Personal Guilt Research Articles

Тема родины в миниатюрах А.И. Солженицына и Ю.В. Бондарева

The purpose of this article is to examine the originality of understanding one of the central themes of the Russian literature – the theme of the Motherland – in the short stories of A.I. Solzhenitsyn and Yu.V. Bondarev. The main research methods are comparative-historical and structural-typological. In connection with the analysis of short stories of Solzhenitsyn’s and Bondarev’s the article emphasizes the key features of the short stories as a genre, defines the main directions of the analysis of the short stories of these writers in school classes of Literature, identifies the points of ideological and conceptual relation and repulsion in the perception of the theme of the Motherland in the short stories of Solzhenitsyn’s and Bondarev’s. The analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s short stories allows us to identify their semantic and emotional dominants. This is the admiration for the beauty of the Russian nature, which gives the heroes of short stories a sense of happiness, harmony and unity with the world; love and an indissoluble connection with the Motherland; the writer’s anxiety about her destiny; reproach to the contemporaries who participate in the destruction of the old days; faith in the spiritual revival of Russia. Bondarev’s characters are also amazed by the richness and diversity of the beauty of their native nature, and they watch the destruction of historical and cultural monuments of the past with a heavy heart. But, unlike Solzhenitsyn’s characters, they feel their personal guilt and responsibility for the future of their Motherland. Thus, the patriotic idea, the pain for the fate of the Motherland, the belief in the spiritual renewal and transformation of the Russian life are vividly embodied in the short stories and conceptually bring together the positions of Solzhenitsyn’s and Bondarev’s. Both writers associate their hopes for saving the Motherland with her return to the traditional system of values of the Russian World.

Guilty by association: How group-based (collective) guilt arises in the brain

People do not only feel guilty for transgressions that they are causally responsible for (i.e., personal guilt); they also feel guilty for transgressions committed by those they identify as in-group members (i.e., collective or group-based guilt). Decades of research using scenario-based imagination tasks and self-reported measures has shown that when reminded of transgressions committed by in-group members, people express guilt and are willing to make amends, even when they are not causally responsible for the transgressions. However, it remains elusive whether people genuinely experience guilt or simply display remorseful gestures deemed appropriate in those contexts. To resolve this puzzle, it is critical to closely examine the neurocognitive basis of group-based guilt and its relationship with personal guilt, a goal that self-reported measures alone cannot satisfactorily achieve. Here, we combined functional MRI with an interaction-based minimal group paradigm in which participants either directly caused harm to a group of victims (i.e., personal guilt), or observed in-group members cause harm to the victims (i.e., group-based guilt). In three experiments (N ​= ​90), we demonstrated and replicated that the perceived responsibility one shared with in-group members in transgression predicted both behavioral and neural manifestations of group-based guilt. Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of the functional MRI data showed that group-based guilt recruited patterns of neural responses in anterior middle cingulate cortex that resembled personal guilt. These results have broadened our understanding of how group membership is integrated into the neurocognitive processes underlying social emotions.

Guilt as impact factor on family functioning in families with cancer patient

Cancer has a negative impact on the mental health not only patients but also their relatives. Based on ethical and deontological principles were examined 288 family members of cancer patient, 174 husbands and 114 wives. In the study used such diagnostic methods as Perceived Guilt Index and the Family Adaptation and Cohesion Scale (FACES-3), a clinical-psychological interview. It is determined, that cancer progression, the level of family adaptation and gender influenced on the intensity of guilt. The severity of situational guilt was higher than the severity of personal guilt in families with a cancer patient. For cancer guilt in the patient and its family members were a frequent manifestation of mental distress, but the progression of the disease was a significant factor in its actualization. Females were at increased risk for the effect of guilt on psychological status. In families with impaired family adaptation, feelings of guilt were a component of the negative experiences that accompanied marital interaction, and were greatly exacerbated in the crisis situation such as oncopathology. It is shown, that medical-psychological help for the patient’s family is an important and necessary component of interventions in oncology practice.

10. GRIEF DEBRIEFS: PROVIDING DEBRIEFS FOR RESIDENTS AFTER PEDIATRIC PATIENT DEATHS

Background The inability to process grief in response to the death of a patient contributes to burnout in medicine. Pediatric residents are directly involved in caring for children with life-limiting disease. A 2017 survey of pediatric residents at the University of Minnesota revealed shared reactions to patient death including work avoidance, decreased productivity, questioned decision-making, loss of confidence, depression, and anxiety. Formal debriefs for our residents were infrequent. Methods A secure email account was used to notify residents of a patient death. Chief residents aimed to facilitate an optional debrief for all trainees within 72 hours. During the debriefs, an additional chief resident held all pagers to ensure protected time with limited distractions. We followed a published bereavement debriefing template. When possible, a chaplain or palliative care attending was present. Results To date, we have held 24 debriefs for 31 patients. Themes discussed included futility of care, personal guilt, helplessness or the sense of providing unfounded optimism, communication breakdown, medical ambiguity, self-care, and honoring the memory of our patients. When surveyed in December 2018, 47% of residents had attended a debrief, and 100% found them helpful or extremely helpful in processing patient deaths. Residents reported that the debriefs promoted “long term wellness”, “insight into emotions”, and “practical ways to process grief”. Time and location of debriefs were factors that both facilitated and prevented attendance. Conclusions We have held a debrief after the majority of inpatient pediatric deaths. Debriefs enable residents to process grief together and enhance community in our program. Since our residents train at four different hospitals, we will continue to identify times and locations that promote attendance. We will continue to gather data from residents on process improvement and effects on well-being in medicine in the hopes that interventions such as these can positively impact the culture of medicine.

К истории русского мифа о великом грешнике: нарушители пятой заповеди в советской повести 1970-х годов (Ф. Абрамов, В. Тендряков, И. Грекова)

A meta-story of “repentance and salvation of a great sinner” became world-famous as part of the Christian ethical doctrine, and was enshrined in the sacrament of confession. For a number of reasons it lost its relevance in the West by the beginning of the New Age, but gained a second life in Russia as one of the myths of national consciousness. The Russian adaptations of the great sinner myth are characterized by a “sobornyi” approach to a problem of personal guilt and redemption, as well as fixation on open endings. The myth’s motifs and variations are widely represented in Russian classical literature works, as well as Soviet writers’ works. The article is devoted to one of the variants of existence of the myth in the Soviet period – a history of a breaker of the fifth commandment (on filial piety) on the example of three novels of the 1970s. “A Trip to the Past” by F. Abramov (1974), which was published in the years of perestroika, is one of the first attempts at a truthful depiction of collectivization. The main character of this little novella, plunging into the memories, overestimates the people and events of his youth, but betrayal of his father, who was declared as “the enemy of the people”, he could redeem only at the cost of his own life. V. Tendryakov’s suspenseful novel “Payback” (1979) is devoted to investigation of a serious crime – patricide committed by a teenager, but a traditional form of detective narration is used in it to raise topical ethical issues of modern life. The study of the causes and background of the private tragedy of the Karyakins family reveals the weak points of interaction between the individual and society, the family and the state, as well as the definition of permissible limits for active resistance to evil. I. Grekova’s “The Widow’s Steamer” (1979) is a vivid example of “female prose”. It tells about the life of the inhabitants of a Moscow communal apartment during several decades. One of the main plotlines of the story is dramatic relationship between mother and son in the Gromov’s family. Cruel youthful maximalism and egocentrism on the one hand, and “bondage of maternal love” on the other, erect a wall of estrangement between once close people, which cannot overcome even belated repentance of the son. Diverse in a creative manner stories bring together interest of their authors to the recent pages of Soviet history, an active use of mythologems of Russian and world culture, as well as the tragical rendition of the immortal parable of the prodigal son.

