at the Australian National University
Canberra
Thursday 4 February, Friday 5 February 2010
All proceedings will take place in the lecture theatre of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, Ellery Crescent, Building 127.
For timetable, see Program
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Judith Armstrong: ‘Tolstoy and the Proposal’
Most readers assume that the famous scene in Anna Karenina in which Levin proposes to Kitty by writing the initial of each word he wants to say to her in chalk on a green baize card table – words which Kitty somewhat miraculously understands straightaway – is virtually a reproduction of Lev Nikolaevich’s courtship of Sonya Behrs. This widespread assumption rests partly on the notion, equally widespread, that Levin and Tolstoy were virtually one person, and partly on Sonya herself, who in her own record, ‘What the Chalk Wrote’, and for her own reasons, gives a similar, ‘original’ account of the momentous occasion. However, both of these accounts are highly glossed and not very accurate versions of what really transpired, as will be demonstrated by my paper.
Mary Besemeres: ‘The Family in Exile, Between Languages: Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead, Anca Vlasopolos’s No Return Address’
This paper explores Polish-born Jewish authors Eva Hoffman’s and Lisa Appignanesi’s memoirs of migrating to Canada as children, from the aftermath of war in Central Europe. Lost in Translation (1989) and Losing the Dead (1999) resonate with each other in a number of ways, from the authors’ parallel journeys between Poland and 1950s Canada, to the invocation of loss in both titles. The theme of loss – at once cultural, personal, linguistic and historical – is central to both these immigrant memoirs. Equally significant is each writer’s relationship to her family. The paper compares how Hoffman and Appignanesi portray differences between their parents’, their sibling’s and their own responses to the upheaval and confusion of migrating from war-scarred Europe to unknown Canada.
Linda Bowman: ‘Corporate taxes in Silver Age Russia and Progressive Era America.’
To what extent are tax systems embedded in or influenced by the political and institutional cultures of each country? How different/similar are the corporate taxes introduced in the United States and Russia in the period from 1885 to 1909?
In the decades before World War One a fiscal revolution spread from Europe across the Atlantic to the United States. In Russia and the United States, the state began to shift its gaze from “toilers” to “wealth” as a source of taxation. The need for new sources of income was urgent, due to rising military costs and increasing demands on government spending.
There were obvious differences in the institutional/cultural context of tax reform in Tsarist Russia and Progressive Era America: autocracy vs democracy; centralization vs decentralization; varying degrees of permeability of the government to business interests; degree of corporate regulation; and the status of business within society. In America the issue of the “trusts” was the big issue of the day; in Russia, it was not.
On the other hand, this paper argues that there was also a convergence of tax theory and policies, reflected by new taxes on corporate wealth and concern with tax justice in both countries. In Tsarist Russia and Progressive Era America corporate taxation was not only a source of urgently needed revenue; it was used as a way of “taming” and “knowing” corporations. Taxation was specifically devised to regulate this new, distrusted and all-too-powerful beast.
Stephen Fortescue: ‘Russia’s political and economic prospects in 2010.’
The paper will consider: the state of the global economy and its effect on Russia; the social tensions that might arise from a continuing economic downturn, with reduced revenues with which to buy social stability; the policy debate over a development strategy for post-crisis Russia; and how well the policy process is coping with the strains of a crisis and post-crisis environment, including the state of Medvedev-Putin relations.
Anna Gladkova: ‘Cultural models of ‘time’ in Russian’
The paper reconsiders Jakovleva’s (1994) explanation of the elaboration of the semantic domain of ‘time’ in Russian by the prevalence of different models of time: historical, emotional, everyday and cyclical. It offers a semantic analysis of several synonyms in the domain of time (e.g., vremja, pora and vremečko; sejčas, teper’, nyne and nynče; do and pered; moment, mig and mgnovenie) through the prism of semantic universals known as Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). It shows that on the basis of a detailed semantic analysis it is possible to identify several cultural themes relating to the perception and conceptualization of time in Russian. The study is based on the data available in the Russian National Corpus.
