Vienna Slavic Yearbook. N.S. 7 (2019) - Abstracts
Slawisch und Deutsch in Österreich. Methodische Ansätze zur Rekonstruktion historischen Sprachkontakts und seiner Einflüsse auf das Deutsche in Österreich
Agnes Kim & Katharina Prochazka (Wien)
Slavic and German in Austria. Methodological approaches to the reconstruction of historical language contact and its influence on German in Austria. Due to a long history of mutual language contact, Slavic languages are believed to have considerably influenced the attitudes towards multilingualism in Austria as well as German in Austria. This paper introduces the methodological toolkit of two projects that shed light on various aspects of the topic and exemplifies their approaches by the example of Southern Moravia. One study establishes a way to identify places with a high degree of societal multilingualism based on census data and correlates them with information on the activity of cultural societies. The other focuses a Czech intentional construction including the verb to go, which is claimed to have been replicated by German dialects in Southern Moravia and neighboring Lower Austria.
Key words:Historical language contact, methodology in contact linguistics, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czech language, German language, Southern Moravia, Census data, Corpus linguistics
Kontaktinduzierte lexikalische Variation im gesprochenen Lemko-Russinischen
Jan Patrick Zeller (Hamburg)
Contact-induced lexical variation in spoken Lemko-Rusyn. The Lemko-Rusyn language in Poland is an East Slavic language that is in intensive contact with the West Slavic language Polish. This contact has left traces in the lexicon of Lemkian. For 70 lexical variables, the study examines the variation of ‘Lemkian’ and ‘Polish’ variants in a corpus of spoken Lemkian. It turns out that there is an overall trend towards ‘Polish’ variants among younger speakers, but some variables also remain stable ‘Lemkian’ or even follow the opposite trend.
Key words:Language variation, language contact, language change, lexical variation, word borrowings, Ruthenian, Lemkian, Polish
Memento mori: Deržavins Ode
„Auf
den Tod des Fürsten Meščerskij“
Joachim Klein (Leiden)
“Memento mori: Derzhavin's Ode On the Death of Prince Meshcherskii”. – Derzhavin's ode is not an epicedium, not an occasional poem on the death of a certain person, but rather a didactic poem about death and the fear of death. Its center of attention is, after all, not Meshcherskii, but the lyrical subject terrified by his encounter with death. Viewed as a didactic poem, the Meshcherskii-ode allows Derzhavin to position himself against a contemporary cult of death. This cult was practiced not only by Edward Young and his Night Thoughts, to which Derzhavin's poem is very close textually, but also by the Russian masons. Derzhavin depicts death not as a friend who liberates man from the burden of earthly life, but as a terrifying enemy; the drastic terms he uses to describe the horror of death harken back to the baroque tradition. Derzhavin confronts Young's and the masons' ‘love of death’ by resorting to the classical tradition as represented by the Horatian formula carpe diem: life is not a vale of tears, but a wonderful if only temporary gift from heaven. The article closes with a reflection on the concept of ‘occasional poetry’ and its relevance for understanding Derzhavin's poetic achievement.
Key words: Gavriil Deržavin, Edward Young, Horace, baroque imagery of death, Russian Freemasonry, the concept of occasional poetry
Императив неправдоподобия:
Как
рассказан пушкинский «Выстрел»
Екатерина Лямина (Москва) & Александр Осповат (Москва | Los Angeles)
The essay “The Imperative of Unreliability: Narrating Pushkin's The Shot” explores the narrative techniques of Pushkin's novella “The Shot”. As we demonstrate, none of the designated or implied narrators assume responsibility for the information they report, its biases or implications. Moreover, independently of its proclaimed source any reported information can be compromised in a variety of ways: established narrative knowledge can be ridiculed and undermined; the imperative of reliability discarded; incompatible stylistic modes combined. All of this can be accompanied by a more or a less manifest subversive presence of the meta-narrator. The novella is permeated by a series of narrative and stylistic shifts which inescapably relegate the plot and its main elements into the realm of fictionality and decoordinate the narration itself. Pushkin's narrative experiment may be interpreted in light of Friedrich Schlegel's theory of the novella as an anecdote “narrated in the fashion of high society”, so that the value of commonplace plots is restored through the mode of story-telling.
Key words: Pushkin's novella, narrative experiment, fictionality
Turgenev Revisited:
The Literary
Reflection of the Essay Hamlet and Don Quixote in
Anatolii Lunacharskii’s The Liberated Don Quixote
and Isaak Babel'’s Red Cavalry
Bettina Kaibach (Heidelberg)
This article reads Lunacharskii's play The Liberated Don Quixote and Babel”s Red Cavalry through the lens of Turgenev's article Hamlet and Don Quixote. Both writers appropriated Turgenev's ideas to grapple with issues raised by the revolution and ensuing Civil War and the Russian-Polish War, respectively. The paper shows how, while harkening back to Turgenev's essay, Lunacharskii and Babel' each tailored its basic tenets to fit their own convictions, thus entering into a dialogue both with their predecessor and with each other. When read together, Turgenev's essay and Lunacharskii's play provide a key to unlock yet another hidden chamber of Babel”s enigmatic text that, like no other, captured the internal contradictions of the revolution.
