Universiẗat, Diss., 2006--Freiburg (Breisgau).

(in English) The present thesis titled "Untranslatable from Sorokin", is applying both theoretical and empirical approach. Particular attention is paid especially to translations from Russian to Czech language. This thesis focuses on common translation problems while working with books of Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin. The introduction to the theoretical part of the present study is devoted to general theoretical framework of translatological analysis of specific translation problems. In next step the most common difficulties are defined and systemized in several groups like author's neologism, foreign language lexicon, etc.. Empirical part of this thesis focuses on solving of particular translation problems and its analysis. These problems are also explained using examples from works of Vladimir Sorokin. The main goal of the thesis is partly to simplify understanding of Sorokin's books, but mainly to ease the work for translators. Various ways of dealing with difficultly translatable or completely untranslatable parts of Sorokin's books can then also help translators who translate another works from different authors.

O presente trabalho apresenta uma tradução direta do russo para o português da peça O jubileu ( - Iubilei) de Vladímir Gueórguievitch Sorókin. Nessa peça, o autor parodia textos dramatúrgicos de Anton Tchékhov e se utiliza também da sátira às instituições soviéticas. Em nossa análise, captamos algumas características essenciais da dramaturgia de Sorókin, que são também comuns a grande parte da literatura russa contemporânea, ou específicas do estilo do autor. Partimos de conceitos de sátira, grotesco e especialmente de paródia, estudados por Linda Hutcheon, Mikhail Bakhtin e Giorgio Agamben, e, no Brasil, por Arlete Cavaliere, Affonso Romano de Sant\'Anna, Bóris Schnaiderman, Flávio R. Khote, entre outros. / The present study introduces the direct translation from Russian into Portuguese of the play Anniversary ( Iubilei) by Vladimir Gueorguievitch Sorokin. In this play, the author parodies dramaturgical texts by Anton Chekhov and lampoons Soviet institutions. In our analysis, we collected some essential characteristics of Sorokins play-writing, that are either common to most of contemporary Russian literature or proper to the authors style. We considered concepts of satire, grotesco and especially parody, studied by Linda Hutcheon, Mikhail Bakhtin and Giorgio Agamben, and, in Brazil, by Arlete Cavaliere, Affonso Romano de Sant\'Anna, Bóris Schnaiderman, Flávio R. Khote, among others.

O presente trabalho apresenta uma tradução direta do russo para o português da peça O jubileu ( - Iubilei) de Vladímir Gueórguievitch Sorókin. Nessa peça, o autor parodia textos dramatúrgicos de Anton Tchékhov e se utiliza também da sátira às instituições soviéticas. Em nossa análise, captamos algumas características essenciais da dramaturgia de Sorókin, que são também comuns a grande parte da literatura russa contemporânea, ou específicas do estilo do autor. Partimos de conceitos de sátira, grotesco e especialmente de paródia, estudados por Linda Hutcheon, Mikhail Bakhtin e Giorgio Agamben, e, no Brasil, por Arlete Cavaliere, Affonso Romano de Sant\'Anna, Bóris Schnaiderman, Flávio R. Khote, entre outros. / The present study introduces the direct translation from Russian into Portuguese of the play Anniversary ( Iubilei) by Vladimir Gueorguievitch Sorokin. In this play, the author parodies dramaturgical texts by Anton Chekhov and lampoons Soviet institutions. In our analysis, we collected some essential characteristics of Sorokins play-writing, that are either common to most of contemporary Russian literature or proper to the authors style. We considered concepts of satire, grotesco and especially parody, studied by Linda Hutcheon, Mikhail Bakhtin and Giorgio Agamben, and, in Brazil, by Arlete Cavaliere, Affonso Romano de Sant\'Anna, Bóris Schnaiderman, Flávio R. Khote, among others.

The aim of this dissertation is to study the evolution of the Russian anti-utopian literary genre in the new post-Soviet environment in the wake of the defunct Soviet socialist utopia. The genre has gained a renewed importance during the 2000s, and has been used variously as a means of dealing satirically with the Soviet past, of understanding the present, and of pondering possible courses into the future for the Russian Federation. A guiding question in this study is: What makes us recognize a novel as anti-utopian at a time when the idea of utopia may appear obsolete, when the hegemony of nation states has been challenged for several decades, and when art has been drawn towards the aesthetics of hybridity? The main part of the dissertation is comprised of detailed analyses of three novels: The Slynx (Kys', 2001) by Tatyana Tolstaya; Homo Zapiens/Babylon (Generation ‘P’, 1999) by Viktor Pelevin; and Ice Trilogy (Ledianaia Trilogiia, 2002−2005) by Vladimir Sorokin. The further development of the genre is subsequently discussed on the basis of seven novels published in the past decade. A main argument in the dissertation is that the genre has been modified in ways which can be seen as a response to social and political changes on a global scale. The waning power of the nation state, in particular, and its broken monopoly as the bearer of social projects marks a new context, which is not shared by the classic works of the genre. Analysis of this evolution in post-Soviet anti-utopian novels draws on sociological as well as literary studies. The dissertation shows how the analysed novels use the possibilities of the genre to problematize various forms of societal discourse, and how these discourses work as mutations of utopia. Prominent among these are historical discourses, which reflect the increasing importance of historical narratives in public political debates in the Russian Federation.

