Studies in East European Thought最新文献

This article examines stylistic and linguistic aspects of photographic thinking in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Bruno Schulz. The analysis is framed by the insights of Western and Ukrainian theorists of the image. The development of photo technologies anticipates photographic thinking as an aesthetic phenomenon. Photographic thinking is embodied in the specific artistic and imaginative reflection of reality and the human world, embedded on the linguistic—syntactic—level of the artistic text. In Dostoyevsky’s tract, the text can be seen as a photo album with consecutive snapshots, each frame containing a certain dominant. On the syntactic level, the phrases “suddenly” and “for a moment” introduce the photographic frame or a change of frame. The phrase “for a moment” grounds a new poetic technique, a way of capturing the psychological states of a character when the soul is revealed, that is, when he or she is reacting unconsciously. The capturing of life from the point of view of a camera distinguishes the surrealist fiction of Bruno Schulz. This photographic perspective is connected with a new conceptualization of temporality: the past and the present are on the same plane and neither is the time of representation, which means the subject of representation is always dead. The conception of time as ‘frozen’ in the moment is also part of Dostoevsky’s poetics.

The letter from Georges Florovsky to Davis McCaughey is a reflection after reading the Report The Era of Atomic Power: Report of a Commission (1946). Florovsky gives his own arguments against the development of research concerning nuclear weapons and their use. These include: treating an attempt at a technical transformation of the world as a human claim to put oneself in God’s place, i.e., to be a God-man. Another group of indictments against the use of the atomic bomb concerned ethical issues and human responsibility for the war. Florovsky’s letter is his contribution to the discussion on the threat posed by the atomic bomb.

This article presents the context of Georges Florovsky’s letter to Davis McCaughey. The creation of the atomic bomb and the philosophical and theological challenges it caused are also presented. The content of the Report The Era of Atomic Power: of a Commission, which was initiated by the British Council of Churches, and McCaughey’s participation in its writing, are presented as well. Finally, Florovsky’s attitude towards science and technical progress, and the relevance of Florovsky’s letter are also shown.

This paper presents a short analysis of the so-called ‘conservative turn’ in contemporary Russia. This ‘turn’ is examined in the context of the previous development of Russian conservatism, particularly its degradation into imitational bureaucratic conservatism in the second half of the nineteenth century. I argue that this ‘new conservatism’ in contemporary Russian politics reflects this degradation and is, in fact, a pseudo-conservatism which has no conservative core but rather an ad hoc (tactical, pseudo-historical, anti-intellectual) character. I also argue that we need to revise our understanding of contemporary autocracies in light of this phenomenon, which is deeply connected to the worldwide crisis of conservatism.

Money and gossip in nineteenth-century Russian fiction act as combined forces that disrupt the narrative and the relationships between the main characters. The motifs of money are prominent in the novels of both major and minor Russian writers and when seen side by side, the function of the motifs of money becomes clear as a genre marker. The two writers discussed in this paper are Fyodor Dostoevsky and Yevdokia Rostopchina. By placing their works side by side, it becomes evident that their treatment of money represents a similar artistic response to the changing world of Russian social relations in the nineteenth century and the emergence of a new value system replacing that of the old estate culture. More than that, the treatment of money in combination with the prominence of gossip as a structuring device, which moves the plots in Rostopchina’s and Dostoevsky’s novels, reflects the development of the novel as a genre. Rostopchina’s seemingly compliant demeanor conceals a more intricate and subversive agenda. Through her strategic use of feminine masquerade, Rostopchina not only anticipated modern theories of gender as a social construct but also employed a timeless tactic of encoding subversive messages within seemingly conventional works. What is of particular interest in this paper is the incorporation of the society tale into the novel and how this reflects the transformation of value in the nineteenth-century Russian novel.

In his direct comments on The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky only refers to Book V (“Pro and Contra”) and VI (“The Russian Monk”) as the novel’s culminating points. These two Books, notoriously polemical, constitute a debate provoked by the representative of Contra values, Ivan Karamazov, who seeks responses from the “Pros.” This paper comes to support a more sophisticated reading of the Pros’ arguments, and argues that they do win the debate, since Ivan never intends to convince his counterparts, but on the contrary, wishes to be convinced of Zosima’s doctrines as the solution to his personal existential crisis. In this respect, Ivan, or more precisely his upbringing and early experiences that have been relatively neglected in Dostoevsky scholarship, becomes the key to our understanding of the novel’s ideological core. Such a viewpoint, it will be argued, fits perfectly with the theme of The Brothers Karamazov, namely “the young generation” and “contemporary Russian families,” according to the writer’s own testimony.

Jan Patočka starts the phenomenology of existence movement as a response to the crisis brought about by modern technology. This movement aims to liberate both humanity and the world from the absolute dominance of technologism, while addressing the spiritual crisis faced by human beings. Patočka offers a new phenomenological perspective on human existence, viewing it as a continuous movement. He emphasizes that human embodiment in the world is characterized by an existential movement, which involves rootedness, self-extension, and breakthrough. Through the concrete and practical movement of human existence, Patočka underscores the existential responsibility that is intrinsic to human subjects. This perspective enables us to confront existential problems and reestablish a sense of purpose and meaning to human existence within the natural world.

The present article attempts to reconstruct Polish philosopher and aesthetician Roman Witold Ingarden’s views concerning his understanding of the concept of artistic style. Starting from the hypotheses provided by the content of the outline of his ultimately unwritten work, Poetics, I have chosen selected threads of the discussions held by Ingarden in Lviv before the war, supplemented by the content of the phenomenologist’s lectures from the 1960s, as essential substantive background. Analyzing the material indicated, I demonstrate that it is appropriate for Ingarden’s understanding of artistic style to correlate this concept with the category of aesthetic concretization. Consequently, I draw a conclusion as to the primary role of some aspects of a literary work – appearances, which allow us to inquire into the properties of artistic style practically as a result of their function of decorativeness and polyphony. A condensed comparative analysis of the two functions, as related to excerpts from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s Insatiability, concludes the account of Ingarden’s conception of artistic style, which turns out to be a unique aphenomenal phenomenon.

In this article, the author reveals the question of the relationship between the political concepts of “conservatism” and “reaction,” their evolution in the historical context, as well as the special place of conservatism in the Russian political tradition.

How should we conceive of the relationship between finite subjectivity and reflection? And what implications does this have for the phenomenological method? This article addresses these questions by reconstructing the main pillars of Patočka’s theory of the subject. I present three of Patočka’s key arguments related to finitude, consciousness, and the world (the primacy of the sum, the reduction to immanence, and temporality); then, after every argument, I outline their implications for Patočka’s philosophy. In particular, I highlight how Patočka’s thought implies a repositioning of the subject in the world to which it ontologically belongs and a reassessment of the meaning of reflection. These theoretical assumptions open phenomenology to a different understanding of the subject than it had previously possessed and promote rich analysis of the movements of existence. The most important implication of Patočka’s theory of finite subjectivity, however, concerns the concept of the world, which bear a significance that extends beyond its critical position vis-à-vis transcendental subjectivity.