Fatum ad Benedictum: Moscow-Petushki, Homo Sovieticus, Postmodernism and the Fatidic post-Soviet Irony of Venedikt Vasilevich Erofeev

The following honors thesis is structured into two parts, four chapters apiece. The first part is a philological study of the Soviet dissident and writer Venedikt Vasilevich Erofeev’s magnum opus, Moscow-Petushki (1969-70). This half of the thesis investigates Petushki in light of its thematic development of fate, or, more particularly, the fate of homo sovieticus—the ironic term devised by Soviet sociologist Aleksandr Zinovyev (1922-2006) to describe a typical conformist citizen of the Soviet Union. I will focus predominantly on Petushki’s connection to the end of the Khrushchev “Thaw” in the early-mid-1960s and the beginning of Brezhnev “Stagnation” in the late-1960s, and will explore the work\u27s engagement with postmodernism. The second part of my honors thesis is an extension of the first. In this section, I reconstruct and analyze the “Kolomna period” of Erofeev’s life and career (ca. 1962-1963), during which he matriculated at the local Kolomensky Pedinstitute and later, following his expulsion, worked as a truck driver and in mass retail. I posit Kolomna as a watershed in Erofeev’s biography. This period saw the end of his university studies and the beginning of the “living large” (what he would name his “ochen’ zhiznennii put’”) that characterized his existence up until his death in 1990 of lung cancer. After Kolomna Erofeev’s life was marked by increasingly destructive bouts of alcoholism and smoking, extensive peregrinations through the former Soviet Union (largely undertaken sans propiska, or mandatory residence permit), and, most of all, the freer form of writing that culminated artistically in Moscow-Petushki. This part of my analysis asserts a link between the fate of Venichka, the notorious erudite drunk of Moscow-Petushki, and that of Venedikt Erofeev, its controversial author. Although not a single journal or piece of writing by Erofeev from this period is extant, I nonetheless maintain that there is a body of evidence that allows us to piece together a provisional reconstruction of Erofeev’s life as he lived it in Kolomna during 1962-1963. The hands-on, on-site research that I conducted for part two took as its starting point the ostensibly “semi-autobiographical” nature of Erofeev’s poem-in-prose. Furthermore, in this second half of the honors thesis I curate and analyze materials from the museum and artcommune “Erofeev and Others” and from the seventh annual Kolomna apple and book fair “Antonov’s Apples.” I also transcribe and analyze interviews taken with knowledgeable sources on Erofeev: a local Kolomna poet, Aleksei Makeev, and the chief executor of Erofeev’s literary legacy and wife of his son, Galina Erofeeva. For the materials from the museum and festival, I include a set of pictures underscored by captioned analyses; for the materials from the interviews, I provide a written transcription interspersed with authorial commentary. I collected these materials during a seven-week stay in the city during the autumn of 2018, and have reprinted or recreated them with the express permission of the city of Kolomna, as well as the specific personages they concern. For additional biographical and literary cultural information, I also rely on published recorded interviews with Erofeev and the journals he kept throughout the 1960s. These can be found on the official Erofeev website, which contains information on his entire œuvre to date

Building Babies - Chapter 16

In contrast to birds, male mammals rarely help to raise the offspring. Of all mammals, only among rodents, carnivores, and primates, males are sometimes intensively engaged in providing infant care (Kleiman and Malcolm 1981). Male caretaking of infants has long been recognized in nonhuman primates (Itani 1959). Given that infant care behavior can have a positive effect on the infant’s development, growth, well-being, or survival, why are male mammals not more frequently involved in “building babies”? We begin the chapter defining a few relevant terms and introducing the theory and hypotheses that have historically addressed the evolution of paternal care. We then review empirical findings on male care among primate taxa, before focusing, in the final section, on our own work on paternal care in South American owl monkeys (Aotus spp.). We conclude the chapter with some suggestions for future studies.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (HU 1746/2-1) Wenner-Gren Foundation, the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation (BCS-0621020), the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation, the Zoological Society of San Dieg

Systems model of T cell receptor proximal signaling reveals emergent ultrasensitivity

Receptor phosphorylation is thought to be tightly regulated because phosphorylated receptors initiate signaling cascades leading to cellular activation. The T cell antigen receptor (TCR) on the surface of T cells is phosphorylated by the kinase Lck and dephosphorylated by the phosphatase CD45 on multiple immunoreceptor tyrosine-based activation motifs (ITAMs). Intriguingly, Lck sequentially phosphorylates ITAMs and ZAP-70, a cytosolic kinase, binds to phosphorylated ITAMs with differential affinities. The purpose of multiple ITAMs, their sequential phosphorylation, and the differential ZAP-70 affinities are unknown. Here, we use a systems model to show that this signaling architecture produces emergent ultrasensitivity resulting in switch-like responses at the scale of individual TCRs. Importantly, this switch-like response is an emergent property, so that removal of multiple ITAMs, sequential phosphorylation, or differential affinities abolishes the switch. We propose that highly regulated TCR phosphorylation is achieved by an emergent switch-like response and use the systems model to design novel chimeric antigen receptors for therapy

Applauding with Closed Hands: Neural Signature of Action-Sentence Compatibility Effects

BACKGROUND: Behavioral studies have provided evidence for an action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) that suggests a coupling of motor mechanisms and action-sentence comprehension. When both processes are concurrent, the action sentence primes the actual movement, and simultaneously, the action affects comprehension. The aim of the present study was to investigate brain markers of bidirectional impact of language comprehension and motor processes. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Participants listened to sentences describing an action that involved an open hand, a closed hand, or no manual action. Each participant was asked to press a button to indicate his/her understanding of the sentence. Each participant was assigned a hand-shape, either closed or open, which had to be used to activate the button. There were two groups (depending on the assigned hand-shape) and three categories (compatible, incompatible and neutral) defined according to the compatibility between the response and the sentence. ACEs were found in both groups. Brain markers of semantic processing exhibited an N400-like component around the Cz electrode position. This component distinguishes between compatible and incompatible, with a greater negative deflection for incompatible. Motor response elicited a motor potential (MP) and a re-afferent potential (RAP), which are both enhanced in the compatible condition. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The present findings provide the first ACE cortical measurements of semantic processing and the motor response. N400-like effects suggest that incompatibility with motor processes interferes in sentence comprehension in a semantic fashion. Modulation of motor potentials (MP and RAP) revealed a multimodal semantic facilitation of the motor response. Both results provide neural evidence of an action-sentence bidirectional relationship. Our results suggest that ACE is not an epiphenomenal post-sentence comprehension process. In contrast, motor-language integration occurring during the verb onset supports a genuine and ongoing brain motor-language interaction

Colliding Worlds: Asteroid research and the legitimization of war in space

Accepted versio

Observation of magnetic flux line structures in superconductors by small-angle neutron diffraction

We describe the recent uses of the technique of small-angle neutron diffraction to investigate flux-line structures within the bulk of superconductors in the mixed state. Despite the small signal in superconductors with a long penetration depth, useful results have been obtained in both High-7^ and heavy-fermion superconductors. These can give information about the perfection of the flux lattice, the values of characteristic lengths, the influence of crystal anisotropy and defects on the flux lattice structure and orientation, and on temperature and flux lattice melting effects.</p