Contenu du sommaire : Liturgie et histoire dans l'Église russe médiévale

Peter the Great Reads the Stepennaya Kniga in Search of Historical Justifications for the Deposition of Tsarevitch Alexei Following the arrest and death of his eldest son Aleksej, Peter the Great transformed the raies of succession to the Russian throne. The ukases he published between 1718 and 1722 are based on references to the Grand Prince of Moscow Ivan III, who changed the order of succession twice, in 1498 and 1502, so as to allow the crown to be bestowed on the heir he thought the most able. Although Peter the Great explicitly refers to the Stepennaja kniga and indeed quotes it, a comparison of his edicts with the 16th Century text shows that the Stepennaja kniga was not his only source. The Emperor also borrowed from the Nikon Chronicle or other 16th С. annals which are textologically close to this chronicle. But he did not merely borrow excerpts from these sources, he also modernized their terminology and edited them so that their idea of tsardom would coincide with his own early eighteenth century needs. This experiment encouraged him to order that early Russian chronicles be collected, copied and stored in a library (Febr. 1722).

Curved Lines and Straight Lines in Mandel´štam's Works The purpose of this essay is to show that Mandel´štam's whole poetical and critical works are based on the opposition between curved lines and straight lines. In so far as the cosmos produces a murmur which the mediator-poet only amplifies, and in so far as poetry is in return the language of the world, poetry and the world infinitely refer to one another according to a circular structure. This is why the fundamental characteristic they share is cur- vedness. In Mandel´štam's works, the motifs of curvedness are numberless : rainbows, lips, waves, winding streets, smiles, snails, etc. They are expressed through a curved language, i.e. a language which, as it does not directly designate an object, simultaneously refers to a thousand objects in the world which refer back to a thousand linguistic motifs referring back again to a thousand objects in the world. The absence of a directly designed object is therefore the first condition of a curved poetical language. Consequently nothingness and death émerge as the condition of any creative being. The horseshoe, a motif which can be found throughout Mandel´štam's whole poetical works, can be seen as the main symbol of this dialectical movement : the empty space between the two ends becomes the condition of a full poetical arc.