“Shagi / Steps” the Journal of the SASH

Abstract:

Abstract: The article discusses the methodological possibilities of niche construction theory in the context of media memory study. The authors consider media memory as a mechanism for the production, storage and oblivion of collectively shared ideas about the Past in a digital environment that has integrated all human culture into the media space. The theory of niche construction makes it possible to explain the processes of formation of collective memory and to show its correlation with individual memory, extrapolating the methodology of biological science to the humanities. The authors analyze the main ideas of Richard Heersmink concerning the role of the ecology of memory and distributed identities in the construction of narrative niches. Individuals inherit narrative niches and modify them as a result of individual as well as collective creativity in reproducing ideas about the Past. The methods of media content production, the types of individual behavior in social networks and the features of its interaction with information technologies determine the logic of constructing memory niches in the digital environment. The authors conclude that digital intermediaries in the form of technologies and social media have a significant impact on the construction of individual and public narrative niches, providing the possibility of their transition into one another.

Abstract: Since the 1870s, the image of the ‘prehistoric man’ has spread widely in European and American public imagination. His appearance is reconstructed by paleoanthropologists and anatomists (Schaaffhausen, Solger, Martin); under the guidance of “primitive cultures” specialists (Lubbock, Boule) it is recreated by artists (Griset, Philippart, Kupka). From the pages of illustrated magazines (Harper’s Weekly, The Illustrated London News, etc.), the ‘reconstructed’ Neanderthal gazes very much alive — hairy, long-armed, round-shouldered, with a low forehead and sunken eyes. The possibility of a direct encounter with him has been put forward by science-fiction writers (from Jules Verne to Conan Doyle and Obruchev). Such ideas could not have arisen without the influence of Darwinism; they stemmed from the understanding that various biological species that appeared at different stages of evolution coexist in living nature, including relict forms. European explorers of the Himalayas and Tibet — military men, mountaineers, naturalists of the late 19th to early 20th centuries — were readers of these magazines and books, and their worldview included a reconstructed appearance of a Neanderthal. They could easily recognize him when they met, and in that sense they were ready for such encounter. And the meeting took place: the relict hominid was discovered in the legends about the ‘Abominable Snowman’ of the Central Asian highlands. This is how hominology was born, which began to research this creature (essentially, since the 1950s) and gather information about him. Audacious, but never confirmed, paleoanthropological hypotheses have been used as a tool for interpreting local folklore texts: neither the object of research, nor the products of his vital activity, nor his remains have been found, which means that behind these texts there are only local images of ‘lower mythology’, although very specific ones.

Acknowledgements: The article was written on the basis of the RANEPA state assignment research programme.

Abstract: The article is devoted to the series of Russian revolutionary songs which the American dancer Isadora Duncan used as a musical basis for her choreographic works while in the USSR. The series included such popular songs as “Dubinushka”, “Varshavianka”, and others. The author also considers the pre-history of this cycle — Duncan’s dance “revolution” in the beginning of the 20th century, and revolutionary motifs in her choreography of the 1910s. Another aspect of the American dancer’s creativity is her intuitive aspiration to the genre of performance, not conceptualized at that time, which intensified in the context of the Russian revolution and experimental art of the first post-revolutionary years. The article analyses some examples of Duncan’s performances, which could be defined in terms of contemporary performative practices — immersive, participatory or site-specific. This despite the fact that Isadora usually worked within the framework of stage traditions of the 19th century: she had a program that consisted of two acts accompanied by an orchestra or a pianist, and meticulously structured her choreography. Nevertheless, the author focuses on Duncan’s innovations, which have not been reflected upon, and shows how Isadora tried to reach beyond the stage and to involve the audience in an art event, blurring distinctions between artist and audience, art and life.

