Cette thèse présente la première monographie française sur le grand écrivain russe et sibérien Victor Astafiev. Peu traduite en français, son œuvre importante (15 volumes) est généralement considérée par la critique comme s’inscrivant dans la veine de la prose rurale qui se développa en Russie à partir des années 70. Cependant, la biographie de l’écrivain et la multiplicité des thèmes qu’il aborde (société, guerre, musique, sons et nature) impose une remise en question de cette interprétation. L’auteur de la thèse s’attache à analyser finement les textes mis en contexte, à étudier l’évolution et la spécificité linguistique de leur écriture pour situer Astafiev dans la tradition de la grande littérature russe et faire apparaitre la profondeur et l’actualité de ses écrits. Le volume II livre une série de traductions inédites, annotées et commentées, ainsi que les versions reconstituées de chansons dont les textes révèlent un trésor de la culture populaire de l’époque. / This thesis presents the first French monograph on the great Russian and Siberian writer, Viktor Petrovich Astafiev. His important work (15 volumes), little-translated into French, is generally praised by critics as taking place within the same framework of the Village Prose, which started growing in Russia from the seventies onwards. However, the biography of the writer and the multiple themes which he takes up (society, war, music, sounds and nature) call into question this interpretation. The thesis author attempts to carry out a shrewd analysis of the texts placed within their context and to study the linguistic development as well as the specificity of Astafiev writings in order to situate him in the tradition of the great Russian literature and to highlight the depth and the topicality of his work. The second volume delivers a whole series of unpublished translations, duly annotated and commented as well as restored versions of songs, the texts of which reveal a treasure of the popular culture in the context of that time.

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This dissertation establishes a category of early Soviet “exodic” literature, which consists of works published in Yiddish or Russian between 1917 and 1935. Reading together texts by Peretz Markish, Andrei Platonov, Moyshe Kulbak, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, Yiddish texts are placed on equal footing with Russian texts to underscore the singular role of Jews in the early Soviet period and demonstrate shared anxieties and practices of resistance to hegemony among groups seemingly separated by language and culture. These anxieties and modes of resistance are what make the Soviet exodic a literature of revolution as it grapples with the complexity of the Soviet period and Soviet identity formation. Drawing upon political theorist Michael Walzer and his text Exodus and Revolution as well as the critical response from Edward Said, this dissertation uses the biblical book of Exodus as a theoretical matrix for the identification and elaboration of narrative sequences and thematic material that constitute a revolutionary genre and applies it to the study of early Soviet literature. Because they are written and published between 1917 and 1935, exodic texts are positioned between the Bolshevik Revolution and the crystallization of high Stalinism. Therefore, they are situated within what is commonly known as the “interwar period.” Such a definition relies upon absence (the absence of war). The Soviet exodic provides this historical moment and its attending texts a positive definition in deference to the revolutionary framework that guides it. This dissertation also considers how the texts enact revolution with the help of critical and queer theory, most notably Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and Mary Rubenstein’s Pantheologies. These theoretical supports serve to articulate the various queer—that is, non-normative—ways that the selected texts engage pluralism to resist ideological regimes and forces of control as they re-evaluate social and political categories and norms. Queer theory also serves to express the entanglement of self, other, and place, and in so doing, brings ecological anxieties to the fore. Resistance in the Soviet exodic thus takes shape through the queering or misalignment of categories like space, language, or gender performance, and culminates in the figure of the Soviet trickster, who, by means of their unfinalizability, is the embodiment of revolution.

Переводы, не учитывающие культурные особенности, оказываются слабыми и мало отражающими писательский замысел. Самую большую трудность вызывают не языковые различия, но элементы культуры, представляющие внеязыковую реальность, связанную с внутренними проявлениями культуры. Существующая концепция принципиальной непереводимости и вовсе говорит о том, что невозможно перевести что-либо с одного языка на другой из-за существующих лингвистических и культурных различий. Данная работа направлена на то, чтобы показать возможность адекватной передачи культурного контекста в переводе на примере публикаций произведений Н. В. Гоголя в Японии. / Translations, which are not culturally sensitive, are weak and little reflect the writer's intent. The greatest challenge is not only the language differences, but elements of culture, which represents extra-linguistic reality associated with the internal’s manifestations of culture. The concept of principled untranslatability suggests that it is impossible to translate anything from one language to another because of linguistic and cultural differences. This work is going to demonstrate the possibility of an adequate cultural context transfer in translation using the example of N.V. Gogol’s publications in Japan.

