the "prisonhouse of nations" and the importance of silenced peoples
Comparative Literature in the post-Soviet world
(from Eastern Europe and Baltic countries to Central Asia)
The phrase "prisonhouse of nations" (or "the prison of nations") has been used to describe, historically, the Russian Empire. It is often attributed to Vladimir Lenin, who criticised the Tsarist Russian Empire for oppressing its many ethnic minorities. However, the phrase has also been widely adopted and applied to the Soviet Union during the Cold War by critics in the West to underscore the suppression of national identities and independence within the USSR and its sphere of influence. And contrary to the West, the Russian Empire never truly decolonised. Some nations regained their sovereignty after the collapse of the superpower on the brink of the 1980s and 1990s; others did not manage to do so. In any case, the imperial shadow is still upon them. Countries like Georgia, Lithuania, or Estonia gained political independence and the right to autonomous cultural expression. Others, like Chechnya, became traumatised losers of genocidal wars. As the example of Ukraine indicates, independence once obtained may also be put under a blood-red interrogation mark. To the Western eye, those nations often remain invisible and inaudible, muffled by Russia, dwarfed by its cultural supremacy. What Chechen, Tuvan or Kazakh writer may equal the greatness of a Dostoevsky?
The post-Soviet world --especially today, when its unfinished wars emerge, risking to drag us all into a global conflict-- may appear as a space of darkness, full of ominous signs, unnamed dangers, and monsters lurking at the very bottom of the mental formation of apparently decent people. Its literature often speaks of trauma and catastrophe, and worse, of stagnant survival. Not a pleasant kind of reading, one might say. Yet it remains essential.
This is why what I gather here under the (debatable) denomination of "post-Soviet studies" is more than a definition of a regional area in World Literature. It has never been put into the limelight through the influential current of scholarship that might be compared to the postcolonial school. For a long time, it was unclear to what degree or under which conditions the postcolonial tools could be applied to the post-Soviet realities. One of the few authors who reflected on such problems in the early years of the 21st century was the Polish-American scholar Ewa Thompson. Yet a significant part of this enormous field remains unexplored, almost untouched by researchers. Most of those who ever care to study Slavic languages and literatures, not to mention Central Asian ones, find sufficient thrill in the main, dominant strands of Russian culture, in its Pushkins, Tolstoys, and Akunins. Nonetheless, the true life lies beneath, in the oppressed layers of nations "without a history", small ethnic groups, peoples lost in the vast, indefinite space between Fergana Valley and Kamchatka, those whose languages no one understands, and who refuse (or not) to communicate with the world through Russian.
The quasi-regional perspective I adopt here is defined by the problems, the kinds of struggle, and the catastrophic dynamics that all these cultures, despite the divergence of their origins and features, must face. Meanwhile, contrary to the relatively coherent methodological proposal of the postcolonial school, dealing primarily with the symbolic violence exerted by Western European powers, the post-Soviet studies lack similar cohesion and clarity. Some scholars, like Ewa Thompson, tried to adopt the premises of the postcolonial school to Eastern cases. In my opinion, nonetheless, such an approach lacks the consistency, power, and impact of the collective intellectual endeavour associated with the deconstruction of Western symbolic supremacy. It is also limited due to one basic difference: while Western European cultures admitted the critical rethinking of their oppression, Russian culture, to a considerable degree, refused to do so. Studying those peoples silenced by an impenitent empire is thus more than an act of justice. Baltic countries, Eastern Europe as a part of the oppressive structure of the former Warsaw Pact, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, constantly reinvent their past, present, and future through original literature.
The post-Soviet world --especially today, when its unfinished wars emerge, risking to drag us all into a global conflict-- may appear as a space of darkness, full of ominous signs, unnamed dangers, and monsters lurking at the very bottom of the mental formation of apparently decent people. Its literature often speaks of trauma and catastrophe, and worse, of stagnant survival. Not a pleasant kind of reading, one might say. Yet it remains essential.
