פרסומים

In the spring of 1887, Chekhov embarked on a journey from Moscow, traversing the vast expanse of the southern Russian steppe with the intention of visiting his hometown Taganrog. Less than a year later, in February 1888, he completed his novella, Steppe: A Story of a Journey, widely regarded as transformative in his literary career. The present article delves into the innovative aspect of Chekhov’s novella by focusing on its pivotal moment of departure. Beside referring to the steppe journey that inspired the story, “departure” pertains to the literary departure of Steppe itself. Published a few decades after the introduction of trains in Russia and just before the advent of cinema, Chekhov’s Steppe, I argue, introduced an original literary “moving image.” By situating the emergence of this image in the broader context of the 19^th-century revolution of seeing, I trace the existential charge of this aesthetic moment, which cast time itself as the vital and pivotal hero of Chekhov’s prose.

October 2025: In the spring of 1887, Chekhov embarked on a journey from Moscow, traversing the vast expanse of the southern Russian steppe with the intention of visiting his hometown Taganrog. Less than a year later, in February 1888, he completed his novella, Steppe: A Story of a Journey, widely regarded as transformative in his literary career. The present article delves into the innovative aspect of Chekhov’s novella by focusing on its pivotal moment of departure. Beside referring to the steppe journey that inspired the story, “departure” pertains to the literary departure of Steppe itself. Published a few decades after the introduction of trains in Russia and just before the advent of cinema, Chekhov’s Steppe, I argue, introduced an original literary “moving image.” By situating the emergence of this image in the broader context of the 19^th-century revolution of seeing, I trace the existential charge of this aesthetic moment, which cast time itself as the vital and pivotal hero of Chekhov’s prose.

How do voters respond to economic crises: do they turn against the incumbent, reward a certain political camp, polarize to the extremes, or perhaps continue to vote much like before? Analyzing extensive data on electorates, parties and individuals in 24 countries for over half a century, we document a systematic pattern whereby economic crises tend to disproportionately favor the right. Three main forces underlie this pattern. First, voters tend to decrease support for the party heading the government when the crisis erupts. Second, after crises voters tend to assign greater importance to issues typically owned by the right. Third, when center-right parties preside over a crisis, voters often drift further rightward to nationalist parties rather than defect to the left. The far-right thus serves as an effective vehicle for keeping the center-right in power even when facing post-crisis disaffection by its voters.

Writing in the years before, during, and right after WWI, Christian Friedrich Weiser published scholarly and political-utopian works of planning for a German victory: Germany’s idealist philosophy, when realized as a political reality, would offer the world a beneficial alternative to the poverty of “Anglo-Saxon” pragmatism. To give imaginative shape to his plans, Weiser also wrote a novella, Die Hoffnung des Iren (1915). Translated into English as The Faith of an Irishman, it latches on to the Irish hatred of the English, the Irish for whom the “German Day” would also come as liberation. In his scholarly book, Shaftesbury und das deutsche Geistesleben (1916), Weiser represents Shaftesbury as inspiration for German idealism. The utopianism in his pamphlets and his fiction is informed by his experiences as a returning immigrant: he believes that ethnic Germans outside the Reich must take the lead in realizing the “German Day.”

October 2025: Rudolphus Teeuwen (PhD Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania) recently retired as professor of English at National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where he taught for nearly 30 years. He now lives in his native the Netherlands. He taught courses related to eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, aesthetics, the utopian imagination, and literary theory, and published on these matters in edited volumes and in journals such as Cultural Critique, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Theory, Culture & Society, Philosophy and Literature, and Symplokē. A special subject of interest to him has been Roland Barthes’s approach to life and letters, and the place of mysticism and utopian imagining in it. Questions of migration, exile, and nostalgia are also of prime interest to him. These elements— mysticism, utopianism, and migration — inform his contribution to Partial Answers as well. With Steffen Hantke he edited Gypsy Scholars, Migrant Teachers and the Global Academic Proletariat (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).