Neprikosnovennij Zapas
eurozine
Neprikosnovennij Zapas
2002-08-01
Summary for Neprikosnovennij Zapas 4/2001
Private Stock (NZ) No. 4 (18) opens with Irreducibly Social Goods, a classical article by Charles Taylor, where the author attempts to demonstrate the existence of certain extra-individual social values. In his introductory essay (Political Theory before September 11) Alexander Etkind, a renowned culture studies expert, puts Taylor's article into the context of the current intellectual debate on the fate of liberalism, which surfaced after the terrorist attacks in the US; he is especially interested in the uneasy relationship between liberalism and public security. The magazine's columnist, historian of ideas Andrei Zorin reflects on the tragedy that took place in America and on its consequences (Autumn in New York).
The Culture of Politics section includes three more reflections on the tragic New York events, one by Alexander Zvonkin, a mathematician, and Anna Yarkho, a philologist (Looking Out the Window) who witnessed the collapse of the WTC towers, another (A Letter from Boston) - by Vladimir Levin, a journalist from Boston, who describes an "average" American's reaction to the terrorist attack, and the third by George Blecher, an American writer (Notes From the Rubble). The first thematic section in the issue deals with "Two Hundred Years Together," a new book on the "Jewish question" in Russia by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Historians Sergei A. Ivanov (The Protocols of the Siamese Twins) and Yohanan Petrovsky-Stern (The Fate of the Middle Line) criticise the book from both an ideological and a professional point of view, finding it methodologically weak and intellectually biased. However, Marietta Chudakova, a literary critic and essayist, argues in her article (Balancing Between Two Extremes) that, contrary to the opinion of Ivanov and Petrovsky-Stern, in his book Solzhenitsyn managed to discuss openly and directly the problems in Russian-Jewish relations outside the painful context created by those relations. The article by the magazine's columnist Alexei Levinson brings the readers back to the American tragedy by discussing how this tragedy was perceived and interpreted in Russia, America, and the rest of the world.
The second thematic section deals with the issue of "Eastern Europe", putting the triangle "Russia - Eastern Europe - Western Europe" into a broad historical and political context (Yaroslav Shimov, Mitteleuropa: Coming Back Home, and Alexei Miller, Eastern Europe: Imagine Anew). The Politics of Culture section features two articles presenting vastly differing views on the place that the intelligentsia occupies in modern Russian society. Rebekka Frumkina (Pardon Me For Saying So...) describes the situation from within, pointing out that - despite all the talks about the crisis of the Russian intelligentsia as a producer of new social meanings - it still plays a highly important role in the life of modern Russian society. Elena Baraban, a literary critic, analyzes the portrayal of the intelligentsia in mass culture, especially in recent Russian detective stories and action movies (Intelligentsia in Russian Detective Fiction).
The last thematic section addresses the changes that took place in the everyday culture during the past decade from different intellectual standpoints. Ilia Utekhin, an anthropologist, reconstructs in his short essay (Anatomy of Nostalgia) the reaction of an "average 'intelligent'" to the "imperceptible" changes in the everyday life of the 1990s: commercial advertising, new price structure, urban topography, etc. Anthropologist Olga Shevchenko (Crossword: A Medicine Against Boredom, Nine Characters), analyzes the social changes behind the epidemic obsession with crosswords in today's Russia. Pavel Pepperstein, an artist and art theorist in his manifesto-like theoretic essay (Looking at the Waterfall) discusses MTV and the new cultural canon it creates. The issue is concluded with the Morals and Mores section that features an article by Vladimir Uspensky, a mathematician (Materials for the Classification of Civilizations) where the author points out the small details that separate Russian, Western and Oriental civilization - from ways of making tea to the construction of latrines. The New Books section includes the reviews of recent works on the history of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.