Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia

Notes

Notes I N T R O D U C T I O N 1. I. Miatlev, Sensatsii i zamechaniia gospozhi Kurdiukovoi za granitseiu, dan l’etranzhe (Tambov: Knigoprodavets Dmitriia Fedorova, 1857), 102–3. My thanks to O.B. Lebedeva for drawing my attention to this quotation. 2. A.N. Maikov, “Progulka po Rimu s moimi znakomymi” (1848), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg: Izdanie T-va A.F. Marks, 1914), vol. 4, 207. 3. Ibid., 206. 4. “Zhurnal puteshestviia V.N. Zinov’eva po Germanii, Italii, Frantsii i Anglii v 1784–1788 gg.,” Russkaia starina 23 (October–December 1878): 238. My thanks to Oksana Farafonova for this reference. 5. A.I. Gertsen, Byloe i dumy (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1963), vol. 2, 55. 6. Throughout this study, the concept of modernity will be used as something more specific than modernization, namely as a worldview that sweeps aside traditional moral and political representations, institutes a rupture with the past, and defines the present as a transition toward the future. The first philosophical conceptualization of this new sense of time belongs to Hegel. See Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity’s Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance,” The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 1–22. For a thorough discussion of the meaning of “modern” through the ages, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Modern, Modernität, Moderne,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), vol. 4, 93–131. For a discussion of the various strands of modernity, including the contradictions and intensity of Russia’s embrace thereof, see Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Verso, 1982). For a recent study of modernization in Russia, see Modernisation in Russia since 1900, ed. Markku Kangaspuro & Jeremy Smith, Studia Fennica Historica, vol. 12 (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2006). 7. For the concept of supermodernity, see Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995). 8. For recent, comprehensive discussions of the cultural role of ruins and their representation, see Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Michael S. Roth, Claire Lyons and Charles Merewether, Irresistible Decay (Los Angeles: The Getty Institute, 1997); Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001); Ruinenbilder, ed. Aleida Assmann, Monika Gomille, and Gabriele Rippl (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002); and Ruinen des Denkens. Denken in Ruinen, ed. Norbert Bolz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996). 9. On industrial ruins, see Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford: Berg, 2005). 10. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Penguin, 1998), 94. 11. Ibid., 93. 12. Ibid., 93. 13. Ibid., 91. 232 Notes to Pages 9–10 14. Ibid., 92. 15. On Burke’s theodicy, see David Womersley, “Introduction,” in ibid., xxv. 16. Ibid., 101. 17. Pierre Hartmann alluded to the “risk of dismemberment of the individual unit,” that is, of individual madness and collective unruliness, implicit in Burke’s theory of the sublime. This, in his view, explains Burke’s diffident attitude toward the sublime. In my reading, Burke used his notion of sympathy to channel the energies released by the sublime. See Pierre Hartmann, Du sublime (de Boileau à Schiller) (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 1997), 45–46. 18. Burke, 107. 19. Ibid., 101, 111 respectively. 20. Ibid., 88. 21. In the 1770s, in light of the record of abusive tyrannical regimes, Burke came to the conclusion that he needed to abandon his blanket legitimization of power. Instead he began to underscore more and more the role of tradition in the development of society. If before the sublime articulated a spatial relationship of high and low, it now establishes a temporal link between past and present. Thus Burke distinguishes between genuine sublimity, which is refracted through tradition and history, and false sublimity, in which power throws the legacy of the past overboard and arrogates to itself the right to create a new reality. It is this theory that underpins his critique of the French revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France. See Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication, 1994). The relationship between Burke’s early aesthetic theory and his subsequent political views is a vexed one. See Womersley, x–xxxviii. 22. During the Dublin flood, Burke wrote to Richard Shackleton, “It gives me pleasure to see nature in those great though terrible scenes. It fills the...