Winter Paris Program
Romantic Paris/Slavic Paris
(Bozena Shallcross)
The purpose of this interdisciplinary course is to investigate the dynamic,
if convoluted Polish-French-Russian interactions occurring in the French
capital, its drawing rooms, lecture & concert halls, churches and
other sites of intercultural exchange during the Romantic era. The 1831
exodus of thousands of insurrectionists from Poland came to closure
in England and France. It was the French capital that became the locus
of a lively émigré culture created by (predominantly solitary)
men--former soldiers and officers. Paris--Europe's recognized center
for art, sophistication and elegance--nonetheless, offered them a bitter
lesson of cultural isolation, intermingled with poverty and homesickness.
At the same time, the foundation of the Chair of Slavic Literatures
at College de France became a rare institutional opportunity to present
the entire Slavdom's literary heritage and achievements to the French
public. We will read Paris as a cultural text reflected in painting,
posters, drawings and prints, as well as in Polish, Russian and French
fictional and non-fictional literature.
Some topics for discussion:
Introduction to the course: War and Diplomacy: Russians in Paris
(PowerPoint presentation; the end of Napoleonic wars, 1814 Treaty of
Paris)
The Great Emigration of 1831: Poles in Paris (PowerPoint
presentation, Slowacki, Letters); émigré centers;
political fractions, press. Revising the past, provincialism and homeland
in Mickiewicz's Master Tadeusz.
A Parisian Home/lessness: A Variety of Experience (PowerPoint
presentation, reading assignment: Chopin, Correspondance; Mickiewicz,
Letters; Goszczynski, Diary; Burnand, La vie qoutidienne
en 1830)
Developing the Polish Theme: Balzac's The Wrong Side of Paris
(reading assignment: Balzac, The Wrong Side of Paris
and Correspondance
Slavic Literatures at College de France, 1840-44 (Mickiewicz,
Parisian Lectures, Weintraub, Literature as Prophecy: Scholarship
and Martinist Poetics in Mickiewicz's Parisian Lectures)
Romantic Friendship: Chopin, Delacroix and Countess Potocka
(PowerPoint presentation, Delacroix, Journal; Liszt, Chopin;
Atwood, The Parisian Worlds of Frederic Chopin)
Les Grandes Dames: Hitrovo, Potocka, Rzewuska, Kalergis,
Sobanska, Volkonskaia (PowerPoint presentation, Goscilo & Holmgren,
Russia-Women-Culture; Zinaida Volkonskaias archives at Harvard
U)
Death in Paris (PowerPoint presentation; Hugo, Choses
vues, Norwid, Black and White Flowers, Delacroix, Journal)
I. Romantic Paris/Slavic Paris
Emigration, Exile, Diaspora
(Robert Bird)
While economic and political emigrants from the Russian Empire and Eastern
Europe had long found refuge in the West, the Russian Revolution of 1917
caused the unwilling displacement of an unprecedented number of highly-educated
Russians and other Eastern Europeans from their homelands. The millions
of Russians who found themselves outside Russia after 1917 were later
joined by millions more (from all communist countries) in the latter years
of World War II, and then by a steady stream after Détente in the
early 1970s. Each generation dealt with its displacement differently,
but the allure of freedom and of material success always clashed with
the nostalgic pull of home, which often did not weaken with time. Self-styled
as the Russian diaspora, Russian émigrés sometimes saw their
eventual return home as an event of messianic proportions.
Taking care to place the Russian contribution within Western European
culture of its day, we will sample a full range of works from all three
waves (after 1917, after 1939, and after 1970), including writers Ivan
Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, Nina Berberova, and Witold Gombrowicz; poets
Vladislav Khodasevich, Alexander Wat, Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky;
philosophers Nikolai Berdiaev and Georgii Fedotov; and visual artists
from Marc Chagall to Andrei Tarkovsky. We will also visit notable sites
of memory, museums and archival collections of the Russian émigrés
in Paris and its environs.
The lesson of the Russian emigration (in particular) sheds valuable
light on the broader issues of how humans are shaped by the spaces they
inhabit and what happens when they are displaced from their homes. It
is not a one-way street; by being the prime center of exile Paris itself
has accrued a peculiar place in the identity of modern Russians and
other Eastern Europeans. We will consider the way humans interact with
particular kinds of spaces in the formation of their identities, especially
in extreme cases of displacement, return, and nostalgia (literally an
aching for home). We will also consider the role of specific loci of
memory, such as cemeteries and archives, in the maintenance of individual
and social identity.
The Idea of Europe in Contemporary Cinema
(Malynne Sternstein)
The third session of "Europe East and West" focuses on how
film originating from Europe "East" has treated the confrontation
of Central and Eastern Europe with Western Europe since 1989. Thematic
concerns such as the real or perceived globalization of western values,
nationalism, racism, and border conflicts, and "Soviet" hangover,
including the phenomenon of 'ostalgie,' or the nostalgia for the communist
past, among other topics, are collated with readings on and discussions
of the medium specific aspects of film, such as filmic gaze, sound,
and editing.
Film, as a locus for exposing and expressing the tensions of European
citizenship along the East-West fault-line, to borrow a term, and as
a medium discretely positioned to explore these dilemmas, is emphasized
so as to draw out the especial place of film in the dialogue with European
integration. Films that explicitly engage the idea of accession and
absorption into "Europe-prope," such as Wolfgang Becker's
Goodbye, Lenin! (2003) and Régis Wargniers Est-Oeust
(1999) are studied along with those that treat more implicitly the move
away from the Soviet past into nationalist self-determination and Capitalist
democracy such as Hans Weingartner's The Edukators (2004) and
Filip Remunda and Vít Klusák's Czech Dream (2004).
Films that explore the East-West divide allegorically, psycho-sexually,
and with an emphasis on the uncanny position of language as a bridge
and an obstruction between the 'civilized' and the 'primitive', complicate
the polarity of East/West and are of special concern: Aleksandr Sokurov's
Russian Ark (2002), Aleksandr Rogozhkin's The Cuckoo
(2002), Krysztof Kieslowski's White (1994), Michael Haneke's
Code Unknown (2000), Emir Kusturica's Underground
(1995), Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land (2001), Robert Koltai's
Colossal Sensation (2004), Filp Renc's From Subway with
Love (2005), and Theo Angelopoulos' Ulysses' Gaze (1995).
Film theory and criticism from authors as diverse as Slavoj Zizek
(on Krysztof Kieslowski and Emir Kusturica), Kevin Wynter (on Michael
Haneke), and Tony MicKibbin ("Cinema of Damnation"), supplemented by
interviews with directors and screen-writers, is a central part toward
understanding and unsettling the idea of Europe.
RETURN TO PARIS WINTER EAST & WEST
PROGRAM
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Study Abroad Office, Harper 203