An important part of Viktor Shklovsky’s legacy remains neglected by scholars of formalism and questio-ned for political reasons: his controversial critical and political interventions, as well as his work in propaganda onbehalf of the Stalinist regime. Personal memories of Shkovsky and whatever is available in his publications fromthat period all convey a sense of compromising uncertainty. I am suggesting that his work during that period hasspecial value, even though it arises from the shadow of a doubt that surrounds his private and public images asa Stalinist opportunist. Based on his earlier theoretical findings and his practical and critical competence in lite-rature and film, Shklovsky found original analytical tools to reflect temporality, historical experience, and (Soviet)subjectivity under political violence. His profound critical revision of his early theoretical postulates in the light ofhistorical experience gained during this controversial period is relevant nowadays.

Under det senaste decenniet har begreppet ”kulturarv” tagit en allt större plats i den offentliga debatten. Samtidigt är kulturarv ett märkligt begrepp, som antyder att kultur kan ärvas som om det vore ett ting och att det därmed finns en sorts arvs-kultur. 

Den här boken handlar om kulturarv, men den handlar inte om kulturarvets eventuella fördelar inom minnes- och identitetspolitik. Inte heller är boken tänkt som en kritik mot hur kulturarv kommer till användning i praktiken. 

Vad som orienterar föreliggande reflektioner är snarare frågan vad ett arv är, vad en kultur är och vad en arvs-kultur kan tänkas vara samt vilka värden och värderingar ett sådant arv förutsätter?

Boken tar sin utgångspunkt i dessa frågor samt i ett pågående samtal mellan Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, professor i filosofi och Johan Hegardt, som är docent i arkeologi.

Ett särskilt förord har skrivits av Irina Sandomirskaja, professor i Cultural Studies.

Bokens bilder är tagna av Esther Shalev-Gerz och Jochen Gerz och föreställer deras konstverk Monument against fascism.

When utopian desire for the future is lost and uncertainty in the present increases, the political signigicance of the past ands its social value dramatically increase. Alongside, and in between, history and memory -- Modernity's two meganarratives of the past --there evolves still another mode of transmission of the past and its accomodation in the present. In this book, this third mode, restoration, is analyzed as a professional practice and part of museum science as well as, in a wider meaning, as a third discourse critically opposed both to history and memory. Restoration is a domain of practical measures and strategic manipulation with material and value-related constitution of historical artefacts undertaken for their enrichment with symbolic and material value. In a broader sense, restoration is analyzed as a symbolic machine for the appropriation of the past by the present and the use of the past for the present moment's own purposes.  Restoration's imagination, techniques, and institutional practices play an important role in the creation of national and imperial  ideologies of history, mass movements of historical monument preservation, and commercialization of cultural heritage, the patrimonializartion of the past in symbolic commodity exchange. Special attention is given to specific strategies of the desirable past within the framework of the symbolic political economy of socialism,  in Soviet restoration and more generally, in the evolution of the Soviet cult of the historical monument. 

The lacuna is an object of restoration and a special problem in the theory of art and historical restoration. This paper analyzes the lacuna more generally, as a figure of destruction and loss, and collective memory as a set of symbolic gestures similar to restoration whose techniques integrate lacunas and neutralize their negative expression. I am reading a 1971 film by Mikhail Bogin and some biographic materials relating to its prototypes, museum workers in Leningrad after the siege, to identify an underlying eschatological dimension in monument preservation, a gesture of restauratio ad integrum.

