Claudia Pieralli
Associate Professor of Russian Literature,
University of Florence (Italy)
EDUCATION:
After a Master Degree in Slavic Philology in 2004, she got a Ph. D. in Russian Studies at the State University of Milan (2008) and a post-graduate specialization course in Aesthetics and Hermeneutics of Symbolic forms (Philosophy, University of Florence).
She further developed her research experience thanks to a:
- two-year Post-Doc Research Grant at the Dom Russkogo Zarubež’ja in Moscow (2008-2010) and a
- second Post-Doc Research Grant at the Sorbonne Paris IV (2012-2013), where she mainly worked in the Russian free-mason archives in Paris.
ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS (BRIEF SUMMARY):
C. Pieralli is author of the first scientific edition of the art treatise Otkrovenie iskusstva by N.N. Evreinov (Sankt-Peterburg: Mir, 2012), publication supported by an RGNF (Russian State Fund for Humanities) grant and of the monograph Il pensiero di N. Evreinov dalla teatralità alla ‘poetica della rivelazione’ (N. Evreinov’s Thought from Theatricality to the “Poetics of Revelation”) which was published in the academic series of Slavic Studies (“Biblioteca di Studi Slavistici”), Firenze University Press, in 2015 (Open Access Publication: http://www.fupress.com/catalogo/il-pensiero-estetico-di-nikolaj-evreinov-dalla-teatralita--alla--poetica-della-rivelazione-/3114).
She has published several essays on Gulag Poetry, Totalitarism and literatury testimony, Russian XXth cent. Theatre, Slavic Folklore tradition in Italian, French, English and Russian languages.
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Starting from Russian Folklore and Theatre, her Research interests have then focused on Cultural history of post-Revolutionary Russian Emigration, Relations between Literary writing and Totalitarianism (esp. Stalinism), Soviet History ‘post-Memoria’ in Russian Language Literature.
She is currently deepening her interests in the literary testimony of the political imprisonment experience in URSS (having published surveys about ‘segregation poetry’ during Stalin’s repressions, among them: The Poetry of Soviet Political Prisoners (1921-1939): historical-typological framework, in: Contributi italiani al Congresso Internazionale degli Slavisti, 2013, FUP, pp. 387-412, Poesia del Gulag o della zona? Problemi e prospettive di analisi per una descrizione del corpus poetico dei prigionieri politici in URSS, in: C. Pieralli (eds), Fratture e integrazioni tra Russia, mondo slavo orientale e Occidente, FUP 2017 - forthcoming), and extending them on the study of personal diaries in Leningrad Blokade as literary testimonies of Soviet reality.
Responsability of AWARDED RESEARCH GRANTS (peer-reviewed), 2016:
1. She Coordinates the Italian Section of a Joint Research Project with Paris-Sorbonne, awarded by Grant “Galileo” 2016/2017, entitled “The Reception of Soviet Political Repressions in French and Italian Cultural Universe (1917-1987)”.
2. She coordinates the Slavic section of a joint Research Project awarded by Competitive Research Grants of the University of Florence, entitled “At the shores of the iron curtain: Cultures of Dissent in Italy, France and URSS and the definition of European identity (1956-1991)”.
View the full Curriculum here:
https://www.unifi.it/index.php?module=ofform2&mode=3&cmd=60&idxfld=2&doc=141983
Phone: 00390552756022
Address: Università degli Studi di Firenze,
FORLILPSI
Via della Pergola 58/60
50121
Firenze
University of Florence (Italy)
EDUCATION:
After a Master Degree in Slavic Philology in 2004, she got a Ph. D. in Russian Studies at the State University of Milan (2008) and a post-graduate specialization course in Aesthetics and Hermeneutics of Symbolic forms (Philosophy, University of Florence).
She further developed her research experience thanks to a:
- two-year Post-Doc Research Grant at the Dom Russkogo Zarubež’ja in Moscow (2008-2010) and a
- second Post-Doc Research Grant at the Sorbonne Paris IV (2012-2013), where she mainly worked in the Russian free-mason archives in Paris.
ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS (BRIEF SUMMARY):
C. Pieralli is author of the first scientific edition of the art treatise Otkrovenie iskusstva by N.N. Evreinov (Sankt-Peterburg: Mir, 2012), publication supported by an RGNF (Russian State Fund for Humanities) grant and of the monograph Il pensiero di N. Evreinov dalla teatralità alla ‘poetica della rivelazione’ (N. Evreinov’s Thought from Theatricality to the “Poetics of Revelation”) which was published in the academic series of Slavic Studies (“Biblioteca di Studi Slavistici”), Firenze University Press, in 2015 (Open Access Publication: http://www.fupress.com/catalogo/il-pensiero-estetico-di-nikolaj-evreinov-dalla-teatralita--alla--poetica-della-rivelazione-/3114).
She has published several essays on Gulag Poetry, Totalitarism and literatury testimony, Russian XXth cent. Theatre, Slavic Folklore tradition in Italian, French, English and Russian languages.
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Starting from Russian Folklore and Theatre, her Research interests have then focused on Cultural history of post-Revolutionary Russian Emigration, Relations between Literary writing and Totalitarianism (esp. Stalinism), Soviet History ‘post-Memoria’ in Russian Language Literature.
She is currently deepening her interests in the literary testimony of the political imprisonment experience in URSS (having published surveys about ‘segregation poetry’ during Stalin’s repressions, among them: The Poetry of Soviet Political Prisoners (1921-1939): historical-typological framework, in: Contributi italiani al Congresso Internazionale degli Slavisti, 2013, FUP, pp. 387-412, Poesia del Gulag o della zona? Problemi e prospettive di analisi per una descrizione del corpus poetico dei prigionieri politici in URSS, in: C. Pieralli (eds), Fratture e integrazioni tra Russia, mondo slavo orientale e Occidente, FUP 2017 - forthcoming), and extending them on the study of personal diaries in Leningrad Blokade as literary testimonies of Soviet reality.
Responsability of AWARDED RESEARCH GRANTS (peer-reviewed), 2016:
1. She Coordinates the Italian Section of a Joint Research Project with Paris-Sorbonne, awarded by Grant “Galileo” 2016/2017, entitled “The Reception of Soviet Political Repressions in French and Italian Cultural Universe (1917-1987)”.
2. She coordinates the Slavic section of a joint Research Project awarded by Competitive Research Grants of the University of Florence, entitled “At the shores of the iron curtain: Cultures of Dissent in Italy, France and URSS and the definition of European identity (1956-1991)”.
View the full Curriculum here:
https://www.unifi.it/index.php?module=ofform2&mode=3&cmd=60&idxfld=2&doc=141983
Phone: 00390552756022
Address: Università degli Studi di Firenze,
FORLILPSI
Via della Pergola 58/60
50121
Firenze
less
InterestsView All (20)
Uploads
Videos by Claudia Pieralli
Higher School of Economics (Moscow), Department of Philosophy,
International Research Laboratory on russian-western intellectual dialogue.
International Conference "Memory as a Historical and Philosophical Phenomenon: Russia and the West, XX and XXIst centuries". In RUSSIAN
21 October 2019
Books by Claudia Pieralli
http://www.fupress.com/catalogo/il-pensiero-estetico-di-nikolaj-evreinov-dalla-teatralita--alla--poetica-della-rivelazione-/3114
ABSTRACT:
The Aesthetic Thought of Nikolai Nikolayevich Evreinov
from Theatricality to the ‘Poetics of Revelation’
This research presents an analysis of the aesthetic thought of the director, playwright, theater theorist and historian, philosopher and art theorist Nikolai Nikolayevich Evreinov (1879-1953), based on a comprehensive study of his artistic and philosophical-theoretical legacy, especially with reference to his critical work during his émigré years in Paris (1927-1953). My intent is to reconstruct the link between Evreinov’s theoretical work, formulated in the pre-Revolution era, and his treatise The Revelation of Art (Otkrovenie iskusstva), written in Paris in the 1930’s and recently published in the original Russian in St. Petersburg in a critical edition edited by myself (see Evreinov 2012). Otkrovenie iskusstva was for Evreinov a kind of intellectual testament. This work, however disorganized, should be considered the summa of his aesthetic concepts, as the destination of a troubled path of research begun as far back as 1908, in the midst of the modernist movement, with the publication of his manifesto-study The Apology of Theatricality (Apologija Teatral’nosti). This volume is divided into two parts: the first presents Evreinov as a director and theoretician of theater, while the second, with a more markedly philosophical approach, examines his ‘poetics of revelation,’ the conceptual essence and interpretive horizon of his aesthetic thought, considered here at last in its entirety and complexity.
