Lenin’s Bodies & Buildings

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Reps Admin

A pair of essays on Soviet sovereignty and the afterlife of Lenin

Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty
by Alexei Yurchak

During discussions a few years ago in the Duma about the fate of Lenin’s body, which is displayed in the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square, Vladimir Medinsky, then a Duma deputy (and now Russia’s minister of culture), suggested that it was time to take this body out of the mausoleum and bury it in the ground. “Do not fool yourselves,” he explained, “with the illusion that what is lying in the mausoleum is Lenin. What’s left there is only 10 percent of his body.” The respected political weekly Vlast’ decided to check this figure. During the autopsy in January 1924, wrote the weekly, Lenin’s brain and organs had been removed. When Lenin was embalmed, his internal liquids were replaced with embalming fluids. Since organs constitute about 17 percent of human body mass, and liquids about 60 percent, Lenin’s body had lost 77 percent of its original matter. Therefore, concluded the weekly, the Duma deputy had gotten it wrong: what is lying in the mausoleum is 23 percent of Lenin’s body, not 10 percent as Medinsky had suggested. Continue reading …

In this essay, Alexei Yurchak analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years. It focuses on the materiality of this particular body, the unique biological science that developed around the project, and the peculiar political role this body has performed.

ALEXEI YURCHAK is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006) and is working on the political history of Lenin’s and other communist bodies and the science that developed around the projects of their preservation.

Snow White and the Enchanted Palace: A Reading of Lenin’s Architectural Cult
by Jonathan Brooks Platt

In 1965 the architect Konstantin Mel′nikov wrote a short memoir of his work on the Lenin Mausoleum, revealing a folkloric source for his 1924 design of the original sarcophagus. Mel′nikov describes his pyramidal glass construction as “a crystal with a radiant play of interior ambient light, suggesting the fairy tale of the sleeping princess.” The reference conflates two literary folk tales: Vasily Zhukovsky’s “Tale of the Sleeping Princess,” a reworking of Charles Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty,” and Alexander Pushkin’s “Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Heroes,” based on the Grimm brothers’ “Snow White.” Mel′nikov likens the embalmed V. I. Lenin to Zhukovsky’s sleeping princess, but his crystal coffin more directly refers to Pushkin’s dead one. Pushkin also likens death to sleep in his tale. Before being placed in the coffin, the princess “lay so fresh, so quiet, / As if under the wing of sleep, / That she seemed only just not to breathe,” and in the end she rises from the coffin with the cry: “Oh, how long I slept!” Applied to Lenin, this image is remarkably potent. Not only does Mel′nikov suggest the dead leader might be resurrected; he feminizes him as the bride of some future hero. Who will come to smash the coffin, awaken the princess, and live happily ever after? Continue reading …

Jonathan Platt’s essay offers a chronotopic reading of V. I. Lenin’s architectural cult and its relation to Soviet sovereignty in the postrevolutionary period, as reflected in the discourse and plans surrounding the Lenin Mausoleum and the Palace of Soviets in Moscow. Central contexts include Andrei Platonov’s novella The Foundation Pit and Russian versions of the “Snow White” tale.

JONATHAN BROOKS PLATT is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He works on Russian and Soviet literature and culture with special interests in the late romantic, Stalinist, and contemporary periods.

Representations’ Lorna Hutson on Henry V

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Reps Admin

Lorna Hutson, Berry Professor of English at the University of St. Andrews and corresponding editor of Representations, will present the keynote lecture at the Renaissance and Early Modern Studies Designated Emphasis Annual Conference at UC Berkeley. The conference takes place from 12:30-5pm on Friday, April 24, in the Geballe Room at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Hutson’s keynote address, entitled “‘Impounded as a Stray’: History, Law and Scottish Sovereignty in Henry V,” will begin at 3:30pm.

Hutson’s most recent essay for Representations, “Imagining Justice: Kantorowicz and Shakespeare,” appeared in the Spring 2009 issue (106) as part of a special forum that she edited, “Fifty Years of The King’s Two Bodies.”

Representations’ Alexei Yurchak in conversation with Mary Neuburger

Posted on April 21, 2015 by Reps Admin

Alexei Yurchak, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and Representations board member, will participate in a conference on “The Pleasures of Backwardness: Consumer Desire and Modernity in Eastern Europe.” Yurchak will provide a response to the opening keynote address by Mary Neuburger, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and Director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, entitled “To the ‘West’ and Back: Pleasure, Restraint, and ‘Civilization’ in Eastern Europe.”

The event will take place on Thursday, April 23, at 5:15pm in the Heynes Room at the Faculty Club, UC Berkeley. For more information about the conference schedule, please visit: http://history.berkeley.edu/events.

Yurchak’s recent essay, “Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty,” is available in Representations 129 (Winter 2015).