Elena Govor: ‘The Russian Mutiny at Nuku Hiva, the Marquesas, 1804.’
In August 1803 two Russian ships, the Nadezhda and the Neva, commanded by Adam Krusenstern and Urey Lisiansky, set off from the Baltic port of Kronshtadt on a round-the-world voyage. Its main stimulus was to emulate the great exploring voyages of Cook and the French expeditions into the Pacific, to carry out scientific exploration and collect exotic artefacts and natural wonders for the Tsar’s kunstkammer in St Petersburg. But Russia’s strategic concerns in the north Pacific led the Russian government to also include as part of the expedition an embassy to Japan headed by the statesman Nikolai Rezanov, who received secret instructions giving him authority over the naval captains, apparently without their being informed. All this created a situation full of tension and rivalry, ripe for conflict, which finally exploded when the expedition reached the little-known Pacific island paradise of Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas archipelago. The two ships carried an ethnically and socially disparate group of men — the Russian-educated elite, German naturalists, Siberian merchants, Baltic naval officers and even Japanese passengers — many of whom left their own diverse eye-witness accounts of the voyage and, especially, of what occurred at Nuku Hiva.
My research based on archival Russian and German sources reconstructs and explores in depth the tumultuous events of the Russians’ twelve-day stay, the course of the mutiny and its subsequent resolution and fall-out, as well as the extent and nature of the contact between the Nuku-Hivans and the Russian visitors, which turned this conflict into an ethnohistorical drama. Echoes of those events as they resurfaced in tall tales and anecdotes from contemporary press sources, particularly those involving count Tolstoy the American, and in contemporary literature, such as in Hoffman’s tales, have unearthed other layers of the expedition’s heritage and its impact on popular psychology.
Peter Hill: ‘Bosna. The Australian-Bosnian Weekly. The Bosnian Language in Australia.’
Since the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Slavists have become more inclined to accept the existence of Croatian as an autonomous language. ‘Typical’ or ‘marked’ Croatian texts are distinguished from ‘typical’ or ‘marked’ Serbian texts by certain characteristic features. There is, however, considerably more scepticism regarding an autonomous Bosnian language. While it can be argued plausibly that there is a stable Croatian literary norm, the same cannot necessarily be said of Bosnian.
Bosnian nationalists insist on the term bosanski jezik, since this is to be the official language of the multinational Bosnian state, while Serbs prefer the term bošnjački jezik, since they see this putative entity as the national language of the Bosniaks. In Tito’s Yugoslavia, Bosnian – “bosanskohercegovački književnojezički izraz” - was considered to be a form of the language that integrated Croatian and Serbian features. However, Isaković (1970) vehemently rejects this view as smacking of colonialism. According to him, usage showed that it was not a question of coexistence of two variants, but of a special Bosnian variant, an organic whole.
One distinctive feature of Bosnian, as opposed to Serbian and Croatian, is the use of orientalisms. It is important to distinguish “marked” orientalisms from those that are so completely integrated into usage throughout the central South-Slavonic area that they are not felt to be orientalisms. Marked orientalisms, on the other hand, are rahmetli “the late”, as in rahmetli Alija Izetbegović, mahana “fault” (rather than mana , which would be an Orientalism of the unmarked kind) or džemat “[Muslim] community”, džematlija “fellow Muslim”, gazija “hero”, muhadžir “migrant, refugee”, rahatluk “relaxation” etc.
The texts in Bosna display enormous stylistic variation. While all texts are ijekavian and some do have a recognizably Bosnian physiognomy, mainly due to the use by some writers of a large number of marked orientalisms, it is difficult to discern anything more than a “soft norm”.
Rosh Ireland: ‘Two satirical footnotes to history: Two comedies from the 1920s repertoire of the Moscow Satire Theatre.’
In 1924, in its first season, the Moscow Satire Theatre staged a play by Yury Yurin, directed by David Gutman, which seemed largely to reflect the spurious ‘ decree’ on the ‘nationalisation’ of women which had appeared in Saratov in 1918.