“Soothing My Child's Soul and My Own”: Dealing with Pregnancy Loss in Postcommunist Romania

AbstractIn Romania—where induced abortions were legally prohibited during communism and are now morally condemned by many—those who lose a pregnancy against their will have long been regarded with suspicion, confronted with a sense of culpability, and surrounded by silence. This ambiguity is reflected in the local terminology and the perceived etiology of loss. In this article, which is based on 15 months of fieldwork between 2012 and 2015, I illustrate the various meanings and manifestations of a silenced sense of culpability around involuntary pregnancy loss in the lives of women from Bucharest and a small town in Central Romania. I also show how many of these women attempt to break the silence around their lost fetuses and carve out a personal space of commemoration and consolation. Their informal use of forbidden religious rituals paradoxically allows them to confirm the existence of their lost little ones and to position themselves as caring, rather than culpable, mothers. [pregnancy loss, commemoration, culpability, postcommunist Romania]

Responsible Shares and Shared Responsibility: In Defense of Responsible Corporate Officer Liability

When a corporation commits a crime, whom may we hold criminally liable? One obvious set of defendants consists of the individuals who perpetrated the crime on the corporation’s behalf. But according to the responsible corporate officer (“RCO”) doctrine, the government may also prosecute and punish those corporate executives who, although perhaps lacking “consciousness of wrongdoing,” nonetheless have “a responsible share in the furtherance of the transaction which the statute outlaws.” In other words, under the RCO doctrine, a corporate executive can come to bear criminal responsibility for an offense of her corporation that she neither participated in nor culpably failed to prevent. As long as the executive in question had the authority to prevent the corporate crime and failed to do so, she may be targeted in a criminal suit. The RCO doctrine plainly poses a challenge to our traditional understanding of criminal culpability, according to which guilt is individual—one may be held responsible only for a wrong one has personally committed, and only if one has done so with a guilty mind. Thus, RCO liability, while representing the most common instance of strict criminal liability, has been deemed “at odds with fundamental notions of our criminal justice system,” and likened to the primitive doctrine of frankpledge, under which innocent members of a group could be punished for the wrongful deed of one of their fellows. On the other hand, corporate crimes have an irreducibly collective aspect. If we take this aspect seriously, as this paper does, then departures from the paradigm of individual culpability may well be warranted. In particular, we may be justified in assigning responsibility not just to the corporate crime’s immediate perpetrators, but also to those who held prominent positions within the corporation at the time of the crime’s occurrence, and this responsibility may license just the kind of criminal liability that the RCO doctrine contemplates. This paper seeks to determine the circumstances under which this extension of responsibility is permissible, and the grounds of its permissibility. More specifically, this Article critiques existing justifications for the doctrine by arguing that these mistakenly construe it as a kind of negligence liability, and in so doing deprive the doctrine of its transformative power. It next offers a defense of the doctrine, according to which personal guilt is not necessary, and then contends with objections to the doctrine, arguing that we need not dispense with the doctrine altogether in order to avoid the concerns of its critics. What is needed instead is a set of guidelines that guard against the doctrine’s misuse or abuse. Finally, this Article ends with a specification of these guidelines.

"The “Nightmare” of the Great Famine: Guilt-Ridden Paralysis in Ulysses"

The Great Famine of the 1840s, one of the most catastrophic events in the history of Ireland, had been nearly absent from Irish writing until the 1990s when Eagleton noted that the Famine was hardly referred to in the Revival literature or Joyce. It can be said that the Anglo-Irish Protestants, leading the Revival and belonging to the land-owning class, evaded the tragic event which their immediate ancestors had survived mostly intact. Joyce, the Irish Catholic, was not free from the historical trauma either, which makes him only allude to it in his work, particularly Ulysses. The Irish Catholics were not completely innocent victims but often complicit in their own tragedy. The Church inculcated them with the scrupulousness of morality, which made them starve rather than withhold the landlord’s rent during the Famine. Their submissiveness to the Church led them to be indifferent to the suffering and death of others as well as their own. Thus, the Irish feel a sense of guilt for the horrible memories of the Famine, which inhibits them from remembering the history altogether. The memories come back only as a nightmare or a ghost, like the ghost of Stephen’s mother in Ulysses. The mother’s ghost, evoking the starving and dying during the Famine, symbolizes the guilt of the Irish Catholics, as well as Stephen’s personal guilt of declining his mother’s last wish. Stephen, only trying to awake from the nightmare of his mother’s ghost without confessing his guilt, remains paralyzed. With the Famine memories missing, Irish history remains a nightmare from which they will never awake.

