Examines the thematic development of absurdity, despair, and man's quest for meaning in Russian literature.

This article deals with women-centred prose texts of the 1990s and 2000s in Russia written by women, and focuses especially on generation narratives. By this term the author means fictional texts that explore generational relations within families, from the perspective of repressed experiences, feelings and attitudes in the Soviet period. The selected texts are interpreted as narrating and conceptualizing the consequences of patriarchal ideology for relations between mothers and daughters and for reconstructing connections between Soviet and post-Soviet by revisiting and (...) remembering especially the gaps and discontinuities between (female) generations. The cases discussed are Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s ‘povest’ Vremia noch [The Time: Night] (1991), Liudmila Ulitskaia’s novel Medeia i ee deti [Medea and her Children] (1996) and Elena Chizhova’s novel Vremia zhenshchin [The Time of Women] (2009). These novels reflect on the one hand the woman-centredness and novelty of representation in women’s prose writing in the post-Soviet period. On the other hand, the author suggests that they reflect the diverse methods of representing the Soviet era and experience through generation narratives. The texts reassess the past through intimate, tactile memories and perceptions, and their narration through generational plots draws attention to the process of working through, which needs to be done in contemporary Russia. The narratives touch upon the untold stories of those who suffered in silence or hid the family secrets from the officials, in order to save the family. The narration delves into the different layers of experience and memory, conceptualizing them in the form of multiple narrative perspectives constructing different generations and traditions. In this way they convey the ‘secrets’ hidden in the midst of everyday life routines and give voice to the often silent resistance of women towards patriarchal and repressive ideology. The new women’s prose of the 1980s–90s and the subsequent trend of women-centred narratives and generation narratives employ conceptual metaphors of reassessing, revisiting and remembering the cultural, experiential, and emotional aspects of the past, Soviet lives. (shrink)

The verb 'imagine' admits of perspectival modification: we can imagine things from above, from a distant point of view, or from the point of view of a Russian. But in such cases, there need be no person, either real or imagined, who is above or distant from what is imagined, or who has the point of view of a Russian. We call this the puzzle of perspectival displacement. This paper sets out the puzzle, shows how it does not (...) just concern language, but also states of imagining themselves, and then presents a solution. The solution draws on the idea that many reports of imagining conceal a distinctive kind of question, and such concealed questions have an extra argument place for (what we will call) an experiencer from whose perspective things are imagined. This solution has a range of advantages over other proposals in the literature, and helps to advance two debates concerning perspectival engagement with fiction. (shrink)

This article explores the problems of Russian engineering in the context of the world studies in philosophy of engineering. Firstly, the author highlights the main questions and topics of the modern philosophy of engineering: what engineering is, the “magic” and “human-oriented” nature of technologies, and models of engineering ethics. Secondly, the article presents a specific mythological narrative of domestic engineers (“the theory of a missed chance”) and shows the inclusion of this “theory” in alternate historical fiction. Thirdly, the (...) article identifies the reasons for emergence of such mythology in the engineering environment. The author highlights a historical context of “missed chances” for the turning of technical inventions into innovations and claims that the country's engineering potential was not used to a full extent. For greater objectivity, the article uses the works both of foreign and domestic researchers. In addition, the author raised a question about the relatedness of the concepts of engineer and innovation. Finally, the article gives an answer to the question about the essence of the engineer; the author believes that the engineering is primarily an environment, close to the human life world, understanding and maintaining the links between science and technology, providing the necessary channels for transforming inventions into innovations, i.e. commercially realized technologies. The given definition demonstrates the prospects for the development of socio-humanitarian research in the field of engineering. (shrink)

The fall of the socialist system in the early 90's of the twentieth century. led to the return of the Orthodox Churches of Europe to the active social and political life of the post-Soviet countries. Therefore, the adoption in August 2000 by the Jubilee Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church of the social doctrine became a necessary stage in the development of Russian Orthodoxy, and at the same time marked the beginning of a new time of not (...) only this Church, but the whole Ecumenical Orthodoxy. However, this serious doctrine did not cause any serious attention, except for one or two colloquiums organized by the UOC of the Moscow Patriarchate. The wave of theological and non-fiction works on the hot topics raised in the Doctrine also did not happen to the experts. (shrink)

The article provides a summary of “Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky and European Culture” International Scientific Online Conference, held by the International Laboratory for the Study of Russian-European Intellectual Dialogue of the National Research University Higher School of Economics in cooperation with the Dostoevsky’s Moscow House Museum Center. At the conference, leading experts in various fields of the humanities presented various reports on the mutual influence of Dostoevsky and European culture. Research attention was paid to the problem of the influence of (...) the Russian writer on the creative development of European philosophical and artistic thought. The speakers demonstrated the history of translations of Dostoevsky’s novels into foreign languages. The participants of the conference also reflected the influence of the concepts of Western European philosophy, literature, and culture on the fiction and religious thought of the writer. A number of conference reports were devoted to the cultural and philosophical problems of Dostoevsky’s works. The researchers examined the religious and philosophical dialogues of the novel Demons, paying special attention to the controversial image of the protagonist of the novel – Nikolai Stavrogin. Leading Dostoyevsky specialists turned to the littlestudied aspects of his journalism, defining the role of the “Jewish question.” The conference presented literary critics’ interpretations of Dostoevsky’s novels, the history of screen and musical adaptations of his works in European and Russian art. (shrink)

The subject of this research is the phenomenon of mystery fiction and its evolution in the context of development of sociocultural project of modernity. The latter is viewed as a complex system, which fundamental principles permeate the entire fabrics of European culture, generating such phenomenon as a mystery fiction plot. The analysis of its varieties deepens the understanding of specificity of modernity and mature of crises that has captured it. Hermeneutic analysis allows going beyond the frames of the (...) narrow-disciplinary analysis of the corresponding texts, allowing to determine the inevident layers within the phenomenon of narration of mystery fiction. The initial methodological point is presented by the concept of V. P. Rudnev, who identified interrelation between the mystery fiction storylines and dominant gnoseological paradigm. The author determines the four levels of narration of mystery fiction: ontological, gnoseological, anthropological, and ethical-normative. The classical (analytical) mystery fiction describes reality commensurable to human reason (ontological level), investigation appears as strict analysis (gnoseological level), detective resembles a “private thinker” who is distant from the society and the crime itself (anthropological level), and a crime is interpreted as a deviation that disturbs harmony of the rational order (ethical-normative level). In this sense, a classical mystery fiction is a reflection of metanarrative of modernity, aimed at building a complete system, and excluding the Other. At the same time, the crisis of the basis of modernity is essentially reflected in metamorphoses of mystery fiction genre. In existential and pragmatic mystery fiction, reality is irrational, and boundaries between the norm and deviation are being diluted. Such situation may be describes as disappointment in metanarrative – in underlines the inability of modern culture to adequately fulfill its fundamental functions. The Other strike roots in the cultural space; however, the space itself exists in accordance with the principles of postmodern anarchy. (shrink)

This article examines Russian engineers’ social imagination about the future through the professional discussions held at the electrotechnical congresses in the nineteenth century. Formulating the prospective future of the industry, the state and society was a collective endeavor, a process in which the identity and mission of engineers were crystallized. Through envisioning the future of technology and its role in the society, engineers revealed their cultural role as mediators between technological innovation, and both the wider public and the state. (...) In order to better understand the manifestations of the shared cultural understandings of a desirable future and social order, the article resorts to Sheila Jasanoff’s concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. The engineering community’s sociotechnical imagination about electricity was shaped around the transformative possibilities of this technology. It was believed that electrical engineering was able not only to accelerate industrial production, but also to solve social, medical and cultural problems, thereby uniting the Russian Empire. Descriptions of the rational, comfortable and beautiful world of the electrified future overlapped in engineering discussions, journalism and science fiction. Positive scenarios emphasized the advantages of electrical engineering and bypassed the problems associated with electrification, constructing an idea of its inevitability. The electrical engineer became a kind of a new cultural hero, who knew how to make a working device or system, and also filled the task of linking the development of technology to the development of society. (shrink)

