Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe

By Mark D. Steinberg and Valeria Sobol

Bringing together important new work by an international and interdisciplinary group of leading scholars, Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe approaches emotions as a phenomenon complexly intertwined with society, culture, politics, and history. The stories in this book involve sensitive aristocrats, committed revolutionaries, aggressive nationalists, political leaders, female victims of sexual violence, perpetrators and victims of Stalinist terror, citizens in the former Yugoslavia in the wake of war, workers in post-socialist Romania, Balkan Romani "Gypsy" musicians, and veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars. These essays explore emotional perception and expression not only as private, inward feeling but also as a way of interpreting and judging a troubled world, acting in it, and perhaps changing it. Essential reading for those interested in new perspectives on the study of Russia and Eastern Europe, past and present, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities who are seeking new and deeper approaches to understanding human experience, thought, and feeling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781609090234

Book preview

Introduction

MARK D. STEINBERG AND VALERIA SOBOL

Emotions have, in recent years, become the subject of a rising tide of study, interpretation, and theory. Since the late 1980s, conferences, articles, and books on this topic have proliferated, involving a very wide range of disciplines and eras and regions of the world. Many have spoken of a new affective turn or emotional turn in the humanities and social sciences, suggesting a change comparable to the linguistic turn of the 1970s, including in the extent of interdisciplinary reach and methodological impact.¹ Scholars working on Russia, Eurasia, and eastern Europe have more recently begun to engage and contribute to the study of emotions, with a succession of workshops and conferences since 2003 and a few initial publications.² As part of this growing attention to emotion as an object of study and a category of analysis, this volume brings together, in dialogue with one another and with scholars working on other regions, new work by some of the leading scholars in Slavic and east European studies engaged in emotion research and interpretation. Unlike the few other publications on emotions concerning this important region of Europe’s east, this book is unusually embracing in its reach across nations, across more than two centuries of time, and across disciplines and methodologies.

The problem of how to interpret emotions is not new, of course. Inquiries into the nature and workings of the passions, feelings, emotions, moods, dispositions, and affects (different writers prefer different terms and often distinguish their meanings) have a very long history, as does attention to particular emotions, such as love, melancholy, or anger. But recent work has taken new directions, reflecting important theoretical and methodological trends within and across disciplines. At times, the range of approaches is dizzying. Contemporary theories of cognition, the body, subjectivity, subjection, power, self, language, performativity, culture, society, gender, and memory, in varied combinations and interpretations, have been tied into the study of emotions. But most consistent and significant about approaches since the mid-1980s has been a newly critical perspective on the key epistemological question of how we know and interpret the world and how the people we study comprehend their lives. As Ronald Suny notes in his chapter, recent work has advanced well beyond both the vague and unfocused methodology in which emotions are viewed as so ubiquitous in human behavior that they explain nothing while being used to explain everything and the rigid and reductionist belief, which still has considerable weight in the social sciences, that all human action is based on rational calculation. Newer work, by contrast—though drawing on a tradition that, since at least Aristotle and, later, Descartes, Spinoza, and sensationalist philosophers, has stressed a deep interconnectedness between emotions and reason—views reason and emotion as complexly intertwined with one another and with physiology, culture, and history. In other words, rather than seeing emotions as a separate, private, and visceral sphere that occasionally seethes over into the world of consciousness, it is precisely the inseparable interrelationships of thinking and feeling, the body and society, and private self and public self that demand our attention. These perspectives also lead to deep exploration of the mutual relationships between emotions and society, emotions and politics, and emotions and historical change. These newer approaches are strongly evident in this volume.

