The Volga Germans assert a particular ethnic identity to articulate their complex history as a multinational community even in the absence of traditional practices in language, religious piety, and communal lifestyle. Across multiple migrations and settlements from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the Volga Germans' self-constructed group identity served historically as a tool with which to navigate uncertain politics of belonging. As subjects of imperial Russia's eighteenth-century colonization project the Volga Germans held a privileged legal status in accordance with their settlement in the Volga River region, but their subsequent loss of privileges under the reorganization and Russification of the modern Russian state in the nineteenth century compelled members of the group to immigrate to the Midwest in the United States where their distinct identity took its full form. The Volga Germans' arrival on the Great Plains coincided with an era of mass global migration from 1846 to 1940, yet the conventional categories of immigrant identity that subsumed Volga Germans in archival records did not impede their drive for community preservation under a new unifying German-Russian identity. A contingent of Midwest Volga Germans migrated in 1881 to Albina, a railroad town across the Willamette River from Portland, Oregon where the pressures of assimilation ultimately disintegrated traditional ways of life--yet the community impulse to articulate its identity remained. Thus, while Germans are the single largest ethnic group in the U.S. today numbering forty-two million individuals, Portland's Volga German community nevertheless continues to distinguish itself ethnically through its nostalgia for a unique past.

Denis Ivanovitch Fonvizin is considered to be a pioneer in an original Russian satirical comedy. His plays [Le Brigadier] The Brigadier-General (1769) and [Le Choix d’un gouverneur] The Selection of a Tutor (1789) mock the obsession with France among Russian nobles of the 18th century. These comedies were published during the peak of the influence that the French civilisation had in Russia and, thus, they constitute a mine to tap into to measure the reaction to this phenomenon. In my study, I explore the sociohistorical context of the close contact between France and Russia that has eventually led to Gallomania under the reign of Catherine the Great. I focus particularly on gallophobic attitudes in two plays by Fonvizin, conveyed both by satirical commentaries and the exsessive use of French by some of the characters. My study reveals Fonvizin’s views concerning the negative impact of Gallomania on different aspects of Russian life, such as education, language, patriotism. A multitude of studies have touched on different aspects of the Franco-Russian relations; however, none of them have yet carried out a detailed study of the gallophobic attitudes expressed in 18th century plays, which is crucial given the fact that satirical comedies of that era are intimately related to the political and social life. / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

The object of this study is a translation from Polish to Russian of the Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski’s Kronika Polska, Litewska, Żmódzka i wszystkiej Rusi, made at the Diplomatic Chancellery in Moscow in 1673–79. The original of the chronicle, which relates the origin and early history of the Slavs, was published in 1582. This Russian translation, as well as the other East Slavic translations that are also discussed here, is preserved only in manuscripts, and only small excerpts have previously been published. In the thesis, the twelve extant manuscripts of the 1673–79 translation are described and divided into three groups based on variant readings. It also includes an edition of three chapters of the translation, based on a manuscript kept in Uppsala University Library. There was no standardized written language in 17th-century Russia. Instead, there were several co-existing norms, and the choice depended on the text genre. This study shows that the language of the edited chapters contains both originally Church Slavonic and East Slavic linguistic features, distributed in a way that is typical of the so-called hybrid register. Furthermore, some features vary greatly between manuscripts and between scribes within the manuscripts, which shows that the hybrid register allowed a certain degree of variation. The translation was probably the joint work of several translators. Some minor changes were made in the text during the translation work, syntactic structures not found in the Polish original were occasionally used to emphasize the bookish character of the text, and measurements, names etc. were adapted to Russian norms. Nevertheless, influence from the Polish original can sometimes be noticed on the lexical and syntactic levels. All in all, this thesis is a comprehensive study of the language of the translated chronicle, which is a representative 17th-century text.

