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Visceral Narratives: Constructing Bodily Awareness as a Moral Value in Thaw and Post-Thaw Soviet Literature and Cinema
Chelpanova, Ekaterina
Chelpanova, Ekaterina
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Abstract
In my dissertation I explore the somatic shift in the Soviet Thaw culture of the 1960s, i.e. the Soviet writers and filmmakers’ pursuit of new and effective models of embodied engagement with the reader/spectator as well as their interest in body-related themes, such as illness, disability, sexuality and others. This shift ensued from the long-lasting neglect of the Soviet citizens’ basic bodily needs during World War II, the Stalinist repressions, the time of collectivization and five-year year plans. My study focuses on novels by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Boris Vasil’ev, and films by Kira Muratova and Larissa Shepit’ko, which endorse the idea of reuniting with one’s body as an ethical value and privilege embodied over purely rational cognition. In doing so, some of the authors drew on the pre-revolutionary Russian thinkers, including the religious ones, such as Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In Thaw-era film and literature, the idea of re-uniting with the body as an ethical value was transmitted to the viewers/readers through emphasizing the moral superiority of the characters that followed their desires and sincerely expressed their emotions. Detachment from the body, on the contrary, was shown as grotesquely unattractive and therefore immoral. In promoting the mind-body reconciliation as a virtue the Thaw filmmakers employed such artistic means as exaggerated body language, discrepancy between speech and body language, and “haptic” (Laura Marks), tactile visuality. Writers on the other hand focused on deconstructing the normative language and creating new linguistic forms that are more effective in communicating moral messages through descriptions of characters’ sensory experiences.Although the 1960s writers’ and filmmakers’ promotion of sincerity as an ethical ideal was not politically subversive, broaching officially tabooed themes related to the human body was potentially dangerous and led to the shelving of Kira Muratova’s films and the banning of Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward.
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Date
2022-12-31
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Slavic studies, Film studies, Slavic literature, body, film, literature, pain, Russian, Soviet