Category: Scholarship

Rus­sophone Science Fic­tion and Uto­pias in the Mar­gins, an essay by Sanna Tuorma in Aleksanteri Insight

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 4 Comments

This article published in December just before the holidays, seems worth highlighting. The topic is dear to me: I’ve been an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy literature, and I am particularly fond of contemporary feminist science fiction. But first, I want to highlight the books that Tuorma mentions in her essay.

Tuorma begins with a review of a scholarly volume, The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia (I.B. Tauris, Sept. 19, 2019), edited by Mikhail Suslov and Per-Arne Bodin. As always with scholarly publications, this book is insanely expensive. Amazon, however, does have a decent preview of it that includes the introduction and gives us a good sense of the various threads of inquiry in this book.

Summarizing the volume’s findings, Tuorma writes, “Current Russian scientific and fantasy literature, both utopian and dystopic, seems to lack the radical and transformative power seminal to science fiction.” She suggests, following the advice of a Finnish-language publication Voima “to abandon dystopias, the predominant mode of global cultural production, and to envision ecological and economic utopias instead.”

She offers one recent anthology of Russian-language feminist and LGBT science fiction that comes from outside of the imperial center. This book, Совсем другие, is available in full from Academia.edu–in the Russian language. An English translation of its opening story, “Element 174,” penned by Kyrgyz activist and academic Syinat Sultanalieva, recently appeared in The Calvert Journal, translated by Lesya Myata and Samuel Goff.

I was born this way: a shameless lesbian. Ever since it became clear that I would have to be physically present on the planet of Omay, it had been my personal goal to sleep with as many of their famously gorgeous women as possible. There were rumours that they were all lesbians. I think my brothers would have understood, had they known about my plans — after all, it wasn’t exactly easy to get hold of women on Earth. There weren’t many left, and those that remained had mostly already been distributed amongst the domains. Those who grew up in ours were either too young or already related to me. I might be a lesbian, but I’m not so craven as to seduce them. I had to get by as best I could, making rare visits to the worse-for-wear residents of the Wild Zone or engaging in self-care. Luckily my father had some antique pictures and videos of sordid delights from before the Exodus, so I could indulge my fantasies at will.

https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/9831/being-lgbtq-element-174-syinat-sultanalieva-shtab

I’m incredibly grateful to Tuorma for pointing out what looks to be a very exciting read.

Looking over the articles that comprise the scholarly volume, I do find it unfortunate that the names of whom I think first in the list of post-Soviet science fiction and fantasy authors had not been taken up for consideration. My personal anthology of writers in this genre begins with the names of Max Frei, Lena Eltang, Linor Goralik, Elena Pervushina–that’s off the top of my head…

Central Asian feminists are carving out their space in gender studies, by Aizada Arystanbek

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

Part of Open Democracy’s “new series on activism, academia and equality in Central Asia,” this piece is by Aizada Arystanbek, “a Central Asian graduate student of gender studies in Europe” (links to the other pieces in the series are included). As she writes, “along with the thrill of being able to study what I am passionate about comes a certain violence of erasure, as I am left constantly searching for my identity in feminist academia.

As I think about Russia’s colonisation of Central Asia and the process of Russification my mother had to undergo in her school in Tselinograd (the former name of the current capital of Kazakhstan), I feel deeply for Latina, black and indigenous women who write about their ancestors being colonised, their land being stolen, and them being perceived as backward simply because they lacked culture in the western conception of the word.

But I am always caught in between these various identities and almost never am I seen for my own very distinguishable one, a Central Asian woman. I have to stitch together my identity in academia by myself, learning little-by-little from other feminist scholars of colour, hoping that I understand their experiences correctly and that their words will represent my struggle accurately when I use them in my essays.”

Central Asia, once part of the Soviet Union and now comprising independent nations, is not particularly well known in the West. In the U.S., academic study of the region has traditionally come out of Slavic departments, where it has only recently begun to garner more attention, although not necessarily about issues of gender and feminism. This series looks to be an important and much-needed step in this direction.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/central-asian-feminists-are-carving-out-their-space-gender-studies/

Looking Back on Our First Event: Participatory Reading in Post-Soviet Literatures, in Pictures

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 3 Comments

On November 25th, Punctured Lines hosted our first literary event in San Francisco. Thanks to a conference that brought to San Francisco scholars, translators, and writers in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, we were able to gather a star list of participants. A few of the readers have appeared in Punctured Lines, and we certainly hope to feature more of their work. Following the scheduled portion of the event, we hosted an open mic that turned out to be a great crowd-pleaser. Below are the pictures we captured that night and brief descriptions of everyone’s contributions.

