Andrew KAHN

Université d’Oxford (Royaume-Uni)
Invité de l’ITEM – mai et juin 2018

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Andrew KAHN – invité mai et juin 2018

Le professeur Andrew Khan sera résident de l’Institut d’études avancées de Paris pour l’année 2018-2019. Projet de recherche : « The Russian Enlightenment. An Essay » (> voir sur le site de l’IEA Paris)

En mai et juin 2018, le labex TransferS et Nathalie Ferrand (ITEM) accueillent Andrew KAHN, professeur de littérature russe à l’Université d’Oxford (Royaume-Uni).

Ré-écrire les Lumières en Russie :
centre et périphérie

Lundi 7 mai – 14h-16h, ENS salle Celan
Enlightenment Correspondences : Catherine the Great as Letter-Writer
Catherine the Great remains a legendary and much studied figure for the diplomatic/military, legislative, and cultural achievements that marked her reign. Debate still surrounds the question of whether she was genuinely an Enlightener and enlightened ruler. Among her less recognized accomplishments is her distinction as a brilliant letter writer with a large circle of correspondents, including Voltaire, d’Alembert, Mme Geoffrin, and Frederick the Great. This lecture will provide an overview of Catherine the Great’s epistolarity and offer some thoughts about their literary/rhetorical quality, their handling of the private and the public, and their role in the creation of an image.

Lundi 14 mai – 14h-16h, ENS - !- salle L361, au 24 rue Lhomond - !-
Catherine the Great and the Art of Epistolary Networking (with reference to the Digital Correspondence of Catherine the Great project)
Through the use of techniques drawn from Social Network Analysis and a set of case studies, the lecture will demonstrate how Catherine used letters to control reputation, disseminate information, assert her power, and position herself within correspondence networks on the European scene. While the lecture will be based on printed sources it will also provide an opportunity to introduce the Digital Database of the Correspondence of Catherine the Great (CatCor) currently run at Oxford by Andrew Kahn and Kelsey Rubin-Detlev and consider how databases of this type help us map interpersonal and political relations in the period.

Lundi 4 juin – 14h-16h, ENS - !- salle L361, au 24 rue Lhomond - !-
Osip Mandelstam’s Notre Dame de Paris
Osip Mandelstam is widely recognized as one of the great Russian poets of the twentieth century. After some prefatory remarks about Mandelstam’s love lyric, the paper will concentrate on a single lyric, “I pray, Dame France, for mercy and compassion,” (“Ia moliu, kak zhalosti i milosti,” 1937), an enigmatic work written during a period of exile in Voronezh and full of Parisian motifs. A secondary aim will be to make talk about the hermeneutics of difficulty poetry and offer some general comments about the critical methods that help to open up his late poetry.

Lundi 11 juin – 15h30-17h30, ENS - !- salle L361, au 24 rue Lhomond - !-
Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow : Pessimism or Optimism ?
Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St Petersburg to Russia (1790) is one of the most important pieces of writing to come out of Enlightenment Russia. The fate of the book and the author, who was exiled by Catherine the Great, also became one of the great causes célèbres of Russian imperial history. This lecture will consider the question of Radishchev’s aims in the light of his philosophy history and against the backdrop of the historical context of the early 1790s.