Perceptions and Experiences of Patients and Informal Caregivers in Advanced Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: An Exploratory Study (TH371B)

•Understanding the perceptions of patients and informal caregivers in advanced COPD.•Understanding what is lacking in PC provision in advanced COPD. Although chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is recognized as being a life-limiting condition with palliative care needs, palliative care provision is seldom implemented in this population. The disease unpredictability, the misconceptions about palliative care being restricted to cancer and only being relevant in the last days of life prevent a timely integrated care plan for patients with advanced COPD. To explore patients and informal caregivers' experiences during the disease trajectory and to understand their perceptions on palliative care integration in COPD. Ten individual interviews with adult patients suffering from advanced COPD (GOLD stages 3 and 4) and their informal caregivers were conducted and recorded. Data analysis was performed through thematic analysis. Six different themes were identified. Patients reported a feeling of personal guilt and a sense of discrimination by healthcare professionals with regard to their smoking habit. Informal caregivers mentioned their caring experience of loved-ones with a “self-inflicted disease” and their distress over acute exacerbations with a sense of helplessness in the case of dyspnoea. Both groups underlined their knowledge about the disease trajectory and the importance of having a palliative care support, which is currently lacking, addressing all multidimensional aspects of advanced COPD. These findings informed the second phase of the study, which involves healthcare professionals in a collaborative inquiry group as part of a participatory action research project. This group will aim to develop and try out new ways to integrate PC into outpatients' services for people with severe COPD.

К вопросу о возможности введения в России уголовной ответственности и уголовных наказаний юридических лиц (сравнительный аспект)

The article is devoted to a problem that causes a lot of controversy in a Russian scientific community at present: the possibility and expediency of introducing in Russia the institute of criminal liability of legal persons. The author underlines the problems of this issue. The main arguments of both supporters and opponents of criminal liability of legal persons are presented. Among the main arguments against – the question of personal guilt, which is a major problem and an obstacle to the introduction of this institute, the possibility of tightening the liability of legal persons in other branches of law, etc. Among the main supporting arguments of legal entities’ the criminal liability, referred to in this article, there are international obligations of the Russian Federation, greater efficiency of criminal sanctions, criminal record of legal persons, judicial optimization and others. Attention is also paid to the fact that since 2002 in the Russian Federation there has already existed administrative liability of legal persons, which was one of the major novelties of the Administrative Code, 2002. Russian administrative scholars have formulated the theoretical and practical bases of administrative liability of legal persons that can be used and the introduction of criminal liability of legal persons. In addition, attention is paid to the current debate in Russia on the possible introduction of the category of criminal offence and the possible merging of criminal liability and administrative liability in one single form of legal liability. In this connection it may be interesting to refer to the French experience, where are three categories of offences: crime, délit and contravention.
 At the end of the article the author points out the objective difficulties of the possible introduction into the domestic legal system the institute of legal persons’ criminal liability, which is caused by a number of reasons, first of all by the established principles of domestic criminal law doctrine.

‘A Radical causation’: Coleridge's Lyrics and Collective Guilt

This paper argues that the early lyrics of Samuel Taylor Coleridge explore the ethical work of collective guilt, a feeling with enormous Romantic and contemporary significance. Coleridge's lyrics formally model collective guilt while making a cautious case for its social value. By reading ‘Fears in Solitude’ and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner through recent work in social psychology and the philosophy of ethics, I show how Coleridge creates causalities of feeling, affirming meaningful relationships of responsibility that go beyond personal guilt. I conclude that Romantic lyric offers an ideal form not only for illustrating how collective guilt works as a ‘structure of feeling’, but also for examining the emotion's potential to create positive social change.

