Boris Uspenskij Research Articles

The system of points of view in Vasily Shukshin's short stories

The purpose of the work is to explore the point of view in Vasily Shukshin's short stories in its systematic and diverse manifestation. Topicality is provided by the exceptional significance of this category in narratology. The study of the point of view based on the material of short stories by Vasily Shukshin has been conducted for the first time. The article briefly traces the history of scientific understanding of the category of point of view in foreign and Russian philology and notes the variety of approaches and definitions in the formulation of the concept. The authors use the classification of Boris Uspenskij for analysis and consider the point of view in Vasily Shukshin's short stories in psychological, ideological (evaluative), spatial-temporal and phraseological terms. The positions of Boris Korman, Yuri Lotman, Wolf Schmid and Franz Karl Stanzel also take into account. The authors note the features of Vasily Shukshin's narration that affect the expression of the point of view in the text. Vasily Shukshin's short stories are characterised by a dynamic and frequent change of points of view, which indicates the technique of “montageˮ and similarities in this regard with cinematic techniques. The conclusions generalise the variety of ways and forms of expression of the point of view in the studied artistic material. The point of view in the considered stories is characterised by variability in the correlation of subjects of speech and subjects of consciousness, alternation of external and internal points of view, mutual transitions from one to the other, text interference and other hybrid phenomena.

Hartley , Janet M. Shaw , Denis J. B. Magic, Texts and Travel: Homage to a Scholar, Will Ryan (review)

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 760 Hartley, Janet M. and Shaw, Denis J. B. (eds). Magic, Texts and Travel: Homage to a Scholar, Will Ryan. Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, London, 2021. x + 388 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Publications of Will Ryan. Index. £25.00 (paperback). According to all its outward signs, this book should make the reviewer wary. The idiosyncratic combination of topics listed in its main title hardly suggests coherence. The subtitle, baldly advertising the book as a Festschrift, gives not even the mildest nod towards modern disguises of the genre (under cover of, for example, a themed issue of a journal). The fact that the volume is published by a study group seems to remind us of publishers’ wariness with regard to collections of essays in general and Festschriften in particular. A glance at the contents list shows contributions ranging from A. V. Chernetsov’s study of early Rus amulets to Paul Dukes’s account of Scottish missionaries and Manchurian railways at the turn of the twentieth century, via detours into diverse side-avenues such as fifteenth-century Slavonic translations of Hebrew philosophical terminology (Moshe Taube), or eighteenth-century masonic rituals (Yuri Stoyanov). Everything seems to indicate the pious obscurity of a semi-private act of — as the title says — scholarly homage. And yet, despite all of that, this turns out to work rather well as a book. As Will Ryan might have said, never underestimate the ostensibly esoteric. The twenty-one chapters are roughly evenly distributed across three sections whose headings are slightly expanded versions of the three words in the main title of the book. To summarize them all is impossible, to select is invidious, but a few highlights will indicate both the diversity and the unexpected coherence. The coherence derives from the predominant focus, across all three sections, on aspects of what might conventionally have been reckoned liminality, on phenomena on or around the cultural, social or geographical margins. But this is not a mere kunstkamera of curiosities. Will Ryan has contributed hugely to the process by which conventionally liminal preoccupations have shifted into the historiographical mainstream. The chapters are also of a consistently high quality. The first section is on ‘Magic and Beliefs’. The line between the two is pleasingly blurred. Valerie Kivelson vividly illustrates the ‘lyrical logic’ of Muscovite spells that involved or invoked animals, while Eve Levin explores the practice of therapeutic blood-letting that seems to have been adopted from Western Europe from the late fifteenth century, despite the fact that Muscovites did not relate disease to ‘humours’ and hence did not share the theory that underpinned the practice. Gary Marker investigates the curiously disproportionate posthumous notoriety of the heretic and dissenter Grigorii Talitskii, who was convicted and immolated in 1701 and on whom a dossier was REVIEWS 761 assembled on the orders of the Empress Elizabeth in the 1740s and published in the 1860s. The second section is headed ‘Texts and Translations’, though in some respects the chapters here also touch on magic and, in particular, belief. Sergei Bogatyrev meticulously deconstructs the sources on the ‘legend of the golden belt’, an apparently scandalous episode at the wedding of Vasilii II. It may have originated as just a drunken row, but it was subsequently interpreted and elaborated into a political polemic. Adelina Angusheva-Tihanov considers how the story of the toll-booths that the soul has to negotiate on its attempted ascent to heaven, derived from a vision in the tenth-century Byzantine Life of Basil the Younger, was adapted in the eighteenth century and later, with particular focus on the treatment of the toll-booth that assessed ‘magic’. Boris Uspenskij makes an intriguing case for the notion that some polite diplomatic rhetoric by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1658 was interpreted (and reported) by a Muscovite envoy as an actual pledge of subservience to the tsar. Thethirdsectionismorewordilyheaded‘Travel,TechnologyandExploration’. Here liminality knows almost no limits, as we are reminded of how much of the globe we can traverse while remaining safely within the realm of Russian Studies. Anthony Cross surveys the British in Crimea between 1774 and 1856. Elena Smilianskaia and Julia Leikin investigate a tour...

