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But the vast economic powers of transnationals now enables them to dictate policies to individual nations. The protests of French grape growers against Italian wine, Japanese farmers protesting American rice and Detroit auto workers bashing a Japanese cars make great photo ops and sound bites but little affect policy. Most of the important offices in departments of commerce and State go to the graduates of small number of elite schools where they are selected, trained and groomed to serve international commerce. In underdeveloped countries with authoritarian governments, direct bribery of unelected officials avoids the needs for subterfuge.

Note the pitiful attempts of the US to hector the Japanese to reduce their exports and trade deficits. In the past year, , there was some silly nationalist patter for sake of electoral politics that opposed globalization, eg. Anyone understanding modern political economy knew they would pass. Computerization and post-Fordist production In the German Ideology and the Grundrisse Marx noted the increasing importance of the integration of technology and scientific knowledge with production-almost years before Robert Reich was born.

Marx argued that the logic of capital mandated the replacement of living labor with dead labor, the surplus value appropriated from wage labor would be invested in machines that would make lower production costs. Capitalism encouraged productivity via machines or techniques to enhance productivity and output. In its classical form of assembly line mass production, large numbers of workers performed the same operation all day long, every day and often for year.

In many cases, their body movements were carefully studied to increase productivity. This type of manufacturing, Fordism with Taylorized management is now the Jurassic Park of industry, the giants that never learned how to dance in the words of Rosabeth Kanter. There are a number of reasons why there have been such major changes in production.

The basic reason however has been the inherent tendency for capital to use either cheaper labor or more advanced technology to maximize profits. Now it uses both. In the US, much of the technological innovation came through military Keynesianism in which some of the technologies had domestic applications. Per- haps the singular most important innovation has been the computer Although 25 years ago, when computers were first coming of age, it was said that they would create more jobs and relieve work from drudgery.

Com- puters have vastly improved productivity in science, medicine, engineering, architecture and management. Cad-cam production linking computers with produc- tion robots can shorten the time from design to prototype to testing by a hundred fold, and eliminate several workers in the process Salesmen with a laptop, modem and cellular phone, cannot only enter an order to a distribution center, but it can be assembled and shipped before he is out of the parking lot. Often this can be done without human hands.

But many end users can now simply enter the order directly without need for a salesman. Thus computers have so vastly increased productivity, that far fewer managers are necessary to run organizations except the Pentagon , fewer workers are needed to design and produce goods, track inventory or ship goods anywhere in the world overnight. The technological transformations of production are moments of a what have been called termed post Fordism Production is more automated and rational- Many mainstream economists suggest the de-industrialization argument greatly distorts the number of jobs that have actually be lost to the third world, rather they argue that most of the lost jobs are due to increasing productivity and not import substitution.

Aronowitz and Fazio have documented the profound transformations of work when computers and leading edge technologies foster enormous increases in productivity. De-industrialization is a bit of a misnomer, rather as noted, fewer workers are producing more goods given robotics, CAD CAM, outsourcing, etc. It is not industry that is in decline but well paid industrial jobs. The end of political man and woman 25 ized. There is more flexibility in manufacturing diverse products and models Lash, Urry Highly specialized limited run items are quickly made.

Production is now highly globalized based largely on labor costs. As is jokingly said, anything can be made anywhere and sold anyplace.

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Thus the major automobile manufacturers have plants all over the world. Ford has two plants making every component of its Contour, in case workers in one country strike, they can double production elsewhere. Designer clothes with Italian, French or American labels are made throughout less developed Asia. Nike paid Michael Jordan more to hack their shoes than they paid Indonesian workers to make the shoes. Patrician plebe, lord serf, capitalist proletariat and now, Wordperfect yellow pad.

The changing technologies of infor- mation production and transmission are such that the production of knowledge is an essential part of the world economy. Ultrasound, laser surgery and MRI are the most evident. But what is not as known is the extent to which various information and knowledge technologies are likely to be exported.

Satellite transmissions allow a number of routine clerical jobs to be done in low wage States or even countries. Software for computers is becoming modular and much of it written in developing nations. Thus for every technician using high tech equipment in the first world, there are many more people working in third world information sweat shops.

While such technologies and products have created fortunes for the wealthy, about billionaires have as much wealth as 2 billion of the world's people, the effects have been devastating to workers in the advanced countries see Aronowitz, De Fazio Mass media and the world of dreams One of the first consequences of printing was to undermine local knowledge and make general knowledge available wherever people could read.

This would ultimately undermine both local parochialism and received wisdom and transform society. By the 19th C. Hegel claimed the newspaper replaced the morning prayer. Many of these papers advocated political views directed to particular audiences As noted, nationalism depended in part on the circulation of printed tracts critical of aristocracy among bourgeois readers who would form a With the increased role of advertising, newspapers attempted to reach wider audiences and in turn toned down political opinion to the point where the editorial pablum of current dailies offends almost no one, nor does it inform.

The growth of mass media encouraged 19th century nation- alisms, and nationhood once attained, used schools and media to gain loyalty and support for its policies. As nations emerged and established schools to expand lite- racy and create communities with a common national language, literature became one of the primary forms in which a national tongue, exemplar goals and distinctive group identity was expressed By the end of the century, technological advances, supported by the rising capitalists created new forms of information and media.

More specifically, the rotary press, photograph, telegraph and phonograph would not only transform information storage and transmission, but enable the mass media of the next century. Mass media now had the capacity to influence popular support for partisan political agendas. Certain newspapers supported or opposed candidates or programs. This expanded to foreign policy as was clear in mobilizing support for the Spanish American war and seizure of Cuba in - The Maine, fighting the Hun in - The Lusitinia and the Axis in - Pearl Harbor The Nazis developed political propaganda to a fine art, they were the first to effectively use modern mass media to mobilize political support They used film and radio to arouse a nationalism shamed by Versailles in which Germany was sold out by various traitors especially the Jewish communist bankers.

Just as the Nazis used film to vilify the Jew and garner mass support, so too did the US. Somewhere between Frank Capra and Ronald Reagan, good decent, God loving Americans, would save the world from perfidy. As media was being used to secure mass support for political ends, with changes in technologies, it become a source of popular entertainment and of course profit.

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In the l9th C. Soon came film, records, and radio. By the early part of the 20th C. Media was now longer a means of transmitting information, but was hence used to transform desires, images and identities to secure consumption see for example the works of Ewen, Liess, Marcuse. Mass media provided a new basis for hegemony, amusement. Amusement became an alternative world, sort of what sci-fi calls a parallel universe that stands apart from the mundane realities of boredom, exploitation and the nuisances of existence.

Whereas for a critical aesthetic such as Adorno or Marcuse, It is easier for most people to read and follow a plot than to listen to classical music or view art. Music and art require more study to appreciate the history of the genre and talent of the producer, such appreciation often depends on class based cultural capital and particular identity formations.

The Lusitiniana had actually been sunk earlier, Wilson got the Germans to stop Uboat attacks, when they resumed, the dictates of national honor left him no choice but war. The foundations for the analysis of mass media, first to muster support for Fascism and then consumerism, was the legacy of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.

The traditions begun by Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse remain the starting points of any analysis. While the Ussr was a brutal regime, it was not due to its being socialist. Rather, socialism was the ideal Other to justify the glorification of American capital. The truth of the consequences For a sci-fi writer like Jules Verne, the 20th C. But the technological and medical advances were not sui generis.