Although quite a few researchers have pointed to the significance of the childhood theme in Tsvetaeva’s work, no systematic analysis of her work has been done from this perspective. Nor have her childhood reminiscences been treated as a thematically consistent whole, but have rather been read as instances of the poet’s prose in general. The present study examines Marina Tsvetaeva’s memories of childhood in the context of her work and in the context of the cultural and political reality to which these reminiscences refer and in which they were written—i.e., Russia around the turn of the century and the Russian émigré world of 1930–1937. In the introductory investigation of the presence of the childhood theme in Tsvetaeva’s oeuvre, it is found that idealization of the naive, innocent state is a relatively constant feature and that the childhood memories can be read as a culmination of this set of motives. It is also stated that Tsvetaeva’s continuous striving in her poetry away from the world, out of time, is an integral part of the childhood thematics. This tendency is traced, in connection with the childhood theme, to the influence of writers of the late Russian Symbolist movement as well as to Boris Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke—all with roots in literary Romanticism. Childhood is moreover found to be something of a key theme that reveals fundamental differences in the relation to memory and language among the authors of Russian modernism. In Tsvetaeva' s case it is shown that her childhood memories contain the romantic essence of her aesthetics. The study also touches upon the symbolic and allegorical dimension of the texts—Tsvetaeva’s “otherspeak” in her prose. It is shown that the central scenes of these texts can be read as illustrations of an artistic and linguistic experience. In this regard the author’s narrative of childhood also appears to have been a suitable medium for articulating controversial aesthetic statements and taking a stand for an historical past and literary tradition that at the time seemed doomed to oblivion.

This cross-cultural case study was conducted through questionnaire format by way of email correspondence with eight Russian art educators in May to June 2006. It was conducted to give an initial overview into Russian Art Education from the perspectives of eight Russian art educators. The data was analyzed to discover any commonalities in values, beliefs, and attitudes that may have significance to Americans wishing to learn about the structure, content, and pedagogy of Russian art education. The findings of this study reveal that Russian art educators embrace a very traditional and classical approach to the teaching of art. Today Russian art educators are also working toward a more democratic society through art education. The participant interview responses generally reflected a desire to positively communicate and express their educational ideas and beliefs. Recommendations include further research through additional case studies in different areas of the country and more English translations of Russian art education are suggested.

Abstract The Russia in which Isaak Babel (1894-1940) wrote was one of deep seated anti-Semitic philosophies and prejudices, a place of pogroms and segregation. Literature of this era painted the Jew as a villainous, dishonest, and feeble minded foreign being within society. Traditionally, Russian literature used the Jew as a national scapegoat or a comical stock character ripe for ridicule. Babel’s contemporaries considered him to be a born writer with a gift for minimalism without the sacrifice of vivid description. His was an evocative style of brutal humanism, showing both character flaws and character virtues. The Odesskie rasskazy (Odessa Tales) epitomized this honest approach to human portrayal. The Jewish community of the Odesskie rasskazy boasted a variety of characters from all walks of life, rejecting the previously perpetuated stereotype. The Jew, as shown by Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov, was simply a caricature. Such characters were restricted to the role of the fool, the thief, and the opportunist. When Babel first described the community, people, and culture of his native shtetl, the previous stereotype of the Russian Jew became an antiquated relic of the past. This thesis will explore some examples of earlier depiction of Jews in literature and the humanized image of Russian Jewry that Babel created in his Odesskie rasskazy. The analysis will discuss how these depictions created a new, three dimensional characterization of the Jew.

Abstract The Russia in which Isaak Babel (1894-1940) wrote was one of deep seated anti-Semitic philosophies and prejudices, a place of pogroms and segregation. Literature of this era painted the Jew as a villainous, dishonest, and feeble minded foreign being within society. Traditionally, Russian literature used the Jew as a national scapegoat or a comical stock character ripe for ridicule. Babel’s contemporaries considered him to be a born writer with a gift for minimalism without the sacrifice of vivid description. His was an evocative style of brutal humanism, showing both character flaws and character virtues. The Odesskie rasskazy (Odessa Tales) epitomized this honest approach to human portrayal. The Jewish community of the Odesskie rasskazy boasted a variety of characters from all walks of life, rejecting the previously perpetuated stereotype. The Jew, as shown by Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov, was simply a caricature. Such characters were restricted to the role of the fool, the thief, and the opportunist. When Babel first described the community, people, and culture of his native shtetl, the previous stereotype of the Russian Jew became an antiquated relic of the past. This thesis will explore some examples of earlier depiction of Jews in literature and the humanized image of Russian Jewry that Babel created in his Odesskie rasskazy. The analysis will discuss how these depictions created a new, three dimensional characterization of the Jew.

