Slavic Languages and Societies Commons^™

"Kill The State In Yourself": Totalitarianism And The Illiberal Dissidence Of Egor Letov, Katherine Frevert

Honors Papers

The Siberian punk movement of the 1980s is often regarded as the Soviet Union’s most aesthetically and politically iconoclastic rock underground. Amidst the numerous bands the scene produced, none has matched the notoriety of Grazhdanskaia Oborona (Civil Defense) and its leader Egor Letov. At first glance, Letov’s songs declaring hatred for the “totalitarian” Soviet Union and its destruction of the individual evoke associations with the previous generation of Soviet dissidents, who used the term “totalitarianism” to contrast the Soviet system with the Western democracy they admired. Yet Letov, who rejected democratic reforms and after the collapse of the USSR proclaimed …

Belief In The Unbelievable: Yakov Druskin And Chinari Metaphysics, Patrick D. Powers

Honors Papers

This project focuses on the philosophy of Yakov Druskin and its applicability as a lens through which to examine the metaphysical and religious elements of chinari literature. Formed in Leningrad at the dawn of the Soviet Union, the group of authors and philosophers known as the chinari has long been recognized as an important component of the Russian avant-garde. However, the role of religion and spirituality in their works remains under-examined, despite the fact that the group featured a prolific religious philosopher, Yakov Druskin. By exploring a selection of Druskin’s philosophical concepts and applying them to major chinari texts—Daniil Kharms’ …

Fatum Ad Benedictum: Moscow-Petushki, Homo Sovieticus, Postmodernism And The Fatidic Post-Soviet Irony Of Venedikt Vasilevich Erofeev, Paul N. Kleiman

Honors Papers

The following honors thesis is structured into two parts, four chapters apiece.

The first part is a philological study of the Soviet dissident and writer Venedikt Vasilevich Erofeev’s magnum opus, Moscow-Petushki (1969-70). This half of the thesis investigates Petushki in light of its thematic development of fate, or, more particularly, the fate of homo sovieticus—the ironic term devised by Soviet sociologist Aleksandr Zinovyev (1922-2006) to describe a typical conformist citizen of the Soviet Union. I will focus predominantly on Petushki’s connection to the end of the Khrushchev “Thaw” in the early-mid-1960s and the beginning of Brezhnev “Stagnation” in the late-1960s, …

Science And Medicine In Liudmila Ulitskaia’S Kazus Kukotskogo, William D. Wise

Honors Papers

Science and medicine play a fundamental role in Liudmila Ulitskaia's 2001 novel Kazus Kukotskogo. This paper argues that Ulitskaia employs science and medicine as a concrete means of considering such diverse questions as social life, morality, and religion in the work.

Translating Chris Ware's Lint Into Russian, Matthew Davis

Honors Papers

Comics translation is rarely practiced with any appreciation of the comics medium – rather, comics usually are translated as prose, ignoring the words relationship to pictures. I chose Chris Ware's work, known for pushing the boundaries of comics language, because translating it mandates formal engagement with the comics medium. My project also involved dealing with the problems of translating into a non-native tongue, cultural translation, and placing Ware's comics in the Russian existentialist tradition.

Review: Electric Salome, Loie Fuller's Performance Of Modernism, Tim Scholl

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dostoevsky And Tolstoy's Oblique Responses To The Epidemic Of Chernyshevskian Philosophy, Zachary D. Rewinski

Honors Papers

This paper focuses on Fyodor Dostoevsky and Lev Tolstoy's subtle responses to the work and philosophy of the radical intelligent, literary critic and philosopher Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had deep qualms about Chernyshevsky's ideas and their consequences, both for the individual and Russian society at large. The goal of this paper is to describe these ideas and consequences as they appear in two of the most famous and important works of 19th century Russian and world literature, Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina."

Discussion begins with exegesis of the radical utilitarian and utopian philosophy advocated by …