All men and beasts, lions, eagles, quails… Anthropomorphic and Zoomorphic Representations of Nations and States in Slavic Сultural Discourse

The book was compiled on the materials of the scientific conference “Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic representations of nations and states in the Slavic cultural discourse” (2019), held at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow) and devoted to the history of the nations’ personifications and generalized ethnic images in period of “imagined communities” formation. This process is reconstructing on verbal and visual sources and by methods of various disciplines. The historical evolution of such zoomorphic incarnations of nations as an Eagle (in the Polish patriotic poetry of the first third of the 19th cent), a Falcon (in the South Slavic and Czech cultures in the 19th cent), a Griffin (during the formation of the Cassubian ethnocultural identity) is considered. The animalistic national representations in the Estonian caricature of the interwar twenty years of the 20th cent., so as the functioning of the Bear’s allegory as a symbol of Russia in modern Russian souvenir products are analyzed. The originality of zoomorphic symbolism in Polish and Soviet cultures is shown оn the examples of para- and metaheraldic images in XXth cent. The transformation of the verbal and visual images of “Mother Russia” personifications in Russian Empire was reconstructed. The evolution of various allegories of ethnic “Self” and “Others” is presented by caricatures of 19th – 20th cent. in Slovenian periodic and in Russian “Satyricon” journal (1914–1918).