A review of: Shaytanov, I.O. (Ed.) (2022). Shekspir U. Sonety [Shakespeare, W. Sonnets]. Aleteiia. (In Russian).

After Herzen’s refusal to return to Russia and the subsequent deprivation of his citizenship and status rights (in 1851), his name was banned from public mention in Russia. With the establishment of the Free Russian Printing House in London (in 1853) and the appearance of its publications and periodicals (foremost Poliarnaia Zvezda (“The Polar Star”) since 1855 and Kolokol (“The Bell”) since 1857), the ban expanded not only to the physical, but also to the “virtual” presence of the exiled Herzen. The Third Department and other government structures were forced to take extensive and sophisticated measures to keep Herzen out of the socio-political and cultural field. However, after a while, a paradox arises: the absence of Herzen in the public field, but his increasingly extensive presence in government communication, primarily in the document flow of the Third Department, and later in correspondence and personal communication of ordinary people, that is, in fact, in the informal socio-political sphere. Moreover, Herzen’s popularity in Russia in the late 1850s and early 1860s was such that he became not just a political figure, an opposition publicist, but a kind of celebrity, a public figure. The article is largely based on archival data, most of which is being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.

The article analyzes the depiction of social roles in the Russian translation of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s ‘Parzival’. During his travels, the protagonist has to change three social roles: Parzival begins his journey as a hunter, then there is his transformation into an ideal knight, and finally he becomes the ruler of the Grail Castle. In the original text, each of these roles is accompanied by certain markers that were clear to the medieval listener but are not always obvious to the modern reader. L.V. Ginzburg’s translation allows inaccuracies, makes many digressions from the original text and paraphrases certain episodes. Naturally, this also affects the descriptions of Parzival’s social roles. Ignoring and neglecting seemingly insignificant markers leads to an inaccurate understanding of the medieval romance. However, to convey all the nuances that are inaccessible to the modern reader would require not so much a more precise poetic idiom, as an extensive historical and cultural commentary, missing from modern Russian-language editions of ‘Parzival’, that would help create the necessary context around the work. The ruler in the medieval novel is the ideal knight, and a knight is always a hunter; Parzival’s transition from one state to another, from one social role to another, is smoothed out in the Russian translation, and the markers that allowed Wolfram von Eschenbach to label each of the social roles more precisely and sharply are lost.

The article compares the representation of architecture in French and Russian academic art history, on the one hand, and in Eugène Atget’s photographs, on the other. The starting point for the art historical descriptions is Jacques-François Blondel’s analysis, supported by Jean Marot’s drawings. The choice of characteristics analyzed by Blondel and later researchers reflects the schematism in the understanding of architecture, its distance from the human being, and its lack of existential characteristics. This representation finds correspondence in the illustrative material — in the preference for drawings, plans, frontal point of view, and the absence of the human being in it. Atget’s images, due to the personal characteristics of their author, as well as of photography as an art form in general, reflected those characteristics of architecture which art historians overlooked, and which are related to its fundamental immersiveness and inseparable connection with the human lifeworld. Atget achieves this effect with the help of complex angles, naturalness of visual coverage, and seriality of photographs. “Unadorned” pictures of old buildings correspond to the naturalness of their aging, to actual and potential ruin as an important characteristic of architecture. On the basis of the analysis, the conclusion is reached about the need to revise the subject of architectural studies in the direction of its greater multidimensionality, inseparability from the human being, dynamism and uncertainty.

The article is devoted to the use of the logogram LÚ(.MEŠ)MAŠ.EN.KAK in Hittite texts. This logogram was borrowed from Mesopotamian cuneiform, in which it rendered the Akkadian word muškēnum (lit. ‘the one who bows down, performs proskynesis’). In 1950 E. Laroche showed that the logogram should be read as ašiwant- ‘poor’ in Hittite. However, subsequently several scholars have pointed out that this meaning did not fit well into many contexts. Therefore it was suggested that LÚ(.MEŠ)MAŠ.EN.KAK was rather a social term referring to a certain group of Hittite population dependent of the state (‘palace’) (V. Souček, I. M. Diakonoff). Such renderings of the logogram as ‘semi-free, dependent, serfs, servants’ which are widely used in the literature conform with this interpretation. But there seem to be insufficient evidence in the sources to substantiate these translations. The article analyses two texts from ancient Tapikka (HKM 8, 105) which were not yet known in the 1960s when the main study on the Hittite LÚ(.MEŠ)MAŠ.EN.KAK appeared. It is suggested that the solution should be sought in the Mesopotamian tradition of the Old Babylonian time in which the Akkadian equivalent of the logogram, the noun muškēnum, denoted commoners, ordinary citizens economically independent of the palace.