In 1928, the same theatre staged a play by Ardov and Nikulin, directed by Gutman and E. Krasnyansky, which is best described as a private joke (though not entirely private) directed at the Moscow literary establishment just as the period of RAPP’s domination was beginning.
Both these plays, fortunately, were published and invite some attention.
Yuri Kato: ‘О первом переводе «Капитанской дочки» Пушкина на японский язык.’
Как известно, Япония была закрыта для иностранцев в течении примерно двухсот лет, оставаясь под безраздельным китайским влиянием.
Историю Японии после открытия страны в 1868 году можно рассматривать, как историю введения элементов европейской культуры. Как вам известно, правительство того периода (при императоре Мэйдзи) направляло все силы на создание «богатой страны, сильной армии», и японская интеллигенция пустилась в погоню за западной техникой и культурой. Люди, быстро поучившись какому-либо европейскому языку, через это «окно в Европу» стремительно вволакивали то, что казалось нужным первой срочностью: требовались юристы, медики, инженеры со знанием европейских научных достижений. Ориентиром модернизации была Англия – классическая буржуазная страна.
Догадывается, что с художественной литературой Европы японцы познакомились в самую последнюю очередь, и, к сожалению, далеко не без проблем.
Тем не менее, в эти годы европейская литература потоком хлынула в Японию, и уже к концу 19 века японцы познакомились почти со всеми основными произведениями выдающихся ее представителей. Судьбы этих книг, и шире – судьбы литератур отдельных европейских стран в Японии были различны, они складывались в зависимости от постоянно менявшихся эстетических потребностей самой японской литературы.
Эти годы (80-90-х гг. Х1Хв.) включают себе специфические проблемы с точки зрения сравнительного литературоведения.
Служит как пример первый перевод «Капитанской дочки» Пушкина в 1883 году. Перевёл её ТАКАСУ Дзисукэ (1856-1909), который учился первым набором студентов в Токийском Институте Иностранных языков. Это был один из самых ранних художественных переводов, и первое представление Пушкина на Востоке. В докладе будет рассматрены стиль, изменение в тексте, и обстоновки данного перевода.
Robert Lagerberg: ‘ “Home, Sweet Home”: The Significance of the Apartment in the Film Little Vera (Маленькая Вера).’
Little Vera can best be viewed as a subtle debunking of Socialist Realism as it was applied to the cinema in the USSR. Through its use of reportorial camera, unresolved moral issues and its depiction of grim everyday life without any of the redemptive doctrine, imagery or music so typical of party-line Soviet films, Little Vera placed itself firmly as a polar opposite of this kind of cinema while providing an entirely novel, even shocking, portrayal of life in a typical provincial town of the Soviet Union. The role of the apartment within this is instructive and consistent: Little Vera is an ironic ode to the apartment, which serves to contain the lives of the family members in unrelieved tension and unhappiness, and provide Vera herself with the bleakest of raisons d’être, both physical and philosophical. The topos of the ideologically correct Soviet apartment is subtly and ironically re-construed as a commonplace par excellence, a living space perfectly located somewhere between life and death in the murky shadows of banality and the everyday, пошлость and быт.
John McNair: ‘Plays for the Times: Boborykin on the Russian stage in the 1890s-1900s’
Students of the renaissance of Russian theatre culture in the 1890s and 1900s may be surprised to learn that the great success of the 1899 season was not Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, but Nakip´ (Skimmings), a three-act comedy of questionable merit by Pyotr Boborykin, then in his early sixties. Whatever their differences, both plays bear witness to the movement for renewal in the Russian theatre, and were inspired by the conscious desire to extend the repertoire, break with the conventions of the past, put ‘real life’ on the stage and create a new drama for the new century.
This paper will examine Boborykin’s plays of the 1880s-1900s in the context of his life-long campaign for theatrical reform, his theories of stagecraft, his notion of a ‘national’ drama and his interest in emergent talents in Russia and in Western Europe. It will show how his self-conscious quest for a ‘modern’ Russian theatre was ultimately at odds with the modernism that reached its culmination in the Moscow Arts Theatre and The Cherry Orchard.
