Rodin in Prague: Modern Art, Cultural Diplomacy, and National Display

Slavic Review ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathleen M. Giustino
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
World War ◽  
Habsburg Empire ◽  
German Nationality ◽  
Provincial Capital ◽  
A Site ◽  
Cultural Maturity

Fin-de-siècle Prague, a provincial capital city in the Habsburg empire, was a site of Czech-German nationality conflict. In 1902 it was also home to the largest exhibition of Auguste Rodin's art outside France during his life. Due to the nationalism that enveloped Czech culture and politics, the Rodin spectacle was no mere display of modernism. National activists in the Manes Association of Visual Artists, including Stanislav Sucharda and Jan Kotera, designed the Rodin exhibition to advance Czech cultural maturity through cosmopolitan art and to convince foreigners of the Czech nation's singularity, unity, and progressiveness. Ultimately, though, the events surrounding the exhibition of Rodin's works in Prague projected Czech disagreement over the meanings of folk heritage and western progress for national identity. Still, the blending of modern display and cultural diplomacy strengthened French-Czech relations and in small but significant ways helped secure Czechoslovakia's creation at the end of World War I.

The Past in Common: Modern Ruins as a Shared Urban Experience of Revolution-Era Moscow and Petersburg

Slavic Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 712-735 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Stroud
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
A Site ◽  
Intellectual Movement

In this article, Gregory Stroud considers the modern ruin as a site of common urban conversation and identity for large, diverse, and otherwise fractious populations of Petersburg and Moscow residents. Stroud argues that what began at the turn of the century as a relatively narrow nostalgic intellectual movement anxious over the perceived modern loss of timeless beauty and value exploded with the frustrations of the Christmas holiday during World War I into a common boulevard conversation concerning the loss of holiday, ritual, authenticity, and habit. The failure of the old regime to satisfactorily engage this conversation and to offer meaningful solutions would render such nostalgia into a biting critique of autocracy, mass consumerism, private property, and shopkeeper capitalism.

scholarly journals The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-161
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
The Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Narrow Road ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second World

This paper engages Cathy Caruth’s thinking about trauma, Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, and Giorgio Agamben’s theorising of bearing witness to examine the affective performance of remembering in Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Reading the narrative as a postmemorial account of Japan’s internment of Australian POWs in Burma during the Second World War, I focus on the body as a site of both wounding and witnessing to show how the affective relays between pleasure and pain reanimate the epistemological drama of lived experience and highlight the ambivalence of passion as a trope for both suffering and love. Framed by its intertextual homage to Matsuo Bashō’s poetic masterpiece of the same name, the Australian narrative of survival is shown to emerge from the collapse of the referential certainties underlying the binaries of victim/ victimiser, witness/perpetrator, human/inhuman, and remembering/forgetting. In Flanagan’s ethical imagination, bearing witness calls for a visceral rethinking of historical subjectivity that binds the world to consciousness as a source of both brutality and beauty.

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