This paper focuses on the question of transformation of the Orthodox tradition in the postmodern context. The apophatic theology and the institute of Holy Fools (jurodstvo) are the most hermeneutic and mystical parts of Byzantine and Russian Orthodox cultures. These practices are now detached from their original sacral context and are used as rhetorical devices. The process and the results of such transgression are studied on the examples from the works of Dmitry Prigov and Vladimir Sorokin. In this paper I concentrate on three rhetorical figures that are used by these authors: logogriph, amplification and ostranenie.
This thesis is a contribution to a growing field of studies on the reception of Byzantine culture in Russia. The object of investigation is the history of the Church Slavonic translation of the Cherubika, which constitute one of the most ancient and dogmatically important functional genres of Byzantine liturgical hymns. The chronological frame of this study is the 13th–17th century. Particular attention is focused on the last change in the liturgical texts in Muscovite Russia, in the mid-17th century. This liturgical reform, which led to the famous Schism in the Russian Church, is studied as part of the cultural reforms started by Tsar Alexis Romanov (1645-1676). The most characteristic feature of Orthodoxy is the principal unity of Scripture and Tradition, which in a hermeneutical perspective means the inseparability of text and context. The semiotic and interdisciplinary approach used in this study reflects this principle. The Slavic Cherubika are interpreted in a broad cultural perspective, and Church Slavonic translations are studied in the proper theological, rhetorical and linguistic contexts. Although the 17th-century translations made in Moscow were based on late Greek and South Slavic sources, they reconstruct the original dogmatic message of the Byzantine Cherubika and are hence closer to the Tradition than earlier Slavonic translations. This study offers a new interpretation of the nature of the Schism. It is shown that the main cause of the controversy between Reformists and Old Believers lies in their different understandings of the connection between Text and Ritual. The traditional medieval interpretation of the Cherubika is influenced by certain iconographical themes, other liturgical texts and the priest’s actions during the liturgy. The transition from a liturgocentric interpretation of sacral texts to a descriptive theological interpretation was a break from the characteristic Russian form of liturgocentrism and the beginning of a new cultural era.
This article aims to explore the connection between the new 2013 Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation and Christian messianism in contemporary Russian intellectual thought. The ‘conservative turn’ in Russian politics is associated with the return to the cultural and political ideologeme of Katechon, which is proposed by several right-wing intellectuals as the basis for the Russia's new state ideology and foreign and security policy. The theological concept of Katechon (from the Greek ό Κατέχων, ‘the withholding’) that protects the world from the advent of the Antichrist originates in the Byzantine Empire. In Russian tradition, this concept is presented in the well-known doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome, dating back to the 16th century. The term ‘Katechon’ in contemporary Russian political discourse is relatively new and can be traced to the post-Soviet reception of Carl Schmitt's political theology. The concept of Russia as Katechon is directly connected to the national security and defence policy, because it is used as the ideological ground for the new wave of militarization and anti-Western sentiment, as well as for Russia's actions during the Ukrainian crisis. This analysis puts the internal political and cultural debate on Russia's role in international affairs and its relations with the West into historical perspective and demonstrates the right-wing intellectual circles’ influence on the Kremlin's new domestic and foreign policy.
Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii’s story Malysh (The Kid; 1971) is often analysed as the text in which the authors first turn from adventure sf to social sf, which focuses on problems of alienation and dehumanisation and on questions of private and social identity. The contextual analysis of the novel and its adaptation Nesmluvená setkání (Unexpected Encounters; Czech Republic 1994), directed by Irena Pavlásková, reveals a serious discrepancy between the postcolonial focus of the Czech adaptation and a more elaborate and multilevel philosophical reading of the Strugatskiis’ story. This article develops the role of the Strugatskiis’ texts as part of the post-Soviet phenomenon of nostalgia for the future within neoconservative intellectual circles. In this interpretation, the Strugatskii brothers’ legacy is included in a new politico-technological and ideological context of imperial sf and transhumanism.
