Slavica Bergensia

Energy/Waste

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This volume investigates representations of energy and waste in post-Soviet cultures. The contributors analyze how post-Soviet societies reinterpret and reimagine not only their role in energy use and waste management, but also their relationship to the Soviet legacy of large-scale environmental changes, pollution, and resource exploitation. By examining how categories of energy and waste are expressed and made visible through discourse, literature, film, art, and other modes of cultural production, the book aims to nuance and enrich environmental approaches in scholarship on the post-Soviet world. The volume’s interdisciplinary chapters highlight the distinctive trajectories of post-Soviet countries’ approaches to environmental regulation and representation in the last three decades.

Vladimir Sorokin's Languages

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Since coming to the attention of a broader Russian public after the pro-Putin youth movement Walking Together stirred up a storm over Blue Lard in 2002, Vladimir Sorokin has indisputably become one of the most prominent and prolific writers in contemporary Russia, and remains surrounded by an aura of political dissent.

The first book in English dedicated to Sorokin’s œuvre, this volume discusses language as the
main focal point of his writing. The contributions focus on the multifaceted dimensions of language(s) and metalanguage(s) in Sorokin’s works, including archaisms and neologisms, foreign terms or intercultural stereotypes, colloquial and vulgar language, metadiscursive distance and the materialization of metaphors. The volume also includes a roundtable discussion on translation, in which Sorokin himself takes part.

The Cultural is Political: Intersections of Russian Art and State Politics

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In the last decade, culture and art have become arenas of forceful political controversy in Russia. Bringing together an international group of scholars from various disciplines – Russian media studies, the history of ideas, political science, literature and gender studies – this book combines assessments of Russian cultural policies, political ideologies and intellectual trends with case studies on Russian literature, film, rap and memory culture.

Dialogue and Rhetoric

Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This book is the first volume in a new series, Slavica Bergensia, published by the Department of Russian Studies at the University of Bergen. It brings together nine articles, originally presented as papers at a symposium on “Dialogue and Rhetoric” held in Bergen on 14–17 January 1999.

The Bergen symposium was one of several seminars held during the past few years as a direct result of contacts established at workshops and meetings within the framework of the Nordic Academy for Advanced Study (NorFA) network for doctoral students in Russian literature (1994–1999), organized by Peter Alberg Jensen of the University of Stockholm. It is a pleasure to launch this series with a book which reflects in written form one of the network’s many fruitful outcomes.

The symposium was financed by “The Norwegian National Committee for Graduate Studies in the Humanities” (nfu-h), while a grant from NorFA enabled us to invite doctoral students from Denmark and Sweden. I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts, University of Bergen, for providing me with financial support for the publication. Special thanks are due to my editorial advisor, Ursula Phillips of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, for her ample suggestions regarding the stylistic and linguistic level of the volume. I would also like to thank Tine Roesen and Knut Andreas Grimstad for their creative input concerning a few particular points, and, finally, the contributors for their valuable cooperation.

Not available online.

Kirill of Turov

Ingunn Lunde — Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The second volume of Slavica Bergensia is devoted to the literary legacy of the twelfth-century Kievan author(ity) known as Kirill, bishop of Turov. It is a daunting fact that we know close to nothing about Kirill’s life and activity. No contemporary historical source mentions his name, and the short Synaxarion Life, written no earlier than the mid-thirteenth century, is largely composed of hagiographical topoi. What we do have, however, is a quite remarkable corpus of texts, which belong to a number of different genres or forms: festal homilies, monastic commentaries, some letters, a cycle of prayers, other hymnographical texts, including several versions of a penitential Prayer Kanon, a Kanon to Ol’ga, and an abecedarian prayer. We do not know whether or not all these texts were written by one and the same author, and if this author is to be identified as “Kirill, bishop of Turov.” If he is, Kirill of Turov must certainly be regarded as a major figure in the history of early East Slav literature and spirituality. Alternatively, the label “Kirill, bishop of Turov” might have been invented at a later point, in order to designate an appropriate authority as the author of a set of texts that were fairly popular and obviously held in high esteem.

