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Cold Fusion

Cold Fusion

Gennady Barabtarlo

(2000)

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Abstract

While historical and political aspects of the Russo-German relationship over the past three to four centuries have received due attention from scholars, the range of the far more diverse, important, and peculiar cultural relations still awaits full assessment. This volume shows how enriching these cultural influences were for both countries, affecting many spheres of intellectual and daily life such as philosophy and religion, education and ideology, sciences and their application, arts and letters, custom and language. The German-Russian relationship has always been particularly intense. Oscillating as it has between infatuation and contempt, it has always been marked by a singular paradox: a German cultural presence in Russia resulting either in a more or less complete fusion, as in the case of Russifield German, or in a pronounced mutual repulsion, accompanied by the denigration of each other's culture as inferior. It is this curious paradox that determines the perspectives of the articles that were specially written for this volume, providing it with a unifying focus.


Gennady Barabtarlo is Professor of Russian at the University of Missouri. An American citizen born in Moscow, he has authored, edited, and translated several books and published a large number of articles on Russian and American literature.


Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Cold Fusion iii
Copyright Page iv
Contents vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. A Swedish Countess and a Russian Empress 19
Chapter 2. From King-as-Poet to Poet-as-King 34
Chapter 3. Dreams of a German(n) in Russia 50
Chapter 4. The Fantastic in the Everyday 62
Chapter 5. The Tyranny of Difference 74
Chapter 6. The Tyrannical \"Knout\" of World History 102
Chapter 7. Pushkin as \"Universal\" Poet 113
Chapter 8. Church and State 126
Chapter 9. The Shape of Russian Idealism 137
Chapter 10. Bakhtin, Benjamin, and Historical Representation of the Holocaust 153
Chapter 11. Mitteleuropa to Moscow 169
Chapter 12. Science, Philosophy Music 185
Chapter 13. Nietzsche's Hidden Voice in Socialist Realism 197
Chapter 14. Transnational Authorship on the German-Slavic Border 212
Chapter 15. \"The Stepmother of Russian Cities 225
Chapter 16. Nabokov and Goethe 241
Chapter 17. Pasternak and the Russian Reception of Heine 252
Chapter 18. Kafka's \"The Hunger Artist\" and Shalamov's \"the Artist of the Spade 277
Appendix. \"The Artist of the Spade 292
Contributors 304