Shelley Fairthweather-Vega opened with an excerpt from her recently published translation of Talasbek Asemkulov’s novel A Life at Noon — available for purchase here. A story about a musician growing up in Soviet Kazakhastan and learning his art form from his father.

Yelena Furman read the opening from her short story “Naming,” recently published in Narrative Magazine, and available in full online (free, with free registration required).

Wayne Goodman read a few brief excerpts from his historical novel Borimir: Serving the Tsars that re-imagines gay romance in Imperial Russia. There’s lots of awkward flirting! This book is available for purchase on Amazon.

Maggie Levantovskaya read from her essay about a trip to Auschwitz concentration camp “To Conjure Up the Dead,” published in Michigan Quarterly Review. The bizarreness of Holocaust tourism with the post-Soviet twist. An excerpt from this essay appears online.

Dmitri Manin wore the T-shirt with Genrikh Sapgir’s poem on the back, and read to us his translations from Sapgir’s “Poems on Shirts” book. We have published three of these translations in an earlier post.

Masha Rumer shared an essay about exposing an unsuspecting date to the delights of pickled herring-and-boiled beet salad, aka “Seledka pod shuboj.” He lived long enough to propose. We’re hoping to read the follow up on this story in her upcoming book, Parenting with an Accent: An Immigrant’s Guide to Multicultural Parenting. More about Masha and her book in the Q&A she gave Punctured Lines.

Sasha Vasilyuk followed with an excerpt from her novel-in-progress about a Soviet prisoner of war. We will be following the development of this project closely.

Mary Jane White delighted us with her translations from Marina Tsvetaeva — her delivery of the “Ode to the Rich” landed particularly well with our audience. Mary Jane’s book of her own poetry and translations from Tsvetaeva Starry Sky to Starry Sky is available online. We will be following up with news of her upcoming book of translations from Tsvetaeva’s Berlin and Prague years, Poems of an Emigrant: After Russia, Poem of the Hill, Poem of the End, and New Year’s.

I read the opening of “Rubicon,” a short story from my collection Like Water and Other Stories.

Josie von Zitzewitz followed up on the thread of discussion about the lack of visibility of contemporary Russian literature in the United States, and introduced a project that she’s developing with Marian Schwartz and Hilah Cohen, soliciting work from young Russophone writers to create a feature publication in an American magazine (possibly more than one).

Joining us for the open mic portion of the show, we had Maxim Matusevich, a writer and a historian of USSR intersections with African countries. He delivered an excerpt from his hilarious short story about cultural encounters between American students going to study abroad in St. Petersburg.

Christopher Fort closed the evening with a poem that he read in both Uzbek and English, bringing our attention to a particular rhyming pattern of Turkic languages. We have previously linked to Christopher’s interview about translating Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon novel Night and Day. This novel is now available for purchase online.



USSR’s Impact on the lives of Muslim Women in Central Asia

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a fascinating study about the role that the Soviet Union played in the lives of Muslim women from Central Asia. This was filed by Özge Öz Döm, a scholar at Yildirim Beyazit University in Anakara, Turkey. Her thesis is that “even though the Soviet officials had a genuine intention for the emancipation of Central Asian women from the patriarchal structure both in the public and private spheres of life, the policies and their implementation were shaped in accordance with the basic motive of regime survival. In the first years of the Soviet regime, mostly ideological intentions shaped the women’s emancipation project. However, in time, the Soviet officials needed to make more reforms in the political, economic and socio-cultural areas not just for the ideological aims such as emancipation of the women, but also for the survival of the Soviet Union.”

Muslim Women in Central Asia

In fiction, I have seen this conflict reflected most directly in Guzel Yakhina’s novel, Zuleikha, recently translated to English by Lisa Hayden. This history also provides useful context for Akram Aylisli‘s work, in particular his trilogy from the 1960s, People and Trees (I read this book in Russian under the title Люди и деревья).

The researcher makes a point in this paper that seems relevant for Punctured Lines: “The studies about women in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras are mostly concerned with the European parts of the Soviet Union, and neglect the Muslim women under Soviet rule. Therefore, the first problem related to the literature regarding Central Asian women is that there are insufficient numbers of studies regarding this area; and the second problem is that the Western scholars studying this subject sometimes fail to understand the meaning of Islamic based customs and traditions to Central Asian women as well as men. So, this study also attempts to make a contribution to gender studies literature regarding Central Asian women “

Yuri Tynianov’s Permanent Evolution

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Translators and scholars Ainsley Morse and Phillip Redko are bringing out a new volume of Yuri Tynianov’s work. Permanent Evolution contains his essays on literature, theory and film, many of which are translated here for the first time. Daria Khitrova of Harvard University penned the intro.

