Age of Genius or Century of Revolution? Russian Culture and Power Across the High-Low Divide, 1850–1950

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 239-253
Author(s):  
Michael David-Fox
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Cultural System ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Masses

Abstract This article discusses Jeffrey Brooks’ metaphor of an integrated ecosystem to describe Russian cultural history in the late imperial and early Soviet periods. Brooks’s Firebird and the Fox describes an interlocking cultural system marked by high-low interactions, as a rich Russian folkloric tradition based on fable and popular tales was reworked with remarkable creativity in what he calls an “age of genius.” In response, this article argues that this period of Russian cultural creativity can be seen as coinciding with the extended life-cycle of the Russian Revolution. The subversive, satirical humor and irony running through Brooks’s cultural “play-sphere” was complemented by another tradition: a didactic, instructional, enlightening “teach-sphere” that animated a wide range of intelligentsia and cultural forces shaping cultural evolution and cultural revolution. If the play-sphere highlights the rebellious distance between culture and power, the teach-sphere’s project of transforming the masses reveals their many commonalities. The essay reflects on how the intersections of culture and power shaped early Soviet culture, the avant-garde, and successive phases of Stalinist culture. While Socialist Realism promoted the theoretical declaration of a unified socialist culture, the persistence of differing elements of the cultural system raises the question of Soviet cultural syncretism.

Cultural evolution and cultural psychology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Mesoudi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Cultural Psychology ◽  
Phylogenetic Analyses ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Cultural Inheritance ◽  
Human Psychology

Cultural evolution is a branch of the evolutionary sciences which assumes that (i) human cognition and behaviour is shaped not only by genetic inheritance, but also cultural inheritance (also known as social learning), and (ii) this cultural inheritance constitutes a Darwinian evolutionary system that can be analysed and studied using tools borrowed from evolutionary biology. In this chapter I explore the numerous compatibilities between the fields of cultural evolution and cultural psychology, and the potential mutual benefits from their closer alignment. First, understanding the evolutionary context within which human psychology emerged gives added significance to the findings of cultural psychologists, which reinforce the conclusion reached by cultural evolution scholars that humans inhabit a ‘cultural niche’ within which the major means of adaptation to difference environments is cultural, rather than genetic. Hence, we should not be surprised that human psychology shows substantial cross-cultural variation. Second, a focus on cultural transmission pathways, drawing on cultural evolution models and empirical research, can help to explain to the maintenance of, and potential changes in, cultural variation in psychological processes. Evidence from migrants, in particular, points to a mix of vertical, oblique and horizontal cultural transmission that can explain the differential stability of different cultural dimensions. Third, cultural evolutionary methods offer powerful means of testing historical (“macro-evolutionary”) hypotheses put forward by cultural psychologists for the origin of psychological differences. Explanations in terms of means of subsistence, rates of environmental change or pathogen prevalence can be tested using quantitative models and phylogenetic analyses that can be used to reconstruct cultural lineages. Evolutionary considerations also point to potential problems with current cross-country comparisons conducted within cultural psychology, such as the non-independence of data points due to shared cultural history. Finally, I argue that cultural psychology can play a central role in a synthetic evolutionary science of culture, providing valuable links between individual-oriented disciplines such as experimental psychology and neuroscience on the one hand, and society-oriented disciplines such as anthropology, history and sociology on the other, all within an evolutionary framework that provides links to the biological sciences.

