Cross-Disciplinary Mixing and Modeling Strategies in the Study of Russia and Russians

This volume is a compilation of papers from the conference entitled "Kultur, Sprache, Okonomie" held at the Wirtschaftuniversitat Wien in December of 1999. Thirty of the papers given during this conference are represented here, twenty written in German, nine in Russian, and one in English. The title words notwithstanding, the topics covered by these articles are hardly restricted to questions of culture, language or economics. While those three disciplines predominate, these articles also delve into questions of sociology, politics, philosophy, art, geography, biology, and history, borrowing and mixing quite liberally from various academic areas. What is striking is the extent to which many of these writers feel free to step outside the investigative media typical for their field and to employ the constructs, theories, and filters of one academic discipline to the examination of phenomena associated with a different discipline. When done badly, this leads simply to specious analogs and awkward comparisons, but when done well, this forced and jarring shift in perspective, not unlike Brecht's V-Effekt or the ostranenie of the Russian Formalists, can take us a step closer to a reality otherwise obscured by the comfortable routine of the usual methods of analysis. While there are individual examples of the aforementioned clumsiness, for the most part the many articles of this volume engage in such scholarly cross-pollination with a marked degree of success. Since it is not possible in reviewing a volume with so many articles to provide an in-depth review of each article, we will instead attempt to find common themes and in so doing provide a profile for the entire volume, touching on as many of the articles as possible.The question of money and language is central to a number of the contributions. In the volume's opening article "Von der Sprache des Geldes zur Schrift der Assignaten: Prolegomena zu einer russischen Mediengeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts" Jurij Murasov examines the close relationship between paper currency and the written word, noting that, in contrast to barter transactions and spoken communication, respectively, they operate with signs and symbols, forming a symbolic unity between that which is absent and that which is present. Thus, human speech, captured in the form of writing, can free one from the need to be present in order to effect communication, while currency, as an abstract representation of goods and property, facilitates the easier exchange of wealth and goods, thereby opening up new possibilities in trade and economics. By removing temporal and spatial restrictions, both information and wealth become not only more portable, but also more quantifiable, in the case of the latter allowing time to figure in profit and loss calculations, with clear implications for concepts such as simple and compound interest rates.Dmitri Zakharine's "Okonomie des Ausdrucks: Zum Wandel der russischen Konversationskultur im 18.-19. Jahrhundert" begins the analysis of the relationship between money and writing by acknowledging the postmodernist take on the adage that money enslaves and language liberates, namely the postmodernist insistence that language also can be seen as enslaving in so far as it has a limiting function. He draws parallels between money and speech, on the one hand, and credit on the other, noting, as does Murasov, their symbolic nature vis-a-vis that which they represent. He notes also the use of falling intonation and other auditory phenomena (coughing, sighing, swallowing, etc.) as indicators of worth, and highlights the connections between semantic drift in language and the value drift sometimes seen in currency. In commenting on the manifestation of national character in language, he juxtaposes the language etiquette of France with the lack thereof in Germany (with the famous quote attributed to Goethe "Im Deutschen lugt man, wenn man hoflich ist,") claiming that the French use the empty compliment as symbolic capital, as opposed to the Germans, for whom "ich kusse Ihnen die Hand" is nothing by an empty gesture. …