Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia: Joseph Brodsky and Travel Writing

Joseph Brodsky, one of the most influential Russian intellectuals of the late Soviet period, was born in Leningrad in 1940, emigrated to the United States in 1972, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, and died in New York City in 1996. Brodsky was one of the leading public figures of Soviet emigration in the Cold War period, and his role as a model for the constructing of Russian cultural identities in the last years of the Soviet Union was, and still is, extremely important. One of Joseph Brodsky’s great contributions to Russian culture of the latter half of the twentieth century is the wide geographical scope of his poetic and prose works. Brodsky was not a travel writer, but he was a traveling writer who wrote a considerable number of poems and essays which relate to his trips and travels in the Soviet empire and outside it. Travel writing offered for Brodsky a discursive space for negotiating his own transculturation, while it also offered him a discursive space for making powerful statements about displacement, culture, history and geography, time and space—all major themes of his poetry. In this study of Joseph Brodsky’s travel writing I focus on his travel texts in poetry and prose, which relate to his post-1972 trips to Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, and Venice. Questions of empire, tourism, and nostalgia are foregrounded in one way or another in Brodsky’s travel writing performed in emigration. I explore these concepts through the study of tropes, strategies of identity construction, and the politics of representation. The theoretical premises of my work draw on the literary and cultural criticism which has evolved around the study of travel and travel writing in recent years. These approaches have gained much from the scholarly experience provided by postcolonial critique. Shifting the focus away from the concept of exile, the traditional framework for scholarly discussions of Brodsky’s works, I propose to review Brodsky’s travel poetry and prose as a response not only to his exilic condition but to the postmodern and postcolonial landscape, which initially shaped the writing of these texts. Discussing Brodsky’s travel writing in this context offers previously unexplored perspectives for analyzing the geopolitical, philosophical, and linguistic premises of his poetic imagination. By situating Brodsky’s travel writing in the geopolitical landscape of postcolonial postmodernity, I attempt to show how Brodsky’s engagement with his contemporary cultural practices in the West was incorporated into his Russian-language travel poetry and prose and how this engagement thus contributed to these texts’ status as exceptional and unique literary events within late Soviet Russian cultural practices.

Strike Hard, Strike Sure - Operation Musketeer : British Military Planning during the Suez Crisis, 1956

This study analyses British military planning and actions during the Suez Crisis in 1956. It seeks to find military reasons for the change of concepts during the planning and compares these reasons with the tactical doctrines of the time. The thesis takes extensive advantage of military documents preserved in the National Archives, London. In order to expand the understanding of the exchange of views during the planning process, the private papers of high ranking military officials have also been consulted. French military documents preserved in the Service Historique de la Defence, Paris, have provided an important point of comparison. The Suez Crisis caught the British armed forces in the middle of a transition phase. The main objective of the armed forces was to establish a credible deterrence against the Soviet Union. However, due to overseas commitments the Middle East playing a paramount role because of its economic importance the armed forces were compelled to also prepare for Limited War and the Cold War. The armed forces were not fully prepared to meet this demand. The Middle Eastern garrison was being re-organised after the withdrawal from the Canal Base and the concept for a strategic reserve was unimplemented. The tactical doctrines of the time were based on experiences from the Second World War. As a result, the British view of amphibious operations and the subsequent campaigns emphasised careful planning, mastery of the sea and the air, sufficient superiority in numbers and firepower, centralised command and extensive administrative preparations. The British military had realized that Nasser could nationalise the Suez Canal and prepared an outline plan to meet this contingency. Although the plan was nothing more than a concept, it was accepted as a basis for further planning when the Canal was nationalised at the end of July. This plan was short-lived. The nominated Task Force Commanders shifted the landing site from Port Said to Alexandria because it enabled faster expansion of the bridgehead. In addition, further operations towards Cairo the hub of Nasser s power would be easier to conduct. The operational concept can be described as being traditional and was in accordance with the amphibious warfare doctrine. This plan was completely changed at the beginning of September. Apparently, General Charles Keightley, the Commander-in-Chief, and the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee developed the idea of prolonged aerial operations. The essence of the concept was to break the Egyptian will to resist by attacking the oil facilities, the transportation system and the armed forces. This victory through air concept would be supported by carefully planned psychological operations. This concept was in accordance with the Royal Air Force doctrine, which promoted a bomber offensive against selected target categories. General Keightley s plan was accepted despite suspicions at every planning level. The Joint Planning Staff and the Task Force Commanders opposed the concept from the beginning to the end because of its unpredictability. There was no information that suggested the bombing would persuade the Egyptians to submit. This problem was worsened by the fact that British intelligence was unable to provide reliable strategic information. The Task Force Commanders, who were responsible for the tactical plans, were not able to change Keightley s mind, but the concept was expanded to include a traditional amphibious assault on Port Said due to their resistance. The bombing campaign was never tested as the Royal Air Force was denied authorisation to destroy the transportation and oil targets. The Chiefs of Staff and General Keightley were too slow to realise that the execution of the plan depended on the determination of the Prime Minister. However, poor health, a lack of American and domestic support and the indecisiveness of the military had ruined Eden s resolve. In the end, a very traditional amphibious assault, which was bound to succeed at the tactical level but fail at the strategic level, was launched against Port Said.