They were based on the need for capital to find ever more sources of profit. Thus while for the privileged life is easier, healthier and with more leisure time for myriad activities from travel to hobbies to media consumption, for less privileged, life remains harsh and is getting harsher. While for a brief period industrialization had a tendency to increase wealth and distribute it to wider numbers. But for the reasons noted, the recent transformations described have led to an increase in class inequality and the various psychological stresses and strains.

The combination of globalization and post fordist production eliminated many of the well paying jobs that were available to blue collar workers. Many high tech and managerial jobs have been eliminated. But computerization has made many of these jobs vulnerable to decline. The growth of the knowledge- symbolic workers in the global cities creates jobs for many of the semi-skilled at the lower ends of the service sector. Buildings need to be cleaned, trendy restaurants pop up like weeds to claim dishwashers and bellboys, and the yuppy scum need domestic workers and baby sitters.

These jobs tend to be 1 poorly paid, 2 without benefits and 3 there are far too few of these jobs to seriously impact the ever larger pools of the unemployed. Just as the feudal city attracted those displaced from the countryside, the global cities are often the sites of a rapidly growing underclass. Forced urban migration began with the enclosure acts. While these changes have been beneficial to corporations that face increasingly competitive markets, this has been a disaster to the lower echelons of workers.

As is likely well known to readers of a book like this, the major areas of job growth are likely to be in services. And while some of these are likely to be the highly skilled knowledge dependent services, most are likely to be semi-skilled. These jobs are likely to be poorly paid and without benefits such as health care or pensions. One of the largest growing segments of the labor force, as many are declining, consists of temporary workers.

Finally, the decline of the union movement has meant workers will stay poorly paid. In the US, the real wages for most of the work force has been stagnant or declining for the last 20 years. Those that are still employed in manufacturing are more likely to be more skilled, more suburban or rural, less unionized and less well paid as in the past. Most of the lower echelons of the service sector are falling ever further behind. For a large number of workers at this level, full time work does not put one over the government defined poverty level.

Observing this trend, Kevin Phillips, one of the few Republican intellectuals, suggested that anger at politicians was one of the key factors in the 92 race. Some of this was expressed as support for Perot see above as well as Langman His attacks on Nafta, while quite misguided, struck a responsive chord with many voters. They seem to be aware that globalization has had major effects on the economy, and that politicians are unable to do much.

The thought that a twerp like Perot could reverse history goes beyond wish fulfillment to border on delusion. As the global city became more central for the international division of labor, we see in modern form, a reproduction of the contradictions of town and country that characterized the feudal period. But this is now played out on an international stage and it is the nation state whose power wanes much as did the power of the nobility as capital replaced land as the basis of wealth. Like the feudal town, the global city is somewhat autonomous from the country. It is part of an international division of labor and its wealth no longer serves the local communities, but the transnational enterprises that are ever less linked to particular nation states.

Thus while the service and controls may be in the global cities, the profits go to banks in Switzerland, Cayman Islands or Panama to be redistributed to shareholders. Given new infor- mation technologies, funds transfers take place instantly. Every day billions of dol- lars circulate around the globe. But few of these dollars get to the nation states that host the global cities. We have noted how the transformations of late capital have had enormous ramif- ications. The most blatant of these consequences are the growth of the urban wastelands of every major city in the US. Many of these urban wastelands tend to be in the same global cities that are the hubs and centers of multi billion dollar corporations.

While the transformations of the world economy created these conditions, the multi-national corporations little or no concern with the particular nations in which they do business, let alone the social problems those nations are ever less able to deal with.

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This is especially the case when the executives are foreigners who will have a limited stay. Often they do not even learn the language. National governments with declining funds are ever less able to deal with the social problems created by the changes described. Taxpayers with declining incomes are less willing to pay for ameliative programs. Thus we see a number of intertwined crises of legitimacy. In the advanced states, we see the paradox of declining nationalism in face of the globalization of the economy and mass media, at the same time as there are various reactionary movements waving banners of nationalism that emerge in face of declining incomes and rising populations of the poor.

There have been quantitative and qualitative changes in the nature of capitalist production. Many of the once powerful manufacturing centers such as Manchester where it all began, the Monongahila valley, the Ruhr valley, etc. Given changes in technology, transportation and cheap labor in the third world, many of the well paid manufacturing jobs in the advanced nations are now gone. While the amount of the GNP dependant on production has remained constant, less than half as many workers are now found in manufacturing and few of those have the real wages of 2 decades ago.

Further, many of the low skilled jobs in textiles, clothing, toys and even many light assembly jobs in high tech industries have also been exported to countries with cheap labor. Look at your watch, calcu- lator or underwear. Thus computers have so vastly increased productivity, that far fewer managers are necessary to run organ- izations except the Pentagon , fewer workers are needed to design and produce goods, track inventory or ship goods anywhere in the world overnight.

With e-mail, networks, databases, etc. Whereas capitalism and nationalism long sustained each other, the globalization of late capital has led to the erosion of the nation State and waning of nationalism. The various agreements over taxation, tariffs, currencies, etc. These agreements generally benefit both the local and global elites. By include we mean the ability to provide sufficient wages, incomes and entitlements to enable general participation and identification with the mainstreams of bourgeois society rather that at the margins.

Growing numbers of people can be considered little more than marginaliz- ed surplus populations that are ever more culturally and socially isolated from the larger society. The capitalist State faces a crisis between a growing urban underclass and the ability of national policies or budgets to ameliorate the problem. The marg- inalized segments of surplus people, pose three major threats to the nation. Dependent populations, including prisoners become a drain on national fiscal re- Many mainstream economists suggest de-industrialization arguments greatly distort the number of jobs that have actually be lost to the third world, rather they argue that most of the lost jobs are due to increasing productivity and not import substitution.

Secondly, young males in such groups are especially prone to various criminal activities including hard drug use that diffuse to the larger society. Finally, such populations push political agendas of the voters to the right which inevitably leads to ass backwards policies that create more problems than they solve. Further, various retrenchments in direct and indirect benefits push many closer to the peripheries.

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Between declining incomes, rising taxes, and deteriorating services, individuals become less enthusiastic about government and even commitments to the nation. At the same time, stagnating or declining incomes among the workers has fostered resistance to increased taxation, especially when it is seen as supporting the undeserving subaltern outsiders. The political elites of the advanced economies either don't understand the basis of the problems and implement foolish policies, or if they do understand the problems, they are politically unable to implement ameliorative programs, in both cases, the primary concerns are to secure re-elections and media politics mitigates against solving the serious problems of today.

Not only are the resources insufficient, but as a legacy of the Reagan, Thatcher Kohl policies, already burdened taxpayers, reluctant to fund more programs either regard politicians as ineffectual or support the various forms of simpleminded policies of the right. Nationalism to the rescue: Or at least its simulations This combination has eroded concerns for politics for most and abdicated the de- bates to increasingly vocal conservative nationalists.

The misunderstandings of the right frame the issues as variations on blame the victim, decline of family values or damnation of popular culture. In turn there have been major investments in new prisons, more police and military efforts to interdict drugs. Retrenchments of welfare are assumed to en- courage teen aged chastity.

As if teenagers who can't plan whether to screw that night can anticipate benefits a year later. What is essential for my argument is that religion and later nationalism provided 1 communities with solidarity rituals to maintain social ties, 2 ideologies that explained reality, gave meanings to injustice and sacrifice, moral codes for conduct, and goals to strive for, and 3 provided identities that gave the individual dignity and personal meaning.

