Slavic Languages and Societies Commons^™

Ellis H. Minns And Nikodim Kondakov’S The Russian Icon (1927), Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Kondakov’s magnum opus [The Russian Icon] failed to win an audience. Though it appeared just in time for a surge of popular interest in Russian icons abroad, it never became the book of choice for the English-speaking public seeking a guide through the ‘dark forest’ of the icon’s history... My chapter offers some suggestions for why this crude caricature of Kondakov’s work took hold in the 1920s and became axiomatic throughout the Soviet period. In particular, it considers the role that Minns’s translation may have played, however inadvertently, in cementing this impression. Minns’s interventions in and framing of …

Migration In Slavic Village, The History Behind The Cleveland Central Catholic Ironmen., Mary C. Brondfield Mrs., Matt Aber Mr.

Migration in Global Context Symposium

This presentation is a collaborative effort by two educators from the disciplines of art and history. The PowerPoint presentation documents the the cross curricular migration themed event that explored migration in Slavic Village, Ohio. Historical speakers and visits to historical sites engaged students throughout the event. Through oral history and the visual arts students engaged in project based learning.

Embroidery In The Circle Of The Last Romanovs, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

This article essay examines the liturgical embroideries associated with the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna and her sister Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna. It suggests that the sisters’ needlework for sacred purposes was invested with a significance not seen in elite Russian society since the late seventeenth century. At a time when the arts of Orthodoxy were undergoing a state-sponsored renaissance, who was better suited to lead the resurgence of liturgical embroidery than the wife and sister-in-law of the Emperor, the last in a long line of royal women seeking to assert their piety and their power through traditional women’s work? In the …

One Big Thing: Suffering As The Path To New Life In Crime And Punishment, Kelly M. Kramer

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

After spending a whole semester reading and thinking about Dostoevsky, the main thing that has struck me about him is his treatment of the theme of suffering. Despite, and even through, his extremely complicated characters and events, he nevertheless focuses his novels, particularly Crime and Punishment, on presenting a nuanced yet unified picture of suffering. After a brief analysis of several of the relevant characters and plot points, his thoughts on what suffering does to and for the individual will be presented. In contrast to our culture’s almost idolization of suffering as an experience which gives one instant respect, …

The Wolf Attacks: A History Of The Russo-Chechen Conflict, Christina E. Baxter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Chechens fought against the Russians for independence. The focus in the literature available has been on the wars and the atrocities caused by the wars. The literature then hypothesizes that the insurgency of today is just a continuation of the past. They do not focus on a major event in Chechen history: the Soviet liquidation of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1944. It is this author’s assertion that the liquidation of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR forever changed the mindset of the people because it fractured a society that was once unified. This …

Faith, Doubt, And Chiasmus In Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue I, William Bartley

Journal of Religion & Film

This article proposes a reinterpretation of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s exploration of the first commandment in Decalogue I. It argues that the narrative structure of the story is chiastic—i.e., inversely parallel—which follows from recognizing for the first time the crucial role that Irena, the devoutly Catholic sister of Krzysztof, a professor and religious skeptic, plays in the story. The pattern of inverse parallelism (chiasmus) emerges as Krzysztof and Irena respond separately to the tragic death of Krzysztof’s son, Pawel: as Krzysztof’s skepticism gives way to a new faith in God, inversely and unexpectedly Irena’s faith retreats into doubt. This outcome, in …

Pavel Tretiakov’S Icons, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Between 1890 and his death in 1898, the Moscow art collector Pavel Tretiakov acquired sixty-two icons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With this comparatively late entry into the world of icons, Tretiakov laid the foundation for one of the world’s greatest collections of medieval Russian paintings. Why is it, then, that Tretiakov’s icons are today so rarely mentioned and so hard to find? The most practical explanation is that they were simply swallowed up into the vast repositories of the reorganized State Tretiakov Gallery in 1930, along with thousands of icons from churches and private collections nationalized afer 1917. …

The Holy Fool In Late Tarkovsky, Robert O. Efird

Journal of Religion & Film

This article analyzes the Russian cultural and religious phenomenon of holy foolishness (iurodstvo) in director Andrei Tarkovsky’s last two films, Nostalghia and Sacrifice. While traits of the holy fool appear in various characters throughout the director’s oeuvre, a marked change occurs in the films made outside the Soviet Union. Coincident with the films’ increasing disregard for spatiotemporal consistency and sharper eschatological focus, the character of the fool now appears to veer off into genuine insanity, albeit with a seemingly greater sensitivity to a visionary or virtual world of the spirit and explicit messianic task.

