The Karamzin-Lelewel Controversy

Slavic Review ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 592-610
Author(s):  
Frank Mocha

The intellectual debate which was taking place in Russia during the reign of Alexander I included a polemic which, although little known today, involved the most important Russian and Polish historians of the time, Karamzin and Lelewel, as well as other historians, writers, and journalists. Among the latter, the transplanted Pole, Tadeusz Bulharyn (Faddei V. Bulgarin), played a crucial part. The polemic developed into a controversy touching on the leading issues of the day, and it produced a sensation commanding the interest of the highest official and intellectual circles, including, reportedly, Alexander I himself. The polemic was largely provoked by the political views of Karamzin.According to Marc Raeff, the political ideas of Nikolai M. Karamzin (1766-1826) are a subject by themselves—still needs investigation. A writer of immensely popular sentimental stories, an innovator in the area of the Russian language, and a member of the progressive literary circle “Arzamas,” Karamzin nevertheless had become the spokesman of the old-fashioned, conservative, serf-owning nobility. It seems that Karamzin's first conservative leanings were a reaction to the later, more radical, phase of the French Revolution. They were voiced, subsequently, in his historical novels. Later, the Napoleonic Wars on the one hand and Alexander's liberal aspirations on the other further strengthened Karamzin's conservative feelings, which were finally provoked, under the influence of the Grand Duchess Catherine, Alexander's ambitious sister, by current projects for the reorganization of Russia.

Author(s):  
Galina L. Denisova ◽  

The article has for an object to determine themes of the Great Patriotic War cartoons based on the contrast between of two pictures and to detect and describe aims that cartoonists try to achieve with help of the political cartoons under study. The author conducts research of the Great Patriotic War cartoons created by Kukryniksy, a group of caricaturists, which M.V. Kupriyanov, P.N. Krylov, and N.A. Sokolov belonged to. They often involved S.Ya. Marshak in the work on the verbal part of their political cartoons. Some of the political cartoons under study give an example of wholeness of his rhymes and the painter’s pictures. The author treats the political cartoon of the Great Patriotic War as a message that is addressed to the Russian language personality and is a polycode one, which presupposes that information, which caricaturists code into the cartoon, is a result of cooperation between iconic and verbal means. Using Yu.N. Karaulov’s idea about the structure of the language personality, the author describes the encoding-decoding process of political cartoons meaning, in forming of which codes of different semiotic systems take part, as projections onto different levels of the language personality where these projections activate a certain string of associative links. The analysis of the political cartoons under study made it possible to detect five themes discussed in them: change of the state of things, change of personage’s emotional state, personage’s intention and results of its realization, action-and-reaction, personage’s mask and his real identity. Describing the political cartoons, the author ascertains that, combining two pictures based on the contrast within the bounds of a political cartoon, the caricaturists fulfill specific range of tasks. (1) The contrast of pictures, which contain both similar and different elements, furthers directing and holding of addressee’s attention. The caricaturists stimulate the addressee of the message to an active search for similar and different elements on those pictures, which diverts the addressee. (2) The contrast in the political cartoon can produce comical effect or increase it. The more cloudless the situation is for the personage on the first picture, the clearer it is to everyone how abased he is on the second one. (3) The contrast of situations with different characteristics (the one in the past and another in the present / the real situation and its hypothetical projection) in a message in the form of a political cartoon can have an explanatory function. The evil depicted on the first picture serves as proof of rightfulness and necessity of counteraction to it. If the form of such counteraction is shown on the second picture, the message contains an indirect appeal to the addressee for his active counteraction to this evil. (4) The usage of contrast for discussion of the theme “personage’s mask and his real identity” enables to show the true face of him, to give his personality a certain estimate and to form addressee’s opinion of the characterized person.


1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 583-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Claeys

Agricultural distress following the Napoleonic wars evoked various responses from those classes whose interests were most immediately bound up with the land. Such factors as decreasing market prices and hence wages, a falling standard of living, and rising indebtedness incited, on the one hand, the disciples of Captain Swing to attempt to restore to the agricutural labourer his dispossessed inheritance, or at least to register protest at its loss. For the landowners and farmers, on the other hand, constitutional means of redress were clearly more acceptable, and between 1815 and 1845 there were several attempts to develop a protectionist organization of farmers’ associations, led, particularly in the early years, by George Webb Hall, and in the latter often associated with Lord Chandos.


