THE SEMIOTICS OF AUGUST IN THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE IMPACT OF GLOBAL CATACLYSMS ON EVERYDAY PRACTICES
New Literary Observer celebrates its
twentieth anniversary by presenting a comparative interdisciplinary study
entitled "The Semiotics of August in the Twentieth Century."
This special issue is a continuation of a
large-scale NLO project that aims to employ an anthropological
perspective in re-evaluating the processes of transformation in modern
societies, formulate new approaches to studying history, and elaborate a new,
productive paradigm for stimulating further developments in the humanities and
social sciences.
This special issue explores
the extent to which the life of the individual has fundamentally changed as a
result of global cataclysms in the Twentieth century — as a result of world wars, intellectual, social and
technological revolutions, and the geopolitical reshaping of the world.
The "short" Twentieth century, according
to Eric Hobsbawm, began in August 1914 and ended in August 1991.
Upon
closer inspection, we see that, during the last century, August constituted a
profoundly symbolic time (especially for Rus-sia): many events of deep
importance, defining watersheds in history, took place in that very month. With
reference to well-known dates, we can present the following basic periodization
of the Twentieth century:
1. August 1914: the beginning of the First World War
2. August 1939: the beginning of the Second World War
3. August 1945: the end of the Second World War, atomic bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki
4. August 1968: the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia;
student unrest in Europe
5. August 1991: the disintegration of the Communist bloc
While acknowledging the conditional nature of this periodization, we
never-theless regard it as a useful tool for realizing the basic aim of our
investigation.
Our task is to test the validity of the generally accepted opinion that
the begin-ning of the First World War marked the end of the belle epoque and a
radical break with modern European society’s existing value system and way of
life.
Our particular interest in "Augusts" as
acmes of social bifurcation in the twentieth century was dictated by our
conviction that it is at such moments of civilizational collapse that the
hidden framework of culture reveals itself—that is, the entire intricate system
of customary lifestyles and values-based practices hit hardest by change. In
their attempt to re-establish a disintegrated sense of continuity, individuals
try to reconstruct the traditional order of things while at the same time
inevitably reformulating and transforming tradition itself.
We attempt to analyze how,
in desperate attempts to normalize their lives amidst the global cataclysms of
the Twentieth century, individuals gave meaning to and recreated their
existence within a broad network of personal and social ties. We examine
changes in:
* individual and collective
memory
* everyday practices,
lifestyle, habitat
* beliefs, ethical values
and behavioral models
* boundaries between public
and private spheres
* forms of social
stratification and mobility
* individual and collective
identity
* intellectual and artistic
reflection
Our "August" project also raises a number
of important questions we will continue to investigate in our further studies:
* In what areas of the individual’s life did the
most radical changes take place?
* Where did customary ways of life remain unchanged
despite global catastrophes and revolutionary breakthroughs?
* What is the correlation between
"losses" and "gains"?
* What are the differences in the new experience of
life between people in "open" and "closed" societies?
* How do documents from this period traditionally
used by researchers reflect the depth and essence of the changes?
ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY
Aleida Assmann (University of Konstanz, Germany) addresses the dramatic
reconfiguration of our temporal orientation that has occurred over the last
decades in her article "Transformations of the Modern Time Regime."
She intro-duces the term "cultural time regime" to refer to a
specific temporal ordering of past, present and future that provides
uncontested meaning and orientation for a given society. It is so deeply
entrenched that it does not rise to the level of conscious reflection. In a
time of crisis, however, it becomes visible and can be retrospectively
reconstructed and revised. She argues that the modern time regime, which had
vigorously supported western thought and action until the 1980s, has met with a severe
crisis and is now undergoing considerable change. Historical analysis shows
that this modern time regime was exclusively focused on the future while
simultaneously being dismissive or oblivious of the past. Today, the future has
lost much of its allure and can no longer serve as the vanishing point of
wishes, goals and projections. The past, however, has become more and more
important in politics, society and the arts, with the effect that it has been
reopened and re-inspected from different points of view and in connection with
various agendas. The essay argues that the return of a forgotten or hitherto re-jected
past has something to do with periods of excessive violence in the twentieth
century and earlier times. This burden of the past, which still weighs heavily
on the shoulders of the present, reappears in the modes of both nostalgia and
trauma, confronting us with the new experience that the past is not over and
done with once and for all, but open to reconstruction and reassessment,
demanding new attention and recognition, the accepting of responsibility, and
forms of remembrance.
