of distribution and consumption in the USSR in two contexts: as a direct result of the war; and as part of the development of the Stalinist mobilization model in general.

The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison

Taken together, these articles suggest how the study of "ordinary" people sheds light on the pinnacles of power, as well as vice-versa; that the material and ideolodical dimensions of the war cand and must be studied together; and that both chrolological and geographical synthesis and boundary-crossing can be productively applied to many other areas in the scholarships on the Eastern Front in World War  II.

 

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, photography became re-popularized as an amateur hobby, which had been unavailable to Soviet citizens since the early 1920s and the liquidation of original amateur societies. Khrushchev’s attention to consumer goods meant that cameras and equipment were affordable for the first time in decades. In lieu of formal educational structures for both professional photojournalists and amateur photographers, Sovetskoe foto and the photo section of the Union of Journalists took action. Almost every issue of Sovetskoe foto contained approximately twenty to twenty five pages devoted to amateur photography. Articles addressed the technical skills required for amateur photography, and offered lessons in photographic aesthetics, written by the most prominent photojournalists, photography critics and theorists in the Soviet Union. In Moscow, Leningrad, and many other cities, amateurs founded photography clubs, which offered lectures and workshops for amateur photographers. These clubs hosted their own exhibitions, and participated in national and international exhibitions both in the Soviet Union and abroad. Amateurs also submitted their work to Sovetskoe foto, where photography masters critiqued their work. By the late 1960s, however, some amateurs found the photography club environment stifling and elitist. As a result, amateurs increasingly found themselves caught between creativity and conformity in order to maintain club membership and exhibition opportunities. Ultimately, while some chose to attempt to reform this trend from within clubs, others turned to unofficial and non-conformist art photography as a creative outlet.

Combining the talents and expert knowledge of an early modern historian of Russia and of a Soviet specialist, Russia's Empires is the first major study of the entire sweep of Russian history from its earliest formations to the rule of Vladimir Putin. Looking through the lens of empire, which the authors conceptualize as a state based on institutionalized differentiation, inequitable hierarchy, and bonds of reciprocity between ruler and ruled, Kivelson and Suny displace the centrality of nation and nationalism in the Russian and Soviet story. Yet their work demonstrates how imperial polities were key to the creation of national identifications and processes that both hindered and fostered what would become nations and nation-states. Using the concept of empire, they look at the ways that ordinary people imagined their position within a non-democratic polity - whether the Muscovite tsardom or the Soviet Union - and what concessions the rulers had to make, or appear to make, in order to establish their authority and preserve their rule. 

While other works in the existing historical literature have applied the concept of empire to the study of Russian history, the story told here is in several ways unique. First, the book tackles the long stretch of the history of the region, from the murkiest beginnings to its most recent yesterday, and follows the vicissitudes of empire, the absence, the coalescence, the setbacks of imperial aspirations, across the centuries. The authors do not impose the category, but find it a productive lens for tracking developments over time. Second, the framework of empire allows them to address pressing questions of how various forms of non-democratic governance managed to succeed and survive, or, alternatively, what caused them to collapse and disappear. Studying Russia's long history in an imperial guise encourages the reader to attend to forms of inclusion, displays of reciprocity, and manifestations of ideology that might otherwise go unnoted, overlooked under the bleak record of coercion and oppression that so often characterizes ideas about Russia.

Russia's Empires follows imperial patterns of rule through distinction, inclusion through reciprocity, and structures for legitimacy in order to trace the experiences of empire by both rulers and ruled. The book traces the coalescence and development of imperial relationships across more than a thousand years. This book brings histories of the peripheries and of the growth and rule of empire into central narratives based in Moscow and Leningrad or Petersburg, in order to understand all the pieces as part of an interrelated whole. The book brings together stories of despots and dictators at the center with those of people of all classes, conditions, and nationalities who jointly made the Russian Empire.

