Russian Heritage Research Articles

Русское деревянное зодчество на примере хозяйственных построек

In terms of state-of-art cultural development the deeper understanding and study of Russian heritage with centuries-old knowledge and skills for a designer and architect becomes important. Object of the study is Russian wooden architecture of household buildings, including storehouses.
 Research methodology consists of the following: a challenge problem; review of specialized literature; generalization and interpretation of the term; historical and cultural analysis.
 Results of the study: it was found that the specificity of the wooden architecture of the Russian North is authenticity and relation with natural feature of area where the buildings are located.
 According to the author’s opinion, understanding of relevance to study the history of Russian people and the knowledge accumulated by them in relation to wooden architecture will greatly affect the further development of the architectural mentality of a modern designer.

Code-switching Between English and Russian with Russian Heritage Speakers, Born and Raised in Russian-speaking Families in the USA

Code-switching is one of the major areas in the field of Bilingualism. Code-switching describes the processes of switching between languages among those who know and speak more than one language. This article will analyze the code-switching between Russian and English in Russian heritage speakers. They are first year students at a large Midwestern university, born in the U.S. to Russian-speaking parents. They have been taking university Russian classes for two semesters. The students were asked to record two five-minute dialogues with their parents who also speak Russian and English. There was neither instruction to use solely Russian, nor the use of English was prohibited. The goal of the research was to count and analyze the instances of code-switching between Russian and English, and prove or reject the hypothesis that there would be fewer code-switching instances in the dialogue devoted to a family holiday versus the dialogue devoted to university classes. The dialogue topics were furnished beforehand, however, no preparation was asked. The speech was asked to be spontaneous and natural. The findings proved the hypothesis that code-switching instances in the first dialogue were less frequent, so the students were mainly using only one language - Russian - without switching to English very often. The second dialogue revealed more code-switching instances as was initially supposed. Conclusions and directions for future research are presented.

Russian Harbin: architecture of the mansion of P. I. Gibello-Socco

The subject of this research is the architectural and style peculiarities of the mansion of P. I. Gibello-Socco. The object of this research is the private residence of P. I. Gibello-Socco build in 1919 in the area of a New City. The author examines the relevance topic – disappearance of the Russian architectural heritage (destruction, demolition, aggressive reconstruction) in Harbin, and possibilities of preservation of architectural landmarks in a large metropolis. Therefore, special attention is given to the questions of studying historical objects built in the early XX century (history, natural observations, measurements, current state) and their reconstructions via methods of stylistic and compositional environmental adaptation. This would allow preserving the Russian heritage abroad. The main conclusions lie in preservation of not only historical objects, reconstruction of interiors, but also restoration of their environment. The results of studying the architecture of disappeared objects of the Russian Harbin period allow conducting a fragmentary reproduction of an authentic historical environment of the city in the township “Sunny Island”. The author’s special contribution consists in examination of the objects of Russian culture, development of restoration projects, identification of disappeared constructs and their façade reconstruction. The novelty lies in description of architectural and style peculiarities of a historical object, which serves as the basis for reconstruction of P. I. Gibello-Socco’s mansion.

Collocations and near-native competence: Lexical strategies of heritage speakers of Russian

This paper presents an exploratory study on the use of frequency-based probabilistic word combinations in Heritage Russian. The data used in the study are drawn from three small corpora of narratives, representing the language of Russian heritage speakers from three different dominant-language backgrounds, namely German, Finnish, and American English. The elicited narratives are based on video clips that the participants saw before the recording. Since the current study is based on a relatively small corpus, we conducted a manual corpus-based analysis of the heritage corpora and an automated analysis of the baseline (monolingual) corpus to investigate the differences between the heritage and monolingual language varieties. We hypothesize that heritage speakers deploy fewer probabilistic strategies in language production compared with native speakers and that their active knowledge of and access to ready-to-use multiword units are restricted compared with native speakers. When they cannot access a single lexical item or a collocation, heritage speakers are able to tap both into the resources of the dominant language and the resources of their home language. The connection to the dominant language results in transfer-based non-standard word combinations; when heritage speakers tap into the resources of their home language, they produce unattested in the monolingual variety, “heritage” collocations, many of which are nevertheless grammatically legitimate.