The article is an attempt to specify the genesis of the image of Laurence Sterne as it was created and presented by Nickolai Karamzin in the early 1790s. Karamzin’s Sterne, the most influential among other such attempts in Russian culture, turns out to be primarily French and imitative. Namely, the fragment “A Poor Man and His Dog”, presented in Karamzin’s Moscow Magazine (1792) as “Sterne’s work”, appears to be a translation not of Sterne but of an interpolation made by his French translator into the French version of Tristram Shandy. The very choice of fragments from Sterne presented in the Moscow Magazine (1791–1792) reflects not the editor’s own taste, but is a replication of the most common items from popular anthological editions of “The Beauties of Sterne”. Karamzin’s culturally influential decision not to translate and consequently not to introduce into Russian culture the original English notions of ‘sentimental’ and ‘humour’ is explained by the fact that he had viewed them through the prism of particular French texts-intermediaries. Karamzin’s insistence on reading Sterne “with tears in the eyes” and on alluding to him (in Letters of a Russian Traveller) primarily in melancholic charnel locations that made Sterne practically indistinguishable from Edward Young goes back not to the original Sterne, but to his later French imitators, such as François Vernes. Karamzin’s Sterne is contrasted with the assimilation of original narrative experiments and humour of Tristram by other Russian authors of the same period but of a different circle, Fyodor Rostopchin and Ivan Martynov.

The idea that fear of death forms the basic motivation for cultural and religious practices has gained attention of cognitive science and has been experimentally tested in recent decades. It is now known as the terror management theory (TMT). However, the idea itself was influential in scholarship at least since the 19th century and has had a significant impact on Egyptology throughout its history. In this article classical and modern works on ancient Egyptian religion and funeral practices are analyzed in order to highlight peculiarities of Egyptological reliance on the topos of fear of death. It can be noted that the use of the category of beneficiary for analysis of funerary literature and ritual is connected with the notion of benefit as a deliverance from fear of death. This perspective on benefits played its role in the formulation of the “democratization of the Afterlife” theory. The model centered on the idea of the orderliness of the world, proposed by J. Assmann, is considered as an alternative approach. It can be further developed in light of the compensatory control theory (CCT). Assmann limited himself to the study of religion as communication with gods. This paper explores funerary practices within the framework of ‘religion as propagation of Maat’. Finally, such specific traits of Egyptian funerary practices as threat-formulae, letters to the dead and heart amulets are analyzed as modes of execution of personal and compensatory control.

Similarities between Sophocles’ Oedipus and Shakespeare’s Lear were first noticed decades ago. Scholars called attention to the episodes in which both kings repel truthtellers (e. g., Tiresias and Kent); Oedipus’ two sons and Lear’s two daughters are killed; Oedipus laments over his wife and mother, the dead Jocasta, and Lear weeps over his daughter, the dead Cordelia; Creon enters with Antigone’s corpse and Lear with Cordelia’s corpse; the blind Oedipus is led by Antigone and the blind Gloucester by Edgar; etc. A few years ago (2019) an entire collection of articles was published on the parallels between Oedipus at Colonus and King Lear. Although in this collection the similarities between the two plays are analyzed from different points of view, no special attention has been paid to the metaphorical meaning of blindness of mind and eyes, an aspect about which the author of this article first wrote in 2015 and discusses it in more detail in this paper. “It is better to be blind in the eye than blind in the mind”: this saying of the 5th century Armenian historiographer Yeghishē, found in other ancient sources as well, perfectly fits the dramatic story of Oedipus, who in his turn has well-known counterparts in Shakespeare’s King Lear, namely Lear and Gloucester. This paper focuses on an interesting parallel between these three characters, namely, the painful, tragic way by which they acquire wisdom (in the case of Oedipus, prophetic wisdom) through blindness.

The Soviet project of creating the “new man” included the construction of a collective memory which was not only a legitimate version of the past, but also a repository of cultural values, and the background or space for celebrating Communist rituals. The project itself was rather uniform, but had multiple local incarnations that were determined mostly by the ethnic and religious identity of the local population. The Old Believers’ communities of the Russian North shared with the rest of the country symbols of the past, sites of memory, and commemorative rituals. Still, local perceptions of the Communist regime and its symbols depended in this milieu on a variety of factors: first, the high literacy rate of the deeply religious Old Believers, as well as their erudite knowledge of Christian, and specifically Old Russian literature; second, the very critical attitude toward Soviet power; and third, local beliefs. This article analyzes the process of adaptation of the Communist project to Old Believers’ persistent religious and cultural traditions and seeks to explain how Communist symbols symbiotically coexisted with hostile local attitudes and why they even survived the collapse of the regime. Mutual adjustment of the imposed Communist project and the local symbolic language took many decades, yet finally, by the end of the Soviet era, when three or four generations had seen no other reality than that they were surrounded by, the strong rejection of this reality was smoothed out, everyday tensions mostly disappeared, and the earlier alienation itself became part of collective memory on both family and community levels. The article is based on interviews with Old Believers of the Upper Kama region (Verkhokamie), conducted by the author in 2011 and 2013.

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