What I am suggesting is that just as capitalism eroded feudalism and nationalism eroded religion, mass media has eroded nationalism as a political agenda and it is now a form of entertainment. Each can be seen as a ideological world view that creates particular forms of communities-church, nation and audience, identities- believer, citizen and fan, and goals-salvation, pride and now amusement. As most commentators have noted, the advent of television has had major conse- quences on politics in general and electoral politics in particular.

The use of expensive commercials, photo-op sound bite campaigns orchestrated by political consultants is now the accepted procedure. Campaigns are no longer based on partisan politics but focus group responses, what feel good about candidate, why the opponent is despicable and dreadful. People who are anxious, fearful and discouraged about the conditions of their lives respond with hope and enthusiasm to unambiguous promises to improve those conditions and also to clear definitions of enemies responsible for their deprivation.

The leader who persuasively offers such promises and definitions becomes a hero; the public that identifies with his or her expressed hopes and fears is now inclined to attribute their misfortunes to political enemies It is for such reasons that conservatives, indeed reactionary politicians have certain built in advantages, they are more amusing, and they are more likely to provide psychological gratifications, especially sustaining identities being assaulted by global capital.

And nationalist rhetoric is especially conducive to expressing the discontents that have been indicated. Insofar as electoral politics has become a form of amusement, albeit sustaining hegemony, nationalist appeals are especially amus- ing at a time when nation states have more limited realms of options in the global economy. They are on the wane Insofar as the prestige of the nation state has thus declined, the simulated forms of nationalism as amusement maintain legitimacy.

This can be seen in such varied forms as the Gulf war or what is misleadingly called the rise of the Christian right. What must be clearly noted is that electoral politics is a form of amusement and nationalist appeals the most amusing. The fundamental danger however, is that while such politics has little consequence on the functioning of global capital, some specific policies can make life very painful for the poor and already marginalized.

But such trends have been taking place in all the industrial societies. Ironically, the demise of developed nations began with the rise of colonial independence movements. With the loss of colonies political capital fell. With the emergence of the global post fordist system, economic autonomy was lost.

Now the dream world of amusement compensates for the loss of political and economic power. From the political to the personal For most societies, social reproduction was based largely on a combination of socialization, networks of personal ties and obligation and culturally patterned routines of everyday life. Most people were largely concerned with their immediate lives, kinship obligations and social ties. These obligations and ties often meant hating another family.

Social arrangements were not topics of much concern. Religion provided justifications for class arrangements, a basis for community, and in turn meaning systems and identities. In this way,for much of European history, religion sustained hegemony. It should be further noted that for most people, religion was closely tied to biblical tales, laws and rituals of birth, marriage, baptism and death that were interwoven with family life.

Otherwise said, most peasants were largely concerned with their immediate lives and not the abstract ponderings of academic theologians. Or sociologists for that matter. The magic of modernity was to shatter the domination by the Church and put in place a hegemonic nationalism that lured subject positions from the immediate worlds centered around family and perhaps village life. While class was the dom- inant feature of the new capitalist order, nationalism became a more important force than class conflict.

The members of a national community had a new basis of dignity and identity, the citizen. In every case of nationalism, there was an attachment to a national community, its framework of meaning and values. Indeed when class interest became an aspect of partisan electoral politics, it was essentially neutralized by gradualism and reform. Further, the prestige of the nation now affected individual self esteem, pride in scientific and literary achievements, shame in military or economic loss.

But no sooner than nationalism fostered a migration of subjectivity from the Church and local community to the nation, capitalism fostered mass mediated consumerism. As was previously claimed, this led to a migration of subjectivity from the nation and the larger life, to the privatized realms of personal consumption. Bellah following Durkheim as well suggests that occupational mobility, residential changes, the growth of leisure and lifestyle choices, etc.

While he is essentially correct, he remains at the level of consequences and not causes. If we start from the radical individualism of Americans that emerged when its English tradition met abundant land, then it becomes clear how consumerism and media have only contributed to the fragmentation of communities that had been long been typical of capitalism. This presumes the very existence of long term stable communities. Firstly, consumerism fragments the public into a number of consumption based groups. If not yet available, in the near future, we can expect perhaps channels available by cable.

This will permit even greater differentiations of taste, eg. Then there are the genres of popular music from bubble gum rock to heavy metal to salsa. Further are the variations in fashion and style. There are wide variations in life styles of the affluent who sail chartered yachts in the Aegean to the poor who join bottle gangs or visit crack houses of the ghettoes. The fragmentation of the audience can also be seen in the rapid proliferation of computer communication, specifically the vast number of bulletin boards available on internet which now has about 20 million subscribers.

It was estimated that , people read the bondage posts every day alt. There are thousands of bulletin boards ranging from intellectual or scientific exchanges, pro- gressive sociologist network being the best, to the grotesque alt. What is being suggested is that the vast range of goods, media and cultural choices and life styles not only fragments a society into so many divers segments, but as was argued, lures selfhood from commitments to the community, in this case the nation, to the manifold realms of privatized hedonism in which market generated individualism becomes superimposed on traditional individualism to provide a vast number of communities, some virtual, meanings and identities.

Of necessity, this has resulted in a decline of political interest and commitment. The end of political man and woman As we have noted the magic of nationalism was its ability to bring large numbers of the society from the peripheries to the core. The current simulations of nationalism, made for television bad guys like Newt Gingrich, LePen, Berlusconi or Haider, and the chumpian sic of them all, Zhirinovsky the anti-Semitic Jew cannot deal with the issues they raise since global capital is the problem, not the immigrants, women, gays, Jews, Turks or Klingons.

Further, it must be noted, that these appeals do not attract majorities, rather, the general trend to move away from the political. In the advanced nations, a plethora of mass mediated spectacles has shifted consciousness from the social and political back to the self and local communities, even if such communities are now virtual and exist largely in cyberspace.

This migration of subjectivity and consciousness is evident in a number of interrelated trends. Perhaps the growth of the therapeutic society is one of the most telling trends. Most bookstores, at least the national chains, have hundreds of books on self help, improving relationships, achieving ultimate orgasm and producing child prodigies.

At any given time, millions attend various 12 step groups, support groups, therapy groups, etc. While to be sure many of these may be quite laudable, and psychotherapy itself a legacy of the Enlightenment, has helped many overcome a variety of problems, whatever else it may or may not do, is that it focuses concern on the private, the personal and the important relationships in one's life. While many of today's social movements are directed toward positive social change, feminism, ecology, gay rights, a far more significant movement is the quest for new religious meanings.

Many have moved away from mainstream religions, often the liberal Churches and synagogues with social messages. They have moved to a variety of feel good religions. Perhaps the most significant has been the various new age religions. While there is a large variety of these new age religions, they largely consist of ripping off rituals from other religions including Native American ceremonies, they ignore social gospels and social teachings. The growing witch covens generally encourage egalitarianism and harmony with nature.

Many of the new age religions tend to be concerned with personal enlightenment and benefit, often healing. While whatever else can be said of Judeo-Christian religions in terms of sustaining hegemony, it must be noted that they did have a very strong social message encouraging charity, forgiveness and concern with others. The pursuit of truth from the crystals, the stars or Tarot cards does little to encourage social con- cern. Indeed following Adorno, such beliefs may sustain a degree of conformity and acceptance of everyday life that can be called little more than fascism on the cheap.

