Publications

The article discusses the Soviet fate of Cubism after WWII. 

is chapter examines the diering opinions between industrial and scientic institutions over the use of the waters of Lake Baikal in the context of Soviet development policies in Siberia, beginning in the 1950s. It argues that institutions and people experienced Baikal as a place of contradiction, clearly illustrating that Soviet industry posed the risk of harm to the natural environment. In dierent professional layers of Soviet society, Baikal became an arena of conict over water (and nature more broadly) and the lake’s own, natural ability to purify chemical waste discharged into the waters. Employing new archival sources, such as institutional and individual correspondence and reports, this chapter discusses the role of Baikal in the interplay between industry and environment at the institutional level and contributes to the scholarship on Soviet postwar environmental history.

This chapter focuses on textual data that is collected for a specific purpose, which are usually referred to as corpora. Scholars use corpora when they examine existing instances of a certain phenomenon or to conduct systematic quantitative analyses of occurrences, which in turn re#ect habits, attitudes, opinions, or trends. For these contexts, it is extremely useful to combine different approaches. For example, a linguist might analyze the frequency of a certain buzzword, whereas a scholar in the political, cultural, or sociological sciences might attempt to explain the change in language usage from the data in question.

The “digital” is profoundly changing Russia today. While in the mid-1990s less than 1 percent of the Russian population had Internet access, today Russia ranks sixth globally with approximately 110 million Internet users, or three-quarters of the population (The World Factbook 2019). The proliferation of affordable smartphones in the 2010s has made Internet access a commonplace by 2020, with over 60 percent of users connecting through mobile devices, and Russia’s Internet market is the largest in Europe (GfK 2019). According to the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media, the Russian Internet industry amounted to an estimated value of "ve trillion rubles in 2019, or 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) (TASS 2019). Taking into account the additional 25 million Russians who live outside of Russia, it is no surprise that Russian is the second most popular language on the Net after English (Historical trends 2019). These figures alone make Russia an attractive object for researchers interested in the development of today’s digital society. The Russian information technologies (IT) industry, moreover, is an ample provider of highly sophisticated digital tools and well-organized software solutions

The aim of this article is to develop an against-the-grain reading of Dostoevskii's relationship to the rise of revolutionary terrorism in nineteenth-century Russia. I start by interpreting the Underground Man's forlorn state of ‘inertia’ and inwardly directed violence in terms of the Hegelian problematic of conscience (Gewissen) and the ‘beautiful soul’, as elaborated in the Phenomenology of Spirit. I then argue that, as Dostoevskii struggled to affirm a moral ideal that could overcome his protagonist's underground condition (which resembles a warped version of Hegel's beautiful soul), 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, I examine the case of Vera Zasulich as an unanticipated realization of Dostoevskii's moral ideal.

Fazliddin Muhammadiev’s Dar on dunyo (In the other world), first published in Tajik in 1965 and later translated to Russian, Uzbek, and many other languages, is the only known fictionalized account of the ḥajj produced in the Soviet Union. Based on a trip made by the author in 1963, the novel provided the Soviet reader a rare glimpse into this sacred rite. Drawing on archival sources, contemporary responses, and the text itself, this article traces the origins and publication history of the novel, situates it within Soviet domestic and foreign policy goals, and analyses the text to see how the author tries to reconcile competing ideological priorities.

The article explores the “encyclopedic” properties of Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), seeking to define the novel as inherently comparative, i.e. requiring no literary counterparts from other cultures to make room for comparative analysis. Written from a transpacific perspective of a millennial Vancouver-based daughter of Chinese immigrants, who accumulates second-hand narrative knowledge about 20th-century China, the novel embraces facts from history, music, literature, architecture, geometry, and calligraphy saturating its several subplots. The primary narrator resorts to a career in mathematics to escape the trauma of her father’s suicide. Memories of her father, an ex-concert pianist, are triggered by music, which also provides a structural model for organizing the stories of two Chinese families between 1940s and 2010s. The resulting “repository of unofficial history” reaches out for Thien’s readers to not only be informed about facts, but also connect sympathetically with storyworld experiences. Disputably a mega-/systems/maximalist novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing is sufficiently “big, ambitious” and “encyclopedic” to join a disproportionately male body of long fictions and be challenged with Wood’s (2000) “hysterical realism” label.

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.

