The ultimate edge: The case for planning media for sustaining space communities

Governments and intergovernmental organisations have long recognised that space communities – the ultimate ‘settlements at the edge’ – will exist one day and have based their first plans for these on another region ‘at the edge’, the Antarctic. United States President Eisenhower proposed to the United Nations in 1960 that the principles of the Antarctic Treaty be applied to outer space and celestial bodies (State Department, n.d.). Three years later the UN adopted the Declaration of Legal Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space and in 1967 that became the Outer Space Treaty. According to the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, ‘the Treaty was opened for signature by the three depository Governments (the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States of America) in January 1967, and it entered into force in October 1967’ (Office for Outer Space Affairs, n.d). The status of the treaty (at time of writing) was 89 signatories and 102 parties (Office for Disarmament Affairs, n.d.). Other related instruments include the Rescue Agreement, the Liability Convention, the Registration Convention and the Moon Agreement (Office for Outer Space Affairs, n.d.-a). Jumping to the present, a newsagency reported in July 2014 (Reuters, 2014) that the British Government had shortlisted eight aerodromes in its search for a potential base for the UK’s first spaceplane flights which Ministers want to happen by 2018 (UK Space Agency, 2014). The United States already has a spaceport, in New Mexico (Cokley, Rankin, Heinrich, & McAuliffe, 2013)...

Confucian education and enlightenment for the masses in the manner of Guwen guanzhi

The topic of this study is the most renowned anthology of essays written in Literary Chinese, Guwen guanzhi, compiled and edited by Wu Chengquan (Chucai) and Wu Dazhi (Diaohou), and first published during the Qing dynasty, in 1695. Because of the low social standing of the compilers, their anthology remained outside the recommended study materials produced by members of the established literati and used for preparing students in the imperial civil-service examinations. However, since the end of the imperial era, Guwen guanzhi has risen to a position as the classical anthology par excellence. Today it is widely used as required or supplementary reading material of Literary Chinese in middle-schools both in Mainland China and on Taiwan. The goal of this study is to explain the persistent longevity of the anthology. So far, Guwen guanzhi has not been a topic of any published academic study, and the opinions expressed on it in various sources are widely discrepant. Through a comparative study with a dozen classical Chinese anthologies in use during the early Qing dynasty, this study reveals the extent to which the compilers of Guwen guanzhi modelled their work after other selections. Altogether 86 % of the texts in Guwen guanzhi originate from another Qing era anthology, Guwen xiyi, often copied character by character. However, the notes and commentaries are all different. Concentrating on the special characteristics unique to Guwen guanzhi—the commentaries and certain peculiarities in the selection of texts—this study then discusses the possible reasons for the popularity of Guwen guanzhi over the competing readers during the Qing era. Most remarkably, Guwen guanzhi put in practise the equalitarian, educational ideals of the Ming philosopher Wang Shouren (Yangming). Thus Guwen guanzhi suited the self-enlightenment needs of the ”subordinate classes”, in particular the rising middle-class comprised mainly of merchants. The lack of moral teleology, together with the compact size, relative comprehensiveness of the selection and good notes and comments, have made Guwen guanzhi well suited for the new society since the abolition of the imperial examination system. Through a content analysis, based on a sample of the texts, this study measures the relative emphasis on centralism and localism (both in concrete and spiritual terms) expressed in the texts of Guwen guanzhi. The analysis shows that the texts manifest some bias towards emphasising innate virtue on the expense of state-defined moral. This may reflect hidden critique towards intellectual oppression by the centralised imperial rule. During the early decades of the Qing era, such critique was often linked to Ming-loyalism. Finally, this study concludes that the kind of ”spiritual localism” that Guwen guanzhi manifests gives it the potential to undermine monolithic orthodoxy even in today’s Chinese societies. This study has progressed hand in hand with the translation of a selection of texts from Guwen guanzhi into Finnish, published by Gaudeamus Helsinki University Press: Jadekasvot – Valittuja tarinoita Kiinan muinaisajoilta (2005), Jadelähde – Valittuja kirjoituksia Kiinan keskiajalta (2007) and Jadepeili – Valittuja kirjoituksia keisarillisen Kiinan kulta-ajoilta (2008). All translations are critical editions, complete with extensive notation. The trilogy is the first comprehensive translation based on Guwen guanzhi in a European language.