Finally, we might note another indication of the movement from the political to the person is attraction to celebrities. The relations to the manufactured stars of media has become a major industry. National inquirer has about 25 million readers each week more concerned with Dolly Parton's breasts, Michael Jackson's weirdness and Oprah's diet than with serious social interests. At the time of this writing, far more Americans are interested in the trial of OJ Simpson than any political event.

Then we could note the vast num- bers of fanzine bulletin boards. And as Rome deteriorated, the circuses were filled. And so we have seen how the globalization of post fordist production has teamed with a mass mediated culture of spectacles to usher a retreat from the political. But as we have warned, as more people escape the political, they abandon the game to the angry, atavistic demigods of the right.

The complexity of social psycho- logical phenomena related to the nation might be an explanation for the relative scarcity of literature concerning the psychological roots and modes of operation of the sense of national belonging, which has tormented the lives of millions of human beings since the French Revolution up to now, in Europe as well as throughout the world. Scholars studying national identity from the perspective of those affected have developed sharply contrasting theories on the nature of the nation as a group.

Histo- rians are divided in their arguments over whether the nation has always been a sort of group which primordially enabled human beings to identify with it, versus the insistence that nations emerged as a means of satisfying new needs that were aroused by modern structures of social organization such as classes, institutions of representative democracy and the market. Consequently, there is a clash of views over whether the nation should be considered a cultural unit providing a common set of assumptions concerned with the way the world is constructed socially, or whether it should be treated as a political unit creating a public sphere of communication where ideological and social differences can be safely expressed without fatally weakening social cohesion.

Sociological reconstructions of the national experience are unable to agree on the nature of the common base of communication provided by the national principle of group organization. Some argue that national development can be understood solely on the basis of continuity of socio-biological forces which form identity through the belief of common descent and ancestry. This view has been challenged by scholars who maintained that the nation is an invention.

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Results of this invention have been conceived as projections in the past creating plausible and feasible images of the nation in an ideological sphere which is completely devoid of feasibility and plausibility. There is not much consensus on whether national identity is rooted in deeply seated psychological needs dominated by irrational patterns of a collective mind, or whether varieties of national experience stem from the need for meaning of the world with the help of national categorization. The interest in solving these problems cannot be constrained within the scope of academia.

Despite expectations concerning the death or loss of relevance of the na- tion recent developments in the world demonstrate the opposite. Nations seem to be enduring entities of human social life and disputes can hardly be continued unless careful investigations are carried out which would yield empirical evidence support- ing or refuting the various hypotheses which exhibit no inclination to be reconciled with each other 2.

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This paper attempts to contribute to the discussion of the aforementioned problems through analyses of texts of European national anthems. While it can well be that nations had existed primordially, their anthems have characteristically been concomitants of a historical process leading to the emergence of states seeking their social-psychological location in the consciousness of people living within their boundaries as well as abroad. National anthems can be regarded as paraphernalia of a state which aspired not merely to command the obedience of its subjects but to rally their loyalty as citizens.

The capital city, representative buildings of government, monuments, the national flag, distinct military uniforms, coats of arms, postal stamps, bank notes, visible bor- der markings, and national holidays formed the stock of national symbolism which were to enhance not just the level of identification of citizens but to delineate and make the reality of nation visible to foreigners.

The inclusion of the national anthem 1. The nation, however, can be viewed purely as a construction stemming from politics without implying any value judgement Breully Certificazione scientifica delle Opere Tutti i volumi pubblicati sono soggetti a un processo di referaggio esterno di cui sono responsabili il Consiglio editoriale della FUP e i Consigli scientifici delle singole collane. Le opere pubblicate nel catalogo della FUP sono valutate e approvate dal Consiglio editoriale della casa editrice. Consiglio editoriale Firenze University Press G. Nigro Coordinatore , M.

Garzaniti Premessa 7 Filologia e linguistica G. Alcune considerazioni sulla classificazione dei codici 23 S. Lomagistro Il codice medievale slavo. Metodi di indagine e questioni terminologiche 93 M. Romoli Le funzioni delle citazioni bibliche nella letteratura della Slavia ortodossa V. Brogi Bercoff Constructing Canons: Ruthenian Literatures of the 17thth Centuries in Plurilingual Context. Sabbatini Il romanticismo italiano in Bielorussia. Alcune riflessioni attraverso Leopardi P. Mazzitelli Premessa I.

Opere collettive II. Contributi personali III. This is a specific term related to the sociological and psychological sides of all experiences of freedom limitation in the context of political dictatorship. The entire corpus of texts and materials I am going to deal with were composed in a synchronic perspective, which has usually been less considered, or at least not rigorously specified, in this field of studies. This specific meaning was the one considered by Sergej Dovlatov in his work The Zone: Frydman, New York which contains the notes of a lager watchman describing daily life in a soviet penal colony.

The same term has been used to entitle one of the very first if not the first one in absolute collec- tion of lyrics by poets who underwent political repression, which appeared in Russia in see Domovitov The emphasis in our insight as far as we are concerned is not set on what has been written or com- posed, but on where it has been written or composed.

In fact, Dori Laub states that time and silence play an important role in the distortion of recalled traumat- ic events: Of course, in the case of poems, we do not have the same number of details that a narrative prose account can display. Poems al- ways represent reality through condensation, at times employing metaphorical or metonymical transpositions of the experienced, in other words they need to be decodified to be fully understood. An analogous distinction can be applied to memorial and artistic prose, as recently done by A.

Gullotta, who proposed to reshape the concept of lagernaja literature regarding works of prose see Gullotta The Poetry of Soviet Political Prisoners policies. In order to develop an exhaustive discussion of the topic, to conduct a typological enquiry on the texts highlighting specific features for different periods, the chronological area to be considered should be as wide as the phe- nomenon of political persecution in the Soviet Union The upper chronological limit is established on the basis of the date which figures in the archive of the History of the Dissidence Movement in the USSR , conserved at the Memorial Society in Moscow, whereas the main chron- ological and conceptual inner boundary that shall be drawn is between Stalinian and Post-stalinian eras dissidence.

The chronological cri- terion is entirely invested with sense, as history itself enters these texts deeply and modulates the ways they were conceived. In fact, the relationship between the geographic area of the Gulag or prison where the author was, the typology of prisoner who he was before be- ing repressed , whether he had been covering literary duties in the camp or not, the typology of forced labour and working structure of the lager given their regional specificities , is important to comprehend the repercussions this has had on the production of the texts.

A systematic and exhaustive analysis of Soviet camp journals and their literary and essayistic contents, even if it would be important to highlight the formal and ideological features of texts that were published, is not possible in this article, but would be expectable for an exhaus- tive study of the issue3. Indeed, gulag press literature offers a wide spectrum of texts, whose historical and cultural value is considerable, as it shows the dynamics and images of cultural life within the camps that can be of primary importance also for the historical reconstruction of intellectual practices in so- viet prisons and Gulags.

Gullotta, who considers GULag press as a specific perspective which can help to assess lager cultural life as a whole Gullotta We deal here with clandestine, secretly composed poems, sort of mental texts composed in the mind and not on paper that were never published, often not even transcribed. This distinction has been partially pointed out in previous surveys5, though the synchronic element was not always taken into consideration as a methodo- logical criterion for the assessment of the corpus.

