1,720,986 research outputs found
Aleksandr Prochanov, o la Crimea come antidoto al postmoderno
No full textWhen Aleksandr Prokhanov’s Mr. Hexogen appeared in 2001 most critics perceived it as a postmodern novel – a totally unexpected move from this author, a long-standing Soviet writer and a leader of the Stalinist-nationalist opposition. The work shows indeed some features in common with, for instance, Babylon by Viktor Pelevin, one of the most popular Russian postmodern writers. Both novels demonstrate a phantasmagoric picture of the hidden side of Russian political life: if, however, in Pelevin’s case the intent is clearly ironic, Mr. Hexogen can be read as a book aimed to convey the view that the Moscow terrorist attacks of winter 1999 were designed in order to ensure Putin’s raise to presidency. If this view is to be taken seriously, the reading of the novel as postmodern will clearly fall apart; the possibility itself of the comparison with Pelevin, in any case, seems to derive from the extra-literary situation: after the fall of the Soviet Union and the turbulent first post-Soviet decade, Russia appeared as a nation who had lost its centre, and its inhabitants in desperate search of a new identity – both to the postmodern and to the reactionary.
A new identity for the right wing – now rallied under Putin’s flag – seems to have been found, once more, in the national mystic, as Prokhanov’s 2014 novel Crimea – where the word Crimea itself carries a symbolic power, whereas the region and the events concerning it are not even mentioned – appears to indicate
Cruises in evil waters: the Gulag Archipelago and its models
No full textSolzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is commonly referred to as belonging to a genre of its own. A connection can be, however, paradoxically traced to Belomor, the collective work of 36 Soviet writers under the direction of Maxim Gorky glorifying the benefits of work in prison camps for “reforging” criminals into enthusiasts of socialist construction. A book Solzhenitsyn shows to know, and violently criticizes, the structure of which, however, seems to inform through parody the structure of his own work. A linguistic analysis of The Gulag Archipelago shows how often inmates are treated as “the other” to which the writer tries to give voice. In this sense, a postcolonial reading can offer new insights, as camps become, paradoxically, the “Contact Zone” where the writer can finally meet the Russian people and even become part of it
Babij Jar: lo sterminio taciuto e l’arte dell’eufemismo
No full textConfrontando le poesie dedicate al massacro di Babij Jar (lo sterminio metodico di tutta la popolazione ebraica rimasta a Kiev dopo la conquista nazista) da Il’ja Erenburg ed Evgenij Evtušenko dovremmo con ogni probabilità considerare superiore quella del primo. La sua qualità poetica deriva in gran parte dall’uso dell’allusione, del non detto, che apre spazi semantici superiori; questa caratteristica deriva però probabilmente da un caso di necessità: Erenburg, che scriveva nel 1945, cercava evidentemente una strada per far penetrare alla stampa una commemorazione delle vittime di Babij Jar in un periodo in cui, in Unione Sovietica, era impossibile farlo in modo più esplicito – nella prima edizione, la poesia era senza titolo e il collegamento all’episodio di Babij Jar poteva solo essere dedotto.
L’effetto della poesia di Evtušenko, d’altro canto – incluso l’effetto sulla carriera del poeta – discende completamente dal suo carattere violentemente esplicito: la conclusione logica è che il valore politico del testo sia superiore a quello poetico. Non bisogna dimenticare, però, lo sforzo di rinnovamento della poesia attraverso l’inclusione di materiale marcatamente impoetico, dove il linguaggio politico assume un valore analogo all’uso del turpiloquio in Majakovskij.If we were to compare the poems that Ilya Ehrenburg and Evgenii Evtushenko wrote about Babii Iar – the place of the mass extermination of what Jewish population was left in Kiev after the Nazis took the town – the former should probably be considered a higher achievement. Its poetic quality derives markedly from the use of allusion, of the unsaid, opening the way to a vast semantic space; it originates, however, from necessity: Ehrenburg, writing in 1945, was in all likelihood looking for a way to express the mourning for the victims of Babii Iar in a time when it was not possible to do it in a more direct way – in its first publication, the poem carried no title, and the connection to the concrete historical event needed as well to be caught by deduction.
The effect of Evtushenko’s text, on the other hand – the effect on the poet’s career included – is based on its explicitness only: it should naturally be maintained as a work of a more political than poetic value. It should be remembered, however, that Evtushenko was striving for a renewal of poetry by the inclusion of markedly unpoetic material, of which political language can be considered an instance just as Maiakovskii’s foul language
La pulce ferrata non ballava: il nazionalismo russo come problema di rappresentazione
No full textThe war propaganda prints pubed as objects of representation; in the Segodniashnii lubok period, the same artists apparently attempted to use the language of folk art directly in order to speak to the common folk.
The discussion aroundlished by Segodniashnii lubok in the fall of 1914 have often been analyzed as the logical development of their authors' – such champions of the avant-garde as Maiakovskii, Malevich, and Larionov – interest for primitive art. It should, however, be reminded that, in Russia, primitivists used national rather than exotic models – the Russian people was for them just as exotic as Tahitians were for Gauguin.
Folk modes were thus treat Nikolai Leskov's tales, however, should remind us that the use of an alien language implies a fundamental ambiguity about the identity of the speaker; this ambiguity is probably the reason why the Soviet propaganda system did not follow the path traced by Segodniashnii lubok
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Pil’niak and the Spies: On Understanding Literature as Intrigue and Disguise
No full textLa storia della fine di Boris Pil’njak, arrestato come spia giapponese, può essere riletta alla luce di quella dell’autore delle Glosse al suo libro di viaggio, Roman Kim. Arrestato anche lui come spia giapponese, questi riuscì a sopravvivere inventando storie incredibili sulla sua vita. Kim era davvero una spia, un agente dell’OGPU che si occupava dell’ambasciata giapponese a Mosca, e conosceva le logiche seguite dall’organizzazione. Una volta rilasciato, si sarebbe costruito una robusta carriera di scrittore di spy-thrillers. Il caso di Kim, dove realtà e finzione si scambiano continuamente di posto con effetti paradossali, offre l’occasione per uno sguardo diverso sulle peculiarità del funzionamento del sistema letterario sovietico, e per una nuova comprensione delle ragioni di incompatibilità tra Pil’njak e quel sistema.The story of Roman Kim, the author of the Glosses to Boris Pilnyak’s Japanese travel book, can help shed new light on the end of Pilnyak, who was arrested as a Japanese spy. Kim was arrested as well, but he managed to survive by inventing incredible stories about himself. He was a real spy – an OGPU agent working on the Japanese embassy in Moscow – and knew the organization’s operational logics. After his release, he built himself a career as a spy-thriller writer. Kim’s case, where reality and fiction constantly trade places with paradoxical effects, can help shed new light on the peculiarities of the Soviet literary system and on the reasons why Pilnyak could not find a place in that system
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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