He work of the Russian nationwide conference ‘National identity through language and literature. Characteristics of conceptoshere of national culture‘ is analyzed in the article. Previous theoretical sources on the issue in question are summarized. The matters represented in the considered scientific forum are generalized. Diachronic analysis of national cultural consciousness as well as complex cognitive-based approach are used to investigate the issue. Special attention is paid to the study of linguistic world-image as exemplified in fiction, folklore, religious texts, (...) business papers, scholarly works and media texts, as well as to the research of intercultural communication in the era of multiculturalism and globalization. As long as terms ‘cultural code‘, ‘national code‘, and ‘fictional code‘ are not precisely defined, the problem of terminological field was noted, as well as the issue of linguo-cognitive interpretation of methods for representing country image in linguistic consciousness. The attention was paid to Russian as a foreign language, to perception and transforming of European cultural codes by American and western European writers in synchronous and diachronic ways. Geopolitical factor of North and South that matters both in global and local context was noted, particularly the issue of German distinction of the modern European mindset was reviewed. Lots of speaker papers mirrored interdisciplinary links that is of importance for contemporary scholarship in the context of globalization and multicultural society. Up-to-date schools of thought in the field of linguistics, literary studies and journalism were represented. (shrink)

The autocratic rule of both tsar and church in imperial Russia gave rise not only to a revolutionary movement in the nineteenth century but also to a crisis of meaning among members of the intelligentsia. Personal faith became the subject of intense scrutiny as individuals debated the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, debates reflected in the best-known novels of the day. Friendships were formed and broken in exchanges over the status of the eternal. The salvation of (...) the entire country, not just of each individual, seemed to depend on the answers to questions about belief. Victoria Frede looks at how and why atheism took on such importance among several generations of Russian intellectuals from the 1820s to the 1860s, drawing on meticulous and extensive research of both published and archival documents, including letters, poetry, philosophical tracts, police files, fiction, and literary criticism. She argues that young Russians were less concerned about theology and the Bible than they were about the moral, political, and social status of the individual person. They sought to maintain their integrity against the pressures exerted by an autocratic state and rigidly hierarchical society. As individuals sought to shape their own destinies and searched for truths that would give meaning to their lives, they came to question the legitimacy both of the tsar and of Russia’s highest authority, God. (shrink)

This article reviews a new book by a Russian scholar, Anastasiya Grigorovskaya, which places Ayn Rand's fiction into its Russian context. Grigorovskaya comes to the conclusion that Ayn Rand's imagery and fiction was heavily influenced by Russian philosophy and literature. Paradoxical it may seem, but written in America in the English language, her novels and plays contain hidden references to ideas and tendencies that preoccupied the minds of many Russian thinkers and writers in the (...) nineteenth and early twentieth century. (shrink)

This article, written by a Russian cultural historian, analyzes the concept of "ideology" in the work of Clifford Geertz. and his role in understanding the figurative nature of ideology as a cultural system. The author compares Geertz's semiotic approach to culture with thesemiotics of culture developed by Russian theorists, particularly Yuri Lotman, showing the convergence and divergence of the two differentnational traditions. This understanding of the nature and functions of ideology opens new possibilities for discussing the tortured relations (...) of ideology and literature, showing the way fiction can affect the formation of ideological systems and influence practical politics. The analysis is illustrated by examples from Russian political life of the 1990s, when revolutionary changes demanded new sets of ideological metaphors that in their turn shaped the direction of events. (shrink)

Mikhail Epstein (b. 1950) and Vladimir Sharov (1952–2018) became close friends in Moscow in 1980. Epstein emigrated in 1990 to become a professor of cultural studies at Emory University; in 1991 Sharov, trained as a historian of medieval Rus’, published the first of his nine novels. With increasing urgency, both writers explored the myth, now backed by military force, that Russia is called to an apocalyptic, salvational global mission. This essay juxtaposes Epstein’s quasi-novel The New Sectarianism (1993), with its plea (...) for poor faith or “minimal religion,” with the maximalist plots of Sharov’s novels, peopled by NKVD informers, homespun visionaries, seekers and priests. When a philosopher writes a novel, or when an historian-turned-novelist formulates a political philosophy, how are we to balance the claims of these competing genres? The final segment discusses a highly antagonistic reading by the sociologist Dina Khapaeva of Sharov’s final novel, which suggests that Sharov was emotionally complicit in the horrific events of the Stalinist era. An attempt is made to rebut this reading, and also to locate a way out for all parties that permits novelistic and philosophical art to be moral—but remain art. The essay originated as a paper presented at the 2023 ASEEES Convention, on a panel titled “Contemporary Russian Philosophy: Four Thinkers on Consciousness, Imagination, and Civilizational Crisis.” The argument has been filled in but not updated, and its oral intonation retained. (shrink)

The writer and activist Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999) came from a prominent establishment family but was a member of the Labour Party and the wife of a Labour MP. Her work was explicitly marked by the Russian Revolution, even when she wrote about antiquity. In the 1920s and 1930s, she produced a number of works of historical fiction set in ancient Greece and Rome, which were highly regarded at the time. The works use the canvas of antiquity to experiment (...) with many forms of political and social radicalism, with a challenging focus on female sexuality. The article discusses four specific representations of revolution which mobilize female agency in ways that are themselves highly unconventional. However, these representations also invoke the Fraserian figure of the dying king who leads the revolution to disaster, compromising the revolutionary energy. This tension speaks to Mitchison’s own contradictory social positioning as a patrician radical. In 1972, however, the novel Cleopatra’s People revisits the theme and stages a more successful uprising. This novel is centered on the sacrificial queen instead of a king, it enlists a mass of people, and saves the revolution by hiding its key figures in Africa. During her final excursion into antiquity, Mitchison thus found a way to press history into useful service. (shrink)

Through Aristotle's theory of catharsis and his concept of complex tragedy, Ben La Farge provides an original examination of genre. Moving effortlessly from Greek to Shakespearean tragedies, to nineteenth and twentieth-century British, American and Russian drama, and fiction and contemporary television, this study sheds new light on the art of comedy.

The article reviews the regular international scientific conference on science fiction – Stanisław Lem Readings. The conference is held since 2007 by the Department of Philosophy in collaboration with the Department of Russian and Foreign Literature and Public Relations of the Samara National Research University. The summary shows the history of the conference, formulates the main definitions of the category of science fiction, proposed by its participants, demonstrates the topics, genres, and key approaches that make up the (...) problem field, lists its most eminent speakers. Lem Readings are currently an international platform for a regular interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophers of technology and futurologists, active engineers and scientists, anthropologists and sociologists. The basic principles of the conference – freedom of expression, professionalism, striving for the synthesis of heterogeneous systems – remain unchanged during the years, and they correspond to the idea of the science fictional as a possibility that can be realized. (shrink)

The article discusses a relatively obscure but significant aspect of work of the Russian and Soviet thinker Alexander Bogdanov—his science fiction novels. The author points out that, using the form...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Exile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters,John GoodliffeExile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters, by David Patterson; xii & 204 pp. University Press of Kentucky, 1994, $29.95.From the title of this book one might expect its principal focus to be on geographical and/or political exile, exile as punishment, of which there have been many examples in Russian life and letters, both (...) before and after the 1917 Revolution. But David Patterson prefers to interpret the word “exile” in a wider metaphysical and existential sense, so connecting it with the problem of alienation and the question of human identity. His purpose is to demonstrate that “the fundamental problem of meaning in human life is a problem of homelessness; that the effort to emerge from exile is an effort to return meaning to the word and thus the self to the other; and that the exile of the word is an exile of human being” (p. xi). (Incidentally this quotation anticipates the rather curious style of English which the author will adopt, regrettably typical of many academics.) The neurosis engendered by this problem of homelessness is one to which Russians have always been particularly prone, perhaps because their geographical situation on a vast inhospitable plain, stretching uneasily between Europe and Asia, has always generated a feeling of insecurity. So it is not at all difficult to find abundant examples of it in Russian literature. As Patterson makes clear in his preface, there are many Russian writers other than the ones he has chosen who well demonstrate estrangement and alienation. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that a Russian writer who does not suffer from the neurosis is the exception to the general rule. And, pursuing the idea further, it might be possible to show that any novel, any poem, any piece of writing in any language, contains elements of the problem, since it derives almost inevitably from the very occupation of a creative writer.Thus, from the outset, Patterson runs the risk of making his “exile” definition so wide that the term becomes almost meaningless. It may well be [End Page 514] that his book would have been less diffuse had he kept his definition rather narrower. And since he professes that his aim is “not only to make a point about Russian letters but to draw on these Russian texts in an effort to arrive at a deeper understanding of a much larger, more pervasive problem” (p. xi), Patterson runs the further risk of allowing the texts he uses for his demonstration simply to turn into pretexts for uncontrolled and unstructured digression. It has to be said at once that these risks he proves unable or unwilling to guard against.From the nineteenth century Patterson begins, inevitably, with the well-worn theme of the “superfluous man.” Nothing very original here, as this particular label has been applied so often and so indiscriminately to Russian literature that it has turned into a kind of critical rubber stamp. But at least Patterson does not go over the well-worn ground of the realist novel, preferring to concentrate on Dostoevsky’s non-fictional Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, as embodying its author’s post-Siberian sense of estrangement from Russia and his search for a new identity, brought into focus by his trip to Europe. However, in the case of Tolstoy, Patterson reverts to fiction, concentrating on The Death of Ivan Ilich and Resurrection. In this connection he is perhaps rather less scrupulous than he ought to have been over the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.Noting the comments on Tolstoy, the reader becomes increasingly aware that the book is in many respects a more extended sermon than scholarly analysis. This is confirmed by Patterson’s decision in Part Three to include two early twentieth-century religious thinkers, Florensky and Shestov. Here we are guided through comparatively uncharted territory, but with the uncomfortable feeling that we are plunging into an ever darkening and more oppressive jungle of ideas. The feeling of oppression is not greatly relieved by the author’s somewhat heavy-handed style.The remaining four writers covered are from the “Soviet Period... (shrink)

Roman Jakobson, who had left Russia in 1920 and in 1941 took refuge in the USA from the Nazis, was one of the main figures in post war linguistics and structuralism. Two aspects of his work are examined in this article. Firstly, Jakobson purifies his linguistic theory of pragmatic references. Secondly, he develops his own diplomatic mission of mediating between East and West. In this article, I argue that these two aspects did not develop independently from one another. Instead I (...) claim that his theory is designed to slip through the Iron Curtain, while at the same time providing the means to analyse ways of acting politically by using language. This argument is unfolded in two steps, each consisting of two parts. First, I compare the theory of pronominal expressions as developed by Emil Benveniste to Jakobson’s theory of shifters. While Benveniste focuses on the relation of language and its subject using language, Jakobson introduces a model of communication to allow maximal formalisation of language. According to this even the category of person can be freed from its reference to a subject which would be understood as having a place in space and time. Then, Jakobson’s theory of shifters is studied in relation to his analyses of poetry. For this, two examples are chosen: Jakobson’s text on two poems by Russian poet Alexandr Blok, and his text on a poem by Bertold Brecht. In both texts, the theory of shifters—and the alleged purification from pragmatic aspects of language use ensuing from this theory—is challenged by the simple fact that they focus on the pronoun of the first person plural. According to Jakobson, the category of number does not belong to the shifters. Rather, number quantifies participants of the related event. The pronoun ‘we’ is at the same time a shifter and a non-shifter, as it refers to the speech event and the related event. Thus the pronoun ‘we’ opens up the possibility to include or exclude the participants of a communicative situation, and thereby enables the speaker to act socially or even politically by using language. The article concludes by coming back to the historical situation in which Jakobson developed his analyses of poetry. Analysing poetry seems to have been a passe-partout for him, a seemingly harmless subject that allowed him to get a foot in the door of remote and secluded lecture halls. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophies of Language in the Fictions of Jorge Luis BorgesPhilip SeargeantIIn his book The Language-Makers, Roy Harris writes that "a concept of language cannot stand isolated in an intellectual no-man's-land. It is inevitably part of some more intricate complex of views about how certain verbal activities stand in relation to other human activities, and hence, ultimately, about man's place in society and nature."1 It is one of the salient (...) features of human language that it is reflexive—that we use language to talk about language—and that this reflexivity is, in fact, a fundamental aspect of the way that language works.2 Human language is not solely a means of communication, it is also a subject for communication. It exists not simply as an entity used in everyday behavior but also as a concept; and given the fundamental role that language plays in life, it is a concept which becomes implicated in the beliefs and debates about wider human concerns. In other words, every conceptualization of language, be it a folk belief about correctness or a philosophical premise concerning truth conditions, is also in some way an implicit statement about human understanding of the world.Conceptualizations of language exist in many fields and are expressed by various means. They can be the explicit assertions of government policy; they can be practice-based guidelines which constitute an educational curriculum; or they can be ontological assumptions that provide the basis for scientific theorizing.3 In any area where language itself is the discursive focus of interest, a particular concept of language will be used, and will be expressed within that discourse. This is the case not only in areas related to social or scientific practice (language policy, [End Page 386] linguistic theory etc.), but also in fiction and literature of the imagination. In works of fiction in which language figures not merely as the medium of narration but also as a focus of that narration, a specific and historically contingent conceptualization of language will be used, and the nature of this conceptualization will, as Harris suggests, relate to wider beliefs about man's place in society and nature.There are many works of imaginative literature, particular in the genres of fantasy and science fiction, which include invented or alien languages. A general rationale for this is that works within such genres are creating new and speculative worlds, and by detailing the languages spoken in these worlds they are able to further the sense of verisimilitude. In cases where the rationale for the inclusion of such fictional languages is primarily for this particular instrumental reason, the nature of these languages may not play any wider role in the narrative, and one would not therefore suggest that linguistic concerns feature as a central theme of the narrative.It is likely, however, that cases of this sort will still reflect general contemporary beliefs about language and society, and that the reception of the narrative will also be guided by the sociolinguistic attitudes of its readership. For example, a review from the early 1970s of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange suggests that Nadsat, the fictional argot in which the narrative is told, is likely to have specific associations for the book's readership because of its linguistic complexion and, specifically, the prevalence of loanwords from the Russian:For the Anglo-American reader the Slavic words connote communist dictatorship.... The medium becomes the message in A Clockwork Orange with a vengeance, and the message is similar to that in other distopias that deal in visions of society in the future after it has become static, completely controlled, amoral, and heartless.4In this case, it is associations made between words from a particular language and the contemporary politics of the speech community most associated with that language, which create for this particular critic a significance that extends beyond the purely structural nature of the anti-language that Burgess has developed. For this critic, it is not merely the fact that Alex and his droogs have their own argot—a detail that adds texture to the imagined future in which the novel is set—but that the lexis... (shrink)

To refute the pathological reactions typical of American political thought about communism, Fromm shows Russian communism to be a conservative state managerialism, and argues against the premiss that world domination is its supreme goal. His argument is given urgency by his conclusions that only genuine disarmament and the coming to terms with revolution, socialism, and neutralism will save the United States from nuclear destruction or the internal degradation of its democracy.--E. W.

