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Per-Arne Bodin Church Slavonic in Russian Dystopias and Utopias In Per-Arne Bodin Church Slavonic in Russian Dystopias and Utopias In this paper I want to examine the function of the Orthodox Church’s liturgical language— Church Slavonic—in Russian liberal dystopias and conservative utopias. In 2011 the Church published the draft of a special program entitled “The Church Slavonic Language in the Life of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Twenty-First Century” suggesting some changes to it in the new millennium. It met with a firestorm of criticism and was withdrawn. Church Slavonic has a special role in Russian culture mirrored in contemporary dystopias and utopias. In the writings of the best-known Russian dystopians Church Slavonic functions as a stylistic device or a motif as in Pelevin’s novel Empire V and in S.N.U.F. Vladimir Sorokin uses extensive passages containing Church Slavonic. In the world described in Den’ Oprichnika (Day of the Oprichnik) cursing and foreign words are forbidden, but Church Slavonic is freely used. In his 2013 novel Telluria similarly inserts passages in Church Slavonic. In all of these examples, Church Slavonic alludes to or is perhaps even directly influenced by popular nineteenth-century seminary priest anecdotes. The comical effect derives from the use of Church Slavonic to refer to modern or everyday phenomena for which the language is actually entirely unsuited. The situation with the fans of empire is the opposite. Here there are almost no examples of actual usage. Church Slavonic is instead included in their grandiose plans for the language of the future as for example in the writings of Aleksandr Dugin and Aleksandr Prokhanov. For the Church, Church Slavonic is a foundation, a heavenly resource or a linguistic prison; liberal writers treat it as a stylistic device for satirizing conservative or reactionary trends in Russian society, while for conservative thinkers it represents a vague vision in a distant future utopia and a striving for a new Slav orthodox unity. Perhaps it is even just an empty concept that merely signals or expresses a desire to recreate the past and isolate the Russia of the future or some sort of “linguistic stiob” used both by the liberals and the conservatives in the same half humoristic, half serious way. Per-Arne Bodin is professor of Slavic literatures at Stockholm University. His main research interests are Russian poetry, Russian cultural history (especially the importance of the Russian orthodox tradition) and Polish literature after the Second World War. His most recent book are Language, Canonization and Holy Foolishness: Studies in Postsoviet Russian Culture and the Orthodox Tradition, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm 2009 and Från Bysans till Putin: Historier om Ryssland, Norma, Skellefteå 2016. Edith W. Clowes Provinces, Piety, and Promotional Putinism: Mapping Aleksandr Prokhanov’s Imagined Russia This talk investigates the rhetorical and mythopoetic techniques deployed by ultranationalist journalist Aleksandr Prokhanov to transform geographical “space” into claims for Russian- occupied “place.” Prokhanov’s project is designed to support Putin’s drive for the incremental re-annexation of border areas with significant Russian population to the south and west of the Russian Federation. Documentation and discussion will include Prokhanov’s three main political projects: as chairperson of the Izborsk Club, Prokhanov’s physical building of “sacred mounds” in border areas and his rhetoric attached to these projects; the editorial bully pulpit in Prokhanov’s rightist newspaper, Zavtra, that support redrawing and expanding the existing western borders of the Russian Federation; Prokhanov’s ultranationalist novels, such as Gospodin Geksogen (2002) and Krym (2014) that script a reinvigorated Russian national identity. Although his writings have little to do with science fiction or even utopia per se—but seen in terms of speculative right-wing place-making rhetoric—Prokhanov’s pathos, vocabulary, and geographical imagination fit well with the themes and keywords of the 2017 Uppsala conference on “‘Russian World’ and Other Imaginary Places: (Geo) Political Themes in Post-Soviet Science Fiction and Utopias.” To start with, his writing embodies one prominent form of the contemporary Russian rightist political imagination. Many of his themes pair well with conference themes: of overcoming the trauma of territorial loss, creating an alternative historical narrative of re-membering imperial greatness; combining Russian Orthodoxy and the pagan occult to create new rituals of nationhood; and invoking the Ukrainian crisis (2014 - ) to build new fictions of Russian greatness. Edith W. Clowes holds the Brown-Forman