Henrietta Mondry

Political Animals: Representing Dogs in Modern Russian Culture

Focusing on the correlation between humans and dogs in traditional belief systems and cultural productions, this book shows that the dog incorporates various often-paradoxical meanings – moral, social and philosophical. This study contributes to the unfolding cultural history of human-animal relations across cultures.

Smell and memory as Jewish archives: the case of Russian Jewish writers

The paper analyses the complex dynamics of the rejection of ‘Jewish smells’ as markers of Jewish corporeality in the context of stereotypes constructed by Russian culture. It addresses the conflicting desire to cherish and yet reject the smells of childhood as an important repository of memory in autobiographical prose by Russian Jewish writers. It theorizes the notion of smell as a Jewish archive in the context of inter-generational knowledge, displacement, space and time. How can the most ethereal of all sensations serve as an archive? How do we pass on this type of knowledge-inducing mechanism to future generations? And how do writers negotiate their national/ethnic identities on the basis of this form of remembering?