Dennis Ioffe

Taxi Blues: The anxiety of Soviet masculinity

Using the lens of cultural analysis, this study examines Pavel Lungin’s Taxi Blues as one of the characteristic examples of perestroika cinema. The homosocial theme of the movie is explored in much detail, while using the available historical and comparative materials taken from Russian and Western cultural history. Taxi Blues traces the development of a relationship between a musician and a taxi driver during Russia’s perestroika period. The taxi driver ‘saves’ the musician from alcohol dependency, imprisonment, financial ruin and self-destruction, only to be forgotten once the musician achieves fame abroad. Their relationship demonstrates a reversal of fortune in which economic and social status is conflated with sexual identity. As such, the homosocial relationship of the two men is disrupted when their personal fortunes are reversed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The sexual overtones in the relationship implicitly evoke various cultural stereotypes (degenerate sexual behaviour, Jewish effeminacy) as well as inherent power dynamics (master and slave, teacher and pupil) to engage the explicit issues of social and economic status in a society that has been turned inside out by perestroika.

The Garden of Hidden Delights of the Russian-Jewish Avant-Garde

What is the Russian-Jewish Avant-Garde? How can it be defined in recent scholarly bibliography? The suggestive Jewish element in Russian Modernism was always, quite heavily (and at times playfully), pronounced. The term, then, represents an umbrella concept that unites both currents within the Russian Jewish community, the religious and the secular, in the perspective of its tortuous history. Secular Jewish art flourished in St. Petersburg, where Leon Bakst was one of the major names along with artists such as Marc Chagall, Alexander Romm, and Sofia Dymshitz. A timid modernist, Leonid Pasternak might be mentioned here as an occasional character, too, along with Iosif Shkolnik and the group “Union of Youth.” A special episode of Russian-Jewish Avant-Garde relates to France and Paris. This historical cluster, all part of the School of Paris, featured a variety of names, including Ossip Zadkine, Jacques Lipschitz, Hannah Orlova, and Emmanuel Mane-Katz, all of whom had undeniable biographical ties with Russia.

Идеология авангарда как феномен фантома. Посцкриптум к дискуссии = The ideology of the avant-garde as a phantom phenomenon: a postscript to the discussion

This article discusses the role of ideology in the Avant-Garde of both Russia and Western Europe. For this purpose it is necessary to clearly delineate “ideology” and “politics”, which takes up the first part of this study. Then a number of different views of these aspects as expressed by several authors on the Russian Avant-Garde are confronted and critically examined.

The ideology of the avant-garde as a phantom phenomenon: a postscript to the discussion

This article discusses the role of ideology in the Avant-Garde of both Russia and Western Europe. For this purpose it is necessary to clearly delineate “ideology” and “politics”, which takes up the first part of this study. Then a number of different views of these aspects as expressed by several authors on the Russian Avant-Garde are confronted and critically examined.

Пассивное противостояние диамату на пути к онтологии и феноменологии: Имяславие и критическое неогумбольдтианство: русские религиозные философы и Густав Шпет = The passive opposition to dialectical materialism on the way to ontology and phenomenology: 'Imiaslavie' and critical neo-Humboldtianism: Russian religious philosophers and Gustav Shpet

Abstract The article discusses the alternative order of “language criticism” as developed by the main representatives of Russian “religious” hesychast philosophy on the one hand and phenomenological “Neo-Humboldtianism” on the other. The article draws on the works written in the early and late twenties by Aleksei Losev, Sergii Bulgakov, Pavel Florenskii and Gustav Shpet and demonstrates their substantial alterity with regard to Stalins philosophical ideology applied to language studies and general humanities. The main object of our study is the descriptive analysis of Russian “imiaslavie” together with Russian linguistic phenomenology debated through the perspective of European semiotics (Ferdinand de Saussure). The article strives to demonstrate the distinctiveness of these Russian intellectual traditions and their possible idiosyncrasy within the semiotic scientific paradigm.

The passive opposition to dialectical materialism on the way to ontology and phenomenology: 'Imiaslavie' and critical neo-Humboldtianism [Russian religious philosophers and Gustav Shpet]

Abstract The article discusses the alternative order of “language criticism” as developed by the main representatives of Russian “religious” hesychast philosophy on the one hand and phenomenological “Neo-Humboldtianism” on the other. The article draws on the works written in the early and late twenties by Aleksei Losev, Sergii Bulgakov, Pavel Florenskii and Gustav Shpet and demonstrates their substantial alterity with regard to Stalins philosophical ideology applied to language studies and general humanities. The main object of our study is the descriptive analysis of Russian “imiaslavie” together with Russian linguistic phenomenology debated through the perspective of European semiotics (Ferdinand de Saussure). The article strives to demonstrate the distinctiveness of these Russian intellectual traditions and their possible idiosyncrasy within the semiotic scientific paradigm.