The Zagreb School of Animation, one of the great achievements of Yugoslav culture, produced hundreds of films from the 1950s to the early 1990s. This paper studies the early development of the Zagreb School and the films that satirized the universal concerns of the post-World War II landscape: industrialization, militarism, environmentalism, nuclear annihilation, and urban alienation, as well as the conforming pressures of commercialization and mass culture. This paper argues that the Zagreb School, which was made up neither of dissidents nor propagandists, breaks many of the stereotypes about artists in the dictatorial states of central and eastern Europe. Its approach to the animation medium is adjacent to the two most important features of Yugoslavia's Third Way experiment: the development of workers’ self-management and a commitment to internationalism. The paper places the Zagreb School in this historical context with a formalist analysis of Boris Kolar's Bumerang (Boomerang, 1962).

The national narrative spun around Ivo Andrić has held firm in both academic circles and popular imagination, despite several comprehensive attempts at correcting appropriations of his oeuvre for national narratives. This article critiques nationalist readings of Andrić by showing how in his most famous novel, The Bridge on the Drina, key passages most often associated with nationalist appropriation speak against rather than for national mythopoesis. Antić does so by re-focusing on the literary rather than historiographic reading of the novel, which is to say, by analyzing narrative strategies that illuminate Andrić’s resistance to nineteenth-century romantic nationalism. In particular, Antić focuses on the scene of Radisav's impalement in order to unravel its many misinterpretations, from those that see in this scene the portrayal of Serbian national victimization and thus a justification for the 1990s genocidal war, to the ones that stay within the fictional text but still overlook ways in which Andrić qualifies the mythical/epic view of Radisav's execution. Antić shows instead that Andrić uses this scene, among others in this novel, to disrupt epic narrative models that underwrite much of South Slavic national invention of tradition, and thus challenge rather than affirm national(istic) models of Bosnian history.

This article examines several documentary films made by and about the Russian oil industry in the period from 2003 to 2016, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which they portray intersections between oil and post-Soviet “life.” It divides these films into two major sub-genres: the corporate documentary (2003-present) and the conspiracy documentary (most widespread after about 2012). Corporate documentaries have been instrumental in fashioning new, post-Soviet links between the oil industry and everyday life, especially through “commodity chain” documentaries shown widely on television and in other media. The conspiracy films of the 2010s then extended these commodity chains into the realm of shadowy international cabals and, in some cases, fantastic alien worlds. Together, these sub-genres speak to the cultural imagination of life in Russia as a petrostate, complete with agents and victims, usable pasts and presents, and a variety of energopolitical subject positions that viewers might inhabit and shift among. Although oil documentaries and science fiction generated around the world have long imagined non-hydrocarbon energy futures for humankind, recent Russian oil documentaries in both sub-genres envision a world in which oil and human life will become ever more tightly enmeshed.

This article analyzes the interactions of medical experts, minor patients, and parents in a child psychiatric institution that operated in the Soviet city of Perm΄ between 1926 and 1929. Through a micro-history of this institution, the author raises questions about the nature of violence within the realm of psychiatric care, demonstrating the multidimensional flow of power within a particular institutional setting and adding complexity to our understanding of the asylum writ large. At the same time, the article engages the question of violence in Soviet society at the end of the NEP, suggesting that the historical actors involved in the Perm΄ institution used violence as a means to explain the crisis of their time.

In the 1930s, Viacheslav Ivanov – erstwhile leader of Russian symbolism – found himself suspended between two totalitarian regimes, Stalin's Soviet Union and Mussolini's Italy. A Soviet citizen living in Italy, he adapted to his new circumstances, converting to Catholicism and embracing Italian cultural traditions, including Petrarch's legacy of transnational humanism. In this period, however, fascist and Nazi thinkers were also claiming humanism for their own nationalist purposes. In his Italian-language writings, Ivanov navigates these dangerous waters by attempting to represent himself as simultaneously national and transnational, and as both a Russian poet and a latter-day Italian humanist.

The importance of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii in Soviet science fiction has been thoroughly examined. A less-explored question concerns how they have continued to inspire post-Soviet authors who muse on an environment that differs drastically from the one that gave rise to their works. Sofya Khagi explores how prominent contemporary writers—Garros-Evdokimov (Aleksandr Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov), Dmitrii Bykov, and Viktor Pelevin—examine the Strugatskiis to dramatize their own darker visions of modernization, progress, and morality. They continue the tradition of science fiction as social critique—in this case, a critique of society after the collapse of socialist ideology with its modernizing projects of historical progress, technological development, and social improvement. According to their parables a contrario to the Strugatskiis, the dreams of modernity embodied by the classics of Soviet fantastika have been shattered but not replaced by a viable alternative social scenario. As they converse with their predecessors, contemporary writers examine stagnation, not just in post-Soviet Russia, but in global, postmodern, commodified reality.

This article explores the image of the khalat, or dressing gown, in and around Petr Viazemskii's 1817 poem “Proshchanie s khalatom” (Farewell to My Dressing Gown). As the poem circulated during the period between its creation and printing, its central image—the khalat—became enshrined as a symbol for early nineteenth-century literary culture around and within the Arzamas circle, emphasizing a creative inner life and an informal approach to writing. The poem mediates between friendship, honor, authenticity, and authorship and the formalities, duties, and expectations of society life. The khalat image appears in later poems, correspondence, and occasional writings by Anton Del'vig, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Vasilii Zhukovskii, among others. Tracing the image through its intertextual influences, extratextual impact, and memetic evolution, I examine the way it contributed to the development of an intellectual network through information transfer during the early nineteenth century and beyond.

On occasion of his first lecture tour of India in 2010, Źižek sparked off a debate with Nivedita Menon, a leading postcolonial feminist scholar. The debate revolves around Menon's contention that Źižek's emphasis on European, Christian Universalism as the most proactive model for countering capitalism is ignorant of the heteroglossiac postcolonial histories of South Asia. Menon's response (“The Two Źižeks”) suggests that what Źižek appears to be missing is knowledge of the fallibility of Eurocentric discourses in negotiating the colonial and postcolonial situations particular to the subcontinent. Though Źižek's debates with Badiou and Butler are well known, few outside India are aware of the Menon-Źižek debate. This paper will occasion this little known debate to consider some of the major points raised by Menon against the applicability of Źižek's theoretical arguments toward reading and understanding postcolonial politics and culture.