Hartley , Janet M. The Volga: A History of Russia's Greatest River (review)

REVIEWS 761 assembled on the orders of the Empress Elizabeth in the 1740s and published in the 1860s. The second section is headed ‘Texts and Translations’, though in some respects the chapters here also touch on magic and, in particular, belief. Sergei Bogatyrev meticulously deconstructs the sources on the ‘legend of the golden belt’, an apparently scandalous episode at the wedding of Vasilii II. It may have originated as just a drunken row, but it was subsequently interpreted and elaborated into a political polemic. Adelina Angusheva-Tihanov considers how the story of the toll-booths that the soul has to negotiate on its attempted ascent to heaven, derived from a vision in the tenth-century Byzantine Life of Basil the Younger, was adapted in the eighteenth century and later, with particular focus on the treatment of the toll-booth that assessed ‘magic’. Boris Uspenskij makes an intriguing case for the notion that some polite diplomatic rhetoric by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1658 was interpreted (and reported) by a Muscovite envoy as an actual pledge of subservience to the tsar. Thethirdsectionismorewordilyheaded‘Travel,TechnologyandExploration’. Here liminality knows almost no limits, as we are reminded of how much of the globe we can traverse while remaining safely within the realm of Russian Studies. Anthony Cross surveys the British in Crimea between 1774 and 1856. Elena Smilianskaia and Julia Leikin investigate a tour of Lord Effingham to the Aegean with the Russian navy in 1770. James Gibson writes on the ‘Amur question’, Alexey Postnikov chronicles an episode in the imaginary and then empirical cartography of the Arctic regions, Denis B. Shaw follows Russian expeditions to Siberia, while Simon Dixon analyses a mission to Jerusalem in 1859, which, he argues, helped shift the balance of prestige from Britain towards Russia. The horizons of Will Ryan’s interests have indeed been wide — a fact underlined by the helpful inclusion of a bibliography of his publications across nearly six decades. Clare College, Cambridge Simon Franklin Hartley, Janet M. The Volga: A History of Russia’s Greatest River. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2021. xix + 379 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Timeline. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £25.00. In her bid to win the musical contest in Volga-Volga (1938), the ravishing yet pure Strelka played by Liubov´ Orlova composes a paean to the ‘broad, deep, strong’ and ‘all-national’ river in which she evokes the Cossack rebels of yesteryear, warns any present-day enemies who might be listening to keep their distance and, just for good measure, slips in a reference to Stalingrad. Not SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 762 surprisingly, after a few misadventures, the song enchants the people, and the self-effacing Strelka wins the Olympiad. Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach, the real-life songwriter, had a somewhat more checkered career, becoming embroiled in a plagiarism scandal a couple of years after the release of the film, though in this case, it’s hard to imagine what he could have stolen. His ‘Song of the Volga’ is so trite there’s almost nothing proprietary about it. By the 1930s, the river was such an obvious national icon that all a savvy Stalinist versifier had to do was offer a shout-out to the great leader and a dash of Socialist Realist cheeriness. The rest, in a sense, was already built in. Janet M. Hartley’s rich overview of the history of the river addresses the mythologies surrounding the Volga but the real strength of the book lies in its sweeping coverage of the nuts-and-bolts. Starting from the age of Khazaria, Bolgar and Kievan Rus’ and running to the present, Hartley patiently chronicles the ebb and flow of political, social and economic change up and down the river. The last line of the book, ‘Without the Volga, there would be no Russia’ (p. 316), quoted from a recent Russian TV production, aptly captures the gist of the work, which is that Volga history is Russian history. Virtually everything of importance affecting the country’s development has a connection to the river, and Hartley relates virtually all of it here. This approach leads to a certain information overload as we move relentlessly from one fact...

Historical Thinking in the Light of the Assumptions of Historical Semiotics. (In The Margin of Boris Uspenskij’s Ego Loquens)

Historical Thinking in the Light of the Assumptions of Historical Semiotics. (In The Margin of Boris Uspenskij’s Ego Loquens)

Boris Uspenskij on history, linguistics and semiotics

The two interviews with Boris Uspenskij on history and the contemporary state of linguistics and semiotics discuss the necessity to elaborate a common terminology in semiotics, at the same time speaking about perspectives for interdisciplinary research, various research models, and the possibilities to produce proof in the humanities. Commenting upon some of his own works, in particular on Ego loquens (2007), Boris Uspenskij reflects upon the crucial events of his academic life and on contacts with his colleagues, emphasizing the importance of friendship with Roman Jakobson and Juri Lotman.