Abstract: John Ford’s films show the changes in the cultural context of the Pacific War and the image of war in combat films from 1941–1945. By the time the U. S. entered World War II, Hollywood and Washington had had a long established relationship: both were well versed in the use of propaganda and had readily employed it on the citizens of the United States. John Ford’s films are a good example of this cooperation. This article is about the “reflection” of the image of the Pacific war, and about key moments in the glorification of the history of World War II in U. S. cinema and media. The article sets out the task of analyzing the connection between the images of war in the film December 7th and the images of war in newspapers, cartoons, politicians’ speeches — this will help to study the problem of visualizing war not in isolation, but in a wider socio-cultural context. The nature and mechanisms of mutual influence of these images of war have been determined: for example, how materials of periodicals influenced the film; how speeches of American politicians were refracted and reflected in the Ford film; how the visual images of cartoons influenced the director’s work.

Acknowledgements: The study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation grant no. 22-28-00099, https:rscf.ru/project/22-28-00099.

Abstract: The purpose of the article is to consider the possibilities that the genre of alternative history applied to the history of space, scientific and technical achievements of the 20th century opens to public history and popular science professionals. The genre of alternative history, firstly, allows us to draw public attention to the fact that global scientific discoveries and technological inventions are no less important facts of modern history than wars and political confrontations. Secondly, due to stories that are deliberately antonymous to “textbook history” (for example, “Alexey Leonov landed on the Moon first”), an alternative history provokes viewers to consider in detail the documentable past. And finally, with the help of transmedia storytelling and modern digital tools, the historical project can be extended to topics from the natural and engineering sciences (for example, by studying a 3D virtual model of the lunar station). In addition, transmedia storytelling involves expanding an audience’s experience: now its members can not only watch a serialized program, but also be involved in gaming and crowdsourcing practices in the project’s applications. In general, this approach draws attention to the multivariance of the past, and to the uncertainty of events and ideological schemes of the history of the Cold War and the first space race.

Acknowledgements: The publication was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2019-2021 (grant №19-01-078 “Visualization of Outer Spaces Objects in Digital Media (Cinema, Astrophotography, Games and 3D Projects): Political, Educational and Aesthetic aspects”).

Abstract: This article is dedicated to an analysis of the influence of King David’s image on the image of Herod the Great. As yet no studies have focused on the comparison of these two historical figures and on uncovering the connections between them, as well as on the degree of influence that one of them had on the other. The author assumes that in the Second Temple Period the history of David became a myth by which kingly power was legitimized. Through a parallel comparison of characteristic passages from David’s and Herod’s biographies the answers to several questions are given: whether the resemblance between the two life stories was accidental or not; why the image of David was chosen for the description of Herod’s history; which religious motives could have influenced this choice. The author claims, using Sunden’s role theory, that Herod turned out to be similar to the biblical king not only owing to the ingenuity of the chroniclers, but also due to the possibility of his self-identification with the image from the Old Testament. The religious traditions of Jewish society influenced not only the Jerusalem cult and the literature of that period, but also the political sphere.

Acknowledgements: The reported study was funded by RFBR, project number 20-311-90023.

Abstract: The article focuses on the figure of an evil bishop in the “Lives of the Fathers of Merida” in the context of the image of a tyrant. The figures of the king and the bishop, on the one hand, and the tyrant and the bad bishop, on the other, are shown to be interconnected. The rhetoric associated with the image of a tyrant reflects the connection of the bad bishop to demonic forces, his fundamental alienness from the Christian community through being a member of corpus Antichristi. This results in his destroying the community (ciuitas) entrusted to him: it becomes subject to disturbances, famine, and disease. Ciuitas is understood as a sacralized social space, organized in accordance with the ideal divine order: Therefore, any action that profaned it was an act of tyranny. In turn, the true bishop set the unity of all elements of the Christian community, whose harmony and well-being depended on maintaining the order of the sacred. The key constituents of the ciuitas thus understood were churches and relics, the integration of which was ensured by the bishop. In the “Lives of the Fathers of Merida” attempts to seize these objects and attacks against the head of the community are depicted as the main tyrannical activities precisely because they disturb the functioning of the sacred space of the ciuitas.

Acknowledgements: The article was prepared in the framework of the project “Paradigm of the Christian priesthood and its transformation in history and modernity” of the Ecclesiastical Institutions Research Laboratory of St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University for the Humanities with the support of the PSTGU Development Foundation.