Though the first wave of social constructionists (mainly anthropologists working on emotion in the 1970s and 1980s) tended to efface the corporeal with arguments that emotions are entirely produced through socially organized forms of behavior and discourse and thus endlessly variant over time and place,³ recent work has brought a more inclusive attention to both the body and culture. Scholars differ on the relative impact of physical and social factors. The dominant paradigms in medicine and neurobiology, of course, continue to emphasize the overwhelming force of the body. We also see a recent trend in literary and cultural studies, often attached to the term affect theory, that has reemphasized the bodily aspects, engagements, and manifestations of feeling. This work describes emotions as intensity or excess, which take place prior to or outside reason, deliberation, will, or cognition. Feelings, in this view, are always (to use the terminology of these arguments) corporeal, pre-personal, nonconscious, irreducible, nonassimilable, and un-narrativized. Sometimes, this work is radically materialist, determined to move away from the social constructionism that views everything as discourse.⁴

The contributors to this book, like the majority of researchers in the social sciences and humanities, favor what might be called a neo-constructionist attention to emotions. The body is not absent—it participates in the construction of feeling and is affected by emotion—but neither is it overwhelming in its determining force. In this book, bodily aspects of emotions, including changing ideas about the physiology of feeling, are examined especially in chapters by Victoria Frede on nineteenth-century Russian radicals, Alexandra Oberländer on the meanings of rape, and Carol Silverman on Gypsy performers. But the physical is never abstracted from social and cultural structures, processes, and experiences. Emotions are viewed as strongly relational and situated human practices, deeply imbedded in society, politics, culture, language, and place, though not reducible to any of these locations.

Scholars have formulated and practiced this complex approach to emotions in different ways. In an influential collection of essays by anthropologists, based on fieldwork and theorizing in the late 1980s, Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz highlighted a recognition that emotion discourse is only apparently about internal state, for it is always already about social life, social problems, and especially power. And not merely as interpretation. Emotion discourse helps produce experience and constitute reality; it is a form of social action that creates effects in the world.⁵ Among historians, Peter Stearns, William Reddy, and Barbara Rosenwein have most cogently (if variously) promoted the study of emotions as practices that both interpret and shape experience, that reflect but also alter the self, that vary and change across time and place, and that are shaped by, and shape in turn, a community’s emotional culture—including its rules of emotional control and expression, as these are entwined with norms, habits, values, moral codes, and discourses, especially about self and society.⁶ Literary scholars have been particularly attentive to the rhetoric and imagery of emotions, which is found to be intensely interpretative and signifying—not merely expressing the characters’ inner world but pointing to complex processes and relationships in the social and cultural sphere. Along with a focus on the ways in which emotions are embedded in fiction, newer work explores the affective and bodily experiences of writing and reading. These studies tend to turn to other disciplines, engaging the history of science and religion, philosophy, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis, among others, in order to challenge a universalist view of emotions and to place fictional representations or intellectual conceptualizations of emotions in specific time periods and cultural contexts.⁷ Some of the most recent work in the humanities, emerging from cultural studies and critical theory, has offered especially rich mixtures of all these elements. Sara Ahmed, for example, has written of a sociality of emotion that understands emotion as continually moving, relational, and ultimately doing things in ways that constitute both the psychic and the social.⁸ That emotions are strongest and most active when self or society is most troubled, especially when individual freedom (agency) is obstructed—a condition often seen in the Russian and east European histories explored in this book—is underscored in Sianne Ngai’s terse definition of emotions as intense interpretations of predicaments.⁹

Notwithstanding many differences of emphasis, the most interpretively useful approaches, shared by the authors in this collection, locate emotion at the knotted intersections of body, self, society, culture, and power, where emotions participate actively in the complex human work of perception, evaluation, interpretation, and judgment. Individual subjects are essential, but do not do their emotional work outside of the social. Thus, the focus of our attention is on what have been variously termed emotional regimes, emotional communities, emotional discourses and scripts, or the emotional habitus. And we examine emotions, not merely as expressions or reflections, but as doing things and having effects in the world. Not least, we inquire into these emotional environments and practices in order to rethink both particular times and places and how we approach human experience, thought, and feeling.