2019 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 165-170
Author(s):  
Aleksey V.  Lomonosov

The article reveals the social significance of determining the political views of V.V. Rozanov in the system of the thinker’s worldview. The correlation of these views with his political journalism is shown. The genesis of social and political ideas of V.V. Rozanov is revealed. The author specifies his ideological predecessors in the sphere of public thought of the late 19th century and the thinker’s affiliation with the conservative political camp of Russian writers. The author of the article also gives coverage of the V.V. Rozanov’s polemical publications in the press. He outlines the circle of political sympathies and determinative constants in the political views of Rozanov-publicist and proves his commitment to the centrist political parties. The author examines the process of Rozanov’s socio-political views evolution at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, and the related changes in his political journalism. The evaluations are based on the large layer of Rozanov’s newspaper publicism in the years of 1905–1917. To determine the Rozanov’s position in the “New time” journal editorial office and to reveal the motives of his political essays the author of the article used epistola


2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 235-241
Author(s):  
Barbara Klonowska

This article reviews the recent monograph by Maxim Shadurski, The Nationality of Utopia. H. G. Wells, England, and the World State (New York: Routledge, 2020) in the context of utopian studies on the one hand, and the political ideas of the nation state vs. world state on the other.


2000 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
María del Mar Asensio Aróstegui

Set in the historical context of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is an outstanding example of the kind of fiction that Elizabeth Wesseling (1991: vii) calls postmodernist historical novels, that is, "novelistic adaptations of historical material". Besides, being profoundly self-reflexive, the novel also falls under Linda Hutcheon's (1988) category of historiographic metafiction. The present paper focuses on Winterson's political choice of two representatives of historically silenced groups, a soldier and a woman, who use two apparently opposed narrative modes, the historical and the fantastic, to tell a story that both exposes history as a discursive construct and provides an alternative fantastic discourse for the representation of feminine desire.


2021 ◽  
pp. 314-329
Author(s):  
Irina V. Shaposhnikova ◽  

The study of the universals of the Russian language personality on the model of the associative-verbal network (AVN) proceeds from ontological and epistemological aspects. Ontologically the AVN “inherits” a number of functional properties from the human cognitome hypernetwork. Along with the dissipation of grammar and stochastic formation of the vectors of associative dominants, they can be attributed to universals in the narrow sense of the word (ultimately due to the evolutionary biological specifics of the species). On the one hand, the dissipated character of grammar in the AVN and stochasticity of the emergence of meaningful vectors impose epistemological restrictions on the methods used to study the AVN phenomena. On the other hand, the gradual accumulation of the new Russian corpora of verbal associations opens a window of research perspectives for studying culturally imposed universals of the Russian language personality in current diachrony with reference to ethno-social and regional variability. The formalization of associative-verbal processes is associated with methods of explicating grammar (dissipated in AVN) and its role in the emergent meaning-formation. The author’s techniques of working with the AVN of the Russian language personality on the latest experimental materials (the database SIBAS and its subcorpora) are aimed at explicating the associative profiles of lexico-grammatical phenomena and their relevance for the analysis of the universals in a broad sense of the term, the associative dominants creating a unified but dynamic with their fluctuations semantic field of the personality’s verbal culture.


Author(s):  
Stefano Rebeggiani

This chapter recapitulates the volume’s main achievements and sketches ways for expanding its methodology to other texts and to parts of Statius’ poem not covered in this book. It suggests that Valerius Flaccus’ epic is influenced by the same anti-Neronian ideology discussed in Chapter 1 and, like the Thebaid, reflects on the topic of imperial succession. The chapter surveys the political relevance of the Lemnos episode. It also argues that Statius’ reflection on the epic hero’s oscillation between the two poles of god and beast (discussed in Chapter 3 with reference to Capaneus and Tydeus especially) concerns other figures in the poem as well (Hippomedon, and by contrast Amphiaraus and Parthenopaeus). Finally, the chapter contains a summary of political views articulated by Statius in the Thebaid and suggests that the political ideas embedded in the poem were particularly close to the position of groups of survivors of Nero.


2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pascal Fischer

Conservatism is notoriously difficult to define. In the present study, conceptual metaphor theory is used to elucidate the nature of this ideology in its early phase when it emerged in England as a force struggling with the ideas of the French Revolution. It can be shown that conservative authors frequently do not conform to the pattern of orientational metaphors described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), according to which “up” is usually regarded as positive and “down” as negative. Conservatives often associate their own ideas with depth or a downward movement, whereas the loathed ideas of the political opponents are related to height or an upward movement. This dichotomy is closely connected to the polarity between solidity, stability and weight on the one hand and gaseity, volatility and lightness on the other. The study bases its analysis on numerous political tracts, pamphlets, and novels from the 1790s and early 1800s.


1989 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-282
Author(s):  
François Furet

I SHOULD LIKE TO START WITH AN EXTREMELY SIMPLE STATEment about the French Revolution. This is that there are many historical arguments among historians on many subjects, but that none of these arguments is so intense and so heated as the one which takes place in every generation about the French Revolution. It is as though the historical interpretation of this particular subject and the arguments of specialists directly reflect the political struggles and the gamble for power. It is true that we are all aware today that there are no unbiased historical interpretations: the selection of facts which provide the raw material for the historian's work is already the result of a choice, even although that choice is not an explicit one. To some extent, history is always the result of a relationship between the present and the past and more specifically between the characteristics of an individual and the vast realm of his possible roots in the past. But, nevertheless, even within this relative framework, not all the themes of history are equally relevant to the present interests of the historian and to the passions of his public.


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