Pod Stalinem: Field notes from another modernity

Anthropology & Materialism, 1 (2013), 2013

In his methodology as well as his political thought Benjamin remains faithful to the principle to proceed “always radically, never consistently”. Therefore, the greatest challenge for a contemporary city researcher inspired by Benjamin is to operationalise his materialist methodology. Benjamin’s anthropological materialism cannot be reached within the fixed limits of any discipline, but rather places itself “on the crossroads of magic and positivism” (Adorno); the dialectical image is not a tool of his methodology but its culminating point where positivism turns to magic. To reach this point, Benjamin conducts perceptive and Striking Dialectical Sparks from the Stones of our Cities 18 Anthropology & Materialism, 1 | 2013 analytical experiments that can be treated as dialectical études, exercises in seeing. The paper examines some of these techniques, exploring their philosophical context and testing them on a contemporary example: the Ernst-Thälmann-Monument in Berlin.

Ders., Ingrid Fleischmann, Albrecht Greule (Hgg.), …, 2007

Southeastern Europe 38/2-3 (2014): 292-297

2018

The story of the towns of Most, the old town whose fate was sealed by rich deposits of brown coal beneath its surface, and the new one built on a ‘green’ field, is also called by Matěj Spurný an experiment in the application of the paradigm of the scientific and technical revolution and its repercussions. The author creates a sophisticated image of a dead town’s autopsy (archaeological, civil-historical, ethnographic or sociological research conducted in the ghost town since the 1960s), and at the same time a laboratory, not only of modernity but also in the sense of an artistic reflection of condemned urbanism. This may imply the fact that more such stories have unfolded on a small scale. But, this is not just a question of demolition of a single settlement that kept alive the memory of several generations. With this story, Spurný aims to show the transformation of the legitimacy of state socialism from the 1940s until the end of the 1980s, i.e. the stability and the renewed consen...

Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2017

Already during my undergraduate studies in South Africa (Stellenbosch 1982-4) I encountered the tradition of critical theory and the name of Ju ¨rgen Habermas. During my master studies in Pretoria (on philosophical hermeneutics and postmodernism) I touched upon the Habermas-Gadamer debate. Hereafter I had the wonderful opportunity to study for two semesters in Germany. In a magical summer semester (Frankfurt 1989), I did not only attend the lectures and seminars of Ju ¨rgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel and Hubert Dreyfus (guest professor), but also the seminar of the young Axel Honneth (Habermas' assistant) where I also met Rainer Forst. When I returned to South Africa to do my doctorate on Habermas' aesthetics in Port Elizabeth, I stayed in contact with Honneth and Forst. It was through their goodwill that I got my first invitation to Prague in April 1994. That first Prague conference is still vivid in my mind. The old city with its cobblestones, mysterious alleys, the Charles Bridge in all its splendor and the castle on the top of the hill was just emerging out of the cold war years. The metro took one among the beautiful people of Prague, with their soft Slavic tongue, to the different underground stations -with Hradcanska Station the one that leads you to the conference at the Villa Lana in the Bubenec ˇsuburb.

Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art, 2018

spent the fall and winter of 1926-1927 in Moscow. His experience and observations were recorded in "Moscow Diary" [2] and essay "Moscow" (1927). In the present paper I refer to the latter text, where Benjamin reflected on the space of the Soviet state capital that was undergoing severe transition. Without even mentioning avant-garde architecture that was being constructed in his presence to transform the new state's living space on all levels, Benjamin left deep analysis of Moscow's post-revolutionary urban constitution, revealed its nature, and predicted its future. While recording those vast transformations that he had witnessed during his stay, Benjamin described them neither in terms of the new functionalist architecture, nor through reflections on demolition of Empire's architectural symbols. He turned to other features and spatial dimensions that were not directly related to any particular architecture, such as mobility, rhythm, aura, and through which he fully revealed the reformation of Moscow space that was initiated by functionalists under support by the new regime. The "Moscow" [4] essay, along with another text that I refer to, "Experience and Poverty" (1933) [5], enables for the deeper analysis of Avant-garde aesthetics, of its origin, development, and end, and which is the major objective of the present article. The Essay "Moscow" that is taken here for closer reading is based on the "Moscow Diary" that Benjamin wrote during his stay in the new capital in December 1926 and January 1927. His immediate impressions and experiences along with highly complicated relationship with Asja Lacis, the lover and, later, the wife of Benjamin's friend, Bernhard Reich, the Austrian playwright, were recorded in the diary that was first published in Germany only in 1980, after Asja's death in Russia [1]. The Essay "Moscow" was written by Benjamin for "Die Kreatur" journal as part of his agreement with Buber that was made before he went to Moscow [17, p. 83]. The first English edition of the "Moscow" essay, where the hardships of Benjamin's private life were set aside to give full way to his reflections on Moscow as urban and spatial phenomenon, was first published in 1978 [7]. The interest to the works by Benjamin has been rising tremendously through the last decade, yet the present article introduces an attempt to take the "Moscow" essay to the close reading with an idea to restore and analyse the urban space of the new Soviet capital of the late 1920s. Here the original text becomes a tool and the spectacles that are borrowed from