The contributors to this volume work in literature, history, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and sociology. Individual chapters examine many different emotions and emotional states, including passion, desire, love, happiness, anger, hatred, mourning, melancholy, shame, guilt, fear, trauma, grief, and despair, especially as they are entwined with social, cultural, and political life. These emotions are studied as they are expressed in literature, letters, lyrics, essays, films, and other texts, but also in physical spaces, buildings, objects, rituals, sounds, and gestures. And they are viewed in an array of different time periods, national locations, and social situations. Social actors in this book range from educated elites to commoners, from men with power in their grasp to individuals largely excluded from structures of authority. They include writers of all sorts, sensitive aristocrats, committed revolutionaries, aggressive nationalists, political leaders, female victims of sexual violence, perpetrators and victims of Stalinist terror, citizens of Kosovo and Dubrovnik in the wake of war, workers in postsocialist Romania, Balkan Romani (Gypsy) musicians, and veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars. Alongside the living, we also feel the presence and influence of the dead.

This diversity of disciplines, locations, and topics is essential to developing a multifaceted approach to interpreting emotions, and it reflects our insistence that emotions are not universal drives or instincts hardwired in the human body but relational, public, contextual, constituting, and moving—often in multiple and contradictory directions—and thus demand not laboratory research but the interpretive study of concrete times, places, and texts. Amid this variety, though, we would emphasize the common themes that link these chapters. Not least, these different studies share a theoretical focus on the interrelations of emotions with human conditions and experiences, especially difficult conditions, such as violence, suffering, loss, and death, which were all particularly intense in this region. No less, these chapters engage key analytical categories, especially empire, nation, ethnicity, religion, gender, class, everyday life, morality, and power (none of which, it bears adding, were in any way stable). The authors of these chapters understand that even the most inward emotions—shame, love, trauma—are inescapably entwined with public, social, and historical matters. Thus, you will find here much attention to the relations of self and society (including politics and economics); to feelings of belonging associated with ethnicity, religion, nation, class, and gender; to questions about sincerity and authenticity of feeling (emotions as moral and epistemological truth) but also evidence that emotion can be ritualized performance and structured according to forms, scripts, and norms; to the agonies of loss and trauma and the pursuit of healing; and to the mobilizing power of affection or hatred but also the drive to manage emotions so that order and power are not threatened. In a word, these papers explore emotional perception and expression not only as private, inward feeling but especially as a way of interpreting and judging a troubled world, acting in it, and perhaps changing it.

The papers in this volume are arranged roughly in chronological order. But this is by no means the only way we might have ordered and linked these papers, or that you might read them. Chronological order usefully emphasizes the experiences, memories, and movements of time, especially as they are fixed as history, as critical to the formation of emotions. But we might have organized the chapters by country, or by the social background and experiences of the people studied, or, especially, by the interpretive themes explored. To be sure, many papers do not fit easily into any single national, social, or conceptual category. For that matter, many reach beyond demarcations of time, especially when memory is at work. But precisely because these chapters are arranged in temporal order, we want in this introduction to emphasize thematic patterns: the major concerns, arguments, and approaches that thread through these papers. Necessarily, our emphasis on salient themes oversimplifies the contributions of these complex and nuanced papers. It also reminds us of the central concern of each author: how we view emotions as an interpretive category and how specific histories of emotion recast our interpretations of culture, society, and politics in Russia and eastern Europe, in both the past and the present.

Emotional Expression—Freedom, Self, Authenticity

Notions of self and subjectivity are inevitably at the center of most emotional narratives. The modern era throughout Europe, Russia and eastern Europe included, experienced a rampant preoccupation with the inward self and its social significance in both private life and public discourse. The Europe-wide, but also widely varied, cultural movements of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Sentimentalism, and Romanticism played powerful roles in focusing Europeans’ lasting attention on the individual, the personality, and the self—and not only in philosophy and the arts but also in science, social and economic organization, and political policy. Sentimentalism, in particular, focused on an individual’s sensibility—

understood in physiological, psychological, as well as moral terms—as the ultimate manifestation of our humanity and vitality, as well as a basis for cognition, sociability, and moral judgment. Romanticism developed this preoccupation with the inward and subjective self, and thus with instincts, passions, and feelings. This emotional self, and how it was construed, is at the center of attention in this volume, for it has been such a powerful presence in the history of the region. In particular, we have seen a great deal of effort to know the authentic inward self as distinct from the artificial, performative self of public existence; to explore inner states (often quite publicly); and to see emotional expression as a truer expression of self, even as closer to truth itself.

