RUSSIAN LITERATURE最新文献

This paper connects Boris Akunin’s app-based novel Soulagine (2016) with the wistful historical revisionism that the author practiced since debuting his Erast Fandorin series of detective novels in the late 1990s. Akunin’s explorations of pre-revolutionary Russian politics attempt to recuperate the Soviet century by stipulating the possibility of avoiding it altogether: perhaps, with the intervention of the right historical actors ‒ namely, a hyper-moral James Bond-Sherlock Holmes hybrid ‒ it would have been possible to avert the calamity of the Bolshevik Revolution. The implicit glorification of the “good policeman” points to Akunin’s desire to discursively jettison the Soviet century as a historical aberration while calling for political moderation and a return to pre-revolutionary cultural norms. At the same time, the longer the Fandorin series continues, the more intense the impression of the Revolution’s ultimate inevitability becomes. By forcing his readers to confront the tragic endpoint of Fandorin’s journey down the slippery slope of Russian radicalism, Akunin didactically emphasizes the importance of political moderation and even conformism in the present. Even as their format dangles the promise of agency before Akunin’s readers, the hidden agenda of ludic-literary hybrids like Soulagine underscores Akunin’s commitment to a political quietism that avoids the pitfalls of radical change even in the face of society-wide injustice or accelerating authoritarianism.

The Strugatsky brothers' novel Snail on the Slope (Ulitka na sklone, 1966-68) marks a turning point in the imagining of utopian subjectivity in the Soviet context. This paper argues that the ubiquitous instability in previously coherent subject-positions emphasizes the ludic aspects of realism which become a central feature of the Strugatskys’ later work, most strikingly illustrated through their exploration of the concept of homo ludens. Late-Soviet science fiction’s incorporation of ludic elements point to the problematics of novelistic subjectivity in an era when the utopian ambition of creating a New Soviet Man came under increasing scrutiny. The crisis of the liberal subject-position in the post-Thaw Soviet Union is dramatized within the dichotomous, complementary relationship between institutional enmeshment and absolute alienation, first articulated in Snail but carried forward into their later work. Through its extensive meditations on the possibility of the utopian, its treatment of split characterization, and the halting, recursive trajectories of its parallel plots, Snail engages with the tension underlying the ludic underpinnings of narrative subjectivity in the Soviet context. This paper, alongside other papers in this cluster, demonstrates the way literature and games have both been called upon to address the problem and possibility of agency for the subjects they create.

This paper considers the video games S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadows of Chernobyl (2007), Metro 2033 (2010), Papers, Please (2013), This War of Mine (2014) and Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic (2021), which all explore the recurring chronotope of Eastern Europe as an experimental space designed for testing the player's ethical agency. I argue that there is a thread linking formal ludic iteration, and the returns of modernist utopian discourses as post-apocalyptic within these games. This thread weaves ethical and unethical choices into a simulacral ludic history, trapping the player within a virtual embodiment of their own utopian desire, to provoke them to escape it, or seek alternatives to it. All these games allegorize Eastern Europe as a site of both normalized oppression and of sovereign choice, holding the player responsible for both options. They imagine and stereotype Eastern Europe as a durance: an entrapping space of looming ideological oppression that can be territorialized only through being survived. This paper interrogates the critical potential of video games by considering what may be the medium's most oppressive aspect ‒ its immense facility at ideological training disguised as sovereign freedom of choice.

The present article examines Andrei Bitov’s Lessons of Armenia (Uroki Аrmenii) and A Georgian Album (Gruzinskii al’bom) as examples of subversive late-Soviet travel writing. While some scholars have noted imperialist tendencies in the two travelogues, I argue that Bitov effectively challenges the colonial perspective. Besides considering the Soviet state’s push for travel writing and tourism while Bitov was writing his texts, the article uses Mary Louise Pratt’s deconstruction of colonialist travel writing as a theoretical framework. Adapting and extending her work, I examine how Bitov consistently deploys and subverts three key devices: mastery of the seen/scene, cultural-translational ability, and narratorial agency. Written under the guise of komandirovka travelogues, Bitov’s Lessons and Album reveal the artifice of their construction. First, they run counter to the primary objective of travelogues of the era, when authors were tasked with documenting the satellite republics and fortifying the state’s hold over them through their narratives and propaganda. By exposing his own insecurities about wielding agency over his story, Bitov suggests a systemic problem in the Soviet attitude. Second, in yielding to his hosts and his literary predecessors in the Caucasus, Bitov acknowledges the bounds of his efforts to assert control over a foreign or colonial space.