Cultural Intertexts, 2018

Volume 8 of Cultural Intertexts-a Journal of Literature, Cultural Studies and Linguistics-brings together articles which result from research carried out by specialists at home and abroad. The common points of interest emerging from the authors' contributions are the representation of private and public selves, the politics behind the constructions of national, cultural and gender identity, as well as the more technical aspects of literary and filmic architectural design-with emphasis on experimentation, historiographic rewriting, intertextuality and the metadimension. The corpus under the lens includes a series of novels (What Maisie Knew, Rue with a Difference, American Psycho, One Flew over the Cuckoo"s Nest, Naked Lunch, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, The Hours, The Unbearable Lightness of Being), two plays (Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Noise) and two films (The Last Peasants. Journeys, Adaptation)-proposing incursions into older and newer, American and European writing which processes intriguing contexts, bears traces of earlier texts, and addresses a contemporary readership. A cultural anthropological study on the metamorphoses of Romanian identity inside the frontiers of Europe and/or within the European Union, as well as an analysis of the paradoxical fracture and merger identifiable with modernity and postmodernity, are also part of the collection. The editors would like to thank, once more, the members of the scientific committee, for the time and effort that went into reviewing the articles submitted, and for facilitating the publication of this volume.

2014

2002

A discussion of the "parallel erasures" of communist and western art history induced by the Cold War and their implications for our contemporary understandings of the history of modernism, which uses the interwar Prague avant-garde (primarily Devětsil and the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group) as a case study. This is the final pre-publications version of the text eventually published in Dariusz Gafijczuk and Derek Sayer (eds), The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe: Re-imagining Space, History and Memory (New York: Palgrave, 2013).

World literature studies, 2013

This article focuses on two masterpieces of Russian modernism that foreground Moscow and Petersburg, two urban spaces that are well-rooted in collective and individual local consciousness: Master and Margarita by Michail Bulgakov and Petersburg by Andrei Bely. Both cities are portrayed in the turbulent political context of early 20th century as real borders between the European civilization on the one hand and the worst barbarity on the other. My aim is to compare the strategies of both key representatives of Russian modernism whose approaches to the same task is rather different. They project dystopic worlds whose inhabitants have lost faith in art, religion and science and where history is only a bad dream, from which the individual can no longer wake up. The article identifies concepts used to explore these urban spaces, emphasizing the auto-referential style of both authors. Any quest for the fascinating craft of building imaginary urban spaces puts the enquirer in an unusual situation, subtly referred to by Italo Calvino in his Invisible Cities: I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways and the degree of the arcades' curves and what kind of zinc scales over the roofs; but I already know that this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between measurements of its space and the events of its past. As this wave of memories flows in, the city soaks up like a sponge and expands. [Calvino 1978, 4] The erratic faces of an urban space change according to the devices of its cultural representation − be it verbal, pictorial, musical, architectural etc. One of the tropes which highlight the artistic practices drawn on by a multilayered urban architecture is the urban palimpsest. My study draws on two urban palimpsests, Petersburg and Moscow, as created by Russian writers Andrei Bely and Mikhail Bulgakov, in their novels Petersburg and the Master and Margarita. Both cities are represented as potential thresholds between the European civilization and a terrifying barbarity, against the background of the political turmoil of the early 20 th century. In what follows, my aim is to uncover the workings of these two key representatives of Russian modernism who take on the same