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87-647: A faction within the National Front called for the building of a fresh ethos within society and for the emergence of a new man , to be known as the Political Soldier, who would reject materialism and devote himself to the nationalist struggle with religious zeal . Basing their ideas on those of Julius Evola , an Italian philosopher who sought the creation of a new elite to combat the decadence of modern bourgeois society, Political Soldiers rejected traditional British nationalism in favour of

174-691: A double-starred first in 1982. He wrote his undergraduate dissertation under Stone's guidance (with help from Isaiah Berlin ) on ' Ludwig Börne and the Formation of a Radical Critique of Judaism' and published it as a journal article in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book in 1984. He completed his PhD on 'The political transformation of peasant Russia: peasant Soviets in the Middle Volga, 1917–1920' under Norman Stone's supervision at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1987. It

261-595: A "moral equivalence" between the economic achievements of the Soviet Union and the "murder and destruction" of Stalinism. In 1990, Figes married Stephanie Palmer, a senior lecturer in law at Cambridge University and barrister at Blackstone Chambers . They have two daughters. He divides his time between his homes in London and Umbria in Italy. On 13 February 2017, Figes become a German citizen . In 2023, Figes

348-685: A European outlook and a racialist equality of separate races . The idea of the Political Soldier, someone who devotes all his time and energy to the nationalist struggle, was one that had long existed on the far right in Europe . Jean-François Thiriart was amongst those to argue for this need for complete devotion from activists and had set up camps to train Political Soldiers in the 1960s. Holland published The Political Soldier - A Statement in 1984. The pamphlet called on supporters to become consumed by their nationalism and to make it

435-570: A TV feature documentary for the BBC, The Tsar's Last Picture Show , about the pioneering colour photographer in Russia Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky . In 2007 he wrote and presented two 60-minute Archive Hour programmes on radio entitled Stalin's Silent People which used recordings from his oral history project with Memorial that formed the basis of his book The Whisperers . The programmes are available on Figes's website. Figes

522-581: A TV feature documentary for the BBC, The Tsar's Last Picture Show , about the pioneering colour photographer in Tsarist Russia Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky . His book The Whisperers Figes followed the approach of oral history . In partnership with the Memorial Society , a human rights non-profit organization, Figes gathered several hundred private family archives from homes across Russia and carried out more than

609-547: A certain objective from the beginning of the play. However, Murray clarifies that strict constancy is not always the rule in Greek tragedy characters. To support this, he points out the example of Antigone who, even though she strongly defies Creon at the beginning of the play, begins to doubt her cause and plead for mercy as she is led to her execution. Several other aspects of the character element in ancient Greek tragedy are worth noting. One of these, which C. Garton discusses,

696-417: A component of argument. Speakers must establish ethos from the start. This can involve "moral competence" only; Aristotle, however, broadens the concept to include expertise and knowledge. For the most part, this perspective of ethos is the one discussed the most by schools and universities. Ethos is limited, in his view, by what the speaker says. Others, however, contend that a speaker's ethos extends to and

783-452: A family archive discovered by Memorial and delivered in three trunks to their Moscow offices in 2007. The letters are the largest known collection of private correspondence from the Gulag, according to Memorial. Figes was given exclusive access to the letters and other parts of the archive, which is also based on interviews with the couple when they were in their nineties, and the archives of

870-664: A historical narrative. Figes has also contributed on European history more broadly with his book The Europeans (2019). Born in Islington , London, on 20 November 1959, Figes is the son of John George Figes and the feminist writer Eva Figes , whose Jewish family fled Nazi Germany in 1939. The author and editor Kate Figes was his elder sister. His father left the family when he was three. He attended William Ellis School in north London (1971–78) and studied History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge , where his teachers were Peter Burke and Norman Stone , graduating with

957-496: A lawsuit against Figes. In an interview with Andrew Marr in 1997, Figes described himself as "a Labour Party supporter and 'a bit of a Tony Blair man ', though he confessed, when it came to the Russian revolution, to being mildly pro- Menshevik ." In 2018, when asked to comment on the popularity of Marxism among the student supporters of Jeremy Corbyn , he expressed concern that British university textbooks were drawing

