Slavic Languages and Societies Commons^™

The Soviet New Wave: A Comparative Analysis, Katarina Parks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis aims to assert the Soviet New Wave into the global New Wave cinema movements of the late 1950s and 1960s. Focusing on three Soviet films—Marlen Khutsiev's I Am Twenty (1965) and July Rain (1967), and Georgiy Daneliya's I Walk the Streets of Moscow (1964)—this study proposes that these works fully commit to the New Wave expression in form, sensibility, and content, despite the aggressive censorship of Soviet authority. By comparing the Soviet films with the French Nouvelle Vague, as well as with British, Polish, and Czechoslovakian New Wave cinemas, the thesis identifies recurring motifs: the centering of young …

Living By The Sword: Religiosity And The Terrorist Subculture Of Russian Revolutionaries, 1904-1910, Gregory I. Mcevoy

Dissertations and Theses

The Marxist dictum of “religion is the opiate of the masses” has led to a prevailing assumption in scholarship that the socialist movements of the early twentieth century have been inherently atheistic. Religion is often associated as a remnant of old, antiquated society and incompatible with the claimed modernity of socialist progress. This assumption has led to overlooking the religiosity within certain radical movements and revolutionary culture at large. Scholarship on the political underground in Tsarist Russia has, thus far, perpetuated this impression. While it is the true that the Bolsheviks and Leninist Social Democrats rejected religion as obscurantist and …

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, And Disgust In The Work Of Virginia Woolf And Zinaida Gippius, Yelizaveta Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, and Disgust in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Zinaida Gippius examines how the discourses of degeneration, eugenics, and sexology shaped representations of women’s bodies in British and Russian modernist literature. Focusing on the writing of Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), I challenge the longstanding argument that both authors attempted to escape the material body by resorting to androgynous tropes. I argue that the material female body takes center stage in both Gippius’s and Woolf’s work and functions as a powerfully paradoxical entity: one that generates disgust and enables oppression while housing …

Audible Futures: Scenes Of Sonic Encounter In Cold War Kurdistan, 1923–2023, Nicholas S. Glastonbury

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines a century of cultural politics in Kurdistan, from 1923 to 2023, and it does so from a relatively marginal vantage point in most histories of Kurdistan: that of the Soviet Caucasus. It takes as its primary object the cultural and political itineraries of sonic media and listening in Kurdistan, from Soviet Kurdish radio broadcasting and pirated cassettes to postsocialist archives, DJ booths, and streaming music. These itineraries map not only the emergence and circulation of Kurdish notions of tradition, heritage, and cultural memory, but also the methods of counterinsurgency deployed by the states that occupy Kurdistan. In …

The Search For Existential Meaning: Tracing Leo Tolstoy’S Nihilism Through His Later Works, Elisabeth Koyfman

Student Theses and Dissertations

In this senior thesis, I explore the writings of acclaimed 19th-century author Leo Tolstoy through the lens of existential and ethical nihilism: a philosophical ideology espousing an assertion of a meaningless existence shaped by similarly meaningless governing social, political, and religious conventions. Prior to the author’s religious conversion at the age of 50, Tolstoy’s writings reflected a nihilistic worldview that opposed any socially accepted definition of a meaningful existence. Although within the span of 1800s Russia nihilism was strongly associated with atheism and terrorism, Tolstoy distanced himself from any accepted cultural value or label—including the negative political associations and other …

Computational Representation Of Russian Aspectual Morphology With A Focus On Perfective Prefixation, Natalia Tyulina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work performs an empirical analysis of Russian aspectual morphology focusing on perfective derivation via prefixation. We present a number of computational experiments measuring productivity of morphological processes of prefixation that form perfective verbs from simple imperfective verbs. Several hypotheses related to the argument structure of perfective verbs vs. their prefixed derivatives are tested statistically. Furthermore, we investigate semantic relatedness by computing cosine similarities of unprefixed verbs vs. their prefixed versions. Finally, we analyze the correlation between productivity, frequency, argument structure and semantic similarity across both simple imperfective – prefixed perfective verb forms, and various perfectivizing verbal prefixes.

