Konstrukcija mnimosti : K poètike "Voskovoj persony" Ju. Tynjanova

The subject of this work is the poetics of «The Wax Effigy», a short novel or novella by Jurii Tynianov, Russian writer, literary critic, historian of literature and prominent literary theoretician. The plot structure of the novel is based upon a real event, the creation by Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli in 1725 of a wax sculpture of the first Russian emperor, Peter the Great. «Construction of the Sham» consists of three chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Due to the fact that Tynianov was at the same time a prose writer and theoretician of literature it seemed important to consider the reception of his prose and his works on literary theory in relationship to each other. The introduction is devoted to this task. The first chapter is about the history of the creation of the novel and its reception. Tynianov stopped writing one short story in order to write the novel; these two works have some common traits. It seems almost obvious that his work on the first text was a real step toward the creation of the second. In the first story there is an opposition of dead/alive which is semantic prefiguring of a central motif in «The Wax Effigy». An analysis of the reception of the novel demonstrated that almost every critic writing about the novel has described it as nonsense. Critics considered Tynianov's work in terms of «devices» and «content» and could not understand how devices are related to the content of the novel: the novel was thought as a signifier without any signified. Implicitly, critics thought the signified of the novel as a traditional one of the historical novel, as the historiosophical «idea», embodied in the system of literary devices. In this case literature becomes something instrumental, a kind of expression of extraliterary content. In contradistinction to that Tynianov considered literary semantics as an effect of the literary structure. From his point of view the literary sense is immanent to the process of signification accomplished inside the literary text. The second chapter is devoted to a rhetorical analysis of the opposition dead/alive. Tynianov systematically compares both terms of the opposition. As a result of this strategy the wax effigy of the dead emperor becomes «as if» alive and the world of living people «as if» dead. The qualifier «as if» refers to the fact that Tynianov creates an ambiguous semantic system. This rhetoric is related to European Romanticism and his «fantastic literature» (Merimé, Hoffmann, Maupassant etc.). But Tynianov demonstrates a linguistic origin of the strange fantoms created by romantics; he demystifies these idols by parodying the fantastic literature, that is, showing «how it was done». At the same time, the opposition mentioned above refers to his idea of «incongruity» which plays a prominent role in Tynianov s theory but has never been conceptualised. The incongruity is a inner collision of the literary text; from Tynianov's point of view the meaning of the work of literature is always a dynamic collision of semantically heterogeneous elements struggling with each other. In «The Wax Effigy» Tynianov creates a metalevel of the work demonstrating the process of creation of the literary sense. The third chapter is a reconstruction of Tynianov's conception of the historical prose, specifically of the mechanisms by which historical facts are transformed into literary events. Tynianov thought that the task of the historical novelist is to depict his hero as an actor, to demonstrate that as a wearer of many masks he is a creator of appearances, ambiguities. Here, in the «figure of fiction» (Andrei Belyi), the very idea of the historical prose and rhetoric employed in «The Wax Effigy», history and literature meet each other. In his last theoretical work, «On parody» Tynianov writes about the so-called sham structure of parody. In his opinion every parody is a text about other texts and «serious» work which could be read at the same time as a text about «reality». This twofold structure of parody is that of «The Wax Effigy»: that text speaks about ambiguities of the history and about ambiguities of the literary sense, about social reality of the past and - about the working of the literature itself. «The Wax Effigy» is written as a autoreflective text, as an experiment in literary semantics, as a system of literary ambiguities - of hero, rhetoric and the text itself. The meaning of the novel is created not by the embodiment extraliterary idea, but by the process of signification accomplished inside the work of literature. In this sense Tynianov's novel is parody, a break with the tradition of the historical novel preceding «The Wax Effigy».

