Quaestio RossicaPub Date : 2024-03-29DOI: 10.15826/qr.2024.1.868
Nursel Bolat, Ömer Çakın, Esennur Sirer
{"title":"A Study on Understanding the Changing Diaspora and Virtual Communities through Digitalization","authors":"Nursel Bolat, Ömer Çakın, Esennur Sirer","doi":"10.15826/qr.2024.1.868","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2024.1.868","url":null,"abstract":"This article contains a research study within the framework of the diaspora approach, focusing on the connection of the Circassian community, which had to leave the Caucasus during the Tsarist Russia period in the 1860s and settle in Turkey, their new homeland. Although various definitions exist, the concept of diaspora is generally used to describe people who were forcibly separated from their homelands during historical processes and settled in at least two countries. With the advent of the digital age, the diaspora concept has evolved, particularly in terms of diaspora communities, as communication tools with the homeland have improved, and social and geographical mobility has changed through virtual communication platforms. In a physical sense, it enables access to numerous resources, such as maintaining connections with the homeland and diaspora members who are physically distant. Diasporic communities can create virtual communities, collaborate, and establish cultural connections through new media. Although this process has not yet spread to every aspect of life, initial steps have been taken through communication initiated by Caucasian Associations. The digital realm adds a digital dimension to the concept of diaspora. In this context, the virtual communities established by Circassians living in Turkey with their homelands in the Caucasus are examined through in-depth interviews with key figures from Caucasian Associations in the diaspora and participants from the homeland.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140365965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quaestio RossicaPub Date : 2024-03-29DOI: 10.15826/qr.2024.1.874
Amiran Urushadze
{"title":"Georgian Aristocracy in the Politics of the Russian Empire: Mechanisms and Stages of Integration","authors":"Amiran Urushadze","doi":"10.15826/qr.2024.1.874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2024.1.874","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the process of integration of the Georgian elite into the social and political space of the Russian Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. In this case, integration should be understood as confirmation of the class rights of the Georgian nobility. This process lasted for half a century. The first part of the article analyses the efforts of the Russian authorities aimed at finding an optimal format for confirming the class rights of the Georgian elite. The class guarantees of the Georgian aristocracy were recorded in several documents, most notably in the Treaty of Georgievsk in 1783 and the Manifesto to the Georgian People in 1801. In addition, the rights of the noble Georgian class were guaranteed in several official proclamations of the regional Russian administration. However, the “nobilisation” of the Georgian elite encountered several legal obstacles and was delayed. Another problem of the Russian government was the unauthorised issuance of princely and noble letters by Georgian princes, who, after the liquidation of the royal house of Bagration, were resettled to Russian capitals. The government was not immediately successful in stopping this illegal practice. All these difficulties led to the fact that by the middle of the nineteenth century, most representatives of the Georgian nobility had not received recognition of their class rights at the imperial level. The second part of the article examines the activities of the first Caucasian Viceroy, Mikhail Vorontsov, aimed at completing the process of the “nobilsation” of the Georgian nobility. In 1846, at the proposal of the Viceroy, two special temporary commissions were created in Tiflis and Kutais to examine the class rights of the Georgian nobility. The commissions consisted of representatives of the Georgian nobility and Russian officials. The work of the commissions was completed in 1849, and a year later the lists of Georgian princes and nobles received the approval of Emperor Nicholas I. The Confirmation of rights made the Georgian nobility part of the imperial elite and motivated Georgians to take an active part in empire-building.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140367972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quaestio RossicaPub Date : 2024-03-29DOI: 10.15826/qr.2024.1.861
Alexey Antoshin
{"title":"Empires and Ethnic Communities in Russian History","authors":"Alexey Antoshin","doi":"10.15826/qr.2024.1.861","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2024.1.861","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:p>____</jats:p>","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140368537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quaestio RossicaPub Date : 2023-12-21DOI: 10.15826/qr.2023.4.839
Omar Lobos
{"title":"Concepts of Translation of Russian Poetry in Western Culture","authors":"Omar Lobos","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.4.839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.4.839","url":null,"abstract":"This article compares the peculiarities of Western and Russian versification and then considers the aspects to observe when translating Russian poems. While the Western tradition continues to be dominated by the distinction between form and content, Russian poetry does not share this binary logic, as both concepts are inextricably linked. Whereas in the West, poetry has become individualised, “mute”, and mostly “written”, Russian verse has not lost its “communicative” character and is therefore highly phonetic. Given this fact, it is possible to identify some Spanish-language examples that bring the two traditions closer together and can serve as rhythmic models for a more identical translation of Russian verse. The author uses his own experience as a translator of Russian-language poems.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138949965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quaestio RossicaPub Date : 2023-12-21DOI: 10.15826/qr.2023.4.851
