Journal ArticleDOI
In a Muddy Land, Wearing a Historical Costume: Posttraumatic Humanism in Post-Stalinist Soviet Culture
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The posttraumatic humanism movement as mentioned in this paper was based on the new aesthetic idiom of "gloomy Renaissance," including images of conflagration, ruins, violence, and war.Abstract:
This paper discusses the reinvention of the humanist ideas and values in the Soviet post-World War II and post-Stalinist culture (the 1950s and the1960s) with the help of Renaissance plots and images in Soviet semi-official art, the main examples being Pavel Antokolsky's poem Hieronymus Bosch (1957), the Strugatsky brothers' novel Hard to Be a God (1963), and Grigory Kozintsev's films based on Shakespeare's Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970), as well as David Samoilov's poem Bertold Schwarz: A Monologue , set in the late Middle Ages. The paper isolates an aesthetic movement that developed in the Soviet culture of those decades; I propose to call this movement "posttraumatic humanism." It was based on the new aesthetic idiom of "gloomy Renaissance," including images of conflagration, ruins, violence. The works of this movement did not use the Aesopian language — or, at least, did not use it as a primary or only tool. Rather, it involves a covert comparison of the Soviet present with the European pre-Enlightenment past and aesthetical valorization and sublimation of 20th-century catastrophic experience. Images of "gloomy Renaissance" conveyed the erosion the Soviet belief in progress and moral modernization as inevitable consequences of Bolsheviks' revolution. One of the earliest mature works of posttraumatic humanism in Soviet culture was Vasily Grossman's essay The Sistine Madonna (1955). Alexei German Sr.'s film Hard to Be a God (2013) can be regarded as the concluding and summarizing work in this movement.read more
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Cultural Memory in the Present : Warped Mourning : Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied
TL;DR: Etkind as discussed by the authors argues that post-Soviet Russia has turned the painful process of mastering the past into an important part of its political present, and argues that the events of the mid-twentieth century are still very much alive, and still contentious.
References
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Book
A Secular Age
TL;DR: In this paper, the Bulwarks of Belief and the Malaises of Modernity are discussed, and the Age of Authenticity is discussed. But the focus is on the past rather than the present.
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Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941
TL;DR: Clark as discussed by the authors provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge and draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods.
Cultural Memory in the Present : Warped Mourning : Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied
TL;DR: Etkind as discussed by the authors argues that post-Soviet Russia has turned the painful process of mastering the past into an important part of its political present, and argues that the events of the mid-twentieth century are still very much alive, and still contentious.
Book
Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied
TL;DR: Etkind as mentioned in this paper argues that late Soviet and post-Soviet culture, haunted by its past, has produced a unique set of memorial practices, and argues that the events of the mid-twentieth century are still very much alive, and still contentious.
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Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia
TL;DR: The last representatives of the Russian intelligentsia, heartened by Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism in 1956, took their inspiration from the visionary aims of their nineteenth-century predecessors and from the revolutionary aspirations of 1917 as discussed by the authors.