January 2016 • V

January 2016 • v. 56, n. 1 NewsNet News of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies On Truth, Politics and Authenticity: Culture in Beleaguered Times Catriona Helen Moncrieff Kelly, University of Oxford The following Presidential Address was given on November 21, ist panels of very high quality (and many more at which 2015 at the 47th Annual ASEEES Convention. some or most papers directly or indirectly addressed the theme). It was also the subject of an excellent Presidential It is a great honour to give this address, and also Plenary, and figured in our second Presidential Plenary a significant responsibility. Thank you all for allowing me on Ukraine, notably in the remarks by Andrew Wilson. the floor, and for your generosity in electing me to a position in which I have learned an So far as our particular associa- enormous amount, and benefited from great tion, and my role in it, goes, the start of collegiality, both inside the Board and be- my presidential year definitely felt like yond. “beleaguered times”. I was reminded, 160 years after the fact, of a cartoon by Andy Byford’s thought-provoking John Tenniel. First published on March study of self-definition among Russian lit- 17, 1855, it shows the young Alexander erary historians in the late nineteenth and II suddenly precipitated into a more ex- early twentieth centuries includes an exten- posed position than he had expected. sive treatment of ritual occasions such as in- augural lectures.1 Presidential addresses evi- Of course, an elected figure dently belong to this category also, and mine serving a statutory term has scant will take the usual form of reflections on the resemblance to someone for whom John Tenniel, Punch, March 17, 1855 field and my own place in it. Alongside this, https://lts.brandeis.edu/research/ governance is a life sentence, no matter though, I will also give attention to the an- archives-speccoll/exhibits/crimeanwar/ how little they may relish it. Just so, the Large/CzarProperty.jpg nounced theme for the 2015 Convention, difference of opinion that broke out in “Fact”, which attracted well over 50 special- ASEEES earlier this year was not, fortu- Inside this Issue • January 2016 • v. 56, n.1 On Truth, Politics and Authenticity: Culture in Beleaguered Times 1 Saving Seventeen Moments in Soviet History: An Interview with Lewis by Catriona Helen Moncrieff Kelly, University of Oxford Siegelbaum and James von Geldern 20 2015 Executive Director’s Report 7 by Amy Nelson, Virginia Tech by Lynda Park Publications 24 Periodical Studies: Why and How to Re-read East European Journals 11 Institutional Member News 26 by Natalia Ermolaev and Philip Gleissner (Princeton U) In Memoriam 27 ASEEES Congratulates Affiliate Organizations’ 2015 Prize Winners 15 Affiliate News 28 2016 ASEEES Board of Directors & Committees 16 Personages 30 Treasures from the Pacific Northwest: Academic Library Collections Shaped by Time and Location 18 by ASEEES Committee on Libraries and Information Resources January 2016 • NewsNet 1 nately, a two and a half-year war fought isolated to serenely competent – yet no for little cause and with substantial loss of longer needed. Certainly, there is meta- life; it was an important debate on points phorical universalism in the pictures: of principle, with fierceness only in the of course we don’t think that Alexander rhetoric. It has made our Association II actually had cannon-balls ricochet- stronger, as examination of principles and ing through his throne-room, or that procedures always does. Bismarck spent his retirement mess- ing round in boats. But the details of In fact, for me, the strongest auto- the setting domesticate world leaders – biographical resonance in Tenniel’s car- awe, as well as hostility, is kept distant Punch, 1854 toon is a very different one. It was one of by familiarity. the most memorable images in the nineteenth-century history textbook that was My extraction of these images used for the public examinations sat in the is not purely adventitious. Several ana- tenth year of high school, Ordinary Levels. lytical themes that have resonated in my A study of British school history books led academic work can be extrapolated from by David Cannadine not long ago conclud- them. One is the importance of childhood ed dismissively that the textbooks of the day experience, and the difficulty of getting at had few illustrations and was generally pret- that experience, and the ways in which it ty stolid and dull.2 That doesn’t accord with echoes in adult subjectivity — or on the my recollection; I can still remember several other hand, does not. Felipe Fernandez- of the pictures in the book forty years on, Armesto, in Truth, suggests that all cul- and I recall the text as reasonably interesting tures lose the insights of childhood, but too, not just for its word-pictures (London lose them in different ways.4 One insight dockers demonstrating with fish-heads