1,721,021 research outputs found
Weaving Myths. Two Women's Voices From The Caucasus
No full textThis research is devoted to a comparison of the prose work of two prominent women writers in the context of the post-Soviet Caucasus: Alisa Ganieva and Ana Kordzaia-Samadashvili. Through their use of myths from various cultures of the world, Ganieva and Kordzaia-Samadashvili succeed in creating original stories of women that lay the basis of what is becoming the new Canon in Russian and Georgian literature. Tapping into the suggestive, arcane power of myths, the oldest relics of the past, they operate a regrouping of values, further problematizing the role of women in times of radical change. Therefore, these two case studies appear to be particularly relevant to describe the paradigmatic cultural shift that occurred in a specific region - that of the Caucasus, - once entirely part of the Soviet Union
“A Retreat From Everyday Soviet Life. Konstantin Vaginov’s Utopian Visions”
No full textStill a rather obscure figure in the wider context of Russian modernism, Konstantin Vaginov (1899-1934) was an eclectic writer who belonged to the Russian avanguardist nebula. To be more precise, he was a member of the Oberiu movement, that is the “Union of Real Art or the Association for Real Art”, active between the 1920s and 1930s. All his works show his preoccupation with several historical events that changed the world, such as the First World War and, most importantly, the Russian Civil War. Vaginov saw these upheavals as inevitable yet ambivalent apocalypses for Russian traditions. The writer manifested his antagonism towards this situation by developing a particular poetics linked to a cult of the past. His beautiful images of an idealized, Hellenic Petersburg form a deep contrast with the ugliness of the Soviet, post-war Leningrad, creating a Utopian alternative to reality. On the basis of these preliminary assumptions, the article analyses Vaginov’s production, and in particular his first and last novels (The Goat Song, Козлиная песнь, 1928 and Harpagoniana, Гарпагониана, 1934), in order to compare the writer’s utopian depictions of the cityscape with realistic ones, keeping a special eye on the role played by collections in the construction of an alternative solution to reality. Notably, a comparison of the latter text with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (La città del sole, 1602) demonstrates the function of collections as utopian islands, which preserve the memory of a recent, yet unattainable past
“‘Žizn’ pobedila smert’’. Sull’ibridazione tra ‘tragico’ e ‘assurdo’ nella prosa breve di D.I. Charms”
No full textUn’articolata riflessione sul concetto di “tragico” nella cultura moderna e contemporanea non può fare a meno di prendere in considerazione la prosa breve di Daniil I. Charms, specialmente se si focalizza l’attenzione sullo studio dell’azione in relazione al personaggio. Nelle scenette charmsiane, le “parti” dei personaggi non sono rilevanti, se non per sottolineare il carattere irrazionale della situazione da loro vissuta; gli “attori” si muovono in uno spazio spesso indefinito, o, se è connotato in qualche maniera, lo è negativamente. “The hero of his absurdist prose exists [...] in the real nauseating Leningrad” (2010: 406), scrive Solomon Volkov , e quest’ambientazione “squallida” agli occhi del poeta non fa che aumentare la tragicità degli eventi. Sono proprio i crudeli, fatali, eventi che coinvolgono i personaggi a scatenare la reazione del lettore, il cui senso di impotenza di fronte a morti accidentali e insensate viene acuito dalla scelta della forma breve.
Attraverso l’analisi della cosiddetta “semantica della morte” - caratteristica individuata da Lipoveckij (2000) nella pratica metafinzionale di Vaginov, Charms e in seguito di Nabokov - il saggio intende mettere in evidenza l’assurdità, e al contempo la tragicità, del gesto del personaggio charmsiano, che nella sua immediatezza di atto puro sostituisce con l’espressione una rappresentazione di stampo mimetico. Paradossalmente, una rappresentazione sostanzialmente “antimimetica” diviene l’unica modalità narrativa possibile per descrivere “fedelmente” quella crudele realtà sovietica che non può più essere raccontata utilizzando le presunte tecniche “mimetiche” del realismo socialista
“Beyond ‘Mimetic Reductionism’. Exploring Unnatural Narratology”.
Full text linkReview of Alber, Jan, Nielsen, Henrik Skov, Richardson, Brian (2013) (Eds.): A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press
Absent yet Present: On the Paradoxical Nature of Characters in Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Full text linkThe present research is focused on the theme of absence, an area of inquiry that might seem dominant in the field of Nabokov Studies. The analysis, which concentrates in particular on the key figures of the novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), notably the narrator V. and the poet Sebastian Knight, interprets the characters’ construction through the paradigm of absence. Arguably, the construction of characters in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is paradoxical: absence constitutes their essence at a core level, as it often happens in the context of the self-conscious genre. Moreover, absence plays a key role in characters’ design, linking them to all Nabokovian novels. However, despite their innermost ‘flatness’, to use Edward M. Forster’s terminology, they still appear to be ‘round’, i.e. plausible, mimetic figures
Russian (1917-1918) and Armenian (1922) Orthographic Reforms. Assessing the Russian Influence on Modern Armenian Language
Full text linkThe Russian Orthographic Reform (1917-1918), which initiated the Armenian one (1922-1924, modified in 1940) has undoubtedly played a central role in the development of Modern Armenian. To support this thesis, the essay retraces the fundamental phases of the reform, focusing on the two decades from the early 1920s to 1940, i.e., the year when the second orthography reform was promulgated. The Armenian case is undoubtedly a very peculiar one amongst the constellation of the linguistic reforms decreed in the Soviet countries outside Russia. In fact, Armenian avoided both Cyrillisation and Latinisation. Nonetheless, the effects of the 1922 orthography reform are still perceived as a heavy burden today. Ultimately, this essay aims at demonstrating that this issue should also be a concern for Russian Studies
A new literary genre. Trauma and the individual perspective in Svetlana Aleksievich’s Chernobyl'skaia molitva
No full textThe present essay discusses Svetlana Aleksievich's approach to the representation of traumatic events, highlighting the importance of "voice" in the creation of what can be arguably considered a new literary genre, which Igor' Sukhikh calls "collective testimony." After examining the role of war and oral testimonies in shaping Aleksievich's poetics, the article focuses on another type of trauma, which involves an element that cannot be controlled: Nature. In this respect, particular attention is devoted to her 1997 book Chernobyl'skaia molitva. Khronika budushchego (Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future), where the narrative is further dramatized by a key process active at a figurative level, here called "inversion of the perspective.
