Der Eherne Reiter: Politischer Barock und russische Revolution zwischen Puškin, Belyj und Benjamin

The essay links the symbolic spaces of the Russian imperial capital St. Petersburg, canonized by the literary tradition known as the "Petersburg text of Russian literature", to the semantics of historical catastrophe explored by Walter Benjamin in his studies of German baroque and revolutionary Paris. Focusing on various literary appropriations of the "Bronze Horseman", the equestrian statue of the city's founder Peter the Great, the essay explores its evolving allegorical relationship to political crises from A. S. Pushkin to Andrei Bely, from the 19th century to the revolutionary era. As a symbolic language of the state of exception, the baroque was revived by avant-garde artists and made to resonate with the political aesthetics of their own time

BUGROV K.D., KISELEV M.A, Estestvennoe pravo i dobrodetel´. Integracija evropejskogo vlijanija v rossijskuju političeskuju kul´turu XVIII veka [L’intégration de l’influence européenne dans la culture politique russe du XVIIIe siècle]

Совместная монография двух екатеринбургских ученых об истории политических и общественных идей и дискурсов в России XVIII в. замечательна и сама по себе, и в связи c обрамляющими ее методологическими тенденциями. В последние годы история идей, давно ставшая самостоятельной сферой изучения для историков западной культуры благодаря трудам Р. Козеллека, Кв. Скиннера, Дж. Покока и других, утверждается в качестве плодотворнейшей парадигмы для исследования русской культуры имперского периода. Это н..

Dramatic Experience: Poetics of Drama and the Public Sphere(s) in Early Modern Europe and Beyond

From Aristotle to New Historicism, theoretical discussions have recognized drama as a medium tailored to produce and manipulate collective emotions in order to obtain desired aesthetic, social, and political effects. Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s) (ed. by Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva, and Kirill Ospovat) explores the convergence of dramatic theory, theatrical practice, and various modes of audience experience — among both theatregoers and readers of drama — which contributed between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries to the emergence of symbolic, social, and cultural space(s) we call ‘public sphere(s)’. Developing on a post-Habermasian understanding of this notion, the essays in this collection demonstrate that related, if diverging, conceptions and forms of the ‘public’ existed in a variety of locations, and cultures across early modern Europe — and in Asia

Reading Russia, vol. 1

Scholars of Russian culture have always paid close attention to texts and their authors, but they have often forgotten about the readers. These volumes illuminate encounters between the Russians and their favorite texts, a centuries-long and continent spanning “love story” that shaped the way people think, feel, and communicate. The fruit of thirty-one specialists’ research, Reading Russia represents the first attempt to systematically depict the evolution of reading in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present day. The first volume of Reading Russia describes the slow evolution of reading between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the reign of Peter the Great, the changes initially concerned a limited number of readers from court circles, the ecclesiastical world, the higher aristocracy and the Academy of Sciences, that considered reading as a potent way of regulating the conduct of the people. It was only under the modernisation programme inaugurated by Catherine the Great that transformations began to gain pace: the birth of private publishers and the widening currency of translations soon led to the formation of an initial limited public of readers from the nobility, characterised by an increasing responsiveness to European models and by its gradual emancipation from the cultural practices typical of the ecclesiastical world and of the court