A cleansing fire: Moral outrage alleviates guilt and buffers threats to one’s moral identity

Why do people express moral outrage? While this sentiment often stems from a perceived violation of some moral principle, we test the counter-intuitive possibility that moral outrage at third-party transgressions is sometimes a means of reducing guilt over one’s own moral failings and restoring a moral identity. We tested this guilt-driven account of outrage in five studies examining outrage at corporate labor exploitation and environmental destruction. Study 1 showed that personal guilt uniquely predicted moral outrage at corporate harm-doing and support for retributive punishment. Ingroup (vs. outgroup) wrongdoing elicited outrage at corporations through increased guilt, while the opportunity to express outrage reduced guilt (Study 2) and restored perceived personal morality (Study 3). Study 4 tested whether effects were due merely to downward social comparison and Study 5 showed that guilt-driven outrage was attenuated by an affirmation of moral identity in an unrelated context.

Beyond Petliura: the Ukrainian national movement and the 1919 pogroms

ABSTRACTOn the basis of largely unused archival materials in Kyiv, this article re-examines the responsibility of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) for the pogroms of 1919. It consciously puts aside the question of Symon Petliura’s personal guilt, preferring to concentrate on the broader responsibility of members of the Ukrainian national movement for propagating antisemitic stereotypes and engaging in anti-Jewish violence. This approach reveals a widely held belief among members of the UNR that they were fighting a Jewish Bolshevik enemy. This led to pogroms but also probably prevented the UNR from punishing its soldiers who had perpetrated them. Despite the declarations by UNR figures condemning pogroms and the creation of an organ to investigate them, there were apparently very few, if any, convictions, at least in 1919, the year of the worst pogroms.

"Eternal, Slithery Penance": Graham Swift's Waterland and the Secularization of Confession

"Eternal, Slithery Penance":Graham Swift's Waterland and the Secularization of Confession Ryan Siemers (bio) "Your history teacher wishes to give you the complete and final version," the narrator of Graham Swift's Waterland, Tom Crick, tells his high school students (7–8). Crick refers to his personal and family history, his account of which constitutes the novel. Crick's avowed aim echoes auricular confession, which requires the complete recounting of a penitent's sins before he or she receives absolution. Like a religious confessant, Crick seeks absolution for past sins: he feels guilty about the abortion of his would-be son, the death of his childhood friend Freddie Parr, and the suicide of his brother. Indeed, Crick reveals his guilt over these deaths to the police: "I confess my responsibility, jointly with my wife, for the death of three people" (314).1 However, because he speaks to his students, to the police, and (implicitly) to the reader rather than to a father confessor with the purpose and authority to offer him absolution, Crick's secular self-examination and self-narration threaten to be endless. In a desperate and improvisational response to that problem, Crick universalizes his condition over the course of his narrative to assuage his feelings of guilt and bring his secular confession to a close. Crick's narrative should be read in the context of—and as a response to the problems posed by—the secularization of confession. As I use the term here, "secularization" stands not for an inevitable decline of religious affiliation due to modernization (a once-prominent thesis that has undergone revision in sociology), but for an interminable historical [End Page 56] process by which religious concepts and practices are translated or transposed into the secular sphere and by which they continue to function in that sphere, often with unexpected consequences.2 Carl Schmitt and Karl Löwith provide examples of secularization understood as transposition: Schmitt claims that "all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts" (37), and Löwith argues that the modern notion of progress and the associated conception of linear history are due to the secularization of Christian eschatology. As I use it here, secularization encompasses the kind of transposition proposed by Schmitt and Löwith, along with the continuing and unpredictable dynamism of once-religious contents following that transposition. Max Weber's analysis may provide an example of the latter: for Weber, the transposition of rational acquisitiveness from Protestantism (wherein wealth provides evidence of election) to modern capitalism (wherein wealth is an end in itself) conditions the modern laborer and makes the current economic order possible—which, of course, is not at all what Martin Luther or John Calvin had in mind. Waterland's Tom Crick demonstrates the transposition of religious contents into the secular sphere, but his narrative also suggests that Weber's rationalization may reverse itself, that disenchantment may prompt re-enchantment. Crick transposes auricular confession into the relationship between himself and his students, but he then appeals to an enchanted circular history as a means to escape the psychological impasse produced by that transposition. Crick critiques progress and prefers cyclical history. Like Löwith, who opts for circular history because it comports with the notion of historical continuity (207), Crick desires historical continuity—especially regarding sexual generation, which in his case has been stymied. (His wife, Mary, is unable to bear children following an abortion.) More importantly, Crick prefers a re-enchanted form of that history—re-enchanted not by a return to ancient Greek paganism, as Löwith ultimately proposes, but through an idiosyncratic mythology of Crick's own making—because it assuages his sense of guilt by relating his individual experience to a universal pattern. Waterland thus illuminates a psychological dimension of Löwith's preferred alternative to linear history: for a subject suffering from a guilty conscience, circular history transforms personal guilt into a universal condition that is less psychologically burdensome due to its impersonality. [End Page 57] Before we examine Crick's narrative in more detail, however, we should address an important objection to the basic premise that secularization entails the transposition of religious concepts and practices...