The Vexing Case of Igor Shafarevich, a Russian Political Thinker

The Russian mathematician, academician and former dissident Igor Shafarevich (b. 1923) is commonly mentioned in Western scholarly studies on perestroika and post-perestroika-era Russian politics as one of the most notable anti-Semites and extreme nationalists of the country. This notoriety owes to Shafarevich’s old samizdat article Russophobia, which was published in 1988. The scandal surrounding Russophobia came to a head when the president of The National Academy of Sciences in the United States asked Shafarevich, its honorary member, to resign. Nothing like this had ever happened in the academy’s history. The present dissertation discusses Shafarevich’s political activities, his texts and ideas as well as their reception. Particular attention is given to Russophobia, whose detailed examination proves very clearly that its reputation as an anti-Semitic text is groundless. The reasons for Russophobia’s hasty but fierce condemnation were many, but only one was that when the Soviet system began to tumble, it was commonly assumed that a vigorous rise in anti-Semitism and extreme nationalism in the Soviet Union/Russia would be just a matter of time. Many observers were highly sensitised to detecting its signs and symptoms. The dissertation also shows that most of those to write the first criticisms of Russophobia and to liken Shafarevich to the ideologues of Nazi Germany were the same people he had criticised in Russophobia for their deterministic view of history and irrational manner of connecting things for the purpose of fanning the flames of distrust between Russia’s Jews and Russians. In retrospect, it is fairly evident that Shafarevich actually managed to effectively “neutralise” the message of many of those obsessed with the Jews among his Russian contemporaries and contributed to the fact that anti-Jewish sentiments have been a great deal less popular in post-communist Russia than so many had feared and expected. The thesis also thoroughly discusses Shafarevich’s other texts and activities before Russophobia’s appearance and after it. In the 1970s, Shafarevich was one of the best-known dissidents in the Soviet Union. He worked together with academician Andrei Sakharov in a dissidents’ unofficial human rights committee and co-operated closely with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn’s exile. Then, during the chaotic years of perestroika, Shafarevich defended the basic rights of ordinary citizens and warned that the hype concerning democracy could become counterproductive if the most palpable result of the reforms was the disappearance of citizens’ basic security and elementary social justice. One of the conclusions of the thesis is that even if the world around Shafarevich has changed considerably, his views have remained essentially the same since the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Expected Performance of the ATLAS Experiment - Detector, Trigger and Physics

A detailed study is presented of the expected performance of the ATLAS detector. The reconstruction of tracks, leptons, photons, missing energy and jets is investigated, together with the performance of b-tagging and the trigger. The physics potential for a variety of interesting physics processes, within the Standard Model and beyond, is examined. The study comprises a series of notes based on simulations of the detector and physics processes, with particular emphasis given to the data expected from the first years of operation of the LHC at CERN.

Oppineiden talossa : Helsingin yliopiston slavistien kansainväliset verkostot Suomen Yliopistollisen Avustuskomitean toiminnan yhteydessä vuosina 1921-1925.

