Publications

This paper argues that as Dostoevsky endeavored to affirm a moral ideal in his struggle against nihilism—attempting to overcome the “inertia” of his protagonist the Underground Man—he gave lucid articulation to the moral-aesthetic values that would later become a staple for Russian revolutionaries, particularly the “conscientious” terrorist.  Within this context the case of Vera Zasulich will be examined as an unanticipated realization of Dostoevsky’s moral ideal.

The current article aims to discuss the construction of femininity in Soviet fashion discourse during the 1950s-1960s. Through visual materials and archival documents, the study shows what Soviet women in Leningrad expected to wear and to Soviet feminine ideal differ from Western models. The analysis prompts to the finding that despite the official declaration about equality of men and women in socialism, Soviet fashion discourse reflected a heterosexual matrix, and the Soviet feminine ideal did not differ from Western models.

The title coinage of this book, stimulacra , refers to the fundamental capacity of literary narrative to stimulate our minds and senses by simulating things through words. Musical stimulacra are passages of fi ction that readers are empowered to transpose into mental simulations of music. The book theorizes how fi ction can generate musical experience, explains what constitutes that experience, and explores the musical dimensions of three American novels: William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central (2005), William H. Gass’s Middle C (2013), and Richard Powers’s Orfeo (2014). Musical Stimulacra approaches fiction’s music from a readerly perspective. Instead of looking at how novels forever fail to compensate for music’s physical, structural, and affective properties, the book concentrates on what literary narrative can do musically. Negotiating common grounds for cognitive audionarratology and intermediality studies, Musical Stimulacra builds its case on the assumption that, among other things, fiction urges us to listen— to musical words and worlds.

Among the inhabitants of the late medieval Venetian Tana one finds people from various countries from Central Asia to Spain. The place hosted the Venetian and Genoese trading posts, Greek, Slavic, Jewish settlements nearby, and anomadic city of Tatars. This study is devoted to the Greek Orthodox population of Tana (Greeks, Russians, Bulgarians, part of the Zikhs and Tatars) in its dynamics throughout time.

Nemirovskiy’s article offers a reading of Pushkin’s poem “The Hero” (1830) in comparison with visual and textual representations of Napoleon as a messianic monarch, including reminiscences about his visit to the plague hospital in Jaffa. In Pushkin’s poem, elements of the Napoleonic text are related to the Russian tsar Nicholas I. Thanks to this connection, the image of Nicholas also falls under the influence of the French antimonarchic discourse.

Статья посвящена описанию феномена агитпропа в современном искусстве.

The term Aktionsart is widely used in modern aspectology; however, there is no common understanding of its meaning. In basic terms, three different approaches to Aktionsart can be identified in modern literature on aspect. The most widespread view equates Aktionsart to lexical aspect, a classification of verbs into Vendlerian or quasi-Vendlerian categories that underlie aspectual properties of the verb. While this approach is predominantly used outside Slavic linguistics, Slavists usually apply the term to phenomena other than lexical aspect. In Slavic studies, the two existing approaches trace their roots to Sigurd Agrell’s study of Polish verb derivatives with special attention to the semantic functions of prefixes (Agrell 1908). However, Agrell’s definition of Aktionsart did not enable a unified understanding of the term. On the one hand, he described Aktionsarten as semantic functions specifying the way the action is performed; on the other hand, his analysis focused on derivatives rather than simple verbs. This triggered the development of the aspectual-semantic and the derivational-modificational theories of Aktionsart. The article discusses both approaches and the relationship between Aktionsarten and the aspectuality domain.

Clausal complements are generally taken to be free from formal licensing conditions such as the Case Filter. In this paper, I discuss the distributional restriction of čto-clause complements of N to restructuring V-N collocations earlier proposed in Knyazev 2016, where it was explained by a formal licensing requirement for čto-clausess. I present the results of an experimental study that used a factorial definition of the restriction adapted from studies of island effects (see Sprouse et al. 2013). The results provide evidence for the restriction and indirectly support the licensing requirement proposed earlier.