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.

Primestoimenno-otnositel'nye konstrukcii v sovremennom russkom jazyke

Relative Constructions with Pronominal Heads in Contemporary Russian Chapter 1 introduces the distinctive syntactic and semantic properties of Russian relative constructions (RCs), which are then divided into two main classes according to the type of the head phrase. The study concentrates on RCs with pronominal heads, which are systematically compared with noun-headed RCs. Chapter 2 clarifies the categorization of pronouns in Russian. The conclusion is that Russian pronouns include only personal, reflexive and wh-pronouns. The remaining words that are traditionally seen as pronouns are actually functional equivalents of determiners. This idea leads to the suggestion that RCs with these determiner-like words as the only constituent of the head phrase are actually headed by zero pronouns. In the other type of RCs with pronominal heads, the head position is occupied by wh-pronouns with clitics expressing different types of indefiniteness and quantification. Comparison of the two types of pronoun-headed RCs shows that the wh-heads and zero-heads share a number of common properties with respect to the grammatical gender, number and person as well as to the semantic distinction between animates and inanimates. The rest of Chapter 2 gives an overview of various uses of wh-pronouns in Russian and an experimental analysis of RCs headed by pronominal adverbs. Chapter 3 discusses fundamental differences between RCs with noun and pronominal heads. One of the main findings is that the choice of the relative pronoun (kto 'who' and chto 'what' versus kotoryj 'which') is motivated by a tendency to reproduce maximally the essential grammatical and semantic properties of the antecedent. Chapter 4 gives a detailed description of the determiner-like words and wh-based heads used in the two types of RCs with pronominal heads. In addition, several issues related to the syntax and semantics of free relatives are discussed. The conclusion is that there is no need to establish a separate category of free relatives in Russian. Chapter 5 discusses the syntax and semantics of correlative and free concessive constructions. They share a number of properties with pronoun-headed RCs and the two are often confused in Russian linguistics. However, a detailed analysis shows that these constructions must be distinguished from RCs. The study combines the methods of functionally-oriented Russian structuralism with some insights from generative syntax.

Èto i to v povesti Staruha Daniila Harmsa

This dissertation focuses on the short story Starukha (The Old Woman), one of the last works of the Russian writer Daniil Kharms (1905-1942). The story, written in 1939, is analysed using the Kharmsian concepts èto and to (this and that) as a heuristic interpretative model. The first chapter gives a detailed analysis of this model, as well as a survey of the critical work done to date on Kharms and Starukha. In the second chapter the model is applied to study the different states of consciousness of the male protagonist. This is significant, because he is the "I" of the work, from whose point of view everything is being told. The third chapter takes a closer look at the reality of the world that exists independently of the consciousness of the protagonist. Physical objects can be said to bear - besides their everyday meaning - a hidden symbolic meaning. Similarly, the characters can be considered as representatives of everyday reality and otherworldliness. The fourth chapter deals with the narrative devices of Starukha. The problematics of the relation between fact and fiction plays an essential role in the story. Kharms's use of Ich-Erzählung and different tenses, which contributes to achieving a complicated elaboration of this kind of problematics, is examined in detail. The fifth chapter provides an intertextual reading of Starukha, based on its allusions to the Bible and the Christian tradition. As a result, the whole story can be seen as a kind of meditation on the Passion of Christ. The final chapter examines how the important Kharmsian concepts of the grotesque and the absurd manifest themselves in Starukha. The old woman represents in a grotesque way two opposite systems: the religious and the totalitarian. The absurdity of Starukha can be claimed to be illusory. Therefore, it is better to speak about paradoxicality. Starukha itself is a kind of paradox, in the sense that it tries to say something of the ultimate truth of reality, which inevitably remains ineffable.