Tutkimuksessani tarkastelen kolmen Helsingin yliopiston slavistin, kirjastonhoitaja Andrei Igelströmin, kansan-runoudentutkija Viljo Johannes Mansikan ja kielentutkija Jooseppi Julius Mikkolan, kansainvälisiä tieteellisiä ja poliittisia verkostoja. Nämä verkostot muodostuivat venäläisten tiedemiesten avustamiseksi perustetun Suomen Yliopistollisen Avustuskomitean kansainvälisen toiminnan ja siihen keskeisesti liittyneiden venäläisten tieteellisten julkaisujen välityksen ja Helsingin yliopiston konsistorin alaisen Venäläisten kirjaston ostohankkeen ympärille vuosina 1921-1925. Tutkimuksessani olen pyrkinyt vastamaan kysymyksiin: Millaista kansainvälistä tieteellistä ja poliittista yh-teistyötä suomalaiset slavistit Avustuskomitean yhteydessä harjoittivat? Millaisia tavoitteita Igelström, Mansikka ja Mikkola asettivat Suomen Yliopistollisen Avustuskomitean toiminnalle? Millaisia poliittisia ja tieteellisiä toimintamuotoja Avustuskomitea slavistien ohjaamana sai, mitä ulkopuolisia tavoitteita avustustoimintaan liittyi, ja lopulta miten Avustuskomitean toiminta heijasteli kansainvälisen tieteellisen yhteistyön muutosta uudessa valtiollisessa tilanteessa 1920-luvun alussa? Aihettani olen jäsentänyt verkosto-käsitteen ja verkostoteorian mallien avulla. Keskeisiä lähteitä ovat olleet Igelströmin, Mansikan ja Mikkolan Avustusko-miteaa käsittelevä kirjeenvaihto, Avustuskomitean kirjanpito ja avustustoimintaan osallistuneiden yhteisöjen julkaisemattomat ja julkaistut raportit sekä muistiot. Tutkimuksessa on käytetty historiantutkimuksen mene-telmiä, ja se liittyy Helsingin yliopiston slaavilaisen filologian oppiaineen ja Venäläisen kirjaston historiaan. Tutkimus osoitti Igelströmin, Mansikan ja Mikkolan kansainvälisten tieteellisten verkostojen olleen ratkaisevassa asemassa Suomen Yliopistollisen Avustuskomitean muodostamisessa ja kansainvälisen avustustoiminnan järjestämisessä. Tieteellisistä verkostoista keskeisessä asemassa oli Pietarin Tiedeakatemian tieteellisten julkaisuiden myynti ja vaihto. Painotuotteiden vaihto länsimaisten tieteellisten instituuttien kanssa järjestettiin Venäläisen kirjaston ja sen kirjastonhoitajan Andrei Igelströmin välityksellä. Vuosina 1921 1923 Igelströmin hallinnoima vaihtokeskus oli kansainvälisesti ainutlaatuinen ja rakensi uudelleen tieteellisen yhteistyön Suomen ja Venäjän välille sekä loi edellytyksiä kansainvälisen tiedeyhteistyön elvyttämiselle venäläisen tiedeyhteisön kanssa. Poliittisten verkostojen näkökulmasta suomalaisten slavistien kontaktit T ekkoslovakian ulko-asianhallinnon kanssa paljastuivat läheisiksi ja yhteistyö ulottui avustustoiminnan lisäksi myös Suomen kau-pallisten etujen edistämiseen ja kysymykseen venäläisten emigranttien asemasta T ekkoslovakiassa 1920-luvun alkuvuosina. Venäläisten emigranttien asema Prahassa ja Suomen Yliopistollisen Avustuskomitean välinen yhteys konkretisoitui Venäläisen kirjaston ostohankkeessa. Kirjastonostohankkeen syyksi on tässä tutkimuksessa osoitettu T ekkoslovakian ulkoasianhallinnon action russe -politiikka ja T ekkoslovakian valtion pyrkimys luoda edellytyksiä uudelle tieteelliselle orientaatiolle, johon slavistisen tutkimuksen ja kielitieteiden kehitys 1920-luvun Prahassa liittyivät. Aloitteentekijöiksi kirjastonostohankkeeseen on osoitettu Helsingissä ja Prahassa toiminut ukrainalainen emigrantti Vladimir Tukalevski, joka yhdessä Igelströmin ja T ekkoslovakian varaulkoasiain-ministerin Václav Girsan kanssa suunnitteli Venäläisen kirjaston ostamista ja sen siirtämistä Prahaan.

Solubility and physical stability improvement of natiral xanthine derivatives

Use of natural xanthine derivates in medicine is complicated with their physical properties. Theobromine is poorly soluble while theophylline is highly sensitive to hydration. The aim of this study was to improve bioavailability of xanthines by co-crystallization, theophylline was also cocrystallized with carboxylic acids (capric, citric, glutaric, malenic, malonic, oxalic, stearic, succinic) and HPMC. Co-crystallization was performed by slow evaporation and ball milling. Physical stability was checked by wet granulation and water sorption methods, solubility was measured by intrinsic tablet dissolution. Theobromine formed co-crystal with other xanthines and theophylline interacted with all acids except stearic and HPMC, the latter showed alternative interactions based on hydrogen bonding. Hydration resistance was good in theophylline:succinic acid co-crystal and excellent in complexes containing capric, stearic acids and HPMC. Theophylline:HPMC showed improved solubility. The reported approach can promote use of xanthines and can be recommended for other compounds with similar problems.