| 1. |
- Andersson, Hans, 1981-
(författare)
-
Något betydelsefullt : Leonid Dobyčins möten bortom orden i den sovjetiska samtiden
- 2019
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis studies the 1931 short story collection Portret [The Portrait] by the Russian author Leonid Ivanovich Dobychin (1894–1936?). My main argument is that the principal theme in Dobychin’s writings arises out of the complexities of human encounters. My approach is based on affirmative interpretations that I call “encountering” readings. They draw on critical practices developed by Boris Gasparov, who argues in his 2013 study of Pasternak Boris Pasternak: Po tu storonu poėtiki (Filosofiia. Muzyka. Byt) that the key to Pasternak’s work lies not in the dominant feature of their linguistic texture, but in the momentary states of everyday life that the author captures, and Henri Meschonnic’s Critique du rythme: Anthropologie historique du langage (1982). Meschonnic focuses on rhythm as an intrinsic aspect of the text that requires the reader to participate actively in appreciating the text as a work of art by following the interplay between rhythm, the active subject and what is expressed. Both scholars reflect a turn away from the linguistically informed theoretical approaches that dominated the academic study of literature in the twentieth century. Similarly, I approach Dobychin’s characters on the level of their personal conflicts and everyday lives by simulating an interpersonal encounter in an anti-theoretical search for meaning that is congenial to both the central theme of the stories and the way in which they reveal human encounters “beyond words,” as it were, both within the works and with the reader, through suggestive associations and not yet categorized, “precategorial” experiences in everyday life. The “unoutspokenness” (nedogovorënnost’)—i.e. reticence, a deliberate avoidance of explicitness that Dobychin’s contemporary critics ascribed to his writings and often disparaged as “incomprehensibility”—serves as a starting point for a critical discussion of both earlier research on Dobychin and theoretical approaches to literature more generally. In searching for a dominant formal feature, a ‘key’ or ‘code’, in Dobychin’s writings, earlier scholars have tended to describe it in terms of an anti-aesthetic. The alleged lack of plot, inner coherence and meaning is explained as deliberate, intended to performatively mirror the absurdness and inadequacies, the disorientation and loss of meaning in Soviet reality itself. In this thesis, I argue instead that there is no such lack or incoherence in Dobychin’s works. The “nedogovorënnost’” of his short stories is instead understood as an exact and purposeful way of conveying meaning through what is experienced and shared beyond words in a time that was overburdened with idealistic ideological discourses. At the heart of Dobychin’s stories are moments of fragile human interaction that underlie trivial dialogues and actions in banal everyday existence. The stories let the reader experience the sudden and unexpected human connections that the characters encounter in their everyday impressions. The contrasts and plurality of human perspectives thus perceived evoke a potential interaction beyond societal roles. These brief encounters are presented as something precarious in a Soviet society striving towards a single true ideology. Such a reading suggests that Dobychin is not so much a deliberately enigmatic author as a writer who aspires to express in words that which is profoundly wordless: the encounters between people outside of the ideological categories and discourses of their language.
|
|
| 2. |
- Heffermehl, Fabian
(författare)
-
Bildet sett fra innsiden : Ikonoklastiske og matematiske konsepter i Florenskijs omvendte perspektiv
- 2015
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- For the Armenian-Russian mathematician, theologian and art-theoretician Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), the so-called reverse perspective of the Byzantine cult-image (in Greek: eikon) functioned not only as a phenomenon within painting, but also as an expression of a world-view that should ultimately define a cultural distinction between Russia and Europe. Florensky argued in various ways that the Russian-Orthodox reverse perspective represents ethical and aesthetical values that are superior to the Western linear perspective. He saw the lack of an exact definition of depth in the icon as an expression of true religious orientation towards a spiritual realm, which cannot be described within frames of our earthly – or Euclidean – categories of space and time. In other words, the reverse perspective became regarded as a real reversal of Western painting, requesting a different space, a different observer, and a different concept of reality.This dissertation is an “archeological excavation” in the 20th century Russian-Orthodox icon theology. By analyzing theories of Florensky in the first line, and also a number of his contemporaries and predecessors, I identify a complex of different layers similar to a palimpsest. In this palimpsest, archaism, paganism, patristic theology, and romanticism interact with a modern re-conceptualization of the medieval Orthodox icon. However, in a usual palimpsest the old letters shine through the new ones; Florensky, on the contrary, seems to project paradigms of his contemporary culture and science into his description of the medieval icon. In this case, would the reverse perspective not instead be a reverse palimpsest, where new texts become visible in the old texts? With this question, my dissertation introduces an approach to Florensky and the icon that is more complex than what has been the case in earlier research. A usual explanation of the formal aesthetics of the icon is that the icon painter directs his/her spirit towards Heaven and, consequently – and in contrast to the Renaissance painter – does not try to make a mimesis of the earthly things. However, I argue that this dichotomy between a profane and spiritual mentality should be regarded both as a condition for Florensky’s world view and, at the same time, as a construction produced by his thinking.