Publisher’s intro: “Yuri Tynianov was a key figure of Russian Formalism, an intellectual movement in early 20th century Russia that also included Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson. Tynianov developed a groundbreaking conceptualization of literature as a system within—and in constant interaction with—other cultural and social systems. His essays on Russian literary classics, like Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and works by Dostoevsky and Gogol, as well as on the emerging art form of filmmaking, provide insight into the ways art and literature evolve and adapt new forms of expression. Although Tynianov was first a scholar of Russian literature, his ideas transcend the boundaries of any one genre or national tradition. Permanent Evolution gathers together for the first time Tynianov’s seminal articles on literary theory and film, including several articles never before translated into English.”

Jewish Underground Culture in the late Soviet Union

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Klavdia Smola (whose new book we introduced earlier) guest-edited an issue of a scholarly journal, East European Jewish Affairs (Volume 48, Issue 1). Several essays in this issue touch on Soviet Jewish literature and its authors. From the introduction: “Klavdia Smola examines Jewish art and literature that originates in the context of the late Soviet unofficial public sphere. Her premise is that the Jewish cultural underground, like the late Soviet unofficial culture as a whole, emerged within a specific communicative niche, which was the result of intensive private exchange, limited knowledge, and collectively discovered sources. <…> She examines the ways in which the semi-private public life and political pressure influenced Jewish cultural production. Her main thesis is that precisely this context determined the aesthetic nature of the artifacts: their intertextuality, numerous cross-medial links, and the incorporation of the alternative lifeworld into art. The predominantly non-Jewish socialization of the “new” late Soviet Jews and their close contact with other unofficial artists produced a highly mediated and highly synthetic culture.”

The table of contents is here. As often with academic publications, you’ll need access to an academic library to read these pieces. They go for $43 a piece!

Kritika’s Feminist Issue

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Kritika is “a leading journal of Russian and Eurasian history and culture, Kritika is dedicated to internationalizing the field and making it relevant to a broad interdisciplinary audience,” and this particular issue features many voices of women who have contributed to Russian feminist criticism.

Of particular interest are personal essays by Natalia Pushkareva, Barbara Engel, Eve Levin, David L. Ransel, and Christine D. Worobec.

From the introduction to this section of the issue:

Russian women’s history—and we use the qualifier “Russian” advisedly, as focused analysis of the intersection of gender with imperial contexts and identities mainly began in the 1990s—formed in dialogue with these broader developments, drawing many of its inspirations and models from non-Russian fields.5 At the same time, it also evolved within the particular context of the Cold War—which had both practical ramifications, such as limited access to archival sources, and more complex political and ideological ones. In the Soviet Union, the “woman question” had long been relegated to a secondary status before class and social structure, which helped marginalize the history of women institutionally and as a topic of study. Early contributions to the field in the United States, such as Richard Stites’s important monograph on what he called “the women’s liberation movement,” tended to focus on activists and elites; the sources were more readily available, as was an abiding interest in radical politics, if told here with an original focus on women that included the powerful movement of so-called “bourgeois” feminism.6 Although Cold War politics and ideological differences helped shape distinctive academic cultures between east and west, scholarly exchange and travel also began to break down some of these barriers during the 1970s, a process that accelerated in the 1980s and after.

This academic publication is accessible here through Project Muse and your nearest academic (and some public) library subscription.

Klavdia Smola’s: Reinventing the Tradition. Contemporary Russian-Jewish Literature.

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

This book comes to us from Germany, with the promise of the Russian-language edition in the next year (thanks to the always wonderful NLO Press). Klavdia Smola (PhD from Technischen Universität Dresden) examines Soviet-era Jewish underground literature from the 1960s and 1970s to the beginning of the 21st Century, and studies the way this literature relates to the tradition of Jewish literature and to the official literature of the Soviet Union.

The book is available from Vandenhoek & Ruprecht Verlage.

