“Shagi / Steps” the Journal of the SASH

Abstract:

Abstract: The article analyzes the features of the treatise “Justification of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy” by Jean Petit (1408), which argued for the right of John the Fearless to murder his cousin Louis of Orleans. The author of the article pays special attention to the accusation of practicing witchcraft, which, according to Petit, turned the Duke of Orleans into a tyrant and a devil and was based, apparently, on the text of the “Policraticus” of John of Salisbury (1159). Analysis of the content and the iconographic program of the “Justification” also allows the author to hypothesize that this treatise marked the beginning of a completely new perception of the lycanthrope in French, and perhaps in all European demonological literature of the 15th–16th centuries: as a dangerous werewolf, that is, as a person whose penchant for practicing witchcraft did not simply lead him into the clutches of the devil, but turned him into a beast that posed a threat to the entire community of true Christians. Thus, the political and legal treatise of Jean Petit, as it has always been considered in historiography, acquired at the same time the features of a demonological text.

Abstract: This article examines the specifi of late 17th century preachers’ employment of the topoi of sacrifi to a demon / idol / devil, which have their roots in biblical and Church Fathers’ denunciations of paganism. The article mostly focuses on sermons from the little-studied handwritten collection Statir, created by an unknown author in the Kama Region, and on sermons from the collection Spiritual Dinner (Rus. Obed Dushevnyi) by Simeon Polotsky. The works of Dimitry Rostovsky are also used to reconstruct the multidimensional context of polemics. These authors are united by their increased focus on contemporaneousness, and by their desire to offer the listener / reader by means of homilies an ideal of salvation (including ‘everyday martyrdom’), contrasting it with ‘sacrifi to idols’. The study identifi sources of the topoi chosen by the authors: biblical books, the works of John Chrysostom, and sermons from the Didactic Gospel (1619) by Cyril Tranquillion-Stavrovetsky. The article shows that the circumstances which prompted the preachers to turn to these common places were the church schism and the increasing opposition of the church and state to superstition and other ‘pagan matters’. In the atmosphere of an age of change, scholars sought to combat sin through spiritual enlightenment of the fl appealing to the inner world of man while avoiding unnecessary formalisation of their work by adapting topoi to current circumstances.

Acknowledgements: This work is supported by the Russian Science Foundation, project number 22-28-01617 “Confronting the ‘World Beyond’ in Late 17th — Early 18th Century Sermons: Authorial Axiology and the Mechanisms of Influence”.

Abstract: The paper examines the phenomenon of the vampire “new wave” of 2021 – еarly 2022 in the context of cultural policy in Russia. The author focuses on the fact that compared to foreign TV series, the image of a vampire in Russian series is strongly instrumentalized, and a reference to history becomes extremely important in them. In an analysis based on three popular series (Svyatoslav Podgayevsky’s Pischeblok, Anton Maslov’s Central Russia’s Vampires, and Danila Kozlovsky’s Karamora) the author problematizes the representation of history in the newest Russian quasihistorical series. It is argued that a new “commonplace” in the politics of history in Russia is the tendency to create narratives that inconsistently combine the aesthetics of the political regimes of Imperial, Soviet, and contemporary Russia. Thus, a new genealogy of the current sociopolitical order is being constructed, inextricably linking this order with the previous unified tradition. The fantastic figure of the vampire is the keystone of this new narrative. The author suggests that the construction of historical experience is isomorphic to the popular state mythologem of ‘historical Russia’. At the same time, the vampire metaphor vividly embodies not only the idea of the ‘organic’ nature of Russian political power, but also the notion of its necessary transgressiveness.

Abstract: In contemporary public culture, there is a stereotypical interpretation of the history of the Louvre Palace as multiple successive attempts to achieve a ‘Grand design’ that dates back to the 16th century. However, this vision of the history of the Louvre does not emerge until the 19th century, although the narrative of its unfinishedness has existed for much longer. This article analyses the origins and transformation of this narrative throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Despite the linguistic continuity associated with the stability of the very expression achever le Louvre (to finish the Louvre), the meaning that was invested in the idea of completion underwent significant changes. Originating in the context of the establishment and glorification of Louis XIV’s strong royal rule, the narrative was subsequently borrowed by critics of his great-grandson Louis XV’s reign and played a significant role in establishing the royal palace as a national treasure. By the 1760-s, in public discussions about the Louvre its completion becomes an allegory of a process of civilisation carried out in the name of the national interest. The changes that took place contributed greatly to the subsequent interpretation of the history of the Louvre and facilitated an ambitious project to merge it with the Tuileries Palace.

