Maintained by: David J. Birnbaum (djbpitt@gmail.com) Last modified: 2020-07-07T17:12:53+0000
In his history of Russian religious thought, philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev describes Nil
Sorskii as a champion of freedom so far as it was understood in those days. He did
not associate Christianity with power and […] was the precursor of the
freedom-loving currents of thought among the Russian Intelligentsia.
This paper
investigates the theological claims of Nil Sorskii, identifying the role that hesychasm,
patristics, and apophatic theology played in his relative radicalization of Orthodoxy in
the late fourteenth century. Taking seriously Berdiaev’s claims to Sorskii as a
precursor to modernist Orthodox doctrines on freedom, this project will argue that Nil
Sorskii’s advocacy for the contemplative life
and combative denunciation of
monastic ownership of property established a distinctly Orthodox conception of
individuality and liberty that continued well into modern Russian debates on the
individual and human rights. In doing so, this paper argues that the larger Russian
Orthodox adoption of ascetic Byzantine theological doctrines takes part in the
foundation of a distinct national discourse on the subject and its relationship to the
church and state.
Little is known about the life of fifteenth-century artist Andrei Rublev, other than his works. As the most revered painter of Orthodox icons and frescoes, Rublev is perhaps most well known for his icon of the Holy Trinity, displayed today at the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow. In spite of an absence of biographical knowledge, in 1966 Andrei Tarkovskii directed the film Andrei Rublev, an adaptation of the life of the painter. Tarkovskii’s fictionalized account narrates the artist’s life in several episodes, centered on Rublev’s work and based on folkloric traditions and historical events. This paper examines the types of biographical narrative in Tarkovskii’s film in juxtaposition to the types of biographical writing that existed in Rus′. In exploring tropes, motifs, and themes of medieval biographical literature, the essay aims to understand how the film makes use of such narrative strategies in order to chronicle the life of a well-known individual from the fifteenth century. While acknowledging the political and cultural status of the film in its own time, the project focuses on hagiographies, life accounts, and legacies, and what they reveal about the nature of constructing a biographical film in the Soviet Union.
The paper aims to explore the construction of space and time and its functions in
Slovo polku Igoreve. Arguably, time construction reflects features of
pre-Christian pagan culture of medieval Rus′: the value of the past over the present
time, existence of epic golden times
, and importance of periods of time
determined by nature, for example sunset and sundown. Space construction could reflect
features that are still important for contemporary Russian culture, such as emphasis on
the size of the land and the impossibility of measuring it.
The paper explores the Byzantine patriarchal influence on the society of medieval Rus′
after its Christianization, following from the fact that the newly established Orthodox
Church adopted a number of rules for women and divided them into good
and
evil
. At the same time, in spite of the overall misogynistic approach evident
in such works as the Discourse on good and evil women
, the Statute of Grand
Prince Iaroslav
, the Izmgrad and the Domostroi, a
number of documents from this period indicate that women did have power, although
primarily in household matters. The age of the woman, furthermore, was an important
factor for power distribution—the older the woman, the more power she enjoyed. This
study, then, intends to examine the roles assigned to women in the society of Medieval
Rus′ and trace their continuous exclusion from public life that reached its nadir in the
seventeenth century. For this purpose, images of women from literary works of the period
(Tale of Igor’s campaign
, Tale of Petr and Fevronia
, Tale of Marfa
and Maria
, Tale of Iuliania Lazarevskaia
, and others) are viewed through
the lens of the developing patriarchy.
This paper focuses on a film adaptation of the legend of Saint Olga, Legenda o
kniagine Ol′ge, directed by Iurii Il′enko in 1983. The film is loosely based
on an entry from The Primary Chronicle, according to which Olga, a tenth-century ruler
of Kievan Rus′, avenged the death of her husband by burying and burning alive numerous
Drevlians allegedly responsible for his demise. Il′enko’s film gives a faithful visual
account of Olga’s cruel deeds described in the Chronicle only to challenge
the credibility of the textual source, the practices of writing
history, in
general, and the Soviet practices of re-writing
history, in particular. In this
light, the choice of the Primary Chronicle as the key historical source for
the film seems particularly interesting. The original manuscript of the document has
been long lost, and the later copies of it exhibit discrepancies that suggest that the
entries were copied, compiled and corrected
by various scribes. Moreover,
scholars agree that the accounts given in the document combine elements of fact and
fiction and often include the scribe’s personal (or imposed) opinions on the events.
This paper will argue that Il′enko’s convoluted narrative structure can be seen as an
imitation of the metanarrative
around the Primary Chronicle. The
film includes various contradictory accounts of Olga’s life that are told by unreliable
narrators, whose credibility is further undermined by the framing device: the stories
are merely delirious dreams of Olga’s dying grandson Vladimir. The use of the legend of
Saint Olga (which, as Il′enko suggests, will always remain a legend) is thus crucial for
the director’s project of equating Soviet historical practices with their early
prototypes that gave rise to he Primary Chronicle, a source that is
nowadays of equal interest to both literary critics and historians.