In his article
"Sevastopol in August 1855:
War,
Photography and Surgery," Ilya Kalinin (Neprikosnovennyj
Zapas Magazine, Saint Petersburg) identifies and describes the various modes of
vision that define the cultural foundations of the modern era. The emergence of
new technical means of visual representation such as photography was also
accompanied by a change in the poetical optics at work in literature. The
beginning of a new era (the mid nineteenth century) can be described via the
collision of the romantic canon, based on emotionally rich painterly imagery,
with a new poetics that sought to achieve the "objective," realistic
recording of reality to which photography, recently invented, laid claim. The
Crimean War and Leo Tolstoy’s early stories are examined in the article as the
space where these two poetics and their concomitant optical modes collided.
THE
INTELLECTUAL LANDSCAPE AFTER THE BATTLE
"Alexandre Kojeve, the
Origin of ‘Anti-Humanism,’ and the ‘End of History,’" by Stefanos
Geroulanos (New York University), deals with Alexandre Kojeve’s
account of the "end of history," developed in his lectures on Hegel’s
Philosophy of History in Paris during the late 1930s, an account that remains
more often taken for granted than seriously historicized. Little critical and
historical atten-tion has been paid to conceptual reasons behind Kojeve’s
advocacy of it, and even less to the way in which it evolved in his own project
during the 1930s, up to its notable presentation during his famous final
lecture in August 1939. The purpose of
this essay is to link the trajectory of Kojeve’s participation in the
burgeoning anti-humanism of the 1930s with the evolution of his thought on
matters of history, man’s place in it (notably, his "negative
anthropology"), and the different forms of the "end of history"
he described in the late 1930s
and
early 1940s. This essay includes a modified version of sections six and seven
of the third chapter of Geroulanos’s book An Atheism That Is Not Humanist
(Stan-ford University Press, 2010),
reproduced
with permission from the Stanford University Press.
The essay by Sergey Zenkin
(Russian State University
for the Humanities) is entitled "Georges Bataille: Politics on a Universal
Scale." In August 1944, as he was
witnessing the battles for the liberation of France, Georges Bataille noted in
his diary that the Second World War was "a war of transcendence against
immanence." He interpreted the politics of the world powers in those terms
both then and later. Nazi Germany thus represented for him a self-transcending
mediocrity, attempting to become heroic by means of military and bureaucratic
"machinery"; the United States, with the Marshall Plan, disavowed the
tran-scendental principles of the capitalist economy in favor of an immanent,
i.e., profitless expenditure of wealth; inversely, the Soviet Union gave up its
primary revolutionary immanence but acquired that of a predatory animal, which
through its aggressiveness provoked the west into sacrificial, non-accumulative
actions on a grand scale. Only a neutral observer, Bataille claimed, could
appreciate such profound processes: standing aloof from the transcendent
activities of states and attaining the immanence of self-consciousness, he
becomes a "mad" person. This, according to Bataille, was the destiny
of the modern intellectual.
In "Memory and
Oblivion: Theodor Adorno and the Time ‘After Auschwitz,’" Valery Podoroga
(Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences) explores certain
consequences of the question posed by Adorno half a century ago: is it possible
to think, write poems or even to live after Auschwitz? The tragic
experience of the Holocaust does not involve the search for "true"
place for thought or establishment of a positive utopia, as was the case in
classical systems of philosophical thought from Descartes and Hegel to
Heidegger. Adorno’s utopia is purely negative. (He defines his method as a
"negative dialectics.") Since western culture has forfeited all moral
values, it is only in despair that one can find hope for Otherness, and only in
despair that one can think. Contemporary philosophy, however, cannot cope with
this task, and the only hope lies in the art of the contemporary avant-garde
(Beckett, Klee, Kafka).