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1044-493: A speaker is a high- or a low-ethos speaker. Violations of ethos include: Completely dismissing an argument based on any of the above violations of ethos is an informal fallacy ( Appeal to motive ). The argument may indeed be suspect; but is not, in itself, invalid. Although Plato never uses the term "ethos" in his extant corpus; scholar Collin Bjork, a communicator, podcaster, and digital rhetorician, argues that Plato dramatizes

1131-469: A speaker's or writer's durable position of authority in the world; invented ethos relies more on the immediate circumstances of the rhetorical situation. Ethos, or character, also appears in the visual art of famous or mythological ancient Greek events in murals, on pottery, and sculpture referred to generally as pictorial narrative. Aristotle even praised the ancient Greek painter Polygnotos because his paintings included characterization. The way in which

1218-589: A specific person, people, organization, culture, or movement. For example, the poet and critic T. S. Eliot wrote in 1940 that "the general ethos of the people they have to govern determines the behavior of politicians". Similarly the historian Orlando Figes wrote in 1996 that in Soviet Russia of the 1920s "the ethos of the Communist party dominated every aspect of public life". Ethos may change in response to new ideas or forces. For example, according to

1305-464: A thousand interviews with survivors as well as perpetrators of the Stalinist repressions. The material is stored by Memorial in its Moscow, St Petersburg and Perm offices, and a selection of the documents and interviews is available on Figes's personal website. Translated into more than twenty languages, The Whisperers was described by Andrey Kurkov as "one of the best literary monuments to

1392-440: A unified identity that is similar to human nature is usually fulfilled. Thirdly, characters in tragedies include incongruities and idiosyncrasies. Another aspect stated by Garet is that tragedy plays are composed of language, character, and action, and the interactions of these three components; these are fused together throughout the play. He explains that action normally determines the major means of characterization. For example,

1479-501: A way as to multiply the positions from which women may speak" (83). Rhetorical scholar and Kate Ronald's claim that "ethos is the appeal residing in the tension between the speaker's private and public self", (39) also presents a more postmodern view of ethos that links credibility and identity. Similarly, Nedra Reynolds and Susan Jarratt echo this view of ethos as a fluid and dynamic set of identifications, arguing that "these split selves are guises, but they are not distortions or lies in

1566-743: A whole, the arts thus became "a unifying force between nations" leading to the emergence of a modern European 'canon' so that, by 1900, "the same books were being read across the Continent, the same paintings reproduced, the same music played at home or heard in concert halls, and the same operas performed in all the major theatres of Europe". The Europeans was published in the United Kingdom in September 2019 and received positive reviews by William Boyd and Rupert Christiansen . Figes published The Story of Russia in September 2022. The book

1653-539: Is 'to chart one hundred years of history as a single revolutionary cycle. In this telling the Revolution starts in the nineteenth century (and more specifically in 1891, when the public's reaction to the famine crisis set it for the first time on a collision course with the autocracy) and ends with the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991.' Published in 2002, Natasha's Dance is a broad cultural history of Russia from

1740-425: Is a Greek word originally meaning "accustomed place" (as in ἤθεα ἵππων "the habitats of horses/", Iliad 6.511, 15.268), "custom, habit", equivalent to Latin mores . Ethos forms the root of ethikos ( ἠθικός ), meaning " morality , showing moral character". As an adjective in the neuter plural form ta ethika. In modern usage, ethos denotes the disposition, character, or fundamental values peculiar to

1827-532: Is a general history of Russia from the earliest times to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It focuses on the ideas and myths that have structured the Russians' understanding of their history, and explores what Figes calls the "structural continuities" of Russian history, such as the sacralisation of power and patrimonial autocracy. The Guardian described it as "An indispensable survey of more than 1,000 years of history [which] shows how myth and fact mix dangerously in

