Русский реализм XIX века. Общество, знание, повествование. Сборник статей / под ред. М. Вайсман, А. Вдовина, И. Клигера, К. Осповата. - Москва: Новое литературное обозрение, 2020.
Литературная культура в России XVIII в. Вып. 8, 2019
В статье предлагается прочтение трагедии А. П. Сумарокова «Гамлет» (1748) на фоне общеевропейской... more В статье предлагается прочтение трагедии А. П. Сумарокова «Гамлет» (1748) на фоне общеевропейской поэтики жанра и его сродства с политической теорией и практикой абсолютистских дворов. Победа Гамлета, восходящего на отцовский престол и следующие за ней помилование и самоубийство Полония интерпретируются на фоне истории переворота Елизаветы Петровны и политических процессов начала 1740-х годов. На этом фоне в статье исследуются матрицы аффективного воздействия, общие для трагедии и абсолютистских «сценариев власти» в Европе начала Нового времени.
This paper analyses a poem by Osip Mandelstam, his 1932 “To the German Tongue”, as it explores an... more This paper analyses a poem by Osip Mandelstam, his 1932 “To the German Tongue”, as it explores and reveals the tensions and dangers of Soviet discursivity and subjectivity. Tracing its semantic unfolding shaped by ambiguities, nuances, and subtle transitions, and illuminating its evocations of the long-gone cultural past, I approach the poem as a consistent, if meaningfully opaque, reflection on the Soviet experience. Mandelstam built upon and self-consciously enacted theoretically informed conceptions of the lyric, the poetic subject, and poetic language developed in Formalist scholarship and adopted in some of his own critical writing. I argue that in the poem, as well as in the criticism which framed it, these Formalist concepts revealed an undercurrent of political signification, made even more evident in the reflections on Soviet political and aesthetic experience in the memoirist writing of a Lidiia Ginzburg or a Nadezhda Mandelstam.
The essay links the symbolic spaces of the Rus sian
imperial capital St. Petersburg as depicted i... more The essay links the symbolic spaces of the Rus sian imperial capital St. Petersburg as depicted in A.S. Push kin‘s “Bronze Horseman” to the semantics of historical catastrophe explored by Walter Benja min in his studies of German baroque and revolutio nary Paris. Focusing on various literary appropriations of the “bronze horseman”, the equestrian statue of the city’s founder Peter the Great, the essay explores its evolving allegorical relationship to political crises from A.S. Pushkin to Andrei Bely, from the nineteenth century to the revolutionary era. As a symbolic langua ge of the state of exception, the baroque was revived by avant-garde artists and scholars and made to reso - nate with the political aesthetics of their own time.
Статья исследует политико-семиотическое про- странство Петербурга XIX—XX вв., запечатлен- ное в «Медном всаднике» Пушкина и романе Андрея Белого, с опорой на теорию барокко у Вальтера Беньямина и его анализ револю- ционного Парижа XIX в. Рассматривая отзвуки и интерпретации памятника Фальконе, работа описывает их соотношение с рефлексией суве- ренитета и революционного кризиса от Пуш- кина до Андрея Белого. В эстетической мысли послереволюционного авангарда, у Беньямина, Белого и Мандельштама, «барокко» было осмыслено как символический язык чрезвы- чайного положения и революции.
The essay links the symbolic spaces of the Russian imperial capital St. Petersburg, canonized by ... more The essay links the symbolic spaces of the Russian imperial capital St. Petersburg, canonized by the literary tradition known as the "Petersburg text of Russian literature", to the semantics of historical catastrophe explored by Walter Benjamin in his studies of German baroque and revolutionary Paris. Focusing on various literary appropriations of the "Bronze Horseman", the equestrian statue of the city's founder Peter the Great, the essay explores its evolving allegorical relationship to political crises from A. S. Pushkin to Andrei Bely, from the nineteenth century to the revolutionary era. As a symbolic language of the state of exception, the baroque was revived by avant-garde artists and scholars and made to resonate with the political aesthetics of their own time.
"EUtROPEs: The Paradox of European Empire", forthcoming.