Central Russia’s Riazan province was on the front lines of World War II for two weeks in late 1941. Placed between German and Soviet forces, the province was on the edges of authorities unable to exert full control over the region. In that time, Soviet power dissolved in the countryside. Peasants raided warehouses and dismantled collective farms while enterprising local notables aided the embryonic occupation regime. Documents created during the two weeks and their immediate aftermath show that rural Russians, even collaborators, defied simple classification as anti-Soviet. Instead, they exhibited survivalist instincts and a traditional antipathy toward central authority rather than a preference for either German or Soviet power. As Soviet power returned to Riazan, authorities grappled with the mass upheaval that the power vacuum had enabled. Unlike later interpretations, which would stress the role of German atrocities in occupation regimes, Riazan authorities blamed “anti-Soviet elements” among the province’s population.

The Second World War held and retains a unique place in Soviet and post-Soviet historical memory. Scholars have generally studied the legacy of the war from the perspective of political and cultural elites. This article uses Russian digital commemoration to assess contemporary memory of World War II from a social perspective. A macroanalysis of I Remember, an interview and social networking site, and Pomnite Nas!, a site with user-contributed listings of war monuments, shows how popular memory of the war reiterates and updates Soviet historical narratives. Supported but not initiated by Vladimir Putin’s government, these sites show how state and society are interacting in Russia to produce and reproduce memory of the war. The article contributes both to methodological discussion of the internet as a source for memory studies and the fate of the Second World War in Russia.

Debate on the exhibit Great Patriotic War and Holocaust at the Moscow Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.

This is the feature review article, focused on the new books on representation of the Holocaust (the Shoa), published in Israel, France, and the USA in 2013-2014. It is supposed that the new academic paradigm is emerging now, caused by inclusion of the Eastern European literature (fiction, poetry, essays) on Holocaust into the context of Western Holocaust literature. The methods of research and interpretation of post-traumatic literary works are also discussed; one of the most difficult issues here is contextualization of such works within diverse cultural and literary movements of a period.  

Essays on the Ignorabimus controversy stirred up by Emil du Bois-Reymond and the debate on the limits of knowledge in philosophy and the sciences: physics, measurement theory, biology, physiology, morals, epistemology.

The emancipation of the nobility in 1762 was, arguably, the central event in the social and cultural history of the Russian imperial elite and, indeed, a watershed in the relationship between the elite and the state in Russia, marking official recognition by the monarchy of the nobles’ autonomous subjecthood. The road toward this recognition, it is argued here, was paved with a thorough reconceptualization of human nature in Russian governance practices in the first half of the eighteenth century, and reconstructing the trajectory of this reconceptualization is the goal in this chapter. Indeed, attempts to understand human nature were central for political thinking of the age, from Locke, Puffendorf, and Montesquieu to Smith and the Founding Fathers of the United States. Scholars of government and practicing politicians in the West debated the limitations and opportunities inherent in human nature for organizing better governance of their societies. So, I argue, did their counterparts in Russia. Whereas in Petrine administrative thinking and legislation nobles appear as subjects swayed by their pernicious passions and thus requiring to be restrained, in subsequent decades the members of the elite were increasingly viewed in a more positive light: as entitled, by their praiseworthy ambitions and love of honor, to make decisions regarding their own lives and the public good in general.

This essay deal with history of postwar patterns of distribution and consumption in the USSR in two contexts: as a direct result of the war; and as part of the development of the Stalinist mobilization model in general.

The article deals with a unique personal project by Hamburg graffiti writer Oz (Walter Fischer, 1950-2014), one of the oldest and prolific participants of Hamburg graffiti and street art scene. His personal project, successful in terms of public recognition (and public hate), includes 30 years of painting simple but incalculable symbols on nearly every surface in Hamburg. Oz presents a viewer with a different image of the city, creating an open and fluid urban “community of vision” as well as the conditions for street art to develop itself in the city in a very innovative way. “Oz project”, while being controversial in the official opinion, contributed to Hamburg identity, first, and to the understanding of one particular important function street art performs on city streets, second. Street art works as an “exerciser for vision”, as a developer of different cultural ways of seeing. Methodologically the article brings together visual studies, which are comparatively less presented in the existing field of debates on street art, with social anthropology and urban studies.

