In this paper the hero of Dostoevskij's novel “The Idiot”, Prince Myškin,
is compared to a more humble character of that book, Luk'jan Lebedev,
with special regard to their religious teaching and the Russian notions of
“jurodivyj” (“God’s fool”) and “šut” (“buffoon”). The paper concludes
with the assertion that the Prince concentrates on the bright aspects of
religion, while Mr. Lebedev, when provoked, emphasizes its more sinister
side.
In film history Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is usually considered the first documentary and possibly one of the best known documentaries of the silent era. It has also been called the first ethnographic film, as well as the first art film. However, this paper will not discuss the question of whether Nanook is a
documentary, rather it will focus on the fact that there is not only one version of this film, but several different editions. This paper will show how some of the paratextual elements – first of all the different prefaces – change from edition to edition and what kind of influence this has on how viewers perceive the film.
Description:
This is the accepted version (final draft post review), reprinted with permission.
Situating itself in the field of cultural memory studies, this article traces the slow emergence in German historical discourse of the narrative of an anonymous German woman who survived the Soviet occupation of Berlin in 1945. I will, firstly, conceptualize the historical condition of the Anonyma as a precarious liminal sphere of transition between competing sovereignties that dislodged her political status as citizen and reconstituted her as bare life in the sense of Agamben. Secondly, I direct focus to the relationship between the personal story of the Anonyma and a historical Master narrative pertaining to the period. The article argues for a close connection between the woman’s form of resistance that aimed at replacing unchecked rape with a form of coerced prostitution to reassert limited control over the borders of her body, and the negative reception her diary received after a first publication in Germany in 1959. Her story implicitly challenges a hegemonic discourse of war that treats mass rape as mainly an assault on the nation’s male defenders and that silences the victims’ traumatic experiences with reference to collective guilt and individual shame or treason.