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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Jan Plamper
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Extract

Recent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences is awash with emotions. Affective social science, the cognitive poetics of emotion, the philosophy of emotions, the history of emotions, and the outer markers of institutionalization and professionalization—conferences, research clusters, dissertations, publications—together create a solid impression: this is a “turn,” if there ever was one.

It appears that this turn has reached Slavic studies. That it has taken so long may seem surprising. After all, in the western European imagination, “the east,” and Russia as a part thereof, has long been linked with emotion—so unmediated and untrammeled that an indication of quantity sufficed as a description: too much emotion, extreme emotion, rather than a different kind of emotion. Whence the current emotional turn? Let me briefly map some of the roads that led to it.

Type
Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History and Culture
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , Summer 2009 , pp. 229 - 237
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2009

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References

1. On emotions and the social sciences, see Ticineto, Patricia Clough with Jean Halley, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, 2007)Google Scholar; on cognitive poedcs and emotions, see Oadey, Keith, Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions (Cambridge, Eng., 1992)Google Scholar or Tsur, Reuven, Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics, 2d ed. (1992; Brighton, 2008)Google Scholar; on the philosophy of emodons, see Nussbaum, Martfia C., Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, Eng., 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For signs of the professionalizadon of one field, the history of emotions, consider in die United States, the Institute for the Study of Emotion at Florida State University (with William Reddy, Peter Stearns, and odiers as inaugural lecturers in 2002) and a monograph series (“The History of Emotions Series” at New York University Press edited by Peter Stearns and Jan Lewis); in Germany, an Excellence Cluster on “Languages of Emotion” at die Free University (Berlin), directed by Winfried Menninghaus, as well as a Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin), headed by Ute Frevert; and, in Switzerland at Collegium Helveticum (Zurich), a section on “Die Rolle der Emotion: Ihr Anted bei menschlichem Handeln und bei der Setzung sozialer Normen.” A milestone in the professionalization of the history of emotions was a 1998 conference “The Historicity of Emotions,” which grew out of a half–year seminar at die Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. The conference was convened by Michael Heyd and Yosef Kaplan and attended by such historians as Natalie Zemon Davis and Anthony Grafton (e–mail communication from Michal Altbauer–Rudnik, 10 June 2007).

2. Take only conferences, such as Sheila Fitzpatrick's workshop “History of Emotions in Russia” at the University of Chicago (2003); a roundtable “Thinking about Feelings: Emotions in Russian/Soviet History and Culture” at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (2004); die conference “Emotsii v russkoi istorii i kul'ture” organized by Marc Elie, Schamma Schahadat, and myself in Moscow (2008); die conference “Interpreting Emotion in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia“ convened by Mark D. Steinberg and Valeria Sobol at the University of Illinois, Urbana– Champaign (2008).

3. Among those who have noted—and bemoaned—the dominance of this binary is Alexander Laban Hinton: “Unfortunately, debates over the emotions frequently lapse into nature/nurture dichotomies.” Alexander Laban Hinton, “Introduction: Developing a Biocultural Approach to the Emotions,” in Hinton, Alexander Laban, ed., Biocultural Approaches to the Emotions (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 1.Google Scholar

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5. See Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Basel, 1939; New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Theodore, Zeldin,France, 1848–1945 (Oxford, 1973–1977)Google Scholar, Zeldin, , “Personal History and the History of Emotions,” Journal of Social History 15, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 339–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Zeldin, , An Intimate History of Humanity (New York, 1994)Google Scholar (I am grateful to Stephen Kotkin for first alerting me to Zeldin's work); Stearns, Peter N. with Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): 813–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Stearns, Peter N., Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History (Chicago, 1986)Google Scholar, Stearns, Peter N., American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth–Century Emotional Style (New York, 1994 Google Scholar), and Stearns, Peter N. and Lewis, Jan, eds., An Emotional History of the United States (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Rosenwein, Barbara H., ed., Anger's Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1998)Google Scholar; and Rosenwein, , Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2006)Google Scholar.

6. Consider the arrangement of Reddy's chapters: first there is the universalist thesis (Chapter 1, “Answers from Cognitive Psychology“), then the constructionist antithesis (Chapter 2, “Answers from Anthropology“), which is then aufgehoben in a synthesis, the history of emotions (Chapters 3–4, “Emotional Expression as a Type of Speech Act” and “Emotional Liberty“). See Reddy, William H., The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, Eng., 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the late 1990s Reddy was one of the first humanities scholars to launch a life science–inspired attack against social constructionism. See Reddy, William M., “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,“ Current Anthropology 38, no. 3 (June 1997): 327–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. See Markwick, Roger D., “Cultural History under Khrushchev and Brezhnev: From Social Psychology to Mentalites,” Russian Review 65, no. 2 (April 2006): 283–301 Google Scholar.

8. In their emphasis on the prevalence of emotion talk in Vladimir Lenin they foreshadowed Krylova, Anna, “Beyond the Spontaneity–Consciousness Paradigm: ‘Class Instinct’ as a Promising Category of Historical Analysis,” Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 1–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Western social history of private life, including the family and sexuality, left a strong mark on this volume. See, e.g., Pushkareva, Natal'ia, “Mir chuvstv russkoi dvorianki kontsa XVIII–nachala XIV veka: Seksual'naia sfera,” in Iu. Bessmertnyi, L., ed., Chebvek v mire chuvstv: Ocherki po istorii chastnoi zhizni v Evrope i nekotorykh stranakh Azii do nachala novogo vremeni (Moscow, 2000), 85–119Google Scholar. On the family history roots of 1980s emotions history more generally, see Stearns, “History of Emotions: Issues of Change and Impact,” 17–31. For works on Muscovite and eighteenth–century honor inspired by western medieval and early modern European studies, see Kollmann, Nancy Shields, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Rustemeyer, Angela, Dissens und Ehre: Majestatsverbrechen in Russland (1600–1800) (Wiesbaden, 2006)Google Scholar.

10. See Gumilev, L. N., Etnogenez i biosfera zemli (Leningrad, 1989)Google Scholar. This—and the larger tradition of Russian/Soviet anthropology of emotions—is something Catriona Kelly thankfully alerted me to. Consider most recently A. K. Baiburin, “Toska i strakh v kontekste pokhoronnoi obriadnosti (k ritual'no–mifologicheskomu podtekstu odnogo siuzheta),” in Baiburin, A. K., ed., Trudy fakul'teta etnologiiEvropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt–Peterburge, no. 1 (St. Petersburg, 2001): 96–115 Google Scholar.

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14. Arpad von, Klimo and Make, Rolf, “Rausch und Diktatur,” Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft, no. 10 (2003): 877–95 Google Scholar. Also see Arpad von Klimo and Make Rolf, “Rausch und Diktatur: Emotionen, Erfahrungen und Inszenierungen totalitarer Herrschaft,” in Arpad von Klimo and Make Rolf, eds., Rausch und Diktatur: Inszenierung, Mobilisierung und Kontrolle in totalitaren Systemen (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), 11–43. 15. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Why We Hate You: The Passions of National Identity and Ethnic Violence” (paper delivered at Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post–Soviet Studies, 1 February 2004), at http://repositories.cdlib.org/iseees/bps/2004_01–sunyr (last accessed 26 February 2009).

16. Glennys, Young, “Emotions, Contentious Politics, and Empire: Some Thoughts about the Soviet Case,” Ablmperio, no. 2 (2007): 113–50.Google Scholar

17. Alexander M., Martin, “Sewage and the City: Filth, Smell, and Representations of Urban Life in Moscow, 1770–1880,” Russian Review 67, no. 2 (April 2008): 243–74 Google Scholar; Alain, Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1986)Google Scholar. Also see Vladimir V. Lapin, , Peterburg: Zapakhi i zvuki (St. Petersburg, 2007)Google Scholar. More generally, see the thematic issue on the history of the senses, Journal of Social History 40, no. 4 (Summer 2007).

18. For the following survey I am much indebted to Schamma Schahadat, “Psikhologizm, liubov', otvrashchenie, razum: Emotsii s tochki zreniia literaturovedeniia i filosofii,“ in Jan Plamper, Marc Elie, and Schamma Schahadat, eds., Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstv: Podkhody k kul'turnoi istorii emotsii (Moscow, 2009).

