RUSSIAN LITERATURE最新文献

Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian who in 2019 was elected president of Ukraine, provoked heated controversies about the country's Russophone pop culture, populism and democratic institutions. By using the figure of the Joker as an analytical metaphor, this paper seeks to unpack the intertwining discourses of Russia’s information warfare, the global rise of populism, and Ukrainian identity politics. Tracing Zelensky’s career as a successful entrepreneur in the Russophone entertainment business, a new approach inspired by Richard Florida’s notion of the creative ethos is developed in order to examine Zelensky’s election campaign. The core messages and storytelling techniques of this campaign will be analyzed using the example of the television series The Servant of the People (Sluga narodu) created by and starring Zelensky. Subsequently, the results of this analysis will be discussed in the context of populism and how it relates to Russophone pop culture.

This introduction provides an overview of current scholarship on Russophone literature ‒ broadly defined as literature written in the Russian language by authors who do not identify as Russian ‒ and situates it within the broader transnational and postcolonial ‘turns’ in Russian, East European, and Eurasian literary studies. The author then outlines the thematic and geographical parameters of the cluster. Articles examine works of literature and media from Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, and the United States, published primarily within the past ten years. Common threads uniting the articles in this special issue are a focus on identity politics and language ideology, the creation of new national ideas, responses to post-Euromaidan geopolitical struggles, and the confluence of contemporary writing and new media.

The article examines aspects of mediality in the relationship between Russophonia and travelogues in the works of the contemporary Russophone writers Alexander Genis and Peter Vail. Both emigrated from the Soviet Union to the US and have been active in various media, including radio and television, not only literature. Both leave postmodernity and the notion of a national language and culture behind. Instead, their travel sketches explore aesthetic as well as entertaining formats, continuing the dialogue with literature but also merging it with other media. Their primary reference system for the Russian language provides stability with intermedial and plurimedial effects. “Mediality” denotes the interplay of several media in the communication process with the audience.

First, the article looks at their co-authored book Amerikana (1991), in which they describe American everyday culture by way of a subtle comparison to Soviet life. Next, it examines Vail’s Slovo v puti (2010), focusing on his intertextual sketch “Armenia,” which reproduces the idea of eclectic time layers. Finally, the analysis shifts to the phenomenology of slow movement through cities, villages and nature in Genis’s Strannik (2011).

Genis’s and Vail’s travel sketches connect the US, Europe and Russia, and also their different medial perceptions of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. They preserve the Russian language as a reliable lingua franca used by émigrés of all nationalities from the former Soviet Union. By suggesting an anachronistic subject determined by biography, history, hedonism and desire for knowledge, documentary literature departs from the post-Soviet aphasia (S. Oushakine), which described society after the shockwaves around 1991. Digital formats seem ideal for a globally interactive Russophonia as well as for the highly intermedial genre of autobiographical travelogue. Nevertheless, both authors avoid digital media.

The aim of this paper is to understand how the position and self-identification of Russophone writers in the Ukrainian literary context have changed over the last two decades (2000-2019). The prime example of the “afterlife” metaphorically experienced by Vladimir Rafeenko (b. 1969, Donetsk) in independent Ukraine will be the main focus of the investigation. Rafeenko’s literary experience in post-Soviet (and post-Maidan) Ukraine revolves around some of the main issues concerning the evolution of the Russophone cultural paradigm and its reception in the national scene: from marginality to recognition; from minority to self-determination; and, eventually, even to literary bilingualism. In this paper, these dynamics will be analysed through reading and interpreting some excerpts from Rafeenko’s most significant works, emblematically reflecting the emergence of his identification as a Ukrainian Russophone author in the post-Maidan era.

Identity is the overarching topic connecting most of the texts written by Iurii Serebrianskii, one of the leading representatives of so-called “Young” Russophone literature in Kazakhstan. This paper analyses how the topic is presented and what concepts of identity are integrated in four of the author’s best known works: Destination. Dorozhnaia pastoral’ (2010), Prazhaki (2014), Kazakhstanskie skazki (2017), and Altynshash (2018). I argue that Serebrianskii’s use of the Russian language, together with his explicit self-positioning in the Russophone world rather than the Russian world, is significant in the first two texts but loses importance through the later course of his work, both on a textual level and beyond. This development corresponds to a change in Serebrianskii’s reading audience. While he targeted a broader Russophone readership in his early work, he wrote his latter works for a primarily Kazakhstani readership, thereby shaping the emerging discourse of a polyphonic Kazakhstani identity.