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1914-425: Is a panoramic history of the Revolution from 1891 to the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924. It combines social and political history and interweaves through the public narrative the personal stories of several representative figures, including Grigory Rasputin , the writer Maxim Gorky , Prince Georgy Lvov and General Alexei Brusilov , as well as unknown peasants and workers. Figes wrote that he had "tried to present

2001-410: Is about the financial crisis of the writer Gustave Flaubert in the last years of his life and the attempts of his literary friends, George Sand , Emile Zola and Ivan Turgenev , to find him a sinecure. Bob Barrett played the part of Flaubert and Philip Wilson directed. Everything Theatre described The Oyster Problem as "a remarkable pearl of a play; a patchwork of anecdotes that welcomes us into

2088-401: Is shaped by the overall moral character and history of the speaker—that is, what people think of his or her character before the speech has even begun (cf Isocrates ). According to Aristotle , there are three categories of ethos: In a sense, ethos does not belong to the speaker but to the audience and it's appealing to the audience's emotions. Thus, it is the audience that determines whether

2175-423: Is the fact that either because of contradictory action or incomplete description, the character cannot be viewed as an individual, or the reader is left confused about the character. One method of reconciling this would be to consider these characters to be flat, or type-cast, instead of round. This would mean that most of the information about the character centers around one main quality or viewpoint. Comparable to

2262-665: Is troubling for black women. Pittman writes, "Unfortunately, in the history of race relations in America, black Americans' ethos ranks low among other racial and ethnic groups in the United States. More often than not, their moral characters have been associated with a criminalized and sexualized ethos in visual and print culture" (43). The ways in which characters were constructed is important when considering ethos, or character, in Greek tragedy . Augustus Taber Murray explains that

2349-649: The Financial Times , Simon Sebag Montefiore called Just Send Me Word "a unique contribution to Gulag scholarship as well as a study of the universal power of love". Several reviewers highlighted the book's literary qualities, pointing out that it 'reads like a novel' Crimea: The Last Crusade is a panoramic history of the Crimean War of 1853–56. Drawing extensively from Russian, French and Ottoman as well as British archives, it combines military, diplomatic, political and cultural history, examining how

2436-788: The European University of St Petersburg . Figes's first three books were on the Russian Revolution and the Civil War . Peasant Russia, Civil War (1989) was a detailed study of the peasantry in the Volga region during the Revolution and the Civil War (1917–21). Using village Soviet archives, Figes emphasised the autonomous nature of the agrarian revolution during 1917–18, showing how it developed according to traditional peasant notions of social justice independently of

2523-632: The Provisional Government , the Bolsheviks or other urban-based parties. He also demonstrated how the function of the rural soviets was transformed in the course of the Civil War as they were taken over by younger and more literate peasants and migrant townsmen, many of them veterans of the First World War or Red Army soldiers, who became the rural bureaucrats of the emerging Bolshevik regime. A People's Tragedy (1996)

2610-525: The Second World War in 1941, when Lev was enrolled in the Red Army , they made contact in 1946, when he wrote from Pechora. Figes uses the letters to explore conditions in the labour camp and to tell the love story, ending in 1955 with Lev's release and marriage to Svetlana. The book documents five illegal trips made by Svetlana to visit Lev by smuggling herself into the labour camp. Writing in

2697-476: The Soviet people " In it Figes underlined the importance of oral testimonies for the recovery of the history of repression in the former Soviet Union. While conceding that, "like all memory, the testimony given in an interview is unreliable", he said that oral testimony "can be cross-examined and tested against other evidence". The Whisperers deals mainly with the impact of repression on private life. It examines

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2784-639: The Stalinism that entered into all of us".' The book includes a detailed study of the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov , who became a leading figure in the Union of Soviet Writers and a propagandist in the "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign during Stalin's final years. Figes drew on the closed sections of Simonov's archive in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and on the archives of