Both intellectual practices 1 and 2 have usually been less examined in this field of studies more concentra- ted on prose, written after liberation, in a diachronic perspective. The thematic and formal variety of this complex kind of poetry in spite of the common issues and life experiences shared by the authors is underlined by O. The first one has examined BAMLag poets, while the second one has no cogni- tion of the existence of an unofficial poetry phenomenon. Vilenskij, whose interest turns mainly to secret zone poetry, having himself been imprisoned in the GULags and having then composed poetry, stresses the heterogeneous cha- racter of the emotional content of these poems Vilenskij The present work takes into account, among others, several unpublished sources conserved at the Moscow Memorial archive, whose discovery is impor- tant for a complete reconstruction of the historical and cultural memory of the GULag and political repression in the Soviet Union, but which still suffer from documentary incompleteness.

Taganov to de- scribe unofficial lager poetry Taganov The Poetry of Soviet Political Prisoners as on a thematic level. We will divide our analysis in two steps: In fact, in later issues of the same year we find frank lyrical confessions about the gloomy and depressing atmosphere of so- viet prisons, where rhetorical messages such as the re-educational virtues of soviet jails see previous ex. Simakov refers to the inhumane anguish pervading the prison in which he is incarcerated Simakov The final line openly refers to F.

In our overview of the penitentiary press of these years, the periodic jour- nal edited by Solovki labour camp represents a specific case. Soloveckij lager shows several peculiarities in comparison to the others that arise later on, from the early Thirties.

Here we find a high percentage of citizens actually condemned for their religious activities, belonging to the old believers movement, as well as aristocrats, artists, and ex- ponents of intelligentsia. I really fear that memory literature of the 20th and the 30th will give us unilateral representation about life of those years, most of all, about life in detention. Life did not absolutely consist only in suffering, humiliation, and fear. In the terrible conditions of lagers and prisons, intellectual life was conserved in a certain extent […] it was pretty intensive […] humour, irony told us: Publication stopped in late and started again in A paragraph devoted to poems, stixi was unfailingly present.

Although this certainly does not mean that it was free from censor control. The character of poems published in this journal is heterogeneous; the mas- sive presence of repressed priests and devotees in this area is reflected by the considerable impact of religiously inspired text, where sufferance is not hidden nor even masked, but in a way understated and borne, thanks to the Christian faith and a correlated sense of expiation, as we see in the ambiguous text by G.

The presence of faith is evident also by the lexicographic recurrences in the poems published in Soloveckie ostrova. Neither in clandestine po- etry do we find such concentration of terms referring to Christian religious values. This has consequently to be considered a distinguishing mark of the Soloveckie ostrova literary section. The shadow then disappears, after one last unheeded prayer, his apparition soon replaced by the sinister one of the Priest, whose name is Polish — Tadeush Ta- deusz — and who hisses to the rabbi: Nor ze, funvanem kumen dos tsu dir azoyne oygn?

Retsikhe shpritst fun zey un shvartse gvure, Vi kumt retsikhe tsu a rov? The cynical Tadeush is certainly right when he sees retshikhe, slaughter, in the eyes of the rabbi, when he recognizes him as an alter ego of the Golem. The Golem, half man and half puppet, endowed with supernatural strength but ready to obey every request of his creator, will be the savior of the helpless Jews. He will be the one to stain his hands with blood in obedience to a higher will; thus it has 15 Quotations in this article from the original Yiddish text of The Golem are taken from Leivick , while the English translations found largely in the notes are from Leivick In the second scene, entitled Walls, the Golem is no longer a shadow, but a person.

He has a name, Yosl, Joseph, that reminds us of his messianic destiny and a rough-hewn appearance: At first, the Golem can feel only the most primordial, violent feelings: The rabbi seems both disap- pointed and fascinated by his creature. He teaches him to bend his head if he has to walk through a very low door, to move objects instead of sweeping them away; he teaches him that the sunset is not a fire that will soon devour every- thing. His rage explodes in an expressionistic outburst, his desperation at finding himself in a world so incomprehensible and threatening recalling scenes in works by other contemporary authors about the tragedy of the First World War: Es hoybt zikh epes inveynik in mir un vergt, Un klapt, a klinkerey in beyde oyern, Un far di oygn — royt un grin… Un mayne fis zey hoybn zikh, zey viln geyn, Un mayne hent ot gibn zey a khap dikh farn halz Un trogn zikh avek mit dir In the following scene, Through Darkness, the distance between the Golem and the community that he is supposed to protect continues to grow.

When the biblical God had called Abraham, the patriarch had answered with the single word: Hinneni, Here I am, and it is from this absolute readiness that Jewish sa- cred history was born. The relationship between the Golem and the rabbi may also be seen as a degraded version of this narrative from the Book of Genesis: God-Maharal will not call Yosl, but Yosl will think he has heard the call, and when he, like Abraham, leaves everything to answer: Un shtendik dakht zikh mir, ikh her dayn kol: Ikh tu a sets Di hak in holts areyn un entfer: Un ale nehmen lakhn, iberkrimen: In the meantime, events come to a head.

And the rabbi answers: Gor a sakh, a sakh Nor gebn konen mir zey gornisht, gornisht, hert mir? Un epes konen mir — o, io, mir konen, reb Basevi, mir viln ober nit. Mir viln nit… mir hobn Tsu alts un alemen fun gor der velt Nor tsugerirt zikh mit eyn shpits fun finger, Gor fun der zeyt a hoykh geton mit unzer otem, Un alts un ale fun der gantser velt Vet trogn shoyn oyf eybik unzer finger, Un shturems, virblendike shturems veln oysbrekhn Fun unzer leykhtn oysgehoykhtn otem… The fourth scene, Beggars, is set among the poor who are quartered in the Fifth Tower, a sort of timeless non-place belonging to noone, perhaps a refer- ence to the Minsk Tower where Leivick himself had been imprisoned.

Tadeush wants to throw the Jews out of even that horrible shelter: According to a well-known prophecy, the Messiah will come when the world is either completely good or when it is completely evil. In either case, mankind will have to be ready to welcome him and to accept change. In the scene Unbidden, Prophet Elias and the Messiah are two beggars, one old and one young, both with sore hands and feet and waiting for dawn at the out- skirts of Prague. As noted above, however, no redeemer may come without having been called for.

The time is not yet ripe; the awaited Messiah can only be the Last One, who marks the end of time. It is the Maharal himself who sends the two miserable beggars away. Fun den man, vos trogt zayn tseylem Tsu dem betler mitn zakh, kumt der oysleyzer, der goylem, mit a fist un mit a hak In scene six, Revelations, the Golem wakes up in the Fifth Tower, where the Maharal had imprisoned him together with beggars and victims of the pogroms.

Here, the puppet suddenly reveals his messianic role; the time set for his birth has come: Nevertheless, the power that he has suddenly acquired does not mean that the Golem is moving away from his creator: In the penultimate scene, In the Cave, the plot draws to a close. In the dark tunnels of the Fifth Tower that connect cathedral with synagogue, Tadeush and a monk carefully carry sealed bottles containing the blood of the child they have killed. Blood is the key word in the last pages of the poem, the blood which the Golem smells from afar.

Only he will be able to prevent the final slaughter, but the means by which he can do so are the same as those used by Tadeush and his fellows. The Golem tries to brace up, repeating the ter- rible formula, but he is continually tormented by nightmares and phantoms he cannot explain.