Detection And Morphological Analysis Of Novel Russian Loanwords, Yulia Spektor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper investigates recent English loanwords in Russian and explores ways in which computational methods can help further theoretical research. The goal of the study is two-fold: to find new, previously unattested loanwords borrowed over the last decade and to examine the rate of adaptation of the new borrowings, attested by the degree to which they conform to the constraints of the Russian language. First, we train a finite-state pipeline that combines character n-gram language models, which encode phonotactic and lexical properties of loanwords, with a binary classifier to detect loanwords. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance results during evaluation, surpassing …

The Production Of Russian Vowels /I/ And /Ɨ/ By Russian-English Bilingual Children, Evgeniya Maryutina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is the first to investigate the production of the Russian vowel contrast /i/-/ɨ/ by Russian-English bilingual children living in New York City. This contrast is interesting because the vowel /ɨ/ is not unanimously recognized as an independent phoneme, based on e.g. its limited occurrence and distribution (Kodzasov & Krivnova, 2010; Matusevich, 1976). Additionally, Russian-speaking children acquire /ɨ/ relatively late in production. Therefore, this contrast’s acquisition may be particularly challenging for bilingual children with more limited exposure and variability in their input and is an interesting test case and contribution to the debate regarding the contrast’s phonological status. In …

Acquisition Orders And Instructional Sequences: A Case Study Of Russian Textbooks, Olga Ozhiganova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research on English as a second language has established the linguistic phenomenon of the natural order of morpheme acquisition in which grammatical features are acquired by learners in a specific order. The acquisition of Russian morphosyntax as an L2 had not been established until Gor’s (2019) research. The present study employs Gor’s (2019) findings to examine whether the order in which five Russian morphosyntactic features—case, impersonal sentences, location-direction, aspect, verbs of motion (VoM)—are acquired is reflected in second-year Russian instructional materials by investigating three commonly used textbooks. The results reveal that (1) the documented order in which Russian morphosyntactic …

The Problem Of Literary Development In Russian Formalism And Digital Humanities, Basil Lvoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interest of this dissertation is how our understanding of literary development—as gradual or revolutionary; self-governed or socio-politically determined; like or unlike biological evolution—informs the status, meaning, and value of literature and literary studies. The dissertation shows how this problem—most pressing in our post-logocentric age—was addressed at the dawn of contemporary literary theory by the Russian Formalists. The latter are compared with Distant Readers, i.e., the Digital Humanists from, or conducting research in dialogue with, the Stanford Literary Lab: Franco Moretti, Matthew Jockers, Ted Underwood, William Benzon, and others.

This dissertation argues that both Russian Formalism and Distant Reading were …

The Paganist Totem Birds In Slavic Folklore: The Black And The White, Anastasia Radzievska

Dissertations and Theses

It is believed that pagan cosmology once ran strong through the Slavic countries and traces are visible through the passed down folklore that spread through the land. While we talk of animals and their representation in folklore, we usually only refer to the Christian written western folklore, but these pagan born animals stand in strong contrast to them. The Slavic people believed that the world was made of diverse natural forces that shared what the Earth had to offer and worked in unison to protect one another, whereas the Christian belief saw the world as a distinct separation of man …

Forbidden Attraction: Russian Poets Read T. S. Eliot During The Cold War, Nataliya Karageorgos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this study is to demonstrate how the reception of T. S. Eliot, one of the leading proponents of Anglo-American modernism, shaped the aesthetics of Russian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, Russian culture found itself in a unique situation of separation from the Western world, with which it had largely identified in the previous century. The official change of the cultural paradigm that took place in the aftermath of the October Revolution led to the advancement of the literary theory and practices of Socialist Realism, shutting off modernist tendencies and …

African American Performers In Stalin’S Soviet Union: Between Political Promise And Racial Propaganda, Christopher E. Silsby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the first half of the twentieth century, a significant number of African Americans left the United States for the promise of racial and economic equality in the supposedly class-less society of a post-Revolution Soviet Union. This dissertation uses a series of interrelated case studies to contextualize the theatrical work of Paul Robeson, jazz dancer Henry Scott, actor Wayland Rudd, and the 1955-56 international tour of Porgy and Bess within the overlapping social, political, and aesthetic landscapes of African American and Soviet performance in Moscow during the rise and height of Stalinism.