The Art of Love Poetry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Gray
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
Meaning And Function ◽  
Comprehensive History

Love begets poetry; poetry begets love. These two propositions have seemed evident to thinkers and poets across the Western literary tradition. Plato writes that “anyone that love touches instantly becomes a poet.” And even today, when poetry has largely disappeared from the mainstream of popular culture, it retains its romantic associations. But why should this be so—what are the connections between poetry and erotic love that lead us to associate them so strongly with one another? An examination of different theories of both love and poetry across the centuries reveals that the connection between them is not merely an accident of cultural history—the result of our having grown up hearing, or hearing about, love poetry—but something more intrinsic. Even as definitions of them have changed, the two phenomena have consistently been described in parallel terms. Love is characterized by paradox. Above all, it is both necessarily public, because interpersonal, and intensely private; hence it both requires expression and resists it. In poetry, especially lyric poetry, which features its own characteristic paradoxes and silences, love finds a natural outlet. This study considers both the theories and the love poems themselves, bringing together a wide range of examples from different eras in order to examine the major structures that love and poetry share. It does not aim to be a comprehensive history of Western love poetry, but an investigation into the meaning and function of recurrent tropes, forms, and images employed by poets to express and describe erotic love.

Lying in Early Modern English Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Constant Feature ◽  
The Right ◽  
English Culture

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterized by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. Many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth; others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life, determining ideas of identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in practice and theory, concentrating on a series of particular events, which are read in terms of academic debates and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Anne Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.

Revolution Rekindled

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Polly Jones
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novels ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Soviet Literature ◽  
Late Socialism ◽  
Revolutionary History ◽  
Gorbachev Era ◽  
Depth Interviews

A major late Soviet initiative, the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ (Plamennye revoliutsionery) series, was launched to rekindle popular enthusiasm for the revolution, eventually giving rise to over 150 biographies and historical novels authored by many key post-Stalinist writers. What new meanings did revolution take on as it was reimagined by writers including dissidents, leading historians, and popular historical novelists? How did their millions of readers engage with these highly varied texts? To what extent does this Brezhnev-era publishing phenomenon challenge the notion of late socialism as a time of ‘stagnation’, and how does it confirm it? Through exploring the complex processes of writing, editing, censorship, and reading of late Soviet literature, Revolution Rekindled highlights the dynamic negotiations that continued within Soviet culture well past the apparent turning point of 1968 through to the late Gorbachev era. It also complicates the opposition between ‘official’ and underground post-Stalinist culture by showing how Soviet writers and readers engaged with both, as they sought answers to key questions of revolutionary history, ethics, and ideology: it thus reveals the enormous breadth and vitality of the ‘historical turn’ amongst the late Soviet population. Revolution Rekindled is the first archival, oral history, and literary study of this unique late socialist publishing experiment, from its beginnings in the early 1960s to its collapse in the early 1990s. It draws on a wide range of previously untapped archives, uses in-depth interviews with Brezhnev-era writers, editors, and publishers, and assesses the generic and stylistic innovations within the series’ biographies and novels.

Charles Olson and American Modernism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Poet ◽  
Mark Rothko

The Practice of the Self situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910–70) at the centre of the early postwar American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson’s work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson’s published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early postwar American modernism. The development of Olson’s work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists—including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage—The Practice of the Self offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of postwar American modernism.

The Baroque as Anti-Classicism: The French Case

2019 ◽  
pp. 622-641
Author(s):  
Larry F. Norman
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
World War ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
French Case

This chapter examines the rising mid-twentieth-century attention to the Baroque as a challenge to “French Classicism.” The concept of the literary Baroque faced strong opposition in France, where it undermined a critical tradition that isolated the “Age of Louis XIV” from European-wide currents. After World War II, the transnational Baroque provided a model for a more cosmopolitan view of the seventeenth century. Its integration into French literary and cultural history, however, reverses established paradigms of cultural evolution and periodization according to which Renaissance Classicism is followed by Counter-Reformation Baroque. This development also raises questions concerning the intellectual and ideological underpinning of the Baroque, including its relation to monarchy and Cartesian modernity. Authors examined include foundational figures of comparative literature (Erich Auerbach, E. R. Curtius, Leo Spitzer, René Wellek), art critics and historians (Eugenio d’Ors, Arnold Hauser, Victor-L. Tapié), and pioneers of the French Baroque (Jean Rousset, Marcel Raymond).

scholarly journals Advanced mycelium materials as potential self-growing biomedical scaffolds