Semiosphere and history: Toward the origins of the semiotic approach to history

This article compares the approaches to the semiotics of history of two central figures of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics – Juri Lotman and Boris Uspenskij. It is argued that Lotman’s approach to the semiotics of history is closely connected with the development of his theory of the semiosphere (despite Lotman’s unfailing interest in history, his theoretical interpretation of the historical process was, in fact, secondary to his reflection on the semiosphere), that is, with the shift in his research from studies of literary-historical cases to typology. Meanwhile, Uspenskij, a linguist who started out as a scholar of structural language typology, moved in the opposite direction, becoming increasingly engaged in the examination of individual historical cases. Lotman’s correspondence with Uspenskij serves as proof that semi-formal communication on scientific issues between the representatives of the Tartu-Moscow School was often what inspired new fundamental ideas and further development of theoretical concepts.

Introduction: Semiotics and history revisited

The introductory article proposes to offer a general frame for the special issue, discussing the emergence of semiotics of history as a new discipline or approach in the humanities. It presents an overview on the attempts of joining the history and semiotics in the Western world since the early 1980s, with a special focus on the United States, and examines the contribution of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics to the semiotic study of history, paying the main attention to the work of Juri Lotman and Boris Uspenskij. Finally, a survey of the articles that make up the special issue dedicated to the 80th anniversary of Boris Uspenskij is presented.

The figure of the impostor to the throne in Russian political culture: Between sacralization and mimesis

Proceeding from materials relating to the “Time of Troubles”, this article examines the phenomenon of imposture (samozvanchestvo) as one of the symbols of Russian political history from the early 17th to the mid-19th century. The duration of the “impostor epidemic” coincides exactly with that of serfdom, and imposture itself can be described as a social reaction to a form of authority founded on total personal dependence. The article aims to develop further Boris Uspenskij’s argument that reveals in sacralization of the Tsar’s power in medieval Russia the main reason of imposture. René Girard’s conception of mimetic desire serves as the theoretical perspective for such a development.

Reading Uspenskij: Soviet ‘semiotics of history’ in the West

The article explores the reception of Boris Uspenskij’s writings and ideas outside of the Soviet Union, primarily in Western European and North American academic contexts. The present brief overview of Uspenskij’s academic reception covers the translations of his best-known scholarly works [first and foremost “Historia sub specie semioticae” and “Istoriya i semiotika (Vospriyatie vremeni kak semioticheskaya problema)”] into English, French, Spanish, German and other European languages, as well as various references to Uspenskij’s ideas on what nowadays would be categorized as ‘semiotics of history’, or thoughts at least in some way related to the ‘cultural-semiotic approach to history’ of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics.

Boris Uspenskij in English: Bibliography

The bibliography provides a list of Boris Uspenskij’s publications in English, including works written in co-authorship and various reprints/reissues. For the most part, Uspenskij’s publications in English are translations of his books and articles originally written in Russian and previously published in the Soviet Union/Russia. The first English-language publication of his work, the monograph Principles of Structural Typology appeared in 1968; the current bibliography consists of 65 entries from a period spanning from 1968 till today.

The future orientation of culture and the memory of the past in the making of history

The article describes the semiotic approach developed by Boris Uspenskij to study the historical process. Uspenskij’s semiotics of history is integrally bound with the Tartu-Moscow School’s programme of cultural semiotics and is rooted in the fundamental premises of that programme, which he helped to shape. These premises contain a complex ontology of culture, encompassing three levels: cultural memory, sets of cultural texts, and semiotic systems, which model both the image of the world and programmes of action. Uspenskij’s analytical model of semiotics of history highlights the pragmatic aspect of the process of historical communication: the agency of its participants as carriers of culture and sign users. This article presents the role of reflexivity in the historical process, associated with reconstruction of the meaning of the past and prospective shaping of the future. Making history means constantly renewing the narrative about past events, which determines the future course of history in the present. Uspenskij presents opposite cultural tendencies in the historical process, associated with different types of semiosis, as symbolic conflicts. The article shows the role of symbolism and symbolic politics in the processes of making history in the model of semiotics of history. This model makes it possible to link together research on cultural memory, time, communicative action and symbolism.