The problem of the creation of artificial man and the creation of artificial intelligence are issues that have now become not just potential, but also actual scientific tasks. The original genetic kinship of philosophy and literature as forms of human culture and meaning formation made it possible to comprehend the most important problems in works rich in ideological content and beautiful in form. The subject of the research is the philosophical aspects of the problem of the creation of artificial man (...) in the classic works of fantasy literature of the XIX-XX centuries. This goal is achieved by consistent consideration and comparison of philosophical and anthropological ideas that can be isolated from the works of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Mary Shelley, Herbert George Wells and M.A. Bulgakov. Hermeneutical method as interpretation and reconstruction of meanings, comparative historical analysis, philosophical comparative studies are used as the methodological basis of this historical and philosophical research. The novelty of the research lies in the historical and philosophical reconstruction of the problem of creating an artificial person, posed for the first time on the pages of the world art classics. The very idea of creating an artificial man was a continuation of the God-fighting aspirations of the Renaissance and the embodiment of the ardent desire to become not only on a par with the Creator, but also to surpass Him. When creating the image of the homunculus, Goethe also had in mind the contrivance, artificiality and fruitlessness of many enlightenment ideas, because the enlighteners questioned the very existence of God, putting a scientist-creator in His place. Goethe's idea of the futility and danger of experimenting with human nature was later developed by Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells and Mikhail Bulgakov. Wagner's homunculus and the creation of Dr. Frankenstein are the closest to the idea of man that prevailed in the philosophy of Modern times and educational pedagogy. Powerful notes of philosophical foresight of many plot moves of the coming history of mankind sound in the novel by Wells (the creation of Dr. Moreau) and the story of Bulgakov (Sharikov). (shrink)

The collective historical amnesia that reigns in contemporary Russia demands an explanation. In the first part of my article I will analyze the mechanisms that suppress historical memory. I will focus my attention on two historical representations of critical relevance for this matter. First, I will discuss the Western-oriented ideology of the post-Soviet intelligentsia. Second, I will analyze the functioning of the myth of the "Great Patriotic War." In the second part of my paper I will address the influence of (...) historical amnesia on contemporary Russian society. Deep distortions in moral judgments and social relations resulting from suppressed memory will be studied through an analysis of contemporary Russian fiction, especially fantasy. Finally, I will consider Russian Gothic society, which originates in historical amnesia. (shrink)

Money and gossip in nineteenth-century Russian fiction act as combined forces that disrupt the narrative and the relationships between the main characters. The motifs of money are prominent in the novels of both major and minor Russian writers and when seen side by side, the function of the motifs of money becomes clear as a genre marker. The two writers discussed in this paper are Fyodor Dostoevsky and Yevdokia Rostopchina. By placing their works side by side, it (...) becomes evident that their treatment of money represents a similar artistic response to the changing world of Russian social relations in the nineteenth century and the emergence of a new value system replacing that of the old estate culture. More than that, the treatment of money in combination with the prominence of gossip as a structuring device, which moves the plots in Rostopchina’s and Dostoevsky’s novels, reflects the development of the novel as a genre. Rostopchina’s seemingly compliant demeanor conceals a more intricate and subversive agenda. Through her strategic use of feminine masquerade, Rostopchina not only anticipated modern theories of gender as a social construct but also employed a timeless tactic of encoding subversive messages within seemingly conventional works. What is of particular interest in this paper is the incorporation of the society tale into the novel and how this reflects the transformation of value in the nineteenth-century Russian novel. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 102-117 [Access article in PDF] Gossip and Literary Narrative Blakey Vermeule Northwestern University Since its murky origins in Grub Street, a specter has haunted the novel—the specter of gossip. In its higher-minded mood, literary narratives have been very snobbish about gossip and the snobbishness is unfair. Even the most casual reader of social fiction will recognize that gossiping is what characters do most (...) passionately. However, they can neither admit nor be aware of it. Only minor or morally compromised characters are allowed to indulge in its pleasures. Matronly middle-aged women, chatty maids, little girls, and effeminate fops are the ones who gossip; their more reflective counterparts—the men and women designated as heroes and heroines—only briefly tolerate such idle chatter. Gossip is derided, decried, condemned, and maligned. It is womanish, low, slavish, servantish, silly, pert, loose, wanton, jiggetty, mean. It is the "tittle-tattle of Highbury" in Austen's Emma, an activity for the old maid Miss Bates and her even older, blind, and senile mother. In Middlemarch, although the world is "apparently a huge whispering-gallery," the greatest gossip of all is Mrs. Cadwallader, a matron with a mind like "phosphorous, biting at everything" (Spacks, p. 194). In Richardson's Clarissa, Lovelace—a man not known for his indifference to social information—airily dismisses gossip as "the female go-round." (In novels, the male equivalents of the "female go-round" tend to be such despised modes of exchange as business letters, gambling, chess, and games of chance.) Gossip has always been a part of charivari with the power to turn the world upside down. It also has the power to destroy lives (Les Liasons Dangereuses) and to derail love (when it becomes the "prejudice" of Pride and Prejudice). If it ever innocent, it is only because it is meaningless.Gossip is all of these things even—especially—when it powers the [End Page 102] whole narrative. This paradox is evident almost anywhere we choose to look. Social novelists view the stuff of direct, unmediated social information as so intense that it requires special handling—even disavowal. I will briefly survey examples from French, English, and Russian fiction. The first is a lurid and overheated speech by Henri de Marsay, the peculiar hero of Balzac's short novel, The Girl with the Golden Eyes (1815). De Marsay is a dissipated aristocrat in love with a mysterious young girl who, he finds out much later, is the sexual slave of de Marsay's long-lost sister. But first, after a night of passion that "had begun with a slow trickle of pleasures and ended in overflowing torrents," de Marsay realizes, when his lover accidentally lets slip the name of his rival, that the person he is competing with is female. The next day he becomes consumed with a bitter plan to kill his faithless lover. He reflects to his friend Paul "Upon my honor, man is a clown dancing on the edge of a cliff. We're told about the immorality of Les Liaisons dangereuses, and some book with the name of a chambermaid. But there is one ghastly, dirty, dreadful, corrupting book that is always open and never closed, the great book of the world—not to mention another book, a thousand times more dangerous, that consists of everything passed on by word of mouth between men or women behind their fans at the ball."1 Even though de Marsay is a corrupt aristocrat, his sentiments are little different from those the narrator expresses in the book's opening chapter, a panoptic survey of Parisian life as a glorious mosaic of infection, rot, and moral disease.In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's new tenant Lockwood breaks his self-imposed exile from social life by pressing the housekeeper Nellie Dean to do what housekeepers do best and launch into an aggrieved saga about her master's family. He wants her to serve up the gossip hot. "I ate..., hoping sincerely she would prove a regular gossip, and either rouse me to animation, or lull me to sleep... (shrink)

Troubling Reason: Notes from Underground Revisited -- Love, Attention and Teaching: The Brothers Karamazov -- Passion as a Quality of Education: The Death of Ivan Ilyich -- Education, Rationality and the Meaning of Life: Tolstoy's Confession -- Pedagogy of the Gaze: An Educational Reading of Lolita -- Education Arrayed in Time: Nabokov and the Problem of Time and Space -- Conclusion: Literature, Philosophy and Education.