Ryssän koulussa : Suomalaiset Venäjän stipendiaatit autonomian aikana 1812-1917

Finnish scholarship students in Russia during the autonomy (1812-1917) During the autonomy in Finland (1809-1917), an attempt to improve the knowledge of the Russian language was made through special language university scholarships. With these scholarships the students could go and study the Russian language and acquire cultural knowledge in Russia. Other member countries on the edges of the Russian Empire, like Poland and the Baltic provinces, did not have similar programs. The first two scholars started their journey in 1812. A system of travel allowances was introduced in 1841. Between the years 1812- 1917 a total of almost 400 students studied in Russia. The studies mainly took place in Moscow. These scholarship students were called the Master s of Moscow ". In this paper, Finnish-Russian relations are studied based on the attitude towards the Russian language and the people who studied it in Finland. Although the attitude towards them was neutral in the beginning, in 1844 there was a strong change. Students of Russian, and especially the scholars, received the stigma of being unreliable and unpatriotic, a stigma they were never able to get rid of. The study of the Russian language was voluntary in Finnish schools between 1863 and 1872. Starting from 1890, however, the study of the Russian language was enforced. In doing so, the Russians attempted to unify the Empire, while the Finns had the illusion that they had their own state. Thus, Russia saw the language as a way to unify the Empire and Finns as an attempt to make them Russians. The purpose of studying in Russia was to improve the student s practical language skills and overall knowledge of the customs and culture of the country. Besides knowing the language, knowledge of Russian culture and customs is essential in understanding Russia and Russians; therefore, the studies of literature, geography and history have been noted in this research. Without knowledge it is difficult to develop understanding. After their studies, almost all of the scholars returned to Finland and did not continue their careers in Russia. They worked mainly as teachers and civil servants, and managed to improve the Finnish people s weak knowledge of Russian and Russia through teaching, translations of literature and newspaper articles. Through these scholars, it is possible to see how the attitudes towards the language have been closely related to the political history between Finland and Russia. The language became the subject of resistance and these attitudes were transferred to its students. In 1917, the study of Russia and the Russian language ended and it was no longer possible to use the acquired knowledge of language and country in independent Finland.

Mifopoètika Andreja Platonova v romane Sčastlivaja Moskva

This dissertation focuses on the mythopoetics of the Soviet writer Andrej Platonov (1899-1951) in his late novel Schastlivaja Moskva (Happy Moscow), written in 1932 1936. The purpose of the work is to reveal the mythopoetic world model in the novel, to characterize the most significant features of Platonov's mythopoetics and finally, to reconstruct the author's myth in the novel by placing the novel in the context of Platonov's oeuvre and Russian literature and culture as a whole. The first chapter provides a representation of the problem and methodology of the work, a short overview of the history of creating and publishing the novel, and a survey of critical work on Platonov done to date. The study utilizes a structuralistic-semiotic approach devised by Tarto-Moscow scholars for analyzing mythopoetic texts and applies the methodology of a conceptual analysis of the mythology of language. The second chapter examines the peculiarities of Platonov's mythopoetics, and its relation to the neomythological paradigm of Russian literature. Some special consideration is given to the character of the scientific utopism of Platonov's myth, to the relation of Platonov's mythopoetic world model with mythopoetic thinking and to the syntagmatical, and paradigmatical aspects of Platonov's myth, in particular to the mythopoetical metasjuzhet and the ambivalent binary structure of myth. The third chapter presents a close examination of the mythopoetics of the novel by discerning the motif structure of the novel, analyzing the characters and main thematic oppositions of Platonov's myth in the novel. It is contended that in every textual level Platonov strives for ambivalency which provides an opportunity to discern his poetics as both utopian and antiutopian. The analysis in the fourth chapter of the key Platonovian ideological concepts revoljucia, kommunizm and socializm confirms this observation. The study concludes that Platonov's myth in the novel is based on the mythologema of his early prose, but reflect the gradual transition from early utopian themes to the intimate "humble" prose of the late 1930's.

Imazhinist Mariengof : Dendi. Montazh. Ciniki.