Повесть Аркадия и Бориса Стругацких «Малыш» (1970 г.) нередко рассматриваетсяисследователями как образец поворота этих авторов от научной к социальнойфантастике, с ее интересом к вопросам личной и социальной этики, проблематикедегуманизации, колонизации и «приручения», к понятию «настоящий человек». Наматериале фильма «Неназначенные встречи» (Чехия, 1994 г.) - экранизации повести«Малыш» - в докладе будет рассмотрены стратегии репрезентации дистопиитрансгуманизма как победы технологической рациональности. Особое внимание будетуделено сравнению повести и фильма по следующим аспектам: визуализация планетыАрхе как места «бывшей жизни», дихотомия дикарь/постчеловек в образе Малыша, плавающая идентичность и «шизоидность» главных героев как необходимыепредпосылки установления контакта.
This article deals with the phenomenon of “digital anti-clericalism” in the Russian-speaking sphere of the Internet (Runet). In the context of post-secularism the claims of Russian clerical and bureaucratic elites to the ideological monopoly in the political and social life face a strong resistance from the champions of religious pluralism and preservation of a secular state. Presented here is a detailed analysis of the topics and the stylistic features of different types of anti-clerical Internet communication – a variety of political folklore (memes, demotivators, photoshopped pictures). Also traced is the connection between the modern anti-clericalism on Runet and the late Soviet counter-culture. Suggested for the first time is a classification of anticlerical and atheist websites that constitute a vital part of the Russian blogosphere.
While post-Soviet cultural revisitations of the Soviet period have assumed various forms and approaches, ranging from nostalgic to critical, recent examples of Russian historical fiction appear to indicate a different turn. They neither seek primarily to establish historical facts in order to work through traumatic experiences, thereby relegating them to the past, nor do they express a nostalgic longing for a lost world, now remembered in a positive light. Rather, these texts focus on individual and collective memory processes, problematizing attempts to understand and come to terms with the past. This paper examines such a problematization with regard to the Stalinist period in the novel Kamennyi most by Aleksandr Terekhov (2009), which has received much critical attention as well as second prize in the Bolshaia kniga awards. The narrative is based on an actual event in 1943, when the son of Stalin’s Minister of Aviation is believed to have murdered his girlfriend—the daughter of the Soviet ambassador to Mexico—because she refused to remain with him in Moscow. In the novel, this case is reinvestigated by the narrator-detective, whose findings suggest a number of possible alternative interpretations of the event. However, the text, which can be described as faction in that it mixes documentary and fictional narrative modes, ultimately raises more questions than it answers—about the nature of the case itself, as well as the nature of human memory and historical knowledge. Drawing upon Linda Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction as a prominent feature of postmodern texts, I will examine how this novel functions as a site of negotiation between past and present. I will also show how it offers a commentary—not only on the Stalinist period, but, more significantly, on post-Soviet Russia and its relation to the past.
This essay examines how the forest is described and its ideological connotations in three works of fiction from the Soviet period, Andrei Platonov’s short story "Among Animals and Plants", Leonid Leonov’s novella
The Russian Forest and Valentin Rasputin’s novel Farewell to Matyora.
The aim is to determine the relationship between the depiction of the forests in the three texts from Soviet period and the nationalistic, slavophile, understanding of the Russian forest that appears in Russian culture in the middle of 19
th century.
The study shows that the forest in Platonov’s work, while not being slavophile, shares some features, especially visual, with the slavophile forest. Rasputin’s forest is slavophile, while Leonov’s forest, though being nationalistic, is not.
12 декабря 2012 года в своем послании к Федеральному собранию российский президент Владимир Путин, затронув тему патриотизма и истории как необходимой опоры сохранения «национальной и духовной идентичности» России, процитировал Александра Солженицина. Интерес Путина к творчеству Солженицина не ограничивается этим посланием. В моем докладе я затрагиваю следующие вопросы:
1. В какой мере анализ художественных произведений и публицистики Солженицина позволяет нам понять причину интереса к писателю со стороны политических властей.
2. Возможно ли рассматривать Солженицина не только как писателя, но и как политического историка, а также как идеолога. Если да, то
3. В чем заключается его идеология?