Fatigue fractures in military conscripts : A study on risk factors, diagnostics and long-term consequences

Fatigue fracture is an overuse injury commonly encountered in military and sports medicine, and known to relate to intensive or recently intensified physical activity. Bone responds to increased stress by enhanced remodeling. If physical stress exceeds bone s capability to remodel, accumulation of microfractures can lead to bone fatigue and stress fracture. Clinical diagnosis of stress fractures is complex and based on patient s anamnesis and radiological imaging. Bone stress fractures are mostly low-risk injuries, healing well after non-operative management, yet, occurring in high-risk areas, stress fractures can progress to displacement, often necessitating surgical treatment and resulting in prolonged morbidity. In the current study, the role of vitamin D as a predisposing factor for fatigue fractures was assessed using serum 25OHD level as the index. The average serum 25OHD concentration was significantly lower in conscripts with fatigue fracture than in controls. Evaluating TRACP-5b bone resorption marker as indicator of fatigue fractures, patients with elevated serum TRACP-5b levels had eight times higher probability of sustaining a stress fracture than controls. Among the 154 patients with exercise induced anterior lower leg pain and no previous findings on plain radiography, MRI revealed a total of 143 bone stress injuries in 86 patients. In 99% of the cases, injuries were in the tibia, 57% in the distal third of the tibial shaft. In patients with injury, forty-nine (57%) patients exhibited bilateral stress injuries. In a 20-year follow-up, the incidence of femoral neck fatigue fractures prior to the Finnish Defence Forces new regimen in 1986 addressing prevention of these fractures was 20.8/100,000, but rose to 53.2/100,000 afterwards, a significant 2.6-fold increase. In nineteen subjects with displaced femoral neck fatigue fractures, ten early local complications (in first postoperative year) were evident, and after the first postoperative year, osteonecrosis of the femoral head in six and osteoarthritis of the hip in thirteen patients were found. It seems likely that low vitamin D levels are related to fatigue fractures, and that an increasing trend exists between TRACP-5b bone resorption marker elevation and fatigue fracture incidence. Though seldom detected by plain radiography, fatigue fractures often underlie unclear lower leg stress-related pain occurring in the distal parts of the tibia. Femoral neck fatigue fractures, when displaced, lead to long-term morbidity in a high percentage of patients, whereas, when non-displaced, they do not predispose patients to subsequent adverse complications. Importantly, an educational intervention can diminish the incidence of fracture displacement by enhancing awareness and providing instructions for earlier diagnosis of fatigue fractures.

An Axiom of Military Law : Applicability of National Criminal Law to Military Personnel and Associated Civilians Abroad

States regularly deploy elements of their armed forces abroad. When that happens, the military personnel concerned largely remain governed by the penal law of the State that they serve. This extraterritorial extension of national criminal law, which has been treated as axiomatic in domestic law and ignored by international law scholarship, is the subject of this dissertation. The first part of the study considers the ambit of national criminal law without any special regard to the armed forces. It explores the historical development of the currently prevailing system of territorial law and looks at the ambit that national legal systems claim today. Turning then to international law, the study debunks the oddly persistent belief that States enjoy a freedom to extend their laws to extraterritorial conduct as they please, and that they are in this respect constrained only by some specific prohibitions in international law. Six arguments historical, empirical, ideological, functional, doctrinal and systemic are advanced to support a contrary view: that States are prohibited from extending the reach of their legal systems abroad, unless they can rely on a permissive principle of international law for doing so. The second part of the study deals specifically with State jurisdiction in a military context, that is to say, as applied to military personnel in the strict sense (service members) and various civilians serving with or accompanying the forces (associated civilians). While the status of armed forces on foreign soil has transformed from one encapsulated in the customary concept of extraterritoriality to a modern regulation of immunities granted by treaties, elements of armed forces located abroad usually do enjoy some degree of insulation from the legal system of the host State. As a corollary, they should generally remain covered by the law of their own State. The extent of this extraterritorial extension of national law is revealed in a comparative review of national legislation, paying particular attention to recent legal reforms in the United States and the United Kingdom two states that have sought to extend the scope of their national law to cover the conduct of military contractor personnel. The principal argument of the dissertation is that applying national criminal law to service members and associated civilians abroad is distinct from other extraterritorial claims of jurisdiction (in particular, the nationality principle or the protective principle of jurisdiction). The service jurisdiction over the armed forces has a distinct aim: ensuring the coherence and indivisibility of the forces and maintaining discipline. Furthermore, the exercise of service jurisdiction seeks to reduce the chances of the State itself becoming internationally liable for the conduct of its service members and associated civilians. Critically, the legal system of the troop-deploying State, by extending its reach abroad, seeks to avoid accountability gaps that might result from immunities from host State law.

