scholarly journals Kavelin and Russian Liberalism

Slavic Review ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Field

Konstantin Dmitrievich Kavelin has long been regarded as both a leader and archetype of nineteenth-century Russian liberalism. It is not clear, however, what “liberal” and “liberalism” mean with reference to nineteenth-century Russia. Russian liberals of the early twentieth century, seeking to create a tradition for their movement, put the most diverse figures from the past in the liberal pantheon. Soviet historians, with somewhat more justice but the same kind of zeal, have sharply demarcated mid-century radicals, with, whom they sympathize, from the liberals. American historians of Russia tend to characterize as “liberal” almost anyone who tried to achieve social and political improvements by nonrevolutionary means. And almost all historians have resorted to the tautology whereby “liberalism” denotes the activities and doctrines of those public figures whom we know to be “liberals.”

1989 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 75-91
Author(s):  
Sarah Paul

As the first love sonnet sequence written by a woman in English, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese challenged the conventions of amatory poetry when it was published in 1850. The genre, which had always required its female inhabitants to maintain an aloof and icy silence, was not accustomed to female voices. Certainly a speaker like the narrator of Barrett Browning's sonnets, loudly proclaiming her right to adopt postures of adoration and unworthiness toward a male love object, had never before disturbed its rarefied spaces. The radical nature of the work, however, seems to have been lost on its nineteenth-century audience. Victorian readers saw nothing shocking or immodest about the sonnets and actually admired them a great deal, particularly because they seemed, oddly enough, to uphold an idealized model of devout and reticent femininity. Hall Caine called them “essentially feminine in their hyper-refinement, in their intense tremulous spirituality” (310–11), while Eric Robertson wrote that “no woman's heart indeed was ever laid barer to us, but no heart could have laid itself bare more purely” (281). Twelve years later Edmund Gosse spoke of the cycle's “noble dignity,” “stainless harmony,” and “high ethical level of distinguished utterance” (11, 21). Neither these nor any other nineteenth- or early twentieth-century critic saw anything revolutionary in the sequence. Only in the past dozen years have feminist critics re-evaluating Sonnets from the Portuguese discovered within its self-deprecating stanzas an “enterprise of heroinism” asserting a woman's “right” to be the active subject of both poetry and feeling rather than their passive object.


2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 20130335 ◽  
Author(s):  
James T. Costa

In 1963–1964 W. D. Hamilton introduced the concept of inclusive fitness, the only significant elaboration of Darwinian fitness since the nineteenth century. I discuss the origin of the modern fitness concept, providing context for Hamilton's discovery of inclusive fitness in relation to the puzzle of altruism. While fitness conceptually originates with Darwin, the term itself stems from Spencer and crystallized quantitatively in the early twentieth century. Hamiltonian inclusive fitness, with Price's reformulation, provided the solution to Darwin's ‘special difficulty’—the evolution of caste polymorphism and sterility in social insects. Hamilton further explored the roles of inclusive fitness and reciprocation to tackle Darwin's other difficulty, the evolution of human altruism. The heuristically powerful inclusive fitness concept ramified over the past 50 years: the number and diversity of ‘offspring ideas’ that it has engendered render it a fitter fitness concept, one that Darwin would have appreciated.


Nordlit ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Sawchuck

The writing of historical polar exploration in the English-speaking academy has undergone a substantial shift in the past twenty years, to the point where it may be safe to declare that the once-dominant triumphal and hagiographical style, inherited from the nineteenth century, has breathed its last. The explorer as depicted in this tradition has become a figure of fun in current discourse, easily recognizable in the contours of caricature. Sherrill Grace, for example, presents for our inspection "courageous men battling a dangerous, hostile, female terra incognita to prove their masculinity and the superior force of their technology" whose fate is to "die nobly in struggle, or to map, claim, name, and control unstructured space, even if only on paper." It is all too simple to dismiss these aims in an era with less palpable sympathy for them. Instead, many current writers have chosen the more difficult approach of grounding these explorers in appropriate political, social, and cultural contexts, and subsequently uncovering the rationale behind their beliefs and practices.


Author(s):  
Kordian Bakuła

The author aims to gain knowledge about the custom, its origin and about ourselves, Poles, in order to change the thinking and teaching about the subject of the article. Methods of research procedure: collection, description, interpretation of literary, ethnographic, dictionary material of the past and present: C.K. Norwid’s poem My Song II, a description of the custom by Z. Gloger, other ethnographic descriptions from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, interviews of students, studies of the attitude of Poles to food. Is kissing a fallen crumb really a Polish custom? It was assimilated rightly from the work of Erasmus of Rotterdam On civility in children (De civilitate morum puerilium); has a literary origin, not a folk background. Today, few Poles practice this custom.


Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland

Chapter 1 explores Woolf’s writings up to the end of 1925 in relation to scientific ideas on wave-particle duality, providing the ‘retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels’ which Michael Whitworth has suggested shows that she was working ‘in anticipation of the physicists’. The chapter as a whole challenges this idea of anticipation, showing that Woolf was actually working in parallel with physicists, philosophers, and artists in the early twentieth century, all of whom were starting to question dualistic models and instead beginning to develop complementary ones. A retrospect on wave-particle duality is also provided, making reference to Max Planck’s work on quanta and Albert Einstein’s development of light quanta. This chapter pays close attention to Woolf’s writing of light and her use of conjunctions, suggesting that Woolf was increasingly looking to write ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. Among other texts, it considers Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and ‘Sketch of the Past’.


