RUSSIAN LITERATURE最新文献

The second half of the 2010s to the beginning of the 2020s in the Russian context are associated with the active intervention of the state in the sphere of private life. In a situation of gender inequality, the male body is subjected to particularly strict regulation. The new normative masculinity is perceived by a significant part of society as illegitimate. In the public sphere, the conflict between the state and society often takes the form of a performance, in which the naked male body turns out to be a medium of the utterance – rebellious and “anarchic”. In contemporary Russian poetry, resistance to the pressure of power is associated with the emergence of “non-normative” models of masculinity, in the design of which bodily representations also play an important role. Victim masculinity implies unbalanced, conflicted behavior, constant readiness for a political challenge. Transgressive masculinity connects the specifics of “masculinity” with striving for all possible boundaries and provocative violation of cultural and aesthetic prohibitions. Phenomenological masculinity puts the “masculine” into question, considering it as something looked-for, and not given a priori, and the “anarchic” meaning of this model is associated with the rejection of the very idea of a behavioral “pattern”.

This paper is the introduction to a cluster of articles on Cultural Biopolitics in Russia. After providing an overview of biopolitical theory and its recent applications to the study of Russian history and politics, the author introduces the notion of “cultural biopolitics” as a theoretical bridge between biopolitical theory and cultural studies. Culture is conceived as a realm of “soft” power in which biopolitical rationalities are reinforced or challanged. Given its many historical entanglements with power, Russian culture in particular provides a rich field of inquiry for scholars of modern biopolitics. The introduction concludes with short summaries of each of the articles in the cluster, which are divided into two categories: “Biopolitics of Writing” and “Biopolitical Performance”.

The piece applies a novel approach to the social network analysis of fiction to Tolstoy’s sprawling masterpiece, War and Peace. We propose that an approach that prioritizes physical proximity provides an illuminating contrast to the typical methods for extracting social networks in fiction that are based on the proximity of character names within the text. In addition to its methodological argument, this article offers commentary on the positions of characters within the novel’s social network and the changing nature of that social network across the novel’s parts. We demonstrate that in the first half of the novel Tolstoy builds a tight-knit “social center” that the second half breaks down.

The article discusses manifestations of the trickster’s subjectivity in the works of contemporary Russian poets. While linking the trickster’s position in culture with Peter Sloterdijk’s discussion on cynicism/kynicism, the article suggests a typology of contemporary lyrical subjects developing different aspects of the trickster tradition, such as the imposter (illustrated by Prigov’s poetry), skomorokh (reinvented by Shish Brianskii), “the people’s poet” (as in Vsevolod Emelin’s poetry), and a “reflexive kynic” (exemplified by Andrei Rodionov). In conclusion, the cultural function of contemporary Russian trickster-like lyrical poetry is discussed through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of profanations and Michel de Certeau’s concept of practical tactics.

The article analyzes several contemporary Russian literary texts, Living Pictures (2014) by Polina Barskova, Aviator (2016) by Evgeny Vodolazkin, and In Memory of Memory (2017) by Maria Stepanova, in which, on the one hand, writing itself is a form of remembrance (literary creation equates to memory), and, on the other hand, memory establishes and manifests itself by overcoming multifaceted configurations of oblivion. Apart from the fact that all the analyzed texts propose aesthetically and narratologically absorbing conceptualizations of the processes of conversion of elusiveness and nothingness (oblivion) into a new presence (memory), interpretations of literary works from the point of view of oblivion initiate a different understanding of the literary value of oblivion, which is commonly recognized as an anthropological category which stands as the Other of memory, as its minus-priëm (Lotman).

The article describes the position of the transfurist group within the field of Soviet unofficial culture and the way they used it to speak about the current state of the underground community. It shows that their self-positioning within this field as well as their overall aesthetic project were a reaction to their provincial status which marginalized them in the community. Apart from this, poets from Moscow and Leningrad saw transfurists as heirs of the Russian avant-garde, the movement that allegedly held the same ideological views as the Soviet state. The article demonstrates that, while taking on Futurist aesthetics, transfurists adopted a conceptual approach towards the avant-garde legacy and the poetic systems of their contemporaries. They invented ways of indicating the ambiguous position of unofficial culture, which was caught between “tradition” that had ended abruptly and new forms of literary mores and publicity. The paper argues that such a “conceptualist drive” was common for samizdat periodicals as one of the main tools of communication within the unofficial field.

This article discusses ethical and axiological issues in the drama Flight by Mikhail Bulgakov. This work, changed and rewritten many times, remains overshadowed by his prose texts, although it is an original and multi-problematic text which rewards examination. Some characteristic features of Flight include combinations of various aesthetic conventions, transitions from dramatic tragedy to grotesque comedy, and the oneiric convention, which supports both the development of existential dilemmas and the search of the main character, Roman Khludov, lost, meandering and increasingly aware of the tragic consequences of his life choices. The multitude of religious, literary, historical, social, and political contexts makes the piece an interpretative challenge, revealing new senses and meanings upon each reading.

The article is devoted to the late-Soviet history of the legacy of Konstantin Vaginov: attempts at publishing his work, inaccessible foreign bilingual publications, special cases of acquaintance with his texts, and cases of reflection initiated by them. The methods of access to Vaginov’s work dictated an antiquarian type of reception of his texts, which functioned more as material traces of culture or discourse of cultural communication, rather than as objects of readers’ interpretations. Vaginov’s case of reception makes it possible to problematize the process of reading / attitudes towards cultural artifacts, as well as to complicate the idea of the media conditions for transferring unconventional information in the late Soviet period.

The mise en abyme trope was introduced into western criticism as a narrative concept of visual self-reflexivity in the arts by A. Gide in 1893, representing the relationship of a larger and smaller image or text in a work of art. My essay begins by considering the trope in its original artform of painting, primarily in the western baroque. But the essay’s main subject – one little studied in the Russian context – is the mise en abyme as a visual trope in early Russian modernist writing: A. Bely’s Petersburg (1913), V. Mayakovsky’s ‘From Street to Street’ (1913), B. Pasternak’s ‘The Mirror’ (1917), and Yu. Olesha’s later Envy (1927). The key component of mise en abyme in literature is a text inside a text, consisting of reflections as if in a mirror, and juxtaposed recursiveness that engages the correlation of part and whole. As they involve a correlation of the verbal and visual, literary mise en abymes require close reading by the reader as viewer, who often knows little about the trope; hence my emphasis on close reading of mise en abymes in the selected literary and visual works. I focus especially on two reflective surfaces, the traditional mirror and modern window, requiring the reader’s “power of sight.”