Russian Mother Research Articles

Живописный код в романе «Бесы» Ф. М. Достоевского («Сикстинская Мадонна» в судьбе С. Т. Верховенского)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the picturesque plot in F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Demons,” built around the canvas of the Italian master Raphael Santi, “Sistine Madonna,” in its semantic and symbolic dynamics — the inner spiritual relationship with the fate of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. The image of Raphael’s Madonna is the most significant element of the ethical and aesthetic system of the character’s worldview, defining the way of thinking and behavior of the character. At the same time, in the conceptual space of the novel, the Sistine Madonna acquires the features of a spiritually ambivalent image: inspiring Stepan Trofimovich to a high way of thinking, she, nevertheless, turns out to be powerless to transform his life. The article analyzes the theological content of the canvas in the context of the Russian tradition (Zhukovsky, Karamzin, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov), which makes it possible to decipher the pictorial code in the fate of Verkhovensky’s father. Spiritual healing and the near-death transformation of the hero become possible thanks to two symbolic and semantic transitions carried out by the Verkhovensky’s father in the final part of the novel: from the Western Catholic “Sistine Madonna” to the Russian Mother of God, from the Western way of thinking and life to the Russian “soil” and Orthodox spirituality.

A family affair? Post-imperial Estonian Orthodoxy and its relationship with the Russian Mother Church, 1917–23

ABSTRACT As the First World War shattered the old empires, Orthodox Christians in former imperial territories faced a dilemma. Should they remain loyal to their Russian “Mother Church,” from which they were separated by physical and ideological borders, or should they pursue autonomy and break away from their former canonical centre? This article deals with the evolution of the Estonian part of Riga diocese into an autonomous Orthodox Church, focusing on the negotiations, compromises, pluralism, and realpolitik that characterized this process. The reconfiguration of Riga diocese in 1917–23 and the emergence of the autonomous Estonian Orthodox Church under the patriarch of Constantinople occurred under the influence of three factors: first, the political formation of Estonian statehood; second, the violence of the Bolshevik takeover and the Civil War; and, third, the temporary decentralization of the Russian Church. Pointing out that Patriarch Tikhon was willing to negotiate various forms of church autonomy in the Baltic and there was support for remaining under the jurisdiction of Moscow, the article argues that the change of jurisdiction was in itself a sign of the Estonian Church’s agency when it came to fulfilling its desire for ecclesiastical autonomy.

Voyage en double au Pays des Soviets : André Beucler et Alfred Fabre-Luce

In 1927, André Beucler is 29 years old. Born in Saint- Petersburg of a Russian mother, whose language he speaks, he publishes at Gallimard novels and short stories. One year younger Alfred Fabre-Luce, from the upper bourgeoisie, is a brilliant political essayist with European convictions and tries to make himself known as a novelist under the pseudonym of Jacques Sindral. From June 26 to August 4, the two men traveled to Russia together and published, on their return, the one Paysages et villes russes (Gallimard) and the other Russie 1927 (Grasset). While both books are hostile to the Soviet regime, they differ radically in the experience of travel and its writing, as well as in their conception of testimony. Written at a pivotal moment in the history of Franco-Russian relations, they also marked a turning point in the careers of their authors.

Kazakh-Russian Roots of Alla Ilchun (yelshin) Combated Against Fascism, the Future Muse of Christian Dior (december 10, 1926 - march 6, 1989)

The article is dedicated to Alla Ilchun, a woman with Kazakh and Russian roots, who left her mark on the history and culture of France. Alla Ilchun was a world famous model, the muse of Christian Dior. According to some reports, she took part in the French Resistance movement. Based on the documents and materials found in the archives of Russia and Kazakhstan, the authors examine the Kazakh roots of Alla Ilchun, the history of her family, the origin and fate of her father, a Kazakh and a Russian mother, the contribution that this outstanding woman made to the history of European fashion. In the archives of St. Petersburg and Almaty, new documents have been identified that allow to restore and explore the biography of the father of Alla Ilchun. In the archive in Moscow, the authors discovered previously unknown information about the date of the death and funeral of Alla Ilchun. An additional collection of documents and materials on the Kazakh-Russian roots of the outstanding model and style icon of Alla Ilchun should be carried out in Paris, Russia and China.