Русская Америка: акторы, места и формы культурной памяти

Автором ставится проблема памяти о единственных заокеанских колониях Российской империи. Статья нацелена на выявление форм и специфики бытования памяти о русском проникновении на североамериканский континент, освоении территорий Алеутских островов, Аляски и Калифорнии в XVIII в. – 1867 г. Показано, что элементы культурного круга, проникавшего из России на тихоокеанское побережье Америки (огнестрельное оружие, новые продукты питания и методы их получения, ремесленные технологии и изделия, судостроение и мореходство, бревенчатые постройки, орудия труда, система администрирования, одежда европейского покроя, квази товарно-денежная система, православие, письменность) нашли отражение в различных формах культурной памяти: православном вероисповедании, произведениях художественной литературы, монументального и изобразительного искусства, архитектуры, филателии, геральдике, театральных постановках, экранизациях, музейных экспозициях, сувенирах. Места памяти о русском присутствии на севере тихоокеанского региона отражены как топонимы, гидронимы, достопримечательные объекты исторических парков, музеи, культурные центры. Память оживает в памятных днях, юбилейных мероприятиях и праздниках. Подчеркнута роль носителей и акторов памяти (историков, музейных работников, литераторов, режиссеров, художников, скульпторов, ассоциаций, обществ, Российской Православной церкви), значимость живых коммуникативных процессов в сохранении и передаче культурной памяти. Показано, что в США русское наследие охраняется государством. Отмечено, что интерпретированная в мировой культуре история нагляднее, чем научные труды влияет на создание образа исторического феномена в памяти поколений, а тема репрезентации исторических фактов в массовом сознании значима как инструмент культурной политики и идеологии.

The preparation to celebrating the 75th anniversary of Victory in Great Patriotic War 1941–1945 in the Diplomatic Academy of Russian Foreign Ministry

The article deals with analyzing practical experience of Department for Youth Innovative Programs Development and Career Guidance of the Diplomatic Academy of Russian Foreign Ministry in terms of breeding patriotic feelings among the youth as an axiological task in training future specialists in international relations. The author elaborates on key patterns of breeding patriotism. Special attention was paid to preserving historical memory and popularizing of Russian diplomatic service heritage and to interaction between different governmental institutions in the patriotic sphere. The author underlines the importance of developing new patriotic projects in the framework of modern digital environment in order to prevent falsification of history.

Some features of the private treaties of Old Rus of the princely era as sources of law

Introduction. The article gives an assessment, from the point of view of law, of the development of the Old Rus private legal acts as a source of law, the attention is drawn to the social and legal causes of its evolution. The aim of the article. The research proposes to apply the existing theoretical developments on the role of the treaty as a source of law in pre- and early-state societies to the information about the private legal acts of Old Rus of the princely era. It also covers the development of written private legal acts in the aforementioned days under the influence of ideas about law and legislation of the time. Methods and results. In the last hundred years, the national and Soviet legal sciences have paid particular attention to the problem of contractual relations in potestary societies. Concepts have been developed on the role of the treaty as a leading source of regulating the relations between particular strata (tribes, tribes, communities, social states, etc.) before the emergence and strengthening of the state. It is noted that the normativity of such treaties was provided by the very fact of their recognition by the state (court) as proper sources. In turn, in the conditions of weakness of legislative regulation, the treaties acted not so much as acts of enforcement, as they combined several features inherent in different types of acts: private and public-law, including rulemaking. Such features were especially inherent in the treaties of the medieval era. These theoretical provisions can be combined with the available information about the social system, law and acts of Old Rus of the princely era, that is, the period from the rise of the East Slavic proto-state formation of the Rurik princes and to the middle of the XIV century. when social processes in the Old Rus began to evolve dynamically under the influence of external and internal factors. The rapid progress of the study of ancient Russian heritage by special historical disciplines, such as archeology, sigillography, diplomacy, etc., contributes to such research. The emergence of new primary sources allows us to review the earlier ideas about the nature of an ancient private act and its significance in the coverage of the historical and legal reality of Old Rus of the princely era. Conclusions. Particular attention is paid to conciliation treaties (ryadnye gramoty) in comparison with other private legal acts. Of particular interest is the consolidation in their texts of public-law sanctions unknown to other sources. The assumption is made about the origin of such sanctions from a certain written legal text, which has led to the widespread geographical distribution of such rare documents. The characteristic of princely legislation is given, in particular the weight is given to its extreme personification, when the acts of one prince were not of fundamental importance to the new one. Attention is also paid to the problem of unreliable obedience and the ways to solve it.