The effects of witnessing violence.

Mental health nurses in the UK are 10 times more likely to be assaulted than general nurses, but evidence on the effects of staff witnessing violence is lacking. After researching the effects on ten mental health nurses who had witnessed an episode of physical violence in the previous 6 months, David Jeffrey and Pauline Fuller reported their research findings in Mental Health Practice. The authors found that participants grappled with fear, guilt and anger, leaving them to seek resolution on five themes relating to personal and professional guilt.

Coleridge's “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner”

Coleridge’s “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner” is greatly related to Christian message, and it appears to have an autobiographical aspect. It is possible to interpret this poem about undergoing the religious pilgrimage in that the Mariner, the surrogacy of Coleridge, is coming to be redeemed by the truth of God. Moreover, Coleridge equates the process of writing imaginative poems with his redemptive voyage, because his fragmented imagination caused by the opium can be restored by the religious pilgrimage. Coleridge’s imaginative powers and concentration were literally destroyed by the drug: his intellectual capacity was fearfully eroded: His sense of truth hopelessly distorted. Under this circumstance, one crucial way to relieve himself from the degenerative quandary was to write his personal guilt in his poems like “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner.” It is through the poet’s employment of the biblical images that Coleridge tries subconsciously to overcome his irrationality and ultimately to reach the state of redemption.

Becoming Reinaldo Arenas: Family, Sexuality, and the Cuban Revolution ‐ by Olivares, Jorge