Content

David Kirk Prestel: Ascent to the Cave: Kirill of Turov and Kievan Monasticism
Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath: A Shadow of the Good Spell: On Jews and Anti-Judaism in the World and Work of Kirill of Turov
Fedor Dviniatin: Semanticheskie oppozitsii v torzhestvennykh slovakh Kirilla Turovskogo: Bog/chelovek v Slove o rasslablennom
Ingunn Lunde: N’’ ne ot svoego serdtsa siia iznoshiu slovesa: Kirill of Turov’s Rhetoric of Biblical Quotation
Vladimir Kolesov: Simvol kak semanticheski sistemoobrazuiushchii komponent v tekstakh Kirilla Turovskogo
Robert Romanchuk: Efrosin of Kirillov and the Paschal-Pentecost Cycle of Kirill of Turov
C.M. MacRobert: In Search of a Canon: The Dissemination in Fourteenth-Century East Slavonic Manuscripts of Prayers and Hymns Attributed to Kirill of Turov
Joy Bache: The Perception of Time in Three Sunday Prayers Attributed to Kirill of Turov
Ekaterina Rogachevskaia: The Concept of Sin in Kirill of Turov’s Writings
Contributors
Index

Not available online.

Samveldet av uavhengige stater

Ole-Jacob Abraham, Ørjan Leren — Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Slavica Bergensia publishes monographs and article collections in English, German and Russian. Vol. 3, in Norwegian and New-Norwegian, is a one-time exception in this respect. This volume is available free of charge (you pay for postage only).

Content

Innhold
Forord
Kristin G. Saunes: Språksituasjonen i Latvia
Ole-Jacob Abraham: Russland blir eit imperium
Jeremy M. Franklin: Språk og etnisitet i Ukraina
Kari Eken Strømmen: Konflikt og sameksistens i Transkaukasia
Anne Songstad: Russifisering i Aserbajdsjan
Kari Eken Strømmen: Nasjonsbygging i Aserbajdsjan
Arne Haugen: Fra nomader til nasjoner: Sentral-Asia i sovjetperioden
Bergljot Hovland: Språkpolitikk og politisk retorikk i Kasakstan: Det russiske språket si stilling
Esther van Veen: Dualøkonomi og etniske relasjoner i Almaty, Kasakstan
Vemund Aarbakke: Verden sett fra Tyrkia: et lite bidrag til forståelsen av en for oss fremmed kultur
Kart
Bidragsytere

Not available online.

Desire, Death and Imitation

Kåre Johan Mjør — Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Foreword
Chapter One: Tolstoy’s Realism
The poetics of realism
The invariant of death and desire
Some methodological consideration

Chapter Two: The Death of Ivan Il’ich
The frame
Tolstoy's absolute language
Ivan Il'ich from a distance
Illness and impending death
The prosecution
The world as lie and deception
The identification with Christ
Death according to the other

Chapter Three: The Kreutzer Sonata
The epic protosituation
The narrator
The dialogue
The marriage
The moralizer
Triangular desire
Remembering and repeating
The eye and the ear
Pozdnyshev and the history of sexuality

Chapter Four: Master and Man
The portraits
The circle
Temptation and temperance
Brekhunov's consciousness
The final return
Silence and extinction
Nikita’s death

Chapter Five: Concluding remarks

Bibliography
Index of Names

Not available online.

Gender and Sexuality in Ethical Context

Knut Andreas Grimstad, Ursula Phillips — Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

For a country like Poland that’s struggling with both democracy and religious fundamentalism, the problem of sexual difference can give art a margin for subversiveness and even revolutionary potential.”^[1] In referring to dissident voices of today, the contemporary art historian Paweł Leszkowicz indicates the premise and the purpose of this volume on Polish prose of earlier times: to explore how issues of gender and sexuality not only emerge as imaginative elements, but also how they may challenge and transgress social as well as cultural norms. In no sense is our project intended as a comprehensive survey of Polish “gender and sexuality writing”; neither does it claim that such writing constitutes a coherent tradition. The title Gender and Sexuality in Ethical Context: Ten Essays on Polish Prose therefore operates as a set of interrogations into selected texts rather than of direct assertions: Is gender socially and ideologically constructed or conditioned? Is there such a thing as essential sexual difference? Is sexuality something given by nature, and is it universally the same? In this connection, gender and sexual ethics, like all ethics, is, as Leszkowicz’s committed quote implies, an ongoing conversation, and this collection is but a voice in the dialogue.

