Olga V. Solovieva - Böcker

The Russian Kurosawa offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian subtext of Kurosawa's cinema, most clearly manifested in the director's films based on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Arseniev, the book shows that Kurosawa used Russian intertexts to deal with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan. Locating the director in the cultural tradition of Russian-inflected Japanese anarchism, the book challenges prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker of muddled ideological alliances by offering a philosophically consistent picture of the director's participation in postwar debates on cultural and political reconstruction.

Christ's Subversive Body offers a fascinating exploration of six historical examples of politically or culturally subversive usages of the body of Christ. Shining a light on the enabling potential of religious rhetoric, Solovieva examines how in moments of crisis or transition throughout Western history the body of Christ has been deployed in a variety of discourses, including recent neo- and theoconservative movements in the United States.Solovieva’s survey includes the iconoclastic polemics of Epiphanius at the moment of struggles for supremacy between the Roman state and the Christian church, the mystical theologico-political alchemy of an anonymous treatise circulated at the Council of Constance, Lavater’s counter-Enlightenment visions of the afterlife expressd through physiognomy, Dostoevsky’s refashioning of ethical communities, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s attempts to provoke the “scandal” of Jesus’s mission once more in the modern world, and the elaboration of a political theology subordinating democratic dissent to the higher unity of a corporately conceived “unitary executive” in early twenty-first-century America.Solovieva presents her findings not as an entry into theological or Christological debates but rather as a study in comparative discourse analysis. She demonstrates how these uses of Christ’s body are triggered by moments of epistemological, political, and representational crisis in the history of Western civilization.

This book examines the transnational circulation of knowledge between Russia and Japan from the early Meiji era to the present day, reconfiguring the East-West paradigm both in terms of socio-geographical divides and cultural and political tensions within both cultures. Featuring chapters from the fields of literature, history, philosophy, film, and social and political thought, the case studies give interdisciplinary examples of the ways in which Russian-Japanese intellectual relations offer cross-cultural interconnections and emphasize the global circulation of ideas while undermining reductive national constructs. By switching the perspective on the cultural history from the grand narratives of modernization and Westernization to that of individual and local case studies of agency, engagement, and creativity on the ground, the book uncovers a much more diverse, fluid, and complex landscape of intellectual history, rich in alternative contexts for understanding the past and embracing the future. Revealing not only the historical points of transfer of ideas, but also the textual and disciplinary forms of this transfer, this book will appeal to students and scholars of the culture, literature, society, and history of both Japan and Russia.