In the 1972 science-fiction novel, Roadside Picnic, by the Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, aliens have used Earth as a rest stop on the way to another, presumably grander, destination...

I have enjoyed reading fiction since I was young, and until I was twenty-eight I believed that I could write it myself. Then I read a novel by [Michel] Tournier and changed my mind. Imperceptibly, great changes have taken place in fiction. The difference between modern fiction and classical fiction is as great as the difference between the car and the horse-drawn cart. The finest of the modern novels cannot be read ten lines at a glance. (...) Let me cite an example, so that my readers can come to share my point of view. The first sentence of Marguerite Duras's novel The Lover is "I was already old." Innumerable vicissitudes are contained in that phrase. If you read on carefully, you will discover that more or less every sentence is written like that, and my views on modem novels were formulated by reference to The Lover. The great modern novels always contain a lot of information and are extremely elegantly written, delighting those who read them and scaring those who would like to write fiction. Of the classic writers, only the Russian Chekhov occasionally writes in this way, but by no means all his works command reverence. I have to confess that modern novelists used to shock me greatly. The novel by Tournier that I read, called Death and the Maiden, was only the first of a series of shocks. (shrink)

Translated by Anthony Bower With an Introduction by Oliver Todd 'A conscience with style' V.S. Pritchett The Rebel (1951) is Camus's 'attempt to understand the time I live in' and a brilliant essay on the nature of human revolt. Here he makes a daring critique of communism - how it had gone wrong behind the Iron Curtain and the resulting totalitarian regimes. And he questions two events held sacred by the left wing - the French Revolution of 1789 and the (...) Russian Revolution of 1917 - that had resulted, he believed, in the use of terrorism as a political instrument. In this towering intellectual document, Camus argues that hope for the future lies in revolt with revolution - a chance to achieve change without losing our freedom. 'The last French intellectual to take the side of humanity and talk its language... a figure of immense moral stature' Sunday Times Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. (shrink)

This article is devoted not only to Losev''sphilosophical works, but also to his fiction,which he created during 1930s and 1940s.Losev''s eight books of the 1920s (his``octateuch'''') combine into a single whole thatamounts to his philosophy of life and historydepicted in expressive images. At the same timeLosev''s ``octateuch'''' strikes one as having beenwritten at a single sitting and in a singlestyle, in a genre that can be identified as the``philosophical novel'''' having as much right asSpengler''s opus to be called an (...) ``intellectualnovel.'''' In his prose of the 1930s and 1940sLosev tries with artistic methods to resolvethe philosophical problems which he raised inhis works of the 1920s. Losev''s ``octateuch'''' andhis fiction are directed against thosecontemporary materialists who seek to embodyPlato''s Republic, whom he christens``soil-less nihilist idealist utopians.'''' All ofthis leads to the conclusion that Losev''sintellectual novel belongs to a definite andmore specific subgenre. It is undoubtedly ananti-utopia, full of the grotesque. In additionto its scientific and social orientation,Losev''s anti-utopia is also religious innature. Thus Losev not only depicts the realconsequences of utopian dreams, but also turnsto the ``life of the artist,'''' which is far fromany technological or social utopias but isfilled with another, no less terrifying ornihilistic utopia: that of the non-religiousexistence of the human person. Losev preservedhis anti-utopian and anti-nihilist viewsthrough his late period (1950s–1980s), despitethe care he took not to cross Sovietcensorship. Losev''s anti-utopia is the kind ofChristian realism to which he appealedthroughout his life. (shrink)

This essay explores the discoved place in human noosphere called as "Cosmos-not-Here," encompassing the speculative realms of science fiction, religious eschatology, and theoretical astrophysics. The content of "Cosmos-not-Here" contrasts with the same of "Cosmos-Here," representing humanity's tangible explorations and mastery of the physical universe. The text delves into how the Cosmos-not-Here operates as a mental construct, offering humanity an imaginative escape into utopian visions and hypertextual narratives, while disregarding the constraints of established physical laws. -/- The discussion emphasizes humanity's (...) innate psychological drive, metaphorically expressed as "forward and upward," linking it to a sacred yearning for cosmic harmony and expansion. This drive manifests culturally in phenomena like Russian aspirations, illustrated by the "Gagarin Smile," and the global fascination with cosmic-themed speculative fiction, games, and spiritual constructs such as astrology. -/- The essay concludes by identifying a universal "Cosmic-We" ethos, characterized by a shared attraction to the cosmos as a concept of transcendence and infinite potential, reflecting humanity's enduring pursuit of meaning beyond the utilitarian confines of terrestrial existence. The analysis reveals the philosophical resonance of this semantic cluster with ancient and medieval cosmologies, suggesting its timeless significance in human thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Case against Rational Egoism in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground*James P. ScanlanWriting in his own voice, in letters, notebooks, and diaries, Fyodor Dostoevsky frequently attacked the philosophy of the Russian “nihilists,” as he typically called them—Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Dmitry Pisarev, and other representatives of the radical Russian intelligentsia in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. But because Dostoevsky also used fiction to argue against them, if (...) we wish to discern the full contours of his opposition, we must turn to his stories and novels; and there we face the problem of determining to what extent, if any, the statements of his narrators and characters express his own views.This problem is particularly challenging in regard to the radicals’ “Rational Egoism,” to use the label by which the Russian variant of the theory of enlightened egoism came to be known. 1 Dostoevsky’s most sustained and spirited attack on that aspect of “nihilist” philosophy is found in Part One of Notes from Underground (1864), but it is voiced by one of the darkest, least sympathetic of all his characters—the nameless narrator and protagonist known as the Underground Man. Was this repellent creature speaking for Dostoevsky? The Underground Man, moreover, can easily be viewed as a sheer irrationalist whose rejection of Rational Egoism is a tortured emotional outburst with no logical credentials. Robert L. Jackson, in his groundbreaking study of 1958, describes the Underground Man’s thinking at one point as follows: “It is impossible to argue [End Page 549] with the rationalists: reason is on their side. All that remains is irrationally to negate reason.” 2 If those words were to be taken not simply as a moment in Jackson’s rich analysis but as a comprehensive description of the Underground Man’s attitude, it would be senseless to expect philosophically nuanced arguments from him. And we would have no grounds for thinking that Dostoevsky’s own treatment of Rational Egoism went beyond emotional rejection.Critics from Vasily Rozanov to Joseph Frank have debated the Underground Man’s stance toward Rational Egoism and its relation to Dostoevsky’s, with no sign yet of a definitive resolution. Frank’s recent treatment, presented in the third volume of his monumental literary biography of Dostoevsky, offers a helpful history of the dispute as well as his own finely elaborated interpretation of the Underground Man as an irrational opponent of Rational Egoism. 3 Frank reads Notes from Underground as satire, and he contends that the Underground Man is caught in an agonizing self-contradiction: intellectually, he accepts the basic premises of the Rational Egoists’ outlook, such as the denial of free will; but he finds that, “despite the convictions of his reason,” he cannot live with the amoral and dehumanizing implications of those premises, which strip human beings of moral responsibility. 4 From a rational point of view, of course, rejection of the implications should force the Underground Man to reject the premises as well (by the hoary logical law of modus tollendo tolens), and indeed he does at times passionately condemn them. But according to Frank, these condemnations simply show the depth of his predicament: his “intellectual acceptance” of Chernyshevsky’s determinism is conjoined with “simultaneous rejection of it with the entire intuitive-emotional level of personality identified with moral conscience,” causing him to respond irrationally in a multitude of instances. 5 Frank’s Underground Man, then, is an intellectual disciple but an emotional critic of Rational Egoism; and he is triply an irrationalist: his thinking is mired in self-contradiction, he acts irrationally as a result, and his opposition to Rational Egoism has not a rational but an “intuitive-emotional” basis.But where does this leave Dostoevsky? Must we conclude that he, too, is somehow suspended between acceptance and rejection of Rational Egoism and for that reason has created in Notes from Underground a Bakhtinian equilibrium in which neither position is clearly privileged? For Frank, certainly not. It follows from Frank’s analysis that Dostoevsky himself, unlike the Underground [End Page 550] Man, is a fully consistent opponent of Rational Egoism, for that theory is the target of the inverted irony at the core of his satire; “the... (shrink)