Marko Pavlyshyn: ‘Poet and Martyr: The Reputation of Vasyl Stus.’
The Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus died in the Gulag in 1985. His imprisonment and death, together with his self-identification as an opponent of the Soviet system, encouraged the development of a politicised and mythicised public image of his life. In the meantime, some literary critics outside the USSR and, after 1989, in Ukraine strove to shape interpretations and evaluations of his work uninfluenced by his heroic image. The paper gives an account of the interplay of these two lines of reception and seeks to relate each to the interests of discrete actors on the stage of Ukrainian culture before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Vadim Rossman: ‘Under the Canopy of Russian Muses: Slavic Orientalism in the West’
Several books and many articles have come out that discuss the fascination with Russian women expressed by some intellectuals and great men of the West, including famous poets, artists, composers, philosophers, scientists and the leaders of political parties. However, none of these works discusses the reasons for the popularity of the Russian “muses”, and they provide predominantly anecdotal explanations for this phenomenon. They treat these affairs as more or less curious historical episodes and often limit themselves to one country or one artistic community and thereby overlook the overarching idea that can bind all these biographical narratives together. In my presentation I will try to look beyond the often intriguing biographical and melodramatic details of these affairs and discuss some of their underlying reasons, place them in the proper historical context of modern European intellectual history and relate it to what I call Russian Orientalism. I will argue that the enthusiasm for Russian women had the same basis as the enthusiasm for Russian culture in general. I will focus in particular on the parallel developments of these Western infatuations beginning in the 1880s, reaching a high point in 1920s, rekindled with Soviet military successes in WWII, and gradually fading in the Cold War.
The origins of Slavic Orientalism and the idea of the “mysterious Russian Soul” are found in the 19th century in German and French Romanticism (e.g. Friedrich Schelling and Elisee Reclus). By the early 20th century the “Russian vogue” had already manifested itself in different spheres: philosophy, literary criticism, history, geopolitics, haute couture. The well-known French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry famously proclaimed that there are three miracles of European culture: ancient tragedy, Italian Renaissance and Russian literature. The surrealist map of the world placed Russia in the middle of the universe. Even in classical geopolitics H.J. Mackinder viewed Russia as the Heartland and “the center of the Earth”. But the most articulate forms of Slavic Orientalism were found in Germany (Oswald Spengler, Walter Schubart et al).
Russian sentiments were particularly strong in ingenious and important men connected with the beginnings and rise of "modernity", such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Diego Rivera, Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Matisse, Amadeo Modigliani, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sigmund Freud, Karl Gustav Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, John Maynard Keynes, Vilfredo Pareto, Oswald Spengler, Rudolf Steiner, Ernst Barloch, Alfred Adler, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas fils, Herbert Wells, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Jean Cocteau, Erich Maria Remarque, George Bataille, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georg Lukacs, Louis Aragon, Aristide Maillol, Jacques Maritain, Romain Rolland, Johann Strauss, Franz Liszt, Imre Kalman, and Heinrich Schliemann among others. All of them had Russian wives or mistresses. The analysis also includes some political leaders such as Benito Mussolini, Otto von Bismarck, Fillipo Turatti, Antonio Gramsci.
The most famous of these muses were Lou Andreas Salome who fascinated Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud; Lydia Dyakonova, or Gala, the wife and muse of Salvador Dali, Paul Eluard and Max Ernst; Moura Budberg who inspired Herbert Wells; and Maria Godebska, who was a muse of such important cultural figures as Verlaine, Renoir, Mallarmé, Sert et al., and was the prototype of Princess Yourbeletieff in Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu. It is no coincidence that most of the important surrealist artists had Russian “muses”. In some cases Russian affairs help to discover and map important intellectual connections between intellectual traditions. A case in point is the marriage between Vilfredo Pareto and Alessandra Bakunin, the daughter of Mikhail Bakunin, a well-known Russian anarchist political philosopher and a close collaborator of Karl Marx. Another case in point is Raisa Maritain, the “muse” of Jacques Maritain, who was an important liaison between Russian religious philosophers of the Silver Age and French neo-Thomism.
