Faith Wigzell

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Jonathan Pitches

University of Leeds

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University of Iceland

Ani Kokobobo

University of Kansas

Vera Shevzov

Smith College

Alaina Lemon

University of Michigan

Wilson Bell

Thompson Rivers University

Igor Pilshchikov

University of California, Los Angeles

Pavel Uspenskij

National Research University Higher School of Economics

Tarik Cyril Amar

Koç University

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University of Glasgow

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Papers by Faith Wigzell

Russian Writers and Society in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Modern Language Review, Oct 1, 1983

$Research paper thumbnail of The staraya skazka of Leskov's \Soboryane\: Archpriests Tuberozov and Avvakum$

The staraya skazka of Leskov's \Soboryane\: Archpriests Tuberozov and Avvakum

Place de la staraja skazka dans la pensee de Leskov: L'abandon de la tradition russe amenera ... more Place de la staraja skazka dans la pensee de Leskov: L'abandon de la tradition russe amenera la Russie a sa perdition. L'A. etudie en detail le personnage de Tuberozov et sa relation litteraire avec Avvakum| a cette lumiere, il estime que Leskov exprime son ideal qui n'est pas, en premier, religieux| celui-ci denonce l'apathie et la lâchete de l'Eglise, mais pense qu'elle est seule capable de realiser son ideal.

Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale by Andreas s> Johns (review)

Slavonic and East European Review

Russian Wondertales. I: Tales of Heroes and Villains; II: Tales of Magic and the Supernatural by Jack V. s> Haney (review)

Slavonic and East European Review

Abstract: Haney, Jack V.(ed., trans.). The Complete Russian Folktale, vols 3 and 4. ME Sharpe, Ar... more

Лѣтопись: 21-24 March 1981, Birmingham: Fifteenth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies. Byzantium and the Slavs

This feature "Chronicle" reports on recent events in the field of Early Slavic, e.g., c... more This feature "Chronicle" reports on recent events in the field of Early Slavic, e.g., celebrations, conferences, symposia, etc. On March 21-24, 1981, in Birmingham, England, the Fifteenth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies was held on the topic of Byzantium and the Slavs. This announcement lists the presentations and their authors. See Polata Knigopisnaia v. 6 (December 1982): 55-63, for more information on this symposium.The 15th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies included presentations by J. Allen, Gordana Babić, Ion Barnea, Yvonne Burns, Slobodan Ćurčić, Simon Franklin, Zaga Gavrilović, Vasil Gjuzelev, Muriel Heppell, Š. Holčik, Peregrine Horden, J. Howard-Johnston, Jana Howlett, F. Kitch, George Majeska, D. Markov, M. Martin, John Meyendorff, Robin Milner-Gulland, J. Opie, Danica Petrović, Günther Prinzing, Jonathan Shepard, Dimitrije Stefanović, G. Stričević, Francis J. Thomson, Vasilka Tŭpkova-Zaimova, William R. Veder, Miloš Velimirović, F. von Lilienfeld, Sara M. Wages, M. Whitby, S. White, E. Tonkin, and Dimitri Obolensky

The dreambook in Russia

Nadia Stangé-Zhirovova. Une autre Russie. Fêtes et rites traditionelles du peuple russe, Paris: Peeters. 1998. xxii + 265 pp. 15 illustrations. Bibliography. Index. ISBN 2-87723-380-4

Folklorica, 2010

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Russian Studies: Literature from the Beginning to 1700

The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies, 2017

The Orthodox Church and Commercial Fortune-Telling and Magic in Russia

Religion, State and Society, 2011

Abstract Based on field work in St Petersburg and supplemented by a range of other sources and ma... more

Russian Writers on Russian Writers

The Modern Language Review, 1997

Writers on writers - introductory essay, R. Aizlewood and F. Wigzell familiar solidarity and squa... more Writers on writers - introductory essay, R. Aizlewood and F. Wigzell familiar solidarity and squabbling - Russia's 18th-century writers, G. Jones Fet on Tiutchev, R. Aizlewood Chekhov and Merezhkovskii, S. le Fleming Shestov on Chekhov, M. Jones Gumilev's reviews of Viacheslav Ivanov's "Cor Ardens" as a tool in the polemics of literary succession, P. Davidson missing links - Russian women writers as critics of women writers, C. Kelly Marina Tsvetaeva as literary critic and critic of literary critics, S. Forrester air, suffocation, muteness - Akhmatova, Mandel'shtam, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva, A. Naiman Joseph Brodsky on Marina Tsvetaeva, H. Gifford Nabokov and Dostoevskii - aesthetic demystification, N. Buhks the myth of the poet and the poet of the myth - poets on Brodsky, V. Polukhina Trifonov on Dostoevskii, D. Gillespie Zinov'ev on Chekhov, M. Kirkwood.