This article deals with the fates of the two notaries, Niccolò de Varsis and Benedetto de Smeritis, who served in the 1430s in the Venetian colony in Tana (today Azov), placed in the mouth of the River Don where it flows into the Sea of Azov. In this article the author established based on the notarial documents the chronology of the arrival and departure of our two notaries together with the chronology of the arrival and departure of the respective consuls. Further, based on the self-identifications of the notaries the author inferred that that the self-description of the notary and, more broadly, of any person in notarial deeds varied considerably, and there is no reason to see any clear relationship between the formula and the legal status of the person. The imbreviaturae of the notarial documents drawn up by the notaries Niccolò de Varsis and Benedetto Smeritis mainly, although with a few exceptions, in Tana from 1430 to 1440 are stored in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, in the sections Notarili Testamenti and Cancelleria Inferior, Notai. After the death or the termination of the activities of public notaries, the Cancelleria Inferior received these imbreviaturae. The deeds of Varsis and Smeritis are the only notary documents of Venetian origin that came to us from Tana in the 1430s. Joining the notarial College, Venetian notaries were not always able to find a place in Venice and went to practice overseas, often combining their work with other positions, most often the clerical ranks, and then they returned home. In the overseas colonies the functions and responsibilities of a notary were much wider than in the metropolis – they included not only the drafting of the private notarial deeds, but also participation in the management of the colonial chancery and administration, the drafting of the official documents of the curial office of the consul, etc. The position of a notary could be combined with other administrative and ecclesiastic posts in the colonies. The notaries in the overseas Venetian trading stations were simultaneously priests, and this can be often seen in Tana, since they could combine in one person a number of essential functions (the chancellor of the consul’s curia, the chaplain, the notary). In Tana, the Venetians lived compactly within a community, which determined the special role of the notary, who performed in relation to them, in addition, the duties of the pastor. One of their tasks was to draw up private notarial deeds for the individuals, although their work as notaries was not limited to this, as it is discussed in this article.

This iis the first German edition of essays and poetry by Kirill Medvedev from the 1990-s to 2010-s. The Moscow based author and political activist is a key representative of a post Soviet style and habitus of "new sincerity" and initiated a new tendency towards an engaged poetry. The book also contains an essay by the editors, Matthias Meindl and Georg Witte, about the linguistic аspects of Medvedev's poetry and its political implications. 

Статья посвящена описания художественныъ институций в России.

CAT is a Corpus of Russian Academic Texts that consists of recently published scientific articles enriched with metadata, morphological and syntactic annotation (see Kopotev et al., 2019). The CAT is used as a reference corpus to automatically evaluate a novice student’s paper against the academic standard. We provide a web service that helps students seeking to improve their writing skills, by getting automatic feedback on the text. As a first step of analysis, the system provides a general analysis of the novice text; the second step involves a fine-grain analysis that analyses three broad areas, found challenging for learners of Russian; 1) lexical knowledge (e.g. unattested lexemes), 2) grammatical knowledge (e.g. overuse of the Genitive case), and 3) collocational knowledge (e.g. well-formed, but unattested collocations). Our project is still a work in progress. The current report is focused on general analysis, where along with the standard measures, we also apply those that focus on academic features of text.