THE
EXPERIENCE OF TRAUMA
This section opens with an
essay by Polina Barskova (Hampshire College),
"The August That Wasn’t and the Mechanism of Calendrical Trauma: Reflec-tions
on Siege Chronologies." How was the idea of "presentness"
perceived and transformed during the Siege of Leningrad (1941—1944)? How did the calendar’s
structure define such social categories as fear, shame and understanding of
self? This article explores notions of historical knowledge in relation to
calendrical time, as revealed by various texts produced in the besieged city.
While for con-temporary consciousness the notion of "Siege time" is
usually perceived through the months of its first deadly winter, in her
research Barskova aims to evaluate how blokadniki (the besieged
citizens) understood their situation during other crucial periods of the Siege — for example, the summer of 1941 and the spring of 1942. Calendar time was measured
and depicted differently by various ideologi-cal registers; the difference
between these approaches defines the central direc-tion of the reading. For her
analysis, Barskova uses both official discursive texts and films, as well as
texts never intended for publication. Among the authors whose texts are
included in her reading are Lydia Ginzburg, Roman Karmen, Vsevolod Vishnevsky and
Elena Mukhina.
In the article "What
Remains of Witness: The ‘Memorization’ of Trauma in the Work of Olga
Bergholz," Sergei Zavyalov (University of Zurich) uses the classic
Soviet poet Olga Bergholz (1910—1975)
to
explore the peculiarities of how trauma was both perceived and rejected by
Soviet heroic consciousness, one of whose fundamental qualities was the
exclusion of everything having to do with human frailty from public discussion.
Soviet individuals refused to recognize themselves as victims and "memorize"
what had happened to them as an irreparable trauma. We see the dramatic
conflict that arises between this rejection and the poet’s natural inclination
to articulate internal traumas. In Zavyalov’s view, Bergholz’s socialist
realism, which lied to itself and others in the desperate attempt to maintain
its heroic stance, is a more adequate witness to a catastrophe (the Siege of
Leningrad) that transported the individual beyond psychology and intellect than
the subtle psychologism and profound intellectua- lism of another classic Siege
author, Lydia Ginzburg. Whereas Ginzburg writes from the viewpoint of someone
who knows, is able to comprehend and is capable of telling what happened,
Bergholz mostly confronts us with the impossibility and insufficiency of
storytelling as a form of witness.
In their essay
"Severed Voices: Radio and the Mediation of Trauma in the Eichmann
Trial," Amit Pinchevski (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Tamar
Liebes (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) consider the role of
radio in the mediation of trauma during the 1961 Eichmann trial. They argue that radio broadcasts
from the courtroom occasioned a transformation in the status of Holocaust
survivors in Israel,
who had been previously seen as deeply trauma-tized, unable or unwilling to
speak about their experiences. Taking to the air-waves facilitated a shift in
the conditions in which survivors’ testimonies could find public articulation.
As such, the Eichmann trial provides a compelling case of the significance of
media in transforming private traumas into collective or cultural trauma.
The article by
Christine Leuenberger (Cornell
University),
"Building Walls in August: Psychological Constructions of the Berlin Wall
and the West Bank Barrier," problematizes the psychological discourse on
borders. Since the rise of nation-state in the nineteenth century, borders have
been a prominent geo-graphical feature. At different times, psychologists have
used "borders" to think about various psychological conditions and
cultural differences. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed that a new era of
open geographical spaces and unprecedented mobility had replaced an ideologically
divided world. However, since 1990,
over
twenty-four "strategic barriers," frequently constructed along
national borders, have been built or proposed across the globe. Yet how has
psychology been used to think about the psychological impact of barriers? This
paper traces how psychologists have used the Berlin Wall and the West Bank
Barrier as "evocative objects" to reflect on societies, cultures and
psychologies. At different times, the Berlin Wall has become an "object to
think with" as it aided in understanding and reifying various
psychological conditions, cultural divergences and national typologies. Israeli
and Palestinian psychologists have also used the West Bank Barrier to evoke
psychological states and reflect on clashing cultures and "civilizations."
While Berliners continue to talk about the post-1989 "mental wall" that, allegedly, describes
the persistent cultural gap between East and West Germany, the physical
infrastructure that constitutes the West Bank Barrier also serves as an evocative
object that signifies and reifies perceptions of cultural and ethnic
disparities across the region.