Abstract: The article addresses the aesthetic views of Charles Darwin, which are considered within the framework of wider Victorian discussions on the nature of beauty as well as influential earlier thought on the topic. Particular emphasis is placed on 1860s–1880s fashion satire, since these visual and textual sources can yield useful insights into the cross-pollination between scientific knowledge and the popular culture of the era. The juxtaposition of a statue of Venus and a fashionable lady of the day, ubiquitous in mid-Victorian journalism and caricature, lurks across the pages of several of Darwin’s works, where it takes on a completely different meaning. While fashion satire presented Venus as a timeless ideal, which at the same time was seen as an epitome of “natural” beauty, Darwin questioned the very possibility of such an ideal. Rather than concentrated in a fixed set of bodily forms and proportions, he saw beauty in nature and in human societies as perpetually fluid and infinitely variable, as if following the logic of fashion, which many of his contemporaries blamed for corrupting classical aesthetics. Indeed, in The Descent of Man Darwin directly attacks Venus de’ Medici, pointing to the limitations of this image of perfection and proposing a radical non-human aesthetics instead.

Abstract: The article examines the evolution of the perception of the word “society” and its derivatives in documents of the Third Section during the reign of Nicholas I. The two distinct meanings of the word were used to refer to two traditional objects of surveillance by the secret police: society as a whole and a smaller part of it, an organization. While presenting its vision and analysis of “societies” of different levels in annual reports and current fi the Third Section simultaneously recorded the perception of public opinion by the state authorities, and acted as a meaning-forming institution that determined what exactly should be considered a society. Changes in the vocabulary used in the documents to describe different types of “societies” and such derivatives as “public opinion” (literally — “opinion by society”) refl both political changes in the country and power practices. Whereas the fi annual reports by the Third Section (from 1827 on) widely use the term “public opinion” (but only as a direct translation from the French, the language of the documents), the authors of the later reports totally avoid it. In addition, they tend to avoid the usage of “society” in the narrow sense, replacing it with various synonyms (such as “gathering” or “a bunch of”). During the last and most severe seven years of the reign of Nicholas I, the word “society” (in the broad sense) acquires a new meaning: the aggregate of people who are loyal to the tsar and the political regime.

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

Abstract: The article examines the cluster of motives of air shortage, labored respiration, suffocation and strangling as one of the important topoi in autobiographical texts written by Soviet dissidents during the era of stagnation, including activists of the Jewish national movement who struggled for emigration from the Soviet Union. The topos has several variations in dissident discourse; it has a mirror parallel in pro-government discourse, i. e., the motive of purifying the air of the motherland by expelling foreign and hostile members of society who pollute it; it has a continuation in egodocuments written in emigration; and, finally, it may constitute a foundation in the deteriorating ecological reality and environmentalist rhetoric of the Soviet press which became increasingly conscious of environmental pollution during the 1970s. Besides such explanations as this topos being a possible reflection of environmental anxiety or a description of shortness of breath characteristic of depressive disorders to which some of the dissident authors were prone, it is assumed that the choice of this particular somatic metaphor among other possible ones in order to describe the unbearableness of living in the Soviet Union was primarily due to its very frequency, which led to a kind of suffocation epidemic and ensured the reproduction of the topos.

Abstract: In the late 2010s, one can observe intensifi of debates about adolescents as political subjects among the various Russian media platforms. Adolescents became an object of close attention of political actors and institutions, journalists, pop artists and ordinary internet users. This process is very noticeable in the shifts of semantics of the dysphemism shkolota (originally a disparaging defi of elementary and middle school students). The article aims to give an overview of the change in the meaning of shkolota as the “commonplace” of imagination and representation of teenagers. To fi out what shkolota means, I conducted an analysis of publications and comments on LiveJournal, a social media platform and the birthplace of shkolota. A symbolic path was traced from the “Lemmings in the Internet” to “New Valiant Protesters” within twelve years. In considering the semantic boundaries and the context of shkolota in publications and comments on the LiveJournal platform and correlating them with the socio-political context of Russia, I describe the process of transformation of the dysphemism as a simultaneous expansion of adolescent participation visibility in the public sphere and the deconstruction of the image of the passive, defenseless (primarily against adult manipulation) and dangerous adolescent in public rhetoric. Analysis of how shkolota was reshaped turns out to be a method that allows us to consider from a new perspective the public rhetoric about children in contemporary Russia.