The analysis of the memoirs, letters, correspondences and the articles of these luminaries reveals that all of them share the same mythology of Russia as a young and energetic peasant culture that should save the West and revitalize the decadent European civilization. Their matrimonial and erotic affections also reflected these mental attitudes regardless of their particular political engagements. The magic of Russian women (and Russian culture) was in many ways related to the sensibilities of the age: disillusionment with capitalism, the bourgeoisie and middle class, the search for new and fresh cultural grounds.
Ludmila Stern: ‘“Prisonnier d’amitié”. Jean-Richard Bloch and his Soviet correspondents (1925-1947)’
French writer and public intellectual Jean-Richard Bloch represents a special case among the interwar fellow-travellers. A member of the French Socialist Party critical of the Soviet politics, he radically changed his position in 1934 when he became a loyal Soviet supporter, joined the French Communist Party (1938) and was the only French writer who spent WWII in the Soviet Union (1941-1944) (Racine, Stern). Ever since Soviet organisations turned to Western intellectuals in an attempt to win their sympathies and gain support for the Soviet Union, Bloch was on their list. Formal and informal letters that Bloch received from Soviet officials, such as Christian Rakovsky, Olga Kameneva, Aleksandr Arosev, Mikhail Apletin and other individuals between 1925 and 1947, are testimony to their tireless efforts to secure the French writer’s political support. (The letters are kept in J.-R. Bloch’s archives at the National Library in Paris, in the VOKS archives in GARF and the International Commission of the Soviet Writers’ Union archives in RGALI, Moscow.
The letters that Bloch received from the Soviet embassy in France, VOKS and the Soviet Union of Writers reflect the evolving and changing mechanisms that Soviet organisations used in the 1920s-30s to establish and foster bonds with existing and potential sympathisers. Friendship is a prominent motif in these letters and manifests itself in both the content and style of the Soviet correspondence. Analysis makes it possible to follow the development of the epistolary style as one of the Soviet mechanisms of influence, to examine both its use and the response to it, and to make observations about its effectiveness as one of the techniques of guaranteeing ongoing relations with Western supporters.
Mark Swift: ‘Психопатология отношений в "Попрыгунье" А.П. Чехова.’
«Кто же отрицает умение искусного писателя изобразить личности в более полном и правдивом виде, чем они встречаются в жизни?» – так психиатр Герви Клекли оправдал употребление ссылок на героев из художественной литературы для иллюстрации симптоматики психопатологии (1).
«В ряду высших достижений Чехова-психолога» Эмма Полотская выделила «типы», изображенные в рассказах «Попрыгунья», «Человек в футляре», «Душечка» и «Ариадна» (2). Патология личности рисуется ярче, чем нормальное, ничем не отличающееся состояние. Герои в названных рассказах представляют собой «аномалии в характере, <...> чрезмерное развитие одних сторон душевной жизни и недостаточность других» (3).
Аномалии в характерах героев в «Попрыгунье» лежат в основе замечания Д. Рейфильда о том, что рассказ страдает от «толстовского изъяна – чрезмерного сгущения красок по черному–белому» (4). Героиня Ольга отличается рядом проявлений «душевной незрелости», свойственных демонстративному (истерическому) характеру: стремление привлекать к себе внимание, позирование в жестах, речи и туалетом; легкомыслие, внушаемость и неумение критически смотреть на себя (5).
Аномалии характера наблюдаются не только у героини: «В характере героя (Рябовского, М.С.) отразились резкие перепады настроения, приступы хандры и тоски, свойственные (прототипу, М.С.) Левитану» (6). Эти черты, как и присущая художнику томность, свойственны циклоидному типу психопатии. Наконец, скромный труженик и жрец науки Дымов, своей робостью и отчужденностью, напоминает шизоидный тип характера.
Чрезмерные и недоразвитые черты характера каждого из героев обуславливают их исходное сближение, последующее отчуждение и взаимное недопонимание в роковом треугольнике.
