Fear and Angst in Early Modern East Central Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Affiliate Organization: Early Slavic Studies Association

Brief Description

It is a conspicuous and also disturbing reality that Eastern European studies in North
America is constantly filled with a staunch sense of presentism and a strong attachment
to political memory. Meanwhile, Slavic national history writing, even until today, often
carries a lachrymose tone haunted by a lingering romanticism. Given these facts, can
we recount premodern Slavic experiences in their own rights without any modern or
modernist disturbance? Can we study feelings and passions without falling victim to the
nationalist sentimentality? Therefore, the goal of this panel is to plot out new ways to
(re)write fear and angst in the Slavic (far) past that is liberated from the tragic and
pathetic tropes commonly present in the teleological historiography of Eastern Europe.
Drawing on recent methodology and discourse of affect and emotionality, we are eager
to build original dialogues between early modern Eastern European history and history
of emotions, along with cultural history, religious history, ecological history, utopian
history, and historical theory. In specific, the four papers in this panel are going to
grapple with various “negative” emotional moments of early modern Czechia, Poland,
and Ukraine - from utopian anxiety and royal angst to the lamentation of loss and the
spectacle of the passion - and offer case studies of how to define Slavic sensibility in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Composed of historians, art historians, and
literary critics, this panel also hopes to promote visibility and interdisciplinarity of the
long-marginalized field of premodern east-central Europe at ASEEES and beyond.

Sub Unit

• Early Slavic Studies

Chair

• Frank Edward Sysyn, U of Alberta (Canada)

Papers

• Poland is Falling: Stanisław Orzechowski and His Utopian Anxiety - Václav Zheng, Johns Hopkins U

• Trauma, Loss, and Lamentation in the Writings of Jan Amos Comenius - Phillip Haberkern, Boston U

• Royal Angst: The Last Aurochs Habitat and Its Artistic Reanimations - Tom Grusiecki, Boise State U

• 'Teach Us How to Weep': The Spectacle of the Passion in Early Modern Ukraine - Maria Grazia Bartolini, U of Milan (Italy)

Discussant

• Frank Edward Sysyn, U of Alberta (Canada)