Christian Raffensperger, “Shared (Hi)Stories: Vladimir of Rus’ and Harald Fairhair of Norway”
Vladimir Sviatoslavich was the ruler of Rus’ in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries and the founder of a unified Rusian state based at Kiev. The majority of what is known about him comes from the Povest’ vremennykh let (PVL), a Rusian source believed to be composed in the twelfth century, but extant only from the late thirteenth century. This has caused difficulties in understanding the historical Vladimir. This article advances the idea that the Vladimir written about in the PVL actually bears a remarkable resemblance to Harald “Fairhair,” the tenth-century unifier of Norway. Similarities in life story and family are examined here, in order to suggest the idea that Rusian chroniclers appropriated elements of Harald’s life. Drawing on the many connections between Rus’ and Scandinavia, and their shared world of oral culture, the chroniclers may have appropriated these stories as part of a deliberate attempt to enhance the reputation of Vladimir and to place him a broader world of European rulers.
Linda Bowman, “Bourgeois Self-Representation and Business Tax Reform in Late Imperial Russia”
In the wake of the 1905 Revolution the Ministry of Finance proposed radical changes to Russia’s direct tax system: an income tax and a modernized business tax system. These reforms elicited strong resistance from the now more politically ambitious and assertive business elite. At the conference of 1908, called by the ministry to negotiate business tax reform, the business elite rehearsed a heroic rhetoric of progress, citizenship, and modernity to deflect tax increases that would harm Russia’s economic development. Business delegates represented themselves as modern and time-conscious, enlightened and civic-minded--a contrast to Russia’s slow, suspicious, and wasteful tax bureaucracy. The well-informed, articulate debates underline the increasing confidence of Russian business elite in defining itself and its needs. But the sometimes discordant tone of business representatives reflected resentments that business remained the only sector that paid an income tax; and that business taxpayers were still denied genuine citizenship in the zemstvos. The failure of the finance ministries, State Duma, and elite interest groups to come to an agreement in favor of tax reform in the Silver Age was inopportune, especially in light of the consequences of Russia’s catastrophic fiscal crisis during the First World War.
Benjamin Tromly, “An Unlikely National Revival: Soviet Higher Learning and the Ukrainian ‘Sixtiers,’ 1953-65”
This article examines the emergence of a cohort of postwar Ukrainian intellectuals usually called the “sixtiers” that championed a revitalized Ukrainian culture and eventually played an important role in national mobilization in the 1980s. The origins of the Ukrainian revival were more contingent and complex than secondary accounts have suggested. For youths in the cities of East and Central Ukraine, embracing the nation meant challenging the longstanding dominance of Russian language and culture. The factor that made this difficult choice possible was Soviet higher learning. Kyiv University and other higher learning establishments in the late 1950s and early 1960s were social spaces where numerous historical forces converged to encourage national thinking: a curriculum that espoused the idea of a Ukrainian high culture, social mobility into the privileged intelligentsia of youths hailing from the peasantry and working class who had a vested interest in the status of the nation, and the intellectual ferment of the period known as the Khrushchev Thaw.
Alexander Etkind, “A Parable of Misrecognition: Anagnorisis and the Return of the Repressed from the Gulag”
Anagnorisis (recognition) is a concept originally from classical poetics that made its way into political theory. This essay explores records or fantasies of misrecognition of survivors of the gulag by their relatives. To the extent that life in the camps was “bare”--that is, had no meaning--it could not be reintegrated and recognized in the context of Soviet “freedom.” Juxtaposing Terrence Cave’s and Nancy Fraser’s concepts of recognition, this essay rereads a variety of texts that describe the first contact between the returning “repressed” and their relatives. In the memoiristic context of mourning for the Soviet victims, the inability to recognize those who returned from the camps is an allegory for the broader practices of the regime.