There is a paradox in the aftermath of the global imperial crisis in the region of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The Habsburg Empire which had been thought about as the katechon of future world of federalism broke into nation-states with regimes of accommodation and repression of national minorities. The Russian Empire which had been thought about as the future centralized nation-state transformed into a federation with layered forms of autonomy and decentralization. The exploration of this paradox begins with the critique of the image of the Russian Empire as a centralized and centralizing state and exploration of inclusive and differentiated governance and ways in which this political formation was reflected in political discourses of reformist and oppositional movements which in one way or another imagined the post-imperial order. The paper then traces the constitutional debates in the revolutionary contexts of 1905 and 1917 and assesses how these debates reflected local and global discourses of imagining the post-imperial order and how they were incorporated into the constitutions adopted on the territory of the former Russian Empire. The global imperial crisis which brought down the Qing, Russian, Ottoman, German and Habsburg empires stimulated imagination of post-imperial order not only in the named contexts, but also in the British, French and other cases. The circulation and synthesis of ideas fostered by the miscellany of the crumbling empires and the diversity within each of them produced a great variety of imaginations. The non-Soviet constitutional projects of 1917–1921 and the Soviet constitutions of 1918 and 1924 incorporated the experience of the Russian Empire and other imperial and post-imperial formations. The Constitution of the Far Eastern Republic, for instance, borrowed the concept of non-territorial autonomy from the Ukrainian Constitution of 1918, while the ineffectiveness of the formal right to territorial autonomy resembled that in the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920. The multilateral transfers and borrowings, both from the Russian imperial and other contexts, resulted in the departure of the 1924 Constitution of the Soviet Union from the initial Bolshevik plans. Instead of establishing a non-national class-centered formation, it became a mere preamble to a multinational confederation to be developed by its sovereign participants, which included two federations.

This paper outlines the complexity of interactions between Russian Orthodox monasteries and fish resources of the Russian North in the White and Barents Sea basins. The authors consider the complete cycle of monastic fishing activities as a complex of routine practices of an organizational, managerial, and commercial character. They demonstrate that the monks developed the organizational structure and management system that crucially contributed to the transformation of traditional fishing practices into the market-oriented exploitation of the natural resources of the White and Barents seas.

We now know that the Iron Curtain was not an impenetrable wall but, rather, a porous imaginary boundary through which people, ideas, and goods could travel. This volume is a fresh attempt to look across two blocs to examine variations, similarities, and connections between what we used to call East and West. As editors Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and John R. McNeill explain in the introduction, the volume aims to challenge a traditional question about the East-West divide. It focuses on the environment and its connections to politics, culture, and society.

The article discusses the pre-history of what Andrey Azov famously called “the overthrow of the literalists”, and the beginning of the half-a-century domination of the “Soviet school of translation” in Russia. It aims to locate and scrutinise the moment when the previous translation trend, later pejoratively labelled as “literalism”, gave way to the “Soviet school”.

In the post-war years, the Russian translators Evgeny Lann and Georgy Shengeli were subjected to harsh criticism as “literalists” by the literary critic, translator and translation theorist Ivan Kashkin. In the official history of Soviet translation as outlined in the Literary Encyclopedia (1968), they were presented as key figures of a translation trend, also labelled “formalist” and “technologically exact”, both post- and pre-war. This version of the history of Soviet translation, still resounding even in Azov’s study (2013), is strongly distorted and needs to be rewritten in a more analytical way. Primarily, the term “literalists”, that was used loosely and pejoratively at the time, can by no means serve as instrumental today. One of the most adequate self-labels of this trend in translation that had its heyday throughout the 1930s, notably in the activities of the Academia publishing house and the Commission for the Study of Literary Translation at the Moscow State Academy of Art Sciences (GAKhN), is “artistically scientific”. In order to describe the trend adequately it should be noted that the “nomination” of Lann and Shengeli as “literalists” and the main targets of post-war criticism owes primarily to the fact that the much more influential key figures of this “school”, mentioned in the Literary Encyclopedia (1934) as the “best present-day translators” – Mikhail Kuzmin, Adrian Pyotrovsky, Boris Yarkho, Mikhail Petrovsky – had either died (Kuzmin) or fallen victim to the great purges that hit also the GAKhNovites, including Gustav Shpet. Their names became unmentionable, while the translation projects and discussions of the 1930s associated with them could not be properly considered in translation histories. In order to reconstruct the true history of Soviet translation they have to be restored to their rightful place.

