scholarly journals The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish‑Lithuanian Commonwealth as an Ideological Foundation of the Unity of Intermarium?

Politeja ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (6(57)) ◽  
pp. 91-105
Author(s):  
Alvydas Nikžentaitis

The article surveys the question how the past of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Commonwealth of Both Nations is used in region’s cross‑border issues, and the question could it be the ideological basis for the idea of the Intermarium is raised. The analysis of the countries of the region revealed that these themes in Lithuania, Poland and Belarus are basicaly used for the creation of the identity of the societies, however in any country these topics of the past are not dominating, moreover in Ukraine the theme of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Commonwealth of Both Nations is in marginal position. The central position in the memory culture of these societies take the events of the 20th century. Obviously such secondory position of the understanding of the events of the past showed the commemoration of the anniversary of the Union of Lublin in Poland in 2009. The analysis of the historical research demonstrates different view. Evaluations of the historians in four countries do not differ so cardinally as it was before 1990. Such situation is as a signal that probably it is a time to think about the preparation of the general textbook for schoolchildren of four countries, or synthesis of the history.

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-163
Author(s):  
Alvydas Nikžentaitis

This article presents an analysis of the role memory culture plays in information wars. Based on the examples of Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Belarus, it finds that the phenomenon of using the past in information wars can be explained as a fighting measure to entrench the authority of a given country in the eyes of the global community. This requirement emerged among countries in this region following the collapse of the old global systems and with the creation of new political blocs. Associations have been noticed between information wars that exploit the past and the growth of a country’s economic potential. For this reason, this foreign policy tool has not been used to the same degree in different countries in the region, nor did it start being used at the same time. Almost all the countries in the region started to massively exploit the past as a means of soft power only in the 21st century. This tool is especially significant in Poland and Russia, being used less often in Lithuania and Ukraine, and hardly at all in Belarus. The storylines of the past being used in information wars can be divided into two categories: Global identities, whose symbols have become Holocaust and Gulag figures; and symbols associated with the memory cultures and identities of separate societies, such as the idea of Slavic unity (in Russian-Ukrainian relations) or the past of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (in Lithuanian-Belarusian relations). The author predicts that the use of the past in information wars is set to intensify in the future, and as such, the teaching of expert skills is necessary to address this; at present, these skills are lacking in countries in the region.


Menotyra ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Steiblytė

The text deals with (re)interpretations of history in professional contemporary Lithuanian theatre.According to historians, nowadays there are few dominating narratives about Lithuanian history: the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with the grand dukes in the forefront, the only Lithuanian king Mindaugas, and the history of the 20th century wars, occupation ant battles for independence. Based on that, the text provides an attempt to figure out how these narratives are represented and reinterpreted in contemporary Lithuanian theatre with the 20th century stories dominating the repertory of historic performances. Those are both confirming the predominant narratives and reinterpreting them and establishing new relation with personalities and events dominant in memory politics. The text also deals with the narrative of the victim that dominates historic Lithuanian self-perception. Two performances help as examples understanding how this narrative can be strengthened or criticised. The last part of the text presents the place that Polish, Russian and Jewish minorities get in contemporary Lithuanian theatre to represent their versions of history and asks whether contemporary Lithuanian theatre is contributing to the creation of a more involving social environment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 219-236
Author(s):  
Andrey Yu. Dvornichenko

The abundant Russian historiography of the medieval history of Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Lithuanian-Russian State) has become in the last decades the centre of the discussions and is often subject to groundless criticism. This historiography was not very lucky in the Soviet period of the 20th century either, as it was severely criticized from the Marxist-Leninist position. When discussing Russian historiography the author of this article is consciously committed to the Russian positions. There are no reasons to consider this historiography branch either Byelorussian or Ukrainian one, as that was really Russian historiography, - the phenomenon that formed under the favorable specific conditions of Russian Empire before the beginning of the 20th century. The said phenomenon can be studied in different ways: according to the existing then main trends and schools or according to their affiliation with specific universities of Russian Empire. But according to the author of this article the best way to study the issue is in accordance with the main concepts of history. And then the pre-revolutionary historiography appears as an integral scientific paradigm that turns out to be the most divaricate branch of the Lithuanian studies of the time. It created, in its turn, the most vivid and objective historical picture that can still serve as the basis for the studies of Lithuanian-Russian state.