Key words: Ivan Turgenev, Isaak Babel', Anatolii Lunacharskii, Hamlet and Don Quixote, Bolshevik revolution, Red Terror, Lenin
„Erste Liebe“ und vierfacher
Schriftsinn:
Isaak Babel' und Ivan Turgenev
Urs Heftrich (Heidelberg)
“First Love” and the Four Senses of Scripture: Isaac Babel and Ivan Turgenev. - Among the Russian writers who influenced Isaac Babel, Ivan Turgenev stands out in two particular ways. Firstly, he is emphatically mentioned in one of Babel's earliest texts, “Childhood. At Grandmother's” from 1915. In this autobiographical piece of prose, Turgenev's story “First Love” from 1860 plays a pivotal role by prompting an erotic initiation in the juvenile narrator's consciousness. Secondly, in his prose collection “The Story of My Dovecot” from 1925, Babel paid tribute to Turgenev by explicitly naming the second story of this cycle after Turgenev's novella. In my paper, I give a close comparative reading of both texts based on the medieval hermeneutics of the four senses of scripture (quatuor sensus scripturae) that has recently been revived by the Heidelberg scholar Horst-Jürgen Gerigk.
Key words:Ivan Turgenev, Isaac Babel', erotic initiation, violence, four senses of scripture
О языке стихотворения Осипа
Мандельштама
«Вооруженный зреньем узких ос…»
Павел Успенский & Вероника Файнберг (Москва)
The article “The Language of Osip Mandel'shtam‘s Armed with the Vision of Narrow Wasps” aims to describe how Osip Mandel'shtam uses literary language in the poem Vooryzhennyi zren'em uzkikh os... (1937) to create its specific semantics, which is both complex and extremely easy to understand. The authors demonstrate that complex metaphors in the poem arise from the transformation of idioms and common collocations. The analysis allows us to clarify the meaning-generating role of idiom-based metaphors as one of the main literary devices in Mandel'shtam‘s poetry.
Key words:Osip Mandel'shtam, poetics, poetic language, idioms
Poetic Antecedents to Zhivago’s
Poem ‘Avgust’
(Metric, Rhymes, and Motifs)
Mária Gyöngyösi (Budapest)
In the present paper the potential antecedents of Boris Pasternak's poem ‘Avgust’ are examined in respect to meter, rhymes, and motifs. Since Aleksandr Blok is considered to be a prototype of Doctor Zhivago, the goal of the paper is to examine the poems of Blok with this theory in mind. Poems that could have served as proto-texts, according to set parameters, are given priority. A comparative analysis of rhymes has proven successful in revealing previously undetected pre-texts. Heine's Book of Songs also provides a number of starting points for research into motifs.
Key words:Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Blok, Heinrich Heine, the Eternal Feminine, prosody
Russischer Emigrant –
tschechischer Schriftsteller?
Sprache und Identität in
autobiografischen Zeugnissen Sergej Machonins und Nikolaj Terleckýs
Carmen Sippl (Wien)
The article “Russian emigrant - Czech writer?” explores the autobiographies of Sergej Machonin (1918-1995) and Nikolaj Terlecký (1903-1994) with regard to self-reflections about language and identity. Using François Jullien's concept of distance as a fruitful tension between cultures instead of defining cultural differences, it identifies Machonin's and Terlecký's experiences with language shift. The paper discusses how their autobiographical writings reflect plurilingualism as a fertile resource and how they disclose the gap as a space in-between that enables cultural transformation.
Key words: Russian emigration in Czechoslovakia, Czech literature, autobiographical writing, concept of distance, language shift, plurilingualism as cultural resource, transculturality
Joseph Brodsky: An Homage to Chekhov?
Zakhar Ishov (Uppsala)
Despite Joseph Brodsky's apparent dislike of the Russian turn-of-the-century classic, in 1993 he wrote a poem titled in English: “Homage to Chekhov.” The poem, which stylizes the atmosphere of some of Chekhov's works has since puzzled several Brodsky scholars. The central question of the scholarly debate has been whether Brodsky sought to pay the playwright a belated homage or was instead deliberately mocking Chekhov in a parody. This article takes another stab at the mystery adopting a new approach: it looks for the solution in the poem itself, rather than in the history of Brodsky's dislike of Chekhov or in his polemics with literary critics. My article identifies a number of Chekhovian subtexts in the poem and explains how exactly Brodsky achieves the effect of a Chekhov pastiche here. It also draws a connection between “Homage to Chekhov” and some of Brodsky's poems dedicated to the theme of fin de siècle. The article puts forth a hypothesis: Brodsky did not think he would live to see the millennium and this brought him closer to Chekhov, who did not live to witness the start of WWI – the “actual” beginning of the 20th century. I argue that by 1993 Brodsky had reached the age when he could better appreciate Chekhov's lack of resolve. I show that the figure of Erlich in the poem is a stand-in for Brodsky himself. That Brodsky depicted himself behind the mask of a Chekhovian character seems to indicate that around the end of his life the notoriously unpredictable poet might have experienced a change of heart about Chekhov.