Литература
1. Cleckley Hervey. The Mask of Sanity. London, 1950. P. 344.
2. Полотская Э.А. К источникам рассказа Чехова «Ариадны» // Известия Академии наук СССР. Серия литературы и языка. 1972, вып. 1., Т. 31. С. 61.
3. Корсаков С.С. Курс психиатрии. М., 1893. С. 449.
Rayfield Donald. Understanding Chekhov. London, 1999. P. 99–100.
5. Бурно Марк Е. О характерах людей. 2е изд. М. 1998, С. 51–55.
6. Чудаков А. П. Поэтика и прототипы. // В творческой лаборатории Чехова / Л. Д. Опульская, З.С. Паперный. М., 1974. С. 187.
Anna Taitslina: ‘Conservative liberalism or liberal conservatism: the debate on
Chicherin and liberalism from Struve to present-day Russia.’
The term ‘conservative liberal’ was coined by Chicherin in his 1862 essay on Different Kinds of Liberalism. The intellectual scene in late nineteenth-century Russia was particularly hostile to this notion, and as a result late nineteenth-century left liberals, such as Struve, tended to redefine it as ‘liberal conservative’. In emigration, in 1928, Struve revisited the question, setting forth a more comprehensive interpretation of Chicherin’s position. The 1990s witnessed a resurgence of interest in Chicherin and liberalism in general. But as the twentieth century drew to a close and, particularly in the new twenty-first century, it became more and more apparent that liberalism of Chicherin’s mould was again out of place in Russia.
Chicherin’s ‘conservatism’ of the 1860s was the upshot of two concerns. Firstly, it was a product of his general Hegelian vision of the state as a positive force in the dissolution of feudal society and bringing forth civic equality. Secondly, it was a product of Chicherin’s preference for an evolutionary path of development.
Chicherin’s views on the state changed with time, particularly in the 1880s and 1900s, owing to his alarm on the emergence of the socialist cult of the state. His later ‘conservatism’ was no more than a thorough form of liberalism. By1900 he had fully developed his concept of civil rights, based upon to the right to property. To him, personal freedom was impossible without the right to choose ‘wrongly’, including a right to ‘misuse’ one’s own property. So he rejected any infringement on personal freedom and the right to property in order to promote egalitarian distribution of wealth. The mature Chicherin’s views may be characterised as ‘conservative’ in the sense of being extremely anti-socialist, rather than ‘conservative’ in the sense of being favouring a paternalistic state.
Toshinobu Usuyama: ‘Social and Linguistic Research into the Preservation of the Ethnic Language and Culture of Russians in Australia.’
The speaker made a survey of the situation on the preservation of the Russian language and culture of Russians in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Adelaide (more than 30 respondents) from July 2008 to January 2009 as a Visiting Associate of Macquarie University.
Based on the interview materials, the purpose of this presentation is to examine the mechanism of assimilation of Russians with Australian English speakers and the primary factors which contribute to the preservation of the Russian language and culture of Russians in Australia..
David Wells: ‘Shelley in the Russian Symbolist Imagination’
The translation of key texts from sympathetic literary traditions was one important way in which the emerging Russian Symbolist movement in the 1890s both created for itself a literary pedigree and ensured the propagation of its own view of the world. One English poet who attracted particular attention both for his ideas about the relation between nature and humanity and for his formal virtuosity was Percy Bysshe Shelley. Konstantin Bal′mont notably embarked on a translation of Shelley’s complete poetic works in 1893, and several other poets made translations of their own or otherwise shared an interest in Shelley’s work, notably Nikolai Minskii and Viacheslav Ivanov. This paper examines Symbolist interpretations of Shelley, exploring how different authors appropriated him in different ways to the Symbolist project.