Ilya Vinitsky, for example, in his chapter explores the centrality, indeed mythic elevation, of melancholy in Russian literature and culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, strongly influenced by the spirit of Sentimentalism. Vinitsky shows the complexity and contradictoriness of this mood: the multiplicity of feelings and thoughts it could embrace and especially the ambivalent status of melancholy as both a pleasure and a danger, and as both a genuinely sorrowful and pessimistic philosophical mood (expressing the inner self facing the external conditions of the world) and as an adopted, ritualized, and aestheticized system of performed feeling. In Andrei Zorin’s chapter, a Russian nobleman, away from his family to attend the tsar’s coronation in 1797, struggles to define the proper sentiments and values a man (and gender matters here) should feel in relation to public power and private life, both of which have a claim on his affections. This struggle, interestingly, is expressed in two parallel sets of letters addressed to his wife—indeed, in two different literary genres—which reflect two conflicting sets of values: those of a civil servant and of a Sentimentalist writer. Methodologically, Zorin, like Vinitsky, emphasizes the importance of existing emotional regimes—the repertoires of sentiment publicly available to individuals—as well as changing emotional standards (not least under the influence of European literature) and unresolved ambivalence, to the point of emotional pain, in the face of tension and uncertainty. Victoria Frede finds among Russian radicals in the 1860s a preoccupation with feeling and the self, surprisingly similar to that of the Romantic era, against which the radicals are typically defined. Frede, however, interprets their polemical stance vis-à-vis the Romanticism of the previous generation as not a repudiation of sentiment as such but a critique of an inauthentic and artificial manipulation of affect. The sons of the 1860s insisted that the sincere and authentic self, or nature, can be recovered only by removing the layers of social and cultural practices and conventions that deform the true self and natural feeling.

On a much darker side, Alexandra Oberländer closely examines the power of shame to express the self. Shame is a complex emotion that reflects recognition of autonomous selfhood, a sense of its transgression or inadequacy, and feelings of unwanted self-exposure. Oberländer’s account of a case of rape and suicide, and its semifictional echo, in late imperial Russia explores the role of shame, and its constructions in discourse, in fashioning the modern individual and subject, including a redefined female self. She examines an unstable but usable emotional narrative that shifted between liberal notions of the free and autonomous subject and traditional notions of honor and virtue; between changing and persistently rigid notions of gender and emotion; between self-assertion and self-annihilation. Glennys Young examines a no less complex and dark emotional history of a social catastrophe: the genesis and development of the Stalinist terror. Looking closely at the important Central Committee Plenum of 1937, Young identifies a ritualized obsession with uncovering individual feelings (not merely thoughts) as a presumed key to a person’s most authentic beliefs and values, to their inward self—again pointing to an assumed theory of the mind and knowledge linking emotion with authenticity and truth, and the often bloody consequences of this belief and its interrogatory practices.

Cultural value placed on emotional expression, in other words, was as likely to lead to sadness, anxiety, trauma, and death as to pleasure, self-realization, and freedom. And these two faces were not separate or even opposite; each helped to shape and define the other. We see this strongly, for example, in Carol Silverman’s discussion of Romani musicians in the Balkans, who often make use of others’ stereotypes about authentic Gypsy passion and joy while conveying in their songs strong feelings of loss, abandonment, and despair. Indeed, we see these dialogues between the suffering self and self-realization repeatedly in the final chapters on postsocialism, where individuals in a variety of settings and conditions experience painful loss and trauma, physical and moral affliction, and damage to selves and identities, as well as new opportunities for self-expression and individual agency.