Acknowledgements: This article was prepared as part of the research seminar “Non-Classical Folklore”, held at the European University in St. Petersburg.
I am grateful to M. L. Lurie for his support and help in working on the article, I. V. Kukulin, M. L. Maiofi E. K. Efremov, M. V. Yavorskaya and other colleagues who participated in the discussion. I would like to thank the reviewers for thoughtful comments.

Abstract: The article analyses the text of the “Journey of the English Ambassadors to Rome in 1555” — a travel memoir compiled in the 1560s on the basis of a diary kept by Thomas North (1535 — c.1601), then a page in the household of ambassador Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Ely. Later in life, Thomas North became famous as the author of the first, often reprinted English translation of Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives” (1579), and his travelogue remains the most important of the extant documents related to the last English embassy to Rome (1555), which temporarily restored the country’s relationship with the Holy See. However, the “Journey” has been poorly studied and has never been looked at in the context of travel literature. Detailed analysis of North’s text shows that although the author followed the genre of medieval itineraries his work differs in focus and intent from other travel diaries and memoirs produced by English travelers and diplomats of the mid-16th century. North was not much interested in the political side of his journey, or even in the Roman antiquities. His text presents a series of the author’s impressions of what he saw in France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, of new palaces, fortresses, instruments, mechanisms and “wonders”: objects, animals and birds, and social practices. The unique combination of itinerary, diary and memoir in North’s “Journey” demonstrates how 16th century Europeans manipulated literary genres in search of a form suitable for describing their travel experiences and tastes.

Abstract: The publication presents a document preserved at the Archives of Vladimir Golenishchev in Paris (Centre Wladimir Gol&;233;nischeff, &;201;cole Pratique des Hautes &;201;tudes). This is a report about the travel of the outstanding Russian Egyptologist Vladimir Golenishchev to Egypt that lasted from October 1890 to February 1891. It appears to be a preliminary version of a paper intended for submission to the Zapiski Vostochnogo otdeleniia Imperatorskogo Russkogo arkheologicheskogo obshchestva (Memoirs of the Oriental Department of the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society). The paper is kept in one file of red cardboard with pencil drafts, sketches and plans made by the Egyptologist during his travel. The report had not been published. It contains evidence about Golenishchev’s acquisitions for his collection (now at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; among the other things he purchased the papyri with the famous texts of Wenamun’s Voyage to Byblos and the Onomasticon of Amenemope), about the survey of archaeological monuments (most importantly, at the Kharga Oasis), about his new interpretations (the correct attribution of the so-called Hyksos sphinxes to Amenemhat III of Dynasty XII). Of special interest is the information about Golenishchev’s participation in the official reception in Egypt of the Russian heir apparent Nicholas Alexandrovich (future Emperor Nicholas II) and about some degree of tension between himself and the British officers in the Egyptian service, due to the contemporary confrontation of the Russian and the British Empire in the Great Game in the East.

Acknowledgements: The research presented in the article is sponsored by the Russian Science Foundation (project no. 19-18-00369-П “The Classical Orient: culture, world-view, tradition of research in Russia (based on the monuments in the collection of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and archival sources)”).
The author is grateful to the project group members: to Dr. Olga Vassilieva (A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts) for the permission to research the documentary evidence that she gathered, and to Denis Izosimov, M. A. (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Faculty of History), for the preliminary work at this evidence that facilitated its research and publication.

Abstract: The publication includes a historical essay: the description of a forced round-the-world trip of about 800 children and adolescents with caregivers, sent from Petrograd, which was on the verge of a famine catastrophe, in May 1918 to the Urals and Western Siberia for three months in a “nourishment colony”. Cut off from home by the uprising of the Czechoslovak Legion and by events on other fronts of the Civil War in Russia, they began to suffer from cold and hunger in the autumn — winter of 1918 and ended up in the care of the American Red Cross, which in the summer of 1919 took them from the combat zone to Vladivostok, where they lived until July 1920. Due to the impossibility of returning through the Far East and Siberia, they sailed on a Japanese ship under the flag of the Red Cross along the route: Muroran (Japan), San Francisco, Panama Canal, New York, Helsinki, Koivisto (Finland), Petrograd. The paper includes the first publication of two colonists’ documents: a handwritten newspaper, ‘Kur’inskaia mozaika’ (Mosaic of Kurya), from July 13, 1918, and the handwritten diary of the colonist Mikhail Ivanovich Kholin for the period July 12 — September 18, 1920 (Vladivostok — Petrograd). The documents were received from A. L. Moyzhes (1910–2014).

