Telling Tales: Genre and Narrative in Post-Soviet Poetry (original) (raw)
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Summary This article studies the poetics of historical reimagination in works by Guzel’ Iakhina and Sergei Lebedev, two contemporary Russian prose writers. The main tendencies in Russian official history politics and memory culture of the last decade form the backdrop for the study. I illustrate these tendencies by a case study analysis of the representation of Stalinist repressions in the history park Rossiia — moia istoriia (Russia — My History). The comparative reading of Iakhina’s and Lebedev’s novels seeks to determine the key poetic features of the two authors’ fictional treatment of the past, also assessing to what degree, and how, these treatments challenge, promote, or negotiate current official history politics and memory culture. The analysis discusses the two authors’ shared concerns but also reveals fundamental differences in their poetics. Whereas Iakhina’s fictional universe has distinct boundaries that confine the story to the time and space where it takes place, Leb...
A Russian Poetics of Trauma: Encounters with Death and the Literary Reclamation of the Individual
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Recent Russian literary works illustrate a keen understanding of lingering transgenerational traumas experienced both collectively and individually. Twentieth-century totalitarian regimes' terror tactics and att empts to destroy individual personality created cultures of trauma that left their traces across generations through practices of dominance and mistrust reiterated in private lives. Th ese tactics also fomented lingering internalized and symbolized residues of death anxiety. Soviet Russia is a case in point. Even as totalism receded in the post-Soviet era, premature death has persisted, particularly among men, and it has brought long-term psychological and cognitive stases that have prevented social and relational dynamism necessary for healing and change. Two contemporary Russian women writers, Svetlana Alexievich and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, represent in their testimonial narratives gender-specifi c traumas and death anxieties lingering for two postwar generations. Th ey create a particularly Russian poetics of trauma in response to human diminishment and denied recognition that symbolizes confrontations with death and narratively represents the nature and value of personal struggles to survive, and to break free of regenerative self-defeating mentalities. To analyze the nature of this poetics, I employ trauma and narrative-and recognition-based theories. Russian experience exemplifi es the enormous psychological costs of authoritarian practices and nation-defi ning militarism that objectify
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This paper examines the paradigm shift in the genre of Russian horror short stories, and this tectonic shift is exemplified by a parallel reading of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “The Black Coat”. The juxtaposition of these two stories exposes how male writers have always been placed on a pedestal in the Russian literary canon. In contrast, this paper highlights how the contributions of their female counterparts have been constantly sidelined, though both streams of works enriched the vast field of the Russian literary empire. Narratology theory is used to highlight the narrative techniques of both authors since it examines what narratives share and what makes them unique. This is illustrated by demonstrating how writers like Petrushevskya have dismantled the common notion that only male writers contribute to the technical aspects of a genre. Using the comparative methodology, this paper also traces the tradition of this genre and the holistic perspect...
hen I unwrapped a package containing the book Anthology of Ukrainian Poetry: Twentieth Century, published by A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA in 2016, my heart skipped a beat. I have been living in the United States for almost fifteen years and have not visited Ukraine often, so books from my homeland come to me mostly through friends. The aesthetic pleasure of holding this compact, beautifully printed volume in my hands was added value to the realization that, for the first time, most of my beloved poets born before 1950 were gathered "under one roof," so to speak. Ever since I was a young and naïve student at the Ukrainian Humanities Lyceum in Kyiv in the early 1990s, I have been fascinated with the poetry of what has been termed The Executed Renaissance (Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia). Almost an entire generation of poets, writers, critics, and intellectuals was killed during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. Their voices-clear and confused, romantic and bitter, patriotic, full of fervour, full of disappointment or blues-kept me awake at night. There was something raw and unbound about the energy of that poetry and something that was very different from the washed-out verses of the accepted "canon" that we learned at school. The anthology under review contains the works of over one hundred poets. It comprises over 1,200 pages of decent, good, very good, great, and fantastic poetry. The division of the anthology into two parts is not dictated by chronology; rather, it reflects the complexity of the editor's task to showcase more than half a century of Ukrainian poetry. The first part-from Pavlo Tychyna to Oleh Lysheha-represents the poets whom we could not do without. The second part-from Maik Iohansen to Anatolii Kychyns'kyiis intended, according to editor and compiler Ivan Malkovych, to be a "zooming" tool for the reader-for one to pay more attention to this or that particular author: "It is similar to focusing the light-look closely at this poet…" (my trans.; 6). Some names in the anthology are well-known to those who have received schooling in Ukraine or to those who have studied Ukrainian literature, but other names are completely new. And this combination of known and half-forgotten or overlooked authors is one of the best aspects of the book. Perhaps this will be the first time that you hear the voice of Tychyna-a voice that is almost vulnerable in its openness and almost pantheistic in its dedication to nature. Or perhaps you never imagined Mykhail' (Mykhailo) Semenko, the key figure of Ukrainian literary futurism, W
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Memorable Fiction: Evoking Emotions and Family Bonds in Post-Soviet Russian Women's Writing (2012)
Argument 2012: 2:1, 59-74
this article deals with women-centred prose texts of the 1990s and 2000s in Russia written by women, and focuses especially on generation narratives. by this term the author means fictional texts that explore generational relations within families, from the perspective of repressed experiences, feelings and attitudes in the soviet period. the selected texts are interpreted as narrating and conceptualizing the consequences of patriarchal ideology for relations between mothers and daughters and for reconstructing connections between soviet and post-soviet by revisiting and remembering especially the gaps and discontinuities between (female) generations. the cases discussed are Liudmila Petrushevskaia's 'povest' The Time: Night (Vremia noch, 1991), Liudmila Ulitskaia's novel Medeia i ee deti [Medea and her children] (1996) and elena chizhova's novel Vremia zhenshchin [the time of Women] (2009). these novels reflect on the one hand the woman-centredness and novelty of representation in women's prose writing in the post-soviet period. On the other hand, the author suggests that they reflect the diverse methods of representing the soviet era and experience through generation narratives. the texts reassess the past through intimate, tactile memories and perceptions, and their narration through generational plots draws attention to the process of working through, which needs to be done in contemporary Russia. the narratives touch upon the untold stories of those who suffered in silence or hid the family secrets from the officials, in order to save the family. the narration delves into the different layers of experience and memory, conceptualizing them in the form of multiple narrative perspectives constructing different generations and traditions. In this way they convey the 'secrets' hidden in the midst of everyday life routines and give voice to the often silent resistance of women towards patriarchal and repressive ideology. the new women's prose of the 1980s-90s and the subsequent trend of women-centred narratives and generation narratives employ conceptual metaphors of r e a s s e s s i n g, r e v i s i t i n g and r e m e m b e r i n g the cultural, experiential, and emotional aspects of the past, soviet lives.