Anna Wierzbicka: ‘Russian emotions, happiness à la russe’
Part A - “Active Emotions”
In her novel Daniel Štajn, perevodčik’ (Moskva 2008) Ljudmila Ulitskaja writes:
Kogda ja popadaju v Izrail´, ja kruču golovoj, udivljajus´, užasajus´, radujus´, negoduju, vosxiščajus´. (p. 50)
This passage cannot be translated into English without a loss or distortion of meaning. The reason is that the whole lexico-grammatical pattern of ‘active emotions’ illustrated in this passage cannot be replicated in English.
Roughly speaking, this pattern implies that a person is as it were manufacturing emotions within him- or herself. The experiencer is not simply in a certain emotional state but is voluntarily ‘giving’ him- or herself to an emotion. Furthermore, the emotion is usually expressed in some way, so that other people can be aware of it. For example, one can read sentences like this in Russian novels and stories: “Živ! Živ!, - radovalis´ deti” (Apresjan, 2004), which show that verbs of ‘active emotions’ can function in Russian as speech act verbs. Thus, a verb like radovat´sja implies not only that the experiencer is ‘manufacturing’ the emotion (in their ‘duša’) but also, that if he or she is with other people, those other people can know about the experiencer’s feelings.
The fact that this pattern is very productive in Russian provides evidence for a certain ‘emotional style’ characteristic of Russian culture and very different from the cultural styles available in, and encouraged by, English.
In my talk I will clarify the exact nature of these differences through semantic explications.
Part B - ‘Happiness’ and ‘sčast´e’
There is no Russian word for ‘happiness’, as there is no English word for ‘sčast´e’. The “inalienable human right to a pursuit of happiness” prominently incorporated in the American Declaration of Independence can hardly be rendered in Russian as “pravo na poiski sčast´ja”. Russian sentences with sčast´je often cannot be coherently translated into English with the word happiness either. One example from Ulitskaya’s novel Daniel Štajn perevodčik:
Kakoe sčast´je, čto sud´ba mne podarila Efima kak sputnika žizni. (p. 323)
If one translates this sentence into English as “What happiness that fate/destiny gave me Efim as a life companion”, this would make little sense and it would significantly distort the meaning of the original. As I have discussed in earlier publications (see in particular Daedalus, Spring 2004, special issue on happiness), the English word happiness does not match in meaning its supposed equivalents such as sčast´je (or, for that matter, bonheur or Glück). The whole outlook on life reflected in the meaning of sčast´je is as different from that reflected in happiness as the outlook reflected in sud´ba is different from that reflected in either fate or destiny.And another example from Ulitskaya’s novel:
S 1959 goda ja živu v Izraile. Velikoe sčast´e žit´ na ėtoj zemle. (p458)
‘Since 1959, I’ve been living in Israel. It is a great ‘gift/happiness’ to live in this land.’
The phrase velikoe sčast´e in the Russian sentence does not mean ‘great happiness’, because great happiness would refer to a wonderful feeling, whereas the Russian phrase combines a reference to a wonderful feeling with a reference to great good fortune. Roughly speaking, sčast´e implies that ‘something very good is happening to me’ (and that ‘things like this don’t often happen to people’), as well as ‘feeling something very good’, whereas the English word happiness implies above all a subjective state of feeling.
In my talk I will show how the differences between sčast´e and happiness can be clarified through detailed semantic (“NSM”) explications.
Kevin Windle: ‘Ferrying the Faithful: The m.v. Smolny, its captain and its passengers in the years 1929-38.’
The Motor Vessel Smolny, built in Leningrad in 1929, was the flagship of the Baltic Maritime Shipping Line. It usually plied the route from Leningrad to Hamburg and London and back, and on occasion carried prominent Western visitors to the Soviet Union. These included Sidney and Beatrice Webb, William and Zelda Coates, Harry Pollitt, Willie Gallacher, Tom Mann, Walter Citrine, Anthony Blunt, Christopher Mayhew and Henri Barbusse. The captain until 1938 was Alexander Mikhailovich Zuzenko, famed for his leadership of the Union of Russian Workers in 1918-19 in Brisbane, whence he was deported to Soviet Russia in 1919. This paper will give a brief account of the impressions reported by these passengers, of the ship, the Captain and what they observed of Soviet life.
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