Identifying author heritage using surname data: An application for Russian surnames.

This research article puts forward a method to identify the national heritage of authors based on the morphology of their surnames. Most studies in the field use variants of dictionary‐based surname methods to identify ethnic communities, an approach that suffers from methodological limitations. Using the public file of ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) identifiers in 2015, we developed a surname‐based identification method and applied it to infer Russian heritage from suffix‐based morphological regularities. The method was developed conceptually and tested in an undersampled control set. Identification based on surname morphology was then complemented by using first‐name data to eliminate false‐positive results. The method achieved 98% precision and 94% recall rates—superior to most other methods that use name data. The procedure can be adapted to identify the heritage of a variety of national groups with morphologically regular naming traditions. We elaborate on how the method can be employed to overcome long‐standing limitations of using name data in bibliometric datasets. This identification method can contribute to advancing research in scientific mobility and migration, patenting by certain groups, publishing and collaboration, transnational and scientific diaspora links, and the effects of diversity on the innovative performance of organizations, regions, and countries.

Holistic Constructions in Heritage Russian and Russian as a Second Language: Divergence or Delay?

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the strategies applied by young learners of Russian when naming a word in a vocabulary test. A total of 40 children took part in the experiment: 10 simultaneous Russian-Swedish bilingual children and 10 successive Russian-Swedish bilinguals who lived in Sweden, 10 children who moved to Russia and acquired Russian as a second language, and 10 monolingual Russian children living in Russia (as a control group). All the children were tested with the Russian version of Cross-Linguistic Tasks (CLT; Nenonen, Gagarina 2016). The results showed that the error pattern in all the groups of children seemed to be similar; yet, the acquisition of some structures appeared to be delayed in Russian Heritage Language (HL) children. Holistic constructions are common for all the children, but in bilingual children the effects of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) were also noticed. We argue that ‘atypical’ construction does not necessarily need to be disordered since the two languages of the HL child develop in contact with each other. However, a pattern of delayed acquisition can later lead to divergent development in the weaker language of bilingual children.

Russian Heritage Language Speakers in the U.S.: A Profile

Russian Heritage Language Speakers in the U.S.: A Profile

Великий Устюг — центр художественной культуры Русского Севера ХIII–ХVIII веков

The paper gives a brief review of the architectural and artistic heritage of Veliky Ustyug – one of the leading regional centers of historical artistic culture of the Russian North. Throughout the 13th–18th centuries, wooden and stone architecture, painting, woodcarving, birch-bark and metal arts, weaving and other folk arts reached a high level of progress here. Because of the active dedicated work of Ustyug intelligentsia – historians, artists, museum staff and teachers of the first half of the 20th century – the city still has a great number of survived monuments of architecture, painting, woodcarving, silver art and works of other arts that constitute an important part of Russian cultural heritage. The ensembles of tall Ustyug iconostases of the 17th–18th centuries made by both local and guest artisans are of special historical and artistic interest.

Объекты культурного наследия России как образовательный ресурс

Объекты культурного наследия России как образовательный ресурс

Русское наследие на Аляске и в Калифорнии в контексте академического и обществен-ного взаимодействия России и США

Русское наследие на Аляске и в Калифорнии в контексте академического и обществен-ного взаимодействия России и США