The study is dedicated to the Russian poet and prose writer Anatolii Borisovich Mariengof (1897–1962). Mariengof – “the last dandy of the Republic” – was one of the leaders and main theoreticians in the poetic group of the Russian Imaginists. For his contemporaries, he was an Imaginist par excellence. His Imaginist principles – in theory and practice – are applied to the study of his first fictional novel, Cynics (1928), which served as an epilogue for his Imaginist period (1918–1928). The novel was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988. The method used in the study is a conceptual and literary historical reading, making use of the contemporary semiotic understanding of cultural mechanisms and of intertextual analysis. There are three main concepts used throughout the study: dandy, montage and catachresis. In the first chapter, the history, practice and theory of the Russian Imaginism are analyzed from the point of view of dandyism. The Imaginist theatricalisation of life is juxtaposed with the thematic analysis of their poetry, and Imaginist dandyism appears as a catachrestic category in culture. The second chapter examines the Imaginist poetic theory. It is discussed in the context of the montage principle, defining the post-revolutionary culture in Soviet Russia. The Imaginist montage can be divided into three main theoretical paradigms: S. Yesenin’s “technical montage” (reminiscent of Dadaist collage), V. Shershenevich’s “nominative montage” (catalogues of images) and Anatolii Mariengof’s “catachrestic montage”. The final chapter deals with Mariengof’s first fictional novel, Cynics. The study begins with the complex history of publication of the novel, as well as its relation to the Imaginist poetic principles and to the history of the poetic movement. Cynics is, essentially, an Imaginist montage novel. The fragmentary play of the fictional and the documentary material follows the Imaginist montage principle. The chapter concludes in a thematic analysis of the novel, concentrating on the description of the October Revolution in Cynics.

Principy sintaksicheskoj idiomatizacii

The book consists of an Introduction and four articles published both in Finland and abroad, written in English or Russian. They present the studies of eight Finnish and Russian idiomatic constructions that appear in the following examples: Ikkuna rikki — Окно сломано, lit.: ‘the window broken’, Äiti täällä — Мама здесь, lit.: ‘mother here’, Kaikki myymälöihin! — Все в магазин, lit.: ‘all to the shops’, Пить так пить! ≈ ‘When I drink, I drink (a lot)!’, etc. The aim of the studies is to reconstruct the origins and to trace the development of the above-mentioned constructions up to their modern usages. To this end, the constructions are investigated both from historical and from comparative perspectives. Finally, the case studies provide a possibility to develop more general bases of development of these 'ungrammatical' items. By attempting to answer the question why such constructions develop even though they destroy the harmonious structure of а language, some principles of idiomatization are postulated in the Conclusion.

Recipient v russkom razgovore : o raspredelenii funkcij mezhdu otvetami da, nu i tak

The study investigates actions by recipients in spontaneous Russian conversations by focusing on DA, NU and TAK, when they are used as responses to the main speaker's larger on-going turn. The database for the study consists of some 7 hours of spontaneous conversations. The participants of the conversations come from different parts of Russia. The use of DA, NU and TAK was analyzed by applying the method of ethnomethodological conversation analysis from the point of view of the type of the context, the sequential placement of the response and its manner of production. The particles were analyzed both in contexts in which they responded to an informing and in affective contexts. The particles NU and TAK were used by the speakers almost exclusively in informing contexts, whereas DA was the central response type in affective contexts. DA was also the most common response to information with affective implications. The information, to which the particle NU provided as response, was often unspesific and projected a spesification or explanation by its speaker as the next action. DA and TAK, by contrast, treated the information as one that could be followed and was sufficient in its local context. As a response to parenthetical information NU responded to information that was only loosely connected with the mainline of talk. The particle DA, by contrast, was used as a response to such parenthetical information, which was more crucial for the larger on-going activity. Only NU was used as a response that invited the main speaker to continue a turn that she or he had offered as possibly complete. NU was also used by the recipient after her or his own contribution as a continuer. In affective contexts, DA expressed, depending on its more spesific context, not only agreement but also other functions, such as giving up arguing or prior knowledge on the topic being discussed. In addition DA responses were used to display empathy and identification with the state of affairs expressed by the co-participant. NU, by contrast, was seldom used as a response to a turn that expressed affect. When it was used in affective contexts, it displayed agreement with the co-participant or just registered an assessment by her or him.

