scholarly journals Chu, P-Y.: The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science

2021 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-283
Author(s):  
Fruzsina Gresina ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Science ◽  
History Of

How Nauchnaia Fantastika Was Made: The Debates about the Genre of Science Fiction from NEP to High Stalinism

Slavic Review ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Soviet Science ◽  
Literary Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Science Fiction

Based on a detailed analysis of published and unpublished sources, Matthias Schwartz reconstructs the making of Soviet science fiction in the cultural context of Soviet literary politics. Beginning in the 1920s, nauchnaia fantastika (scientific fantasy) became one of the most popular forms of light fiction, though literary critics and activists tended to dismiss it because of its origins in popular adventure, its ties to the so-called Pinkerton literature, and its ambiguous relationship to scientific inventions and social progress. Schwartz's analysis shows that even during high Stalinism, socialist realism's norms were far from being firmly established, but in the case of nauchnaia fantastika had to be constantly negotiated and reconstituted as fragile compromises involving different interest groups (literary politicians, writers, publishers, readers). A cultural history of Soviet science fiction also contributes to a better understanding of what people actually wanted to read and sheds new light on the question of how popular literature adapts to political changes and social destabilizations.

An ethnographer's early years: Boris Dolgikh as enumerator for the 1926/27 polar census

Polar Record ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-251
Author(s):  
Sergei S. Savolskul ◽  
David G. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
Soviet Science ◽  
Central Siberia ◽  
History Of ◽  
Traditional Sense

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Boris Osipovich Dolgikh, the great Russian ethnographer of Siberia, this article gives an account of his first field expedition to the Kets, Evenkis, Nganasans, and Dolgans of central Siberia. The author, himself a former student of Dolgikh, argues that Dolgikh's work as an enumerator for the 1926/27 census forged his identity as an ethnographer. He also implies that the expedition for the 1926/27 census was a cradle for the careers of many other scientists. The article is framed by a history of Soviet science by the editor. It also serves as an introduction to the unique polar census expedition, which the editor argues is better understood as ‘an inscription’ of Siberian aboriginal peoples than as a statistical census in the traditional sense.

scholarly journals V. S. Baevsky and M. L. Gasparov: to the history of scientific communication in prosody

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-35
Author(s):  
Evgenii Ivanovich Gusev
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Communication ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Academic Science ◽  
State University ◽  
Soviet Science ◽  
Peer Reviews ◽  
Method Integration ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
New Perspective

Based on the biographies of the prominent philologists V. S. Baevsky and M. L. Gasparov, this article examines the relationships of the Soviet scholars of humanities in the late XX century, and verifies the facts from the history of prosody. The archive of V. S. Baevsky with collection of 146 letters of M. L. Gasparov is deposited in Smolensk State University. It preserved handwritten and printed documents that tell about their shared scientific interests and sincere relationship. Gasparov’s dedicatory inscriptions on the books resembling the token reverence and friendship also serve as important and informative sources in studying this topic. The library of V. S. Baevsky accounts to 35 such books. There is also extensive memoir literature dedicated to V. S. Baevsky and M. L. Gasparov. The article analyzes peer reviews of V. S. Baevsky on the monographs of M. L. Gasparov, responses to the jubilees of the scholar, and obituary in his memory. The conclusion was made that mutual respectful dialogue established between V. S. Baevsky and M. L. Gasparov contributed to the synergy of efforts on the development of prosody as a research method, integration of university and academic science for the advancement of humanities in Russia. The study of various scientific contacts and relationships between the Soviet philologists allows having a new perspective upon the history of philology in Russia, examine the problem of opposition of Soviet science as a social institution, which was controlled by the government and its founding scholars, as well as clarify important facts in the establishment of prosody.

scholarly journals Introduction: A New History of Russian Science

2002 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexei Kojevnikov
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Soviet Science ◽  
Russian Science ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Upheaval

Like almost everything in the Soviet Union, the discipline of history of science and technology altered dramatically during the social upheaval of Gorbachev’s perestroika, in some ways that were predictable, and in other ways that were not. One new direction of research that has since grown into a bourgeoning field – the social history of Russian and Soviet science – is represented by the articles in this volume. This short introduction cannot substitute for a real historiographical study, which will probably appear in due course (see also Gerovitch 1996, Gerovitch 1998, Graham 1993). This is rather a personal memoir about the origin and motivations behind the approach; as incomplete as a participant’s memoir can be, but with some benefits of retrospective hindsight. Ten years ago, at a time of great fluidity in minds and intellectual agendas, many developments were driven primarily by intuition and the sheer momentum of Zeitgeist; now, as things have become somewhat settled, there is time for more reflection.