Vladimir Putin's image functions as a political talisman far outside of the borders of his own country. By studying material objects, fan fiction and digital media, this book traces the satirical uses of Putin's public persona, notably how he stands as a foil for other world leaders. It argues that the internet is crucial to the creation of contemporary Putin memorabilia and that these items show a continued political engagement by young people, even as some political scientists and media (...) experts decry what they see as the opposite. The book further addresses the ways in which explicit sexual references about government officials are being used as everyday political commentary in the United States. Turning a critical eye to Putin kitsch shows how the number of such references skyrocketed during the 2016 US Presidential election campaign, and suggests that the phenomenon is likely to still be important when Americans next return to the polls. Finally, the internet makes possible a totally new kind of kitsch--the virtual kind. An examination of how the Russian president's image circulates via memes and parodies, as well as through apps and games, suggests that political culture has become increasingly participatory in the last decade. (shrink)

The author of the article studies the creative legacy of Yuriy Mamleev, trying to establish the correlation between of his philosophical and fiction writings. The conventional editorial distinction between philosophical and literary texts as different and autonomous categories is rejected. Instead of the idea, that philosophical and fictional aspects of texts by Mamleev are inextricably linked, it is claimed that they should be considered together. In the author’s opinion, these texts present different perspectives and implementations of his oeuvre that (...) contains the rational dimension and on the other hand – irrational dimension of artistic images and obscure allusions. Mamleev’s writings considered by means of 5 crucial “metathemes”: Аbyss and the “Ultimate relationships” concerned with it, the Mystery which has two levels – one cognizable and the another – uncoognizable in principal, the “root of self-being” and metaphysic of “I”, death and immortality, Russia and the Russian soul which are existed between West and East with special historical and cosmological mission. It is concluded that these 5 metathemes pervade all Mamleev’s texts and comprise his spiritual search. The characters of Mamleev’s fiction are mostly people of post-Soviet world, who ask questions with no set answers to become acquainted with the secrets of being. At the same time they are concerned with their own existence, their self destiny. Their actions are extraordinary and illogical. Supposedly Mamleev’s artistic images not only correspond with his philosophical ideas, for instance – utrism or the “Ultimate relationships”, but also reveal them from unexpected perspective. The author determines that distinction between philosophy and literature of Mamleev is incorrect, as these areas are conflated. Any distinction of this kind will ruin the logic of Mamleev’s thinking and outlook. Thus, metaphysical realism can be viewed as the crossing, distinction blurring area, productive and creative transgression. Or as the situation when philosophy is more than it is itself. (shrink)

Background: A key message in the World Health Organization’s report on dementia emphasizes the need to improve public and professional attitudes to dementia and its understanding, while acknowledging the fact that the workforce in dementia care is becoming increasingly diverse culturally. Objectives: To explore possible differences among formal caretakers from varied cultural background in their attitudes toward the autonomy and human dignity of patients with dementia. Research design: Semi-structured interviews and content analysis, utilizing two fictional vignettes for eliciting caretakers’ attitudes (...) toward dignity and autonomy of their patients. Participants and context: A total of 20 formal caretakers of patients with dementia from three different cultural groups in Israel (“Sabras,” “Arabs,” and “Russians”), working in nursing homes and a hospital. Ethical consideration: Approvals of relevant research ethics committees were obtained and followed. Findings: In comparison with the other groups, most Arab caretakers offer markedly richer perceptions of human dignity and autonomy. Their human dignity’s conceptualization emphasizes “person-centered approach,” and their perception of patients’ autonomy includes provision of explanations and preservation and encouragement of independence. Discussion: The differences found in the attitudes toward the meaning of autonomy and human dignity between the Arab caretakers and the other caretakers stand in contrast to previous studies regarding human dignity, emphasizing the common nature of these attitudes. Offering a linkage (theoretical and empirical) between the Arab perceptions of dignity and autonomy, the study strengthen and further the importance attributed in existing literature to person-centered care in enhancing the quality of care for patients with dementia. Conclusion: The conceptualization of human dignity may vary among different cultural groups. It may also influence the extent to which the caretaker holds a full-fledged perception of the patients’ autonomy. (shrink)

This essay describes some of the literary, psychological, and historical causes of Russia’s war in Ukraine (2022) based on observations of the national character found in the fiction of Aleksandr Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky and in philosophical and psychological essays of Petr Chaadaev, Sergei Askol’dov, and Sigmund Freud. The political ideology that stands behind the war can be characterized as schizofascism, or schizophrenic fascism that embraces the contradiction between archaic myths, chauvinism, and xenophobia, on the one hand, and corruption (...) and cynicism, on the other. Citing the controversial results of sociological polls indicating both Russians’ aspiration for friendship with Ukraine and their support for the aggressive war, the author explores the deep ambivalence inherent in the psychology of Russians as historical successors of the Golden Horde and the Moscovite State, incorporating the legacy of nomadism, militarism, messianism, and autarky. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Evgeny Zamiatin's "The Cave"Timothy LangenEvgeny Zamiatin's short story "The Cave," like Fyodor Dosto- evsky's novel Crime and Punishment, has at its dramatic center a single criminal act, and as its philosophical preoccupation the reasons for and the results of that act. The act in "The Cave" is not murder but theft, the theft of scarce firewood from a downstairs neighbor. The result, unlike Dostoevsky's, is rapid detection, confrontation, and (...) then suicide. The reasons, however, are somewhat more complex, and as with Dostoevsky they reach beyond merely topical sensation to touch a paradox that lies close to the heart of human civilization.The immediate reasons are topical and simple enough. Martin Martinych and Masha live together on the brink of hypothermic death during the predictable cruelty of a Petrograd winter and the exceptional horror of the Russian Civil War. Nearly everyone in the city is freezing and starving, and the precariousness of existence has led people to trade the luxuries of civilized life for the barest essentials of physical survival. Books and sheet music shift imperceptibly from repositories of memory and culture into combustible objects good for a few more minutes of life-saving warmth. Favorite rooms are abandoned as not worth the cost of heating, and Martin Martinych sacrifices his conscience for a few scraps of wood. Indeed, Zamiatin prepares the crime at least as sympathetically as does Dostoevsky: the victim, Obertyshev, is every bit as dislikable as Dostoevsky's pawnbroker; he hoards his considerable supply of wood in total indifference to the suffering of his neighbors. Moreover, Mart's crime, unlike Raskolnikov's [End Page 209] in Crime and Punishment, hardly injures the victim, who seems to suffer a purely mental affront when some of his stash has been stolen. We would like to think that in Raskolnikov's place we would not commit his crime; in Mart's place, however, we might well be excused for following his example and filching a few sticks of wood from a man who doesn't need them.However, it is not an easy decision for Mart, and Zamiatin describes it as a battle between two Marts, bifurcated by the extreme deprivation of his circumstances into a purely animal Mart, a "caveman" who says only "I must," and another Mart clinging tenaciously in memory, a Mart who used to love the music of Scriabin and who now, standing before Obertyshev's ample woodpile, says "I may not." The caveman prevails, Mart brings the wood upstairs, and he and Masha enjoy a day of warmth. At the end of the day, the chairman of the housing committee confronts Mart, assuring him that he too detests Obertyshev, but advising Mart to return the wood or else face legal consequences. Alas, there is none to return. In despair Mart reaches for a vial of poison that he has apparently reserved for that moment when the suffering of life outweighs the hope—but Masha, who is further gone than he, insists on taking the single portion herself. She instructs Mart to go outside for a little walk while she does the deed. He does so, and here the story ends.Zamiatin was trained as an engineer and early in his career he worked both as a technical writer and as a writer of fiction, and so it is tempting see behind this story a mechanical vision of human existence that is something like a physical structure. The structure of human civilization, according to this view, is built on an essential framework without which the entire thing would collapse, and to which every other part of the structure must be sacrificed if need be. Physical existence is part of this framework: it is the precondition of any human civilization, and the ornaments of that civilization must when necessary be devoured to ensure the continued survival of human beings. The burning thirst of physical necessity must be slaked before we can irrigate the lush fields of beauty, kindness, and imagination. Books are for reading, but in some circumstances they are more valuable as kindling.In the writing of some psychologists—most notably Abraham Maslow—there appears a "hierarchy of human needs" that... (shrink)