Abstract: The Horde vykhod (tribute) was a term for direct receipts from the Russian lands to the Khan’s treasury. It was regarded as irrevocable expenses: “Tatar protory”. The severity of these losses should only be assessed in relation to specific payment amounts. However, there is only fragmentary data for such figures and only for the time of the end of the 14th — beginning of the 16th centuries. Despite the fact that these are fairly accurate and reliable sources — spiritual (testamentary) and contractual documents of princes — their information is difficult to reconcile and leads to different interpretations of specific and general nominal amounts paid by Russian princes to the Khan’s treasury. An important problem remains whether the amounts presented in the act are a scrupulously accurate or a hypothetical (showing only the share that the Prince is obliged to cover from tax collections) expression of payments due from the principalities. A model of the hypothetical system for calculating the amount of tribute was proposed by V. A. Kuchkin. However, P. N. Pavlov considered these amounts as a list of real levies from each principality in the total amount of tribute in a given period. Analysis of the evidence of spiritual and contractual certificates, as well as evidence from chronicles suggests that there was a direct relationship between the amount of the Horde tribute and the number of taxable farms. It can be reasonably assumed that the norms for calculating taxable objects and recruitment in decimal units introduced by the Mongols during the population census also affected the calculation of tax revenues. The principle of such calculations could be hypothetical “thousands”, the traces of which drew the attention of V. A. Kuchkin. The capitals of appanage principalities could well have become the centers of such “thousands”. Direct and indirect evidence suggests that a number of such urban and princely centers can be identified.

Abstract: The holdings of the Scientific Library of Moscow State University contain a number of ancient Russian records that came to the collection in different ways. Two previously unknown charters from the 1630s entered the collection at different times and are united by the fact that both relate to land ownership in the Kostroma region of the Moscow state. The “vvoznaia” (constitutive) charter was given in 1631 to the brothers Ivan “the Bigger’ and Vasily “the Lesser” Romodanovsky for lands that previously belonged to the official Mark Pozdeev. The document supplements the scarce information about Ivan Romodanovsky, the elder son of boyar Grigorii Romodanovsky. It remained the title deed for at least the next 150 years and was presented by the following owners when surveys were conducted in the second half of the 18th century. The receipt of the landowner Vasilii Vasil’evich Bestuzhev is key evidence of the existence of documentary registration of a private easement in 17th century Russia. At the same time, the document is almost the only evidence of the existence of Vasilii Bestuzhev and his son Fedor. Both documents contain information about persons and relationships that is not reflected in the existing scholarly literature. The charters are published with commentaries.

Acknowledgements: The work was performed at the National Research University Higher School of Economics within the project “Semiotics of book and non-book text — the Slavic world between East and West”.

Abstract: The article focuses on the use in historical research of ego-documents obtained in the course of investigative activities. The term “inquisitorial anthropology” is introduced to denote the origin of sources of this type, and comprises the practices of observation, intelligence from informers, private denunciations, interrogations of suspects and collection of witness testimonies. The article presents the genesis of such practices, their generic properties and species differences. The characteristics of evidence resulting from inquisitorial anthropology are described and the necessity of scientific criticism of this type of sources is substantiated. They are biased, one-sided and contain falsifications. The article offers criteria to distinguish spontaneous authentic speech from its deformation by an unscrupulous investigator. Spontaneous speech is characterized by vagueness, the presence of dialectisms, and repetitions. In relation to the objectives of the investigation it contains redundant information. The article analyses the obvious signs of falsification of investigative materials. The article presents situations in which there are no alternatives to inquisitorial sources. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of archival and investigative files and minutes of party meetings from the 1930s in Soviet Russia . The article points out possible subject fields for everyday historians who use materials from inquisitorial anthropology as sources: structures of mentality, everyday practices, human subjectivity, types of social behaviour and everyday communication. The article addresses the problems of research ethics for historians working with materials of “inquisitorial anthropology”.