Olivares, Jorge (2013) Becoming Reinaldo Arenas: Family, Sexuality, and the Cuban Revolution, Duke University Press ( Durham, NC and London), xi + 241 pp. $22.95. I remember the first and only time I watched an interview with Reinaldo Arenas's father. It was almost by chance that it came up on my computer screen. I was taken by surprise, so almost no time was available to conjure any preconceptions. There was very little to recall anyway, since Arenas himself did not know his father beyond one casual encounter in childhood; thus, as a reader, I remembered very few of the author's comments to hang on to when this topic would come up in discussion. I did not know what to expect but, although the interview was very short, throughout the encounter the camera focused only on the man, so we could see his face, his smiling expression and his body movements. There he was, the father whose absence shaped the life of one of the best-known twentieth-century Cuban writers. He was a typical Cuban peasant. Not a man of many words, he had a charming smile but was quiet and reserved, not trusting strangers. As one would expect, the interview did not reveal any secrets; he looked slightly surprised, as if he still could not understand why a son whom he had fathered so many years ago kept coming back to hound him in his old age. He did not express any personal guilt for the abandonment, and looked both charmed and bewildered by the attention that had been thrown upon him. This mysterious person that I have just described dwells at the epicentre of this book. Although some chapters were taken from previously published journal articles, Olivares's work represents the best attempt so far to give Arenas's father the place which the writer always claimed for him through his fiction. Was he a fictional character created in absentia, or a person that played a central role in his son's literary production? The latter seems to be what Olivares sets out to prove, inviting us to appreciate his personal commitment to the story behind the book, drawing parallels between himself and the writer. Both ‘lost’ their father at an early age, and then lost contact with their same country of origin to become exiles. Probably for that reason, autobiography plays a pivotal role in this book and, besides The Palace of the White Skunks, a study on irregular family patterns, the two other titles on which the book strongly relies are Before Night Falls, the writer's autobiography, and Viaje a La Habana: Novela en tres viajes (untranslated), a book written by Arenas when dying of AIDS. The latter remains a difficult book to read, full of pain but packed with the richest language and technical details from Arenas's repertoire. Both an experimental tour de force and a poetic evocation of love between father and son, it leaves a mark on its readers, as students in my courses testify. Olivares wants to demonstrate that the commanding influence behind Arenas's impulse to write and to create a fictional world was the father and not the mother, as critical opinion has tended to believe. Even when he discusses the role of the family, mostly women, in The Palace of the White Skunks, emphasis is placed on the main character's critical moments of remembrance of his absent father. Olivares's reliance on Before Night Falls allows him to interpret Viaje a La Habana in an autobiographical vein too, a mode in which it fits fairly well, except that in the last section, narrated in the first person, the story is told of an exiled father who goes back to Cuba, somewhat reluctantly, to see a son whom he left as a child. The [fictional] homoerotic encounter between father and son is interpreted as a revealing instance of the power exerted by that ‘enigmatic figure’. To strengthen his thesis, he points to the lack of communication between son and mother, commenting on the letters they exchanged when Arenas was in exile. Throughout the book, Olivares elaborates his understanding of Arenas as an author dedicated to rewriting and reinterpreting other texts, even his own life. A reader of Arenas will find the book stimulating and suggestive. We are shown how Arenas borrowed from everything he read, and how he bridged the differences between literature and life, even sometimes extrapolating from ‘how things should have been’ to make fiction reach what would stand as an impossible real-life ending. Besides the relentless analysis found in these pages, there is plenty of contextual and historical information that adds to what we know about the development of Arenas's work. This book will remain an important point of reference for future students.

О введении в России института уголовной ответственности юридических лиц

The number of European countries which have included into their national legislation the provision on criminal liability for legal persons (corporations) has been continuously growing. The following countries remain essential supporters of preserving criminal liability for individual guilt: Germany, Russia, Italy, and, may be, Poland, where after the adoption of the Law on Liability of Collective Entities for punishable offences, the Constitutional Tribunal in 1994 adopted the decision to consider this liability to be not criminal, but sui generis. Some Russian legal theorists were quick to support the tendency to recognize the practicability of introducing criminal liability for legal persons in spite of centuries-old traditions of liability for a personal guilt that is characteristic of the criminal law of the European continental countries. This can be explained by an excessive influence of the Anglo-Saxon common law countries, whose representatives went all out during the preparation of many international conventions to include into them the provisions that require establishing criminal liability for legal persons in national legislations of the European countries. But none of such conventions mentions the basis for criminal liability of legal persons. They fail to mention this fact, otherwise they would have to state that such liability suggests only strict liability. The author of the article tries to prove the irrelevancy of the above-mentioned type of liability in Russia with its rather effective administrative law and fairly solid provisions of the civil legislation which help to efficiently fight the damage incurred by legal persons (corporations) to different entities protected by the law. Introduction of the provisions on criminal liability for legal persons into the Russian criminal legislation touches upon the foundation on which all types of legal liability in this country are based on, as well as domestic centuries-old traditions, for it is not possible, without changing anything in the principal structure of the criminal responsibility, to simply include, without solid justification of the adopted changes, a new provision into the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, in which only a range of criminal acts for which legal persons may be liable would be outlined, without indicating grounds for their criminal liability, in contrast with the grounds for the liability of physical persons.

