Andreas Schönle

The Scare of the Self: Sentimentalism, Privacy, and Private Life in Russian Culture, 1780-1820

This statement, written by a foppish young nobleman about to make a pseudo-confession, goes to the core of the problem I would like to investigate here. Sentimentalism is usually credited with creating a culture of sensibility, of delicate and secret feelings, and with promoting an idyllic vision of family life, of homeliness, of intimacy within the four walls of an interior environment. Yet sentimentalism also developed an ethos of sincerity, which compelled writers and readers to reveal their inmost desires and confess their real and imagined sins. How then did sentimentalism conceive of privacy? Was it intent on tearing down the walls of intimacy in order to expose the underside of things, perhaps in pursuit of a dream of transparency between people and minds? Did it, on the contrary, seek to privatize public life, as it were, constituting public discourse as a dialogue between private selves rather than as an exchange regulated by social conventions? What I propose to do here is to examine a series of textual documents, written roughly in the years 1780-1820 in Russia, in a period I call broadly and somewhat arbitrarily sentimentalism, to see how Russian writers of various stripes and talents conceived of privacy. Travel accounts will serve as primary sources for this inquiry, on the premise that symptomatic evidence might reveal itself in the confrontation with another culture, one that operates with a different implicit convention about the boundaries of private life. Indeed, since privacy rarely becomes an issue

Ruin philosophy, poetic discourse and the collapse of meta-narratives in Aleksandr Kushner's poetry of the 1970s

This article offers an analysis of the trope of ruin in the poetry of Aleksandr Kushner (born 1936), in particular through a close reading of two of his poems: “In a slippery graveyard, alone” and “Ruins”. The analysis of these poems is preceded by an overview of ruin philosophy from Burke and Diderot to Simmel and Benjamin, with particular emphasis on the way the trope of ruin contemplation stages a confrontation between the self and what transcends it (death, history, nature, etc.). This philosophical background serves as a heuristic tool to shed light on the poetry of Kushner. Through the trope of ruin, Kushner explores the legitimacy of poetic speech after the collapse of all meta-narratives. Kushner has no truck with Diderots solipsism, nor with Hegels bold narrative of progress, nor with Simmels peaceful reconciliation with the creative forces of nature. Nor, really, does he intend to bear witness to history, the way Benjamin does in the faint anticipation of some miracle. Instead, Kushner posits the endurance of a community united not around a grand project, but around the idea of carrying on in the face of everything, muddling through despite the lack of hopes for a transformational future and making the most of fleeting moments of positivity that emerge out of the fundamental serendipity of history.

Between the Iconic and the Symbolic: The Ruin Photographs of Boris Smirnov and the Aesthetics of Trauma

This article examines the photographs of ruined East European and German cities which amateur photographer Boris Smirnov took in 1945 when he was sent to Germany to study the Nazis’ camouflage techniques. Cast in an aesthetically alert and self-consciously stylized idiom, his ruin photography presents a figurative expression of trauma, free of the requisite heroic inflections of Soviet representations of the war. His works reveal a suggestive emphasis on material form, which causes the viewers to ask what defines the experience of war and what it means to maintain aesthetic alertness amidst a landscape of ruins. Responding to the shock of the Leningrad Blockade and to the anaesthetization that the struggle to survive and to contribute to the collective war effort required, Smirnov identified with the expressiveness of the built environment. Redeeming the density of lived experience—bodily sensations, imagination, memory—he sought to enable a moment of self-absorption and to overcome the fragmentation and self-denial imposed by the war and, more broadly, by his countrys totalitarian project.