Emotional Control and Management

Efforts to control, regulate, and manage emotions are closely linked to their expression. This is not simply a matter of anxieties, notably among authorities determined to protect the stability of social and political power, about the dangerous unpredictability of feeling, leading to efforts to manipulate and limit emotional expression, though it is that too. Rather, the drive for emotional control usually involves a more complex set of interactions that have much in common with Michel Foucault’s arguments about a discursive formation (discursive practices governing knowledge in a particular culture that are entwined with power and discipline) or Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus (internalized and durable dispositions involving structures of perception, thought, and action). These more structural cultural notions have been adapted to the phenomenology of emotion, for example, by William Reddy’s idea of emotional regimes, which can be either constraining or enabling, and can be used, resisted, and overthrown (his metaphor of navigation involves both structures and agency) and Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities, which are more multiple and conflicting than Reddy’s regimes and less tied to state formation.

The evidence of shared structures of feeling can be seen throughout this book, as can the persistent tension between conditions nurturing emotional expression and conditions channeling, managing, and constraining expression. Chapters concerned with self-expression naturally also involve histories of working with, within, and sometimes against emotional formations. Young’s analysis, in particular, highlights the importance of public and ritualized emotion management and exposes strategies by which, at the 1937 Plenum, party leaders managed, controlled, and eventually reinterpreted the emotions of the accused. Similarly, Polly Jones describes the tension in de-Stalinization between the political effort to unleash and mobilize emotions (especially anger against the perpetrators of terror) and the political effort to manage them to positive purpose: to release grief in order to bring cathartic relief, to limit stories and memories that might depress people or encourage helplessness and despair. Ideally, emotion should be both sincere in expressing authentic experience and feeling and civic-minded in its usefulness as public expression. In fact, she shows, this controlling balance was often elusive and the post-Stalinist emotional community often marked by conflict and disorientation.

The post-Communist era has had its own histories of suffering, often developing on top of memories of past troubles and traumas, inspiring new efforts at emotional control. Jack Friedman describes a history of attempts in postsocialist Romania to tame working-class anger. Under socialism, workers had been authorized to be angry at capitalist inequality and poverty; after socialism, social and economic anger was redirected, marginalized, or simply delegitimized as irrational and regressive. Veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars also engaged in complex practices of emotionally remembering the past and navigating the present. Serguei Oushakine examines how these veterans found ways through song (often adapted songs from World War II) to allow their traumatic experiences, which were dismissed by the authorities and often forgotten by the public, to be both recognized and safely domesticated. As we can see, memory was a key element in many of these struggles with emotion, complicating further emotion’s engagements and histories.

Morality and Values

It is impossible to separate notions of morality and ethics from the dynamics of emotional expression and control. Questions about what is right, fair, virtuous, and just, and what violates these norms, are entwined with pleasure, love, empathy, hope, shame, and anger. Around moral questions we can see the workings of what Sarah Ahmed has called the cultural politics of emotion. At the center of Zorin’s chapter, for example, are changing values that stimulate emotional skepticism about public political life as a sphere of vanity and egoism, and thus a preference for the supposedly more authentic and virtuous sphere of private family life. Russian radicals in the 1860s, Frede shows, though claiming to be rationalists, built their social and political vision out of faith in sensation, reliance on the instincts and desires of the self, belief in the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain as the natural purpose of life, love for humanity, and disgust in the face of poverty and the suffering self. Emotion lay at the very core of the ethics and politics promoted by these radicals, who, as Frede reminds us, frequently referred to moral judgment as feeling. Moreover, sincerity and intensity of feeling (often internalized to become thought) was a crucial moral attribute through which new people defined themselves in opposition to previous generations. Oberländer shows how narratives of moral conduct were used to define selfhood, including in its inwardmost feelings. Likewise, the Bolshevik state, Young emphasizes, insistently pursued a moral ideal of the new man that would be created by public emotion work to alter individuals’ everyday habits, feelings, and desires. Stalin’s notorious division of his fellow party leaders into us versus them was strongly based on alleged emotional qualities. During the de-Stalinizing Thaw, Jones shows, released emotional memories of the terror were also expected to always possess moral clarity about good and evil. Friedman’s study of working-class loss, suffering, and anger in postsocialist Romania shows how conceptions of rights and entitlements often emerge from historically and emotionally constructed models of moral right, which produce outrage at their violation and indeed nurture a sense of moral entitlement to anger itself in such conditions. Emotions, in these histories and experiences, have strong moral significance; and moral judgment is constructed of emotional elements.