Souveraine Magnifique by Eugène Ébodé

Albert cannot choose the button for erasing his recollections of his brother, father, and mother. The writer masterly connects different stories, Jewish legends, myths, literary allusions and keeps up their rhythm. To picture the reality and to comprehend the nature of evil, David uses and combines various documentary confessional forms from the past (diaries, letters, messages, interviews) and present (newspaper articles, medical and criminal reports) with dreams, hallucinations , fantastic visions, nightmares, and hope. The essayistic parts on evil and violence may serve as a literary connection to the books by Tzvetan Todorov (Facing the Extreme, 1996) and Amartya Sen (Identity and Violence, 2006). In an age when news all around the world is full of evil, national and religious conflicts, wars, and terrorism , David, himself a surviving witness of the Holocaust, wants us to remember that “(our) world is based on human solidarity and individual conscience.” It is not without reason that the central episode of the novel is the one about Miša and Kosta, about love and humanity, truth and morality. Significantly, during diverse interactions with the world, many male characters of David’s novel cry. This purifying power of the body makes human suffering more visible and at the same time points out what Todorov underlined, that “humanity has not improved and still refuses, on the whole, to hear the lesson from Auschwitz.” Svetlana Tomić Alfa University Eugène Ébodé. Souveraine Magnifique. Paris. Gallimard. 2014. isbn 9782070146314 Eugène Ébodé, of Cameroonian origin but having lived and worked in France for many years, was one of ten African writers invited by Fest’Africa to go to Rwanda in 1998 to describe their experiences after the genocide. While several of the writers soon published novels or collections of stories—the best known is probably Tierno Monénembo’s L’aîné des orphelins (2000)—Ébodé initially only contributed to an article describing the political situation he had seen. Later he returned to Rwanda to meet Souveraine Magnifique, whom he interviews twenty years after the genocide. Souveraine Magnifique is a reconstruction of her experiences, sometimes in her own voice, sometimes in his voice as narrator. Souveraine gives the narrator detailed explanations of her life as a small child, and of the differences between the Longs (i.e., Tutsis) and the Courts (Hutus), with occasional references to the Très Courts (the Twa, Pygmies). She often describes her family’s love of milk and cows. Her family, the Magnifiques, had always had good relations with their Hutu neighbors, the Constellations; the wife, Mélancolie, had taught Souveraine to read. When she was eight years old, Modeste Constellation came into the Magnifiques’ house during the time of the genocide. Her father, sensing a possible problem, hides his daughter in a cupboard. There she sees Modeste hack off her father’s head and his testicles, try to force her mother into a sexual act, then destroy her unborn child before beheading her as well. Souveraine describes how she was saved by a neighbor, a Muslim convert, who helps her escape to the Congo, where she lives with his uncle for fifteen years before returning to her home. When the narrator speaks of his admiration for a well-known Congolese musician, Souveraine can only speak of how she was not happy with her life in the Congo, which she found too disordered . He is critical of her praise for the order in Rwanda, which she feels is in the genes of her compatriots. The narrator meets one of the judges of the gacaca, a woman whose own husband , a Hutu, had been killed defending his Tutsi wife. She describes the trial of Modeste Constellation. He is unwilling to accept any personal guilt, blaming instead several men who are now either dead or World Literature in Review 108 wlt may / august 2015 have escaped from Rwanda. He tries to divert attention by calling a young judge “grandfather.” He even says the Tutsis may be responsible for the violence. He is, however, condemned to seven years in prison and five years working to build a cobbler’s shop in memory of Souveraine’s father, Donatien Magnifique. Through the auspices of a nongovernment association, “To be...

Portraying the Perils to Polar Bears: The Role of Empathic and Objective Perspective-taking Toward Animals in Climate Change Communication

Images of animals, particularly polar bears, harmed by climate change are often used in environmental campaigns, despite warnings of potential reactance and resultant perceived distance from the issue. As an alternative to these emotional appeals, environmental campaigns could encourage an objective (i.e., emotionally detached) perspective on climate change impacts. The present research tests the effects of a message that encourage empathic vs. objective perspectives toward polar bears harmed by climate change on emotions and subsequent support for climate change activism among 241 American adults through an online survey. Contrary to popular warnings, the present research found no reactance toward portraying harm to polar bears from climate change and no benefits of taking an objective perspective toward the polar bears. Instead, portrayals of polar bears harmed by climate change motivated both environmentalists and non-environmentalists to donate money to environmental activist groups when they took an empathic perspective toward the animals. Empathy and hope explain effects for environmentalists and empathy, hope, worry, personal guilt, and boredom explain effects for non-environmentalists.