The word poshlost’ denotes the concepts of banality, vulgarity or phlistinism, and has been an intellectual and cultural obsession since the second half of the nineteenth century, lasting well into the twentieth century. Russian author Vladimir Nabokov attempted to familiarize English-speaking readers with the notion of poshlost’ in his book Nikolai Gogol (1944); it is hard to find any English-language exposition of the term that does not cite Nabokov’s vigorous elaboration of it. Moreover, it is arguably a convention in scholarship to acknowledge the relationship between poshlost’ and Nabokov’s uncompromising moral and aesthetic values. Poshlost’ has often been discussed as a theme in Nabokov’s fiction, and its bearing on Nabokov’s role as a cultural critic has often been assessed, but there are few studies that examine how the concept influences the overall composition and interpretation of his fiction. This thesis examines how poshlost’ functions as a literary device in Nabokov’s final Russian-language novel Dar (1938), which tells the story of an émigré Russian writer living in Berlin in the 1920s. I look at poshlost’ from the perspective of the theories of aesthetic innovation advanced by semiotician and cultural theorist Iurii Lotman, and within this framework I link poshlost’ with the formation and re-formation of the protagonist’s, as well as the author’s, consciousness. I consider it a relational construct rather than simply an immanent feature of the text, as it would be considered in Russian Formalist approaches. Among the topics I focus on are individuation, self-modelling and autocommunication as facets of the process of personal and creative maturation. I argue that poshlost’ serves as a means of modelling Nabokov’s aesthetics as a textual feature and is a multisignifying and a multifaceted device whose overall artistic effect depends on the conditions under which it is employed.

This dissertation analyzes the ideology and activities of the Black Hundred movement at the end of the Imperial period in Russia (1905-1917). It seeks to explain the reasons for the sudden, rapid expansion of Black Hundred organizations in 1905, as well as the causes of their decline, which began just two years after their appearance. It further attempts to elucidate the complex relationship between the Black Hundred and Russian authorities, including the central government and local officials. The problem is approached by offering two distinct perspectives on the Black Hundred. First, a broad overview of the movement is presented. The focus here is on the headquarter branches of Black Hundred organizations in St. Petersburg, but these chapters also look at the activities of many different provincial branches, relating trends in the provinces to events in the center in order to draw conclusions about the nature of the overall movement. Second, this dissertation offers an extended case study of the Black Hundred in the city of Odessa, where a particularly large and violent Black Hundred movement emerged in 1906. It explores the factors that made Odessa conducive to the Black Hundred, and explains events in Odessa as symptomatic of the overall condition of Black Hundred groups. The research is based primarily on material from archives in Moscow and Odessa comprising police reports and resolutions approved at national monarchist congresses. It also draws on memoirs, newspaper accounts from the liberal, leftist, and Black Hundred press, and the secondary literature. The framework primarily consists of analyzing the membership, leadership, ideology, funding, and activities of the Black Hundred organizations that served as the main expression of the monarchist movement. This dissertation concludes that the decline of the Black Hundred cannot be attributed to the harmful actions of government officials, as historians have previously argued. Instead, the movement lost public confidence and fell victim to bitter infighting owing to the corruption of Black Hundred leaders, both in the center and in the provinces. Because Black Hundred organizations enjoyed the backing of many state officials and the outspoken support of the tsar, they were often perceived as officially-sponsored parties. This attracted many unscrupulous members who hoped to use their links to the Black Hundred to cultivate official connections or to identify money-making opportunities. These members, often rising to leadership positions, proved particularly prone to corruption, a habit that ruined the organizations' finances, sparked bitter internecine rivalries, and ultimately discredited the entire movement. / Dissertation