scholarly journals Annalistic Writing and the Development of Written Culture (Novgorod of the 11th and the First Half of the 12th Centuries)

Slovene ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-110
Author(s):  
Timofey V. Guimon

The author studies key moments in the history of early Novgorodian annalistic writing in the context of other written practices in Novgorod. The first, very brief annalistic notes were made by clerics of the St. Sophia Cathedral in the middle of the 11th century, at the time when, in Novgorod, writing was becoming part of the everyday life of clerics as well as of the lay elite and the administration. The first systematic historical works (an annalistic compilation and a collection of lists) appear in the 1090s, when we see the spread of book production beyond St. Sophia and the start of the mass usage of princely seals. The beginning of the systematic keeping of annalistic records in the 1110s was probably stimulated by the creation and the revisions of the Primary Chronicle in Kiev but, at the same time, it is around 1117 that the posadnik’s seal appears, and this reflects a shift in the political balance in Novgorod. The 1130s were the time when the earliest extant documents granting lands, incomes, and privileges to church institutions were issued, and some other innovations in written culture also took place at around that time. In 1132 the annals previously kept for the prince passed to the control of the archbishop. Their content changed and official accusations relating to the behavior of princes began to be included. Thus, it was in the 1130s that the rights, privileges, and mutual positions of the actors in Novgorodian politics started to be fixed in writing.

Author(s):  
N.A. Beliakova

This study aims at providing an overview of the everyday life of Russian nuns in Palestine after World War II. This research encompassed the following tasks: to analyze the range of ego-documents available today, characterizing the everyday life and internal motivation of women in choosing the church jurisdiction; to identify, on the basis of written sources, the most active supporters of the Moscow Patriarchate to examine the nuns’ activity as information agents of the Russian Orthodox Church and Soviet government; to characterize the actors influencing the everyday life of the Russian nuns in the context of the creation of the state of Israel and new borders dividing the Holy Land; to present the motives and instruments of influence employed by the representatives of both secu-lar and church diplomacies in respect to the women leading a monastic life; to describe consequences of including the nuns into the sphere of interest of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR; to show the specific role of “Russian women” in the context of the struggle for securing positions of the USSR and the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in the region. The sources for the study were prodused by the state (correspondence between the state authorities, meeting notes) and from the religious actors (letters of nuns to the church authorities, reports of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission, memoirs of the clergy). By combining the methods of micro-history and history of the everyday life with the political history of the Cold War, the study examines the agency of the nuns — a category of women traditionally unnoticeable in the political history. Due to the specificity of the sources, the study focuses exclusively on a group of the nuns of the Holy Land who came under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patri-archate. The majority of the Russian-speaking population of Palestine in the mid-1940s were women in the status of monastic residents (nuns and novices) and pilgrims, and in the 1940s–1950s, they were drawn into the geopolitical combinations of the Soviet Union. The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, staffed with representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, becomes a key institution of influence in the region. This article shows how elderly nuns became an object of close attention and even funding by the Soviet state. The everyday life of the nuns became directly dependent on the activities of the Soviet agencies and Soviet-Israeli relations after the arri-val of the Soviet state representatives. At the same time, the nuns became key participants in the inter-jurisdictional conflicts and began to act as agents of influence in the region. The study analyzes numerous ego-documents created by the nuns themselves from the collection of the Council on the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the USSR Council of Ministers. The study shows how nuns positioned themselves as leading a monastic life in the written correspondence with the ROC authorities and staff of the Soviet MFA. The instances of influence of different secular authorities on the development of the female monasticism presented here point to promising research avenues for future reconstruction of the history of women in the Holy Land based on archival materials from state departments, alternative sources should also be found. The study focused on the life of elderly Russian nuns in the Holy Land and showed their activity in the context of the geopolitical transformations in the Near East in the 1940s–1950s.