This paper addresses the cultural poetics of pan-European absolutist politics, as revealed during... more This paper addresses the cultural poetics of pan-European absolutist politics, as revealed during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and in its outcome known as the ‘miracle of the house of Brandenburg’. I argue that political self-fashioning of the war’s two major actors, the Russian emperor Peter III and Frederick II of Prussia, and their reading of events were shaped by “scenarios of power” elaborated in tragedy and opera seria, the two major theatrical genres of pan-European absolutist theater specifically suited to negotiate fundamental visions of sovereignty. For Frederick, himself a man of letters and poet, tragedy provided a paradigm of royal charisma paradoxically affirmed by defeats threatening its very essence; theatrical interest for a misfortunate hero, the fundamental aesthetic effect of tragedy, served as a model for patriotic mobilization around the figure of the defeated rather than the triumphant king. On the other hand, the instant restitution of all conquered Prussian territory by Peter III immediately after his ascension to the throne was conceived as a spectacular gesture inaugurating a scenario of clement rule, canonized in some of the central texts of the neoclassical dramatic canon and extended to the internal policies of new emperor whose important measures – such as the abolishment of the terrifying secret police – relied on theatrical patterns of manipulating public emotion in favor of the ruler-as-actor.
The paper deals with the complex social strategy of the poet and polymath Mikhail Lomonosov, ofte... more The paper deals with the complex social strategy of the poet and polymath Mikhail Lomonosov, often considered as the founding father of Russian academic science, and explores the evident but insufficiently appreciated links between Lomonosov’s trajectory and the sociocultural spaces of the Russian court under Empress Elizabeth and her favorite Ivan Shuvalov. Concentrating on Lomonosov’s letters to Shuvalov, his patron, the paper illuminates the discursive techniques which allowed this low-born intellectual to combine the seemingly contradictory roles of the misanthropic “natural philosopher” and the astute court writer and to secure social respect through the manipulation of epistolary and literary conventions. Asserting his dignity, Lomonosov seems to appeal to the ancient tradition, revived by the Baconian ideology of “new science”, which attributed to intellectuals (“philosophers”) constant seclusion and a contempt for worldly affairs. However, Lomonosov in fact depended on the court for social and intellectual recognition, and was arguably more successful as a writer of panegyric poetry and prose than as a natural scientist. Viewing his epistolary rhetoric in this perspective, one can discern a well-established (though often neglected in contemporary scholarship) strategy of self-assertion of the client intellectuals “at the table of eminent lords”, expounded in epistolary manuals well-known to Lomonosov, and exemplified by the lives and oeuvre of many authors central for the literary tradition, first of all Horace, famously protected by Maecenas and Augustus. Styling himself as the Russian Horace in his literary works, as well as letters, Lomonosov used the idiom of courtly literature as an instrument for sociocultural self-fashioning. My analysis brings to light the mechanics of the social process whereby language in general, and the literary idiom in particular, could become a crucial factor in the formation of an intellectual’s social niche.
In Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s) Katja Gvozdeva... more In Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s) Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva, and Kirill Ospovat (eds.) focus on a fundamental question that transcends the disciplinary boundaries of theatre studies: how and to what extent did the convergence of dramatic theory, theatrical practice, and various modes of audience experience — among both theatregoers and readers of drama — contribute, during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, to the emergence of symbolic, social, and cultural space(s) we call 'public sphere(s)'? Developing a post-Habermasian understanding of the public sphere, the articles in this collection demonstrate that related, if diverging, conceptions of the 'public' existed in a variety of forms, locations, and cultures across early modern Europe — and in Asia. Students and scholars of early modern theatre, and anyone interested in the theory of drama, in audience studies, performance studies, comparative literature, and the history of literary institutions and cultural dynamics.
Русский реализм XIX века. Общество, знание, повествование. Сборник статей / под ред. М. Вайсман, А. Вдовина, И. Клигера, К. Осповата. - Москва: Новое литературное обозрение, 2020.
Литературная культура в России XVIII в. Вып. 8, 2019
В статье предлагается прочтение трагедии А. П. Сумарокова «Гамлет» (1748) на фоне общеевропейской... more В статье предлагается прочтение трагедии А. П. Сумарокова «Гамлет» (1748) на фоне общеевропейской поэтики жанра и его сродства с политической теорией и практикой абсолютистских дворов. Победа Гамлета, восходящего на отцовский престол и следующие за ней помилование и самоубийство Полония интерпретируются на фоне истории переворота Елизаветы Петровны и политических процессов начала 1740-х годов. На этом фоне в статье исследуются матрицы аффективного воздействия, общие для трагедии и абсолютистских «сценариев власти» в Европе начала Нового времени.
This paper analyses a poem by Osip Mandelstam, his 1932 “To the German Tongue”, as it explores an... more This paper analyses a poem by Osip Mandelstam, his 1932 “To the German Tongue”, as it explores and reveals the tensions and dangers of Soviet discursivity and subjectivity. Tracing its semantic unfolding shaped by ambiguities, nuances, and subtle transitions, and illuminating its evocations of the long-gone cultural past, I approach the poem as a consistent, if meaningfully opaque, reflection on the Soviet experience. Mandelstam built upon and self-consciously enacted theoretically informed conceptions of the lyric, the poetic subject, and poetic language developed in Formalist scholarship and adopted in some of his own critical writing. I argue that in the poem, as well as in the criticism which framed it, these Formalist concepts revealed an undercurrent of political signification, made even more evident in the reflections on Soviet political and aesthetic experience in the memoirist writing of a Lidiia Ginzburg or a Nadezhda Mandelstam.
