Literary identity and social structure of the imperial period

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn ◽  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Irina Reyfman ◽  
Stephanie Sandler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Literary Identity ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Village

The chapter explores how works of literature in the nineteenth century increasingly mapped the complex social structure of imperial Russia. It explains why social class and group identity features so prominently in the representation of characters in nineteenth-century Russian literature. The chapter demonstrates that different types of space, such as the capitals (St. Petersburg and Moscow), the village, or the estate, have specific cultural associations in literature. It discusses the phenomenon of the Petersburg mythology and the genre of Petersburg fiction, examines the provincial spaces as presented by Gogol and Chekhov, and colonial spaces such as the Caucasus as portrayed by Tolstoy.

Eating Out in Imperial Russia: Class, Nationality, and Dining before the Great Reforms

Slavic Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 747-768 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison K. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Russian State ◽  
The Social ◽  
Eating Out ◽  
Great Reforms

During the first half of the nineteenth century, arguments over Russian social structure played a central role in discussions of eating establishments. The Russian state controlled these establishments in part through legislation that kept social groups apart; it focused particularly on the extremes of the social hierarchy, showing little interest in the middling groups. In more narrative descriptions of eating establishments, however, the middling groups—or their absence—seemed remarkably important. Foreign observers generally felt that Russia lacked both a middle class and middling eating establishments. Russians in part agreed, but by the middle of the century they were more likely to locate a middle class among one particular group: Moscow's merchants.

Middle-Class Formation and Class Alliance

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doowon Suh
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Occupational Structure ◽  
Simple Task ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
Different Types ◽  
White Collar Workers

The fact that white-collar workers share relatively similar experiences of economic hardship and proletarianization across nations but develop clearly different types of trade unionism renders the theoretical relevance of formalist and economist approaches to the class location and class character of whitecollar workers questionable. According to this perspective, notwithstanding ideological and logical variants, social class reflects an occupational conglomerate, and class constituents' consciousness, disposition, and action are determined by their position in the social structure. Analysis of social class becomes a simple task of filling empty strata with workers and debate centers on the demarcation lines within the occupational structure, generating theories of class structure without attention to class agents (Bourdieu 1984). By contrast, historico-cultural, ethnographic approaches to social class, pioneered by E. P. Thompson's monumental work in 1963, turn formalist, economist theories on their head by bringing class agents back in. The process by which workers become class members is considered complex, contingent, and relational: lifestyles, dispositions, modes of collective action, and political orientations blend at a historical juncture in such a way that a class character substantially distinct and sustained enough forms and becomes an important dimension of social structure.

Eros and Empire in Russian Literature about Georgia

Slavic Review ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Layton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Wild Man ◽  
Growing Body

In recent years a growing body of studies has analyzed the discursive practices used by Europeans to constitute the Asian, African and American Indian as the less civilized other. A most influential contribution has been Edward Said'sOrientalism.Although Said deals essentially with western responses to the Islamic east, his work contains many insights germane to nineteenth century Russian literature stimulated by tsarist expansion into the Caucasus. The Russian case, however, presents interesting variations on Said's model. Russia itself was only semi-europeanized, so that it was more problematic to build constructs of Asiatic alterity. The sense that there was no absolute division between “us” and the “Asiatics” produced extraordinarily ambivalent representations of Caucasian Muslim tribesmen in Russian literature. In “Ammalat- Bek,” for example, Alexander Marlinskii defended the tsarist conquest of the tribes as a European civilizing mission and yet expressed intense self-identification with the freedom and machismo of the Caucasian wild man.

The Reception of J.S. Mill’s Feminist Thought in Imperial Russia

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-141
Author(s):  
Julia Berest
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Similarities And Differences

The essay explores the publication and reception of J. S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women in Imperial Russia. Translated in 1869, the same year that the book came out in Britain, The Subjection of Women found a wide audience in Russia, attracting both feminist and conservative readers, many of whom had already been familiar with Mill’s name after the publication of his Principles of Political Economy in Russia nine years earlier. Until the end of Imperial period, the book was published in four translations and six editions, some of which were accompanied by extensive editorial introductions and followed by reviews in the leading Russian journals. The essay analyzes conservative and feminist responses to Mill’s ideas in the context of Russian intellectual and socio-political developments in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also highlights the similarities and differences in the reception of Mill’s feminist thought in Russia and in England.

The Medieval Population of Mountainous Ingushetia According to Odontological Data

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 178-196
Author(s):  
Natalya A. Lejbova ◽  
Umalat B. Gadiev
Keyword(s):  
Morphological Traits ◽  
Dental Anthropology ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
New Material ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Village ◽  
Medieval Population

Although population of the Caucasus has been studied in a rather detailed way, there are peoples whose anthropological portrait is still incomplete. Among them are the Ingush, one of the oldest autochthonous peoples of the Caucasus. This work presents new material on the dental anthropology of medieval Ingush, collected in 2017 during expeditions to the Jairakh and Sunzhen districts of the Republic of Ingushetia. In the Jairakh district, the investigations were carried out in the crypt complexes of the 15th–18th centuries – Targim, Agikal, Tsori, Salgi, and in Sunzhen region - in crypts near the village of Muzgan. The craniological series of medieval Ingush studied according to the dental anthropology program can be described as belonging to the western range of odontological complexes. Unlike most modern Caucasian groups, it does not belong to gracile forms, but rather to a maturized odontological variant, which has deep roots in the Caucasus. The results once again demonstrate a certain conservatism and stability of the dental system, which preserves morphological traits of ancestral groups longer than other anthropological systems.

Narratives of Queer Migration

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gray ◽  
Mike Baynham
Keyword(s):  
The European Union ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Depth Migration ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Global North ◽  
Economic Necessity ◽  
The Village ◽  
The City

This chapter considers the phenomenon of queer migration from a linguistic perspective, paying particular attention to the constitutive role of spatial mobility in narrative and its role in the construction of queer migrant identities. The chapter begins by looking at the way in which queer migration has been discussed in the literature and then moves on to address three different types of queer migration in greater depth: migration within national borders from the village/countryside to the city; migration between cities in member states within the context of the European Union; and finally, asylum-seeking within the context of migration from the Global South to the Global North. The chapter concludes by suggesting that queer migration is a complex phenomenon in which the intersection of sexuality, gender identity, desire, affect, abjection, economic necessity, class, politics, and fear for one’s life combine in ways that are unique in the lives of individual migrants.

Viktor Vasnetsov’s New Icons

Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Wendy Salmond
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Paris Exposition ◽  
The Many ◽  
Modern Orthodox ◽  
Human Hands

Abstract This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.

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