Tsar And God And Other Essays In Russian Cultural Semiotics

Featuring a number of pioneering essays by the internationally known Russian cultural historians Boris Uspenskij and Victor Zhivov, this collection includes a number of essays appearing in English for the fi rst time. Focusing on several of the most interesting and problematic aspects of Russia's cultural development, these essaysexamine the survival and the reconceptualization of the past in later cultural systems and some of the key transformations of Russian cultural consciousness. The essays in this collection contain some important examples of Russian cultural semiotics and remain indispensable contributions to the history of Russian civilization.

Featuring a number of pioneering essays by the internationally known Russian cultural historians Boris Uspenskij and Victor Zhivov, this collection includes a number of essays appearing in English for the fi rst time. Focusing on several of the most interesting and problematic aspects of Russia's cultural development, these essaysexamine the survival and the reconceptualization of the past in later cultural systems and some of the key transformations of Russian cultural consciousness. The essays in this collection contain some important examples of Russian cultural semiotics and remain indispensable contributions to the history of Russian civilization.

Featuring a number of distinguished essays by internationally known Russian cultural historians Boris Uspenskij and Victor Zhivov, this collection encompasses various ground-breaking works appearing in English for the first time. Focusing on several of the most interesting and problematic aspects of Russia?s cultural development, these essays examine the survival and reconceptualization of Russia?s past in later systems, and some of the key transformations of Russian cultural consciousness. This volume contains important examples of cultural semiotics and indispensable contributions to the history of Russian civilization.

This volume brings together a selection of Juri Lotman’s late essays, published between 1979 and 1995. While Lotman is widely read in the fields of semiotics and literary studies, his innovative ideas about history and memory remain relatively unknown. The articles in this volume, most of which are appearing in English for the first time, lay out Lotman’s semiotic model of culture, with its emphasis on mnemonic processes. Lotman’s concept of culture as the non-hereditary memory of a community that is in a continuous process of self-interpretation will be of interest to scholars working in cultural theory, memory studies and the theory of history.

Deification in Russian Religious Thought considers the reception of the Eastern Christian (Orthodox) doctrine of deification by Russian religious thinkers of the immediate pre-revolutionary period. Deification is the metaphor that the Greek patristic tradition came to privilege in its articulation of the Christian concept of salvation: to be saved is to be deified, that is, to share in the divine attribute of immortality. In the Christian narrative of the Orthodox Church 'God became human so that humans might become gods'. Ruth Coates shows that between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 Russian religious thinkers turned to deification in their search for a commensurate response to the apocalyptic dimension of the universally anticipated destruction of the Russian autocracy and the social and religious order that supported it. Focusing on major works by four prominent thinkers of the Russian Religious Renaissance—Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florensky—Coates demonstrates the salience of the deification theme and explores the variety of forms of its expression. She argues that the reception of deification in this period is shaped by the discourse of early Russian cultural modernism, and informed not only by theology, but also by nineteenth-century currents in Russian religious culture and German philosophy, particularly as these are received by the novelist Fedor Dostoevsky and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev. In the works that are analysed, deification is taken out of its original theological context and applied respectively to politics, creativity, economics, and asceticism. At the same time, all the thinkers represented in the book view deification as a project: a practice that should deliver the total transformation and immortalisation of human beings, society, culture, and the material universe, and this is what connects them to deification's theological source.

Orthodox Sisters explores the relationship between women, religion, and social, cultural, and economic change between 1700 and 1935 through the experiences of Orthodox convents in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese. Focusing primarily on the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross, William G. Wagner places the women's experiences in the broader context of developments in female monasticism and religious life in Russia, as well as in Europe and North America over the same period. This is the first comprehensive study that follows a Russian convent through all the stages of its life—from its origins in the eighteenth century to its flourishing at the turn of the twentieth century, to its resistance to Soviet assault, and, finally, to its rebirth in the 1920s. By the late nineteenth century, the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross and the other convents and women's religious communities in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese constituted a reimagined form of a traditional Orthodox monastic community. Wagner shows how these nuns and novices adapted to the conditions of emergent modernity in a distinctively Orthodox way. When almost everything but their communal life, work, and worship and their sacred spaces had been stripped away and they were subject to the socialist state's efforts at subversion, the sisters of the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross and the other convents in the diocese created an authentic Christian community that gave their lives a collective meaning. In this way they were able to lead a rewarding life and survive the early years of Soviet Russia.

Russia's imperial past has shaped modern Russian identity and historical experience. The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys the empire's emergence and governance, exploring how the state maintained control of defense, criminal law, taxation, and mobilization of resources, while tolerating local religions, languages, cultures, and institutions.