The essay links the symbolic spaces of the Rus sian
imperial capital St. Petersburg as depicted i... more The essay links the symbolic spaces of the Rus sian imperial capital St. Petersburg as depicted in A.S. Push kin‘s “Bronze Horseman” to the semantics of historical catastrophe explored by Walter Benja min in his studies of German baroque and revolutio nary Paris. Focusing on various literary appropriations of the “bronze horseman”, the equestrian statue of the city’s founder Peter the Great, the essay explores its evolving allegorical relationship to political crises from A.S. Pushkin to Andrei Bely, from the nineteenth century to the revolutionary era. As a symbolic langua ge of the state of exception, the baroque was revived by avant-garde artists and scholars and made to reso - nate with the political aesthetics of their own time.
Статья исследует политико-семиотическое про- странство Петербурга XIX—XX вв., запечатлен- ное в «Медном всаднике» Пушкина и романе Андрея Белого, с опорой на теорию барокко у Вальтера Беньямина и его анализ револю- ционного Парижа XIX в. Рассматривая отзвуки и интерпретации памятника Фальконе, работа описывает их соотношение с рефлексией суве- ренитета и революционного кризиса от Пуш- кина до Андрея Белого. В эстетической мысли послереволюционного авангарда, у Беньямина, Белого и Мандельштама, «барокко» было осмыслено как символический язык чрезвы- чайного положения и революции.
The essay links the symbolic spaces of the Russian imperial capital St. Petersburg, canonized by ... more The essay links the symbolic spaces of the Russian imperial capital St. Petersburg, canonized by the literary tradition known as the "Petersburg text of Russian literature", to the semantics of historical catastrophe explored by Walter Benjamin in his studies of German baroque and revolutionary Paris. Focusing on various literary appropriations of the "Bronze Horseman", the equestrian statue of the city's founder Peter the Great, the essay explores its evolving allegorical relationship to political crises from A. S. Pushkin to Andrei Bely, from the nineteenth century to the revolutionary era. As a symbolic language of the state of exception, the baroque was revived by avant-garde artists and scholars and made to resonate with the political aesthetics of their own time.
"EUtROPEs: The Paradox of European Empire", forthcoming.
This paper addresses the cultural poetics of pan-European absolutist politics, as revealed during... more This paper addresses the cultural poetics of pan-European absolutist politics, as revealed during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and in its outcome known as the ‘miracle of the house of Brandenburg’. I argue that political self-fashioning of the war’s two major actors, the Russian emperor Peter III and Frederick II of Prussia, and their reading of events were shaped by “scenarios of power” elaborated in tragedy and opera seria, the two major theatrical genres of pan-European absolutist theater specifically suited to negotiate fundamental visions of sovereignty. For Frederick, himself a man of letters and poet, tragedy provided a paradigm of royal charisma paradoxically affirmed by defeats threatening its very essence; theatrical interest for a misfortunate hero, the fundamental aesthetic effect of tragedy, served as a model for patriotic mobilization around the figure of the defeated rather than the triumphant king. On the other hand, the instant restitution of all conquered Prussian territory by Peter III immediately after his ascension to the throne was conceived as a spectacular gesture inaugurating a scenario of clement rule, canonized in some of the central texts of the neoclassical dramatic canon and extended to the internal policies of new emperor whose important measures – such as the abolishment of the terrifying secret police – relied on theatrical patterns of manipulating public emotion in favor of the ruler-as-actor.