Afanasii Nikitin’s Voyage beyond the three seas, written in the fifteenth century, was immensely popular in the USSR and India in the 1950s. Nikitin was extolled as one of the first Europeans to discover India and his notes were considered a valuable and truthful source of information about this country at that time (1466–1472). Indeed, in their analyses of Nikitin’s travelogue, Soviet and Indian scholars underscore that, unlike other European travelers, Nikitin did not perceive India through the prism of an Oriental grid, but, rather, documented what he saw and experienced during his stay there with great precision (Neelkant, Minaiev, Vitashevskaia, Shlapentokh). Even where they do mention passages from his notes that might be considered Oriental, they do this only in passing and account for them by stating that Nikitin believed everything the locals told him (Vitashevskaia, Lur′e).
It is no surprise that, during the high time of Indo-Soviet amity, Nikitin’s Voyage became a basis for the first Indian-Soviet film, entitled Journey beyond the three seas (Pardesi, Khozhdenie za tri morya, dir. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Vasilii Pronin, 1957). The directors, however, preserved very little from the original text; instead they transformed this medieval travelogue into the love story of a Russian merchant, Afanasii Nikitin (Oleg Strizhenov), and an Indian girl, Champa (Nargis Dutt). This transformation included not only elimination of the Oriental passages from the original manuscript, but also orientalization of the Russian traveler himself. Even though such a transformation has not been discussed by scholars so far, I argue that it played a significant role in the reception of Nikitin’s Oriental account of his voyage as a manifestation of friendship and mutual understanding between India and the USSR.
In this paper, I intend to look at both Nikitin’s travelogue and its Soviet film adaptation through the lens of Said’s Orientalism (1978). First I will re-examine how Nikitin depicts Indians and their perception of him in the original text. Then I will showcase the changes in the portrayal of Indians and their perception of Nikitin as a Russian in the Soviet film adaptation of his medieval travelogue. I will also explain why those changes were made and what they signify.
This paper seeks to examine a peculiar cinematic trend that flourished predominantly on the peripheries of the Soviet film industry during the 1960s. In particular, this paper focuses on Sergei Paradzhanov’s Shadows of forgotten ancestors (1964, Dovzhenko Film Studio), Evgenii Shiffers’s Pervorossiiane (1967, Lenfil′m Studio)1, and Iurii Il′enko’s Evening on the eve of Ivan Kupala (1968, Dovzhenko Film Studio). Scholars of Russo-Soviet cinema commonly categorize these films as belonging to poetic cinema. The flexibility of this all-encompassing term, however, does not manage to grasp the peculiar style of these films. In this paper I propose to label this style tableau cinema due to its static painterly quality, which most heavily relies on the Orthodox iconographic tradition. The central questions in this paper are: How should we understand the invocation of iconographic technique deployed in these films? And more broadly: How does the implementation of iconographic technique contribute to remapping the boundaries of cinema beyond its medium specificity?
The resemblance of the style of these films to Orthodox icons is particularly prominent because of their avoidance of linear perspective and depth. This tendency is all the more remarkable since both linear perspective and depth are an almost inevitable consequence of the monocular property of the camera lens. The filmmakers, however, implements such techniques as close-ups, monochromatic backgrounds, distorted size of the filmed objects, and high camera angle to avoid linear perspective and to construct cinematic space according the rules of reverse perspective. This paper argues that the reference to the reverse perspective in these films not only has a spiritual connotation, but, more importantly, is invoked as a counter-technique to undo the technical and conceptual habituation to a dominant visual mode determined by linear perspective.
Another aspect that these films share with Orthodox icons is the static quality of the filmed objects. This quality can be interpreted in terms of a shift in the relationship to the film’s viewer from passive spectator to active participant. Building on Lev Zhegin’s and Boris Uspenskii’s argument concerning dynamic point of view in the religious icon, this paper proposes that in these films frozen poses and minimal amounts of motion within each non-perspectivally constructed frame are designed to stimulate the meandering mobility of the viewer’s gaze inside the frame.
Overall, this paper offers a cross-media examination of the tableau films to inquire into the role of the iconographic technique in rethinking the boundaries of the cinematic medium, which today is undergoing significant revisions with the advent of new media.
1 Although officially Aleksandr Ivanov—an ideologically trustworthy director from an older generation—is listed as the director of the film, according to the interview with the crewmembers of the film, Ivanov was only a nominal director and a shield for Shiffers, who directed the film in an astonishingly non-traditional style.
The spread of Christianity in pre-Mongol Rus′ was a gradual process, and one that certainly did not occur over the night following St. Vladimir’s proclamation of the Christianization of Rus′. Christianity did, however, constitute a revolutionary force that recrafted many components of Eastern Slavic identity throughout the Kievan period. Although Rus′ adopted the Christian rite of the Byzantine Empire, the practice of copying Byzantine religious material, e.g., icons, sermons, architectural designs, etc., did not persist long in an unmodified fashion. The Rus′ principalities quickly began to make their own innovations on Byzantine traditions while still remaining within a perceived Christian framework. This paper will examine the development of unique brand of Rusian Christendom, as attested by the independent iconographic traditions and schools nascent throughout the pre-Mongol Rus′ lands, in attempt to discern the geographical spread and regional reception of the Christian faith. Icons and other art pieces of ecclesiastical significance will be treated as witnesses to the development and solidification of Christianity as both a culturally edifying and religious force within Rusian society. Conversely, questions regarding the emergence of a uniquely Rusian brand of Christendom will be addressed through comparison of early Rusian-produced icons to those of Byzantine and/or Bulgarian traditions, with differences among the pieces noted as evidence for the emergence in Rus′ of a unique sense of Christendom.