The pivotal point that marked both the acme of the “artistically scientific” translation, as well as the beginning of its demise, was the year 1934. It famously saw the First All-Union Congress of Writers at which translation was declared not the “private domain of a couple of literary pedants, not the academic theme for a philologist’s thesis, but an affair of utmost state importance”. Integration of translation into Stalinist national politics (discussions at the Writers’ Congress were centred on the interests of Soviet nationalities and on praising the free translations made by poets) resulted in a drastic decline of autonomy in the field and in the competition between critics profiting from the heteronomy concerning who would define the true “Soviet translation” and thus have the power to judge. The brilliant samples of scientifically founded translations of classics that appeared in 1934 – Boris Yarkho’s rendition of the medieval romance La Chanson de Roland and Gustav Shpet’s new Russian Dickens and Shakespeare (both to become virtually erased from the history of Soviet translation later on) became the focal point of the dispute over what “Soviet translation” should be.

The article reconstructs both Yarkho’s and Shpet’s philologically based translation premises and the conflicting reception of their work by fellow philologists and by politically motivated critics. The transcript of a 1934 discussion held after Evgeny Lann’s report on the principles of the new Dickens translations preserved in the archives clearly shows that, at the time, all discussants, including Kashkin, addressed not Lann but Shpet as the real source of these principles and that it was only after Shpet’s arrest and death that the spearhead of criticism was aimed at Lann (who, unlike Shpet, unfortunately lacked the philological and spiritual stamina and weight to confront it decisively). As for Yarkho’s attempt to invent a Russian poetic diction adequate for rendering French syllabic verse and the heterogeneous style of the medieval war epic, it was both daring and philologically grounded and had been highly praised as a model “Soviet translation” by major philologists working in the field of translation, e.g. Mikhail Alexeev, Alexander Smirnov and Rosalia Shor. At the same time, critics trying to speak in accordance with the political line would criticise it harshly, programmatically declaring their preference for the outdated free-verse translation into Russian made by de la Barthe.

In the history of Soviet translation, the transition from the “artistically scientific” or, to use a more familiar term, foreignising trend that had been flourishing throughout the 1930s and given brilliant practical as well as theoretical results, to a domesticating, ahistorical “Soviet school” that lacked theoretical reflection was not a natural evolution. Instead, it constituted a brutal intrusion of heteronomy into the field of translation, the triumph of politically oriented literary critics over professional translators and philologists that was strongly facilitated by the fact that many of the latter were repressed and, consequently, their names and works were erased from the history of Soviet translation.

Since the nineteenth century, access to and the development of natural

resources became an important element of national and international politics. Resource

security emerged as an issue vital to national security; and resource competition and

crises gave rise to international tensions as well as to technological innovation and new

modes of transnational cooperation. This paper discusses ongoing collaborative research

activities in the Tensions of Europe network. Three broader themes are presented: (1)

perceptions and constructions of resources, resource crises, and resource futures; (2)

globalized resource chains and environmental transformation; and (3) managing crises:

technologies, expertise, and the politics of natural resources.

The Chapter reveals to the reader a look at the global process of climate change from the perspective of the local population of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous district and adjacent regions. Their destinies, way of life, professional plans and career trajectories unfold against the background of changing natural conditions, shifting seasons, unpredictable ice conditions, the collapsing Soviet and emerging post-Soviet infrastructure being built by new stakeholders. The first section explains the socio-economic, historical, infrastructural and natural linkages between the Arctic and subarctic zones, as well as the need to take into account the zonal changes throughout Western Siberia, as they form a transdisciplinary context of transformations in the Russian Arctic.

The second section shows the scenarios of overcoming the difficulties and adapting to the changing conditions caused by the new wave of development of the North, management decisions and natural disasters occurring during the life of the last two generations of the northerners. What is more important for survival in the Arctic: the ability to survive autonomously, using local knowledge and skills, community resources, or the bet made on the operational supply and close, intensive transport and informational links in the Arctic?

The third section raises the question of whether there are serious climate changes (that can be seen thanks to the research of landscapes, the state of permafrost, water resources, soils, ecosystems, ecology of regions), from the perspective of local residents, leading the economy and working in the far North? How do they feel them and what aspects of daily life are affected by climate change? The Chapter is based on empirical research on the territory of the Yamal and Khanty-Mansiysk district (Yugra) and northern part of Tomsk region, the corpus of interviews and observations.