In turning to the language of freedom, I am not automatically freed from the dangers of reduction and self-privileging. "Freedom" as a term is at least as ambiguous as "power" . When I say that for me all questions about the politics of interpretation begin with the question of freedom, I can either be saying a mouthful or saying nothing at all, depending on whether I am willing to complicate my key term, "freedom," by relating it to the language of (...) power. The best way to do that is to get power in from the beginning, by making a distinction taken for granted by many earlier thinkers and too often ignored today: freedom from as contrasted with freedom to; freedom from external restraints and the power of others to inhibit our actions, and freedom to act effectively when restraints disappear.All the freedom from in the world will not free me to make an intellectual discovery or to point a picture unless I have somehow freed myself to perform certain tasks. Such freedoms are gained only by those who surrender to disciplines and codes invented by others, giving up certain freedoms from. Nobody forbids by interpreting the original text of Confucius' Analects or the Principia Mathematica, yet I am not free to do so, lacking the disciplines—having not been disciplined—to do so. The distinction can lead to troublesome complexities, but in its simple form here it cuts through some of the problems that arise in power language.Every critical revolution tends to speak more clearly about what it is against than about what it seeks. The historicists against impressionism, the New Critics against historicism, the new new critics against intentionalism and the authority of canons, the feminists against misogynous art and criticism–clearly one could write a history of modern criticism as a glorious casting off of errors. But it is rightly a commonplace among intellectual historians that all revolutionaries depend on their past far more than they know. Revolutionary critics are enslaved by a nasty law of nature: I can say only what I can say, and that will be largely what I have learned to say from the kings I would depose.Everyone who tries to forge any kind of ideological criticism must struggle with these complexities. Nobody ever knows just what powers have been rejected and what voices heard. But at the moment it seems clear that what follows here, both in its emerging clarities and remaining confusions, results from my somewhat surprised surrender to voices previously alien to me: the "Mikhail Bakhtin" who speaks to me, muffled by my ignorance of Russian, and the feminist criticism" that in its vigor and diversity and challenge to canonic views has—belatedly, belatedly—forced me to begin listening.Wayne C. Booth's most recent work, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism, won the Laing Prize in 1982. He is working on a book about ethical and political criticism of narrative. A new edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction will appear in 1983. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange by Helen PalmerTrevor Norris (bio)Helen Palmer, Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, 214 pp. ISBN 978-1-4744-3414-0Helen palmer is senior lecturer in English literature and creative writing at Kingston University in London and the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (2014). Her research examines queer theory, performance, literary modernism, gender, aesthetics, and feminist and Afrofuturist (...) fiction. Queer Defamiliarisation explores these ideas and also includes part of Palmer’s literary creative response to James Joyce. The project here is an inquiry into reading, thinking, writing, and pleasure and considers how language can change us when we experience the relationship between naming and the performance of identity as a material boundary: the places where our bodies, behavior, and language are subject to violence in gendered, sexualized, and racialized forms. Palmer also suggests how our own and others’ experiences of violence might be bound up with an aesthetics of linguistic and formal complexity, and she reimagines the difficulty of naming for violently excluded identities by reviewing a range of complex experimental and avant-garde literary works in which new identities can emerge. Showing us how we might understand the materiality of bodies, sense making, and desire in emancipa-tory ways, Palmer attunes us to a phenomenology of reading in which we [End Page 217] recognize how argument undergoes metamorphosis by always being a hybrid of theory, criticism, cultural history, appropriation, memoir, and experimental form. Palmer’s wide-ranging arguments speak about the porosity and mutual embeddedness of our selves, our language, our bodies and environments, and the queer processes of world creation that act on and emerge from these things. Placing her work with other texts that rethink gender, personhood and ecology through new materialisms is productive, therefore, and readers might find value in looking at Queer Defamiliarisation alongside Donna Haraway’s (2016) Staying with the Trouble, Timothy Morton’s (2019)Humankind, and Rebecca Tamás’s (2020) Strangers inasmuch as they think through the ethics and emergence of relatedness and examine what it means to play, be alongside, care for, and nurture other beings and their worlds. Palmer’s project stays with the kind of “serious and... lively” trouble that allows “unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles” (Haraway 2016, 4).The fertile landscape is mapped out in three introductions whose themes are explored in four chapters. Palmer transforms the early-twentieth-century Russian formalist concept of defamiliarization as literary and aesthetic device, the “paradoxical process that... restores sensations to things through a [linguistic] distancing that is also a re-proximation, an approximation, a touching” (9), by reading early- to mid-twentieth-century literary and cultural theorists such as Shklovsky, Brecht, and Jakobson through the ideas of contemporary queer, feminist, and decolonial scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Rosi Braidotti, and Vicki Kirby. She questions how the estrangement of naming operates for those whose bodies are not normatively gendered, racialized, and sexualized in relation to dominant forms of representation and power and explores concerns with and for queer, trans, decolonial, and feminist aesthetics. Throughout, she encourages us to think of the strangeness of language in relation to an ethics and an erotics of radical sympathy with the stranger because it is in the “continuous movement and continual transformation” (13) of naming, and categories of naming, that an emancipatory ethics can be found. This is a timely intervention by Palmer given current anxieties around naming gender and sex, and her argument seeks to move beyond “unhelpful binaries” to acknowledge the “infinite variations and permutations of existence and experience” (14).Palmer productively combines Sara Ahmed’s concept of disorientation from Queer Phenomenology (2006) with the psycholinguistic registers of Jakobson’s “contiguity and displacement” to suggest that queer defamiliarization is a performance of language and naming that “cleaves through and between sameness and difference,” “knocking signifiers loose and ungrounding bodies,” leading to “perceptual shifts and corporeal responses” that can “materially en-gender newness” (Palmer 17). From the start of the section “Spectaxa” (152), Palmer foregrounds the materiality of her text in increasingly modernistic excess to illustrate what we have been reading and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Playing the Dummy:Maugham, Smartphones, and the End of EleganceEric BronsonIOn the Russian Trans-Siberian train from Vladivostok to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), an American businessman won't stop talking for the entire ten-day journey. In his story, "A Chance Acquaintance," W. Somerset Maugham describes this 1917 meeting between Ashenden, a British character loosely based on himself, and the chatty American, named Harrington. The two passengers are blissfully unmoved by the (...) revolution unfolding all around them. Ashenden casually suggests the two of them try and find another pair to pass the time playing bridge. Harrington refuses. "It beats me how an intelligent man can waste his time card-playing," Harrington asserts, "and of all the unintellectual pursuits I have ever seen it seems to me that solitaire is the worst. It kills conversation. Man is a social animal and he exercises the highest part of his nature when he takes part in social intercourse."1 Ashenden doesn't understand the American's distaste for playing cards, especially bridge. "'There is a certain elegance in wasting time,' said Ashenden. … 'Besides,' he added with bitterness, 'you can still talk.'" [End Page 477]Like many of his fictional characters, Maugham enjoyed eloquent, "time-wasting" games like bridge. Unlike solitaire, bridge encourages social interaction. Once, when his confounded bridge partner confronted Maugham with evidence that his high-class opponents were cheating, Maugham was nonplussed. "They gave us double Martinis to start with," he noted, "a slap-up lunch with a particularly good bottle of white Burgundy and old brandy with our coffee."2 The dishonesty was irrelevant. For Maugham, a good bridge game, like the attendant conversation, should help temper one's moral outrage and skim over the unruly passions that so often plague our public and private lives. Elegance, for Maugham, meant presenting the appearance of calm and respectability, especially when such presentations conflicted with one's more turbulent emotions.In Maugham's short story "The Three Fat Women of Antibes," the women around the bridge table desperately try to keep up appearances, both physically and emotionally. When passionate arguments inevitably threaten to undo the air of genteel conversation, Lena, the newest addition to the table, states, "I think it's such a pity to quarrel over bridge. … After all, it's only a game."3 But while it might be true that bridge is "only a game," Maugham took games seriously. Parlor games like bridge were spaces to practice and perfect the social mores on which colonial hierarchies were solidified. In Maugham's England, the game of life required an elegant performance of the many roles the genteel class was expected to play. That performance was predicated on a relentless effort to keep up ordinary appearances by regulating emotional displays. As Maugham wrote in a 1944 article for Good Housekeeping, a good bridge game rewards people who are "truthful, clearheaded, and considerate," characteristics essential "for playing the more important game of life."4More than any other card game, bridge is built on conventions. Etiquette dictates how cards are shuffled, passed, and played. While there is always some room for surprise and risk, everyone around the table needs to know the bidding and playing conventions to ensure the best possible game. In every hand a silent partner, known as the dummy, lays their cards face up, thereby taking themself out of the action.The persistence of such conventions is a holdover from the game of whist, the predecessor of bridge. In an early-nineteenth-century story, "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist," essayist Charles Lamb describes an elderly whist player who enjoys the elegant waste of time that such long card games encourage. While dances and parties help build social skills around untrustworthy passions, card games like whist, and later bridge, [End Page 478] were more like "a long meal; not like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two rubbers might co-extend in duration with an evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships." This kind of congeniality mattered to serious people like Mrs. Battle, people who "despised superficiality, and looked deeper than the colours of things."5The game of bridge... (shrink)

