Drawing on the classic question of feminist art history, this article asks how and by whom the contemporary canon of Czech art history was constructed, and when the exclusion of women artists of the 1980s generation from it took place. It shows that the 1960s generation of women artists emerged from the disruption of the traditional gender order in the Stalinist era. In contrast, the generation of women artists who entered the art scene in the 1980s was disadvantaged by the declining power of art institutional structures and the growing importance of informal networks for career success in late socialism. Their lack of social capital, combined with the re-emergence of macho culture in the 1980s art scene, the persistence of traditional gender roles in the home, and the loss of more substantial state support for artistic production after 1989, led to their “invisible” role in the post-1989 art world.

Russia’s brutal invasion in February 2022 revitalized considerations about how Ukraine can contribute to historiographical issues related to the origins of nation-statehood. This essay contributes to that discussion by returning to the 19th century and exploring how the participants in multiple archeological congresses, nascent social scientists confident in the empirical objectivity of their evidence, envisioned Ukraine. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson’s commonplace about a nation as an “imagined community,” I highlight the contestation between nationalist and imperialist discourses in the emergent social sciences. Although the Versailles Peace Conference, which denied Ukraine the opportunity to “self-determine” as a modern political entity, revealed the limits of the Western political imagination in 1919, many of the ideas presented at these congresses continue to inform the cultural and geographical borders of Ukraine.

Abstract

This article examines Yugoslav women's transnational memories of state terror in two autobiographical texts bearing witness to the Holocaust and corrective labor camps on Goli otok and Sveti Grgur: Ženi Lebl's White Violets (1990) and Eva Israel Grlić's Memories (1997). I argue these texts recover disparate histories of state terror, coproducing shared strategies of memory and narration in the process. This article contextualizes how women's testimonies maneuvered the patriarchal cult of silence that marginalized gendered experiences of the corrective labor camps until the 1990s and women's erasure from Yugoslavia's important legacies, such as the antifascist struggle within which Ženi Lebl and Eva Grlić were actively involved. Drawing attention to how the Yugoslav state terror apparatus negated the women's revolutionary contributions and weaponized their biographies against them, this article argues that life writing reclaims their authorial agency and restores multilayered archives of the past.

Riga and Odesa (Odessa) rank among the Russian empire's foremost nineteenth-century ports. These port cities, respectively located on the Baltic and Black Seas, enabled imperial Russia to trade huge amounts of goods, boosting its burgeoning economy in the second half of the nineteenth century. We argue that, despite the distance separating the two cities, it is only in relation to each other that their full significance emerges. This article explores the histories of Riga and Odesa, examining their situations within the Russian empire's economic geography and taking a closer look at the interrelationships between the two ports. In our view, this history is more than a narrative of competition for the premier position among the ports of the Russian empire; it is also a tale of local initiatives, engagement with the imperial center, lobbying for imperial financial support, relationships of economic interdependence, and an example of the crucial role that ports at the supposed periphery of an empire played in a globalized economy.

The Soviet physiologist Lina Solomonovna Shtern (1875—1968) was the only defendant in the trial against the Jewish Antifascist Committee who was not sentenced to death; the circumstances surrounding the court’s leniency toward her have long remained unknown. Shtern was sentenced to five years in exile and even her belongings were not confiscated. Her story has become the stuff of legends and much speculation. My paper reconstructs the particular circumstances surrounding the court’s decision to give Shtern a more lenient sentence and considers how the politics of science in the late 1940s and early 1950s could have influenced this decision and helped Shtern elaborate her own strategy of survival. I argue that the main reason for sparing Shtern’s life was her essay “On Cancer” written in the prison cell in the late 1951—early 1952. My work is based on a careful analysis of documents from Shtern’s personal archive and of the context of Soviet and North American medicine.

This paper explores the relationship between elegy, national mourning, and the poetics of public grief by taking as an example Jaroslav Seifert's sequence of elegies, Osm dní (Eight Days), published in 1937 to mourn the death of Czechoslovakia's first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937). An extraordinary work of poetry—exceptional both in its ambition and in the apparent speed with which it was composed and published—Seifert's Eight Days has largely been forgotten today and remains little known outside of Czech literary criticism. This article offers a reading of the sequence as a modernist elegy, with the purpose of rethinking the multidirectional relationship between poetry, nationalism and public mourning.

This essay suggests that there are three crucial contexts that have been overlooked in the scholarship on Andrei Zviagintsev's film, Leviathan. First, there is the ecclesiastical history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the years following the election of Kirill (Gundiaev) as Patriarch of Moscow in 2009. The article demonstrates that Zviagintsev was keenly aware of Kirill's growing partnership with the Putin regime and that he was especially dismayed by the patriarch's response to the Bolotnaia protests and Pussy Riot affair. The second context is more theological and considerably lesser known. It concerns the notion of the church's “dark double”, a concept developed in the mid-twentieth century by an obscure Gulag survivor and lay theologian named Sergei Fudel΄. My main contention in the essay is that Fudel΄'s conception of the “dark double” is the foundational theological idea in Leviathan—the idea that structures and underpins all of the film's religious scenes. Finally, the third context recovered is the religious thinking of Andrei Zviagintsev himself. For it turns out that the celebrated auteur director is comfortable discussing not only scriptwriting or cinematography. He also has much to say, both onscreen and off, about the clerics and faithful of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church.