Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

Dina Khapaeva

Ph.D. in History (St Petersburg State University)

Mailing address:
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
P.O. Box 4
FIN-00014 University of Helsinki
Finland

Tel +358-(0)9-191 23450                       
Fax +358-(0)9-191 24509
Email dina.khapaeva(AT)helsinki.fi

Selected publications

 

Areas of Expertise:

• Russian literature (N.V. Gogol, F.M. Dostoevsky)
• Gothic trends in literature and visual arts
• Historical memory in post-Soviet culture and fiction
• Contemporary Russian and European intellectual history
• Historical consciousness
• Russia and the West XX-XXI century

Research Title and Abstract:

Historical Amnesia and Its Effects in Post-Soviet Russia

The project’s goal is to understand how suppressed historical memory influences contemporary society. The project seeks to observe emotional, moral and social effects resulting from post-Soviet amnesia where memories of Stalinism had been substituted for idealized versions of the collective past. Historical and sociological sources for the project vary from large-scale opinion polls on mass historical consciousness (1990 and 2007, in collaboration with Nikolay Koposov,) to the series of in-depths interviews. These sources document the mass character of amnesia and that of profound contradictions in value-judgments of respondents on Soviet history. However, these sources remain insufficient to interpret emotional mechanisms that underlie moral dilemmas and judgment fallacy caused by amnesia. Hence, the project which crosses boundaries of historical memory, sociology of mass historical representation, and cultural studies, seeks to consider contemporary fiction, especially fantasy, as an important source for an understanding of the mechanisms of amnesia. Departing from historical research on the reconstruction of emotions experienced by the subjects of history, I will explore contemporary fiction to study how suppressed memory of Stalinism manifests itself in the consciousness of contemporary Russians. Given that post-Soviet ‘cult’ fiction (S. Lukyanenko, V. Pelevin, V. Panov, V. Sorokin) overwhelmed by reminiscences of Stalinism is considered here as a genre where meaning is created by the productive work of reader as well as by that of the author, the study of reception of fiction will enable to examine readers’ reactions to the memory aspects reflected in it. Interpretations resulting from the analysis of fiction will be match up to sociological and historical data. Analysis of the most popular examples of fantasy in U.S. will provide research on post-Soviet fiction with a comparative perspective. The theoretical prospect of the project is twofold: 1) fiction is treated as a source for reconstructing functions of historical memory in contemporary society; 2) investigating the impact of distortions of historical memory might contribute to the theory of historical memory. Emphasis on emotions also raises a theoretical problem, namely, an issue of collective vs. individual character of historical memory. History of concept of ‘historical memory’ and ‘collective memory’ is seen as an important theoretical approach to tackle the issue.