Crushing the Bones of the Other: Disability, Ethnicity, and Homosexuality in Rashid Al-Daif’s Sikirida’s Cat and Alexandra Chreiteh’s Ali and His Russian Mother

ABSTRACTThis article offers a textual analysis of Rashid Al-Daif’s Sikirida’s Cat and Alexandra Chreiteh’s Ali and His Russian Mother, focusing on the novels’ exploration of disability, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. I contend that both novels reveal the violence of exclusionary cultural discourses and practices that render the nation’s “Others” in a constant state of vulnerability by virtue of their stigmatized gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and/or corporeal difference. The novels give voice to emergent subjectivities that—while still marginalized—are no longer subdued by dominant discourses of disavowal and exclusion. Furthermore, no longer are the struggles of non-normative characters foreshadowed by the text’s preoccupation with war and security (or the lack thereof). By vividly portraying the lived realities of minoritized characters who struggle against hegemonic notions of gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship, al-Daif and Chreiteh’s texts reveal and interrogate multiple discourses of oppression, including sexism, homophobia, ableism, and xenophobia.

The Bibliographical Collections and Archives of the Fundación Alejo Carpentier, Cuba

The great Latin American novelist Alejo Carpentier was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 26 December 1904, to a French father and Russian mother. Some years later, the family settled in the outskirts of Fdavana, Cuba. Carpentier's literary and musical sensibility became apparent from a very early age. In 1922, he began his journalistic career. Fie was imprisoned for some weeks during the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and, in 1928, after being given Cuban nationality, he was able to move to France where he joined the Surrealist group. In Paris, he became a correspondent for Cuban magazines and also wrote for French and Latin American publications. It was during this period that he concluded his first novel, iEcue-Yamba-O!, which was first published in Spain. In 1939 he returned to Cuba where he continued his journalistic work, also publishing some short stories and undertaking research for what would later become La musica en Cuba (1946).1 In 1945, he moved to Venezuela in order to work in radio, which gave him more time for journalism and literary production. It was during this period that some of his most significant works were published: El reino de este mundo (1949); El acoso (1956); Guerra del tiempo (1956); and Los pasos perdidos (1953). It was also where he wrote El siglo de las luces (1962).2 After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, he settled permanently in Cuba and took up several cultural posts (this is also where El siglo de las luces was first published). In 1966, he was appointed to a diplomatic post in France; it was there that he collated and published a large number of his essays, as well as writing his last novels: El recurso del metodo (1974); Concierto barroco (1974); La consagracion de la primavera (1978); El arpa y la sombra (1979).3 Carpentier died in Paris on 24 April 1980. During his lifetime, he received many national and international awards, including the international Cino del Duca World Prize and the Spanish Miguel de Cervantes Prize for literature in the Spanish language. He is considered to be one of the most representative Latin American authors of the twentieth century and one of the first writers to be recognised in the Latin American 'boom'.The Fundacion Alejo Carpentier (FAC) was created by the writer's widow, Lilia Esteban Carpentier, who bequeathed before her death all her goods, including those inherited from her husband. In 1982, she established the Centro de Promocion Cultural Alejo Carpentier (Alejo Carpentier Centre for Cultural Promotion) which in 1993 became the FAC. The FAC is a cultural NGO whose principal objective is to disseminate the life and work of Carpentier through the following areas of action: by supporting Cuban and non-Cuban research on this topic; by publishing, in Cuba and elsewhere, Carpentier's oeuvre, both known and hitherto unpublished; by conserving and restoring the bibliographical collections and archives; and by generally disseminating the archives through organising conferences, postgraduate courses and exhibitions. The FAC is based in two headquarters: the first, in the Habana Vieja area of the Cuban capital, is located in the mansion which was the inspiration for the house inhabited by the protagonists of El siglo de las luces (intelligently restored thanks to the efforts of the Oficina del Historiador de La Habana [Office of the Historian of Havana]); the other headquarters, where the directorate is located, is the former residence of the novelist and his wife, where the latter lived until her death in 2008, located in the Vedado neighbourhood of Havana.4The FAC has negotiated publishing agreements with publishers in many countries around the world, which help the writer's work become known in many different languages. In Cuba, the most important relationship with publishers is maintained with Editorial Letras Cubanas, under the Instituto Cubano del Libro (Cuban Book Institute), which has established the Biblioteca Alejo Carpentier (Alejo Carpentier Library). …

Interpreting of Children's Emotions by Mothers Living in St. Petersburg (RF)

The article is devoted to recognition of child's emotions in Russian mother sample. 80 mothers living in Saint- Petersburg took part in research. For studying of recognition of facial emotions of children the «IFEEL Pictures» method was used. The results of this research lead us to the following conclusions: the words used by Russian mothers in order to classify emotions displayed in photographs of children's faces can be grouped together in categories according to their semantics and according to their placement on the scales of arousal and hedonic tone; the lexicon of emotional words, used by Russian mothers to describe emotions displayed in photographs of children's faces differ from those employed by American mothers in terms of the content and significance of emotional categories and their placement on the scales of arousal and tone; level of arousal for positive and negative emotional categories depends on mother's education and family income.