National, Ethnic, and Local Belonging (Love) and Constructions of Otherness (Fear and Hatred)

Collective identification is in large measure an affective tie, as Suny argues in his chapter, involving feelings of love and pride that bind, as well as the distancing feelings of fear, resentment, and hatred of others. The relevance of this approach to understanding national, ethnic, and local belonging is clear, though it also requires care to avoid the old fallacy that reduces the nation and similar group identities to an unchanging, primordial feeling. Chapters in this volume that focus on the emotional aspects of collective identification examine various emotions in specific historical contexts, both synchronically and diachronically: they analyze particular group emotional ties or distancing strategies at certain moments in history but also reconstruct historical or imaginative traditions against which these emotional constructions should be interpreted. This combined theoretical and historical approach to emotions leads to more complex and nuanced explanations of some well-known conflicts in recent history, and, more generally, to a better understanding of how collective identification works.

Suny shows how serious attention to both emotions and reasoning—going beyond the overly simplified rational choice paradigm in the social sciences—can provide a richer account of how people identify with ethnicity, religion, and nation and how they define and exclude others. These are socially and historically constructed feelings of attachment and rejection, located in language and memory, requiring complex mixtures of empathy and difference. In a word, he argues, a nation is an affective community. He applies this theoretical approach to the particular historical situations of two failing empires, tsarist Russia and Ottoman Turkey, making quite clear that what is essential are particular conditions and actions of emotional attachment and alienation, not any fixed universality of such feelings. In Russia, the weakness of affective national ties led to catastrophic failure of the imperial polity, while their intensity among the ruling Young Turk elite led to catastrophic violence against the Armenian other. In neither case could the ideal of a multinational empire win needed emotional allegiance when compared to the allure of nation.

Judith Pintar draws our attention to the importance of place (and, through it, of the past) in forming collective emotional ties. Using the tragically relevant case of the former Yugoslavia—another failed empire, one might

argue—in particular Kosovo and Dubrovnik, Pintar shows how local identities and loyalties are maintained by an emotional attachment to place, as well as to the histories that place embodies. A more nuanced and accurate explanation of recent bloody conflicts in this country, Pintar argues, requires that we take into account not only the traditional categories of ethnic, religious, and familial ties but also emotive factors, especially as these are rooted in place. Emotional ties prove to be decisive in people’s notions of home, selfhood, and otherness—especially given the complexity of the region and its rapidly shifting patterns of identity during crises.

Silverman’s chapter explores the complex role emotions and emotional codes have played in constructing the otherness of the Balkan Roma. Conceptually, her chapter also highlights how emotions are linked to ethnicity and gender and how music and performance can embody and convey such emotional knowledge. Outsiders have viewed the Roma’s emotionality in ambivalent terms: as evidence of the Gypsies’ wild, irrational, and uncivilized nature (thus contributing to the negative image of the Roma and the resulting emotions of fear, distrust, and hatred) but also as a manifestation of their passion and sexuality. This construction of positive and negative features was often viewed in gendered terms: the barbaric Romani man and the sexual Romani woman, but also, in the stereotypical appreciation of Gypsy music, the wild male musician and the sensual female singer or dancer. Silverman argues that although the real range of emotions in their music reaches far beyond the stereotypes, Romani artists actively perform this image, which they cannot otherwise control, in order to benefit from the market for Gypsy music. The case of a contemporary Macedonian Romani female singer demonstrates how this emotional identity can be performed and turned into a saleable and negotiable commodity. Friedman’s discussion of how Romanian workers’ anger was perceived shows that similar strategies of othering through emotion can work internally, within the same ethnic community but across class lines. Workers’ emotions were consistently interpreted, both by

Communist ideologues and post-1989 Romanian intellectuals, as evidence of their essentially irrational, ignorant, regressive, and, in post-Communist rhetoric, anti-European nature, therefore inconsistent with the newly constructed Western Romanian identity. Emotions embodied in music and song are also central to Oushakine’s account of how recent Russian war veterans create new solidarity and meaningfulness by appropriating existing forms—mainly rhetoric, imagery, and textual fragments from the Great Patriotic War—to fashion new rituals of collective remembering, which enable a community of shared loss, incorporate past suffering into the present, and affirm common values. A new patriotism of despair is created that aesthetically reconciles individuals with one another, with the past, and with their country.

