Models of Personal Conversion in Russian cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries: (12 Interdisciplinary Studies on Central and Eastern Europe)

This volume offers a view of modern Russian intellectual culture as shaped by the dynamic of conversions. The individual contributions examine a rich variety of personal conversions occurring in a culture in which the written word enjoyed a privileged status and, historically, was closely linked to the sacred. However, the essays presented go beyond the original meaning of conversion as a change of religious beliefs. They address shifts in style, aesthetic outlooks, and mindsets, political and ideological transfigurations as well as religious conversions in the true sense of the term. Whether at the level of culture, society or biography, the study of conversions opens the way to profound reflections about questions of identity, cultural ruptures, and continuity. The awareness of former conversions and the possible «convertibility» of one’s own ideological, spiritual or social stance has been among the central traits of Russian intellectual culture during the last two centuries.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Jens Herlth/Christian Zehnder: On Russian Conversions – Tomáš Glanc: Slavic Conversions – Alexey Vdovin: Between Schlegel and Baader: Stepan Shevyrev’s Conversionto Orthodox Literary Science in the European Cultural Context – Jens Herlth: «An upheaval was so necessary»: Authorial Conversion and the Literary Public in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) – Anatoly Korchinsky/Oxana Zamolodsky: The Terrorist «Tigrych» versus the Monarchist Lev Tikhomirov: Why did Tikhomirov «Stop Being a Revolutionary»? – Irina Sirotkina: Conversion to Dionysianism: Tadeusz Zieliński and Heptachor – Regula M. Zwahlen: Sergei Bulgakov: The Potentiality of Conversion – Oleg Kling: Valerii Briusov’s Shift from Symbolism to Proletarian Culture – Bela Tsipuria: Cultural Conversion: From Modernism to Socialist Realism (Boris Pasternak and Titsian Tabidze) – Christian Zehnder: Conversion as Attitude in Pasternak – Josephine von Zitzewitz: Leonid Borodin’s Rasstavanie: Orthodoxy and the Moscow Intelligentsia in the 1970s – Milutin Janjić: The Place of the Religious-Philosophical Seminar # 37 in the Witnessing of the Orthodox Christian Conception of «Anthropos» in Soviet Society – Miriam Finkelstein: Our House Russia? Conversions from and to Judaism in Oleg Iur’ev’s Novel Poluostrov Zhidiatin – Ekaterina Orlova: «To Be Means to Communicate …» Tat’iana Bek’s Poetry: A Dialogue Between the Poet and God.

About the Author :
Jens Herlth is Professor of Slavic Literatures at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). Christian Zehnder is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland).