Ivan the Terrible in Russian Historical Memory since 1991

2020 ◽

Vol 5 (3) ◽

pp. 160-175

Author(s):

Denis Artamonov ◽

Sophia V. Tikhonova

Keyword(s):

Narrative Research ◽

Historical Memory ◽

Digital Environment ◽

The Past ◽

Moral Aspect ◽

The Media ◽

Ivan The Terrible ◽

Media Narratives ◽

Selection Of

The article deals with the mechanics of oblivion in the structure of historical memory in the digital environment (media memory). Th e authors consider media memory as a system of selection of emotionally colored ideas about the Past, in which oblivion plays the role of a fi lter established by censorship and mythologizing practices. Using the example of two specifi c historical events, the murder of the heirs of the throne by the royal fathers, they show how the mechanism of oblivion works by comparing historiographical, mythological and media narratives. Th e empirical basis of the media narrative research is Internet memes dedicated to Ivan the Terrible and Peter I. Th e authors come to the conclusion that the censorship and ideological practice of state mythology refused to distort the historiographical conventions about the analyzed events in favor of their displacement. Empirical data demonstrate the displacement of the moral aspect in the assessment of events due to the humorous strategy of their interpretation.

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“Tolstoys are Totally Different Matter...” A. K. Tolstoy in Bunin’s Experience of Historical Reflection: B. Genre Aspect of the Theme of Memory

Studies in Theory of Literary Plot and Narratology ◽

10.25205/2410-7883-2020-2-371-384 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 15 (2) ◽

pp. 371-384

Author(s):

E. E. Anisimova

Keyword(s):

Historical Memory ◽

Russian History ◽

The Past ◽

History Of ◽

Ivan The Terrible ◽

The One ◽

Historical Reflection ◽

Artistic Heritage ◽

Literary Revision ◽

Poetic Response

The article deals with I. A. Bunin’s perception of the personality and works by A. K. Tolstoy. The key components of this reception are the system of philosophy of history views formulated by A. K. Tolstoy and his concept of historical memory. The belonging of the 19 th century poet to the large Tolstoy family was mythologized by Bunin and became a reason for understanding and determining the young writer’s own position in relation to each of the three writers: L. N. Tolstoy, A. K. Tolstoy and Bunin’s contemporary A. N. Tolstoy. The paper draws upon fictional and nonfictional documents by I. A. Bunin and A. K. Tolstoy. Bunin’s reception of the personality and artistic heritage by A. K. Tolstoy was determined by the history of his origin. The Tolstoy family attracted Bunin’s attention because it was an illustration of his own concept of the literary gift as a “family affair”. Leo Tolstoy enjoyed an undisputed genius and generally recognized family reputation. Aleksey N. Tolstoy’s biography, on the contrary, was ambiguous – the fact that inspired Bunin’s scandalous hints in his essay “The Third Tolstoy”. Aleksey K. Tolstoy’s biographical path of was also surrounded by similar rumors – but Bunin in his article “Inonia and Kitezh” prefers to keep silent on them. In the 1900s, A. K. Tolstoy appeared to Bunin as a rival poet, and in the eyes of Bunin’s contemporaries as the one of his main literary predecessors. Bunin’s poem “Kurgan” was a kind of poetic response to A. K. Tolstoy’s ballad “Kurgan” dedicated to the problem of historical oblivion. These works-doublets could serve as an illustration of one of the types of literary “revision” introduced by H. Bloom. Bunin developed the plot of A. K. Tolstoy’s “Kurgan” in the elegiac genre and demonstrated the value of the past in the present. Since 1918, Bunin’s perception of Tolstoy’s legacy has changed. A. K. Tolstoy’s views of the Russian history are publicly emphasized in the “Cursed Days”, “Mission of the Russian Emigration” and “Inonia and Kitezh”. According to A. K. Tolstoy, the historical catastrophe for Russia was programmed by “Tatar yoke”, which distorted the European character of the national culture and personality and later drove the nation to the particularly Asian, as Tolstoy thought, phenomenon of Ivan the Terrible. Borrowing some modern ideas from the natural sciences, Bunin transferred a number of A. K. Tolstoy’s observations into an anthropological sphere and pointed out specific signs of the “Mongolian” traces in Bolsheviks’ Russia.