“Lʼincanto dellʼ いき(iki) nella prosa di K.K. Vaginov”
No full textRiferendosi a Konstantin Vaginov, eclettico scrittore che gravitava attorno alla nebulosa avanguardista oberiuta, si potrebbe parlare di un’autentica “poetica della fantasmagoria”. Infatti, servendosi del filo rosso del collezionismo, l’autore propone nei suoi romanzi una vera e propria doppia sfida, lanciata sia alla tradizione russa, sia alla nascente “tradizione” sovietica. Una competizione, questa, alimentata anche da un procedimento di traduzione culturale: in particolare, diversi oggetti legati alla lontana civiltà giapponese entrano nelle sue opere, diventando non solo parte integrante dell’elemento culturalmente sovversivo per eccellenza, la collezione, ma svolgendo anche una funzione descrittiva, come avviene nel caso del personaggio Teptelkin in "Il canto del capro" (Kozlinaja Pesn’, 1927). Questi oggetti, appartenenti a un retaggio alieno, entrano dunque nel tessuto narrativo innescando una reazione a catena, che ha come risultato finale quello dell’apertura del testo attraverso la polifonia.
Il contributo analizza la presenza e la funzione degli oggetti giapponesi all’interno della prosa di Konstantin Vaginov, con particolare riferimento al suo ultimo romanzo, "Arpagoniana". Una simile ricerca mira, in ultima istanza, ad osservare il particolarissimo fenomeno messo in campo dall’avanguardia sovietica Oberiu, che opera una trasformazione in un più ampio contesto anch’esso di transizione
“The Presence of Absence. Longing and Nostalgia in Post-Soviet Art And Literature”
Full text linkThe main focus of the paper is to delve into the question of how nostalgia for the Soviet epoch manifests itself in contemporary Russian society. In order to assess the different modalities through which this longing is represented, the contribution is based on a comparative analysis carried out on several works belonging to different media, spacing from art to literature.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s most famous “total” installation, "Monument to a Lost Civilization" is the first text examined in order to demonstrate its function as a modern “Russian ark”, saving the relics of Soviet material culture. In a similar vein, Sergey Volkov’s artistic reflection on Soviet society, poignantly expressed in his 1990 installation Art Warehouse, is taken into account. The final part of the contribution is devoted to Andrey Astvatsaturov’s novel Skunskamera (2010). Arguably, the pages of this book enable the reader to perceive, nearly phisically, the smells and the sounds that populated Soviet Leningrad.
The interdisciplinary approach is integrated with a privileged line of research that, availing itself of the instruments provided by visual studies, explores the relationship between the “visual” component of a work of art, nostalgia, memory and material culture
Igra slov: tradurre il palindromo nei testi russo-sovietici. Difficoltà , strategie, implicazioni culturali.
No full textAccording to Umberto Eco, translating means “to understand the internal system of a language and the structure of a text in that language, and to build a double of the textual system that, under certain conditions, may produce analogous effects on the reader” (2003: 16). The translator’s task becomes particularly complicated in the presence of figurative language and especially of wordplay (calembour, igra slov), which, according to Bubnov (2002a), is collocated in the wider context of figurative language. Bice Mortara Garavelli (2003: 130) considers these “metagraphs” as “manifestations of figurative poetry”. The problem of the translation of wordplay is particularly acute if considering avant-garde experiments and post-modern texts. Indeed, these works are characterized by a markedly playful attitude towards words, as several critics have outlined.
From this starting point, the present analysis focuses on a series of case studies drawn from Russian-Soviet, “modern” and “post-modern” texts. Its aim is to verify their “translatability” into various languages. More specifically, examples of anagram and palindrome will be examined. These devices not only allow an original elaboration of the signifier, but also a rich (and consequent) accumulation of signifieds, a process which is essential for the creation of figurative language. The central part of the paper is dedicated to a comparison between Futurist poets (with detailed reference to Velimir Khlebnikov), modern and post-modern authors (such as Vladimir V. Nabokov and Sasha Sokolov). Finally, the paper discusses the problem of the translation of wordplay both from a theoretical point of view and with regard to the Russian-Soviet cultural context
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