Abstract: The article is devoted to analyzing the correspondence between the British Egyptologist Sir Alan H. Gardiner and the remarkable Russian Orientalist Vladimir Golénischeff. From the start of their lasting exchange of letters both scholars frequently discussed various issues concerning translation from Egyptian into modern languages. During these discussions both Egyptologists shared their opinions on problems of Egyptian syntax and on their own methodology of translations from Egyptian. The following letters shed light on the above-mentioned views and ideas of both well-known scholars. The current article focuses on mainly on the views of Vladimir Golénischeff, who was the most prominent Russian Egyptologist of that time but nevertheless failed to complete and publish his major work, where he would present his own views on various issues of Egyptian philology systematically. However, the correspondence between Alan H. Gardiner and W. S. Golénischeff shows that the Russian Orientalist paid a special attention to Egyptian syntax and to both stylistic and semantic nuances of Egyptian phrases in different contexts. At the same time, Golénischeff was less interested in problems of morphology. Besides, the Russian Orientalist considered the possibilities of contemporary Egyptian philology to be rather limited.

Acknowledgements: The research presented in the article is sponsored by the Russian Science Foundation, project no. 19-18-00369.

Abstract: The article deals with the history of tin usage in Russia. The most important fact about it is that tin was an imported metal which Russia did not produce commercially. Nevertheless, tin became an important item of domestic trade by the 17th century and was widely used by all classes of Russian society, including the peasantry. The main focus of the article is on the presence of tin and tin products in the Russian folk tradition. The article shows the breadth of the spheres of the use of tin in traditional culture (in addition to everyday life, there are the spheres of rituals and folk medicine). Historical and ethnographic information is used along with data from folk dialects and folklore to reconstruct the Russian cultural and linguistic “portrait” of tin by ethnolinguistic methods. The author makes an attempt to reveal the properties of tin that are most relevant for a naive native speaker and, accordingly, that are fixed in the secondary semantics of words formed from the name of this metal, and in contexts with their participation. The article also contains data on the history of the Russian and Slavic words for tin.

Acknowledgements: The research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (project No. 20-18-00269 “Mining and Early Plant Culture in the Language, Folk Writing and Folklore of the Urals”).

Abstract: In the article, on the basis of ethnolinguistic analysis, the role of fish in the diet of the peasants of the Arkhangelsk and Vologda regions is determined: the composition of the fish diet, the unique food preferences of certain groups of the population, the cultural and linguistic symbolism of fish diet are revealed. Lexicographic files of the Ural Federal University Toponymic Expedition, as well as dialect dictionaries covering the Northern Russian territories were the main source of the material. We discuss the names of the dishes (zharega, ukha po balkam, treskovik, latka, molevatik, etc.), the methods of cooking, storing and eating fish (mezhonnaia ryba, ryba s dushkom; syrkom, machko, ryba machkom, etc.), as well as nicknames that go back to ichthyonyms. Under the conditions of artel-based fishing and the need to sell the catch or hand it over to the state, valuable fish rarely appeared on peasant tables, which resulted in the popularity of dishes from ruffs and other small fish. Analysis of collective anthroponyms allows us to determine the main types of fish consumed: ruffs — ersheedy, ershegloty, smelt — riapusa, koriushin’ia, cod — treskoedy, etc. Nicknames record local food habits, for example, the use of lightly salted or pickled fish (syroedy, kislaia kambala), which were formed under the influence of the Finno-Ugric culinary tradition. The specificity of the fish diet was a marker that differentiated local groups of the population, drawing the boundaries between “their own” food and that of “others”, “urban” and rural, etc. Anthroponyms also reflect the opposition between peasant farmers, whose diet consisted of farinaceous dishes, and residents of villages who were engaged in fishing (testoedy, oparniki — khaiduki-fishermen).

Acknowledgements: The author’s work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation, project no. 17-18-01373 “Slavic archaic zones in the space of Europe: Ethnolinguistic research”.