Henryk (Heini) Eisenberg (1921–2009): From polymer chemistry to halophilic enzymes to chromatin and back

Henryk (Heini) Eisenberg (1921–2009): From polymer chemistry to halophilic enzymes to chromatin and back

ASPECTS OF CULTURAL COMMUNICATION IN RECOGNIZING EMOTIONS

The study addresses cultural influence in the recognition of moderately expressed emotions in a second language (L2) and foreign speech. The web-based listen- ing test consisted of context-free sentences drawn from the Estonian Emotional Speech Corpus. The task was to recognize the emotion (joy, anger, sadness) or neutrality of each sentence without seeing the speaker. Three adult groups participated: (1) 36 Estonians, with Estonian as mother tongue; (2) 16 highly educated Russians living in Estonia, with Russian as their mother tongue and Estonian as a second language; (3) 16 highly educated Russians living in Russia, with Russian mother tongue and no knowledge of Estonian. The results showed a significant difference between Estonians and Russians living in Estonia in their recognition of joy and neutrality; Russians living in Russia differed significantly from Estonians and Russians living in Estonia on all emotion scores. This confirms that cultural norms are mastered through interaction: to recognize vocal emotions expressed in another language it is necessary to live in the culture and communicate in its language.

Rethinking theNakba

In The Orchard (1972), the Israeli writer Benjamin Tammuz reformulated the image of the land as the arena of the struggle in Palestine.1 In this symbolic novella, the Israeli writer tries to go beyond the image of the Arab in the Israeli literature as a mute shadow. The mute in this novella is Luna, the woman who symbolizes the land, and the struggle between the two brothers who are her lovers results in their deaths and her son’s appropriation of the motherland. The highly symbolic style in Tammuz’s work overshadows the magic elements in the tale. The memoir of the narrator shows the limits of symbolism and how the story of pain in the Palestinian theater is erased by a poor imitation of the Old Testament myth of Abraham and his two wives and sons. In the novella Ishmael and Isaac take the names of Obadiah (Abdullah) and Daniel, two brothers born to a Russian German father, the first from a Muslim Turkish mother and the second from a Jewish Russian mother. Both meet in the orchard of Mahomet Effendi, a Turkish land owner in Jaffa, who has an adopted girl whose origins are vague: was she a Jewish or a Muslim Arab? No one knows. The fight between the two brothers for the woman, who takes the shape of a mythical character, ends with their deaths, and their mother becomes pregnant by her Palmachi son. One can read this novella as a new version of A. B. Yehoshua’s story “Facing the Forests.”2 The same dream of fire and the same ambiguities veil the story of the indigenous Palestinians. In “Facing the Forests” not only is the nameless Palestinian called an Arab but the name of his original village

In memory of Prof. Helena Rašková, MD., DSc., Dr.h.c.

In memory of Prof. Helena Rašková, MD., DSc., Dr.h.c.On April 13, 2010, Prof. Helena Rašková, MD, DrSc., Dr.h.c., the legendary figure of Czecho-Slovak and world pharmacology, passed away. She was born in 1913 in Laussane in a physician's family of a Czech father and Russian mother. She was predestinated for science even due to her childhood experience and meetings with A. Einstein and the later Nobel prize winner W. Hess, who played in a chamber quartet with her father. Moreover, she became a polyglot from the earliest time of her life (Czech from her father, Russian from her mother), Switzerdeutsch and Hochdeutsch from nursary rhymes, French in the elementary school in Zurich and basic English in convent summer school in Weymouth, where as she put it "she got an early lesson that one loves one's own country but is also a citizen of the world".

Maternal Effects on the Hygienic Behavior of Russian x Ontario Hybrid Honeybees (Apis mellifera L.)

Strains and hybrids of Russian and Ontario honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) were evaluated for hygienic behavior at both colony and individual levels. The objectives were to determine phenotypic and genotypic variability and to study the inheritance of this behavior. At the colony level, Russian bees uncapped and removed significantly more freeze-killed brood than Ontario bees. The most hygienic Russian colonies and the least hygienic Ontario colonies were selected to perform reciprocal crosses between the strains. Bees from the hybrid colonies as well as from the parental colonies were tagged and introduced into observation hives, where hygienic behavior was directly observed on a piece of frozen brood comb. Russian and hybrid bees of Russian mother had the highest percentages of workers uncapping cells and removing brood. Conversely, Ontario and hybrid bees of Ontario mother had the lowest percentages of individuals for these variables. Differences were also observed among the 4 genotypes for their degree of specialization on hygienic tasks. Russian and hybrid bees of Russian mother showed a significantly higher uncapping frequency per individual than Ontario and hybrid bees of Ontario mother. These results demonstrate phenotypic and genotypic variability for hygienic behavior and are suggestive of maternal effects in the inheritance of hygienic traits.

