Abstracts

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Abikeyeva, Gulnara
State-funded and Independent Film Production in Kazakhstan
This paper (presented in Russian) analyses the current state of affairs in the Kazakh film industry.  The state-funded production of films which promulgate a national concept, such as The Nomad or Mustafa Shokai, is compared to the work of independent production studios and co-productions, which have recently delivered such internationally recognized films as Sergei Dvortsevoi’s Tulpan and Zhanna Issabaeva’s Karoy. The paper offers a sociological analysis of the film industry in Kazakhstan on the basis of case studies of these films.

Adler, Nanci
The Communist Within: Narratives of Gulag Prisoner Loyalty to the Party
This paper documents the attitudes – especially loyalty -- among GULAG prisoners toward the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and seeks to ascertain how their incarceration subsequently influenced those sentiments.  This issue may offer insight into the larger question of how repressive regimes are maintained.  It is paradoxical that some prisoners – many of whom were falsely convicted – endured grueling, barely survivable, lengthy terms of labor camp and prison and emerged maintaining their loyalty toward the system of government that was responsible for their imprisonment.  With the materials that have become available, we can now begin to understand this phenomenon.  Explanations include the ‘traumatic bond’ (Stockholm Syndrome), Communism (the Party) as a surrogate for institutionalized religion, cognitive dissonance, and functionalism.  As we try to evaluate the issues surrounding the violence and misfortune wrought by leaders against their own people in the twentieth century, investigation of Gulag prisoners’ attitudes toward the Party should facilitate a deeper understanding of the dynamics of Soviet Communism, and perhaps even a deeper understanding of the dynamics of repressive regimes.  

Ambrose, Kathryn
The Unattainable Ideal: Tolstoy’s Mother Heroines
This paper will explore the idealised mother figures in Tolstoy, focusing mainly on Dolly and Kitty (Anna Karenina) and Natasha (War & Peace). It will draw upon the methodological framework I am using in my thesis, where I am taking a revisionist view of the semiotics of space (influenced by Lotman and Bakhtin), by looking instead at the semiotics of barriers to explore the ‘woman question’ in nineteenth-century German, Russian and English literatures. In my thesis, I divide barriers into three sub-types – textual, actual and perceived. Textual barriers are narrative or textual devices which limit the female characters (for example, when they are given less dialogue than males). Actual barriers are just that: hedges, fences, walls, windows and doors, to name but a few. The final category is perceived barriers, which in the case of Tolstoy, can be divided into two sub-types. The first one is the barrier of societal conventions. For example, Tolstoy presents it as more acceptable for men to have affairs than women (as in the case of Stiva and Anna). The second perceived barrier for Tolstoy’s women (and this is what forms the basis of this paper) might be described as the Tolstoyan moral code, as it seems that the only role deemed acceptable for a woman is that of wife and mother. To this end, I am going to suggest that in his idealisation of characters such as Kitty, Tolstoy presents an insurmountable barrier for the women who do not fit into this ‘type’; most notably, Anna Karenina.

Andrew, Joe
‘The Eyes Have It’: Towards a Typology of the Physical Appearance of the Nineteenth-Century Russian Heroine
Description of characters’ physical appearance is a standard feature of nineteenth-century literature, especially the novel, both Western and Russian. Even where the great tradition of Russian psychological realism is concerned, it was not uncommon for the psychology to be linked to, even explained by physical appearance. (A classic example is the ‘portrait’ of Pechorin in the Maksim Maksimych section of Hero of Our Time.) This attention to physicality and its relevance to personality is often seen as the result of the widespread impact of the theories of the Swiss physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801).  Lavater and his ideas that a person’s external appearance is related to character were widely popular amongst Russian writers from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and remained influential even as late as Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, and his theories are closely linked with the fictional treatment of appearance. This paper aims to use Lavater’s ideas as the context for an examination of the physical description of the heroines of Russian literature. The study will begin with Karamzin’s Poor Liza and run through key works from the late eighteenth century up to and including Turgenev. Alongside an analysis of depiction of the feminine form in the early ‘classics’ (Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov), the paper will undertake a comparative study between male and female writers (including Gan, Zhukova and Khvoshchinskaia). Within these frameworks the paper will have two main aims: the construction of a typology of the appearance of the nineteenth-century heroine; and a consideration of the extent to which this typology varies between male and female writers.