The first part of the book presents an overview of Evreinov’s critical fortune in Russia and in the West from the 1910’s to the present. Subsequently, his artistic personality is placed in the cultural context of the first two decades of twentieth-century Russian theater. Hence I recount the key moments of his education and the first lines of development of his thought (concerning the relationships between norm and transgression in art, violence and theater), the key thematic nuclei that mark his theoretical production during his Russian period, condensed into his two major works: The Theater as Such (Teatr kak takovoj, 1912) and The Theatre for Oneself (Teatr dlja sebja, 1915-1917). After covering the basic stages of Evreinov’s career as a theorist and director in his homeland, I provide a complete reconstruction of his activities abroad, which I have subdivided into two phases (1925-27 and 1927-1953). Evreinov’s theoretical production is thus presented by contextualizing Revelation of Art in the overall framework of his oeuvre.
The second part of the book presents a formal and conceptual analysis of Evreinov’s major text, Otkrovenie iskusstva, marking the special relationship the author had with his country of origin and its more recent cultural tradition. Herein his tacit models of reference are revealed (Tolstoy’s What Is Art?), and his possible relationships, connections and derivations with respect to the various schools of critical method: formalism and especially Viktor Shklovsky, sociological criticism of Marxist inspiration, Freudianism and its reception in the Russian milieu of the 1920’s. The comparison with the first period of theoretical thought that Evreinov devoted to the theater is here adopted as a basic methodological key, although every kind of influence is taken into account, including his involvement in the Russian Masonic movement of his fellow émigrés in Paris. After having provided a formal-typological analysis of the text, I illustrate in chapter four the cardinal points of his system of thought, focusing on his ‘archetypal I’ (iskonnoe Ja) and the dyad ‘art of mastery’-‘art of super-mastery’ (masterstvo-sverch-masterstvo) by comparing Evreinov’s ideas with those of authors who were his contemporaries (in particular Vladimir Vejdle, Nikolai Berdyaev, Henri Bergson, Georgy Fedotov), or by placing them in relation with the general elements of Masonic moral philosophy. The fifth and final chapter deals with the last part of what according to Evreinov is the path that leads to true artistic revelation. I show here how the author developed a new interpretive theory of normative type that led to a thoroughly original concept of theatricality (teatral’nost’) as a specific method of artistic creation based on visual effectiveness.
The end of this multifaceted analysis reveals that my reflection on Evreinov’s theater, by which he is now known to critics, was from the very start an incursion into the realm of the psychology of art as such. In fact this is the absolute uniqueness and complexity of the Revelation of Art in the context of Evreinov’s aesthetic thought: a sweeping, original theory of art, an important document, till recent years neglected, of a historical segment of Russian émigré culture. His treatise, however, is also the supreme result of the reinterpretation he made as an émigré, a Mason (and in this special sense ‘re-educated’), of a segment of the tradition of Russian aesthetic thought and especially of himself as an anarchic, passionate apologist of theater in life. In this sense, this work represents a summation of the studies and research he carried out over a lifetime, which encloses and reorganizes into a system all the ideas he expressed in his decades-long career as a theoretical provocateur and interpreter of culture.
The Revelation of Art is thus the most eloquent proof of the enlargement of Evreinov’s disciplinary research horizons, in which this multifaceted figure can be more properly placed, no longer identified solely with the disciplinary realm of the history of theater (theory, directing, dramaturgy), but making his way into the history of culture, the history of thought and criticism.
The main focus of this research regards the figure of Nikolai Evreinov in the 1930’s, but it also touches on various disciplines, taking into account elements of textual analysis, the history of the Russian theater, the theory of theater and of symbolic forms in general, and the history of Russian thought and criticism. This without losing sight, in the background, of the intellectual history of the first wave of Russian émigrés (1917-1939), and primarily some phases of the debate on art held in the Russian press published in Paris and some data and documents relating to the history of the Russian Masonic lodges in the Paris of the 1930’s.