Content

Ursula Phillips: Femme Fatale and Mother-Martyr: Femininity and Patriotism in Żmichowska’s The Heathen
Małgorzata Anna Packalén: The Femmes Fatales of the Polish Village: Sexuality, Society and Literary Conventions in Orzeszkowa, Reymont and Dąbrowska
Grażyna Borkowska: The Feminism of Eliza Orzeszkowa
Włodzimierz Bolecki: Gender and Sex in Early Polish Modernism: Przybyszewski, Irzykowski, Witkacy, Schulz
German Ritz: Does Paluba Have a Sex? Irzykowski’s Paluba in the Light of Gender Studies
Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik: Family Nausea: Attitudes towards Family Values in Zofia Nałkowska’s Snakes and Roses and The Impatient Ones
Urszula Magdalena Chowaniec: Initiation into Womanhood: Irena Krzywicka’s Flight from Darkness
Ewa Kraskowska: Femininity and Communism: The Case of Elżbieta Szemplińska
Knut Andreas Grimstad: Gombrowicz’s “Gender Trouble” or, the Problem of Intimacy in Possessed
German Ritz: Inexpressible Desire and Narrative Poetics: Homosexuality in Iwaszkiewicz, Breza, Mach and Gombrowicz
Contributors
Index of Names

Not available online.

From Poets to Padonki

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Norms are essential to the human condition. Whether in the guise of tradition, culture, canon or rules, norms are therefore central to studies in the humanities. This book focuses on Russian language culture of the post-revolutionary and post-Soviet periods, times when norms — linguistic and otherwise — have been eagerly debated, challenged, broken and redefined. Exploring the intersections between linguistic authority and creative response, an international team of scholars examines different realms of linguistic practice (literary fiction, internet slang, literary criticism and aesthetics, writers’ blogs, linguistic play) and various arenas for “talk about talk” (the classroom, blogs, the media, or the courtroom). By combining various approaches and disciplines — linguistics, literary criticism, new media studies — the book as a whole explores the multiplicity of meanings that are accorded to the notion of linguistic norms in the Russian community. The result is both a broad and a detailed picture of important trends in modern Russian language culture.

Setevye razgovory

Vera Zvereva — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Распространение цифровых технологий в культуре 2000-х гг. влияет на способы взаимоотношений пользователей со средствами информации и коммуникации. В русскоязычном сегменте Интернета складывается система динамичных социокультурных взаимодействий. Люди из разных групп общества вступают друг с другом в бесконечные разговоры – важные и тривиальные, деловые и игровые, опосредованные новыми технологиями. В них конструируется идентичность говорящих и образы их собеседников, транслируются формулы, при помощи которых реальность наделяется значениями. Рассмотрение повторяющихся фигур речи дает возможность выявить стоящие за ними культурные установки пользователей Рунета.

Проблемы трансформации культурных форм и практик, связанных с освоением цифровых медиа в российской культуре, находятся в центре внимания этой книги. Ее основу составили кейсы, позволяющие изучать специфику языка, стилей коммуникации и онлайновой идентичности у юзеров, общающихся при помощи различных Интернет-сервисов. В книге формулируется вопрос о влиянии практик коммуникации в Интернете на устойчивые паттерны постсоветской идентификации.

Книга адресована исследователям и студентам, изучающим современную российскую культуру, проблемы медиакультуры, языка и коммуникации в условиях цифровых технологий.

The Poetry of Prose

Jostein Børtnes — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In prose, and especially in narrative prose, the poetic system of repetitive parallel elements is less conspicuous than in verse composition. And yet the poetry of narrative prose is likewise brought about by elaborate systems of parallels and equivalences that prompt the reader to transform the true-to-life representation of events and characters into higher, symbolic levels of meaning. The readings in this book explore the functions of parallelistic patterning in narrative Russian literature: from the figural interpretation of early East Slavic hagiography — the juxtaposition of saints’ lives with the gospel narratives about the life of Christ — to the deployment of related forms of parabolic projection in the works the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists. It is the uncovering of such patterns that provides access to the symbolic dimension of the Russian novel.

