Sympathy for the Weary State?: Cold War Chronotopes and Moscow Others

Abstract

Julya paces the parquet, blond hair coiled severely, hands clasped atop padded buttocks encased in a boxy gray, ill-fitting suit. She sputters abuse at her audience: fifteen classmates sprawled on the floor, their teacher seated in a chair, and a video camera. Moscow, November 2002. The Americans prepare to invade Iraq, Putin serves his third year as president, and these students begin their first term at the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts (RATI/GITIS). Inside its walls, Julya depicts the head of her high school, an older woman in a town two hours north. She yells: “I REQUEST that TODAY at the meeting with ZhshzhshshzhshuGAnov you ALL be there!” (Zjuganov is the leader of the Russian Communist Party.) Some students slap the parquet laughing. Their teacher is less impressed.

Rodologia: Genealogy as Therapy in Post‐Soviet Russia

“…Using a graphic display of his relatedness, Oleg was encouraged to sympathize with the dead. Similarly to the performance exercises at the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts, described by Lemon (), in which credibly depicting a character from a different historical context relied on students’ training in sympathy ( simpatiia ) and compassion ( sostrodanie ), the “burning chair” enabled Oleg to learn about himself through learning about his relatives. This included Oleg's detailed account of his grandfather's journey to Siberia and the recounting of the historical and political circumstances under which he lived and worked.…”

Textual Iconicity and the Primitivist Cosmos: Chronotopes of Desire in Travel Writing about Korowai of West Papua

“…Travel writers' practices of mapping between myth and personal experience are an intensive case of patterns of mapping practiced by tourists at large. Identifying a relatively unitary spatiotemporal level as a chronotope is only a heuristic beginning of inquiry into distinctive logics of personhood, morality, and causation by which events unfold (Morson 1994;Lemon 2009). Following Munn (1986), I take it that these distinctive spatiotemporal logics of linkage and fracture are, by definition, social logics made up of intersubjective desire, recognition, and evaluation.…”

THE MODERNITY OF MANUAL REPRODUCTION: Soviet Propaganda and the Creative Life of Ideology

“…For people who routinely engaged in aligning everyday aesthetics with a perpetual movement toward future goals that they had no part in setting, it may well be that counterintuitive ideology and hegemonic common sense interpenetrated each other to the point that it made little sense to disentangle the two. The magical realism of some late Soviet fiction and folk political mythologies, as well as the particular combination of empathy and suspicion cultivated by members of the intelligentsia certainly suggest a far more intimate efficacy of ideology than standard images of high modernist bureaucracies allow for (Humphrey 2003; Lemon 2009). But the amount of labor (by local propagandists, cultural workers, schoolchildren, and everyone engaged in producing politically mandated aesthetics) that went into lecture texts, concerts, and visual aids is also a reminder of the productivity of keeping the gap between the familiar and the counterintuitive open, and people engaged in working to bridge it.…”