Peer reviewed Essays and Papers by Claudia Pieralli
labor camps and prisons, Gulag, and the so called specposelenija (settlements in confinement). The research relies on the evidence drawn from the already published
as well as hitherto unknown archive materials related to the period between 1918 and 1956. The author of the article proposes a detailed systematization of the corpus of
the poetry, based on historical and typological criteria that complement her previous research on the subject. The aim of the article is to encourage and help further studies in this area. Based on the evidence provided by the first and second degree sources, the essays demonstrates the effectivity of the proposed methodology, which is entirely based on the key-concept of the so called “Zone poetry” as a literary track of testimony of political repression which was synchronical with the imprisonment experience in the USSR.
Аннотация: Настоящий обзор является базовым для более широкого исследования поэзии, написанной жертвами политических репрессий в тюрьмах, лагерях и ссылках в Советском Союзе: предварительных и пересыльных тюрьмах, досталинских, сталинских и постсталинских исправительно-трудовых лагерях и тюрьмах, ГУЛАГе и спецпоселениях. Исследование основано на данных, полученных из опубликованных и архивных материалов, относящихся к периоду 1918-1956 гг. Автор статьи предлагает детальную систематизацию корпуса поэзии, основанную на исторических и типологических критериях, которые дополняют работу над данными, полученными автором в предыдущих исследованиях. Работа послужит основой для дальнейших исследований. Продуктивность предлагаемой методологии основана на ключевой концепции «поэзии зоны» как литературного следа политических репрессий, синхронизированных с тюремным заключением в СССР. Ключевые слова: поэзия ГУЛАГа, литературное свидетельство, политические репрессии, поэзия-свидетельство, поэзия «зоны», поэзия в заключении, советская поэзия, поэзия политзаключенных, лагерная литература.
The present survey aims at creating the basis for an extensive study on the generically called "Gulag poetry": poetry written by victims of political repressions in the whole area of Segregation in the Soviet Union, which we call "zone": preliminary and transit prisons, pre-Stalinist, Stalinist and post-Stalinist forced labour camps and prisons, Gulags and confinement (life in specposelki), exc.. The research relies on evidence drawn from published as well as archive materials, concerning the 1918-1956 period. We therefore propose a detailed systematization of the corpus, based on historical and typological criteria, which complement the work on data the author has acquired in previous studies, in order to help develop further studies on a solid and effective methodological basis. On the evidence provided by first and second degree sources, we demonstrate the productiveness of the proposed methodology, which is entirely based on the key-concept of ‘poetry of Zone’ as a literary track of testimony of political repression, which was synchronical to the imprisonment experience in the USSR.
Higher School of Economics (Moscow), Department of Philosophy,
International Research Laboratory on russian-western intellectual dialogue.
International Conference "Memory as a Historical and Philosophical Phenomenon: Russia and the West, XX and XXIst centuries". In RUSSIAN
21 October 2019
http://www.fupress.com/catalogo/il-pensiero-estetico-di-nikolaj-evreinov-dalla-teatralita--alla--poetica-della-rivelazione-/3114
ABSTRACT:
The Aesthetic Thought of Nikolai Nikolayevich Evreinov
from Theatricality to the ‘Poetics of Revelation’
This research presents an analysis of the aesthetic thought of the director, playwright, theater theorist and historian, philosopher and art theorist Nikolai Nikolayevich Evreinov (1879-1953), based on a comprehensive study of his artistic and philosophical-theoretical legacy, especially with reference to his critical work during his émigré years in Paris (1927-1953). My intent is to reconstruct the link between Evreinov’s theoretical work, formulated in the pre-Revolution era, and his treatise The Revelation of Art (Otkrovenie iskusstva), written in Paris in the 1930’s and recently published in the original Russian in St. Petersburg in a critical edition edited by myself (see Evreinov 2012). Otkrovenie iskusstva was for Evreinov a kind of intellectual testament. This work, however disorganized, should be considered the summa of his aesthetic concepts, as the destination of a troubled path of research begun as far back as 1908, in the midst of the modernist movement, with the publication of his manifesto-study The Apology of Theatricality (Apologija Teatral’nosti). This volume is divided into two parts: the first presents Evreinov as a director and theoretician of theater, while the second, with a more markedly philosophical approach, examines his ‘poetics of revelation,’ the conceptual essence and interpretive horizon of his aesthetic thought, considered here at last in its entirety and complexity.