2014 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabella Cosse

Abstract In this article I reconstruct the history of Mafalda, the famous comic strip by the Argentine cartoonist Quino that was read, discussed, and viewed as an emblematic representation of Argentina’s middle class. With the aim of contributing to discussions on the interpretation of the middle class in Argentina and Latin America, I examine the emergence, circulation, and sociopolitical significance of the comic from its first strips in 1964 until Quino stopped producing new installments in 1973, making use of two conceptual and methodological approaches: a perspective situated at the intersection of the everyday and the political, as well as a consideration of humor as a way of exploring social identities. I argue first that Mafalda’s ironic and conceptual humor worked with the contradictions of the middle class as it faced social modernization, cultural and political radicalization, and a weakening democracy. Second, I suggest that the strip contributed to a representation of a heterogeneous middle class marked by ideological differences but nonetheless conceived as one. Third, I claim that such a representation lost its relevance with the political polarization and violence of the 1970s, as portraying a middle class—or a society—united despite differences was no longer feasible in that context. To illustrate this, the article closes by noting that, shortly after Mafalda was discontinued, state terrorism would brutally demonstrate just how little space there was in Argentina for the young, antiestablishment generation depicted in the strip.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrey Lyamzin

This article publishes and analyses an interview with Lieutenant Colonel V. V. Skoryak, a Soviet military specialist who took part in the Vietnam War for eleven months in 1970. The interview describes little-known facts about military advisers’ stay in the country, when they mostly stayed far away from the frontline and dealt with the preparation and maintenance of the S‑75 high-altitude air defence systems. Special attention is paid to the everyday life of the advisers and their legal status, which helps reveal new aspects of the “everyday history” of war. Skoryak speaks about the ideological, moral, and psychological preparedness of the Soviet people to fulfil their “international duty”, which, according to him, was internally motivated. He also analyses post-traumatic syndromes in Soviet military men: it was especially frequent and profound in the early stages of the conflict. Additionally, the interview contains information about the medical care provided to the participants of the conflict and the consequences for their health. It puts forward some ideas about how the chemical weapons used by the Americans affected the human reproductive system. The interview provides an emotional assessment of the war and their place in the biography of a Soviet officer.


2019 ◽  
pp. 85-92
Author(s):  
Maryna Budzar

The publication of the document is devoted to the anniversaries of two well-known representatives of the Ukrainian elite of the 19th century — 200th anniversary of the birth of Hryhorii Pavlovych Galagan and the 215th anniversary of the birth of Mykola Andriiovych Markevych. Published letter depicts the serious events of the family history of Markevyches — the disease and the death of the father of historian Andrii Markevych. The text contains a detailed description of the events leading up to the event and the circumstances of the death of A. Markevych. The author addresses to Pavlo Galagan, who is the husband of his aunt (mother’s sister). He fully trusts this man. This leads to the frankness of the story. The text includes people from the immediate surroundings of related families of Markevyches — Galagans. This allows us to clarify the personal and psychological characteristics of individual representatives of the Markevyches family. We can notice from the text the remarkable details of the everyday life of the middle-income family of the beginning of the 19th century. We see the arrangement of everyday life, the traditions of everyday communication, the level of provision of medical aid, etc. The contents of the document reveals the attitude of the nobility Left Bank Ukraine to the problem of disease and death, to the ethics of family communication, to property and financial problems.


Author(s):  
Olha Zubko ◽  

This article informs about the impact of scientific and technological progress of the 1920s on everyday life of the Ukrainian emigration center in the interwar period of Czechoslovakia in 1918-1939. First of all, it is referred to technological novelties of the period in 1921-1929: cinematography, television, automobile manufacturing, fashion, medical industry, telegraph, and bank and post transfers. The proposed topic has not been submitted to the scientific audience yet, as far as the life of the Ukrainian emigration in the interwar of Czechoslovak Republic was considered mainly in the context of political and sociocultural work both emigrants themselves and the latest Ukrainian, Czech and Slovak historians. It is focused on two pointsin the proposed scientific intelligence: consideration of the everyday life of anti-Bolshevist emigration and of the lives of Ukrainian immigrants in Czechoslovakia which were arbitrarily distributed for four periods: 1918-1921, 1921-1925, 1925-1933, 1933-1939, all of which had its own specific features. Consideration of the Ukrainian everyday emigration life in the years 1921–1929 in the interwar of Czechoslovakia carried out with the help ofrecollection, memoirs, postal correspondence (letters) and archival documentation. Therefore, it implies the usage of general methods of the scientific research: analysis, analogy, historical and logical methods. The emigrational routine is a farsighted direction of the historical research, because it is the history of the small vivid worlds, peculiar alternative to the researches which are focused on global political and social processes and events.Everyday life is not minted in special decrees or laws;it is notrecorded in programs and speeches, as far as political and state history, and it is not honed by the financial gains in the economy, and by the cultural monuments, though it always exists like air, it goes unnoticed as time.