Deserted by the Maharal and lost in the airless underground tunnels, he finds the bottles with the blood and probably intends to murder Tadeush and his assistant. But visions haunt him: The rabbi has not visited him for eight days. The memory of that terrible night in the Fifth Tower is still vivid in the larg- er community: And yet, the Rabbi would still like the Golem to learn to live among other Jews, to relish the sound of their prayers. Moreover, the violence that the Rabbi himself has triggered within his creature — indeed, the violence for which the Rabbi created him — cannot be restrained.

The result is a grotesque tragedy: Iz dos a shtraf far unzer freyd, Reboyne oylem? Iz doz dayn shtraf far veln rateven zikh? Ti hostu nisht baviligt? Mayn zind far veln opnemen baym faynt dos zeynike; Der faynt hot oyfgemant Ikh hob gevolt farmaydn blut un blut fargosn Dvorel runs in, terrified. The Golem reaches out to her, thinking she has come to be with him. The Maharal orders the faithful to resume the song that marks the beginning of the Shabbat.

Here again, Leivick highlights the problem of violence being completely alien to Jewish identity. Dervayl hot zikh mit eynuneyntsik rege Fartsoygt mer, durkh mir, dayn leben; Zay dankbar mir far der gerateveter rege, Vayl ot fargeyt zi The devising of utopias and conjuring up of complex plans for salvation is pointless, Leivick argues.

While Leivick knew that even the greatly yearned for coming of the Mes- siah would change nothing in the human condition, he also held that continuing to wait for and to believe in his arrival was necessary. As the narrator explains: While Yiddish, to which Leivick chose to attach his destiny, is generally associated — at least in its secular version — with the simul- taneous acknowledgement and acceptance of dispersion and of exile, Yiddish language and culture also participated, albeit in often conflicting and troubled ways, in the building of the new country.

Leivick spent the greater part of his life hovering between two idealizations of life in the Diaspora, both of them reflective in mood: These two visions culminated after his death, as had often happened in his life, in a symbolic event, namely the creation in Tel Aviv in of the House of Lei- vick, a cultural center and museum, as well as the Israeli seat of the association of Yiddish writers and journalists This institution is one of very few in the state of Israel where the sounds of Hebrew and Yiddish, together with the multiple nostalgias of the Hebrew world, coexist in relative harmony — and both worlds, significantly, are contained in its name: Bet Leyvik, Leyviks Hoys.

Translated by Cecilia Pozzi and Sara Dickinson 27 At the same time, this guttural and poetic idiom of a disinherited and homeless people, a language whose very structure would seem to symbolize exile, necessarily sug- gested paradox and a sort of bizarre defeatism. Indeed, in the early years of the Israeli state, Ben Gurion led an aggressive campaign against Yiddish culture, which he identi- fied with the humiliation and powerlessness of the Diaspora.

This article will focus on that variety of Vysockian toska that might be defined, paraphrasing Giambattista Vico Unless otherwise noted, subsequent volume and page numbers in this chapter for citations of Vysockij refer to this edition. Heroic gestures simultaneously constitute a supreme form of human ex- perience for Vysockij and serve as the object of nostalgia — and it is in this light that they appear in his most well-known musical-poetic cycles. Harsh expanses of steppe and polar ice, underground mines, and mountain peaks are among the spaces selected by Vysockij to elaborate his conception of heroism.

When locat- ing heroism in other eras, Vysockij often chooses to contemplate the heroic feat in the context of war. Particular attention will be devoted in this article to the origins of this choice as well as to the expression of heroism found in his songs about the men who fought in World War II. The blend of a profoundly personal nostalgia for the heroic feat with widely shared public sentiments enabled both Vysockij and his audience to transcend the quotidian reality of daily Soviet life.

In these lyrics, we can begin to intuit a link between heroism and the ethical nature of true friendship the only admissible kind found elsewhere in Vysockij as well6. Nikolaj Rerix, who in characterized podvig as a concept that is specifically Rus- sian and thus untranslatable into other languages, highlighted the notion of moral choice found at its core: Heroism accompanied by fanfare is not capable of conveying the immortal, complete, and all-encompassing idea contained in the Russian word podvig [ Those who choose to take on the heavy burden of the podvig bear it voluntarily Rerix His impetu- ous temperament, his romantic sense of honor, and his irrepressible surges of creativity clashed constantly and irremediably with the paralysis that reigned in Soviet society during that era.

In particular, Vysockij suffered from the stifling conformity that reigned in the official artistic institutions and from the hostil- ity of the politico-cultural bureaucracy, that, while never overt, was insidious, systematic, and encountered by him daily8.

His travels through poetic space took him to dramatic geo- graphical settings and harsh climates: His colleague, however, who up until that moment also been his friend, obeys a mistaken instinct for survival and, in a display of irrationality and irresponsibility, succumbs to the urge to flee. Luck- ily, fate has prepared a happy ending for both men, as well as for the truck that they are delivering to a construction site beyond the Urals: Having overcome adversity with remarkable firmness, the hero reaches his apotheosis in a demonstration of magnanimity — as genuine as it is laconic — to- wards his weaker companion: In role lyrics, a lyrical procedure is used to appropriate epic material: Regret for the Time of Heroes 81 Though his coworker fails the test of friendship, the heroic protagonist re- mains generously disposed towards him.

Both songs are set in dramatically rendered environments that sharply contrast with one another and with daily life: Severe atmospheric conditions are exploited still more fully in Beloe bezmolvie White Silence , where perennial pack ice serves as stage for the mental states and heroic acts of polar explorers: Such homecom- ing is tolerable only because it is necessary in order to subsequently embark upon yet another path of ascent. In his mountain songs, the vital and vitalist Vysockij suggests that our only means of achieving happiness is choosing to set out again and thus to perform not just one, but several heroic feats, waging sustained battle against our own weaknesses and fears: As we gradually supersede one trial after another, uncertainty and appre- hension give way to a self-confidence that borders on exaltation: Not one step back!

While the two brief and apparently random quatrains that Volodja intones lack any explicit connection with mountain heroism, they can be linked to his general vision of mountaineering. The quest for such opportunities is con- stant in his work, perhaps because it is through the demonstration of heroism, in his view, that one earns the right to be called a human being. Hero- ism constitutes an ongoing process that, despite moments of triumph, is imbued with uneasiness and longing.

Vysockij himself appears to have been driven by a troubled restlessness or anxiety in his ceaseless desire to uncover heroes. He searches for heroes everywhere, ranging widely through space and time to do so. The feats of such personages offer at least temporary respite from the con- tinued threat of quotidian stagnation, their repeated acts of heroism constituting a bulwark against the encroachment of the mundane as well as the vital reasser- tion of full human dignity. As noted, the quest for heroism takes Vysockij to ex- treme geographical contexts: His search also leads him to the past and, particularly, to the era of World War II and to the heroism of the soldier.

He began to write war songs in the first half of the s25, when no theme in Soviet culture was more widespread than that of the Second Great Patriotic War. Ubiquitous in the figurative arts and classical music, the War was also featured in hundreds and hundreds of novels, stories, plays, poems, lyrics, songs, historical essays, journalistic reportage, war diaries, and films, both doc- umentary and non-. Regret for the Time of Heroes 85 the conflict with Napoleon that broke out in , clearly underlined historical continuity with the tsarist epoch.