Angusheva-Tihanov, Adelina
The Tale of Three Religions: The Representations of Inter-religious Dialogue in the Late Twentieth-century South Slavic Literature and Film
The paper addresses the representations of the dialogue between the three major religions in the Balkans, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, in the South Slavic literary and cinematic production from the last two decades of the twentieth century by studying the modern responses to and metamorphoses of a medieval tale of a competition between these three religions. Reinvented in the Balkan context of long-lasting co-habitation and enduring cultural antagonism between the exponents of the three religions, the medieval tale is transformed in recent literary works and films (such as The Dictionary of the Khazars, 1984 by M. Pavich and  After the End of the World, 1998 directed by Iv.Nichev), into a tool for questioning the relevance and the rhetoric of the established clichés in the representation of the three religious denominations. The paper examines the cultural and political implications of this representational shift, as well as the complex cohesiveness of the new imagery.   

Aris, Stephen
‘Losing friends in the West, turning to friends in the East’: The Asian Vector of Russian Foreign Policy
Although often downplayed as of secondary importance to relations with Europe, Russia has been paying increasing attention to the Asian vector of its foreign policy. Improved relationships with countries in Central and East Asia, especially China have been a major positive for Moscow in the last decade. These partnerships are taking on even greater importance in the context of the tense relationship between Russia and the West in the wake of the South Ossetia crisis. This paper has two objectives, one to examine the nature of Russia’s relations with states to its East; two to assess the degree to which this network of relationships seeks to present an alternative normative model to what many perceive as the Western orientated nature of the contemporary international system. It argues firstly, that Russia’s relations with many states to its East have evolved on a dual basis: bilateral and multilateral. The multilateral approach is proving successful and mutually-reinforcing for developing bilateral relations. Secondly, an important aspect in the creation of this multilateral architecture has been solidarity on perceptions and positions on international affairs, some of which are consciously distinct to those of the West and lie at the heart of many of the disputes between Russia and the West. It concludes that Russia is successfully engaging with a selective network of Asian partners, in order provide itself valuable rhetorical support and vital economic cooperation, and as relations with the West sour it seems natural that Russia will increasingly look to advance these relations further.

Arnold, Vicky
Sacred Place in Post-Soviet Russia
Much has been written about the “religious revival” which has apparently taken place in Russia since the late 1980s, with much debate over its origins and spiritual depth, whether its intensity has waned in the early 21^st century, and the extent of its most visible expression – the restoration and construction of places of worship across the country.  This study attempts to move beyond statistics of how many have been built or reopened to ask what role they have played in the development of post-Soviet religious life in the context of one city, Perm', and one small town, Barda, both in the western Urals.  Among the topics investigated are: 1) how Orthodox churches and mosques are perceived and used by various people (as places of personal significance, places of visual beauty, symbolic cultural sites, sources of redemption and places which have themselves needed to be redeemed); 2) how religious sites are involved in public life by both secular and religious authorities, and the compromise and cooperation between these authorities which has been necessary to decide such places' futures; 3) how religion has been bound up in the process of addressing the past in Russia (both personally and collectively), and how sacred places may be involved in this.

Autio-Sarasmo, Sari
The Soviet Union and the Search for Western Cooperation During the Cold War
In the political rhetoric, the Soviet Union had a very strong juxtaposition against the West, and the Capitalist bloc was defined as an enemy. When the political rhetoric was in many senses ideologically loaded and it supported the juxtaposition of two systems, the rhetoric in economic matters was a different case. The presentation will focus on the Soviet initiatives to establish economic cooperation with the states in West Europe. In a special interest in the presentation will be the relations between the Soviet Union and West Germany. How were these connections built and what were the aims of the cooperation? After the WWII, technological progress was very fast and especially the automation helped the West to transform extensive economic growth to intensive economic growth. This process became the task also in the Soviet Union during the 1950s. The Soviet Union wanted to become a part of the worldwide technological progress. During the 1950s, Soviet leadership started to build connections and cooperation with the West. The main interest in Western Europe was West Germany, which was in the late 1950s technologically developed state. Soviet specialists were sent to visit the Western technical fairs where they collected information and visited the Western enterprises. Based on the information collected during the visits, the Soviet leadership established a network of connections to the West.