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Elena Antinori ◽  
Marco Contardi ◽  
Giulia Suarato ◽  
Andrea Armirotti ◽  
Rosalia Bertorelli ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Tissue Engineering ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Direct Interaction ◽  
Dermal Fibroblasts ◽  
Engineering Systems ◽  
Edible Fungi ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Fibrous Network ◽  
Body Tissues ◽  
Wide Range

AbstractMycelia, the vegetative part of fungi, are emerging as the avant-garde generation of natural, sustainable, and biodegradable materials for a wide range of applications. They are constituted of a self-growing and interconnected fibrous network of elongated cells, and their chemical and physical properties can be adjusted depending on the conditions of growth and the substrate they are fed upon. So far, only extracts and derivatives from mycelia have been evaluated and tested for biomedical applications. In this study, the entire fibrous structures of mycelia of the edible fungi Pleurotus ostreatus and Ganoderma lucidum are presented as self-growing bio-composites that mimic the extracellular matrix of human body tissues, ideal as tissue engineering bio-scaffolds. To this purpose, the two mycelial strains are inactivated by autoclaving after growth, and their morphology, cell wall chemical composition, and hydrodynamical and mechanical features are studied. Finally, their biocompatibility and direct interaction with primary human dermal fibroblasts are investigated. The findings demonstrate the potentiality of mycelia as all-natural and low-cost bio-scaffolds, alternative to the tissue engineering systems currently in place.

S. YAKOVENKO AND HIS SKILLS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE INTERPETATION OF Y. BOUTSKO’S MONO-OPERA "DIARY OF A MADMAN"

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-145
Author(s):  
O. A. Podguzova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Xxth Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Great Demand ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Vocal Art

Sergey Borisovich Yakovenko is the People's Artist of Russia, a famous musician, vocal teacher and Doctor of Art History. He entered a bright page in the history of Russian vocal art of the XXth century. Starting from the 1950s, as a vocalist, he was in great demand for chamber vocal performances, with some of them being composed by modern musicians. Yakovenko was able to operate freely with a whole stock of expressive means, inherent for avant-garde music, allowing him to take part in the most difficult performances of the latest vocal and vocal-instrumental compositions, which manifested his inclination to the theater, to the disclosure of the dramaturgy of works. S. B. Yakovenko’s stage talent declared itself in its fullness during the performance of mono- operas, among them "Diary of a Madman" by Yuriy Butsko (1968), which received a great resonance in the theatrical life of Russia. The general content of this article is the analysis of S. B. Yakovenko’s performing skill, which gave birth to a wide range of character images, generated by the protagonist’s imagination. After the analysis of audio and video recordings of the vocalist’s performances, as well as his numerous scientific works and conversations, the author discovers several important features typical for the performing interpretation by S. B. Yakovenko. These are his vocal-dramaturgical principles and vocal-theatrical direction. In Y. Boutsko’s opera "Diary of a Madman" the unique performance palette of S. B. Yakovenko allows the singer to create eight various, rapidly interchanging images, using exclusively the resources of his voice, while being on an empty stage without props and with little or no gesture or mime.

Allegorie della libertŕ e tipologie del sacro nell'iconografia rivoluzionaria russa

2012 ◽  
pp. 57-80
Author(s):  
Dogo Dunja
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Symbolic System ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Source Materials

Allegories of liberty and typologies of the sacred in the iconography of revolutionary Russia. Revolutionary iconography addresses a topic that crosses the field of studies of the Russian Revolution, whose scope in the past two decades has begun to investigate the cultural history of 1917, thanks to easier access to source materials that have re-emerged after the opening of the Russian archives. Above all, the essay attempts to reconstruct how three particular typologies (St. George, the Angel, Liberty) came into use in the Russian revolutionary symbolic system and underwent a metamorphosis, contributing to a phenomenon of syncretism. Such discourses can show how different political subjects – at times on opposing sides - employed a common imagery within a struggle for the conquest of the symbol.

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