Loss and Mourning, Despair and Anger, Trauma and Healing

As can be seen, many of these papers explore darker emotions, especially loss, mourning, despair, outrage, hatred, and anger—perhaps not surprisingly given the historical and contemporary experiences of the region. Even positive emotions, such as faith in a cause or love of nation, are seen to have dark effects and consequences. Trauma is a key metaphor, even diagnosis, in many of these studies. This reflects the ubiquity of this notion in recent cultural studies, as well as the pervasiveness in modern times (a reason for trauma’s greater presence in our analytical language) of intense personal suffering, often resulting from catastrophic violence and disruption, that overwhelms the ability to understand and cope, leading to feelings of helplessness and despair. But even when experiences are less catastrophic, or means of comfort and healing are found, we see the relevance and usefulness of psychological arguments about the centrality in human social experience of grief for what has been lost and efforts to mourn and thus move forward emotionally. Of course, feelings of loss and trauma—and the processes of mourning and healing—are often entwined with memory.

Some of these narratives are mainly intimate and personal, though the social setting is certainly not absent. Cultural attempts to domesticate melancholy, Vinitsky shows, remained utopian—the last comforting utopia of the Age of Reason—while personal experience of melancholy posed real dangers of metaphysical disorientation, madness, and suicide. A man’s mourning over being forced to leave the family hearth catalyzes the emotional struggle that Zorin explores. The bodily and psychic trauma of rape, as Oberländer reveals, stimulates considerations of the emotional and gendered self.

In many stories, social and political catastrophes are at the center of feelings of loss and trauma. Jones describes efforts to manage traumatic memories of the Stalinist terror, especially through literature and film. This trauma, however, ultimately proved very difficult to contain: released emotional memories and stories were as likely to produce confusion, anxiety, frustrated anger, helplessness, despair, and pessimism as the desired catharsis, healing, and quietness. Likewise, Pintar’s study of emplacement and displacement in the former Yugoslavia explores the relationship between space, loss, memory, and trauma. The scars of the civil war and other historic displacements in the region are yet to be healed, but Dubrovnik’s remarkable resilience shows that a collective based on what Pintar defines as a human, material, and emotional unity, linked to a particular spatial entity, can find its own particular resources of healing and survival.

The subjective experience of sudden downward mobility in Romania, which Friedman examines—though this was an experience shared by a very large number of citizens throughout the postsocialist world at least through the 1990s—was a painful experience of violation, loss, and anxiety. Facing similar experiences, made a great deal more traumatic by participation in the wars in Afghanistan or Chechnya, Oushakine’s veterans find some measure of healing for their feelings of post-traumatic loss, uncertainty, and hopelessness in the collective: in their case, in collective song. By aestheticizing loss, domesticating trauma, appropriating familiar forms and meanings, ennobling suffering, and creating a new narrative of these wars—often quite critical of established authorities and narratives—these veterans succeed, at least momentarily, in restoring lost community, national pride, and personal honor.

As this brief overview of themes shows—and by no means have we pointed to every example in different chapters nor to every theme—the work of these authors is connected not only by the broad geographic region we study, but, more fundamentally, by common interpretive and methodological concerns. Our purpose is not only to bring together some of the best new work on emotions in Russia and eastern Europe, but also to insist on and explore the central importance of emotions—and the complexity of how emotions work—for interpreting the forces and experiences that shape us as both individuals and social beings. Focusing our analytic attention on emotion requires us to confront difficult questions of methodology and theory in the social sciences and humanities—not least, how people think, feel, and act as social and political beings, and how we know this—while we continue to question and deepen our understanding of this important and still troubled part of the world. This works both ways: the particular local stories, themes, and evidence explored here suggest ways to enrich the broader conceptualization of how emotions work and to approach the study of emotions in other places and times. In both respects, local and theoretical, this work is meant to stimulate questions—the essential tool of good research—as well as to suggest new answers.