Babiracki, Patryk
Soviet-Polish Literary Contacts and the Politics of the ‘Raw Deal,’ 1945-1953
My essay is about the Soviet and Polish failures to forge a transnational patronage network from the respective literary milieus.  While the notion that transnational contacts within the Soviet bloc were rare in the immediate post-WW II era, we know relatively little about why this was the case.  I focus on the fate of contemporary Polish fiction in the USSR between 1945 in 1953.  At the center of the discussion will be the controversies that the new Polish literature generated among government officials, party bureaucrats and literary communities in Poland and the USSR.  I demonstrate how conflicting expectations concerning form of new Polish fiction and its role in the USSR, as well as institutional limitations on the Soviet side divided individuals involved in the process of literary exchange.  I also show that tight restrictions on the Soviet side, coupled with Polish miscalculations about the nature of the Soviet enterprise effectively closed off potential channels of cooperation between the imperial elites in both countries.  The fruitlessness of the negotiations about the status of Polish literature in USSR motivated members of the respective literary communities to resolve potential difficulties through less formal contacts with one another.  Some were willing to make compromises through “consensual censorship,” a process whereby Polish authors and Soviet editors were revising given work in order to match the Soviet ideological standards.  But these mutual efforts were further undermined by omnipresent confusion with regards to with the correct literature was supposed to be.

Badcock, Sarah
Experiencing Punishment: Exile to Siberia, 1900-1917
This paper examines the lived experiences of different categories of prisoners in the last years of the Imperial regime, alongside the struggles of regional administration to contain and care for their unwilling guests.  I will use case studies of Irkutsk and Yakutsk provinces to demonstrate the profound contradictions in Tsarist attitudes to exile, and the deep conflicts that developed among regional governors about the administration of exiles. The lived experiences of prisoners are explored alongside the administration’s efforts to care for and contain them. Two aspects of the dynamics of state-prisoner relationships will be discussed in this paper; exiles’ attempts to earn a living, and the control of exile movement and escape.

Beumers, Birgit
Dancing Puppets: Alexander Shiryaev and his Films
This panel explores the representation of body movement in Russian ballet of the early twentieth century, a period that saw the rise of Russian ballet, culminating in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes seasons in Paris from 1909 onwards and marking their centenary in 2009. This paper deals with the recording of body movement and dance choreography through drawings (used for projection in a praxinoscope) and animated puppets by the dancer and assistant ballet-master to Petipa, Alexander Shiryaev, in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Bjørnflaten, Jan Ivar
The Emergence of Gerunds in the Slavic Languages
It is a common feature of practically all languages in Europe that they during the last millennium have developed a verbal form generally called gerund. This is also the case with the Slavic languages that all have two nonfinite verbal forms, i.e. forms of the verbal paradigm whose main function is to mark adverbial subordination. In Slavic these forms originated from the paradigms of the present and past active participles through a process that “took out” or “froze” individual participle forms, depriving these forms the categories of case, number and gender. It is conspicuous that in the individual Slavic languages different participle forms have emerged as, for instance, present gerunds. In Russian, MNomSg present active participle has been generalized, e.g. znaja, while Polish has generalized a form which most probably was FSg or Pl, e.g., mówiaˆc. The situation in Polish resembles the one in Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Slovak, while Slovene and Czech make use of both forms. Czech is in addition the only Slavic language in which gender and number congruence have been preserved, cf. the present gerunds nesa, nesouc, nesouce. Through an analysis of Russian texts from the 17^th century an attempt will be undertaken to demonstrate how the loss of congruence of the participle in the subordinated clause with the subject in the main clause came about. This development will be treated as decategorialization in a process of grammaticalization since the gerunds are considered more grammatical than the original participial forms.

Blacker, Uilleam
The Russian Voice of Postcolonial Ukraine: Andrei Kurkov’s ‘Dobryi angel smerti’
Over the last two decades postcolonial theory has become a popular prism through which to examine Ukrainian literature. Scholars in Ukraine and abroad identify a specifically post-soviet post-coloniality in the work of such writers as Iurii Andrukhovych and Oksana Zabuzhko, with an underlying assumption that this post-colonial moment in Ukrainian literature marks its maturing into a 21^st century literature open to world cultural trends, and finally able to deal with overcome the traumatic colonial past of Ukraine. The paper wishes to challenge some of the assumptions of Ukrainian literature studies of recent years in two ways. First it will suggest that some of this literature is not quite as postcolonial as scholars like to think, through brief reference to several writers championed as postcolonial in Ukrainian literary circles. The main body of the paper will deal with Andrei Kurkov’s novel Dobryi angel smerti. Kurkov, as a Russian writing in Russian, is largely ignored in Ukrainian literary circles, which in itself testifies to the incomplete postcolonial process within the new Ukrainian literary establishment. The paper argues that Kurkov’s work, as epitomised in Dobryi angel smerti, represents perhaps the most mature, open and sophisticated literary treatment of Ukraine’s postcolonial/post-soviet situation to date. The novel is also most true to the theoretical aspirations of post-colonial scholars such as Said, Spivak and Bhabha, and the work of the latter will be key in informing my discussion of the novel.

