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  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    Difficult cases: Communist morality, gender and embodiment in Thaw cinema
    (Informa UK Limited, 2017) Dmytryk, Olena; Dmytryk, Olena [0000-0001-8985-5096]
    The article explores cinematic sensibility in Larisa Shepit'ko’s $\textit{Wings}$ ($\textit{Kryl'ia}$, 1966) and Dinara Asanova’s $\textit{Rudolfio}$ (1966) within the broader context of the Thaw cinema and Communist morality. Both films became ‘gender trouble’ for the audience and censors, and were considered controversial by their contemporaries. The aim of the article is to explore how women filmmakers used the aesthetic pluralism of the Thaw to embed a critique of the standards of Communist morality. The article begins by analysing Communist morality and its reconfigurations during the Thaw. It claims that Shepit'ko and Asanova revealed non-normative experiences of womanhood and girlhood as complex, yet legitimate. Drawing on recent theories of ‘haptic’ in cinema, special attention is paid to the aesthetic strategies used by the filmmakers to encourage an embodied connection between the spectator and the film. The foregrounding of this connection can lead to a better understanding of the interrelation between the aesthetics of the film, the politics of emotions and gender/sexual norms in the Soviet society.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    Three Types of Asymmetry in the Muscovite Engagement with Print
    (Brill Deutschland GmbH, 2017) Franklin, S; Franklin, Simon [0000-0002-0514-7314]
    Muscovite awareness and use of printed books both predated and extended beyond the scope of native Muscovite printing. The three types of “asymmetry” explored in this survey relate to the wider reception of print in Muscovy. The first and most widely noted is the chronological and cultural mismatch between the spread of print culture in Russia and in Western Europe. The second is the differential chronology and repertoire of local print production by comparison with the use of imported printed materials. The third – the main focus of the survey – is the phenomenon of “reverse technology transfer,” whereby West European printed materials were appropriated into manuscript culture in Muscovy. Examples are adduced from diverse and unrelated fields: medical knowledge, newspapers, and biblical illustration. Taken together, these patterns of asymmetry not only pose a challenge to “techno-determinist” approaches to the history of writing and print, but reflect a distinctive ecology of media, a distinctive set of cultural filters in the translation of print to Muscovy.
  • ItemOpen AccessAccepted version Peer-reviewed
    Embarrassment in the idiot
    (American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, 2016) Tapp, A
    With its marriage plots and drawing room conversation, The Idiot, of all Dostoevsky’s novels, is the closest to a novel of manners. But the would-be society novel clashes with a theological imperative: the re-establishment of a Christological vision, which Dostoevsky introduces into the novel embodied in the Christ-like Prince Myshkin. The presence of Christ in the drawing room of the marriage plot appears as a kind of embarrassment of genre. Taking this scenario as its departure point, the article approaches the relationship between embarrassment and narrative in The Idiotfrom two perspectives, one grounded in the vision of disintegration, the other in the vision of cohesion. Firstly, it shows how the embarrassment of this generic quandary is allied to formal difficulties in the novel’s handling of temporality and the configuration of its character system. Secondly, in discussing the possibility of unity for which the novel yearns, embarrassment is shown to participate in the ethical constitution of the reader. This study locates emotion (embarrassment) in the novel’s genre, narrative structure, and text, and locates the reader's emotion, too. Informed by sociologist Erving Goffman’s seminal analysis of embarrassment, this article also speaks to those engaged in the study of affect and the history of emotions.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Printing social control in Russia 3: Blank forms
    (Brill Deutschland GmbH, 2015) Franklin, S; Franklin, Simon [0000-0002-0514-7314]
    Mainly on the basis of material from archives in St Petersburg, this article presents a classification and chronology of early printed blank forms in Russia, attributing their continuous history to Petrine initiatives from c.1714. Such “ephemera”, it is argued, constitute important but neglected components of Russian print culture and administrative practice.