Notes

1. Key works include Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. Levine, eds., Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (Cambridge, UK, 1984); Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards, American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): 813–36; Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago, 1986); Catherine S. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge, UK, 1990); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, 1996); William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, UK, 2001); Barbara Rosenwein, Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1998); Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals in Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, UK, 2001); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, 2003); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (New York, 2004); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2006); Daniel Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago, 2007). See the Bibliography for a more extensive list of comparative and theoretical works that authors in this volume have found useful.

2. Workshops, panels, and conferences have included a workshop titled History of Emotions in Russia at the University of Chicago in 2003; a roundtable at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Boston in 2004, Thinking about Feelings: Emotions in Russian/Soviet History and Culture; a conference held in Moscow in 2008, Emotsii v russkoi istorii i kul’ture; the conference at the University of Illinois, also in 2008, organized by the editors of this book; and two conferences organized by Serguei Oushakine: The Pain of Words: Narratives of Suffering in Slavic Cultures in 2008 and Totalitarian Laughter: Cultures of the Comic under Socialism in 2009. Key publications include Il’ia Vinitskii, Utekhi melankholii (Moscow, 1997); Mark Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred (Ithaca, 2002); Andrei Zorin, Progulka verkhom v Moskve v avguste 1799 goda: Iz istorii emotsional’noi kul’tury, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie no. 65 (2004): 170–84; Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Happiness and Toska: An Essay in the History of Emotions in Pre-War Soviet Russia," Australian Journal of Politics and History 50, no. 3 (September 2004): 357–71; Ronald Grigor Suny, Why We Hate You: The Passions of National Identity and Ethnic Violence (February 1, 2004), Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies (http://repositories.cdlib.org/iseees/bps/2004_01-suny); Maruška Svašek, ed., Postsocialism: Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe (New York, 2005); Árpád von Klimó and Malte Rolf, eds., Rausch und Diktatur: Inszenierung, Mobilisierung und Kontrolle in totalitären Systemen (Frankfurt/Main, 2006); Valeria Sobol, Nerves, Brain, or Heart? The Physiology of Emotions and the Mind-Body Problem in Russian Sentimentalism, Russian Review 65, no. 1 (January 2006): 1–14; Glennys Young, Emotions, Contentious Politics, and Empire: Some Thoughts about the Soviet Case, Ab Imperio 2 (2007): 113–51; John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca, 2007); Mark Steinberg, Melancholy and Modernity: Emotions and Social Life in Russia between the Revolutions, Journal of Social History 41, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 813–41; Jan Plamper, ed., Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History and Culture, special section of Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (Summer 2009); Valeria Sobol, Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination (Seattle, 2009); Serguei Oushakine and Elena Trubina, eds., Travma: Punkty (Moscow, 2009); Jan Plamper, Schamma Schahadat, and Marc Elie, eds., Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstv: Podkhody k kul’turnoi istorii emotsii (Moscow, 2010). For additional publications, see the Bibliography.

3. Notably, Michelle Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life (Cambridge, UK, 1980); Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, 1986); Catherine Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago, 1988). See also the discussion in Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, chapter 2.

4. The neuroscientist most influential among humanists has been Antonio Damasio, especially in his books Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, 1994) and The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York, 1999). For examples from cultural theory and literature, see, especially, Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, 2002); Jane Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); and Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, 2007).

5. Lutz and Abu-Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion, 16, 88, 12.

6. Stearns and Stearns, Emotionology; idem., Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago, 1986); Peter Stearns, Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American History (New York, 1989); idem., Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America (New York, 1999); William Reddy, Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution, Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (March 2000): 109–52; idem., The Navigation of Feeling; Barbara H. Rosenwein, Worrying about Emotions in History, American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 821–45; idem., Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages.

7. For early examples see, Keith Opdahl, Emotion as Meaning: The Literary Case