This is why what I gather here under the (debatable) denomination of "post-Soviet studies" is more than a definition of a regional area in World Literature. It has never been put into the limelight through the influential current of scholarship that might be compared to the postcolonial school. For a long time, it was unclear to what degree or under which conditions the postcolonial tools could be applied to the post-Soviet realities. One of the few authors who reflected on such problems in the early years of the 21st century was the Polish-American scholar Ewa Thompson. Yet a significant part of this enormous field remains unexplored, almost untouched by researchers. Most of those who ever care to study Slavic languages and literatures, not to mention Central Asian ones, find sufficient thrill in the main, dominant strands of Russian culture, in its Pushkins, Tolstoys, and Akunins. Nonetheless, the true life lies beneath, in the oppressed layers of nations "without a history", small ethnic groups, peoples lost in the vast, indefinite space between Fergana Valley and Kamchatka, those whose languages no one understands, and who refuse (or not) to communicate with the world through Russian.
The quasi-regional perspective I adopt here is defined by the problems, the kinds of struggle, and the catastrophic dynamics that all these cultures, despite the divergence of their origins and features, must face. Meanwhile, contrary to the relatively coherent methodological proposal of the postcolonial school, dealing primarily with the symbolic violence exerted by Western European powers, the post-Soviet studies lack similar cohesion and clarity. Some scholars, like Ewa Thompson, tried to adopt the premises of the postcolonial school to Eastern cases. In my opinion, nonetheless, such an approach lacks the consistency, power, and impact of the collective intellectual endeavour associated with the deconstruction of Western symbolic supremacy. It is also limited due to one basic difference: while Western European cultures admitted the critical rethinking of their oppression, Russian culture, to a considerable degree, refused to do so. Studying those peoples silenced by an impenitent empire is thus more than an act of justice. Baltic countries, Eastern Europe as a part of the oppressive structure of the former Warsaw Pact, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, constantly reinvent their past, present, and future through original literature.
how do I contribute to East European & post-Soviet studies?
The East European literary and cultural history is my own. Yet I decided to widen the scope of my vision, beyond Polish literature, as naturally the closest to me, while I was working at the University of Warsaw from 2006 to 2016. My employment at the Faculty "Artes Liberles" coincided with a period of attempts at fostering an approximation between European Easts and Wests, if not, as it might be put bluntly, at "civilising Russia" (some Polish professors did, at least episodically, nurture such fantasies). Be that as it may, this is when I refreshed my competences in Russian (a language I knew, however imperfectly, since my high-school times) and started to explore the imperial borderlands: Siberia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, where I found a rich, unexplored, and fascinating territory waiting to be inscribed in the encompassing project of World Literature. My contribution to the area consists of reading this often marginalised literature along the great lines of major, English-speaking criticism, which is mostly quite oblivious of those vast territories. What I put in the balance is the sensibility of an insider, someone living and working in the permanent menacing shadow of imperial history that did not end in 1989, nor in 1991, nor 2005. Looking, so to speak, in the opposite direction, I believe I can supplement the dominant currents of research on Polish literature with the Westernised competences of a mainstream, transnational scholar, moving beyond the methodological and ideological myopia that is not infrequent among the colleagues who write exclusively in Poland and in Polish.
a very short & subjective bibliography
Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.
Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Ewa M. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Ewa M. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
ongoing research
The dynamics of flight and catastrophe:
Caucasian literature between East and West
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The publication of Leo Vardiashvili's debut novel, Hard by a Great Forest (2024) is an excellent occasion to revisit the history of novelistic writing in/on Georgia that -- just like this book -- has typically spanned large distances, involved transcultural identities, and sought possibilities of expression in major European languages rather than Georgian. This translocal history of the Georgian novel, inaugurated with Kurban Said's Ali und Nino, continued, still in German, with Nino Haratischvili's Die Katze und der General. On the other hand, the tragic discomforts of the closed country in the shadow of Russia permit us to associate those stories with narrations in Georgian, such as Dato Turashvili's The Flight out of the USSR. The newest novel, written and published in London, closes the cycle of flight as it narrates the return to Georgia, conceptualised as an abysmal forest that swallows Saba's father and brother before menacing to swallow him as well.