Vyra enie obob čёnno-ličnogo značenija v russkom jazyke

Expressing generalized-personal meaning in Russian Based on data from Russian, this doctoral dissertation examines generalized-personal meaning that is, generic expressions referring to all human beings, people in general, each or any person (e.g. S vozrastom načinae cenit prostye ve či With age you start to appreciate simple things ). The study shares its basic theoretical orientation with functional approaches going from meaning to form . The objective of the thesis is to determine and describe the various linguistic means which can be used by the speaker to express generalized-personal meaning. The main material of the study consists of 2,000 examples collected from modern Russian literature, newspapers, and magazines. The linguistic means of expressing generalized-personal meaning are divided into three main classes. Morphological and lexico-grammatical means (22% of the material) include the use of personal pronouns and personal verbal endings. In Russian, all personal forms except the 3rd person singular can be used in a generalized-personal meaning. Lexical means (14% of the material) involve, above all, pronouns like vse all , ka dyj everyone , nikto no one , as well as the nouns čelovek man and ljudi people . In emotional speech, generalized-personal meaning can also be conveyed lexically by using utterances like da e idiot znaet even an idiot knows . In rhetorical questions the pronoun kto who can appear in this meaning (cf. Kto ne ljubit moro enoe?! Who doesn t like ice cream?! ). The third main class, syntactic means (64% of the material), consists of constructions in which the generic person is not expressed at the surface level. This class mainly includes two-component structures in which the infinitive relates to a modal predicative adverb (e.g. mo no can, be allowed to , nado must ), modal verb (e.g. stoit be worth(while) , sleduet must, be obliged to ), or predicative adverb ending in -о (e.g. trudno it is hard to , neprilično is not appropriate ). Other syntactic means are: one-component infinitive structures, so-called embedded structures, structures with a processual noun, passive constructions, and gerund constructions. The different forms of expression available in Russian are not interchangeable in all contexts. Even if a given context tolerates the substitution of one construction for another, the two expressions are never entirely synonymous. In addition to determining the range of forms which can express generalized-personal meaning, the study aims to compare these forms and to specify the conditions and possible restrictions (contextual, semantic, syntactic, stylistic, etc.) associated with the use of each construction. In Russian linguistics, the generalized-personal meaning has not been extensively studied from a functional perspective. The advantage of a meaning-based functional approach is that it gives a comprehensive picture of the diversity and distribution of the phenomenon.

Ivanov-mistik : Okkul'tnye motivy v poèzii i proze Vjačeslava Ivanova (1907-1919)

The subject of this work is the mysticism of Russian poet, critic and philosopher Vjacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949). The approach adopted involves the textual and discourse analysis and findings of the history of ideas. The subject has been considered important because of Ivanov's visions of his dead wife, writer Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, which were combined with audible messages ("automatic writings"). Several automatic writings and descriptions of the visions from Ivanov's archive collections in St.Petersburg and Moscow are presented in this work. Right after the beginning of his hallucinations in the autumn of 1907, Ivanov was totally captivated by the theosophical ideas of Anna Mintslova, the background figure for this work. Anna Mintslova, a disciple of Rudolf Steiner's Esoteric School, offered Ivanov the theosophical concept of initiation to interpret paranormal phenomena in his intimate life. The work is divided into three main chapters, an introduction and aconclusion. The first chapter is called The Mystical Person: Anthropology of Ivanov and describes the role of the inner "Higher Self" in Ivanov's views on the nature of human consciousness. The political implications of the concepts, "mystical anarchism" and "sobornost" (religious unity) are also examined. The acquaintance and contacts with Anna Mintslova during 1906-1907 gave a framework to Ivanov's search for an organic society and personal religious experience. The second part, Mystics of Initiation and Visionary Aesthetics describes the influence of the initiation concept on Ivanov's aesthetic views (mainly "realistic symbolism"). On the other hand, some connections between the imagery of his visions and symbols in his verses of that period are established. Since Mintslova represented the ideas of Rudolf Steiner in Russia, several symbols shared by Steiner and Ivanov ("rose", "rose and cross") have been another subject of investigation. The preference for strict verse form in the lyrics of Ivanov's visionary period is interpreted as an attempt to place his own poetic creation within two traditions, a mystical and literary one. The third part of this work, Mystics of Hope and Terror, examines Ivanov's conception of Russia in connection with Mintslova's ideas of occult danger from the East. Ivanov's view of the "Russian idea" and his nationalistic idea during World War I are considered as a representation of the fear of the danger. Ivanov's interpretation of the October revolution is influenced by the theosophical concept of the "keeper of the threshold" which occurs in the context of the discourse of occult danger.