Der Kampf sowjetischer Juden um das Recht der Emigration nach Israel führte seit der zweiten Hälfte der 1960er Jahre zu einer jüdischen Kulturrenaissance im Raum des Inoffiziellen. Literatur, die aus der Feder nonkonformer jüdischer Intellektueller in Russland, Israel, Amerika und Deutschland entstand, schöpfte nun erneut aus den jüdischen und judaistischen Kulturquellen und nahm so den jüdischen “cultural revival” der postsowjetischen Periode bis in die Gegenwart vorweg. Diese Rückkehr förderte jedoch nicht nur Poetiken der Erinnerung und Rekonstruktion, sondern auch der imaginativen Subversion und des performativen Bruchs. Diese Studie erschließt das Phänomen der wiedererfundenen Tradition in der russisch-jüdischen Literatur seit den 1960er Jahren im Dialog mit aktuellen Kultur- und Literaturtheorien.

Or, in Russian,

В монографии прослеживается, как в русско-еврейской литературе после долгого периода ассимиляции, Холокоста и десятилетий официального (полу-)запрета на еврейство заново «изобреталась» еврейская традиция. Процесс «переизобретения традиции» (Хобсбаум) начался в контркультуре еврейских диссидентов-отказников, в среде позднесоветского андерграунда 1960-1970-ых годов, и продолжается, как показывает проза 2000-2010-ых, до настоящего момента. Он обусловлен тем фактом, что еврейская литература создается для читателя «постгуманной» эпохи, когда знание о еврействе и иудаизме передается и принимается уже не от живых носителей традиции ‒ из семейного и коллективного окружения, но из книг, картин, фильмов, музеев и популярной культуры. Такое «постисторическое» знание, однако, результат не только социальных катастроф, официального забвения и диктатуры, но и секуляризации, культурного ресайклинга традиций, свойственного эпохе (пост-)модерна. Оно соединяет реконструкцию с мифотворчеством, культурный перевод с практиками создания вторичного – культурно опосредованного – коллективного «воспоминания», ученый комментарий с фольклоризацией. Когда «естественная» преемственность уже невозможна, а традиционная герменевтика (прошлого) натыкается на лакуны, следы и фрагменты, литература сама становится тропом памяти, восполняющим потерю своими собственными символическими средствами.
Бóльшая часть монографии посвящена советскому еврейскому андерграунду и вышедшей из него прозе эксодуса (еврейского исхода). Автор показывает, как в процессе возвращения ассимилированных позднесоветских евреев к своим корням в литературе возникала альтернатива соцреалистическому канону (подобно множеству других альтернатив периода позднего коммунизма, например, деревенской прозе или ре-этнизации литератур советских республик) и в то же время во многом его зеркальное отражение. Телеологию прозы алии/исхода «пересекает» скептический, антисионистский литературный нарратив тех же лет ‒ и она же отдается поздним эхом в новом консерватизме и почвенничестве еврейской литературы 2010-х годов.
В этой же главе изучается возрождение идишского сказа и восточноеврейского фольклора в 1970-1980-ые годы.
Вторая большая глава монографии посвящена постсоветской и новейшей русско-еврейской литературе: с одной стороны, постмемориальной поэтике культурной памяти и «придуманных воспоминаний», с другой, поэтике дискурсивной деконструкции языка и идеологии советской империи.
В целом автор показывает, как современная русско-еврейская литература, не будучи продуктом живой преемственности, обращается к традициям еврейской письменности, начиная с библейского и средневекового иудаизма и кончая раннесоветскими (анти-)сионистскими романами, и «переписывает» например сатиру маскилов, хассидский мидраш или идишские травелоги. Исследуются как совсем или почти неизвестные, так и уже отмеченные критикой тексты еврейских авторов, перформативно «изобретающих» еврейскую традицию. Таким образом переосмысливается сама история русской литературы, ставится под вопрос ее монокультурный (славянский) контекст.
Помещая русско-еврейскую литературу в общие макрокультурные рамки эпохи, автор обращается к теории гуманитарной мысли последних десятилетий: культурной семиотике Юрия Лотмана и Бориса Успенского, работам о мифе Мирсеи Элиаде, геопоэтике Кеннета Уайта, теориям культурной памяти Алеиды и Яна Ассманов и постпамяти Марианне Хирш, постколониальным и постимпериальным исследованиям, а также наследию постструктурализма.

Cold War Nostalgias: East and West | American Comparative Literature Association

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

“We invite papers exploring recent film and television representations of the Cold War in North America and Europe that highlight the complex legacy of the conflict on both sides of the Atlantic. Particularly encouraged are papers focusing on the former Eastern bloc, in an effort to challenge the still-dominant Hollywood metanarrative.“

https://www.acla.org/cold-war-nostalgias-east-and-west