Nila Friedberg, “Rule-Makers and Rule-Breakers: Joseph Brodsky and Boris Slutsky as Reformers of Russian Rhythm”
In Symbolism (1910), Andrei Bely classified Russian poets into "reformers" and "followers," deriving this distinction from the properties of verse rhythm. Reformers, Bely argued, drastically deviate from the statistical norms of the period, while followers echo the rhythmic trends set by others. Bely’s classification opened up a number of interesting questions, some of which, though posed almost a hundred years ago, remain unanswered to this day. While many researchers catalogued and discussed specific types of reforms, no general principle was formulated to explain what a "reformer" really means. Can we define reformers more precisely? By definition, innovative poets must abandon the rules that their predecessors have obeyed, but how? This essay proposes to refine the definition by describing poets-reformers as either rule-makers or rule-breakers. Focusing on iambic meter, I show that a rule-maker (like Brodsky) creates new rules which were not previously used and which are consistently observed for extended periods of time; a rule-breaker (like Slutsky) violates the rules observed by his predecessors, but proposes no consistent rule in return. Although poetic meter is employed as a testing ground for this theory, the distinction between rule-breakers and rule-makers potentially has broader applications in literary analysis extending to genres, metaphors, rhyme and poetic syntax. The specific phenomenon I discuss is disruption of rhythm. Unlike most Russian poets, Slutsky and Brodsky occasionally disrupt the flow of their iambic poems by inserting extra syllables into the line. Brodsky's experiment is very likely to have been influenced by Slutsky's, since Brodsky and the poets of his generation held Slutsky in high regard, and several of Brodsky’s poems clearly echo or paraphrase Slutsky. Twenty five years later, Brodsky still praised the innovative aspects of Slutsky's style: "It is Slutsky who almost single-handedly changed the diction of post-war Russian poetry” Given the possibility of Slutsky's influence on the younger generation of poets, it is necessary to determine whether the rhythmic affinity between Brodsky and Slutsky is real. This essay offers a linguistic method for drawing an explicit distinction between these two poets and shows that their seemingly similar rhythms are radically different. Brodsky turns out to be a rule-maker, since the prosodic shape of his disrupted iambic lines consists of only a small and carefully selected subset of what is possible in the language. In contrast, Slutsky is a rule-breaker, since his disrupted iambic lines are not constrained phonologically, and the difference between them and the rhythm of Slutsky's prose is not statistically significant. Moreover, the shape of Brodsky's experimental lines is uniform across years and bears strong resemblance to English prosody, while Slutsky creates no consistent pattern of any kind. The analysis proposed here uses evidence from a wide variety of disciplines, and evidence for rule-making is sought from the generative approach to meter, phonetics, statistics, archival research and linguistic fieldwork. My goal is to illustrate that each approach complements the other and provides an explanation that the alternate approach does not. I provide previously unavailable archival evidence of Brodsky's intent to create the new rule, such as corrections in the drafts of poems from the Yale University Beneicke library. I also analyze the prosodic features of the specific English texts that Brodsky read in the 1960s, showing the context that could have triggered his rule-making in Russian. Finally, I record native speakers of Russian reading Brodsky's verse and analyze the acoustic properties of their recitation as well as Brodsky’s own recitation. Thus, the essay shows that linguistic analysis of verse extends far beyond simply formalizing what we already know. The distinction between rule-makers and rule-breakers, based on seemingly minute details of verse language, has relevance beyond poetics. It sheds light on the general mechanisms of creativity and on how different artists conceptualize innovation.
Anton Shekhovtsov and Andreas Umland, “Is Aleksandr Dugin a Traditionalist? ‘Neo-Eurasianism’ and Perennial Philosophy”
This paper attempts to question the widely held view that one of the Russian “New Right’s” leading theoreticians, the notorious neo-fascist Alexander Dugin is a “Traditionalist” or even Russia’s leading representative of Integral Traditionalism. We argue that Perennial Philosophy did play a role in Dugin’s intellectual biography, yet merely served him as an arsenal of original terms and ideas that he incorporated into an ideology that goes far beyond Integral Traditionalism and is principally inspired by other sources than Rene Guenon, such as the German “Conservative Revolution” of the interwar period, and the West European “New Right” of today. We also touch upon the role of Julius Evola as both a disputed follower of Guenon and an important source for Dugin. Finally, we review and criticize Mark Sedgwick’s noted monograph, “Against the Modern World,” and reject his interpretation of Dugin as a “Traditionalist” by way of quoting Dugin, as well as other researchers and representatives of Integral Traditionalism, who denied that Evola and/or Dugin should be regarded as “Traditionalists.”