Models of Personal Conversion in Russian cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries (Interdisciplinary Studies on Central and Eastern Europe)

Description

This volume offers a view of modern Russian intellectual culture as shaped by the dynamic of conversions. The individual contributions examine a rich variety of personal conversions occurring in a culture in which the written word enjoyed a privileged status and, historically, was closely linked to the sacred. However, the essays presented go beyond the original meaning of conversion as a change of religious beliefs. They address shifts in style, aesthetic outlooks, and mindsets, political and ideological transfigurations as well as religious conversions in the true sense of the term. Whether at the level of culture, society or biography, the study of conversions opens the way to profound reflections about questions of identity, cultural ruptures, and continuity. The awareness of former conversions and the possible «convertibility» of one’s own ideological, spiritual or social stance has been among the central traits of Russian intellectual culture during the last two centuries. Cover Contents On Russian Conversions: Introduction (Jens Herlth and Christian Zehnder) Slavic Conversions (Tomáš Glanc) Between Schlegel and Baader: Stepan Shevyrev’s Conversion to Orthodox Literary Science in the European Cultural Context (Alexey Vdovin) “An upheaval was so necessary”: Authorial Conversion and the Literary Public in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) (Jens Herlth) The Terrorist “Tigrych” versus the Monarchist Lev Tikhomirov: Why did Tikhomirov “Stop Being a Revolutionary”? (Anatoly Korchinsky and Oxana Zamolodsky) Conversion to Dionysianism: Tadeusz Zielin´ ski and Heptachor (Irina Sirotkina) Sergei Bulgakov: The Potentiality of Conversion (Regula M. Zwahlen) Valerii Briusov’s Shift from Symbolism to Proletarian Culture (Oleg Kling) Cultural Conversion: From Modernism to Socialist Realism (Boris Pasternak and Titsian Tabidze) (Bela Tsipuria) Conversion as Attitude in Pasternak (Christian Zehnder) Leonid Borodin’s Rasstavanie: Orthodoxy and the Moscow Intelligentsia in the 1970s (Josephine von Zitzewitz) The Place of the Religious-Philosophical Seminar # 37 in the Witnessing of the Orthodox Christian Conception of “Anthropos” in Soviet Society (Milutin Janjić) Our House Russia? Conversions from and to Judaism in Oleg Iur’ev’s Novel "Poluostrov Zhidiatin" (Miriam Finkelstein) “To Be Means to Communicate …” Tat’iana Bek’s Poetry: A Dialogue Between the Poet and God (Ekaterina Orlova) Contributors