Contents

Preface
Introduction
Chapter One · Medieval East Slavic Literature 988–1730
Chapter Two · Religion and Art in the Russian Novel
Chapter Three · The Function of Hagiography in Dostoevsky’s Novels
Chapter Four · Polyphony in The Brothers Karamazov: Variations on a Theme
Chapter Five · Dostoevskian Fools—Holy and Unholy
Chapter Six · Dostoevsky’s Idiot or the Poetics of Emptiness
Chapter Seven · Male Homosocial Desire in The Idiot
Chapter Eight · The Last Delusion in an Infinite Series of Delusions: Stavrogin and the Symbolic Structure of Demons
Chapter Nine · The Poetry of Prose: The Art of Parallelism in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons
Chapter Ten · Seeing the World Through Genres
Index of Names

Landslide of the Norm

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Rapid changes in post-Soviet political and social life have been accompanied by dramatic shifts in language culture. Bringing together an international team of linguistic and literary scholars, this book explores the dynamic interrelationship between language and literature as it identifi es different responses to the linguistic situation as well as contributing factors in its development. The linguo-cultural practices under scrutiny include language use and language debates, popular and professional linguistic attitudes and their ideological underpinnings, works of artistic prose and poetry, as well as linguistic ideologies and strategies stemming from the Soviet era that continue to be relevant.

Styling Russia

Knut Andreas Grimstad — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In response to the clichéd view of Nikolai Leskov as an exceptionally gifted stylist and “the most Russian of writers,” this book explores a nineteneeth-century storyteller who was a patriot and believer in the spiritual uniqueness of the Russian people, yet who also represented, or styled, ethnic identity as unstable and permeable. By combining key concepts from modern literary theory and semiotics, as well as from anthropology and the theory of culture, it investigates the image of human life as portrayed in five of Leskov’s most celebrated works, amongst them Cathedral Folk and The Enchanted Wanderer. Here the lay theological attitudes that inform them can be said to challenge the idea of the multiethnic Empire as a culturally unified nation state.

Knut Andreas Grimstad is Associate Professor and Head of Polish Studies in the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo. The co-editor of Gender and Sexuality in Ethical Context: Ten Essays on Polish Prose (2005), he has also published on early Russian hagiography as well as Russian nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose. Among Grimstad’s current research interests are popular culture and Jewish-Polish relations in independent Poland 1918–39.

Contents

Introduction
Opinions and approaches
Multiculture and the resonance of styles
National romanticism and national literature
What this book does

Chapter One · Myth-Making Movements
Mingling, conflict, and syncretism
Local discord and everyday heroism
Meaning in-between styles/texts/cultures
Complexity in simplicity or, a “Russian” Russia
Chapter Two · Idyllizing the Russian Provinces
A language of feeling
The imperfections of the societal idyll
Orthodoxy as micro-harmony
The multiple facets of sentimental idyllization
Chapter Three · The Problem of Multiethnicity
Myth, manner, meaning
In the company of strangers (otherness, foreignness)
The accommodation of Polishness
Processing cultural diversity
Chapter Four · Adapting the Christian Text
The social and the personal
Transformation in imitation
“Imitation” as continuation
Identity formation and the significance of sociality
Roots of ambivalence
Chapter Five · The Sealed Angel
A common contrivance
Loss, discovery, or “an account of the places through which we travelled”
An English master builder
The purpose of sentimental dreaming
Chapter Six · The Enchanted Wanderer
The adventures of an unwilling adventurer
Under the Tatar yoke
Gypsies, tramps and thieves
Surveying Russian history
Chapter Seven · On the Edge of the World
A Christological discussion
Going East
The potential of borderlands
Apocatastasis, or an optimistic worldview
Chapter Eight · Childhood Years
The art of remembering
A journey from St Petersburg to Kiev
Polishness revisited
The dictates of the heart
Restless identities: Who are Leskov’s Russians?
Epilogue
Leskov’s texts as testaments to “idyllic utopia”
Religious pluralism or, transcending multiculture
By way of conclusion
Works Cited
Index of Names

Contemporary Approaches to Dialectology

Sat, 09 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This volume brings together studies from different fields of dialectology with a focus on contemporary methods and understudied subfields. The collection comprises articles on dialectal grammar, historical dialectology, language contact, and theoretical approaches to dialectal variation, as well as sociolinguistic descriptions of particular vernaculars based on first-hand data. Furthermore, the collection addresses central questions in the field, such as the extent to which one may still speak of dialect continua, and the conditions that influence variation in vernaculars across space and time.

The majority of the contributions are case studies that analyse the functional range or diachronic development of specific constructions, or home in on the sociolinguistic environment and provenance of individual speaker groups. Other contributions offer a methodological overview of variationist linguistics or a critical synthesis of previous research.