and that modern academic culture has lost is so on), but for its markedly ironic attitude to a sense of any connection with childhood British imperial adventures and gun-boat 1850s caricature of the Allies, from the – which seems particularly strange when diplomacy.3 collection of A. M. Zaionchkovskii. the perceptions and practices convenient- 1853-1856: the Events and Images of the Crimean War. Exhibition, Russian State ly, if controversially, grouped as “iden- Be that as it may, compared with Archive of Military History, State Ar- tity” have been so extensively explored. the often grotesque images of Russia in the chive of the Russian Federation, Federal Archive Agency, Moscow, 2006, http:// Perhaps the explanation is that academic Western press at the time, and in the Rus- www.rusarchives.ru/evants/exhibitions/ crimean_war_f/66.shtml. investigation is inseparable from educa- sian press of Westerners, Tenniel’s draw- tion, and is preoccupied with hastening ing is a human and sympathetic glimpse of the maturation of thought and purifying what was, at the time, the “other side”. [Im- it from any vestige of the unprofessional ages: top and middle] and half-baked.5 To analyse human expe- Tenniel’s image of Bismarck, rience up to the age of 13-14 is, generally “Dropping the Pilot”, [bottom image] speaking, to be intellectually invisible, to showed equal and commendable restraint. be the participant in any general collec- Apparently, Bismarck himself was delight- tion of articles who is dismissed in three ed with the image when Tenniel had him lines by reviewers as addressing “chil- sent a presentation copy. dren’s experience”. Childhood, despite the efforts of specialists such as Margaret Pea- Tenniel was not just a journey- cock, Marina Balina, Larisa Rudova, Olga man cartoonist, but a considerable artist, Kucherenko, Andy Byford, or, outside our and in both these pictures he captures ef- field, Aaron Moore, Colin Heywood, or fective fictions, mini-narratives: the young Nicholas Stargardt, exists on the margins ruler who has just entered into his role, and of scholarly investigation. It excites wider the elder statesmen who is being released interest, if at all, only when children be- from his. Alternatively, one can see it as John Tenniel, “Dropping the Pilot”, come the victims of state repression or the typical start and end of a career in any Punch, March 29, 1890 natural calamity.6 Perhaps because educa- modern society: from overwhelmed and tion is always about developing to a point January 2016 • NewsNet 2 beyond childhood, academics, at the pinnacle of the edu- by “fact.” And there is good reason for this, as underlined cational profession, are especially keen to avoid appearing some years ago by Roger Chartier: if all interpretations childish. The problem is that this can go with a general loss have equal value, there is no ground left upon which one of wonder, a banishment of the ludic, that is at some level may object to unscrupulous politicians. (Indeed, the argu- life-denying. ment of multiple interpretation has been extensively used by the Putin-era Russian press, for instance.) The problem If “childhood” is problematic and definitely mar- is that a scrupulously argued, carefully weighed interpre- ginal in academic terms, far more popular as a subject tation may also have limited political traction – so if po- of exploration, recently anyway, has been another theme litical traction becomes the measure of our achievement, that my first picture evokes: the role of memory (as- the result will be unavoidable stultification. sumed memory) in constructing attitudes and reactions. The term “memory” groups together, in a loose alliance, Added to that, the debunking of myth may seem commemoration, the material, textual, or ritual perpetu- more effective in a scholar’s eyes than it seems to a non- ation of lost time, recollection, or the retrieval of the past specialist observer. Ruth Harris’s book on the Dreyfus in formal, public narratives such as professional history, case is pertinent here: it shows how the coherent, rational journalism, guidebooks, and websites, and remembrance case set out by Dreyfus’s supporters, based on the scru- - the common currency of the past in everyday practices, pulous use of fact, failed because of its very detachment.9 in family traditions, and in conversation.7 Memory of the In a brilliant 1967 essay on the cinema of Michelangelo third kind is, as Yosef Yerushalmi pointed out in Zakhor, Antonioni, the Russian writer Reed Grachev presents the much older than history, and such “remembrance” also resort to fact as a recourse of weakness – but a creative and presents a serious challenge to professional history in its suggestive weakness: “The pull to the factual in twentieth- slipperiness, its often emotional claims to authenticity, century arts is the result of a loss of confidence in the plau- and on the basis of that to political leverage.

Load more