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Per Arne BodinProfessor Emeritus of Slavic Languages

About me

 

Per-Arne Bodin is Professor of Slavic Languages at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stockholm University. He defended his dissertation on the poetry of Pasternak at Stockholm University in 1976. He has written extensively on Russian, Polish and Ukrainian literatures. One special interest is the relation between Russian culture and Russian Orthodox tradition. His most recent books are Eternity and Time: Studies in Russian Literature and the Orthodox Tradition (2007) and Language, Canonization and Holy Foolishness: Studies in Post-Soviet Russian Culture and the Orthodox Tradition (2009). He has written several collections of essays in Swedish on Russian culture, literature and church history. He has also translated poetry from Russian, Polish and Ukrainian. At the moment he is working on two projects: Russian culture and linguistic violence and Russian cultural mythologemes in a post-Soviet world. He is member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and doctor honoris causa at Uppsala University.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Mandel'shtam and the Opera

    2017. Per-Arne Bodin. Russian literature 91, 27-46

    Article

    Osip Mandel'shtam's poetry has been interpreted abundantly by scholars and it might be seen as preposterous to return to one of the most discussed poems in general: “Chut' mertsaet prizrachnaia stsena” dealing with Gluck's opera Orpheus and Eurydice. My approach will be an intermedial one and I will analyse it in relation to the famous productions at the Mariinskii Opera in 1910 and in 1919. The task will be to scrutinize the relationship between the text of the poem and various paratexts, or, in the words of Derrida (1987) and broader, the relation between ergon and parergon. The focus is on the aesthetic impact of these relations more than on the question of genesis or influence. The basis for the interpretation will be the opposition between the period of the performance and the post-performance time, as well as the notion of liminality. The poem will be analysed against the background of the motif of the exit from the theatre in Russian 19th century Russian culture both in relation to literature and to a lithography from 1843 made by Rudol'f Zhukovskii. I will, however, use in particular material concerning the opera performance alluded to in the poem.

    Read more about Mandel'shtam and the Opera

  • The Russian Language in Contemporary Conservative Dystopias

    2016. Per-Arne Bodin. Russian Review 75 (4), 579-588

    Article

    The topic of this paper concerns a subgenre of modern prose, namely the linguistic dystopia, by which I mean a depiction of a future (“pessimistically extrapolating contemporary social trends into oppressive and terrifying societies”), in which the dysfunctionality or power potential of language is thematicized and operationalized by either the narrator, various characters in the novel, or the reader. The focus in the article will be on the mirroring of the development in Russian politics and society of today in the dystopias (or utopias) of Russian conservative authors through language.

    Read more about The Russian Language in Contemporary Conservative Dystopias

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