Teacher Educator

AbstractNikolai Leskov and Anton Chekhov frequently portray Russian Orthodox sites and services in their fiction. Examining Leskov’s novella The Sealed Angel, and three early Chekhov stories, this article explores how the two authors represent Orthodox liturgical space through the Byzantine technique of ekphrasis, a descriptive method used to present church architecture in sermons, hymns, encomia, and prayers. Rather than objectively describing church architecture and interior space, ekphrasis reproduces the site’s aesthetic and affective impact on the speaker, who recounts this idealized experience to evoke an emotional response. Ekphrastic technique therefore contradicts mimetic procedures of realist representation, prioritizing the impression produced by the material image over descriptive accuracy. Leskov and Chekhov present Orthodox sites as they are imaginatively perceived, in idealist approximations of liturgical space that more faithfully reflect the nature of liturgical experience. Both authors dramatize character point of view and voice to call forth an embodied, affective experience of Orthodox space—transposing the reader to a fictive setting, and simulating spatial presence and perception. By reviving classical ekphrasis, Leskov and Chekhov also parody realist mimetic conventions, and advance the historical development of realism itself.

AbstractThe traditional Sovietological paradigm of Stalin’s nationalities policy—presented as an anti‐national policy geared toward the assimilation of non‐Russian ethnic groups in the supernational entity of the “Soviet people” and its Russian culture—has, in recent decades, given way to a more complex approach that has identified strong tendencies in the ideology and practice of Stalinist Bolshevism to foster “primordial” ethnic identities. Most of the historiography on Soviet Jews, however, has found it hard to break free of Cold‐War Sovietological assumptions and continues to view the policies of the Stalinist regime toward the Jews as seeking their assimilation and eventual disappearance. The present article attempts to re‐examine this view and point to the ambivalent and even negative attitude of Stalin and his acolytes to the issue of Jewish assimilation—this based on a closer reading of Stalin’s relevant writings and archival sources pertaining to the Birobidzhan project and the period of anti‐Jewish persecution, some of which have never been studied before, and on the critical insights of recent studies on the subject of Stalin’s nationalities policy.