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Ivan the Terrible in Russian Historical Memory since 1991

10.1515/9781644695883 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Charles J. Halperin

Keyword(s):

Historical Memory ◽

Ivan The Terrible

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Triumphant memory of the perpetrators: Putin’s politics of re-Stalinization

Communist and Post-Communist Studies ◽

10.1016/j.postcomstud.2015.12.007 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 49 (1) ◽

pp. 61-73 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Dina Khapaeva

Keyword(s):

Historical Memory ◽

Mass Movement ◽

Modern Concept ◽

Russian Society ◽

Social Basis ◽

State Dependent ◽

Great Patriotic War ◽

Soviet Russia ◽

Ivan The Terrible ◽

The One

In this article, I explore the interconnection between Putin’s politics of re-Stalinization, historical memory, and a specific version of the post-Soviet neo-medievalism. I show that re-Stalinization is a mass movement that is grounded in the unprocessed memory of Soviet crimes and atrocities. The popular myth of the “Great Patriotic War” and the myth of Stalinism as the Golden Age exploited by Putin’s memory politics became a gold mine for Putin’s kleptocracy. I argue that re-Stalinization and the Kremlin-sponsored ideology of Eurasianism represents two interrelated trends of a complex ideological process. Eurasianism combines Soviet denial of individuality with the idea of a state-dependent patriarchal society and Russian historical messianism. It glorifies the reign of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin. The ‘medievalist’ discourse of Eurasian ideologists, which advocates a return to the medieval society of orders, on the one hand, and the Gothic monsters populating post- Soviet film and fiction, on the other, creates a political language that expresses new attitudes to people in post-Soviet Russia. They depict a new social contract that reconsiders the modern concept of citizenship, and creates a social basis for the criminalization and militarization of Russian society.

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False Identity and Multiple Identities in Russian History: The Mongol Empire and Ivan the Terrible

The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies ◽

10.5195/cbp.2011.160 ◽

2011 ◽

Author(s):

Charles Halperin

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Natural Science ◽

Historical Memory ◽

Multiple Identities ◽

Current Status ◽

Russian History ◽

False Identity ◽

Ivan The Terrible ◽

Mongol Empire ◽

And Linguistics

Anatolii Fomenko, the “New Chronology,”and Russian History*The ludicrous reconstruction of Russian history by the Moscow mathematicians Anatolii Fomenko and Gleb Nosovskii, called the “New Chronology,” has elicited a heated response in Russia from professional historians and other scholars. Fomenko and Nosovskii’s methodology purports to be good natural science (mathematics and astronomy), but it is actually bad humanities (history and linguistics) research. Because its conclusions are worthless, the support engendered by the New Chronology among the Russian public requires explanation and sheds light on the current status of historiography and historical memory in Russia. In addition, more study is needed of the New Chronology’s relationship to Marxism, nationalism, and Eurasianism, its attitude toward religion and possible anti-Semitism.Who Was Not Ivan the Terrible,Who Ivan the Terrible Was NotThe New Chronology’s contention that “Ivan IV” is really a composite of four rulers is science fi ction, but legitimate scholars have also proposed that Ivan had multiple identities to resolve contradictions and shed more light upon Ivan’s reign. However, newer attempts to attribute multiple names to Ivan and to ascribe literary alter egos to him are as unconvincing as earlier theories that Ivan’s reign was divided into “good” and “bad” phases or the more recent contention that Ivan’s writings are seventeenth-century apocrypha. There was one and only one Ivan the Terrible, and one is more than enough.

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