|
|
| 3. |
- Korobenko, Larysa, 1964-
(författare)
-
Шведская коллекция славянских пергаменных фрагментов : Кодикологическое и палеографическое исследование
- 2024
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation carries out a codicological and palaeographic investigation of Slavic parchment fragments taken from Russia to Sweden as war booty during a period of Swedish-Russian cultural interactions and military conflicts in the late 16th – early 17th centuries. The fragments in question were kept in Sweden until the beginning of the 19th century and mostly used as accounting binders. After 1809, some accounting records of Finnish territories (along with their parchment covers) were transferred from Sweden to Finland. Among them were accounting records with Slavic covers. In Finland, the parchment covers were removed from the accounting books and administrative documents that they had enclosed and sent to the University Library in Helsinki (now the National Library of Finland). In 1869, the Slavic fragments stored in Finland were donated to the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg and then preserved in the Academy’s library (BAN, collection “Finliandskie otryvki”). Two Slavic fragments later came to England with George Stephens’ collection. Thus, the Slavic fragments are now held in archives, libraries and museums in four countries (Sweden, England, Finland and Russia). I use the designation The Swedish Collection of Slavic Parchment Fragments to refer to these four collections, once preserved in Sweden as part of a larger Swedish collection (the largest collection of medieval parchment fragments in Europe).All the parchment fragments belonging to the Swedish collection are undated, i.e. they have no inscriptions or additional information about the scribe, owner or patron, which would make it possible to immediately establish the time and place of their creation. This circumstance determined my choice of method for the analysis of the preserved fragments. They are studied in a comprehensive manner that combines codicological, palaeographic, historical and linguistic analysis. This has made it possible to pursue the study of the fragments in different directions, and to obtain the new specific and more general results presented in this dissertation.The palaeographic method of identifying scribes on the basis of their handwriting enabled me to connect different fragments with each other as well as with comparative manuscripts, and to determine their origins in the Mediaeval scriptoria of ancient Rus′: they were produced not only in Novgorod, but also in Pskov, Rostov and Moscow.