2871-551: The interdependence between ethos and cultural context by arguing that "To have ethos is to manifest the virtues most valued by the culture to and for which one speaks" (60). While scholars do not all agree on the dominant sphere in which ethos may be crafted, some agree that ethos is formed through the negotiation between private experience and the public, rhetorical act of self-expression. Karen Burke LeFevre's argument in Invention as Social Act situates this negotiation between

2958-403: The pan-European culture formed through new technologies (especially the railways and lithographic printing), mass foreign travel, market forces, and the development of international copyright , enabling writers, artists and composers as well as their publishers to enter foreign markets through the growth of literary translations, touring companies and international publishing. In the continent as

3045-563: The self (47). In the era of mass-mediated communication, Oddo contends, one's ethos is often created by journalists and dispersed over multiple news texts. With this in mind, Oddo coins the term intertextual ethos, the notion that a public figure's "ethos is constituted within and across a range of mass media voices" (48). In "Black Women Writers and the Trouble with Ethos", scholar Coretta Pittman notes that race has been generally absent from theories of ethos construction and that this concept

3132-732: The British far right as many of its ideas were new and alien concepts. The Official National Front was eventually removed from the NF and the calls for a 'new man' were continued by the International Third Position . Within the UK, the magazine Final Conflict is still devoted to this idea. Holland's book has been translated into a number of European languages (notably into Polish for the National Revival of Poland ) whilst

3219-504: The Jewish historian Arie Krampf, ideas of economic modernization which were imported into Palestine in the 1930s brought about "the abandonment of the agrarian ethos and the reception of...the ethos of rapid development". In rhetoric , ethos (credibility of the speaker) is one of the three artistic proofs ( pistis , πίστις) or modes of persuasion (other principles being logos and pathos ) discussed by Aristotle in ' Rhetoric ' as

3306-635: The Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture is a panoramic history of nineteenth-century European culture told through the biographies of Pauline Viardot , the opera singer, composer and salon hostess, her husband Louis Viardot , an art expert and theatre manager, and the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev , who had a long love affair with Pauline Viardot and lived with the couple in a ménage à trois for over twenty years. They lived at various times in Paris , Baden-Baden , London, Courtavenel and Bougival . Figes argues that

3393-720: The Ottoman Empire. He frames the war within a longer history of religious conflict between Christians and Muslims in the Balkans , southern Russia and the Caucasus that continues to this day. Figes stresses the religious motive of the Tsar Nicholas I in his bold decision to go to war, arguing that Nicholas was swayed by the ideas of the Pan-Slavs to invade Moldavia and Wallachia and encourage Slav revolts against

3480-684: The Ottomans, despite his earlier adherence to the Legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance . He also shows how France and Britain were drawn into the war by popular ideas of Russophobia that swept across Europe in the wake of the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. As one reviewer wrote, Figes shows "how the cold war of the Soviet era froze over fundamental fault lines that had opened up in the 19th century." The Europeans: Three Lives and

3567-548: The Revolution who attempted to explain its political development in terms of social history. In 2008, The Times Literary Supplement listed A People's Tragedy as one of the "hundred most influential books since the war". In 2013 David Bowie named A People's Tragedy one of his 'top 100 books'. Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (1999), co-written with Boris Kolonitskii  [ ru ] , analyses

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3654-580: The Stalinist regime . He organised an open protest letter to President Dmitry Medvedev and other Russian leaders, which was signed by several hundred leading academics from across the world. After several court hearings, the materials were finally returned to Memorial in May 2009. Figes saw his first Russian translation contract for The Whisperers cancelled in March 2009 by publisher Attikus  [ ru ] , who cited commercial reasons. Figes suggested that

3741-605: The arrest by the FSB of historian Mikhail Suprun as part of a "Putinite campaign against freedom of historical research and expression". In December 2013, Figes wrote a long piece in the US journal Foreign Affairs on the Euromaidan demonstrations in Kyiv suggesting that a referendum on Ukraine's foreign policy and the country's possible partition might be a preferable alternative to