Semiotics And Christian Discipleship In Fyodor Dostoevsky’S Crime And Punishment And Dietrich Bonhoeffer’S The Cost Of Discipleship, Jacob Pride

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The literary and philosophical theory of semiotics considers signs and symbols. Pragmatics is the branch of semiotics that explicates the practical effects of a given interpretation according to its context. Through analyzing the pragmatic context of Crime and Punishment, one can begin to uncover the depth of meaning that the novel delivers. In The Limits of Interpretation, Umberto Eco talks about what he calls "intersubjective meaning," which helps a particular interpretation of a text attain "a privilege over any other possible interpretation spelled out without the agreement of the community" (40). The particular intersubjective meaning that needs to …

An Imperial Collection: Exploring The Hammers' Icons, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Changing hands one last time, in the 1950s, for many years the icons at BJU lived as it were incognito, the details of their glamorous origins largely forgotten. Reuniting this core group-the cream of the Hammers' imperial icons--with others that passed into American museums in the 1930s allows us to appreciate the full significance of Armand and Victor Hammer's foray into marketing icons Americans.Viewed in isolation, most of their "imperial icons" are perhaps no mo than a poignant reminder of the vast destruction and dislocation of Orthodox culture during the Soviet Cultural Revolution. Taken together, however, they paint a vivid …

And Then, He Folds His Patterned Rug: Repressive Reality And The Eternal Soul In Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Cook

Masters Theses

While Vladimir Nabokov has deservedly earned fame as a stylist of the strange, most critics who study his novels approach his absurd and beautiful characters as little more than fractured victims of a wholly subjective reality. Compounding the misunderstanding is the tired debate over whether or not Lolita is literary, pornographic, or some cruel game of cat-and-mouse in which Nabokov seizes control of his readers' sense of morality. However, critics who read Nabokov as nothing more than a manipulative stylist neglect to realize that his characters suffer such absurd distortions of spirit and mind because their environment--the "average" reality of …

Religious Culture: Faith In Soviet And Post-Soviet Russia, Jerry Pankhurst

Russian Culture

The former Soviet Union is undergoing a religious revival. People inside and outside the Russian Orthodox church are reexamining its ancient ways, rediscovering its long-forgotten saints, searching its institutional memory for answers to urgent questions facing the nation. The Western reaction to this remarkable resurgence of religion in Russia has been mixed. All observers welcome the fact that free inquiry about religion and free religious worship have been restored in the Russian Federation. At the same time, many are concerned about the xenophobic tendencies that have accompanied the religious revival in Russia and that became especially evident after the liberal …

Russian Spirituality And The Theology Of Negation, Mikhail Epstein

Russian Culture

Toward the end of the twentieth century Russian culture found itself at a crossroads which cannot be ascribed to any political election but which rather presupposed a radical change in its religious and social orientation. Two somewhat opposing theses will be developed in this article. First I will discuss the processes of secularization in Russian culture and the necessity of a third, neutral zone between the "sacred" and the "profane." Next, the dangers of social neutralization in culture and the necessity of retaining elements of the dual model along with the introduction of intermediate elements will be presented. We will …

Culture And Interreligious Understanding According To The Romanian Philosopher Lucian Blaga, Michael S. Jones

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

Culture affects how we interpret our experiences and the way we construct our world. It also affects our ability to communicate with one another. The late Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga developed a systematic philosophy of culture that explores and explains how culture challenges and at the same time facilitates interideological communication. This article introduces and explains these aspects of Blaga's philosophy and then applies them to the issue of interreligious dialogue. It concludes that Blaga's philosophy of culture promotes a high regard for culture and cultural distinctness and at the same time vindicates, enables, and promotes efforts at interreligious understanding.