: The article considers the relationship between memory and post-memory through the lens of translating the experience of generations. The author takesZ. Baumann’s term “retrotopia” as the basis of the research. As a new mode of referring to the past retrotopia he treats it as the phenomenon of reaction in socio-psychological and political meanings. The escape of the obsessive retrotopic past is visiblein the ability to have a dialogue (Z. Baumann), and things that link to the experienceof previous generations play here a vital role. The paper analyzes variants of things’behavior in their inter-generation interaction: the mode of tactility in collectingthings serves the setting “total recall” (M. Stepanova “To the memory of memory);interaction with other people’s things (the movie “Khrustalyov, the car”) whena live dialogue of generations is impossible. The refusal of things to converse isa symptom of guilt in losing the past. Retrotopia coordinates with another important concept — post-memory with the cult of accumulating and preserving heritageinterpreted as the result of ideology and upbringing. The cult of legacy testifi esto real anxiety of survival. Post-memory as a cult of heritage strives to reproducehistorical experience in the effects of representation, and discourses of collectivememory and traumas effectively suppress and replace real memory of the historical experience. Thus, it substantiates the transition from retrotopia to utopia, fromheritage to oblivion. Retrotopia is a form of oblivion that forces one to delve intothe past. It is not for the sake of the past, but to forget the impending terrible future.Present-day digital media create a new arrangement of memory based on the valueof the concrete and the individual. History starts to converge with memory coinciding in the limit with infi nitely changing fragments and connections that memoryorganizes not by the principle of cause-and-effect but by associations and similarities. This program has features of principally different ways of managing the heritage: retrotopia (the goal is to save and preserve), and utopia (to put the past to rest).

Early work by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygostky was connected with the special education of the so-called "defective" children. Vygotsky constructed blindness, deafness, and other functional disorders in children as "defects"  in the social system that alienates them from the so-called normal people. In the chapter, I am analysing Vygotsky's representation of the blind child as a subject of proletarian revolution, and his method of psychological and pedagogical "correction" as an allegory of cultural revolution in general.

A comparative reading of the social conditions of cultural production in the so-called "enforced communities" of besieged Leningrad and the Theresienstadt ghetto and concentration camp. My analysis is based on the testimonial and theoretical writing by the  survivors, Lydia Ginzburg and H. G. Adler.

This essay is an attempt to interpret Mikhail Bakhtin’s working notes in a new way, by reading them as instances of fragmented writing produced in exile during the war. To capture the specific way Bakhtin’s thinking reveals itself in a difficult relationship with writing, I read these pieces through the prism of critical categories suggested by Maurice Blanchot in his book The Writing of the Disaster (1980). By means of comparative reading of these two quite disparate authors, I hope to demonstrate that the very fragmentariness of Bakhtin’s writing, a well as its unfinished and ”un-worked” character, opens it up for critical reflection.  The fragments in question should be read as exilic theory rather than merely biographic data or preliminary materials that suffer, not surprisingly, from intellectual and writerly incompleteness. This essay also discusses ambiguities in Bakhtin the asyndetic writer (a stylistic trait especially difficult to solve in translation) as methodologically central for an understanding of his philosophy of history and language.

In his Theresienstadt 1941/1945, Hans Günther Adler describes episodes of film making in Theresienstadt giving most attention to the history of the production of the 1944 film. He sums up the episode calling its purpose and organisation by the SS "the gruesome carnival". Interesting enough, while giving a whole chapter in the book to a description of Theresienstadt's cultural life, Adler never mentions the film among other examples of cultural expression but inserts its description into Theresienstadt's administrative chronicle. The film receives a place for itself within the context of the bureaucratic transformations of Theresienstadt from a closed camp into a "ghetto" and finally into a purely decorative "Jewish settlement". This latter transformation Adler describes as part of the cynical campaign of "Verschönerung" of Theresienstadt, an attempt of the SS and the administration to make it presentable to international observers. Adler describes the cruel film carneval as the campaign's piece de resistance and thus resolutely excludes the film from the domain of cultural phenomena as if rejecting any possibility for its redemption. Instead, he inscribes the project into the administrative logic of extermination, filmmaking becoming an additional – inventive in its cruelty and effective – technique of moral extermination in the world of "der verwaltete Mensch". In this article, I emphasize Adler's view of the moving image as a predominantly administrative means, and not a medium of cultural expression. This view becomes quite challenging and complex if Adler's witness account of the film project in Theresienstadt is read together with his reflection on mechanically reproducible, and especially moving, images in Adler's fiction. I will focus on Adler's treatment of the image and image technology in his novels Panorama and Eine Reise / The Journey, with a special attention to the way he considers the relation between the apparatus, memory, and witnessing.

