Russian Commerce Raiders in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, 1904

The naval museum in St. Petersburg once commemorated the Russo-Japanese War with photos of riddled warships and pieces of armor plate pierced by Japanese shells. That conflict yielded Russia no glorious trophies of war to adorn its display cases or walls. The literary record too is a dismal litany of tragedy and defeat, relieved only by occasional episodes of individual and collective heroism. The Russian tragedy was rooted in bureaucratic ineptitude and the failure of the tsarist leadership to coordinate the empire\u27s foreign, military, and naval policies and capabilities. Japan\u27s assault on the Russian fleet on the night of 26-27 January 1904--Admiral S.O. Makarov had warned in 1896 of a surprise attack-caught the Russian army and navy unprepared for war in the Far East

The Timeless Philosophical and Cultural Meanings in Sergei Slonimsky’s Operatic Adaptation of King Lear

The focus of this article is the new opera by Sergei Slonimsky, King Lear, based on the Shakespeare’s tragedy (in Boris Pasternak’s translation adopted by the composer himself as a libretto). The opera premiered in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg in 2016. Using this opera as a case study of Shakespeare’s adaptation to music, we utilize it to better understand the development trajectory of contemporary Russian musical theater. The goal of this article is to highlight timeless philosophical and cultural meanings of King Lear opera through culturological approach. We explore the history of King Lear musical adaptations in Russian and global tradition; the approach taken by Sergei Slonimsky; the use of Renaissance and Baroque musical style within the contemporary musical trends; and the interpretation of the main characters of the opera (King Lear, Cordelia, Fool). We come to the conclusion that the new opera synthesizes techniques of high and mass culture, thus allowing the composer to translate timeless philosophical meanings of Shakespeare’s tragedy into music in a rich and powerful way.     Keywords: opera, dramma per musical, composer, tragedy, philosophy, high culture, mass culture, folklore, tradition, innovatio

Turgenev’s appropriation of King Lear: A case of medieval transmission and adaptation

This paper tries to provide a thorough analysis of Ivan Turgenev’s appropriation of King Lear, the Shakespearean tragedy, as it appears in the novella King Lear of the Steppes (1870), from the perspective of translation and adaptation studies, and how this was adapted to 19th - century Russia. This analysis highlights the role of cross-cultural relations and its influence on the evolution of target literatures. The comparison with Shakespeare’s source text shows evident similarities but also differences, all of which raise multiple questions from the perspective of philosophy, history and ideology, among others. In fact, the interpretation of Shakespeare’s work, in Turgenev’s work and in the Russian literature as a whole, has become essential to understand the intellectual development of this country since the 19th century, as well as the rise of some debates about the Russian cultural identity, which still continue today. By focusing on Turgenev’s novella King Lear of the Steppes, the relevance of processes such as appropriation and adaptation for the development of national literatures will be underscored and how these foster debate and discussion within cultural systems. And, in order to illustrate this, it will also be highlighted that Shakespeare’s King Lear was in fact based upon several previous medieval sources and suffered multiple changes and adaptations over the centuries, which proves that knowledge transforms and adapts to the literary, cultural and ideological features of each period of time and society

RUSSIAN LITERARY EMIGRATION OF THE XXth CENTURY (The Poles of Zinaida Gippius’s Worldview)

For Russia, XX century appeared extremely complicated, burdened set of a various sort of cataclysms: revolutionary, military, economic, etc. It is thought that attempts to understand their causes and effects will make mainstreams of scientific and public idea of the come century. In the paper, I address to that phenomenon, where the tragedy of the Russian culture of last XX century opens: Russian emigration of the beginning of century. In the center of attention there will be a Russian literary emigration. In work, the methodological approach based on a principle of ‘the uniform block’ will be applied. It enables to track strategy of creative destiny of this, or that writer, dynamics of his creativity by the rather - typological analysis, to reveal those changes, that have taken place in his outlook during the migratory period, and to show, how they were reflected in poetics of his main products.For Russia, XX century appeared extremely complicated, burdened set of a various sort of cataclysms: revolutionary, military, economic, etc. It is thought that attempts to understand their causes and effects will make mainstreams of scientific and public idea of the come century. In the paper, I address to that phenomenon, where the tragedy of the Russian culture of last XX century opens: Russian emigration of the beginning of century. In the center of attention there will be a Russian literary emigration. In work, the methodological approach based on a principle of ‘the uniform block’ will be applied. It enables to track strategy of creative destiny of this, or that writer, dynamics of his creativity by the rather - typological analysis, to reveal those changes, that have taken place in his outlook during the migratory period, and to show, how they were reflected in poetics of his main products

Chornobyl as an Open Air Museum: A Polysemic Exploration of Power and Inner Self

This study focuses on nuclear tourism, which flourished a decade ago in the Exclusion Zone, a regimented area around the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (Ukraine) established in 1986, where the largest recorded nuclear explosion in human history occurred. The mass pilgrimage movement transformed the place into an open air museum, a space that preserves the remnants of Soviet culture, revealing human tragedies of displacement and deaths, and the nature of state nuclear power. This study examines the impact of the site on its visitors and the motivations for their persistence and activities in the Zone, and argues that through photography, cartography, exploration, and discovery, the pilgrims attempt to decode the historical and ideological meaning of Chornobyl and its significance for future generations. Ultimately, the aesthetic and political space of the Zone helps them establish a conceptual and mnemonic connection between the Soviet past and Ukraine’s present and future. Their practices, in turn, help maintain the Zone’s spatial and epistemological continuity. Importantly, Chornobyl seems to be polysemic in nature, inviting interpretations and shaping people’s national and intellectual identities

The ISCIP Analyst, Volume XVI, Issue 12

This repository item contains a single issue of The ISCIP Analyst, an analytical review journal published from 1996 to 2010 by the Boston University Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy