Since its inception in 1918, Soviet children’s literature was acclaimed as innovative and exciting, often in contrast to other official Soviet literary production. Indeed, avant-garde artists worked in this genre for the entire Soviet period, although they had fallen out of official favor by the 1930s. This dissertation explores the relationship between the childlike aesthetic as expressed in Soviet children’s literature, the early Russian avant-garde and later post-war unofficial poetry. Even as ‘childlike’ devices were exploited in different ways in different contexts, in the post-war period the characteristic features of this aesthetic had come to be a marker for unofficial art. The introduction presents the notion of the childlike aesthetic, tracing its recent history from Russian modernism and the avant-garde. Chapter One, “Detki v kletke: The Underground Goes into Children’s Literature,” traces the early development of Soviet children’s literature and introduces the work of the OBERIU poets, the “first underground” to be driven by circumstance to write for children. Chapter Two, “‘Playing with Words’: Experimental Unofficial Poetry and Children’s Literature in the Post-war Period,” fast-forwards to the late 1950s-70s, describing the emergence of a more substantial unofficial literary scene alongside still-rigid boundaries within official literature, including children’s. The final two chapters present detailed comparative studies of the work of two post-war unofficial poets from each of the Soviet ‘capitals,’ Moscow and Leningrad: Igor Kholin and Vsevolod Nekrasov, and Leonid Aronzon and Oleg Grigoriev. All of these poets worked in children’s literature and experimented with the childlike aesthetic in their unofficial work. With its roots in folklore, nonsense poetry and nursery rhymes, the childlike aesthetic challenges established notions of logic, propriety and order. Through childlike form and content, unofficial poetry could distinguish itself starkly from its official counterpart. Furthermore, unofficial writers who worked in children’s literature could demonstratively ignore the strict generic boundaries of official literature by blurring them through their own, openly childlike poetry. This dissertation attests to the expressive power, resilience and ongoing relevance of the childlike aesthetic in art, while showing the curious intermingling of literary experiment and children’s literature in Soviet literary history. / Slavic Languages and Literatures

The object of this thesis is to present a reinterpretation of Adam Smith's philosophy. It works to show the pessimistic character of his thought that is so often overlooked by conventional analyses. The skepticism Smith holds for man can be seen in his theories on the accumulation of knowledge, morality, economics, and human progress. By emphasizing Smith's theory of man's subjugation to the natural order, an alternative interpretation is given of liberal economics. The role of God in Smith's philosophy will be shown to serve two purposes. God serves as Smith's final line of explanation, and it also provides humanity beneficial results through unintended outcomes.

The purpose of this Ph.D. thesis on émigré art historians in Britain is not only to show how alien the concept of art history was to the British before 1933, but also to assess and qualify the subsequent practical and theoretical contribution of art historians who immigrated to Britain. These 93 art historians who immigrated to Great Britain after 1933 had a major impact on the British art world. Yet, apart from a few monographs on Sir Ernst Gombrich and Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, no in-depth study has ever been done on this influx of scholars who changed the - picture of art history in Britain and, by extension, worldwide. Part one is a biographical enquiry based on both archival and historical research undertaken in Germany, work done in various private estates and public archives in Britain - the majority of which have never been utilised before - and interviews carried out both in Germany and Britain. It addresses fundamental issues about lewishness and the arts and gives an overview of the stages of Nazi persecution of art-related professions in Central Europe. It then categorises different groups which emerged in Britain between 1933 and 1945, depending on both gender issues and the intellectual background of the emigres. Eventually, it investigates the settlement of émigré art historians in Britain. This involves an analysis of the reasons which led refugee art historians to choose Great Britain as a first exile country. It focuses on help networks, problems of subsistence in a country where art history was under-developed, internment, the role played in the war effort, "Remigration" and, finally, the institutional acceptance of different emigre art historians by British scholars. The second section of my thesis is theoretical. It investigates the intellectual reaction of the émigrés to the British formalist tradition as well as the encounter of British scholars with the Central Europeans' non-aesthetical input. After emigration, some iconographers tried to steer clear of conventional style analysis, Geistesgeschichte or any other method involving criteria based on nationalistic components. It has been noted that émigré art historians took extreme care to winnow out any ideological inflection from their work by undertaking systematic research. However, a case study of the adaptation of the two most prominent emigre art historians emphasises the diversity in this "ideological withdrawal" and demonstrates that emigration was a key factor in their intellectual development. Pevsner's adherence to Hegelian and nationalistic analysis was transformed into a broader international version so as to escape the ideological debate. On the other hand, Gombrich's rejection of systems is an exacerbated phenomenon of the detachment from Hegelian historiography. This part eventually analyses another factor which had a deep influence on the works of the émigrés, i.e. language. Emigration was an important stage in the development of art history as the transfer to a new language helped clarify the art historical terminology of the émigrés. The third part of this thesis sheds some light on the active role of emigre art historians in Britain. It includes substantial work on the influence of the emigres on the structuring of art historical education, a survey of the emigres' new attempts in museology and a study of the unprecedented input of émigré art historians in art collecting, art dealing and art publishing. This thesis shows the extent of the influence of emigre art historians both in intellectual and practical domains. In the realm of theories, the British art theorists acknowledged a need for a more scientific discipline while remaining very attached to their tradition of "art appreciation", and the same phenomenon applied to their attitude towards art-historical education. In the practical arena, the British art scene was also professionalised through this influx of scholars. This Ph.D. thesis concludes that the post-1933 emigration of art historians professionalised the British art world but that this was achieved through a popularisation of the methods and techniques originally imported by the emigres.

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Cette thèse porte sur le problème du nihilisme. Elle se veut plus particulièrement une exploration des interprétations de ce phénomène proposées par Friedrich Nietzsche et Fédor Dostoïevski dans certaines de leurs oeuvres. Elle cherche à répondre à deux questions, en particulier: d'abord, que veut dire exactement le nihilisme pour chacun des auteurs; ensuite, pourquoi et comment on doit, selon eux, lutter contre le problème qu'il représente. Pour répondre à ces questions, on s'attardera à l'étude de concepts tels que la «volonté», les «valeurs», la «foi», la «liberté» et la «vie». L'homme atteint de la maladie du nihilisme n'est pas un homme libre. La solution à ce problème se trouve donc dans l'idée d'une certaine forme de foi, une foi qui rend libre en offrant des paramètres à la liberté de l'homme. Car une liberté sans limites ne peut que se transformer en absence de liberté. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This study treats in detail one of the significant themes of world literature in the narratives of the Russian writer L. N. Tolstoy. The theme of death, its modalities, motifs and related aspects, occur frequently in all of Tolstoy's artistic and philosophical writings. He presents this theme in connection with other dominant themes such as appearance and reality, falsity and truth, the attempts and failures to materialize individuals' objectives, all in various contexts of life--both private and public, and especially military life. The selection of themes such as sexuality, violence, or the transgression of moral laws, also affects the presentation of the theme of death. Instead of focusing on one pair of dominant semantic fields, Tolstoy (in the majority of his narratives) connects several of them equally. There are very few of his works in which one semantic field dominates. In accordance with Realist poetics, Tolstoy presents the theme of death directly; references to death on an allegorical or symbolic level occur in only a few of his narratives. In his early works, Tolstoy varies not only the fundamental modalities, but also the basic modes of violent and natural death. The presentation of a theme in a narrative differs depending on the length of the narrative. In his shorter prose fiction, Tolstoy concentrates the theme of death into specific passages, while its presentation in the longer narratives is distributed throughout the texts. In presenting the various characters, his narrators reveal their philosophies of life, which are particularly apparent in the borderline situation of death and dying. Members of different social classes display, as a rule, contrasting philosophies in revealing their attitudes and reactions--a trend which is again noticeable both in Tolstoy's major prose and in his late narratives. The author's focus on introspection (although in his early prose members of the lower classes are excluded from this technique) continues to play an important role in his late work as well. The author uses typical narrative devices such as anticipation, retrospection, association and paradox in the depiction of this complex theme as he attempts to 'de-romanticize', 'de-sensationalize' and 'de-dramatize' this topic. Despite the general tendency to omit the actual moment of death, there are a few works in which the horror of violent death shocks the reader. As for artistic development in presenting this theme, Tolstoy continues to employ a basic stock of devices and techniques already manifest in his early works.