This book offers new perspectives on the environmental history of the lands that have come under Russian and Soviet rule by paying attention to ‘place’ and ‘nature’ in the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them

Plagiarism currently tends to be viewed as a problem connected primarily with students, albeit more prominent authors such as William Shakespeare and George Friedrich Handel were accused of it long ago. The plagiarism continues to be widespread in educational institutions, predominantly due to single-click technology, but another contributing factor that helps make it common practice is the tolerance of plagiarism on the part of educators and academia in general. In 2004, for instance, it was estimated that 10 percent of student projects in the United States and Australia involved plagiarism (Oakes 2014, 60). By contrast, in Russia, 36 percent of respondents admitted to having regularly copied the texts of others (Kicherova et al. 2013, 2); as many as 36.7 percent of undergraduate students in 8 Russian universities took personal credit for the material they had, in fact, downloaded from the Internet

This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today.

The formation of the travel and tourism industry in the Russian Empire was a prolonged process. Along with the development of a vast transportation network, the spread of rail services and the introduction of new railway tariffs in 1894, the number of travellers in the Russian Empire increased by the beginning of the twentieth century. All those people required reliable information, instructions and advice on how to organise and complete their journeys, which they increasingly found in tourist guidebooks. Guidebook authors and publishers helped them master the fears arising from the uncertainties of travel.  Being a highly contested rhetorical resource, authors, compilers and publishers of guidebooks debated, negotiated and constantly changed the Trans-Siberian ‘landscapes of transportation’. By analysing travel guides on Siberia as complex artefacts and focusing on the transportation landscapes as a historical phenomenon, we hope to shed more light on the complex intersections of mobility, transport technologies and environment in the Russian Empire at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. We argue that in the process of (re)making railway landscapes—which we consider as a material stage on which actions took place—perception of these landscapes was shaped by the natural environment in the process of its transformation, by transportation technologies and infrastructure, by services and conveniences, comfort and safety.

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.

This article studies the emergence and development of iambic tetrameter in Ukrainian poetry in the 18th to mid-19th century. The genesis and evolution of the verse pattern is regarded with its Russian poetry at the background. The core hypothesis of this study is that the early forms of Ukrainian iambic verse are closely related to the poetic work of Mikhail Lomonosov and Alexander Sumarokov. The shaping and development of particular features of Ukrainian metrical verse are traced from 1761 to Taras Shevchenko. According to the proposed hypothesis, the development of alternating rhythm in Shevchenko’s verse, which is normally attributed to Pushkin’s influence, may be no less determined by some innate prosodic features of the Ukrainian language.

The article represents a fragment of collaborative study on the reception of heliocentrism at the turn of the twentieth century. Popular interest in astronomy and its history was an essential part of the intellectual culture of that time. From this perspective, the authors consider Alexander Blok’s poem «Worlds fly, years fly. Empty…» (1912). Blok implicitly contrasts the fixed and closed cosmos of antiquity and the Middle Ages with a multitude of worlds that fly through the endless, dark, and empty space with monstrous speed. The rotating Earth is likened to a whirring top, which reminds one, a contrario, of the former harmony of the spheres. The commentary offered in the article provides a partial reconstruction of the still largely unexplored lines of the intellectual history of the late nineteenth — early twentieth centuries related to the widespread views on the Renaissance and modern cosmology.

The Time of Troubles brought not only social and cultural changes to the Russian society at the beginning of the 17th century, but also political ones, including modifications in understanding the political “space”. The processes of increased migration flows, and cultural exchange were characteristic features of the Russian history in the first third of the 17th century. As a result of the Truce of Deulino (1618), Smolensk and Chernihiv lands became a part of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth. Some representatives of the Russian nobility, who did not leave their land plots in these territories, became subjects of King Sigismund III. In Russia, such representatives of the nobility were considered as “traitors”. The article is devoted to the phenomenon of emigration of the Russian nobility to the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Smolensk Voevodship) in the first third of the 17th century. The study explores the reasons for changing the subjectness by representatives of the Russian nobility, the practice of their integration into the PolishLithuanian society, and their number. The purpose of the study is to find out the status of Russian defectors in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, as well as to compile a list of representatives of the Russian nobility who became subjects of the Commonwealth in 1600–1630.

The article offers the new interpretation of Pushkin's poem "The Hero" based on its correlation with the messianic iconography of Napoleon and with the story of Napoleon's visit to the hospital in Yaffo, during the plague. The article shows how Pushkin transposes the elements of Napoleonic legend into his building of the image of the emperor Nicholas I which allows him to empoly the arguments of the French anti-monarchy polemics when discussing the Russian tsar.