Author(s):  
Jean Louis Halpérin

Bentham has defended the idea of a general codification as a “map of the law” that could allow the comparison between the laws of different nations. This essay aims to use this relationship about the ideas of codifying the law and mapping the laws to think about the possibility of mapping the history of codification, taking as its point of departure the writing specialized codes - not only the civil codes. Mapping can be a means to deal with the relationships between the countries adopting a code, the opportunity to consider the relationships between the codes and the creation of new States, the national processes of unification, the adoption, the political and social revolutions and ruptures. Also, it will try to make correspondences between these phenomena in order to construct tables that could be represented through future maps.


Author(s):  
Anna S. Akimova ◽  

Moscow is the city which united the characters of A.N. Tolstoy’s novel “Peter the First”. Kitay-Gorod is the space where the action of the first book is mainly set. In the novel Tolstoy showed in great detail the everyday life of the city and its inhabi- tants. According to the I.E. Zabelin’s research (“History of the city of Moscow”) in late 17 — early 18 th centuries Moscow was like a big village that is why Tolstoy relied on his childhood memories about the life in the small village Sosnovka (Samara Region) describing the streets of Moscow. The novel begins with the description of a poor peasant household of Brovkin near Moscow, then Volkov’s noble estate is depicted and Menshikov’s house. The space of the city is expanding with each new “address”. Moscow estates, and in particular, connected with the figure of “guardian, lover of the Princess-ruler” V.V. Golitsyn, in Tolstoy’s novel are inextricably linked with the character’s living and with the life of the country. The description of the palace built by Golitsyn at the peak of his career is based on the Sergei Solovyov’s “History of Russia in ancient times”. Golitsyn left it and went to his estate outside Moscow Medvedkovo and from there in exile.


Author(s):  
Priyanuj Choudhury

Fear is one of the foremost debilitating factors that hinder an individual’s growth, and one of the cornerstones of mainstream competitive schooling in India. The presence of fear in the process of schooling has great significance in the way it shapes an individual and affects learning. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the ways in which education can be imparted without the operation of fear, by looking at the everyday practices, rituals and built form of a KFI school in Bengaluru. Through an ethnographic exploration, the author attempts to interpret the micro processes of everyday life in the school and pedagogic practices employed across junior, middle and senior school classrooms that work in collusion to create an environment free of fear. Through a case study of contradictions, the author also looks at the possible factors that may work against the creation of such a space.


2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (02) ◽  
pp. 207-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larissa Zakharova

Why should we consider the everyday life of ordinary citizens in their countless struggles to obtain basic consumer goods if the priorities of their leaders lay elsewhere? For years, specialists of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies neglected the history of everyday life and, like the so-called “totalitarian” school, focused on political history, seeking to grasp how power was wielded over a society that was considered immobile and subject to the state's authority. Furthermore, studies on the eastern part of Europe were dominated by political scientists who were interested in the geopolitics of the Cold War. The way the field was structured meant that little attention was paid to sociological and anthropological perspectives that sought to understand social interaction.


Author(s):  
Frank Trentmann

As recently as 1985, the doyen of social science history in Germany, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, said the study of everyday life added little more than a bit of ‘gruel’ to the main course of history. Since then, the turf wars between social history, history from below, and cultural history have themselves become a thing of the past. It was during the 1950s–1970s that first sociologists, and then ‘new social’ historians, embraced the everyday. The flowering of consumption studies since would be unthinkable without the recognition that everyday life is an important – perhaps the most important – place people find meaning, develop habits, and acquire a sense of themselves and their world. This article offers an historical account of the changing scope and politics of everyday life. In contrast to recent discussions that have made the everyday appear the product of Western Europe after World War II, it traces the longer history of the everyday and the different politics of modernity which it has inspired.


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