Foreword To Irina Yazykova, Hidden And Triumphant: The Underground Struggle To Save Russian Iconography, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Wendy Salmond's foreword to Irina Yazykova's Hidden and Triumphant: The Underground Struggle to Russian Iconography, in which Yazykova discusses how the art of icon painting survived during years of Russian Communism and is now poised to launch a new era that reflects modern experience.

How America Discovered Russian Icons: The Soviet Loan Exhibition Of 1930-32, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Books and Book Chapters

On 14 October 1930, the first exhibition of Russian icons ever to take place in the United States opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Over the next nineteen months it traveled to nine venues across the country, introducing the American public to a form of medieval painting virtually unknown outside Russia. Billed as the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Loan Exhibition," its avowed goal was to share with the outside world the full story of Russian icon painting's evolution from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, thereby adding a vital missing chapter to the history of medieval …

Erasing The Past: Destruction And Preservation Of Cultural Heritage In Former Yugoslavia, Part Ii, Igor Ordev

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

No abstract provided.

Russian Icons And American Money, 1928-1938, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

The article explores the marketing tactics and consumer expectations with regards to icons released in the street markets and provincial cities of Soviet Russia and acquired by American collectors from 1928-1938. These icons, including those from Byzantium in the tenth century, were seen as cultural commodities during the Russian revolution and the subsequent socialist construction. The Soviet apparatus Antikvariat was tasked with appraising the icon collections held by the Gosmuzeifond or the State Museum Reserve for exports.

Review Of The Iconostasis Of Peter The Great In The Peter And Paul Cathedral In St. Petersburg (1722-1729), Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

Wendy Salmond reviews The Iconostasis of Peter the Great in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg (1722-1729) by Julia Gerasimova.

Czarist Missionary Contact With Central Asia: Models Of Contextualization?, David M. Johnstone

Publications from Student Life & Spiritual Life

Although the Western church knows little of these ventures, Russian Orthodoxy in fact has a rich missionary heritage. There have been instances of great courage, passion, and cultural sensitivity in Orthodox attempts to bring the Gospel to the Muslim peoples. I outline here some of the context and features of these missionary endeavors.

Revival Of Traditions In Post-Soviet Central Asia, Anara Tabyshalieva

History Faculty Research

The collapse of the Soviet Union gave the unexpected gift of independence in 1991 to five new states in Central Asia-Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. In common with other post-socialist countries, these states are currently going through a transition period characterized by serious and worsening social and economic problems. The 55 million people who live in the region are facing problems of overpopulation, a chronic decline in living standards, and ecological crisis. There has also been a revival of patriarchal traditions and a reversal of female emancipation: The combination of Soviet and Muslim components has led to an …

The Issue Of Antitrinitarianism In The Fifteenth-Century Novgorod-Moscow Movement: Analysis And Evaluation, Oleg Zhigankov

Dissertations

This study attempts to examine the trinitarian beliefs of the fifteenth-century Novgorod-Moscow movement, analyzing both their own writings and the polemical writings of those who considered their teaching antitrinitarian.

The main objective of the present research is to contribute to the restoration of the authentic theological identity of this movement. Chapter 1 defines the problem, which has already been raised by some nineteenth-century scholars who have pointed out that the allegedly antitrinitarian character of the Subbotniks' movement must be open for further discussion. It also shows that no systematic research on Subbotniks' theology has ever been produced.

The second chapter …

The Controversial Saints: Representations Of Cyril And Methodius In Modern Slavic History: Chronology And Theses, Petko Ivanov

Slavic Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Dostoevsky: A Man Of Mission, H. E. S. Woldring

Pro Rege

Dr. H. E. S. Woldring spoke at Dordt College in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Dostoevsky's death. Although the speech published here is substantially as delivered, the editors, with Dr. Woldring's permission, have edited it for the readers of Pro Rege.

One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich: A Response To Repression, Fred J. De Jong

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

The Harvest Field: 1958 Edition, Howard L. Schug, J.W. Treat, Robert L. Johnston Jr.

Stone-Campbell Books

No abstract provided.