Gogol and Vaudeville

Nikolay Gogol, 1989

Both the production of The Government Inspector and its reception by the illustrious first-night ... more Both the production of The Government Inspector and its reception by the illustrious first-night audience at the Aleksandrinsky Theatre in April 1836 appalled Gogol. His friend Annenkov decribed the occasion in his literary reminiscences: By the end of the first act perplexity was writ on every face … as though no one knew what he should make of the picture that had just been presented. This perplexity increased with every act.1

Dream and Fantasy in Goncharov’s Oblomov

From Pushkin to Palisandriia, 1990

Discussing the processes of literary creation, Goncharov placed his own writing firmly in the cat... more Discussing the processes of literary creation, Goncharov placed his own writing firmly in the category of ‘unconscious creativity’, as opposed to art that stemmed from an idea or concept.1 By this he meant that when his creative imagination was stirred, he saw images and scenes which flowed fluently from his pen. A consequence of Goncharov’s artistic method was that he tended not to write his novels from beginning to end, but to tackle a work piecemeal as his imagination dictated (VIII, 70–71). This spontaneous method, which drew on the unconscious via the imagination, had the effect in his most famous novel, Oblomov (1859), of transforming the character of Il’ia Il’ich Oblomov from a specific social type, a landowner of a particular time and place, into an archetype, something that Goncharov himself realised fully only after the book had appeared (VIII, 71). At the same time he stressed that the roots of his unconscious creativity lay not in fancy but in life: ‘I wrote only what I had experienced, what I thought and loved, and what I saw close at hand and knew, — in a word, I described both my own life and what had become part of it’ (VIII, 113). While the insistence on life as the source of his creativity is typical of contemporary demands that literature reflect life, there is here at the same time an implied disapproval of imagination unfettered by reality.

Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene (eds). Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars

Folklorica, 2010

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Heretz, Leonid. Russia on the Eve of Modernity: Popular Religion and Traditional Culture under the Last Tsars

Folklorica, 2010

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Traditional Magic or European Occultism? Commercial Fortune-Telling and Magic in Post-Soviet Russia and their Relationship to Russian Tradition

Folklorica, 2010

The article examines the vibrant commercial magic and fortune-telling industry in Russia today. B... more The article examines the vibrant commercial magic and fortune-telling industry in Russia today. Based on fieldwork in Petersburg conducted in 2006, supplemented by printed and, in particular, web material, it seeks to show that, despite the many similarities with its counterparts in Europe and North America, Russian fortune-telling and magic are clearly shaped by local traditions. In the context of the article, tradition is taken to include not just rural folk magic and divination, but also urban traditions of the late imperial period as well as those resulting from Soviet policies and practices. It emerges that as far as magic services are concerned, the range of services offered are those demanded by the client, largely stemming from folk tradition. By contrast discourse, approach and ritual often owe much to Western esoteric literature, and perhaps also to pre-Revolutionary occultism and the Soviet interest in psychics. In the case of fortune-telling, today's professionals (gypsies apart) have adopted more complex and sophisticated ways of telling the future (tarot and astrology). Old ways of fortune-telling are so widely known that they must offer something different to clients. Tradition survives in many ways, sometimes transmuted, sometimes partial, but it makes the Russian magic and fortune-telling scene distinctive. Folklorists were never sympathetic to assumptions, usually from outside Russia, that the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 represented a radical break with the Soviet past. They need no convincing that traditions die hard, nor that they evolve in response to social and political change, and, as they do, interact in the modern world with spoken, written and visual media. Consequently, folklorists are able to contribute to the current exploration of continuities and change [e.g. Rouhier Willoughby 2008; Panchenko 2010]. Following this trend, in this article I too focus on continuities in one area of contemporary Russian life, the vibrant commercial magic and fortune-telling scene. In this case tradition encompasses both rural folklore and other traditions, Soviet or earlier, since to separate them seems artificial and impoverishing.