This article investigates Viktar Martsinovich’s writings within the context of literary debates in Belarus. Positioning the discussions concerning Belarus’ national literature between the Belarusian nativist and the Russophile literary fields as the results of hegemonic struggles, I stress their discursive violence. Imposing a logic of equivalence based on (mono-) linguistic and ethnic particularisms, both discourses fail to represent the constitutive plurality of Belarusian culture. Martsinovich dissociates himself from this approach. Borrowing Jérôme Meizoz’s term “external posture”, I illustrate Martsinovich’s self-representation and self-positioning as a diglossic Belarusian-Russophone writer. Martsinovich writes in Belarusian and Russian and allows his books to be translated in both directions, creating a metaliterary dialogue which reflects the literary conflicts in Belarus. Further, he pursues particular (meta-) linguistic strategies in his texts. Russian and Belarusian allow him to achieve different effects. In Mova (2014), he stresses the performative political potential of Belarusian by “implanting” Belarusian words on a Russian matrix. In The Lake of Joy (2016), he uses Russian for a critical and realistic representation of today’s Belarus. My analysis of these strategies in the two novels will illustrate Martsinovich’s concept of a ‘Belarusian Russophone literature’ and show its importance in undermining both nativist and Russophile positions.

Having become famous thanks to publications in Russian publishing houses in the 1990s and 2000s, after 2014 the Russophone Odessite poet Boris Grigor’evich Khersonskii faced allegations of Russophobia for his pro-Ukrainian position and criticism of Russian interference in Crimea and the Donbas region of Ukraine. Over the post-Euromaidan years, the poet increasingly added Ukrainian-language translations of his Russian poems and texts originally written in Ukrainian to his portfolio. This paper¹ investigates Khersonskii’s forced choice of poetic language, zooming in on the post-2014 timeline of his increasingly Ukrainophone oeuvre and distinguishing between various digital and print genres, comprising both his Facebook blog and book publications such as Stalina ne bulo (There Was no Stalin) and Odesskaia intelligentsiia (Odessite Intelligentsia, both 2018). The paper analyzes the poet’s linguistic performance with a special focus on his self-translations, which can be found online in Khersonskii’s Facebook blog dating from October 30, 2013 to February 19, 2019, and proposes a postcolonial framing of self-translation and code-switching: in so doing, it defends the thesis that Khersonskii’s anti-hegemonic code-switching is counterweighed by his subsequent self-translations and bilingual blogging, serving the goal of mitigating the bipolar language conflict in post-Maidan Ukraine.

Teffi’s only full-length play written in Russia, Шарманка сатаны (Satan’s Hurdy-Gurdy, 1915), with its mixture of the comic and serious and an overlayer of symbolism, conforms to the broadened Chekhovian concept of comedy, but, with its strict demarcation of the satirical and dramatic, also harkens back to 18th century classical comedies. The article traces both the play’s comedic and serious lines and shows its pivotal position between Teffi’s earlier and her émigré writing. The comic side depicts stultifying provincial life through a mixture of light humor, dark satire, and symbolism, while the serious side offers two means of escape. In the main plot escape is thwarted when the transcendent “fiery” world, promised the heroine by her seducer, turns out to be the illusory Land of Never, but in the secondary plot a wealthy merchant’s son does succeed, abandoning provincial society for a tramp’s life. In Teffi’s émigré works pursuit of both the fiery and earthly means of escape recurs, but inevitably fails. The enduring influence of Шарманка сатаны is evident in her last play, Ничего подобного (Nothing of the Kind).

This is an introduction to a collection of six articles on N. A. Teffi’s work for theatre and cinema.

This contribution presents an overview of the theatre works written by Teffi throughout her literary career, which started in tsarist Russia and successfully continued in Paris from 1919.