Abstract: The paper deals with the anatomy of the idiom “St. Bartholomew’s Night” and the reasons for its popularity in the context of pre-revolutionary and early Soviet history. It analyzes the rumors of this era about a forthcoming “St. Bartholomew’s Night” and determines their place in the auditory response to significant sociopolitical transformations of the early 20th century. Since the middle of the 19th century the expression “St. Bartholomew’s Night” is found in journalism, historical literature, school textbooks, etc., and is then actively used in leftist political discourse of the early 20th century to negatively characterize the tsarist regime. In Bolshevik rhetoric the idiom is found in threats to political opponents. “St. Bartholomew’s Night” covers a series of events and generates a network of meanings associated with the discursive practices of competing political, ethnic and confessional groups. The reaction during the period of the Civil War and the first Soviet years to such public texts and speeches is expressed in mass panics in connection with the expected reprisals against various social, ethnic, and confessional groups. Rumors from the 1920s and 1930s about “St. Bartholomew’s Night” fit perfectly into the general context of early Soviet eschatological moods, when the post-revolutionary breakdown of the usual order actualized notions of the end times. Rumors appear in mass discourse in an order that corresponds to the key changes in the sociopolitical agenda of the first decades of the twentieth century. This shows how public anxiety is expressed and the problem of the conflictual division of society.

Acknowledgements: The research is supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation, project No. 21-18-00508, https:rscf.ru/en/project/21-18-00508.

Abstract: The article is devoted to the role of the marker of “someone else’s life” in the Russian friendly form of address starina ‘old man (without age semantics)’. The study of the use of the form of address was carried out by the method of corpus analysis (analysis of the main, oral and parallel corpora of the Russian National Corpus) and by the method of comparison with a reference sample, the Russian friendly form of address starik ‘old man, without age semantics’, which is close in a number of parameters. It turned out that the form starina is rarely found in live colloquial speech, but often in Russian fiction describing life abroad, in fantastic literature, etc. (in a third of the contexts in the main corpus of the RNC). In the dialogs of literary characters speaking an abstract foreign language, this word is a copy of a nonexistent original. The emergence of such a role, apparently, was influenced by the use of the word as a loan translation (calque) of analogous Gallicisms and anglicisms: mon vieux, old man and so on, starting with the translations of Beranger, Jack London, etc., which gave the word a connotation of “foreign”. The article also highlights the evolution of the form starina (in the RNC since the late 1820s as an address to an elderly person of low status), which could determine the choice of this particular word for a loan translation like mon vieux. In a broad sense, the study demonstrates the fundamental possibility of a language unit playing the role of a copy of a non-existent original, i. e. a simulacrum, according to Baudrillard.

Acknowledgements: The study was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (project “Political Correctness in Russian Language and Russian Culture” No. 19-78-10081).

Abstract: The paper deals with feminitives that have appeared in Russian over the past two years. During the COVID-19 pandemic there is a rapid growth of derivational activity, new person nouns appear, and feminitives are studied on a piecemeal basis. In our work we use dictionaries of neologisms from 2021, media and Internet resources. The purpose is to determine the way of word-formation, the derivational models and the meaning of the new feminitives; semantic, word-formation and structural-semantic methods are used. As a result, we identified 15 models, according to which neofeminitives were formed on the basis of personal masculine and feminine nouns, as well as on the base of concrete, abstract and other nouns. We conclude that affixation and addition are the most active and productive in derivation of Russian feminitives. The study made it possible to determine the semantic features of the new feminitives, which, like masculine agentives, designate a person on the basis of professional and non-professional activities, in relation to various aspects of life during a pandemic. The corpus of new nominations for a person consists of asymmetric parts. Quantitative asymmetry is manifested in the fact that in the “Russian Dictionary of the Coronavirus Epoch” (2021) nominations of the feminine gender (feminitives) make up 11% of all nominations of a person. Semantic asymmetry is manifested in the fact that feminitives predominantly denote women, while masculine agentives, as a rule, name a person regardless of gender, according to belonging to a group of people, which is manifested in the use of plural forms.

Abstract: A review of: Sokolova, A. (2022). Novomu cheloveku — novaia smert’? Pokhoronnaia kul’tura rannego SSSR [A new death for the new man? Funeral culture of the early USSR]. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. 436 p. (Ser. Studia religiosa). (In Russian).