Book chapter
Интернациональный Шекспир: Журнал «Интернациональная литература» и «шекспиризация» 1930х годов
The article deals with the analysis of W.Shakespeare's works in the Internacionalnaya literatura's editorial policy.
The article deals with the analysis of W.Shakespeare's works in the Internacionalnaya literatura's editorial policy.
Today we cannot but notice the sequence of the considerable changes in the present-day social and cultural order through the obvious process of its invasion by certain semiotic constructs, possibly described as political myths, and nearly all of them closely connected with the issue of past/present/future glory. This glory could be lost (e.g., the col-lapse of the USSR), or gained anew (e.g., the joining of Crimea in 2014). The concepts of glory and victory in Russian political discourse are bound up with each other so closely that it is difficult to divide them. Besides, glory and victory are being gradually possessed by the establishment. At the same time, political myths are the means and the aim of this process. Myth comes forward as a universal code, and moreover, as a universal social-cultural matrix which contains patterns of ethics that are to be installed into the society. Besides, myth is a structure based upon the category of shap-ing the reality in which people may believe, not the category of belief. In the sphere of the media, myth broadcasts itself mainly through memes, using them both as instruments and as a certain communication channel. The structure of a meme is semiotic, while there is still a communicative difference between a meme and a myth. The idea of political glory is closely connected with the sphere of myth and with the concepts of time and space. This kind of integration makes up what Bakhtin called a “chronotope.”
In this paper, I would like to examine the meaning of and relationship between ‘practice’ and ‘ideology’ in Boris Hessen’s “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia”. I propose that for Hessen, practice can be defined as the transformation of things in-themselves into things for-us, as well as the transformation of things in-themselves into things for-themselves. Ideology, for him, refers to the specific difference between practice and theory, when the practical roots of theory are concealed. In section 1, I explain the Hessen theses and identify means and relations of production as the two kinds of practice presented in the Newton paper. In section 2, I trace the history of the composition and reception of the Hessen theses, showing that any attempt to understand practice and ideology in Hessen’s work requires incorporating his not only Marxist, but Deborinite background. In section 3, I explain conceptions of practice and ideology from previous Marxist thinkers and how Hessen, as a Deborinite, may have integrated aspects of these conceptions into his own view. In section 4, I show that Nikolai Bukharin’s “Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism” provides the proper complement for understanding the remaining elements of Hessen’s account.
This paper discusses the reinvention of the humanist ideas and values in the Soviet post-World War II and post-Stalinist culture (the 1950s and the1960s) with the help of Renaissance plots and images in Soviet semi-official art, the main examples being Pavel Antokolsky’s poem Hieronymus Bosch (1957), the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Hard to Be a God (1963), and Grigory Kozintsev’s films based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970), as well as David Samoilov’s poem Bertold Schwarz: A Monologue, set in the late Middle Ages. The paper isolates an aesthetic movement that developed in the Soviet culture of those decades; I propose to call this movement “posttraumatic humanism.” It was based on the new aesthetic idiom of “gloomy Renaissance,” including images of conflagration, ruins, violence. The works of this movement did not use the Aesopian language — or, at least, did not use it as a primary or only tool. Rather, it involves a covert comparison of the Soviet present with the European pre-Enlightenment past and aesthetical valorization and sublimation of 20th-century catastrophic experience. Images of “gloomy Renaissance” conveyed the erosion the Soviet belief in progress and moral modernization as inevitable consequences of Bolsheviks’ revolution. One of the earliest mature works of posttraumatic humanism in Soviet culture was Vasily Grossman’s essay The Sistine Madonna (1955). Alexei German Sr.’s film Hard to Be a God (2013) can be regarded as the concluding and summarizing work in this movement.