Nonetheless, while he does mourn a profound lack of heroism in the dismal, gray, and dispiriting life that surrounds him, Vysockij does not seek return to the past. A lack of interest in such themes allows him to avoid the heavy finality of either tragic or rhetorical emphasis, and to conclude his songs with the acknowl- edgement of a permanent, ongoing state or condition of toska.

At the end of the day, artistic pro- duction seems to have allowed Vysockij to simultaneously sublimate and come to terms with a sense of loss through the act of commemorating it. It is also true that since his songs contain no clearly expressed desire for any actual restoration of the past, they generate in listeners a variety of nostalgia that is linked less to properly historical memory than to remembrance shot through with an emotional and even deeply personal nostalgia.

Since the struggle for survival that characterized the War era did not lend itself well to the discussion of ideological fine points, rehabilitated s pa- triotism was easily reconciled with the official image of the USSR as different nationalities united to defend the native land against medieval Nazi barbarity. In the initial months of the war, I had to take him, as a three-year-old, with me to work.

Sometimes he would sleep right there on the tables. When the air-raid sirens went off, we went down into the bomb shelter. It was always crowded, very hot and stuffy. And did he whine? Volodja came up to the loft several times, too, with his little toy bucket Safonov With the adjective bylinnye, referring to the Russian folk epic, Vysockij blends historical reality with folkloric reminiscence. The age-old concept of the war trophy requires little ulterior explanation. With the passage of time, the term progressively moved towards the criminal world, becoming a slang term for institutions of detention cf.

It is instructive to compare the verses quoted above with what Vysockij himself declared about the motives that drove him to write songs about the war: Indeed, most of the protagonists in his war songs are individuals or well-defined groups. Nonetheless, Ballad on Combat contains no trace of any disenchantment or bitterness towards youthful romantic idealism. On the contrary, fidelity to the teachings of books read in childhood and adolescence constitutes an ethical requirement for human beings: Immediately after the war, Volodja lived with his father and stepmother on a Soviet military base in Eberswalde, East Germany for almost three years from the end of to August Volodja began to love books very early [ He loved retelling to his friends what he had been reading.

He had an excellent memory. He could memorize a poem after reading it only once [ In Germany and later in Moscow my friends would come to see us. You can imagine what men who had served together on the front lines would talk about when they got together.

I pay tribute to this era with my songs. Regret for the Time of Heroes 91 Red Banners. Nonetheless, for all their plausibility, these songs seem to be set both in World War II, and also — simultaneously — in a metahistorical or mythologically prototypical dimension. May 9, was proclaimed a national holiday — as it had been in the early postwar years — and the tradition of holding an impos- ing military parade on Red Square was revived as well. Ana- tolij Kulagin This twentieth anniversary of the victory was celebrated with under- standable pride by the large majority of Soviet citizens, to whom the War had caused indescribable suffering and hardship.

The Communist Party exploited the event to launch a major campaign of self-celebration, mobilizing expo- nents of the creative intelligentsia. Painters, sculptors, prose writers, poets, playwrights, theatre and film directors each responded to the call on the basis of their talents if they had any and character, be it a tendency towards servil- ity or the affirmation of courage and a sense of dignity. Vysockij himself was involved during this period with two important projects that he would never have occasion to regret and that marked a significant step in his artistic evolu- tion.

Danelija that met with great success. He committed suicide in Regret for the Time of Heroes 93 the heroic to the lyrical The most well known among them, Mass Graves Bratskie mogily , was sung off screen by Mark Bernes and used by Turov as a connecting thread in the plot He was a truly extraordinary man, who really valued bard music. And this had a surprising effect, because, for ex- ample, we received a letter from a woman who had lost her memory when two of her sons were hanged right in front of her.

She watched this movie in the hospital and she wrote us a letter telling us that she had suddenly remembered where that had happened to her children. She wrote both to Bernes and to the studio in Minsk. Vysockij, like Bernes, regularly received a number of letters from veterans who thought they had rec- ognized themselves in the protagonist of this or that song, a fact that he often mentioned with pride during his concerts.

Here director Jurij Lju- bimov used an approach that would become one of his trademarks, namely pre- senting the bare poetic text without any set. As was the case with all Taganka productions, restrictions imposed by the censorship meant protracted struggles, lengthy negotiations, and multiple post- ponements.

In point of fact, the song Mass graves was itself cut before the drama opened in November , although Vysockij had the honor of singing another of his songs on stage. More- over, when he made a brief video in May in order to introduce himself to Warren Beattie, who was then casting the movie Reds, Vysockij began by reciting in Russian some poems from The Fallen written by wartime poet Semen Gudzenko , rather than a selection from his own wide repertoire.

Unlike the prohibited theme of the illegal underground that Vysockij had explored in previous work — and that had no official outlet — the war theme was publicly approved and even officially embraced; his own approach to the War, however, remained sui generis. An initial answer to this question was given by Vysockij himself in an explanation of his constant references to war: Having argued that war provides the best context for investigating hu- man nature, offering as it does constant opportunities for such to be revealed, Vysockij goes on to note that in the martial setting questions of themes such as courage or cowardice, selflessness or egotism, responsibility or lack thereof, re- main substantially invariant across eras: And I often find them in those times.

It seems to me that there were simply more of them then, that the situations in which they found themselves were more ex- treme. If you think about and listen to them care- fully, you will see that they can even be sung today: The motives for courageous acts on the battlefield are quite specific and differ from those that inspire, for instance, climbers.

The sentiment is so natural and deeply-rooted, in other words, that no explicit mention of it is neces- sary. Indeed, Vysockij makes no use of patriotic rhetoric in his entire oeuvre — a fact essential to understanding his poetics. The soldierly sense of duty that Vysockij describes does not appear to be trig- gered by conditioned reflex since the men do reflect upon it , nonetheless, this sentiment ultimately prevails over their other motives for action and, most nota- bly, over an instinct for self-preservation.

Their participation in the war results situations have been taken from those days [of war], but all of it could very well happen here, too, even now. This is how I regard them: Regret for the Time of Heroes 97 from various pressing events, but it is mainly the product of individual choice. In- deed, Vysockij rarely deprives his characters of the chance to choose or, at least, to challenge their fate even in the most dramatic contexts. And thus he thinks before obeying: Nonetheless, it is not the order from above, but his own sense of personal responsibility in pursuit of the common good that prevents him and his companions from giving in to hatred or instinc- tive emotion.

Despite a few variations in poetic tone, the war cycle is a coherent group of songs persistently laced with the themes of friendship, danger, courage, fear, physical exertion, life, and death. Certainly, such an approach itself might be interpreted as adding a touch of aesthetic and psychological authenticity to the subject, insofar as those who were actually involved in the War, whether as participants, witnesses or victims, were often quite unwilling to offer up the grisly details, preferring to recollect the tragedy in all its emotional complexity as a world in and of itself.

While not all of the persons described perform heroic feats, they do all overcome their fears and transcend the limitations imposed by an egotistical sense of self-preservation in order to create an epic together. Recalling the land where he was born, the protagonist remembers his orphanage childhood with implicit gratitude: Decades of exile, misfortune, hardship, unfreedom, and displacement follow: The Chechen does not speak of his own sad fate in order to inspire compassion, but reflects upon it, fully aware that his experience is but one detail in an immense collective portrait of the entire na- tion: Of all the types of violence to which he has been subjected, he is particularly haunted by the ethnic variety perpetrated among the deported peoples: More than one third of the deportees died during the journey or from hardships suffered in the first years of exile, while the survivors were forbidden to leave their place of destination.

