Suchergebnisse

Dante, Florenskii, Lotman : journeying then and now through medieval space / David Bethea -- Lotman's other : estrangement and ethics in culture and explosion / Amy Mandelker -- Pushkin's Anzhelo, Lotman's insight into it, and the proper measure of politics and grace / Caryl Emerson -- Post-soviet political discourse and the creation of political communities / Michael Urban -- State power, hegemony, and memory : Lotman and Gramsci / Marek Steedman -- The ever-tempting return to an Iranian past in the Islamic present : does Lotman's binarism help? / Kathryn Babayan -- The self, its bubbles, and illusions : cultivating autonomy in Greenblatt and Lotman / Andreas Schönle -- Lotman's Karamzin and the late soviet liberal intelligentsia / Andrei Zorin -- Iconic self-expression : bipolar asymmetry, indeterminacy, and creativity in cinema / Herbert Eagle -- Post-ing the soviet body as tabula phrasa and spectacle / Helena Goscilo -- Eccentricity and cultural semiotics in imperial Russia / Julie A. Buckler -- Writing in a polluted semiosphere : everyday life in Lotman, Foucault, and De Certeau / Jonathan H. Bolton -- Afterword : Lotman without tears

The calendar reforms of Peter the Great introduced on January 1, 1700 have produced a surprising amount of confusion and misunderstanding. This articles proposes firstly to clarify the aims and outcomes of these reforms, so far as the available sources allow. Secondly, through an examination of the New Year celebrations mandated by Peter's edicts, the article examines the legitimating arguments that have been deployed, including ideas about Russia's relation to western countries, about the position of the Orthodox Church in the polity, and about the prerogatives of the ruler in these matters. As a result of the changing arguments invoked by Peter and his entourage, the reforms introduced a regime of plural temporalities that has affected the course of Russia's development and the elaboration of its identities to this day. The reforms had little to do with heralding a secular, modern society. If initially they represented a failed pragmatic attempt to create a civil calendar aligned with Protestant countries, their justification, once it finally settled, harked back to long-standing theological ideas about the time of the Incarnation.

In this article Andreas Schönle explores the treatment of ruins in the Romantic period, in particular the propensity toward holistic reconstruction, rather than preservation of architectural heritage. He argues that the Romantic disregard of extant heritage harks back to the Sentimentalist infatuation with the fleetingness of life and dramatization of loss, that this melancholy feeling stoked a sense of national victimization, and that it legitimated an imaginary reinvention of the past and the constructedness of collective memory. The Church of the Tithe in Kiev serves as a case study illustrating that the Romantic commitment to totality has resulted in the significant destruction of architecture. Depictions of its ruins in travel accounts and in the writings of Vadim Passek and Andrei Murav'ev evidence a marked desire to exacerbate the sense of loss rather than to describe and valorize the remains. This disregard of heritage reprises the Sentimentalist infatuation with melancholy prominently deployed by Nikolai Karamzin. A comparison with Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in France and Augustus Pugin in England indicates that in Russia the invention of a national style of architecture required a much more radical imposition upon the historical landscape.

This article surveys theories of ruins and discusses their applicability to Russian history and culture. It identifies four major approaches to ruins: the ruin as a site of freedom from social norms and practices (Denis Diderot, Peter Fritzsche, Tim Edensor), the ruin as a reconciliation with nature (Georg Simmel), the ruin as the affirmation of modernity at the expense of the past (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno), and the ruin as the emblem of on-going historical decay (Walter Benjamin). In contrast to western approaches to ruins, Schönle identifies a reluctance to aestheticize ruins in Russian culture. Yet ruins acquire a distinctive meaning in Russian culture, be it that they occur and disappear as a result of political will, that they serve as exemplars of imperial legitimacy and might, that they reveal the vulnerability of Russia's identity between east and west, or that they betoken the crushing of Utopian projects and the magnitude of historical devastation.

This paper investigates the ramifications of the garden trope, as Catherine the Great and Grigorii Potemkin applied it to the Crimea after Russia's annexation in 1783. Schönle argues that Catherine conceived of the province as a kind of garden and that she did so in order to bolster the identification of the Crimea with the garden of Eden and thus appeal to the paradise myth that became an intrinsic part of Russia's ideology of imperial power. The Crimean garden was meant to exemplify the benefits of her loving and protective rule, one that enables multicultural coexistence, eschews the risks of assimilationist imperial policies, and yet brings about a moral transformation of the subjugated population. In both its physical and ethnic geography, the Crimean garden claims universality in that it foregrounds an eclectic diversity of species and peoples. Catherine ascribed religious overtones to the garden trope, and she did so in opposition to a western Enlightenment definition of empire and civility.

This century may be called the century of openness in the physical and moral sense: look at our sweet beauties! … Before people used to hide in dark homes behind the cover of high fences. Nowadays, one sees bright homes everywhere with large windows facing the street: please look in! We want to live, act, and think behind a transparent glass–Nikolai Karamzin, Moia ispoved

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note to the Reader -- INTRODUCTION -- 1. HISTORICAL OUTLINE OF RUSSIA'S EUROPEANIZATION TO 1825 -- 2. EXPOSURE TO EUROPE -- 3. COMMERCE WITH POWER -- 4. THE QUEST FOR TRUE SPIRITUALITY -- 5. WRITING ON THE TABULA RASA -- 6. THE RISE OF LITERATURE AND THE EMERGENCE OF A SECULAR CULT -- 7. THE EUROPEANIZED SELF COLONIZING THE PROVINCES -- CONCLUSION -- Abbreviations -- Bibliography -- Index