Dr. Evgenii Matveev — Apophatic Art Practice and Research

Apophatic representation of Russia in Russian poetry

The aim of the proposed research is to analyze the apophatic image of Russia in Russian poetry of the 18–20th centuries. The scholars suggest that the apophatic approach is important for Russian culture, largely determining its (religious) philosophy based on Eastern Christian discourse and public sentiment in the past or present. It is difficult to confirm or refute the thesis that apophasis reflects Russian cultural identity in general. However, it can be stated that one of the visible functions of apophatic negations in Russian poetry is that they are repeatedly used when depicting Russia. An analysis of the poetic subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language made it possible to identify the following semantic groups of apophatic images of Russia:

The vastness of the Russian space: negations emphasize the horizontal monotony, immensity, and timelessness of Russia.
Silence and stillness: these appear in descriptions of landscapes and people; Russia is often portrayed as a silent, lethargic environment.
Myths about Russia: uncertainty, irrationality, unearthliness, and special national characteristics; epithets such as “inimitable” and “immortal” emphasize Russia's uniqueness, invincibility, and divine aspects.
Historical dimension: apophatic images address catastrophes, Russia's disappearance from memory or reality, and possible future scenarios; poets develop positive (survival, revival) and negative prognoses (irretrievability, downfall).
Negative living conditions and social deficits: lack of freedom, unhappiness, poverty, insomnia, infecundity, etc.

The objectives of the project are:

to clarify the above-mentioned semantic components of the apophatic image of Russia in poetry;
to identify dominant rhetorical strategies used by Russian poets;
to describe the development (evolution) of the apophatic image of Russia;
to analyze the components of the apophatic image of Russia developed by Russian poets that are nowadays exploited in Russian propaganda.

Dr. Evgenii Matveev is a scholar, educator, and research coordinator with nearly 20 years of experience in academia, specializing in linguistics, literary studies, and the cultural, religious, and political contexts of literature. He holds a PhD in Russian Literature from Saint Petersburg State University and has taught a wide range of courses, including the history of Russian literature, literary theory, rhetoric, stylistics, and Russian as a foreign language.

Throughout his academic career, Dr. Matveev has combined research excellence with extensive administrative and organizational responsibilities. He has coordinated scholarly projects, organized international conferences and workshops, co-led a long-running research seminar on eighteenth-century Russian culture, and served as editor of a major academic publication series. His research focuses on the interaction between literature, religion, rhetoric, and broader cultural processes.

Dr. Matveev has held research and teaching positions at Saint Petersburg State University, the Institute for Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Friedrich Schiller University Jena. As a postdoctoral researcher within the DFG-funded Graduate School “Model Romanticism” at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, he conducted a project on apophatic rhetoric in Russian Romantic lyric poetry, examining literary strategies for representing the ineffable and the limits of poetic language.