Aesopian language (or Aesopian speech) is an important component of Soviet language culture, a cultureof expression under surveillance and censorhip that invented various modes of the  circumlocution and euphemization of politically sensitive topics. In this chapter, I am illustrating some of the innumerable ways of organizing communcation under the sign of (sometimes imagined) prosecution. I am describing various practices of Aesopian circumlocution and summarizing theoretical work in Soviet literary history that addressed this peculiar phenomenon in Russian and Soviet literary tradition. I am also discussing the aesthetics and politics of Aesopian language and its role as a means of expressing political dissent as this was seen by its practitioners inside the USSR and by the theorists who worked with the matters of language and power in the West.

When discussing Bolshevik cultural politics, both scholars and the public today emphasize what the Bolsheviks destroyed. In this essay, however, the focus is on what they “preserved,” and especially how they preserved it, to what purpose, and with what consequences. The article reconstructs the ideology and practices of cultural heritage in Soviet Russia from the vantage point of Bolshevik policies in reuses of the past. As an example, in reading the writing of the authority in Soviet cultural heritage industry, Igor Grabar, the author reconstructs the process of aestheticization, commodification, and internationalization of the Russian Orthodox icon.

A comparative reading of Walter Benjamin's linguistic theology and Sören Kirkegaard's theory of the revolutionary age.

An allegory of the omnipotent state, the Leviathan occurs in Lidia Ginzburg’s notes from 1943-44 and in the context of her reflections on the experiences of surviving in, and living on after, the unprecedented human catastrophe of the siege of Leningrad. Ginzburg describes her time as the “era of great experiences and tests” which started in 1914: the era of world wars with their “maximum non-freedom” and the “absolute non-freedoms” imposed by the all-powerful state, the Leviathan. The siege of Leningrad is not an exception from such a history, but a culmination of the “non-freedoms” of Soviet and, more broadly, European modernity of the twentieth century. All of these events/experiences produced a generation that “became history’s experimental material. And history burned it and disemboweled it and minced it into a bloody mess.” In the siege of Leningrad, various dimensions of “non-freedom”— total mobilization and total war, state terror, and mass death – culminate, converge, and confirm one another.  In the struggle for survival amidst destruction, repression, and starvation, Ginzburg tries to understand the Leviathan, the omnipotent state that sanctions and orchestrates the massive obliteration of life. The new Leviathan emerges as a complex aggregate of different power technologies involving various aspects of life and, hence, producing different overlapping regimes of “non-freedoms.”

According to Ginzburg, the subject is involved in the workings of the Leviathan in many ways. Moreover, as exemplified by the experience of the civilian in the siege, the individual depends on the Leviathan for elementary survival. This political and biopolitical complexity makes Ginzburg’s critique more challenging than the trivial understanding of “non-freedom” as a mere deprivation of rights. Matters of life and death in the siege, as Ginzburg’s witness account shows, are deeply politicized, and the power to administer and distribute life and death constitute the foundation of the New Leviathan’s omnipotence. The New Leviathan’s three vectors of power – repression, discipline, and biopower — each in their own way contribute to the destruction of the human and usher a new, post-human historical subject summed up in the figure of distrofik (a patient of starvation disease in the terminal stage) overpowered by the total indifference between life and death, between living and surviving. I propose to look at the strategies and politics involved in such a subjectivity, with a special emphasis on the “choreography” of besiegement: its spatio-temporal structure, its corporeality, and strategies of surviving its post-human condition, as well as the dilemmas of living on “ever after”.