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The Author as Researcher
(2019)
This article proposes a new perspective on avant-garde travel writing through the lens of scientific field work, investigating these new writing techniques in Boris Pil’niak’s expedition prose. In the 1920s, the researching writer represents a hidden, but influential counterpart to the widely propagated figure of the working writer. While the author as producer combines word and deed in an operative act, the author as researcher investigates the production of knowledge. This entails revising the centrality of facts. Literature as artistic research subverts factography by going beyond the horizons of veristic data registration to include uncharted realms and vague possibilities. This exploration leads to specific genres: the author as researcher tries his hand at a kind of laboratory text, a prolific genre at the intersection of testing equipment, recording media, and hypothetical thought. Not confined to a sterile lab, avant-garde writer-researchers, as members of research expeditions, oscillate between their home writing desks and the remote depths of the emerging USSR. At the same time, they explore writing practices situated between data acquisition, sampling, fact-finding, observation and recording.
The author stems from the premise that modern anthroponymy effectively incorporates data from related fields of knowledge, primarily those of cultural and political history, thus getting enlarged through interdisciplinary research. An integrated approach allows one to deduce the extra-linguistic mechanisms which lay behind anthroponymic changes. In the same vein, the present paper focuses on the dynamics within the Russian anthroponymic paradigm caused by the changing vectors of political, ideological, cultural, and religious identity in the historical perspective of the New Time (1700-1920s). The study aims to establish the connection between specific trends in naming and the precedent names, events, and texts of political, cultural, and religious life. The mechanisms of anthroponymic shifts are illustrated by the cases of individual names becoming socially significant in a particular historical context. Using interdisciplinary methods of cultural anthropology, the study builds on textual sources, primarily name indexes to the collections of works by outstanding cultural figures and scholars, and biographical dictionaries. Some examples of pragmatic naming strategies in works of art (literature, opera, cinema) are also provided. Preliminary findings reveal some major trends in the Russian anthroponymic system of the New Age such as Europeization vs. Russification, modernization vs. archaization, as well as their synthesis. These tendencies remain key up to the present day and can be traced and characteristically defined within a set (or corpus) of names relating to the particular epoch, in terms of their frequency and the parameters of the sociolinguistic distribution. The diachronic perspective of the study also supports the sociolinguistic observation that the newly introduced names, which are currently in use, have a pronounced social resonance, which is getting neutralized as their frequency increases. Further development of the topic implies, among other things, statistical verification of preliminary findings.
The border shifts and population exchanges between Central and East European states agreed at the 1945 Potsdam Conference continue to reverberate in the culture and politics of those countries. Focusing on Poland, this article proposes the term “border trouble” to interpret the politicized split in memory that has run through Polish culture since the end of the Second World War. Border trouble is a form of cultural trauma that transcends binaries of perpetrator/victim and oppressor/oppressed; it is also a tool for analyzing the ways in which spatial imagination, memory, and identity interact in visual and literary narratives. A close analysis of four recent feature films demonstrates the emergence of a visual grammar of cosmopolitan memory and identity in relation to borderland spaces. Wojciech Smarzowski’s Róża (“Rose,” 2011) and Agnieszka Holland’s Pokot (“Spoor,” 2017) are both set in territories that were transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945. Wołyń (“Volhynia,” released internationally as “Hatred,” 2016) and W ciemności (“In Darkness,” 2011), also directed by Smarzowski and Holland respectively, are set in regions that were under Polish administration before the war but were transferred to Soviet Ukraine in 1945. All four productions break new ground in the memorialization of the post-war legacy in Poland. They deconstruct hitherto dominant discourses of simultaneity and ethnic homogeneity, engaging in Poland’s wars of symbols as a third voice: anti-nationalist, but also refusing to essentialize cosmopolitan identity. They show the evolution of border trouble in response to contemporary political and cultural developments.
This introduction to the special section on Poland’s wars of symbols analyzes the symbolic contestation that has characterized the country in recent years, studying a range of phenomena including nation, gender, memory, and religious symbolism within the overall framework of political conflict. In doing so, it offers a multidisciplinary view on political fractures that have resonated throughout Europe and the “West.” Overall, the four case studies in this section study ways in which national symbols, topoi, and narratives have been deployed as tools in drawing and redrawing boundaries within society, polarizing and mobilizing the political camps as well as contesting and resisting power. These studies enable us to situate recent political events in a historical perspective, mapping the rise of populism in Poland against the background of legacies specific to the East-Central European region.
This book features four essays that illuminate the relationship between American and Soviet film cultures in the 20th century.
The first essay emphasizes the structural similarities and dissimilarities of the two cultures. Both wanted to reach the masses. However, the goal in Hollywood was to entertain (and educate a little) and in Moscow to educate (and entertain a little).
Some films in the Soviet Union as well as in the United States were conceived as clear competition to one another – as the second essay demonstrates – and the ideological opponent was not shown from its most advantageous side.
The third essay shows how, in the 1980s, the different film cultures made it difficult for the Soviet director Andrei Konchalovsky to establish himself in the US, but nevertheless allowed him to succeed.
In the 1960s, a genre became popular that tells the story of the Russian Civil War using stylistic features of the Western: The Eastern. Its rise and decline are analyzed in the fourth essay.