A. Kolesnik
{"title":"The Leningrad Rock Club in St Petersburg: From Memory to Cultural Heritage","authors":"A. Kolesnik","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.4.851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.4.851","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last 30 years, the popular musical past has become a subject of interest for researchers in many social sciences and the humanities, from cultural geography and cultural sociology to urban studies and public history. Popular music is regarded not only as a significant part of national and regional cultural history, but also as an important element of the urban cultural heritage. The revision of both the content and the very concept of cultural heritage is associated with large-scale changes in the humanities and social sciences that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century and influenced the transformation of historical politics in many cities, regions, and countries. In Russia, a diverse and rich musical past, related to the history of late Soviet popular and rock music, has only recently begun to be studied and represented in the urban space. The article discusses the ways of authorising the musical heritage associated with the history of the Leningrad Rock Club in contemporary St Petersburg. The research is based on field data collected in 2020–2021: in-depth and spontaneous interviews with musicians participating in the Leningrad Rock Club, rock journalists, employees of the Pushkinskaya, 10 Art Centre and the Kamchatka Rock Club-Museum, and field observations during guided tours of rock-related places in St Petersburg and exhibitions dedicated to the history of Leningrad rock. The author proposes to consider the urban musical heritage in St Petersburg self-authorised. The examples studied in the article are initiatives of the predominantly St Petersburg rock community of musicians, journalists, and city activists. Its key forms are excursions, installation of memorial plaques and signs, temporary exhibitions, and opening of a museum dedicated to the history of Leningrad rock music based on the Pushkinskaya, 10 Art Centre. Despite the traditional format of representing the memory of the musical past, the organisers do not seek to designate the musical places of modern St Petersburg in terms of “authorised heritage discourse” but gravitate toward a less formal conversation and representation of this past.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138950109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quaestio RossicaPub Date : 2023-12-21DOI: 10.15826/qr.2023.4.840
Vladislav Bortnikov
{"title":"John Milton’s Iambic Pentameter in Russian Translations: The Problem of Equirhythmic Correspondence to the Source Text","authors":"Vladislav Bortnikov","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.4.840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.4.840","url":null,"abstract":"The author of this article compares two Russian poetic translations of J. Milton’s Paradise Lost by O. Chyumina (1899) and A. Steinberg (1976). The comparison is based on the rhythmic specific features of the introduction to the poem. The article aims to identify the translators’ strategies when working with the rhythmic structure of each poetic line as a peculiar case of meter (iambic pentameter) realisation. Obviously, preserving iambic pentameter does not mean making the text sound the way it does in the original in the target language. Consequently, when comparing two poetic variants of the text, it is necessary to consider the individual characteristics of each verse: pyrrhic feet, rhythmic italics, etc. The author proposes the term “equirhythmicity” for the degree of approximation to absolute rhythmic equality of the original. It is assumed that “equirhythmicity” can serve as a qualitative and quantitative characteristic of a translation and, therefore, as a basis for comparing translations. This assumption is tested with reference to the introduction to Paradise Lost, which occupies 26 lines in the English original and 35 (O. Chyumina) and 28 (A. Steinberg) lines in the Russian translations. This increase in text volume is not only due to the fact that Russian words are longer than those in English but also the absence of rhyme and regular stanzas and different translation strategies in general. The table of lexical correspondences proposed by the author demonstrates that O. Chyumina cares about rendering all words as fully as possible, thus not seeing any problem in syllabic inequality and, consequently, in the extension of the text. This occurs in the number of her lexical additions, which is 2.5 times higher than A. Steinberg’s. On the contrary, the latter tries to compensate for the syllabic expansion using lexical omissions and choosing the shortest possible equivalents. Based on the calculated average coefficients of syllabic correspondence and qualitative equirhythmic analysis, the author draws a conclusion about a more considerable formal correspondence of Steinberg’s translation to the original (as compared to Chyumina’s), with minimal lexical and semantic losses. Both Russian versions come to be “equirhythmic” and reflect the corresponding trends in the history of Russian translation.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138950481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quaestio RossicaPub Date : 2023-12-21DOI: 10.15826/qr.2023.4.847