3828-414: The book was "inconvenient" to Vladimir Putin 's government and that the real explanation for the refusal to publish lay in "political pressure". A second translation project was abandoned by the publisher Corpus  [ ru ] and the rights owner Dynasty Foundation in 2010 after one of Memorial's researchers reported that she found anachronisms , incorrect interpretations and factual errors in

3915-740: The book. Figes was notified of the decision in April 2011 in a letter which suggested that its publication would cause offence in Russia. Figes offered to revise the book, but his offer was ignored. Published in 2012, Just Send Me Word is a true story based on 1,246 letters smuggled in and out of the Pechora labour camp between 1946 and 1955 between Lev Mishchenko (a prisoner) and Svetlana Ivanova (his girlfriend in Moscow). There are 647 letters from Lev to Svetlana, and 599 from her to him. They form part of

4002-902: The building of St. Petersburg during the reign of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century. Taking its title from a scene in Tolstoy 's War and Peace , where the young countess Natasha Rostova intuitively dances a peasant dance, it explores the tensions between the European and folk elements of Russian culture, and examines how the myth of the " Russian soul " and the idea of "Russianness" itself have been expressed by Russian writers, artists, composers and philosophers. It received positive reviews amongst British press. Figes has also written essays on various Russian cultural figures, including Leo Tolstoy , Dmitri Shostakovich , Sergei Prokofiev and Andrei Platonov . In 2003 he wrote and presented

4089-437: The character cannot exist without plot, and so the character is secondary to the plot. Murray maintains that Aristotle did not mean that complicated plot should hold the highest place in a tragedy play. This is because the plot was, more often than not, simple and therefore not a major point of tragic interest. Murray conjectures that people today do not accept Aristotle's statement about character and plot because to modern people,

4176-454: The character's choice, the pictorial narrative often shows an earlier scene than when the action was committed. Stansbury-O'Donnell gives an example of this in the form of a picture by the ancient Greek artist Exekia which shows the Greek hero Ajax planting his sword in the ground in preparation to commit suicide, instead of the actual suicide scene (Stansbury-O'Donnell, p. 177). Additionally, Castriota explains that ancient Greek art expresses

4263-472: The complexity of rhetorical ethos in the Apology of Socrates . For Aristotle, a speaker's ethos was a rhetorical strategy employed by an orator whose purpose was to "inspire trust in his audience" ( Rhetorica 1380). Ethos was therefore achieved through the orator's "good sense, good moral character, and goodwill", and central to Aristotelian virtue ethics was the notion that this "good moral character"

4350-420: The concept of persona has emerged from the literary tradition, and is associated with a theatrical mask. Roger Cherry explores the distinctions between ethos and pathos to mark the distance between a writer's autobiographical self and the author's discursive self as projected through the narrator. The two terms also help to refine distinctions between situated and invented ethos. Situated ethos relies on

4437-428: The depiction of a character was limited by the circumstances under which Greek tragedies were presented. These include the single unchanging scene, necessary use of the chorus, small number of characters limiting interaction, large outdoor theatres , and the use of masks, which all influenced characters to be more formal and simple. Murray also declares that the inherent characteristics of Greek tragedies are important in

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4524-707: The driving force behind everything in their lives. The book offered four historical examples of a Political Soldier, i.e., the Spartans , the Roman Centurion , the Crusaders and the Iron Guard of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu , a Romanian movement of fascism and religion. The book also made the Celtic Cross the emblem of the Political Soldiers. The concept of the Political Soldier caused divisions within

4611-526: The flat character option, the reader could also view the character as a symbol. Examples of this might be the Eumenides as vengeance, or Clytemnestra as symbolizing ancestral curse. Yet another means of looking at character, according to Tycho von Wilamowitz and Howald, is the idea that characterization is not important. This idea is maintained by the theory that the play is meant to affect the viewer or reader scene by scene, with attention being only focused on

