The presented work focuses on the history of Russian America, the only Russian overseas colony located in the territory of today's American state of Alaska, specifically it is concerned with the middle period of its existence, i.e. between the years 1784 and 1818. After a brief introduction of the beginnings of Russian presence in the North Pacific, the thesis deals with its main topics. The first one is the organization of voyages to the islands and the mainland of Russian America. Commercial hunting companies are introduced in this context as a subject representing eastern Russian expansion and the characteristics of hunting expeditions are analysed in detail. The second, key part of the thesis is the analysis of the Russian colonization of Alaska in terms of the relations between Russians and the indigenous people, the creation of base structures and the competitive struggles of Russian traders. Comparison with colonization practices of other colonizing states in this area - Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America - is also included. This chapter is followed by the analysis of the administration of Russian America and its development since the times of hunting-and-trading companies, to the activities of the Russian-American company, a semi-governmental organization with the...

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T14:16:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 CarlosNegretti.pdf: 1213179 bytes, checksum: b4db34b2eaca3e036fb14e0b7dc37436 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-06-08 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The Russian biochemist Alexandre Ivanovicth Oparin , in 1924 in the former Soviet Union wrote an article in which he puts forward his hypothesis about a delicate subject in the history of biology: the origin of life on Earth. Proposes his hypothesis about th origin of life relating the biological evolution mainly the Natural Selection Theory of Charles Darwin with the Dialectic Materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. There are some disagreements about the nature of such relation, which is considered by some authors coherent and by others just adequate to political pressures of the Stanilist regime in the former Soviet Union. From a comparative analysis between the books of Engels mainly Dialectic of Nature, in with his conception of nature and dialectic materialism are present and Oparin s articles, this work shows that such concepts helped Oparin to develop his lage hypothesis with a sophistication in terms of argument, to the philosophical point of view as well as experimental / O bioquímico russo Alexandre Ivanovicth Oparin publica, em 1924, na antiga União Soviética, um artigo contendo sua hipótese acerca de um ponto considerado nevrálgico da história da biologia: o problema da origem da vida na Terra. Oparin propõe sua hipótese sobre a origem da vida relacionando o evolucionismo biológico, principalmente a teoria da seleção natural de Charles Darwin, com o materialismo dialético de Karl Marx e Friedrich Engels. Há divergências quanto à natureza de tal relação, considerada, por alguns autores, coerente e, por outros, forçada por pressões políticas presentes no contexto em que Oparin viveu, sob o regime stalinista da antiga União Soviética. A partir de uma análise comparativa entre os livros de Engels principalmente Dialética da natureza, no qual sua concepção de natureza e do materialismo dialético são presentes e publicações de Oparin, este trabalho mostra que tais concepções serviram a este último para o desenvolvimento posterior de sua hipótese, como uma certa sofisticação em termos de argumentos, tanto do ponto de vista filosófico como experimental

This dissertation examines Russian fantastical travel narratives from 1784 to 1855, an era of substantial imperial conquest, in which authors of various backgrounds, both Russian and non-Russian, wrestled with questions of cultural identity and the prospects for Russia’s development on the global scale, while in a profound but often contentious relationship with the countries of Western Europe. My chapters cover three different categories of fantastic travel. The first includes journeys to undiscovered space, including Antarctica and the Moon (in works by Shcherbatov, Lyovshin, Kiukhelbeker, and Senkovsky), which largely criticize Russian expansionism. The second is stories of travel to or in the distant future (Vilgelm Kiukhelbeker, Faddei Bulgarin, and Vladimir Odoevsky), which project a more positive view of Russian imperial destiny. The third category is metafictional travel, through maps and the written page (Veltman), which deconstructs the very notion of imperial reality. I argue that writers employed the genre of fantastic travel literature, as well as specific devices such as dreams and frame narratives, to critically interrogate and reshape the imperial and national ideologies of their time. These works anticipate modern science fiction by using a wide range of spatial and temporal settings to create new worlds that highlight the possibilities or faults of their own societies, for satirical or didactic purposes—and as such they benefit from the application of recent theories of science fiction. Given the diverse range of authors and time periods I investigate, my work also has a taxonomic purpose, delineating the thematic evolution of fantastic travel narratives in different categories and paving the way for more targeted analyses of these understudied works.

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.