CBEES Guest Lecture 2021: Renate Lachmann - The Two Iconoclasms in 20th Century Russia

Welcome to online CBEES Guest Lecture 2021!
We would like to invite you to join us in lecture given by Renate Lachmann, Professor Emerita, University of Konstanz

Two iconoclasms took place in the Russian history of the 20th century: the iconoclasm after the October revolution, and the iconoclasm after the breakdown of the Soviet Union.

The revolutionary demolition of the symbols of the imperial past was executed in accordance with a clear-cut plan (Lenin's decree of 1918 officially accepted by the ideologically trained public) included the erection of new monuments for outstanding communist activists. The official aim in the postsoviet removal of these monuments to delete traces of the problematic past was confronted with a revitalized communist ideology on the one hand and with the reaction of the human rights organization Memorial on the other that criticizes the insufficient demolition of Soviet symbols.

This multifaceted situation is complicated by the reconstruction of destroyed prerevolutionary monuments of Russian (predominantly religious) history (e. g. the Christ the Saviour Cathedral). I am interested in analyzing the functional difference between these two (iconoclastic and iconophilic) episodes and respective procedures.

About:
Renate Lachmann, literary theorist and historian, historian of culture, professor emerita, formerly professor of general literary theory and Slavic literatures at the university of Konstanz, member of Academia Europaea (1991) and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences (1994), fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1996/97), visiting professor at numerous international universities.

Professor Lachmann is one of the world’s leading specialists in Russian literature and culture theory, translator and author of seminal work on Russian literary history and theory, Mikhail Bakhtin and dialogism, Russian formalism and structuralism. The subjects of her research include rhetoric in historic and present-day literary practices, the rhetorical constructions of phantasy and memory, including her latest book on Gulag witness accounts.

Selected books:
Gedächtnis und Literatur: Intertextualität in der russischen Moderne, 1990 (Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism, 1997)
Die Zerstörung der schönen Rede: rhetorische Tradition und Konzepte des Poetischen, 1994) (Демонтаж красноречия. Риторическая традиция и понятие поэтического, 2001)

Erzählte Phantastik. Zu Phantasiegeschichte und Semantik phantastischer Texte, 2002 (Дискурсы фантастического, 2009)

Zu einer Literaturwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft, 2005

Lager und Literatur: Zeugnisse des GULAG, 2019

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Meeting ID: 697 7023 5807
Passcode: 065394