|
|
| 4. |
- Korolczyk, Marousia Ludwika
(författare)
-
Polsk poesi under mellankrigstiden: ett paradigmskifte : Exempel marialyriken
- 2011
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The dissertation examines how medieval poetic tradition was reactivated in the production of poetry from the period between the two world wars—the Polish interwar period, defined here as one of literary transition. The positioning in regard to certain literary conventions and the quest for a new normativity that is so prevalent in interwar poetry is also reflected in the era’s poetry on the theme of Mary. Marian lyrics, owing to their strong position in Polish literature (but also by dint of their role in Polish piety and national identity), serve as an indicator in identifying and defining certain poetic processes. Central to this are the respective relationships of Marian themes to tradition and to the poetic norms of the era: is a given poem located along the traditional axis (if so, which), does it run counter to it, or is it an innovation? The poems analysed—Julian Przyboś’ Heavenly Blue, Jerzy Liebert’s Litany to the Virgin Mary, Tytus Czyżewski’s De profundis, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska’s The Black Portrait, Józef Czechowicz’ pious rhymes—represent disparate poetic models: the Krakow Avant-garde, Catholic literature, formism/futurism, the circle of Skamander, the Poetics of the Third Sphere in the Second Avant-garde. Reflected here is the broad spectrum of the period’s poetic trends, tendencies, and constellations—as are the historical and literary events of the era. Despite important differences in the poetic/aesthetic models, in these poems it is possible to identify shared characteristics relevant to this study, that is, elements of medieval poetry. The identifying criterion for these elements here is the concept of dogmatic formal language. In the poems medieval poetics are transformed into their own modern form and integrated into the respective poetic models. No other literary epoch offers what the poets are seeking better than poetic formal language modelled on medieval liturgical language. The five poets all participate in what has been called the interwar paradigm shift in Polish poetry—a parameter that only indirectly relates to modernism. The term high modernism (in the sense of the culmination of Polish poetic modernism) can serve to summarize the historical and literary delimitations and definitions in the study. As interwar poetry is indeed part of the definitive emergence and full expansion of modernism in Polish literature, serving as a link between tradition and innovation, such a study of the influence of high modernism and Marian lyrics on each other aspires to reflect general processes in the poetry of the time.
|
|
| 5. |
- Ågren, Mattias, 1971-
(författare)
-
Phantoms of a Future Past : A Study of Contemporary Russian Anti-Utopian Novels
- 2014
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this dissertation is to study the evolution of the Russian anti-utopian literary genre in the new post-Soviet environment in the wake of the defunct Soviet socialist utopia. The genre has gained a renewed importance during the 2000s, and has been used variously as a means of dealing satirically with the Soviet past, of understanding the present, and of pondering possible courses into the future for the Russian Federation. A guiding question in this study is: What makes us recognize a novel as anti-utopian at a time when the idea of utopia may appear obsolete, when the hegemony of nation states has been challenged for several decades, and when art has been drawn towards the aesthetics of hybridity? The main part of the dissertation is comprised of detailed analyses of three novels: The Slynx (Kys', 2001) by Tatyana Tolstaya; Homo Zapiens/Babylon (Generation ‘P’, 1999) by Viktor Pelevin; and Ice Trilogy (Ledianaia Trilogiia, 2002−2005) by Vladimir Sorokin. The further development of the genre is subsequently discussed on the basis of seven novels published in the past decade.A main argument in the dissertation is that the genre has been modified in ways which can be seen as a response to social and political changes on a global scale. The waning power of the nation state, in particular, and its broken monopoly as the bearer of social projects marks a new context, which is not shared by the classic works of the genre. Analysis of this evolution in post-Soviet anti-utopian novels draws on sociological as well as literary studies.The dissertation shows how the analysed novels use the possibilities of the genre to problematize various forms of societal discourse, and how these discourses work as mutations of utopia. Prominent among these are historical discourses, which reflect the increasing importance of historical narratives in public political debates in the Russian Federation.
|
|
| 6. |
- Linde, Fabian, 1975-
(författare)
-
The Spirit of Revolt : Nikolai Berdiaev's Existential Gnosticism
- 2010
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is a study of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev (1874-1948). The aim of the thesis is to re-examine the alleged gnostic subtext in Berdiaev’s thought by exploring a number of interrelated motifs in his world outlook, teaching on man and theory of knowledge. The method employed is a close reading of Berdiaev's philosophical and autobiographical writings. In order to establish which motifs should be examined, how they are to be understood and the manner in which they are interconnected, a scrutiny is made of Hans Jonas’s phenomenological elucidation of ancient Gnosticism. A synthetic conception labelled Jonasian Gnosticism is proposed as the interpretive framework, in order to provide a unitary and consistent heuristic tool with which to investigate the topic, and to distinguish the specific proposed representation of Gnosticism from other existing ones. A chapter is devoted to an analysis of the concept of gnosis as employed by Berdiaev. Another key notion taken from the Jonasian framework is that of demundanization, which denotes among other things a rejectionary attitude towards the world grounded in a negative experience of evil and suffering. Varieties of dualism as well as Berdiaev’s doctrine of the human spirit’s otherworldly origin and non-belonging in the world, constitute other issues that are examined. In addition, both Berdiaev’s assessment of historical Gnosticism and his view of a gnostic return in modern times are examined. The study demonstrates the complexity of Berdiaev’s attitude towards the classic Gnostics, and his attempt to denounce Gnosticism while at the same time making a case for a Christian gnosis. The results suggest both affinities and divergences in the relationship between Berdiaev’s thought and Jonasian Gnosticism. Even though the doctrinal standpoints diverge on crucial points, it is argued that a suggestive affinity nevertheless exists in the shared existential attitude towards self and world.
|
|
| 7. |
- Philipson, Joakim, 1958-
(författare)
-
The Purpose of Evolution : the 'struggle for existence' in the Russian-Jewish press 1860-1900
- 2008
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In late 19th century Russia, Darwinism was viewed as a measuring-rod of modernity. Thus, the Jewish reception of Darwinism may serve as an indicator of the extent to which the Jews in Russia were part of the modernization of Russian society. But the Darwinian concept of evolution of species through natural selection is considered incompatible with a teleological worldview, including a God-given plan for creation. This thesis addresses a twofold problem. One concerns the difficulties of reconciling Darwinism with Judaism and its traditional view of a God-given purpose in creation. The other problem is to explain the possible motives of the Jewish intellectuals for using Darwinian concepts such as the ‘struggle for existence’ in journal articles in the emerging Russian-Jewish press. The study employs discourse analysis, and the concept of isomorphism from institutional theory, for the examination of key concepts, citations, implied readers and purposes in a selection of journal articles from the Russian-Jewish press of the period 1860-1900. Contrasting with the lively general Russian debate on Darwinism, the results show that the Jews in Russia were rather reluctant to discuss Darwinism in the Russian-Jewish press. Censorship, other constraints and imminent problems facing the Jews, such as defence against growing anti-Semitism, are indicated as possible causes of the minimal evidence of a Jewish reception of Darwinism that was found. It was only to the extent that Darwinian concepts such as the ‘struggle for existence’ could be employed to address these more pressing issues that they were they found useful in a Jewish context. The results further imply that the integration between Russian and Jewish intellectuals during this period was weak, as reflected by the insignificant number of references to Russian sources in the selection of Jewish journal articles that were examined.
|
|
| 8. |
- Søvik, Margrethe
(författare)
-
Support, resistance and pragmatism : An examination of motivation in language policy in Kharkiv, Ukraine
- 2007
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Ukrainian society has gone through vast changes since independence in 1991 and in this thesis some of these social changes are discussed through the prism of language policy. The main topic of the study is language policy (conceptualised as language practices, language beliefs, and language management) in the eastern Ukrainian city Kharkiv. This topic is examined within a framework focusing on motivation, allowing for a study of how people in Kharkiv describe, explain and rationalise language policy in the context of change in society. Ukrainian is the only state language in Ukraine, but Russian is widely used in Ukrainian society, and in Kharkiv Russian is the predominantly used language. One specific topic of the study is how young Ukrainians perceive the role granted the Ukrainian language in on-going processes of nation-building, related to the formation of a national identity. This is contrasted with discussions on individual linguistic rights and what is considered reasonable to demand from the Ukrainian population in terms of language practices. Further, the study examines the concept of language conflict, notably what kinds of conflict can be identified in and extracted from discussions on the role of language in society. This examination shows that it is not necessarily a case of potential conflict between groups or individuals, but also that individuals may struggle with internal conflict. This study demonstrates how language conflict is not about language, but rather about social positions, interests and value systems. This also illustrates the fact that the three components of language policy are not necessarily interrelated and consistent. Especially language practices and language beliefs are often at odds. Fieldwork was carried out in Kharkiv 2003-2005 and the study relies on a combination of methods (in-depth individual interviews, group interviews and a large-scale questionnaire).
|
|