Abstract: The article analyzes travelogues about the USSR of the second half of the 1950s written by Italian authors Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, Curzio Malaparte, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Goffredo Parise and Guido Piovene. We draw the conclusion that the reception of the Soviet Union of that period is determined by two mythological paradigms: the “Russian” one, dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries, and the “Soviet” one, which was formed in the epoch of Stalin. A complex interaction of the “Russian” and “Soviet” myths generates certain concepts concerning the USSR: fi of all, the USSR as a basically rural society and, second, the USSR as a land of childhood (meaning both individual childhood of the authors and collective “childhood” of Europe and of the whole world). These motifs play a key role in Italian perception of Soviet society of the second half of the 1950s. By the 1960s the infl of both paradigms on Italian travel prose is sharply reduced, but getting rid of mythological schemes in travelogues of the 1960s and 1970s comes at a price: the authors start avoiding broad conclusions and prefer to focus on local issues and descriptions of their private contacts with Soviet people.

Acknowledgements: The article was prepared at A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences and financially supported by the Russian Scientific Fund, grant no. 20-78-00042 “Soviet Union and the ‘Russian Myth’ in the Travelogues by Italian Writers”.

Abstract: The article attempts to reveal the scale of influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on the subject matter and writing method of Thomas Bernhard. On the basis of the novella Walking, published in 1970, we demonstrate that the issues raised by Wittgenstein at the beginning of the 20th century were of primary importance for Bernhard. The Austrian writer was interested not only in establishing the relationship between the world and language, but also in extrapolating this metaphysical problem to an understanding of the nature of literary creativity. Wittgenstein in his work asked the critical question about the possibility of adequate transmission of events by means of language and sought to explore its ontological and logical foundations. However, this idea of the philosopher receives an unusual refraction in the novella Walking. On the one hand, Bernhard casts doubt on Wittgenstein’s assumption about the initial isomorphism of words and objects and condemns his characters to endless wandering in the closed space of speech. On the other hand, in such a negative way he confirms the ideological core of the “linguistic turn”, and, in fact, that human existence is determined by language. Thus, literary exploration of themes of madness, suicide, the deceptiveness of reality, which in the logical continuum of the Tractatus are declared nonsensical, leads Bernhard’s narrative to an existential level.

Acknowledgements: The paper is written with financial support from the Russian Foundation for Fundamental Research (RFFI), Project No. 19-311-60010, “The ethical dimension of language: modern literature as a way to approach the limits of words”.

Abstract: The article is devoted to the concept of “the infra-ordinary” in the work of the French writer Georges Perec. The purpose of the study is to define the notion of “the infra-ordinary” and establish its forms in the poetics of this author. This concept often appears in his works, although it may not be directly indicated. To this day, the meaning of “the infra-ordinary” remains poorly clarified, because it is difficult to find support for its understanding in the author’s texts, while it occupies one of the main places in his poetics. Perec articulates the term “the infra-ordinary” in one of his little-known essays, yet “the infra-ordinary” as an approach to writing is found in both his early and later texts. The indeterminacy of “the infra-ordinary” is largely connected with the multi-valued functioning of the concept of “everyday life” in Perec’s texts. This paper discusses the general problems of the concept of everyday life, the emergence of the concept of “the infra-ordinary”, the features and forms of implementation of “the infra-ordinary” in different texts by Perec. In the end, a conclusion is drawn about the serious significance of “the infra-ordinary” in his works, since it substantiates the author’s attitude both to the material of his writing and to writing itself, being meaningfully connected with the themes of memory, recollections, history, language and reality.

Abstract: A review of: E. V. Vorontsova, A. N. Allenov, V. S. Elagina, & E. A. Korshikova (Eds.). (2021). Derevenskie sviatyni: Sb&;959;rnik statei, interv’iu i dokumentov [Village shrines: A collection of articles, interviews and documents]. Izd-vo PSTGU. 280 p. (In Russian).