Cold Fusion

While historical and political aspects of the Russo-German relationship over the past three to four centuries have received due attention from scholars, the range of the far more diverse, important, and peculiar cultural relations still awaits full assessment. This volume shows how enriching these cultural influences were for both countries, affecting many spheres of intellectual and daily life such as philosophy and religion, education and ideology, sciences and their application, arts and letters, custom and language. The German-Russian relationship has always been particularly intense. Oscillating as it has between infatuation and contempt, it has always been marked by a singular paradox: a German cultural presence in Russia resulting either in a more or less complete fusion, as in the case of Russifield German, or in a pronounced mutual repulsion, accompanied by the denigration of each other's culture as inferior. It is this curious paradox that determines the perspectives of the articles that were specially written for this volume, providing it with a unifying focus.

Chapter 1. Dreams of a German in Russia: German Heroes and Subtexts in The Queen of Spades and Other Works by Pushkin
W. Schmid
Chapter 2. The Tyranny of Difference: Gogol and the Sacred
M. Holquist
Chapter 3. Church and State: Dostoevsky and Kant
A. von Schönborn
Chapter 4. Bakhtin, Benjamin, and Historical Representation of the Holocaust
M. Bernard-Donals
Chapter 5. From Mitteleuropa to Moscow: Germanic Links with Russian Architecture
W. C. Brumfield
Chapter 6. Nietzsche's Hidden Voice in Socialist Realism
B. G. Rosenthal
Chapter 7. Nabokov and Goethe
O. Ronen
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index