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Expendable lives. Catastrophe and resilience in Dato Turashvili's Flight from the USSR and Ruta Sepetys' Salt to the Sea
The article establishes a comparative reading of two novels thematising catastrophes: Dato Turashvili's Flight from the USSR (2008) and Ruta Sepetys' Salt to the Sea (2016). Both texts revisit historical events in which lost lives, initially placed beyond the Butlerian “frames of war”, had been treated as unworthy of grief. The parallel reading focuses on the elemental power of History depicted in the analysed texts, as well as the affective responses of young protagonists confronted with violence and oppression. Yet another common denominator is the trans-peripheral vision, accentuating solidarity between the peoples oppressed by the Soviet Union, such as Georgia and the Baltic countries. Finally, both novels sketch visions of resilience in confrontation with the catastrophe, even if such an attitude may cross the frontier of delusion, proclaiming the triumph of the dream over reality.
selected essays in East European & post-Soviet studies
The shipwreck and the wreath.
Dissolution of identities in Ruta Sepetys' Salt to the Sea
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Literatūra, vol. 66, no 4, 2024, p. 39-50. ISSN 0258-0802, eISSN 1648-1143. https://doi.org/10.15388/Litera.2024.66.4.3 The Blumenbergian vision of the eternally repeated shipwreck implies the cyclical concept of time that modernity did not obliterate. Yet quite another, positive concept of cyclical time is implied in the immemorial European rituals evoked in the novel, such as those of the solstice celebration; they create space for resilience and rebirth. The wreath of interwoven, intermingling identities may be reconstructed and launched on the water as a luminous sign of harmony. Instead of the Blumenbergian metaphor of the eternally repeated, ghostly winter shipwreck in the Baltic, a wreath, thrown into a quiet summer river, could become a new metaphor for European cultural and intellectual history. Will the Blumenbergian, pessimistic vision prevail, announcing yet another turn of the screw of history? Should the young European generation of today remain faithful to the vision of the solstice and to the legend of sleeping knights coming in time to retrieve the wreaths from fire, or get ready for yet another mass evacuation? It is beyond the power of literature to answer such questions. Sepetys’ novel is an anticipation of both: the catastrophe and the resilient survival. |
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Life wins in the West.
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Transcultural writing and non-hegemonic universalism. Reading Ali und Nino in the context of global literary studies
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სჯანი / Sjani: Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, 21/ 2020, p. 69-80.
ISSN 1512-2514, e-ISSN 2346-772X sjani.ge/?page_id=4624 sjani.ge/sjani-21/evalukaz.pdf Ali und Nino is a novel narrating a romance between a young Muslim and a Christian, set in Baku in the first decades of the 20th century. In the article, it is treated as an example of transcultural writing. After a short presentation of the content of the novel, the author mentions the biography of Lev Nussimbaum published by Tom Reiss, concluding that Kurban Said is a pseudonym hiding an ambiguous figure of an outsider representing the Caucasian reality for his European audience. He is regarded as a precursor of the contemporary transcultural writing, exemplified by Jamyang Norbu and José Eduardo Agualusa; their strategy consists in appropriating alien strands of cultural tradition or literary history. They create hybrid configurations that fill the gaps of the established national literary systems. Similarly, Kurban Said created a syncretic Caucasian novel that did not exist, merging various cultural spheres, as well as national and religious identities in a melting pot of a single narration. In order to study such a phenomenon, new concepts are necessary: those useful concepts include such notions as “dissolution of cultures”, “exotopy”, “transculture”, “pluriversalism”, etc. proposed by Wolfgang Welsch, Mikhail Bakhtin, Mikhail Epstein, Arianna Dagnino, Walter Mignolo. Also, the author comments on the choice of the notion of “non-hegemonic universalism”. 
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Desdemona Syndrome. Advocacy and agency in Agnieszka Holland's The Green Border
[in progress]
Agnieszka Holland's film thematizing the problem of pushbacks and violation of human rights on the border between Poland and Belarus provoked enormous outcry in the director's homeland. Nonetheless, the main focus of the criticism implied in the cinematographic narration remained unnoticed. The figure that appears in the center is not a refugee, but an activist. In the second plan, there is a figure of a border guard. The illuminating aspect comes to the fore in the Epilogue, presenting the existence of a dual border and a dual refugee problem in Poland. The treatment of people on the Belarusian and Ukrainian frontier is presented in sharp contrast. The short, final dialogue between two border guards is treated as the key to the film's meaning.
