Papers by Kerstin Olofsson
Ph.D. dissertation. Stockholm Slavic Papers, 1988
The point of departure for this dissertation is the interest in memory that has characterized Sov... more The point of departure for this dissertation is the interest in memory that has characterized Soviet cultural life during the 1970s and early 1980s. This theme is developed through an examination of the role of memory in two noted works of the period – Valentin Rasputin´s Farewell to Matyora from 1976 and Chingiz Aitmatov´s And the Day is Longer Than a Century from 1980.
The chapter on Rasputin´s work mainly treats the semantics of the novel in relationship to various aspects of myth and folklore. Mythical allusions serve to create a symbolic framework where Matyora, the island and village to be engulfed by water from a power plant´s magazine, represents the entire earth. Through them Matyora appears as a world threatened by extinction, a world representing the lives of the nature and the human spirit. Opposed to this world is the “new life”, death´s shore; as in myth there is a struggle between life and death, good and evil. Memory is here above all shaped by the links to myth and folklore.
In the chapter on Aitmatov´s work, on the other hand, different connections between various temporal levels are shown to be of particular semantic significance; this is its most important means of shaping memory. One of the temporal levels is constituted by historical legends – they are stressed as being important as parables. But the main attention is not directed towards the remote cultural memory, as in Rasputin, but towards a level of individual memories, the immediate historical and political past – the Stalin era.
The last chapter points out that the symbolic level, which exists in both works, is realized in different ways. Symbols in Rasputin are opposed to a number of connections to allegory in Aitmatov
Icke-givna tematiska subjekt i fack- och skonlitteraturen (K.Olofsson) ; Sprakdifferentiering i M... more Icke-givna tematiska subjekt i fack- och skonlitteraturen (K.Olofsson) ; Sprakdifferentiering i Marin Držics komedi "Dundo Maroje" (B.Arapovic)
Scando-Slavica, 2002
Acta Sueco-Polonica 8/9 (1999-2000), 256 pp. Baschmakoff, Natalia and Marja Leinonen, Russian Lif... more Acta Sueco-Polonica 8/9 (1999-2000), 256 pp. Baschmakoff, Natalia and Marja Leinonen, Russian Life in Finland 19171939: A Local and Oral History (= Studia Slavica Finlandensia 18), Helsinki 2001,407 pp. + appendix. Björling, Fiona (ed.), On the Verge. Russian Thought between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Centuries (= Slavica Lundensia 21), Lund 2001, xxiii + 123 pp. Ekecrantz, Jan and Kerstin Olofsson (eds.), Russian Reports. Studies in Post-Communist Transformation of Media and Journalism, Stockholm [2001], 276 pp. Orešnik, Varja Cvetko, K metodologiji preučevanja baltoslovansko-indoiranskih jezikovnih odnosov. Prvi del, Ljubljana 1998, 213 pp. Packalén, Malgorzata Anna, Under tvá kulturers ok. Allmogeskildringar i den polska och svenska 1800och 1900talslitteraturen. [With a summary in English: Under the Yoke of Two Cultures: Peasant Portrayals in Polish and Swedish Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries] (= Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia Slavica Upsaliensi...
Boldinskije čtenija / [ed] N. M. Fortunatov, Nizjnij Novgorod: muzej-zapovednik A. S. Puškina , 2007, s. 246-258, 2007
The article is about the perception of Alexander Pushkin in Sweden.
"Pikovaja dama" A. S. Puskina v svedskich perevodach ; "Пиковая дама" А. С. П... more "Pikovaja dama" A. S. Puskina v svedskich perevodach ; "Пиковая дама" А. С. Пушкина в шведских переводах
De artiklar som samlats i denna antologi har skrivits aren 2000-2003 inom ramen for forskningspro... more De artiklar som samlats i denna antologi har skrivits aren 2000-2003 inom ramen for forskningsprojektet Media Societies Around the Baltic Sea vid Sodertorns hogskola. De beror alla pa olika satt ry ...
Polyfonin hos Dostoevskij - finns den? : Tva standpunkter i sovjetisk litteraturvetenskap. Exempl... more Polyfonin hos Dostoevskij - finns den? : Tva standpunkter i sovjetisk litteraturvetenskap. Exemplet "Broderna Karamazov"
Mot slutet av perestrojkan skedde ett kulturellt paradigmskifte i Ryssland i samband med censuren... more Mot slutet av perestrojkan skedde ett kulturellt paradigmskifte i Ryssland i samband med censurens avskaffande och sovjetsystemets fall. I den intellektuella debatten bearbetades kulturtidskriftern ...