Return to Soviet Russia: Edwin Erich Dwinger and the Narratives of Barbarossa

Virtually unknown today, Edwin Erich Dwinger (1898-1981) emerged as one of the most popular German authors in Nazi Germany thanks to his firsthand accounts of his encounter with Russia in the years 1915-20. He very nearly single-handedly produced the knowledge that Germans had of the Soviet Union on the eve of Germany's 1941 invasion--otherwise German readers relied on accounts of Napoleon's campaign 129 nine years earlier. (1) Together Dwinger's books sold some two million copies, making him a rich man, financially stabilizing the renowned Eugen Diederichs publishing house, and feeding Dwinger's thwarted ambition to compose the literary epic of National Socialism's victory in World War II. Along with the SS bard, Hanns Johst, who also saw himself as a new Homer in the Third Reich but was more faithful to Nazi ideals, Dwinger indicates how determined Nazi Germany was to aesthetically represent both the war and the Holocaust in eternal literary monuments that were to edify the new world capital Germania that Hitler envisioned. Indeed, Dwinger came quite close to imagining the local conduct of race war, although the victims he cast in his book, Death in Poland, were German, not Jewish, and the perpetrators Poles rather than Germans. (2) His relationship with Russia was more complex, however. A resolute anti-Communist, he could not help but admire the Soviet Union, which he by turn took as a model for Germany's regeneration in the wake of its defeat in World War I, as the fundamental foe of Western civilization which only a nationalist Germany could vanquish, and finally as a ferocious twin of National Socialism whose similarities to the Third Reich made it more dangerous and more invincible. He returned again and again to the Siberian ground where as a prisoner of war he had been caught between and Red. He was never certain whether to destroy Russia or to save it. He pleaded the case of the anti-Bolshevik General Andrei Vlasov at the end of World War II; Vlasov's willingness to serve the Germans recalled Dwinger's own wartime service fighting the Bolsheviks under the White general, Alexander Kolchak, in the Russian Civil War. As it was, there was little either general could do in the face of the Red Army's impending victory. Dwinger traveled through many of the contradictions of National Socialism, conceiving of Germans both as a horribly betrayed and as a powerfully vengeful nation and imagining the catastrophe of his Siberian experience both as the premise for post-World War I German politics and the logical if unavailing end point of those politics in World War II. son of a Russian mother and a German naval officer, and fluent in Russian, Dwinger joined the German army in 1915 but was almost immediately shot off his horse and captured by the Russians. He endured two years of Siberian imprisonment in Totzkoje before fleeing in the confusion of the Revolution. He was later recaptured by anti-Bolshevik forces, whom he joined and with whom he shared the disaster of retreat and defeat. Imprisoned in a camp, this time by the Bolsheviks, Dwinger finally succeeded in escaping and returned to Germany in 1920. It was not until the following year when the last of the surviving German prisoners of war, whose characters Dwinger sketched in his novels, were repatriated. It was this unusual experience of being a prisoner of war, watching the Revolution, fighting in the Civil War, and returning to postwar Germany that formed the basis of his trilogy, The German Passion, which appeared over the course of the years 1929-32 and recapitulated with each volume the increasing hold of National Socialism on the German imagination. Dwinger's plainspoken account of individual suffering in war gave way to an obsessive concern for Germany's national tribulations; at the same time, his horror in the face of the Civil War in Russia amalgamated into astonishment at the revolutionary energies mobilized by the Bolsheviks, whom he wanted to both destroy and emulate. …

Baba Iaga and the Russian Mother

Baba Iaga and the Russian Mother

Stalin's Captive: Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet Race for the Bomb

After World War 2, German scientist Nikolaus Riehl and his family were held captive in the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1955. His story is uniquely interesting in part because of its historical content, in part because he was bilingual in German and Russian, having grown up in St Petersburg as the son of a German father and a Russian mother, and as a result of his warm human interest in the Russian people. Frederick Seitz has written a detailed introduction that provides a historical context for his translation (from German) of Riehl's book.

A Russian mother: a novel

A Russian mother: a novel

Projects for the Reconstruction of the Firmament

Francisco Infante was born in 1943 in Russia of a Russian mother and a Spanishfather. He attended Moscow Art Schoolfrom 1956 until 1962, when he became a member of the Movement Group and began producing mobile and kinetic artworks inspired by the autonomous idea of infinity. Since 1968, he has constructed environmental installations with his wife, artist Nonna Goriunova. In 1970 he organized theArgo Group, which has realized eight projects involving artificial kinetic environments placed in nature. Since 1976 he has been working with projects that he calls Artifacts. He lives and works in Moscow.-Ed.

Slavonic Traces in Rilke’s Geschichten vom lieben Gott

Slavonic Traces in Rilke’s <i>Geschichten vom lieben Gott</i>