Present Perfect is part intellectual history of the discourse of humanism in twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Russian culture, and part cultural history of the New Man in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, looking primarily at works of Soviet and post-Soviet fantastika (science fiction and fantasy). The study employs a critical posthumanist methodology drawn from the work of Jean-François Lyotard, and his concept of “rewriting” modernity (here transformed into “rewriting humanism”), and the posthumanist theorization of scholars like Rosi Braidotti and Stefan Hebrechter. The first chapter covers the pre- and post-revolutionary periods, the second chapter the post-Stalinist period, and the third the post-Soviet. The first chapter looks at critiques of humanism in the non-fictional works of religious philosophers and writers (Fedorov, Berdiaev, Ivanov, Merezhkovsky), Soviet ideologues and writers (Lunacharsky, Trotsky, Bukharin, Gorky), and some writers who fall between the two poles (Blok, Mandelshtam, Lezhnev), and covers texts published between 1906 and 1934. The second chapter deals with the works of the Strugatsky brothers’ Noon Universe series (1961-86) and the figure of the “Progressor” as the New Man. The third chapter looks at novels by three authors: Petrushevskaya’s Nomer Odin (2004), Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F. (2011), and Sorokin’s Ice trilogy (2002-05). These works attest to the inextricable interpenetration of the posthuman with the human, of posthumanism with humanism, of the post-Soviet with the Soviet. The study demonstrates how humanism and posthumanism function dialectically: in the best-case scenario, they negate one another to come to a more whole understanding of the human; in the worst-case scenario, this dialectic creates an increasingly more exclusive humanism that reserves the title of ideal subject for fewer and fewer. Moreover, Present Perfect argues that the New Man (that “ideal subject”) in Soviet and post-Soviet fiction is best conceptualized as a field of competing discourses, which fall along three lines of development: the animal-man, the machine-man, and the god-man, each with their own critical orientation toward humanism. In both the Soviet and post-Soviet context, writers like the Strugatsky brothers, Petrushevskaya, Pelevin, and Sorokin employ a critical posthumanism to demonstrate, on the one hand, how the New Man is used as a tool for discursive domination that denies otherness, and on the other, how the New Man can be reconceptualized as a tool for a liberatory ethics that affirms it.

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This dissertation examines Soviet and Polish science fiction from the 1960s to 1980s as a political genre that investigates power and society. The problem of alterity is central for this genre: it is ungovernable because it is incomprehensible. Science fiction of this kind explores the possibilities and impossibilities of living with the Other that can impact social organization dramatically and lethally while that Other cannot be impacted in return. Living peacefully with such alterity is the fundamental premise of pluralism as a principle of social organization, according to the conclusions of the study. The dissertation explores alterity in science fiction by Ivan Efremov (1908–1972), Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1925–1991 and 1933–2012), Stanisław Lem (1921–2006), and Volodymyr Savchenko (1933–2005). My goal is to reveal in their works a transformative epistemological shift that had manifested itself through the tropes of alterity. Among these tropes the dissertation highlights aliens and alien civilizations, artificial intelligence, anisotropic universe, distant planets endowed with unique natural attributes, the more abstract unknown, and non-human elements running out-of-control within human species. I also examine specifically science-fictional notions such as the bull and progressor, which represent the intelligentsia’s relations with power and the masses. The analyzed literary worlds also represent their authors’ views of alternative societal organization, ruled by the powerful alterity such as a mega-computer or alien super-intelligence. Another important trope of alterity is based upon a simultaneous performance of contradictory competing logics that create an effect known as parallax: the reader may interpret the same characters and/or stories in multiple, mutually incompatible, ways. Beyond avoiding censorship, these tropes set the stage for the authors’ utopias, in which the Other appears as an impenetrable alterity that affects those who encounter it. For these writers, alterity serves as the tool for problematizing progress, as it was imagined after World War II by the majority of political elites under socialism and in the West. I suggest that their science fiction contributed, among many other factors, to the lexicon and the imaginary of a cohort of political dissidents and Communist Party functionaries alike who translated science-fictional themes into political science terms to shape Perestroika’s discourse. The dissertation, thus, establishes a historical connection between Soviet and Polish science fiction of the post-Stalin period and the ways in which democracy was discursively constructed in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other former socialist nations.

