Research subject Russian studies

A presentation of Russian research at the Slavic department

Russian linguistics at the department is focused on both research into the modern Russian language and Russian language history. This applies to areas such as semantics, syntax, aspectology, lexicology, child language development, bilingualism and political language (Nadezjda Zorikhina-Nilsson, Ludmila Pöppel, Natalja Ringblom, Irina Malaxos, Arthur Edgren and Thomas Samuelsson).

Our researchers actively participate in the research school "Language and Power". From 2018, this orientation has been named one of the future leading research areas at the Faculty of Humanities. The subject area also has an affiliated professor – Dmitrij Dobrovol'skij, who is a professor at the Institute of Russian Language at the Russian Academy of Sciences and Die Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW), Vienna. In autumn 2016, Dmitrij Dobrovol'skij was appointed an honorary doctorate in humanities at Stockholm University.

Political language studies, lexicology, historical accentology, and the publication of medieval Russian manuscripts have been the subjects of a series of theses and monographs, published in the Stockholm Slavic Studies series.

Parts of the rich Slavic heritage in Swedish archives have been the subject of extensive cataloging – the Occupation Archive from Novgorod and the Smolensk Archive (Elisabeth Löfstrand).

Another area of ​​research is the culture and language of the Russian population in the Swedish-ruled Ingermanland in the 17th century (Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath). A typological investigation of medieval Church Slavonic parchment fragments in Swedish collections is the subject of a doctoral thesis (Larisa Korobenko).

Since the 1960s, Russian literary research has been characterized by close reading and text analysis, which is the basis of the internationally renowned so-called Stockholm School. It has produced seven professors, active in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Lund, Turku and Columbus, Ohio. The school has lived on in several dissertations published in the 2000s in the series "Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature". The poetry and culture of the 20th century have been in the focal point, and research on the Russian avant-garde has led to the Stockholm School winning such wide international recognition. A special status is held by research on Boris Pasternak: three dissertations and several articles have been written about his writing. Later, works about Marina Tsvetayeva have been added.

Since the 1990s, poets from older periods have also been studied, including Fyodor Tyutchev and Pyotr Vyazemskij (Anna Ljunggren and Per-Arne Bodin). At the same time, the peculiarity of prose in Dostoevsky and Chekhov has been studied by Peter Alberg Jensen.

The department's five doctoral students in Russian literature continue to explore Dostoevsky's peculiar world of novels (Cecilia Dilworth) and its adaptation in film (Henrik Christensen), Russian poetry starting from the symbolism of the turn of the century to poetry written during the years of revolution and war (Emma-Lina Löflund) and Russian prose from the 20s and 30s of the last century (Hans Andersson and Lidia Sjökvist).

Another important area of ​​research is the History of culture and ideas and especially questions about church and religious conditions. Several theses have been published in the area. Fabian Linde defended the thesis "The spirit of revolt: Nikolai Berdiaev's existential gnosticism" and Joakim Philipson defended the thesis "The purpose of evolution: the "struggle for existence" in the Russian-Jewish press 1860-1900".

A new and current field of research in the borderland between Translation sciences  and Slavistics has been established at the department through Susanna Witt's two research projects on fiction translation as a cultural phenomenon in the Russian context.

In his research, Per-Arne Bodin deals with a series of questions about the relationship of Russian culture to the Orthodox tradition. Together with Maria Engström, he has managed a research project on the Russian Church in post-Soviet Russia. The cultural science research at the department is theoretically and methodologically close to Russian semiotics.

Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath is currently researching Swedish-Russian relations especially during the 17th century. Several of the department's literary researchers, such as Mattias Ågren, touch cultural science issues such as dystopian thinking in their scientific work.

In her research, Susanna Witt deals with translation-historical and translation-theoretical problems with a focus on the Soviet era. The function of literary translation in the creation of a Soviet literary canon, both an intra-Union and a world literary one, is examined on the basis of material from Russian archives. Modern translation science theory is combined with  current  perspectives on censorship, canon formation and world literature.