Representations’ Tom Laqueur on Museums and the Construction of Narrative

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Reps Admin

Thomas W. Laqueur, Helen Fawcett Professor of History at UC Berkeley and founding board member of Representations, will present a talk on “Museums and the Construction of Narrative” at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley. Part of the Magnes Collection’s PopUp Exhibition series, in which speakers present lectures based on selected collection items, this talk will discuss the challenges that contemporary museums face in creating and preserving narratives. On display for this talk will be a 2500-year-old coin and a glass vessel from Ancient Judaea; a basketball jersey from Peninsula Temple Beth El in San Mateo (California); and a painting by Sarah Samuels Stein, Gertrude Stein’s sister-in-law, a student of Henri Matisse, and a collector of Matisse’s work.

The talk will take place at noon on Wednesday, April 22, at the The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, located at 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley.

Description Across the Disciplines

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Reps Admin

Description Across the Disciplines

A conference at Columbia University organized by Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, and Heather Love

Thursday, April 23, 2015 – Friday, April 24, 2015

Participants in “Description Across the Disciplines” will consider the relation between description and other modes of engaging with objects of analysis, such as interpretation, evaluation, argument, and critique.

While description has proven to be contentious in literary studies and critical theory, it constitutes a central and prized aspect of scholarly practice in fields such as anthropology, musicology, and art history and has remained so despite critiques of objectivity and the “view from nowhere.”

How have practices of description—from ethnography to ekphrasis—shifted in light of changing views of the role of the observer, scholarly ethics, and epistemology? What protocols are involved in describing people, texts, images, musical scores, and material artifacts?

Questions of description have been taken up recently within several disciplines; we hope to expand these conversations by offering a comparative perspective.

The conference brings together presenters from history, anthropology, psychology, art history, and literary studies alongside curators and artists working in different genres, such as observational documentary and graphic memoir, for whom description represents a crucial aspect of their practice.

Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus are also the co-editors of the Representations special issue “The Way We Read Now,” a much-discussed collection of essays on surface reading published in Fall 2009.

Intellectual History and the Anthropocene

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Reps Admin

Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene

by Noah Heringman

The essay begins:

Man can have an influence on the climate he inhabits, and, in a manner, fix its temperature at any point that may be agreeable to him; and, what is singular, it is more difficult for him to cool than to heat the earth.

—Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Epochs of Nature (1778)

The Anthropocene poses a radical new answer to an old question: where do humans fit in the story of deep time? As a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene comes freighted with the Enlightenment origins of the geological time scale, an escalation so profound that it dislocated time itself into a spatial register: deep time. The urgency of this intellectual history in the Anthropocene may seem less clear than the urgency of remembering and disentangling the contingencies of a global political economy built on fossil fuels. Still, as Dipesh Chakrabarty observed in 2009, “In the era of the Anthropocene, we need the Enlightenment (that is, reason) even more than in the past.” One Enlightenment text, Buffon’s Epochs of Nature, provides grounds for questioning Chakrabarty’s insistence on the novelty of the Anthropocene, defined memorably by him as a time in which “humans wield geological force” by virtue of anthropogenic climate change. “In no discussion of freedom in the period since the Enlightenment,” Chakrabarty contends, “was there ever any awareness of the geological agency that human beings were acquiring at the same time as and through processes closely linked to their acquisition of freedom.” As my epigraph shows, however, Buffon does construe freedom as geological agency (“heat[ing] the earth”), signaling the critical potential of a history of deep time in the Anthropocene. All too often civilization has presented itself as the culmination or completion of geological and anthropological time. This Enlightenment legacy is encoded in the very name of the Anthropocene. Recalling it might help to make the Anthropocene less anthropocentric. The cognate stories of deep time and the Anthropocene converge in the present on what I will argue is a primary symptom of the new epoch, and a part of its forgetting: evolutionary nostalgia. Continue reading …

In this essay Heringman argues that the concept of deep time is essential to the intellectual history of the Anthropocene—the name widely (though not yet formally) used for our current geological epoch. Buffon’s Epochs of Nature, one of the earliest secular models of geological time in Enlightenment natural history, uses inscription as a metaphor to mark the advent of biological species, including humans, in the course of earth history. The Anthropocene extends this project of writing ourselves into the rock record. Buffon makes a productive interlocutor for the Anthropocene because he is one of the first to examine climate change and related constraints on human agency in the context of deep time. The essay examines Buffon’s natural history and associated Enlightenment discourses of primitive art and culture to gain a purchase on the challenges of scale posed by the Anthropocene.

NOAH HERINGMAN teaches English at the University of Missouri. His latest book is Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work (2013).

John P. McCormick presents “On the Myth of the Conservative Turn in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories”

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Reps Admin

John P. McCormick, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, will present a talk at UC Berkeley entitled “On the Myth of the Conservative Turn in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories.” The event will take place on Wednesday, April 1 at 5:00pm in 300 Wheeler Hall.

McCormick’s article, “Prophetic Statebuilding: Machiavelli and the Passion of the Duke” is available in Representations 115.1 (Summer 2011).