1 online resource (181 leaves) / This study relies on ecocriticism as the discipline benefitting the analysis of the imagery of nature in Konstantin Paustovsky’s prose. The objective of this approach is to demonstrate that Paustovsky’s prose goes beyond of what was expected from a Soviet writer by the socialist realist dogma. This thesis attempts to prove that an ecocritical approach validates his prose as being universal in its message and thus relevant to contemporary readers. Scholars of ecocriticism ask the following questions when analysing a nature-orientated prose: what values are expressed in nature-orientated literature, does the portrayal of nature reflects the cultural values of a nation as well as the way in which a person’s interaction with his natural environment enhances or hampers his spiritual development. The timeframe, within which Paustovsky wrote his prose, should be taken into account, because it coincides with the Lenin and Stalin regimes, when any criticism of the government including its nature conservation policies was impossible. The analysis of attitudes of the Russian people towards nature in Paustovksy’prose demonstrates that it evolved from the acceptance of the official stand to the one of criticism. This research resulted in the following conclusions: Firstly Paustovsky’s view with regard to ecological problems and his solutions to these problems are on par with those of modern ecologists. The writer, for example, proposes a holistic way to undertake nature conservation, such as replacing ruined forests by the same type of trees, not interfering in the cycles of nature and stresses the importance of scientific information on how to care of the natural environment. Secondly, it is through his presentation of nature that the author familiarises the reader with the essence of the Russian culture, which is totally intertwined with the manifestations of Russian nature, such as folklore, superstitions, cultural traditions and values attached to certain animals and trees Thirdly, it has been established that the ‘external’ natural landscape of a person namely his environment, undoubtedly influences his ‘internal landscape’, his psyche. This implies that the natural environment of a person will have an influence on his psychological make-up. It is assumed that this study, in particular the use of ecocriticism as a tool to analyse literature where nature plays a role, will shed new light on the role of nature in Russian prose. This is especially the case with regard to the way in which ecological issues such as nature conservation are treated. / Classics & World Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (Russian)

O presente trabalho tem por objetivo a análise da evolução da semiótica da cultura na obra de estudioso da cultura e literatura, crítico e filósofo russo Iúri Lótman por meio de traduções e dos comentários concernentes aos seus ensaios, escritos em diferentes épocas e dedicados aos principais conceitos da semiótica da cultura, tais como o fenômeno da cultura e os seus processos dinâmicos, o fenômeno da arte, o problema do texto, a memória cultural e a semiosfera. A obra de Lótman enquanto semioticista é inseparável do contexto histórico dos estudos da literatura, linguística, semiótica, cultura tanto na Rússia, quanto no Ocidente. Entre os seus precursores russos estão os escritores e os filósofos do século XIX e, no século XX, os simbolistas, os futuristas e os formalistas. A essência da semiótica da cultura lotmaniana começou a se formar no âmbito da Escola Semiótica de Tártu- Moscou e com a base na tradição dos estudos linguísticos, já nos trabalhos posteriores ela adquiriu um caráter mais filosófico, ao lidar com a imprevisibilidade dos processos culturais universais. Definimos ainda os pontos de coerência entre as ideias de Lótman e a obra dos estruturalistas e pós-estruturalistas franceses, além de Mikhail Bakhtin e Umberto Eco. / The present work aims at analyzing the development of semiotics of culture in the work of Russian culture and literature scholar, critic and philosopher Yuri Lotman through translation and commentary of his essays, written at different periods and dedicated to the core concepts of semiotics of culture, such as culture phenomenon and its dynamic processes, the phenomenon of art, the problem of the text, the cultural memory and semiosphere. Lotman`s work as a semiotician is inseparable from the historical context of the literature, linguistics, semiotics and culture studies both in Russia and the West. Among his precursors are Russian writers and philosophers of the nineteenth and twentiethcentury, the symbolists, futurists and formalists. The essence of Lotman`s semiotics of culture began to form in the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School on the basis of language studies tradition, though in later works he developed a more philosophical approach, dealing with the unpredictability of universal cultural processes. Further, we point out the connection between Lotman\'s ideas and work of French structuralists and poststructuralists, Mikhail Bakhtin and Umberto Eco.