A város tere és ideje: Gondolatok az ismétlésről és a művészi újrajátszásról

Abstract

In this study I focus on the aesthetics and methods of artistic reenactments and try to interpret and emphasize the urban background of those artistic reenactments which problematize culturally significant themes, such as the post-Soviet state. I argue that one of the most characteristic elements of literary repetition is space in novels, more precisely Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and the culture-forming character of the city. I also analyse the distinction and characteristics of (re)enactments and fictitious reenactments. However, in this paper I do not aim to give an overview of art history, but rather to discuss the interpretation experiment that appears in a less prominent way in the international and Hungarian literature on artistic reenactments: definition of parallelism as a text organizing element in literature and the significance of repeating spatial situations. I apply this approach in the interpretation of artistic (re)enactments related to the Soviet and Russian past and present, and to the city of Saint-Petersburg.