The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2010

This Festival begins 18-28th Feb 2010 in Dublin. This year there is a Russian cinema section which contains 9 Russian Films.

1. Hipsters – wed 24th Feb, Light house cinema, 6.30pm. Director Valerity Todorovskiy will be in attendance at the screening.

2. The Island – Sat 20th Feb, Light house cinema, 6.30pm.

3.  Mermaid – Sun 21st Feb, Screen 1 cinema, 1.30pm.

4. Morphia – Tues 23rd Feb, Light house cinema, 8.15pm.

5. One war - Mon 22nd Feb, Light house cinema, 6.30pm, Director Vera Glagoleva will be in attendance at this screening.

6.  Room and a Half - Thurs 25th Feb, Light house cinema. 6.15pm, Director Andrey Khrzhanovskiy will be in attendance at this screening.

7.  Ward No.6 – Fri 19th Feb, Light house cinema, 6pm, Director Karen Shakhnazarov will be in attenance at this screening.

8. The Weather Station – Sat 27th Feb, Light house cinema, 8.30pm, Director Johnny O’Reilly will be in attendance at this screening.

9. Wolfy – Sun 21st Feb, Light House Cinema, 6.30pm.

For more film information or booking check out  www.jdiff.com

The Triumphant Return of George Eliot

It’s interesting how much George Eliot is popping up these days.  I mentioned her in the last class as a comparative point to Russian literature, and now she is returning to us in the form of an OED citation.

The question that arose at the end of the last class was when the term “Nihilist” gained traction in Europe.

According to the OED, “nihilist”, defined as, first appeared in Eliot’s translation of Feuerbach.  Here are the first three citations.

1854 ‘G. ELIOT’ tr. L. Feuerbach Essence Christianity 28 We must say with the oriental nihilist or pantheist.

a1856 W. HAMILTON Lect. Metaphysics (1859) I. xvi. 294 Philosophers..are divided..into Nihilists or Non-Substantialists [etc.].

1876 J. PARKER Paraclete II. xviii. 290David Hume..has been correctly described as a nihilist; he denied everything and affirmed nothing.

The Essence of Christianity, in turn, was written in 1841, according to marxist.org (which I am sure is a reputable scholarly source).

One final note to make is that the OED distinguishes this first definition of nihilist from the second sense:

A supporter of a revolutionary movement in 19th-cent. and early 20th-cent. Russia, which rejected all systems of government, sought the complete overthrow of the established order, and was willing to use terrorism to achieve this end. Also (in extended use): a terrorist, a revolutionary. Now chiefly hist.

So, while “nihilism” appeared in Continental Europe in 1841 and in England in 1854, Turgenev not only coined the term in Russian, but created another meaning in the English as of 1868:

1868 AUG. BOBORUIKIN Nihilism in Russia in Fortn. Rev. 4 133 If he is a Nihilist, he should profess exclusively negative and abolitionary doctrines.

Karolina Pavlova

Last class I mentioned one of the few female writers of the 19th century, Karolina Pavlova.

Her novel, A Double Life, is interesting both in terms of being one of the few Russian novels about women by women, but also since it mixes prose and poetry in its exploration of the characters.

The book can be found here, and her wikipedia bio is here.

More on Gogol’s Overcoat…

As promised in yesterday’s class (Tuesda, 11 December), some more information on Gogol:

Simon Karlinsky’s book , postulating that Gogol was a represssed homosexual, is: The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U.P., 1976. Ussher, Open Access  -  ARTS 891.783 GOGg L6

A useful starting point for exploring The Overcoar is: Julian Graffy, Gogol’s The Overcoat, London: Bristol Classical Press, 1980, Ussher, Open Access  -  ARTS 891.783 GOG:31g P0.

Finally, you might like to have a look at a quite faithful 1959 Soviet Russian film version of the story (unfortunately, without subtitles); if you follow this YouTube link you will find the first part, with links indicated there to the remaining parts…

Pre-Revolutionary Colour Photos

Newsweek recently published a fantastic slide show of pre-revolutionary photos from the Russian countryside.  Colour photography was still in its infancy at the time, and the colours have a slightly washed-out, ethereal feel to them.   The photographer’s name is Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, and you can read more about him and his photographic method at his wikipedia page.

