Essays are selected scholarly articles published without prior peer-review process.
It is here claimed that it is practically impossible to determine whether the collector and connoisseur in question (namely Igor Immanuilovich Grabar, 1879—1960) was, indeed, saving his objects from scattering and destruction — or contributing to their further enslavement by exploiting them in a capacity that was radically alien, if not inimical, to their nature.
Essay by
Irina Sandomirskaja
June 18, 2018
The Basilys had both the means and opportunities to collect and exhibit Imperial elite art and books. In doing so, it is argued here that they wished to present an alternative narrative of Russia’s past to the Soviet political, economic, and modernist artistic program that they witnessed unfolding in Soviet Russia.
Essay by
Edward Kasinec
June 18, 2018
Lithuanian architecture of the past 25 years is a mirror of social decomposition is here argued. It is suggested that is should serve as a space for engagement with outcomes of this decomposition instead of glossing over it. Further that architecture and architects might contribute to the dissensus in all spheres of life existing today, or might cultivate fantasies about the social unity and spirituality of their art-craft.
Essay by
Arnoldas Stramskas
June 18, 2018
This paper examines women’s contribution to war and the perceptions of that contribution by comparing experiences of women in the Red Army during the Second World War and in the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the conflict in the Donbas region. Here it is argued that in both cases structural gender discrimination was ingrained in the military, which accepted women’s contribution to war in times of need, but treated that contribution as subsidiary, thereby distorting men’s and women’s experiences of warfare and facilitating the instrumentalized militarization of women.
Essay by
Olesya Khromeychuk
March 8, 2018
Agnieszka Mrozik analyzes the portrayals of women communists in the Stalinist period in Poland, produced in the framework of nationalist history during the illiberal turn. She argues that biographies of women dignitaries served the broader political function of delivering a cautionary tale against “excessive” liberation of women, so that female communists were often presented as beasts and demons rather than political agents.
Essay by
Agnieszka Mrozik
March 8, 2018
This paper is devoted to the semantics of the visual images of the Chinese-Eastern Railroad (KVGD)1 and the “Oriental Other” in the Russian public consciousness of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here it is that the construction of the KVGD was intended to be a symbol of the technological progress and spiritual strength of the Russian Empire in the Russian mass consciousness.
Essay by
Viktoriya Sukovata
March 8, 2018
There are parallels in discussions about monuments in Ukraine and the USA. The reminder of the Soviet past (or in the American context, of the Confederacy) is an abject that is difficult to assimilate. On the one hand, the abject is our unwillingness to see the past and accept it; on the other hand, for those who associate themselves with this past, this is the threat of castration because through the negation of a given past a certain group is cast out from the space of representation. That is why it is questionable whether a monument can be inclusive at all. Which memory does the monument recall? Which past is castrated when a new monument is built? Which groups are fighting for recognition and representation? Which groups lose this right? These questions confront researchers and memory workers and are discussed in this essay.
Essay by
Yuliya Yurchuk
November 10, 2017
That gender cannot be reduced to an ahistorical fact is a widely researched insight of multidisciplinary gender studies. In theory as well as in political practice gender is thus generally understood as a post-essentialist, reflexive, and contingent concept. Against this backdrop the essay asks for the German context in what way and with which intentions, neo-authoritarian discourses and movements explicitly not only reject, attack and defame gender as concept, but also reclaim it. I will argue that under the cipher ‘anti-genderism’, a discourse has been formed that can first be described as a neo-fundamentalist discourse and that is secondly explicitly used to construct racist, neo-authoritarian us/them-dichotomies. The so called anti-gender forces become thus identifiable as the element of a dispositif, which is at the core and subject to further clarification of anti-democratic nature.
Essay by
Sabine Hark
November 7, 2017
This study focuses on three aspects of the geography of Pomerania: The definition of the area, in terms of bordering and containment, its governance, particularly in relation to the third aspect, its demography, in terms of which religious and ethnic groups were allowed in or expelled from the area. In the long history of Pomerania, groups in the area also changed religion or ethnicity.
Essay by
Thomas Lundén
June 19, 2017
New legislation at the end of the 1960s contained clearer procedural rules for marrying and divorcing and material regulations on support payments for children after divorce. Family values and domestic comfort increasingly occupied people’s minds from the 1960s onwards. This decade can be regarded as the point when, for the first time, public demands were made on men to be present in the family and more involved and engaged in their role as fathers.
Essay by
Helene Carlbäck
June 13, 2017