This thesis is the first book-length study to explore the function of Russian obscene language (mat) in late Soviet and post-Soviet prose published between the late 1970s and the late 1990s. This period was characterised by radical socio-ideological transformations that also found expression in major shifts of established literary and linguistic norms. The latter were particularly strongly reflected in the fact that obscene language, which was banned from official Soviet discourse, gradually found its way into literary texts, thereby changing the notion of literary language and literature. The thesis breaks new ground by employing obscene language as a prism through which to demonstrate how its emergence in literature reflected and contributed to the shifts of established literary norms and boundaries. A second aim of the thesis is to trace the diachronic development of Russian literary mat. Primary sources include novels by authors pioneering the use of mat in fiction in the late 1970s, as well as texts by writers associated with ‘alternative prose’ and postmodernism. Applying a methodological framework that is based on an approach combining Bakhtinian dialogism with cultural narratology, the study demonstrates what the use of mat means and accomplishes in a given literary context. The methodological framework offers a systematic approach that does justice to the dynamic relationship between text and context, allowing for an analysis of the role of obscene language on all narrative levels while also taking the socio-historical context into account. The thesis offers not only new ways of interpreting the novels selected, it also provides new insight into the role of verbal obscenity in the process of ‘norm negotiation’ that has shaped and transformed Russian literary culture since the late 1970s. By accentuating the dialogic nature of obscene language, this study reveals that mat is a defining element of Russian (literary) culture, with implications for all facets of Russian identity.

Pitirim A. Sorokin est l'un des plus importants sociologues américains du XXe siècle. Ses contributions à la sociologie sont non seulement nombreuses, mais surtout diversifiées. La majorité de ses ouvrages furent traduits et toutes les grandes langues du monde ont accès à au moins un de ses livres. Cependant, en Occident, sa carrière précédant son émigration aux États-Unis fut longtemps négligée, les critiques s'intéressant plutôt à ses écrits post-Russie. Par ailleurs, très peu d'écrits francophones existent sur cette grande figure de la sociologie américaine. Remédiant à cette situation, ce mémoire revisite la vie et l'oeuvre de Sorokin en Russie et présente aux lecteurs contemporains la partie éclipsée de sa carrière. Plus précisément, la recherche porte sur la carrière russe de Pitirim A. Sorokin d'un point de vue biographique et sociologique. La question au coeur du travail est la suivante : Comment expliquer la production sociologique de Pitirim A. Sorokin en Russie? Dans une première partie est présentée sa biographie entre 1889 et 1923. L'objectif est de décrire la formation de son habitus et les diverses positions qu'il occupa. La seconde partie, quant à elle, résume les recherches produites par le sociologue avant son exil et montre en quoi ses prises de positions scientifiques furent déterminées par son parcours. / Pitirim Aleksandrovich Sorokin is one of the greatest American sociologists of the XXth century. His contributions to sociology are not only numerous but, more importantly, diversified. The majority of his writings have been translated and most of the languages of the world have at least access to one of his books. Nonetheless, in the Western world, his career before his emigration to the United-States has been neglected for a long time, because his critics were mostly interested in his writings post-Russia. Furthermore, very few French writings exist on this classic of American sociology. Solving this situation, this memoir revisit the life and work of Sorokin in Russia and presents to contemporary readers the eclipsed part of his career. More to the point, this research focuses on the Russian career of Pitirim A. Sorokin from a biographical and sociological point of view. The question at the center of it is as follow : How can one explain the sociological production of Pitirim A. Sorokin in Russia? In the first part, his biography from 1889 to 1923 will be presented. The objective is to describe the development of his ''habitus'' and the diverse positions that he occupied. The second part summarizes the researches produced by the sociologist before his exile and explain his scientific positions.

In my dissertation Theory of Petrified Worlds on the Example of Anti-Utopian and Dystopian Literature, I deal with anti-utopian and dystopian literature, which has been largely neglected by Czech scholarship. After the introduction to the issue I deal with the detailed analysis of the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, after which I devote my attention to the theoretical definition of terms, including the historical mapping of previous research. I focus on the historical context of the emergence of the genres, including a deeper analysis of its beginnings, i.e. the development of utopian literature from Plato to William Morris and Herbert George Wells, and in detail describe the emergence of anti-utopian literature primarily as an opposition to utopian tendencies and its evolution into dystopia. A major part of the work deals with a specific semiotic analysis of the characteristic and constitutive features of the genres of anti-utopian and dystopian literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. This includes, among other things, the closed and petrified world of the novels, which gave the name to the presented theory, the strict division of society, the existence of newspeak, the characteristics of the main and secondary characters, as well as the social and political context of the analysed works. In...

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the rapid growth of musical culture in Russia. This resulted in a large repertoire of piano music — ranging from miniatures to virtuosic etudes and sonatas. Growing out of the nineteenth century romantic tradition, and highly influenced by the social conditions of the time, Russian composers developed a distinctive style which closely reflected their culture, personalities and ideologies. There are several approaches to studying performance practice. One is to study the interpretations of other pianists. While this does have many advantages, it has not been adopted in this paper as it has one flaw: it still fails to capture the distinctive language of these composers. Rather, the paper will study the social and musical influences on the composers, and, more importantly, their philosophies about pianism and the purpose of music. This will be related to interpretative issues in the works. The repertoire has been divided into four areas. The paper commences with a study of the miniature, which is valuable in finding the ‘essence’ of a composer’s musical language expressed on a small scale. Here, the ‘elementary’ considerations in performance practice will be studied. The second chapter discusses etudes. This is useful in gaining an insight into composers’ conception of technique, and how this relates to performance practice. The third chapter deals with music that has extra-musical themes. This provides opportunity for a more detailed cultural and biographical study of the composers. To represent the large-scale repertoire of Russian composers, the sonata will be studied. Here, a detailed analysis of the composers’ musical language and its relationship to expression will be discussed. / Masters Thesis

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.