Report by Claudia Pieralli "Culture of Dissent in Europe and the USSR in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century. On-line Project for Education and Research"

On November 29, 2019, in the framework of the seminar "West and East: Universalism of Culture", the International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue held a lecture by Professor Claudia Pieralli (University of Florence)

Professor C. Pieralli spoke about the research project “On Both Sides of the Iron Curtain: A Culture of Dissent and the Definition of European Identity in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century in Italy, France and the USSR (1956-1991)”, funded by the University of Florence in 2017. The project was led by Prof. Teresa Spignoli (Italian Contemporary Literature) and Prof. Claudia Pieralli (Slavistics / Russian Literature).
The research area of the project includes various forms of culture of dissent, which since the fifties have entered the European context. This is especially noticeable when comparing Western and Eastern Europe, in particular, the Franco-Italian part of it and the Slavic (Soviet Russia, Belarus and Ukraine). These countries are characterized by the appearance of similar forms of protest against the cultural and political establishment, which are expressed, although in the opposite, but mirror form with respect to the axis that separates the eastern block from the western one.
The project aims to problematize the geocultural concept of Europe, starting with the definition of its internal historical, social and ethnocultural differences. The project is more interested in dividing into West and East (after the end of World War II) than into South and North, in other words, dividing Western Europe and Eastern Europe as part of the sphere of influence of the Soviet bloc.
For this reason, 1956 (the beginning of de-Stalinization and the Western conception of the most important issues of communism) and 1991 (the collapse of the USSR and, consequently, the abolition of the Iron Curtain) are considered symbolic and significant dates.
At the lecture, Professor C. Pieralli guided the audience in relation to working with sections and subsections of the online project, showing the content, in particular, the Slavic-Russian section, as well as ways of functional use of this web resource for academic purposes and not only.

The original version of the project site.
The English version of the project site.

The event was moderated by Olga Anatolyevna Zhukova, deputy head of the IL for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue, professor at the School of Philosophy of the Higher School of Economics.

The video of the seminar.