The article gives the history of Swedish translations of the povest “Metel´” and on the whole of ... more The article gives the history of Swedish translations of the povest “Metel´” and on the whole of the prosaic works of Pushkin. It describes the state of affairs in Sweden for translation of Russian ...
This book presents a set of studies on the state of journalism in post-communist Russia. The pict... more This book presents a set of studies on the state of journalism in post-communist Russia. The picture of post-Soviet conditions contains structures inherited from the past and the clashes that neces ...
Swedish translations of Aleksandr Puškin´s "Pikovaya dama"
explores the contemporary Russian debate on the relations between empire and language in his pape... more explores the contemporary Russian debate on the relations between empire and language in his paper "Two Languages and three Empires: About the Discourse on Russian and Church Slavonic in Today's Russia". The two languages mentioned in the headline are Russian and Church Slavonic. The three empires are the geographically fixed Russian Federation, the religiously and geographically determined Slavia Orthodoxa (the Slavic Orthodoxy), consisting of a couple of countries with Russia as its centre, and, finally, the religiously determined conception of God, the "Kingdom of Heaven", seen as universally valid. Between the three discourses concerning these three empires, there is a paradoxical relation. Russian, the imperial language in the first empire, the Russian Federation, is seen as an unclean language not suitable for the two other empires where Church Slavonic reigns. This debate on language casts an interesting light on some aspects of the political atmosphere in the new Russia.
The prison theme, however, dates further back in Russian culture. In literature it was first intr... more The prison theme, however, dates further back in Russian culture. In literature it was first introduced with ”The Lay of the Host of Igor” (Slovo o polku Igoreve) from the late 12th century with its exclamation that it is better to be dead than to be taken prisoner. The Novgorod prince, Igor, is caught by the Asian steppe people, the Polovtsians, during his campaign. This medieval work was important to Russian romanticism. However, the Romantic writers, headed by Alexander Pushkin, transformed the prisoner theme which used to be based on actual events, in a number of earlier works.
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Papers by Kerstin Olofsson
The chapter on Rasputin´s work mainly treats the semantics of the novel in relationship to various aspects of myth and folklore. Mythical allusions serve to create a symbolic framework where Matyora, the island and village to be engulfed by water from a power plant´s magazine, represents the entire earth. Through them Matyora appears as a world threatened by extinction, a world representing the lives of the nature and the human spirit. Opposed to this world is the “new life”, death´s shore; as in myth there is a struggle between life and death, good and evil. Memory is here above all shaped by the links to myth and folklore.
In the chapter on Aitmatov´s work, on the other hand, different connections between various temporal levels are shown to be of particular semantic significance; this is its most important means of shaping memory. One of the temporal levels is constituted by historical legends – they are stressed as being important as parables. But the main attention is not directed towards the remote cultural memory, as in Rasputin, but towards a level of individual memories, the immediate historical and political past – the Stalin era.
The last chapter points out that the symbolic level, which exists in both works, is realized in different ways. Symbols in Rasputin are opposed to a number of connections to allegory in Aitmatov
The chapter on Rasputin´s work mainly treats the semantics of the novel in relationship to various aspects of myth and folklore. Mythical allusions serve to create a symbolic framework where Matyora, the island and village to be engulfed by water from a power plant´s magazine, represents the entire earth. Through them Matyora appears as a world threatened by extinction, a world representing the lives of the nature and the human spirit. Opposed to this world is the “new life”, death´s shore; as in myth there is a struggle between life and death, good and evil. Memory is here above all shaped by the links to myth and folklore.
In the chapter on Aitmatov´s work, on the other hand, different connections between various temporal levels are shown to be of particular semantic significance; this is its most important means of shaping memory. One of the temporal levels is constituted by historical legends – they are stressed as being important as parables. But the main attention is not directed towards the remote cultural memory, as in Rasputin, but towards a level of individual memories, the immediate historical and political past – the Stalin era.
The last chapter points out that the symbolic level, which exists in both works, is realized in different ways. Symbols in Rasputin are opposed to a number of connections to allegory in Aitmatov