4698-464: The idea that character was the major factor influencing the outcome of the Greeks' conflicts against their enemies. Because of this, "ethos was the essential variable in the equation or analogy between myth and actuality". Orlando Figes Orlando Guy Figes ( / ɔː ˈ l æ n d ə ʊ ɡ aɪ ˈ f aɪ dʒ iː z / ; born 20 November 1959) is a British and German historian and writer. He

4785-460: The influence of the Soviet regime and its campaigns of terror on family relationships, emotions and beliefs, moral choices, issues of personal and social identity, and collective memory. According to Figes, 'the real power and lasting legacy of the Stalinist system were neither in structures of the state, nor in the cult of the leader, but, as the Russian historian Mikhail Gefter once remarked, "in

4872-403: The influence that such ethical representation may exert upon the public". Castriota also explains that according to Aristotle, "[t]he activity of these artists is to be judged worthy and useful above all because exposure of their work is beneficial to the polis ". Accordingly, this was the reason for the representation of character, or ethos, in public paintings and sculptures. In order to portray

4959-623: The labour camp itself. Figes raised the finance for the transcription of the letters, which are housed in Memorial's offices in Moscow and will become available to researchers in 2013. According to Figes, "Lev's letters are the only major real-time record of daily life in the Gulag that has ever come to light." The book tells the story of Lev and Svetlana who met as students in the Physics Faculty of Moscow University in 1935. Separated by

5046-547: The main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching [...] while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name ethike is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit)" (952). Discussing women and rhetoric, scholar Karlyn Kohrs Campbell notes that entering the public sphere was considered an act of moral transgression for females of the nineteenth century: "Women who formed moral reform and abolitionist societies, and who made speeches, held conventions, and published newspapers, entered

5133-451: The makeup of the characters. One of these is the fact that tragedy characters were nearly always mythical characters. This limited the character, as well as the plot, to the already well-known myth from which the material of the play was taken. The other characteristic is the relatively short length of most Greek plays. This limited the scope of the play and characterization so that the characters were defined by one overriding motivation toward

5220-412: The meaning of ethos within rhetoric as expressing inherently communal roots. This stands in direct opposition to what she describes as the claim "that ethos can be faked or 'manipulated'" because individuals would be formed by the values of their culture and not the other way around (336). Rhetorical scholar John Oddo also suggests that ethos is negotiated across a community and not simply a manifestation of

5307-431: The moniker "orlando-birkbeck" on the UK site of the online bookseller Amazon . The reviews criticised works by two other British historians of Russia, Robert Service and Rachel Polonsky , but praised other books, including one of his own. After initially denying that he wrote these reviews, Figes took full responsibility for them, apologized and agreed to pay for legal costs and damages to Polonsky and Service who launched

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5394-415: The most memorable things about tragedy plays are often the characters. However, Murray does concede that Aristotle is correct in that "[t]here can be no portrayal of character [...] without at least a skeleton outline of plot". One other term frequently used to describe the dramatic revelation of character in writing is " persona ". While the concept of ethos has traveled through the rhetorical tradition,

5481-442: The philosopher's sense. Rather they are 'deceptions' in the sophistic sense: recognition of the ways one is positioned multiply differently" (56). Rhetorical scholar Michael Halloran has argued that the classical understanding of ethos "emphasizes the conventional rather than the idiosyncratic , the public rather than the private" (60). Commenting further on the classical etymology and understanding of ethos , Halloran illuminates

5568-495: The play Julius Caesar, is a good example for a character without credibility, Brutus. Another principle he states is the importance of these three components' effect on each other; the important repercussion of this being character's impact on action. Augustus Taber Murray also examines the importance and degree of interaction between plot and character. He does this by discussing Aristotle's statements about plot and character in his Poetics: that plot can exist without character, but

5655-468: The poet's wife and son to produce his study of this major Soviet establishment figure. On 4 December 2008, the St Petersburg offices of Memorial were raided by the police and the entire electronic archive, including the materials collected with Figes for The Whisperers , was confiscated by the authorities. Figes condemned the police raid, accusing the Russian authorities of trying to rehabilitate