The first part of the book presents an overview of Evreinov’s critical fortune in Russia and in the West from the 1910’s to the present. Subsequently, his artistic personality is placed in the cultural context of the first two decades of twentieth-century Russian theater. Hence I recount the key moments of his education and the first lines of development of his thought (concerning the relationships between norm and transgression in art, violence and theater), the key thematic nuclei that mark his theoretical production during his Russian period, condensed into his two major works: The Theater as Such (Teatr kak takovoj, 1912) and The Theatre for Oneself (Teatr dlja sebja, 1915-1917). After covering the basic stages of Evreinov’s career as a theorist and director in his homeland, I provide a complete reconstruction of his activities abroad, which I have subdivided into two phases (1925-27 and 1927-1953). Evreinov’s theoretical production is thus presented by contextualizing Revelation of Art in the overall framework of his oeuvre.
The second part of the book presents a formal and conceptual analysis of Evreinov’s major text, Otkrovenie iskusstva, marking the special relationship the author had with his country of origin and its more recent cultural tradition. Herein his tacit models of reference are revealed (Tolstoy’s What Is Art?), and his possible relationships, connections and derivations with respect to the various schools of critical method: formalism and especially Viktor Shklovsky, sociological criticism of Marxist inspiration, Freudianism and its reception in the Russian milieu of the 1920’s. The comparison with the first period of theoretical thought that Evreinov devoted to the theater is here adopted as a basic methodological key, although every kind of influence is taken into account, including his involvement in the Russian Masonic movement of his fellow émigrés in Paris. After having provided a formal-typological analysis of the text, I illustrate in chapter four the cardinal points of his system of thought, focusing on his ‘archetypal I’ (iskonnoe Ja) and the dyad ‘art of mastery’-‘art of super-mastery’ (masterstvo-sverch-masterstvo) by comparing Evreinov’s ideas with those of authors who were his contemporaries (in particular Vladimir Vejdle, Nikolai Berdyaev, Henri Bergson, Georgy Fedotov), or by placing them in relation with the general elements of Masonic moral philosophy. The fifth and final chapter deals with the last part of what according to Evreinov is the path that leads to true artistic revelation. I show here how the author developed a new interpretive theory of normative type that led to a thoroughly original concept of theatricality (teatral’nost’) as a specific method of artistic creation based on visual effectiveness.
The end of this multifaceted analysis reveals that my reflection on Evreinov’s theater, by which he is now known to critics, was from the very start an incursion into the realm of the psychology of art as such. In fact this is the absolute uniqueness and complexity of the Revelation of Art in the context of Evreinov’s aesthetic thought: a sweeping, original theory of art, an important document, till recent years neglected, of a historical segment of Russian émigré culture. His treatise, however, is also the supreme result of the reinterpretation he made as an émigré, a Mason (and in this special sense ‘re-educated’), of a segment of the tradition of Russian aesthetic thought and especially of himself as an anarchic, passionate apologist of theater in life. In this sense, this work represents a summation of the studies and research he carried out over a lifetime, which encloses and reorganizes into a system all the ideas he expressed in his decades-long career as a theoretical provocateur and interpreter of culture.
The Revelation of Art is thus the most eloquent proof of the enlargement of Evreinov’s disciplinary research horizons, in which this multifaceted figure can be more properly placed, no longer identified solely with the disciplinary realm of the history of theater (theory, directing, dramaturgy), but making his way into the history of culture, the history of thought and criticism.