The section continues with
an essay by Kevin M.F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania),
"The Affective Poetics of 1991:
Nostalgia
and Trauma on Lubyanka Square."
August 1991 inscribed an
epochal divide in the Russian experience of time. Echoing this split in the
temporal horizon, two modes domi-nate affective access to Soviet history in
contemporary Russian public discourse: the modes of trauma and nostalgia. One
may mourn Soviet traumas—the repres-sions, camps, murders and lack of freedoms.
Alternately, one may wax nostalgic over the values, food, clothes, innocence
and idealism. In contemporary Russian public discourse, both of these modes
tend to support all-encompassing political and evaluative positions with regard
to the Soviet past, which appears as a single and unified field of historical
experience. Yet neither mode is adequate to grapple with the complex tasks of
making sense of the past or comprehending political and cultural legacies in
the present. In his essay, Platt focuses on the history of a landmark Moscow building, the
Central Children’s World department store, and on current public debates concerning
its reconstruction. His analysis locates this material in the context of
"neighboring" problems of history and memory regarding Lubyanka Square,
where the building is located, but which also once was the location of KGB
headquarters and the well-known monument to its founder Felix Dzerzhinsky. This
makes possible an examination of the inter-sections and divides between
nostalgic and traumatic discourse concerning the Soviet past, revealing the
relationship between nostalgia and trauma to be one of mutual interference,
preventing both affective projects from coming to terms with history and its
contemporary significance. Ultimately, Platt argues that the affective poetics
of Soviet history and memory are in need of a fundamental revision, one that
intentionally reunites nostalgia and trauma in a complex manner in order to
overcome the seeming epochal divide of 1991 and to inscribe difference and variability,
multiple levels of continuity and discontinuity, as a new basis for social
understanding and consensus.
INTERPRETING
TERROR
"The Riskiest Moment:
Kafka and Freud," by Mladen Dolar (University of Ljubljana),
examines the moment of waking, which features so prominently in many of Kafka’s
novels and stories. Awakening entails the encounter of something that no longer
belongs to the logic of dreams and does not yet belong to the con-stituted
reality of waking life. Kafka’s heroes seem stuck on the verge between
protracted nightmare and the struggle for wakefulness. Something appears on
this verge that can be seen as a strange ontological opening to new experience.
Kafka calls awakening the "riskiest moment," where it takes great
presence of mind to get through it without being dragged out of place. This
strange encounter is then considered from the viewpoint of Freud’s
interpretation of dreams, as a moment that lies beyond the realm of
interpretation, and further linked to what Jacques Lacan has called the logic
of the missed encounter. This moment is situated in the broader perspective of
the emergence of modernity, as its peculiar wake-up call, and considered in
relation to some of its other prominent figures (Proust, Duchamp, Malevich,
Schoenberg, Stravinsky, etc.).
In recent years, personal
accounts purporting to provide evidence of the Soviet experience (diaries,
memoirs, etc.) have been appearing in print in large numbers. Many of them
contain dreams; most of these dreams have political content. In her article
"Dreams of Terror: Dreams as a Source for the History of Stalinism,"
Irina Paperno (University
of California, Berkeley) provides interpretations of such
dreams. Following such authors as Reinhold Koselleck, who has written about
dreams from Nazi Germany, Paperno argues that dreams, long recognized as a
historical phenomenon, may be of particular interest to his-torians of terror
regimes. While the article reflects on methodological issues and on theories of
dreams, the emphasis is on a close reading of dream stories from Stalinist
Russia. The author asks what dreams mean to those who chose to record them and
include them in their larger narratives, and what they mean to us, their
distant readers. The answers are many and varied.
"Breakthrough at
Stalingrad: The Repressed Soviet Origins of a Bestselling West German War
Tale," by Jochen Hellbeck (Rutgers University),
delves into the concealed origins of a famous German memoir on the Battle of
Stalin-grad, published in 1957.
