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Regular version of the site

"The Gulag poetry as Literary Testimony: Theoretical and Epistemological Basis and a Corpus Description" Report by Claudia Pieralli

16+
*recommended age
Event ended

On November 14, 2019 as part of the seminar "West and East: Universalism of Culture" of the IL for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue there will be held a lecture by prof. Claudia Pieralli (University of Florence)

Abstract.
The purpose of the report is to present a corpus of poems created by victims of political repression in the Soviet Union from the point of view of published collections and major scientific works relating primarily to texts of the Stalin era. We will indicate the theoretical and epistemological framework for the study and definition of this literary phenomenon of the history of Russian culture of the twentieth century. It is, firstly, about the opportunity to consider these literary texts in connection with the concept of evidence and, secondly, about an attempt to identify a certain specificity of the structural and aesthetic interaction of the witness function with the literary and artistic transformation in a special case of poetry. This corpus of texts is considered as material for studying the status of a poetic word as an aesthetic means that can give historical (and artistic, more broadly - socio-cultural, philosophical)
evidence of the Soviet concentration system. The lecture reveals artistic techniques by which the witness function is carried out.

We will offer a detailed systematization of the poetry corpus based on historical and typological criteria. The productivity of the proposed methodology is based on the key concept of “zone poetry” as a literary trace of political repression synchronized with imprisonment in the USSR.

In this composite theoretical formulation, the corps of poetic texts of political prisoners is one specific whole in the history of Russian literature of the twentieth century. and so should be presented, as we argue, in further research.

The event leader is Olga Zhukova, professor at the HSE.

Venue: HSE building at 21/4 Staraya Basmannaya Street, building 1, Room 502.
Time: 6 p.m.
The working language is Russian. Everyone is welcome.
If you need a pass to the Higher School of Economics, please send a request with your full name to Anna Doronina (email: adoronina@hse.ru) until 6 p.m. on Tuesday November 12, 2019.