[photo of Lev Tolstoy]

If you’d like to see even more, the Denver Post published a large number of them at this blog post.

Gogol’ criticism

As promised in class today, the source of several

useful and interesting essays on Gogol’ and ‘Shinel”

is Robert Maguire, Gogol from the twentieth century

 1 copy in the Ussher Library, this has the studies

of Eikhenbaum and Chizhevskii, as well as the study by

A. Slonimsky, ‘The Technique of the Comic in Gogol’

Annotated Class 27/11

I wanted to pass on a few links following our discussion in today’s class.

The first is to a blog post from last year regarding Pushkin’s mythic status in the Russian cannon.  Specifically, Pushkin’s more sexually-charged poetry was suppressed in the Soviet Union in order to maintain his saint-like status.  The link can be found here.

There’s a Harvard scholar, Stephanie Sandler, who writes extensively on the myth of Pushkin in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.  The abstract from her book Commemorating Pushkin reads:

Two hundred years after his birth, Alexander Pushkin still issues a dynamic, liberating challenge to Russia’s cultural identity. His story has promised national coherence and meant artistic integrity in its seemingly purest form. Irreverent and polemical responses to Pushkin abound, but Russians retain a deep investment in Pushkin’s image.

Commemorating Pushkin argues that the emotional complexity of Russia’s relationship with Pushkin has informed both large-scale cultural institutions and the writings of talented individuals. It assesses twentieth-century museums, anniversary rituals, and films that keep the poet alive. It shows how Pushkin’s self-fashioning was exemplary for Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Bitov, and Andrei Sinyavsky. And it goes beyond well-known figures to give names and histories to poets, novelists, actors, filmmakers, scholars, and museum workers who have sustained Russia’s myth of a national poet.

You can also find a great article by Sandler entitled “Sex, Death and Nation in the Strolls with Pushkin Controversy” at JSTOR here (you can log in no problem from an on-campus connection, and if you’re on campus you can log in with you college id through the library site).

cartoon Irishman ca 1920

We also only got to gloss over the school of literary study known as Imagology or Image Studies.  If you’re interested in going a little deeper in the issue of literary stereotypes, here is a great site run by Joep Leerssen, who did his PhD at UCD.

For the specific bit on the literary stereotypes of the Irish that I glossed in class today, you can click into the page on “Images – Compendium.”  At the bottom of that page there is a link for the survey article on the Irish, taken form the recently-published Imagology Compendium.

More on Chatman

In today’s 19th century class, we discussed a possible reading of Lermontov’s HoT according the Chatman’s diagram of narrative elements (ie author, implied author, narrator, etc.).

The book that this comes from is Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1980), by Seymour Benjamin Chatman.  Here’s a passage from page 150 dealing with the concept of the “implied reader”:

[click on the image to see a larger version]

If this tickles your curiosity, you can read more of a preview version of the book here at Google Books.

Physiognomy: Fighting on in the 20th Century

In one of last week’s classes, we discussed the 19th-century psuedo science known as physiognomy, where one attempts to divine personality traits of a subject given their physical attributes.  This “science” was extremely popular in the 1830s in Russia, and certainly did seem to have influence upon Lermontov.

Most sources that treat physiognomy refer to it as a movements in the 18th and 19th centuries that was eventually roundly discredited.  But it is not as though it died out by the 20th century.

I recently stumbled across a bizarre extension of physiognomy into the 1960s – much farther on than one would have thought possible.  It involves the so-called “Ivy League Nude Posture Photos.”

Here’s the New York Times summary of these Photos, from 1995:

“The Smithsonian Institution has cut off all public access to a collection of nude photographs taken of generations of college students, some of whom went on to become leaders in American culture and government. The pictures at first were taken to study posture. Later they were made by a researcher examining what he believed to be a relationship between body shape and intelligence.”

If you’re interested in going any deeper into the issue, there is a summary article on the Harvard’s site (which was one of the schools involved) here.

Last year’s Lermontov posts

 

 

If anyone is interested in going deeper into the topic of Lermontov and the Caucusus, there are a few old posts on this blog that you can check out.

There’s a map of Vladikavkaz up here, and a post on Lermontov’s Romantic Caucusus-themed paintings here.