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Reading the future: women and fortune-telling in Russia (1770–1840)

New Perspectives, 1996

Dostoevskii and the Russian folk heritage

The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii

The Ethical Values of Narodnoe Pravoslavie: Traditional Near-Death Experiences and Fedotov

Folklorica, 2010

In 1935 the emigré scholar G. P. Fedotov published an analysis of the ethical values of popular R... more In 1935 the emigré scholar G. P. Fedotov published an analysis of the ethical values of popular Russian Orthodoxy, basing his conclusions on the genre of dukhovnye stikhi (lit. spiritual verses). These religious songs were performed before the Revolution by the blind itinerant singers known as the kaleki or kaliki perekhozhie [Fedotov 1935/1991].(2) For Fedotov the key features of folk Orthodoxy (narodnoe pravoslavie) were the emphasis on life as suffering, the profound sinfulness of man, the belief in the power of Christian love and the attachment to Mother Earth (Mat' syra zemlia) and maternal values in general, with their supreme embodiment in the Mother of God. His view has proved highly influential outside Russia, largely through its distillation in the opening chapter of volume one of The Russian Religious Mind [Fedotov 1946]. Fedotov's influence has perhaps been reinforced by the coincidences between his own concept of folk Orthodoxy and key aspects of Dostoevskii's view of the people (narod), itself based to a considerable extent on the writer's reading of the dukhovnye stikhi [Ivanits 2002; Wigzell 2002b:28-31].(3) In Russia where Fedotov's work began to appear only in 1989, his views have had less impact, while, among folklorists, there is a new interest in and awareness of the complexities of folk ethics [Belova 2002]. In this essay I question the validity of Fedotov's analysis for popular Orthodoxy as a whole by examinng another of the genres of religious folklore, the type of vision known as the obmiranie. So unfamiliar is the obmiranie, except to some folklorists and traditional Orthodox believers, that a definition would seem in order. The term obmirat', self-evidently linked to umirat' (to die), refers both to the state of falling into/being in a coma as well as to the narrative account of what is seen during a coma, that is, essentially a near-death experience. To this day among traditional believers (official Orthodox or Old Believers) in rural Russia as in other Orthodox Slavic countries, the near-death experience is generally believed to consist of a journey to the world beyond the grave.(4) Here the subject most commonly meets relatives, sees the torments of hell and learns the date of his or her own death. Obviously these narratives represent a continuation of early and medieval Christian tradition (Dante's Divine Comedy is the supreme literary example.) Visits to the world beyond the grave were traditionally experienced not only during coma but also as dreams, or, when awake, as visions, but in Orthodox Slavic countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such visions are linked primarily with a coma or unusually prolonged and deep sleep. Indeed, it is traditionally assumed that anyone in this state will visit the afterlife, and in particular hell. During the vision, even when heaven is mentioned, the specific virtues of the blessed are not. Consequently, the ethical emphases of the obmiranie have to be judged largely from the sins mentioned, whether those of categories of sinners, or specific people known to the visionary, including his or her own moral failings. Within the Byzantino-Slavic Orthodox tradition considerable differences exist between accounts of visits to heaven and hell, allowing the visionary to select

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Catherine Merridale. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia.

Folklorica, 2010

For the best part of two years, from 1996 to 1998, the historian Cathy Merridale travelled around... more For the best part of two years, from 1996 to 1998, the historian Cathy Merridale travelled around Russia and parts of the former Soviet Union in the company of her Russian research assistant, an ethnographer. Her aim was a study of mentalité, in this case death à la russe. Basing her work on the oral testimony of survivors (including families of victims), together with memoirs and other written sources, she was looking at the ways the terrible bloodshed, the fifty million lives lost from war, violence, famine and disease between 1914 and 1953, have affected the lives and aspirations of ordinary Russians. Night of Stone is the result. Oral history and folklore study have a good deal in common, especially when the testimony comes from those close to the traditional worldview, and the book does indeed have much to offer the folklorist. Part of this stems from the author's realization that, to understand the specificity of the Russian reaction to the tragedies of their recent history, she needed to be aware of the cultural context, in particular folk funeral rituals and death beliefs. Death

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Nikolay Gogol: Text and Context

The Slavic and East European Journal, 1989

Gogol and vaudeville, F.Wigsell the mirror-world of Gogol's early stories, R.Peace passion ve... more Gogol and vaudeville, F.Wigsell the mirror-world of Gogol's early stories, R.Peace passion versus habit in "Old World Landowners", "Diary of a Madman - the hidden absurd, L.Trott Gogol's "The Nose" or the devil in the works, A.Shukman "Dead Souls" - without naming names, B.Heldt the unwelcome tradition - Bely, Gogol and metafictional narration, R.Keys Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov, L.Milne.

Russian Writers and Society in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Modern Language Review, Oct 1, 1983

$Research paper thumbnail of The staraya skazka of Leskov's \Soboryane\: Archpriests Tuberozov and Avvakum$

The staraya skazka of Leskov's \Soboryane\: Archpriests Tuberozov and Avvakum