19. See Olga, Matich, “The Symbolist Meaning of Love: Theory and Practice,” in Paperno, Irina and Grossman, Joan Delaney, eds., Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, 1994), 24–50 Google Scholar. For a juxtaposition of Russian sentimentalist khandra with Czech veselost, see Gudrun, Langer, “Russkaja Chandra–Ceska veselost: Melancholie und nationale Identitatsmuster in der russischen und tschechischen Literatur der ersten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Germanoslavica 7 (2000): 147–75, 237–49Google Scholar. On Stanislavsky and emotions, see Tait, Peta, Performing Emotions: Gender, Bodies, Spaces, in Chekhov's Drama and Stanislavski's Theatre (Burlington, Vt., 2002)Google Scholar.

20. Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum, Lermontov: Opyt istoriko–literaturnoi otsenki (Leningrad, 1924). Also see Eikhenbaum, , “Razmyshleniia ob iskusstve. 1. Iskusstvo i emotsiia,“ Zhizn'iskusstva, no. 11 (11 March 1924): 8–9 Google Scholar. This is a point I owe to Catriona Kelly.

21. On emotions and gender, see Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington, 1987); Svedana Boym, “Loving in Bad Taste: Eroticism and Literary Excess in Marina Tsvetaeva's ‘The Tale of Sonechka,'” in Jane T. Cosdow, Stephanie Sandler, Judith Vowles, eds., Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (Stanford, 1993), 156–76.1 owe these references to Catriona Kelly as well.

22. For a critique of an attempt to validate Norbert Elias's civilizing process with a peculiar brand of evolutionary psychology, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, “The Uses of Biology: A Response to J. Carter Wood's ‘The Limits of Culture?'” Cultural and Social History 4, no. 4 (December 2007): 553–58.

23. See, e.g., Antonio R., Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Joseph E., LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York, 1998)Google Scholar.

24. On Zamkov, see Eric, Naiman, “On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them,” Russian Review 60, no. 3 (July 2001): 308–9.Google Scholar

25. Daniel M., Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago, 2006), 34 Google Scholar.

26. Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London, 2005), 34–43.

27. For Ivan Pavlov's impact, see, for example, Eric R. Kandel, “From Metapsychology to Molecular Biology: Explorations into the Nature of Anxiety,” American fournal of Psychiatry 140, no. 10 (October 1983): 1278–79; LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, 142–48 (Pavlov), 356 (Luriia).

28. See Aleksandr, Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1993)Google Scholar; Martin A., Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven, 1998)Google Scholar.

29. See Maruska, Svasek, ed., Postsocialism: Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; Noah W. Sobe, “Slavic Emotion and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism: Yugoslav Travels to Czechoslovakia in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Anne E., Gorsuch and Diane P., Koenker, eds., Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism (Ithaca, 2006), 82–96 Google Scholar.

30. On post–Soviet Omsk, see Dale Pesman, Russia and Soul: An Exploration (Ithaca, 2000).

31. Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universale (Cambridge, Eng., 1999); Jean Harkins and Anna Wierzbicka, eds., Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective (Berlin, 2001).

32. See, e.g., I. A., Sharonov, ed., Emotsii v iazyke i rechi: Sbornik nauchnykh statei (Moscow, 2005)Google Scholar; Grigorii Efimovich Kreidlin, Neverbal'naia semiotika (Moscow, 2002). Also see V. M., Kruglov, Imena chuvstv v russkom iazyke XVIII veka (St. Petersburg, 1998)Google Scholar.

33. See Roger D., Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth–Century Eastern Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 2002)Google Scholar.

34. David, MacFayden, Songs for Fat People: Affect, Emotion and Celebrity in the Soviet Popular Song, 1900 to 1955 (Montreal, 2002)Google Scholar.

35. See Irina, Sirotkina, “Pliaska i ekstaz v Rossii ot Serebrianogo veka do kontsa 1920kh gg.,” in Plamper, Elie, and Schahadat, , eds., Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstv: Podkhody k kul'turnoi istorii emotsii. Google Scholar

36. On this pattern, see Irina, Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford, 1988)Google Scholar.

37. For another study in this vein see I. Iu., Vinitskii, Utekhi melankholii (Moscow, 1997)Google Scholar.