Its
author, Heinrich Gerlach, a veteran of the battle and former Soviet POW,
claimed to have recovered the memory of his wartime ex-perience through
hypnosis, after the original script, which he wrote in captivity, was
confiscated by Soviet authorities. The original manuscript has now been
found in a Russian archive. It reveals how Soviet political re-education
efforts prompted Gerlach to compose an autobiography revolving around questions
of personal complicity and guilt in German wartime crimes. Gerlach later
expunged these soul-searching passages, as well as any reference to the Soviet
origins of his memoir, from the published memoir, which he presented as a
self-generated inquiry into the tragedy of German soldiers abandoned by Hitler.
COMMEMORATIVE
PRACTICES
In "War Memoirs of the
Dead: Writing and Remembrance in the First World War," Victoria Stewart
(University of Leicester) considers a peculiar genre of First World War-era
English literature via two works, Oliver Lodge’s Raymond, or Life
and Death, and Marie Leighton’s Boy of My Heart.
War memoirs of the dead, which were usually not intended for the general
reader, were a special means of coping with trauma. In these books,
recollections of the dead were combined with a scholarly apparatus and various
commentaries (among other things, the posthumous fate of the dead was touched
on, for example, through descriptions of seances). Publications of this sort
helped survivors cope with the trauma of loss and realize that the sacrifices
were not in vain.
Over three turbulent
decades — from the end of
the First World War to the period after the Second World War — Germans buried their dead, mourned their
passing and imagined what forms of existence they might have beyond the grave. In
her essay "Death in Germany
between Two World Wars," Monica Black (University of Tennessee)
examines the various practices surrounding mortality in Germany over this period, including
funerals and other rituals of burial and mourning, and the evolving set of
cultural perceptions that gave meaning to those practices. Because the
practices of death are embedded within a complex and eternally shifting web of
values, attitudes, symbols, images and sensibilities, Black argues, they offer
insights into the normally unspoken and often unrecorded moral codes that
defined and redefined German society and became the basis for its continual
transformation in a highly unstable period marked by peace and war, democracy
and dictatorship.
In "’Exceptionally Normal’ and the
Normalization of the Exceptional: Self- Censorship in the Memory of a German
Family Forcibly Deported to the Soviet Union," Igor Narsky
(South Ural State University, Chelyabinsk) uses a unique document — corrections made by an interviewee to a
transcript of her family’s story as told by her — to problematize the use of
non-traditional sources and dis-cuss the changes (and the stubborn resistance
to change) in the family relations, memory and behavioral models of
"ordinary" people in the twentieth century.
In "Iron August, or Double-Use Memory,"
Alexander Etkind (University
of Cambridge) explores
manifestations of memory and mourning in Russian litera-ture, historiography
and popular culture. Focusing on several examples — Nikolai Zabolotsky’s
"Iron August"; Iulian Oksman’s re-publication of Belinsky’s letter to
Gogol; Grigory Kozintsev’s screen adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragedies; and
the five-hundred-ruble banknote still in use — the essay shows how mourning for
the victims of the Soviet period has been at the forefront of Russian culture.
The essay by Mikhail Ryklin
(Institute of Philosophy,
Russian Academy of Sciences) is entitled
"’The Jews — Who Are They?’:
The Structure of the Concept of ‘Jew.’" When they took in Soviet Jews,
German authorities attempted to trans-late something emotionally charged — a
sense of responsibility for the monstrous crimes of National Socialism — into legal language. The resulting
translation was
quite problematic: the Jews were given the status of refugees, which
clearly did not fit them. In addition, it came to light that, from the
viewpoint of the host country, "Jew" was not an ethnic concept, but a
religious one: a Jew is someone who professes Judaism. Soviet Jews, especially
the older generation, regarded themselves not as victims of the Holocaust, but
as people who had defeated the Third Reich. The impression arose that they had
no memory of the Holocaust; that this was the heritage of German, Polish and
French Jews, but not of Soviet Jews, although over a million of the victims
were their direct relatives. However, Holocaust amnesia in the Soviet Union was neither an original nor a voluntary
phenomenon. Memory of this event was seared out with a hot iron, and its place
was taken (later, though, under Brezhnev) by the ideology of the Great Victory,
with which the victims of this historical substitution identify.
LOST
ILLUSIONS: THE COLLAPSE OF THE UTOPIAN PROJECT
The section opens with excerpts from Zinaida Denisievskaya’s diary,
edited by Jochen Hellbeck (Rutgers University).
Denisievskaya was a provincial Russian woman who kept a diary during the first
third of the Twentieth century. In an accompanying article, Hellbeck traces
Denisievskaya’s gradual transition from a cautious attitude towards the
Bolsheviks to self-identification with the Soviet regime, as well as the role
of gender in this transition.
In an essay from October 1988 entitled "The
Presumption of Socialism," published here for the first time, Lydia
Ginzburg explains why the liberal intel-ligentsia should support Gorbachev’s
reforms. At the same time, she acknowledges that the socialist system goes
"against human nature," and exposes the hypocrisy and illogicality of
the political rhetoric of Gorbachev and his allies. In an intro-ductory article,
"Ginzburg and Perestroika," Andrei Zorin (University of Oxford)
and Emily van Buskirk (Rutgers University)
analyze Ginzburg’s intellectual and ideological stance during the final years
of her life, both in relation to her creative trajectory and to the political
events unfolding rapidly around her.
In "The End of a
Beautiful Era: Soviet Intellectuals’ Reception of the Soviet Invasion of
Czechoslovakia," Nikolay Poselyagin (Moscow State
University) examines
the date August 21, 1968, as the symbolic
designation of a certain finale. He hypothesizes that this finale (at least on
the epistemological level) had to do with the era of positivist utopianism,
whose final surge in the Soviet Union, as in the rest of the world, took place
in the 1960s, but was violently crushed. (In other countries, it also came to a
dramatic end, albeit not so artificially.) Poselyagin understands utopianism as
a focus on a particular predetermined ideal, which is simultaneously regarded
as such and, nevertheless, postulated as something fundamentally attainable.
THE
ANTHROPOLOGY OF SOCIAL PSYCHOSIS
In
"Augusterlebnis: The Beginning of the First World War as a
Turning Point in German History," Frithjof Benjamin Schenk
(University of Basel) examines the particular fervor that the German people,
according to most historians, experienced in the early days of August 1914, as
the war began. Using German newspapers, Schenk traces how it was perceived in
the early years of the war and attempts to show that the traditional
interpretation of this event as a mo-ment of national community and general
enthusiasm is in much need of revision.
This essay is followed by
Andrei Zhdanov’s notorious report of August 16, 1946, which preceded the infamous Central
Committee decree "On the Journals ‘Zvezda’ and ‘Leningrad.’"
In his commentary, Pyotr Druzhinin (Moscow) examines the report in the context of the
political atmosphere in the postwar Soviet Union,
arguing that it was a symbol of the turn towards a bipolar world, at least on
the ideological front.
In his article "The Party Organization of the
Stalin Plant Has Been Gripped by Psychosis…" Oleg Leibovich
(Perm State Institute of Art and Culture) uses archival materials to
reconstruct the conflict between an engineer/Communist Party member, on the one
hand, and the authorities, on the other. The place of the conflict: a brand-new
enterprise for the manufacture of aviation motors, Plant No. 19 in Perm. The subject of the conflict: the right to a
personal inter-pretation of people and events, contested by the Party
organization. The time of the conflict: the repressive ideological campaign in
August 1936 (the Trial of
the Sixteen in Moscow). The content of
the conflict was determined by a clash of two cultures: rational and
individualistic, on the one hand, and patrimonial, on the other. Common sense
confronted ideological formulas and was defeated.
In "Tender August, or
the Forced Metaphor," Gasan Guseinov (Moscow State
University) examines
a situation in which generational memory and the impersonal memory of the
native speaker converge when a word or phrase emerges in the stream of poetic
speech, animating personal memory. He analyzes one of the forced associations
that arise in such cases, the semantic line "tenderness," using Anton
Makarenko’s "A Book for Parents." Understood now as the basis of the
educator’s relationship to the student, now as the quality of an edible
product, "tenderness" evokes a complex set of forced associations,
which is part of the discourse of how "August(us)" — the harvest month and the name of the
founder of the empire that served as Russia’s prototype — is experienced.