Glossary of Russian Culture

Russians have had a profound impact on how we define and understand language, literature, and culture. Here are some of the concepts that they have introduced.

• Acmeism - A poetic movement in the early twentieth century that
  opposed the other-worldly orientation of the symbolists (see below) and wished to bring poetry back down to earth. The poet Nikolai Gumilyov introduced the term in 1912, deriving it from the Greek akme (point, summit, flower). Acmeists such as Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam believed that poetry was not tied to mysticism, and that poets (who were artisans, not prophets) should focus on culture, language, and human existence in the phenomenal world. They favored "beautiful clarity" over dreamy obscurity; explored everyday reality in all its manifestations; and used motifs such as the rose and the sun not as symbols of a transcendental realm, but as images of earthly delights.
  
• Agitprop - The term Agit-prop is a contraction of the Russian words 'agitatsiia'
  and 'propaganda' in the title of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda set up in 1920 by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. From then on it was an omnipresent activity in the Soviet Union. Intended to control and promote the ideological conditioning of the masses, it took many forms such as palaces of culture, Agit-prop trains and cars covered with slogans and posters, poster campaigns, and countless agitation centres, or 'agitpunkts'. Books and libraries also played an important role in the Agit-prop enterprise. In the early years avant-garde artists particularly those associated with the Constructivists contributed to Agit-prop manifestations, particularly poster designs. Today the term has come to refer to any cultural manifestation with an overtly political purpose. - Source
  
• Bylina - Traditional form of Old Russian and Russian heroic narrative poetry transmitted orally, still a creative tradition in the 20th century. The oldest byliny belong to a cycle dealing with the golden age of Kievan Rus in the 10th–12th century. They centre on the deeds of Prince Vladimir I and his court. One of the favourite heroes is the independent Cossack Ilya of Murom, who defended Kievan Rus from the Mongols. Although these ancient songs are no longer known to the peasants around Kiev, they were discovered in the 19th century in the repertoire of peasants living around Lake Onega in the remote northwestern regions of European Russia. They are also known in the far northeastern outposts of Siberia. - Source
  
• Carnivalesque - Mikhail Bakhtin
  
• Chronotope –
  
• Constructivism - The term was initially applied to a movement in the visual arts developed by Russian sculptors and painters such as Vladimir Tatlin and El Lissitzky, who created suspended non-representational three-dimensional arrangements of geometric graphics. After the October Revolution, the Russian constructivists volunteered their skills to the new regime, offering to apply them to utilitarian ends in industrial and commercial design. An offshoot of constructivism in the visual arts were the stage sets of Meyerhold's theater; Meyerhold's own principle of biomechanics, by which he proposed to convert his ensemble into a maximally effective mechanism geared to infuse the audience with proper social attitudes, was another constructivist idea. (Source: entry on constructivism by Victor Terras in The Handbook of Russian Literature)
  
• Cultural Mediation - Lev Vygotsky, founder of cultural-historical psychology, observed how higher mental functions developed historically within particular cultural groups, as well as individually through social interactions with significant people in a child's life, particularly parents, but also other adults. Through these interactions, a child came to learn the habits of mind of her/his culture, including speech patterns, written language, and other symbolic knowledge through which the child derives meaning and affected a child's construction of her/his knowledge.
  
• Defamiliarization - Viktor Shklovsky
  
• Dialogic Imagination –
  
• Dol’nik - An accentual verse metre (early 20th century)
  
• Fabula vs. Syuzhet - In their structural analysis of narrative, Russian formalists made a distinction between fabula (fable) and syuzhet (plot). Fabula is the sum total of events in a narrative, while syuzhet is how the storyteller links those events together. If fabula is what happened, syuzhet is how the storyteller explains what happened.
  