In this chapter we are going to examine the logical connections between various descriptions of the Scientific Revolution proposed by Alexandre Koyré. We are going to propose an attentive and detailed reading of texts written by Koyré in different periods of his life in order to identify various aspects of his interpretation of the revolution in thought that occurred in early modern Europe. His most famous description of the Scientific Revolution (the dual characterization) indicates two aspects of the process that led to the emergence of classical physics: “destruction of the Cosmos” and “geometrization of space”. However, Koyré frequently used other expressions for characterization of the period, such as “mathematization of Nature”, or transition “from the world of more-or-less to the universe of precision” and “from the closed world to the open universe”. We could expect that Koyré would try to reduce his initial dual characterization to one single formula. I argue here that, on the contrary, the duality of description had a special meaning which permits us to keep in focus the complexity of the intellectual change that occurred during 17th century, when new science was rising from a new conception of reality, and a new world-view was emerging from the new science

A threat is a strange thing—for it is neither simply a deed done, nor undone. But if we think the threat in terms of the presence or absence of an actual or potential threat—as the history of philosophy (from the Greeks, through Hegel, to us) has done, then we miss what is threatening. For the threat—whether to life and limb, freedom or identity, or to an individual or group, family and friends, civil society or a state or the world as a whole—is the suspension of action. Then the threat is prior to possibility and impossibility, necessity and contingency, presence and absence. But this too, is a threat—and one that implicates us—at least insofar as the implied threat implies the threat of implication.

This paper discuss the issues of polysynthesis focusing on West Circassian (Adyghe), a Northwest Caucasian language.

Les hommes transposent facilement leurs actes et leur comportement sur les animaux, comme on le voit dans les fables, d’Ésope à La Fontaine. A l’inverse, on peut se demander si nous transférons les caractéristiques des animaux sur nous-mêmes, et de quelle façon. Ce double phénomène d’anthropocentrisme et de zootropisme linguistique se rencontre fréquemment dans les langues. En partant du constat que certains verbes liés aux animaux s’emploient aussi pour désigner ou pour caractériser des actes ou des comportements humains, des linguistes français et russes ont mené une recherche sur les verba sonandi et la métaphorisation des cris et des bruits émis par les animaux dans 23 langues appartenant à 7 familles linguistiques différentes, dans le cadre d’une exploration linguistique relevant d’un domaine à part entière, la typologie lexicale. Le volume est divisé en deux parties. La première traite des verbes de bruit associés aux animaux selon une approche linguistique. La seconde regroupe des études culturelles qui se complètent, portant sur l’emploi des verbes de bruit et sur la représentation des animaux dans la littérature et dans certaines cultures. L’ouvrage peut intéresser aussi bien des spécialistes – linguistes, traducteurs, culturologues, spécialistes des sciences humaines en général – que tous ceux qui s’intéressent aux cultures et aux langues.

Die russischen Emigranten, die nach dem Sieg der bolschewistischen Revolution ihr Land verließen, wurden zu Zeugen und Opfern des ersten geschichtlichen Experiments, eine totalitäre Utopie in die Wirklichkeit umzusetzen. Viele von ihnen begriffen, dass die im Oktober 1917 begonnenen Prozesse lediglich den ersten Akt eines allgemeineuropäischen Zivilisationsbruchs darstellten. Wie gebannt schauten damals viele Europäer auf das von den Bolschewiki durchgeführte soziale Experiment, ungeachtet der Tatsache, dass unzählige Menschen für dieses Experiment mit ihrem Leben bezahlen mussten. Wie wurde dieses "Experiment" von den führenden russischen Exildenkern analysiert? Wie reagierten sie auf die immer tiefer werdende europäische Krise der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts? Mit diesen Fragen befasst sich das vorliegende Buch.