University of Pittsburgh, Autumn 2008 (09-1)
David J. Birnbaum (djbpitt+medieval@pitt.edu)
Location:
http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~djb/medieval_literature/09-1/research_papers.html
Main Course Page:
http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~djb/medieval_literature/09-1/
Last revised 2009-01-11
My paper examines the Judaizing heresy. I first look at the religious and political context surrounding the heresy. My goal is to analyze Iosif Volotskii’s relationship to the heresy and role in shaping the portrayal of the Judaizers. I am attempting to piece together how Volotskii’s writing (especially “The Enlightener”) depicted the group and what effect that had on both treatment of the Judaizers at the time, as well as how the system of practices and beliefs of the group are reconstructed from his works in more recent history.
In my paper, I will discuss Svetlana Vasilenkoʼs use of medieval motifs in her novel Little Fool (Durochka). I am arguing that Ganna, the protagonist of the novel, presents a synthesis of the images of various hagiographical and apocryphal origins. In particular, I am looking at the lives of holy fools, the Descent of Virgin into Hell, and the Life of Iuliianiia Lazarevskaia. I also argue that Gannaʼs life as well as various other medieval legends presented in the novel oppose the dominant narratives of modernization and imperialism of the 30s and 60s.
(no abstract available)
This paper will focus on a recent trilogy of films (2004–06) from Mel′nitsa Studio that are based on three popular Russian byliny. The three films have been extremely popular, earning 1.7, 3.5 and 9.8 million dollars. Articles and projects about these films have largely viewed these works in terms of how they fit into New Russian Cinema: they feature contemporary language, state of the art special effects, and are marketed with online games that appeal to children. I would like to instead view the films as adaptations of the bylina, and see how these connections add to the films’ recent success. I am interested in the texts as adaptation of not only the original tales, but also of popular Soviet representations of the byliny (see Ptushko, Aksenchuk). A major question to explore in the paper is how medieval culture has been reshaped through these films (Soviet and post-Soviet). What do contemporary Russian films draw from medieval culture, and how is this packaged to audiences?
During World War II, the Soviet government put a lot of emphasis on creating a deep feeling of patriotism among its citizens. In order to intensify the horror of war and to encourage soldiers to fight enemies until the victorious end, Soviet artists used an assortment of visual techniques and referred to a variety of themes in their propaganda posters. Among other things, they used characters from Russian medieval culture, including St. George, Aleksandr Nevskii, Dmitrii Donskoi, and Russian bogatyrs. This use of medieval imagery in military propaganda art was not, however, unique; even before the Revolution some artists produced posters that were based on stories about medieval heroic warriors.
The goal of this paper is to analyze war posters from both the 1910s and 1940s that include medieval imagery of this type, and to answer the question about the purpose and the meaning of these visuals. It is important for this research, first, to analyze the status of these heroes in the original medieval texts. I will be looking at the medieval literary texts, such as byliny, hagiography, and military tales, and also at icons depicting these characters. The next step will include comparing the ways in which medieval warriors are portrayed in the medieval texts and in the war propaganda posters from the 1910s and the 1940s, which I will examine within a framework of semiotic theory. Because all three groups of cultural artifacts (medieval, WWI, WWII) were created during different cultural, political, and ideological periods, I expect that they will differ from one another in terms of the messages they convey and the ways they construct heroic feelings among their viewers.
The correspondence between Prince Andrei Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV (Groznyi) has long been considered a valuable historical artifact, integral to understanding Ivan’s personal conception of the autocratic conventions according to which he brutally rearranged the state. This paper’s close reading of motifs of violence in the correspondence certainly affirms this generally held assumption, but also attempts to situate it in the continuity of the cultural literary tradition of Rus′, drawing upon such institutions as the Bible and the cults of warrior saints and martyrs.