This book explores the North in Russian romantic literature as a symbol of national particularity. It largely ignores the vogue of Ossian, being primarily concerned with the significance of the North for Russia's national self-image. The author demonstrates how, starting with Lomonosov, the North initially functions as a symbol of Russia's 'new' European identity. Gradually it acquires a different ideological charge, giving voice to growing resentment over the inroads of western culture. By the turn of the century, the North no longer denotes Russia's supposed Europeanness, but its 'unique national' spirit, believed to have been polluted by the slavish imitation of the West. By this time, the theme of winter was discovered as an appropriate vehicle for the expression of nationalist sentiments, culminating in the popular myth of the winter of 1812 as an ally of the Russian people. This study also investigates the theme of 'northern homesickness' as opposed to the lure of the South and concludes by examining the national stereotypes of Russia's northern neighbours, the Swedes and the Finns.
This book explores the North in Russian romantic literature as a symbol of national particularity. It largely ignores the vogue of Ossian, being primarily concerned with the significance of the North for Russia's national self-image. The author demonstrates how, starting with Lomonosov, the North initially functions as a symbol of Russia's 'new' European identity. Gradually it acquires a different ideological charge, giving voice to growing resentment over the inroads of western culture. By the turn of the century, the North no longer denotes Russia's supposed Europeanness, but its 'unique national' spirit, believed to have been polluted by the slavish imitation of the West. By this time, the theme of winter was discovered as an appropriate vehicle for the expression of nationalist sentiments, culminating in the popular myth of the winter of 1812 as an ally of the Russian people. This study also investigates the theme of 'northern homesickness' as opposed to the lure of the South and concludes by examining the national stereotypes of Russia's northern neighbours, the Swedes and the Finns.
This innovative volume considers the relationship between the Gothic and theories of Post-Colonialism. Contributors explore how writers such as Salman Rushdie, Arunhati Roy and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala use the Gothic for postcolonial ends. Post-Colonial theory is applied to earlier Gothic narratives in order to re-examine the ostensibly colonialist writings of William Beckford, Charlotte Dacre, H. Rider Haggard and Bram Stoker. Contributors include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, David Punter and Neil Cornwell.
It deals extensively with Decembrism, the political conspiracy so known after its culmination in a failed attempt to overthrow the tsarist autocracy in December 1825. The Decembrist writers and other romantics influenced by Freemasonry, including Kondraty Ryleyev, Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, and Alexander Pushkin, were adept in the application of thaumaturgical skills to literature.
Cold has long been a fixture of Russian identity both within and beyond the borders of Russia and the Soviet Union, even as the ongoing effects of climate change complicate its meaning and cultural salience. The Russian Cold assembles fascinating new contributions from a variety of scholarly traditions, offering new perspectives on how to understand this mainstay of Russian culture and history. In chapters encompassing such diverse topics as polar exploration, the Eastern Front in World War II, and the iconography of hockey, it explores the multiplicity and ambiguity of “cold” in the Russian context and demonstrates the value of environmental-historical research for enriching national and imperial histories.
"The North" is simultaneously a location, a direction, and a mystical concept. Although this concept has ancient roots in mythology, folklore, and fairy tales, it continues to resonate today within modern culture. McIntosh leads readers, chapter by chapter, through the magical and spiritual history of the North, as well as its modern manifestations, as documented through physical records, such as runestones and megaliths, but also through mythology and lore. This mythic conception of a unique, powerful, and mysterious Northern civilization was known to the Greeks as "Hyberborea"--the "Land Beyond the North Wind"--which they considered to be the true origin place of their god, Apollo, bringer of civilization. Through the Greeks, this concept of the mythic North would spread throughout Western civilization. In addition, McIntosh discusses Russian Hyperboreanism, which he describes as among "the most influential of the new religions and quasi-religious movements that have sprung up in Russia since the fall of Communism" and which is currently almost unknown in the West.
Montaging Pushkin offers for the first time a coherent view of Pushkin's legacy to Russian twentieth-century poetry, giving many new insights. Pushkin is shown to be a Russian forerunner of Baudelaire. Furthermore it is argued that the rise of the Russian and European novel largely changed the ways Russian poets have looked at themselves and at poetic language; that novelisation of poetry is detectable in the major works of poetry that engaged in a creative dialogue with Pushkin, and that polyphonic lyric has been achieved. Alexandra Smith locates significant examples of Pushkin's cinematographic cognition of reality, suggesting that such dynamic descriptions of Petersburg helped create a highly original animated image of the city as comic apocalypse, which followers of Pushkin appropriated very successfully even as far as the late twentieth century. Montaging Pushkin will be of interest to all students of Russian poetry, as well as specialists in literary theory, European studies and the history of ideas. "Smith's thesis is both startling and original: that Pushkin, for all his Mozart-like fluidity and perfection, can be productively read as a poet of pain and violence. His reflex was to respond to the totalizing, authoritative public landscape of his era with an equally severe but specifically private, individualizing, disciplined set of demands on the Poet. The recurring attention that later generations have paid toward those aspects of Pushkin's life and texts governed by the private right to resist or to initiate violence (his duel, his struggles with the bureaucracy, his failed pursuit of service with honour) suggest that this mythologeme is among the most productive in Pushkin's astonishing legacy" CARYL EMERSON (A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Chair of the Slavic Department, Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University) "Smith's innovative study offers a wonderful analysis of how cinematographic editing and polyphony are detected in Russian twentieth-century poetry... It views Pushkin as a "reference obligee" of contemporary urban poetry" VERONIQUE LOSSKY (Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne IV)
For over five hundred years the Russians wondered what kind of people their Arctic and sub-Arctic subjects were. "They have mouths between their shoulders and eyes in their chests," reported a fifteenth-century tale. "They rove around, live of their own free will, and beat the Russian people," complained a seventeenth-century Cossack. "Their actions are exceedingly rude. They do not take off their hats and do not bow to each other," huffed an eighteenth-century scholar. They are "children of nature" and "guardians of ecological balance," rhapsodized early nineteenth-century and late twentieth-century romantics. Even the Bolsheviks, who categorized the circumpolar foragers as "authentic proletarians," were repeatedly puzzled by the "peoples from the late Neolithic period who, by virtue of their extreme backwardness, cannot keep up either economically or culturally with the furious speed of the emerging socialist society."Whether described as brutes, aliens, or endangered indigenous populations, the so-called small peoples of the north have consistently remained a point of contrast for speculations on Russian identity and a convenient testing ground for policies and images that grew out of these speculations. In Arctic Mirrors, a vividly rendered history of circumpolar peoples in the Russian empire and the Russian mind, Yuri Slezkine offers the first in-depth interpretation of this relationship. No other book in any language links the history of a colonized non-Russian people to the full sweep of Russian intellectual and cultural history. Enhancing his account with vintage prints and photographs, Slezkine reenacts the procession of Russian fur traders, missionaries, tsarist bureaucrats, radical intellectuals, professional ethnographers, and commissars who struggled to reform and conceptualize this most "alien" of their subject populations.Slezkine reconstructs from a vast range of sources the successive official policies and prevailing attitudes toward the northern peoples, interweaving the resonant narratives of Russian and indigenous contemporaries with the extravagant images of popular Russian fiction. As he examines the many ironies and ambivalences involved in successive Russian attempts to overcome northern—and hence their own—otherness, Slezkine explores the wider issues of ethnic identity, cultural change, nationalist rhetoric, and not-so European colonialism.