The question of how literary fiction is used for political and ideological propaganda involves both textual and contextual comparative analysis. Using recent discussions of the literary genre of prophecy, Mehtonen explores the case of a hitherto unexplored anonymous fictional publication from 1770, which became a literary sensation and was soon translated from German into Danish, Russian, Swedish, Finnish and Dutch. Mehtonen shows how this narrative – about the 106-year-old Swiss hermit Martin Zadeck, who presented on his deathbed in (...) 1769 a prophecy about the coming of a powerful united Northern Europe – was closely attached not only to emerging ideas of Europe and its transoceanic expansion after the Seven Years War (1756–1763), but also to topical trends in the utopian fiction of the nobility and military networks in the Northern European monarchies. Mehtonen concludes that the seemingly simple prophecy by Zadeck, often catalogued as »devotion literature«, in fact addressed multiple audiences and even clashing worldviews. The monarchic and colonialist ideas of the narrative appealed to royalist patriots; the legendary and mythological layers were immediately evident to readers familiar with the Rosicrucian and Hermetic underpinnings; the millenarian vision pleased the eschatological mindset of proponents of religious awakening movements; and, ultimately, the Zadecksche Gattung was food for enlightened critiques and philosophies concerning superstition. (shrink)

This article reconstructs the theory of the Soviet-American psychologist Vladimir Lefebvre as part of the neocybernetic movement. In particular, I propose to explore such elements of his research of the 1970s—1990s as systemic vision; reflexive analysis; a search for holistic configuration and Janus cosmology; and the realization of neocybernetics. An interest in the reflexive structures of cognition and action led Lefebvre to an understanding of the limited nature of the world’s scientific picture. The conflicting objects he studied proved too complex (...) for behavioral modeling and forecasting. Lefebvre therefore expanded the boundaries of the application of his formal theory of intelligence, relying on functionalist positions, which led him to the science-fiction narrative of “The Big Correction.” I contend that Lefebvre’s works not only propose an original Soviet version of the neocybernetics the 1970s but develop their own model of inhumanism long before it appeared on the scene of modern philosophy. Lefebvre’s formal theory, reinforced by thermodynamics and elements of Russian cosmism, builds cognitive behavior into the teleology of the Big Correction, which involves the idea of overcoming the heat death of the universe. The activity of cosmic intelligence, which Lefebvre equates with magnetic-plasma structures in the finished areas of the universe, is aimed at cooperation and prolonging the existence of life and the intellect. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the consideration of some Wittgenstein’s ideas in relation to similar ideas of Dostoevsky. The comparison is given on a number of key topics for both: the world as the whole as it is and what it is; the image of the world and the meaning of life; the world of the happy and the unhappy. Despite the fundamental difference between the thinkers, the comparison makes it possible to discover an affinity with Dostoyevsky’s worldview of values (...) in Wittgenstein. The analysis of his “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, the philosopher’s “Diaries” and “Lecture on Ethics” in comparison with the analysis of the Russian writer’s fiction texts, helps us to discover those religious and spiritual foundations that both hide and expose to the thoughtful reader beyond the “border and logic of the world”, about which one suggests silence, while the other hides and demonstrates only through the opposite form of false Christianity. The comparison allows us to see that, for Wittgenstein, making sense of the world as the meaning of life is not as silent as he himself claims. At the same time, it was the philosopher’s language of description that allowed us to discover Dostoevsky’s theodicy within the rational world, visibly crucifying Christ but tacitly living it. (shrink)

Henryk Chmielewski is the author of a historical comic book devoted to the 100th anniversary of Poland regaining its independence. The comic book of Chmielewski is a subjective vision of Polish history, because every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction. Artist says about very difficoult moment of Polish history (the 19th century, the early 20th century). He creates original story, argues, that the idea of Poland as an independent state was never not lost. Polish people (...) were formed armyduring the Napoleonic Wars, and Polish organisations started major uprisings (the Polish–Russian War of 1830–1831 and the January Uprising of 1863-64). Chmielewski creates an interesting picture of the world with the use of many varying forms, different codes (e.g. picture, word, photography). He use various means of expression: semantic, linguistic, compositional (see values, compotents: metannaration, digression, opposition "we" - "they", stereotype, appropriate words - freedom, Poland, Poles, relationship: fiction - real world, illusion, colloquial language). (shrink)