Bogatyrev, Sergei
Ceremonial Headgear and Dynastic Politics under Ivan the Terrible
This paper deals with one of the most important component of royal ritual at the court of Ivan IV the Terrible, the cap of Monomakh. In Muscovite dynastic culture, the cap of Monomakh became a material symbol of alleged continuity of royal power from Byzantium and Kievan Rus. Ivan the Terrible was crowned with the cap of Monomakh in 1547. In my paper, I will re-examine the history of the cap in the context of Ivan IV’s dynastic politics. I will contrast and compare the cap with other ceremonial headgear used under Ivan IV. Particular attention will be given to different cultural influences which led to the appearance of the cap in Moscow and its place in royal ritual. This will allow us to make new conclusions about the origin of the cap of Monomkah, its place among Ivan IV’s royal regalia and its symbolical function in Muscovite court culture. I will show how the ruling circles articulated Ivan IV’s dynastic priorities through the use of ceremonial headgear during court ceremonies and in official art. My study is based on new and little studied visual and textual sources, which shed a new light of the history of the cap of Monomakh and other royal regalia.

Brandist, Craig
Bakhtin's historical poetics between Romanticism and Positivism: the importance of the Soviet context
In the second half of the 1930s Bakhtin turned his attention away from synchronic studies of discursive interaction in the novel and focused on the historical development of literary genres and forms. Rather than being an exceptional figure in Soviet literary theory at the time, Bakhtin's work of this period closely follows the contours of debate at the time and important sources for some of his key formulations can be found in the work of Leningrad literary and cultural scholars. Like many at the time, Bakhtin sought to combine Romantic and positivist scholarship into a historical poetics that was at once educative and sociologically grounded.

Briggs, Jane
Mothers and Daughters: Teenage Tantrums in Turgenev and Dostoevsky
Analysis of the portrayal of young women in 19th-century Russian novels raises questions as to whether they may be seen as characters in their own right, rather than merely as symbols or consorts for the men; and whether the writers give serious consideration to the experience of teenage girls in terms of family life and relationships with men, Christian faith and spiritual development, and conflicts with personal and institutional evil. This study focuses on three such girls: Turgenev's Zinaida (First Love); Dostoevsky's Netochka Nezvanova; and Liza Khokhlakova (Brother Karamazov) - and their mothers, respectively, an elderly widow in reduced circumstances; a young mother trapped in an unhappy marriage (Netochka's foster-mother); and a rich young widow struggling to reconcile the management of her wealth with her Christian faith. Consideration is given to the role of the mother as educator and regulator of behaviour; and as a model for the lived experience of Christian faith and values. The mother is also considered in her role as the protector of her daughter from oppression and exploitation by men. The lives of the daughters illustrate the problems faced by teenage girls, struggling to form loving relationships with men, and troubled by the sin and evil which they perceive in the world around them. In some cases, this leads them along a self-destructive path; but others survive, and even offer protection to the older women.

Bullock, Philip Ross
A Russian Rake: Pushkin, Chaikovskii and the English ‘Onegin’
Studies of the reception of Russian literature in Britain between 1880 and 1940 have by and large focused on the leading representatives of realist prose (broadly defined): Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. Other figures have been treated in less detail; in this paper, I propose to consider British reactions to Pushkin – and in particular, his novel in verse, Evgenii Onegin – between 1880 and 1940. I will suggest that British modernists’ interest in Russian prose was not matched by an awareness of Russian poetry. Moreover, I will argue that two specific features of de Vogüé’s Le Roman russe further problematised the British reception of Pushkin: first, the allegation of his untranslatability (part of a broader discourse of the impossibility of rendering Russian poetry into English); secondly, the suggestion that, as a Romantic, Pushkin was of insufficient interest to Western readers keen to satisfy a taste for the exotic and the nationalist. Yet British audiences were familiar with Onegin in a variety of ways, not least a number of translations of fragments from the novel published between the more famous versions of Spalding (1881) and Deutsch (1936). However, the most important instance of Onegin reception at this time (and, arguable, since) was awareness of Tchaikovsky’s operatic version of the novel, which was known through a number of productions, concert performances and critical discussions in secondary literature. I will conclude by analyzing the role of Tchaikovsky’s opera in shaping – or even prejudicing – British perceptions of Pushkin.

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