This article investigates public readings in late Imperial Russia, which became both an official and popular educational practice following the establishment of the Standing Commission of Public Readings by the State Ministry of Public Enlightenment in 1872. Public readings, done by an authorized person who would read aloud useful and entertaining texts in front of an audience, represent a significant democratization of the practice of reading. The content of such readings, both textual and visual, was heavily controlled by the state authorities which inevitably led to the shaping of a very specific addressee, the so-called common reader, whose official image was supposed to reflect the ordinary citizen, and is emblematic of the complex problem of nation-building in Russian history. The study enquires how the visual context of public readings contributed to the general image of the common reader. The article examines the representation of the common reader in the media of the time, the limitations imposed by the censorship and strategic choices of images for the magic lantern slides to illustrate the public readings. It provides a deeper perspective on the figure of the common reader, which became an ideological construct of importance for both domestic and foreign policy.

The article discusses one of the elements of Mayakovsky’s lifetime reputation and iconography ‒ his representation as a hooligan poet, which remained relevant throughout his entire literary biography, even during the period of post-revolutionary Soviet “service”. As a contribution to the poet’s future iconography, five representations that may portray him are analyzed and reproduced. These should be interpreted as satirical images which accumulate characteristic features of Mayakovsky.

Focusing on the problems of female authorship, this article considers how the “I” of the author is expressed in the works of Z. Gippius, E. Dmitrieva, A. Gertsyk and T. Shchepkina-Kupernik in the context of the gender revolution of the late XIX – early XX centuries. This increased the scope of women’s opportunities but was still a very painful process. Constrained by gender role traditionalism, female writers’ authorial subjectivity was called into question. The article examines these poets’ narrative strategies and the emergence in resistance to dominant androcentric practices of a dual female style or voice, identified in analysis of metalyric texts containing metaphors of women’s needlework: images of spinning, sewing and weaving wreaths that encode the creative process of the female subject. Zinaida Gippius’ lyrics reveal the hidden female subject. Gertsyk (articulating passivity but hinting at a special relationship with the Higher Principle) and Dmitrieva (problematizing female authorship as a threatening act but emphasizing her heroine’s favorites) experiment with an ultra-feminine mode of poetic utterance. Even Shchepkina-Kupernik, whose poems do not stray beyond the traditional “women's circle”, uses gender role stereotypes to mask the true content and the addressee of her lyrics, as her own biography suggests.

The article focuses on three areas that have so far attracted only marginal attention from researchers. It looks at the unusual pattern of word-formation, based on metonymy, employed by Mayakovsky especially in the creation of new adjectives. The study then concentrates on Mayakovsky’s motivation for coining neologisms (beyond the usual need to find names for new objects and phenomena), focusing on those neologisms created by Mayakovsky in pursuance of rhyme. The study also examines the afterlife of Mayakovsky’s neologisms following their use in his works, to identify which of them made their way into current Russian. The three-level comparison of two authoritative works on Mayakovsky’s neologisms (Humesky, 1964 and Valavin, 2010) with data from the Russian National Corpus demonstrates the survival of several of Mayakovsky’s neologisms in ordinary Russian. The Corpus also reveals that some neologisms traditionally ascribed to Mayakovsky were in fact created by other authors and may have been only “borrowed” by Mayakovsky. The comparison of the works by Humesky and Valavin also revealed interesting facts about the evolution of the study of Mayakovsky’s neologisms.

The article explores new opportunities for studying and publishing the archival heritage of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Examining his poem ‘I Love’ (1922) in its draft and final versions, it considers the most important stage in the creation of the poetic text – drafting and revision in notebooks. Comparison of the drafts and published text can help elucidate the creative history of the poem and the genesis of Mayakovsky’s poetic text as a whole.

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.