Book
Triumph der Rache: Joachim Wilhelm von Brawe und die Ästhetik der Aufklärung
The chapter juxtaposes Veselovsky’s theory of the persistence of forms with the set of critical practices known as New Historicism, and shows that both approaches exclude the possibility of new forms arising. The chapter suggests that both the oblivion of an old form and the rise of the new result from a fundamental shift in perception that occurs within the order of verbal creativity and does not lend itself to a historical-deterministic explanation.
This article analyzes how the ‘progressive’ imagination of democratically minded intellectuals in Russia discursively produces the internal ‘other’ – Vladimir Putin’s supporters – as a singular monolithic subject whose ‘underdeveloped’ intellectual condition is judged against an imagined scale of human progression. Discussing the case study of a Russian independent radio station Echo of Moscow, the author argues that its democratizing anti-Putin discourse is organized along the lines of a mythological narrative well known since colonial times: struggle between ‘moderns’ identifying themselves with progress and ‘barbarians’ whose barbarian identity is ascribed to them by modernizers. Drawing on postcolonial and media studies, the author suggests that antidemocratic divisions into ‘civilized’ wedom and ‘underdeveloped’ theydom are unavoidable until we realize the full extent of the enslaving potential of the progressive narrative of the Enlightenment.
Ukraine’s demonstrations for European integration began in Kyiv on November 21, 2013, after the popular journalist Mustafa Nayem called on Ukrainians to gather at the Maidan. Nayem worked for Ukrainian Pravda (UP), a political web site that served as an important mobilization resource for protesters during both the “Orange Revolution” of 2004 and the “Revolution of Dignity” of 2013. How did the popular UP bloggers imagine the European integration in the name of which they organized the Maidan? How did they imagine those citizens – about half of the population of Ukraine – who did not support their European aspirations? By means of discourse analysis of posts by the 35 contributors to UP's “Maidan” blog, this chapter shows that UP bloggers constructed “Europe” as a mythological object devoid of any social or political complexities, as a symbol of progress and a moral force empowered with the right to judge. The bloggers also constructed the opponents of European integration in the hierarchical terms of the progressive imagination – as people who were not developed enough yet to understand and support the clear call to progress represented by the European course. The argument I put forward is that by diminishing and marginalizing their “unworthy” compatriots, UP bloggers undermined the very democracy in the name of which they organized the Maidan.
The paper is focused on the study of reaction of italian literature critics on the publication of the Boris Pasternak's novel "Doctor Jivago". The analysys of the book ""Doctor Jivago", Pasternak, 1958, Italy" (published in Russian language in "Reka vremen", 2012, in Moscow) is given. The papers of italian writers, critics and historians of literature, who reacted immediately upon the publication of the novel (A. Moravia, I. Calvino, F.Fortini, C. Cassola, C. Salinari ecc.) are studied and analised.
The Incongruity Theory of Humor in its different forms states that the cause of laughter is the perception of something that violates our mental patterns and expectations. It seems particularly true of comic absurdity which is based on a deadpan violation of established norms of logic and convention. The current paper explores linguistic mechanisms that underlie the comic effects in the works of Mikhail Zoshchenko, one of the great satirists of Soviet Russia. Zoshchenko is well-known for his simplified writing style which imitates the language and mentality of “the simple people” while at the same time mocking the nascent Soviet officialdom and its demands for the popular accessibility of art. The paper considers Zoshchenko’s narrative through the prism of conventional implicatures (Grice 1961, Karttunen and Peters 1979, Horn 2004, Potts 2005, 2007), or meanings that are not directly stated in the utterances, but implied by the speaker; e.g. Even John solved the problem implies that it was it was not expected of John to solve it. In successful communication, implicit meanings form the shared background of conversational partners; violation of these shared norms may be used to create comical effect. One of the most conventionalized societal norms and one Zoshchenko most frequently violates is the value of human life and, hence, solemn attitude to death. The narrator in Zoshchenko’s stories repeatedly implies otherwise, thus creating a comical portrait of the mentality of Homo Soveticus. Consider a quote from “The story about a greedy dairy woman”: “So, her husband died. At first she probably took it lightly. - A-a, she thought – no big deal… But then she realized – yes, this is a big deal!... Eligible bachelors are not running around in bunches. And then, of course, she started grieving” (shift in emphasis; the cause for grief is not the husband’s death but its inconvenience for the surviving wife). The story “A restless old man” (about an old man who lives in a communal flat and falls into lethargic stupor taken by his family and neighbors for death and then after waking up really dies) is based on violating the same conventional implicature. Throughout the story the narrator implicitly creates the image of death as an inconvenient occurrence and of a deceased person as an unwanted piece of waste. The harshly comic effect is achieved by implicatures about the shallow emotional impact of death (“And then of course there is aggravation: because the room is small and here is a superfluous element”, “If my husband, this surviving idiot, ordered the hearse right away, then the wait for it would have only been three days”; “The summoned doctor reassured everybody that now the old man is bona fide dead”); by violation of semantic compatibility rules whereby the seemingly dead old man is alternately referred to as an animate being (“The dead man is lying and demanding the last tribute to be paid to him”, “The babysitter is afraid to be in the room where a dead person is living”) or inanimate object (“There is so little space that there is even nowhere to pile up the old man”; “I am going to pile him up in the hall, let him wait for the hearse there”).
In the article the patterns of the realization of emotional utterances in dialogic and monologic speech are described. The author pays special attention to the characteristic features of the speech of a speaker feeling psychic tension and to the compositional-pragmatic peculiarities of dialogic and monologic text.
The article examines the main trends in the study of the Stalinist period and the phenomenon of Stalinism in connection with the mass opening of the archives.