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Post-Soviet Mausoleum of the Past. History in times of Putin. Collected essays by Kirill Kobrin, 2017
Rights sold: Russia – NLO
"I am convinced that the period of history known as “post-Soviet” in Russia is over. This is why the personalities and processes of the previous period are no longer relevant. They are still in the news, and they still act, sometimes dangerously, but discussing them is as relevant as discussing laws passed by pre-revolutionary premier Pyotr Stolypin in 1919. Today’s changes aren’t as quick and catastrophic as they were then, but then history doesn’t repeat itself, not even as farce.
The old post-Soviet project, once relevant back in 1991, is over. It has achieved its aims
What has changed? The public agenda. The hierarchy of what’s important and what’s not for Russian society. What is appropriate and desirable. And, most importantly, the project of the present and the past. The old post-Soviet project, once relevant back in 1991, is over. It has achieved its aims. It’s just that nobody’s rushing to pronounce what has happened as the “natural, logical results” of this process.
Maybe now it’s time to sum up (tentatively, of course,) the results of Russia’s post-Soviet project — this is what this series of essays is devoted to. The post-Soviet project began with a public gesture of rejection of Soviet ideology. It ended when it drowned in the pseudo-ideological swamp of conservatism. Ideology, culture, public life in general, these are the things we must concentrate on to understand what happened in 1991-2016.
In this book, I look at the history of Soviet ideology, which was allegedly spurned by the freedom-loving Soviet peoples in the late 1980s, and which supposedly formed the foundation of the “Soviet empire.” I also discuss what happened to this ideology, discuss the possibility of new ideologies, and draw some conclusions about the state of the public mind in modern Russian society".
See excerpts from Kirill Kobrin´s History in times of Putin in English at openDemocracy project:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/death-of-post-soviet-project-in-russia/
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/welcome-to-post-post-soviet-era/
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Unpredictable Mechanisms of Culture by Yuri Lotman (NF)
Rights sold: Brazil - Hucitec Editora, Estonia – TALLINN UNIVERSITY PRESS (in Russian and in English), Georgia – MTSIGNOBARI, Poland – WYDAWNICTWA AKADEMICKIEGO SEDNO
This book, dictated by the world-known cultural semiotician Yuri Lotman at the end of his life, is in fact the last volume of Lotman’s opus magnum (along with his other fundamental works ‘Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture’ and ‘Culture and Explosion’).
The author analyses the global rules of history, the meaning of explosion and unpredictability in culture as well as art as a workshop of unpredictability. The book features a vast variety of new culturological ideas explained with plain and simple language distinguishing for all other Lotman´s writings. First and foremost, Lotman´s interest lies in the ways of development of culture. Among processes of cultural evolution Lotman distinguishes the three general types: the cyclical processes, which regularly return to the same start point, the linear processes, and finally, the explosive processes, which only might be attributed as unpredictable and as such represent the most interest to the culturological science.
The legendary semiotician didn't see this work published. It was put together and edited by his disciples, and for a long time remained unknown to the reader.
The book also contains extensive commentaries authored by Yuri Lotman’s long-time friends and colleagues: a prominent Russian philologist and Indo-Europeanist Vyacheslav Ivanov, writer and semiotician Boris Egorov, and Boris Uspensky.
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