Ilia Pechenkin
{"title":"Imagining Russian: Vladimir Stasov in the Construction of the National Style of the Russian Empire","authors":"Ilia Pechenkin","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.4.847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.4.847","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the phenomenon of the “Russian Revival Style” in the architecture of the late Russian Empire, which opens vast opportunities for interpretation. Since the late twentieth century, the most widespread approach to this phenomenon has been a romanticised point of view, where the Russian style is described as a realisation of the people’s objective need for national selfidentification. A significant role in the formation of this perspective was played by the journalism of the post-reform decades of the nineteenth century, by Vladimir Stasov in particular, whose views were regarded as canonical in the Soviet era as those of an expert and interpreter of the Russian artistic process of the 1860s–1880s. The experience of Soviet art studies shows that in case of a biased reading, Stasov’s texts could provide a more radical version of the origin of the Russian Revival Style interpreted as an expression of the sympathies and aspirations of the revolutionary-minded intelligentsia. This study identifies the contradiction between Stasov’s “democratic” rhetoric and the realities of class society. This inner conflict allows Stasov’s judgments to be attributed to the realm of cultural imagination and not to the description of an ongoing process, to the category of presumptions, not statements. Analysing the interpretation of the Russian Revival Style given by Stasov as one of the manifestations of progress, of which he was an unconditional and ardent supporter, the author of the article proposes to consider this phenomenon in the context of the purposeful construction of the imperial nation, carried out by the Russian autocracy throughout the nineteenth century. The title and arguments of his review essay Twenty-Five Years of Russian Art (1883), which summarises the artistic results of the quarter-century reign of Emperor Alexander II (1856–1881), testifies to the quite state-centred character of Stasov’s optics. The practice of the authorities in building a national identity through architecture met the needs of various social groups – from representatives of the aristocracy who sympathised with modernisation to industrialists interested in selling their goods on the foreign market. The opposition-minded intellectual, who clearly understood the socio-political background of the Russian Revival Style, was the last in the line of sympathisers with this enterprise. Sceptical of pre-reform institutions and the slanted tastes of high society, the nobleman Stasov was at the same time not one of the “Carbonari of art” and his apologia of the “Russian” was entirely in line with official imperial nationalism.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138951796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quaestio RossicaPub Date : 2023-12-21DOI: 10.15826/qr.2023.4.848
Y. Zevako
{"title":"“Excluded from Memory”: The Question of Passing Down National History","authors":"Y. Zevako","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.4.848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.4.848","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the (partial) “exclusion” or “self-exclusion” of the “complex heritage” descendants from the “inheritance” of the official narratives of national history. As a rule, such discourses rely on antagonistic logic. In the article, the idea of “complex heritage” descendants denotes people whose family history includes both representatives of mutually exclusive groups (from the point of view of different public discourses of memory). When any single discourse is dominant in the public space or in a competition between antagonistic discourses of national history, descendants of “complex heritage” must independently cope with the emerging internal tension and discomfort (if they arise). In this article, in the context of common European trends, the author shows and analyses different options for such reactions with reference to competing discourses of national history in Russia, i. e., “Triumph” (Victory in the Great Patriotic War) and “Tragedy” (the era of political repression), as well as the most massive public practice of memory dedicated to the Great Patriotic War heroes: the civil event known as the “Immortal Regiment”. The analysis refers to forty indepth interviews conducted by the author in 2021–2023 with descendants of the repressed from the third, fourth, and further generations (as well as those who fought and showed themselves differently in the past). The author relies on the concept of antagonistic memory, supplemented by the ideas of Ts. Todorov on the principles of working with the “difficult past”, the theory of post-memory by M. Hirsch and others. As a result of the research, the author draws the following conclusions: first, the experience of “exclusion” from national history due to the lack of blood ancestors that give the right for “inclusion” into the “fundamental myth of the nation” really exists; second, in the conditions of (even unequal) competition of antagonistic discourses, the descendants of the “complex heritage” find themselves constrained between the narrow limits of each of them. At the same time, the need to meet externally set criteria and the impossibility of doing this lead to resistance to the imposed public antagonistic models of understanding the past; finally, those “excluded” from national history in one or different interpretations thereof, the descendants collect, preserve, and transmit their family histories as “heritage” in the full diversity and inconsistency, as life itself, and the circumstances in which their ancestors were placed.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138952539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quaestio RossicaPub Date : 2023-12-21DOI: 10.15826/qr.2023.4.841