Author(s):  
Rimma M. Khaninova ◽  

Introduction. In the genre system of Kalmyk poetry, the literary fable appeared in the 1930s. When it came to master the genre, Kalmyk poets mainly focused on the traditions of Russian fable of the 19th–20th centuries, primarily on I. A. Krylov’s works which they eagerly translated. The Kalmyk authors were the least likely to rely on traditions of Eastern literature — whether Indian, Tibetan, or Oirat Mongolian — since those sources written in Tibetan, Classical Mongolian and Clear Script (Kalm. todo bichiq) were virtually unavailable to them, and not all poets had knowledge of the scripts. National folklore, including myths, animal tales, household tales, aphoristic poetry (proverbs, sayings, riddles), to a certain extent contributed to the creation of plots and motifs, a gallery of images ― people and the animal world ― in the Kalmyk literary fable. The appeal to the fable was determined by the tasks of cultural construction in Kalmykia, the satirical possibilities of the genre designed to scourge social vices and human shortcomings, contribute to the correction of morals, facilitate education of a person in the new society. Attention to the fable in 20th-century Kalmyk poetry was not that universal and constant, by the end of the century it was no longer in demand and never revived further. The Kalmyk literary fable has been little studied so far, with the exception of several recent articles by R. M. Khaninova, which determines the relevance of this study. Goals. The article aims to study zoopoetics of text of the animalistic fable in Kalmyk poetry of the past century through examples of selected works by Khasyr Syan-Belgin, Muutl Erdniev, Garya Shalburov, Basang Dordzhiev, Timofey Bembeev, and Mikhail Khoninov. Methods. The work employs a number of research methods, such as the historical literary, comparative, and descriptive ones. Results. The animalistic fable is not the leading one in the general genre system of Kalmyk poetry of the past century, including among fables with human characters. It usually includes characters of the steppe fauna whose figurative characteristics are manifested in Kalmyk folklore. The social satire and political orientation of the fables are actualized by modern reality, actual international situation and events. The paper reveals a relationship between the animal fable and — Kalmyk folklore and the Russian fable tradition. Most of the fables have not yet been translated into Russian. Conclusions. In terms of national versification patterns, the study of the Kalmyk poetic animal fable has identified such synthetic forms as fable-fairy tale, fable-proverb, and fable-dream. The genre definition is not always specified by the authors, a moral usually concludes each quatrain-structured narrative. Genre scenes, monologues, and dialogues contribute to an in-depth reading of the context, symbolism of images, and semantic code.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Welchman ◽  
Judith Norman

AbstractF.W.J. Schelling’s Ages of the World has just begun to receive the critical attention it deserves as a contribution to the philosophy of history. Its most significant philosophical move is to pose the question of the origin of the past itself, asking what “caused” the past. Schelling treats the past not as a past present (something that used to be a ’now’ but no longer is) — but rather as an eternal past, a different dimension of time altogether, and one that was never a present ’now’. For Schelling, the past functions as the transcendental ground of the present, the true ’a priori’. Schelling’s account of the creation of this past takes the form of a theogeny: in order to exist, God needed to separate the past from the present. By grounding the creation of the past in a free decision of God, Schelling tries to conceptualize temporality so as to preserve the sort of radical contingency and authentic freedom that he considers essential features of history. In so doing, he opens up a way of viewing time that avoids the pitfalls of the Hegelian dialectic and anticipates some of the 20th century developments in phenomenology.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 528
Author(s):  
Olga V. Zalesskaia

Russian-Chinese interaction in the Far East covers relations between the two largest world civilizations: Russia and China. One of its most important features is Chinese migration in the Russian Far Eastern (RFE) border region. This article analyzes the role and importance of Chinese migration as an integral component of the Sino-Russian cross-border interactions that has had varied effects over the past century and a half. Chinese migration is an indispensable condition for the emergence and development of cross-border practices in the RFE and the presence and economic activity of Chinese migrants ensures the continued development of forms of cross-border interaction and, in general, the dialogue between the cultures. To substantiate this thesis, systemic and historical-chronological methods are used to analyze a significant amount of factual and statistical material accumulated by historical research in the works of Russian and Chinese historians and social researchers.


