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I wonder if you can contextualise the emotional categories you have found and put them in terms of the ways these emotions were understood at the time, by non-experts. You put your analysis in a Jamesian frame, but would these historical actors have done so? What difference does this make? What kind of translation work have you had to do to make the emotion words you use into orthodox English emotion words, and has anything been sacrificed in the process? And I find myself wondering why you choose this framework for your own understanding of emotions. Can you justify that choice, given that there are many other options, and given that most historians of emotion would probably emphasise culture over physiology in their explanations. Thanks for your poster! Good to think with.
Dear Robert Boddice,
Thank you for such interesting questions! I decided to use the concept of “emotion” by William James and Karl Lange for two reasons. Firstly, there are different understandings of emotions and I share the idea that since emotions formed in our brain, which is part of our body, then, our emotional reactions are physiological reactions towards the outside reality. Secondly, maybe the authors of the texts did not understand their emotions in these terms, but through their diaries it could be seen that the authors inner state were closely connected with his/her physical experience and both they influence on each other.
As for translation of the words, discussion of besieged emotions in works by Polina Barskova “Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster” and by Alexis Peri “The war within” were useful. Besides, I tried to find an equivalent in English language myself as well.
With respect,
Yana
Thank you for a very interesting presentation! I wonder if it would be possible to compare the Leningrad diaries with similar sources from e.g. Moscow, which was not besieged although was close to the frontlines? It would also be interesting to know about the possible emotional differences in relation to social status, gender, age, and so on, if your sources would reveal them. Or maybe the collective experience of being besieged leveled these differences? I think you have an important topic and an original approach to it.
Dear Ville Kivimäki,
Thank you very much for your comment! Thank you for amazing suggestion of the possible future analysis. I think that it would be very interesting to compare besieged community with Moscow community and find out was the experience of Leningraders so differ from others. As for differences in amotions due to social status, gender and age, in my case, I took middle-aged people around 35-43 who were intelligentsia representers. At the first stages of developing my research I was thinking about making gender differences in emotions central topic. However, in the process of the study I could not find any emotional differences between man and woman. Probably, if I analyzed more sources, I could find something. But I rather think that absence of differences could be connected to the gender shift leading to physiological desexualization and political resexualization of the besieged society about which J. K. Hass writes in “Moral Economies of Wartime Intimacy: One Facet of Gender in the Blockade of Leningrad”.
With respect,
Yana
Thank you for a really interesting poster presentation! I want to ask, in the diaries did you get a sense of people policing their own or other people’s emotional reactions or expressions?
Dear Amanda Gavin,
Thank you for such an interesting question! Through my analysis, I actually noticed that besieged texts represent how people lose control on their emotions, when conditions become really harsh. Terefore, it was rather emotions controling people. It is espesially clear through observation of the metaphors, like, for example: “какое-то гнетущее предчувствие не оставляет меня!..” (some kind of oppressive premonition does not leave me alone! ..)
With respect,
Yana
Thank you so much for your great poster. While listening to you, I was wondering if besieged Leningrad could also be conceptualized as a community of experience (cf. emotional community). For me, your analysis seems to provide a lot of material for such an analysis. How would you see the potential benefits and problems of an alternative conceptualization?
Pirjo Markkola
10.3.2021 10:58
Dear Pirjo Markkola,
Thank you so much for your question and ideas! I think, that it would be interesting to examine Leningrad community as a community of experience. The benefit of such perspective is that Leningraders could be compared with other communities with traumatic experience. (like earthquakes or, for example, Chernobyl catastrophe). The problem probably could be; if we identify citizens as a community of experience, does it put them somehow in the position of a victim of such experience? As far as I know, people who survived the Siege were against referring to themselves as victims at all. There was also a special petition for the president in 2000-s connected to this subject.
I hope I answered your questions.
With respect,
Yana
Yana Valeryevna Gorbatenko
11.3.2021 22:16