Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Understanding The Cultural And Nationalistic Impacts Of The Moguchaya Kuchka, Austin M. Doub

Musical Offerings

This paper explores Russian culture beginning in the mid nineteenth-century as the leading group of composers and musicians known as the moguchaya kuchka, or The Mighty Five, sought to influence Russian culture and develop a "pure" school of Russian music amid rampant westernization. Comprised of César Cui, Alexander Borodin, Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, this group of inspired musicians opposed westernization and supported Official Nationalism by the incorporation of folklore, local village traditions, and promotion of their Tsar as a supreme political leader. In particular, the works of Balakirev, Cui, and Mussorgsky established cultural pride and contributed …

Radio Maria Transylvania: National Representation, Prayer, And Intersubjectivity In A Growing Catholic Media Network, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article examines the public discourse of a Radio Maria Transylvania, a growing Catholic media network for members of the Hungarian ethnic minority in Romania. I look at two primary narratives: first, accounts about how the network was founded in the mid-2000s. And second, listeners’ prayers to the Virgin Mary published on the media network’s web site. Acts of petitioning powerful others for assistance on behalf of a family are central features of Radio Maria Transylvania’s storytelling–on behalf of a national family in the case of the network’s origin narratives and a natal family in the case of prayers to …

Introduction: Mediating Catholicisms: Studies In Aesthetics, Authority, And Identity, Eric Hoenes Del Pinal, Marc Roscoe Loustau, Kristin Norget

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

Overview & Acknowledgements, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

Ivan And His Doubles: The Failure Of Intellect In The Brothers Karamazov, Alex Donley

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

The purpose of this research is to explore Dostoevsky’s theodicy in The Brothers Karamazov, including key critical commentary that enhances an understanding of the text. One of the novel’s title characters, Ivan, embodies the emerging spirit of intellectualism and freethinking in nineteenth-century Europe. He confronts the Christian concept of God in two famous speeches. First, Ivan’s “Rebellion” epitomizes the problem of evil by asking why an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God allows earthy atrocities. Second, Ivan’s “Grand Inquisitor” rejects the moral freedom given to men, reasoning that it is too great a burden for mankind to bear. These arguments remain relevant …

Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko And The Conclusion Of Dostoevsky’S Idiot, Saera Yoon, Robert O. Efird

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko, and the Conclusion of Dostoevsky’s Idiot" Robert O. Efird and Saera Yoon discuss film adaptations of Dostoevsky’s novel. Both in his homeland and abroad, the major works of Fyodor Dostoevsky have largely made for disappointing film adaptations. This article examines the cultural diversity and aesthetic motivations underlying two very different adaptations of his novel Idiot, with particular attention to the concluding scenes. Both Akira Kurosawa and Vladimir Bortko follow the novelist's lead by hinting at some form of hope and future redemption amidst the tragedy but, for different reasons, …

Retro-Future In Post-Soviet Dystopia, Sergey Toymentsev

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Retro-Future in Post-Soviet Dystopia” Sergey Toymentsev explores the vision of retrospective future in such Russian novels as Tatiana Tolstaya’s The Slynx, Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, and Dmitry Bykov’s Zhd. Unlike Zamyatin’s and Platonov’s anti-Soviet satires, post-Soviet dystopias do not respond to any utopian narrative, but project the historical and ideological reality of Russia’s violent (predominantly Soviet) past into the future. Such a traumatic reenactment of the Soviet past in the dystopian future testifies to the rise of authoritarianism in contemporary Russia as well as its incomplete collective memory …

Substituting Stories: Narrative Arcs And Pilgrimage Material Culture Between Lourdes And Csíksomlyó, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

In this essay, I propose that substitution is one way subjects situate themselves in relation to European Catholics’ growing interest in multiple pilgrimages. I elaborate this claim through a case study of one Transylvanian Hungarian Catholic woman, Emilia, who substituted a story about a Transylvanian Hungarian shrine, Our Lady of Csíksomlyó, for a story about the Lourdes pilgrimage in France. I set also Emilia’s experience within a social context of memory production in the World Family of Radio Mária, a global Catholic media network that promotes devotional remembering. Emilia’s story about Our Lady of Csíksomlyó had revealed the strain of …

In Pursuit Of Healing And Memories: Cross-Border Ukrainian Pilgrimage To A Polish Shrine, Iuliia Buyskykh

