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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

The Genetics Of Morality: Policing Science In Dudintsev’S White Robes, Yvonne Howell Jan 2017

The Genetics Of Morality: Policing Science In Dudintsev’S White Robes, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The Men and women in White Robes (Belye odezhdv), Vladimir Dudinstev's fictional account of the banning of genetics in the Soviet Union, are acutely aware that in the 20th century, the study of the fruit fly is the study of man. The key to unraveling the mystery of human nature lies in the easily observed chromosomes of the forbidden fly (drosophila melanogaster). Under Stalin, the banned geneticists were branded “Morganists” after their hero Thomas Hunt Morgan, the Columbia University researcher who pioneered the technique of mapping locations on drosophila chromosomes to specific traits in the flies. To …


A Clash Of Fictions: Geopolitics In Recent Russian And Ukrainian Literature, Yvonne Howell Jan 2016

A Clash Of Fictions: Geopolitics In Recent Russian And Ukrainian Literature, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

When the vast, multinational Soviet empire collapsed in 1991, the geopolitical structure it had struggled to maintain for most of the 20111 century - often by means of brutal repression and forced remobilization of entire populations - proved itself in the eyes of many to be fatally out of sync with the epochal norm of the nation-state. By the end of the 18th century, people in many parts of the world had begun to "imagine themselves" as nations and to organize politically into states whose primary function would be to protect, nurture, and (in a kind of Romantic feedback loop) …


From ‘Sots-Romanticism’ To Rom-Com: The Strugatskys’ Monday Begins On Saturday As A Film Comedy, Yvonne Howell Jan 2015

From ‘Sots-Romanticism’ To Rom-Com: The Strugatskys’ Monday Begins On Saturday As A Film Comedy, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The Strugatskii brothers’ novella Ponedel’nik nachinaetsia v subbotu (Monday Begins on Saturday; 1965) imagines bright young scientists working at the cutting edge between quantum physics and folktale sorcery in a setting that was undeniably contemporary and local. I argue that the story can be best understood as ‘soc(ialist) romanticism’ – an aesthetic mode that celebrates the possibilities for individual questing and agency in late Soviet socialism. Konstantin Bromberg’s 1982 adaptation of the Strugatskiis’s story abandons both the romanticism and complexity of the novella, but, by incorporating elements of the‘youth film’, it represents a different kind of Soviet rom-com.


The Transcendent As Theatre In Roerich's Paintings, Joseph C. Troncale Jan 2013

The Transcendent As Theatre In Roerich's Paintings, Joseph C. Troncale

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

It would not be an exaggeration to say that much of Russian artistic culture in the first two decades of the 20th century was theatricalised. The work that Russian painters did in the theatre was intimately integrated and synthesised with all of the other elements of a production. Many artists of the World of Art Movement were instrumental in revolutionising the theatrical arts in Russia at the invitation and under the direction of Sergei Diaghilev. Following the pioneering steps of Konstantin Korovin, many artists, including Nicholas Roerich, Alexander Benois, Leon Bakst, Mstislav Dobuzhinski and later the avant-garde painters Natalia Goncharova, …


The Liberal Gene: Sociobiology As Emancipatory Discourse In The Late Soviet Union, Yvonne Howell Jul 2010

The Liberal Gene: Sociobiology As Emancipatory Discourse In The Late Soviet Union, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

In the following analysis, we will find that Soviet sociobiology did not develop incrementally out of daring interdisciplinary probes; rather, it seemed to spring forth fully formulated in the comprehensive Novyi mir article. Moreover, already in 1971, several years before Wilson's book established its controversial eponymous discipline in the United States, the biosocial paradigm was framed by its earliest Soviet proponents as a scientific vindication for diversity, pluralism, individual difference, heterogeneity, human rights, and ultimately, individual responsibility for one's own actions. In short, the same scientific discipline that in the west was associated with racism, reductionism, and social determinism developed …


Baring The Brain As Well As The Soul: Milan Kundera's The Joke, Yvonne Howell Apr 2010

Baring The Brain As Well As The Soul: Milan Kundera's The Joke, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

In what follows, I will argue that two current theories about how our minds ascribe intentional psychological states to other people (so-called Theory of Mind) as well as to non-personal events that happen to us (a proposed Existential Theory of Mind) provide a rich interpretive framework for understanding the social and historical context of Kundera’s innovative aesthetics.


Efroimson, Vladimir Pavlovich, Yvonne Howell Jan 2008

Efroimson, Vladimir Pavlovich, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

EFROIMSON, VLADIMIR PAVLOVICH ( 1908-1989). Geneticist, seminal figure in the development of population and medical genetics, author of works on sociobiology and the genetics of human ethical and aesthetic behavior.


Fiziki-Liriki (Scientist-Poets), Yvonne Howell Jan 2007

Fiziki-Liriki (Scientist-Poets), Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Fiziki-liriki refers to a 1959 poem by Boris Slitskii that crystallized in memorable shorthand the intellectual divide between what he called 'physicists' and lyricists'.


Berries (Iagody), Yvonne Howell Jan 2007

Berries (Iagody), Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

For centuries the berries that grow in the forests and swamps of northern Russia have been a crucial source of vitamin C, antioxidants, and other micronutrients that would otherwise be lacking in the locally-based diet of most Russians.


