This thesis examines the changing identities of the Estonian Russophone minority based on the literary works of Estonian Russophone writers. It analyses Andrei Ivanov’s short novel Untermensch: the part of me that is torn to pieces applying the concepts of Baltic postcolonial identities and hybridity. The theoretical analysis of the thesis is built on the works of local literary researchers self-identifying with the Estonian Russophone minority, and the Baltic postcolonial thought.   The demographic and linguistic landscape of Estonia changed dramatically due to the Soviet colonisation. In 2021, 29% of Estonian population was Russian-speaking — a heterogenous group of people with different ethnic, historical, and cultural backgrounds. In his text Ivanov describes how the Russian neo-colonial war against Ukraine and the imperial vision for the future of Europe has turned the identity of these people into an international battlefield. / Uppsatsen undersöker den estniska rysktalande minoritetens förändrande identiteter och utgår från Estlands rysktalande författares litterära verk. Den analyserar Andrei Ivanovs kortroman Untermensch: den sönderslitna sidan av mig genom att applicera begreppen baltisk postkolonial identitet och hybriditet. Den teoretiska delen av uppsatsen bygger på arbetet av de lokala litteraturforskarna som identifierar sig med den estniska rysktalande minoriteten, och den baltiska postkoloniala litteraturforskningen.        Det demografiska och lingvistiska landskapet i Estland förändrades dramatiskt på grund av den sovjetiska kolonisationen. År 2021 var 29 % av Estlands befolkning rysktalande — det är en heterogen grupp av människor med mångfald av etniska, historiska och kulturella bakgrunder. I sin text beskriver Ivanov hur det ryska neokoloniala kriget mot Ukraina och den ryska imperialistiska framtidsvisionen för Europa har gjort identiteter av dessa människor till ett internationellt slagfält. / В данной диссертации исследуется изменение идентичности эстонского русскоязычного меньшинства на основе литературных произведений эстонских русскоязычных писателей. Анализируется повесть Андрея Иванова «Untermensch: моя разорванная часть», применяя концепции балтийского постколониального тождества и гибридности. Теоретический анализ диссертации построен на трудах отечественных литературоведов, идентифицирующие себя с эстонским русскоязычным меньшинством и балтийской постколониальной мыслью.   Демографический и языковой ландшафт Эстонии резко изменился из-за советской колонизации. В 2021 году 29% населения Эстонии было русскоязычным — неоднородная группа людей разного этнического, исторического и культурного происхождения. В своем тексте Иванов описывает, как российская неоколониальная война против Украины и имперское видение будущей Европы превратило личности этих людей в международное поле битвы.

xii, 310 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Nostalgia is the longing for a lost, and often substantially reimagined, time or place. Commonly regarded as a conservative impulse available for exploitation by hegemonic forces, nostalgia can also be a source of social questioning and creative inspiration. This dissertation examines the ways in which nostalgic longing imports images and ideas from memory into present discourse and infuses works of art with complication, contradiction, and ambiguity. In the early 1960s, emboldened by Nikita Khrushchev's cultural Thaw, many Soviet filmmakers engaged both personal and social memory to craft challenging reflections of and responses to their times. These filmmakers reengaged the sundered spirit of the 1920s avant-garde and reimagined the nation's artistic and spiritual heritage; they captured the passing moments of contemporary history in a way that animated the permanent, productive, and sometimes stormy dialogue between the present and the persistent past. Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba (1964), Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966, released 1971), and Marlen Khutsiev's Ilich's Gate (1961, released with changes in 1965 as I Am Twenty ) were planned in the anxious years surrounding Khrushchev's fall, and the films mark a high point of Thaw-era cinematic audacity. Each film is epic in scope; each deploys temporal longing to generate narrative ambiguity and dialogue between historical epochs. The films are haunted by ghosts; they challenge the hegemony of the "now" by insisting on the phantom presence of a thousand "thens"; they refurbish old dreams and question contemporary assumptions. The Thaw permitted the intrusion of private memory into public history, and the past became a zone for exploration rather than justification. Easy answers became harder to come by, but the profusion of questions and suggestions created a brief silver age for Soviet cinema. For us, these films offer an extraordinary glimpse into creative life during one of the great, unsung social transitions of the 20th century and reveal the crucial contribution of individual memory in the artistic quest for formal diversity, spiritual inspiration, and ethical living. / Committee in Charge: Dr. H. Leslie Steeves, Chair; Dr. Biswarup Sen; Dr. Julianne Newton; Dr. Jenifer Presto

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Boston University PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / The purpose of this thesis is to closely analyze some of the individual authorial voices that have emerged from contemporary Romanian cinema. Billed by the international critical establishment as a "New Wave," the recent slate of Romanian productions, while very successful on the international festival circuit, still lacks an apt conceptualization of the precise characteristics that set these new filmmakers apart, not only from other international directors, but also from one another. The analysis focuses on six recent productions: Stuffand Dough (2001), The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) and Aurora (2010) by Cristi Puiu, 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006) and Police, Adjective (2010) by Corneliu Porumboiu, and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010) by Andrei Ujica, breaking down the individual authorial characteristics and thematic and stylistic concerns of each filmmaker and contextualizing them within the larger history of Romanian film, as well as the trajectories of international art cinema.

The cantata A World Without War (2009), by Armenian-born composer Edward Manukyan (b. 1981), was written, in part, to support increased awareness of human rights issues. Based on a quote from linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), the narrative of the cantata states: "We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world." In addition to Chomsky's words, the cantata excerpts quotes of two additional literary giants advocating human rights, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), and Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989). The purpose of this dissertation is to focus attention on human rights activism; using Manukyan's A World Without War, I highlight moral and ethical questions at the center of this work and explain how this cantata embraces the ideal of moral cosmopolitanism. I strongly believe in the importance of human rights for all citizens of the world, and the role music plays in advancing its cause through performance arts.

This dissertation argues that Russia’s confrontation with modernity generated a series of sociocultural paradigm crises that gave rise to a modernist grotesque aesthetic tradition, uniting over forty years of artistic production into a coherent literary movement. While close reading the work of Fyodor Sologub (The Petty Demon [Мелкий бес]), Andrei Bely (Petersburg [Петербург]), Evgenii Zamyatin (At World’s End [На куличках]), and Velimir Khlebnikov (“The Crane” [Журавль]), I argue that prerevolutionary modernist writers utilized grotesque modes of representation to depict a world where the former cornerstones of pre-modern Russian identity are fracturing under the pressures of modernity. In contrast to extant scholarship, I argue the 1917 Revolution is not a fundamental break in Russia’s experience of the crisis of modernity, but an extension, and an exacerbation of it. Though discourses of Russian identity formation will be rapidly recodified around the Soviet project, the same underlying grotesque aesthetic devices used by pre-revolutionary authors are taken up by a new generation of Soviet-era modernists. Mikhail Zoshchenko’s parody in Michel Sinyagin (Мишель Синягин) elicits skepticism about yesterday’s unenlightened masses becoming today’s new Tolstoys. Andrei Platonov’s anomalous depictions of the Russian periphery in his Juvenile Sea (Ювенильное море) are still inhabited by monsters, too far from Soviet nodes of power to be assimilated into the national ideological project. And Konstantin Vaginov (in the novel Goat Song [Козлиная песнь]) and Evgenii Shvarts (in the play The Shadow [Тень]) capture the prevalence of superfluous intellectuals with ruptured psyches, frustrated by their unsuccessful attempts to adapt to the new Soviet reality.