Èvoljucija sistemy glasnyh fonem v nekotoryh russkih govorah Vologodskoj oblasti

The present dissertation analyses 36 local vernaculars of villages surrounding the northern Russian city of Vologda in relation to the system of the vowels in the stressed syllables and those preceding the stressed syllables by using the available dialectological researches. The system in question differs from the corresponding standard Russian system by that the palatalisation of the surrounding consonants affects the vowels much more significantly in the vernaculars, whereas the phonetic difference between the stressed and non-stressed vowels is less obvious in them. The detailed information on the local vernaculars is retrieved from the Dialektologičeskij Atlas Russkogo Jazyka dialect atlas, the data for which were collected, for the most part, in the 1940 s and 1950 s. The theoretical framework of the research consists of a brief cross-section of western sociolinguistic theory related to language change and that of historical linguistics related to the Slavonic vowel development, which includes some new theories concerning the development of the Russian vowel phonemes. The author has collected dialect data in one of the 36 villages and three villages surrounding it. During the fieldwork, speech of nine elderly persons and ten school children was recorded. The speech data were then transcribed with coded information on the corresponding etymological vowels, the phonetic position, and the factual pronunciation at each appearance of vowels in the phonetic positions named above. The data from both of the dialect strata were then systematised to two corresponding systems that were compared with the information retrievable from the dialect atlas and other dialectological literature on the vowel phoneme system of the traditional local vernacular. As a result, it was found out (as hypothesised) that the vernacular vowel phoneme system has approached that of the standard language but has nonetheless not become similar to it. The phoneme quantity of the traditional vernacular is by one greater than that of the standard language, whereas the vowel phoneme quantity in the speech of the school children coincides with that in the standard language, although the phonetic realisations differ to some extent. The analysis of the speech of the elderly people resulted in that it is quite difficult to define the exact phoneme quantity of this stratum due to the fluctuation and irregularities in the realisation of the old phoneme that has ceased to exist in the newest stratum. It was noticed that the effect of the quality of the surrounding consonants on the phonetic realisation of the vowel phonemes has diminished, and the dependence of the phonetic realisation of a vowel phoneme on its place in a word in relation to the word stress has become more and more obvious, which is the state of affairs in the standard language as well.

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».

"Four Ways of Writing the City" : St. Petersburg-Leningrad as a Metaphor in the Poetry of Joseph Brodsky

The present study discusses the theme of St. Petersburg-Leningrad in Joseph Brodsky's verse works. The chosen approach to the evolving im-age of the city in Brodsky's poetry is through four metaphors: St. Petersburg as "the common place" of the Petersburg Text, St. Petersburg as "Paradise and/or Hell", St. Petersburg as "a Utopian City" and St. Petersburg as "a Void". This examination of the city-image focusses on the aspects of space and time as basic categories underlying the poet's poetic world view. The method used is close reading, with an emphasis on semantical interpretation. The material consists of eighteen poems dating from 1958 to 1994. Apart from investigating the spatio-temporal features, the study focusses on exposing and analysing the allusions in the scrutinised works to other texts from Russian and Western belles lettres. Terminology (introduced by Bakhtin and Yury Lotman, among others) concerning the poetics of space in literature is employed in the present study. Conceptions originating from the paradigm of possible worlds are also used in elucidating the position of fictional and actual chronotopes and heroes in Brodsky's poetry. Brodsky's image of his native city is imbued with intertextual linkings. Through reminiscences of the "Divine Comedy" and Russian modernists, the city is paralleled with Dante's "lost and accursed" Florence, as well as with the lost St. Petersburg of Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova. His city-image is related to the Petersburg myth in Russian literature through their common themes of death and separation as well as through the merging of actual realia with the fictional worlds of the Petersburg Text. In his later poems, when his view of the city is that of an exiled poet, the city begins to lose its actual world referents, turning into a mental realm which is no longer connected to any particular geographical location or historical time. It is placed outside time. The native city as the homeland in its entirety is replaced by another existence created in language.