Starting with an overview of race in the …

Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout Western medical history, unconsummated, unreturned, or otherwise failed love was believed to generate a disorder of the mind and body that manifested in physiological and psychological symptoms. This study traces the medical and literary history of lovesickness from antiquity through the 19^th century, emphasizing significant moments in the development of the medical discourse on love. The project is part of the recent academic focus on the intersection between the humanities and the medical sciences, and it situates literary texts in concurrent medical and philosophical debates on afflictions of the psyche. By contextualizing the fictional works within the scientific …

Dostoevsky As A Translator Of "Eugénie Grandet", Julia Titus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The focus of this study in comparative criticism is a close analysis of Dostoevsky’s first literary publication - his 1844 translation of the first edition of Balzac’s Eugе́nie Grandet (1834) and the stylistic choices that he made as a young writer while working on Balzac’s novel. Through the prism of close reading this dissertation analyzes Dostoevsky’s literary debut in the context of his future mature aesthetic style and poetics. Comparing the original and the translation side by side, the dissertation focuses on the omissions, additions and substitutions that Dostoevsky brought into the text. It demonstrates how young Dostoevsky’s free translation …

Quantifier Spreading In Child Eye Movements: A Case Of The Russian Quantifier Kazhdyj ‘Every’, Irina A. Sekerina, Antje Sauermann

Publications and Research

Extensive cross-linguistic work has documented that children up to the age of 9–10 make errors when performing a sentence-picture verification task that pairs spoken sentences with the universal quantifier every and pictures with entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. These errors stem from children’s difficulties in restricting the domain of a universal quantifier to the appropriate noun phrase and are referred in the literature as quantifier-spreading (q-spreading). We adapted the task to be performed in conjunction with eye-movement recordings using the Visual World Paradigm. Russian-speaking 5-to-6-year-old children (N = 31) listened to sentences like Kazhdyj alligator lezhit v vanne ‘Every alligator …

For Narrativity: How Creating Narratives Structures Experience And Self, Natallia Stelmak Schabner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation responds to the challenge to narrativity posed by Galen Strawson in “Against Narrativity,” where he claims that not everyone is Narrative by nature and that there is no reason to be. I make my claim “For Narrativity” as a mental process of form finding and coherence seeking over time that is an inherent mental activity and essential for experience of one’s Self. I make my case through examinations of our experience of time, our use of language, how we plan, and our sense of Self. In the first chapter, I show that considering Narrativity as viewing life as …

Tuff Breeches, Arkadiy Ryabin

Theses and Dissertations

In consideration of language and it’s relationship to information and knowledge, the author explores personal set of events in relationship to that of the public, via forms of orality. 19th century American literature is posited as a hangover influencing contemporary events.

A Reader's Beheading: Nabokov's Invitation And Authorial Utopia, Aaron Botwick

Publications and Research

“A Reader’s Beheading: Nabokov’s Invitation and Authorial Utopia” argues that Invitation to a Beheading polemically outlines Nabokov’s position on the relationship between reader and writer: in other words, that writing and reading are difficult, elite pursuits whose meanings should necessarily be available only to those willing to face and surmount the magician’s challenges. Narratively, it operates as a kind of roman à clef in which Cincinnatus C. follows a trajectory towards artistic freedom (or authorial utopia) where he is liberated from the constraints of poor readers—among them literalists and Freudians—while Nabokov, ever the unaccommodating creator, frustrates that progression with the …