Meditations on the divine liturgy: boundaries of the theatricality in the creative work of Nikolay Gogol

The purpose of the present article is to demonstrate the theatricality of Gogol’s Meditations on the Divine Liturgy. Theatricality is “the language of theatre as art”, as Jurij Lotman has stated. Phillis Hartnoll points out three aspects, viz. an actor, a dialogue, and a spectator, that separate theatre from its origins – the ritual. The birth of the spectator seems to Lotman and to Boris Uspenskij to be the decisive factor to establish a situation of the performance. The visuality of the performance is the main feature of theatre as art.There are three presumptions Gogol has about liturgy: (1) liturgy is a dramatic form of the evangelical plot, (2) the forms of worship in liturgy are so perfect that watching them is enough to understand the meaning of the ritual, (3) in liturgy, it is possible to achieve the unity of souls and feelings of all participants of the ritual. Gogol presents liturgy as performance. The narrative is based on separate scenes with clearly marked beginnings and ends. Gogol even renders intonations of dialogues between a priest and a deacon. The motif of performing distinguishes Gogol’s work from his predecessors.The only point of view in the text is from the outside. The narrator is one of the spectators of liturgical performance. On the other hand, the narrator is also a participator of the worship. Gogol shows the effect the performance makes on people and also renders their praying. Taking the sacrament is described as catharsis and in the same terms as Aristotle has done, viz. the horror and the purging. So even at this moment the theatrical nature of liturgy is retained.In the context of the Gogol’s discourse of theatre, liturgy seems to be the ideal performance. One can presuppose that the writer’s wish to explain the role of the theatre has ended with describing the most spectacular performance of the orthodox ritual. In doing this the writer was most likely influenced by the Ukrainian baroque tradition which shaped Gogol’s artistic imagination. The theatricality of the baroque aesthetics found its place in the visual nature of Gogol’s texts.In his search for new creative forms Gogol was not alone. In 1842–1843 Adam Mickiewicz pointed to the Greek tragedy and to the mysteries of the Middle Ages as possible examples to follow in the future Slavonic theatre. By demonstrating the theatrical possibilities of the Christian ritual Gogol was close to these ideas.

The Manifesto of Tartu-Moscow Semiotics since 1973

Abstract In 1973, a collectively written manifesto titled Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures was penned under the leadership of Tartu scholar Juri Lotman together with his Moscow colleagues Vjacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Aleksandr Pjatigorskij, and Boris Uspenskij. The appearance of this work marked the birth of a new scholarly field of research called the semiotics of culture. In the present contribution we provide a bibliographic list of republications and translations of this seminal text.

Boris Uspenskij and the semiotics of communication: An essay and an interview

Boris Uspenskij and the semiotics of communication: An essay and an interview

Lotman’s epistemology: Analogy, culture, world

According to Jeanne Parain-Vial and others, humans are characterized by their need for analogy, together with the need for logic and intelligibility, and this need is expressed by a continuous research of models in the scientific field that can, in some aspects, bring to light some properties of reality, namely be analogous of them. The knowability of things is founded on analogy; thus, they are not exhausted by a single model of knowledge but rather through multiple and autonomous forms of comprehension.As also pointed out by Juri Lotman and Boris Uspenskij, mythical thought was the first to postulate the possibility of establishing a relationship of likeness among very different realities, as in the archetypical cosmological model of world: a possibility that, as they explain, has survived in post-archaic man, constituting a fundamental component of cognitive activity and scientific modelling.The article is dedicated to the use of analogy in Lotmanian semiotic theorization and to its heuristic and epistemological value.

Boris Uspenskij and the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics

Boris Uspenskij and the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics

L'influence du jansénisme en Russie au XVIIIe siècle : Deux épisodes

Andrej Shishkin, Boris Uspenskij, Influence of Jansenism in eighteenth-century Russia: two episodes. The article is devoted to the steps taken by Jansenists from the Sorbonne in Russia. During the reign of Peter the Great, the Jansenists endeavored to introduce a dialogue with the Russian Orthodox Church concerning the union of churches. The numerous autographical variants of "replies" give an idea of the reaction of the Russian clergy to this initiative. An analysis of these texts allows to draw up a picture different from the version accepted by scientists - from Samarin and Chistovich to Winter and Cracraft. The Sorbonne had a new chance to renew its initiative during the reign of Peter II. Influential Russian diplomats and nobles were favorable to the Jansenist endeavors. This also applies to the poet V. Trediakovskii. The part he played in this (which explains many events in his subsequent life) is subjected here to a special investigation.

Bachtin and Soviet Semiotics: (A Case Study: Boris Uspenskij's Poètika kompozicii)

Bachtin and Soviet Semiotics: (A Case Study: Boris Uspenskij's Poètika kompozicii)