Problemos ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 111-119
Author(s):  
Darius Kuolys

By refering to the examples of different cultural traditions, Arūnas Sverdiolas in his study Constitution and Preservation described the mechanisms that are involved in the creation of culture – constitution and preservation. The goal of this article is to show how these mechanisms operated in the reality of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The article analyzes the roles that the Lithuanian political society gave to legislation, upbringing, historical narratives, heroic and occasional poetry while constituting and preserving itself.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-24
Author(s):  
José Mapril

In 1996, Appadurai argued that imagination is an essential element in the creation of cross-border political forms.Electronic media, for example, establishes links across national boundaries, linking those who move and those who stay.In his argument, these diasporic public spheres were examples of post-national political worlds and revealed the erosion of the nation-state in the face of globalisation and modernity. In this paper, I draw inspiration on this concept of diasporicpublic sphere but to show how these imaginaries are intimately tied to forms of group making and emplacement in several contexts. This argument is based on an ethnographic research about the creation of a transnational federation ofBangladeshi associations – the All European Bangladeshi Association (AEBA) – in the past decade, its main objectivesand activities. Through the analysis of an AEBA event that took place in Lisbon, I want to show the productive dialecticbetween diasporic imaginaries, group formation and emplacement processes between Portugal and Bangladesh.


1998 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 109-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhard Jaritz

Historical images contain a variety of signs and meanings. The latter have influenced perception and response decisively, in the past as well as today. Methods and possibilities of computer-supported image analysis in context, and particularly of digital image analysis have started to support recent research-efforts considerably. The creation and organisation of digitised historical archives seem to have become particularly important for any kind of studies of the contents and messages of pictorial sources. This creation and organisation of image archives, and the analysis of the contents of such archives mainly imply digitisation and documentation, making catalogues and codebooks available, the linking and binding of images and their details, encoding, segmentation, sub-segmentation and archiving the image segments, creating and keeping up contexts. They make comparative primary and secondary analysis possible. Fruitful co-operation and exchange of skills are necessary. The ‘culture of images’has come up to other levels; history and its images are about to reach new and very promising dimensions.


Author(s):  
Olga Rvacheva ◽  
Pierre Labrunie

Introduction. The paper deals with studying the formation of culture elements during the Cossacks revival process in the late 20th – early 21st centuries. The cultural pattern of a community is always changing. Cultural practices and traditions of the past get integrated into the modern social conditions, while new values and rituals assume the character of traditional ones. The topicality of the subject derives from the fact that the Cossack culture was subject to a dramatic transformation in the 20th century, while many elements of the culture were wiped out. The transmission of the cultural tradition was interrupted. The Cossacks revival in the late 20th century supposed a return to traditional historical forms. However, this task proved difficult because of the break in the transmission of the ethnic culture. The formation of the present-day Cossack cultural system supposed the selection of some elements of culture from the past and their integration into the new conditions as well as the creation of new forms of culture that would contribute to the cultural identification of the Cossacks. Methods and materials. Historiography has predominantly described the traditional forms of the Cossack culture. The issues of cultural construction were touched upon only occasionally. This paper applies the historical and chronological, historicalgenetic methods as well as the conception of socio-cultural construction. Analysis. During the Cossacks revival process its participants demonstrated a sharp increase of interest in the traditional forms of culture. The attempts at their integration into the present-day conditions led to the deformation of cultural forms. They lost their authenticity and transformed themselves into secondary forms of culture, thus cultural patterns of the modern Cossacks got changed. At the same time, new cultural traditions and norms were “invented”. Their function was to fix Cossacks identity and to show that the Cossacks do exist in the social life of the country. The adaptation of the traditions and historical elements of the Cossack socio-cultural system had its peculiarities. The traditions and elements were taken from different epochs and formed an arbitrary composition of different cultural phenomena. Traditions played an important role in the Cossacks revival process because they acted as cultural identification markers for the Cossack community. For that reason even new cultural practices were given the appearance of traditions. Results. In the late 20th – early 21st centuries the restoration of the Cossack culture was actually its construction. A number of trends can be traced in the process. They developed concurrently and contributed to the creation of new cultural milieu.


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