Presenter: Volodymyr Kulikov (University College London)
Discussant: Molly Brunson (Yale University)
Organizer and moderator: Anna Mazanik (Max Weber Network Eastern Europe)
Wednesday, November 12, 17:00 CET
This talk focuses on one of the central paradoxes of industrial modernity: the attempt to master nature using bodies that are themselves part of it. In the late imperial Donbas, the state and industrialists sought to make rock ‘go into service’ – to move machines, power industry, and strengthen imperial might. Yet both rock and body refused to obey. The very seams miners sought to master instead bent their flesh and filled it with dust. Their exhausted bodies disrupted corporate plans, just as unpredictable geology undermined the rational designs of capital and state. Drawing on visual, literary, and statistical sources, the paper presents industrializing nature as a process of co-creation: one where rock shaped flesh as much as flesh cut rock.
Volodymyr Kulikov is Lecturer in Ukrainian history at University College London. His research focuses on the business and economic history of Eastern Europe, particularly industrialization, natural resource extraction, and business organizations in Ukraine from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.
Molly Brunson is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her research interests include 19th-century Russian literature, visual arts, and material culture. She is currently working on a book project The Underground: Mining and Matter in Russian and Soviet Culture.
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