Kevin M. F. Platt

Terribly Romantic, Terribly Progressive, or Terribly Tragic: Rehabilitating Ivan IV under I.V. Stalin

In recent years scholars have written much on the valorization of Ivan the Terrible in the historical mythology of the Stalinist period. Their work has illustrated how the first Russian tsar and his Muscovite domain were represented as glorious antecedents to Stalin and Soviet society. Through the lens of historical analogy, Ivan the Terrible provided the context for an examination of issues relevant to Soviet life in the 1930s and 1940s, ranging from the ubiquitous danger of treason to the manifest destiny of a strongly centralized, multinational state.

Figures of memory and forgetting in Andrej Bitov's prose : postmodernism and the quest for history

Contents: Postmodernism in the Soviet Union - History and its representation in modernist, socialist realist, and postmodern aesthetics - Different models of mnemonic representation and their applicability in the Soviet context - Andrej Bitov as a postmodernist - Bitovs attitude towards modernism and socialist realism.

Secret Speech: Wounding, Disavowal, and Social Belonging in the USSR

Comrade Eikhe was arrested on April 29, 1938. . . . The investigation into his case was conducted with the most extreme violations of Soviet law, arbitrary abuses and falsifications. Under torture, he was forced to sign interrogation transcripts that had been prepared in advance by the investigators, implicating in anti-Soviet activity not only Eikhe himself but also many other prominent party members and Soviet workers. . . . Eikhe’s second appeal to Stalin of October 27, 1939 has been preserved . . . : “This is how it happened: I just couldn’t take the torments that Ushakov and Nikolaev inflicted on me—especially the former, who caused unbearable agony by deftly making use of the fact that my spine was still only partly healed after being fractured the first time. I was forced to slander myself and other people. . . . ” On February 4, 1940, Eikhe was shot. (Noise, expressions of outrage in the hall). —Nikita Khrushchev, “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” (the “Secret Speech”), 1956

LYRIC COSMOPOLITANISM IN A POSTSOCIALIST BORDERLAND

Latvia presents a unique and counterintuitive case in the history of postsocialist ethnic relations. Despite the USSR’s having annexed Latvia by fiat and armed force in the 1940s—and despite the population transfers of so many Russians and other Soviet peoples to the region that Latvians themselves nearly became an ethnic minority in “their own” republic—there has been no ethnic violence between Latvians and Russians in the postsocialist era. Yet the events of summer 2014 have radically shifted the political imaginary of this region, raising the specter of a loss of social cohesion and an eruption of violence. The essay examines one of the factors that has supported amity in Latvia for the past two decades: late-Soviet cosmopolitanism and its legacies in present-day Latvian cultural life. Analysis focuses on public art projects in Riga during the summer of 2014, in the shadow of the war in Ukraine.

INTRODUCTION: A Motto for Moral Diplomacy

Introduction: A Motto for Moral Diplomacy “Only connect . . .” — is there any single phrase that offers a more direct and humane method of conflict resolution? This sensible exhortation serves as the epigraph for E. M. Forster’s 1910 “condition of England” novel, Howards End, in which Forster humorously, then desperately, plots to get people, classes, and even places (rural England versus cosmopolitan London) utterly opposed in character and in values to “connect.” The moral good of human connection, the central theme of all of Forster’s fiction, is a primary article of his humanistic creed, as expounded with great urgency and yet a certain wistfulness in his 1938 essay “What I Believe.” “I realize,” he confesses,“Only connect . . .,” the epigraph of Forster’s Howards End , offers itself as a model of moral diplomacy. The efficacy of genuine human connection — whether it takes the form of creative action or of decent human relations — in containing and civilizing force is an idea that informs the novel’s conception of what constitutes and ensures civilized life. Forster regarded propriety and convention as expressions of force and so applauded any assault on conventional feeling as an act of moral heroism. This essay introduces the third installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means”: it explores and indeed extols the moral efficacy of connection in containing force and resolving conflicts, but it also contemplates the obstacles to connection, which Forster dramatizes with his characteristic honesty.

Peace by Other Means

Introduction: A Motto for Moral Diplomacy “Only connect . . .” — is there any single phrase that offers a more direct and humane method of conflict resolution? This sensible exhortation serves as the epigraph for E. M. Forster’s 1910 “condition of England” novel, Howards End, in which Forster humorously, then desperately, plots to get people, classes, and even places (rural England versus cosmopolitan London) utterly opposed in character and in values to “connect.” The moral good of human connection, the central theme of all of Forster’s fiction, is a primary article of his humanistic creed, as expounded with great urgency and yet a certain wistfulness in his 1938 essay “What I Believe.” “I realize,” he confesses,“Only connect . . .,” the epigraph of Forster’s Howards End , offers itself as a model of moral diplomacy. The efficacy of genuine human connection — whether it takes the form of creative action or of decent human relations — in containing and civilizing force is an idea that informs the novel’s conception of what constitutes and ensures civilized life. Forster regarded propriety and convention as expressions of force and so applauded any assault on conventional feeling as an act of moral heroism. This essay introduces the third installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means”: it explores and indeed extols the moral efficacy of connection in containing force and resolving conflicts, but it also contemplates the obstacles to connection, which Forster dramatizes with his characteristic honesty.