O. Turysheva
{"title":"The Concept of Music from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: Author vs Translator","authors":"O. Turysheva","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.4.841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.4.841","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the problem of preserving the meaning of the translation of fiction texts. The author refers to the translation into Russian of “War er ein Tier, da ihn Musik so ergriff?”, a phrase from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It is argued that in the only translation of the novella into Russian by S. K. Apt, there is an inaccuracy in the translation of this phrase, which distorts the semantics of the source. The article reveals the grounds for the assumption of this inaccuracy in the translation of the outstanding Russian Germanist. They relate to the translator’s intuitive rejection of the concept of musical art, which is reflected in the phrase analysed. While reconstructing Kafka’s thought, the author of the article concludes that Kafka’s work expresses an understanding of music that completely disagrees with the one that distinguishes the classical works of European philosophy of music, forged on the basis of Romantic aesthetics. Kafka has a non-Romantic understanding of music: he refuses to venerate it as an ideal metaphysical essence, reflecting on the nature of the impact of music on the listener. The author puts forward a hypothesis that in Kafka’s work, there is a rethinking of the philosophy of musical art belonging to F. Nietzsche, who opposed music to the non-musical human world, subordinated to logic and language. Kafka radicalises this opposition: in his logic, music alienates people from the rational world, plunging them into an animal, primordially natural state. Gregor Samsa’s sensitivity to music, which he discovers after the metamorphosis, makes him recognise his animal essence, which requires that the analysed phrase be translated as a sentence with a clause of reason (“Was he an animal because music excited him so much?”) rather than a clause of condition (as in Apt: “Was he an animal if music excited him so much?”). The reference to other novellas about “animals responsive to music” (Investigations of a Dog, Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk) reinforces the proposed reconstruction of Kafka’s understanding of music, which, in turn, opens significant semantic layers of the novella related to the interpretation of the images of other characters (Gregor’s family, three guests in Mr. Samsa’s apartment) and its deep tragic content.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138952353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quaestio RossicaPub Date : 2023-12-21DOI: 10.15826/qr.2023.4.844
Ernest Zitser
{"title":"Il parlait assez bien français et plusieurs langues: Foreign Language Acquisition and the Diplomatic Self-Fashioning of Prince Boris Ivanovich Kurakin","authors":"Ernest Zitser","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.4.844","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.4.844","url":null,"abstract":"Using the example of Prince B. I. Kurakin (1676–1727), the Imperial Russian diplomat who served as extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador to France (1724–1727), this article seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the possible reasons for the adoption of French as the language of international communication in general and eighteenth-century diplomacy in particular. It asks when the Moscow-born Gediminid prince learned to speak French and how this non-native speaker of the language became proficient enough to impress a finicky and fastidious interlocutor like Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755). The author suggests that the answer to these questions lies not in Russia or France, but in Poland and Italy; and not in the halls of formal educational institutions, but in the networks of personal connections that were sustained as much by face-to-face communication as by written correspondence. This brief biographical survey of the development of Prince Kurakin’s “linguistic personality” demonstrates the mediating role of modern, vernacular languages (Russian, Polish, Italian) in the transition from Latin to French as the lingua franca of international diplomacy. It also emphasizes the intimate connection between foreign language acquisition and diplomatic self-fashioning, showing how linguistic knowledge could be instrumentalized for both personal and professional advancement. In doing so, it illustrates the active role that individual brokers – especially, but not exclusively, aristocratic royal servitors with broad linguistic skills and extensive international connections, like Prince Kurakin and the duc de Saint-Simon – played in creating the very notion of an early modern “European” style of diplomacy based on the cultural dominance of the French language.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138949026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}