• Formalism –
  
• Futurism - Iconoclastic avant-garde movement of 1910s
  
• Golden Age - Flowering of Russian literature (especially poetry), coinciding with the "Age of Pushkin" ( 1820s, 1830s)
  
• Gosizdat - Officially published material by State publishing house in the Soviet period
  
• Goslitizdat - State publishing house of the first half of the Soviet period
  
• Heteroglossia -
  
• Iambic tetrameter -
  
• LEF Left Front of Arts: revolutionary artistic grouping of the 1920s, headed by Vladimir Maiakovskii
  
• Litfond Hardship fund for needy writers, established in the I9th century; subsequently administered by Union of Soviet Writers (see Writers' Union below)
  
• Morphology of the folktale - Vladimir Propp
  
• Mutual aid - The term used by anarchist and proto-environmentalist Alexander Kropotkin to refer to his counter-Darwinian model of evolution
  
• Mystical anarchism - Georgy Chulkov
  
• Narodism (Russian populism) - Cherneshevsky
  
• Natural school - Gritty realism depicting the lives of the downtrodden (mid-19th century)
  
• Necro-realism - (Late 20th, early 21st century) A trend in film, epitomized by Alexander Sokurov's early works
  
• OBERIU (Oberiuty) - Association of Real Art - An avant-garde artistic movement operating in Leningrad, late 1920s—early 1930s, headed by Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedenskii
  
• Oral tradition -
  
• Philosophy of the Common Cause - A treatise by Nikolai Fyodorov that called for developing the science of resurrection
  
• Poetic Function - The linguist Roman Jakobson distinguishes poetic language from other types of language by noting that it is partially or wholly auto-reflexive -- it primarily calls attention to its own medium. When reading a nonliterary text, we read through the text, but when we read a literary text, the text invites us to actually look at how it is saying what it is saying.
  
• Polyphony - Refers to a diversity of perspectives and voices in narrative. Coined by Mikhail Bakhtin.
  
• Poshlost' - This term, which is difficult to translate, roughly means "self-satisfied vulgarity" or "petty evil". Svetlana Boym describes it this way: "Poshlost' is the Russian version of banality, with a characteristic national flavoring of metaphysics and high morality, and a peculiar conjunction of the sexual and the spiritual. This one word encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and a lack of spirituality. The war against poshlost' is a cultural obsession of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia from the 1860s to 1960s."
  
• Realogy - The study of Things, pioneered by Mikhail Epstein, a leading contemporary Russian philosopher
  
• Realism -
• Sentimentalism -
  
• Skaz - (from skazat', "to tell") - While the term originally referred to traditional oral narratives, the Russian Formalists used skaz to describe a technique in written narratives that imitates a spontaneous oral account through the use of dialect, slang, and the peculiar idiom of the narrator. The narrator in skaz is often conveyed as different from the author.
  
• Socialist Realism -
  
• Sots Art - An underground art movement in the Soviet Union that combined the aesthetics of socialist realism and American pop art (e.g., advertising, comics)
• Symbolism - A major art movement that developed in Russia at the turn of the century, influenced subsequent trends from Acmeism to Absurdism, and changed the whole direction of art. Russian Symbolists were influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as well as French Symbolist and Decadent poets. Notable Symbolist writers included Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Zinaida Gippius, and Fyodor Sologub. The Symbolists broke from the tradition of socially engaged literature that privileged the collective; by contrast, they saw art as escape from reality and an expression of individual subjectivity. Their emphasis on poetic form, often manifested as a desire to merge literature and music, was connected to their revolt against the positivism and utilitarianism of the preceding century that they perceived to be the root of a worldwide spiritual crisis. Symbolism, like Romanticism before it, returned to the idea of a split between a fallen material world and an ideal transcendent realm; and Symbolist poets saw themselves as mediumistic figures who could provide tantalizing glimpses of this realm through their art.
  
• Synesthesia - in Petersburg and Nabokov
• Syuzhet - See Fabula
• Todorov -
  
• Unfinalizability -
  
• Voloshinov's theory of language - For Voloshinov, language is the medium of ideology, and cannot be separated from ideology. Ideology, however, is not to be understood in the classical Marxist sense as an illusory mental phenomenon which arises as a reflex of a "real" material economic substructure. Language, as a socially constructed sign-system, is what allows consciousness to arise, and is in itself a material reality. Because of this belief that language is the defining human characteristic, Voloshinov held that the study of verbal interaction was key to understanding social psychology.
  
• What is to be done? Cherneshevsky
  
• Yuri Tynianov - Theory of parody
  
  

 

Sources:

• Chatman, S. Story and Discourse. (Cornell University Press, 1978)
• Tomashevsky, B. Teorija Literatury (Poetika). (Leningrad, 1925)