The same fate also befell the Crimean Tatars, similarly accused of col- laboration with the Nazis and rounded up by the Red Army in May for deportation to Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan. No one could move, everyone sat in silence. And suddenly someone burst into tears, another began to cry, a third. In the last stanza, a long-awaited note of almost cathartic liberation sounds: As Austrian scholar Heinrich Pfandl He thus contextualized his own personal and familial affairs in the greater historical narrative that saw the Jews of the tsarist Empire adhere en masse to the progressive and universalist ideology of the Revolution inimical as it was to nationalism and antisemitism , as Yuri Slezkine brilliantly demonstrates.

Initially rewarded with roles of power and responsibility, the Jews fell victim to Stalinist repression in the s: In a list of historical situations allowing humankind to demonstrate its heroic qualities, he regretted that such an opportunity had been denied to him by the epoch in which he lived: We can agree with Klimakova There is no lasting escape from existence: Summing up, Vysockian toska is an existential melancholy that is incom- mensurate with the rudimentary mechanisms of restorative nostalgia: Vysockij at- tempted to overcome the anxiety produced in him by this divide through artistic expression and experience.

Singing offered him a means of transcendence and it is not mere coincidence that Vysockij set himself a furious pace in work and as a result in life cf. His frenetic attempts to achieve an exalted state yet again illustrate an attitude that deeply worried those close to Vysockij and was the primary cause of his premature death. It is quite probable that he more or less consciously considered artistic creation to be his own individual podvig, a heroic feat whose realization required a vzlet or act of taking flight that could not, alas, continue uninterrupted.

His quest to soar con- stantly above daily life was ultimately impossible to reconcile with the physical limitations of human existence. Vysockij was not content with artistic creativity that was restricted to an intimate or personal scale — the result of factors both external and internal, in- cluding his character, his theatrical training, and a certainty that he would not be published or officially recorded in Soviet Russia. Vysockij was driven to share his art, and the more he immersed himself in others, the more successful he felt it to be.

Writing verses was only the first step in this heroic creative process: Vysockij himself affirmed that his songs assumed semi- definite shape only after having passed muster with his audience: This re- corded Alice, directed by Oleg Gerasimov, was first released in as a double album and, after its great success, reissued almost every year until the early nineties; an MP3 version became available in Will you chicken out at once?

Or will you boldly leap? Inter- estingly, his compositions never achieved a final form: Perhaps he felt that the heroic feat of performing a song could not be repeated mechanically and that each realization required new effort and new adjustments. Some clarification of this apparent paradox is suggested by Boym The border between bytie and byt seems to parallel the mythical border between Russia and the West. Vysockij also meets the definition established by Antonio Gramsci This is exactly what Vysockij does and it explains his success: And by voicing nostalgia for the War and, more generally, for heroic contexts located in other spatial and temporal worlds, Vysockij allowed his public to both accept daily life and to understand it as preparatory to the heroic feat.

Melancholic Humor, Skepticism and Reflective Nostalgia. Svetlana Boym What is freedom? To me freedom is the Russian language. He now lives in Jerusalem. Although Guberman worked for many years as an electrical engineer, he has written verse throughout his life. A reliable biog- raphy that might offer insight on this charge does not currently exist, although Guberman himself provides some information on the subject in his prose writings and other scat- tered comments may be found in the memoirs of his friends and other acquaintances.

Indeed, dozens of gariki demonstrate that the poet does not take his own literary endeavors too seriously. Later books including the Seventh and Eighth Journals came out in and , respectively cf. According to Svetlana Boym Melancholic Humor, Skepticism and Reflective Nostalgia on oppositions whose psychological appeal belies their rhetorical and artificial nature: Restorative nostalgia is a means to assertively translate a vague and intimate longing into a concrete sentiment that is both ideologized and goal-directed, whereas reflective nostalgia cf.

Reflection or introspection corrodes any comfortable, self-referential sys- tem of values I vs. He is content with everything. Where indicated, we have been able to use the translations of Guberman found in Sokolovskij , although the bulk of the gariki cited here have been rendered into unrhymed English verse by Sara Dickinson, Cecilia Pozzi, and Laura Salmon. Indeed, the sober unmasking of this delu- sion is the only existential happiness that humans can hope for: Toska with no object, in other words, is nothing but the feel- ing of reflective nostalgia, or melancholia.

The same can be said of other frequently occurring lexemes referring to the same semantic domain, i. His smiles and his tears transcend rhetoric and eventually blend: Even when oppressive toska drives the poet to respond in typical Rus- sian fashion by praying, drinking and writing, he invariably filters his feelings through skepticism or irony, rather than dramatizing them: Such individuals live on the margins of a domi- nant culture, in a borderland whose fertile soil nourishes skepticism.

For such exiles, there is no spacetime on earth where this in- ner sense of diversity might be erased — hence their questing takes the shape do Jews always answer a question with a question? Melancholic Humor, Skepticism and Reflective Nostalgia of wandering not through actual spacetime, but through their own minds. The component of reflection that is specific to reflective nostalgia results from this process of mental wandering. They are always potentially ready to leave, to find and adapt to new spaces, and yet to preserve their constitutive strangeness wherever they are. Whereas Apollonians have a clear sense of belonging to a concrete territory and constituting a stable nation — they can leave immovable property to their heirs — Mercurians tend to cultivate knowledge, an asset that can not be inherited, but is easily transport- able in case of flight.

In the host countries of the Diaspora, the Jewish condition of alien brought with it fear, uncertainty, and a sense of ontological suspension, and encouraged concomitant Jewish-Mercurian tendencies towards mastering the languages of the Others, reflecting on alterity, and renewing and even subverting various cultures: Regardless of the particular form that it assumes, Jewish-Mercurian exile appears as intrinsically disharmonic cf.

This state of incertitude and its related inclination for reflection inspires in the Jews of the Diaspora both increasing curiosity towards the Other and partial — and ambivalent — identifica- tion with them. They are the artistic expression of a thoughtful and empathic Mercu- rian mood36, for reflection also means looking at oneself from an outside per- spective, i. A direct connec- tion between his mental flexibility and the reflective nature of his social critique is evident.

If serious Apollonian writers experience a concrete sense of cultural be- longing, Mercurians operate in a reality that is paradoxical. Where Apollonians offer conservative answers, Mercurians pose thorny questions: Such stability does not necessarily mean rigidity, however. Why did my friends always laugh so much at parties?

In his treatise On Humor, Pirandello, who was also quite preoccupied with fluctuating identities as at- tested in The Late Mattia Pascal and One, No One, and One Hundred Thou- sand , provides a good description of the empathetic reflective mood, albeit in somewhat different terms cf. Aimed at in- dividuals or groups that are seen to represent specific faults ignorance, greed, arrogance, etc. Paradox, by its very nature, is exclusively horizontal and anti-Manichean: But I know you are going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?

According to Freud Ivi: Throughout the twentieth century, the paradoxical melancholic mood of Ashkenazi Jewish culture exerted a strong influence on Apollonian culture in the West. Skeptical humor is by no means frequent in either everyday life or literature Freud But the fact that our life is a comedy is understood and felt by only very few of its participants.