5742-501: The political language, revolutionary songs, visual symbols and historical ideas that animated the revolutionary crowds of 1917. Revolutionary Russia: 1891–1991 is a short introduction to the subject published as part of the relaunch of Pelican Books in the United Kingdom in 2014. In it Figes argues for the need to see the Russian Revolution in a longer time-frame than most historians have allowed. He states that his aim

5829-635: The possibility of civil war and military intervention by Russia. In June 2023, he said that Russia "needs to be completely defeated" in the Russo-Ukrainian War , "not just for Ukraine's sake, but for Russia's sake". In February 2024, Figes was sanctioned with denial of entry into Russia by Vladimir Putin 's government, together with other British academics and experts, for criticizing the war in Ukraine and allegedly demonizing Russia. In 2010, Figes posted several pseudonymous reviews under

5916-482: The post in 2022. He has served on the editorial board of the journal Russian History since at least 2011, writes for the international press, broadcasts on television and radio, reviews for The New York Review of Books , and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature . During his career, he was involved in an international summer school for history teachers in Russian universities organised by

6003-481: The power of music to influence emotions, behaviors, and even morals . Early Greek stories of Orpheus exhibit this idea in a compelling way. The word's use in rhetoric is closely based on the Greek terminology used by Aristotle in his concept of the three artistic proofs or modes of persuasion alongside pathos and logos . It gives credit to the speaker, or the speaker is taking credit. Ethos ( ἦθος , ἔθος ; plurals: ethe , ἤθη ; ethea , ἤθεα )

6090-407: The private and the public, writing that ethos "appears in that socially created space, in the 'between', the point of intersection between speaker or writer and listener or reader" (45–46). According to Nedra Reynolds, "ethos, like postmodern subjectivity , shifts and changes over time, across texts, and around competing spaces" (336). However, Reynolds additionally discusses how one might clarify

6177-474: The private life of Gustave Flaubert and his literary contemporaries" Figes has contributed frequently to radio and television broadcasts in the United Kingdom and around the world. In 1999 he wrote a six-part educational TV series on the history of Communism under the title Red Chapters . Produced by Opus Television and broadcast in the UK, the 25-minute films featured turning-points in the history of Soviet Russia, China, and Cuba. In 2003 he wrote and presented

6264-455: The public sphere and thereby lost their claims to purity and piety " (13). Crafting an ethos within such restrictive moral codes, therefore, meant adhering to membership of what Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner have theorized as counter publics. While Warner contends that members of counter publics are afforded little opportunity to join the dominant public and therefore exert true agency, Nancy Fraser has problematized Habermas 's conception of

6351-623: The public sphere as a dominant "social totality" by theorizing "subaltern counter publics", which function as alternative publics that represent "parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs" (67). Though feminist rhetorical theorists have begun to offer ways of conceiving of ethos that are influenced by postmodern concepts of identity, they remain cognizant of how these classical associations have shaped and still do shape women's use of

6438-439: The revolution not as a march of abstract social forces and ideologies but as a human event of complicated individual tragedies". Left-wing critics have represented Figes as a conservative because of his negative assessment of Lenin and his focus on the individual and "the random succession of chance events" rather than on the collective actions of the masses. Others have situated Figes among the so-called 'revisionist' historians of

6525-446: The rhetorical tool. Johanna Schmertz draws on Aristotelian ethos to reinterpret the term alongside feminist theories of subjectivity, writing that, "Instead of following a tradition that, it seems to me, reads ethos somewhat in the manner of an Aristotelian quality proper to the speaker's identity, a quality capable of being deployed as needed to fit a rhetorical situation, I will ask how ethos may be dislodged from identity and read in such

6612-436: The section at hand. This point of view also holds that the different figures in a play are only characterized by the situation surrounding them, and only enough so that their actions can be understood. Garet makes three more observations about a character in Greek tragedy. The first is an abundant variety of types of characters in Greek tragedy. His second observation is that the reader or viewer's need for characters to display