scholarly journals The Cold War and Western Perspectives on Soviet Science

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-175
Author(s):  
Climério Paulo da Silva Neto
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Sociology Of Science ◽  
Soviet Science ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Methodological Choices ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This essay presents an overview of the dominant trends in the Western historiography on the Soviet Union along the Cold War inquiring how they affected the perspectives on the history of Soviet science. It discuss three major trends, namely totalitarian school, which resonated with Robert Merton and Karl Popper’s claims that science best develops in democratic societies; the revisionists, which came of age in the 1960s and resembled some schools of the sociology of science both in their motivation to subvert the dominant perspective in their discipline and in their methodological choices; and, finally, the post-Cold War and post-revisionists perspectives on Soviet history and history of Soviet science, and how they challenged widely held beliefs on Soviet science and society that underpinned many Cold War-era works on the Soviet Union. The conclusion discussed how the historiography of Soviet Science resonates with Christopher Hill’s claim that history needs to be rewritten at every generation.

scholarly journals History of Academician Alexander Braunstein’s Nomination for the Nobel Prize: Materials from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences

2019 ◽  
pp. 408-416
Author(s):  
Tatiana A. Kursanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Molecular Biology ◽  
Nitrogen Metabolism ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Soviet Science ◽  
Nobel Committee ◽  
Russian Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
History Of ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
The Impact

The article reviews the history of nomination for the Nobel Prize of the Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR Alexander E. Braunstein (1902-1986), biochemist and molecular biologist. The author has studied documents of the Brownstein fond from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences and materials from the Archive of the Nobel Committee, as well as literary sources on the topic. Having studied the historiography, the author concludes that the interpretation of the issue in the national scholarship is inaccurate. The task is complicated by the fact that, according to the rules of the Nobel Committee, the names of nominees are not publicly announced, nominees are not informed of their nomination, promulgation of names of nominees is allowed only fifty years after the nomination. It was the study of archival materials that has allowed to supplement and clarify the history of the Russian scientist’s nomination for the Nobel Prize. 1950s saw many works on molecular biology that laid foundation for the subsequent research and received recognition of the Nobel Committee. The study refutes the tendency to underestimate the impact of Soviet science by showing the foreign scholars’ attitude to Alexander Braunstein’s discoveries. The chronological framework of the study is determined by submissions for nomination stored in the fond and dated 1952-1985. The article examines four nominations of Braunstein to the Nobel Committee for his work on processes and enzymes of nitrogen metabolism. Braunstein was one of Russian biochemists who could have been awarded the Nobel Prize, but never has. And yet his repeated nomination for the award shows high evaluation of his work by scientists of global renown.

scholarly journals Introduction: From Nauchnaia Fantastika to Post-Soviet Dystopia

Slavic Review ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibelan Forrester ◽  
Yvonne Howell
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Technological Advancement ◽  
Soviet Science ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Collective Imagination ◽  
Soviet Science Fiction

Science fiction is the genre that links our lives to the future: the faster the pace of scientific and technological advancement, the greater our awareness of what István Csicsery-Ronay called “the science-fictionality” of everyday life. The more we feel the effect of scientific and technological change on global flows of economic, social, and cultural exchange (not to mention the blurring of biological and environmental boundaries), the more we are drawn to a literature that Boris Strugatskii identified as “a description of the future, whose tentacles already reach into the present.“ It is hardly surprising that scholarly interest in Russian and Soviet science fiction has been growing in recent years, with an expanding roster of roundtables and panels exploring the topic at professional conferences. Why talk about Soviet science fiction? As the articles in this special thematic cluster suggest, science fiction functions more as a field of intersecting discourses than as a clearly delineated genre: for readers of Slavic Review, it is a genre that foregrounds the interdisciplinary connections between the history of Soviet science and technology, political and economic development, and social and literary history. Science fiction, in short, offers a way to read the history of the future, with texts selfconsciously oriented toward distant spatial and temporal horizons, even as they point insistently back to the foundational factors shaping the vectors of a society's collective imagination.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document