The Enlightenment Idea of History as a Legitimation Tool of Kemalism in Turkey

The study analyzes the effort to build political legitimacy in the Republic of Turkey by ex-ploring a group of influential texts produced by Kemalist writers. The study explores how the Kemalist regime reproduced certain long-lasting enlightenment meta-narrative in its effort to build political legitimacy. Central in this process was a hegemonic representation of history, namely the interpretation of the Anatolian Resistance Struggle of 1919 1922 as a Turkish Revolution executing the enlightenment in the Turkish nation-state. The method employed in the study is contextualizing narratological analysis. The Kemalist texts are analyzed with a repertoire of concepts originally developed in the theory of narra-tive. By bringing these concepts together with epistemological foundations of historical sciences, the study creates a theoretical frame inside of which it is possible to highlight how initially very controversial historical representations in the end manage to construct long-lasting, emotionally and intellectually convincing bases of national identity for the secular middle classes in Turkey. The two most important explanatory concepts in this sense are di-egesis and implied reader. The diegesis refers to the ability of narrative representation to create an inherently credible story-world that works as the basis of national community. The implied reader refers to the process where a certain hegemonic narrative creates a formula of identification and a position through which any individual real-world reader of a story can step inside the narrative story-world and identify oneself as one of us of the national narra-tive. The study demonstrates that the Kemalist enlightenment meta-narrative created a group of narrative accruals which enabled generations of secular middle classes to internalize Kemalist ideology. In this sense, the narrative in question has not only worked as a tool utilized by the so-called Kemalist state-elite to justify its leadership, but has been internalized by various groups in Turkey, working as their genuine world-view. It is shown in the study that secular-ism must be seen as the core ingredient of these groups national identity. The study proposes that the enlightenment narrative reproduced in the Kemalist ideology had its origin in a simi-lar totalizing cultural narrative created in and for Europe. Currently this enlightenment project is challenged in Turkey by those who are in an attempt to give religion a greater role in Turkish society. The study argues that the enduring practice of legitimizing political power through the enlightenment meta-narrative has not only become a major factor contributing to social polarization in Turkey, but has also, in contradiction to the very real potentials for crit-ical approaches inherent in the Enlightenment tradition, crucially restricted the development of critical and rational modes of thinking in the Republic of Turkey.

The German Military Entrepreneur Ernst von Mansfeld and His Conduct of Asymmetrical Warfare in the Thirty Years War

The dissertation examines aspects of asymmetrical warfare in the war-making of the German military entrepreneur Ernst von Mansfeld during his involvement in the Thirty Years War. Due to the nature of the inquiry, which combines history with military-political theory, the methodological approach of the dissertation is interdisciplinary. The theoretical framework used is that of asymmetrical warfare. The primary sources used in the dissertation are mostly political pamphlets and newsletters. Other sources include letters, documents, and contemporaneous chronicles. The secondary sources are divided into two categories, literature on the history of the Thirty Years War and textbooks covering the theory of asymmetrical warfare. The first category includes biographical works on Ernst von Mansfeld, as well as general histories of the Thirty Years War and seventeenth-century warfare. The second category combines military theory and political science. The structure of the dissertation consists of eight lead chapters, including an introduction and conclusion. The introduction covers the theoretical approach and aims of the dissertation, and provides a brief overlook of the sources and previous research on Ernst von Mansfeld and asymmetrical warfare in the Thirty Years War. The second chapter covers aspects of Mansfeld s asymmetrical warfare from the perspective of operational art. The third chapter investigates the illegal and immoral aspects of Mansfeld s war-making. The fourth chapter compares the differing methods by which Mansfeld and his enemies raised and financed their armies. The fifth chapter investigates Mansfeld s involvement in indirect warfare. The sixth chapter presents Mansfeld as an object and an agent of image and information war. The seventh chapter looks into the counter-reactions, which Mansfeld s asymmetrical warfare provoked from his enemies. The eighth chapter offers a conclusion of the findings. The dissertation argues that asymmetrical warfare presented itself in all the aforementioned areas of Mansfeld s conduct during the Thirty Years War. The operational asymmetry arose from the freedom of movement that Mansfeld enjoyed, while his enemies were constrained by the limits of positional warfare. As a non-state operator Mansfeld was also free to flout the rules of seventeenth-century warfare, which his enemies could not do with equal ease. The raising and financing of military forces was another source of asymmetry, because the nature of early seventeenth-century warfare favoured private military entrepreneurs rather than embryonic fiscal-military states. The dissertation also argues that other powers fought their own asymmetrical and indirect wars against the Habsburgs through Mansfeld s agency. Image and information were asymmetrical weapons, which were both aimed against Mansfeld and utilized by him. Finally, Mansfeld s asymmetrical threat forced the Habsburgs to adapt to his methods, which ultimately lead to the formation of a subcontracted Imperial Army under the management and leadership of Albrecht von Wallenstein. Therefore Mansfeld s asymmetrical warfare ultimately paved way for the kind of state-monopolized, organised, and symmetrical warfare that has prevailed from 1648 onwards. The conclusion is that Mansfeld s conduct in the Thirty Years War matched the criteria for asymmetrical warfare. While traditional historiography treated Mansfeld as an anomaly in the age of European state formation, his asymmetrical warfare has begun to bear resemblance to the contemporary conflicts, where nation states no longer hold the monopoly of violence.