The main focus of this research regards the figure of Nikolai Evreinov in the 1930’s, but it also touches on various disciplines, taking into account elements of textual analysis, the history of the Russian theater, the theory of theater and of symbolic forms in general, and the history of Russian thought and criticism. This without losing sight, in the background, of the intellectual history of the first wave of Russian émigrés (1917-1939), and primarily some phases of the debate on art held in the Russian press published in Paris and some data and documents relating to the history of the Russian Masonic lodges in the Paris of the 1930’s.
labor camps and prisons, Gulag, and the so called specposelenija (settlements in confinement). The research relies on the evidence drawn from the already published
as well as hitherto unknown archive materials related to the period between 1918 and 1956. The author of the article proposes a detailed systematization of the corpus of
the poetry, based on historical and typological criteria that complement her previous research on the subject. The aim of the article is to encourage and help further studies in this area. Based on the evidence provided by the first and second degree sources, the essays demonstrates the effectivity of the proposed methodology, which is entirely based on the key-concept of the so called “Zone poetry” as a literary track of testimony of political repression which was synchronical with the imprisonment experience in the USSR.
Аннотация: Настоящий обзор является базовым для более широкого исследования поэзии, написанной жертвами политических репрессий в тюрьмах, лагерях и ссылках в Советском Союзе: предварительных и пересыльных тюрьмах, досталинских, сталинских и постсталинских исправительно-трудовых лагерях и тюрьмах, ГУЛАГе и спецпоселениях. Исследование основано на данных, полученных из опубликованных и архивных материалов, относящихся к периоду 1918-1956 гг. Автор статьи предлагает детальную систематизацию корпуса поэзии, основанную на исторических и типологических критериях, которые дополняют работу над данными, полученными автором в предыдущих исследованиях. Работа послужит основой для дальнейших исследований. Продуктивность предлагаемой методологии основана на ключевой концепции «поэзии зоны» как литературного следа политических репрессий, синхронизированных с тюремным заключением в СССР. Ключевые слова: поэзия ГУЛАГа, литературное свидетельство, политические репрессии, поэзия-свидетельство, поэзия «зоны», поэзия в заключении, советская поэзия, поэзия политзаключенных, лагерная литература.
The present survey aims at creating the basis for an extensive study on the generically called "Gulag poetry": poetry written by victims of political repressions in the whole area of Segregation in the Soviet Union, which we call "zone": preliminary and transit prisons, pre-Stalinist, Stalinist and post-Stalinist forced labour camps and prisons, Gulags and confinement (life in specposelki), exc.. The research relies on evidence drawn from published as well as archive materials, concerning the 1918-1956 period. We therefore propose a detailed systematization of the corpus, based on historical and typological criteria, which complement the work on data the author has acquired in previous studies, in order to help develop further studies on a solid and effective methodological basis. On the evidence provided by first and second degree sources, we demonstrate the productiveness of the proposed methodology, which is entirely based on the key-concept of ‘poetry of Zone’ as a literary track of testimony of political repression, which was synchronical to the imprisonment experience in the USSR.
The research area includes the various forms of dissent culture that from the fifties onwards have concerned the European context, with particular regard to the comparison between Western and Eastern Europe, notably the Franco-Italian area and the Slavic one, (Soviet Russia, Belarus and Ukraine). These areas are characterized by the emergence of similar forms of protest against the cultural and political establishment, which express themselves in an antithetical but specular manner, in relation to the axis that separates the eastern bloc from the western one. The project aims to problematize the geocultural concept of Europe starting from its internal historical, social, and ethnocultural diversities, especially interested, with the end of the Second World War, in the West/East dividing axis, more than in the South/North axis, or the axis that divides Western Europe from Eastern Europe, included in the sphere of influence of the Soviet bloc.
Visit the Project's Web page:
www.culturedeldissenso.com
Teresa Spignoli (Associate Professor – Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature) and Claudia Pieralli (Tenure Track Associate Professor – Slavic Studies/Russian Literature).
The research area includes the various forms of dissent culture that from the fifties onwards have concerned the European context, with particular regard to the comparison between Western and Eastern Europe, notably the Franco-Italian area and the Slavic one, (Soviet Russia, Belarus and Ukraine). These areas are characterized by the emergence of similar forms of protest against the cultural and political establishment, which express themselves in an antithetical but specular manner, in relation to the axis that separates the eastern bloc from the western one. The project aims to problematize the geocultural concept of Europe starting from its internal historical, social, and ethnocultural diversities, especially interested, with the end of the Second World War, in the West/East dividing axis, more than in the South/North axis, or the axis that divides Western Europe from Eastern Europe, included in the sphere of influence of the Soviet bloc.