Morphological Bottleneck: The Case of Russian Heritage Speakers

The Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2008) assumes functional morphology to be a particular challenge in second language (L2) acquisition whereas acquisition of syntax and semantics to be unproblematic. I propose, following Polinsky (2011), that functional morphology can be seen as an acquisitional bottleneck for heritage language (hl) speakers as well. Russian verbal aspect is known to be problematic in bilingual Russian children (Anstatt, 2008; Gupol, 2009), in adult foreign language learners (Slabakova, 2005, Nossalik, 2009) and in Russian heritage speakers of low (Polinsky, 2008) and even near-native fluency (Laleko, 2010). This comprehension study tested fluent and literate English dominant hl speakers of Russian on their interpretation of lexical and grammatical aspect. The findings suggest that the semantics and syntax of aspect were unproblematic, but aspectual morphology played both a facilitative and a hindering role in the comprehension of aspectual distinctions. In the untimed Semantic Entailments task, where participants chose the most logical continuation of an utterance, the morphological complexity of secondary imperfectives coupled with their semantic complexity, hindered hl interpretations. In contrast, in the Stop-Making-Sense self-paced reading task, in which participants read sentences one word at a time, the idiosyncratic morphology marking lexical aspect hindered hl processing, while the regular mechanism of marking grammatical aspect facilitated it.

Managing classroom transgressions: Use of directives in a reading practice

This discourse analysis of classroom interactions examines management of transgressions during reading practice in a religious Russian heritage language school located in California. The detailed analysis of classroom talk-in situ focuses on directive sequences utilized in attempts to divert students’ attention away from transgressions and toward the reading activity. The paper contributes to our understanding of activity organization and management, and the process of “positioning” (Davies & Harré, 1990) of actors as “transgressors” and “victims” that takes place during classroom interactions. The analysis demonstrates that at the level of elementary literacy skills development, reading practice, management of the activity, and positioning of actors vis-à-vis each other are multi-party achievements that often consist of multiple sub-projects (including disciplining actions) which become consequential for the activity's progression and successful execution.

The Nationalization of Liturgy in the Orthodox Church of Finland in the 1920s-30s

Abstract The article explores the nationalization of the Orthodox liturgical tradition in Finland in the 1920s-30s. It was a process through which the Finnish Orthodox tried to remove signs of Russian heritage from their church culture in order to prove their loyalty to the newly independent Republic of Finland. The analysis of the national discourse reveals how the contemporary writers justified the nationalizing reforms.

The E-library of the public libraries corporation as a component of the national digital resources

The e-library of St. Petersburg Corporate Network of Public Libraries is a fulltext information retrieval system: it embraces valuable sources in Russian and world cultural heritage and enables public libraries to offer their users an efficient instrument for working with scientifically valuable publications. Corporate member libraries also transfer their collections to NEL and most popular ELS of commercial companies, which widens the audience, increases library collection use efficiency. The authors highlight organizational and technological solutions for the e-library: from digital collections of V. Mayakovasky City Public Library to building the corporate public information resource (2008-2016). Project work principles and vectors are discussed.

Russiske kvinner i Nord-Norge: fortellinger om soppturer og sovjettid

The article portrays and discusses various reorientation practices used by Russian women who have migrated to the Finnmark region in Northern Norway. It draws on participant observation, individual interviews and focus group interviews. The fieldwork revealed that mushroom related activites – picking, talking about, preparing and eating – constitute an important part of a shared Russian heritage accumulated through a communist-era childhood. The article makes particular use of Floya Anthias’ concept of translocal positioning. Anthias conceptualizes social positioning as a practice that occurrs within and across both concrete locations and cultural contexts, and is shaped by specific processes of minoritizing and majoritizing. Through the perspective of translocation, and inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body (1994), this article aims to show how my informants position themselves as Russian women in Finnmark. Based on an analysis of the experiences and practices related to mushrooms, the article argues that migrants’ reorientations may fruitfully be viewed as practices that are constituted through the body across time and space.
 Citation: Tatiana Wara (2016) «Russiske kvinner i Nord-Norge: fortellinger om soppturer og sovjettid». Nordisk Østforum 30 [3] 177–192. http://dx.doi.org/10.17585/nof.v30.430
 (Published: Oktober 2016)

Literary St. Petersburg in Contemporary Russian Transnational Writing: Anya Ulinich, Gary Shteyngart, and Zinaida Lindén

ABSTRACTThis article elucidates the ways in which the Russian literary tradition and literature, associated with St. Petersburg in particular, are reflected in contemporary Russian transnational fiction written in English and Swedish. The article focuses on the work of three prominent writers: the American-Russian writers Gary Shteyngart and Anya Ulinich, and their respective novels Absurdistan (2006) and Petropolis (2007), and the Finnish-Swedish-Russian author Zinaida Lindén and her novels Waiting for an Earthquake (2004) and Takakirves-Tokyo (2007).The main argument of this article is that while the fourth wave of transnational writers are well-acquainted with the St. Petersburg myth, they do not, as a rule, develop the literary tradition of the peterburgskij tekst further in their own texts. Instead, St. Petersburg, as well as Russian literature associated with the city, is employed in the construction of a new hybrid identity, in which Russian heritage is complemented by the culture of the author’s new country of residence.

The Cameri Theatre (1945–1961): The Success, the Crisis and Its Healing by Leah Gilula (review)

Reviewed by: The Cameri Theatre (1945–1961): The Success, the Crisis and Its Healing by Leah Gilula Hanna Scolnicov The Cameri Theatre (1945–1961): The Success, the Crisis and Its Healing By Leah Gilula. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 2014. 319pp. (Hebrew). In this book, Leah Gilula tells the story of Israel’s Cameri Theater, a modern theater that started out as a revolt of young actors against the established and acclaimed Habima Theater, which did not make room for the new generation. Tyrone Guthrie wrote scathingly about the allocation of roles not by correspondence of age, but by the seniority of actors. “Cameri” in Hebrew means “chamber,” so a modest chamber theater, rather than a stage for spectacle (and “habima” means “the stage”), calling for a tightly knit, realistic action taking place within a restricted, intimate space. The founder of the new theater, director Yosef Millo, had suggested naming the new theater the “1944 Theater,” renaming it year by year. Another suggestion, “The Young People’s Theater,” was rejected on the grounds that it would turn ridiculous as the actors grew older. The debate over the naming of the new theater is indicative of the grappling for a new content and a new style. [End Page 138] From a rebellious splinter group, the Cameri has grown into a central, perhaps the central, theater in Israel, overshadowing the famous Habima and its Russian-trained actors. The story of Habima has also been told recently by Elena Tartakovsky, in her book, Habima; The Russian Heritage (2013), which spans the whole history of that theater. Together, this duo of new books by young researchers provides an invaluable, and largely missing, perspective on the development of the Hebrew theater in Israel. This perspective is created through a painstaking collection and examination of historiographic and archival material, in conjunction with interviews of surviving firsthand witnesses. The need for a new and more modern theater was not only the result of the growing disaffection of the younger generation of Habima trainees struggling to find suitable employment, but also the natural outcome of the inpouring of young talent from central Europe, especially from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. An important component of the Cameri innovations was the introduction of the first original Hebrew play, Moshe Shamir’s He Walked Through the Fields (Hu Halach B’Sadot, 1948), dealing with the War of Independence, and premiering just two weeks after the declaration of independence, directed by Millo. This was not only an original Israeli play, but was directly engaged with what was happening in the country. The success of this performance encouraged the other theaters to also look for promising, original, contemporary plays. Gilula emphasizes throughout the importance of the financial basis of the theater, perhaps even beyond its artistic aspirations, showing how this influenced all aspects of the budding theater, but especially the nature of the personal relationships between the members of the collective. A good example of Gilula’s treatment of a particular staging is her examination of director Millo’s first production at the newly founded theater, Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters. This performance was heavily indebted to Max Reinhardt’s world famous production of the play. The playful, physical, commedia dell’arte style of presentation was a marker of departure from the conventional acting that had become the norm in Habima. Furthermore, moving away from the Russian heritage, the Cameri was eager to adopt the new ideas circulating in contemporary European theater, in line with the countries of origin of the young actors. Gilula critiques the discrepancy between the purported intention of the new theater to be small, intimate, and true to life, and the actual visual spectacle and artificiality of Servant. But she also points to the refreshing introduction of [End Page 139] original, contemporary, European and American plays. The new trend was to emulate what was going on in the Western world, to immediately translate the new hits and have them produced locally. This was the case with Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Anouilh’s Antigone, as well as with a long list of other plays that were enjoying success on the stages of Europe and Broadway. The plays were also...