An Appeal for a Creaturely Attitude to Animals in Vasily Rozanov’s Writing

The work of Vasily Rozanov offers a relevant case study of our changing relation to natural-cultural contact zones with animals. Rozanov used a comparative approach to human-animal connections to change the societal attitude to the physical body and erase boundaries between human and animal corporeality. I focus on his narratives that promote a creaturely attitude to animals in the context of societal problems. The issues he addresses have special relevance to the current pandemic realia. I argue that Rozanov used both ethico-religious and secular arguments, as well as logic and emotion as part of his strategy to appeal to wider audiences. The hybrid genre of his narratives was a new form of literature that employed multiple rhetorical devices in creating creaturely poetics

An appeal for a creaturely attitude to animals in Vasily Rozanov's writing

The work of Vasily Rozanov offers a relevant case study of our changing relation to natural-cultural contact zones with animals. Rozanov used a comparative approach to human-animal connections to change the societal attitude to the physical body and erase boundaries between human and animal corporeality. I focus on his narratives that promote a creaturely attitude to animals in the context of societal problems. The issues he addresses have special relevance to the current pandemic realia. I argue that Rozanov used both ethico-religious and secular arguments, as well as logic and emotion as part of his strategy to appeal to wider audiences. The hybrid genre of his narratives was a new form of literature that employed multiple rhetorical devices in creating creaturely poetics.</jats:p

Synthesizing Religions: Vasily Rozanov’s “Phallic Christianity”

Vasily Rozanov was one of the first Russian writers of the fin de siècle to create a nexus between the study of the history of world religions and the history of sexuality. He viewed Christianity’s asceticism as a source of the disintegration of the contemporary family. This article examines Rozanov’s strategy to synthesize religions and to use pre-Christian religions of the Middle East as proof of common physical and metaphysical essence in celestial, human, animal, and mythological human/animal/divine bodies. I argue that while his rehabilitation of the physical life by endowing it with religious value was socially positive, his self-proclaimed “mission of sexuality”, when politically motivated, was manipulative and incorporated the notion of the atavistic ‘survivals’. In conclusion, I explain that Rozanov’s monistic search for the divine in the physical body as well as his strategy to synthesize religions were additionally driven by his personal doubts in the preeminence of Christian eschatology

“We are all souls”: Dogs, dog-wo/men and borderlands in Coetzee and Tyulkin

Examining the notion of “dog-men” in Coetzee’s Disgrace and Tyulkin’s documentary Not about Dogs, I argue that when the main characters become dog-men and dog-women they share with dogs the status of subaltern border-creatures. I view the spaces in the Eastern Cape and eastern Kazakhstan as borderlands which parallel the mythic lands of Dog-men from White’s anthropological study Myths of the Dog-man. These spaces of human-dog interactions, in turn, relate to Foucauldian heterotopias as sites that establish alternative modes of power relations

Physical and metaphysical visualities: Vasily Rozanov and historical artefacts

In Russian modernism, the work of writer Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919) presents an un derstudied case of constructing a worldview based on the study of the parallel history of human physicality and artefacts, which he articulated within the framework of the physical and metaphysical. I argue that Rozanov widened the domain of what was viewed as “compelling visuality” at his time, in line with the subjective synthesising principles of his worldview. He looked in art for the manifestations of that which he considered to be eternal and trans-historical: the mystery of the metaphysical roots of human sexuality

Hibridi različitih vrsta i bioetika u ranoj sovjetskoj beletristici

My article addresses issues of bioethics in cross-species hybridism raised in Robert and Beylis’ well-known “Crossing species boundaries” (2003) and the ensuing discussion by examination of two important stories written in the Soviet 1920s, “A Dog’s Heart” and “The Amphibian Man”. I argue that these two fictional narratives show that literature not only responds to changing trends in biological sciences but also heuristically considers and intuits wider social implications of radical experimentation. My approach is both synchronic and diachronic as I demonstrate that while being grounded in the same reformative atmosphere of the 1920s, the two texts present divergent responses to the issue of cross-species hybridism relevant for our contemporary debates. In particular, I deal with the notions of man playing God, species identity in analogy to ‘race’, procreation of human-animal hybrids, and also consider the relevance of culture-specific concepts of charismatic and distant species for cross-species discourse.U članku se bavim bioetičkim pitanjima hibridizacije različitih vrsta u poznatom radu „Crossing species boundaries” („Prijelaz granica između vrsta”) (2003.) Roberta i Beylisa i raspravom koja iz toga proizlazi analizirajući dvije važne priče napisane 1920-ih godina u Sovjetskom Savezu, „Pseće srce” i „Čovjek vodozemac”. Tvrdim da ove dvije izmišljene priče dokazuju da književnost ne odgovara samo na mijenjanje trendova u biološkim znanostima, već heuristički i intuitivno razmatra šire društvene posljedice radikalnog eksperimentiranja. Pristup u procesu dokazivanja da oba teksta, unatoč činjenici da su ukorijenjeni u reformacijskoj atmosferi 1920-ih, predstavljaju različite odgovore na problematiku hibridizacije različitih veza koji su relevantni u današnjim debatama, istovremeno je sinkronijski i dijakronijski. Posebice se bavim idejom da čovjek glumi Boga, identitetom vrsta kao analogijom za rasu i stvaranjem ljudsko-životinjskih hibrida. Također se bavim relevantnošću koncepata specifičnih za određenu kulturu i udaljenih vrsta za raspravu o različitim vrstama

The Evaluation of Ideological Trends in Recent Soviet Literary Scholarship

Since the publication of formerly forbidden und unpublished texts constitutes the main trend of Glasnost', this study has as ist aim the isolation of main trends in the process of the re-evaluation of the cultural heritage of the past by Soviet literary scholarship. The analysed authors will be divided into four main groups: 1. Accepted 19th century classics (e.g. Goncharov); 2. Formerly forbidden 20th century writers (e.g. Zamiatin); 3. Formerly forbidden 19th century writers (e.g. Rozanov and Leontiev); 4. Hagiographic classics of the 20th century Soviet period (e.g. Gorkij)

Nineteenth century Russian literature in today's ideological debates a quest for national identity in Soviet literary criticism

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