The literary studies conference, organised by Prof. Dr. Rainer Grübel and Dr. Gun-Britt Kohler and funded by the DFG, aimed to confront one of the basic ideas of contemporary cultural concepts that is hardly in doubt any more - the calculated, realised and controlled symmetry of all the actions of those involved in cultural events - with a rather repressed alternative concept of the asymmetrical self-image of the promoters and producers, mediators and preservers of culture, but especially of literature. The work of art as a commodity subject primarily or even exclusively to the market has penetrated so deeply into the general understanding of Central and Western Europe that concepts, forms of behaviour and productions that imply or even explicate a different concept are condemned as archaic, abnormal, if not abnormal. The idea of a cultural act as a gift that does not require a counter-gift seems to be largely reduced in the public consciousness to patronage in the form of the much demanded foundation through a gift of capital or transfer of ownership, although patrons - in accordance with the symmetry model - are increasingly speculating on counter-gifts.

As gifts and sacrifices often have religious motivations in the Christian tradition, the secularised character of such an understanding of gifts and sacrifices must also be examined.

In Russian literature, three aspects make an investigation of gift-sacrifice models appear particularly promising: 1. the idea of the production of cultural objects in return for payment only became established in Russian cultures very late, due to an understanding of religious images and art characterised by the icon, which suggests to the painter a self-image of nameless service; 2. in the 18th and 19th centuries, the nobility, as a class producing culture, resisted a self-image of the gift-sacrifice model. In the 20th century, the totalitarian economic system of real socialism, which largely overrode the market even in the public consciousness, repelled or at least mitigated the advance and dominance of the idea of exchange as the supreme regulator of events in culture.

The accompanying conference volume Gabe und Opfer in der russischen Literatur und Kultur der Moderne has been published as volume 13 of the series Studia Slavica Oldenburgensia series.