Speaker: Andreas Schönle, the University of Bristol, (UK).
Moderator: Irina Sandomirskaja, Södertörn University.
Commentator: Mark Bassin, Södertörn Universit

There is nothing natural about time, as self-evident it may seem to us. Ways to measure, organize, and celebrate the course of time reach deep into the cultural make-up of a country. Calendar reforms always elicit complex and consequential representations about cultural and national identity. And this not only in Russia. This talk will analyze the rationale behind the various projects of calendar reform Russia has considered or undertaken since Peter the Great, who decided in 1700 to count the years from the birth of Christ and move the beginning of the year to 1 January, yet without adopting the Gregorian calendar. These reforms often hinged on specific ideas about Russia’s presumed and desired position in the world and about what makes Russia unique, even when they marshaled “scientific” arguments. They also presumed various models of the role of religion in society and served as tools to shape everyday life and fashion the mindset of the people. This talk will thus shed light on the political and cultural ramifications of calendar reform and examine its use as a tool for fashioning everyday life for political purposes.

Andreas Schönle is Professor of Russian and Head of the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol as well as Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of four monographs and three edited volumes. His publications include a book called Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia (2011), in which he explores the way ruins have been treated and mistreated over the course of Russia’s history and their significance for various communities and subcultures. More recently he developed a collaborative project (with Andrei Zorin) on the self-invention of the Russian elite in the eighteenth century, which was about the hybrid, fluid, and ambivalent emotional and cognitive world of the elite as it rapidly Europeanized itself. This project led to a co-edited volume and to the monograph On the Periphery of Europe, 1762-1825: The Self-Invention of the Russian Elite (2018), co-authored with Zorin. His current project, provisionally entitled a History of Russian Time, explores the co-existence of plural temporalities in Russia, as seen in a broad cross-cultural context.