The paper deals with the complex social strategy of the poet and polymath Mikhail Lomonosov, ofte... more The paper deals with the complex social strategy of the poet and polymath Mikhail Lomonosov, often considered as the founding father of Russian academic science, and explores the evident but insufficiently appreciated links between Lomonosov’s trajectory and the sociocultural spaces of the Russian court under Empress Elizabeth and her favorite Ivan Shuvalov. Concentrating on Lomonosov’s letters to Shuvalov, his patron, the paper illuminates the discursive techniques which allowed this low-born intellectual to combine the seemingly contradictory roles of the misanthropic “natural philosopher” and the astute court writer and to secure social respect through the manipulation of epistolary and literary conventions. Asserting his dignity, Lomonosov seems to appeal to the ancient tradition, revived by the Baconian ideology of “new science”, which attributed to intellectuals (“philosophers”) constant seclusion and a contempt for worldly affairs. However, Lomonosov in fact depended on the court for social and intellectual recognition, and was arguably more successful as a writer of panegyric poetry and prose than as a natural scientist. Viewing his epistolary rhetoric in this perspective, one can discern a well-established (though often neglected in contemporary scholarship) strategy of self-assertion of the client intellectuals “at the table of eminent lords”, expounded in epistolary manuals well-known to Lomonosov, and exemplified by the lives and oeuvre of many authors central for the literary tradition, first of all Horace, famously protected by Maecenas and Augustus. Styling himself as the Russian Horace in his literary works, as well as letters, Lomonosov used the idiom of courtly literature as an instrument for sociocultural self-fashioning. My analysis brings to light the mechanics of the social process whereby language in general, and the literary idiom in particular, could become a crucial factor in the formation of an intellectual’s social niche.
In Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s) Katja Gvozdeva... more In Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s) Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva, and Kirill Ospovat (eds.) focus on a fundamental question that transcends the disciplinary boundaries of theatre studies: how and to what extent did the convergence of dramatic theory, theatrical practice, and various modes of audience experience — among both theatregoers and readers of drama — contribute, during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, to the emergence of symbolic, social, and cultural space(s) we call 'public sphere(s)'? Developing a post-Habermasian understanding of the public sphere, the articles in this collection demonstrate that related, if diverging, conceptions of the 'public' existed in a variety of forms, locations, and cultures across early modern Europe — and in Asia. Students and scholars of early modern theatre, and anyone interested in the theory of drama, in audience studies, performance studies, comparative literature, and the history of literary institutions and cultural dynamics.
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Papers by Kirill Ospovat
На этом фоне в статье исследуются матрицы аффективного воздействия, общие для трагедии и абсолютистских «сценариев власти» в Европе начала Нового времени.
imperial capital St. Petersburg as depicted in
A.S. Push kin‘s “Bronze Horseman” to the semantics
of historical catastrophe explored by Walter Benja min
in his studies of German baroque and revolutio nary
Paris. Focusing on various literary appropriations of
the “bronze horseman”, the equestrian statue of the
city’s founder Peter the Great, the essay explores its
evolving allegorical relationship to political crises from
A.S. Pushkin to Andrei Bely, from the nineteenth century
to the revolutionary era. As a symbolic langua ge
of the state of exception, the baroque was revived by
avant-garde artists and scholars and made to reso -
nate with the political aesthetics of their own time.
Статья исследует политико-семиотическое про-
странство Петербурга XIX—XX вв., запечатлен-
ное в «Медном всаднике» Пушкина и романе
Андрея Белого, с опорой на теорию барокко
у Вальтера Беньямина и его анализ револю-
ционного Парижа XIX в. Рассматривая отзвуки
и интерпретации памятника Фальконе, работа
описывает их соотношение с рефлексией суве-
ренитета и революционного кризиса от Пуш-
кина до Андрея Белого. В эстетической мысли
послереволюционного авангарда, у Беньямина,
Белого и Мандельштама, «барокко» было
осмыслено как символический язык чрезвы-
чайного положения и революции.
http://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.20
Books by Kirill Ospovat
На этом фоне в статье исследуются матрицы аффективного воздействия, общие для трагедии и абсолютистских «сценариев власти» в Европе начала Нового времени.
imperial capital St. Petersburg as depicted in
A.S. Push kin‘s “Bronze Horseman” to the semantics
of historical catastrophe explored by Walter Benja min
in his studies of German baroque and revolutio nary
Paris. Focusing on various literary appropriations of
the “bronze horseman”, the equestrian statue of the
city’s founder Peter the Great, the essay explores its
evolving allegorical relationship to political crises from
A.S. Pushkin to Andrei Bely, from the nineteenth century
to the revolutionary era. As a symbolic langua ge
of the state of exception, the baroque was revived by
avant-garde artists and scholars and made to reso -
nate with the political aesthetics of their own time.
Статья исследует политико-семиотическое про-
странство Петербурга XIX—XX вв., запечатлен-
ное в «Медном всаднике» Пушкина и романе
Андрея Белого, с опорой на теорию барокко
у Вальтера Беньямина и его анализ револю-
ционного Парижа XIX в. Рассматривая отзвуки
и интерпретации памятника Фальконе, работа
описывает их соотношение с рефлексией суве-
ренитета и революционного кризиса от Пуш-
кина до Андрея Белого. В эстетической мысли
послереволюционного авангарда, у Беньямина,
Белого и Мандельштама, «барокко» было
осмыслено как символический язык чрезвы-
чайного положения и революции.
http://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.20