Chair in the Humanities and teaches Russian language, literature, and culture and Czech literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, USA). Her primary research and teaching interests span the interactions between literature, philosophy, religion, and utopian thought (Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia, 1993). Author or editor of 12 books, multi-authored books, and forums, Professor Clowes most recently edited a special number of the journal Region, titled “Centrifugal Forces? Russia’s Regional Identities and Initiatives” (5:2 (2016)), following a conference on that topic held at the University of Virginia in 2015. A multi-authored book, Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity appeared with Northern Illinois University Press in 2016. Professor Clowes’s recently published books include an interdisciplinary study on post-Soviet Russian identity, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity (Cornell, 2011) and a discursive history of Russian philosophy, Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy (Cornell, 2004). Professor Clowes is an associate editor of Russian Review and serves on a number of other editorial boards (Losevskie chteniia; Region; and Heidelberger Beiträge zur Slavistischen Philologie. Maria Engström Post-Humanism, Сosmos and Contemporary Russian Art The paper surveys and analyses the development of the ”cosmic” theme in the contemporary Russian visual culture, commencing with the famous ”Gagarin Party” in 1991 and onwards to the projects of Anton Vidokle and Arseny Zhilyaev devoted to Russian cosmism from 2016. Specific attention is paid to the ideological component of the ”cosmos”- metaphor for artists and musicians who belong to Timur Novikov’s circle (”New Artists”, ”New Composers”, ”New Academy”). Those were the first in early 1990s to attempt appropriating the Soviet space discourse, connecting the Russian utopian impulse to the new technologies and enhanced perceptions of the reality as well as visualising the ”new Russian idea” in popular culture. Maria Engström is Associate Professor of Russian, School of Humanities and Media Studies at Dalarna University, Sweden. Her research focus is on the Post-Soviet right-wing intellectual milieu, the role of the Orthodox Church in Russian politics, contemporary Russian Utopian imagination, and Imperial aesthetics in Post-Soviet literature and art. Engström’s most recent publications include “Apollo against Black Square: Conservative Futurism in Contemporary Russia”, “Daughterland [Rodina-Doch’]: Erotic patriotism and Russia’s future”, ”Post-Secularity and Digital Anticlericalism on Runet”, “’Orthodoxy or death!’: Political Orthodoxy in Russia”, “Contemporary Russian Messianism and New Russian Foreign Policy”, “Forbidden Dandyism: Imperial Aesthetics in Contemporary Russia”. She co- edited Digital Orthodoxy: Mediating Post-Secularity in Russia, a special issue of Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media (2015). Her current project “Visuality without Visibility: Queer Visual Culture in Post-Soviet Russia” (2017-2020) is supported by the Swedish Research Council. Maria Galina “Попаданчество” as a Reflection on the Post-traumatic Syndrome. Evolution of a Trend Popadantsy/попаданцы – a division of trash literature describing the adventures of a modern protagonist or a group of protagonists who by chance find themselves in some key point of historical past or in a fantasy world. In the latter case we have escapist, relaxation literature but more interesting for us is the first case. Minding that a protagonist tries to revise the past for a better (i. e. more fit to collective mind expectations) future and that the trend is popular only on the post-soviet (in fact “Russian world”) territory we may conclude that the enormous popularity of the trend is connected with social tension and frustration as a consequence of the USSR’s collapse. It may be worth mentioning that this trend appeals to the reconstruct movement (role games that imitate historical events especially military ones) and the input of this movement into the events of the past three years cannot be underestimated. Maria Galina, Moscow, Russia, Novy Mir Magazine, department of literature critique and social studies, columnist, an author of several fiction books and also of the two collections of articles "Science Fiction from the biologist point of view” (2008) and “Not only about Science fiction” (2013) dedicated to SF and its history. Sofya Khagi Parameters of Space-Time and Degrees of (Un)Freedom”: Dmitry Bykov’s ZhD Given that previous analyses of Dmitry Bykov’s magnum opus ZhD have largely focused on the novel’s ideological superstructure, I would like to pay closer attention to its poetics.
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