Key words: Joseph Brodsky, Anton Chekhov, Wystan Hugh Auden, subtext, eroticism, parody, fin-de-siècle
От Франко-русской студии в Париже до монашества в Иерусалиме: Несколько штрихов к биографии Всеволода Фохта.Публикация, подготовка текста, вступительная заметка и комментарии Владимира Хазана
Владимир Хазан (Иерусалим)
Wsevolod de Vogt (Vsevolod Fokht; 1895-1941) was a writer, journalist, translator, and clergyman. He is known for his reviews for numerous French newspapers and magazines. He also worked for many years for L'Intransigeant. In late 1920s Vogt became close with Vladislav Khodasevich and joined a Russian literary group Kochev'e. His major cultural achievement was a creation of Le Studio Franco-Russe, that functioned in 1929-31 as a joint forum for French and émigré and intellectuals. In 1934 Vogt left Paris and moved to the Middle East. After arriving to Damascus, he took his vows and adopted the monastic name of Father Gabriel. In 1934-36 he served as a secretary to Alexander, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch. Since 1938 he lived in Jerusalem. Vogt's correspondence with Yevsei Shor (1891-1974), a historian of philosophy, translator, musician and art critic, covers a period from August 14, 1938 until April 2, 1940. Currently, this is the only written testimony of his monastic life.
Key words:Vsevolod Fokht, Yevsei Shor, The Holy Land, Russian Church in Palestine, Russian émigrés in Paris, Christendom and the Jews
«Дело Л. Л. Кобылинского» в архиве Охранного отделения
Елена Глуховская (С.-Петербург)
In this publication, previously unknown materials from the archive of the former State Security Department relating to the life and work of the Russian symbolist poet and critic Ellis (Lev L. Kobylinsky) are described and commented on. The documents, which cover the period 1899-1911, clarify certain episodes of Ellis' biography and allow us to place the pre-émigré (Russian) period of his life in the context of the social and political situation in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century.
Key words: Ellis (Lev Kobylinsky), Russian symbolism, The Moscow Security Department, literature and politics
«Чудный заколдованный круг». Эллис в Локарно в 1930-е годы (По материалам переписки с Николаем Зарецким)
Федор Поляков (Вена)
The article “‘A wonderful enchanted circle’. Ellis in Locarno in the 1930s (based on his correspondence with Nikolai Zaretsky)” presents an analysis of previously unpublished correspondence between the Russian symbolist, poet, translator and historian of Russian literature Lev Kobylinsky (1879-1947), who wrote under the pseudonym Ellis, and the well-known artist and book illustrator Nikolai Zaretsky. The fragments discussed relate mainly to the Pushkin Jubilee of 1937, which inspired a large number of émigré publications, due to its perceived importance for the preservation of Russian national cultural traditions in exile. Further, the letters provide unique information on Ellis' private life and working conditions in Locarno, which are essential for reconstructing this period of his biography.
Key words: Lev Kobylinskii-Ellis, Nikolai Zaretsky, Russian émigré culture, Pushkin's death anniversary 1937, Pushkin Committee in Paris, Russian culture in Germany after 1933, Russian emigration in Switzerland
Православное искусство как массовый товар на территории Третьего Рейха и оккупированных территориях во время Второй мировой войны
Юлия Янчаркова & Сергей Гаген (Прага)
The present article Orthodox Icons as Mass Consumer Goods in the Area of The Third Reich and its Occupied Territories during WWII (based on archives of the Nikodim Pavlovič Kondakov Archeological Institute in Prague) is devoted to the trading activity of the Institute in Prague, the manufacturing and sale of colour reproductions of old Russian icons. This is the first time this topic has been approached within a cultural-historical paradigm that includes evidence in the form of financial documents from the Kondakov Institute. The article also discusses the Institute's relationship to the Orthodox population at the time of the so called “Protectorate” including immigrant workers from the East in the territory of the Third Reich itself. The discussion is placed in the context of the attempt to constitute a new identity for the “Orthodox citizens of the Reich.”
Key words:Russian emigration during the Second World War, The Orthodox church in Nazi-occupied territories, The Kondakov Archeological Institute in Prague, Nikolay Andreev
Из Именного указателя к «Записным книжкам» Ахматовой
Роман Тименчик (Иерусалим)
“Towards the Index of Anna Akhmatova's Notebooks”. - This part of series of historical and literary commentary to the poet's notebooks examines several of her literary relationships, in particular with Sergei Rittenberg and Boris Filippov. Also, it reconstructs the poet's responses to Boris Filippov's critical articles and his edition of her own literary work.
Key words:Anna Akhmatova, Boris Filippov (B. A. Filistinskii), Georgii Ivanov, Nikolai Kliuev, Sergei Makovskii, Osip Mandelshtam, Sergei Rittenberg, Peter Paul Rubens, Gleb Struve