Kasha, Yvonne Howell Jan 2007

Kasha, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Russian kasha can refer to virtually any grain cooked into a porridge.


The True Water Of The Universe: Orlove Linnik, Joseph C. Troncale Jan 2007

The True Water Of The Universe: Orlove Linnik, Joseph C. Troncale

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Eugenics, Rejuvenation, And Bulgakov's Journey Into The Heart Of Dogness, Yvonne Howell Aug 2006

Eugenics, Rejuvenation, And Bulgakov's Journey Into The Heart Of Dogness, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

In this article, I propose a new reading of Heart of a Dog, one that takes seriously Professor Preobrazhenskii's claim that his real interest is "eugenics, the improvement of the human species." The Professor's eugenics project is not limited to a cosmetic, physical improvement of human subjects; it anticipates urging humankind toward a higher stage of intellectual and spiritual development as well. Therefore, when he mistakenly transforms a dog into a man instead of a more intelligent dog, he considers the experiment an abject failure because the new man "no longer has a dog's heart, but a human one, …


The Space Of Freedom, Joseph C. Troncale Jan 2006

The Space Of Freedom, Joseph C. Troncale

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The exhibition, The Space of Freedom: Apartment Exhibitions in Leningrad, 1964-1986, invites visitors directly into the carefully re-created interior of a Soviet communal apartment. Within the kind of environment where the paintings first breathed freely, visitors have the opportunity to experience works by unofficial artists of the Soviet era who boldly executed and exhibited art that did not conform to the ideological prescriptions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. These artists had to substitute the private space of their apartments for the public space controlled and denied them by the Party. Planning and staging these exhibitions, the artists …


We (1924), Yvonne Howell Sep 2005

We (1924), Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

One of the first and most important works of modern dystopian literature, this novel by Russian writer Evgeny Zamayatin was written in 1919-1920 and published in English in 1924. The original Russian version was not authorized for publication in the Soviet Union until 1988, when Gorbachev's policy of culture openness (glasnost) allowed readers access to twentieth-century Russian literature inimical to the communist project.


Zamayatin, Evgeny Ivanovich (1884-1937), Yvonne Howell Sep 2005

Zamayatin, Evgeny Ivanovich (1884-1937), Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Zamayatin, Evgeny Ivanovich (1884-1967), Russian engineer, fiction writer, critic-essayist, and editor. Zamayatin was born in the provincial town of Lebedyan in central Russia. He joined the Bolshevik Party in opposition to the tsar's regime while still a student of naval engineering in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg. He was imprisoned and exiled from St. Petersburg, an experience that provided material for his first short novels and stories.


Havel, Vaclav, Yvonne Howell Sep 2005

Havel, Vaclav, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Czech playwright, dissident writer and human rights philosopher, statesman, president of Czechoslovakia, and first president of the Czech Republic. Havel was born into a prominent business family in Prague during the interwar period of Czech independence.


Russia And The Former Soviet Union, Yvonne Howell Jan 2002

Russia And The Former Soviet Union, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Contested geographies and cultures in which (according to Iurii Lotman's and Boris Uspenskii's seminal study "Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture") there is a lack of relatively neutral political, social, economic, and legal institutions capable of mediating between the polarities of church and state, private and public, sacred and secular. As a consequence, for the last two centuries Russian literature and literary debate have assumed extraordinary significance as almost the sole realm of negotiating a collective as well as individual identity. The binary structure of Russian culture in large part characterizes the relationship between literature and science as …


An Introduction To The Brotherhood Of Free Culture And The Cultural Center Of Pushkinskaya Ten, Joseph C. Troncale Jan 2002

An Introduction To The Brotherhood Of Free Culture And The Cultural Center Of Pushkinskaya Ten, Joseph C. Troncale

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The exhibition, The Brotherhood of Free Culture: Recent Art From St. Petersburg, Russia represents a significant moment in the history of exhibitions of Russian nonconformism in painting. Like all Russian nonconformist art, this exhibition and these artists trace their roots back directly to 1863 and to the tradition of "unofficial" art, which, one might say, began with the refusal of those fourteen artists to remain under the yoke of the academy. The bold move of those young artists in the nineteenth century precipitated the formation of a more permanent group of painters into the Brotherhood of Traveling Art Exhibitions, …


A Calendar Of Wisdom. Daily Thoughts To Nourish The Soul. Written And Selected From The World's Sacred Texts (Book Review), Yvonne Howell Jan 1999

A Calendar Of Wisdom. Daily Thoughts To Nourish The Soul. Written And Selected From The World's Sacred Texts (Book Review), Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Tolstoy spent over fifteen years collecting "the wisdom of the centuries in one book" (6). He began compiling this wisdom in written form, as quotes from the world's sacred texts and from famous (as well as obscure) artists, in 1902-1903. The first version of the resulting book was published in 1904. It was reprinted three times during his lifetime, variously titled Thoughts of Wise Men, A Circle of Reading, or The Way of Life. It is the early version of the book that made it into the 1957 Soviet edition of Tolstoy's collected works as Krug chteniia: …


Karel Capek In 1984, Yvonne Howell Jan 1984

Karel Capek In 1984, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.