Journal of Global Catholicism

I present an analysis of Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic and Orthodox pilgrimages to Kalwaria Pacławska in south-east Poland near the Polish-Ukrainian border. Before World War II, there were two pilgrimage sites in Kalwaria Pacławska, one Roman Catholic and the other Greek Catholic. Today, Ukrainian pilgrimage is quite a diverse phenomenon, consisting of people of both Ukrainian and Polish origin, and the three Christian denominations. The approach to pilgrimage as a palimpsest can broaden the research perspective of mobile religiosities and reconsider the interactions between religious motivations, sacred sites, memories, experiences, and storytelling through space and time. In my research case, …

Introduction To The Special Issue

Russian Language Journal

No abstract provided.

Heritage Language Learners Of Russian And L2 Learners In The Flagship Program: A Comparison, Olga Kagan, Anna Kudyma

Russian Language Journal

In 2005, a consortium of schools consisting of Bryn Mawr College, University of Maryland, University of California Los Angeles, and Middlebury Summer School was formed in order to launch a Russian Flagship Program. Both participants and NSEP 1 felt that these universities would bring different strengths to the program: Maryland and Bryn Mawr, for example, would attract students returning from a year-long study abroad experience in Russia as administered by American Councils, and UCLA would attract heritage language learners from large Russian communities in both Northern and Southern California. As expected, the first cohort of UCLA Flagship students consisted of …

Designing And Integrating A Community-Based Learning Dimension Into A Traditional Proficiency-Based High School Curriculum, Elizabeth Lee Roby

Russian Language Journal

When considering the goals of language instruction, few would debate the importance of promoting a lifelong interest in learning language and culture in authentic contexts through engagement in multilingual communities. The World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages (2015) state that, to meet the Communities goal, students should be able to “communicate and interact with cultural competence in order to participate in multilingual communities at home and around the world” (9). Nonetheless, instructors often struggle to integrate authentic community engagement into the traditional classroom-based curriculum. The first years of language learning frequently include simulations and role-playing scenarios that duplicate situations in which …

Fields Of The Mind: An Integral Learning Styles Component Of The E&L Cognitive Styles Construct, Betty Lou Leaver, Andrew R. Corin

Russian Language Journal

The E&L Cognitive Styles Construct was developed in 1997 and copyrighted in 2002 by Ehrman, director of the Research, Evaluation, and Development Division at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), and Leaver, then an associate at the National Foreign Language Center. It was developed in order to organize the proliferation of validated cognitive styles into a single instrument with ten easy-to-understand subscales specifically for the field of foreign or second language (L2) learning and teaching (Leaver 1997, 2000; Ehrman and Leaver 2002). The first two subscales, which relate to fields of the mind, however, have often created confusion or misunderstanding among …

Russian Heritage Language Speakers In The U.S.: A Profile, Olga Kagan

Russian Language Journal

Brecht and Ingold (2002) advocate systematic efforts to develop heritage language (HL) pedagogy to remedy U.S. language deficits: “…because of [heritage language learners’(HLLs’)] existing language and cultural knowledge, they may require substantially less instructional time than other learners to develop these skills. This is especially true for speakers of the less commonly taught languages” (p. 1).

Russian is one of those less commonly taught languages in the U.S. that is critically important for national security and the global economy. Since the early 1970s, when a large wave of Russian-speaking immigrants began to settle in the U.S., American universities have had …

Piloting A Dynamic Assessment Model: Russian Nominal Morphology As A Building Block For L2 Listening Development, Rimma Ableeva, Olga Thomason

Russian Language Journal

Second language (L2) Russian research identifies listening comprehension as the least developed language ability among university students and points to the importance of listening instruction in Russian programs (e.g., Rifkin 2005; Comer 2012a; Isurin 2013). For example, Rifkin (2005, 11) states that students typically exhibit an “intermediate-low level of L2 listening proficiency” after completion of a 4-year Russian program. According to Isurin (2013, 39), the survey conducted among L2 Russian learners and instructors acknowledged “listening comprehension as the most problematic area in students’ language proficiency in general.” Comer (2012a) attributes poor listening ability to insufficient teaching materials and activities as …

Word Order Patterns In The Writing Of Heritage And Second Language Learners Of Russian, Olesya Kisselev

Russian Language Journal

Word Order (WO) variability is an important feature of the Russian language. Appropriate use of WO patterns makes a Russian text meaningful and coherent and has larger implications for the grammaticality of sentences and the ability of the language user to interpret and convey the meaning of the utterance. In the words of the late Olga Kagan, “every learner and teacher of Russian would agree that acquisition of native-like WO is one of the most challenging hurdles on the path to the higher levels of language performance” (Kagan and Dillion 2004, 89). Despite this widely shared opinion, little is known …

Teaching Compassion In The Russian Language And Literature Curriculum: An Essential Learning Outcome, Benjamin Rifkin

Russian Language Journal

One of Dr. Olga E. Kagan’s most important contributions to the language education field was a reconceptualization of the perspective of the language performance of heritage speakers of Russian. In the past, heritage speakers’ language was considered deficient in all the ways in which it diverged from Contemporary Standard Russian. Their lack of formal instruction in Russian or the interruption of their formal instruction due to their immigration from a Russophone country to North America was considered the source of numerous errors and anglicisms, which the Russian language curriculum was designed to eliminate. Teachers of Russian as a foreign language …

Lexical Profile Of L2 Russian Textbooks, Ekaterina Talalakina, Tony Brown, Mikhail Kamrotov

Russian Language Journal

Traditionally, the link between vocabulary mastery and reading comprehension has been examined through the prism of lexical thresholds and vocabulary coverage (Milton 2009). Lexical thresholds represent the most frequent words in a language (i.e., lemmas, or dictionary forms of a word) and usually come in increments of 1,000. In relation to the Russian National Corpus, knowledge of the 1,000 most frequent lemmas allows for comprehension of 60% of a text’s vocabulary, 2,000 lemmas – 69%, and 10,000 – 85% (Lyashevskaya and Sharoff 2009, v). These figures support an earlier estimation by Brown (1996, 2), who claimed (without elaborating on what …

Businessmen And Ballerinas Take Different Forms: A Strategic Resource For Acquiring Russian Vocabulary And Morphology, Laura A. Janda

Russian Language Journal

Included in the tasks facing a language learner is the acquisition of a lexicon and a grammar. However, when the target language has inflectional morphology, these two parts of the language-learning task intersect in the paradigms of grammatical word forms because each open-class lexeme has a number of forms that allow it to express various combinations of grammatical categories. Among major world languages, Russian is relatively highly inflected, meaning that the challenges of acquiring vocabulary are compounded by the need to master the inflectional morphology. Even a modest basic vocabulary of a few thousand inflected lexemes has over a hundred …

«В Каком Контексте?»: A Context-Based Approach To Teaching Verbs Of Motion, Irina Six

Russian Language Journal

Anyone who has studied or taught Russian using the textbook В пути, authored by Olga Kagan, Frank Miller, and Ganna Kudyma, is probably familiar with the following thought-provoking prompt: В каком контексте? ‘Think of a situation when you could say’: Ты звонила домой сегодня? – Ты позвонила домой сегодня? ‘Did you call [imperfective] home today? – Did you call [perfective] home today?’ or Они не приходили. – Они не пришли. ‘They did not come [imperfective]. – They did not come [perfective]’(Kagan, Miller and Kudyma 2006, 79). This is one of the rare examples of assignments where Russian as a Second …

Review: Standards For Foreign Language Learning: Preparing For The 21st Century, Larysa Stepanova, Elizabeth F. Geballe

Russian Language Journal

Although this textbook does not include many explanations of syntactic constructions practiced in exercises, students at this level likely already have other reference materials. Instructors may want to supplement a course with some review, depending on the overall level of the students. The book is of great interest to a targeted audience of readers – those who want to develop their Russian language skills beyond the Intermediate level and to enhance their understanding of Russian culture, particularly the arts. Being strongly communicative in nature, this textbook will be of great help to any instructor of the Russian language.

This final …

Review: Paper Victory;The Old Woman, James S. Levine, Anna S. Kudyma, Irina Walsh

Russian Language Journal

These two Readers are a welcome addition to the available authentic texts for learners of Russian at the intermediate level of proficiency (CEFR, 2011). Both of these James S. Levine-edited Readers have much to offer, not only in terms of their linguistic accessibility, but also through the way they might improve students’ cultural literacy and analytical skills when it comes to Russian literature. One’s reading skills, review of Russian grammar and vocabulary also stand to benefit from these two valuable volumes.