Abstract
Although Russian medievalism has often been employed in the service of a modern national (and even nationalist) discourse, not least by the Russian state itself, its sources in cultures that predate the modern nation-state and, in some cases, are outside the ethnic orbit of the East Slavs, has often rendered it paradoxically anti-national. For every government-inspired creation – from the “Byzantine-style” Church of Christ the Savior in nineteenth-century Moscow to the current Patriarch’s militaristic “Prayer for Holy Rus’” (in Church Slavonic) during the Russian invasion of Ukraine – there are counter-examples that undermine official discourse, from Leskov’s medievalist versions of hagiographies, that employ Church Slavonic in the service of a radical revision of Eastern Christianity and bypass the East Slavs altogether, to Vodolazkin’s 2012 Laurus, that emphasizes the interconnected, boundary-crossing nature of the recreated medieval world of the novel. This paper examines the competing narratives of Russian medievalism and their paradoxical cultural products.
Presenters
Michael MakinProfessor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, Michigan, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Russia, Medievalism, Nation, Modernity, Culture