6699-460: The subject and his actions are portrayed in visual art can convey the subject's ethical character and through this the work's overall theme, just as effectively as poetry or drama can. This characterization portrayed men as they ought to be, which is the same as Aristotle's idea of what ethos or character should be in tragedy. (Stansbury-O'Donnell, p. 178) Mark D. Stansbury-O'Donnell states that pictorial narratives often had ethos as its focus, and

6786-577: The tales this crucial country tells about itself" A reviewer in The Spectator called it "a saga of multi-millennial identity politics"; Figes argues that no other country has so often changed its origin story, its "[h]istories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future". In 2023 Figes's debut play, The Oyster Problem , was produced by the Jermyn Street Theatre in London. The play

6873-508: The term is still used by the National Democratic Party of Germany to describe its followers. Ethos Ethos ( / ˈ iː θ ɒ s / or US : / ˈ iː θ oʊ s / ) is a Greek word meaning 'character' that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology ; and the balance between caution and passion. The Greeks also used this word to refer to

6960-649: The war left a lasting mark on the national consciousness of Britain, France, Russia and Turkey. Figes sets the war in the context of the Eastern Question , the diplomatic and political problems caused by the decay of the Ottoman Empire . In particular, he emphasises the importance of the religious struggle between Russia as the defender of the Orthodox and France as the protector of the Catholics in

7047-885: Was "too Jane Austen" and "too English". Figes's The Whisperers was adapted and performed by Rupert Wickham as a one-man play, Stalin's Favourite . Based on Figes's portrayal of the writer Konstantin Simonov , the play was performed in London at the National Theatre in November 2011 and at the Unicorn Theatre in January 2012. Figes has been critical of the Vladimir Putin government, in particular alleging that Putin has attempted to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin and impose his own agenda on history-teaching in Russian schools and universities. He condemned

7134-550: Was a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London , where he was made Emeritus Professor on his retirement in 2022. Figes is known for his works on Russian history, such as A People's Tragedy (1996), Natasha's Dance (2002), The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (2007), Crimea (2010) and Just Send Me Word (2012). A People's Tragedy is a study of the Russian Revolution , and combines social and political history with biographical details in

7221-492: Was appointed University Lecturer at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge in 1987. His students at Cambridge included the historians Andrew Roberts and Tristram Hunt , the food writer Bee Wilson , the journalist James Harding , and the film producer Tanya Seghatchian . He succeeded Richard J. Evans as Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London in 1999. He announced his retirement from

7308-492: Was his supervisor who suggested the shift of topic from German-Jewish philosophy to Russian peasant history. He also claimed to have taken inspiration from the work of Teodor Shanin for his thesis, and received Shanin's recommendation to study with Viktor Danilov  [ ru ] in Moscow . Danilov helped him get "unprecedented" access to the Soviet archives. Figes was a Fellow of Trinity College from 1984 to 1999. He

7395-493: Was increased in virtuous degree by habit ( Rhetorica 1380). Ethos also is related to a character's habit as well (The Essential Guide to Rhetoric, 2018). The person's character is related to a person's habits (The Essential Guide to Rhetoric, 2018). Aristotle links virtue, habituation, and ethos most succinctly in Book II of Nicomachean Ethics : "Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in

7482-498: Was the historical consultant on the film Anna Karenina (2012), directed by Joe Wright , starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard . He was also credited as the historical consultant on the 2016 BBC War & Peace television series directed by Tom Harper with a screenplay by Andrew Davies . Interviewed by the Sunday Telegraph , Figes defended the series against criticism that it

7569-408: Was therefore concerned with showing the character's moral choices. (Stansbury-O'Donnell, p. 175) David Castriota, agreeing with Stansbury-O'Donnell's statement, says that the main way Aristotle considered poetry and visual arts to be on equal levels was in character representation and its effect on action. However, Castriota also maintains about Aristotle's opinion that "his interest has to do with

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