Author(s):  
Julian Wright

This chapter asks wider questions about the flow of time as it was explored in this historical writing. It focuses on Jaurès’ philosophy of history, initially through a brief discussion of his doctoral thesis and the essay entitled ‘Le bilan social du XIXème siècle’ that he provided at the end of the Histoire socialiste, then through the work of three of his collaborators, Gabriel Deville, Eugène Fournière, and Georges Renard. One of the most important challenges for socialists in the early twentieth century was to understand the damage and division caused by revolution, while not losing the transformative mission of their socialism. With these elements established, the chapter returns to Jaurès, and in particular the long study of nineteenth-century society in chapter 10 of L’Armée nouvelle. Jaurès advanced an original vision of the nineteenth century and its meaning for the socialist present.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald G. Knapp

AbstractAmerica’s first documented wooden covered bridge was erected at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1805. Hundreds were constructed within two decades and at least 10,000 by the later 1800s. As settlers moved West, broad rivers were crossed with inventive structures incorporating timber trusses ingeniously developed by carpenters. Called covered bridges because of the roof and siding needed to protect the timber trusses, they became ubiquitous features on the American landscape. Over the past two centuries, most covered bridges were lost to flood, ice, arson, lightening, decay, as well as “progress,” replaced by “modern” iron, concrete, and steel spans. Of some 700 covered bridges remaining, many are mere replicas of their original forms no longer supported by timber trusses. Genuine historic bridges remain largely from the last half of the 1800s while civic boosterism has led to claims of earlier dates with often questionable authenticity. This essay presents three wooden covered bridges constructed in the 1820s along a 10-mile stretch of the Wallkill River in New Paltz, New York. Of the three, only Perrine’s Bridge, constructed first in 1821 and covered in 1822, is still standing with intact Burr timber trusses. Perrine’s is an iconic structure with exceptional heritage value because of authentic re-building and restoration in 1834, 1846, 1917, and 1968. Using documentary records, this essay establishes an accurate intertwined chronology for the three bridges, detailing nineteenth century building practices and contentious mid-twentieth century struggles pitting preservationists wanting authentic restoration against those wanting removal.


Modern Italy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Andrea Bonfanti

This essay demonstrates that it is impossible to appreciate the actions of the Italian communist Emilio Sereni without considering his Zionist background. Anyone who is interested in understanding the complexities of communism in the past century and to avoid simplistic conclusions about this ideology will benefit from the study. The problem at stake is that researchers often approach communism in a monolithic manner, which does not adequately explain the multiform manifestations (practical and theoretical) of that phenomenon. This ought to change and to this extent this essay hopes to contribute to that recent strand of historical research that challenges simplistic views on communism. More specifically, by analysing the Management Councils that Sereni created in postwar Italy, we can see that many of their features in fact derived from, or found their deepest origins in, his previous experience as a committed socialist Zionist. The study, then, also relates Sereni to and looks at the broader experiences of early twentieth-century Zionism and Italian communism in the early postwar years.


1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Caulk

Several centuries after firearms had been introduced, they were still of little importance in Ethiopia, where cavalry continued to dominate warfare until the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they were much sought after by local leaders ambitious to secure their autonomy or to grasp supreme authority. The first of these warlords to make himself emperor, Tēwodros (1855–68), owed nothing to firearms. However, his successors, Yohannis IV (1872–89) and Minīlik (d. 1913), did. Both excelled in their mastery of the new technology and acquired large quantities of quick-firing weapons. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, possession of firearms — principally the breech loading rifle — had become a precondition for successfully contending for national leadership. Yet the wider revolution associated (as in Egypt) with the establishment of a European-style army did not follow. Nor was rearmament restricted to the following of the emperor. Despite the revival of imperial authority effected by Yohannis and Minīlik, rifles and even machine-guns were widely enough spread at the turn of the century to reinforce the fragmentation of power long characteristic of the Ethiopian state. Into the early twentieth century, it remained uncertain if the peculiar advantages of the capital in the import of arms would be made to serve centralization.


2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
Stefan Knapik

Abstract The pedagogical treatise is generally understood to be a manual of singing or instrumental techniques that is largely practical in approach, yet a critique of violin tutor books dating from the early twentieth century, especially those written by the renowned violinists Joseph Joachim (writing in conjunction with Andreas Moser), Leopold Auer, and Carl Flesch, reveals an extensive engagement with a range of wider ideologies. In a bid to trump the supposedly deadening effects of both a historicism resulting from the availability of earlier treatises, as well as the overly scientific approach taken by contemporaneous treatises, these violinist-authors embrace metaphysical ideals of mind or vitality, and the result is a model of violin playing founded on the concept of “singing tone,” an idea developed out of nineteenth-century notions of song/melody as embodying a vital essence. As did Wagner, in his 1869 essay Über das Dirigiren, writers play with the idea that theoretical and performative categories, such as tempo, phrasing, dynamics, vibrato, and types of bow stroke, both conflict with each other and find a deeper unity in a subjectivist ideal of tone. The approach of these texts is not explorative, however, so much as a rather defensive championing of the idea of mind or vitality: ideologies of self, health, and nationalism ultimately prevail over an engagement with historical evidence in Moser's discussion of ornaments, and Auer's intolerance of any mitigating influence that might qualify the artist's final word on aesthetic matters is reminiscent of a reductive, Nietzschean ideal of vitality. Nevertheless, writers struggle to reconcile it with the messier realities of performing, as an embodied and collaborative activity, and subsequently what speaks louder in their texts are anxieties over affronts to notions of self, expressed using pathological notions common to the era. Whereas at times writers encourage students of the violin to share in their lauding of vitalistic ideals, more often than not they try to impose disciplinary measures as a means of inculcating them.


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